 Live in Washington DC. This is day two of two days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're in person, face-to-face event. It's kicking off day two. Dave Levy's here. Vice President of the U.S. government, non-profit healthcare businesses for AWS Public Sector. Dave, great to see you again. Welcome back. Great to see you, John. So great time. Last time we were in person, 2019. It was like the event in the last year was virtual. What's new? Well, first of all, I think it's just exciting. I mean, I'm excited to be back and in person and so much has happened in our personal lives, in our communities, and so I'm really glad that we can all be together and it's been great so far. I was talking yesterday with some folks and I saw some people doing some networking. I heard someone, hey, I want to hire someone. So the face-to-face is back, but we're also streaming. Max Peterson told me that pushing it everywhere on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, everywhere, Twitch, so free content, but still a lot of registrations here in person. Good stuff. Yeah, great registrations. We're thrilled with the support from partners and customers and also to, like you said, the connections that people are making. So it does feel good that things are flowing and people are having conversations. Well, you've got healthcare, nonprofits, US government. Healthcare has been a big focus so far this show. A lot of action. Local governments, governments in healthcare seem to be like pandemic enabled to change. What's the update, what's the highlight so far for you? Well, I think the highlights are in those areas that what we've been able to help our customers with is the ability to respond. And that's what cloud is all about. And their ability to react and to respond to things that they don't necessarily know is gonna happen. And the big thing that none of us knew was gonna happen was the pandemic. And so that ability and agility and preparedness to respond has really been great to see from a lot of those customers. Max Peterson had the CIO from the Air Force up on stage and she's known for her comments about data. And the data is our data, the US Air Force. And so data is a big part of it. They're having a transformation. What's the, how's that project going? What's the update there? What's your impression? Well, it was great to see the Air Force on stage and great to see Laura up there. And we're really proud to support the DOD and the Air Force. And the Air Force has a lot to be proud of in their transformation journey and what they're doing with cloud one is pretty substantial and amazing transformation for them. And then they've got 35 applications running on AWS. And so we think their progress is really good and they're thinking the right way in terms of their software factories and other types of projects. What's interesting is it's watching like who's adopting. It's like, you look at like the pandemic has really kind of opened up the view of the projects. Those ones are doing well. And how do I say this politely? The projects that were being blocked or hidden or the KPIs camouflaged into the value were exposed. Because I mean, once that pulled back the curtain, people realized, oh my God, we're stuck or we're inadequate. We are antiquated, we need to change because now the pressure to deliver shifted to digital. I mean, this literally exposed the good, bad and the ugly. It did and some were more prepared than others. There are great examples. We worked with the SBA to help expand the portal for the Payroll Protection Program to get more lenders access faster. And that was a great project. They were able to respond really quickly and we were able to support them in that. Others, not so much, I think you're right. It did expose that there's an opportunity. There's an opportunity to accelerate some of the things that they were doing already in terms of digital transformation. Talk about the GovCloud and the federal customers that you have, what's the traction point? How is that going? Is there a new generation here? GovCloud's been a great success. GovCloud is our- 10-year anniversary. It's our 10-year anniversary, so we're thrilled to celebrate that. I can't believe it's 2011. PC2 is 15. Is S3 15? Oh, yes, 15 too. So is SQS, the original building blocks. So we've got a lot of great success through GovCloud and GovCloud was really something that was born out of what customers wanted, primarily federal customers, but we've also seen over the last few years real adoption from regulated industry, real adoption from partners that are going into GovCloud that really want to take advantage of the kind of security and compliance that federal customers need and the larger defense industrial-based organizations need. So GovCloud's been a fabulous success and expect a lot of growth going forward. Yeah, is there a cultural shift in the federal government now? I mean, I can't imagine. Some conversations have been exploring this. I did talk briefly about it with Shannon Kellogg and John Wood about how if you're under the age of 40 and you work in the federal government, you got to be like, you know, why aren't we doing this? Like, this seems to be like a cultural shift, younger generation coming in and be like, looking at the old way and be like, why are we still doing that? Well, I think, you know, look, bipartisan support for, you know, digital transformation for making sure that we have the competitive edge for generations and generations to come in the U.S., both in business and in defense and national security, I think is an imperative. I mean, nobody I've talked to disagrees that we need to do this. And I think that younger workforce coming in behind, I'm a jealous of the 40-year-olds, I wish I was under 40, but none of that workforce really sees the obstacles that maybe previous generations saw. These emerging technologies are becoming, you know, the basic unit of computers getting smaller. The cost to do these things is coming way down. And, you know, I think that younger workforce says, why aren't we doing this? Yeah, and I think that Air Force projects are interesting too, because that kind of shows us not just about the CIA or the DOD that you have, you know, they're leaning into production workloads and the mission-critical workloads too. The DOD is also now continuing to adopt. What else are you guys doing with the DOD? Well, you know, we're partnering with GDIT on MillCloud, and that's going to give DOD mission owners access to a whole suite of AWS services. So we're really excited about that. And those are available now. We're the only cloud provider that's making that accessible to them on MillCloud. And so this is going to open up the opportunity for them to start doing that mission work that you described. A good example of that are programs like ABMS, Air Force's Advanced Battle Management System. It's really, it's part of their effort around JADC2. And a great set of capabilities that they're delivering there. We're happy to have participated. We did some testing and some show and tell, if you will, at Ramstein Air Force Base. And, you know, we're really proud to support that effort and we're excited about what the Air Force is doing. You know, I've always been impressed with the DOD when the tactical edge kind of concept came out. That was very impressive because they're really using the data properly. And I know Amazon has been doing well in this area because you've got things like Outpost, Wavelength, Snowball, these products. How is that edge piece developing? Do you see that becoming more critical now? It's absolutely critical. It's not becoming critical. It is critical. And I think if you look at what the DOD and all of their partners are trying to accomplish, it's really moving all of that data around from the very edge in theater back home to where it needs to be analyzed, doing it fast, doing it secure, being able to deliver on their missions. And that's what this is all about. So we see huge, huge opportunities to really innovate around the edge. The data equation really is fascinating to me. You know, just when you think about things like words, highly available versus high availability, mean something. Sure. Because you're going to want real time, not just on available data. You've got to have it real time so the pressure around these projects are high. And so technically you've got to have a little latency on all this stuff. That's true. You've got to either have near real time or real time availability. And in many cases, there's high stakes. So the ability for the DOD to pull this off is really important and we're a big supporter of that. Dave, I want to get your perspective because you've been in the industry, you've seen the waves, we've talked before camera about the 90s and the data centers and stuff. 10 years of GovClub, look at public sector, just look at the 10 years. Interesting evolution. I mean, you couldn't give a cloud away 15 years ago. I mean, they weren't moving. Glacier speed of adoption, now massive adoption, uptakes there, the transformations are happening, migrations are huge, healthcare, which is like, you know, silo the data, HIPAA compliance, you know, lock everything down. Everything's opening up. This is causing a lot of change. What's your reaction to that? Well, my reaction to that is I think customers are starting to connect what their outcomes are. You know, whether it's a business outcome or a mission outcome or both, to what cloud can actually do. And I think that's freeing them up to make decisions about enabling cloud in their environment, enabling experimentation, because that's what you want. You don't know what you're going to be faced with. We don't know what the threats are. We don't know if there's going to be another major pandemic. We hope there's not, but we don't know. If you set goals around your outcomes for mission and tie those, cloud becomes such an enabler for that. And I see customers embracing that, customers across the spectrum, non-profit healthcare providers, everybody, Homeland Security and VA, they're all thinking about, what are the mission outcomes we're trying to drive? Yeah, what's interesting too on that is that, just to point out, is that the applications now aren't as complex to build relatively to the speed. In other words, you can get the time to value so the pandemic showed people that if you were in the cloud and had that agility or optionality to be agile, you could write software, because software's the key in this, not, let's do the waterfall, 12 weeks of assessment, 10 month rollout. Now people are doing it in 10 days, right? New applications. Sure, sure. Well, I tell customers a lot, think about McDonald's during the pandemic and think about customers like that who had to react to a new environment of delivery and fast food, fresh, and how quickly companies like that are able to roll out capabilities. And I don't know that federal customers will be able to do it in a week or two weeks, but it's certainly possible and it certainly will shorten that lead time that they have now in their software development. Well, great to see you, Dave. Is there any highlight, customers you want to highlight and you want to talk about, get a plug in for? Yeah, a lot of great customers here representing today and we're really appreciative. Also just want to say it was really great to see Max on stage for his first summit and think it was great to see Laura and others as well too. We've got some great customers coming here. The Veterans Administration is going to, Veterans Affairs is going to be here as well as the Navy presenting on a lot of their capabilities today. So I'm really excited about that. A lot of action, education, healthcare, really booming, really changing. And modernizing, big wave. Migration, modernization, all kind of the big wave. It is, yeah, big things coming and some of these systems are ready. So these systems are 40 and 50 years old and we're here to help these customers deliver on the agility and the extensibility of these systems to really serve citizens. What's your outlook for next year? What do you see next year or so happening? How do you see everything unfold? And obviously you mentioned the pandemic, we're still in it, Delta virus. Who knows what's going to happen next? The world stage has changed, it's the global economy, we've got space. I see customers really leaning in and starting to see the benefits of moving their data to the cloud number one. And then also too, getting the insights, using AI and ML to really drive the insights that they need to make the decisions on that data. And I see more and more customers doing that there. I did a panel this week, moderated a panel with some great customers around that. And getting started is probably the biggest thing that I see and we're going to have more and more customers getting started. Yeah, getting the cloud. Congratulations, a mill cloud by the way too. Thank you. That was a good call out. All right, thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks Sean. Okay, good to hear as always. Keep coverage here at Adbeth Public Sector Summit live in Washington DC in person event, also hybrid. We're streaming out, we're doing remote interviews on Amazon and streaming all the keynotes and key sessions for the digital folks out there. Thanks for watching.