 Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage. We are here in Bahrain in the Middle East for exclusive coverage of AWS's new region in the area. I'm John Furrier, Coast of theCUBE. It's our first time in the Middle East as we go out into the world and expand theCUBE's mission of bringing you the best content, extracting the signal from the noise, meeting new people, connecting with thought leaders, people creating innovation, creating a new cultural shift with cloud computing. It's a societal global phenomenon, it's a change that's going to impact society, culture, economics, and humans. And this is theCUBE coverage. We're going to continue with that. We are excited to have Khalid Aloumahi, who's the CEO of the Bahrain Economic Development Board. He's the man and responsible with his team for all the success and vision of bringing an Amazon region into the area here in Bahrain, Amazon has announced a region that's going to come in and we expect to see economic revitalization. We expect to see an amplification of culture. Welcome to theCUBE, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for inviting us and thanks for having us here in the middle of all the action. Theresa Carlson from Amazon had a vision and you aligned with that vision. You guys are like-minded individuals. You saw something special with digital. And this is not new, it's not like you woke up one morning and said, hey, let's bring Amazon in. Take us through the history of how we got here with Amazon, about to launch a region early 2019 in Bahrain. You guys have had a vision, take us through that. You know, I started in my position about three years ago. I remember March 2015, a little more than three years ago. And my first week on the job was joining his Highness the Crown Prince in a meeting with Theresa. And so in that meeting, that's what kicked it really off. Theresa heard from his Highness, who was the Chairman of the Bahrain Economic Development Board, the vision for the country. We deregulated our telecom sector about 13, 14 years ago. We were the first country to do that in the Middle East, which meant that we introduced competition on broadband, on mobile. It dropped prices by about 50% on connectivity in the country. That attracted Amazon. When they looked at the region, they said, here's a government that's allowing true competition. And for a data center, obviously, broadband communication and the competitiveness of that price is key. And she was also impressed with His Royal Highness's vision for the country going forward. We want to become a digital economy. We want to transform this economy from an oil-based economy to one that is based on information. And so we had a common view. And we determined at that point that we were going to do everything in our power to translate the conversation we had there to reality. And here we are, almost three years later, almost to have a- And you know, people know my rant and rave. I always talk about data is the new oil. Information is the new oil. In that data and information, digital assets are digital. It is a lifeblood now of society. Citizens are reacting. Everyone's now connected with mobile devices. You start to see autonomous vehicles. You start to see a cultural blending between the old world and then digital. And citizens can get new services. There's more efficiencies. But there's actually a better opportunity for the citizens and also in general. How do you guys look at that? When you guys have your meetings and you're looking at the vision of the future, the citizen benefits, whether it's an entrepreneur or someone who's just living life. Well, you know, when we had this discussion with Amazon, we decided to do what we call a cloud first policy. And we decided that we were going to move the government workloads to the cloud. We were going to actually challenge any government institution why they're not using the cloud. And it's been phenomenal. Now it's been phenomenal from a cost saving perspective which we want to pass on to the citizens. So for the citizen, for them to be able to get government services on their mobile phone, to pay their electricity bill, to do get their license. And the government, if it reduces its cost, can pass that on to that citizen. But more importantly, it's going to allow innovation to take place in the government. We're going to be able to have our education data in the Ministry of Education communicate with our labor data. We're going to be able to do education in a new way. So it is going to unleash innovation in the government and the way it offers its services. We think it's going to do the same for businesses and for startups. We didn't get a chance to film it yesterday, but we were part of the Teresa Carlson's team with you and your startup Bahrain, all the entrepreneurs from the community, very vibrant talking. General Keith Alexander was there, knows a thing or two about cyber. And then we had an entrepreneur visionary in John Wood who's been in the business, but he's also a visionary. He made a comment and you reacted to that around the impact of the AWS region coming here. He was almost like, there's a storm of innovation coming. And you aligned with that. You kind of reacted at dinner last night about it. What is your feeling of what this will bring to the region? Because Amazon has proven that when they put a region out this unexpected consequences, sometimes like things you might not see, what are you expecting for the impact for AWS? I think it's a game changer. I mean, you said data is the new oil. If we think back to the 30s, this country was the first country to discover oil. When at that time, Texaco and SoCal started a refinery and started extracting oil. All the industries that developed around it, refineries, oil field engineering, oil field services. You know, I think we're seeing, we're going to see that in the new digital economy with data. Amazon coming here is going to do several things. Number one, it's going to unleash this innovation. It's going to reduce latency for people who are storing data and looking to retrieve that. It's going to create new jobs. Data scientists, we estimate 10,000 jobs are going to come on the back of this that is going to be for the entire region. And again, I emphasize this is going to be a game changer, not just for the Kingdom of Bahrain, but for the entire Middle East. We're already seeing startups who are getting educated about what the cloud can do for them and the scale that they can reach by going to the cloud early on. We've seen them in the United States. Why can't this region see a unicorn that is able to be a global leader just by virtue of going to the cloud and learning from Amazon? And Amazon AWS shares our passion for the startup community and what this can do for that. I want to get to what's going to attract this is to come into Bahrain, but first I'll talk about the startup impact. Amazon has proven and I heard a comment from one of the startups. Amazon Web Services for big companies. Whoa, whoa, yeah, big companies are using Amazon now, but they won, they were built on the backs of startups when Amazon first started and startups still use Amazon. It is a dream for a startup, the cost to get a company up off the ground, the speed of innovation with Amazon has proven to startups. This is a big opportunity. And so this is going to impact how you set policy and get out of the way of entrepreneurs. Do you help them? As you look at policy, it's almost a tough decision on your part because you guys are used to helping entrepreneurs, very entrepreneurial friendly, but almost you get out of their way, do you help them? What's the strategy for the startups? How do you look at this? Because if the acceleration comes in and the training kicks in, you're going to see a renaissance of entrepreneurship. What do you do? Get out of the way, help them out. What's the plan? You got to balance it. I think you can't coddle them. You can't do everything for the entrepreneur. There's got to be that grit, the resilience, that hunger at the entrepreneur. I was an entrepreneur before I took this role and I think you've really got to have that fire in your belly. So what we want to do is we want to create an ecosystem but we don't want to spoon feed them. So what we've done is, for instance, we launched a $100 million venture capital fund of funds and we said the government shouldn't invest in startups but let's create a fund of funds that will invite venture capitalists to base themselves here but we're not going to tell these venture capitalists how to invest. So each startup has to pitch itself to these venture capitalists and make sure that there's justification for it. We're going to create training. We're going to create elements, the regulation. We introduced a bankruptcy law this year that is going to allow people to fail and to restructure. So we're going to put the policy in place. We're going to allow capital to be there. We're going to look at our training and education but again, it really is down to the entrepreneur. So you've got to mix, you've got to balance it. You've got to say the burden is also on you to think about what's the market opportunity. Here is what the country will do but then the rest is up to you. And I think we're going to see our young youth in the region, we're doing this because this region is transforming. This region needs to create jobs. There's about 100 million jobs you need to create in the Middle East over the next couple of years. You're not going to be able to create that in the normal way. So we want people to become employers, to become entrepreneurs rather than just employees and looking for a nine to five job. So it's integral to the vision of the region. Entrepreneurship is the engine of innovation. All right, let's talk about the region. We're first out here. So I'm kind of new, fresh eyes and you see Dubai out there. You got Asia, you got China and all these in Hong Kong on Singapore. So you guys have a unique opportunity. Dubai is kind of like a New York. It's hustle bustles built out. You guys but have this feeling like a Silicon Valley vibe. It feels very open, very friendly. So you don't have to compete with each other. New York does things, Silicon Valley does things. So you have this entrepreneurial culture. The key is a global co-creation, a connection. How are you going to attract businesses? Because there is demand in the U.S. for domiciling in places outside the United States. And there's been a lot of competition. So are you prepared for companies to come here work with you? I know you guys are doing a lot of work. What do you say to the folks out there saying, I need to have a presence. Can I domicile in Bahrain? What's it like? What's the opportunities for me to connect into a growing ecosystem around Bahrain? So I'd say, first of all, on the region, I mean, just like in Asia, just like in the U.S., you can have multiple hubs. So Bahrain will be a hub alongside a Dubai or a Riyadh or a Kuwait and so forth or an Abu Dhabi. And our niche is as a small country, we're going to be very agile. One of the reasons why Amazon chose Bahrain is because we have a team Bahrain approach. And I came from the private sector, when you're talking to General Electric, you're not talking to one department in General Electric, especially if you're a large customer. The whole company's going to rally around you and bring a solution to you as a customer. And we're going to do that as a country. So with Amazon, we got all the various ministries and we took a team Bahrain approach and we said we're going to solve, through the economic development board, we're going to solve for your problem. Mondalis, which chose to locate their $100 million facility in Bahrain, built a facility about 30 soccer pitches. And they did it within a year and a half. We reclaimed land and had the land ready for them. They called it, because they make Oreos, they called it turning ocean to Oreos. And so it's that agility that is going to differentiate us. In terms of niche, we're very interested in fintech. We think we're going to take a leadership position not only regionally, but globally in fintech. We have exciting announcements that we're going to make in fintech as a small country. We can be nimble, agile, startup friendly, and kind of innovate. And so we're determined to carve a niche in open banking, in cryptocurrency exchanges, interesting innovation areas that we think we can excel at. Cloud computing certainly is a driver. Artificial intelligence, obviously clearly the fodder for entrepreneurship because it allows you to do things with data at a scale with a cloud engine. Talk about fintech and banking, you can't ignore blockchain and cryptocurrency, which is bubble-ish right now and it was kind of cleaning itself out, sorting itself out. But when that starts to settle, and it becomes legitimate in the sense of a global access to digital money or software-defined money, and data, that could be an integral part. How do you guys look at that? I know that's something that everyone's talking about. People are looking to do token kind of business models and there really hasn't been any leadership globally at all on, there's some places people can domicile, we hear Malta here, there and there. So how do you guys look at that market? Are you thinking about it? Are you kicking the tires? What's happening? We're looking at fintech and saying, really beyond all the logos and all the, we're looking to reduce the friction for a customer doing the simple things. You know, aggregating your accounts, understanding how you're spending money, looking at how to transfer money, looking at how to raise capital. If we can look at reducing the friction for people around these challenges, these day-to-day challenges, and use our country as a pilot for doing that, then imagine the potential that once you illustrate the potential here, you could go replicated elsewhere. So we're very interested in blockchain. So you talk about cryptocurrencies. I think the real interesting element is the blockchain opportunity, infintech and beyond. How can you allow the distributed ledger to have multiple applications? We're going to introduce issuing car licensing via blockchain, land real estate transactions via blockchain. In addition to that, we're looking at open banking and allowing open banking to be prevalent here and allowing entrepreneurs to plug in and get access to that data and innovate around that. So that's how we're thinking about innovation and infintech. Really, thanks for coming on and spending the time. I know you're super busy and thanks for hosting us with theCUBE as part of the Amazon contingent. I'll give you the final word for the folks watching out there. What should they know about Baja Rain that they might not know about it? And how do they engage with you guys? What are you guys doing? How should someone contact you? How do you engage? And what's the secret sauce of the Baja Rain plan? Well, first of all, I'm going to plug my institution. It's simple. Look at BahrainEDB.com. It's online internet. It's going to give you everything you need about what Bahrain. And what I'd say is this is a small, but in today's world, a global world, an interconnected world, small is beautiful. So we're a small forward thinking country. We're in a region that is about $1.5 trillion in terms of just the Gulf Cooperation Council. And here is a great gateway for tapping into that opportunity. We're about 30 minutes from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which is doing wonderful things with Vision 2030. And you can be in Bahrain accessing that opportunity. And so I'd invite you to come, look at our website, and the BahrainEDB will help you translate that kind of opportunity to a reality. Please, Chief Executive of Economic Development Board in Bahrain, bold move, congratulations. Bold moves have bold payoffs. Good day with Amazon. Thanks for having me, John. It's coming up. It's theCUBE here, we're live in Bahrain here at the Ritz-Carlton for AWS Summit 2018. Here in the Middle East, I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.