Modern development and the accelerated digital transformation unwittingly caused by the pandemic has been a key theme at this week’s AWS re:Invent. The public sector has especially been impacted. Civil service, national security, education, commercial healthcare, first responders and patient care have all faced ground-zero challenges under the weight of COVID-19. 

“Things that traditionally would have taken years were done in months and major accomplishments in 30 days,” said Lynn Martin (pictured), vice president of government, education and healthcare at VMware Inc., speaking of the company’s public sector customers. “As an example, cancer institute MD Anderson had a need to expand the connectivity of the facility to segregate patient care and ensure that patients that already had health issues were separated from any other COVID patients, and very quickly we saw them scale and extend their data center in record time.”

Martin spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how VMware has adapted to the pandemic environment, how its partnership with AWS has helped facilitate the public sector’s digital transformation, and joint opportunities going forward. (* Disclosure below.)

AWS-VMware partnership focuses on customers first

Partners VMware and AWS give organizations a path to modernize applications with jointly engineered solutions. The partnership has enabled many public sector entities to speed up their digital transformation during the pandemic. 

“VMware Cloud on AWS for Horizon is a great example that we saw across many state and local entities in how they transform their education for clients,” Martin said. “With the federal government, there are many examples across some of the larger agencies, as well with VMC on AWS … sometimes it wasn’t one solution. They may have AWS native for part and VMC on AWS for another part. And the combination of that really allowed the companies to come together and partner to get things done very, very quickly.“

Martin elaborated on the partnership with AWS and how the companies are collaborating to support healthcare and the public sector in particular.

“The dynamics and the future outlook of the industry is going to require lots of innovation,” she said. “I think what’s very unique about our partnership … is we focus first on customer needs and the mission of those customers and what they need to achieve.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE