In most cases, the government of any country is its largest employer of labor. The U.S. government alone handles more than 2,600 data centers within its borders, the largest of any nation.

Governmental operations involve large swathes of information that need to be processed, put to use and stored in a secure environment. Now is the time for these public sector operations to be digitized, and the Databricks Inc./Amazon Web Services Inc. collaboration is helping to make that happen.

“Let’s say in each one of those data centers, you’ve got a handful of operational data stores of databases,” said Howard Levenson (pictured), general manager and area vice president of Databricks Federal at Databricks. “The federal government is trying to take all of that data and make sense out of it. The first step to making sense out of it is bringing it all together, normalizing it and federating it. And that’s exactly what we do.”

Levenson spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Summit Washington, DC event. They discussed the changing face of public sector digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Getting the naysayers to embrace the move

With every technological advancement, there’s bound to be naysayers in the periphery (or foreground). The federal government, for example, is at least five5 years behind the stages that Databricks’ other top private sector clients are at, according to Levenson. There has, however, been meaningful progress toward changing the “data center hugger” mentality at the government level.

“There are parts of the federal government that have really ramped it up and are on a par. We’re even exceeding some of the commercial clients. USCIS, CBP, FBI are some of the clients that we work with that are pretty far ahead,” he said. “At USCIS, they do these naturalization interviews. Those are captured in real text. So, now you want to do natural language processing to make sure these interviews are of the highest quality control.”

There are clearly strides ahead to be taken, but the Databricks/AWS partnership is helping steer public sector digital transformation in the right direction, Levenson concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Summit Washington, DC event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS Summit Washington, DC. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE