This past year has accelerated the demand for digital experiences and virtual outreach at the Department of Defense. From recruits seeking information to service members completing training, to staff collaborating remotely, omnichannel, personalized, and secure online experiences are now essential to enabling mission readiness. Explore these digital operations, secure communications, and process improvements critical to force readiness. Listen today to learn how to leverage the Joint Enterprise License Agreement (JELA) to enable your workforce to achieve mission objectives.
Featured Webinar Speakers
Moderator: John Landwehr, VP & Public Sector CTO, Adobe
- Dr. Simon Pincus, Chief, Connected Health Branch, Defense Health Agency;
- Steve Wallace, Systems Innovation Scientist, Emerging Technologies Directorate, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA)
- Amy Taira, JELA Program Manager, Carahsoft;
Enable the Mission with Digital Experiences
Intro 00:13
On behalf of Adobe and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around enabling the mission with digital experiences. We're Dr. Simon Pincus, Chief of the Connected Health Branch at the Defense Health Agency, Steve Wallace, System Innovation Scientist of Emerging Technologies Directorate at the Defense Information Systems Agency, Amy Taira, JELA Program Manager at Carahsoft, and john Landwehr, VP and Public Sector CTO at Adobe, discuss how COVID-19 has accelerated the demand for digital experiences and virtual outreach at the Department of Defense, and how digital operations are critical to force readiness.
John Landwehr 00:54
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our event today. We greatly appreciate DHA, DISA and Carahsoft for participating in this session on Enabling the Mission with Digital Experiences. So we're going to start our panel with Dr. Pincus and Mr. Wallace. And we should probably start by looking back at this past year. So like most of the nation, the Department of Defense underwent a dramatic shift in how it operates. Let's start by talking about what impact that had on digital services and virtual outreach and communication with your constituents. Dr. Pincus, how about we start with you?
Dr. Simon Pincus 01:30
Great. So for the defense health agency, obviously delivery of care during COVID-19 was a paramount priority. And one of the challenges, of course, is keeping people safe. And before we had the vaccine, delivering care virtually either through enable social distancing and safety for both patients and providers. Our patients reported that they were very satisfied, for the most part, with receiving their care virtually. And it was also convenient. So I would say that because of COVID, we actually have really have an acceleration of the use of synchronous virtual health. Right. Miss Wallace, what are your thoughts? So first, thanks. Yeah, the past year, with now 14 months, it was a dramatic shift for the department, we went from an organization, and we are probably being generous, when I say a federated organization. But we went from the large majority of our folks being on site and interacting on a daily basis, to uh, you know, instantly or near instantaneously scattered workforce. So that meant, you know, a lot for organizations in terms of, you know, being telework ready at DISA specifically, we were actually in pretty good shape from get go. But they're, you know, not everybody was as fortunate. And we had to make some adjustments as we went, even at this point, there, there were still were a lot of adjustments that we needed to make, you know, one of our one of our biggest things that we've been talking about since then is the stand up of our CVR environment, the Commercial Virtual Remote environment that we stood up and like, you know, when we all first started out in the in the pandemic, it was only supposed to be three months. And here we are over a year later. And that's still operational. But that will be coming to a close before long. But it also drove us to better adopt, you know, interactive collaboration technologies. You know, we had them, we had some of them already. But this really stepped up and really increased our reliance on it. It's going to be interesting, I think over the next six to nine months as people start to return. And we move from, you know, the pendulum starts to swing back, you know, went from one extreme to another extreme. And as it comes to the middle, and you actually have people that are both in the office and out of theoffice at the same time, you know, how we can also leverage those technologies as well as others to help us continue to be collaborative and effective moving forward.
John Landwehr 04:10
Great, Dr. Pincus, the Connected Health Branch has digital services at the core of its mission. How did your priorities change over the past year? And what were your biggest learnings and takeaways with the big shift to digital?
Dr. Simon Pincus 04:24
Right, actually, you know, our priorities did not change. It's just the pace in which those priorities were implemented. Now our goal really is across the Military Health System, to improve healthcare, and readiness of the military through technology. And so obviously, we would like to be the provider of choice and connecting our beneficiaries with healthcare. So some of the changes that we saw were that primary care and behavioral health really significantly increased their synchronous virtual health. Usage, and many other specialties, especially ones that don't really rely on needing a physical exam also began using virtual health, some for the first time and some just expanding their use. So like Steve has just mentioned, as we, you know, hopefully get to a place where COVID-19 allows us to return either to the workplace to our healthcare providers or back to school, it's, I don't see it going back to where it was pre COVID, especially in healthcare, I think the questions of prior to COVID-19 rarely was what care can we do virtually, and still maintain the same standard of care. Now, the question is what cared needs to be seen in person, because virtual care is so convenient for many patients and preferred. And if you could imagine a patient having to, you know, let's say their parent have to drop off their child in daycare, then go to then drive to the provider or the healthcare team, and then see their provider and then do the reverse, you know, that takes out many hours of the day, and this often makes healthcare inaccessible.
Steve Wallace 06:17
You know, one of the things that that as Dr. Pincus was talking about, that I was sort of thinking, in the same vein as they're rethinking how we approach healthcare, and I mean, it's not exactly healthcare, but, but you know, how we approach our interactions going forward, and you know, talking about shifts back towards the, one, both people being, you know, in and out, you know, just as they're rethinking their experience from the, you know, seeing patients and, and, you know, interacting with both the healthcare providers, as well as the patient, you know, we're rethinking our experiences internally to our facilities of, of how people collaborate, and that type of thing. It's, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be all cubed farms, and, you know, these shared work areas and rethinking conference rooms, that kind of thing, you know, across the board, just, you know that that entire experience is going to be very important to us going forward.
John Landwehr 07:12
Great. I know, our family is certainly benefited from doing virtual care visits over the last year, that sometimes you just have quick questions, and it's nice to be able to reach the experts quickly. And I think the same thing also does apply to other types of work that, you know, what may have been a long walk across the campus or in different buildings can now be accomplished very quickly with virtual visits in an office environment as well for IT questions and other things. So I think there have been some nice benefits that have come out of this, that I think we hope continue. Why don't we talk a little bit more about some of the technical and management perspective that you encounter, as you're working to integrate online collaboration and engagement processes. I think some of the management perspective is especially interesting, because a lot goes into the technology. And there are a lot of moving pieces and getting cameras and audio and systems configured, network bandwidth and all of that certainly can be tricky, but there's a lot more to it. Dr. Pincus, your thoughts?
Dr. Simon Pincus 08:18
Interestingly enough, I just experienced one of the things that happens with synchronous virtual care, which is sometimes there is a break in care. And this is, is a new sort of domain for folks becoming comfortable with troubleshooting, both providers and patients. And there's a learning curve associated with it. And being flexible and being patient have become kind of a priority and also having a backup plan. So for example of a synchronous virtual visit, fails because of a bandwidth issue, then maybe you'll go to an auditory or a telephone call. So then you need to know what their phone number is, and make that connection. And then there are other ways that you could possibly communicate as well, that are asynchronous, such as secure messaging. So there are multiple ways to communicate with patients. And if you as a provider, and I am a psychiatrist, or as a provider, if you work through that and make your patients comfortable, they generally will accept this is as a reasonable way to receive care and sometimes even prefer.
John Landwehr 09:35
That's great. I know I appreciate when I've engaged with folks where they say, you know, if we get disconnected, can I get a phone number to call you right back? And it's like, wow, that's, that's nice to hear when you're calling for support or chair, that calls do drop or other calls come in and then get dropped in the handoff and all of that. So having those backups I think are important. Mr. Wallace, your thoughts?
Steve Wallace 09:58
Absolutely. And real time communications are very, you know, they're very challenging service to deliver and operate and, you know, maintain behind the scenes and, you know, the user experiences is paramount. And when the user experiences an issue for any number of reasons, they, you know, rightfully so blame the service, but it could be any number of things along the along the path between that that user and the service that's ultimately being provided. That's, you know, one of the lessons that we've learned over the years is, is it's not necessarily, you know, when, especially as we start to move into more cloud and SaaS provided services, you know, we move those services physically further from the user, you know, things like path diversity and that kind of thing are even more critical. Because when you do have latency or interruptions or that kind of thing, that ability to reestablish without the you know, with the least amount of friction to the user is, is ultimately key, you know, to keeping them happy and maintaining a consistent service.
John Landwehr 10:59
And I imagine, it's been quite a quite a shift, because, you know, typically the IT environment supporting users has been fairly rigid and well known and controlled within the buildings walls, no matter what the kind of system it is, and you know, how much bandwidth you've got on your core land getting out to all the workstations and you know exactly what software everyone's running and, and now reaching out to folks, in other places, at least, their underlying hardware and operating system may be very different. And all sorts of different bandwidth connections with coax and copper and fiber and satellites and everything else going on. So there are a lot of moving pieces to make all this happen. So as we kind of look forward a little bit, how can you deal with the continue accelerating this shift toward digital experiences? And it's been going so well, it seems like there's strong momentum to keep continuing. So as you look at, you know, all of your constituents internally as well as externally, are there certain services at your agencies that are most prepared for a continued digital engagement? Dr. Pincus, we start with you.
Dr. Simon Pincus 12:11
So behavioral health has always done very well with, especially in Defense Health Agency, for tele-behavioral health, what we really witnessed was primary care and other specialties that don't need, often don't need a direct physical exam, also found an acceleration in their use of virtual health technologies. But it isn't just, you know synchronous virtual health, there's a whole array of, of healthcare that can occur in the digital space. So for example, one might have remote health monitoring. One of the things that happened in COVID was remote health monitoring where a patient who might not need admission, but is not necessarily fully out of the woods could potentially have their pulse oximetry or their vital signs, monitored 24-7, and if they had a decrement in their care, they could be brought very quickly back into treatment. So there's that, you know, we have been using glucose, continuous glucose monitors for some time now. But now the ability again, to monitor that, either intermittently or in real time, our new capabilities that we have, one of the really interesting developments has been the explosion in our tele-critical care footprint, we've expanded to numerous military treatment facilities. And as you might imagine, with COVID-19, the ability to surge intensive, this ICU physician-type support to a place where there might not be enough, has been a real game changer. When you think about that kind of capability. And you're really thinking about how does that affect military readiness when you can really apply not only you know, in the continental United States, but even overseas, you can apply these kinds of technologies in real time and get specialists to provide carry them directly to the battlefield.
John Landwehr 14:25
That's great. I've been personally intrigued with a number of the connected health devices that are now consumer friendly, that you can pick up at various places, whether they're connected Bluetooth or Wi Fi or standalone for even things like swiping your forehead for temperature, and having it automatically record to your phone; all sorts of other interesting tools that you can plug in. And, of course, security and privacy is important, but you know, having that information so quickly available that can be shared appropriately with providers, I think is very interesting to see how we can kind of continue to do more remotely and other places. So, you know, with the mission experience, of course, at the heart of the DoD's digital service, and it's so critical to empowering everyone to be a part of that mission success, whatever their mission happens to be one of the top priorities and challenges at your agency for improving digital experiences for your personnel. Mr. Wallace?
Steve Wallace 15:23
Sure. So, you know, with our improvement internally, we're looking at a number of things, or we're looking at how do we just like in your personal lives, you know, as we've seen over the last year, as we've described, as Dr. Pincus has described on the on the medical side, not necessarily have been as many personal interactions, or requiring the user to jump through as many hoops. We are looking to how do we, you know, refine user experience for how they interact for things, you know, like helpdesk requests, and, you know, being more self service oriented, better communication to the user in terms of, you know, service status, that kind of thing, so that they don't necessarily have to go look, or search or, you know, ask questions, when certain things come up, they can, they can handle a lot more on their own. The other side to it, not just for our folks that this book for the department in general, you know, as we've seen this shift, and people move without it, it really started. While the last year and a half has been fairly dramatic, you know, this shift in IT really started 10 plus years ago, you know, as data started to move about, and data started to shift into different places, it wasn't necessarily centrally located on the internet anymore, it was, you know, it was moving about it was in the cloud providers, that kind of thing. And now we're seeing the users become more mobile and want to use different devices. And you know, not the same, you know, government equipment that they've always been issued. And a lot of the capabilities are, they've been there for some time, but we're now finally able to integrate them into something a bit more cohesive. So that, you know, traditionally we would backhaul that traffic into NIPRNet via VPN, or, or whatever, and then send it where it needed to go. And in many cases, it's not terribly beneficial. In fact, it's takes away from the users experience, because you're adding, you know, latency and more opportunities for things to break along the way. So we're starting to look at how do we better provide those services remotely, without necessarily having to backhaul, the traffic there's a there's a number of categories out there in terms of the next generation perimeter technologies that we're taking a taking a good hard look at, and figuring out how we can integrate them into the enterprise. And so again, it's to the benefit of the disciplines. But really, the broadly, the department as well.
John Landwehr 17:44
We appreciate that work is a cloud service provider that is taken some of our clouds through the DISA IO for accreditation process, that, you know is, there's more interest in getting applications quickly delivered from commercial clouds. And I'm certainly looking at the end to end all the pieces is very important. And it's great to hear that things like bandwidth and experience and all that tie in. Dr. Pincus your thoughts on this topic?
Dr. Simon Pincus 18:14
Well, user experience is key right to adoption. And it's key to adoption, both on the part of the healthcare providers and healthcare teams, as well as to patients where there's a will there's away and so our patients are beneficiaries, whether they be active duty, or you know, retired the family members, they're pretty savvy. A medical visit doesn't look like it used to, they often come in having done a web search, or gone to social media about a condition that they might have, they may know something about the treatments already. Sometimes they even know more than the provider does when they walk into the room, especially if they have a condition that is more rare. And almost patient becomes the expert. So in that environment, there is this this expectation and it's a very high expectation that everything is going to integrate and work or be interoperable. Like from the get go and that is the that is one of the challenges. For VHA we are rolling out an electronic health record that integrates inpatient and outpatient and also integrates across with labs and labs and eventually will integrate with scheduling. Then how do you make that work for the patient? Do you have a patient facing app where the patient can now potentially on their smartphone access all of this can they secure message their provider so that they're not waiting for a phone call in return? If they developed a rash on the new medication, can they just take a picture in storing that picture forward? In that environment, the challenge then is one of trying to accelerate our abilities trying to either integrate the platforms, so they're all in one or have them interoperable. And that's really probably Steve's challenge more than mine. And then cyber, as we all know, is extraordinarily important, especially for, you know, DHA, which, you know, entrust secrets, and we have service members with secret security clearances and such. But the expectation is there, and then the expectation on the readiness side is the same, the military services, they want to see all of this capability, as much as possible downrange, and they're an environment where potentially they could have breaks in in access to the internet. So then that information needs to be collected at the point of injury, and then somehow uploaded to the, you know, a cloud based system or, or some kind of server farm type system, where then that information is fully integrated. With providers and healthcare teams, it's a real challenge, because all of this information coming in, and making sure that it's usable to actually partner with the patients in making their healthcare decisions. That's key, because, you know, if it just rolls into a database and can't be used, assure that the patient in real time or near real time, then you know, patients will know, and they expect that.
John Landwehr 21:45
Great. So I think that the increase on digital is also potentially creating some opportunities for hiring and recruiting. Mr. Wallace, do you see an impact on helping recruit top talent and retaining talent in your organization based on this big shift to digital, and now enabling more folks to work more places?
Steve Wallace 22:08
Yeah, absolutely. So it's, you know, the past year is proven the fact that, you know, people can work from nearly anywhere, obviously, they have to deal with time-zone differences, that kind of thing. But, you know, whether an employee was just down the street, or several states away, or whatever, I know, on my team, specifically, I had several folks that as the pandemic start, they scattered to go be with family, that kind of thing, and in different parts of the country. And you know, you could always theorize before, but now you have living proof and information that shows you that, you know, organizationally, we can function, we being the larger department, and frankly, it worlds in this kind of, in this kind of construct. I think there are always a need for human person, the person, you know, physical face to face interactions. But I think it is a bit less critical now. So what this is allowing us to do is open up the aperture. You know, this is headquartered out of out of Fort Meade, and you know, that that is a very tough job market, for the employers, because, you know, there's a lot of competition there, both in the government and in the private sector. And so, by allowing us to sort of open up our aperture a little bit more, you know we can, we can go, you know, nationwide, and start pulling in folks from all different portions of the country. Now, in terms of retention, it presents some challenges there too, right? Because a lot of other organizations are moving in that kind of in that same direction. The other side of the coin, beyond just, the remote work capacity of all of this is, as we are changing out, you know, the way that we approach business and, you know, the tool sets that we are using and going more, you know, cloud and software oriented, and with less of a focus, you know, across the board, not just a discipline across the board less of a focus on infrastructure that becomes more commoditized. You know, it's moving the workforce in the direction of being much more software oriented, coding oriented, and retooling the talent that we have, as well as focusing on the talent that we need to recruit as time goes on. So you know, there's a, there's a lot of benefits to what has happened, but it's also shifted some of the challenges around maybe in the different spaces than what we had before. And we just, we need to adapt and, and we'll definitely do that.
John Landwehr 24:29
Yeah, that's great. It's definitely competitive market out there to recruit and retain talent. And I think all the organizations are feeling that right now and in those that are embracing digital recruiting to get the word out and talk about all the great opportunities as well as you know, capabilities on the inside that are available in the workforce are seemingly doing better. So hopefully we can uh--go ahead?
Steve Wallace 24:52
You know, based on your statement or two if I could, you know if I could tack on to that one of the things that I you know, that we used to say previously It's more important than ever is the DMV from a recruitment and retention perspective offers a challenge set that you're not going to find anywhere else. And that's the, frankly, the coolest part about working in the, in the Department of Defense is, you know, it's the right way, the largest enterprise in the world. And, you know, the challenges are like no other and the benefits and the rewards from, you know, seeing what you do, and the people that benefit from, you know, the work that we put in is second to none. So it's, it is, it's really a blessing working in the department these days.
John Landwehr 25:35
Yeah, understood, you've got scale security, global operations, all sorts of great things to work with. So it, it's great to be a partner of that environment and really see all the great missions that both of you get to contribute to. So maybe to close out, you know, I'd like to seek some practical advice for our audience here. What's one thing that our attendees can begin to do, maybe even this week, to improve their digital experiences; you know, quick win, do something that will delight the users and please management all at the same time, by going digital. Dr. Pincus, what are your thoughts?
Dr. Simon Pincus 26:22
Please management by going digital? Interesting...going back to your former question, which is the ability to provide specialty care where there's not access is a big deal when you're talking about both patient and provider satisfaction and being able to recruit providers who, who maybe even are wanting to work part time, and to not lose that capability. In terms of where we're going digitally, I think that it's really, I mean, the vision is the smart phone of healthcare, right? Where everything is integrated, are interoperable, where yo u have data that can be mined with predictive analytics. So with predictive analytics, the idea is that patients will have a certain profile, whether it be genetic or genomic, and treatments could be, you know, tailored to the specific individual, to so these are exciting things that are all occurring at the same time. And I anticipate that what we'll see is leapfrogs in certain in certain capabilities over time, and it's going to be a challenge to keep up. But it's, it's gonna be an exciting one. One thing that I did, when you said one thing folks could do today, we actually have some really pretty interesting mobile apps right now that DHA sponsors for no shared decision making over contraception, which is important to our female service members, if they deploy, we saw that providers were having stress—since we have a provider resilience toolkit, these are all on these storefronts and app settings that you can get on your, on your smartphone, you have an antidepressant medication adherence app. So, you know, providers and health care teams are going to have to get savvy as to what patients are actually accessing. Because they're going to come in, and they're going to say, I'm using this tool, I'm using that tool, we have to be prepared to adapt to the technology they bring you, but also help them make medical decisions as well.
Dr. Simon Pincus 28:42
Um, Mr. Wallace—your closing thoughts? And one thing that we could do this week to go digital even stronger?
Steve Wallace 28:49
Sure. So I think that I'll start with the, you know, one thing we can do to make digital even stronger. And that is, and it's been mentioned a couple times during the discussion, but, you know, continue to focus on that user experience and, you know, a positive user experience backed by good security practices behind that, but not, you know, many times we do security, because it makes us feel good, and not because there's actual provable benefit to it. And by doing that, we degrade the user experience and drive them in a direction to go to shadow IT or that kind of thing. Right? So, so really think about that, and how that, you know, how that actually impacts the outcome for the user would be, would be the—would be my advice. And my ask, if I may my ask to the to the audiences is help us with the same thing in return, right? A lot of times when we're looking at things, you know, no matter what the topic, we see it, you know, perhaps through our lens and having an external lens that is coming in a straightforward and honest way, I guess I'll put it to you that way. That is looking for the benefit of the department not the benefit of the bottom line. The benefit of the department. Those are the kinds of conversations that I love to have. And I think we need to have. So and it helps us, you know, helps us move forward by getting those other external perspectives.
John Landwehr 30:14
Very well said, one of our mottos in Adobe is "Digital experiences that put people first" and really looking at kind of the end to end workflow, starting with the people wherever they happen to be, whether they're inside or outside your organization, consumers, businesses, other government organizations, and kind of not just walking in their shoes, but looking at what they need. And then kind of following the IT trail back to the data centers, versus I think a lot of other organizations always kind of start with just the looking from the data center looking out. But it's very important, as you said, to get that user experience feedback on what's working, what isn't, and what they need. And, you know, great ideas come from all over. So it's great to hear your organization's looking for that feedback. I very much enjoyed our panel conversation today. Our next speaker, I'd like to hand it over to Amy to talk a bit about Adobe and Carahsoft and the joint enterprise license agreement that's in place. During that time, if there are questions that come up for any of our panelists, please do type them in. I see we have some already that we'll get to those, after Amy provides an overview of the job. So Amy, take it away.
Amy Taira 31:37
Very good. Thank you, John, I appreciate it, and our government speakers on the panel. I appreciate your insights. It's extremely valuable for the team, I think, here on this call. So hopefully I can enlighten everybody else just as much as you have. So thank you for introducing me. My name is Amy Taira. I am the Adobe JELA Program Manager here at Carahsoft. Today, I wanted to share a high level overview with the folks on this call on what the Adobe JELA or otherwise known as the Joint Enterprise License Agreement offers its current enrollees. And you know, hope it helps other organizations and other folks on the industry side see kind of, how it can support your missions and visions going into supporting your interfaces. So I'm going to go over a high level on contract details. Some of the Adobe value added benefits that the industry team does to support the program, go over some of the use cases on the value added benefits and kind of specifics on what we're doing to support what the JELA means for enrollees, what's in it for you guys, and then kind of give you a little sneak peek on the Adobe JELA 3 future. So to start, everyone wants to know if you're not already an enrollee on this call who is enrolled today. The Adobe JELA by contract **indiscernible** today includes a select few agencies: Army, Air Force, DISA OSD JSP JCS, DHA, DCMA and the MEA. Well, the JELA is considered open to ordering for all DoD. The buy-in to the agreement actually can only be established after some initial discussions with the DISA PMO which is where our PM sits **indiscernible** the OEM, which is Adobe here, in this case. The JELA was awarded in 2016 as a base plus four option year contract and important to note for enrollees on this call today, we are in the final option here of the agreement. But we understand you know DISA's intent to establish a follow on agreement, so that's very exciting news. Current products available on the contract are for enrollees, include unlimited access to both Acrobat Pro and AEM forms as well as discounted pricing and access to Adobe Creative Cloud, both the full suite as well as single applications, and Adobe's published business unit products for those that are using Captivate or Presenter or ColdFusion. So with that being said, high level overview on the contract. The next few slides, I'm just going to be talking to a high level on what the JELA offerings are, what they include, and some of the more specific use cases we have on how we support the contract on a program aspect, as well as a customer support related aspects. So what does JELA offer? We have some amazing resources available to enrollees on this contract, including things that are on the slides and all access on demand training pass for enrollees. It's a portal our Captivate Prime Team at Adobe built specifically for enrollees on this contract. The training encompasses a variety of opportunities to get educated on Acrobat Pro, AEM forms as well as AEM Designer and Creative Cloud. In addition to training on the contract, another value added benefit we have is that the JELA includes 10 service packs, and you're probably wondering "what's a service pack" right? Each pack is inclusive of a bucket of hours to support a customer's AEM form's deployment, as well as OEM resources to support that customer’s effort. The packs are typically leveraged for customers with a larger scale AEM forms deployments. But you know, we've seen everything in the past and depending on the complexity of the product, or the program will depend on what resources at the **indiscernible** we can dedicate to this effort. There are a total of 10 service packs on the JELA today, one for each agency, and two on reserve for any additional agencies that might need to use them. As we add agencies to the contract, obviously, there will be additional offerings for those agencies as well. So the next thing in the value added benefits scale is that the JELA offers both a Technical Support Manager and a Technical Account Manager. That's from the OEM, which is Adobe. They are all tier one support. They're amazing resources, and wherever the Carahsoft or the reseller prime can't support on a technical level, we have amazing resources, a tier one at Adobe that can support customers. And then finally, something kind of a little bit more I'll talk about on the following slides. We do have support internally at distribution, which is Carahsoft for product demonstrations, download and install support and tips and tricks sessions for those customers that are really just trying to get better educated on how to get the best use out of their Adobe licenses. And to piggyback actually off of some of those Adobe JELA value added benefits I had mentioned on the previous slide. There are some examples here on this slide of where the industry team supports those customers. So our technical teams, both at the OEM and here on the distribution side Carahsoft can assist with transitioning customers on the BPA from Adobe serialized licensing model, to Adobe's next generation licensing model either towards a, what Adobe calls "feature restricted licensing", or named user deployments. Depending on the complexity of your environment, internet access, or capabilities, we'll determine the best path forward and the industry team can certainly help you determine that. And in addition to that, we work with various commands within the DoD in particular HRC, Air Force, DHA and JSP just to name a few that were transitioning on a large scale, and to get ramped up on their new deployments on Adobe's administrator console, which is where Adobe's next generation licensing will sit. Carahsoft and Adobe will also offer resources to support custom training days, as well and custom webinars for enrollees with more specific needs, which is kind of unique, because, you know, instead of just having a standard set calendar, we have the ability to work with our commands and our sub commands on this contract, depending on what they need their users to get educated on, to customize Adobe days for them. And then the last thing is help us help you, right? We want the DoD, we want DHA and DISA, for example, to be able to share amazing use cases on how they're using our technology to support their missions and go digitally strong and digitally forward, which is where we are today in the technology world. But we would love to hear your use cases and be able to nominate some of your organizations for some of these government and public sector awards that are out there. And the follow on is what do you get as a JELA enrollee, right? What do you guys is as a user or a buyer, what do you care about right? Higher volume discounts. It's a very important aspect of buying into these enterprise agreements. You want to know what you're saving. Customers have license management can manage their licenses independently, apart from the Acrobat Pro and am forms licenses that are managed on the enterprise side. There's decentralized purchasing capabilities on this contract that every organization has the authority to do without going through additional red tape. With the exception of specific RFP protocols and processes that are already in place from those headquarters. We have a bunch of, as I had mentioned on previous slides, tech support resources, not available via other contract vehicles, like the on demand training portal, and then dedicated teams not only on the Carahsoft side on a technical and on a customer support related aspect, but as well as on the reseller prime side and the Adobe end as well. So a lot of support for you guys. And we're happy to support any of your efforts. And then so, last but not least, very exciting for me to actually talk about here. Although I'm I can't give too many details around this aspect, the JELA 3 future, what does the JELA 3 include? What are we hearing that it might include? We know today, Acrobat and AEM forms are still going to be a part of the JELA 3, there is still going to be a mandatory continued a purchase and buy and requirement for JELA 3, as there is today. There are customers as in the JELA 2, all purchased into the BPA, what they considered their enterprise or full time employee count for both their Acrobat and AEM forms. The good news for that is that every user under those agencies defined on the contract to get unlimited access to those products. And because they're paid for at a command level at the enterprise level, the user doesn't accrue a bill or invoice for that. So next, with probably a lot of questions, everyone's probably wondering what products might be included on the JELA 3. As I mentioned, Creative Cloud and Acrobat and AEM forms are all included today. But what we understand is there's chatter internally about additions such as Adobe Stock, Adobe Sign and substance under Adobe's digital media business unit being considered for the JELA 3. But then, in addition to those applications, under Adobe's digital experience business unit, we anticipate, again can't speak for 100% certainty, but we anticipate the addition of below the line purchase availability for AEM sites, assets and analytics and Adobe target. And then a couple of other support related items that we understand might be included in the next iteration of the JELA are managed services as a deployment option for Adobe's digital experiences, products. And then premier support, U.S. citizen access for tanzen additional services, we understand the sensitivity of the DoD, and know that we do have U.S. support for you. And then finally, one of the bigger things on this JELA 3 iteration that I wanted to highlight was, with the recent Fourth Estate Network Optimization Initiative, also known as the 4ENO. We anticipate the JELA 3, adding, potentially, other defense agencies not already enrolled on the BPA, that now will roll under essentially the big end. So there will be some agency ads, I'm not certain who those are, how many there will be in the first year, but we do know that there will be a growth to the JELA 2 for those specific agencies. And so, with that being said, that is all I have pertaining to the JELA 2, there's your seat on the JELA 3, and I will hand it back over to our team and John for the follow on for Q&A.
John Landwehr 42:50
Thank you, Amy, appreciate the opportunity to partner with you all on making it easier for Adobe software to get out to the mission. There are a lot of details in the JELA certainly on the procurement side, on the support side, also on the security side. And we know that that is very important within DoD networks. We've been supporters of PKI in the common access card for a very long time, for both authentication and digital signatures and, and continue to see that two factor authentication being very important for, you know, not only authenticating to sites and providing digital signatures, but just as a way to get rid of usernames and passwords that we all have way too many. So it's great to have options like that that we can support. The Next Generation licensing is also another topic I know that often comes up within our God base. We very much appreciate and understand that there are some networks not directly connected or not ever connected to the internet. And it's very important that our software continue to support the mission in those networks. And those new licensing schemes, especially the feature restricted licensing, was designed and included a lot of feedback from the Extended Defense and National Security community, to make sure that our fan favorites like Acrobat and Photoshop and the other desktop products that we have continued to run in those networks. And the new licensing schemes for that provide a very secure yet compliant way to do that. That doesn't do callbacks to licensing servers at Adobe, like our consumer anti-piracy software mechanisms do. Our enterprise toolkits also allow administrators to really tune our desktop software for the features and needs and Group Policy and Registry settings that you need in your networks, that there may be some areas, like public affairs that does want to collaborate externally and use some of our cloud services, and there may be other mission areas that don't, and you want to turn off those capabilities. So those are all included in our enterprise deployment documentation; and we did get some questions that came in on how our software would run on multiple networks and global networks, and I wanted to make sure that we address that, that even though we put the word cloud in, like the Creative Cloud product name, that that doesn't imply it only runs on the internet, right, that there are public clouds, the private clouds and hybrid clouds. And we do have our desktop software on the joint enterprise license agreement that can run in completely isolated networks. And that next generation licensing capability is something definitely to check out as well as the enterprise; documentation is definitely appreciated by the system administrators on how to set that up. And there's a great support team standing by to answer any questions that come up on using Adobe software in DoD networks. I want to look here and see if there are any other questions. I know we're coming up on the top of the hour here, and I greatly appreciate the partnership that we have with all of our participants today, I found that the conversation was great. I hope we can do it again some time because the insights that are coming from all of you are fantastic on what the shift to digital is really meaning for government and specific for the Department of Defense. So again, thank you very much, Amy. We appreciate the information on the JELA. Dr. Pincus, Mr. Wallace is great to hear what's going on with digital experience in the mission. And I think we will wrap up. So again, thank you all, really appreciate it. Thanks all
Outro 46:58
Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or Adobe can assist your agency, please visit www.carahsoft.com or email us at adobe@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.