(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone; I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE NEWS and host of theCUBE, and welcome to our SiliconANGLE NEWS MWC NEWS UPDATE in Barcelona where MWC is the premier event for the cloud telecommunication industry, and in the news here is Red Hat, Red Hat announcing a collaboration with NVIDIA, Samsung and Arm on Efficient Open Networks. Red Hat announced updates across various fields including advanced 5G telecommunications cloud, industrial edge, artificial intelligence, and radio access networks, RAN, and Efficiency. Red Hat's enterprise Kubernetes platform, OpenShift, has added support for NVIDIA's converged accelerators and aerial SDK facilitating RAND deployments on industry standard service across hybrid and multicloud platforms. This composable infrastructure enables telecom firms to support heavier compute demands for edge computing, AI, private 5G, and more, and just also helps network operators adopt open architectures, allowing them to choose non-proprietary components from multiple suppliers. In addition to the NVIDIA collaboration, Red Hat is working with Samsung to offer a new vRAN solution for service providers to better manage their open RAN networks. They're also working with UK chip designer, Arm, to create new networking solutions for energy efficient Red Hat Open Source Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter project, or Kepler, has been donated to the open Cloud Native Compute Foundation, allowing enterprise to better understand their cloud native workloads and power consumptions. Kepler can also help in the development of sustainable software by creating less power hungry applications. Again, Red Hat continuing to provide OpenSource, OpenRAN, and contributing an open source project to the CNCF, continuing to create innovation for developers, and, of course, Red Hat knows what, a lot about operating systems and the telco could be the next frontier. That's SiliconANGLE NEWS. I'm John Furrier; thanks for watching. (monotone music)

(electronic music) >> Hello, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE News and host of theCUBE, and welcome to our news update for MWC in Barcelona, the premier event for cloud and to the telecommunication industry. News today, VMware in the news has lots of announcements, where it's expanding its line of products for communication service providers with Open RAND portfolio VMware's unveiled service management orchestration framework for simplifying and automating radio access networks and their applications. RANDs have traditionally been proprietary because of their need for low latency and speed and the Overran Alliance is championed open standard that would expand the number of players in the RAND ecosystem. According to Sanjay Oppai, senior vice president and general manager of the service provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware, VMware is the forefront of getting deployed in telcos both in the RAND as well as the core and VMware hopes they can extend their leadership from the enterprise data center and SD WAN and be the defacto standard in the RAND. VMware is also announcing a technical preview that'll allow communications service providers to run disaggregated and virtualized RAND functions directly on bare metal servers using VMware Tanzu. Project Hui is the initiative aimed at telecom providers that need flexibility in how they deploy edge devices. The VMware Telco cloud platform is also being improved to deliver carrier grade intelligent networking and lateral security features such as distributed firewall and intrusion detection and prevention, along with support for energy efficient use cases for 4G and 5G core load balancing. For enterprise customers, VMware is delivering new and enhanced remote worker device connectivity and intelligent wireless capabilities to its SD WAN and Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE Products, is also expanding its collaboration with Intel aimed at delivering new edge applications based on 5G connectivity that will support SD WAN use cases involving mobile and internet of things devices. Again, VMware spinning their portfolio in the news. Again, VMware is not stopping. Of course, theCUBE's, all the coverage of VMware Explorer will be coming up this year in 2023. Don't miss that. But at mwc, Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, the entire Cube team are there for four days of live coverage. Of course, all the news and reporting is on SiliconANGLE.com. For all the action, go there. And of course theCUBE.net is where the broadcast is in Barcelona. This is theCUBE News. Thanks for watching.

(Introductory music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Mobile World Congress (MWC) and also SiliconANGLEs news coverage. Welcome to SiliconANGLEs news update for MWC. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE and reporter with SiliconANGLE News Today. Google showcasing new updates for Android and wearables at MWC. Kind of going after the old Apple-like functionality. Google has announced some new updates for Android and wearables at MWC and Barcelona. The new features are aimed at enhancing user productivity, connectivity and overall enjoyment across various devices for Chromebooks and all their Android devices. This is their answer to be Apple-like. New features include updates to Google Keep, audio enhancements, instant pairing of Chromebooks, headphones, new emojis, smartphones, more wallet options, and greater accessibility options. These features designed to bridge the gap between different devices that people use together often such as watches and phones or laptops or headphones. Fast Pair, another feature which allows new Bluetooth headphones to be connected to a Chromebook with just one tap. If the headphones are already set up with Android phone, the Chromebook will automatically connect to them with no additional setup. And finally, Google Keep taking notes for you that app - very cool. New features include widgets for Android screens, making it easier for users to make to-do lists from their mobile devices and Smartwatches phones. So that's the big news there. And it's really about Apple-like functionality and they have added things to their meat, which is new backgrounds and then filters that's kind of a Zoom clone. So here you got Android, Google adding stuff to their wallet. They are really stepping up their game and they want to be more mobile in at a telecom conference like this. They can see them upping their game to try to compete with Apple. And that's the update from from Google, Android and Chromebook updates. Stay tuned for more coverage. Check out SiliconANGLE.com for our special report on Mobile World Congress and Barcelona. Got theCUBE team - Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, the whole gang is there for four days of live coverage. Check that out on theCUBE.net (closing music)

(suspenseful music) >> Welcome back everyone, this is the SiliconANGLE news report, news flash, news update. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE founder and editor. Got our team in Mobile World Congress, MWC. But here's some news flash: the GSMA debuted API toolkit as AWS and Microsoft roll out their offerings to make the cloud part of the telco world. The GSMA association, which runs this program and is the most important organization in telecommunications, unveiled the GSMA Open Gateway. This is a toolkit designed for creating applications that integrate with multiple carrier networks. The technology debuted at MWC23. This is the largest trade show opened in the telco area. This Open Gateway allows carriers to support APIs created with the technology that'll interoperate with each other. That means interoperability and cloud is coming to the telecommunication carriers. That's your cell phone, that's wireless. This allows developers to move applications from one carrier to another without needing to port their code. This is a huge game-changer. This is big news, and, of course, Microsoft and AWS are pounding stories out there as well. They got 21 carriers worldwide adopted and it's created using an open-source API toolkit called CAMARA. And Amazon and AWS are jumping on the cloud bandwagon with this and driving it hard into telco. And that's the big story, and, of course, more actions happening, theCUBE is onsite for four days in Barcelona for MWC23 and keep the news flowing. Check out SiliconANGLE.com, you'll see all the news there, and, of course, theCUBE.net for the livestream. I'm John Furrier, that's the news brief. (atmospheric music)

(energetic instrumental music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to SiliconANGLE CUBE News here from Mobile World Congress. This is a Mobile World Congress news update. Dell in the news here partners with leading infrastructure companies, Dell Technologies, really setting up an ecosystem. Here, Dell, with leading telecom and infrastructure players accelerating the network adoption, announcing that it's launching the Dell's Open Telecom Ecosystem community. A community of multiple telecom partners and communication service providers aimed at becoming a unifying force in the telecom industry. This announcement comes just days after Dell introduced a host of new hardware, platforms designed to help the teleconference build cloud-native open radio network access, also called RAN architectures, using proprietary and sub-components for various suppliers. Dell's Open Telecom Ecosystem community has already partnered with Nokia, Qualcomm, Amdocs and Juniper Networks to create new offerings aimed at accelerating open RAN price performance for communication service providers. This includes creating a new virtual RAN offering using Open Telecom Ecosystem Labs, and as the center for testing and validation, building next-generation 5G virtualized distributed units and deploy and automated validated 5G-SA network with various partners across the ecosystem. Dell's promising that this is just the beginning of the collaboration with the telecom industry as it seeks to accelerate the adoption of 5G networking technologies and solve key industry challenges. More action's on the ground, go to thecube.net, theCUBE is broadcasting live for four days, Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin. I'm in the studios in Palo Alto bringing you the news. Lot of action happening, of course. Go to siliconangle.com to catch all the breaking news. We have a special report. We already got 10 plus stories already flowing. Probably have another 10 today. Day two tomorrow as MWC continues to power more news coverage for the edge and cloud-native technologies. (pensive ambient music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(intro music) >> Now, as we all know, businesses are awash with data, from financial services to healthcare to supply chain and logistics and more. Our activities, and increasingly, actions from machines are generating new and more useful information in much larger volumes than we've ever seen. Now, meanwhile, our data-hungry society's expectations for experiences are increasingly elevated. Everybody wants to leverage and monetize all this new data coming from smart devices and innumerable sources around the globe. All this data, it surrounds us, but more often than not, it lives in silos, which makes it very difficult to consume, share, and make valuable. These factors, combined with new types of data and analytics, make things even more complicated. Data from ERP systems to images, to data generated from deep learning and machine learning platforms, this is the reality that organizations are facing today. And as such, effectively leveraging all of this data has become an enormous challenge. So, today, we're going to be discussing these modern data challenges and the emergence of so-called "Smart Data Fabrics" as a key solution to said challenges. To do so, we're joined by thought leaders from InterSystems. This is a really creative technology provider that's attacking some of the most challenging data obstacles. InterSystems tells us that they're dedicated to helping customers address their critical scalability, interoperability, and speed-to-value challenges. And in this first segment, we welcome Scott Gnau, he's the global Head of Data Platforms at InterSystems, to discuss the context behind these issues and how smart data fabrics provide a solution. Scott, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Thanks a lot. It's good to be here. >> Yeah. So, look, you and I go back, you know, several years and, you know, you've worked in Tech, you've worked in Data Management your whole career. You've seen many data management solutions, you know, from the early days. And then we went through the hoop, the Hadoop era together and you've come across a number of customer challenges that sort of change along the way. And they've evolved. So, what are some of the most pressing issues that you see today when you're talking to customers and, you know, put on your technical hat if you want to. >> (chuckles) Well, Dave, I think you described it well. It's a perfect storm out there. You know, combined with there's just data everywhere and it's coming up on devices, it's coming from new different kinds of paradigms of processing and people are trying to capture and harness the value from this data. At the same time, you talked about silos and I've talked about data silos through my entire career. And I think, I think the interesting thing about it is for so many years we've talked about, "We've got to reduce the silos and we've got to integrate the data, we've got to consolidate the data." And that was a really good paradigm for a long time. But frankly, the perfect storm that you described? The sources are just too varied. The required agility for a business unit to operate and manage their customers is creating an enormous presser and I think ultimately, silos aren't going away. So, there's a realization that, "Okay, we're going to have these silos, we want to manage them, but how do we really take advantage of data that may live across different parts of our business and in different organizations?" And then of course, the expectation of the consumer is at an all-time high, right? They expect that we're going to treat them and understand their needs or they're going to find some other provider. So, you know, pulling all of this together really means that, you know, our customers and businesses around the world are struggling to keep up and it's forcing a real, a new paradigm shift in underlying data management, right? We started, you know, many, many years ago with data marts and then data warehouses and then we graduated to data lakes, where we expanded beyond just traditional transactional data into all kinds of different data. And at each step along the way, we help businesses to thrive and survive and compete and win. But with the perfect storm that you've described, I think those technologies are now just a piece of the puzzle that is really required for success. And this is really what's leading to data fabrics and data meshes in the industry. >> So what are data fabrics? What problems do they solve? How do they work? Can you just- >> Yeah. So the idea behind it is, and this is not to the exclusion of other technologies that I described in data warehouses and data lakes and so on, but data fabrics kind of take the best of those worlds but add in the notion of being able to do data connectivity with provenance as a way to integrate data versus data consolidation. And when you think about it, you know, data has gravity, right? It's expensive to move data. It's expensive in terms of human cost to do ETL processes where you don't have known provenance of data. So, being able to play data where it lies and connect the information from disparate systems to learn new things about your business is really the ultimate goal. You think about in the world today, we hear about issues with the supply chain and supply and logistics is a big issue, right? Why is that an issue? Because all of these companies are data-driven. They've got lots of access to data. They have formalized and automated their processes, they've installed software, and all of that software is in different systems within different companies. But being able to connect that information together, without changing the underlying system, is an important way to learn and optimize for supply and logistics, as an example. And that's a key use case for data fabrics. Being able to connect, have provenance, not interfere with the operational system, but glean additional knowledge by combining multiple different operational systems' data together. >> And to your point, data is by its very nature, you know, distributed around the globe, it's on different clouds, it's in different systems. You mentioned "data mesh" before. How do data fabrics relate to this concept of data mesh? Are they competing? Are they complimentary? >> Ultimately, we think that they're complimentary. And we actually like to talk about smart data fabrics as a way to kind of combine the best of the two worlds. >> What is that? >> The biggest thing really is there's a lot around data fabric architecture that talks about centralized processing. And in data meshes, it's more about distributed processing. Ultimately, we think a smart data fabric will support both and have them be interchangeable and be able to be used where it makes the most sense. There are some things where it makes sense to process, you know, for a local business unit, or even on a device for real-time kinds of implementations. There are some other areas where centralized processing of multiple different data sources make sense. And what we're saying is, "Your technology and the architecture that you define behind that technology should allow for both where they make the most sense." >> What's the bottom line business benefit of implementing a data fabric? What can I expect if I go that route? >> I think there are a couple of things, right? Certainly, being able to interact with customers in real time and being able to manage through changes in the marketplace is certainly a key concept. Time-to-value is another key concept. You know, if you think about the supply and logistics discussion that I had before, right? No company is going to rewrite their ERP operational system. It's how they manage and run their business. But being able to glean additional insights from that data combined with data from a partner combined with data from a customer or combined with algorithmic data that, you know, you may create some sort of forecast and that you want to fit into. And being able to combine that together without interfering with the operational process and get those answers quickly is an important thing. So, seeing through the silos and being able to do the connectivity, being able to have interoperability, and then, combining that with flexibility on the analytics and flexibility on the algorithms you might want to run against that data. Because in today's world, of course, you know, certainly there's the notion of predictive modeling and relational theory, but also now adding in machine learning, deep learning algorithms, and have all of those things kind of be interchangeable is another important concept behind data fabric. So you're not relegated to one type of processing. You're saying, "It's data and I have multiple different processing engines and I may want to interchange them over time." >> So, I know, well actually, you know, when you said "real time", I infer from that, I don't have a zillion copies of the data and it's not in a bunch of silos. Is that a correct premise? >> You try to minimize your copies of the data? >> Yeah. Okay. >> There's certainly, there's a nirvana that says, "There's only ever one copy of data." That's probably impossible. But you certainly don't want to be forced into making multiple copies of data to support different processing engines unnecessarily. >> And so, you've recently made some enhancements to the data fabric capability that takes it, you know, ostensibly to the next level. Is that the smart piece? Is that machine intelligence? Can you describe what's in there? >> Well, you know, ultimately, the business benefit is be able to have a single source of the truth for a company. And so, what we're doing is combining multiple technologies in a single set of software that makes that software agile and supportable and not fragile for deployment of applications. At its core, what we're saying is, you know, we want to be able to consume any kind of data and I think your data fabric architecture is predicated on the fact that you're going to have relational data, you're going to have document data, you may have key-value store data, you may have images, you may have other things, and you want to be able to not be limited by the kind of data that you want to process. And so that certainly is what we build into our product set. And then, you want to be able to have any kind of algorithm, where appropriate, run against that data without having to do a bunch of massive ETL processes or make another copy of the data and move it somewhere else. And so, to that end, we have, taking our award-winning engine, which, you know, provides, you know, traditional analytic capabilities and relational capabilities, we've now integrated machine learning. So, you basically can bring machine learning algorithms to the data without having to move data to the machine learning algorithm. What does that mean? Well, number one, your application developer doesn't have to think differently to take advantage of the new algorithm. So that's a really good thing. The other thing that happens is if you, you're playing that algorithm where the data actually exists from your operational system, that means the round trip from running the model to inferring some decision you want to make to actually implementing that decision can happen instantaneously, as opposed to, you know, other kinds of architectures, where you may want to make a copy of the data and move it somewhere else. That takes time, latency. Now the data gets stale, your model may not be as efficient because you're running against stale data. We've now taken all of that off the table by being able to pull that processing inside the data fabric, inside of the single source of truth. >> And you got to manage all that complexity. So you got one system, so that makes it, you know, cost-effective, and you're bringing modern tooling to the platform. Is that right? >> That's correct. >> How can people learn more and maybe continue the conversation with you if they have other questions? (both chuckle) >> Call or write. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean, certainly, check out our website. We've got a lot of information about the different kinds of solutions, the different industries, the different technologies. Reach out: scottg@intersystems.com. >> Excellent. Thank you, Scott. Really appreciate it and great to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> All right, keep it right there. We have a demo coming up next. You want to see smart data fabrics in action? Stay tuned. (ambient music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the program, and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization, that's cybersecurity. You know, survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me to discuss this critical topic area, are Jim Shook, who's the Global Director of Cybersecurity and Compliance Practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on cloud and infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks Dave, great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart, they adapt to everything that we do. So we're seeing more and more, kind of living off the land. They're not necessarily deploying malware, makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think though, Dave, we've adapted and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's, let's protect as much as possible so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can, but then let's have the ability to adapt to, and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful. So we're recognizing that we can't be perfect a hundred percent of the time against a hundred percent of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So Andrew, you know, I like what Jim was saying, about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. But, and as Jim was saying, you can't be perfect. But, so given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like when you look at an attack if it were to occur, right? How you get that copy of data back into production, and not only that but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe seem to be data or an active directory or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails that you can protect it, and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and, where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put in a yellow sticky? No, it's got to be, you got to be somewhere safe, right? So you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. So, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy but actually identifying what that golden crown jewel data, let's call it, actually entails as one aspect of it and then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated? That's the other portion of it. >> You know, if I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, you know, cybersecurity was kind of a checkoff item. And then as you got toward the middle part of the decade and I'd say clearly by 2016 it, security became a boardroom issue. It was on the agenda, you know, every quarter at the board meetings. So, compliance is no longer the driver, is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation or data, you know, or money, et cetera. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean the, you know, bad actors are good at what they do. These losses by organizations, tens, hundreds of millions into the billions sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly, if they're larger organizations, but that's also on the table too. So you can't just rely on, oh, we need to do, you know, A, B, and C because our regulators require it. You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business and then come up with the strategy from there. >> You know, Jim, staying with you, one of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for a resilience capability, but that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see the backup is a target, the bad actors want to take it out or corrupt it or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So, the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure. You've already got it in place, let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then, as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure which commonly we might say a cyber vault, although there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others, and that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this is, prior to the pandemic, they, you know, had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place but they felt like they weren't business resilient and they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So, Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We take a position that to be cyber resilient it includes operational resiliency, it includes understanding at the C-level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown jewel data but also how to recover it in real-time. So DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution, since we architect these specific each client needs, right? When we look at what client data entails, their recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration. But when we architect these out we look at not only how to protect the data but how to alert and monitor for attacks in real-time. How to understand what we should do when a breaches in progress. Putting together with our security operations centers a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client. And then being able to cleanse and remediate so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect and recover, and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep 'em out, to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> You know, this discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO, I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery 'cause it was too risky or, you know, maybe they tested it on, you know, July 4th or something like that. But I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could, you know, double click on recovery, how hard is it to test that recovery and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So it depends, right, on the industry vertical, what kind of data, again. Financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours. In some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple days. We do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy, but it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about. It's not on the technology of how the data gets protected it's focused on the recovery, that's all that we want to do. And so the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is you have to think about different scenarios. So, there are scenarios where the attack might be small, it might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly-based, like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. The regulatory environment, we call those attacks severe but plausible. So you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure but you can test some things with the infrastructure. Others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise or walk through what that looks like to really get that recovery kind of muscle memory so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down what are those critical applications? What do we need? What's most important? What has to come back first? And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense, understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCUBE, especially lately is around, you know, IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, you know, traditionally operations technologies have been air-gapped often by design. But as businesses, increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0 and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're, you know, driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, et cetera. So, a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah, so bad actors can come in many forms. We've seen instances of social engineering, we've seen, USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IOT devices is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So, when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually it's not dissimilar from what we've been talking about, where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IOT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your business is, right? So when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front-end protection but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what data entails to put in the vault from an IOT perspective is just as critical as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the key points there, everything is interconnected. So even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them or controlling theM, SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly but there was uncertainty around that and the IT systems hadn't been secured so that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked but the outcome was the same that the business couldn't operate. So, you really have to take all of those into account. And I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services and then the applications and data, and other components that support those and drive those and making sure those are protected, you understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean you made the point, I mean, you're right, the adversary is highly capable, they're motivated 'cause the ROI is so, it's so lucrative. It's like this never ending battle that cybersecurity pros, you know, go through. It really is kind of frontline, sort of technical heroes, if you will. And so, but sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of cyber from the good guys' perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave, so that focus. I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be a hundred percent capable every single time and let's figure that out, right? That's real world stuff. So, just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time. And of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities but there's a lot more information sharing, there's a lot more focus from the business side of the house and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah, to add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You brought up a point earlier, it used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now as we have been in the market for a while we continue to mature the offerings, it's further education for not only the business itself but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected and continue to be evolved and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check the box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right guys, we got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a really important topic. Keep up the good work, appreciate it. >> Thanks Dan. >> Thank you. >> All right, thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time. Really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and infrastructure services both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to the Cube. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model and really think about transforming your business particularly the operating model. So my first question Jim is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well, there are really three aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social and governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation and that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience and I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation and resilience. >> So, thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate everybody's sort of concerned and there's not great visibility on the macro. So Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mind today. I think everybody really, you know understands the innovation and agility piece at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because, you know, prior to the pandemic people you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow, my business might not be that resilient. So Jay, my question to you is what are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? >> You know, priority is often an overused term in digital transformation, you know people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But, you know, with DXC'S philosophy not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized for instance, in many cases you can run applications, you know in your own data center or on-prem or in other environments in a hybrid environment or multi-cloud environment and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint, and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the bring the things to the business that the clients are you know, that their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera, trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And we advocate for, you know there's not a single answer to that. We'd like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So let's talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We always talk about people process and technology, technology oftentimes CIOs will tell us, well, that's the easy part, We'll figure that out whether it's true or not but I agree, people and process are sometimes the tough ones. So Jay, why don't you start, what do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? >> Well, I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from, you know, the standards that are being built by, you know best in class models, and there's many people that have gone on, you know cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a, you know, there's a change management aspect that you'd need to look at with the, you know, with the environments, there's a, you know, there's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people, you know, to deliver with the, you know, with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of, you know there's a lot of different elements. It's not just a this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that, you know, we're being, you know as much of a consultative advocate for the client, for, you know, where they want to go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients, you know and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked, you know across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own, you know their own challenges if you would. So they need advocacy to help, you know bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through you know, technology advances, which, you know Jim's really good at doing for us. >> Yeah. Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is, thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want, and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments, are really important to get maximizing your business return on a journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You know, mentioned multi-cloud just then we had in January 17th we had our Supercloud two event and Supercloud is basically, it's really what multi-cloud should have been, I'd like to say. So it's just creating a common experience across clouds, and you guys were talking about, you know there's different governance, there's different security there's different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event, in talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table and what is DXC's, you know, unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great. >> I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC given the size and the history of the company. I can use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're, on the edge. They're, you know, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now and they've really brought, you know a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there's somebody who could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscaler activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said, listen, not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment, and they'd like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know both private and public, you know to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and, and what's, you know what's the best optimal running environment, you know for us to be able to bring, you know the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know, and, you know the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah. You know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not a zero sum game. And I think, you know, you're right Jay, I think initially people felt like, oh wow, it is a zero sum game, but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it super cloud or Uber cloud or multi-cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction and I've, you know, look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. >> Help us figure this out Jim (all laughing) >> Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table, and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners, to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now. Even predates, you know, the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know, you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition, Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments at the right time and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach but a cloud right approach, where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include mainframe, it might include an on-premises infrastructure, it could include private cloud, public cloud and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah, Jay, please. It's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, but chime in here. >> And now if you were speaking still specifically to Dell here, like they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership they put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in, you know, arm in arm in front of clients. And it's not, you know, it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship, we do regular QBR meetings, we have regular executive touchpoint meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client with the partners, you know, in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there and, you know, continue to show a lot of support, you know, both for them, you know there's other OEM partners of course in the market there's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, kind of over the years, taking your arrows, you know, over decades, and you know, that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on the cube right back. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Valante and in this session, we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for Smart Factories. And with me are, Todd Edmunds,the Global CTO of Smart Manufacturing Edge and Digital Twins at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (chuckles) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee, who's the Vice President, General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Nice to be here. >> Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, Smart Factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain, what is Industry 4.0 all about and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while and it's gone by multiple different names, as you said. Industry 4.0, Smart Manufacturing, Industrial IoT, Smart Factory. But it all really means the same thing, its really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So, being much more efficient, implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so, we really look at that by saying, okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time? So it's really not- it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this, not as a one-of, two-of individual Use Case point of view but instead they're saying, we really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this. Not to just enable one or two Use Cases, but enable many many Use Cases across the spectrum. I mean, there's tons of them out there. There's Predictive maintenance and there's OEE, Overall Equipment Effectiveness and there's Computer Vision and all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor, but it needs to be done in a little bit different way and really to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in Smart Factory or Industry 4.0 or however you want to call it. And truly transform, not just throw an Industry 4.0 Use Case out there but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future or you don't and fade into history. Like, 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000. Right? And so, really that's a key thing and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah. So, Aditi, it's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So, is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely. Though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation. What we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right? For example, improving the downtime or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments or improving the quality of products, right? So, I think these are lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So, Aditi, I wonder if I could stay with you and maybe this is a bit esoteric but when I first first started researching IoT and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, well, there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem. I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, Aerospace Defense companies the firms building out critical infrastructure actually had kind of an incumbent advantage and a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV somebody now they're building homes with 3D printers. It like blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive. But, so- But they got to continue, the incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well-capitalized. They're pretty good businesses, very good businesses but there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will, or this transformation that we're talking about. So, my question is, how are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing in the the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for Greenfield Factories, right? That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies, with the new connectivities, right? For the machines, for example, Industrial IoT having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at Edge versus Cloud type of technologies, right? Those are all getting built in the Greenfield Factories. However, for the Install-Based Factories, right? That is where our customers are looking at how do I modernize these factories? How do I connect the existing machine? And that is where some of the challenges come in on the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security because now you are connecting the factories to each other. So, cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right? So, there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way. So, perhaps they start with the innovation program and then they look at the business case and they scale it up, right? >> Todd, I'm glad you did brought up security, because if you think about the operations technology folks, historically they air-gaped the systems, that's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, 'Hey, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligence.' So, that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It absolutely is, Dave. And, you know, you can no longer just segment that because really to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IoT and Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory but then you got to put data back in the factory. So, no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So, you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the Cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of Cloud all the way down to the Edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does. Because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the Cloud the broader the attack surface is. So, what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from kind of that hybrid right ones run anywhere on the factory floor down to the Edge. And one of the things we're seeing too, is to help distinguish between what is the Edge and bridge that gap between, like, Dave, you talked about IT and OT and also help what Aditi talked about is the Greenfield Plants versus the Brownfield Plants that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those. It's great to kind of start to delineate what does that mean? Where's the Edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about really two Edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an Industrial Edge that sits... or some people call it a Far Edge or a Thin Edge, sits way down on that plant, consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity. The hard stuff about how do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it? And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another Edge evolving above that, which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself; that helps figure out where we're going to run this? Does it connect to the Cloud? Do we run Applications On-Prem? Because a lot of times that On-Prem Application it needs to be done. 'Cause that's the only way that it's going to work because of security requirements, because of latency requirements performance and a lot of times, cost. It's really helpful to build that Multiple-Edge strategy because then you kind of, you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new Applications, new Use Cases and become the foundation for DXC'S expertise and Applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, its.. so yeah. How long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that we're- you know, like I said at the beginning, this is not new. Smart Factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been, it's people have been trying to implement the Holy Grail of Smart Factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch or quite a bit of a switch to where the enterprises and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and they have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So, instead of deploying a computer here and a Gateway there and a Server there, I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see Servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a PC in a closet somewhere running a critical production application. So, we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table, much louder voice at the table to say, we've been doing this enterprise all the time. We know how to really consolidate, bring Hyper-Converged Applications, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure to really accelerate these kind of applications. Really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that Smart Factory and start to bring that same capabilities down into the Mac on the factory floor. That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement, you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily and you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So, we're seeing manufacturers that first Use Case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way when that- Think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that what you've done in that one factory and then set. Let's make that across all the factories including the factory that we're in, then across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat. Almost like cookie cutter. >> Got it. Thank you. >> Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, Data, Integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely. Lot different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right? Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is important. But the digital skillsets like IoT, having a skillset in in different Protocols for connecting the machines, right? That experience that comes with it. Data and Analytics, Security, Augmented Virtual Reality Programming. Again, looking at Robotics and the Digital Twin. So, the... It's a lot more connectivity software, data-driven skillsets that are needed to Smart Factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are recruiting these types of resources with these skill sets to accelerate their Smart Factory implementation, as well as consulting firms like DXC Technology and others. We recruit, we train our talent to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to Industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC to bring these to market? >> Yeah, Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership and we work very closely together to create solutions, to create strategies and how we are going to jointly help our clients, right? So, areas that we have worked closely together is Edge Compute, right? How that impacts the Smart Factory. So, we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at Vision Technologies. How do we use that at the Edge to improve the quality of products, right? So, we have several areas that we collaborate in and our approaches that we want to bring solutions to our client and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent and the right level of security. So, we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question. Kind of similar but different, you know. Why Dell, DXC, pitch me? What's different about this partnership? Where are you confident that you're going to be to deliver the best value to customers? >> Absolutely. Great question. You know, there's no shortage of Bespoke Solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual Use Cases and do these things and just, and that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is we do the optimization of the engineering of those previously Bespoke Solutions upfront, together. The power of our scalable enterprise grade structured industry standard infrastructure, as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And Dell's infrastructure and our, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that scalable infrastructure to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's again, not just one individual solutions it's all of the solutions that not just drive Use Cases but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, you're right. The partnership has gone, I mean I first encountered it back in, I think it was 2010. May of 2010. We had guys both on the, I think you were talking about converged infrastructure and I had a customer on, and it was actually the manufacturing customer. It was quite interesting. And back then it was how do we kind of replicate what's coming in the Cloud? And you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation and love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on "The Cube."

(upbeat music) >> Now, as we all know, businesses are awash with data, from financial services to healthcare to supply chain and logistics and more. Our activities, and increasingly, actions from machines are generating new and more useful information in much larger volumes than we've ever seen. Now, meanwhile, our data hungry society's expectations for experiences are increasingly elevated. Everybody wants to leverage and monetize all this new data coming from smart devices and innumerable sources around the globe. All this data, it surrounds us, but more often than not, it lives in silos, which makes it very difficult to consume, share, and make valuable. These factors combined with new types of data and analytics make things even more complicated. Data from ERP systems to images, to data generated from deep learning and machine learning platforms, this is the reality that organizations are facing today. And as such, effectively leveraging all of this data has become an enormous challenge. So today, we're going to be discussing these modern data challenges in the emergence of so-called smart data fabrics as a key solution to said challenges. To do so, we're joined by thought leaders from InterSystems. This is a really creative technology provider that's attacking some of the most challenging data obstacles. InterSystems tells us that they're dedicated to helping customers address their critical scalability, interoperability, and speed to value challenges. And in this first segment, we welcome Scott now. He's the global head of data platforms at InterSystems to discuss the context behind these issues and how smart data fabrics provide a solution. Scott, welcome, good to see you again. >> Thanks a lot. It's good to be here. >> Yeah, so look, you and I go back, you know, several years and you've worked in tech. You've worked in data management your whole career. You've seen many data management solutions, you know, from the early days. And then we went through the Hadoop era together. And you've come across a number of customer challenges that sort of changed along the way, and they've evolved. So what are some of the most pressing issues that you see today when you're talking to customers, and, you know, put on your technical hat if you want to? >> Well, Dave, I think you described it well. It's a perfect storm out there, you know, combined with, there's just data everywhere. And it's coming up on devices, it's coming from new different kinds of paradigms of processing and people are trying to capture and harness the value from this data. At the same time, you talked about silos, and I've talked about data silos through my entire career. And I think the interesting thing about it is for so many years we've talked about we've got to reduce the silos, and we've got to integrate the data, we've got to consolidate the data. And that was a really good paradigm for a long time. But frankly, the perfect storm that you described, the sources are just too varied. The required agility for a business unit to operate and manage their customers is creating an enormous pressure. And I think, ultimately, silos aren't going away. So there's a realization that, okay, we're going to have these silos, we want to manage them, but how do we really take advantage of data that may live across different parts of our business and in different organizations? And then, of course, the expectation of the consumer is at an all-time high, right? They expect that we're going to treat them and understand their needs, or they're going to find some other provider. So, you know, pulling all of this together really means that, you know, our customers and businesses around the world are struggling to keep up, and it's forcing a new paradigm shift in underlying data management, right? We started, you know, many, many years ago with data marts and then data warehouses, and then we graduated to data lakes where we expanded beyond just traditional transactional data into all kinds of different data. And at each step along the way, we help businesses to thrive and survive and compete and win. But with the perfect storm that you've described, I think those technologies are now just a piece of the puzzle that is really required for success. And this is really what's leading to data fabrics and data meshes in the industry. >> So what are data fabrics? What problems do they solve? How do they work? Can you just add- >> Yeah, so the idea behind it is, and this is not to the exclusion of other technologies that I described in data warehouses and data lakes and so on. But data fabrics kind of take the best of those worlds, but add in the notion of being able to do data connectivity with provenance as a way to integrate data versus data consolidation. And when you think about it, you know, data has gravity, right? It's expensive to move data. It's expensive in terms of human cost to do ETL processes where you don't have known provenance of data. So being able to play data where it lies and connect the information from disparate systems to learn new things about your business is really the ultimate goal. You think about in the world today, we hear about issues with the supply chain, and supply and logistics is a big issue, right? Why is that an issue? Because all of these companies are data driven. They've got lots of access to data. They have formalized and automated their processes. They've installed software. And all of that software is in different systems within different companies. But being able to connect that information together without changing the underlying system is an important way to learn and optimize for supply and logistics, as an example. And that's a key use case for data fabrics being able to connect, have provenance, not interfere with the operational system, but glean additional knowledge by combining multiple different operational systems' data together. >> And to your point, data is by its very nature, you're distributed around the globe, it's on different clouds, it's in different systems. You mentioned data mesh before. How do data fabrics relate to this concept of data mesh? Are they competing? Are they complimentary? >> Ultimately, we think that they're complimentary. And we actually like to talk about smart data fabrics as a way to kind of combine the best of the two worlds. >> What is that? I mean, the biggest thing really is there's a lot around data fabric architecture that talks about centralized processing. And in data meshes, it's more about distributed processing. Ultimately, we think a smart data fabric will support both and have them be interchangeable and be able to be used where it makes the most sense. There are some things where it makes sense to process, you know, for a local business unit, or even on a device for real time kinds of implementations. There are some other areas where centralized processing of multiple different data sources make sense. And what we're saying is your technology and the architecture that you define behind that technology should allow for both where they make the most sense. >> What's the bottom line business benefit of implementing a data fabric? What can I expect if I go that route? >> I think there are a couple of things, right? Certainly being able to interact with customers in real time and being able to manage through changes in the marketplace is certainly a key concept. Time to value is another key concept. You know, if you think about the supply and logistics discussion that I had before, right? No company is going to rewrite their ERP operational system. It's how they manage and run their business. But being able to glean additional insights from that data combined with data from a partner, combined with data from a customer, or combined with algorithmic data that, you know, you may create some sort of forecast and that you want to fit into. And being able to combine that together without interfering with the operational process and get those answers quickly is an important thing. So seeing through the silos and being able to do the connectivity being able to have interoperability, and then combining that with flexibility on the analytics and flexibility on the algorithms you might want to run against that data. Because in today's world, of course, certainly there's the notion of predictive modeling and relational theory, but also now adding in machine learning, deep learning algorithms, and have all of those things kind of be interchangeable is another important concept behind data fabrics. So you're not relegated to one type of processing. You're saying it's data, and I have multiple different processing engines and I may want to interchange them over time. >> So, I know, well actually, when you said real time, I infer from that I don't have a zillion copies of the data and it's not in a bunch of silos. Is that a correct premise? >> You try to minimize your copies of the data. There's a nirvana that says there's only ever one copy of data. That's probably impossible. But you certainly don't want to be forced into making multiple copies of data to support different processing engines unnecessarily. >> And so you've recently made some enhancements to the data fabric capability that takes it, you know, ostensibly to the next level. Is that the smart piece, is that machine intelligence? Can you describe what's in there? >> Well, you know, ultimately the business benefit is be able to have a single source of the truth for a company. And so what we're doing is combining multiple technologies in a single set of software that makes that software agile and supportable and not fragile for deployment of applications. At its core, what we're saying is, we want to be able to consume any kind of data, and I think your data fabric architecture is predicated on the fact that you're going to have relational data you're going to have document data, you may have key value store data, you may have images, you may have other things, and you want to be able to not be limited by the kind of data that you want to process. And so that certainly is what we build into our product set. And then you want to be able to have any kind of algorithm where appropriate run against that data without having to do a bunch of massive ETL processes or make another copy of the data and move it somewhere else. And so to that end, we have taken our award-winning engine, which, you know, provides traditional analytic capabilities and relational capabilities. We've now integrated machine learning. So you basically can bring machine learning algorithms to the data without having to move data to the machine learning algorithm. What does that mean? Well, number one, your application developer doesn't have to think differently to take advantage of the new algorithms. So that's a really good thing. The other thing that happens is if you're playing that algorithm where the data actually exists from your operational system, that means the roundtrip from running the model to inferring some decision you want to make to actually implementing that decision can happen instantaneously. As opposed to, you know, other kinds of architectures where you may want to make a copy of the data and move it somewhere else. That takes time, latency. Now the data gets stale. Your model may not be as efficient because you're running against stale data. We've now taken all of that off the table by being able to pull that processing inside the data fabric, inside of the single source of truth. >> And you got to manage all that complexity. So you got one system, so that makes it cost effective, and you're bringing modern tooling to the platform. Is that right? >> That's correct. How can people learn more and maybe continue the conversation with you if they have other questions? >> (Scott laughs) Call or write. Yeah, I mean, certainly check out our website. We've got a lot of information about the different kinds of solutions, the different industries, the different technologies. Reach out at scottg@intersystems.com. >> Excellent, thank you, Scott. Really appreciate it. And great to see you again. >> Good to see you. All right, keep it right there. We have a demo coming up next. If you want to see smart data fabrics in action, stay tuned. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to the program, and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization. That's cybersecurity. Survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me, to discuss this critical topic area, are Jim Shook, who's the global director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on cloud and infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks, Dave. Great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart, they adapt to everything that we do, so, we're seeing more and more kind of living off the land, they're not necessarily deploying malware, makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think, though, Dave, we've adapted and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's let's protect as much as possible, so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can, but then let's have the ability to adapt to and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful. So, we're recognizing that we can't be perfect 100% of the time against 100% of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So, Andrew, I like what Jim was saying about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. And as Jim was saying, you can't be perfect, but so, given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown-jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like when you look at an attack, if it were to occur, right? How you get that copy of data back into production. And not only that, but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe SIM2B data, or an Active Directory, or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails, so that you can protect it, and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put in a yellow sticky? You know, it's got to be somewhere safe, right? So, you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. So, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy, but actually identifying what that golden crown-jewel data, let's call it, actually entails is one aspect of it, and then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated, that's the other portion of it. >> If I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, cybersecurity was kind of a check-off item, and then as you got toward the middle part of the decade, and I'd say clearly by 2016, security became a boardroom issue, it was on the agenda every quarter at the board meetings. So, compliance is no longer the driver is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation, or data, or money, etc. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean, the bad actors are good at what they do, these losses by organizations tens, hundreds of millions into the billions, sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly, if they're larger organizations. But that's also on the table too. So, you can't just rely on, oh, we need to do A, B and C because our regulators require it. You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business, and then come up with the strategy from there. >> Jim, staying with you. One of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So, how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for a resilience capability. But that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities, and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see, the backup is a target, the bad actors want to take it out, or corrupt it, or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful, and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So, the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure, you've already got it in place, let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then, as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure, which commonly we might say a cyber vault, or there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others. And that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this prior to the pandemic, they had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place, but they felt like they weren't business-resilient, and they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So, Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We take a position that to be cyber resilient, it includes operational resiliency, it includes understanding at the C level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown-jewel data, but also how to recover it in real time. So, DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution, since we architect these specific to each client needs, right? When we look at what client data entails, their recovery point, objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration, but, when we architect these out, we look at not only how to protect the data, but how to alert and monitor for attacks in realtime. How to understand what we should do when a breach is in progress. Putting together with our security operations centers a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client. And then being able to cleanse and remediate, so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect and recover and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep 'em out, to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> This discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO, I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery, 'cause it was too risky, or maybe they tested it on July 4th or something like that, but I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could double-click on recovery, how hard is it to test that recovery, and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So, it depends, right? On the industry vertical, what kind of data, again, financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours, in some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple days, we do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems, the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy. But it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about, it's not on the technology of how the data gets protected, it's focused on the recovery. That's all that we want to do. And so, the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is you have to think about different scenarios. So, there are scenarios where the attack might be small, it might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly based, like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. In the regulatory environment we call those attacks severe but plausible. So, you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure, but you can test some things with the infrastructure, others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise, or walk through what that looks like to really get that recovery kind of muscle memory, so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down what are those critical applications. What do we need? What's most important? What has to come back first? And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense. Understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCUBE, especially lately, is around IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, traditionally, operations technologies have been air gapped, often by design, but as businesses increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0, and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, etc. So, a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure, and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah. So, bad actors can come in many forms, we've seen instances of social engineering, we've seen USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IOT device is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So, when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually, it's not dissimilar from what we've been talking about, where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IOT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your business is, right? So, when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front end protection, but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what data entails to put in the vault from an IOT perspective is just as critical as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the key points there. Everything is interconnected. So, even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them, or controlling them SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly, but there was uncertainty around that, and the IT systems hadn't been secured. So, that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked, but the outcome was the same, that the business couldn't operate. So, you really have to take all of those into account, and I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services, and then the applications and data, and other components that support those and drive those, and making sure those are protected, you understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean, you made the point, I mean, you're right. The adversary is highly capable, they're motivated, 'cause the ROI is so lucrative. It's like this never-ending battle that cybersecurity pros go through, it really is kind of frontline sort of technical heroes, if you will. But sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of cyber from the good guys' perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave, so that focus, I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be 100% capable every single time and let's figure that out, right? That's real-world stuff. So, just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time, and, of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities, but there's a lot more information sharing, there's a lot more focus from the business side of the house, and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah. To add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You brought up a point earlier, it used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now, as we have been in the market for a while, we continue to mature the offerings, it's further education for not only the business itself, but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected, and continue to be evolved, and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check-the-box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right, guys. We got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a really important topic. Keep keep up the good work. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real-world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time, really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there.

>> Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Vellante and in this session we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for smart factories and with me are Todd Edmunds, the global CTO of Smart Manufacturing, Edge and Digital Twins, at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (Todd laughs) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee, who's the Vice President General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Well- >> Nice to be here. >> Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, smart factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain, like, what is Industry 4.0 all about and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah, sure Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while and it's got, it's gone by multiple different names. As you said, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart factory. But it all really means the same thing. It's really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So being much more efficient. Implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so we really look at that by saying, "Okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time"? So it's really not, it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this, not as a one-off, two off individual use case point of view, but instead they're saying, "We really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this." Not to just enable one or two use cases, but enable many, many use cases across the spectrum. I mean, there's tons of 'em out there. There's predictive maintenance and there's OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, and there's computer vision. And all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor, but it needs to be done in a little bit different way. And really to to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in smart factory, or Industry 4.0, or however you want to call it. And truly transform. Not just throw an Industry 4.0 use case out there, but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. You know, I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future or you don't and fade into history like 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000, right. And so really that's a key thing and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah, so Aditi, that's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely, though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation. What we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right. For example, improving the downtime, you know, or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments or improving the quality of products, right. So I think these are lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So Aditi, one, if I could stay with you and maybe this is a bit esoteric, but when I first started researching IoT and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, you know, while there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem, I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, aerospace defense companies, the firms building out critical infrastructure, actually had kind of an incumbent advantage and a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV, somebody now, they're building homes with 3D printers. It like blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive. But. So, but they got to continue, the incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well capitalized. They're pretty good businesses. Very good businesses. But there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will. Or there's transformation that we're talking about. So my question is how are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing in the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for greenfield factories, right. That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies with the new connectivities, right, for the machines, for example. Industry IoT, Having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at edge versus cloud type of technologies, right. Those are all getting built in the greenfield factories. However, for the install-based factories, right, that is where our customers are looking at how do I modernize, right. These factories. How do I connect the existing machine? And that is where some of the challenges come in on, you know, the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security, right, because now you are connecting the factories to each other, right. So cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right. So there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way, right. So perhaps they start with the innovation program. And then they look at the business case and they scale it up, right. >> Todd, I'm glad Aditi brought up security because if you think about the operations technology, you know folks, historically they air gapped, you know, the systems. That's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, "Hey, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligent." So that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It absolutely is Dave. And, you know, you can no longer just segment that because really to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IOT and industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory but then you got to put data back in the factory. So no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of cloud all the way down to the edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the cloud, the broader the attack surface is. So what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from, kind of, that hybrid, you know, write once, run anywhere on the factory floor down to the edge. And one of things we're seeing too is to help distinguish between what is the edge and that. And bridge that gap between, like Dave, you talked about IT and OT, and also help that what Aditi talked about is the greenfield plants versus the brownfield plants, that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those, is it's great to kind of start to delineate. What does that mean? Where's the edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about, really, two edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an industrial edge that sits, or some people call it a far edge or a thin edge, sits way down on that plant. Consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity, the hard stuff, about how do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it? And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another edge evolving above that which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself that helps figure out where we're going to run this. Is... Does it connect to the cloud? Do we run applications on-prem? Because a lot of times that on-prem application is needs to be done because that's the only way it's going to work. Because of security requirements. Because of latency requirements, performance, and a lot of times, cost. It's really helpful to build that multiple edge strategy because then you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware, into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new applications, new use cases, and become the foundation for DXC's expertise in applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, it... So, yeah, how long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what, you know, what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that we're, you know, like I said at the beginning, this is not new smart factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been... It's people have been trying to implement the holy grail of smart factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch or quite a bit of a switch, to where the enterprise and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So instead of deploying a computer here and a gateway there and a server there. I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a PC in a closet somewhere running a a critical production application. So we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table. Much louder voice at the table to say, "We've been doing this enterprise all the time. We know how to really consolidate, bring hyper-converged applications, hyper-converged infrastructure, to really accelerate these kind of applications. Really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that smart factory." And start to bring that same capabilities down into the Mac on the factory floor. That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily. And you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So we're seeing manufacturers... Yeah, that first use case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way, when that... Think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that what you've done in that one factory and then set. Let's that, make that across all the factories including the factory that we're in, but across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat almost like a cookie cutter. >> Got it, thank you. Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, data, integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely. Different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right. Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is important. But the digital skillsets, like, you know, IoT. Having a skillset in different protocols for connecting the machines, right. That experience that comes with it. Data and analytics, security, augmented virtual reality, programming. You know, again, looking at robotics and the digital twin. So, you know, it's a lot more connectivity software data-driven skillsets that are needed to smart factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are, you know, recruiting these types of resources with these skillsets to, you know, accelerate their smart factory implementation as well as consulting firms like DXC technology and others. We recruit. We train our talent to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC, to bring these to market? >> Yeah, I... Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership, you know, and we work very closely together to create solutions, to create strategies, and how we are going to jointly help our clients, right. So. Areas that we have worked closely together is edge compute, right. How that impacts the smart factory. So we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at vision technologies, you know. How do we use that at the edge to improve the quality of products, right. So we have several areas that we collaborate in and our approach is that we want to bring solutions to our client and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent, and the right level of security. So we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question. Kind of similar but different. You know, why Dell DXC? Pitch me. What's different about this partnership? You know, where are you confident that, you know, you're going to deliver the best value to customers? >> Absolutely, great question. You know, there's no shortage of bespoke solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual use cases and do these things and just... And that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is we do the optimization of the engineering of those previously bespoke solutions upfront, together. Right. The power of our scalables, enterprise grade, structured, you know, industry standard infrastructure as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And Dell's infrastructure and our, what, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that scalable infrastructure to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's, again, not just one individual solutions. It's all of the solutions that not just drive use cases but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, you're right. The partnership has gone... I mean, I first encountered it back in, I think, it was 2010, May of 2010. We had you guys both on the queue... I think we were talking about converged infrastructure and I had a customer on, and it was actually manufacturing customer. Was quite interesting. And back then it was how do we kind of replicate what's coming in the cloud? And you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation. And love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> It was a pleasure speaking with you. >> I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on theCUBE.

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, along with the way that Dell has integrated this technology into its PowerEdge server lines. We're in for an interesting conversation today. Today, I'm joined by Dilip Ramachandran, Senior Director of Marketing at AMD, and Juergen Zimmermann. Juergen is Principal SAP Solutions Performance Benchmarking Engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Welcome. >> Thank you David, nice to be here. >> Nice to meet you too, welcome to theCUBE. You will officially be CUBE alumni after this. Dilip, let's start with you. What's this all about? Tell us about AMD's recent launch and the importance of it. >> Thanks, David. I'm excited to actually talk to you today, AMD, at our fourth generation EPYC launch last month in November. And as part of that fourth generation EPYC launch, we announced industry-leading performance based on 96 cores, based on Zen 4 architecture. And new interfaces, PCIe Gen 5, as well as DDR5. Incredible amount of memory bandwidth, memory capacity supported, and a whole lot of other features as well. So we announced this product, we launched it in November last month. And we've been closely working with Dell on a number of benchmarks that we'd love to talk to you more about today. >> So just for some context, when was the last release of this scale? So when was the third generation released? How long ago? >> The third generation EPYC was launched in Q1 of 2021. So it was almost 18 to 24 months ago. And since then we've made a tremendous jump, the fourth generation EPYC, in terms of number of cores. So third generation EPYC supported 64 cores, fourth generation EPYC supports 96 cores. And these are new cores, the Zen 4 cores, the fourth generation of Zen cores. So very high performance, new interfaces, and really world-class performance. >> Excellent. Well, we'll go into greater detail in a moment, but let's go to Juergen. Tell us about the testing that you've been involved with to kind of prove out the benefits of this new AMD architecture. >> Yeah, well, the testing is SAP Standard Performance benchmark, the SAP SD two tier. And this is more or less a industry standard benchmark that is used to size your service for the needs of SAP. Actually, SAP customers always ask the vendors about the SAP benchmark and the SAPS values of their service. >> And I should have asked you before, but give us a little bit of your background working with SAP. Have you been doing this for longer than a week? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely, I do this for about 20 years now. Started with Sun Microsystems, and interestingly in the year 2003, 2004, I started working with AMD service on SAP with Linux, and afterwards parted the SAP application to Solaris AMD, also with AMD. So I have a lot of tradition with SAP and AMD benchmarks, and doing this ever since then. >> So give us some more detail on the results of the recent testing, and if you can, tell us why we should care? >> (laughs) Okay, the recent results actually also surprised myself, they were so good. So I initially installed the benchmark kit, and couldn't believe that the server is just getting, or hitting idle by the numbers I saw. So I cranked up the numbers and reached results that are most likely double the last generation, so Zen 3 generation, and that even passed almost all 8-socket systems out there. So if you want to have the same SAP performance, you can just use 2-socket AMD server instead of any four or 8-socket servers out there. And this is a tremendous saving in energy. >> So you just mentioned savings in terms of power consumption, which is a huge consideration. What are the sort of end user results that this delivers in terms of real world performance? How is a human being at the end of a computer going to notice something like this? >> So actually the results are like that you get almost 150,000 users concurrently accessing the system, and get their results back from SAP within one second response time. >> 150,000 users, you said? >> 150,000 users in parallel. >> (laughs) Okay, that's amazing. And I think it's interesting to note that, and I'll probably say this a a couple of times. You just referenced third generation EPYC architecture, and there are a lot of folks out there who are two generations back. Not everyone is religiously updating every 18 months, and so for a fair number of SAP environments, this is an even more dramatic increase. Is that a fair thing to say? >> Yeah, I just looked up yesterday the numbers from generation one of EPYC, and this was at about 28,000 users. So we are five times the performance now, within four years. Yeah, great. >> So Dilip, let's dig a little more into the EPYC architecture, and I'm specifically also curious about... You mentioned PCIe Gen five, or 5.0 and all of the components that plug into that. You mentioned I think faster DDR. Talk about that. Talk about how all of the components work together to make when Dell comes out with a PowerEdge server, to make it so much more powerful. >> Absolutely. So just to spend a little bit more time on this particular benchmark, the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. It's a widely used benchmark in the industry to basically look at how do I get the most performance out of my system for a variety of SAP business suite applications. And we touched upon it earlier, right, we are able to beat a performance of 4-socket and 8-socket servers out there. And you know, it saves energy, it saves cost, better TCO for the data center. So we're really excited to be able to support more users in a single server and meeting all the other dual socket and 4-socket combinations out there. Now, how did we get there, right, is more the important question. So as part of our fourth generation EPYC, we obviously upgraded our CPU core to provide much better single third performance per core. And at the socket level, you know, when you're packing 96 cores, you need to be able to feed these cores, you know, from a memory standpoint. So what we did was we went to 12 channels of memory, and these are DDR5 memory channels. So obviously you get much better bandwidth, higher speed of the memory with DDR5, you know, starting at 4,800 megahertz. And you're also now able to have more channels to be able to send the data from the memory into the CPU subsystem, which is very critical to keep the CPUs busy and active, and get the performance out. So that's on the memory side. On the data side, you know, we do have PCIe Gen five, and any data oriented applications that take data either from the PCIe drives or the network cards that utilize Gen five that are available in the industry today, you can actually really get data into the system through the PCIe I/O, either again, through the disk, or through the net card as well. So those are other ways to actually also feed the CPU subsystem with data to be processed by the CPU complex. So we are, again, very excited to see all of this coming together, and as they say, proof's in the pudding. You know, Juergen talked about it. How over generation after generation we've increased the performance, and now with our fourth generation EPYC, we are absolutely leading world-class performance on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. >> Dilip, I have another question for you, and this may be, it may be a bit of a PowerEdge and beyond question. What are you seeing, or what are you anticipating in terms of end user perception when they go to buy a new server? Obviously server is a very loose term, and they can be configured in a bunch of different ways. But is there a discussion about ROI and TCO that's particularly critical? Because people are going to ask, "Well, wait a minute. If it's more expensive than the last one that I bought, am I getting enough bang for my buck?" Is that going to be part of the conversation, especially around power and cooling and things like that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, every data center decision maker has to ask the question, "Why should I upgrade? Should I stay with legacy hardware, or should I go into the latest and greatest that AMD offers?" And the advantages that the new generation products bring is much better performance at much better energy consumption levels, as well as much better performance per dollar levels. So when you do the upgrade, you are actually getting, you know, savings in terms of performance per dollar, as well as saving in space because you can consolidate your work into fewer servers 'cause you have more cores. As we talked about, you have eight, you know. Typically you might do it on a four or 8-socket server which is really expensive. You can consolidate down to a 2-socket server which is much cheaper. As also for maintenance costs, it's much lower maintenance costs as well. All of this, performance, power, maintenance costs, all of that translate into better TCO, right. So lower all of these, high performance, lower power, and then lower maintenance costs, translate to much better TCO for the end user. And that's an important equation that all customers pay attention to. and you know, we love to work with them and demonstrate those TCO benefits to them. >> Juergen, talk to us more in general about what Dell does from a PowerEdge perspective to make sure that Dell is delivering the best infrastructure possible for SAP. In general, I mean, I assume that this is a big responsibility of yours, is making sure that the stuff runs properly and if not, fixing it. So tell us about that relationship between Dell and a SAP. >> Yeah, for Dell and SAP actually, we're more or less partners with SAP. We have people sitting in SAP's Linux lab, and working in cooperative with SAP, also with Linux partners like SUSE and Red Hat. And we are in constant exchange about what's new in Linux, what's new on our side. And we're all a big family here. >> So when the new architecture comes out and they send it to Juergen, the boys back at the plant as they say, or the factory to use Formula One terms, are are waiting with baited breath to hear what Juergen says about the results. So just kind of kind of recap again, you know, the specific benchmarks that you were running. Tell us about that again. >> Yeah, the specific benchmark is the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. And for SAP, this is the benchmark that needs to be tested, and it shows the performance of the whole system. So in contrast to benchmarks that only check if the CPU is running, very good, this test the whole system up from the network stack, from the storage stack, the memory, subsystem, and the OS running on the CPUs. >> Okay, which makes perfect sense, since Dell is delivering an integrated system and not just CPU technology. You know, on that subject, Dilip, do you have any insights into performance numbers that you're hearing about with Gen four EPYC for other database environments? >> Yeah, we have actually worked together with Dell on a variety of benchmarks, both on the latest fourth generation EPYC processors as well as the preceding one, the third generation EPYC processors. And published a bunch of world records on database, particularly I would say TPC-H, TPCx-V, as well as TPCx-HS and TPCx-IoT. So a number of TPC related benchmarks that really showcase performance for database and related applications. And we've collaborated very closely with Dell on these benchmarks and published a number of them already, and you know, a number of them are world records as well. So again, we're very excited to collaborate with Dell on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark, as well as other benchmarks that are related to database. >> Well, speaking of other benchmarks, here at theCUBE we're going to be talking to actually quite a few people, looking at this fourth generation EPYC launch from a whole bunch of different angles. You two gentlemen have shed light on some really good pieces of that puzzle. I want to thank you for being on theCUBE today. With that, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here on theCUBE. Stay tuned for continuing CUBE coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, and Dell PowerEdge strategy to leverage it.

hi everybody welcome back to re invent 2022. this is thecube's exclusive coverage we're here at the satellite set it's up on the fifth floor of the Venetian Conference Center and this is part of the global startup program the AWS startup showcase series that we've been running all through last year and and into this year with AWS and featuring some of its its Global Partners Ed wallson series the CEO of chaos search many times Cube Alum and Kevin Miller there's also a cube Alum vice president GM of S3 at AWS guys good to see you again yeah great to see you Dave hi Kevin this is we call this our Super Bowl so this must be like your I don't know uh World Cup it's a pretty big event yeah it's the World Cup for sure yeah so a lot of S3 talk you know I mean that's what got us all started in 2006 so absolutely what's new in S3 yeah it's been a great show we've had a number of really interesting launches over the last few weeks and a few at the show as well so you know we've been really focused on helping customers that are running Mass scale data Lakes including you know whether it's structured or unstructured data we actually announced just a few just an hour ago I think it was a new capability to give customers cross-account access points for sharing data securely with other parts of the organization and that's something that we'd heard from customers is as they are growing and have more data sets and they're looking to to get more out of their data they are increasingly looking to enable multiple teams across their businesses to access those data sets securely and that's what we provide with cross-count access points we also launched yesterday our multi-region access point failover capabilities and so again this is where customers have data sets and they're using multiple regions for certain critical workloads they're now able to to use that to fail to control the failover between different regions in AWS and then one other launch I would just highlight is some improvements we made to storage lens which is our really a very novel and you need capability to help customers really understand what storage they have where who's accessing it when it's being accessed and we added a bunch of new metrics storage lens has been pretty exciting for a lot of customers in fact we looked at the data and saw that customers who have adopted storage lens typically within six months they saved more than six times what they had invested in turning storage lens on and certainly in this environment right now we have a lot of customers who are it's pretty top of mind they're looking for ways to optimize their their costs in the cloud and take some of those savings and be able to reinvest them in new innovation so pretty exciting with the storage lens launch I think what's interesting about S3 is that you know pre-cloud Object Store was this kind of a niche right and then of course you guys announced you know S3 in 2006 as I said and okay great you know cheap and deep storage simple get put now the conversations about how to enable value from from data absolutely analytics and it's just a whole new world and Ed you've talked many times I love the term yeah we built chaos search on the on the shoulders of giants right and so the under underlying that is S3 but the value that you can build on top of that has been key and I don't think we've talked about his shoulders and Giants but we've talked about how we literally you know we have a big Vision right so hard to kind of solve the challenge to analytics at scale we really focus on the you know the you know Big Data coming environment get analytics so we talk about the on the shoulders Giants obviously Isaac Newton's you know metaphor of I learned from everything before and we layer on top so really when you talk about all the things come from S3 like I just smile because like we picked it up naturally we went all in an S3 and this is where I think you're going Dave but everyone is so let's just cut the chase like so any of the data platforms you're using S3 is what you're building but we did it a little bit differently so at first people using a cold storage like you said and then they ETL it up into a different platforms for analytics of different sorts now people are using it closer they're doing caching layers and cashing out and they're that's where but that's where the attributes of a scale or reliability are what we did is we actually make S3 a database so literally we have no persistence outside that three and that kind of comes in so it's working really well with clients because most of the thing is we pick up all these attributes of scale reliability and it shows up in the clients environments and so when you launch all these new scalable things we just see it like our clients constantly comment like one of our biggest customers fintech in uh Europe they go to Black Friday again black Friday's not one days and they lose scale from what is it 58 terabytes a day and they're going up to 187 terabytes a day and we don't Flinch they say how do you do that well we built our platform on S3 as long as you can stream it to S3 so they're saying I can't overrun S3 and it's a natural play so it's it's really nice that but we take out those attributes but same thing that's why we're able to you know help clients get you know really you know Equifax is a good example maybe they're able to consolidate 12 their divisions on one platform we couldn't have done that without the scale and the performance of what you can get S3 but also they saved 90 I'm able to do that but that's really because the only persistence is S3 and what you guys are delivering but and then we really for focus on shoulders Giants we're doing on top of that innovating on top of your platforms and bringing that out so things like you know we have a unique data representation that makes it easy to ingest this data because it's kind of coming at you four v's of big data we allow you to do that make it performant on s3h so now you're doing hot analytics on S3 as if it's just a native database in memory but there's no memory SSC caching and then multi-model once you get it there don't move it leverage it in place so you know elasticsearch access you know Cabana grafana access or SQL access with your tools so we're seeing that constantly but we always talk about on the shoulders of giants but even this week I get comments from our customers like how did you do that and most of it is because we built on top of what you guys provided so it's really working out pretty well and you know we talk a lot about digital transformation of course we had the pleasure sitting down with Adam solipski prior John Furrier flew to Seattle sits down his annual one-on-one with the AWS CEO which is kind of cool yeah it was it's good it's like study for the test you know and uh and so but but one of the interesting things he said was you know we're one of our challenges going forward is is how do we go Beyond digital transformation into business transformation like okay well that's that's interesting I was talking to a customer today AWS customer and obviously others because they're 100 year old company and they're basically their business was they call them like the Uber for for servicing appliances when your Appliance breaks you got to get a person to serve it a service if it's out of warranty you know these guys do that so they got to basically have a you know a network of technicians yeah and they gotta deal with the customers no phone right so they had a completely you know that was a business transformation right they're becoming you know everybody says they're coming a software company but they're building it of course yeah right on the cloud so wonder if you guys could each talk about what's what you're seeing in terms of changing not only in the sort of I.T and the digital transformation but also the business transformation yeah I know I I 100 agree that I think business transformation is probably that one of the top themes I'm hearing from customers of all sizes right now even in this environment I think customers are looking for what can I do to drive top line or you know improve bottom line or just improve my customer experience and really you know sort of have that effect where I'm helping customers get more done and you know it is it is very tricky because to do that successfully the customers that are doing that successfully I think are really getting into the lines of businesses and figuring out you know it's probably a different skill set possibly a different culture different norms and practices and process and so it's it's a lot more than just a like you said a lot more than just the technology involved but when it you know we sort of liquidate it down into the data that's where absolutely we see that as a critical function for lines of businesses to become more comfortable first off knowing what data sets they have what data they they could access but possibly aren't today and then starting to tap into those data sources and then as as that progresses figuring out how to share and collaborate with data sets across a company to you know to correlate across those data sets and and drive more insights and then as all that's being done of course it's important to measure the results and be able to really see is this what what effect is this having and proving that effect and certainly I've seen plenty of customers be able to show you know this is a percentage increase in top or bottom line and uh so that pattern is playing out a lot and actually a lot of how we think about where we're going with S3 is related to how do we make it easier for customers to to do everything that I just described to have to understand what data they have to make it accessible and you know it's great to have such a great ecosystem of partners that are then building on top of that and innovating to help customers connect really directly with the businesses that they're running and driving those insights well and customers are hours today one of the things I loved that Adam said he said where Amazon is strategically very very patient but tactically we're really impatient and the customers out there like how are you going to help me increase Revenue how are you going to help me cut costs you know we were talking about how off off camera how you know software can actually help do that yeah it's deflationary I love the quote right so software's deflationary as costs come up how do you go drive it also free up the team and you nail it it's like okay everyone wants to save money but they're not putting off these projects in fact the digital transformation or the business it's actually moving forward but they're getting a little bit bigger but everyone's looking for creative ways to look at their architecture and it becomes larger larger we talked about a couple of those examples but like even like uh things like observability they want to give this tool set this data to all the developers all their sres same data to all the security team and then to do that they need to find a way an architect should do that scale and save money simultaneously so we see constantly people who are pairing us up with some of these larger firms like uh or like keep your data dog keep your Splunk use us to reduce the cost that one and one is actually cheaper than what you have but then they use it either to save money we're saving 50 to 80 hard dollars but more importantly to free up your team from the toil and then they they turn around and make that budget neutral and then allowed to get the same tools to more people across the org because they're sometimes constrained of getting the access to everyone explain that a little bit more let's say I got a Splunk or data dog I'm sifting through you know logs how exactly do you help so it's pretty simple I'll use dad dog example so let's say using data dog preservability so it's just your developers your sres managing environments all these platforms are really good at being a monitoring alerting type of tool what they're not necessarily great at is keeping the data for longer periods like the log data the bigger data that's where we're strong what you see is like a data dog let's say you're using it for a minister for to keep 30 days of logs which is not enough like let's say you're running environment you're finding that performance issue you kind of want to look to last quarter in last month in or maybe last Black Friday so 30 days is not enough but will charge you two eighty two dollars and eighty cents a gigabyte don't focus on just 280 and then if you just turn the knob and keep seven days but keep two years of data on us which is on S3 it goes down to 22 cents plus our list price of 80 cents goes to a dollar two compared to 280. so here's the thing what they're able to do is just turn a knob get more data we do an integration so you can go right from data dog or grafana directly into our platform so the user doesn't see it but they save money A lot of times they don't just save the money now they use that to go fund and get data dog to a lot more people make sense so it's a creativity they're looking at it and they're looking at tools we see the same thing with a grafana if you look at the whole grafana play which is hey you can't put it in one place but put Prometheus for metrics or traces we fit well with logs but they're using that to bring down their costs because a lot of this data just really bogs down these applications the alerting monitoring are good at small data they're not good at the big data which is what we're really good at and then the one and one is actually less than you paid for the one so it and it works pretty well so things are really unpredictable right now in the economy you know during the pandemic we've sort of lockdown and then the stock market went crazy we're like okay it's going to end it's going to end and then it looked like it was going to end and then it you know but last year it reinvented just just in that sweet spot before Omicron so we we tucked it in which which was awesome right it was a great great event we really really missed one physical reinvent you know which was very rare so that's cool but I've called it the slingshot economy it feels like you know you're driving down the highway and you got to hit the brakes and then all of a sudden you're going okay we're through it Oh no you're gonna hit the brakes again yeah so it's very very hard to predict and I was listening to jassy this morning he was talking about yeah consumers they're still spending but what they're doing is they're they're shopping for more features they might be you know buying a TV that's less expensive you know more value for the money so okay so hopefully the consumer spending will get us out of this but you don't really know you know and I don't yeah you know we don't seem to have the algorithms we've never been through something like this before so what are you guys seeing in terms of customer Behavior given that uncertainty well one thing I would highlight that I think particularly going back to what we were just talking about as far as business and digital transformation I think some customers are still appreciating the fact that where you know yesterday you may have had to to buy some Capital put out some capital and commit to something for a large upfront expenditure is that you know today the value of being able to experiment and scale up and then most importantly scale down and dynamically based on is the experiment working out am I seeing real value from it and doing that on a time scale of a day or a week or a few months that is so important right now because again it gets to I am looking for a ways to innovate and to drive Top Line growth but I I can't commit to a multi-year sort of uh set of costs to to do that so and I think plenty of customers are finding that even a few months of experimentation gives them some really valuable insight as far as is this going to be successful or not and so I think that again just of course with S3 and storage from day one we've been elastic pay for what you use if you're not using the storage you don't get charged for it and I think that particularly right now having the applications and the rest of the ecosystem around the storage and the data be able to scale up and scale down is is just ever more important and when people see that like typically they're looking to do more with it so if they find you usually find these little Department projects but they see a way to actually move faster and save money I think it is a mix of those two they're looking to expand it which can be a nightmare for sales Cycles because they take longer but people are looking well why don't you leverage this and go across division so we do see people trying to leverage it because they're still I don't think digital transformation is slowing down but a lot more to be honest a lot more approvals at this point for everything it is you know Adam and another great quote in his in his keynote he said if you want to save money the Cloud's a place to do it absolutely and I read an article recently and I was looking through and I said this is the first time you know AWS has ever seen a downturn because the cloud was too early back then I'm like you weren't paying attention in 2008 because that was the first major inflection point for cloud adoption where CFO said okay stop the capex we're going to Opex and you saw the cloud take off and then 2010 started this you know amazing cycle that we really haven't seen anything like it where they were doubling down in Investments and they were real hardcore investment it wasn't like 1998 99 was all just going out the door for no clear reason yeah so that Foundation is now in place and I think it makes a lot of sense and it could be here for for a while where people are saying Hey I want to optimize and I'm going to do that on the cloud yeah no I mean I've obviously I certainly agree with Adam's quote I think really that's been in aws's DNA from from day one right is that ability to scale costs with with the actual consumption and paying for what you use and I think that you know certainly moments like now are ones that can really motivate change in an organization in a way that might not have been as palatable when it just it didn't feel like it was as necessary yeah all right we got to go give you a last word uh I think it's been a great event I love all your announcements I think this is wonderful uh it's been a great show I love uh in fact how many people are here at reinvent north of 50 000. yeah I mean I feel like it was it's as big if not bigger than 2019. people have said ah 2019 was a record when you count out all the professors I don't know it feels it feels as big if not bigger so there's great energy yeah it's quite amazing and uh and we're thrilled to be part of it guys thanks for coming on thecube again really appreciate it face to face all right thank you for watching this is Dave vellante for the cube your leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage we'll be right back foreign

(mellow music) >> Oh, welcome back to theCUBE. We continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent 22. We're in the Venetian in Las Vegas, and this place is hopping. I'm tell you what. It is a nearly standing room only that exhibit floor is jam packed, and it's been great to be along for the ride here on Accenture's sponsorship at the Executive summit as well. We'll talk about Pfizer today, you know them quite well, one of the largest biopharmaceutical companies in the world but their tech footprint is impressive, to say the least. And to talk more about that is Wes Barnes, senior Director of Pfizer's Digital Hosting Solutions. Wes, good to see you, sir. >> Good to meet you, John. >> And Jon Harrison, the North American lead for Infrastructure and engineering at Accenture. Jon, good to see you as well. >> Good to see you as well. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Happy to be here. >> Alright, so let's jump in. Pfizer, we make drugs, right? >> Pharmaceuticals. >> Yes. >> Among the most preeminent, as I said biopharms in the world. But your tech capabilities and your tech focus as we were talking about earlier, has changed dramatically in the 18 years that you've been there. >> Yep. >> Now, talk about that evolution a little bit to where you were and what you have to be now. >> Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. When I started at Pfizer, IT was an enabling function. It was akin to HR or our facilities function. And over the past couple years, it's dramatically changed. Where Digital now is really at the center of everything we do across Pfizer. You know it really is a core strategic element of our business. >> Yeah. And those elements that you were talking about, just in terms of whether it's research, whether it's your patients, I don't want to go through the laundry lists the litany of things, but the touch points with data and what you need it to do for you in terms of you know, computations, what you, the list is long. It's pretty impressive. >> Yeah, yeah, for sure yeah. >> I mean, shed some light on that for us. >> We cannot release a medicine without the use of technology. And if you think about research now, a huge component of our research is computational chemistry. Manufacturing medicines now is a practice in using data and analytics and predictive machine learning and analytics capabilities to help us determine how to best you know, apply the capabilities to deliver the outcomes that we need. The way in which we connect with patients and payers now is wholly digital. So it's an entirely different way of operating than it was 10 years ago. >> And the past three years, pretty remarkable in many respects, to say the least, I would think, I mean, John, you've seen what Pfizer's been up to, talk about maybe just this, the recent past and all that has happened and what they've been able to do. >> Yeah, I mean, what is so exciting to me about working with a company like Pfizer and working in life sciences more broadly is the impact that they make on patients around the world world, right? I mean, think about those past three years and Pfizer stepped up and met the moment for all of us, right? And as we talk a little bit about the role that we played together with Pfizer with AWS in their journey to the cloud, it's so motivating for myself personally it's so motivating for every single person on the team that we ask to spend nights and weekends migrating things to the cloud, creating new capabilities, knowing that at the end of the day, the work that they're doing is making the world a healthier place. >> Yeah, we talk so much about modernization now, right? And it's, but it kind of means different things to different people depending on where you're coming into the game, right? If you've been smart and been planning all along then this is not a dramatic shift in some cases though, for others it is. Right? >> Yeah. >> Traumatic in some cases for some people. >> For sure. >> For Pfizer, I mean talk about how do you see modernization and what does it mean to your operations? >> Following our success of the COVID program of 2021, I mean it became evident to us that, you know we needed to maintain a new pace of innovation and in fact try to find ways to accelerate that pace of innovation. And as I said earlier everything we do at Pfizer is centered around digital. But despite that, and despite 10 years of consolidating infrastructure and moving towards modern technology, last year, only 10% of Pfizer's infrastructure was in the native public cloud. So we had a problem to solve. In fact, I remember, you know, we had to build up our clinical systems to support the volume of work that we were doing for COVID-19 vaccine. We were rolling things into our data center to build up the capacity to achieve what we needed to achieve. Moving to the public cloud became more imperative to try to achieve the scale and the modern capabilities that we need. >> And so where did you come into play here with this? Because obviously as a partner you're right alongside for the ride but you saw these inherent challenges that they had and how did Accenture answer the bell there? >> Well, so look, I mean we saw Pfizer react to the pandemic. We saw them seize the moment. We talked together about how IT needed to move quicker and quicker towards the cloud to unlock capabilities that would serve Pfizer's business well into the future. And together we laid out some pretty ambitious goals. I mean, really moving at a velocity in a pace that I think for both Accenture and AWS surpassed the velocity and pace that we've done anywhere else. >> Yeah, right, yeah. >> So we've set out on an ambitious plan together. You know, I was kind of reflecting about some of the successes, what went well what didn't in preparation for re:Invent. And you know, many of the folks that'll listen to this will remember the old days of moving data centers when you'd have a war room you'd have a conference bridge open the whole time. Someone would be running around the tile floor in the data center, do a task, call back up to the bridge and say, what do I do next, right? Then when I think about what we did together at Pfizer in moving towards the public cloud, I mean, we had weekends most weekends where we were running a wave with 10,000 plus discrete activities. >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> Right, so that old model doesn't scale. >> Right. >> And we really anchored, >> You have a very crowded data center with a lot of people running into each other. >> You'd have a whole lot of people running around. But we really anchored to an Accenture capability that we call myNav Migrate. I know you guys have talked about it here before so I won't go into that. But what we found is that we approached this problem of velocity not as a technical problem to solve for but as a loading and optimization problem of resources. Right, thought about it just a little bit different way and made sure that we could programmatically control command and control of the program in a way that people didn't have to wait around all Saturday afternoon to be notified that their next activity was ready, right? They could go out, they could live their day and they could get a notification from the platform that says, hey it's about your turn. Right, they could claim it they could do it, they could finish it, and that was really important to us. I mean, to be able to control the program in that type of way at scale. >> Yeah, by the way, the reason we went as fast it was a deliberate choice and you'll talk to plenty of folks who have a five year journey to the public cloud. And the reason we wanted to move as fast as we did and Jon talked about some of it, we wanted to get the capabilities to the business as quickly as we could. The pace of innovation was such that we had to offer native cloud capabilities we had to offer quickly. We also knew that by compressing the time it took to get to the cloud, we could focus the organization get it done as economically as possible but then lift all boats with the tide and move the organization forward in terms of the skills and the capabilities that we need to deliver modern outcomes. >> So, you know, we talk about impacts internally, obviously with your processes, but beyond that, not just scientists not just chemists, but to your, I mean, millions of customers, right? We're talking, you know, globally here. What kind of impacts can you see that directly relate to them, and benefits that they're receiving by this massive technical move you've made? >> Pfizer's mission is breakthroughs that change patient lives. I mean, the work that we do the work that everybody does within Pfizer is about delivering therapies that, you know provide health outcomes that make people live longer, live healthier lives. For us, modernizing our infrastructure means that we can enable the work of scientists to find novel therapies faster or find things that perhaps couldn't have been found any other way without some of the modern technologies that we're bringing to bear. Saving money within infrastructure and IT is treasure that we can pour back into the important areas of research or development or manufacturing. We're also able to, you know, offer an ecosystem and a capability in which we connect with patients differently through digital mechanisms. And modern cloud enables that, you know, using modern digital experiences and customer experience, and patient experience platforms means that we can use wearable devices and mobile technologies and connect to people in different ways and offer solutions that just didn't exist a couple years ago. >> And so, I mean, you're talking about IoT stuff too, right? >> 100%. >> It's way out on the edge and personal mobile, in a mobile environment. And so challenges in terms of you know, data governance and compliance and security, all these things, right? They come into play because it's personal health information. So how, as you've taken them, you know to this public cloud environment how much of a factor are those considerations? Because, you know, this is not just a product a service, it's a live human being. >> Yeah. I mean, you start with that, you think about it through the process and you think about it afterwards, right, I mean, that has to be a core factor in every stage of the program, and it was. >> So in, in terms of where you are now, then, okay, it's not over. >> It's never over. >> I mean, you know, as good as you are today and as fast as you are and as accurate and as efficient. >> Yeah. >> Got to get better, right? You got to stay competitive. >> Yeah. >> So where do you find that? Because, you know, with powers being what they are with speed and what it is how much more is there to squeeze out of this rock? >> There's a lot more to squeeze out of the rock. If you think about what we've done over the past year it's about creating sort of a new minimum viable product for infrastructure. So we've sort of raised the bar and created an environment upon which we can continue to innovate that innovation is going to continue sort of forever at this point. You know, the next focus for us is how to identify the business processes that deliver the greatest value ultimately to our patients. And use the modern platform that we've just built to improve those processes to deliver things faster, deliver new capabilities. Pfizer is making a huge investment in digital medicines therapies that are delivered through smart devices through wearables using, as I said technology that didn't exist before. That wouldn't be possible without the platform that we've built. So over the past year, we've come a long way but I think that we've effectively set the table for all of the things that are yet to come. >> So, Jon, how do you then, as you've learned a lot about life science or, and certainly Pfizer with what they're up to, how do you then apply, you know, what you know about their world to what you know about the tech world and make it actionable for growth to make it actionable for, for future expansion? >> Yeah, I mean, we start by doing it together, right? I think that's a really important part. Accenture brings a wealth of knowledge, both industry experience and expertise, technology experience and expertise. We work together with our clients like Pfizer with our partners like AWS to bring the best across that power of three to meet clients where they're at to understand where they want to go, and then create a bespoke approach that meets their business needs. And that's effectively what we're doing now, right? I mean, if you think about the phase that we've just went through, I mean, a couple of fast facts here no pun intended, right? 7,800 server instances across 11 operating system versions 7,500 databases across 20 database versions, right? 4,700 applications, 350,000 migration activities managed across an eight month period. >> In eight months. >> Yeah. But that's not the goal, right? The goal is now to take, to Wes' point that platform that's been developed and leverage that to the benefit of the business ultimately to the benefit of the patient. >> You know, why them, we have we've talked a lot about Pfizer, but why Accenture? What, what, what's, 'cause it's got to be a two way street, right? >> We've had a long partnership with Accenture. Accenture supports a huge component of our application environment at Pfizer and has for quite a long time. Look, we didn't make it easy on them. We put them up against a large number of world class SIs. But look, Accenture brought, you know, sort of what I think of as the trifecta here. They brought the technical capabilities and knowledge of the AWS environment. They brought the ability to really understand the business outcomes that we were trying to achieve and a program leadership capability that, you know I think is world class. And Jon talked about myNav, you know, we recognized that doing what we were trying to do in the time that we were doing it required new machinery, new analytics and data capabilities that just didn't exist. Automation didn't exist. Some people experience capabilities that would allow us to interface with application owners and users at a velocity and a pace and a scale that just hasn't been seen before at Pfizer. Accenture brought all three of those things together and I think they did a great job helping us get to where we need to be. >> When you hear Jon rattle through the stats like he just did, right? We talk about all, I mean, not that I'm going to ask you to pat yourself on the back but do you ever, >> He should. >> Does it blow your mind a little bit, honestly that you're talking about that magnitude of activity in that compressed period of time? That's extraordinary. >> It's 75% of our global IT footprint now in the public cloud, which is fantastic. I mean, look, I think the timing was right. I think Pfizer is in a little bit of a unique position coming off of COVID. We are incredibly motivated to keep the pace up, I mean across all lines of business. So, you know what we found is a really willing leadership team, executive leadership team, digital leadership team to endorse a change of this magnitude. >> Well, it's a great success story. It's beyond impressive. So congratulations to both you on that front and certainly you wish you continued success down the road as well. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Good job. >> Pfizer, and boy, you talk about a job well done. Just spectacular. All right, you are watching our coverage here on theCUBE, we're at the AWS re:Invent 22 show. This is Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture and you're watching theCUBE the leader in high tech coverage.

(relaxing music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am absolutely thrilled for this segment. We are joined by leaders at Cisco AppDynamics as well as Royal Caribbean. The two have been working together for over five years, leveraging full stack observability. We're going to dig in, but first of all please welcome Alice from Royal Caribbean and Greg from Cisco AppDynamics to the show. Hey friends. >> Hi. How are you doing? >> I'm excited, clearly. How are you doing, Greg? >> I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on the show today. >> Hey, it's our, it is absolutely our pleasure. Alice, I have to start with you. I don't think there are too many industries that have gotten as much coverage as cruising has over the last couple of years. You've been working with Royal Caribbean for over a decade so you've seen it through the stormy seas of the pandemic, if you will. What has the last few years and the last few months been like for you? >> You know, it's really been a wild ride. To your point, we were sailing high, and then I don't think any other industry experienced what we did in COVID, that you walked in one day and then that day the whole industry shut down. So it was a big challenge for us. And then as soon as we shut down and we weathered the storm with COVID, then we had what we called our healthy return to service. So as quickly as it stopped, we had to start sailing again. So it's really been a challenge but we're happy to be back on our feet and heading in the right direction now. >> I really hope we can continue the sailing metaphors throughout the course of this interview. And you nailed that for a segment, Alice, I'm so here for it. I want to talk about how you've worked together but I want to give Greg a second to chime in here. So, Greg, you're the executive CTO at Cisco AppDynamics. How have you and the team weathered the last two and a half years? >> Well, you know, it's interesting, the pandemic really brought together an interesting conundrum, right? So on one hand, you had, you know, the consumers, the end users that became very reliant on digital services. They had a function in a way that was very performing, right? So, 84% of the respondents that we had come back through a report called the App Attention Index, came back and said that digital services were really instrumental for them to get back to some level of normalcy. But the interesting part that came about that is that out of those respondents, 60% of them blamed the brand if the application did not work the way they expected it. So they didn't really care about the complex- >> Wow. >> In the back end, right? So when you look at- >> Yeah. >> You look at the shift in the IT department, the IT department had to go out and quickly innovate. Quickly start to introduce new services, which ultimately brought together a sprawl in their technology stack. So, when you're adding to it you're not taking things away, you're continuously growing. So finding that the problems or the root cause of an application issue became more difficult. So that's where, you know, from a Cisco AppDynamics perspective, you know we're one of the leading observability and application performance monitoring tools. So, we help customers like Royal Caribbean to be able to zero in on root cause and ensure that their end users have that best experience. >> It's, I'm smiling as someone who was a former waitress and I can remember the amount of times I was scolded for something that happened that was far out of my control in the complex layers of the kitchen. (Greg laughs) And I think that anyone who's had a poor customer experience while interacting with a brand may or may not intentionally, you know, I think it's actually sometimes very unintentional to your point, get frustrated with said brand. I can imagine that is an experience and a priority that you have at Royal Caribbean, Alice. How has full stack observability played a role in your team's ability to serve the customers and keep your community engaged during this very kind of wobbly time? >> Yeah, you know, we have really worked hard to improve and remove friction from our guest vacation. And we want to keep them on vacation and having a great time. You know, we say we don't really sell a cruise. We sell an experience. So we use AppDynamics to monitor those key applications that our guests are interacting with to ensure that they're having that experience that we expect. You know, we've learned that just because a system or a server says, hey I'm up 99% of the time, that doesn't mean that my guests are experiencing that same type of stability, you know? So once again, we really worked well with AppDynamics. They've partnered with us to ensure that, you know, our guests are getting that vacation experience they're looking for. >> Do you think, just a follow up there, do you think that you would have advanced in the ways that you have working with Cisco AppDynamics and across functions over the last few years, without this crunch? Was necessity the mother of invention for you to any degree? >> You know, I don't think that the crunch brought it on 'cause we, like I said, we started this journey back in 2017. And we're not unlike a lot of companies where we're on this maturity ride where we want to go from being reactive, where our guests are telling us something is broken, to being preventive. Definitely, you know, COVID played into this because I think we learned to do less, you know, more with less. So, you know, it's very hard in the cruise industry. We did take a hit but we were able to use the AppDynamics tools to ensure that our systems were running with having less people also watching those systems. So less eyes on glass, more automation. >> And that's more stability, more credibility, and more transparency is definitely something that we're all looking forward. And it's nice to see that implemented, especially at scale when you're dealing with so many customers from all over the world trying to access your service and wanting that personalized experience. Greg, what does it feel like for you as a leader to hear someone like Alice say how powerful your tool has been in ensuring that customer experience? >> Yeah, that's, you know, it's absolutely fantastic. And especially, you know, Alice is absolutely right. You know, the cruise industry was really, had a very unique challenge in front of them. And I really applaud the folks at Royal Caribbean for stepping up to make sure that when the pandemic eased, so to speak, that the experience to the customer was actually even better, right? So when we were able to work and partner together to make sure that, you know, the user experience is topnotch, the availability's there, the resiliency of their platform is there. So, by working with customers like Royal Caribbean is really one of the shining stars that we can talk about that really helped make a big difference in, you know that post pandemic era to be able to really do what's right for the customer. >> How often are you engaging with customers like Alice as a team? How big is that feedback in your product roadmap? >> Oh, personally, I'm engaged with customers on a daily basis. And I see it across the map from many different industries. And, you know, a lot of folks had different challenges, but the ultimate commonality that I've seen across, you know, multiple industries is that, you know, when we're in that pandemic state, digital services were the only way that their customers were interacting with them. So, you know, when you're looking at a bank or you're looking at, you know, different types of travel agencies and organizations that, you know like Royal Caribbean as well, that really had that opportunity to focus on what's the most valuable thing to them which is user experience. It's a very, very common trend that we saw. And, you know, you see an expedited path of digital transformation happen. And really that's where we partner with, you know, customers like Royal Caribbean and many others across different industries to make sure that the business outcomes were being driven towards the proper direction as well as that, you know, the user experience. And I don't think I can emphasize user experience as being so critically important, anymore than I already have. But it's really one of the most valuable currencies most organizations have. >> One of my favorite lines is community is your first defensible asset. And you know, you can talk about user experience as much as you want on here, at the end of the day. If people aren't having a positive interaction with your brand or your product, it's probably not going to last super long unless it's legacy. And we don't have to go down that rabbit hole today. >> Especially if I can add, there's a lot of competition there. >> Of course. >> Right? There's a lot of competition out there. So if your applications do not perform or your digital services do not perform the end user has the quick ability to just quickly delete and move on. And the same thing with what Alice sees in the cruise industry, you know. You have an opportunity to rise to the top and I really applaud them for taking advantage of that opportunity. >> Yeah. Well, I'm here for both of you cheering each other on. Certainly, the water level rises together. >> That's right. >> Alice, what sort of challenges are you taking on currently that you're able to disclose? What sort of leaps do you think or it doesn't have to be leaps, but what kind of experience are you hoping to continue to enhance for Royal Caribbean customers? >> You know, right now, you know with our current connectivity it's all about managing that bandwidth. You know, we're hoping to go to that state where bandwidth isn't at a high cost. So now we're going to be even able to watch our user interaction more from ship to shore. You know, and we're maybe moving to that area where we're thinking cloud first from a shift. If you think about it, we've got 50 plus data centers floating around the world. So that connectivity is key. Now we're opening up that bandwidth. Now I need to see how the transactions are performing as we come off ship. You know, with that, once again, that cloud first mentality. It's a super exciting time for us. And I really see, you know, AppD is going to play a role in that. >> I love that visual just for a second of 50 data centers with also, surrounded by people having a very wonderful time on board. What a nice thought. I can't say that every data center I've ever been to is as glamorous, fun or sexy as being on a Royal Caribbean ship. However, I hope that we move perhaps in that direction. We were just at Super Computing a few weeks ago and it was great to see all the hardware there. So you never know. What role do you see yourself and the team and Cisco AppDynamics playing in that future for companies like Royal Caribbean, Greg? >> You know, it's really, it's really staying right lockstep with our customers as they move through that digital transformation efforts. The key piece is that we look at it from that full stack view. So we offer full stack observability, which, you know, if you look at the challenges that we want to go after. Traditional IT departments were historically siloed pretty significantly between, you know network and infrastructure, security, app dev. So I mean, ensuring that we can get our customers to be able to have that common view that shows what's the real important pieces across all domains. So when they start moving down the path of digital transformation, that's an opportunity to also revamp how their processes are, the people interact and the technology that they use to be able to deliver the proper business outcomes. So we talk a lot with our customers around full stack observability, but the key part is business context. So if you have a big effort for digital transformation, you're starting to add new services to it. How do you know if it's actually impacting the business in a positive or negative way? So by us implementing the business context to ensure that you understand the investments being made, that you can show to your business leaders, is showing an uptake in the business outcomes you're going after. It's really, really about a strong partnership with our customers. But also ensuring that their business is being positively impacted by our technology to be able to help them really align the teams and be able to have the right desired outcomes. >> I love that Greg and I love that customer first, that community first attitude. It's something that you both share. Final question for the two of you. And I'm going to start with you, Alice, since I suspect you've probably been on more cruises than Greg and I combined. Though I could be making a wild assumption. Where are you cruising to next? >> You know, I just got off a cruise. So next stop, I want to revisit the Galapagos. I think the Galapagos is the best place to go. And if you haven't done it that's absolutely where you should go. >> Oh, it's a beautiful trip. Greg, have you ever done the Galapagos? Is that going to be your next Royal Caribbean cruise? >> I have never done the Galapagos, but that may just have made it to my list. >> Fantastic. Well, I second Alice's endorsement on that. I had the pleasure of going about a decade ago. Very magical place that teaches you a lot about nature. Much like the two of you have taught us very extensively about full stack observability, how it applies to user experience, customer experience and the ocean that I am currently staring at here in Pacifica, California. Alice, thank you so much for joining us from Miami. Greg, to you in Colorado. I hope that you both continue to work in harmony together and that we can all see each other on the friendly seas soon. Thank you all for tuning in to our AWS re:Invent coverage. This is theCUBE. My name's Savannah Peterson. And we look forward to seeing you for our next segment. (relaxing music)

(relaxing intro music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage here live at reinvent 2022. We're here at the Executive Summit upstairs with the Accenture Set three sets broadcasting live four days with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier your host, with two great guests, cube alumnis, back Tanuja Randery, managing director Amazon web service for Europe middle East and Africa, known as EMEA. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great to see you. And Karthik Narain, who's the Accenture first cloud lead. Great to see you back again. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming back on. All right, so business transformation is all about digital transformation taken to its conclusion. When companies transform, they are now a digital business. Technologies powering value proposition, data security all in the keynotes higher level service at industry specific solutions. The dynamics of the industry are changing radically in front of our eyes for for the better. Karthik, what's your position on this as Accenture looks at this, we've covered all your successes during the pandemic with AWS. What, what do you guys see out there now as this next layer of power dynamics in the industry take place? >> I think cloud is getting interesting and I think there's a general trend towards specialization that's happening in the world of cloud. And cloud is also moving from a general purpose technology backbone to providing specific industry capabilities for every customer within various industries. But the industry cloud is not a new term. It has been used in the past and it's been used in the past in various degrees, whether that's building horizontal solutions, certain specialized SaaS software or providing capabilities that are horizontal for certain industries. But we see the evolution of industry cloud a little differently and a lot more dynamic, which is we see this as a marketplace where ecosystem of capabilities are going to come together to interact with a common data platform data backbone, data model with workflows that'll come together and integrate all of this stuff and help clients reinvent their industry with newer capabilities, but at the same time use the power of democratized innovation that's already there within that industry. So that's the kind of change we are seeing where customers in their strategy are going to implement industry cloud as one of the tenants as they go through their strategy. >> Yeah, and I see in my notes, fit for purposes is a buzzword people are talking about right size in the cloud and then just building on that. And what's interesting, Tanuja I want to get your thoughts because in the US we're one country, so yeah, integrating is kind of within services. You have purview over countries and these regions it's global impact. This is now a global environment. So it's not just the US North America, it's Latin America it's EMEA, this is another variable in the cross connecting of these fit for purpose. What's your view of the these industry specific solutions? >> Yeah, no and thanks Karthik 'cause I'm a hundred percent aligned. You know, I mean, you know this better than me, John, but 90% of workloads have not yet moved to the cloud. And the only way that we think that's going to happen is by bringing together business and IT. So what does that mean? It means starting with business use cases whether that's digital banking or smart connected factories or frankly if it's predictive maintenance or connected beds. But how do we take those use cases leverage them to really drive outcomes with the technology behind them? I think that's the key unlock that we have to get to. And very specifically, and Adam talked about this a lot today, but data, data is the single unifier for all of business and IT coming together to drive value, right? However, the issue is there's a ton of it, (John Furrier chuckling) right? In fact, fun fact if you put all the data that's going to be created over the next five years, which is more than the last 30 years, on a one terabyte little floppy, disk drive, remember those? Well that's going to be 15 round trips to the moon (John Furrier chuckling) and back. That's how much data it is. So our perspective is you got to unify, single data lake, you got to modernize with AI and ML, and then you're going to have to drive innovation on that. Now, I'll give you one tiny example if I may which I love Ryanair, big airline, 150 million passengers. They are also the largest supplier of ham and cheese sandwiches in the air. And catering at that scale is really difficult, right? If you have too much food wastage, sustainability issues, too little customers are really unhappy. So we work with them leveraging AWS cloud and AI ML to build a panini predictor. And in essence, it's taking the data they've got, data we've got, and actually giving them the opportunity to have just the right number of paninis. >> I love the lock and and the key is data to unlock the value. We heard that in the keynote. Karthik, you guys have been working together with AWS and a lot of successes. We've covered some of those on the cube. As you look at these industry solutions they're not the obvious big problems. They're like businesses, you know it could be the pizza shop it could be the dentist office, it could be any business any industry specific carries over. What is the key to unlock it? Is it the data? Is it the solution? What's that key? >> I think, you know the easier answer is all of the about, but like Tanuja said it all starts by bringing the data together and this is a funny thing. It's not creating new data. This data is there within enterprises. Our clients have these data the industries have the data, but for ages these data has been trapped in functional silos and organizations have been doing analytics within those functions. It's about bringing the data together whether that's a single data warehouse or a data mesh. Those are architectural considerations. But it's about bringing cross-functional data together as step one. Step two, is about utilizing the power of cloud for democratized innovation. It's no longer about one company trying to reinvent the wheel, or create a a new wheel within their enterprise. It's about looking around through the power of cloud marketplace to see if there's a solution that is already existing can we use that? Or if I've created something within my company can I use that as a service for others to use? So, the number one thing is using the power of democratized innovation. Second thing is how do you standardize and digitize functions that does not need to be reinvented every single time so that, you know, your organization can do it or you could use that or take that from elsewhere. And the third element is using the power of the platform economy or platforms to find new avenues of revenue opportunity, customer engagement and experiences. So these are all the things that differentiates organization, but all of this is underpinned by a unified data model that helps, you know, use all the (indistinct) there. >> Tanuja, you have mentioned earlier that not everyone has their journey of the cloud looks the same and certainly in the US and EMEA you have different countries and different areas. >> Yep. >> Their journeys are different. Some want speed and fees, some will roll their own. I mean data brick CEO, when I interviewed them that last week, they started database on a credit card swiped it and they didn't want any support. Amazon's knocking on their door saying, "you want support?" "No, we got it covered." Obviously they're from Berkeley and they're nerds, and they're cool. They can roll their own, but not everyone can. >> Yeah. >> And so you have a mix of customer profiles. How do you view that and what's your strategy? How do you get them over productive seeing that business value? What's that transformation look like? >> Yeah, John, you're absolutely right. So you've got those who are born in cloud, they're very savvy, they know exactly what they need. However, what I do find increasingly, even with these digital native customers, is they're also starting to talk business use cases. So they're talking about, "okay how do I take my platform and build a whole bunch of new services on top of that platform?" So, we still have to work with them on this business use case dimension for the next curve of growth that they want to drive. Currently with the global macroeconomic factors obviously they're also very concerned about profitability and costs. So that's one model. In the enterprise space, you have differences. >> Yeah. >> Right, You have the sort of very, very, very savvy enterprises, right? Who know exactly what they're looking for. But for them then it's about how do I lean into sustainability? In fact, we did a survey, and 77% of users that we surveyed said that they could accelerate their sustainably goals by using cloud. So in many cases they haven't cracked that and we can help them do that. So it's really about horses for courses there. And then, then with some other companies, they've done a lot of the basic infrastructure modernization. However, what they haven't been able to yet do is figure out how they're going to actually become a tech company. So I keep getting asked, can I become a tech company? How do I do that? Right? And then finally there are companies which don't have the skills. So if I go to the SMB segment, they don't always have the skills or the resources. And there using scalable market platforms like AWS marketplace, >> Yeah. >> Allows them to get access to solutions without having to have all the capabilities. So it really is- >> This is where partner network really kind of comes in. >> Absolutely. >> Huge value. Having that channel of solution providers I use that term specifically 'cause you're providing the solution for those folks. >> Yeah. Exact- >> And then the folks at the enterprise, we had a quote on the analyst segment earlier on our Cube, "spend more, save more." >> Yeah. >> That's the cloud equations, >> Yeah. because you're going to get it on sustainability you're going to save it on, you're going to save on cost recovery for revenue, time to revenue. So the cloud is the answer for a lot of enterprises out of the recession. >> Absolutely, and in fact, we need to lean in now you heard Adam say this, right? I mean the cost savings potential alone from on-prem to cloud is between 40 and 60 percent. Just that. But I don't think that's it John. >> The bell tightening he said is reigning some right size. Okay, but then also do more, he didn't say that, but analysts are generally saying, if you spend right on the cloud, you'll save more. That's a general thesis. >> Yeah. >> Do you agree with that? >> I absolutely think so. And by the way, usage is, people use it differently as they get smarter. We're constantly working with our customers by the way though, to continuously cost optimize. So you heard about our Graviton3 instances for example. We're using that to constantly optimize, but at the same time, what are the workloads that you haven't yet brought over to the cloud? (John Furrier chuckling) And so supply chain is a great idea. Our health cloud initiative. So we worked with Accenture on the Accenture Health Insights platform, which runs on AWS as an example or the Goldman Sachs one last year, if you remember. >> I do >> The financial cloud. So those, those are some of the things that I think make it easier for people to consume cloud and reimagine their businesses. >> It's funny, I was talking with Adam and we had a little debate about what an ISV is and I talked to the CEO of Mongo. They don't see themselves on the ISV. As they grew up on the cloud, they become platforms, they have their own ISVs and data bricks and Snowflake and others are developing that dynamic. But there's still ISVs out there. So there's a dynamic of growth going on and the need for partners and our belief is that the ecosystem is going to start doubling in size we believe, because of the demand for purpose built or so out of the box. I hate to use that word "out of the box", but you know turnkey solutions that you can buy another one if it breaks. But use the building blocks if you want to build the foundation. That is more durable, more customizable. Do that if you can. >> Well, >> but- >> we've got a phenomenal, >> shall we talk about this? >> Yeah, go get into- >> So, we've built a five year vision together, Accenture and us. which is called Velocity and you'll be much better in describing it, but I'll give you the simple version of Velocity which is taking AWS powered industry solutions and bringing it to market faster, more repeatable and at lower cost. And so think about vertical solutions sitting on a horizontal accelerator platform able to be deployed making transformation less complex. >> Yeah. >> Karthik, weight in on this, because I've talked to you about this before. We've said years ago the horizontal scalability of the cloud's a beautiful thing but verticals where the ML works great too. Now you got ML in all aspects of it. Horizontal verticals here now. >> Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. Again, the power of this kind of platform that we are launching, by the way we're launching tomorrow we are very excited about it, is, create a platform- >> What are you launching tomorrow? Hold on, I got news out there. What's launching? >> We are going to launch a giant platform, which will help clients accelerate their journey to industry cloud. So that's going to happen tomorrow. So what this platform would provide is that this is going to provide the horizontal capabilities that will help clients bootstrap their launch into cloud. And once they get into cloud, they would be able to build industry solutions on this. The way I imagine this is create the chassis that you need for your industry and then add the cartridges, industry cartridges, which are going to be solutions that are going to be built on top of it. And we are going to do this across various industries starting from, you know, healthcare, life sciences to energy to, you know, public services and so on and so forth >> You're going to create a channel machine. A channel creation machine, you're going to allow people to build their own solutions on top of that platform. And that's launching tomorrow. Make sure we get the news on that. >> Exactly. And- >> Ah, No, >> Sorry, and we genuinely believe the power of industry cloud, if you think about it in the past to create a solution one had to be an ISV to create a solution. What cloud is providing for industry today in the concept of industry clouds, this, industry companies are creating industry solution. The best example is, along with, you know, AWS and Accenture, Ecopetrol, which is a leader in the energy industry, has created a platform, you know called Water Intelligence and Management platform. And through this platform, they are attacking the audacious goal of water sustainability, which is going to be a huge problem for humanity that everybody needs to solve. As part of this platform, the goal is to reduce, you know, fresh water usage by 66% or zero, you know, you know, impact to, you know, groundwater is going to be the goal or ambition of Ecopetrol. So all of this is possible because industry players want to jump to the bandwagon because they have all the toolkit of of the cloud that's available with which they could build a software platform with which they can power their entire industry. >> And make money and have a good business. You guys are doing great. Final word, partnership. Where's it go next? You're doing great. Put a plugin for the Accenture AWS partnership. >> Well, I mean we have a phenomenal relationship and partnership, which is amazing. We really believe in the power of three which is the GSI, the ISV, and us together. And I have to go back to the thing I keep focused on 90% of workloads not in cloud. I think together we can enable those companies to come into the cloud. Very importantly, start to innovate launch new products and refuel the economy. So I think- >> We'll have to check on that >> Very, very optimistic. >> We'll have to check on that number. >> That seems a little- >> You got to check on that number. >> 90 seems a little bit amazing. >> 90% of workloads. >> That sounds, maybe, I'd be surprised. Maybe a little bit lower than that. Maybe. We'll see. >> We got to start turning it. >> It's still a lot. >> (laughs) It's still a lot. >> A lot more. Still first, still early days. Thanks so much for the conversation Karthik great to see you again Tanuja, thanks for your time. >> Thank you, John. >> Congratulations, on your success. Okay, this is theCube up here in the executive summit. You're watching theCube, the leader in high tech coverage, we'll be right back with more coverage here, and the Accenture set after the short break. (calm outro music)