(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am thrilled to be joined by Ramkumar Pandurangan. He is Practice Leader of the Cloud Advisory and Consulting Organization at Kyndryl. Ram, welcome. >> Thanks for having me, David, it's a pleasure. >> First time on theCUBE I believe. >> Ah, yes it is, so a little excited, and anxious as well, but it's great to be here. >> Fantastic. Well, when we're done, you'll be a CUBE alumni, which is actually a very distinguished badge of honor to have so. So, let's get started. Tell me about Kyndryl. I'm particularly interested in a bit of the history, how did Kyndryl come about? >> Yeah, so -- >> And what do you do now? >> I'm sorry. Before we talk about who we are and what we do, let me talk about Kyndryl's, philosophy, right? Basically so, people don't buy the cloud, people buy outcomes, and with this explosive growth in the market, as well as the complexity in which the technology has evolved, it's very challenging for everybody to find the right partner, as well as who to go to deliver it for them. And we do understand that technology is supposed to help drive your business capabilities, but not hinder. So, Kyndryl's primary philosophy is to how we can help enable our clients get the business capabilities using technology. So, having said that, we are a spinoff from IBM in 2021, and we have a strong base of 90,000 skilled professionals across a hundred countries. And, you know, we have almost 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, and we almost cater half of the Fortune 500 companies, just to give you a background. And we have people across applications, data, AI, you know, network, edge, security and resiliency across the globe, but of course, cloud. >> So, do you work with partners from a cloud perspective? What does that look like? >> We have a whole broad ecosystem of partners, and, you know, anywhere from all the hyper scalers, to all the large product companies. And we understand that with a combined force of our years of experience helping our clients to be successful, partnering with our partners to help drive their capabilities. And you know, let's talk about AWS. Everybody knows that AWS has been a pioneer in the public cloud, coming up with a whole catalog of services, which is there, available for anybody. And I would like to call them as construction materials. Right? So, you could take these services, assemble them, and it could be a simple house, or it could be as big as a very complex model, kind of an environment. So, this is where we partner with AWS and bring our years of experience and help our clients go through the journey and successfully deliver in whatever complexity that they have, their existing environments. So, just an example of how we partner with our partners. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. In fact, I heard someone once describe AWS as being like Home Depot, in the sense that they offer all of the bits and bytes. Of course, the AWS folks were like, "What? No, we're nothing like Home Depot!" It's like, well, you kind of are. (laughs) Because it really is important for an organization like Kyndryl to be there, to bridge the divide between the tools and the outcomes, as you mentioned. Well, what are some of the customers, or kinds of customers that you work with in this arena? >> Yeah. So, just to double click on what I said about the 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, we currently manage the top five ad lanes of all ad lanes, we probably manage four of the five largest retailers, and 49% of the mobile connections are supported for the customers, and 61%, or roughly around 60% of the top 50 banks assets are managed by our service. So, we have a huge portfolio across the financial services, public sector, you know, communications, and distribution market across the globe. >> So is it fair to say that each of these customers is somewhere along the digital transformation timeline? Are they all thinking in terms of transforming digitally, what that means? Whether it's application modernization, of course, movement to cloud is part of that, does that sound like the profile of a lot of your customers? >> Exactly. So, each of them are in various, what I call in the paradigm of everybody are trying to modernize, right? Modernization is the way to go. Even though in the last three years we saw that the physical slowdown of the world, like digital transformation took an explosive growth, so everybody realized that not doing the business in a traditional way is going to get to where they want to go. And traditionally, people are cutting costs, or trying to trim down, and trying to see how they can, you know, do incremental modernization. And then they realize, especially in the last three years, that they need to holistically look at how they need to be modernizing it. Right? And that is where either it's a datacenter-driven modernization, or it's an application-centric modernization, which is moving the transformation journey. Or in general, people are holistically looking at how they can improve their overall presence in the digital world. >> So, do you think that the pandemic accelerated that? >> Absolutely. I would say that everybody started realizing how critical, and the businesses who were already a leg up in that world were quickly able to grab that opportunity, and they were able to run with that, and everybody are trying to catch up on that journey. And, you know, a lot of people who started that journey have realized that if they do not have a proper strategy to start off with, they get stuck somewhere. And that is where we can go and help them, wherever they are. >> Talk to me about some of the challenges that you see out in the field working with the actual organizations that are seeking to transform, to go through this digital transformation. What are some of the things that might surprise someone looking in from the outside? >> Again, if you go back to the basics, right, in the digital transformation world, it's not just the technology which is driving everything. People who have not clearly mapped their business objectives to the technology drivers, or the imperatives, are the ones which are, you know, feeling the pinch, that they have some technology driven transformation, but once it is done, they don't see that it's translating back to a business objective which they are trying to accomplish. That's one of the larger things which I see. So, we are trying to go back and help clients to bridge that gap, to make sure that, first, their strategy is in place, and the strategy is holistically looked at. That's one part of it. The second, larger challenge, which I'm seeing a lot of people is, they were able to quickly, you know, grapple around the technology explosion and able to start the journey, but the process and the people associated the transformation regarding those two are a lot more associated with the culture and everything else. So, it's a combination of technical resources, with not able to quickly adapt the operating model, which is the newer operating model required for the digital transformation, are the challenge which is an ongoing one. And none of this is news to anybody, but, practically, when I walk into a company, those are the areas which I continue to see where people are struggling. >> So, Kyndryl isn't solely involved with the virtual movement of workloads from one place to another, you actually work with customers to make those kinds of organizational changes and operational environment changes that need to take place. Is that right? >> Absolutely. So, as I told you, we have a whole suite of clients whom we have been supporting for decades. So, we have one set of those clients who have trusted us for years. And then we have another set of clients who we are providing some kind of services, and now we have newer clients. So between all of them, they're starting to realize that we have the end-to-end capabilities. The differentiator is, we can start from building a business case for somebody, and then strategizing it, creating a roadmap, and then actually doing the design, implement it, and help them to migrate it. And once the migration is done, continue to help optimizing it, and then not only stopping there, but the key thing where everybody have, you know, fallen behind, is how do you operate, manage it once you start migrating it. So, this is where Kyndryl is sitting in a very sweet spot, because we already are managing most of our clients, or we have the client base, they're operating theirs either holistically, or some portions of it, and now when they're trying to go on their journey we are very well suited because we already understand their environment. And while they are transforming into the cloud space, we are also able to bridge that gap by managing their existing and to manage to the cloud. So, we can, end-to-end. >> And yeah, talking about true end-to-end, you know, we're talking to you from AWS Summit New York 2022, of course, so the focus is AWS, but Kyndryl works with other hyperscale cloud partners as well. So I mean, you are primarily an advocate for the customer. Is that a fair? That's what they call in the business "a softball question." (Ramkumar and David laughing) Because if you answer, "no, we're not primarily in involved in the business of advocating for our customers," we should just stop this conversation right now. But seriously, the point is, you are truly an objective consultant in this game. >> Absolutely. Thank you for asking that, (David laughing) because we are a vendor neutral service provider. So we go, and when we walk into the client, we like to hear from the client what their challenges are. Right? Where are they trying to be? If they already started the journey, where they are. They could be anywhere from an on-premises trying to just modernize some aspects of their, you know, operational, or from the application side, or they could be anywhere in the hybrid cloud. And most of them are hybrid multicloud. So, it's not just AWS, it could be Azure, GCP, OCI, Oracle, or IBM cloud. It doesn't matter. We go and meet the client where they are. If they ask us for a point of view, we will provide them once we understand what their objectives, and their technology workloads they are having, and how they want to do it based on that we can. But if they already started journey, we are more than happy to partner with them on any of the cloud journeys. And most of them are in the hybrid multi-cloud as I said, so we are very well suited to help them. And as I said, we are not completely an agnostic service provider. >> Well, if I am an existing business that's seeking to go through digital transformation, I would recognize that there is a lot of power in this idea that you have a history in on-premises IT, going back to, you know, the sort of DNA for IBM global services. And the reason why I think that's important is because anyone can stand up a net new service with nothing existing, in one of the hyperscale clouds. It's a whole different proposition when you have decades of legacy infrastructure and processes that need to be massaged and moved over. I wonder, does Kyndryl get a lot of mileage out of that in terms of being able to say, "Hey, we understand your existing environment because we've been working in this world for decades." Or is the message more, "Hey, we are super cool cloud kids too?" How do you come down on that? Maybe that's a little bit of inside info. (Ramkumar laughing) >> No, the reality on the ground basically, David, is not everybody can move all their workloads to cloud, and not all workloads are suited to go to cloud as well. So, it is us who need to make sure that we can help our clients make the right choices by doing a rationalization of their workloads, and make sure that we understand their business, their end clients whom they're servicing, their capabilities, and then based on that, we can help them to do both, right? Whether it's just on-premises modernization, or help them to take them in a hybrid cloud mode. So the answer is both, right? Even though we currently manage their environment, doesn't mean that we need to continue to support, but, you know, we are moving up the stack to help them, to support them in their hybrid cloud journey as well. And not only that, this gives us a capability or an ability to help them in a much more holistic way by looking at their full ops, right? That's a huge area where people are trying to go into the cloud, or they already started to go into the cloud, but how do they optimize their environment? Right? These are the areas where, and then if you want to modernize some of their operating model, right, how do we deploy the SRE, or the DevSecOps, or the DevOps? So, we kind of look up all those aspects as people are trying to move into the cloud aspect so we can help them both on-premises, or if they want to modernize much more we can do it in the hybrid cloud as well. I don't know whether that fully answered your question. >> Absolutely, it does. In fact, Ram, what you and Kyndryl are doing is what we at theCUBE refer to as having adult conversations about cloud with the clients that you serve. With that, looks like we are at the end of our time together. I really appreciate the chance to hear about what you're doing, and to hear all about Kyndryl. From me, Dave Nicholson, at theCUBE, I'd like to say, stay tuned for a continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022, and always stay tuned to theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of splunk.com, virtual 2021. I'm John Ford, your host of the cube. We're here with Teresa Carlson, special guests cube alumni. Who's now the president and chief growth officer of Splunk. Teresa, welcome back to the queue. >>So glad you're here with us >>As the president of Splunk. Great to see you. Great to see you. So we've had many conversations in the queue. When you were the chief of public sector of Amazon web services, you grew that business significantly over the years. We've documented on the cube and we've talked about I've written about it. Um, now Splunk, it feels a lot like AWS was back in LA a couple of years ago, where you have this amazing product everyone's using. They don't lose customers. They're getting customers they're in the middle of the security thing, which you know a lot about, and they have this large enterprise base growing. It's just a minute. Grazer leaning in Splunk is, seems to be going to the next level. >>Totally. Well, you nailed it. I would say we're definitely in a scale mode at this point at Splunk. And also to your point, our customers are so loyal to us and we're seeing actually customers with more than a million dollars doubling their spend almost with us. Uh, it's pretty cool. And now we have this cloud portfolio, which is one of my jobs, as you know, I love, I've got my cloud shirt on. I've been believer in cloud. I'm a real believer. You know, I saw the transformational effects of cloud in real time, over 11 years and bringing that here even more to utilize that in our security and observability spaces is quite phenomenal. And then you see again in a much more, uh, set of segmented workloads, how customers take advantage of this. And of course today, like no other John security is just top of mind. It's always been you and I talked earlier about how security kind of evolved over the years and public sector led some of that over time. And then commercial industry say, you know, wow, that today it's, I mean, it's more than top of mind for not just every enterprise organization and government entity, but it's also every board out there. It's something that we think about internal threat, external threat. How do we manage it? How do we get the data around it to understand it? And then how do we take action on it? >>I seen you up on stage as a senior leader here at Splunk, um, at the virtual venue at a great keynote was a lot of news. And we'll get into that in a second, but I want to ask you, knowing you personally and covering you over the years of Amazon web services, you've been a fierce competitor. Okay. But you also have been a great people, person, people loved working for you, Splunk, is it the same? We've been covering them just as long as we cover an ADFS. The culture seemed to fit because Splunk is kind of competitive, but they're kind of quiet, competitive culture. Yeah. Interesting. Tell us about, tell us about your experience. >>Well, and I think we can, yeah, we can do it in our own Spanky way. I'm learning new it's six minutes today that I've been as blind quiches and believable that I've been here this long already, but, uh, Splunk has a very quirky culture, which I led. They have a lot of fan. They have a big following and I'm so sorry that everyone couldn't attend in person, but the virtual social media feeds are off the charts. I mean, I'm just, I'm having so much fencing high already. They come together. It's a real community, but, uh, yeah, on the competition front, here's what reminds me so much about my old world is that I always love that when somebody wakes up and realizes that it's a huge industry and they want to participate. And that's kind of what happened when I was at AWS and now it's blank. >>I'm like, Hey, all these companies are waking up and saying, data's this real thing. It's like a $90 billion plus industry and growing, and then data with security. Hello, are you kidding me? So I feel like really that's kind of what's happened. And Splunk has such a unique set of tools and solutions that just work, they work. And that's what customers, I have heard that statement from customers and partners so much that it just works. And the other thing that's pretty unique about us, I would say John is our ability to navigate between an on-prem world and a cloud world in a unique set of areas like IOT, edge computing. So wherever customer's data is multiple clouds, we're able to take advantage of that for the customer. So they make the choice of where that data comes from and they use the splint tooling then to be able to get those insights and information >>Well, great to have you on the Cuban grid, that's swung to have you, and they're going to be lucky to have you going to do a lot stuff, knowing you and knowing the Splunk community and the team here. A great team. Now talking about the announcements, look at what's going on. Obviously security is still in everything. Yep. A couple of things, rebranding of the partner versus sends a huge message of the ecosystem. You know, that movie you've seen that movie before, um, digital journey for customer success. Again, they have tons of customers that have been with them from beginning and new customers, but they've got to go government action going on here. Whereas you know, a lot about the government logging in monetization program. >>Yeah. Well, as you know, the government, uh, you got 11, but they do continually come up with N fended mandates. And my government customers always have said, oh my gosh, I've got another unfunded mandate. So we're really helping them at that because yes, while it's infested in this budget this year, as it states, they know how important it is. And I do think this initiative is something that is going to have a waterfall effect into the commercial industries. Also just like a lot of these things do and around security, uh, but it's important that we help our government customer made as best as they can. So we've come up with, I think, a very unique offering that they can take advantage of for Splunk and we're going to be out there helping them every way. And, and hopefully John L also helped them learn more about cross governmental, what they're doing and how they can understand from their logs and metrics even more about how to protect. Yes. >>One of the things that we've talked about before in the past, but how cloud-scale, and as creates ecosystems, Amazon VMware, you seeing all these ecosystems that have been thriving for, for decades, Splunk has an ecosystem developing very, very fast. Their partners are, are loyal and they're making money with them. And they're being delivered solutions as data becomes the new enablement. How do you see the role of the partners that growing? How do you see them evolving over time? >>Well, let me just tell you, I'm, I'm a real believer in the partner community. I mean, firsthand over the years, my time at Microsoft at AWS, I saw it as an unbelievable force multiplier to your business. And I mean that, and they do things that you don't even think of. I, you know, I'm always amazed at partners. I'm like, oh, you're using the tool for that. Wow. So while we are broadly good, we're, we're very good at what we do, but we cannot understand every horizontal or vertical industry out there. And the reason it's important to have partners, they can take you to places that you never dreamed. And for us, if you look at the categories, we need our CSP or cloud service providers to be able to really help us make sure that we take advantage of the cloud platforms that are out there and our primary, we AWS, and then Google cloud. >>Uh, and then after that we work, we work with both those a migration. You saw Steve Schmidt today. Good friend of mine love Steve. And the work we're doing. And you saw, we were one of the first migration partners with AWS. You'll see us continue that program. We'll work together to continue to look for security services jointly that we can offer. And we're a customer of theirs. They're a customer of ours. It makes a good partnership. And then additionally, you have, uh, you have your MSPs, right? Your managed service providers. And today we talked about blue buoyant who had multiples, and these are partners out there that have a unique offering for me, generally managed security or observability in the marketplace. They take the Splunk toolkit, they add to it and they have it off, offered out to their customers. Um, and then you have your largest size like Accenture. I'm so excited about that. First of all, led Julie Sweet. She's an amazing CEO and leader. Uh, and w in what they're doing with this, they've been a long-standing partner of ours, but now they've actually made us part of their, one of their 11 business groups. So it's Accenture plus Splunk, and now they'll take us into all of their industries together. So it's huge. And, you know, >>Does that mean cause, cause this is a business deal. This isn't just like a, you know, some sort of deal where you guys saying we're going together. This is a specific division. >>That's right. That's right. So they have a leaven partners that they work with. AWS is one of them. SAP's one of them. Uh, IBM's one of them, Salesforce, I believe is one of them. And they have, they have experts at Accenture that can go into customers to implement tools and services for customers at the enterprise level. And so they have selected. Splunk is one of those business partners that you heard Paul today talk about. We already have 400 customers together and growing, we will expand that, but it's a joint effort of both go-to-market selling and technical resources that will deliver. But for Splunk, again, it's back to that horizontal and vertical slicing where they can take us into security practice that they have chosen. Splunk is one of their security offerings and it's important that we really support them. But also in the splint, a partner verse, we're going to do some new things. >>John, if I just first take and talk about it, we've had a great partner program, but now we're going to Korea's credits, uh, technology, architecture, tooling support, uh, getting in, you know, to certify themselves, to be pro serve ready for those migrations and modernizations. But also really what we heard from a lot of them is they need more training and education remaster to understand our new cloud offerings. And that makes sense. So it's more digital and more cloud oriented with these partners. And then guess what they would love for us to talk about how great they are and we should. So when we get them out there that helps our customers really understand the offerings they have in the marketplace >>At Brooke honeymoon was saying she didn't do a lot more listening and they're working on this next level partner verse. I found that really interesting, all sorts of Katie beyond key. I talked with she's the SVP of customer success, something you're I know you're obsessed about. You always work backwards from the customers as the AWS way. How do you view customer stuff? Because you have a lot of different customers, you have diverse customers. What's important. What are you going to keep Katie's on top of this, but what's your view. >>We ha we do have a lot of different customers. However, we have a concentration of the largest, most important and influential customers in the world. So our customer base is very large enterprise oriented, multiple departments within that enterprise take advantage of Splunk. We work with 90 to the 100 fortune 100 companies, and we've worked with them for a long time. And like I said, we're continuing to see them use more of splice, not less as blank. And the way that that happens is, and I hear from him, I sit and talk to him and they're like, now we're using Splunk in these multiple departments and we need to bring it all together at the enterprise level for the C-suite to look at it. Now, I know it sounds a little strange John, but that's changed a bit over the years. And that is because, you know, if you look at big spenders at an enterprise, he spends a lot of money because they need to at dev, you know, uh, security, right. Security infrastructure, and they need to monitor all that. They need to understand it, but guess what they want, understand it now at the corporate level. And they need it at the CIO, they need at the Cisco level for threat analysis. And then now boards want more and more that information they want to roll up of what's happening. So we're seeing a trend where the C-suite, the senior executives really are much more interested in Splunk. It used to be very departmental. >>I'll throw another wrench in the equation. There is one developers want shifting left. They want real time data security policy in the development, CDC at pipelining. So another problem. Yeah. >>Yeah. And developers lever tools. And again, they're, they're another unique group I should totally talk about. That takes your tools to another level and really fears that ways within their customer set to take advantage of the tooling. >>He's a great to see you. Congratulations on a new opportunity here. And the leadership at Splunk, um, really perfectly poised to take the growth of the cloud. That's. So I have to ask you, what's your mission? What's your mission for the next year as you come on? You're six months in what's the, >>Well, for us, here's blankets, continuing to scale, really listening to our customers and partners. It sounds, I don't want it to sound like a cliche. We really are spending time listening and working back, Sean and I are working. He's their president of technology products and technology. He and I are working very closely to look at features and functionality that we need to be talking about. Uh, it is about taking advantage of the partner community in a way to support them, to help again, get us into new areas of the business. And then lastly, continue to make sure that we have the training and education for customers directly because our tools and technologies are evolving. And if I've learned anything over the last 11 years is cloud is a step change for a lot of customers and they're still hybrid. So it's important that we meet them where they are, but help them get over that bridge so that they have that full digital journey. So that's what you're going to see me focused on. I'm super excited. >>I was talking with Claire, the CMO just before you leave, I want to get your reaction. This event went virtual the last minute. It became a studio here in Silicon valley. You're a media company now Splunk. Yeah. >>It's like it. I mean, it is amazing what we accomplished today. Uh, I, you know, I don't want to pre give numbers, but we had way, way over 20,000 today, online and, uh, growing. So the numbers we're still looking at, but it was unbelievable. And we had, I think we had had like 22,000 registered and we even got more. So people joined in, they stay, they watched the keynote, there were out narrow specialty sessions. And I all agree, like it was pretty cool. It was a step change because we were thinking about doing it in person. We took a pulse and we said, you know, we think we can actually do a better job this year because of COVID steel. If we do it all virtually and it turned out and we have you, so look at this, you're like, we have you here. And I love your cool backdrop here, John. Yeah. >>Well, you guys do a great job. You guys are a media company. Now you're telling your own stories direct. There's a lot of stories to tell. Thank you for coming on the cube. Great to see you >>Again. John's great to see you because the >>Cubes coverage here at.com 2021 virtual I'm John for your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.