(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS re:invent 2021 live in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, with David Nicholson. We are running one of the industry's largest, most important hybrid tech events this year with AWS and its enormous ecosystem of partners. We've been talking yesterday and today about the next decade and cloud innovation. We're pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Alan Henson, the Vice President of Pariveda Solutions. Welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> So talk to us about what's going on at Pariveda. What are some of the things that you're focused on in the energy space? >> So for us, specifically, we're looking at energy as it's redefining itself, right? It's no longer just oil and gas. It's no longer just coal. It's renewable energies, it's carbon capture, it's retail energy, it's power generation. We're trying to understand as this energy industry redefines itself, how companies are starting to participate in there and how technologies are really helping them as they redefine their business models and go through their digital transformations. >> I was doing some reading that Amazon is already the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the world and will be 100% renewable energy by 2025. Talk to me about the partnership with AWS. >> So our partnership goes back quite a while. We were one of their early partners. We saw the early potential of AWS, jumped in both feet in the deep end, and we've had a wonderful partnership ever since. More recently over the last couple of three years, as they've really matured their definition of energy, we've been right there with them, partnering with them on a number of different projects across multiple industries and really getting excited about how they define their journey going forward in the energy industry. >> We're in such a state of flux right now. We have been for quite a while, but talk about the energy transition. What is that? Why now? Are we all ready? >> Ooh, great question. So the energy transition is really about us as a society, looking to new sources of energy over fossil fuels. 83% of the world's energy today comes from fossil fuels, about 30% from coal, a little over 50% from oil and gas itself. We as a world are looking at this as this is energy that can't continue to be our primary source. It has been a pivot-able source of energy getting us here. It is cheap, it is reliable, it is abundant. It's very good at what it does today. However, it's causing harm. So we need to address that. So what we're doing looking forward is helping companies understand what does it mean to be net zero? What does it mean to monitor and capture your carbon? What does it mean to transition your business model from a pure oil and gas play to one that's looking at new energies like carbon capture, like wind, like solar. So we're helping all of these companies go through that journey as they figure out those next steps. >> So where does Pariveda come into the picture? Take this down to the level of an engagement with an energy company. Who are the people that you parachute in? >> Sure. >> To engage with the customer? Well let's talk about oil and gas first. The most near-term best solution that we're seeing is really about operational excellence. How can I better run my business so I reduce my footprint? Am I having better maintenance to reduce accidental spills? Am I controlling my unexpected emissions, like flaring? How can I use technology to help me run my business better? Then we have companies in the retail energy, who are looking at their customer base who are purchasing large amounts of energy, who they themselves are striving to be net zero by 2050, 2060 and creating solutions for them so they can begin to capture their carbon solutions. So we typically parachute in a couple of different types of groups. Pariveda is both an advisory services firm and a technology services firm. So based upon where a company is in their journey, we may start more in the strategy space, working with the C-Suite. What does it mean to build and structure an organization to strategically go after this new energy space or perhaps they're focusing more on operational excellence. They're trying to figure out how to leverage technology and process, to run their business better, more cost effectively. More importantly, more ESG friendly. >> ESG is a big buzzword these days. You were talking about conversations at the C-Suite level? Has it always been there or is that something that with climate change and all the things going on, you think of, you know, Hurricane Ida, the drought in California and the fires, the flooding in Washington, is that something that is now more of a focus of the C-suite level? >> I think it has to be. Global warming first became mainstream back in the seventies, when we first started realizing there was going to be an impact from our use of fossil fuels. Originally, it wasn't quite sure the scientific data wasn't there necessarily to support it. But now we're starting to see that there is a climate change. Whether or not it's caused by fossil fuels is a debate for another day. But we are starting to see that. As a result, we're also starting to see a lot of pressures coming from various different areas of our world, the financial industry, wanting to become a lot more transparent about their investment holdings. Which means they're looking at their portfolio and choosing whether or not to put investment into capital projects, which is the heart of oil and gas companies. We're seeing social pressers, not just with campaigns and protests, but where people are choosing to work, the products they're choosing to buy, the brand that they're using to associate their identity. And that's also creating pressures for the C-Suite to start to pay attention because that impacts their whole pipeline of talent. So I think we're starting to see that because of those impacts becoming much more far reaching than just some scientific publications. >> Well, the focus on people is critical. You know, we talk about often people process technology, but the people focus is critical, especially since this has such, from an optics perspective, global visibility. >> Yes, people is critically important, not just from a talent acquisition, but also from a talent development perspective. These organizations are going to be going through some pretty dramatic changes. They're going to be leveraging technology they're already familiar with, perhaps some processes they're already familiar with, but they're ultimately moving into new industries, new competitive markets. So you need to not only be able to recruit the top talent by promoting an image that people can align to, but also be able to build that talent internally so that you can make them effective as you go through these business model transformations. >> You know, there's been a theme that we've seen just in the first full day today here at AWS re:invent. And that theme is that the AWS ecosystem is thriving and critical to the success of what AWS is developing. You've given a great example of an organization, your organization, that connects or bridges the divide between technology and the value that technology can bring. You said it at the outset, you're not going in and talking technology first, typically. It's, let's talk about strategy. Let's talk about people and culture, and then let's find the tools that are best suited to leverage to achieve the goals. Because you started talking about energy, and it's like, well, so which compute instance do I need for that, exactly? Somebody has to connect those dots. >> Absolutely. That's what I love about AWS. They offer a broad suite of services in their overall cloud infrastructure that allow you to start in multiple areas. Let's start with one of the very first projects that we got into that really focused on operational excellence and improving how the organization ran its business. This is a public reference, I'm going to go ahead and say it, we did work with AWS, partnering with them at ExxonMobil to help them redefine how they collaborate with their engineering procurement and construction companies. So this was a cloud platform that allowed them to change the way they interface with those vendors as they took on these large capital projects. We were able to take time out of the system, help that organization run more profitably, which allows them to invest in that new energy technology. Then we moved to retail energy where we've been looking at a large adoption in IOT technologies. That IOT capability of AWS allows organizations to monitor their infrastructure, understand how their equipment is performing, where carbon emissions might be occurring, or other greenhouse gases might be occurring, and bringing that in. Then you bring in the AL and ML stack capabilities. One of the leading ways of detecting emissions right now is image machine learning around emissions, looking at satellite photos to see if there are changes in the atmosphere where there might be a methane leak. So all these technologies work together to help us derive better answers for how to be a better energy company and how to be a more environmentally friendly corporation. >> What's the customer flywheel like? You know, often we talk with AWS there, they talk about really-- we start backwards. We start from the customer, we work forward, our customer obsession. We saw the NASCAR slides this morning of all the logos and I'm sure many more that didn't fit. But talk to me about the alignment between Pariveda, your focus on the customers, how they help you guys innovate and create new solutions, I imagine similar culturally to AWS. >> That's one of my favorite aspects about being a premier partner with AWS is the cultural alignment. We have a process that we call right to left faking. It's beginning with business outcomes before we ever look at the technology, ever start to design the solution, ever start to build that solution. Are we meeting the end user's needs, and where that culturally aligns with AWS is it aligns with their working backwards process where they sit with their primary end users and pick some point in the future and say, if I were to do a press release today, announcing the solution that we just built, what would it say? And then if I had questions, I wanted people to be able to find answers to the frequently asked questions. What would be in those frequently asked questions and what would those answers look like? So those two approaches to starting with the right to left business outcome focus helps us begin with the most important thing that we call "jobs to be done". So we're not working on a symptom, we're working on the actual problem. And that's where we've really aligned with AWS and our cultures have helped us focus on the most critical issues at hand. >> So we've talked a lot about energy and your affiliation with AWS in these efforts, but tell us a little more about Pariveda in terms of in a more broad sense. What's the history? >> Sure. >> Give us the pitch. >> Yeah, absolutely. Pariveda has been around for over 18 years. It started with a vision that our mission should be about developing people to their fullest potential. Start there and everything else will come. Since then, we've developed into both a strategy services firm and a technology services firm where we want to bring together what we consider to be the three primary components of an enterprise architecture. Basically business, product, technology, all wrapped around strategy. And so we want to focus on those areas when we use those to help deliver projects. So whether it's technology, whether we're helping travel and hospitality companies that you probably would recognize, or we're working with sports leagues to help rebrand, we're working in the agricultural industry to change how they capture data from equipment in the field. To working in the medical industry, redefining the way that doctors work with your patients by capturing your entire conversation for them. So they're spending less time translating their notes and instead evaluating their notes to ensure top quality health care, to working energy. So we're based in North America. We have ten offices in the U.S., one in Toronto. We're about 750 strong. And we are really focused on deliberate growth versus just exponential growth. >> Well the outcomes focus is absolutely critical, as you talked about earlier. For every organization, you know, one of the things that we learned during the last 22 months is that real-time data access is no longer a "nice to have". It's absolutely essential. But we're also seeing every company's becoming a data company, but they have to learn how. How can we work with technology partners like AWS, like Pariveda, to be able to capture the value that it -- unlock it quickly so that we can iterate and be able to deliver, especially in this interesting climate that we're in and pivot and pivot and pivot. So that outcomes focus that Pariveda has, is really critical for enabling businesses in every industry to be able to survive and thrive these days. >> You said it well, we agree with you completely. What we've designed at Pariveda is what we call the modern data enterprise, where it looks at the holistic vision of becoming a data company, everything from governance to technology choices, to how I structure my organization to have the right roles, the right leadership, the right executive support, and thinking about the full picture of delivering a successful data platform so that we can really focus on something that one of my mentees calls "data liquidity". It's the ability of a company to convert their data to value as quickly as possible. In order to do that, you have to come at it from multiple angles. >> You do, and that's a competitive differentiator these days. >> Yes, absolutely. It's more than just "Let me bring you a data link and hookup some data pipelines". Again, if that's where you start, you're probably not starting in the right place. We want to start with the end users. What questions are they answering? What jobs they trying to get done? And then moving back and say, well, what data do we need? And what form do we need and how do we present it to them so they can do their job extremely well and create their own competitive differentiation. >> Right. That's really critical. Last question is -- we have just a few seconds left here, Alan -- is so much announced today alone. This is, like David said, the first full day of coverage at re:invent, but from a visionary perspective, what are some of the things that we can expect to see from Pariveda as we finish the year 2021 and enter 2022? >> So let me speak a little selfishly to the energy. What you are going to see is us as an organization are going to work side-by-side with AWS energy to help shape the picture. What does it mean to be an energy company? As these industries start to converge, we're going to build more holistic platforms and more holistic approaches so organizations can figure out "How do I still do the business I need to do today to fund the business I need to so tomorrow?" And you're going to start to see us bringing better messaging to that on both strategy, technology, and product approaches. >> Awesome. Alan, thank you for joining David and me, talking about what's going on with power data, awesome approach. I love the people focus. Great stuff. >> Lisa, David, thank you for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. For David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards for this very important event, the award for best partner transformation, best energy solution. I'm your host, Natalie Erlich for theCUBE and I'm very pleased to welcome our next guests. They are Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. Welcome to the program, so glad to have you here. >> Glad to be here. Thank you. >> Yes, thanks for having us. >> Terrific. Well, let's start with you, Doug. Can you give us a brief overview of your subsidiary for some of our audience that may not be familiar with it? And also how are you using AWS now to transform collaboration on major capital projects? >> Certainly and thank you. So as many will know ExxonMobil as a sort of a global energy provider around the world operating on six out of the seven continents. Global Projects, which is the specific subsidiary where I work, we are responsible for delivery of major capital projects to the various business units around the world. So we have the opportunity to, once approved by the business unit, to deliver on the engineering, procurement, and construction activities associated with building a new facility, if you will. And that ranges across oil and gas production, refining and chemical activities. >> Terrific. And I'd love to shift now to Alan. Could you give us an insight on DPH and your collaboration with ExxonMobil? That would be terrific. >> Happy too. We first got involved with Digital Project Home after Doug had reached out to AWS seeking ways to innovate how major capital projects look at collaboration in the engineering, procurement, and construction value chain. And we were brought in as an AWS Premier Partner to help design an uplift, a new way to facilitate that collaboration between ExxonMobil and its EPC companies. And we got involved early on in the design phase where we were in the room together putting up wire frames on the walls, walking through the processes, trying to figure out how do we streamline the process that had quite a bit of toil in it from both the combination of mixed systems to manual processes. And that's where we got involved and really helped to sketch out some of that early vision from Doug. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, how is Digital Project Home facilitating collaboration with your contractors? >> Well, as folks would recognize, some of these projects are quite large, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, very extensive in terms of the number of people on the owner-operator side as well as the various professional contracting firms that help us to succeed at building out these projects and the decisions, the interactions, the way that we work with one another involves hundreds of millions of hours in some cases, and many, many decisions. What we were looking for is to try to understand how some of those formal interactions, where questions are asked and answered and we need a record of the question that was asked and answered for contractual purposes and for the history, when documents are submitted and need to be reviewed and returned. Some of those formal interactions, historically, had been through platforms and methodologies that were really quite, to use the phrase Alan just did, quite toilsome. And what we were looking to do was to kind of come in to the modern world and use some of the digital tools, methods and programming that are available to help automate in some cases, to help smooth the actual transfer of information, and to bring information to the surface. As practitioners on a project, how do you have information available to you at your fingertips so that you can have better information that allows you to make better decisions and return your answers, not only more quickly with less hours involved in getting to that answer, but also a better answer with a higher confidence that we've answered it the way we need to, we don't have to revisit later. >> Terrific. Well, Alan can you now describe some of the benefits of this cloud native serverless architecture? >> Absolutely. If you remember back what Doug was saying earlier, ExxonMobil operates on six to seven continents around the world. So one of the first things we wanted to do is make sure that we were designing for a solution that could meet any end-user, no matter where they were in the world, whether it was Africa, North America, Australia, Asia, it didn't matter. So we wanted to choose a cloud infrastructure like AWS that had an amazing ability to serve global customers around the world. And more specifically, we knew it was really important to get to a value adding solution as quickly as possible. So by leveraging serverless technology, we got to spend most of our time building the technology that was going to be adding value because AWS infrastructure had already solved many of just the pipe work style issues at hand. So AWS really gave us an accelerated platform to really start diving in to the innovative side of improving collaboration between ExxonMobil and their engineering, procurement and construction vendors. >> Terrific. Now staying with you, Alan. I'd love to hear how is that helping ExxonMobil to build with greater agility and at lower costs? >> There are a couple of things that come to mind with me. First, we led very early on with a modular based design. We knew there were going to be multiple use cases that we had to satisfy and every major capital project does follow rigorous global processes, but often has to adapt them to the environment at hand to what they're particularly constructing, things of that nature. So we wanted to build a solution that would adapt them quickly, so they're not constantly having to go back and build new customizations, new workflows that were specific to one entity or project versus another. So just by making it modular and flexible, we were able to already start to save costs. Additionally, because we're moving into the cloud, we completely take out a lot of the infrastructure maintenance costs that go with that. And that's really where the AWS infrastructure and the cloud based solution really started to help save money as we streamlined this solution. >> Yeah. Well, speaking of flexibility, Doug, why is it so important for your business? >> So, as Alan pointed out, Natalie, we work all over the world with different partners, different EPC contractors, and so we needed the flexibility to be able to use this tool in locations, all around the world. In many cases, the same project has people located around the world. So we had to have that speed and access. We also had to have the flexibility to be able to adjust to specific requirements perhaps of unique relationships between us, our co-venture partners, the countries that host us and so forth. But in addition to that, I'll add to Alan's comment, by structuring it the way Pariveda did, what we ended up with is sort of foundational building blocks that allowed us then to extend in future to additional interactions that we might have with our contractors. So we built out the first couple, and those are available to us today, technical queries and document reviews, but we knew and anticipate that we will continue to have additional workflows, if you will, additional interactions with our partners that we will want to automate and strengthen in the same way. And so having the flexibility of this building block architecture that Pariveda put together allows us to anticipate that in future we can build that out to additional workflows. >> Terrific. Well, now shifting gears. I'd love to hear from Alan a bit here, or actually Doug, excuse me. How do you actually find the system? Do you find that it is intuitive, or do you have to train people really meticulously on this kind of platform? >> Well, design from the beginning to be a very user-friendly. The user experience element of the design work, Pariveda brought that in from the very beginning. And in fact, from our perspective, was one of the key talents that they brought to the design. So we had a problem that we were trying to solve, a platform that we wanted it to work on, but that user interaction, that user experience was so important from the very beginning and is quite frankly, an area where I lacked the experience to have been able to influence it very much, but the Pariveda team and the AWS team as they work together with us built in user experience from the very beginning. That doesn't mean that we don't have to still give some folks a little bit of training to get used to it, but it was designed from the beginning to be quite an intuitive approach, so folks could do their work. We really were after, from my view, from the very beginning, low in toil, rich in information, those were the two things we were trying to accomplish with the entire platform. >> Yeah. And if either one of you want to jump in here. Obviously, you're dealing with a lot of information, what is the data storage like? >> It's surprising not as much as you might think. We designed for optimized data storage from the beginning. We really wanted to make sure we only stored the data that we needed, but also capture as much of it as possible so that we could surface information. That was a goal for us in the beginning, was to not only capture the information that was happening between the collaboration, but design it in a way that we could use technologies like AI and machine learning languages capabilities to surface data out. So from a data storage standpoint, a lot of the data was stored outside of AWS, but we also have a fair amount stored inside of AWS. And because of that footprint, we were able to keep costs quite low. >> Terrific. Well, Alan, again, staying with you, really curious. How is this system addressing the pain points of ExxonMobil global projects specifically? >> One of the main goals from the beginning, like Doug was saying, is to reduce the toil. And a lot of the toil came from the process of an EPC company needing to submit a document over to ExxonMobil and then getting it distributed to the right teams to provide that feedback, or perhaps in reverse, where ExxonMobil needed to send a document over to another EPC companies to get feedback as well. That oftentimes involve multiple people on both sides of that equation. It involved multiple systems that had to be accessed and leveraged to not only capture and trance to document, provide tools for doing markup and providing comments. Digital Project Home unified that entire experience so that the engineers on both sides of the document collaboration process could go into one system and perform all their functions. We automated the routing. We gave them an in tool PDF markup capabilities. So they could just load the document straight into their browser, start doing their work, add their comments, save and submit, and the system would facilitate all of that. So we took out multiple hops in the process and reduce the amount of time people had to spend doing tasks that weren't necessarily a value add. >> And I'll add to that. Natalie, is it okay I'll add to that? >> Oh, please do. >> Both on the EPC contractor side as well as the owner side, we have small teams of what we call document controllers 'cause we handle so many documents. But it's quite a labor intensive or manual type approach, but it didn't need to be. And the DPH approach and the way that it was built out, it's still not completely eliminated all of the intervention of document controllers, but it reduces the burden and even the team size necessary to maneuver those documents back and forth. We in our engagements with our contractors have a contractual obligation to return our comments within a specified period of time. And we were losing 10 to 20% of that time just in the document management side of getting it from the right person to the right person and back. And so when schedules are tight, we have a lot to do, losing 20% of our contractual time to get a document returned with comments, that was a bit painful for us. So eliminating that, or at least drastically reducing it was a big win among others. >> Well, staying with you, Doug, what do you see as the major benefits of creating this platform on AWS? >> Really, to me, it comes down to better decisions. In underpinned by better information at hand to those who are or having to review, answer questions, review documents that are information at hand that allows us then to have the information that's required to get to a good answer and provide that back, whether it's from the contractor to us or the other way around. On either side, surfacing information, because otherwise a practitioner is going off to find an industry standard, going back to find out if we already had a query on that same document, see what we said last time or how that question was different from this question. There was a lot of hunting and pecking, so to speak to find out what information was allied to the question or allied to the document. And what we were really looking for was a solution that would bring that information up, give us live links, allow us to jump across to that information straight away. Not only have the information, but also be able to access it quite quickly. >> Terrific. And Alan, now shifting gears over to you. I'm really curious how this system will improve efficiencies for MCPs for the years to come. >> As Doug mentioned, we designed the system from the beginning to be extendable, to be modular, to think of like Lego blocks, where the Legos themselves represent functionality that we know can serve purposes in multiple different workflows. So as ExxonMobil continues to develop this platform in partnership with feedback from their engineering, procurement, and construction companies, they're going to be able to quickly build new workflows leveraging component based design that we did from day one. So the efficiency is going to come as they or able to add new capabilities to the platform very quickly and using modern technology to ensure that it's relevant and capable and serving the businesses needs. >> Terrific. Now, Doug, as this project scales up, what are some of the other benefits would you expect can be realized? >> Well, Natalie, we're looking to extend it to more projects as is often the case with things like this. We trial it in a few places to get, to build it out, gain the experience. We're looking to extend it to additional users, but we're also looking to do, just what Allan was just mentioning there, folks involved in major projects are familiar with such things as management of change, deviations, issues management. So there are a handful of interactions that happen between between parties and something like this. And so while we've built out two of the workflows as a starting place, and while we've deployed this tool, if you will to a few of our projects, our vision is that we would be able to extend the number of users and be able to build out additional important interactions or workflows that we have so that the Digital Project Home becomes a place that holds even more of a practitioners daily work activities. >> Terrific. And if either one of you would like to jump in here and provide just like a quick snapshot of how much manpower, time, and costs are saved as a result of using this type of platform. >> Well, on our side, Alan, I'll jump in here. We anticipate on a large project, we will transact over thousands of documents. Now, some of them get more review and some of them get less review, but there are thousands of documents that are developed in terms of engineering, procurement, and construction type activities. And to the extent that we can save a small amount of time and get better answers on each one, that really adds up quickly when you consider the number of hours expended in that overall effort. So we're talking thousands upon thousands of hours that we believe can be reduced and what that translates to, not only the ability to execute a project with a smaller team, but we are confident with better information in hand, we'll make better decisions. >> Well, thank you both for your insights. Loved having you on this program. That was Alan Henson, Senior Principal at Pariveda Solutions and Doug Priedeman, Project Engineering Manager at ExxonMobil Global Projects. That's all for this session for the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards, and I'm your host Natalie Erlich for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (bright music)