>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Summit Online. Virtual Conference Is the Virtual Cube doing the remote? Interviews from our studio in Palo Alto? I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We're here with our quarantine crew. We're getting all the interviews out there. Also covering all the greatest in the cloud. We're in the cloud or in the coverage. Our got a great guest here practitioner who's really riding the innovation wave at the same time, taking advantage of the scale of a ws and putting into practice. Chris Foster, who's the CEO of TC Energy. Chris, Thanks for spending the time to come on the Cube. Appreciate it. >>Pleasure, John. Thanks for the opportunity. >>So you've got a great innovation story. That's something that we've been reporting a lot on is how companies can really reinvent, reset, reinvent, grow and put things in place from a Dev Ops cloud scale perspective. You doing it within the energy area. Take a minute to first explain what TC energy is and your role. >>Yeah, for sure, John TC Energy. You know, we're one of the biggest energy companies in North America. So the fastest way to explain it, You know, we like to think we provide the energy that you know in a enables and powers people's lives and about one in four of every molecules that gets delivered in North America. That's us on my role there. I'm very fortunate I >>lead the the >>I s team I have done since January 1st of 2019. Um, and our AWS journey started a little bit before that. I've had the pleasure of sort of jumping on the ah, the exciting part of it. I like to think where we've got a lot of that enabled and we're moving toe a lot of the innovation phases of that implementation. >>I love the innovation story. We love talking about how the new reality that's upon us certainly were in this covert crisis where people are actually seeing the impact at scale problems. You have a job where your product really cannot have disruption, right? At the same time, there is a large scale to it. And so as you guys think about what's going on on the pressure under at the same time, you can't just cut project. You can just cut costs for cutting costs sake. They're actually really needs to be an investment or doubling down in this case, take us through that that process because if you're on the cloud native wave and the AWS way, which you are on, you've been rolling out thinking about Dev ops. You ever thinking about agility? But now, as these new pressures emerge and even more new realities, certainly not a new normal. I hate the term, but it's the people using it. It's a new reality, and that is the right projects need to be funded because of the consequences of not having everything in place. This >>is >>where cloud shines, and this is where innovation and good management kind of comes into play. Can you share your perspective on that? >>Yeah. Be happy to John. You know, safety is our number. One concern always has been, always will be. And so, you know, we we look at everything we do from that lens of doing things safely and reliability as well. Of course, it's not just the safety in the way people would you know, I think about every day. It's also the reliability of that energy people rely on every day. And that has to be almost in our in our thoughts and then everything that we do. Um so I mean, as an example, I would say, you know, some of the, you know, around the periphery of what we did with our AWS implementation. We also took a hard look at our network implementations and how things were working in the background, how we were connected up. And that's one of the reasons that when we transitioned, you know, literally we went from a hey, we should start thinking about working from home sort of on a Wednesday, Thursday, and by Monday, the entire company was working from home, right? And that was the story for a lot of folks. I think on it was seamless. You know, we were not just able todo Obviously the primary focus was safety, reliability, and of course, you know, that was what preoccupied people in the early days we went even beyond that, I would say very quickly we were actually talking to people about, you know, I asked projects that didn't reach the criticality of safety and reliability, but was still important. And we were telling our stakeholders the delivery dates haven't changed. I mean, we were working in the office on Friday. We're working up home on Monday. No big deal. >>So what? The agility piece of that? Because I think that puts an exclamation point around what agility is supposed to be unformed. Seen situation. You implement your business as usual in kind of a weird way. It's not usual, but Cloud allows you to put the speed and scale and reliability together. What was the partnership with Azure? How did that change things or help things? Can you just unpack that a little bit? >>Yeah, by the way, I explain it to my business partners That work within TC energy is Look, it used to take us, you know, several weeks to get you any kind of compute capacity. So when we start talking about innovation and trying new things, the entry cost was high in terms of time and in terms of money, right? Like you'd have to give us a pile of cash. Let us go away. Design servers, you know, get all the right equipment racket and everything else, and that's a huge impediment to trying new things and being truly agile. What AWS has really given us. Yes, we're out of the business of looking after our own servers. And so I'm able to move my people, too. What I would say is more valuable work for the company that really focuses on the outcomes. But what's also very cool for our business partners is I can say that. Look, if you want more compute power than you've ever had before this afternoon, you know, give me, give me an hour and we'll have it for you on the Great part. Two is if on Monday you change your mind and you decide that that idea you had wasn't so great after role and oops, that's fine. I'll just turn it off for you, right? And there's no big deal. Where is in the old days? You phoned me on Monday and said it was a bad idea and say, Well, that's great, But I already bought the server and you, you're living with it for five years. >>That's a great example. You know, I've seen both pieces of the puzzle here. One side, the waterfall provisioning is a lot of risk involved at many levels of processing at scale or if it fails, you got the costs and then the agility side. You've got those example that you just pointed out. But I got to ask you as a manager, you know, some enterprises that are going into this area get stressed out, and things seem to be last minute. How >>do you >>manage that? When does it tip over to be part of the culture where it's like, don't worry about it. It's gonna hurt, because when new things have a full of process, process is great, you know, Don't break anything sweet last minute. So experimentation, as you pointed out, is the key to innovation getting things out there. But managing it is a hard part. What's your experience and what your best practice? >>Yeah, I think if I understand your question right, the journey. A lot of this goes to me towards culture, and, you know, we you can be, I think, coming from a place where perhaps your your your view of risk needs to change to get you into this new space. So obviously, like I said at the outset, in the safety and reliability is number one. We never do anything that would compromise any of those things. The reality and I asked, if I look at it is that you know, 80 90% of what I do doesn't have those types of implications associated with it. And so it becomes, you know, a different conversation about about risk and saying What's the worst thing that could happen? And, you know, you know, if that's not going Teoh intact, any safety and reliability, then let's take a look at it. And so I think the other thing that people are frightened off when it comes to implementing a change like this is obviously the impact on people, right? And I take that part of it very seriously to what I've been really pleased by in our journey is that we've managed to bring people along and give them new skill sets, and we're continuing to do that. We actually introduced what I call next year or the team. Sorry they came up with us, not me. But it's called next TC University, and it's this fabulous, you know, ability for people start signing on and getting new skill sets, you know, retraining themselves. And so we're starting to try and give people that sense of what's in it for them. Because that's the human element, right? So for people that love servers, you know, a You know, it was a big change to say, I'm not gonna get to touch it anymore. I'm not going to get a rack. That server, that's what I'm good at. No, But you're still going to get to do these other skills, right? >>Yeah, that's a great point. Well, if you love service, you love compute. So when you see the compute in action, they got to get excited about that. And I think that's one of the things I think having that on demand compute, almost dial, start dialing it up. And you guys probably agree with that. And your business is having that on one hand. But the team piece, I want to get back to that, cause I think that's the thing you mentioned earlier. Your team can be deployed in new new things. You have a next TC, which is more of a learning aspirational ladder or kind of way to make people feel good about themselves by getting new skills and reapplying it. It's a nice flywheel for the people side of the business. People process technology, as they say, but talk about the impact of the teams working with AWS and Cloud in general. What are some of those things they're working on? How do you shift? How do u flex that with some of the commentary around team the work that they dio and value? >>Yeah, It's a great question, John, and it's what I like to talk about, because what we've been able to do is to draw much more of, ah, clear line for our people between you know what they do and how it impacts the business. And I like to talk to people about the fact that we're blurring the lines now between IOS and the business. I think like it's never been tree done before, right? You know, I love to tell a story about one of my earlier in career folks who was presenting to a very senior group of senior group of VPs, one of whom came to me at the end of the meeting and said, you know which which one of our business units is that young man from And I said he's a nice guy you know? He said, The guy that was talked about line, pack and all those other things And I said, No, he's he's and I asked, right? And he was in disbelief. And that's what I would tell you is the biggest impact of the teams is it's blurring that line now where they're getting much more engaged on the business side, but also the, You know, the business folks are getting much more engaged in the IAS sites. This this kind of meshing now that you know, I asked, People have always striven for I always said, You know, be a partner. Don't be an order taker in my mind. A lot of this makes that possible cause you're getting out of those technical conversations you're having connecting much more with the with the outcomes that you can produce for the business, because it's mostly >>for the action to with this do you get there near the business. They can see it. They can feel the victories and also participate in that upside, and also take some of the learnings doing a lot of steep learning curve that go on for through the experimentation that you mentioned. This is this >>is >>the fun part. But also, it could be rewarding if you look at it that way. So how do you guys deal with the failures and learnings? And you know a lot about failure. But in a sense, if you can try out that you've gotta have that mindset of growth mindset where you're like, Okay, we're to fail, we're not gonna take it. Personal zones, you learn from it. How do you handle >>that? Yeah, it's a great question, John. You mentioned your sort of sick of the words new normal. And I'm I get a little tired of the of the Fail fast for similar reasons. Right to me, it's it's not fail fast as much as fail small and fail. Quick. Well, fail fast. But it's it's making sure you fail on the small things. So we have had failures. What I say to my business partners is look, in the past, I would have failed off the nine months and a couple $1,000,000 of your money. And probably more importantly, you've lost nine months of getting to that solution. Now I'm going to fail in six weeks or less. Andi were going very quickly. Weed out ideas and what I try and get very excited about is, you know, stop worrying about women. Idea is a good idea or a bad idea and spending months of analysis and time trying to figure it out. Let's do things on. You'll find it's cheaper to do. Some of these ideas figure out quickly going to cost way too much money. So we had one that was targeting some improvements in our field experience, and we underestimated the complexity of the systems it was gonna tie back into and all the legacy stuff that was in there wasn't a Greenfield. Nice clean thing to do. We did. We found out after a couple months, this isn't gonna work, right? Um, well, better after two months than two years and several $1,000,000. And that's how we kind of position that internally, >>you know, the whole fail fast thing. You know, you got me going on that couple terms. I always first talk a lot of jargon, so it's always kind of calm. The pot black but fail fast is no one wants to fail, right? So this whole glamorization of failure, any entrepreneur, any leader, no one rebels and failure failure is avoided. No one loves to say no fails, but it's more engineering. It's more getting the iteration. That's that's That's the real issue Here is not so much I look at me. I failed, you know that's got to be put to the side. But what you're getting at is really engineer architect ing really working the problem. And you need to make those iterations which essentially failure. But this whole idea of failing is just And that Data Lake don't get me going. >>It was true that example I gave you. We've actually just launched a very successful pilot from the learnings of that so called failure. Not really. I was just >>talking to another entrepreneur. I'm like, you know, when you're in the business and you're ahead of the curve, the whole world realizes that all of the pandemic these are some things. There are some companies that have those deep learnings, and they have an advantage because those endeavors give them that that courage to try something. But when it's now something obvious to do, those learnings Aaron advantage not a disadvantage. So to your point, that's awesome stuff. Um, tell about the, um, the machine learning side. And I'd love to get your take on. Are you tapping into some of the Amazon machine learning outside the compute stuff? I can see that being killer for you guys. What are some of the higher level services that come out of having some of these new things available? Like sage maker? There's a machine learning a ton of stuff coming out of the the wood work, if you will, From an Amazon standpoint, How are you looking at that? >>Yeah, there's some fabulous tools in there that we're definitely you know, we're fairly early in the in the journey, I would say, but we're already starting to see some great opportunities and great possibilities. So, you know, for example, assess. People probably realize we're quite rightly ah, heavily regulated. And we, you know, quite correctly have to produce a lot of information for regulators to establish that we're doing all of the right things. You know, sometimes when you've grown by acquiring different companies, you know, putting your hands on the right information at the right time could be challenging on dso we're using things like machine learning to help us find documentation quicker and faster to make sure that we can pull out, you know, certificates or regulation. You know, testing results, things like that much faster than we could in the past. Right? Um so that's one use that we already see for that that has the potential to speed up our interactions of regulators, help us refocus some costs internally on, you know, safe initiatives and that type of thing. So that's one example. We're also using machine learning to tell us more about how you can continue to operate the pipe, you know, more safe, you know, always more safely, more reliably, all the time. And, you know, the I truly believe, you know, all roads lead back to the data and how you get at that data, right. And so machine learning is most people in this audience who understand is is really another way of getting that data to tell you everything that's hidden within it. >>Once you get your team set up with the mindset, the culture having that compute, working on new things, you take advantage machine learning. Then you've got things like Kendra just announced general availability. These become abstractions of services, so that kind of leads me to. My final question for you is we're living in a time where Post Pandemic is gonna be exposed, that there's a lot of gaps. People realize that, you know, the tide has pulled out and you can see all the rocks that exposed opportunities out there, and there's also challenges. So we expecting a lot of projects will be cut me personnel as But there's a lot of projects being funded. So the funding versus cutting is going to be, I think, going all level out. But as people get back in and want to go the cloud, how should they be thinking about this? Actually, they be coming into the market because at your level, the CSO levels. It's more visibility than ever on resetting, reinventing and growing right, getting back on track or doubling down on a win. So what's your advice to people out there? The practitioners of Google Amazon summit and other folks that really need to take the step into the cloud native scale world. What's your advice? >>Well, yeah, it's definitely a challenging world, John, for a lot of people, and we're not immune to that. You know, we are seeing in my local community for sure lots of lots of people pulling back on projects and, um, expenditures. Right now, my advice to any of the folks out there is when I talk to my business partners, I try and talk about funding outcomes and not funding projects. Right? And so, you know, rather than when you might my biggest concern. Whenever we talk about budgets, everyone has to go for budget conversations that I don't care what industry you're in or what your position is. I want to make sure that when we decide where we set the budget, if we're gonna set it here, do we know what's above the line and below the line in business terms, right. So it's very easy to cut technology and not really see a business impact on DSO. What I like to talk about with our business partners internally is to talk about everything in terms of the outcomes you're trying to fund. And so if for me it's a enhancement infield productivity, you know, reducing the windshield time of our people in the field because that's a primary safety issue. That's the outcome I'm going for and their bi projects behind it and that that's the biggest advice I can give people when it's now. There's so much scrutiny on, you know, is that a dollar that's worth spending? If you talk about technology in most you know, boardrooms or leadership tables around North America, you're gonna lose people. Very first, you gotta focus it back to what the business is trying to do with it and create teams that can really zero in together. You know, blur the lines. Like I said previously, between IOS and the business people, where everyone's got the outcome that's pasted up on the wall, that's what we're going to deliver. We're gonna, you know, come to ah, conclusion quickly on whether we can do it. >>Yeah, it's not a shiny new toy. It's how the engine of innovation hits the business object. That's great stuff. Final final question. What are you excited about these days? Obviously, we're in a tough time. Um, there are new realities we're gonna come out of this is going to be a hybrid world in this virtual interactions. We're having the cube virtual Amazon summit. Virtual life isn't now part of everybody's immersion. You've got the edge of the network exploding. You've got all the you know it's chaotic. But if you squint through that there's opportunities. Start up a big business. What are you excited about? >>I agree with you, John. I think you have to be glass half full. And I don't mean to be just the sort of overly optimistic, but I think you have to look at this as an opportunity for a bit of a rebirth of the shift, right? And, you know, I don't wanna downplay the fact that change is hard for people. I don't downplay the fact that people are going through some very tough things right now. So, you know, not not trying to put sort of, but too much of sweetener on things. But I think if you're looking for a positive angle, you look at it the rebirth of the opportunities that will come out of that right. I think there's incredible, you know, technology opportunities coming out of it. I talked to my people all the time about focus on what you can control on what you can control. This staying relevant right. We know we're entering a digital world. We know that things are gonna look differently when we come back. We may not know what they are yet, but companies are gonna continue to need great technology. You know, our partnership with AWS has given us access to great technology. Focus on that. Because that's what you can control on. I think you know, you'll see that some opportunities will come out of this. We probably didn't expect >>and also that it's an inflection point as well. 2000 and eight. When we had the financial crisis there, there were clear coming. They're on the up trajectory and stayed up here. I think we're going to see something similar. So I think there's gonna be a right side of history coming out of this. And it's going to be one of those things where you can tell by who's growing and who's the trajectories of their business outcomes. Um, well, tried a lot of that. >>Yeah, I would agree. A lot of there's a there's always someone that's that you don't realize till later was was quietly making making hay right? Well, this was happening, and I would encourage people to think about that. >>You don't want to be that company. As expression goes, Chris, thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights on the Cube virtual as part of our AWS summit coverage. This is the Cube virtual. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Pleasure. Thanks for having me. >>I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios covering AWS Summit online. Virtual. Is the Cube virtual doing our part here with our quarantine crew getting all the data sharing that with you. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.