>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to UI Path Forward at five. You're watching the Cubes coverage. Everybody here is automating everything. Mundane tasks, Enterprisewide Automation Platform Beats product. Dave Nicholson. Dave Ante, Garish Pie is here. He is the Global head of Intelligent Enterprise Automation at Cognizant Global. Si, good to see you. Thanks for coming to the queue. Thank you for having me. Tell us about your role. What are you focused on? So, >>So I lead the enterprise automation practice at Cognizant, and we are focused on three broad segments, right? So we help customers anchor to business outcomes in, in looking at the business outcomes, what we look to do is help them drive transformation at a process level, looking at it from a technology standpoint, and then helping them look at how they're trying to drive change across their entire enterprise and bringing that together, you know, and helping them harmonize both at a technology and at a process level in terms of, you know, the outcomes they're trying to achieve. So >>You guys are a partner, I see your booth over there, and you're also a customer, right? Yes, we are. So are you involved in the both sides? One side, what, what, what's your purpose? >>So we do, so we, we sort of work, So we have a full 360 degree relationship with the i p. So we work with them, you know, in a professional services capacity. They, they support us as a partnership in the marketplace where we go into a number of our customers jointly to drive turnkey transformational engagements from an automation standpoint and second from a, as a, as a, as a customer to UiPath, they've been supporting us, you know, drive a number of automation initiatives across our operations book over the course of the last two years. >>Okay. So tell us more about that. So you started your internal journey, we had you guys on last year. Yep. It were just getting started I think, I think I think you, your head count is what, 60,000 somewhere around? Yeah. 70,000. Yeah, $70,000 growing. I think at the time it was maybe less than 10% of the workforce was kind of automated and the goal was to automate everybody. How are you guys doing along >>The, I think it's starting to in industrialize quite significantly. So over the course of the last year since we last spoke to you, probably, you know, we've doubled the head count in terms of the number of people that are now, you know, officially what we call quote unquote citizen developers. And you know, how they are driving automation at a personal level, we've probably gone about 2.5 x in terms of the number of RS we've saved. So we've done about, I think 450,000 rs, you know, in terms of actual saves at a personal automation level. And look, it's, it's been a great, you know, last 12 months too, right? Because, you know, as we've sort of started to get the message percolated more and more, our teams have started to get energized. They are happy that they are, you know, getting a release in terms of what they're doing on a day to day basis, which is largely repetitive at times, very mundane. And now they have the ability to bring in technology to be able to embrace that and drive that, that you know, much more efficiently. >>Are you talking dozens of bots? Thousands of bots? What's the scope of? >>So I think we've, we've scaled to about 3,500 today in terms of the bots and, and it's, it's a journey that continues to evolve. For me, the number is probably something which I wouldn't anchor to because it's, look, it's end of the day what you end up releasing and what you end up freeing and what the teams are doing. And I think, you know, that's the way we are >>Leading. So you're saying like, we always talk about number of boss, but you're saying it's largely in a relevant metric? Well, and not if it's five versus a thousand. Okay. That's meaningful, right? But, but >>Yeah, I think look a number for me, I think it's not about the number, right? It's about the outcome and it's about what impact you're having in, in terms of, you know, what you're trying to get done at the end of the day, right? Because ultimately you're trying to better, you know, what you do on a day to day basis and you know, whether it's done through 10 or whether that's done through 10,000. >>Yeah. But you pay >>Form, >>Right? Exactly. So, so you better get some value out. Exactly. It's about the value. >>But is there, is there a, is there a curve in terms, you know, an s-curve in terms of scalability though? I mean we, we, we've heard organizations doing, from organizations doing an amazing amount of modernization and automation and they say they've got 15 bots running, you have 3,500. Is there a number where it becomes harder to manage or, or is there scalability involved? >>So look, for me, so let me answer it this way, right? I think, I think there are two aspects to it. I think the, the, the, the more you have, you know, the bigger the challenge in terms of how you run the controls, the governance and the residency in terms of, you know, how you manage the, you know, the, the setup of the bots itself. So I think, yeah, I mean we want to have it to a manageable number, but for us, in the way we've looked at the number of bots, one of the things that we've done is we also look at, you know, what's foundational versus what's nuanced in terms of the kind of use cases that you're trying to deliver. So, so any program of this nature, you need to have a setup, which is, you know, which allows you to sort of orchestrate it in the right manner so that as you sort of scale and you bring more people into that equation, you, it's, you're not just creating bots for the sake of it, but you're actually, you know, trying to look at what you can reuse, what you can orchestrate better. >>And then in the context of that, figuring out where you have the gaps and then hence, you know, sort of taking the delta approach of what else and what more you need to build it. >>So you guys have a big observation space. You work with a lot of customers and, and so what are you seeing as the trends when you look out there? How are you applying it to your own business and your customer's businesses? >>So look, for me, I think the last two years, if anything, the one thing I've taken away is that transformation is now extremely, extremely compressed, right? So, so it's almost, you know, what's true today is probably irrelevant tomorrow. So, which means you have to continually evolve in terms of what needs to be done, right? Second is experiences have become extremely, extremely crucial and critical and experiences of, in, in my mind, you know, two or three kinds, right? One the end customer second from an employee standpoint, and third, in terms of the partner ecosystem that you will have as an enterprise that you have to cater to, right? The other element that you know, which becomes true will always remain true is the whole outcome story in terms of, you know, how we have an anchor to why you're trying to do what you're trying to do. >>And that is, you know, core to what you need to get done. So in the way we've looked at it, as we've said, you know, as you sort of look at how transformation is now evolving and how compressed it's starting to become, the more you are able to orchestrate for what the enterprise is trying to get done in terms of modernization, in terms of digitization, in terms of end goals and end outcomes that they're trying to achieve. And the more you're able to sweat what sits within, you know, the enterprise bring that together as you think about automation is, you know, where the true value lies in terms of being able to create an agile enterprise. >>When you think about digital transformation, digital experiences, if it's, if it's a layer cake, where is automation in that, in that layer? Is it, is it sort of the bottom of the stack? Is it, is it the whole stack? >>So for me it's, I mean it's, it's evolved. If you take today's view, I think what's emerging is a very pervasive view of how you think about automation. It sits across, you know, the entire enterprise. It, it, it, it takes a people process, technology dimension, which is age old. It has to cover, you know, all forms of transformation. You know, whether you're looking at end, how do I say, impact in terms of how you're dealing with customers, whether you're looking at the infrastructure, whether you're looking at the data layer in between, it has to be embedded across the base, right? It, it, you have to take a pervasive approach. And for me, I think automation increasingly in the days ahead is gonna be an enterprise capability. You know, it has to be, you know, all pervasive in the way it needs to be set up. >>The key, the operative word there is pervasive. And that seems to be, you know, the era that we're entering, I don't know what you call it, call it the metaverse, I mean, you know, it's more than cloud and cloud is basically just the infrastructure, right? You're building on top of that, whether it's natural language processing or cryptography or virtual, I mean, there's so many different, you know, technology dimensions, right? But it, but the point about pervasive, okay, it's everywhere. It's sensing, it's anticipatory, it feels like there's this new, you know, construct, emerging of platform that is the basis for digital business, right? And I, and I feel like every 15 years our industry goes through some big transformation. How, how do you see it? You know, do you agree that you, it feels like, okay, something new is happening. It's, it's not gonna be the social media, you know, Facebook's not gonna continue to dominate the world as it does. You already seen some cracks in that armor. We saw Microsoft after the pc, and then of course it came back with cloud Amazon looks, you know, indestructible. But that, that's never the end story, right? In our, in our world, how do you see that? >>No, I think all of what you said, I, I would sort of tend to agree with, for me, look, I don't have a crystal ball to say, you know, what's gonna happen with Facebook or Amazon or >>Otherwise. Yeah. But that's what makes this fun. But >>I, Yeah, but, but I think for me, the, the core is I think you're dictated by, you know, us as end consumers, if you're a B2B or a b2b, b2c, you know, depending upon what business you're in, I think the end customer value dictates, you know, what evolves in terms of, you know, the, the manifestation of, you know, how you will two minutes sort of deliver services, the products that you'll get into. And in that context then, you know, whether you take a, a TikTok view to it or whether you take an Amazon view to it, or whether YouTube becomes relevant in the days ahead, I think it's gonna be dictated by, >>By customer, but it tends to be a technology that's the disruptor, it's the microprocessor or it's the social capability or, or maybe it's ai that, that is the catalyst for that. And then the customer adoption dictates, oh, you're right about that. But there, but the, the match is usually technology. Is that fair or not necessarily? Yeah, >>I still look, I mean you talked about metaverse earlier, right? I think we are, I think we are, it's probably hype more than it is reality right now, at least in my view. And it's, I think we are significantly out in terms of, you know, large scale adoption in terms of what needs to be done. You talk about blockchain, blockchains been around, you know, for at least a decade if not more in, in, right. The way it's being talked about, the adoption, you know, in terms of the, the, the applicability of the, you know, of what is that technology I think is understood, but the actual use cases in terms of how it can be taken into the market and how you can scale it across industries, I think is, you know, is still because >>The economics determine ultimately exactly the outcome. So, Okay, that makes sense. >>Yeah. Now you said you don't have a crystal ball. I, I have one, but when I look into it, it's sort of murky when I try to figure out the answer to the question, Is a platform necessary for this, for automation? I mean, this is really the direction, the question, the existential question in terms of the trajectory of UI path. It seems obvious that automation is critical. It's not as obvious where that automation is going to end up eventually because it's so critical. It feels like it's almost the same as, okay, there's an interface between my keystrokes and filling in a box with text. Well, of course there has to be, there has to be that interface, right? So why wouldn't everyone deliver that by default? So as you gaze into my crystal ball with me, tell me about the things that only a platform can do from your perspective. >>So, >>So, so, so think of it this way, right? I mean, any enterprise probably has hundreds of technologies that they've invested in some platform, some applications that you would've built and evolved over time, which are bespoke custom in nature. So for me, I think when you think about automation, I think it's the balance between the two. What a platform allows you to do is to be able to orchestrate, given the complexity and the, the spa that is any enterprise, you know, that's probably got the burden of, you know, what they've done over the course of the, the previous years. And then in that context then, you know, how do you sort of help get the, the best value out of that in terms of what you want to deliver as the end, end outcomes, if I can call it that, right? So for me, I don't think you can say it's, it's her platform versus the rest. >>I think it's gonna be, it's always gonna be a balance and to the question that you asked earlier. And in terms of saying where does an automation end up at? I think if it's gonna be a pervasive view, look, you know, if, if clients are trying to modernize and get onto the cloud, you can do automation at a cloud level too. Now, you know, do I say then, you know, is it, is it sort of inclusive or it's native to what the cloud providers offer? Or do I then go and say automation needs to be something which I will, you know, sort of overlay on top of what the cloud providers offer. So I think it depends upon what dimension that you come at it. So I don't think you can say it's one or the other. You have a platform, I think it helps you orchestrate quite significantly. But there are gonna be aspects within any enterprise, given the complexity that exists that you will have to balance out, you know, platform versus, you know, how you have to address it maybe in a more individual capacity. >>Garris, gotta go. Thank you so much. Appreciate your perspectives. Good conversation. All right, keep it right there. But trains will back it up. We'll be right back right after this short break. The cube live at UI path forward, five from Las Vegas.

>> (Announcer) From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCube covering UiPath FORWARD IV, brought to you by UiPath. >> Good afternoon. Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're on day two of our coverage. We've been talking a lot about automation, all of the opportunities that it's uncovering across industries. We're now going to be talking about a big company undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Joining us next, Mariesa Coughanour, head of Automation Advisory Services at Cognizant. Mariesa, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here today. >> So let's talk. So Cognizant is a part, both a partner and a customer of UiPath. >> Yes. >> We're going to talk about you in the customer realm today. Cognizant is undergoing its own automation-led digital transformation. Let's talk about that. Talk to me about some of the business outcomes that are, that you're expecting, how it's going to transform the employee experience, the customer experience. >> (Mariesa) Sure, absolutely. We actually started working with automation ourselves back in 2018, where we just put in a CoE, we said we want to drive it into our business operations. But about a year ago, we said, let's go further. I really wanted to play with all of our employees. We wanted to empower them. We talk about citizen development, of robot for every person. And we know that that's really the future. That's where we're going. We're digitally transforming our organizations. And so what we did is we sat down and we worked really closely with UiPath on how do we do this? What kind of training do we need? We're going to need some process, some governance in there. And so we put that in place and, you know, we said, let's get this going this year. So we went out, we did, our first Hackathon, went really well. It was Bring Your Own Bots. So BYOB, so, fun themes. And we got some good savings. We actually drove over 10,000, close to 20,000 hours back into the organization. And we said after that, let's go a bit bigger though. And we did what's called Game of Bots. So obviously we know where that came from, right? And we said, we're going to go a little bit longer and we want to go bigger. So we went and had 2,500 people participate over eight weeks. We built over a thousand bots. And guess what? We drove over 200,000 hours back into the organization in just eight weeks. So super big success story. People loved it. Our teams were excited. We recognized over 200 people out of that with team awards, who submitted the most ideas. And even our top leadership said, let's do a presentation. So the guys and gals who had the top, biggest impact automations got to meet with our top senior leaders and present out to them. It's been awesome. And now we're starting to move that force. We're scaling bigger. We're actually going pretty big in Cognizant. We have some big goals right now. >> That's a gob of hours. Game of Bots, get it? GOB. >> (laughs) >> Come on, with me. >> It is a gob of hours. >> How do you measure the hours? Is it a back of napkin kind of thing? We ask people, Hey, how much, how what, how do you actually measure it? >> No, we actually track it. We could see how many hours people were doing a certain tasks and things that they do every day, whether they're running reports, submitting claims for a customer. And so we're able to see that that time is actually going down. We're faster. We get better quality. People were also able to get hours back in their day so they could do more value added work in the organization. So we actually do track it. And we're able to really measure those tangible outcomes for the teams. >> Sounds like you guys have been moving pretty quickly on this. >> We are. >> So the appetite at Cognizant was there, the culture was there to embrace it. Those are probably, I imagine, two big facilitators of being able to move at the speed and the scale, >> Yeah >> that, with what you're doing. >> Culture was there. We're really digitally savvy. I would say we're digital at heart in Cognizant. We are, we're really a tech company and we really focus on how to be at the forefront of all things when it comes to technology. But we said, we also want to transform how we work. So starting to shift the conversation from, you know, do you want to automate, to why not? How do we actually start talking about, you know, I have this to do list, but you know what, actually, we can improve if we did some of this other stuff instead. So let's free up that time, but use automation there and we can actually grow things. We can add more value. We do all that stuff on your to-do list that I think everybody has and they want to get to, but you get caught up in your day-to-day job all the time. So we're actually getting people to be more excited about and have a real voice. And I actually think that's important. Is that, it's not just about giving people the tool, it's about shifting our culture to really embrace digital, embrace this technology, because we're trying to transform how we all work. And we want to lead by example. >> So we talk about BPO. Business Process Optimization, right? It was kind of the buzz word of the '90s and early 2000s. A lot of times it meant putting in SAP. (chuckles) >> (Mariesa) (laughs) Yeah. >> So that's evolved. And there's some companies that would say, "Hey, we specialize in that," technology companies, obviously, >> (Mariesa) Yep. >> you know, SI's as well. How do you think about the difference between end-to-end enterprise automation and, and sort of traditional BPO? >> I think it has to come together a bit, is one thing. So when you do the BPO, or you do shared services, or you outsource some of the work. We actually put into those contracts, because we do a lot of that for our customers. And we put in automation. The step we took further was we actually started to empower people to actually build the automations themselves, which meant we actually had to work with customers too. So they knew we were doing this. We wanted to make sure they understood, they were comfortable. We put any controls in place that they also needed, to make sure that, you know, we didn't impact any of their services. We want to make it better. We want them to feel nothing but bigger, better results in outcomes. And then as you think about the enterprise side, we have to compliment, because a lot of those processes do feed back into how you run a business. And so we focus on how do you bring both of those stories together so that you're driving synergies across the board. And actually some good lessons learned along the way because some of this stuff becomes reusable. You have best practices you could share across the board. And we want to make sure that we are connecting the dots from the shared services BPO work, back into the enterprise because really a process is end to end, an organization. And we want to help people think that way and also get the results that way too. >> Is that end to end automation, at enterprise automation, more tech heavy, or, or maybe it's tech light in a way, whereas BPO is maybe a lot more, sort of, lean thinking, a lot more chalkboard. Are we deep into the, so I, sometimes, you're saying they have to come together. >> They do yeah. >> But from, from where I guess is, is what I'm trying to better understand. >> So I would think about it this way. When you think about a process, right, from when you even placed an order, the whole way through when you fulfill it for a customer. There's work that we, we do outsource all the time, right? So maybe it's the, the PO process, some of the order transactions from the payment, but you also have the pieces is actually touching the customer, too. You have the pieces that are fulfilling the order. So we say end to end, that is really thinking about that beginning, from a conversation with the customer, the whole way to when we're delivering. And I do think there's a lot of technology. That is something I think everyone gravitates to because there is a lot. Especially if you're going to go end to end, you have to be able to take in documents. You have automation. You're not going to know all the rules, no matter how many times you ask, you're going to need machine learning to be able to help figure it out and get smarter as what, as you go along the way. But as you're putting this into place, what's important is: as you're thinking about, kind of, transforming that business so that they're feeling the results the whole way through, because if you just focus on one, you might create a bottleneck, right? You might've got super fast, but the guy who's going to get the work from you, they're going to feel like, oh my goodness, there's all this work on my plate. So we really want to make sure that we create that seamless experience for everyone across the board, as we put it in. >> And how does UiPath, help facilitate that? >> Across the board, I mean, we were sitting down, we were laying out our program. 'Cause we're actually trying to get to 60,000 strong. So we have 7,000 trained today. We're going to get to 60,000. That's our plan. So we're working very closely with UiPath on what does that training that you need to have in place? What's that model? How do we get people comfortable? Because one thing you'll find is not everyone's in the same spot. Some are going to jump in, dive right in, give me the tool. I want to build. I love this. Others might need a little bit more confidence boost. They might need more handholding. And I think that's really important. And it's probably the one thing I would add too, as you do talk a lot about the technologies, we put it in, but it's the people at the end of the day, it's how you help them adopt, feel comfortable with this technology and really embrace it. That's really going to be the difference on whether, how fast you get down that line for transformation. >> Is it a classic bell curve? You got your 10% early adopters, you got a big fat middle, and then you've got some laggards who come along. >> It kind of is. And I think what's important is that middle is all up in how you do it because 10% are always going to love it. You're always going to have a few people, they're a little extra nervous maybe. But in the middle, if you really think about it, and you're able to put in that culture, you're able to put in your leadership is engaged. You're putting us in gamification, make it fun. That's what we found is, if we got people really having fun up front with it, it gives people a reason to be a part of it. And also, why don't we let people partner up? We can give them the technology, but if someone's not as comfortable, let us do teams. Let's meet people where they're at and then move them along this journey. And let's try to accelerate the best we can. >> How did you gamify it? Crypto. No. (chuckles) >> (laughs) >> (laughs) No, no crypto. But I will say we have some really cool prizes and people were super excited to get to do the presentations because they got to show their, their bots live, their creations, to the team. And I think that was important. Not everyone always is able to capture all the results, but we wanted to actually talk about like, what were the ideas, share it across the board. Cause it also generated ideas. because what you'll find is, when you hear something like, you know what, that's kind of what I do. Wonder if I could do some automation too. At least submit an idea, and then, maybe they're moving down the line, they're getting their hands on the technology. And I think that's how we all push the needle forward and move this along faster. >> One of the most important things about automation is letting people be able to move away from the mundane, the repetitive tasks, that they probably don't enjoy. And being able to focus more on their core competencies or more strategic initiatives that really make them more relevant to themselves and to their company. And it sounds like you guys have achieved that pretty quickly and, and you have an aggressive plan >> (chuckles) We do. >> to go from 7,000 to 60,000. >> Yes. And that's really the power of automation, if you think about it. We all have things in our job we don't like to do. I don't know about you guys, but there's things that I'm like, oh man, like, can we please automate this? Expense reports, for example. All about automated expense reports. (laughs) But it's really about freeing people up. Think about it. These people went to school, they often have degrees and things, and they do get caught in a lot of the manual things, downloading reports, consolidating data, you know, submitting spreadsheets and forms. Imagine if we're able to make that easier for people, we give them what they need to do their job. So that all that stuff you would like to do, that you know would improve things. You know would make the company better. The culture better. Heck, maybe it's a new product that people know would be really awesome to go build, but everyone feels like they're so busy. They don't have the time to do it. I mean, that's one of the big values of automation. Is this value creation conversation that you get to have with people. And you get to start asking 'why not' a little bit more. >> You've mentioned a couple of times the IDC presentation this morning. And we were talking about earlier, and the pie chart of, of, of value benefits was cost savings, which was very large, new revenue, which was very large. And then I think 15% was quality improvements. And that, I think that's an underappreciated slice of the pie. Somebody, I think years ago, of the UiPath FORWARD said to me, I can very inexpensively apply Six Sigma to business process. >> (Mariesa) Yeah. >> And I could never afford to do that before RPA. And, and so I wonder if you could talk to the quality impacts that you're seeing. >> Absolutely. I actually spent a lot of time in Lean Six Sigma in my early career days. And one of the things about it too, is when you're doing automation, we actually asked that question upfront, can we just simplify, can we just stop doing this? Because you don't want to automate a bad process either. So you want to ask some of those questions. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> But you're spot on. There's a ton of quality benefits that you get from automation. And one of the things I've actually seen is if you focus on some of the quality upfront, process gets better. Get better impact, as when you get faster. If you have better quality, and get faster, you also get your cost out targets. And I, that really matters because quality also, beyond being able to drive the cost out, it also helps a lot with the experience that people face. Customers are frustrated if they have poor quality, something doesn't work the way it's supposed to, a site's not working the way it should. And also even employees, they go, how many times, if you try to do something and you try to follow a process and something's hung up or who knows what happened, right. It's frustrating. So if you're able to improve the quality in the process, not only do you get the cost savings, but you get these, it's softer tan, there's still tangible experiences that get better and actually motivates people to want to do more. >> And those motivated people are probably dealing with customers much, much better. >> Yes, yeah. >> I mean, it's, I always think the employee experience is so, is, is a critical component. >> It is. >> But the customer experience. So how has the customer experience improved at Cognizant as a result of building in automation and enabling all these people? >> Yeah, they're loving the results because we're giving them back efficiencies in their process immediately by putting this automation in. These are quick impacts they're feeling and we're able to do more for them as well. So we're actually having conversations now on how do we drive more efficiencies for you and also, you know, how can we do more? Is there more volume of work? Is there more we could be doing to add value back to your organization? And that's what you want to talk about with customers is we're able to give you this value. And by the way, we actually did X for you now as well, because we knew you needed it. And we have the capacity to do this for you. So it's a really positive conversation, but we did have to upfront talk to them about it, to make sure that we, everyone was on board. They're comfortable. And we're continuing to have those conversations because you know, sometimes you're in a regulated business and we did put a little extra control in. Absolutely okay. But we want to be able to drive these efficiencies back for them. So they feel it in their own operations internally too. And it hits their bottom line and oftentimes helps their employees too, because we interact with them. So those downstream benefits and sometimes even upstream get some nice returns there as well. >> We've heard from, well, we're going to have Daniel on soon. He's the CEO. We've of course heard from CFOs. We've, that's kind of one of the main springs of RPA in the early days. We've heard a lot more CIOs at this event and we have a CTO coming on later. Are these C suite executives totally aligned in their objectives? Do they have they have different agendas? What are you seeing in terms of serving the C suite? >> Yeah. They're all going to have a little bit different agendas, right? Cause that's, their roles have different objectives, but they all align back to the strategy, obviously, for their company. But they're going to have portions of it that they're trying to drive and deliver. What we do see is that there's still some merging that needs to happen between the operations, the more business focused side and the more technical side. But we do, we're starting to see that convergence happen. Because what happens is, is that, you have these technologists, who really are going to have to help move you forward. We're, you know, we're applying AI, ML. Very technical technologies, and we want to make sure we do it right, that we put the right governance in. And we think about the security that we have to have in place for this too. And but we also have the business outcomes and coming together is where you really see the results. If you look at all of those that have reached true maturity, it's where you see these agendas aligning a bit more because you also have to shift the culture too. And it's a collaboration point. You need to be able to have the tech savvy folks. It helps bring them along this journey, but you also have to have the business depth as because you're looking at a process and you're going really deep into it to apply the technology. So it's when people partner is when we really see the results become more exponential. >> So digital transformation, you know, we hear that term a lot. And automation-led digital transformation. >> Yep. >> I hear a lot of data led digital transformations are those parallel tracks, or they can talk a lot about convergence. >> Yeah. >> Are they? I mean, they're not competing. They're obviously very much related. How do you see the data agenda and the automation agenda coming together. >> They have to. Because you really need good quality data to be able to enable your automation at the end of the day. And, but they actually play nicely together. You can actually use automation to help go back and improve your master data management too, which is the core of your information because that's actually where a lot of the struggle sometimes comes, is in the quality of the data that everyone has to work with. So you see the data agenda working on, "How do I clean this? How do I get more insightful, predictful information?" And then from an automation standpoint, how do I then use that to go take action? So all we see is you bring it together, to be able to identify where do you need to get in the process? How do I get the right information? So the automation also is proven data behind it, that we drove the outcomes, because that's where you take it to the bank at the end of the day. Is that you see it in the data itself. But I think one of the things I've seen with automation that helps drive the digital transformation conversation is, the business and IT teams are coming together and having a joint conversation now. People are excited. They're understanding it. I think that's why people jumped on with RPA so quickly, was because they're like, I get this, this is rule-based, this is my business process. I just tell it what to do. I'll take that. I want to do that. And so people got excited about that. And then they said, let's do more. How do I make it more intelligent? How do I help it do things in my process that it's harder for me to explain because there's just so much information here. There's so many nuances. Well, we have the technology can help make it more intelligent, smarter, and learn, so that we're able to drive that back into the business itself to transform. >> You mentioned Master Data Management is, is the data agenda as it relates to automation, primarily reporting, is it moving? Is it transcending reporting into the building of data products, for example, data services that can be monetized either within Cognizant or in your customer base? >> So it's really evolving. I would say some start with reports. That's easy. That's where we'll start, but I'll just kind of give you maybe a little example. So we have a customer and we work with them. So they have customers where they need to, when they call in, the sales folks and the contact centers, they have to upsell. So they work with a lot of different restaurants and different, maybe, bars and, you know, different companies that have different type of like beverages and things like that. So we worked with them to show, how are they performing today with all their sales reps? And then we started to use some automation to be able to get them more helpful information the moment the customer's calling in. And we also did some semantic analysis on a voice, how people were, how were they sounding? How was their tone? Were they happy? Were they upset? Were they sad during the call? And we fed that information back to those teams, back to those managers, and went back even to their training programs. What they actually saw was a ton of top line growth. They saw all of their metrics starting to get better, and they also start to get more predictive on ways that they can use more data to drive the support for those teams and their customers. Like for example, if you know holidays are coming up or a certain time of year with weather, we're able to actually put that type of information in and helps those sales reps better serve their customers. >> Last question, some of the announcements that came out yesterday and some of the news today about UiPath, what excites you about the technology and how it's going to continue to enable you to, to foster this new culture that you've shifted? >> I think, so one thing about UiPath that we've always loved to be able to partner with them as we're still customer centric. And you see that in every announcement that they're doing, and also they're focused on this true process transformation, intelligent end to end thinking, because I think a lot of times when we've had conversations most get stuck in kind of point solutions. And that's just because people are trying to solve today's problems. But with where UiPath is moving and where we want to move to, is how do we help you to really transform how people work? We know automation is a part of our future. We know it's going to be how we work in the future. And we love about UiPath is to really think about how do we integrate it? How do we make those connections? So we can drive the bigger results, we can make it easier for people to adopt and really embrace it because we need to bring the people along this journey and we need to be able to actually impact our processes too, so we can transform them. So I think that's one thing that's been really exciting is just watching them in general. Involved with the announcements the last couple of days, we really see them continue to push that needle. >> Excellent. Well, Mariesa, thanks for joining us. Talking to us about the automation-led digital transformation at Cognizant. Good luck raising your trained individuals from 7K to 60K. It sounds like the momentum is there. The culture's there. We can't wait to hear what happens next! >> Awesome. Thanks again for having me today. >> Our pleasure. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. UiPath FORWARD IV is the event we're covering. We'll be right back with our next guest. >> (bubbly outro music)

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto in boston connecting >>with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector Partner awards. I'm your host, Natalie ehrlich. Today we'll discuss the award for the most customer obsessed mission based win for state and local government. I'm pleased to introduce our guests for today's session Todd, Carey, Global Head West Business group Cognizant and David. Sullivan chief executive officer of Elizabeth river crossings. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thanks >>Thanks Todd. >>I'd love to start with you. How are companies thinking about cloud today in their businesses? >>Well, there's some, some really exciting developments but at the heart of a cloud is changing the way companies interact with their customers, their suppliers and the way they think about business. And at cognizant it is really a customer first customer centric approach and then we work our way back to a solution. But most of the time, cloud decisions are not really made from a cost optimization or cost take out point of view. They're made from a customer experience or a business driver point of view. And how do we make businesses better? More, more scalable, more agile, more flexible and we've really built some some really great solutions that are industry specific and we've loved working with the R. C. In this capacity. >>How about you? I'd love to get your insight. Um As well. David, what what what do you see is like the main challenges and also how next gen technologies like you know, five G. Can help alleviate in those issues. >>Um Yes. First, it, like Todd said that, you know, the customer has an expectation and that expectation is raised every day by what they experienced in every other channel they work in and shop in and whatever they're doing so, so expectations are always increasing from the customer side, responsiveness personalization. They want to see all of that in everything they do, including paying their told bill. Um, and so I think as technology has changed, you know, tolling has kind of come from technology that is really 2030 years old or older. Uh, two more of a modern influence. And today we use R. F. I. D. Tags that are embedded in things like EZ Pass. But in the future it will be, it'll be your, your mobile device or your automobile itself that that triggers a total transaction and helps us process it and making in a way that is fast, convenient and most importantly accurate. >>Yeah. Well staying with you, David, I'd love to hear how working with AWS helped modernize your systems and as well as if you could give us some insight on your tracking systems. >>Yes. So with AWS, we have been working with Cognizant. Cognizant is our tolling subcontractor. So they are responsible for providing our tolling system. And we had what I would call a typical legacy tolling system. We had to data centers, both of them located pretty close together, a primary and a redundant data center and both of them very close to flood prone areas. And in our location in the southeast corner of Virginia were very vulnerable to tropical storms and tidal flooding. So part of our concern was, you know, we're exposed all our infrastructure, all our tolling infrastructure is exposed. So as we began to pursue a cloud strategy, uh the first idea was just to lift everything out of our environment and move it to a W. S. And Cognizant pull that off in about three months, uh which is really pretty incredible and we never missed a beat. Uh You know, we did it over a three day holiday weekend, but from a business transaction standpoint it all flowed once in the cloud. We began to rethink now that we're out of these legacy hardware environments, How do we get out of the legacy application environment and embrace what the cloud enables and working closely with Cognizant who had a great vision for how this could be achieved. We were able to, you know, systematically move through and migrate to a cloud first cloud oriented uh system. And uh you know, it's given us lower cost, increased availability and most importantly for our customer service agents that deal with customers or customers that deal with the web, it's given them a better experience uh shorter call times, better information and you know, and and frankly better customer satisfaction. >>Terrific. Well, thank you for that Todd. Let's shift to you. What do you see as the next phase of this digital transformation process? >>Well, as David hidden, I think it's an important theme of cloud first. I mean most companies in our clients start with that cloud forest, cloud native mentality. But for cognizant, our cloud approach is really customer first and being able to start with the client in mind and then work our way back into a technology staff or into a scalable solution. But specifically for the coal industry, there's a lot of things that are needed around revenue, predictability and looking at potential leakages. But as we hit on already of making sure that we're really delivering a great customer experience. And so with our solution, as we expect our tolling solution to really grow, we're keeping it cloud native, we're keeping it modular in nature and integration ready. So for example, are total customers can use their own roadside solutions or hand picked some of the small back office modules that they want to use. It's always going to be purpose bill and align to our customer and we see nothing but growth in this segment. It's very exciting. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, David, you know, now that you've actually implemented this, what do you see as the next phase? What is your vision um for the future for your business in 2021? >>Well, I think, you know, for for us moving forward, um you know, we've been in this uh as Todd said, kind of a modular approach, which is great because you can make the changes and really manage your risk while you're making them. Um so you're you're moving small things. Whereas traditionally new systems meant massive investments, long, long time implementation times and you know, all in cut overs, all of which are packed with risk. So, you know, we want to reduce our risk and the solution that we have being cloud native allows us to really incrementally and quickly, just continually to improve the system. So you know, on our forecast, we would like to have a better insight into our customers and you know, support a direct app, Annie R. C. App that would allow our customers to interact with us and give us a better view of the customer um and a better experience for the customer overall. But you know, we, our goal is to build that total transaction accurately fairly. And then if the customer has an issue to be able to treat them in a way that uh that they feel respected and and valued as a customer because we we do look at it that way. >>Yeah, Terrific. I mean obviously, you know, engagement such an important issue in this area. Now I'd like to shift gears and here a little bit more about, you know, what are some of the other applications that cognizant could provide beyond tolling and let's shift this to Todd? >>Well, David had done a little bit, there's there's a lot of when we start to focus on the customer, there's a lot of opportunity there on the front side. So mobile apps, websites, the synchronization of data, but then also the way that we support that customer interacting with that data. Things like I've er automating, call centers, being able to support that customer through the entire chain of custody. There's some new and exciting applications now that we come out and David touched on a little bit too in terms of vehicles. So the vehicles to everything type motion. That's an exciting development in this segment as well to be able to continually integrate everything that's in the customer ecosystem. So whether that's uh, the, the need to pay a bill or be able to drive a car through a gate and be able to simply not touch anything but be able to have that all the way that payment process all the way through and have clear visibility into usage and insights. And then also be able to turn all that data over to a company like er, C to make good decisions based on what they see in terms of buying patterns, consumption, etcetera. There's a lot of expansion going on in this and the greatest part about this is it's built on the AWS platform. So when we architect something in a cloud native way, we can rapidly expanded and we can really streamline the investment required to jump start any kind of innovation and best of all our customers in keeping with the best model, really only pay for the actual traffic that they use so we can keep those long term costume. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Thank you both gentlemen for joining our program. Really loved having you. And uh, you know, that was Todd, Cary and David. Sullivan. Excuse me. And I'm your host, Natalie or like, Thank you for watching. >>Mm hmm. Mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. The digital version. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm here with Todd Cary Thomas, the global head of the A. W s business group at Congressman Todd. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thanks. Great to be here. >>Unfortunately, we're not all cramped together in a massive space in Las Vegas, but it's great that we still get to come together virtually so. I want to just give our audience kind of an update on the Cognizant AWS strategic partnership. What's going on there? >>Sure. So a lot of exciting things. I mean, it's been a tough year, obviously, for for all of us in 2020. But one of the bright spots One of the exciting things for us is cognizant has been the announcement of the best business group and really a strategic relationship with AWS. It's just a great statement to the market that we're taking cloud seriously. We're taking a W s seriously, and it really is a core component of our go to market. It's a core component of how our customers right now are looking at what their plans are post pandemic, right? And how we survive 2020. If you look at the just the explosion of cloud, we all understand how critical now cloud computing is to all businesses, regardless of vertical, regardless of industry and what you're trying to accomplish. So for us it was it was really about putting a stake in the ground and saying, A W S is going to be a critical critical player for us and our go to market for 2020 and obviously beyond >>and beyond. I think we're all looking forward to that beyond talk to me a little bit about the core purpose, the mission and how you're going, how customers are reacting to this news about the strategic shift. >>Well, there's a couple of tracks. I mean, you know, if your ah large company looking at cloud, you're going down, the cost take out right, we're gonna go, and we're gonna be more efficient or or we're gonna go down the innovation track and for us, we really want to be able to serve our customers running both of those tracks in parallel. And so the role of the business group is to really be an innovation engine is to get into those those those deep, detailed layers of where clients are going through planning and assessment and trying to figure out how they want to leverage AWS. And on the other side, you know, there's a lot of legacy applications and appliances out that environments. And so how can the AWS business group that cognizant go in and help with that cost? Take out go accelerate the move from legacy applications and on Prem to Cloud. And so for us, it is much about the technology as it is about the outcome and is exactly how we're accomplishing gotten. So what I mean by that is that really being more creative, being an active player, an active investor and bringing A W. S and early in the solution ING cycle figuring out how we can drive ultimately the outcome for the customer? Because I think AWS will tell you as we we will tell you it's really not about technology. It's not about cognizant. It's not about a W s. It's about clients figuring out what they want how to get it and making sure that AWS and Cognizant can deliver that outcome together. >>It is all about outcomes, especially in these times when when businesses have pivoted multiple times in the last nine months probably will continue to do so and need toe have not just the right technology foundation, the right partners and the right culture to be able to get on board and continue to pivot. Talk to me, though, um, talked about, have your conversations within customer organizations change. Like knowing how much acceleration we're seeing of digital transformation. Is this a board level C suite conversation? Is that where you're starting? What's kind of that conversation like these days? >>Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's happening at all levels. What one of the main things that's happened about Cloud is that it's impacted literally every level of an organization. And and now, most of the time, though, we're seeing conversations enter at the business level. So whether that's a a new product to bring the market, or maybe it's cleaning up critical systems, maybe like policy administration or supply chain systems. Whatever the outcome in the business problem that they're trying to solve. That's really where the conversation starts. And and that really starts at the the See really see Exelon C suite all the way down to even the programming and application level. Those types of groups of really looking at A. W S and Cognizant has an enabler to solve those kinds of business issues, and and it's really driven out of really 2020. So obviously we exposed a lot of stuff with clients and and worker productivity with security, remote access to information. It's been a really tough year, but it's also exposed a lot of gaps and a lot of deficiencies. And those gaps and deficiencies didn't care if that was that the sea level or that was at a programming level or regional level or vertical. It just exposed everything. And so, and that's where we saw cloud consumption go up. But most companies weren't ready for that. They weren't prepared and were optimized and ready to take on that kind of kind of cloud consumption, you know, and and the overarching theme here of customer experience, employee experience, you know, how do we fix all those problems and also deliver really a limitless bandwidth experience to that individual user and ensure that while we're solving outcome, we're also gaining traction, saying with customer acquisitions or were quickly deploying. Applications were doing something good at every turn when we talk about eight of us >>like that. And as I was thinking and speaking of doing something good, that what you were talking about with the new business group, opportunities that come out of, you know, they always say stuff for these mother of invention. But you saw those gaps and they were exposed by this particular time. But it's just an opportunity to be able to identify them, help them and help customers with this light switch moment of especially those that were kind of caught off guard. Oh my gosh, we can't operate. We can't get to our data centers. We've gotta be able to have a remote workforce and get accessibility. How did you help them from that cultural perspective of that light switch moment of adopting cloud? Knowing that it's maybe in the beginning was a survival mechanism. >>Sure, there's been a couple of light switch moments. I mean, one of them is certainly you hit on. It is people in process. You know, Cloud is certainly about technology, but the people in process the organizational change management, the impact that cloud hands on a development community on a company as a whole, the acceleration the the pace at which you have to change and be flexible and agile to embrace a cloud. Native architectures is unlike most companies have ever done before, and so it's a failed strategy to just simply focus on the tech. You have to look a change. Management people and culture and systems. And how these how these everything works together in unison. And the other light switch moment has been how hard cloud is. You know, we saw early adoption. I mean, we we jumped out of the gate and that 1st 10 2030% of workloads just flew to the cloud. This was simple. Everyone was giving some amazing public statements of of how much we were gonna embrace Cloud. But what's happened is that we've got to the hard stuff like the on Prem, the legacy, the work of the stuff that just is stuck. It doesn't want to move, and it really requires some deep dive systems analysis, business analysis cost analysis to trying to figure out you know what services and data and everything is connected. And how do we disconnect that move to the Kyle transform that optimize it, but then also manage the company in between? Because a lot of companies now, in fact, almost 90% of CXS will tell you they've had to embrace the hybrid architecture for this reason. So now how do we help our clients manage applications in different environments, moving a different paces and make sure that they were transformed and optimizing and getting to a digital state as fast as possible? And so there's a lot. There's a lot to unpack there, but that's really the purpose of the AWS business group is to focus on all of these things all at the same time being able to drive that outcome we talked about earlier, but also making sure that we're keeping you know, our clients lights on right. We're keeping the boat afloat, that they can be successful in a very complex environment, very challenging environment, but then also, from a technology standpoint, >>something that that we talked about a number of times in terms of the people in the processes and the culture. I'm curious. Are you having conversations with customers or helping them kind of bring? As you said, it's not. This is not just about the technology knowing the business drivers air leaving this are you? Are you helping customers have those conversations between business units and the I t folks to really understand? This is what we've done so far. This This is the complexity that we have, but we've got to get over here is quickly as possible. And we've gotta bring these two cultures together, >>right? Yeah, we talked about a little bit early. It's there's the conductivity problem that that companies have because there's again there's that tech track and then there's people tracks and you've got to be able to blend those two. And that really, when you when you boil down the role of the age of this business group, within cognizant and within our client environments, that's really what we're working on is how do we pull in all of these disparate pieces and I like Thio. You wanna grab the front seat when you're a teenager, everybody's driving called shotgun. Well, we want to bring our clients along in that shotgun position, right? Be able to see how an enterprise class deployment works, how apt transformation and modernization works. Ah, lot of our clients are very open and transparent. So, like I don't really know how all of this is going to work. I'd really love to see. I would love to see this in motion. And so for us, we're very transparent of these types of engagements. This is not a cognizant showing up and delivering in a output or an outcome for a customer. It's making our clients better. It's making them mawr aggressive and more interested in more excited about cloud and transformation. Because, you know, the first couple of steps like we talked about a cloud typically is easy. It gets more complex. But as we as we saw for these complexities, we open up new pockets of data and new applications and new groups and regions and things that could move. And as soon as we start to move some of those heavier pieces, new opportunities absolutely explode. And and that's really what we want to do is take that message to our clients internally, evangelized the opportunity they have with AWS to take advantage of that and really challenge the mindset through innovation. You know, through new products, new go to market initiatives. What do they want to accomplish? Because, really, we're in a time that's very rare. Assed faras. I've I've been technology a long time. This is the first time that I can remember that the client had come to us and come to a W s ask for an outcome, ask for something and we could deliver it. And it's not gonna be a science project. We can actually commit to it, >>not not rocket science. So for those customers who would be able shotgun and gotten in the front with you guys put are some of the best practices that you've seen that you'd recommend our audience, pay attention to >>definitely assess. You see a lot of companies that they marked the finish line, and I always tell customers that were there is no finish line of digital. There is no finish line in cloud, and they've pretty much marked it. And this is what success looks like. I think success in cloud is absolutely a journey. It's a work in progress, always, and so you need to assess and look at where you want to be. Not in six months, not in 18 months. Where do you wanna be next month? Well, what's what are your immediate plans on immediate business pressures? Things that you need to solve right now, And that's what we focus on. But we we need to understand the environment. We need to understand the applications and work and what's in play and and really get a true assessment of the estate. And then we blend that with business outcomes, not technical, not a bunch of letters in acronyms and things like that. We don't wanna convoluted that, really. The effort is to try to figure out what you want to accomplish. And then, from an advisory standpoint, really put those hooks in and build a solid plan. And then we can execute. Now, whether we we execute that plan, it 100% pace or a 30% or 40% pace, it's about having that plan and at least the right direction, but a direction that's quickly attainable because, as we've seen, anything can happen. >>You're not kidding. We haven't seen that anything can happen. So as we look into going into calendar year 2021 hoping for a lot of great things. What are some of the key areas that cognizance a W s business group is gonna be focusing your investments >>on? Well, what we've seen from A clients and we hear them loud and players thio here from them about industry and vertical specific solutions. And so we are in in the emotions right now across the globe and my team building out vertical specific and I p based offerings on AWS things around S a P. Things about Amazon connect things that that really impacted clients business because it is hard. I mean, it's it just to be in total transparency. As a global systems integrator, it's hard to rise above a lot of noise And what? How you rise above that is really to be unique on AWS. And so, from a client standpoint, you know, one of the things they're going to get different from cognizant from saying some of our larger competitors and I will tell you one of the things obviously is complete commitment we have in a W s business group that gets up in the morning. Is Onley concerned about our client success in a W s. And so some of the things that we're gonna be born out of that direction are these vertical specific solutions or in in development of pipe. We've had amazing run with AWS and Cloud. I mean, we have over 600 projects deployed over almost 10,000 certified, uh, 10,000 certified. Uh, resource is on DSO for us. Super excited to bring that talent to market along with solutions. But again, it's not about what we have. It's really about what our clients need. >>But it's great advice that you're telling, You know, your clients look short term because we've got to be able to get just to hear and to hear. It's not necessarily about having this this 2020 vision. I don't think anybody wants that anymore about what's gonna happen in 12 months or 18 months. It's we've gotta be able t o get businesses to pivot quickly and leverage the technology to fuel those business outcomes. As you said in kind of shorter and faster time increments, because, as we all know, 2021 calendar changes and we're probably still going to be in quite a pickle, I guess for ah time longer. But I also from what you've said, it seems like you you're uncovering so many opportunities that what comes and kindle you do with a W s what you can deliver for businesses and how you can help the cultural shift so that these businesses thrive going forward, get out of that survival mode and actually be able to take advantage of those all those data sources that you talked about to deliver new products and new services, maybe even get into new markets. >>Yeah, most definitely. It is about time to market. And in the one of the things that we've seen to, his clients are getting away from this modernization first, then migration. And and that was really a big thing. When we started down this cloud journey, we saw the market reacted. Well, let me get my house in order. Let me start modernizing. Let me clean up some service layers and we saw some anti patterns. Let me let me figure all that out, and then I'm gonna go to cloud. And we've seen really the direct opposite of that, especially with cove it and during a pandemic, is Okay. How fast can I get these systems and data to the cloud? Alright. And then we'll worry about transformation. And so for us we've pivoted. I think very well is cognizant over overall is a company and the specific, innovative this business group to really maintain multiple work streams that that run on Prem right to be ableto fix and attack those workloads and make that on prime environment efficient. But move those applications while we're doing that. Move those a w s and then concurrently build a transformation plan around those applications and things that are now in the cloud around NWS. >>Excellent title. You've been busy, so I'm not let you get back to work. But great stuff that you guys are working on together with AWS, we look forward to seeing what's to come. >>Thank you, Lisa >>for Todd Kerry. Find Lisa Martin and you're watching the Cube

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two of UiPath Forward III, the third North American conference that UiPath-- The rocket ship that is UiPath. Clemmie Malley is here. She's the Enterprise RPA Center of Excellence Lead at NextEra Energy. Welcome. Great to have you. And Mariesa Coughanour, who is the Managing Principal of Intelligent Automation and Technology at Cognizant. Nice to see you guys. >> Nice seeing you. >> Nice to see you. >> Thanks for coming on. How's the show going for you? >> It's been great so far. >> Yes. >> It's been awesome. >> Have you been to multiple... >> This is my third. >> Yep. >> Really? Okay, great. How does this compare? >> It has changed significantly in three years, so. It was very small in New York in 2017 and even last year grew, but now it's a two-year event taking over. >> Yeah, last year Miami was-- >> I don't know. >> It was nice. >> Definitely smaller than this, but it was happening. Kind of hip vibe. We're here in Vegas, everybody loves to be in Vegas. CUBE comes to Vegas a lot. So tell me more about your role at NextEra Energy. But let's start with the company. You guys are multi billion, many, many, tens of billions, probably close to $20 billion energy firm. Really dynamic industry. >> Yeah, so NextEra Energy is actually an awesome company, right? So we're the world's largest in clean renewable energy. So with wind and solar, really, and we also have Florida Power and Light, which is one of the child companies to NextEra as a parent, which is headquartered out of Florida. So it's usually the regulated side of power in the state of Florida. >> We know those guys. We've actually done some work with Florida Power and Light. Cool people down there. And we heard, one of the keynotes today, Craig LeClaire, was saying, "Yeah, the Center of Excellence, "that's actually maybe asking too much." But there are a lot of folks here that are sort of involved in a COE and that's kind of your role. But I was surprised to hear him say that. I don't know if you were in the keynote this morning, but was it a challenge to get a Center of Excellence? What is that all about? >> So I think there's a little bit of caution around doing it initially. People are very aggressive. And we actually learned from this story. So when we started, it was more about showing value, building as many automations as possible. We didn't really care about having a COE. The COE just happened to form. >> Okay. >> Because we found out we needed some level of governance and control around what we were doing. But now that I look back on it, it's really instrumental to making sure we have the success. So whether you do a hybrid development to automation, which you can have citizen development, or you're fully centralized, I think having the strong COE to have that core governance model and control and process is important. >> Mariesa, so your title is not, there's not RPA in your title, right? RPA is too narrow, right? >> Yeah. >> In your business you're trying to help transform companies, it's all about automation. But maybe explain a little bit about your practice and your role. >> Sure, so Cognizant's been on the automation journey now for three years. We started back in 2014 and right out the gate it was all about intelligent automation, just not RPA. Because we knew to be able to do end-to-end solutions you would need multiple technologies to really get the job done and get the outcomes they wanted. So we sit now, over 2,500 folks at our practice, going out, working cross-industry, cross-regions to be able to work with people like Clemmie to put in their program. And we've even added some stuff recently. A lot of it actually inspired by NextEra. And we have an advisory team now. And our whole job is to go in and help people unstuck their programs, for lack of a better way to say it. Help them think about, how do you put that foundation? Get a little bit stronger and actually enable scale, and putting in all this technology to get outcomes? Versus just focusing on just the pure play RPA, which a lot of people struggle to gain the benefits from. >> So Clemmie, what leads you to the decision to bring in an outside firm like Cognizant? What's that discussion like internally? >> So, I'll just give you a little bit of backstory, because I think that's interesting, as well. When we started playing with RPA in late 2016, early 2017, we knew that we wanted to do a lot of things in-house, but in order to have a flex model and really develop automations across the company, we needed to have a partner. And we wanted them to focus more on delivery, so developing, and then partner with us to give us some best practices, things that we could do better. When we founded the COE we knew what we wanted to do. So we actually had two other partners before we went with Cognizant, and that was a huge challenge for us. We found we were reworking a lot of the code that they gave us. They weren't there to be our partners. They wanted to come and actually do the work for us, instead of enabling us to be successful. And we actually said, "We don't want a partner." And then Cognizant came in and they actually were like, "Let's give you somebody." So we wanted somebody around delivery, because we said, "Okay, now that we centralize, "we have a good foundation, a good model, "we're going to need to focus on scale. "So how do we do that? "We need a flex model." So Cognizant came in and they said, "Well, we're going to offer you a delivery lead "to help focus on making sure "you get the automations out the door." Well, Mariesa actually showed up, which was one of the best hidden surprises that we received. And she really just came in, learned the company, learned our culture, and was able to say, "Okay, here's some guidance. "What can you instill? "What can you bring?" Tracking, and start capturing the outcomes that she's mentioned. And I know that was a little bit more, but it's been quite a journey. >> No, it's really good, back up. So Mariesa, I'm hearing from Clemmie that you were willing to teach these guys how to fish, as opposed to just perpetual, hourly, daily rate billing. >> Yep. And that's really what our belief is. We can go in, and yes, we can augment, from resourcing perspective, help them deliver, develop, support everything, which we do. And we work with Clemmie and others to do that. But what's really important to get to scale was how do we teach them how to go do this? Because if you're going to really embed this type of automation culture and mindset, you have to teach people how to do it. It's not about just leaning on me. I needed to help Clemmie. I need to help her team, and also their leadership and their employees. On how do you identify opportunities, and how then do you make these things actually work and run? >> So you really understand the organization. Clemmie was saying you learned the culture. >> Yeah. >> So you're not just a salesperson going in and hanging out in theCUBE. So you're kind of an extension, really, of the staff. So, either of you, if you can explain to me sort of, where RPA fits into this broader vision. That would really be helpful. >> Sure, so maybe I can kick a little bit off from what I'm seeing from clients like Clemmie, and also other customers. So what you'll find is RPA tends to be like this gateway. It's the stepping stone to all things automation. Because folks in the business, they really understand it. It's rule-based, right? It's a game of Simon Says, in some ways, when you first get this going. And then after that, it's enabling the other technology and looking at, "Look, if I want to go end-to-end, "what do I need to get the job done? "What do I need around data intake? "How do I have the right framework "to pick the right OCR tool, "or put analytics on, "or machine learning?" Because there's so much out there today and you need to have the stuff that's right-fit to come in. And so it's really about looking at what's that company strategy? And then looking at this as a tool set. And how to use these tools to go and get the job done. And that's what we were doing a lot with Clemmie and team when we sat down. They have a steering committee that's chaired by their CIO, Chief Accounting Officer, and senior leaders from every business unit across their enterprise. >> So you mentioned scaling. >> Yep. >> We heard today in the predictions segment that we're going to move from snowflake to snowball. And so I would think for scaling it's important to identify reusable components. And so how have you, how has that played out for you? And how's the scaling going? >> Yeah, so that's been one really cool component that we've built out in the COE. So I had my team actually vote on a name and we said, "We want to go after reusable components." They decided to call them Microbots. So it's a cool little term that we coined. >> That's cool. >> And our CIO and CAO actually talk about them frequently. "How are our Microbots? "How many do we have? "What are they doing?" So it's pretty catchy. But what it's really enabled us is to build these reusable snippets of code that are specific to how we perform as a company that we can plug and play and reduce our cycle time. So we've actually reduced our cycle time by over 50%. And reusable components is one of the major key components. >> So how do you share those components? Are they available in some kind of internal marketplace? And how do you train people to actually know what to apply where? >> Right. So because we're centralized, it's a little bit easier, right? We have a stored repository, where they're available. We document them-- >> And it's the COE-- Sorry to interrupt. It's the COE's responsibility, and-- >> Exactly. So the COE has it. We're actually working with Cognizant right now to figure out how can we document those further, right? And UiPath. There's a lot of cool tools that were introduced this week. So I think we're definitely going to be leveraging from them. But the ability to really show what they are, make them available, and we're doing all of that internally right now. Probably a little manual. So it'll be great to have that available. >> So Amazon has this cool concept they call working backwards documents. I don't know if you ever heard this. But what they do is they basically write the press release, thinking five years in advance. This is how they started AWS, they actually wrote. This is what we want, and then they work backwards from there. So my question is around engineering outcomes. Can you engineer outcomes, and is that how you were thinking about this? Or is it just too many unknown parts of the process that you can't predict? >> So I think one of the things that we did was we did think about, "What do we want to achieve with this?" So one of the big programs that Clemmie and the team have is also around accelerate. And their key initiatives to drive, whether it's improve customer experience, more efficiencies of certain processes across the company. And so we looked at that first, and said, "Okay, how do we enable that?" That's a top strategy driven by their CEO. And even when we prioritize all the work, we actually build a model for them. So that it's objective. So if any opportunities that come in align to those key outcomes that the company's striving for, they can prioritize first to be worked on. I actually also think this is where this is all going. Everyone focuses today on these automation COEs and automation teams, but what you will see, and this is happening at NextEra, and all the places we're starting to see this scale, is you end up with this outcomes management office. This is a core nucleus of a team that is automation, there's IT at the table, there's this lean quality mindset at the table, and they're actually looking at opportunities and saying, "All right, this one's yours. "This one's yours and then I'll pick up from you." And it's driving, then, the right outcomes for the organization versus just saying, "I have a hammer, I'm going to go find a nail," which sometimes happens. >> Right, oh, for sure. And it may be a fine nail to hit, but it might not be the most strategic-- >> Exactly. >> Or the most valuable. So what are some examples of areas that you're most excited about? Where you've applied automation and have given a business outcome that's been successful? >> Yeah, so we are an energy company. And we've had a lot of really awesome brainstorming sessions that we've held with UiPath and Cognizant. And a couple of key ones that have come out of it, really around storm season is big for us in the state of Florida. And making sure that our critical infrastructure is available. So our nursing homes, our hospitals, and so on. So we've actually built automations that help us to ping and make sure that they're available, so that we can stay proactive, right? There's also a cool use-case around, really, the intelligent automations space. So our linemen in their trucks are saying, "Hey, we spend a lot of time having to log on the computer, "log our tickets, "and then we have to turn our computers off, "drive to the next site, "and we're not able to restore as much power "or resolve issues as quickly as possible." So we said, "How can we enable them?" Speech recognition, where they can talk to it, it can log a ticket for them on their behalf. So it's pretty exciting. >> So that's kind of an interesting example. Where RPA, in and of itself's not going to solve that problem, right, but speech recognition-- >> It's a combination. >> So you got to bring in other technology, so using, what, some NLP capability, or? >> Yeah, so that's one we're currently working on. But yes, you would need some type of cognitive speech recognition, and. >> So you sort of playing around with that in R&D right now? The speech [Mumbles]. >> Yeah. >> Which, as you know, is not perfect, right? >> It is not. >> Talk to us. We know about it all. Because we transcribe every word that's said on theCUBE. And so, there's some good ones and there's some not so good ones. And they're getting better, though. They're getting better. And that's going to be kind of commodity shortly. You really need just good enough, right? I mean, is that true? Or do you need near perfect? >> So I think there's a happy medium. It depends on what you're trying to do. In this case we're logging tickets, so there might be some variability that you can have. But I will say, so NextEra is really focused on energy, but they're also trying to set themselves apart. So they're trying to focus on innovation, as well. So this is a lot of the areas that they're focusing on: the machine learning, and the processing, and we even have chat bots that they're coining and branding internally, so it's pretty exciting. >> So NextEra is, are you entirely new energy? Is that right? No fossil fuels, or? >> So it's all clean energy, yes. Across the enterprise. >> Awesome. How's that going? Obviously you guys are very successful, but, I mean, what's kind of happening in the energy business today? You're sort of seeing a resurgence in oil, right, but? >> Yeah, so I think we had a really good boom. A couple years ago there were a lot of tax credits that we were able to grow that side of our company. And it enabled us to really pivot to be the clean energy that we are. >> I mean, that's key, right? I mean, United States, we want to lead in clean energy. And I'm not sure we are. I mean, like you say, there was tax incentives and credits that sort of drove a lot of innovation, but am I correct? You see countries outside the U.S., really, maybe leaning in harder. I mean, obviously we got NextEra, but. >> I mean, I think there's definitely competition out there. We're focused on trying to be, maybe not the best, but compete with the best. We're also trying to focus on what's next, right? So be proactive, and grow the company in a multitude of ways. Maybe even outside the energy sector, just to make sure that we can compete. But really what we're focused on is the clean renewables, so. >> That's awesome. I mean, as a country we need this, and it's great to have organizations like yours. Mariesa, I'll give you the final word. Kind of, the landscape of automation. What inning are we in? Baseball analogy. Or how far can this thing go? And what's your sort of, as you pull out the binoculars, maybe not the telescope, but the binoculars, where do you see it going? >> I think there's a lot of runway left. So if you look at a lot of the research out there today, I heard today, 10% was quoted by one person. I heard 13% quoted from HFS around where are we at on scale from an RPA perspective? And that's just RPA. >> Yeah. >> So that means there's still so much out there to still go and look at and be able to make an impact. But if you look, there's also a lot of runway on this intelligent automation. And that's where, I think, we have to shift the focus. You're seeing it now, at these conferences. That you're starting to see people talk about, "How do I integrate? "How do I actually think about connecting the dots "to get bigger and broader outcomes for an organization?" and I think that's where we're going to shift to, is talking about how do we bring together multiple technologies to be able to go and get these end-to-end solutions for customers? And ultimately go, what we were talking a little bit about before, on outcome-focused for an organization. Not talking about just, "How do I go do AI? "How do I go put a bot in?" But, "I want to choose this outcome for my customer. "I need to grow the top line. "I'm getting this feedback." Or even internally, "I want to get more efficient so I can deliver." And focus there, and then what we'll do is find the right tools to be able to move all that forward. >> It's interesting. We're out of time, but you think about, it's somewhat surprising when people hear what you just said, Mariesa, because people think, "Wow, we've had all this technology for 50 years. "Haven't we automated everything?" Well, Daniel Dines, last night, put forth the premise that all this technology's actually creating inefficiencies and somewhat creating the problem. So technology's kind of got us into the problem. We'll see if technology can get us out. All right? Thanks, you guys, for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest right after this short break. UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from Anaheim, California, it's the Cube! Covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my cohost, John Furrier. We are the Cube. We are the ESPN of tech. We have two tech athletes on with us today. We have Asvin Ramesh, AVP marketing and alliances technology services at Cognizant. Welcome. And we have Inder Sidhu, EVP global customer success at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Inder. >> Thank you. >> So why don't I start with you. For viewers who are not familiar with Cognizant, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do, what you're all about. >> Sure, so Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies. We focus on transforming clients' business model, operating model and technology model. Naztech listed at 16 billion revenue last year. We are a Fortune 200 company. We work with about half of the Fortune 200 companies. And companies trust us to help transform the work that they're doing. >> Those are tall orders. (laughs) So what are you hearing from customers right now? What are their biggest challenges that they're facing? >> So, I think customers are basically in two buckets, as we see it, right? We see customers who are inherently excited about the challenges that they're facing, and there are other customers who are still grappling how to figure out the onslaught that's coming at them. And if I just abstract this beyond technology into the overall spectrum of how I look at it, it really transforms to what I call, are customers set or not? And that translates to social, economic and technology. There are a lot of social changes that are happening because of all the things that are going on. How well are companies able to adapt to those social changes? Really makes a difference in their ability to engage with the consumer. There are a lot of economic changes, economic martyrs that are being brought. How well are companies being able to adapt to those economic models? And more importantly from where Nutanix and Cognizant sit, technology is playing a huge role, both on the social and the economic angle. So how do companies leverage technology to be able to drive that change? And how well you do these three things really makes a difference in customers' lives. >> Talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's the relationship? Obviously partner, you have customers. They got the software now and hardware before, all coming together. What's the relationship how you guys work together? >> It's fantastic. We've been a partner with Nutanix for more than three years. And, I think the critical piece and foundational elements of the partnership with Nutanix, more than the products that they bring out because they're constantly innovating all the time, I think is on a bedrock of transparency, flexibility, and specificity. So there's a lot of transparency in terms of their roadmap, and we get a sense of where they're headed. They get a sense of where we're headed and how we are focused and what our strategy is. That allows us to really lock into what the customer's demanding. Second is flexibility with the elements that I talked about around social, economic and technology. It's very important for a flexible combination, because I kind of look at this age of cooptition as a battle of ecosystems. So, we are locked in with Nutanix in this battle of ecosystems, so in my role, I build value chains, and Nutanix is a critical partner in that value chain and being able to adopt to what the customers are demanding of us, and we are very specific about what we do in the market place. Because all of us have choices, and it's very important to be specific to solving customers' issues. It's been a great partnership-- >> It's interesting, we always talk on the Cube around automation. DevOps has been a big driver with multi cloud now. If you have all these value activities strung together in a set of value chains, no one company can own it all. But automation requires end-to-end visibility, so the big trend we're seeing is who's going to enable that? Because I can imagine, your environment you can talk to the top customers. We do the Cube hundreds of events a year. The same theme comes back over and over again on the Cube. It's a refrain. It's the anthem of the customer which is, look, I need to innovate my business model. I got to move quickly to a new operating model cloud. 'Cause they all taste the cloud, and they want the cloud everywhere. And then they want to make sure they have a technology partner. So all three of those theaters are exploding in innovation, and all at the same time. This has been a big challenge. How do you guys work together to address the business model innovation, the operating model challenges, the skill gaps training or whatever? And then obviously technology selection? >> So I think the most important thing is to be able to sense and engage, right? I think that's where it starts. If you've built a ecosystem of the value chain, in our case with Nutanix, in a way that we stay close to the consumer changes, we build a method of engagement that allows us to sense and engage better. I think that addresses a big part of what you talked about. Then it's about figuring out what elements of technology and being able to advise the customer in the right way in their journey to what they want to achieve in introducing those technologies to the table. >> Inder, I want to bring you in here on this. You are the EVP of customer success at Nutanix. You have a lot of success. You have net supporter scores on 90 which is really unheard of in this industry. I think so many people out there watching this want to know what is your secret sauce. How do you get that? (laughs) >> I think it's a combination of things. I think the first and foremost is being extremely customer centric in everything that you do, not as a function within the company but across the company. Customer success isn't just a function. It's a philosophy; it's a cultural value. It's a mindset; it's everybody's job. You got to start there. Second, you hire people who have a great deal of empathy for the customer and a great deal of expertise in what the customer is looking for. So to bring empathy and they're deeply technical in terms of bringing that expertise and actually applying that towards the customer's problems. And then, maybe the third thing I'd say is always being focused on the customer's outcomes as opposed to your own desire to either sell more services or more products or whatever, because if you're customer-outcome centric, everything else follows from that. Keeping that as a north star, I think has been the primary factor that's driven that. There's one other thing that I'd add to that, and that is something, I think, John, you were referring to a little bit earlier which is this notion of automation. So in the past, people would drive customer success by throwing more and more bodies at the problem, more and more people at the problem. That's so yesterday, right? Now it's all about, you still need people, absolutely, but you need to empower them with a great deal of data, with a great deal of insight, with a great deal of automation. Do that in real time, be predictive, be proactive, and so on. That last element, that secret sauce is pretty important. >> That's interesting. We had a session earlier; I talked about the tech landscape. We talked it out from cloud to politics, and how technology without accountability and responsibility with people can be a bad outcome. Right? (laughs) You give the tools to the wrong people, or someone, say government, doesn't know what the technology can do, bad outcomes happen. Same with cloud selection. When you start to get in some of these new areas where this market shift's going on, where there's real lives on the line in terms of jobs, re-skilling training, you guys are on the cusp of this next shift. You're on the front lines, putting it all together as a global SI for all the top customers. So digital's transformation, although it sounds very buzz-wordy, is actually real in the sense that these are material changes to companies, how they're operating and their business model. So the impact's pretty high, so the role of people is super important. What's going on there? How's the progress, in your view? Are customers ready? Are they getting trained up? Are their IQs moving faster? Are they more accountable? >> Couple of observations over there, I think I would say that in the last 90 days, I've probably met 100 customers. I don't think there's probably, with the exception of maybe a couple, I don't think there's been any conversation where talent hasn't come up. Specifically, the shortage of talent. Which is why, by the way, it becomes hugely critical for us to have partners like Cognizant with whom we have a fantastic relationship. They are so complementary and so critically interwoven into our skill and their skill jointly. Every customer basically says, look, I used to have a virtualization admin, a security admin, a network admin, a database admin, and this, that and the other. And what you've done is you've hyper-converged, not only technology but you've hyper-converged the roles. Well, hyper-converging the roles means you need one person instead of 10 people, but that one is really hard one to find. So help me train them and work with your partners to bring that capability. So talent shortage, especially as you move away from the larger metropolitan areas, is a real issue. And we're working towards that. We're trying to address that by making products simpler. As you know, that's been a hallmark of Nutanix is simplicity and support and service. Those have been our hallmark. So making it simpler is very key, but no matter how simple you make it, you still need that element of human intelligence, human touch, and the automation. Those are the ways. >> And the risk, too, from the customers, love to get the integration standpoint, because, one, that's a lever for you guys. You get leverage out of that. When you take 10 to one or reduce down the roles, hyper-converge things, but the outcome is pretty positive. You're enabling new things, but it allows for people to be redeployed, as well. The existing roles, they're not really going away. They just get shifted. So, yes we need more people, need new people, but also, the dynamic of fear. Is my job going away? So there's leverage and you get efficiencies and potentially redeployment capabilities. How's that affecting your job at Cognizant? >> So, at Cognizant, people are extremely core to the way we operate, so, as I mentioned, we are a $16 billion organization, but we are almost 200,000 people. 185,000, just to be precise. So, for us, the retraining and re-skilling of people is ingrained in the way we've operated since our inception 25 years ago. And it's about two, three things. One is a basic understanding that while technology curves at exponential, the change management in people are linear. So that fundamental understanding of that shift is very important that we continue to invest into the training and change management of individuals to allow them to progress through the value curve as technology shifts happen. And for that, you need both a culture and a structure for that to happen. And because we have grown through this environment, we have Cognizant Academy, and we have few other systems and processes and communication elements that we have put in place that allow our employees to grow as the technology shifts happen. That's one. Second piece is, I think, a very important reason why customers work with us is because we understand their industry. So we serve almost 20 industries, but almost 70 to 80% of our revenue comes from a few industries. And customers really engage and continue to work with us because of our deep understanding of their business, right? So it's this ability to be able to understand technology and the progress of technology from companies like Nutanix. And then, be able to stitch that appropriately to the business of the customer, and put a structure in place that allows the shift to happen, that allows us to grow. >> But going back to what Inder said earlier, so many of the skills that are necessary today, I mean, yes of course, it's about keeping up with the shifts in technology, but so many of the reasons that Nutanix has been successful is that its employees are empathetic, that they listen, that they're paying attention, that they ask good follow-up questions. So when you're talking about Cognizant Academy and the re-skilling, are you also helping them learn these important skills? >> No, I think, I have a 10-year-old son, so as I think about what his future would look like, I definitely feel that the relevance of IQ, as a race is reducing, and empathy to the point that Inder made and your EQ is far more important. And we live in this world where the virtual world is almost taking over the physical world. We're on that cusp, right? Somewhere. >> You're talking John's language there. (laughs) >> You can take a guess on who's ahead and who's losing. So it becomes very important not only to build a sense of empathy in the real world but also a sense of empathy in the virtual world, in the way you communicate with customers, in the way you listen to customers, how you listen to customers and engage. So that is a very critical component of how we train our employees so that we're continuously staying ahead, in terms of even sensing and engaging with them. >> One of the things that brings up in conversation we had earlier with a customer, they love the efficiencies of how you guys can collapse with the hyper convergence which you've done in modern enterprise now and going to the cloud, you know, hyper-converged clouds, we get that strategy, and I think it's going to be bigger than you guys forecast in my opinion. But what that really points to is a cultural shift. And the cultural shift is, okay, I had this before, all this legacy stuff. Then it's the question of, okay, how do I get people on the right tune here? How do I organize internally? So it's not so much a technology decision. It's more of a cultural decision. And so I asked the CIO of a big consumer company who came in to transform this big conglomerate. You'd know their name if I said it. He said, when he walked in, the biggest problem that they had is they outsourced everything in the 90s to the point where in the 2000s, they were so efficient. They had the storage admin, and they had all these roles, and they were holding the gear down. They had perimeter base security; they were perfect. But they had lost their competencies during software. So as the world shifts to software, a lot of CIOs are being asked essentially to build software teams. So the new changeover combined with the new efficiencies is they have to boot up development teams, infrastructure all the way to the top of the stacks. It's challenging, so I know you guys do a lot of work there, in this area, in helping companies transform. This is a huge challenge. How do you go from being lean and nimble, operationally, to having fewer core competency in software development, automation, machine learning? There's not enough people to hire, so this seems to be a core challenge. >> Yeah, I think if I look at the core challenge, in terms of areas to focus, clearly, people focus historically on infrastructure technologies. They need to focus on two additional areas. Let me elaborate what they are. One of them is absolutely the new move towards DevOps, containerization, those kinds of newer technologies that play not in the CIO's shop but in the development side of the house. And there's clearly a focus within Nutanix on the product side and on the people side to emphasize that, and we work with customers on that. The second thing is actually a little bit related to what Asvin was saying. What we find when we engage with customers is again and again if there's an issue, it turns out nine times out of 10 it's not because of a technology. It's either because there was an operational deficiency in their processes, or there was an organizational lack of proficiency or just something financial. So, when I put customer success managers onto accounts, the biggest thing that they do is they create a customer success plan that actually focuses number one on operational practices. Do you have run books? Do you have controls? Do you have automation? Do you have monitoring? Do you have callback information? Do you have all of that so that your processes are robust? It's entirely customer centric. It's independent of technology or only mildly related. That's one. Second, do you have the organizational skills, the capabilities that these people need to have? Can you get them sandboxes or training? Can you get them certified, et cetera, et cetera? Can you move them up? And then, of course, the last thing is financial which is, can you look at it in a larger context, not just of a technology decision but of a financial decision relative to total cost of ownership, return on the investment, cloud versus private, et cetera, et cetera. >> And software seems to be the theme in all of this. >> Software, absolutely-- >> Software rules. >> Software rules. (all laugh) Well, everyone's a software company now. >> Yes. >> That's right. Especially the Cube. (laughs) Inder, Asvin, thank you both so much for coming on the Cube. This was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching the Cube. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to the theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019 here in Sin City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're here with Arun Varadarajan. He is the vice president of AI and anaylsitcs at Cognizant. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Arun. >> Wonderful its also great to meet you folks at theCUBE. >> You are Cube alarm. >> I am a Cube alarm. This is probably the third or fourth time that I'm on theCUBE. >> Excellent. Well for those viewers who have not seen your previous clips tell us a little bit about your role at Cognizant. >> My role at Cognizant is focused on two primary things. One is to really get our customers ready for AI and truly compete in the digital world. The second big focus for me is to get them there. To me it's all about the data. So many times we don't realize this that if you look at a lot of the FANG players. The digital natives are born digital who really have leveraged machine learning and AI to disrupt the market place. They do it with data. It's all about the data. So the big push that I'm working on these days is to help our clients create this new modern data platform that can truly help them leverage AI and disrupt the market where possible. >> So tell us what you've-- So we know that this journey is incredibly complex and there's a lot of layers, a lot of questions, hard questions that companies are wrestling with. >> Yes. >> Give us the lay of the land. What do you see as sort of the big dominant forces happening in AI and ML? >> I think the first place is companies are still trying to figure out where do they apply AI and ML. I think that is where they need to start because if it is not designed and the initiative is not purposed around any sort of specific business area or business focus or business outcome, it becomes an engineering project that really doesn't see light of day. If you remember back in the days when Hadoop was big. Hadoop was almost like a solution trying to find-- A problem or a solution trying to find a problem, whichever way it is. I think as opposed to taking a technology view which has been the traditional approach that most of the CIO organizations have used. In AI even more so, there needs to be significant participation for the business to decide where are the opportunities for me to drive business value. So I've always told my clients that the place to start is where can I apply AI and machine learning because at the end of the day it is just a technique right, and the technique has to be focused on delivering true business outcomes and business values. So that is where I think our clients need to start. If you go back in time and remember the ERP days when people were implementing SAP and Oracle there was this very strong focus on process optimization and process excellence. How do I get a straight through process organization? Really create that process orchestration layer that could execute at excellence. I think that needs to be brought back today but in a different light and the light is, now let me view my value chain, not just from a process orchestration standpoint but where are the opportunities for me to leverage machine learning and AI to create very different outcomes within that process layer? And I think-- Sorry. >> I definitely want to go back to that but I also want to remember that we are here at Informatica World and I want to make sure I ask you how you at Cognizant work with Informatica. >> Informatica is a strategic partner of ours and as I was saying, while you start with that outcome in mind and really say these are the areas I want to drive business outcomes it's very important you understand how data plays a role in delivering those outcomes. So that's where Informatica and our partnership really comes to fruition. You know that Informatica has been working very strong in the areas of metadata management, data governance, security. All of these are essential part of you knowing your data and knowing where your data's coming from, where is it going, who is using it, how is it being consumed, in what form and shape should it be delivered so that we can deliver business value is a key aspect of really leveraging AI and machine learning. In AI and machine learning the one thing that we have to be cognizant of, pun intended, is the fact that when you're going to get the machine to start making decisions for you, the quality of your data has to be significantly higher than just a report that is inaccurate, right. Report inaccuracy, yes you're going to get shouted at by the consumer of the report but that's the only problem you face but with AI and machine learning coming into play if your data is not truly representative of the decision area that the machine is working on then you're going to have a very bad outcome. >> This is a deep and philosophical issue because if the data is shoddy or biased there is a lot of problems that companies can get into. So where do you even start? How do you even work with a company to make sure that their data is the right data, is pure? What do you think? >> Interesting you ask that question. We've come up with this notion that even data has got IQ. We call it data IQ in Cognizant and it's a mathematical measure that we have come up with which allows us to score a data's ability to perform in a given area or function. So it could be in the area of sales effectiveness. Look we have a large retail company that is really trying to figure out how can they improve their store level information so that they can execute more sales orders with their customers. Their assumption is that they're working with a data set that can help them drive that outcome. How do they know that? Well there's one way to find out, which is for you to experiment, test, and learn and test and learn but that's an arduous process. Which is why a lot of the data science work that is happening today is, I would say, probably seventy to 80% of the data science effort goes waste because there are experiments that fail. This was-- >> But is that a waste? So it failed, but you tried and you maybe had some learnings from it, right? >> So a lot of people keep saying that failure is a great teacher of-- >> That's the Silicon Valley mantra right now. >> Well you can be smart about where you fail. >> True. >> Right. >> Good point. >> If there are opportunities for you to prevent that failure why wouldn't you? >> Okay. All right. >> That's what we're looking at. So what I'm saying is that before you go into doing any data science experiment, what if I came back and told you that the data that you're working on is not going to be sufficient for you to deliver that outcome. Would it not be interesting? >> Exactly, so it's making sure that you at least are maximizing your chance of success by having the right data to begin with. It is a failure for failure's sake if you're not even starting with the right data. >> Absolutely and you know the other thing that people don't realize is is if you go and ask-- If you just do it, I'm going back to my industrial engineering days, if you go and do a simple time and motion study of data science, data scientists, I can guarantee you that 80% or 90% of their time is spent on just prepping the data and only less than 10% or 15% on truly driving business value. So my question is you're spending big dollars on data science experiments where eighty to 90% of the time the data scientists are prepping. Looking at the data, is it the right skew, has it the right features, do I need to do some feature engineering, do you denormalize it? There are a whole bunch of data prep work that they do. My question is, what if we take that pain away from them? That's what I call as data science freedom and this is what we are promoting to our clients saying what can you do with your data so that your data is ready for the data science folks? Today it's data science folks, tomorrow it's going to be hopefully machine learning algorithms that can self model because a lot of people are talking about auto ML which is the new buzz-word, which is AI doing AI and that's an area that we're heavily invested in. Where you really want to make sure that the data going in is of the veracity and the complexity and the texture required for that outcome area. So that's where I think things like data IQ as a concept would really help our clients to know that hey the data I'm working with has got the intrinsic intelligence in that outcome area for me to drive that particular business outcome that I'm working on. That's where I think the magic lies. >> That's where they'll see the value. >> That's where they'll see the value. >> So talk a little about the AI journey because that is, it's all intertwined but so many companies are coming to you, to Cognizant and saying we know we need to do more of this, we want to make it real, how do we get there? So what do you say? What's your advice? >> So, I think I mentioned this right up-front when we started the conversation. It all has to start with purpose. Without purpose no AI project really succeeds. You'll end up creating a few bots. In fact when I look out there in the world and look at the kind of work that is happening in machine Learning and AI, many of the so-called AI projects, if you double click on them, are just bots. So we are doing some level of maybe process automation, we're trying to reduce labor content, bringing in bots, but are we truly driving change? I'm not saying that that's not a change. There is definitely a change but it's more of an incremental change. It is not the kind of disruptive change that some of the FANG leaders that are showing right. If you take Facebook, Amazon, the whole gamut of digital natives, they are truly disrupting the market place. Some of them are even able to do a million predictions a second to match demand, supply, and price. Now that is how they are using it. Now the question I think for our clients, for our enterprise clients is to say that's a great goal to have but where do I start and how do I start? It starts with, in my opinion, two or three big notions. One is, honestly ask yourself, how much of a change are you willing to make, because if you have to compete and really leverage AI and machine learning the way it has been designed to do so you have to be willing to press the reset button. You have to be willing to destroy what you have today and there is, I think Bill Baker back in the days, he was a SQL server guy. He was talking about this whole concept of what is known as scale up and scale out and he was talking about it from the angle of managing a pet versus managing cattle. So when you're managing a pet, a pet is a very unique component like your mail server So Bob the mail server, if the mail server goes down then all hell breaks loose and hopefully you have another alternate to Bob to manage the mail server. So it's more like a scale up model where you are looking at, hey how do I manage high availability as opposed to today's world where you have the opportunity to really look at things in a far more expansive manner. So if you have to do that you can't be saying I have this on-prem data warehouse right, which is running on X Y Z, and I want to take that on-prem data warehouse and move it to the Cloud and expect magic to happen, because all you're doing is you're shifting your mess from your data center to somebody else's data center which is called the Cloud. >> Right. >> Right? So I think the big thing for clients to really understand is how much are they invested in this change. How are they willing to drive this change? I'll tell you it's not about the technology. There are so many technology options today and we have got some really smart engineers who know how to engineer things. The question is, what are you doing this for? Are you willing, if you want to compete in that paradigm, are you willing to let go of what you have tody? That is a big question. That I would start with. >> An important question but I want to sneak in one more question and that is about the skills gap because this is something that we hear so much about. So many companies facing a, there is a dearth of qualified candidates who can do these jobs in data science and AI and ML. What are you seeing at Cognizant and what are you doing to remedy the problem? >> So I think it's definitely a challenge for the industry at large and what we are starting to see is two things emerging. One is the new workforce coming into the market is better equipped because of the way the school systems have changed in the last few years and I would say this is a global phenomenon not just in North America or in Europe or in China or India. It's a global phenomenon. We're starting to see that undergrad students who come out of school today are better equipped to learn the new capabilities. That's number one. Which is very heartening for us right, in the whole talent space. What I've always believed in, and this is my personal view on this, what I've always believed in is that these skills will come into fashion and go out of fashion in months and days. It's about the kind of engineering approach you have that stays constant, right. If you look at any of the new technologies today, they all are based on some core standard principles. Yes the semantics will change, the structure will change, but some of the engineering principles remain the same. So what we've been doing in Cognizant is really investing in our engineering talent. So we call it data engineering and to us data engineering means that if you're a data engineer you can't tell me I will only work with A, B, or C technology. You should be in a position to work with all of these technologies and you should be in a position to approach it from an engineering mindset as opposed to a skill or a tool based mindset and that's the change that we need with fads coming in and out of Vogue. I think it's super important for all consultants in this space to be grounded on some core engineering principles. That's what we are investing in very heavily. >> Well it sounds like a sound investment. Well thank you so much for coming on the show Arun. I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for theCUBE. You are watching theCUBE at Informatica World 2019. Stay tuned. (lighthearted music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2018, brought to you by Informatica. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, we're here live at the Venetian, we're at the Sands Convention Center, Venetian, the Palazzo, for Informatica World 2018. I'm John Furrier, with Peter Burris, my co-host with you. Our next guest, Arun Varadarajan, who's the VP of AI and Analytics at Cognizant. Great to see you. It's been awhile. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Thank you John, it's wonderful meeting you again. >> So, last time you were on was 2015 in the queue. We were at the San Francisco, where the event was. You kind of nailed the real time piece; also, the disruption of data. Look ing forward, right now, we're kind of right at the spot you were talking about there. What's different? What's new for you? ASI data's at the center of the value preposition. >> Arun: Yep. People are now realizing, I need to have strategic data plan, not just store it, and go do analytics on it. GDPR is a signal; obviously we're seeing that. What's new? >> So, I think a couple of things, John. One is, I think the customers have realized that there is a need to have a very deliberate approach. Last time, when we spoke, we spoke about digital transformation; it was a cool thing. It had this nice feel to it. But I think what has happened in the last couple of years is that we've been able to help our clients understand what exactly is digital transformation, apart from it being a very simple comparative tactic to deal with the fact that digital natives are, you know, barking down your path. It also is an opportunity for you to really reimagine your business architecture. So, what we're telling our clients is that when you're thinking about digital transformation, think of it from a 3-layer standpoint, the first layer being your business model itself, right? Because, if you're a traditional taxi service, and you're dealing with the Uber war, you better reimagine your business model. It starts there. And then, if your business model has to change to compete in the digital world, your operating model has to be extremely aligned to that new business model paradigm that you've defined. And, to that, if you don't have a technology model that is adapting to that change, none of this is going to happen. So, we're telling our clients, when you think about digital transformation, think of it from these three dimensions. >> It's interesting, because back in the old days, your technology model dictated what you could do. It's almost flipped around, where the business model is dictating the direction. So, business model, operating model, technology model. Is that because technology is more versatile? Or, as Peter says, processes are known, and you can manage it? It used to be, hey, let's pick a technology decision. Which database, and we're off to the races. Now it seems to be flipped around. >> There are two reasons for that. One is, I think, technology itself has proliferated so much that there are so many choices to be made. And if you start looking at technology first, you get kind of burdened by the choices you need to make. Because, at the end of the day, the choice you make on technology has to have a very strong alignment and impact to business. So, what we're telling our clients is, choices are there; there are plenty of choices. There are compute strategies available that are out there. There's new analytical capabilities. There's a whole lot of that. But if you do not purpose and engineer your technology model to a specific business objective, it's lost. So, when we think about business architecture, and really competing in the digital space, it's really about you saying, how do I make sure that my business model is such that I can thwart the competition that is likely to come from digital natives? You saw Amazon the other day, right? They bought an insurance company. Who knows what they're going to buy next? My view is that Uber may buy one of the auto companies, and completely change the car industry. So, what does Ford do? What does General Motors do? And, if they're going to go about this in a very incremental fashion, my view is that they may not exist. >> So, we have been in our research arguing that digital transformation does mean something. We think that it's the difference between a business and a digital business is the role that data plays in a digital 6business, and whether or not a business treats data as an asset. Now, in every business, in every business strategy, the most simple, straightforward, bottom-line thing you can acknowledge is that businesses organize work around assets. >> John: Yep. >> So, does it comport with your observation that, to many respects, what we're talking about here is, how are we reinstitutionalizing work around data, and what impact does that have on our business model, our operating model, and our technology selection? Does that line up for you? >> Totally, totally. So, if you think about business model change, to me, it starts by re-imagining your engagement process with your customers. Re-imagining customer experience. Now, how are you going to be able to re-imagine customer experience and customer engagement if you don't know your customer? Right? So, the first building block in my mind is, do you have customer intelligence? So, when you're talking about data as an asset, to me, the asset is intelligence, right? So, customer intelligence, to me, is the first analytical building block for you to start re-imagining your business model. The second block, very clearly, is fantastic. I've re-imagined customer experience. I've re-imagined how I am going to engage with my customer. Is your product, and service, intelligent enough to develop that experience? Because, experience has to change with customers wanting new things. You know, today I was okay with buying that item online, and getting the shipment done to me in 4 days. But, that may change; I may need overnight shipping. How do you know that, right? Are you really aware of my preferences, and how quickly is your product and service aligning to that change? And, to your point, if I have customer intelligence, and product intelligence sorted out, I better make sure that my business processes are equally capable of institutionalizing intelligence. Right? So, my process orchestration, whether it's my supply chain, whether it's my auto management, whether it's my, you know, let's say fulfillment process; all of these must be equally intelligent. So, in my mind, these are three intelligent blocks: there's customer intelligence, product intelligence, and operations intelligence. If you have these three building blocks in place, then I think you can start thinking about what should your new data foundation look like. >> I want to take that and overlay kind of like, what's going on in the landscape of the industry. You have infrastructure world, which you buy some rack and stack the servers; clouds now on the scene, so there's overlapping there. We used to have a big data category. You know, ADO; but, that's now AI and machine learning, and data ware. It's kind of its own category, call it AI. And then, you have kind of emerging tech, whether you call, block chain, these kind of... confluence of all these things. But there's a data component that sits in the center of all these things. Security, data, IOT, traverse infrastructure, cloud, the classic data industry, analytics, AI, and emerging. You need data that traverses all these new environments. How does someone set up their architecture so that, because now I say, okay, I got a dat big data analytics package over here. I'm doing some analytics, next gen analytics. But, now I got to move data around for its cloud services, or for an application. So, you're seeing data as to being architected to be addressable across multiple industries. >> Great point John. In fact, that leads logically to the next thing that me and my team are working on. So we are calling it the Adaptive Data Foundation. Right? The reason why we chose the word adaptive is because in my mind it's all about adapting to change. I think Chal Salvan, or somebody said that the survival of the fittest is not, the survival is not of the survival of the fittest or the survival of the species that is intelligent, but it's the survival of those who can adapt to change, right? To me, your data foundation has to be super adaptive. So what we've done is, in fact, my notion, and I keep throwing this at you every time I meet you, in my opinion, big data is legacy. >> John: Yeah, I would agree with that. >> And its coming.. >> John: The debate. >> It's pretty much legacy in my mind. Today it's all about scale-out, responsive, compute. The data world. Now, if you looked at most of the architectures of the past of the data world, it was all about store and forward. Right? I would, it's a left to right architecture. To me it's become a multi-directional architecture. Therefore what we have done is, and this is where I think the industry is still struggling, and so are our customers. I understand I need to have a new modern data foundation, but what does that look like? What does it feel like? So with the Adaptive Data Foundation... >> They've never seen it before by the way. >> They have not seen it. >> This is new. >> They are not able to envision it. >> It is net new. >> Exactly. They're not able to envision it. So what I tell my clients is, if you really want to reimagine, just as you're reimagining your business model, your operating model, you better reimagine your data model. Is your data model capable of high velocity resolutions? Whether it's identity resolution of a client who's calling in. Whether it's the resolution of the right product and service to deliver to the client. Whether it's your process orchestration, they're able to quickly resolve that this data, this distribution center is better capable of servicing their customer need. You better have that kind of environment, right? So, somebody told me the other day that Amazon can identify an analytical opportunity and deliver a new experience and productionize it in 11.56 seconds. Today my customers, on average, the enterprise customers, barely get to have a reasonable release on a monthly basis. Forget about 11.56 seconds. So if they have to move at that kind of velocity, and that kind of responsiveness, they need to reimagine their data foundation. What we have done is, we have tried to break it down into three broad components. The first component that they're saying is that you need a highly responsive architecture. The question that you asked. And a highly responsive architecture, we've defined, we've got about seven to eight attributes that defines what a responsive architecture is. And in my mind, you'll hear a lot of, I've been hearing a lot of this that a friend, even in today's conference, people are saying, 'Oh, its going to be a hybrid world. There's going to be Onprim, there's going to be cloud, there's going to be multicloud. My view is, if you're going to have all of that mess, you're going to die, right? So I know I'm being a little harsh on this subject, but my view is you got to move to a very simplified responsive architecture right up front. >> Well you'd be prepared for any architecture. >> I've always said, we've debated this many times, I think it's a cloud world, public cloud, everything. Where the data center on premise is a huge edge. Right, so? If you think of the data center as an edge, you can say okay, it's a large edge. It's a big fat edge. >> Our fundamentalists, I don't think it exists. Our fundamental position is data increasingly, the physical realities of data, the legal realities of data, the intellectual property control realities of data, the cost realities of data are going to dictate where the processing actually takes place. There's going to be a tendency to try to move the activity as close to the data as possible so you don't have to move the data. It's not in opposition, but we think increasingly people are going to not move the data to the cloud, but move the cloud to the data. That's how we think. >> That's an interesting notion. My view is that the data has to be really close to the source of position and execution, right? >> Peter: Yeah. Data has got to be close to the activity. >> It has to be very close to the activity. >> The locality matters. >> Exactly, exactly, and my view is, if you can, I know it's tough, but a lot of our clients are struggling with that, I'm pushing them to move their data to the cloud, only for one purpose. It gives them that accessibility to a wide ranging of computer and analytical options. >> And also microservices. >> Oh yeah. >> We had a customer on earlier who's moved to the cloud. This is what we're saying about the edge being data centered. Hybrid cloud just means you're running cloud operations. Which just means you got to have a data architecture that supports cloud operations. Which means orchestration, not having siloed systems, but essentially having these kind of, data traversal, but workload management, and I think that seems to be the consistency there. This plays right into what you're saying. That adaptive platform has to enable that. >> Exactly. >> If it forecloses it, then you're missing an opportunity. I guess, how do you... Okay tell me about a customer where you had the opportunity to do the adaptive platform, and they say no, I want a silo inside my network. I got the cloud for that. I got the proprietary system here. Which is eventually foreclosing their future revenue. How do you handle that scenario? >> So the way we handle that scenario, is again, focusing on what the end objective, that the client has, from an analytical opportunity, respectfully. What I mean by that is that semi-customer says I need to be significantly more responsive in my service management, right? So if he says I want to get that achieved, then what we start thinking about is, what is that responsive data architecture that can tell us a better outcome because like you said, and you said, there's stuff on the data center, there's stuff all over the place, it's going to be difficult to take that all away. But can I create a purpose for change? Many times you need a purpose for change. So the purpose being if I can get to a much more intelligent service management framework, I will be able to either take cost out or I can increase my revenue through services. It has to be tied to an outcome. So then the conversation becomes very easy because you're building a business case for investing in change, resulting in a measurable, business outcome. So that engineer to purpose is the way I'm finding it easier to have that conversation. And I'm telling the plan, keep what you have so you've got all the speckety messes somebody said, right? You've got all of the speckety mess out there. Let us focus on, if there are 15 data sets, that we think are relevant for us to deliver service management intelligence, let's focus on those 15 data sets. Let's get that into a new scalable, hyper responsive modern architecture. Then it becomes easier. Then I can tell the customer, now we have created an equal system where we can truly get to the 11.56 seconds analytical opportunity getting productionized. Move to an experiment as a service. That's another concept. So all of that, in my opinion John, is if he can put a purpose around it, as opposed to saying let's rip and replay, let's do this large scale transformation program, those things cost a lot of money. >> Well the good news is containers and Cubernetties is stowing away to get those projects moving cloud natives as fast as possible. Love the architecture vision. Love to fault with you on that. Great conversation. I think that's a path, in my opinion. Now short-term, the house in on fire in many areas. I want to get your thoughts on this final question. GDPR, the house is on fire, it's kind of critical, it's kind of tactical. People don't like freaking out. Saying okay, saying what does this mean? Okay, it's a signal, it is important. I think it's a technical mess. I mean where's the data? What schema? John Furrier, am I J Furrier, or Furrier, John? There's data on me everywhere inside the company. It's hard. >> Arun: It is. >> So, how are you guys helping customers and navigate the landscape of GDPR? >> GDPR is a whole, it's actually a much bigger problem than we all thought it was. It is securing things at the source system because there's volatibilities of source system. Forget about it entering into any sort of mastering or data barrels. They're securing its source, that is so critical. Then, as you said, the same John Furrier, who was probably exposed to GDPR is defined in ten different ways. How do I make sure that those ten definitions are managed? >> Tells you, you need an adaptive data platform to understands. >> So right now most of our work, is just doing that impactive analysis, right? Whether it's at a source system level, it has data coverance issues, it has data security issues, it has mastering issues. So it's a fairly complex problem. I think customers are still grappling with it. They're barely, in my opinion, getting to the point of having that plan because May 18, 2018 May, was supposed to, for you to show evidence of a plan. So I think there... >> The plan is we have no plan. >> Right, the plan of the plan, I guess is what they're going to show. It may, as opposed to the plan. >> Well I'm sure it's keeping you guys super busy. I know it's on everyone's mind. We've been talking a lot about it. Great to have you on again. Great to see you. Live here at Informatica World. Day one of two days of coverage at theCUBE here. In Las Vegas, I'm John here with Peter Burris with more coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 live from Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Raja Renganathan, he is the Vice President of Cloud Services at Cognizant Technology Solutions. I should say welcome back, it's not just welcome, it's welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you Rebecca. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Cognizant Technology. What does your company do and what do you do there? >> I head the cloud services for Cognizant in the capacity of a vice president. Cognizant is a world-leading professional services company. Our objective is to help our clients to navigate the shift to digital. We have three pillars: go to market, we have Cognizant Digital Business which focuses on the user experience, data related, and we have the Cognizant Digital Operations which is predominantly a middle-office, back-end processing in an enterprise, and the third pillar is Cognizant Digital Systems and Technology which is basically modernizing the platform systems that is required to create the digital foundation. >> And you're also just this week been called a Certified Global Partner of ServiceNow so explain how that works. >> Our relationship with ServiceNow goes back six years. Today I think the ServiceNow line of business, which is under the cloud services, is one of the fastest-growing business unit for us. The key thing in any platform such as ServiceNow is the human intellectual capital. That is where we give a lot of importance. While technology is created by ServiceNow, someone has to go execute and implement the technology. So that's where we spent time and started hiring people, re-skilling the people, and then getting certified across different facets of what ServiceNow recommends as a part of their education system. So today we have about 850 plus certified people across the globe and we also do the delivery across our global operation centers, we also call it as RDCs, Regional Delivery Centers, we have one in Budapest, one in Phoenix, and one in Buenos Aires. So all these three centers caters to different service areas of ServiceNow. As a part of this RDC we're also adding, creating an experience zone, a ServiceNow experience zone, so when client walks in they not only see our associates working on projects, but they also get the panoramic view or the panoramic experience of how ServiceNow orchestration happens, how automation happens, how HR module works, and things like that. Because of the people we have, in terms of re-skilling and certification, we are being measured as the best overall global partner award yesterday in Knowledge18. >> Well congratulations. When you were searching for these people, as you said you had to so a lot of hiring, what were the kind of skills you were looking for when you were trying to find the top talent? >> If you look at Cognizant as a 265,000 plus organization we know the art of hiring people. >> And it is an art, it absolutely is an art. >> So our approach is, one we go to the campus, hire the fresh grads in all of the campus. If you look at of late the kids that are coming out of the campus, they are pretty smart in the sense of they come with the latest digital technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing understanding, and things like that. So we take them and then we, within 30 days, we completely format them for ServiceNow. This is one approach. The second approach is we go to the lateral market and we hire and we bring them up to speed on the ServiceNow-related technologies. The third option is, with 265,000 people we have, the raw material is inside Cognizant, so we take people from other business units, other domain and then try to format them and to do that. But of late what we have started, especially within the U.S. footprint, is we go to all the community colleges and also we go to all the veteran's associations, those type of organizations and we hire them. So if you look at our Phoenix RDC, I'm proud to say that it is a woman-powered delivery center, when it comes to ServiceNow, with a pretty good mix of veterans. So these are the different approaches we use to hire people towards the ServiceNow practice. >> And they've been successful. >> They have been successful and if you look at how long can they continue in ServiceNow 'til they retire? No, so we do job rotation, every three years we give them opportunity. I have a unique advantage since I run the cloud services. I always rotate my people from ServiceNow to go to Amazon or to Microsoft as you're in different technologies every 24 to 36 months we do the job rotation. In that way I think I'm managing my retention well. >> So we know that the role of IT is really changing in so many organizations around the world. What are you hearing from customers, what are their pain points? What are the challenges that you're trying to solve? >> I think that's a great question now, Rebecca. We are in a very interesting time. The customers have a tremendous problem in their hand because they need to stay relevant in their business because business models are changing and if you look at for a retailer, the competition is not from the same industry. Similar for a pharmaceutical company, the competition is not from the same pharma industry. Everybody wanted to know, a pharma company wanted to know why Google is hiring 100 physicians. So the disruption is going to happen not in your industry, outside your industry. So that is the biggest challenge. The second thing is they need to continue to reinvent their business model. They cannot operate. We are hearing many stories like a lot of regional stores are closing because they didn't stay relevant to the business, to the customers. The third thing if you look at, let's take healthcare industry. Typically patients expect, historically, they were asked to maintain their prescription and medical records, but today in the new age patients are expecting the hospitals to manage everything because keep the data and intelligently apply the data because data is the new fuel or new oxygen, whatever you want to call it. >> Fuel, oxygen, one of those analogies. >> Data is going to play a critical role for any business. So every business is looking for how do I take the data and apply it intelligently? In the process how do I elevate experience? When I say experience it's both customer experience and also employee experience. So that's why if we look at, going back to the purpose of ServiceNow when John Donahoe was presenting in the keynote, he said, "We are in the world to make people's work better." The work is basically the experience. So we know about all the digital, every client is adopting the digital because of the advent of the cloud and the technologies around the AI, machine learning, et cetera, everybody is having a clear chatter of the digital transformation chatter as a part of their enterprises. So that is where we, companies like Cognizant, we go to them and then help them in truly being digital, how do you get there. That is where technologies like ServiceNow plays a critical role. >> And so it is the mission of ServiceNow, and it sounds like also the mission of Cognizant, to make the world of work work better for people. So give me some examples of ways that you are creatively solving employee headaches. How are you making the world of work better? >> I'll give a couple of examples. To start with, for a leading manufacturing company there are a lot of equipment dispersed across the field so we use IOT technology, sensors, and we collect the data, and the data gets analyzed and then we give a dashboard to our customers. When I say customers, the chief customer support officer, he or she can look at the dashboard and send the technician for evaluate it Imagine if the cloud was not there and moreover we use ServiceNow as a platform to do all the orchestration. If the cloud was not there, if products like ServiceNow was not there, this could have been a humongous task, but we are helping the problem for the customer. Today, with one click, the chief customer support officer can know which machine is giving which problem, accordingly dispatch a technician. This is one example. The second example is we are helping some agricultural companies where, in fact this came out during our hackathon, which I'll talk about you a little bit later, all this agricultural farms, the lands are there. When you wanted to grow something, you also need to know everyday what is the moisture of the soil, what is the temperature, et cetera. So we apply IOT technology and then collect the data and use ServiceNow dashboard to give it back to the customer. These are all real-time problems the customers are facing. There are so many examples, but if you look at most of the solutions and the outcomes what we give to the customer, it's all triggered by our innovation. So we are the only company, I can proudly say, conducted three hackathons with ServiceNow. When I say hackathon, all the people are put under one room and ideas were given and end of the day you'll get 100 plus ideas. Recently we did, about a month back, we did a global hackathon. First time we wanted to try India, three continents, seven cities, India, Budapest, Phoenix, 20 hours of continuous time. We generated about 115 ideas. Out of the 115 ideas, I think we are going to come with certain ideas and then put that back into ServiceNow app store. We have close to six plus apps already running on the ServiceNow store, now our plan for the next six months is to add another about 10 plus apps onto the ServiceNow store. >> That is the other questions that that begs. Are hackathons the best way in your mind to spark energy and innovation and creativity? >> Especially with the millennials. The millennials, yes definitely because they don't want to very mundane, routine work. They want a challenge, they are asking for challenge. So this hackathon is one of the ways to keep them happy. Because the future of workforce is changing with millennials coming in. And the jobs, they're also expecting, even in my team people wanted a change every 12 months. While we need to address our customers, we also need to take care of their expectations also. >> Let's think about the future a little bit now. What do you see your customers' future demands and where do you see Cognizant and ServiceNow being able to provide solutions to the problems they don't even know they're having. >> Right, right. So digital is the heartbeat. When I say digital is the heartbeat, the outcome is all about experience because if someone asks me, digital is not technology. Digital is all about experience so in order to give that experience, customers wanted multiple technologies, they wanted to reinvent, rewire, rethink their business models. So that is where we wanted to go as a Cognizant. For example, if you take ServiceNow, if you're taking that platform to them, how can I digitize your enterprise process, digitize your entire workflow and create automation, et cetera and then bring a collaborative work environment within your ecosystem. So this is what they are expecting. Nobody wants non-value add, mundane task, everything they want to get operated in an automation manner. That is where we are helping, basically anything that changes the experience, or pave a new way to the experience, that is where we at Cognizant we are constantly reinvesting on people, process, technology, and then taking that back to our customers. >> That's a great note to end on. Raja, we'll look forward to seeing you again at Knowledge19 next year. >> Thank you, definitely. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 in just a little bit.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. I'm Dave Vellante, this is Jeff Frick. Raja Renganathan is here. He's the Vice President of Cloud Services at Cognizant Technology Solutions. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> So, tell us about Cognizant and what you're doing to sort of support your client's digital transformations. Let's start there. >> Yeah. So Cognizant is, you know, a leading digital technology outsourcing, you know, provider. We help our clients to lead the digital. Okay, so basically customers are going through disruption, that digital disruption, and everybody is going through the digital transformation. So, we help our clients to navigate the digital shift. So, how we do that is via three-pillar, right. We have, you know, imagine a front office, a middle office and a back office. The front office is digital business. Our digital business unit helps our customers to innovate new products and solutions, you know, using data as a new oil, new ad, whatever you want to call it as. Then, the middle office, that is where, getting into the enterprise, we're touching the business processes. How do we create platforms to simplify and modernize those processes. And how do we create business process as a service? That's what we call it, as a middle office. That's our digital operations, you know, pillar. The third one is, how do I modernize the legacy technologies, you know, into the latest turning-towards-digital, thereby providing agile and you know, extensible, you know, things like that. So, that's our digital systems and technology. So, we introduce these three core pillars, and the underlying platform for everything is Cloud. That's where we see, you know, products like, such as ServiceNow. It plays a very critical role towards, you know, fulfilling our customers' value. >> So, what's your strategy with respect to ServiceNow and the partnership? >> If you look at our partnership, you know, back in 2008, this is a small history to that. See, we introduced the Fortune, you know, 1000 enterprises. At the time, you know, The BMC and the HP, you know, those are all providing, it was pervasive those days. >> Sure. >> Then we started hearing from the customers, "Hey, do you guys know a company called ServiceNow?" You know, that is where I think, hey, everybody's talking ServiceNow. So, what is it all about? That is where we started our journey, back in 2008. At the time, we put together, we took some, you know, the BMC and the HP guys, we reskilled them, trained them on ServiceNow. Right? Started with about a 10-people practice. Today we are 700-plus people practice, spread across four delivery centers. And the beauty is all of the 700, 675-plus, are certified in ServiceNow. So, that is what the value people see. That the certification skillset, the implementation, you know, the knowledge that we take to the customer, they see that as a value. >> Then, how are you seeing the implementations evolve inside the customers, once you go in and do an initial project? How is it evolving? We keep hearing about all these different application stacks and kind of service areas. What are you seeing in the field? >> If you look at our customers, I think, you know, we also, the place is valued, we have ServiceNow. Most of them are, you know, they are Cognizant customers. You know, because we know that application. Because we bring the domain knowledge and the application. Everyone starts with the basic thing, ITSM. IT Service Management Model. But, because of the digital shift, they are going beyond ITSM. So, they want to move from systems of records to systems of intelligence. Now, we are going one level above. How do we create a system of action with ServiceNow, workflows and automation and things like that. So, today, if you look at ITSM, yes, it's becoming a commodity. That is where, I think, ServiceNow has really helped us. But, customers want to use the power of the platform. How do I add customer service on top of it? How do I create, you know, HR module and Finance module and Legal and facilities, and use the power of the platform. So, this is how we see the implementation approach. They start with ITSM and then go through, you know, module by module. But there are some customers where they say, "Hey, you know what? "I have so many tools in the ecosystem, "but I want ServiceNow to be the fulcrum "or manager of managers." So that is where we use the ServiceNow platform to integrate. ServiceNow has got a lot of API integretation, you know, mechanics. We use the integration, API integration methodology and then integrate various tools into it. Provide a common, single-pane window. >> Is this allowing your customers to gain a competitive advantage? Or is it cutting costs for them? I mean, what is there, what is your customers' sort of, business case, and the business value? Is there differentiation that's inherent? >> So, traditional ideas sim, they, if you take the legacy, the tools that used to exist, compared to a ServiceNow-based idea sim. We have seen customers who are already reducing call volumes by 30 per cent. Okay? Just an average, incident, call-incident reduction, call reduction, et cetera. However, we are in the AI era, artificial intelligence, you know. We have moved from mobile firsts to artificial intelligence first. Artificial intelligence is no longer in the labs. It is on the street. Customers are looking for, how do we, you know, use artificial intelligence and mission learning to increase the service levels? So, that is why we call it as, modernizing ideas sim. That's what even ServiceNow says, that one of the customer conversations. In the modernization ideas sim, how do we bring the artificial intelligence and mission learning? Your 30 per cent can go up to 40 to 50 per cent. Right, and in the process, with conversational analytics, it makes, you know, again a superior end-user experience. >> And how does Cognizant differentiate in the marketplace? >> That's a great question. The key thing is the people. I would say, I would start with the people because any new technology, okay, whatever, the robots are there. You need the human intellectual capital to implement that. So that is where we realize this problem earlier and we started investing on the people. So we have something called a ServiceNow Academy where we constantly recruit people and reskill our own people to meet the needs of the ServiceNow. So, the ServiceNow Academy, that is where, constantly produces, you know, people, number one. Number two, we have ServiceNow Labs. This is an investment from Cognizant. We call it a center of excellence, whatever the name you want to call. The ServiceNow Labs is the biggest differentiator for our customers, where we constantly, you know, produce you know, the best practices and we take those best practices, you know, to the customer. The third one is, we constantly innovate. Innovation is very critical. So, we used to do something called Hackathon. For the past three years, we have been doing Hackathon. A team from ServiceNow, they go all the way to our delivery centers, in offshore. 4000 people will be part of the Hackathon, across different locations, while we're video conferencing, webex and things like that. Recently we did, about three months back, For 4000 people participating, 80-plus innovation ideas came out. All these 80-plus innovation ideas, we go back to our customer. "Hey, you're in healthcare. "This is something, you know, to track your ambulance. "You know, for 911, et cetera. "These are the things, ideas, you can do that." So, I would say, constantly reskilling the people via our ServiceNow Academy. The second thing is constantly producing best practices via our ServiceNow Labs. And the third one is, you know, powering the innovation by our Hackathon. These three things really help us to, you know, take the value of ServiceNow to our customers. >> Excellent, all right, we've got to wrap before the music starts. Raja, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> And thank you, and it's a pleasure in talking to you, guys, thank you. >> Ah, you're welcome. >> Thanks. >> All right, >> keep right there, everybody. We'll be back to wrap, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm here with the leader of the partner program, Sandy Carter, Vice President, AWS, Amazon Web Services @Sandy_Carter on Twitter, prolific on social and great leader. Sandy, great to see you again. And congratulations on this great program we're having here. In fact, thanks for coming out for this keynote. Well, thank you, John, for having me. You guys always talk about the coolest thing. So we had to be part of it. >> Well, one of the things that I've been really loving about this success of public sector we talked to us before is that as we start coming out of the pandemic, is becoming very clear that the cloud has helped a lot of people and your team has done amazing work, just want to give you props for that and say, congratulations, and what a great time to talk about the winners. Because everyone's been working really hard in public sector, because of the pandemic. The internet didn't break. And everyone stepped up with cloud scale and solve some problems. So take us through the award winners and talk about them. Give us an overview of what it is. The criteria and all the specifics. >> Yeah, you got it. So we've been doing this annually, and it's for our public sector partners overall, to really recognize the very best of the best. Now, we love all of our partners, John, as you know, but every year we'd like to really hone in on a couple who really leverage their skills and their ability to deliver a great customer solution. They demonstrate those Amazon leadership principles like working backwards from the customer, having a bias for action, they've engaged with AWS and very unique ways. And as well, they've contributed to our customer success, which is so very important to us and to our customers as well. >> That's awesome. Hey, can we put up a slide, I know we have slide on the winners, I want to look at them, with the tiles here. So here's a list of some of the winners. I see a nice little stars on there. Look at the gold star. I knows IronNet, CrowdStrike. That's General Keith Alexander's company, I mean, super relevant. Presidio, we've interviewed them before many times, got Palantir in there. And is there another one, I want to take a look at some of the other names here. >> In overall we had 21 categories. You know, we have over 1900 public sector partners today. So you'll notice that the awards we did, a big focus on mission. So things like government, education, health care, we spotlighted some of the brand new technologies like Containers, Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Connect. And we also this year added in awards for innovative use of our programs, like think big for small business and PTP as well. >> Yeah, well, great roundup, they're looking forward to hearing more about those companies. I have to ask you, because this always comes up, we're seeing more and more ecosystem discussions when we talk about the future of cloud. And obviously, we're going to, you know, be at Mobile World Congress, theCUBE, back in physical form, again, (indistinct) will continue to go on. The notion of ecosystem is becoming a key competitive advantage for companies and missions. So I have to ask you, why are partners so important to your public sector team? Talk about the importance of partners in context to your mission? >> Yeah, you know, our partners are critical. We drive most of our business and public sector through partners. They have great relationships, they've got great skills, and they have, you know, that really unique ability to meet the customer needs. If I just highlighted a couple of things, even using some of our partners who won awards, the first is, you know, migrations are so critical. Andy talked at Reinvent about still 96% of applications still sitting on premises. So anybody who can help us with the velocity of migrations is really critical. And I don't know if you knew John, but 80% of our migrations are led by partners. So for example, we gave awards to Collibra and Databricks as best lead migration for data as well as Datacom for best data lead migration as well. And that's because they increase the velocity of migrations, which increases customer satisfaction. They also bring great subject matter expertise, in particular around that mission that you're talking about. So for instance, GDIT won best Mission Solution For Federal, and they had just an amazing solution that was a secure virtual desktop that reduced a federal agencies deployment process, from months to days. And then finally, you know, our partners drive new opportunities and innovate on behalf of our customers. So we did award this year for P to P, Partnering to Partner which is a really big element of ecosystems, but it was won by four points and in quizon, and they were able to work together to implement a data, implement a data lake and an AI, ML solution, and then you just did the startup showcase, we have a best startup delivering innovation too, and that was EduTech (indistinct) Central America. And they won for implementing an amazing student registration and early warning system to alert and risks that may impact a student's educational achievement. So those are just some of the reasons why partners are important. I could go on and on. As you know, I'm so passionate about my partners, >> I know you're going to talk for an hour, we have to cut you off a little there. (indistinct) love your partners so much. You have to focus on this mission thing. It was a strong mission focus in the awards this year. Why are customers requiring much more of a mission focused? Is it because, is it a part of the criteria? I mean, we're seeing a mission being big. Why is that the case? >> Well, you know, IDC, said that IT spend for a mission or something with a purpose or line of business was five times greater than IT. We also recently did our CTO study where we surveyed thousands of CTOs. And the biggest and most changing elements today is really not around the technology. But it's around the industry, healthcare, space that we talked about earlier, or government. So those are really important. So for instance, New Reburial, they won Best Emission for Healthcare. And they did that because of their new smart diagnostic system. And then we had a partner when PA consulting for Best Amazon Connect solution around a mission for providing support for those most at risk, the elderly population, those who already had pre existing conditions, and really making sure they were doing what they called risk shielding during COVID. Really exciting and big, strong focus on mission. >> Yeah, and it's also, you know, we've been covering a lot on this, people want to work for a company that has purpose, and that has missions. I think that's going to be part of the table stakes going forward. I got to ask you on the secrets of success when this came up, I love asking this question, because, you know, we're starting to see the playbooks of what I call post COVID and cloud scale 2.0, whatever you want to call it, as you're starting to see this new modern era of success formulas, obviously, large scale value creation mission. These are points we're hearing and keep conversations across the board. What do you see as the secret of success for these parties? I mean, obviously, it's indirect for Amazon, I get that, but they're also have their customers, they're your customers, customers. That's been around for a while. But there's a new model emerging. What are the secrets from your standpoint of success? you know, it's so interesting, John, that you asked me this, because this is the number one question that I get from partners too. I would say the first secret is being able to work backwards from your customer, not just technology. So take one of our award winners Cognizant. They won for their digital tolling solution. And they work backwards from the customer and how to modernize that, or Pariveda, who is one of our best energy solution winners. And again, they looked at some of these major capital projects that oil companies were doing, working backwards from what the customer needed. I think that's number one, working backwards from the customer. Two, is having that mission expertise. So given that you have to have technology, but you also got to have that expertise in the area. We see that as a big secret of our public sector partners. So education cloud, (indistinct) one for education, effectual one for government and not for profit, Accenture won, really leveraging and showcasing their global expansion around public safety and disaster response. Very important as well. And then I would say the last secret of success is building repeatable solutions using those strong skills. So Deloitte, they have a great solution for migration, including mainframes. And then you mentioned early on, CloudStrike and IronNet, just think about the skill sets that they have there for repeatable solutions around security. So I think it's really around working backwards from the customer, having that mission expertise, and then building a repeatable solution, leveraging your skill sets. >> That's a great formula for success. I got you mentioned IronNet, and cybersecurity. One of things that's coming up is, in addition to having those best practices, there's also like real problems to solve, like, ransomware is now becoming a government and commercial problem, right. So (indistinct) seeing that happen a lot in DC, that's a front burner. That's a societal impact issue. That's like a cybersecurity kind of national security defense issue, but also, it's a technical one. And also public sector, through my interviews, I can tell you the past year and a half, there's been a lot of creativity of new solutions, new problems or new opportunities that are not yet identified as problems and I'd love to get your thoughts on my concern is with Jeff Bar yesterday from AWS, who's been blogging all the the news and he is a leader in the community. He was saying that he sees like 5G in the edge as new opportunities where it's creative. It's like he compared to the going to the home improvement store where he just goes to buy one thing. He does other things. And so there's a builder culture. And I think this is something that's coming out of your group more, because the pandemic forced these problems, and they forced new opportunities to be creative, and to build. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so I see that too. So if you think about builders, you know, we had a partner, Executive Council yesterday, we had 900, executives sign up from all of our partners. And we asked some survey questions like, what are you building with today? And the number one thing was artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I think that's such a new builders tool today, John, and, you know, one of our partners who won an award for the most innovative AI&ML was Kablamo And what they did was they use AI&ML to do a risk assessment on bushfires or wildfires in Australia. But I think it goes beyond that. I think it's building for that need. And this goes back to, we always talk about #techforgood. Presidio, I love this award that they won for best nonprofit, the Cherokee Nation, which is one of our, you know, Native American heritage, they were worried about their language going out, like completely out like no one being able to speak yet. And so they came to Presidio, and they asked how could we have a virtual classroom platform for the Cherokee Nation? And they created this game that's available on your phone, so innovative, so much of a builder's culture to capture that young generation, so they don't you lose their language. So I do agree. I mean, we're seeing builders everywhere, we're seeing them use artificial intelligence, Container, security. And we're even starting with quantum, so it is pretty powerful of what you can do as a public sector partner. >> I think the partner equation is just so wide open, because it's always been based on value, adding value, right? So adding value is just what they do. And by the way, you make money doing it if you do a good job of adding value. And, again, I just love riffing on this, because Dave and I talked about this on theCUBE all the time, and it comes up all the time in cloud conversations. The lock in isn't proprietary technology anymore, its value, and scale. So you starting to see builders thrive in that environment. So really good points. Great best practice. And I think I'm very bullish on the partner ecosystems in general, and people do it right, flat upside. I got to ask you, though, going forward, because this is the big post COVID kind of conversation. And last time we talked on theCUBE about this, you know, people want to have a growth strategy coming out of COVID. They want to be, they want to have a tail win, they want to be on the right side of history. No one wants to be in the losing end of all this. So last year in 2021 your goals were very clear, mission, migrations, modernization. What's the focus for the partners beyond 2021? What are you guys thinking to enable them, 21 is going to be a nice on ramp to this post COVID growth strategy? What's the focus beyond 2021 for you and your partners? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, we're going to actually continue to focus on those three M's mission, migration and modernization. But we'll bring in different elements of it. So for example, on mission, we see a couple of new areas that are really rising to the top, Smart Cities now that everybody's going back to work and (indistinct) down, operations and maintenance and global defense and using gaming and simulation. I mean, think about that digital twin strategy and how you're doing that. For migration, one of the big ones we see emerging today is data-lead migration. You know, we have been focused on applications and mainframes, but data has gravity. And so we are seeing so many partners and our customers demanding to get their data from on premises to the cloud so that now they can make real time business decisions. And then on modernization. You know, we talked a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Containers are wicked hot right now, provides you portability and performance. I was with a startup last night that just moved everything they're doing to ECS our Container strategy. And then we're also seeing, you know, crippin, quantum blockchain, no code, low code. So the same big focus, mission migration, modernization, but the underpinnings are going to shift a little bit beyond 2021. >> That's great stuff. And you know, you have first of all people don't might not know that your group partners and Amazon Web Services public sector, has a big surface area. You talking about government, health care, space. So I have to ask you, you guys announced in March the space accelerator and you recently announced that you selected 10 companies to participate in the accelerated program. So, I mean, this is this is a space centric, you know, targeting, you know, low earth orbiting satellites to exploring the surface of the Moon and Mars, which people love. And because the space is cool, let's say the tech and space, they kind of go together, right? So take us through, what's this all about? How's that going? What's the selection, give us a quick update, while you're here on this space accelerated selection, because (indistinct) will have had a big blog post that went out (indistinct). >> Yeah, I would be thrilled to do that. So I don't know if you know this. But when I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. We just helped through (indistinct), one of our partners reach Mars. So Clint, who is a retired general and myself got together, and we decided we needed to do something to help startups accelerate in their space mission. And so we decided to announce a competition for 10 startups to get extra help both from us, as well as a partner Sarafem on space. And so we announced it, everybody expected the companies to come from the US, John, they came from 44 different countries. We had hundreds of startups enter, and we took them through this six week, classroom education. So we had our General Clint, you know, helping and teaching them in space, which he's done his whole life, we provided them with AWS credits, they had mentoring by our partner, Sarafem. And we just down selected to 10 startups, that was what Vernors blog post was. If you haven't read it, you should look at some of the amazing things that they're going to do, from, you know, farming asteroids to, you know, helping with some of the, you know, using small vehicles to connect to larger vehicles, when we all get to space. It's very exciting. Very exciting, indeed, >> You have so much good content areas and partners, exploring, it's a very wide vertical or sector that you're managing. Is there any pattern? Well, I want to get your thoughts on post COVID success again, is there any patterns that you're seeing in terms of the partner ecosystem? You know, whether its business model, or team makeup, or more mindset, or just how they're organizing that that's been successful? Is there like a, do you see a trend? Is there a certain thing, then I've got the working backwards thing, I get that. But like, is there any other observations? Because I think people really want to know, am I doing it right? Am I being a good manager, when you know, people are going to be working remotely more? We're seeing more of that. And there's going to be now virtual events, hybrid events, physical events, the world's coming back to normal, but it's never going to be the same. Do you see any patterns? >> Yeah, you know, we're seeing a lot of small partners that are making an entrance and solving some really difficult problems. And because they're so focused on a niche, it's really having an impact. So I really believe that that's going to be one of the things that we see, I focus on individual creators and companies who are really tightly aligned and not trying to do everything, if you will. I think that's one of the big trends. I think the second we talked about it a little bit, John, I think you're going to see a lot of focus on mission. Because of that purpose. You know, we've talked about #techforgood, with everything going on in the world. As people have been working from home, they've been reevaluating who they are, and what do they stand for, and people want to work for a company that cares about people. I just posted my human footer on LinkedIn. And I got my first over a million hits on LinkedIn, just by posting this human footer, saying, you know what, reply to me at a time that's convenient for you, not necessarily for me. So I think we're going to see a lot of this purpose driven mission, that's going to come out as well. >> Yeah, and I also noticed that, and I was on LinkedIn, I got a similar reaction when I started trying to create more of a community model, not so much have people attend our events, and we need butts in the seats. It was much more personal, like we wanted you to join us, not attend and be like a number. You know, people want to be part of something. This seem to be the new mission. >> Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that, you know, people do want to be part of something and they want, they want to be part of the meaning of something too, right. Not just be part of something overall, but to have an impact themselves, personally and individually, not just as a company. And I think, you know, one of the other trends that we saw coming up too, was the focus on technology. And I think low code, no code is giving a lot of people entry into doing things I never thought they could do. So I do think that technology, artificial intelligence Containers, low code, no code blockchain, those are going to enable us to even do greater mission-based solutions. >> Low code, no code reduces the friction to create more value, again, back to the value proposition. Adding value is the key to success, your partners are doing it. And of course, being part of something great, like the Global Public Sector Partner Awards list is a good one. And that's what we're talking about here. Sandy, great to see you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights and an update and talking more about the 2021, Global Public Sector partner Awards. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Okay, the Global Leaders here presented on theCUBE, again, award winners doing great work in mission, modernization, again, adding value. That's what it's all about. That's the new competitive advantage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, Bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Recent survey data from ETR shows that enterprise tech spending is tracking with projected US GDP growth at six to 7% this year. Many markers continue to point the way to a strong recovery, including hiring trends and the loosening of frozen IT Project budgets. However skills shortages are blocking progress at some companies which bodes well for an increased reliance on external IT services. Moreover, while there's much talk about the rotation out of work from home plays and stocks such as video conferencing, VDI, and other remote worker tech, we see organizations still trying to figure out the ideal balance between funding headquarter investments that have been neglected and getting hybrid work right. In particular, the talent gap combined with a digital mandate, means companies face some tough decisions as to how to fund the future while serving existing customers and transforming culturally. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE's Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we welcome back Erik Porter Bradley of ETR who will share fresh data, perspectives and insights from the latest survey data. Erik, great to see you. Welcome. >> Thank you very much, Dave. Always good to see you and happy to be on the show again. >> Okay, we're going to share some macro data and then we're going to dig into some highlights from ETR's most recent March COVID survey and also the latest April data. So Erik, the first chart that we want to show, it shows CIO and IT buyer responses to expected IT spend for each quarter of 2021 versus 2020, and you can see here a steady quarterly improvement. Erik, what are the key takeaways, from your perspective? >> Sure, well, first of all, for everyone out there, this particular survey had a record-setting number of participation. We had a 1,500 IT decision makers participate and we had over half of the Fortune 500 and over a fifth of the Global 1000. So it was a really good survey. This is seventh iteration of the COVID Impact Survey specifically, and this is going to transition to an overlarge macro survey going forward so we can continue it. And you're 100% right, what we've been tracking here since March of last year was, how is spending being impacted because of COVID? Where is it shifting? And what we're seeing now finally is that there is a real re-acceleration in spend. I know we've been a little bit more cautious than some of the other peers out there that just early on slapped an eight or a 9% number, but what we're seeing is right now, it's at a midpoint of over six, about 6.7% and that is accelerating. So, we are still hopeful that that will continue, and really, that spending is going to be in the second half of the year. As you can see on the left part of this chart that we're looking at, it was about 1.7% versus 3% for Q1 spending year-over-year. So that is starting to accelerate through the back half. >> I think it's prudent to be cautious (indistinct) 'cause normally you'd say, okay, tech is going to grow a couple of points higher than GDP, but it's really so hard to predict this year. Okay, the next chart here that we want to show you is we asked respondents to indicate what strategies they're employing in the short term as a result of coronavirus and you can see a few things that I'll call out and then I'll ask Erik to chime in. First, there's been no meaningful change of course, no surprise in tactics like remote work and holding travel, however, we're seeing very positive trends in other areas trending downward, like hiring freezes and freezing IT deployments, a downward trend in layoffs, and we also see an increase in the acceleration of new IT deployments and in hiring. Erik, what are your key takeaways? >> Well, first of all, I think it's important to point out here that we're also capturing that people believe remote work productivity is still increasing. Now, the trajectory might be coming down a little bit, but that is really key, I think, to the backdrop of what's happening here. So people have a perception that productivity of remote work is better than hybrid work and that's from the IT decision makers themselves, but what we're seeing here is that, most importantly, these organizations are citing plans to increase hiring, and that's something that I think is really important to point out. It's showing a real following, and to your point right in the beginning of the intro, we are seeing deployments stabilize versus prior survey levels, which means early on, they had no plans to launch new tech deployments, then they said, "Nope, we're going to start." and now that stalling, and I think it's exactly right, what you said, is there's an IT skills shortage. So people want to continue to do IT deployments 'cause they have to support work from home and a hybrid back return to the office, but they just don't have the skills to do so, and I think that's really probably the most important takeaway from this chart, is that stalling and to really ask why it's stalling. >> Yeah, so we're going to get into that for sure, and I think that's a really key point, is that accelerating IT deployments, it looks like it's hit a wall in the survey, but before we get deep into the skills, let's take a look at this next chart, and we're asking people here how our return to the new normal, if you will, and back to offices is going to change spending with on-prem architectures and applications. And so the first two bars, they're Cloud-friendly, if you add them up, it's 63% of the respondents, say that either they'll stay in the Cloud for the most part, or they're going to lower their on-prem spend when they go back to the office. The next three bars are on-prem friendly. If you add those up it's 29% of the respondents say their on-prem spend is going to bounce back to pre-COVID levels or actually increase, and of course, 12% of that number, by the way, say they've never altered their on-prem spend. So Erik, no surprise, but this bodes well for Cloud, but isn't it also a positive for on-prem? We've had this dual funding premise, meaning Cloud continues to grow, but neglected data center spend also gets a boost. What's your thoughts? >> Really, it's interesting. It's people are spending on all fronts. You and I were talking in the prep, it's like we're in battle and I've got naval, I've got air, I've got land, I've got to spend on Cloud and digital transformation, but I also have to spend for on-prem. The hybrid work is here and it needs to be supported. So this is spending is going to increase. When you look at this chart, you're going to see though, that roughly 36% of all respondents say that their spending is going to remain mostly on Cloud. So that is still the clear direction, digital transformation is still happening, COVID accelerated it greatly, you and I, as journalists and researchers already know this is where the puck is going, but spend has always lagged a little bit behind 'cause it just takes some time to get there. Inversely, 27% said that their on-prem spending will decrease. So when you look at those two, I still think that the trend is the friend for Cloud spending, even though, yes, they do have to continue spending on hybrid, some of it's been neglected, there are refresh cycles coming up, so, overall it just points to more and more spending right now. It really does seem to be a very strong backdrop for IT growth. >> So I want to talk a little bit about the ETR taxonomy before we bring up the next chart. We get a lot of questions about this, and of course, when you do a massive survey like you're doing, you have to have consistency for time series, so you have to really think through what the buckets look like, if you will. So this next chart takes a look at the ETR taxonomy and it breaks it down into simple-to-understand terms. So the green is the portion of spending on a vendor's tech within a category that is accelerating, and the red is the portion that is decelerating. So Erik, what are the key messages in this data? >> Well, first of all, Dave, thank you so much for pointing that out. We used to do, just what we call a Net score. It's a proprietary formula that we use to determine the overall velocity of spending. Some people found it confusing. Our data scientists decided to break this sector, break down into what you said, which is really more of a mode analysis. In that sector, how many of the vendors are increasing versus decreasing? So again, I just appreciate you bringing that up and allowing us to explain the reasoning behind our analysis there. But what we're seeing here goes back to something you and I did last year when we did our predictions, and that was that IT services and consulting was going to have a true rebound in 2021, and that's what this is showing right here. So in this chart, you're going to see that consulting and services are really continuing their recovery, 2020 had a lot of the clients and they have the biggest sector year-over-year acceleration sector wise. The other thing to point out on this, which we'll get to again later, is that the inverse analysis is true for video conferencing. We will get to that, so I'm going to leave a little bit of ammunition behind for that one, but what we're seeing here is IT consulting services being the real favorable and video conferencing having a little bit more trouble. >> Great, okay, and then let's take a look at that services piece, and this next chart really is a drill down into that space and emphasizes, Erik, what you were just talking about. And we saw this in IBM's earnings, where still more than 60% of IBM's business comes from services and the company beat earnings, in part, due to services outperforming expectations, I think it had a somewhat easier compare and some of this pent-up demand that we've been talking about bodes well for IBM and other services companies, it's not just IBM, right, Erik? >> No, it's not, but again, I'm going to point out that you and I did point out IBM in our predictions when we did in late December, so, it is nice to see. One of the reasons we don't have a more favorable rating on IBM at the moment is because they are in the process of spinning out this large unit, and so there's a little bit of a corporate action there that keeps us off on the sideline. But I would also want to point out here, Tata, Infosys and Cognizant 'cause they're seeing year-over-year acceleration in both IT consulting and outsourced IT services. So we break those down separately and those are the three names that are seeing acceleration in both of those. So again, at the Tata, Infosys and Cognizant are all looking pretty well positioned as well. >> So we've been talking a little bit about this skills shortage, and this is what's, I think, so hard for forecasters, is that in the one hand, There's a lot of pent up demand, Scott Gottlieb said it's like Woodstock coming out of the COVID, but on the other hand, if you have a talent gap, you've got to rely on external services. So there's a learning curve, there's a ramp up, it's an external company, and so it takes time to put those together. So this data that we're going to show you next, is really important in my view and ties what we were saying at the top. It asks respondents to comment on their staffing plans. The light blue is "We're increasing staff", the gray is "No change" and the magenta or whatever, whatever color that is that sort of purplish color, anyway, that color is decreasing, and the picture is very positive across the board. Full-time staff, offshoring, contract employees, outsourced professional services, all up trending upwards, and this Erik is more evidence of the services bounce back. >> Yeah, it's certainly, yes, David, and what happened is when we caught this trend, we decided to go one level deeper and say, all right, we're seeing this, but we need to know why, and that's what we always try to do here. Data will tell you what's happening, it doesn't always tell you why, and that's one of the things that ETR really tries to dig in with through the insights, interviews panels, and also going direct with these more custom survey questions. So in this instance, I think the real takeaway is that 30% of the respondents said that their outsourced and managed services are going to increase over the next three months. That's really powerful, that's a large portion of organizations in a very short time period. So we're capturing that this acceleration is happening right now and it will be happening in real time, and I don't see it slowing down. You and I are speaking about we have to increase Cloud spend, we have to increase hybrid spend, there are refresh cycles coming up, and there's just a real skills shortage. So this is a long-term setup that bodes very well for IT services and consulting. >> You know, Erik, when I came out of college, somebody told me, "Read, read, read, read as much as you can." And then they said, "Read the Wall Street Journal every day." and so I did it, and I would read the tech magazines and back then it was all paper, and what happens is you begin to connect the dots. And so the reason I bring that up is because I've now taken a bath in the ETR data for the better part of two years and I'm beginning to be able to connect the dots. The data is not always predictive, but many, many times it is. And so this next data gets into the fun stuff where we name names. A lot of times people don't like it because they're either marketing people at organizations, say, "Well, data's wrong." because that's the first thing they do, is attack the data. But you and I know, we've made some really great calls, work from home, for sure, you're talking about the services bounce back. We certainly saw the rise of CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, well before people were talking about that, same thing with video conferencing. And so, anyway, this is the fun stuff and it looks at positive versus negative sentiment on companies. So first, how does ETR derive this data and how should we interpret it, and what are some of your takeaways? >> Sure, first of all, how we derive the data, are systematic survey responses that we do on a quarterly basis, and we standardize those responses to allow for time series analysis so we can do trend analysis as well. We do find that our data, because it's talking about forward-looking spending intentions, is really more predictive because we're talking about things that might be happening six months, three months in the future, not things that a lot of other competitors and research peers are looking at things that already happened, they're looking in the past, ETR really likes to look into the future and our surveys are set up to do so. So thank you for that question, It's a enjoyable lead in, but to get to the fun stuff, like you said, what we do here is we put ratings on the datasets. I do want to put the caveat out there that our spending intentions really only captures top-line revenue. It is not indicative of profit margin or any other line items, so this is only to be viewed as what we are rating the data set itself, not the company, that's not what we're in the game of doing. So I think that's very important for the marketing and the vendors out there themselves when they take a look at this. We're just talking about what we can control, which is our data. We're going to talk about a few of the names here on this highlighted vendors list. One, we're going to go back to that you and I spoke about, I guess, about six months ago, or maybe even earlier, which was the observability space. You and I were noticing that it was getting very crowded, a lot of new entrants, there was a lot of acquisition from more of the legacy or standard players in the space, and that is continuing. So I think in a minute, we're going to move into that observability space, but what we're seeing there is that it's becoming incredibly crowded and we're possibly seeing signs of them cannibalizing each other. We're also going to move on a little bit into video conferencing, where we're capturing some spend deceleration, and then ultimately, we're going to get into a little bit of a storage refresh cycle and talk about that. But yeah, these are the highlighted vendors for April, we usually do this once a quarter and they do change based on the data, but they're not usually whipsawed around, the data doesn't move that quickly. >> Yeah, so you can see some of the big names in the left-hand side, some of the SAS companies that have momentum. Obviously, ServiceNow has been doing very, very well. We've talked a lot about Snowflake, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all very positive, as well as several others. I guess I'd add some things. I mean, I think if thinking about the next decade, it's Cloud, which is not going to be like the same Cloud as the last decade, a lot of machine learning and deep learning and AI and the Cloud is extending to the edge and the data center. Data, obviously, very important, data is decentralized and distributed, so data architectures are changing. A lot of opportunities to connect across Clouds and actually create abstraction layers, and then something that we've been covering a lot is processor performance is actually accelerating relative to Moore's law. It's probably instead of doubling every two years, it's quadrupling every two years, and so that is a huge factor, especially as it relates to powering AI and AI inferencing at the edge. This is a whole new territory, custom Silicon is really becoming in vogue and so something that we're watching very, very closely. >> Yeah, I completely, agree on that and I do think that the next version of Cloud will be very different. Another thing to point out on that too, is you can't do anything that you're talking about without collecting the data and organizations are extremely serious about that now. It seems it doesn't matter what industry they're in, every company is a data company, and that also bodes well for the storage goal. We do believe that there is going to just be a huge increase in the need for storage, and yes, hopefully that'll become portable across multi-Cloud and hybrid as well. >> Now, as Erik said, the ETR data, it's really focused on that top-line spend. So if you look on the right side of that chart, you saw NetApp was kind of negative, was very negative, right? But it is a company that's in transformation now, they've lowered expectations and they've recently beat expectations, that's why the stock has been doing better, but at the macro, from a spending standpoint, it's still stout challenged. So you have big footprint companies like NetApp and Oracle is another one. Oracle's stock is at an all time high, but the spending relative to sort of previous cycles are relative to, like for instance, Snowflake, much, much smaller, not as high growth, but they're managing expectations, they're managing their transition, they're managing profitability. Zoom is another one, Zoom looking negative, but Zoom's got to use its market cap now to transform and increase its TAM. And then Splunk is another one we're going to talk about. Splunk is in transition, it acquired SignalFX, It just brought on this week, Teresa Carlson, who was the head of AWS Public Sector. She's the president and head of sales, so they've got a go-to-market challenge and they brought in Teresa Carlson to really solve that, but Splunk has been trending downward, we called that several quarters ago, Erik, and so I want to bring up the data on Splunk, and this is Splunk, Erik, in analytics, and it's not trending in the right direction. The green is accelerating spend, the red is in the bars is decelerating spend, the top blue line is spending velocity or Net score, and the yellow line is market share or pervasiveness in the dataset. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, first I want to go back. There's a great point, Dave, about our data versus a disconnect from an equity analysis perspective. I used to be an equity analyst, that is not what we do here. And the main word you said is expectations, right? Stocks will trade on how they do compare to the expectations that are set, whether that's buy-side expectations, sell-side expectations or management's guidance themselves. We have no business in tracking any of that, what we are talking about is the top-line acceleration or deceleration. So, that was a great point to make, and I do think it's an important one for all of our listeners out there. Now, to move to Splunk, yes, I've been capturing a lot of negative commentary on Splunk even before the data turns. So this has been a about a year-long, our analysis and review on this name and I'm dating myself here, but I know you and I are both rock and roll fans, so I'm going to point out a Led Zeppelin song and movie, and say that the song remains the same for Splunk. We are just seeing recent spending attentions are taking yet another step down, both from prior survey levels, from year ago levels. This, we're looking at in the analytics sector and spending intentions are decelerating across every single group, and we went to one of our other slide analysis on the ETR+ platform, and you do by customer sub-sample, in analytics, it's dropping in every single vertical. It doesn't matter which one. it's really not looking good, unfortunately, and you had mentioned this is an analytics and I do believe the next slide is an information security. >> Yeah, let's bring that up. >> And unfortunately it's not doing much better. So this is specifically Fortune 500 accounts and information security. There's deep pockets in the Fortune 500, but from what we're hearing in all the insights and interviews and panels that I personally moderate for ETR, people are upset, that they didn't like the strong tactics that Splunk has used on them in the past, they didn't like the ingestion model pricing, the inflexibility, and when alternatives came along, people are willing to look at the alternatives, and that's what we're seeing in both analytics and big data and also for their SIM and security. >> Yeah, so I think again, I pointed Teresa Carlson. She's got a big job, but she's very capable. She's going to meet with a lot of customers, she's a go-to-market pro, she's going to to have to listen hard, and I think you're going to see some changes there. Okay, so sorry, there's more bad news on Splunk. So (indistinct) bring this up is Net score for Splunk and Elastic accounts. This is for analytics, so there's 106 Elastic accounts in the dataset that also have Splunk and it's trending downward for Splunk, that's why it's green for Elastic. And Erik, the important call out from ETR here is how Splunk's performance in Elastic accounts compares with its performance overall. The ELK stack, which obviously Elastic is a big part of that, is causing pain for Splunk, as is Datadog, and you mentioned the pricing issue, well, is it pricing in your assessment or is it more fundamental? >> It's multi-level based on the commentary we get from our ITDMs teams that take the survey. So yes, you did a great job with this analysis. What we're looking at is the spending within shared accounts. So if I have Splunk already, how am I spending? I'm sorry if I have Elastic already, how am I spending on Splunk? And what you're seeing here is it's down to about a 12% Net score, whereas Splunk overall, has a 32% Net score among all of its customers. So what you're seeing there is there is definitely a drain that's happening where Elastic is draining spend from Splunk and usage from them. The reason we used Elastic here is because all observabilities, the whole sector seems to be decelerating. Splunk is decelerating the most, but Elastic is the only one that's actually showing resiliency, so that's why we decided to choose these two, but you pointed out, yes, it's also Datadog. Datadog is Cloud native. They're more dev ops-oriented. They tend to be viewed as having technological lead as compared to Splunk. So a really good point. Dynatrace also is expanding their abilities and Splunk has been making a lot of acquisitions to push their Cloud services, they are also changing their pricing model, right? They're trying to make things a little bit more flexible, moving off ingestion and moving towards consumption. So they are trying, and the new hires, I'm not going to bet against them because the one thing that Splunk has going for them is their market share in our survey, they're still very well entrenched. So they do have a lot of accounts, they have their foothold. So if they can find a way to make these changes, then they will be able to change themselves, but the one thing I got to say across the whole sector is competition is increasing, and it does appear based on commentary and data that they're starting to cannibalize themselves. It really seems pretty hard to get away from that, and you know there are startups in the observability space too that are going to be even more disruptive. >> I think I want to key on the pricing for a moment, and I've been pretty vocal about this. I think the old SAS pricing model where you essentially lock in for a year or two years or three years, pay up front, or maybe pay quarterly if you're lucky, that's a one-way street and I think it's a flawed model. I like what Snowflake's doing, I like what Datadog's doing, look at what Stripe is doing, look at what Twilio is doing, you mentioned it, it's consumption-based pricing, and if you've got a great product, put it out there and damn, the torpedoes, and I think that is a game changer. I look at, for instance, HPE with GreenLake, I look at Dell with Apex, they're trying to mimic that model and apply it to infrastructure, it's much harder with infrastructure 'cause you've got to deploy physical infrastructure, but that is a model that I think is going to change, and I think all of the traditional SAS pricing is going to come under disruption over the next better part of the decades, but anyway, let's move on. We've been covering the APM space pretty extensively, application performance management, and this chart lines up some of the big players here. Comparing Net score or spending momentum from the April 20th survey, the gray is, sorry, the gray is the April 20th survey, the blue is Jan 21 and the yellow is April 21, and not only are Elastic and Datadog doing well relative to Splunk, Erik, but everything is down from last year. So this space, as you point out, is undergoing a transformation. >> Yeah, the pressures are real and it's sort of that perfect storm where it's not only the data that's telling us that, but also the direct feedback we get from the community. Pretty much all the interviews I do, I've done a few panels specifically on this topic, for anyone who wants to dive a little bit deeper. We've had some experts talk about this space and there really is no denying that there is a deceleration in spend and it's happening because that spend is getting spread out among different vendors. People are using a Datadog for certain aspects, they are using Elastic where they can 'cause it's cheaper. They're using Splunk because they have to, but because it's so expensive, they're cutting some of the things that they're putting into Splunk, which is dangerous, particularly on the security side. If I have to decide what to put in and whatnot, that's not really the right way to have security hygiene. So this space is just getting crowded, there's disruptive vendors coming from the emerging space as well, and what you're seeing here is the only bit of positivity is Elastic on a survey-over-survey basis with a slight, slight uptick. Everywhere else, year-over-year and survey-over-survey, it's showing declines, it's just hard to ignore. >> And then you've got Dynatrace who, based on the interviews you do in the (indistinct), one-on-one, or one-on-five, the private interviews that I've been invited to, Dynatrace gets very high scores for their roadmap. You've got New Relic, which has been struggling financially, but they've got a really good product and a purpose-built database just for this APM space, and then of course, you've got Cisco with AppD, which is a strong business for them, and then as you mentioned, you've got startups coming in, you got ChaosSearch, which Ed Walsh is now running, leave the data in place in AWS and really interesting model, Honeycomb is getting really disruptive, Jeremy Burton's company, Observed. So this space is it's becoming jumped ball. >> Yeah, there's a great line that came out of one of them, and that was that the lines are blurring. It used to be that you knew exactly that AppDynamics, what they were doing, it was APM only, or it was logging and monitoring only, and a lot of what I'm hearing from the ITDM experts is that the lines are blurring amongst all of these names. They all have functionality that kind of crosses over each other. And the other interesting thing is it used to be application versus infrastructure monitoring, but as you know, infrastructure is becoming code more and more and more, and as infrastructure becomes code, there's really no difference between application and infrastructure monitoring. So we're seeing a convergence and a blurring of the lines in this space, which really doesn't bode well, and a great point about New Relic, their tech gets good remarks. I just don't know if their enterprise level service and sales is up to snuff right now. As one of my experts said, a CTO of a very large public online hospitality company essentially said that he would be shocked that within 18 months if all of these players are still standalone, that there needs to be some M and A or convergence in this space. >> Okay, now we're going to call out some of the data that really has jumped out to ETR in the latest survey, and some of the names that are getting the most queries from ETR clients, many of which are investor clients. So let's start by having a look at one of the most important and prominent work from home names, Zoom. Let's look at this. Erik is the ride over for Zoom? >> Ah, I've been saying it for a little bit of a time now actually. I do believe it is, and we'll get into it, but again, pointing out, great, Dave, the reason we're presenting today Splunk, Elastic and Zoom, they are the most viewed on the ETR+ platform. Trailing behind that only slightly is F5, I decided not to bring F5 to the table today 'cause we don't have a rating on the data set. So then I went one deep, one below that and it's pure. So the reason we're presenting these to you today is that these are the ones that our clients and our community are most interested in, which is hopefully going to gain interest to your viewers as well. So to get to Zoom, yeah, I call Zoom the pandemic bull market baby. This was really just one that had a meteoric ride. You look back, January in 2020, the stock was at $60 and 10 months later, it was like 580, that's in 10 months. That's cooled down a little bit into the mid-300s, and I believe that cooling down should continue, and the reason why is because we are seeing huge deceleration in our spending intentions. They're hitting all-time lows, it's really just a very ugly dataset. More importantly than the spending intentions, for the first time, we're seeing customer growth in our survey flatten. In the past, we knew that the deceleration of spend was happening, but meanwhile, their new customer growth was accelerating, so it was kind of hard to really make any call based on that. This is the first time we're seeing flattening customer growth trajectory, and that in tandem with just dominance from Microsoft in every sector they're involved in, I don't care if it's IP telephony, productivity apps or the core video conferencing, Microsoft is just dominating. So there's really just no way to ignore this anymore. The data and the commentary state that Zoom is facing some headwinds. >> Well, plus you've pointed out to me that a lot of your private conversations with buyers says that, "Hey, we're, we're using the freebie version of Zoom, and we're not paying them." And that combined with Teams, I mean, it's... I think, look, Zoom, they've got to figure out how to use their elevated market cap to transform and expand their TAM, but let's move on. Here's the data on Pure Storage and we've highlighted a number of times this company is showing elevated spending intentions. Pure announced it's earnings in May, IBM just announced storage, it was way down actually. So still, Pure, more positive, but I'll on that comment in a moment, but what does this data tell you, Erik? >> Yeah, right now we started seeing this data last survey in January, and that was the first time we really went positive on the data set itself, and it's just really continuing. So we're seeing the strongest year-over-year acceleration in the entire survey, which is a really good spot to be. Pure is also a leading position among its sector peers, and the other thing that was pretty interesting from the data set is among all storage players, Pure has the highest positive public Cloud correlation. So what we can do is we can see which respondents are accelerating their public Cloud spend and then cross-reference that with their storage spend and Pure is best positioned. So as you and I both know, digital transformation Cloud spending is increasing, you need to be aligned with that. And among all storage sector peers, Pure is best positioned in all of those, in spending intentions and adoptions and also public Cloud correlation. So yet again, to start another really strong dataset, and I have an anecdote about why this might be happening, because when I saw the data, I started asking in my interviews, what's going on here? And there was one particular person, he was a director of Cloud operations for a very large public tech company. Now, they have hybrid, but their data center is in colo, So they don't own and build their own physical building. He pointed out that during COVID, his company wanted to increase storage, but he couldn't get into his colo center due to COVID restrictions. They weren't allowed. You had 250,000 square feet, right, but you're only allowed to have six people in there. So it's pretty hard to get to your rack and get work done. He said he would buy storage, but then the colo would say, "Hey, you got to get it out of here. It's not even allowed to sit here. We don't want it in our facility." So he has all this pent up demand. In tandem with pent up demand, we have a refresh cycle. The SSD depreciation cycle is ending. SSDs are moving on and we're starting to see a new technology in that space, NVMe sorry, technology increasing in that space. So we have pent up demand and we have new technology and that's really leading to a refresh cycle, and this particular ITDM that I spoke to and many of his peers think this has a long tailwind that storage could be a good sector for some time to come. >> That's really interesting, thank you for that extra metadata. And I want to do a little deeper dive on storage. So here's a look at storage in the industry in context and some of the competitive. I mean, it's been a tough market for the reasons that we've highlighted, Cloud has been eating away that flash headroom. It used to be you'd buy storage to get more spindles and more performance and we're sort of forced to buy more, flash, gave more headroom, but it's interesting what you're saying about the depreciation cycle. So that's good news. So ETR combines, just for people's benefit here, combines primary and secondary storage into a single category. So you have companies like Pure and NetApp, which are really pure play primary storage companies, largely in the sector, along with Veeam, Cohesity and Rubrik, which are kind of secondary data or data protection. So my quick thoughts here that Pure is elevated and remains what I call the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, but that's positive tailwinds there, so that's good news. Rubrik is very elevated but down, it's big competitor, Cohesity is way off its highs, and I have to say to me, Veeam is like the Steady Eddy consistent player here. They just really continue to do well in the data protection business, and the highs are steady, the lows are steady. Dell is also notable, they've been struggling in storage. Their ISG business, which comprises servers and storage, it's been softer in COVID, and during even this new product rollout, so it's notable with this new mid range they have in particular, the uptick in Dell, this survey, because Dell is so large, a small uptick can be very good for Dell. HPE has a big announcement next month in storage, so that might improve based on a product cycle. Of course, the Nimble brand continues to do well, IBM, as I said, just announced a very soft quarter, down double digits again, and they're in a product cycle shift. And NetApp, it looks bad in the ETR data from a spending momentum standpoint, but their management team is transforming the company into a Cloud play, which Erik is why it was interesting that Pure has the greatest momentum in Cloud accounts, so that is sort of striking to me. I would have thought it would be NetApp, so that's something that we want to pay attention to, but I do like a lot of what NetApp is doing, and other than Pure, they're the only big kind of pure play in primary storage. So long-winded, intro there, Erik, but anything you'd add? >> No, actually I appreciate it as long-winded. I'm going to be honest with you, storage is not my best sector as far as a researcher and analyst goes, but I actually think that a lot of what you said is spot on. We do capture a lot of large organizations spend, we don't capture much mid and small, so I think when you're talking about these large, large players like NetApp not looking so good, all I would state is that we are capturing really big organization spending attention, so these are names that should be doing better to be quite honest, in those accounts, and at least according to our data, we're not seeing it in. It's longterm depression, as you can see, NetApp now has a negative spending velocity in this analysis. So, I can go dig around a little bit more, but right now the names that I'm hearing are Pure, Cohesity. I'm hearing a little bit about Hitachi trying to reinvent themselves in the space, but I'll take a wait-and-see approach on that one, but pure Cohesity are the ones I'm hearing a lot from our community. >> So storage is transforming to Cloud as a service. You've seen things like Apex in GreenLake from Dell and HPE and container storage. A little, so not really a lot of people paying attention to it, but Pure bought a company called Portworx which really specializes in container storage, and there's many startups there, they're trying to really change the way. David Flynn, has a startup in that space, he's the guy who started Fusion-io. So a lot of transformations happening here. Okay, I know it's been a long segment, we have to summarize, and let me go through a summary and then I'll give you the last word, Erik. So tech spending appears to be tracking US GDP at 6 to 7%. This talent shortage could be a blocker to accelerating IT deployments, so that's kind of good news actually for services companies. Digital transformation, it remains a priority, and that bodes, well, not only for services, but automation. UiPath went public this week, we profiled that extensively, that went public last Wednesday. Organizations that sit at the top face some tough decisions on how to allocate resources. They're running the business, growing the business, transforming the business, and we're seeing a bifurcation of spending and some residual effects on vendors, and that remains a theme that we're watching. Erik, your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm going to go back quickly to just the overall macro spending, 'cause there's one thing I think is interesting to point out and we're seeing a real acceleration among mid and small. So it seems like early on in the COVID recovery or COVID spending, it was the deep pockets that moved first, right? Fortune 500 knew they had to support remote work, they started spending first. Around that in the Fortune 500, we're only seeing about 5% spend, but when you get into mid and small organizations, that's creeping up to eight, nine. So I just think it's important to point out that they're playing catch up right now. I also would point out that this is heavily skewed to North America spending. We're seeing laggards in EMEA, they just don't seem to be spending as much. They're in a very different place in their recovery, and I do think that it's important to point that out. Lastly, I also want to mention, I know you do such a great job on following a lot of the disruptive vendors that you just pointed out, with Pure doing container storage, we also have another bi-annual survey that we do called Emerging Technology, and that's for the private names. That's going to be launching in May, for everyone out there who's interested in not only the disruptive vendors, but also private equity players. Keep an eye out for that. We do that twice a year and that's growing in its respondents as well. And then lastly, one comment, because you mentioned the UiPath IPO, it was really hard for us to sit on the sidelines and not put some sort of rating on their dataset, but ultimately, the data was muted, unfortunately, and when you're seeing this kind of hype into an IPO like we saw with Snowflake, the data was resoundingly strong. We had no choice, but to listen to what the data said for Snowflake, despite the hype. We didn't see that for UiPath and we wanted to, and I'm not making a large call there, but I do think it's interesting to juxtapose the two, that when snowflake was heading to its IPO, the data was resoundingly positive, and for UiPath, we just didn't see that. >> Thank you for that, and Erik, thanks for coming on today. It's really a pleasure to have you, and so really appreciate the collaboration and look forward to doing more of these. >> Yeah, we enjoy the partnership greatly, Dave. We're very happy to have you on the ETR family and looking forward to doing a lot, lot more with you in the future. >> Ditto. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you have to do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcast, and please subscribe to the series. Check out ETR website it's etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me, david.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me on Twitter @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. I could see you in Clubhouse. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Porter Bradley for the CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We are joined by Tracey Newell, she is the President Global Field Operations at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, for coming back on theCUBE. >> Coming back on theCUBE, it's great to be here. >> So the last time you were on, you had just taken over as the president of Global Field Operations. Give our viewers a catch up on exactly what you've been doing over these past two years, and what the journey's been like. >> Yeah, no that's great, thanks so much. As a reminder the last time we were together, I had just joined the company. I was literally two weeks in, and yet I actually did join Informatica three years ago. So I joined on the board of directors, and I was on the board for two years, and the company was doing so extremely well that after a couple of years we all agreed that I would step off the board and join the management team. >> I got to get in on this! >> I know, exactly. I've got to get off the sidelines and get into the game. >> Both sides of the table, literally. >> Exactly. >> So that's really interesting that you were on the board watching this growth and seeing, obviously participating in it, too, as a board member, but then you said, "I want to be here, I want to be doing this." What was it about the opportunity that so excited you that you felt that way? >> Well, it's funny, because when I did join the management team I spent two months on a listening tour, and the first question from all the employees and our partners was, "Why'd you do that?" Usually it goes the other way around, you go from the management team to the board. And the answer was really simple in that my hypothesis in joining the board was that digital transformation is an enterprise board of director's decision, that governments and large organizations are trying to figure this out with the CEO, the board, the management team, because it's critical, and yet it's also really hard. It's complicated, the data is everywhere. And so when you have something that's important and really complicated, you need a thought leader. And so my belief was that Informatica should be that thought leader. And two years in we were doing so phenomenally well with the platform play that we had been driving from an R&D standpoint, it just seemed like such an amazing opportunity to literally get off the sidelines and get into the game. And it's just been fabulous. >> And you have experience, obviously, doing field organizations so you've been there, done that. Also you have some public sector experience, so also being on the board was a time when Informatica went private. And that was a good call because they don't have to deal with the shot clock of the public markets and doing all those mandatory filings, and a lot of energy, management energy goes into being public company. >> That's right. >> At the time where they could get the product development and reposition some of the assets, and the thing that was interesting with you guys, they had customers already. So they didn't have to go out and get new customers to test new theses. >> That's right. >> They had existing customers. >> Oh no, we serve the biggest companies and governments on the planet. Globally, a very large percentage of the global 2000, is kind of our sweet spot. And yet thousands and thousands of customers in the mid market. And so to your point, John, exactly we had built out this platform that included all things on-premise, we're almost synonymous, PowerCenter and ETL, that's kind of been our sweet spot. And MDM data quality, but adding in all of the focus on big data, all the area of IPAAS, all the work that everybody's doing with AWS, with Azure, with Salesforce.com, with Google Cloud, and suddenly we've got this platform play, backed by AI and machine learning, and it's a huge differentiator. >> So you've seen a lot of experience, again you worked in the industry for a long time, you know what the field playbook is, VCs say the enterprise playbook. It's changing, though, you're seeing some shifts and Bruce Chizen was talking to me yesterday about this, there's a shift back to technology advantage and openness. It used to be technology advantage, protect it, that's your competitive advantage, hold it, lock in, but it's changing from that to technology, but open. This is the new equation, what's your take on that? >> Our strategy's been really simple, that we want to be best of breed in everything that we do. And Gartner seems to agree with us. In all five categories we play in we are up and to the right. And yet we want you to get a benefit that if you do decide to buy one product, and then add a second, or a third, or a fourth family, you're going to get the benefit of all that being backed by a platform play, and by AI and machine learning. And so this concept of we'll work with everybody, a customer called us Switzerland of Data, and that's certainly true, we partner with everybody. Where you do see synergies to leverage your entire data platform, you're going to get a real advantage that no one else will have. >> You've got a lot of customers, this is a very intimate conference here at Informatica, this is our fourth year covering it, it's been great to watch the journey, but also the evolution and the tailwinds you guys have. What are some of the customer conversations you're having? You're in all the top meetings here, I know you guys are busy running around, I see you doing meetings and the whole team's here. What are some of the top-level priorities and challenges and opportunities that your customers have? >> We literally have thousands of people at the conference here as you know, and it's just been phenomenal. So I've been in back-to-back meetings, meeting with some of the largest companies in retail that are trying to figure out, "How do I serve my customer base online?" "And yet when they walk into one of my stores, "I want to know that. "My salesperson needs to know exactly what that person's "been shopping for, and looking on the Internet for, "if they're on my site, "or perhaps what they've been tweeting about." So they want to know everything about their customer that there is to know. The banks want to know who their high wealth clients are. And hey want to make sure that if they call in on a checking account and have a bad customer service experience, they want to know that. If it's a hospitality company, they want to understand what's going on every time you check into a hotel. If you looked for a quote and you don't actually follow through, they want to understand that. And so there's this theme of understanding everything that there is to know about a customer. And yet at the same time, a huge requirement for governance, in the California Privacy Act, the CCPA and GDPR are changing everything. I had a large bank once say, and this was years ago, "How can I forget you?" Which is what GDPR says I have the right, you have the right to be forgotten in Europe. How can I forget you if I don't know who you are? Again that's because data's everywhere, and again we're enabling that, so it's a pretty exciting time. It literally is about companies transforming themselves. >> I remember the industry when search engines came out, when the web came out, you had Google and those greenfield opportunities, they were excellent, you type in a keyword and you get results. When people tried to do enterprise search, it was like all these different databases, so you had constraints and you had legacy. Similar today, right? So how has that changed? What's different about it now? And again you had compliance and regulation coming over the top. How does an enterprise unlock those constraints? >> It's funny, you say unlock the power of data is one of our catchphrases. I'm meeting with CIOs around the planet who sound like they're CMOs, because they're using these phrases. They're saying things like, "I need to disrupt myself before someone disrupts me." Or there was one, it was a large oil and energy, it was a CIO at this massive company said, "Data's the new goldmine, and I need a shovel." So they're using these phrases, and to your point, how do you do that? Again, we do think it is about getting the right platform that plays both on-premise and ties in everything the customers are doing in cloud. So we see partnerships as being critical here. But at the same time, one of our fastest growing solutions has been our enterprise data catalog, which is operating at the metadata level. My peer in products Amit Walia likes to say, "How come you can ask the Internet anything at all?" You're so used to it, when your kids ask you a question, you just get online, I don't know, and get the answer. But you can't do that in your own enterprise. And suddenly, because of what we're doing at the metadata level working with all of the different companies around the globe through open APIs, you can now do that inside your enterprise, and that is really unlocking the capabilities for companies to run their businesses. >> You're giving us so much great insight into the kinds of conversations you're having about this deep desire to know the customer and understand his wants and needs at every moment. And yet the technology is so often the easy part, and the hard part of the implementation are the people and the processes. Can you talk a little bit about the stumbling blocks and the challenges that you're seeing with customers as they are embarking on their digital transformations? >> That's a great question. Because one of the things that I caution our clients about is companies get so focused on, I've got to pick the right technology. And we agree with that, again, that's why we focus so much, we've got to be best in breed in every decision. We're not going to lock you into something that doesn't make sense. And yet half of the battle, if you would, in these projects, it's not about the technology, it's a people/process issue. So think about to have a comprehensive view of your data, if you're a large CPG company or a large bank, you might have 10 CIOs, 50 CIOs. We have customers that have 10 ERP systems, we have folks that talk about 50 ERP systems. These are very cross functional, complex projects, and so our focus is on customer success and customer for life. I have more people in customer success than I do in sales by design. Literally thousands of people around the world, this is all that we do, that are focused on business outcomes. And so we really give an extra guarantee, if you would, to our customers to make sure they know that we're in this to make sure that they're successful, and when we start running into challenges, we're going to raise those high so that both organizations can make sure that we get to that promise that everybody is committed to. >> Talk about the ecosystem, because you continue to get success with the catalog, which is looking good. Great that, by the way, we covered that on theCUBE, I remember those conversations like it was yesterday. That really enables a lot, so you're seeing some buzz here around obviously the big clouds, the Google announcement, Amazon, and Microsoft are all here, on-premise, you've got that covered. But the ecosystem partners have a huge economic opportunity, because with the value proposition that you guys are putting forth that's rolling out with a huge customer base, the value-to-economic shift has changed, so that the economics are changing for the better for the customer and the value's increasing. That's kind of an Amazon-like effect if you think about that flywheel. That's attracting a lot of people in to your ecosystem because there's a money making opportunity. >> That's right. >> Talk about that dynamic. >> It's been humbling. I'm really pleased with Informatica World and how things are shaping up because we've had some amazing speakers here as you mentioned, from Amazon, Thomas Crane here from Google Cloud, AWS sending their CMO. It's just been a phenomenal event, yet if you go to the show for literally dozens and dozens and dozens of other providers that are critical to our customers that we want to partner with. When we say partner, we actually do deep R&D together so that there's a true value proposition where the customer gets more and a better-together solution when they choose Informatica and their critical partners. There's another category of partners that I think you're hinting at which is the large GSIs. >> The global system integrators, yeah. >> The global systems integrators. >> Accenture, Deloitte. >> Accenture, Deloitte, Cognizant have been phenomenal partners to us. And so again, when you talk about this being a board level discussion, which literally I've met with so many CIOs who say, "I just presented to my board last week, "let me tell you about this journey that we're on." Of course the large global system integrators are in the middle of that and we are very clear, we don't want to compete with those folks that are so good at both the vision and also really good in arms and legs and execution to help drive massive workflow change for our clients. So we work together brilliantly with those folks. >> And these are meaty projects, too, so it's not like they're used to, back in the old days when these projects were massive, rolling out these big ERP systems, the CRMs, back when people were instrumenting their operation of businesses. Similar now with data, these are massive, lucrative, profitable opportunities. >> These are really strategic for the client, the global system integrator, and for us for all of the same reasons. This drives massive change in a good way for our clients to keep ahead of whoever's nipping at their heels, but certainly it's a tremendous services opportunity for the large integrators, there's no question. >> Being humble. >> One of the things that's really coming through here is Informatica's commitment to solving the skills gap, especially with the Next 25 program, and this is something your company's being really thoughtful about. I'm interested from your perspective, particularly as somebody who's been in the technology industry and was on the board for a while, how do you see the skills gap and what the technology industry is doing as a whole to combat it? And then your advice from your vantage point in terms of what you think are the next things that kids should be studying in schools? >> This reminds me, and Furrier, you're talking about the old days, so I'm going to date myself, it reminds me a lot of when the Internet first started to occur. This is a very similar type change. People have been, companies have been trying to make these changes and they're starting to realize that it does start, they've got to have a good grasp of the data in order to run all of these strategic initiatives that they've got. And so it's tremendous opportunity, to your point, for young people. So how do we think about that? Certainly we do our fair share of hiring interns trying to get them early in life, when they're sophomores, juniors coming into senior year and then hiring those folks. So we see an opportunity for our own company to bring in those young people, if you would. And then the GSIs, the global systems integrators, we partner quite a bit with them, because we see them as massive scalers, they have-- >> How about people specialize in majors, any areas of interest that someone might want to specialize in to be a great contributor in the data world? Obviously stats and math are clear on machine learning and that side. But there's affects, there's societal, business outcome challenges that have not yet been figured out. What areas do you see that someone can go after, have a career around? >> So it literally is a business and a technical problem that we're solving, and so there's going to be career opportunities for everyone that's in school. Whether it be on the business side, whether it's business management, marketing, sales, because again think about when you talk about change of management, it is a CMO trying to rethink how do they reach their clients. It is a sales leader thinking, "How do I get better analytics as to what's working "and what's not working?" And then of course it crosses over into computer science and engineering, as well, where you're actually developing these products, and developing these AI applications that are just beginning to take off. But it's in the early days, so for young folks coming out of schools this is a tremendous opportunity. >> Well, next you'll have to find what's up with the field, and your customers, and then next year, next event. >> Yeah, I can't wait, it's great. I've really enjoyed spending time with you all, and we look forward to seeing you soon. >> Indeed, well thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Tracey. >> Okay, thank you. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, you've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World, stay tuned. (upbeat music)

[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas! It's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World, here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We're joined by Sally Jenkins. She is the executive vice president and CMO here at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Sally. >> Oh you're welcome, thank you for having me. Its nice to see you all again. >> So congrats on a great show, we're going to get to the stats of the show, but the framework of Informatica World is built around these four customer journeys. Next Gen analytics, Cloud Hybrid, 360 engagement, Data Governance and Privacy. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about how this framework reflects what you're hearing from customers and their priorities >> Yes absolutely, Rebecca and yes, you got the right and in the right order, thank you. So, we started this journey with our customers and trying to understand how do they want to be spoken to. What business problems are they solving? And how do they categorize them, if you will. And so, we've been validating these are the right journeys with our customers over the past few years. So everything that you see here at Informatica World is centered around those journeys. The breakouts, our keynotes, all the signage here in our solutions expo. So, its all in validation of how our customers think, and those business problems they're solving. >> So the show, 2600 attendees from 44 countries, 1200 sessions. What's new, what's new and exciting. >> Oh, gosh, there's so many things that are new this year. And one other stat you forgot, 92 customers presenting in our Breakouts. So our customers love to hear from other customers. As to what journeys they're on, what problems their solving. Those are record numbers for us. Record number of partners sponsoring. We've got AWS, we've got Google, we've got Microsoft, we've got the up and comers, that we're calling in the Cloud and AI Innovation zone. So people like DataBricks and Snowflake. We wanted to highlight these up and comer partners, what we call our ecosystem partners. Along with the big guys. You know, we're the Switzerland of data. We play with everybody. We play nicely with everybody. A lot of new things there. A few other things that are new, direct feedback from our customers last year. They said we want you to tell us which breakouts we should go to. Or what work shops should we attend. So we rolled out two things this year. One's called the Intelligent Scheduler. That's where we ask customers what journey are they on. What do they want to learn about. And then we make a smart recommendation to them about what their agenda should look like while they're here. >> You're using the data. >> Yes, AI, we're involving AI, and making the recommendations out to our customers. In addition, our customers said we want to connect with other customers that are like us, on their journeys, so we can learn from them. So we launched we called the Intelligent Connect and again this is part of our app. Which, our app's not new, but what we've done with our app this year is new. We've added gamification, in fact as part of the AI and Cloud Innovation zone, we are asking our customers and all of our attendees to vote on who they think is the one with the best innovation. They're using our app to use voting. They can win things, so there's lots of gaming. There's social that's involved in that, so the app's new. We're taking adavantage of day four. We usually end around lunchtime on day four, this year we're going all in, all day workshops, so that our practitioners can actually roll up their sleeves and get started working with our software. And our ecosystem partners are also leading a lot of those workshops. So a lot that's new this year. And as I mentioned, the Cloud and AI Innovation zone, that's new it's like a booth within a booth here on the solutions expo floor. So this is the year of new, for sure. >> You know one of the things that's been impressive, I was talking with Anil and also Bruce Chizen, who is a board member, The bets you guys have made is impressive. You look back, and this our tenth year in theCUBE, so we go to a lot of events, 100s events in a year, over 100 events over 10 years. We've seen this story with you guys, this is now our fourth year doing theCUBE here. And the story has not changed, its been early moves, big bets. Cloud, early. Going private to see this next big wave. AI, early before everyone else. This is really kind of showing, and I think the ecosystem part is on stage with Databricks, with Snowflake. Really kind of point to a new cast of characters in the ecosystem. >> That's right. >> You're seeing not just the classic enterprise, 'cause you guys have great big, large enterprises that you do business with. That want to be SAS like, they want the agility, they want all those great things but now you have Cloud. The markets seems to have changed. This is an ecosystem opportunity. >> That's right. >> Can you share what's new? Because you see Amazon, Google and Azure, at the cloud, you got On-Premise, you now Edge and IoT, everything's happening with data. Hard, complex, what's new, what's the ecosystem benefit? Can you just share some color commentary around how you guys view that as a company. >> Yeah, thanks, John, and that's a good question. I'm glad you're pointing out that our whole go to market motion is evolving. It's not changing it's evolving because we want to work with our customers in whatever environment they want to work in. So if they're working in a cloud environment, we want to make sure we're there with our cloud ecosystem partners. And it doesn't matter who, cause like I said, we work with everybody, we work nicely with everybody. So we are tying in our cloud ecosystem partners as it makes sense based on what our customer needs are. As well as our GSI partners. So we've got Accentra's here. They brought 35 people to Informatica World this year. We play nicely with Accentra, Deloitte, Cognizant, Capgemini so we really are wanting to make sure that we're doing what makes sense with our customer and working with those partners that our customers want to work with. >> Well I think one of the observations we've made on theCUBE and we said in our opening editorial segment this morning, and we're asking the question about the skill gaps, which we'll get into with you in second, but these big partners from the Global System Integraters to even indirect channel partners, whether they're software developers and or channel partners. They all are now enabled and are mandated to create value. >> Yes, that's right. >> And if they can't get to the value, those projects aren't going to get funded and they're not going to get renewed And so we've seen with the Hadoop cycle of just standing up infrastructure for infrastructure sake isn't going to fly. You got to get to the value. And data, the business that you're in, is the heart of it. >> Well, data's at the heart of it. That's why we're sitting at a really nice sweet spot, because data will always be relevant. And the theme of the conference here is data needs AI and AI needs data. So we're always going to be around. But like I said, I feel like we're sitting right in the middle of it. And we're helping our customers solve really complex problems. And again, like I said if we need to pull in a GSI partner for implementation, we'll do that we've got close to 400,000 people around the world, trained on how to use Informatica solutions. So we're poised and we are ready to go. >> We were talking before we came on camera. We were sitting there catching up, Sally. And I always make these weird metaphors and references, but I think you guys are in an enabling business. It reminds me of VMware, when virtualization came in. Because what that did was, it changed the game on what servers were from a physical footprint, but also changed the economics and change the development landscape. This seems to be the same kind of pattern we're seeing in data where you guys are providing an operational model with technical capabilities. Ecosystem lift, different economics. So kind of similar, and VMware had a good run. >> We'll take that analogy, John, thank you. >> What's your reaction? Do you see it that way? >> Yeah I do, and it all comes back to the journeys that we talk about right. Because our customers, they're never on just one journey. Most of them are on multiple journeys, that they are deploying at the same time. And so as they uncover insights around one journey, it could lead them to the next. So it really comes back to that and data is at the center of all that. >> I want to ask about the skills gap. And this is a problem that the technology industry is facing on a lot of different levels I want to hear about Informatica's thoughts on this. And what you're doing to tackle this problem. And also what kinds of initiatives you're starting around this. >> Well, I'm glad you asked because it's actually top of mind for us. So Informatica is taking a stance in managing the future, so that we can get rid of the skills gap in the future. And last year we launched a program we call the Next 25. That's where we are investing in middle school aged students for the next seven years. Its starts in 6th grade and takes them all the way through high school. They are part of a STEM program, in fact we partnered with Akash middle school here in Las Vegas. Cause we wanted to give back to the local communities since we spend so much time here. And so these kids who are part of the STEM program take part in what we call the Next 25. Where we help them understand beyond academics what they need to learn about in order to be ready for college. Whether that's social skills, or teamwork, or just how do we help them build the self confidence, so it goes beyond the academics. But one of the things that we're talking about tomorrow, is what's next as part of STEM. Cause we all know they're very good at STEM. And so we've engaged with one of the professors at UNLV to talk about what does she see as a gap when she sees middle school students and high school students coming to college and so that's where she recognizes that coding is so important. So we've got a big announcement that we're making tomorrow for the Next 25 kids around coding. >> Its interesting, cause we could talk about this all day, cause my daughter just graduated from Cal, so its fresh in my mind, but I was pointed out at the graduation ceremony on Saturday that the first ever class at University of California Berkley, graduated a data science, they graduated their inaugural class. That goes to show you how early it is. The other thing we're hearing also on these interviews as well as others, that the aperture or the surface area for opportunities isn't just technical. >> Right >> You could be pre med and study machine learning and computer science. There's so much more to it. What do you see just anecdotally or from a personal standpoint and professional, key skills that you think people should hone in on? What dials should they turn? More math, more coding, more cognitive, more social emotional, What do you see as skills they can tailor up for their-- >> Well so let's just start with the data scientist. We know LinkedIn has identified that there are 150,000 job openings just for data scientist in the US alone. So what's more interesting than that, is four times that are available for data engineers. And for the first time ever, data engineers' starting salaries are paying more than starting salaries on Wall Street. So, there's a huge opportunity, just in the data engineering area and the data scientist area. Now you can take that any which way you want. I'm in marketing and we use data all day long to make decisions. You don't have to be, you don't have to go down the engineering path. But you definitely have to have a good understanding of data and how data drives your next decisions, no matter what field you're in. >> And its also those others skills that you were talking about, particularly with those middle school kids, it is the collaboration and the team work and all of those too. >> It does, again, it goes beyond academics. These kids are brilliant. Most of them are 7th or 8th grade. But nothing holds them back, and that's exactly what we're trying to inspire within. So we have them solving big global problems. And you'll hear as they talk about how they're approaching this. They work in teams of five. And they realize to solve huge problems they need to start small and local. So some of these big global problems they're working on, like eradicating poverty, they're starting at the local shelters here in Las Vegas to see how they can start small and make a difference. And this is all on their own, I have folks on my team who are junior genius counselors with them, but that is really to foster some of the conversations. All the new ideas are coming directly from the kids. >> My final question is obviously for the folks who couldn't make it here, watching, know you guys, what's the theme of the show because the news right out of the gate is obviously the big cloud players. That's the key. And the new breed of partners, Snowflake, Databricks as an example. Hallway conversations that I'm hearing, can kind of be geeky and customer focused around "where do I store my data?" so you're seeing a range of conversations. What is the theme this year? What's different this year, or what more the same? Where are you doubling down? What's going on here for the show? What's the main content? >> Well so this is our 20th Informatica World if you can believe that. We've been around for 26 years, but this is our 20th Informatica World. And several years ago we started with the disruptive power of data. Then last year we talked about how we help our customers disrupt intelligently. And this year the theme is around ClAIrity Unleashed. You can tell the theme has been that we've been talking about for the past three years is all underpinned with AI. So it is all about how AI needs data and data needs AI. And how we help bring clarity to our customer's problems through data. >> And a play on words, ClAIr, your AI to clarity. >> Exactly, AI is at the center of our Intelligent data platform. So it is a play on AI but that is where ClAIrity Unleashed comes from. >> Terrific, thank you so much for coming on theCube, Sally. Its great having you. >> Great, thanks Rebecca. Thanks, John. >> Thank you. >> Nice to see you all. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have more from Informatica World, stay tuned. (upbeat pop outro)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE Covering Informatica World 2019 Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are joined by Ariel Kelman. He is the VP, Worldwide Marketing at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having me on today. >> So let's start out just at ten thousand feet and talk a little bit about what you're seeing as the major cloud and AI trends and what your customers are telling you. >> Yeah, so I mean, clearly, machine learning and AI is really the forefront of a lot of discussions in enterprise IT and there's massive interest but it's still really early. And one of the things that we're seeing companies really focused on now is just getting all their data ready to do the machine learning training. And as opposed to also, in addition I mean, training up all their people to be able to use these new skills. But we're seeing tons of interest, it's still very early, but you know one of the reasons here at Informatica World is that getting all the data imported and ready is, you know, it's almost doubled or tripled in importance as it was when people were just trying to do analytics. Now they're doing machine learning as well. You know, we're seeing huge interest in that. >> I want to get into some of the cloud trends with your business, but first, what's the relationship with Informatica, and you know we see them certainly at re:Invent. Why are you here? Was there an announcement? What's the big story? >> I mean, we've been working together for a long time and it's very complementary products and number varies. I think the relationship really started deepening when we released Redshift in 2013, and having so many customers that wanted to get data into the cloud to do data we're housing, we're already using Informatica in, to help get the data loaded and cleansed and so really they're one of the great partners that's fueling moving data into the cloud and helping our customers be more successful with Redshift. >> Yeah, one of the things I really admire about you guys is that you're very customer centric. We've been following Amazon as you know since their, actually second reinvent, Cube's been there every time, and just watching the growth, you know, Cloud certainly has been a power source for innovation, SAS companies that are born in the cloud have exponentially scaled faster than most enterprises because they use data. And so data's been a heart of all the successful SAS businesses, that's why start ups gravitated to the Cloud right away. But now that you guys got enterprise adoption, you guys have been customer centric and as you listen to customers, what are you guys hearing from that? Because the data on premises, you've got more compliance, you've got more regulation, you've got-- news today-- more privacy and now you've got regions, countries with different laws. So the complexity around even just regulatory, nevermind tech complexity, how are you guys helping customers when they say, you know what, I want to get to the cloud, love Amazon, love the cloud, but I've got my, I've got to clean up my on param house. >> Yeah, I would say like a lot, if you look at a lot of the professional services work that we do, a lot of it is around getting the company prepared and organized with all their data before they move to the cloud: segmenting it, understanding the different security regulatory requirements, coming up with a plan of what they need, what data they're going to maybe abstract up, before they load it, and there's a lot of work there. And, you know, we've been focused on trying to help customers.. >> And is there a part in you're helping migrate to the cloud, is that.. >> Yeah, there's technology pieces, companies like Informatica helping to extract and transform and load the data and on data governance policies. But then also, for a lot of our systems integrator partners, Cognizant, Accenture, Deloitte-- they're very involved in these projects. There's a lot of work that goes on; a lot of people don't talk about just before you can even start doing the machine learning, and a lot of that's getting your data ready. >> So how, what are some of the best practices that have emerged in working with companies that, as you said, there's a lot of pre-work that needs to be done and they need to be very thoughtful about about sort of getting their data sorted. >> Well I think the number one thing that I see and I recommend is to actually first take a step back from the data and to focus on what are the business requirements of, what questions are you trying to answer, let's say with machine learning, or with data science advanced analytics, and then back out the data from that. What we see a lot of, you know companies sometimes will have it be a data science driven project. Okay, here's all the data that we have, let's put it in one place, when you may not be spending time proportionate to the value of the data. And so that's one of the key things that we see, and to come up-- just come up with a strong plan around what answers you're, what business questions you're trying to answer. >> On the growth of Amazon, you guys certainly have had great record numbers, growth, even in the double digit kind of growth you're seeing on top of your baseline has been phenomenal. Clearly number one on the cloud. Enterprise has been a big focus. I noticed that on the NHL, your logo's on the ice during the playoffs; you've got the Statcast. You guys are creating a lot of aware-- I see a lot of billboards everywhere, a lot of TV ads. Is that part of the strategy is to get you guys more brand awareness? What's the.. >> We're trying, you know, it's part of our overall brand awareness strategy. What we're trying to do is to help, we're trying to communicate to the world how our customers are being successful using our technology, specifically machine learning and AI. It's one of these things where so many companies want to do it but they say, well, what am I supposed to use it for? And so, you know, one of, if you dumb down what marketing is at AWS, it's inspiring people about what they can run in the cloud with AWS, what use cases they should consider us for, and then we spend a lot of energy giving them the technical education and enablement so they can be successful using our products. At the end of the day, we make money when our customers are successful using our products. >> One of the hot products was SageMaker, we see in that group, AI's gone mainstream. That's a great tail wind for you guys because it kind of encapsulates or kind of doesn't have to get all nerdy about cloud, you know, infrastructure and SAS. AI kind of speaks to many people. It's one of the hottest curriculums and topics in the world. >> Yeah, and with SageMaker, we're trying to address a problem that we see in most of our customers where the everyday developer is not, does not have expertise in machine learning. They want to learn it, so we think that anything we can do to make it easier for every developer to ramp up on machine learning the better. So that's why we came up with SageMaker as a platform to really make all three stages of machine learning easier: getting your data prepared for training, training in optimized models, and then running inference to make the predictions and incorporate that into people's applications. >> One of the themes that's really emerging in this conversation is the need to make sure developers are ready and that your people are skilled up and know what they need to know. How are, how is AWS thinking about the skills gap, and what are you doing to remedy it? >> Yeah, a couple things. I mean, we're really, like a lot of things we do, we'll say what are all the ways we can attack the problem and let's try and help. So, we have free training that we've been creating online. We've been partnering with large online training firms like Udacity and Coursera. We have an ML solutions lab that help companies prototype, we have a pretty significant professional services team, and then we're working with all of out systems integrators partners to build up their machine learning practices. It's a new area for a lot of them and we've been pushing them to add more people so they can help their customers. >> Talk about the conferences, you have re:Invent, the CORE conference, we've been theCUBE there. We've just also covered London, Amazon's Web Services summit, and 22,000 registered, 14,000 showed up. Got huge global reach now. How do you keep up with this? I mean it's a... >> Well we're trying to help our customers keep up with all the technology. I mean, really, we have about, maybe 25 or so of these summits around the world-- usually around two days, several thousand people, free conferences. And what we're trying to do is >> They're free? >> The summits are free and it's like, we introduce so much new technology, new services, deeper functionality within our exiting services, and our customers are very hungry to learn the latest best practices and how they can use these, and so we're trying to be in all the major areas to come in and provide deep educational content to help our customers be more successful. >> And re:Invent's coming around the corner. Any themes there early on, numbers wise? Last year you had, again, record numbers. I mean at some point, is Vegas too small >> Yeah, we had over 50,000 people. We're going to have even more, and we've been expanding to more and more locations around Las Vegas and you know we're going to keep growing. There's a lot of demand. I mean, we want to be able to provide the re:Invent experience for as many people as want to attend. >> What's the biggest skill set, you know the folks graduating this month, my daughter's graduating from Cal Berkeley, and a lot of others are graduating >> Congratulations >> high school. Everyone wants to either jump into some sort of data related field, doesn't have to be computer science, those numbers are up. What's your view of skill sets that are needed right now that weren't in curriculum, or what pieces of curriculum should people be learning to be successful if machine learning continues to grow from helping videos surface to collecting customer data. Machine learning's going to be feeding the AI applications and SAS businesses. >> Yeah, I mean look, you just forget about machine learning, you go to a higher level. There's not enough good developers. I mean, we're in a world now where any enterprise that is going to be successful is going to have their own software developers. They're going to be writing their own software. That's not how the world was 15 years ago. But if you're a large corporation and you're outsourcing your technology, you're going to get disrupted by someone else who does believe in custom software and developers. So the demand for really good software engineers, I mean we deal with all the time, we're hiring. It is always going to outstrip supply. And so, for young people, I would encourage them to start coding and to not be over reliant on the university curriculums, which don't always keep pace with, you know, with the latest trends. >> And you guys got a ton of material online too, you can always go to your site. Okay, on the next question around, as someone figures out, okay, enterprise versus pure SAS, you guys have proven with the Cloud that start ups can grow very fast and then the list goes on: AirBnB, Pinterest, Zoom Communications, disrupting existing big, mature markets by having access to the data. So how do you talk about customers when you say, hey, you know, I want to be like a SAS company, like a consumer company, leverage data, but I've got a lot of stuff on premise. So how do I not make that data constrained? How do you guys feel about that conversation because that seems to be the top conversation here, is you know, it's not to say be consumer, it's consumer-like. Leveraging data, cause if data's not into AI, there's no, AI doesn't work, right? So >> Right >> It can't be constrained by anything. >> Well, you know, you talk to all these companies and at first they don't even know what they don't know in terms of what is that data? And where is it? And what are the pieces that are important? And so, you know, we encourage people to do a good amount of strategy work before they even start to move bits up to the cloud. And of course, then we have a lot of ways we can help them, from our Snowball machines that they can plug in, all the way to our Snowmobile, which is the semi truck that you can drive up to your data center and offload very large amounts of data and drive it over to our data centers. >> One of the things that is trending-- we had Ali from Data Bricks talk about, he absolutely believes a lot of the same philosophies you guys do-- data in the cloud. And one of his arguments was is that there's a lot of data sets in these marketplaces now where you can really leverage other people's data, and we see that on cybersecurity where people are starting to share data, and Cloud is a better model for that than trying to ship drives around, and there's a time for Snowball, I get that, and Snowmobile, the big trucks for large ingestion into the cloud, but the enterprise, this is a new phenomenon. No one really shared a lot in the old days. This is a new dynamic. Talk about that, is it-- >> I mean, sharing, selling, monetizing data. If there's something that is important, there will be a market for it. And I think we're seeing that just the hunger, everything from enterprises to startups, that want more data, whether it's for machine learning to train their models, or it's just to run analytics and compare against their data sets. So I think the commercial opportunity is pretty large. >> I think you're right on that. I think that's a great insight. I mean, no one ever thought about data as a service from our data set standpoint, 'cause data sets feed machine learning. All right, so let's do, give the plug on what's going on with AWS. What's new, what's on your plate, what's notable. I mean I love the NHL, I couldn't resist that plug for you being a hockey fan. But what's new in your world? >> Um, you know, we're, we're in early planning stages on our re:Invent conference, our engineers are hard at work on a lot of new technology that we're going to have ready between now and our re:Invent show. You know, also we're, my team's been doing a lot of work with the sports organizations. We've had some interesting machine learning work with major league baseball. They rolled out this year a new machine learning model to do stolen base predictions. So, you can see on some of the broadcasts, as a runner goes past first base, we'll have a ticker that will show what the probability is that they'll be successful stealing second base if they choose to run. Trying to make a little more entertaining all those scenes we've seen in the past of the pitcher throwing the ball back to first, trying to use AI machine leaning to give a little bit more insight into what's going on. >> And that's the Statcast. Part of that's the Statcast >> That's Statcast, yeah >> And you got anything new coming around that besides that new.. >> Yeah, I think that yeah, major league baseball is hard at work on some new models that I think will be announced fairly soon. >> All right, to wrap up Informatica real quick, an announcement here, news coming I hear. How are you guys working with Informatica in the field? Is there any, can you share more about relationship >> Yeah I mean I think we're going to have an announcement a little bit later today, I mean it's around the subject we've been talking about: making it easier for customers to, you know, be successful moving their data to the Cloud so that they can start to benefit from the agility, the speed and the cost savings of data analytics and machine learning in the Cloud. >> And so when you're working with customers, I mean, because this is the thing about Amazon. It is a famously innovative, cutting edge company, and when you talk about the hunger that you describe, that these customers, isn't it just that they want to be around Amazon and kind of rub shoulders with this really creative, thinking four steps ahead kind of company. I mean how do you let your innovation rub off on these customers? >> I mean there's a couple ways We do, one of the things we've done recently is these innovation workshops. We have this thing we talk about a lot this working backwards process where we force the engineers to write a press release before we'll green light the product because we feel like if you can't clearly articulate the customer benefit, then we probably shouldn't start investing, right? And so we, that's one of the processes that we use to help us innovate better, more effectively and so we've been walk-- we walk customers through this. We have them come, you know there's an international company that I was, part of one of the efforts we did in Palo Alto last year where we had a bunch of their leadership team out for two days of workshops where we worked a bunch of ideas through, through our process. And so we do some of that but the other area is we try and capture area where we think that we've innovated in some interesting way into a service that then customers can use. Like Amazon Connect I think is a good example of it. This is our contact center call routing technology and you know, one of the things Amazon's consumer business is known for is having great customer support, customer service, and they spent a lot of time and energy making sure that calls get routed intelligently to the right people, that you don't sit on hold forever, and so we figure we're probably not the only company that could benefit from that. Kind of like with AWS, when we figure out how to run infrastructure securely and high performance and availability, and so we turn that into a service and it's become a very successful service for us. A lot of companies have similar contact center problems. >> As a customer, I can attest to being on hold a lot. Ariel, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been great talking to you. >> I appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thanks for coming out, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. Stay tuned. (upbeat music)