>>From Miami beach, Florida. It's the queue covering a Chronis global cyber summit 2019 brought to you by Acronis. >>Okay. Welcome back to the cubes coverage. Everyone two days here in Miami beach at the fountain blue hotel for kronas cyber global cyber summit 2019. I'm John furrier, our next guest, Phil, she founder of structured research, do an industry analyst firm doing analysis of what's going on here. And the big story is cyber protect as a category emerging from data protection, but a lot of infrastructure going on under the knee. Phil, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. So they got this platform, but underneath the platform they got a hyper converged stack. A lot of stories, lot of networking involved, abstraction layer, platform layer to enable Cisco services. ISV is whatnot. Um, pretty compelling. And you're seeing with cloud computing, cloud 2.0 modernization. These kind of white spaces can become categories. So I kinda like the cyber protection angle. We'll see how it's kind of developed, but you got to make it work under the hood. >>What's your take of their infrastructure, the platform, what's underneath? What's, what's going on there in your opinion? >> Yeah, I mean, I look at the world from the angle of service providers or infrastructure service providers. They come in all shapes and sizes. Uh, typically the crowd here is probably what most would classify as small to mid size. And those kinds of organizations are typically challenged when it comes to resources you have, they have, uh, you know, smaller staffs, you know, less resources to acquire development talent. And so when it comes to approaching, you know, innovative products and services to drive their business, you know, they often have to look to a third party like Acronis, >> they'll talk about them. The evolution of service providers, the deputies has changed over the decades, right? I mean, Cisco Sarvis targeted service providers, what does that means and tell goats what's a, you know, MSP, managed service providers. >>So the word service providers kind of evolving as these platforms start to become more relevant. How do you, how do you, how do you shape the market? How would you talk about the evolution of what a service provider is? >> Yeah, I mean I like to think of it as infrastructure providers, infrastructure service providers. So those that are managing third party infrastructure that lives, uh, typically in some kind of off premise, not on premise environment. Uh, that's certainly a big chunk of the audience here. Uh, those people will run data centers or they'll run multiple data centers. They might run some of their own data sets and they might run some stuff on the public cloud. Uh, and then they manage that for an end user, which could be a small business, mid size enterprise or large enterprise. >> What are the top stories in that market dynamic that you're seeing involved? >>Is it IOT? Is it the SLA, is the required for latency? What are some of the dynamics going on and then that serves provided market? I mean, I think the big thing today is a boil it all down is the impact of hyperscale and what that does to market that these service providers playing. So you have hyperscale just grabbing huge chunks of the infrastructure and it real estate out there. And how that affects MSPs or service providers is that Hey, there's probably a little less market than you would have, like pre hyperscale. And so what that forces them to do is to do two things, I think, uh, which is a specialized focus, uh, and try to drive value from the infrastructure you do get to host or manage or run on, on the public cloud. So that brings the punchline here to be, you know, it's all about value add. >>What is the value add? Well, you know, this is how kind of a kronas came there. They understood that, you know, organizations that are a little more specialized like to work with service providers, they need to backup up infrastructure. They have security requirements, they have compliance requirements, and then, uh, they have to deliver that to the customer. Uh, and being able to do all that is sometimes can be difficult. But if you work with a third party like, what they've done is, you know, package that for you, hence the cyber platform so that people can basically, you know, turn the key and be able to deliver those kinds of services. And get back to focusing on what they're good at, managing customers and dealing with them. What's been the reaction, your opinion on what's happening with the crunch value proposition? Because again, like you said, these they want to differentiate ed services to around it seems like a good opportunity. >>Is it resonating well with um, infrastructure service providers? No, no, I think so because of where, as I mentioned where we are in the marketplace, you know, hyper scale is maybe 10, the public cloud, maybe 10, 12 years old. Uh, and you know, it took some time for, you know, to MSP server the feel it, uh, and now they're reacting, right? The market is changing, customer requirements, becoming more sophisticated and they're saying, Hey, listen, we've got to get out there and do something. So absolutely anything that drives value add on top of, let's call it commodity. Come on. I don't want to use that word. Plain vanilla infrastructure infrastructure. Uh, yeah, anything above value add. I mean, we saw the global service providers like Assensure and these guys doing the same thing because their days were numbered on the consultant and they're building their own sets of services. >>Why wouldn't they? I mean, it's a whole nother cloud expansion opportunity for people with expertise. Why wouldn't they want to increase their gross profits would deliver services on top of something like this. So, so I've got to ask you, um, on the, on the research section, how big is the Tam and you're in this market that, that's in there? I mean, what's it, what's a size? Is it changing? Is it shifting or is it more than saying no, it's definitely, I like to think of, you know, the world, like there's many ways to look at it. Uh, you know, some people throw around the word, sorry, the number $1 trillion a night to spending. Um, but what I like to do is look at, at least for a lot of the guys here, what they're doing is they're managing infrastructure or hosting infrastructure on a third party basis. >>And that means the customer, the end user letting go, not running it themselves in house, in server closets and their own it, their own data centers. Yeah. Uh, and in terms of going from that model, which is a traditional model to outsource infrastructure and all its flavors, you know, we're still not, you know, we use the baseball analogy. Uh, you know, we're not, we used to say that we're in the first or second any further along now, but we definitely haven't hit the seventh inning stretch. So we're middle innings, we're like middle innings of this game. I would argue maybe only the third or fourth. Anyway. Yeah. Um, and not only that, if you think so you can think of that as, Hey, if you put a number on the total value and we're only 30% of the way there, there's still all that addressable market left. >>But you also have to think about all the new workloads, content applications that are being built and created. They are invariably moving to either the public cloud or something that an MSP or a third party or third party provider would touch. So it's a big one. Yeah, it's a big market and the, and, and this channel businesses are very efficient. I was talking earlier with, with the sales guys here who runs growth, it's like they don't mess around. Like they're pretty efficient and if it works they can take it and they run with it doesn't as feedback comes back pretty quick. Yeah. So I can see MSPs liking this kind of approach. The question that I have is that, you know, the adding tier at this show, one of the top stories is they're opening up API APIs. They are doing some developer reaction questions. >>Does that develop our action translate down into like say storage and these other areas? What's your take on the ecosystem and developers specifically opportunity cause ecosystems. The nice to Acronis they have some success there. Now they have a developer piece to it. What's your assessment of that developer angle? No, absolutely. It's important, uh, because they need everybody to get together. They need the ecosystem come together to try to innovate. Uh, if you're looking at, if you're managing infrastructure, you're competing against some pretty innovative platforms. And, and we know the names of those, uh, and the resources they can put at, they can throw it that are just, they're, they're unbelievable. So smaller providers have to team up, they have to work together, they have to work in an ecosystem, you have to encourage each other. And what Kronos I think is doing a great job of is creating a venue and a platform for them to say, Hey you guys, you can be part of this channel. >>You can also work. We're going to open up our platform so that you can innovate and build cool tools that we haven't thought of of building that are specific maybe to your use case and maybe another provider can use them as well. Platforms are hard to figure out and hard to, easy to say, hard to do. But I think one of the validations that I always look for for platforms is, is there an enabling technology angle? Is there a disruptive enable that's gonna create some enablement and then true, what's the valuation value validation from an ecosystem. So I can talk platform, it's like a dance floor. How many people are on the dance floor, you know, if the music is good here, the platform's good, the ecosystem rises up and you can see it. Absolutely. That's a key thing. Feel. Take a minute to talk about the structure research. >>Okay. What do you guys do and what's your, what's your focus, um, how long you've been doing it and what do you see evolve and give a quick plug for what you're working on. Yeah, we're a eight year old firm. We were founded in 2012. Uh, we're based in Toronto. Uh, we yourself as a smaller focused, uh, boutique research firm. Uh, so we cover, uh, we don't cover multiple sectors. We covered infrastructure services, what some people call internet infrastructure, uh, but we live and breathe on a daily basis. The life of the service provider and that service provider could be one, you know, a 10 man shop that's walking around here. There are many of those all the way up to, to a Rackspace, uh, to, uh, the hyperscale clouds as well as the underlying data center infrastructure, uh, encompassing real estate facilities. You guys are laser focused absolutely. >>Service rider is what we all the vote. You know, we have six man analyst team. So yeah we only have time to focus on this. I mean, yeah, what we do is what we've taken with it is try to take a, a global approach to, so we're, we're based in North America. Uh, but we uh, we, we do a lot of research and food just feels to me, I mean I'm not in the, in the weeds of details that you guys are, cause you're laser focused on that. But Dave a lot and I always talk on the Q about how the rich are getting richer, the bigger getting bigger and it's really been sucking in the like that title waves of the beach wave from South and there's a tsunami of, of the hyperscalers dominating. But it's interesting that with the IOT opportunity you start to see him with machine learning and AI kind of really out front you seeing a Renaissance of what I call domain specific apps and services. >>And we think that this is going to create a massive innovation around what I call tier one be or two clouds. Why not build on Google, Amazon or Azure and create a unique service provider model for something that's very domain specific. I mean, that's seems like a great business opportunity. Why? I mean, it's a been a part of the space and I think more so we're headed there faster. And, and you know, to your earlier question, you know, where the impact of hyperscale cloud, how it's taken out certain parts of the more commodity parts of the business and then it's driven service riders who go to pockets of value. You know, we did a panel earlier on, you know, that featured for service providers that had decided to take a vertically focused strategy. So get into areas where their specific expertise with certain platforms or certain software packages, uh, you know, targeted that. >>And then the kind of customers they use, those have specific security and compliance requirements, certain backup NDR requirements that obviously Acronis is more than happy to enable and then these service miters deliver that. So yeah, you absolutely could see, you know, people popping up. Yeah. Doing kind of have an entire business focused on just serving the specific requirements on financial services, uh, for even the dental sector. Uh, and yeah, and they can run on, on private infrastructure, but they also can run on the public cloud. There's a lot of marketplaces popping up too. I had the Ingram micro on Amazon's got a market Wade's, Google's gonna have one. They ever going to have these marketplaces for their clouds. How does multi-cloud fit into your world? First of all, I think multicloud is just BS. Me personally, but I think everyone has multiple cloud providers. If you've upgraded with office three 65 you technically have Azure. >>It doesn't mean that you're using Azure. That's like you might have an Amazon and Google, but know people might have multiple clouds, but hybrid seems to be the operating model. How does hybrid and this hype around multi-cloud impact your research area in any way or? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, we care about how people deploy their infrastructure and we closely track how, you know, the way they do it and how those patterns change. You know, I would say I would slightly disagree. I think multicloud they starting, I would probably agree that it's not very pervasive. Yeah, it's not, it's not very pervasive, but it is a model we've tracked, uh, and sorry and uses. We've seen, uh, I have definitely, you know, taken a liking to that or at least are putting that on the roadmap and saying, Hey, listen, you know, if we're going to build, you know, most of the architectures that are being built are hybrid. >>Uh, but how w I think the question is in what way? Or how are they hybrid? Does that mean I'm running exclusively on the public cloud and running on AWS and Google for other stuff? Am I running private infrastructure on premise? And then in a private cloud and on backing that up to say the public cloud, there's so many different ways to do it. So, you know, it's interesting. Fill your brain. First of all. I agree. Well, we could debate, I love to have debates, but to me, I think you're right. I look at multicloud in terms of the hype. Hype is good, but you've always gotta be careful of it. Not over, you know, overplay their card on that. But yeah, I would see that multi-cloud basically to me is multi-vendor. I've got I got it. So as that shakes out, that's going to be an operational dynamic. >>And I think that's going to be interesting to see how a company will operationalize their tech stacks to deal with the multi-vendor or multi-cloud case because the workload shouldn't care. Ideally, if it's true multi-cloud, none of my workload, I mean she should run right. And so I haven't seen a lot of that across multiple clouds and some peoples have use case analytics. I get that. But like running a workload on any cloud, probably not there yet. Not there yet. All right. What's the coolest, coolest thing that you're covering right now that you think is important for folks to know that in your space, what's the top burning issues of your sector? Yeah, I mean, I would say that, you know, just the global build out of the cloud, the hyperscale clouds, you know, that short list of very big platforms. He's going, you know, global at a rapid speed. >>Uh, and also just the pace at which they are expanding is just incredible. And that's not just the infrastructure but also just the product and service development. Just the tool sets have gone from dozens to hundreds to probably thousands. You know, as we're speaking right now, just the pace at which this is growing is just, you know, pretty tough to comprehend and it's tough to comprehend because not that long ago we were debating, you know, what is the cloud? Or yeah, running, I as, yeah, I'm running a few things on the cloud, but now people are making much bigger bets. There are businesses now out there that you use on your phone that are run completely on the cloud. I mean, that's, that's big. And I mean, just go back with the, has been around for 10 years riding this wave and covering it. Remember OpenStack? Yeah, of course. >>Hold up a second. Just a hyperscaler just blew that away, just, and then found his place. No, that's just crazy. Great time. Yeah. And I think it's, it's, it's the, you're right, the, the pace at which things are changing is incredible. And we're, the other thing, you know, to answer my second part to the question was not only going to, we're following the global buildup, but at the same time almost kind of paradoxically, like we're talking now and I think it's a really exciting part of RV searches. He's the edge. So the decentralization, you know, everything is building out really rapidly into the, you know, compute as an it infrastructure is consolidate around centralized locations, you know, but now how do we hit mobile eyeballs are eyeballs in kind of more distant locations. And so yeah, edge infrastructure or the decentralization, uh, is we're really excited about, I think edge is beautiful thing. >>It's gonna open up. And by the way, we were talking last night, bunch of the sales guys here, I always like to debate them. Their edge is a box, but there's the deeper edge. There's also deep edge or outer edge, right? This human's right. So there's edge edge, so it's just so many surface points now. It's just manageable challenge. Yeah, there's edge on a kind of like on a geographic basis and then there's edge, you know, how close to the user's device can you get. And that device may not be static. Right. They'll be moving around. So yeah. Well, Phil, thanks for the great insight of structured research. Is there a URL for your site? Yes. Structure research.net structured research.net check it out. Hyper focused on service providers and infrastructure. Super important area as the clouds continue to grow as hybrid multicloud. Certainly IOT is going industrial IOT from national security and physical security to digital security. All big a part of it. Data as the pay is going to be there. Storage and compute. Phil, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. Thanks for having coverage here. Miami beach. I'm John furrier back with more coverage after this short break.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT research summit, presented by NTT research. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBEs, coverage of Upgrade 2020. Of course, it's NTT's Global Research Summit. Really excited, we're going to be able to dig into healthcare, the health system of course, something that's been, top of mind for everyone around the globe this year, so happy to welcome you to the program. First time guest Mary Edwards. She is the president of provider at NTT DATA Services. Mary, welcome to the program, saying thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi, Stu. Glad to be here. >> All right. So why don't we start, as I tee it up. We're going to be talking about health care there, just a little bit of your background, your group inside of NTT DATA Services. >> Sure. So I've been at NTT DATA Services for a year, just about a year on the knows. Really glad to be here. I've been healthcare, all of my career over 30 years. At first in the Blues, in underwriting actuarial and strategy, then hop to consulting. I was a partner with Accenture for 20, well, yeah, I think 22 years, I was at Accenture. and then, I was leading a commercial markets portion of a platform as a service company for a couple of years, and then NTT called and I was really impressed with what I learned about NTT and delighted to join the firm as the president of provider. >> Well, Mary, I've got a little bit of background in some of the health I love, I go to innovation conferences, and they're like, "We have the opportunity to really transform markets, but it's so tough to make change." Well, you've been there for a year, and the last year, there's been a force in function to change the advent of telehealth and telemedicine. I've done plenty of interviews, and heck, me and my family have been to doctors, using those services, which, at the beginning of this year, I wouldn't have thought was possible. Some of these might be long term changes in impact on what's happening, but bring us inside, your customers, what are some of the pressing challenges they're facing? And it's been a little bit this, there obviously, are huge challenges, but there's also been an opportunity to make some rapid changes. >> Great question. Well, first of all, there's no place I'd rather be right now, than serving the health systems across the US, and certainly we have impact globally. It's dynamic time, lots of change, and as you say, with change comes opportunity. But also, it's a time of deep fragility, and a time when these clients really need help, not just from NTT, but from a variety of partners. And I know, I feel and my team feels, that it's a privilege to work in supporting them, through this very difficult time. And when I say difficult time, I mean, think about it, even before the pandemic, Chartists research was talking about the fact that likely 25% of rural hospitals would fail. Fast forward only a couple of months from that, research being published and across the industry, outpatient revenues are down 11% year over year, inpatient revenue down as well, labor expenses up by nearly 18%. And so there's a lot of pressures on the industry right now. And that's what I mean by just a very significant time to be in the industry and position to help. There's a huge recovery, that needs to happen from what our clients have experienced. First and foremost, top line. We've got to get the revenue back into the hospitals. The CARES Act funding doesn't last forever, and certainly, brings with it some obligations. So bringing in that top line growth, virtual health, which you mentioned, is a big part of that strategy. At the same time, they've got to deal with all the new delivery models or working models, work from anywhere is something that all businesses have to face, and incredibly, an incredible challenge for our health systems. Because of course, it's not just about how we do our individual work, but the interactions that they have to have in conducting the work that they do. So care from anywhere and work from anywhere, are huge concerns of our health system clients now. And you have to do that in industrialized ways, because you don't know where you're working day to day, you have to be able to have fast switching, right? Because we're not in control of where we work. Cities and states are telling us, what we have to do on a day in day out basis. There's a huge concept - >> Human. >> Oh, go ahead. Sure. >> Yeah, no, I just say, as you say, obviously, healthcare is rightly so a heavily regulated industry. So bring us inside a little bit, what are some of those opportunities, some of those innovations that providers are being able to take advantage? And have we opened the gates a little bit to help things move a little bit faster here in 2020, due to necessity? >> Yeah. Well, virtual care, you mentioned that earlier, has exploded. There's a lot of dialogue right now in the industry about whether that's forever. It will never go back to the low single digits that it was prior to the pandemic. I mean, prior to the pandemic health systems were happy if they could get to 10%. Overnight, virtual care went to 40%, 50%, increase overnight, and just continue to grow. CEOs across the industry prior to the pandemic, were really focused on digital front door strategies, the ability to enable consumers to enter the healthcare system, digitally and virtually. And so probably for the 18 months before the pandemic, most large system CEOs that I talked to, were working on those strategies. They're doubling down on those strategies, because the industry is reshaping around that digital future state. The cost pressures that we're seeing in health care, at the same time, require that they think about new operating and delivery models, certainly the industry will restructure, based on what we've gone through and continue to experience. And that will mean certainly changes in consolidation in the healthcare industry, right? As certainly certain systems will fail, right. Can't support what's happening around the economics of the industry. But also within our delivery and operations, there will be and we're already seeing a trend toward more pervasive outsourcing, moving offshore, taking particularly back office functions, whether it's IT or business processes, and looking for the help that can drive down the cost structure, better automate, and innovate on those processes and delivery models, and accelerate their journey to the digital future state of health. >> So Mary, help us understand NTT DATA Services, and NTT broader, what are the solutions? How are you helping your customers with everything we've discussed here? >> Sure, well, you can't enable those digital front door strategies unless you do things like get your applications to the cloud. You've got to be able to open up your environment to trade, if I say it that way, right? To exchange more broadly, even within your own ecosystem, within your own walls, the ability to connect doctors with doctors that before the pandemic didn't have a need to connect in the same way becomes important. So at NTT, we do everything, journey to the cloud. Certainly the security that's so important to those journey and also the digital future of health care. RPA, the introduction of bots and AI to workflows and operations in order to reduce cost. In my division in provider, we worked for nearly the last year on something we call, nucleus for healthcare, which is that digital front door enabled by digital foundation and which delivers through pre-selected capabilities scheduling, through virtual care visits to care coordination and payment, all integrated across the digital fabric, in order to accelerate the industry and certainly our health system partners achievement of that digital front door vision and the full digital future for healthcare. >> I love you talked about RPA automation, has been one of the top things we've been hearing this year. It's just a top sea level priority. We love coming to events like this, a lot of discussion of research looking a little bit forward down the road. What are some of the items here at Upgrade 2020, you want to make sure our audience get a little peek into? >> Yeah, well, you talk about automation, and I said a moment ago about offshore, we're thinking about no shore, right? So when you think about the application of automation and advanced analytics AI into business processes, it's not about moving business processes to a lower cost geography, it's about automating, and enabling through bots and whatnot, the ability to not have hands touch it, and really conserving your resources for the more complex things that have to happen. So I love that concept of no shoring, and really using technology to position humans for their best possible work, solving the harder problems that we face as an industry. I think about innovations in patient monitoring, and what we can take in terms of IoT, from other industries. And for instance, at NTT, we've been doing smart city with the city of Las Vegas, for a couple of years now. And we've got lots of AI around movement, heat, light, the physical context of things. You think about how you move that into healthcare. And it's certainly about patient observation, and creating safe spaces, where doctors and nurses don't have to travel in and out of rooms when there's a high contagion rate, but it's also about using AI, not just to watch the room, but to allow AI to alert when there's something very significant happening, what kind of movement in the bed, what does that infer in terms of what's happening in the patient's room, and alerting on that basis versus a visual monitor, if you will. There are other innovations. Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> Oh, no, so sorry, I thought you had said, please finish. >> Well, I was just about to say there are other innovations that we're working on, that are really about patient well being, patient companion. I think about the work we're doing at NTT disruption around something called Jibo, which is a robotics, very cool little guy who we've had some experience using it in our children's hospitals, right. It becomes like a really a companion of sorts. There are lots of applications for that kind of technology, especially in a pandemic time, when most of our patients are isolated and craving some human interaction and these capabilities can be like that, they can be companions, and they can provide the social interaction that really lead to health and well being. >> Well, so many important topics. Mary, thank you so much for joining us. Great to hear your automation, robotics in the people, at the center, of course, of what we look at in healthcare. Great to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. Bye bye. >> Stay tuned for more coverage from Upgrade 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's the Cube covering the Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit presented by NTT Research. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the Cube's coverage of Upgrade 2020 the Global Research Summit for NTT and always happy when we get to talk about digital transformation. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest on the program, Eric Clark. He is the Chief Digital Officer with NTT data. Eric, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> All right so Eric, let's start, you know, CDOs, first of all, there's lots of CDOs. We've done lots of events with the Chief Data Officers, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about data, but the digital officers, of course digital so important in general and even more so in 2020. But let's understand your role as Chief Digital Officer. What's your charter? Where you sit in the work? What are you responsible for? >> Yeah, definitely, and you know, it's a good question. I often start conversations with our customers by talking about exactly that, because Chief Digital Officer means something different to different companies. So for us, it's primarily my market facing. And what that means is I spend most of my time looking at research, looking at R&D, looking at what our competitors are doing in the market and looking at where trends are going to make sure that we have the right offerings and capabilities to bring to our customers, to make sure that they will remain competitive in their markets. >> That's great, you know, we've been talking for years about the digital transformations that companies have been going through. One of our definitions has been, if you're not at the end of it, more data-driven, you probably haven't done the right thing. But Eric, this year with 2020, you know, anecdotally, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously there's certain initiatives that get frozen or will take a little bit longer, but those digital initiatives, which are supposed to rely on data and help us move fast and be more agile, seem to be at the top of the list and are accelerating because if I can't respond to the daily and weekly changes that have been great in 2020, I might have a tough time surviving. So, what are you seeing? How does that live in your world? >> Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's what we're seeing from our client base as well. So early on in the pandemic, there was a lot of freeze. You know, hold everything, stop, stop spending, and let's figure out where we are and where this is going. But very quickly that turned to, we've got to react. We're going to be living with this for awhile. And we can't afford to sit back and wait and see where it goes. We've got to react and we've got to direct our future. And very often the way that comes out is with digital. So, customers are looking for opportunities to leverage digital, to grow revenue, to improve customer engagement and to drive more of their revenue through digital channels. >> Interesting, but one thing I didn't here in there, but I'm sure is part if it, what about the employees themselves? One of the big things of course, is that we've made this wonderful corporate environment, you've got the great internet there and now way everybody's at home and scrambling as to what they do. So how about the kind of the EX to go along with the CX? >> Yeah, exactly, and that was actually one of the first places that we focused as a company, because we do a lot of what we refer to as workplace services. So making sure that our customers, employees have the tools they need to do their job successfully. So immediately when offices started closing and people started going home, our big challenge was let's make sure that our customers can connect from anywhere, from wherever they need to be working from and have access to the applications and the tools and the products that they need to perform their jobs remotely. And that's really turned into a significant business of its own, really addressing those needs, not only for our customers, but also for our employee base. We have 50,000 people that we sent home, more than 90% of overnight. And many of these are our employees that are interacting with our customer base on a daily basis. So we had to make sure not only that they had connected but they had to be secure. So it was a very big switch and I think I personally was really impressed not only with what we did, but what we saw the industry do, to make that transition very safely and seamlessly. >> Eric I'd love you to expand a little bit on that, You know, which pieces of that full solution that is NTT offering and how do you and your partners help your customers through those rapid adoptions that they need? >> Yeah, so we're a full suite provider. So, we're focused on digital operations, which is digitizing your back office from your workplace services to your hybrid infrastructure network, et cetera. All the way through bringing what we refer to as journey to the cloud. So how do we help you identify what applications and what data you need in the cloud. CX and EX very big focuses for us. In fact, we take a lot of pride in, while we do go to market and sell CX specifically, we consider CX part of everything we do. So if we're talking about workplace services or hybrid infrastructure or security, we want the employee experience to be solid, and we want the employee experience to be consistent across all of those things. So, we think that our customers should not expect to have different interfaces and different portals and different user experiences when they do work with us across infrastructure, application and cloud, et cetera. >> That's excellent Eric. You know we spent the last six months talking about how did we react to the pandemic, and now at least here in the US, the children are back in school. If they're back though, it tends to be a hybrid model. And when we look at work, often we know we're going to have this long gated, kind of new abnormal if you will. So, yes you might be back in the office some, but chances are you will spend some time remote and therefore it's not work from home or back to work, it's work from anywhere, is what I need to be able to do. So, how are you preparing? How are you helping your customers through that? Because it's one thing if it was just a switch that says, I'm either here or there, but it's changing and it's very fluid. >> Yeah, and you're exactly right, it is work from anywhere. But there are some of our customers that don't have the luxury of work from anywhere. So when you think about manufacturing facilities and different hospitality companies, there are people that need to go into physical places. We do a lot in the healthcare space. We need doctors in the hospitals. So we've done a lot to help our customers figure out safe ways to return to work. Recently, we've seen universities, and as you mentioned, high schools and elementary schools all going back with varying degrees of success, right? Some of them have failed and they've had to take a pause and figure out how they're going to restart. We've also seen professional sports leagues and now college sports leagues. And when we see them having issues, we see protocols adjusting and we see them looking for what can we do to make this safer, more effective and more successful for whether it's our sports team, our school or our business. So we've taken a very active approach in that. And we're leveraging technology and creating IP that starts with pre-arrival, registering in advance and opting in for things like tracking social distancing and tracking the use of masks. Then using cameras and facilities to monitor it, to make sure people that are adhering to social distancing and adhering to wearing mask. And in the event that they aren't, we can send instant notifications to their phone. If we have repeat violators, we can prohibit them from coming back to the office. So we can have very strict controls and adherence to whatever the protocols may be as the protocols change. And then the other thing that allows us to do is in the event, someone would test positive with COVID, we will know exactly who they've been within six feet of without a mask over the past X number of days. All of that is stored in the cloud for us to use for reference and use for audit purposes. So that gives us the ability to then use our app to direct all the people that the person that was positive was in contact with, let them go get tested, come back with a negative test before they returned to the office. So basically what we've done is we've created all kinds of technology using automation and AI and facial recognition to bring more safety and more security to the workplace, whatever that workplace might be. Whether again, school, university, manufacturing facility, or a hotel. >> Really interesting topic. Tracking and tracing, so critically important. We've seen in many countries around the world, that's really helped them get their arms around and control that. We talked at the top of the interview about digital means leveraging the data. And if I don't have the data, I can't respond to what's happening there. Here in the US, I haven't heard as much about the tracking and tracing. Is this a company by company thing? Do they have the expense all on them to do it? And of course it raises the concerns about, well, I'm concerned about my privacy and that balance between the public interest and my right to privacy. How do you help your customers sort through some of those issues? >> Well, privacy is definitely a big issue. And you notice that when I was explaining that I said in pre-arrival, you opt in. So the way we've approached it is, it is an opt in. So those that don't want to opt in to that kind of tracking and tracing, won't be those that will be allowed to come back to the office. And that goes back to your other point, I've worked from anywhere. Many of those people can still successfully work from anywhere. But those that feel like they're more effective, more successful or have a need to be in an office, or a need to be physically again in a manufacturing facility or a hotel, we have a way to do that safely. >> All right, well, Eric one of the things I love about research events lately like yours, is a little peek into what's coming on down the road. So, any other things you'd like to share about? You know, some of the things that are exciting you, some things we should be looking at a little bit further down the road? >> Well, I think, you know, for us as you know, we spend a significant amount of money each year on research, and we really get excited about these opportunities and these showcases. So you'll see a lot of exciting information and a lot of what's coming in the future. (indistinct) out of it right now obviously because of the time you'll see themes of safety and security, but you're also going to see just a whole lot of really thought provoking, forward thinking technology. >> You always take the opportunity, even when they're crisis out there. There's the opportunity for innovation and acceleration of what's happening. >> Yes. Eric, thanks so much, a pleasure talking with you and definitely looking forward to hearing more from the event. >> Great, thank you, enjoyed it. >> And stick with us for more coverage from Upgrade 2020, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks as always for watching the Cube. (upbeat music)