(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. As you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications and data workloads resilient on the cloud?" Meaning  how is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep. >> Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - There's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Param Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Param, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Param phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Param, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Param for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Param said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Param I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Param to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Param what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(gentle instrumental music) >> Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vantara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Vantara drives customer success, specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green IT, and then the 07-08 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back, and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in IT. Are you seeing this? Is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >> Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers, and end consumers nowadays are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see, is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough, so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to follow the human rights and sustainability, three levels back in the supply chain. But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action, and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in, and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company, because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themselves as the CEO, but they also are hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens, it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a KPI, others are indirectly measured. So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels, they all get measured on it, and for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round tables. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well, the pressure is coming from end consumers and new laws that are put into action, that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the three pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new score system where they put out request for proposal, and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive, that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? And in their store system, cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It weighs about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a CFO. But in some cases the CFO say, "I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it." But they're asked to do it because end consumers, laws, and so on, are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah sustainability has become a maker trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >> Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, and we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR, and it looks like it's going to lead again here. Just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. Odawara is my favorite, because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >> Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well, to keep our production close to our customers and reduce transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the EMEA region, back in 2013, we created a new factory. And when we did that, we were asked to do it in an energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we built a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the wintertime, with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panels on the roof to power that factory. We were collecting rain water to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with LED. And when we send out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a rack, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer. We want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EMEA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up in price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking the talk, and we make that decision, even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013. When you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future, but right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >> I want to come back to the economics, but before I do, I want to pick up on something you just said, because you hear the slogan, "Sustainability by design." A lot of people might think, "Okay, that's just a marketing slogan to vector into this mega trend," but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time based on your last comments. Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, so, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission in that part of the life of a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from new for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core it's a technology innovator and our answer is to reduce the CO2 emission, and the decarbonization of the data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >> How about recycling? Where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was... A lot of times at a hotel you used to get bottled water now you get plant-based waters in a box and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >> Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here because one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we want to do when you keep it for 10 years, is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CPU power, you just switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system, to keep it those 10 years. But you can also expand with new disk media, flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that, you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment, like computer network and switches, but we also take competitive equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years that has been linear economics, where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into the landfill afterwards. The recycling economics is really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circular economics, where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only 1-2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along, and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >> Yeah, and that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design. You have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I do want to come back to the economics, because in the early days of so-called green IT, there was a lot of talk about, "Well I'll never be able to lower the power bill, and the facilities people don't talk to the IT people," and that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I understand it's going to take some time, but help us understand your experience there Tom. >> Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality, when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting, and we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world, where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure, is to reduce the electricity by 96%. This is a very high number, and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 emission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part, just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure, and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting, because you save electricity and you do something really good for the environment at the same time. In this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million U.S. dollar annually, and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here, looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer if you have that kind of capability in your organization. Modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >> Yeah, a big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners. Are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers, and distributors who may be watching? >> So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software, and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization, and partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO, and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've see in this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room, is that they are very focused on the green profile, and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on in the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO, and there will immediately be a request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization, to be relevant, and have an impact, and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >> Well, really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom, really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >> Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >> Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back to summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. (gentle instrumental music)

>>Hi everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently, our cost, the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi vent has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexity is of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi. How does this fit into the overall sheet for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we are not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners, that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we've allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that hit Tashi van is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value based and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scaled it all the way through to our midsize enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagements, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi Valar is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>So lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time. I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they pre-approved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customers needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that that Hitachi Van Tara has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how is that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time up front planning with them. What is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at, your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Ventura's as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them, with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us. And understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users. >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pike? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority, right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today, talking about what Hitachi van is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in it for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage.

(shimmering corporate music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi Vantara. Lisa Martin here with Russell Skingsley, the CTO and Global VP of Technical Sales at Hitachi Vantara. Russell, welcome to the program. >> Hiya, Lisa! Nice to be here! >> Yeah, great to have you. So, here we are, at the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers' priorities for 2023? >> Yeah, good one. Just to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission-critical IT environments and this has been been in our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So, just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from and so, that's what you're going to hear about here. Now, in terms of 2023, one of the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate, is power consumption and closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and de-carbonization and all of that sort of thing, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say, it is a priority for us and we are very active in that area. So, aside from that one, that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020 and I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So, just the act of managing that amount of data is a challenge in itself and I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas is another one of those big challenges. In that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call, the Post-Facebook Awakening Era, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's, yeah, the minutiae of people's lives, and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data. >> Right. >> Yeah, right, and I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, this whole idea of all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to power it and I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data. Right. >> Yeah, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, it's got to be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value, new opportunities for the business, at record speed. >> Yes, that's exactly right, and so, being able to wield that data somehow, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data or a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the Cloud to be able to build out their capabilities and the reason why the Cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card and now, all of a sudden, they could start to build a business from that and I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now, how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages? How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this is why, really, Hybrid Cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >> So, when it comes to Hybrid Cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then, I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Vantara and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those Hybrid Cloud challenges? >> Yeah, it's a great question and, you know, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from one vendor. Hybrid by, sort of, its, you know, by definition, is going to involve multiple pieces and so, there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at a one-stop shop like you used to, but even if you think about the biggest public Cloud provider on the planet, AWS, even it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on Public Cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace comes in. Now, for us, you know, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage, and, you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So, partners are absolutely essential, and so now, we kind of have a partner-first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in Hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our own solutions and so, you know, when it comes to those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace and, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter, but, you know, that's kind of what you say when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable. You know, of course they matter and for us, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible Hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >> Can you peel the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions? Give me a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that. >> Yeah, let me do that with a few examples here and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So, for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important Hybrid Cloud partners and in fact, it's my belief they have one of the strongest Hybrid Cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with our customers as well, but, you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. We combine that with what VMware's doing and then, when you look at our converged, or hyper-converged, solutions with them, it's a 'better together' story where you now have what is one of the best Hybrid Cloud stories in the industry with VMware, but now, for the on-premise part especially, you've now added 100% data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level, a level underneath, where VMware are, and so, that's VMware, and I've got a couple more examples just to sort of fill that out a bit. >> Sure. >> Cisco is another part, a very strong partner of ours, a key partner, and, I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a $50,000,000,000 IT provider, and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own, so they're going to partner with someone. From our perspective, we look at Cisco's customers and we look at them and think, they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality and we think we match with them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converged platforms in the industry from Cisco, so it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best arrays, best storage arrays, they can get, and so, we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be UCS customers. Final one for you, Lisa, by way of example. We have a relationship with Equinix and, you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading Colo provider and the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. They're connected to all of the significant Cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the Cloud. Compute from the Cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over. You, like, you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long-lived. Storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time and so, the cost model around Public Cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute, and so, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a data anchor point, where they put our arrays into an Equinix location and then they utilize Equinix as high-speeding, interconnects to the Cloud providers to take the compute from them. So, they take the compute from the Cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way, they feel like, we've now got the best of all worlds. >> Right. >> What I hope that illustrates Lisa is, with those three examples, is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partner's advantages. >> Right. What are, when you're in customer conversations, in our final few minutes here I want to get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi Vantara as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as-a-service business so we can round out with that. >> Okay, let's just start with the differentiators. You know, firstly, and hopefully, I've kind of, I've hit this point hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that and so, they're looking for, okay, you've got that. Now, how can you make my Hybrid Cloud aspirations better? So, we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly, I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and into the areas of data management. >> Okay. >> You know, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. So, you know, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that and we think that that's a competitive advantage for us. >> Right. >> One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time, where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again, but you only really get that perspective if you are long-lived in the industry and so, we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >> Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as-a-service business? >> They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know? We ourselves don't own data centers, right? So, we don't provide our own Cloud services out. So, we are 100% partner-focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their Cloud services with our solutions and then on-sell them to their customers as a service. You know, and by quick way of example, VMware, for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware Cloud services. 5,000 blows me away and many of them are our partners too. So, we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware, and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as-a-service business. >> Got it. So, as you said, the partner ecosystem, it's absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things Hybrid Cloud challenges and how Hitachi Vantara is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you very much, Lisa! >> Thanks, Russell. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage!

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers priorities for 2023? >>Yeah, good one. Just to, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, it's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the, the act of managing that amount of data is, is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's Yeah. The minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, to power it. And I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data, right? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. >>Yes, that's exactly right. And so being able to, to wield that data somehow turn it, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, and the reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service. IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card. And now all of a sudden they could start to build a business from that. And I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I, how do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages. How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >>So when it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, you know, by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. And so there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at, at a one stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, aws even, it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, so even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. >>And you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So partners are absolutely essential. And so now we kind of have a, a partner first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. And, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter. But you know, that's kind of what you say when, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >>Can you peel the, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, let me do that with a few examples here, and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with, with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners and in, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, with our customers as well. But you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. >>We combine that with what VMware's doing, and then when you look at our converged or hyper-converged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. But now for the on premise part, especially, you've now added a hundred percent data, data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level A level underneath where VMware are. And so that's, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. So they're going to partner with someone. >>From our perspective, we look at Cisco's, Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality, and we think we match them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array they can get. And so we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be ucs customers. Final one for, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, with Equinix and you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading colo provider. And the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over you. Like you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long lived storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. And so the cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. And so our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. To take the compute from them. So they take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. Right. What I hope that illustrates Lisa is with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations, and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for, and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that. And so they're looking for, okay, you've got that now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? So we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment, of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. >>So, you know, we, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that. And we think that that's a, that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this, this, this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again. But you only really get that perspective if you are, if you are long lived in the industry. And so we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, we ourselves don't own data centers, right? So we don't provide our own cloud services out. So we are 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what quick way of example, VMware for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. And many of them are our partners too. So we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as a service business. >>Got it. So the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, brilliant cloud community, and welcome back to AWS re:Invent. We are here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, how you doing? >> I'm doing well, thanks, yeah. >> Yeah, I feel like... >> I'm hanging in there. >> you've got a lot of pep in your step today for the fourth day. >> I think my voice is coming back, actually. >> (laughs) Look at you, resilient. >> I was almost lost yesterday, yeah. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> So, I actually, at a Hitachi event one time almost completely lost my voice. The production guys pulled me off. They said, "You're done." (Savannah laughing) They gave me the hook. >> You got booted? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, you actually (laughs) got the hook, wow. >> So, I have good memories of Hitachi. >> I was going to say (Dave laughing) interesting that you mentioned Hitachi. Our two guests this morning are from Hitachi. Sid and KP, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Savannah: How you guys doing? Looking great for day four. >> Great. Thank you. >> Great. >> Hanging in there. >> Thank you, Dave and Savannah. (Savannah laughing) >> Dave: Yeah, cool. >> Savannah: Yeah. (laughs) >> Yeah, it was actually a Pentaho thing, right? >> Oh, Pentaho? Yeah. >> Which kind of you guys into that software edge. It was right when you announced the name change to Hitachi Vantara, which is very cool. I had Brian Householder on. You remember Brian? >> Yeah, I know. >> He was explaining the vision, and yeah (indistinct). >> Yeah. Well, look at you a little Hitachi (indistinct). >> Yeah, I've been around a long time, yeah. >> Yeah, all right. (Dave laughing) >> Just a casual flex to start us off there, Dave. I love it. I love it. Sid, we've talked a lot on the show about delivering outcomes. It's a hot theme. Everyone wants to actually have tangible business outcomes from all of this. How are customers realizing value from the cloud? What does that mean? >> See, still 2007, 2008, it was either/or kind of architecture. Either I'm going to execute my use cases on cloud or I'm going to keep my use cases and outcomes through edge. But in the last four or five years and specifically we are in re:Invent, I would talk about AWS. Lot of the power of hyperscalers has been brought to edge. If you talk about the snowball family of AWS, if you talk about monitor on edge devices, if you talk about the entire server list being brought into Lambda coupled inside snowball, now the architecture premise, if I talk about logical shift is end. Now the customers are talking about executing the use cases between edge and cloud. So, there is a continuum rather than a binary bullion decision. So, if you are talking about optimizing a factory, earlier I'll do the analytics at cloud, and I'll do machine on edge. Now it is optimization of a factory outcome at scale across my entire manufacturing where edge, private cloud, AWS, hyperscalers, everything is a continuum. And the customer is not worried about where, which part of my data ops, network ops, server ops storage ops is being executed. >> Savannah: It's like (indistinct). >> The customer is enjoying the use cases. And the orchestration is abstracted through an industrial player like Hitachi working very collaboratively with AWS. So, that is how we are working on industrial use cases right now. >> You brought up manufacturing. I don't think there's been a hotter conversation around supply chain and manufacturing than there has been the last few years. I can imagine taking that guessing game out for customers is a huge deal for you guys. >> Big because if you look at the world today, right from a safety pin, to a cell phone jacket, to a cell phone, the entire supply chain is throttled. The supply chain is throttled because there are various choke points. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And each choke points is surrounded by different kind of supply and geopolitical issues. >> Savannah: 100%. >> Now, if we talk about the wheat crisis happening because of the Ukraine-Russia war, but the wheat crisis actually creates a multiple string of impacts which impact everything. Silicon, now we talk about silicon, but we then forget about nickel. Nickel is also controlled in one part of that geopolitical conflict. So, everything is getting conflagrated into a very big supply issue. So, if your factories are not performing beyond optimum, if they are not performing at real, I'm, we are talking about factory, hyperscale of the factory. The factory needs to perform at hyperscale to provide what the world needs today. So, we are in a very different kind of a scenario. Some of the economists call it earlier the recession was because of a demand constraint. The demand used to go down. Today's recession is because the supply is going down. The demand is there, but the supply is going down. And there is a different kind of recession in the world. The supply is what is getting throttled. >> And the demand is somewhat unpredictable too. People, you know, retailers, they've... >> Especially right now. >> kind of messed up their inventory. And so, the data is still siloed. And that's where, you know, you get to, okay, can I have the same experience across clouds, on-prem, out to the edge? Kind of bust those silos. >> Yep. >> You know, I dunno if it's, it's certainly not entirely a data problem. There's (laughs), like you say, geopolitical and social issues. >> Savannah: There's so much complexity. >> But there's a data problem too. >> Yes. >> Big. >> So, I wonder if you could talk about your sort of view of, point of view on that cross-cloud, hybrid, out to the edge, what I call super cloud? >> Absolutely. So, today, if you look at how enterprises are adopting cloud or how they're leveraging cloud, it's not just a hosting platform, right? It is the platform from where they can draw business capabilities. You heard in the re:Invent that Amazon is coming up with a supply chain service out of the box in the cloud. That's the kind of capabilities that business wants to draw from cloud today. So, the kind of multicloud or like hybrid cloud, public cloud, private cloud, those are the things which are kind of going to be behind the scenes. At the end of the day, the cloud needs to be able to support businesses by providing their services closer to their consumers. So, the challenges are going to be there in terms of like reliability, resilience, cost, security. Those are the ones that, you know, many of the enterprises are grappling with in terms of the challenges. And the way to solve that, the way how we approach our customers and work with them is to be able to bring resilience into the cloud, into the services which are running in cloud, and by driving automation, making autonomous in everything that you do, how you are monitoring your services, how we are making it available, how we are securing it, how we are making it very cost-effective as well. It cannot be manually executed; it has to be automated. So, automation is the key in terms of making the services leveraged from all of this cloud. >> That's your value add. >> Absolutely. >> And how do I consume that value add? Is it sort of embedded into infrastructure? Is it a service layer on top? >> Yeah, so everything that we do today in terms of like how these services have to be provided, how the services have to be consumed, there has to be a modern operating model, right? I think this is where Hitachi has come up with what we are calling as Hitachi Application Reliability Center and Services. That is focusing on modern operating, modern ways of like, you know, how you support these cloud workloads and driving this automation. So, whether we provide a hyper-converged infrastructure that is going to be at the edge location, or we are going to be able to take a customer through the journey of modernization or migrating onto cloud, the operating model that is going to be able to establish the foundation on cloud and then to be able to operate with the right levels of reliability, security, cost is the key. And that's the value added service that we provide. And then the way we do that is essentially by looking at three principles: one, to look at the service in totality. Gone are the days you look at infrastructure separately, applications separately, data and security separately, right? >> Savannah: No more silos. >> No more silos. You look at it as a workload, and you look at it as a service. And number two is to make sure that the DevOps that you bring and what you do at the table is totally integrated and it's end to end. It's not a product team developing a feature and then ops team trying to keep the lights on. It has to be a common backlog with the error budget that looks at you know, product releases, product functionalities, and even what ops needs to do to evolve the product as well. And then the third is to make sure that reliability and resiliency is inbuilt. Cloud offers native durability, native availability. But if your service doesn't take advantage of that, it's kind of going to still be not available. So, how do you kind of ingrain and embed all of these things as a value add that we provide? >> There's a lot of noise. We've got hybrid cloud. We've got multicloud. We've got a lot going on. It adds to the complexity. How do you help customers solve that complexity as they begin their transformation journey? I mean, I'm sure you're working with the biggest companies, making really massive change. How do you guide them through that process? >> So, it is to look at the outcome working backwards, like what AWS does, right? Like, you know, how do you look at the business outcome? What is the value that you're looking to drive? Again, it's not to be pinned through one particular cloud. I know there is lot of technology choices that you can make and lot of deployment models that you can choose from. But at the end of the day, having a common operating model which is kind of like modern, agile, and it is kind of like keeping the outcomes in the mind, that is what we do with our customers to be able to create that operating model, which completes the transformation, by the way. And cloud is just one part of the LEGO blocks which provides that overall scheme and then the view for driving that overall transformation. >> So, let's paint a picture. Let's say you've got this resilient foundation; you've kind of helped the customers build that out. How do they turn that into value for their customers? Do you have any examples that you can share? That'd be great. >> Yeah, I can start with what we're doing for one of the, you know, world's largest facility, infrastructure, power, cooling, security, monitoring company that has their products deployed in 2,000 locations across the globe. For them, and always on business means you are monitoring the temperature. You are monitoring the safety of people who are within the facility, right? A temperature shift of one to two degree can affect even the sustainability goals of NARC, our customer, but also their end consumers. So, how do you monitor these kind of like critical parameters? How do you have a platform? >> Savannah: Great example, yeah. >> How you have cloud resources that are going to be always on, that are going to be reliable, that are going to be cost-effective as well is what we are doing for one of our customers. Sid can talk about another example as well. >> Great. >> Yeah, go for it, Sid. >> So, there are examples: rail. We are working with a group in England; it's called West Coast Partnership. And they had a edge device which was increasing in size. Now, this edge device was becoming big because the parameters which go into the edge device were increasing because of regulation and because the rail is part of national security infrastructure. We have worked with West Coast Partnership and Hitachi Rail, which is a group company, to create a miniaturization of this edge device, because if the size of the edge device is increasing on the train, then the weight of the train increases, and the speed profile, velocity profile, everything goes down. So, we have miniaturized the edge device. Secondly, all the data profiles, signal control, traction control, traction motors, direction control, timetable compliance, everything has been kept uniform. And we have done analytics on cloud. So, what is the behavior of the driver? What is a big breaking parameter of the driver? If the timetable has being missed, is there an erratic behavior being demonstrated by the driver to just meet the timetable? And the timetable is a pretty important criteria in rail because if you miss one, then... So, what we have done is we have created an edge-to-cloud environment where the entire rail analytics is happening. Similarly, in another group company, Hitachi Energy, they had a problem that arguably one of the largest transformer manufacturer in the world. The transformer is a pretty common name now because you're seeing what is happening in Ukraine. Russia went after the transformers and substations before the start of the winter so that their district heating can be meddled with. Now, the transformer, it had a lead time of 17 weeks before COVID. So, if you put me an order of a three-phase transformer, I can deliver it to you in 17 weeks. After and during COVID, the entire lead time increased to 57 to 58 weeks. In cases of a complex transformer, it even went up to something like two years. >> Savannah: Ooh! >> Now, they wanted to increase the productivity of their existing plant because there is only that much sheet metal, that much copper for solenoid, that much microprocessor and silicon. So, they wanted to increase the output of their factory from 95 to 105, 10 more transformers every day, which is 500 and, which is 3,650 every- >> Savannah: Year. >> Year. Now, to do that, we went to a very complex machine; it's called a guard machine. And we increased the productivity of the guard machine by just analyzing all the throttles and all the wastages which are happening there. There are multiple case studies because, see, Hitachi is an industrial giant with 105 years of body of work. KP and I just represent the tip of the digital tip of the arrow. But what we are trying to do through HARC, through industry cloud, through partnership with AWS is basically containerizing and miniaturizing our entire body of work into a democratized environment, an industrial app store, if I may say, where people can come and take their industrial outcomes at ease without worrying about their computational and network orchestration between edge and cloud. That's what we are trying to do. >> I love that analogy of an industrial app cloud. Makes it feel easier in decreasing the complexity of all the different things that everyone's factoring into making their products, whatever they're making. So, we have a new challenge here on theCUBE at AWS re:Invent, where we are looking for your 30-second hot take, your Instagram reel, sound bite. What's the most important story or theme either for you as a team or coming out of the show? You can ponder it for a second. >> It might be different. See, for me, it is industrial security. Industrial OT security should be the theme of the Western world. Western world is on the crosshairs of multiple bad actors. And the industrial security is in the chemical plants, is in the industrial plants, is in the power grids, is in our postal networks and our rail networks. They need to be secured; otherwise, we are geopolitically very weak. Gone are the days when anyone is going to pick up a battle with America or Western world on a field. The battle is going to be pretty clandestine on an cyber world. And that is why industrial security is very important. >> Critical infrastructure and protecting it. >> Absolutely. >> Well said, Sid. KP, what's your hot take? >> My take is going to be a modern operating model, which is going to complete the transformation and to be able to tap into business services from cloud. So, a modern operating model through HARC, that is going to be my take. >> Fantastic. Well, can't wait to see what comes out of Hitachi next. Sid, KP... >> KP: Thank you. >> thank you so much for being here. >> Sid: Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> Dave: Thanks, guys. >> Savannah: This is I could talk to you all about supply chain all day long. And thank all of you for tuning in to our continuous live coverage here from AWS re:Invent in fantastic Sin City. I'm Savannah. Oh, excuse me. With Dave Vellante, I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. (digital xylophone music)

(intro music) >> Hi everybody. Dave Vellante, back with Day Two coverage, we're live at the ARIA Hotel in Las Vegas for fal.con '22. Several thousand people here today. The keynote was, it was a little light. I think people were out late last night, but the keynote was outstanding and it's still going on. We had to break early because we have to strike early today, but we're really excited to have Stephan Goldberg here, Vice President of Technology Alliances at Claroty. And we're going to talk about an extremely important topic, which is the internet of things, the edge, we talk about it a lot. We haven't covered securing the edge here at theCUBE this week. And so Stephan really excited to have you on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. Tell us more about Claroty, C-L-A-R-O-T-Y, a very interesting spelling, but what's it all about? >> Claroty is cybersecurity company that specializes in cyber physical systems, also known as operational technology systems and the extended internet of things. The difference between the traditional IoT and what what everyone calls an IoT in the cyber physical system is that an IoT device has anything connected on the network that traditionally cannot carry an agent, a security camera, a card reader. A cyber physical system is a system that has influence and operates in the physical world but is controlled from the cyberspace. An example would be a controller, a turbine, a robotic arm, or an MRI machine. >> Yeah, so those are really high-end systems, run, are looked after by engineers, not necessarily consumers. So what's what's happening in that world? I mean, we've talked a lot on theCUBE about the schism between OT and IT, they haven't really talked a lot, but in the last several years, they've started to talk more. You look at the ecosystem of IoT providers. I mean, it's companies like Hitachi and PTC and Siemens. I mean, it's the different names than we're used to in IT. What are the big trends that you're seeing the macro? >> So, first of all, traditionally, most manufacturers and environments that were heavy on operations, operational technology, they had the networks air-gapped, completely separated. You had your IT network for business administration, you had the OT network to actually build stuff. Today with emerging technologies and even modern switching architecture everything is being converged. You have the same physical infrastructure in terms of networking, that carries both networks. Sometimes a human error, sometimes a business logic that needs to interconnect these networks to transmit data from the OT side of the house, to the IT side of the house, exposes the OT environment to cyber threats. >> Was that air-gap by design or was it just that there wasn't connectivity? >> It was air-gap by design, due to security and operational reasons, and also ownership in these organizations. The IT-managed space was completely separate from the OT-managed space. So whoever built a network for the controllers to build a car, for example, was an automation engineer and the vendors, that have built these networks, were automation vendors, unlike the traditional Ciscos of the world, that we're specializing in IT. Today we're seeing the IT vendors on the OT side, and the OT vendors, they're worried about the IT side. >> But I mean, tradition, I mean, engineers are control freaks. No offense, but, I'm glad they are, I'm thankful for that. So there must have been some initial reticence to them connecting up these air-gap systems. They went wanted to make sure that they were secure, that they did it right, and presumably that's where you guys come in. What are the exposures and risks of these, of this critical infrastructure that we should be aware of? >> So you're completely right. And from an operational perspective let let's call it change control is very rigorous. So they did not want to go on the internet and just, we're seeing it with adoption of cloud technologies, for example. Cloud as in industry four ago, five ago, cloud as in cyber security. We all heard Amol's keynote from this morning talking about critical infrastructures and we'll touch upon our partnership in a second, but CrowdStrike, CrowdStrike being considered and deployed within these environments is a new thing. It's a new thing because the OT operation managers and the chief information security officers, they understand that air-gap is no longer a valid strategy. From a business perspective, these networks are already connected. We're seeing the trends of cyber attacks, IT cyber attacks, like not Patreon, I'm not talking about the Stoxnet, the targeted OT. I'm talking about WannaCry, EternalBlue, IT vulnerabilities that did not target OT, but due to the outdated and the specification of OT posture on the networks, they hit healthcare, they hit OT much harder than they did IT. >> Was Log4J, did that sleep into OT, or any IT that. >> So, absolutely. >> So Log4J right, which was so pervasive, like so many of these malwares. >> All these vulnerabilities that, it's a windows vulnerability, it has nothing to do with OT. But then when you stop and you say, hold on, my human machine interface workstation, although it has some proprietary software by Rockwell or Siemens running on it, what is the underlying operating system? Oh, hold on, it's Windows. We haven't updated that for like eight years. We were focused on updating the software but not the underlying operating system. The vulnerabilities exist to a greater extent on the OT side of the house because of the same characteristic of operational technology environments. >> So the brute force air-gap approach was no longer viable because the business imperative came in and said, no, we have to connect these systems to digitally transform, or advance our business, there's opportunities to monetize, whatever it was. The business laid that out as an imperative. So now OT engineers have to rethink how they secure it. So what are the steps that they're taking and how does Claroty help? Is there a sort of a playbook, a sequential playbook? >> Absolutely, so before we discussed the maturity curve of adopting an CPS security, or OT security technology, let's touch upon the characteristic of the space and what it led vendors like Claroty to build. So you have the rigorous chain control. You have the security in mind, operations, lowered the risk state of mind. That led vendors, likes of Claroty, to build a solution. And I'm talking about seven, eight years ago, to be passive, mostly passive or passive only to inspect network and to analyze network and focus on detection rather than taking action like response or preventative maintenance. >> Um-hmm. >> It made vendors to build on-prem solutions because of the cloud-averse state of mind of this industry. And because OT is very specific, it led vendors to focus only on OT devices, overlooking what we discussed as IoT, Unfortunately, besides HMI and PLC, the controller in the plant, you also have the security camera. So when you install an OT security solution I'm talking about the traditional ones, they traditionally overlook the security camera or anything that is not considered traditional OT. These three observations, although they were necessary in the beginning, you understand the shortcomings of it today. >> Um-hmm. >> So cloud-averse led to on-prem which leads to war security. It's like comparing CrowdStrike and one of its traditional competitors in the antivirus space. What CrowdStrike innovated is the SaaS first, cloud-native solution that is continuously being updated and provide the best in cloud security, right? And that is very much like what Claroty's building. We decided to go SaaS first and cloud-native solution. >> So, because of cloud-aversion, the industry shows somewhat outdated deployment models, on-prem, which limited scale and created greater diversity, more stovepipes, all the problems that we always talk about. Okay, and so is the answer to that, just becoming more cloud, having more of an affinity to cloud? That was a starting point, right. >> This is exactly it. Air-gap is perceived as secured, but you don't get updates and you don't really know what's going on in your network. If you have a Claroty or a crosswork installer, you have much higher probability detecting fast and responding fast. If you don't have it, you are just blind. You will be bridged, that's the. >> I was going to say, plus, air-gap, it's true, but people can get through air-gaps, too. I mean, it's harder, but Stoxnet. Yeah, look at Stoxnet right, oh, it's mopping the floor, boom, or however it happened, but so yeah. >> Correct. >> So, but the point being, you know, assume that breach, even though I know CrowdStrike thinks that the unstoppable breach is a myth, but you know, you talk to people like Kevin Mandia, it's like, we assume you're going to get breached, right? Let's make that assumption. Yeah, okay, and so that means you've got to have visibility into the network. So what are those steps that you would, what's that maturity model that you referenced before? >> So on top of these underlying principles, which is cloud-native, comprehensive, not OT only, but XIoT, and then bring that the verticalization and OT specificity. On top of that, you're exactly right. There is a maturity curve. You cannot boil the ocean, deploy protections, and change the environment within one day. It starts with discovering everything that is connected to your network. Everything from the traditional workstations to the cameras, and of course ending up with the cyber physical systems on the network. That discovery cannot be only a high level profile, it needs to be in depth to the level you need to know application versions of these devices. If you cannot tell the application version you cannot correlate it to a vulnerability, right? Just knowing that's an HMI or that's a PLC by Siemens is insufficient. You need to know the app version, then you can correlate to vulnerability, then you can correlate to risk. This is the next step, risk assessment. You need to put up a score basically, on each one of these devices. A vulnerability score, risk score, in order to prioritize action. >> Um-hmm. >> These two steps are discovery and thinking about the environment. The next two steps are taking action. After we have the prioritized devices discovered on your network, our approach is that you need to ladle in and deploy protections from a preventative perspective. Claroty delivers recommended policies in the form of access control lists or rules. >> Right. >> That can leverage existing infrastructure without touching a device without patching it, just to protect it. The next step would be detection and response. Once you have these policies deployed you also can leverage them to spot policy deviations. >> And that's where CrowdStrike comes in. So talk about how you guys partner with CrowdStrike, what that integration looks like and what the differentiation is. >> So actually the integration with CrowdStrike crosses the the entire customer journey. It starts with visibility. CrowdStrike and us exchange data on the asset level. With the announcement during FalCon, with Falcon Discover for IoT, we are really, really proud working on that with CrowdStrike. Traditionally CrowdStrike discovered and provided data about the IT assets. And we did the same thing with CPS and OT. Today with Falcon Discover for IoT, and us expanding to the XIoT space, both of us look at all devices but we can discover different things. When you merge these data sets you have an unparalleled visibility into any environment, and specifically OT. The integrations continue, and maybe the second spotlight I'll put, but without diminishing the other ones, is detection and response. It's the XDR Alliance. Claroty is very proud to be one of the first partners, XDR Alliance partners, for CrowdStrike, fitting in to the XDR, to CrowdStrike's XDR, the data that is needed to mitigate and respond and get more context about breaches in these OT environments, but also take action. Also trigger action, via Claroty and leverage Claroty's network-centric capabilities to respond. >> We hear a lot. We heard a lot in today's keynote note about the data, the importance of data, of the graph database. How unique is this Stephan, in the industry, in your view? >> The uniqueness of what exactly? >> Of this joint solution, if you will, this capability. >> I told my counterparts from CrowdStrike yesterday, the go-to market ones and the product management ones. If we are successful with Falcon Discover for IoT, and that product matures, as we plan for it to mature, it will change the industry, the OT security industry, for all of us. Not only for Claroty, for all players in this space. And this is why it's so important for us to stay coordinated and support this amazing company to enter this space and provide better security to organizations that really support our lives. >> We got to leave it there, but this is such an important topic. We're seeing in the war in Ukraine, there's a cyber component in the future of war. >> Yes. >> Today. And what do they do? They go after critical infrastructure. So protecting that critical infrastructure is so important, especially for a country like the United States, which has so much critical infrastructure and a lot to lose. So Stephan, thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> For the work that you're doing. It was great to have you on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll be right back from fal.con '22. We're live from the ARIA in Las Vegas. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Javits in the big apple, New York City. This is theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. We're here for a full day of coverage. We're talking to customers, partners, executives and analysts as well. Peder Ulander is here. He's the Chief Marketing Officer of MongoDB and he's joined by Radhika Krishnan, who's the Chief Product Officer at Hitachi Ventara. Folks, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you both again. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you David, it's good to be back again. >> Peder, first time since 2019, we've been doing a lot of these conferences and many of them, it's the first time people have been out in a physical event in three years. Amazing. >> I mean, after three years to come back here in our hometown of New York and get together with a few thousand of our favorite customers, partners, analysts, and such, to have real good discussions around where we're taking the world with regards to our developer data platform. It's been great. >> I think a big part of that story of course, is ecosystem and partnerships and Radhika, I remember I was at an event when Hitachi announced its strategy and it's name change, and really tried to understand why and the what's behind that. And of course, Hitachi's a company that looks out over the long term, and of course it has to perform tactically, but it thinks about the future. So give us the update on what's new at Hitachi Ventara, especially as it relates to data. >> Sure thing, Dave. As many, many folks might be aware, there's a very strong heritage that Hitachi has had in the data space, right. By virtue of our products and our presence in the data storage market, which dates back to many decades, right? And then on the industrial side, the parent company Hitachi has been heavily focused on the OT sector. And as you know, there is a pretty significant digital transformation underway in the OT arena, which is all being led by data. So if you look at our mission statement, for instance, it's actually engineering the data driven because we do believe that data is the fundamental platform that's going to drive that digital transformation, irrespective of what industry you're in. >> So one of the themes that you guys both talk about is modernization. I mean, you can take a cloud, I remember Alan Nance, who was at the time, he was a CIO at Philips, he said, look, you could take a cloud workload, or on-prem workload, stick it into the cloud and lift it and shift it. And in your case, you could just put it on, run it on an RDBMS, but you're not going to affect the operational models. >> Peder Ulander: It's just your mess for less, man. >> If you do that. >> It's your mess, for less. >> And so, he goes, you'll get a few, you know, you'll get a couple of zeros out of that. But if you want to have, in his case, billion dollar impact to the business, you have to modernize. So what does modernize mean to each of you? >> Maybe Peder, you can start. >> Yeah, no, I'm happy to start. I think it comes down to what's going on in the industry. I mean, we are truly moving from a world of data centers to centers of data, and these centers of data are happening further and further out along the network, all the way down to the edges. And if you look at the transformation of infrastructure or software that has enabled us to get there, we've seen apps go from monoliths to microservices. We've seen compute go from physical to serverless. We've seen networking go from old wireline copper to high powered 5G networks. They've all transformed. What's the one layer that hasn't completely transformed yet, data, right? So if we do see this world where things are getting further and further out, you've got to rethink your data architecture and how you basically support this move to modernization. And we feel that MongoDB with our partners, especially with Hitachi, we're best suited to really kind of help with this transition for our customers as they move from data centers to centers of data. >> So architecture. And at the failure, I will say this and you tell me if you agree or not. A lot of the failures of sort of the big data architectures of today are there's, everything's in this monolithic database, you've got to go through a series of hyper-specialized professionals to get to the data. If you're a business individual, you're so frustrated because the market's changing faster than you can get answers. So you guys, I know, use this concept of data fabric, people talk about data mesh. So how do you think, Radhika, about modernization in the future of data, which by its very nature is distributed? >> Yeah. So Dave, everybody talks about the hybrid cloud, right? And so the reality is, every one of our customers is having to deal with data that's straddled across on-prem as well as the public cloud and many other places as well. And so it becomes incredibly important that you have a fairly seamless framework, that's relatively low friction, that allows you to go from the capture of the data, which could be happening at the edge, could be happening at the core, any number of places, all the way to publish, right. Which is ultimately what you want to do with data because data exists to deliver insights, right? And therefore you dramatically want to minimize the friction in the process. And that is exactly what we're attempting to do with our data fabric construct, right. We're essentially saying, customers don't have to worry about, like you mentioned, they may have federated data structures, architectures, data lakes, fitting in multiple locations. How do you ensure that you're not having to double up custom code in order to drive the pipelines, in order to drive the data movement from one location to the other and so forth. And so essentially what we're providing is a mechanism whereby they can be confident about the quality of the data at the end of the day. And this is so paramount. Every customer that I talk to is most worried about ensuring that they have data that is trustworthy. >> So this is a really important point because I've always felt like, from a data quality standpoint, you know you get the data engineers who might not have any business context, trying to figure out the quality problem. If you can put the data responsibility in the hands of the business owner, who, he or she, has context, that maybe starts to solve this problem. There's some buts though. So infrastructure becomes an operational detail. Let's hide that. Don't worry about it. Figure it out, okay, so the business can run, but you need self-service infrastructure and you have to figure out how to have federated governance so that the right people can have access. So how do you guys think about that problem in the future? 'Cause it's almost like this vision creates those two challenges. Oh, by the way, you got to get your organization behind it. Right, 'cause there's an organizational construct as well. But those are, to me, wonderful opportunities but they create technology challenges. So how are you guys thinking about that and how are you working on it? >> Yeah, no, that's exactly right, Dave. As we talk to data practitioners, the recurring theme that we keep hearing is, there is just a lot of use cases that require you to have deep understanding of data and require you to have that background in data sciences and so on, such as data governance and vary for their use cases. But ultimately, the reason that data exists is to be able to drive those insights for the end customer, for the domain expert, for the end user. And therefore it becomes incredibly important that we be able to bridge that chasm that exists today between the data universe and the end customer. And that is what we essentially are focused on by virtue of leaning into capabilities like publishing, right? Like self, ad hoc reporting and things that allow citizen data scientists to be able to take advantage of the plethora of data that exists. >> Peder, I'm interested in this notion of IT and OT. Of course, Hitachi is a partner, established in both. Talk about Mongo's position in thinking. 'Cause you've got on-prem customers, you're running now across all clouds. I call it super cloud connecting all these things. But part of that is the edge. Is Mongo running there? Can Mongo run there, sort of a lightweight version? How do you see that evolve? Give us some details there. >> So I think first and foremost, we were born on-prem, obviously with the origins of MongoDB, a little over five years ago, we introduced Atlas and today we run across a hundred different availability zones around the globe, so we're pretty well covered there. The third bit that I think people miss is we also picked up a product called Realm. Realm is an embedded database for mobile devices. So if you think about car companies, Toyota, for example, building connected cars, they'll have Realm in the car for the telemetry, connects back into an Atlas system for the bigger operational side of things. So there's this seamless kind of, or consistency that runs between data center to cloud to edge to device, that MongoDB plays across all the way through. And then taking that to the next level. We talked about this before we sat down, we're also building in the security elements of that because obviously you not only have that data in rest and data in motion, but what happens when you have that data in use? And announced, I think today? We purchased a little company, Aroki, experts in encryption, some of the smartest security minds on the planet. And today we introduce query-able encryption, which basically enables developers, without any security background, to be able to build searchable capabilities into their applications to access data and do it in a way where the security rules and the privacy all remain constant, regardless of whether that developer or the end user actually knows how that works. >> This is a great example of people talk about shift left, designing security in, for the developer, right from the start, not as a bolt-on. It's a great example. >> And I'm actually going to ground that with a real life customer example, if that's okay, Dave. We actually have a utility company in North Carolina that's responsible for energy and water. And so you can imagine, I mean, you alluded to the IO to use case, the industrial use case and this particular customer has to contend with millions of sensors that are constantly streaming data back, right. And now think about the challenge that they were encountering. They had all this data streaming in and in large quantities and they were actually resident on numerous databases, right. And so they had this very real challenge of getting to that quality data that I, data quality that I talked about earlier, as well, they had this challenge of being able to consolidate all of it and make sense of it. And so that's where our partnership with MongoDB really paid off where we were able to leverage Pentaho to integrate all of the data, have that be resident on MongoDB. And now they're leveraging some of the data capabilities, the data fabric capabilities that we bring to the table to actually deliver meaningful insights to their customers. Now their customers are actually able to save on their electricity and water bills. So great success story right there. >> So I love the business impact there, and also you mentioned Pentaho, I remember that acquisition was transformative for Hitachi because it was the beginning of sort of your new vector, which became Hitachi Ventara. What is Lumada? That's, I presume the evolution of Pentaho? You brought in organic, and added capabilities on top of that, bringing in your knowledge of IOT and OT? Explain what Lumada is. >> Yeah, no, that's a great question, Dave. And I'll say this, I mentioned this early on, we fundamentally believe that data is the backbone for all digital transformation. And so to that end, Hitachi has actually been making a series of acquisitions as well as investing organically to build up these data capabilities. And so Pentaho, as you know, gives us some of that front-end capability in terms of integrations and so forth. And the Lumada platform, the umbrella brand name is really connoting everything that we do in the data space that allow customers to go through that, to derive those meaningful insights. Lumada literally stands for illuminating data. And so that's exactly what we do. Irrespective of what vertical, what use case we're talking about. As you know very well, Hitachi is very prominent in just about every vertical. We're in like 90% of the Fortune 500 customers across banking and financial, retail, telecom. And as you know very well, very, very strong in the industrial space as well. >> You know, it's interesting, Peder, you and Radhika were both talking about this sort of edge model. And so if I understand it correctly, and maybe you could bring in sort of the IOT requirements as well. You think about AI, most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. But in the future and as we're seeing this, it's real-time inferencing at the edge and it's massive amounts of data. But you're probably not, you're going to persist some, I'm hearing, probably not going to persist all of it, some of it's going to be throwaway. And then you're going to send some back to the cloud. I think of EVs or, a deer runs in front of the vehicle and they capture that, okay, send that back. The amounts of data is just massive. Is that the right way to think about this new model? Is that going to require new architectures and hearing that Mongo fits in. >> Yeah. >> Beautifully with that. >> So this is a little bit what we talked about earlier, where historically there have been three silos of data. Whether it's classic system of record, system of engagement or system of intelligence and they've each operated independently. But as applications are pushing in further and further to the edge and real time becomes more and more important, you need to be able to take all three types of workloads or models, data models and actually incorporate it into a single platform. That's the vision we have behind our developer data platform. And it enables us to handle those transactional, operational and analytical workloads in real time, right. One of the things that we announced here this week was our columnar indexing, which enables some of that step into the analytics so that we can actually do in-app analytics for those things that are not going back into the data warehouse or not going back into the cloud, real time happening with the application itself. >> As you add, this is interesting, as basically Mongo's becoming this all-in-one database, as you add those capabilities, are you able to preserve, it sounds like you've still focused on simplicity, developer product productivity. Are there trade off, as you add, does it detract from those things or are you able to architecturally preserve those? >> I think it comes down to how we're thinking through the use case and what's going to be important for the developers. So if you look at the model today, the legacy model was, let's put it all in one big monolith. We recognize that that doesn't work for everyone but the counter to that was this explosion of niche databases, right? You go to certain cloud providers, you get to choose between 15 different databases for whatever workload you want. Time series here, graph here, in-memory here. It becomes a big mess that is pushed back on the company to glue back together and figure out how to work within those systems. We're focused on really kind of embracing the document model. We obviously believe that's a great general purpose model for all types of workloads. And then focusing in on not taking a full search platform that's doing everything from log management all the way through in-app, we're optimizing for in-app experiences. We're optimizing analytics for in-app experiences. We're optimizing all of the different things we're doing for what the developer is trying to go accomplish. That helps us maintain consistency on the architectural design. It helps us maintain consistency in the model by which we're engaging with our customers. And I think it helps us innovate as quickly as we've been been able to innovate. >> Great, thank you. Radhika, we'll give you the last word. We're seeing this convergence of function in the data based, data models, but at the same time, we're seeing the distribution of data. We're not, you're clearly not fighting that, you're embracing that. What does the future look like from Hitachi Ventara's standpoint over the next half decade or even further out? >> So, we're trying to lean into what customers are trying to solve for, Dave. And so that fundamentally comes down to use cases and the approaches just may look dramatically different with every customer and every use case, right? And that's perfectly fine. We're leaning into those models, whether that is data refining on the edge or the core or the cloud. We're leaning into it. And our intent really is to ensure that we're providing that frictionless experience from end to end, right. And I'll give a couple of examples. We had this very large bank, one of the top 10 banks here in the US, that essentially had multiple data catalogs that they were using to essentially sort through their metadata and make sense of all of this data that was coming into their systems. And we were able to essentially, dramatically simplify it. Cut down on the amount of time that it takes to deliver insights to them, right. And it was like, the metric shared was 600% improvement. And so this is the kind of thing that we're manically focused on is, how do we deliver that quantifiable end-customer improvement, right? Whether it's in terms of shortening the amount to drive the insights, whether it's in terms of the number of data practitioners that they have to throw at a problem, the level of manual intervention that is required, so we're automating everything. We're trying to build in a lot of security as Peder talked about, that is a common goal for both sides. We're trying to address it through a combination of security solutions at varying ends of the spectrum. And then finally, as well, delivering that resiliency and scale that is required. Because again, the one thing we know for sure that we can take for granted is data is exploding, right? And so you need that scale, you need that resiliency. You need for customers to feel like there is high quality, it's not dirty, it's not dark and it's something that they can rely upon. >> Yeah, if it's not trusted, they're not going to use it. The interesting thing about the partnership, especially with Hitachi, is you're in so many different examples and use cases. You've got IT. You've got OT. You've got industrial and so many different examples. And if Mongo can truly fit into all those, it's just, the rocket ship's going to continue. Peder, Radhika, thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE, it's great to see you both. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> All right. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante from the Javits Center in New York City at MongoDB World 2022. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back everyone. CUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon Web Services, reinvent 2021. In person event on the floor, back in business, theCUBE. Two live sets pumping out content left and right. Three and a half days of wall to wall overage, over 120 interviews, stream 28 hours literally on the main site as well as on the CUBE zone. Go to CUBEreinvent.com to get all the action, all the videos will be there. Of course theCUBE.net. I'm John Furrier, your host, with Dave Nicholson my cohost this week and Sarbjeet Johal cloud strategist, influencer, all around great guy, CUBE alumni, here to break down reinvent in context to the cloud industry. Sarbjeet, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you guys in person finally. >> I'm so excited. I did all these interviews the past two years in person and I've been remote, now were in person, great to do it, everyone's excited. 27,000 people here at reinvent. Stand in line for classes. By the way, they're not offering these classes online, only the leadership classes and the keynote. If you're not here, you're not getting the classes. >> I like the vibe actually. I thought it would be more subdued but it is better than what I thought and energy is here. It's not like 2019, it's not. >> That's 60,000 people, you couldn't even get through the hallway. Any company would love to have 27,000 people but I got to say, this year we were just talking earlier on the segment this morning, I wanted to get your thoughts on this, you go back 15 years ago when AWS rolled out, you have EC2, S3, SQS, you had to roll your own. Basically your alternative was better than building a data center or hosting on a colo. So great, check, you don't have to buy the technology tax. I think you had to fill in the glue layers, you had to kind of roll your own and build it up. Now everyone is scaling up and next gen cloud is a completely different architecture. You got serverless, you got all the glue layers pretty much there, and you can still add stuff on it, so a completely different mindset. Changing the startup speed game. Changing the enterprise. Looking pretty good. What's your reaction to the new architecture in cloud vis a vis where it came from? >> My reaction to the new architecture is that number one it's just new. We change stuff all the time in software stacks and what I was grasping within myself sitting in my hotel in the morning listening to Warner's keynote was that we have started to accumulate the technology debt even in cloud. We cooked up some some stuff with the scripts and we automated stuff with programing, language of your choice, or CLIs. Then became the cloud formation automation, orchestration of your cloud stack, if you will. Then Hashicorp are like, so Hashicorp are sitting on the side there. But now there's another abstraction layer on top of that which was announced during Warner's keynote today. I think the new abstraction layers leave the pervious architectures a little stale. It's always like, what should you do? Should you refactor your existing stacks or should you not touch that? Just go from now on on the new architecture? I think it's getting busy, complicated, a lot of number of services. >> What do you think other people are saying? I saw you did a little snippet with Dion Hinchcliffe online, nice Tweet there, you got a big video coming out. As you talk to other folks and influencers and people in the front lines, what are they saying about Amazon Reinvent this year? >> I think almost everybody's saying that number of services is expanding exponentially. I was thinking that 200 plus number of services or whatever that number is today, it's mind boggling. I totally understand that when you have two teams that they want to take the credit for creating a new service and they want to publish it. They want to do a press release and all that. But my request to all cloud providers, mainly three, is to not call everything a new service. Call that feature of a service. So number of services has to be reduced, collapsed if you will. We need umbrella services and then under that there should be features of services, that's one thing. Another feedback I got from some second tier partners is that they have the competency program for partners. They announced that. They had that earlier but new competencies. It leaves the second or third tier partners in the cold. Only the first tier partners can get those competencies because for that they have to send a lot of money, train people, then they get that check box, oh, you can do this. >> This whole services thing and what you call a service, if you called everything a service a new feature of DNS or a new thing here and there, serverless, there's be thousands of features, services. I think Amazon, I think they culled it down to like, 200, is the number we hear. >> But isn't that part of the role of the partner, the services provider, the consultancy, to act as a bridge between all of those services and features, whatever you want to call them and figuring out exactly what the end user customer actually needs? The idea that AWS is messaging here is targeted directly towards end user customers. There's a lot to be desired there because how do you translate that? I'm thinking, compare and contrast that with the Steve Jobs approach of there shall be three. There will be a large, a medium and a small. I know that this is more complex, but when you come out and you say, 475 different kinds of instances, you're leaving that to your partners to translate. To your point, if you're segregating those partners into categories where only a top tier has access to everything, interesting place to be. >> A couple of discussions I had with partners was that I actually suggested them to create a bank of reference architectures, we call that in Amazon terms. But it's not only technical side of things, but business as well. They need to create some principle based architectures and have a bank of that and then prescribe that to their customers base. I think that's the only way to simplify these things because as you said, if you have 200 different types of instances, for instance, (laughs), it is hard. It is really hard. >> I want to get your thoughts, we talk about this on Twitter all the time so the folks watching, if you want to follow our rants and raves on Twitter, follow us on Twitter you'll get all the action, all the influencers are there. Competition. I've been ranting all week and been saying it for a long time, Microsoft's not even close to Amazon. I'm a bit over the top but I'll just say that if Amazon goes unchecked, Microsoft's ecosystem's going to get decimated. Why would I want to run software, my software, on a suboptimal performance infrastructure? Microsoft had Windows back in the day and had the system software and the application suite but they encouraged developers to build on top of Windows. Their "dot net" or ecosystem. That game's over. I guess Window's runs on Amazon too, whatever. But now the cloud is the Windows. The cloud is the system software. So developers are running on top of the cloud. >> Yes. >> So who wins? >> I think Open wins. Not Open-source. Open-source and Open are different things, we always discuss that. I think Open wins, the close systems have this problem of protectionism which doesn't work, with our little kids at home or your economy as whole. When you protect your local industry, the economy goes down. I've seen that, I'm an economist by education as you guys know. >> Yes. >> I think it's the same, when you protect too much of whatever you have, I think it's has a worse effect. But there's one narrative, Satya sort of narrates if you will, he says that, hey, when you use Windows, you keep everything, 100%. We are not taking a cut. When you're sitting in a cloud marketplace, somebody's getting a cut. That's the argument. >> Terry Chen said, because he puked on what I said, he said better could win. >> Yes. >> That's one thing. Okay, I buy that. Azure could be better in some use cases. But I think over all Amazon wins hands down currently. Certainly with the custom processors. >> You haven't mentioned GCP. >> Actually GCP. >> What can you say about it? >> What you could say is that AWS right now has either constructed or is benefiting from the highest barrier to entry to any business in the history of our planet. You can look at the investment that GCP is making to the tune of six billion dollars a year to go after market share. Are they going after current market share which is arguably the 20% of IT that's in cloud now? Or are they going for future market share which is a piece of the larger pie? When you talk about who wins, I think it's still possible for- >> Hold on, hold on. >> You left Oracle out. I think it's still possible. >> Hold on, hold on, hold on. >> I can tell you about Oracle. >> Hold on, hold on. This is a thought exercise, I'm going to ask you guys this question. It may be rhetorical, you don't need to answer it. If you went to all the people out there buying Azure and GCP, no offense guys, and you said, "Put aside all your credits you've been given, how much are you actually using?" If you take the incentives away, why are you on those clouds from a performance perspective? >> Sorry to cut you off. We know that Oracle uses incentives, X codes, leads for sale, and all that stuff, we know that. A lot of people know that. So cloud became shelfware there, we know the story. I'm leaving Oracle to the side. But I think Google has legs. Google's cloud has legs. They are a very enduring focus company. They are more open-source friendly and data science friendly as well. I think they are actually a number two, personally I believe. I'm a developer by heart, so they are number two developer cloud after Amazon. >> I think it's well know, I agree with you by the way. I think people may not know this but it's well known in the industry that Amazon has been mostly afraid of Google more than Microsoft. I think now because of this market share, the ecosystem war that's going to happen in a very short period of time, Microsoft's more of a threat on paper. But Google's got more threat to sling shot back and front technically because if you look at Graviton, the stack that they're building for ISVs and developers, Amazon's clearly winning. Google can pull that off. If they get it, they got to have their own way. >> Let me tell you, the one thing actually, if we want to know what was the fumble this time? I have some, actually I will talk about it in my radio, if you have enough time here. I think Google will do better because they're open and Amazon is complex. I was thinking during the keynotes, what are the clues to Amazon, AWS, leaving which is helping Google and Azure, mainly Google. Google is simple actually, a lot simpler to use, but again having said that, there's one thing actually, the new term I'm trying to define is the feature proximity. Amazon has feature proximity, like the best. When you are doing one thing and you want to do another thing, they have that all right there. They're ahead of the game. They have their 5G, private 5G on all their stuff, it's very futuristic. >> By the way, I got Amazon to agree to get me some private 5G for when we go back home. We're going to setup an outdoor area for some open CUBE action with some 5G. >> Actually we could put that on a nice van with the logos and all that. We could move around. >> We'll park it right there on El Camino, right next to Stanford University. Maybe we could live in one of those things too. >> Make it a taco truck and I'll join you guys. >> (laughs) Taco truck for free food. >> Yeah, let's do that. >> All seriousness guys, I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up this segment on the analysis of the cloud industry. What do you guys think, your opinion, it's going to take, I'll start by saying I think Amazon, if not contested for their leadership in the performance of silicon and the stack for software developers and owners to run the fastest they can run away with this. I think Microsoft and Google better be cranking right now to make it easy and have silicon advantage as well. I think clearly if the ecosystem's going to be at play, because the shift is happening to modernize software development, low code, no code, every shift everyone will go to the best performance, independent of cost and incentives. Amazon's got lower cost too so they got the fly wheel going. >> I can make mine short. I think GCP can also be successful. But I think already the amount of momentum that AWS has, the wind behind it's sails, I was at EMC for many years and we used to joke about our arch nemesis Hitachi Data Systems and saying that they were quite discouraged every morning as they woke up learning that they were a year further behind. Every night they went to sleep. They woke up the next day and they were a year further behind. Watching the announcements coming out of this event this week, I think there are some people at GCP and Microsoft and others who have that sense. But having said that, we're at the dawn of at era of cloud. There's plenty of room for a lot of players. When you give us your thoughts, I'd like your answer to the question, how much are consumers in the driver's seat today? Will the customers be able to demand multi sourcing? >> I think customers, you work with your money. Customers can demand that but at the same time customers can get stuck in a platform and they can't get out. We usually talk about when to lock in. There's one thing that Amazon keeps saying that we are open, we are open and the other vendors are like, these brands. I think that kind of narrative can come bite back to them. It's not a good thing to say. You don't want to be cocky about your features or you are the best and all that stuff. I think you want to stay humble and respect the other guys as well because they are coming right behind you. I think the key is developers. I have the bias towards developers because I was a developers but I totally believe deep down, actually I have tried to put my developer hat off and still think that way about these constructs. Developers are the people who call the shots. If you are not developer friendly you can't do much. >> That's a good point. >> That's my warning to Amazon. Don't go away from developers. You are number one developer cloud, stay there. This refocus is good, but put that to the side, not make that front center. Google has made that front center, I think that's a mistake. >> Yeah, you have the features, the right features, but again, speed, performance. Developers, capture the opportunity. Developers want to move fast. That's the entrepreneurship. Sarbjeet, great to have you on theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me here, I enjoyed it. Great set here. >> All right, Dave Nicholson's here. Dave Nicholson, CUBE host. I'm John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE, the world leader in technology coverage. We'll be back with more live coverage from Reinvent after this short break. (upbeat music)