(upbeat music) >> Hi and welcome to another Cube conversation. This one from BMC Helix Immersion Days in Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. I'm Peter Burris. Every organization that attempts significant change, and there are a lot of organizations attempting digital transformation, which is about as significant a set of change as you can make, has to worry about what platform, what foundation has to be in place to make that change easier, and that's what we're going to be talking about in this conversation. We've got John Fraser, who's the Managing Director of Service Management in Online Business Systems. John, welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks Peter. >> So, tell us a little bit about online business systems. Let's start there. >> So, online business systems is a Canadian digital transformation in cyber security consultancy. We've been around now for 33 years. We're headquartered in beautiful Winnipeg, Manitoba, but I have operations all across North America and we're about 330 people today and growing rapidly. >> Winnipeg happens to be one of my favorite cities in the world, so good for you. >> Perfect. All right. So, let's talk about, I mentioned up front this notion of a stable platform, a stable foundation. Tell us a little bit about what your understanding of, as you work with your clients, what constitutes that stable foundation for change? >> Well, one of the biggest challenges we see with companies, is they try to make change in the wrong way. Too much, too fast with no control, no governance and they just don't have the proper controls in place. One of the biggest challenges with change in an organization in digital transformation today is they don't know where they're starting from. So, one of the fundamentals is really understanding where they're beginning and what they're trying to change. It's staggering to see organizations, and I've got lots of stories to tell around companies that have gone through major program transformations to really trying to embrace digital technologies only to fail again and again and again, because they don't understand how things are connected together or where they're starting from. >> So, the foundation has to start with knowing what's in the foundation? Have I got that right? >> That's right. You can't change what you don't know. >> So, it's online business systems helps clients move through some of these digital transformations. I got to believe that the service management element is a crucial feature of any successful transformation. >> Absolutely, we begin with embracing technology to help companies understand where they're starting from. We leverage a lot of tools and techniques in terms of understanding where they're starting as an organization, the people, and then using tools like BMC's Helix discovery to understand all of the components that make up the systems within their organization that they're trying to transform and how they're all connected together. >> Now, as we go through this process, one of the things that a lot of my clients are discovering is that the cyber security challenges get that much more extreme. One of the things that's become increasingly obvious is as companies talk more about digital business, talk more about how they're transforming and generating new classes of revenue or customer experience, they become more obvious target to the bad guys. What is the relationship between digital transformation, service management, and cyber security? >> Yeah, and interesting you say that. We believe as an organization that they're intertwined. You can't do digital transformation without a strong cyber security program. You can't do either one of them without automation. The pace of change and more importantly the volume of threats and challenges facing the organizations is beyond human capability. You can't do it manual anymore. It doesn't matter how many people you throw at it, it's just impossible. So, you've got to automate, you've got to leverage technology, artificial intelligence to really face these challenges. >> So, given your standing and working on the service management side, what are some of the steps that your customers are taking to ensure that they are going to succeed with digital transformation in a way that doesn't open them up to security issues? >> So, one of the key areas is understanding, like I said before, where they're starting from. How all of the components that make up their business service fit together and then, understanding from a security aspect how to prioritize fixing those threats. One of the biggest challenges in securing your organization, today is understanding what to work on. The average large organization gets thousands and thousands of new vulnerabilities a day and the back log just becomes insurmountable. So, without being able to understand how to prioritize that work against valuable business services, they're never going to win. >> So, you mentioned something about service capabilities or service components, the historical norm for IT has been, until a few years ago, to focus on mainly the hardware or infrastructure assets as the things to be managed and that has been not working as well in a world where we're delivering digital services to customers and partners for revenue or other purposes. So, what constitutes a service capability or a service component in your mind as kind of the new notion of asset within IT? >> It's assets, anywhere. It could be the traditional hardware sitting in your server room. It could be servers and/or microservices sitting in a cloud location, it could be a software as a service component. They all make up business services together. >> Or combinations of all of them. >> It often is combinations of all of them together and that's one of the biggest challenges is understanding how they all fit together and how the information flows. So, for instance, if an organization is trying to prioritize how to secure a business service. Let's use automated tellers as an example. They may have traditional on premise servers, they may have cloud offerings and they may have third-party software as a service just protecting their servers on premise is not going to protect that business service, so you really need to understand how all of the pieces fit together. >> So, are you actually working with business leaders and IT leaders to do a better job with defining what constitutes a digital business capability and use that as an organizing principal for how they think about how all their resources come together? >> Yes, it's critical that you have business and IT working together and you have the right level of business working with IT. Without sponsorship at the executive level, digital transformation will fail. >> Even in Canada? >> Even in Canada. >> Well, this has been a great conversation. John Fraser who's a Managing Director and Service Management in Online Business Systems. Thanks very much for being on the Cube. >> Thanks Peter. >> And once again, this has been a Cube conversation from BMC Helix Immersion Days in Santa Clara Marriott and I'm Peter Burris. Thanks until next time. (upbeat music)