>>Hey guys, and gals. Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here at Coupa inspire 2022 with about 2,500 folks. Very excited to be back in person. I can assure you that is the vibe that is here to be. You joins me next to the managing director at KPMG Toby. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thanks. It's great to be here. >>Isn't it great to be back? I know it feels so normal. We were talking before we went live, that it feels normal. >>It does. It does. And it feels great. And after a great kickoff with, uh, with Rob >>Fantastic, Rob Bernstein has, and Barbara Corcoran, Rob has probably the highest energy of a CEO that I've ever gotten to work with. So you always know you're in for a good high energy conversation. Then Barbara Corcoran coming in, Jon Taffer with bar rescue is it's a, been a great morning so far. So you let's talk about you, you specialize in digital transformation within the procurement and the contract management spaces. Talk to me a little bit about that. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, I, uh, I love helping folks to re-imagine their, uh, operating models to solve today's challenges. And there are so many challenges coming out in this post COVID world, um, that many of our clients are dealing with. And, and I'm never short on phone calls and, you know, uh, from, from my clients reaching out for help, um, to really figure out how to retool, um, and, and, and really help themselves to transform, to be able to address the, the, the changes to come. >>I heard a really smart description of the last two years today, compressed transformation. We've been talking about digital transformation for years, and then we've also been talking about it's acceleration during the COVID era, but the compressed transformation, I thought that's probably something that's here to stay. Nobody's going to want access to older, less data slower. >>Yep. >>They're just not >>A hundred percent. What >>Are some of the trends that you've observed in your role in the last couple of years? >>Yeah, I, I absolutely believe that folks that took advantage of that digital transformation pre pandemic have actually been able to fare much better than those that have held off on those investments. Um, for whatever reasons, you know, there are always different priorities, but those that have actually gotten that journey started, um, pre pandemic have definitely fared, uh, for, well, I think the trends that I'm seeing today, the CPO's challenge, um, and there are many challenges, um, but you know, the, you know, coming out of the, uh, post COVID era, you are now recovering and ramping up production as a result, your buying activities increasing, right. Um, and, and other ways other than increasing, um, activity. There's also the changing of requirements. So, you know, the folks in the front office are looking at new technologies to innovate new products and services, and that's going to change what the, the mix of the skills and resources that you need in the back office. >>Um, in addition to that, um, there are other requirements like ESG. And so as you're thinking about retooling and being able to, um, buy more sustainably or drive diversity, um, with the spend that you have, that's also changing the skill mix that you have. And I think on top of speak, uh, on top of that, um, the skills and the talent, we are dealing with the, a unfortunate situation that many companies are with the, uh, you know, the great resignation where the talent is, has as quickly exited the workforce. Um, and, uh, and, and with the demand increasing and changing, that puts everyone in a tough spot. And so those are really the big challenges that I've seen with the clients. Most recently, as we're coming out of COVID >>Of your customer conversations, escalated up the C-suite you talk, you mentioned the chief procurement officer. If we think of every company, these days has to be a data company to be successful. If they're not, they're probably not going to be around. Are you noticing that from a supply chain perspective within procurement and contract management, is that escalating the C-suite to be much more of a C-suite or board level initiative? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. I think what folks have realized in many of their, even the earlier digital transformation efforts, it was very geared around automating and streamlining transactions and processes, not so much putting data at the core. Yes, you would get intelligence out of that, but we hadn't architected your entire organization around data and good quality data and what is needed, um, to be able to actually translate that data to meaningful insights, to make the decisions or drive, um, visibility within to your, into your supply chain. Um, so when you think about things that are, um, such as ESG, where you really need to know, um, your tier one, tier two tier three suppliers, and all the impacts that that has, um, in order to drive to those, um, ESG objectives that you're telling your investors, you're telling your customers, and you're telling your, um, your employees about it's very important. You have to be centered around data and be able to be able to see their entire supply chain. And if you weren't, if you weren't architected to do so, doing it as an afterthought is very costly because you've already made those investments >>Very costly. And also, I mean, from a business perspective, I think, you know, we, we talk so often Toby and you probably do as well about it, business alignment. It's one of those, it's like digital transformation. It's almost a buzzword if you will, but it's critical because I'm seeing a lot of data and research from, from folks like Gardner that are showing that massive percentages of businesses believe that the technology is really the driver and the fuel of the business going forward. So no longer can it and lines of business be separated. >>Yeah, I, I totally agree. I actually think that when I mentioned about new skills, if you think about the next generation and the new operating models, um, uh, you know, the, the, the new folks coming out of college have to have that skill set because process and technology are, are, are completely linked. Um, and I think that the organizations, the future and the sick, the most successful ones will know how to actually be more human centric and be able to harness the data through the technologies. So I'll actually allow you and I to do what we do best, right, which is collaborate and negotiate deals work on our relationship versus focused on the technology or entering data into forms and all the administrative components that, uh, many of my clients are plagued with today, >>Collaboration, I think has maybe become even more important in the last two years that we've been so limited about how to collaborate. Thankfully, we have a lot of technologies to do that, but when I think of Coupa collaboration, community are two words that jump out. Talk to me a little bit about from an, a partnership perspective alignment there with the collaborative spirit at KPMG. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, for, for us, uh, I recently just presented on a very similar topic that nothing great in business is done by a single person. And it takes partners to be able to drive the innovation needed to solve the new challenges of tomorrow. And, and I see our relationship with that. You know, they offer a platform, they offer a method to get access to the data and simplify it in a way for our clients so that they can focus on the relationships and driving the collaboration with their suppliers. And, and I think that that's, that's the thought leadership, uh, in partnership with, uh, with them that we'd like to bring to the table. >>Speaking of alignment between KPMG and Qubit. Talk to me a little bit about ESG as, as sort of a new initiative within KPMG. Talk to me a little bit about that. And what's some of the high level objectives are >>Absolutely. Um, I wouldn't say that it's, it's, it's new. I think it's always been there and there's always been a focus, but I think the recent events and with the regulatory environment changing as well, and as with consumers, consumer behavior, driving and investor community driving towards, um, uh, ESG, I think that is quickly changing how companies are prioritizing that within the Mo amongst everything else that they have. And as a result, I think the CPO's role in that equation is ever so important when it comes to delivering and operationalizing ESG. >>I imagine it, the CPS role must be a lot more strategic these >>Days >>Because they really have to be kind of a transformation change agent. >>Yeah. And actually in most cases, the CPO is perfect for that because that's been their role, um, in, uh, in, in, uh, in many cases before. Um, and I think, yeah, this is just yet another dimension that they didn't have to attack and, and incorporate into the, uh, into the process of selecting the right partner or the right supplier within their, um, within the, uh, with, with who they want to onboard for, for the company. >>Got it. Okay. Let's talk about advice now for companies that are either in the early stages of the supply chain transformation really digitizing, how do they get started? Is it too late for some? >>No, I don't think it's ever too late. I don't think, I, I think, um, I don't think it's too late, you know, and especially with the very big focus on digital and tech these days, sometimes being the late, being late to the game allows folks to actually work out the kinks for, you know, the bleeding edge technologies. And so that makes it even less risky for them to adopt in, in many cases. Um, that's, that's, uh, that, that's what we've seen, but, you know, I think the advice is get educated, uh, really just understand as much as you can around what other people are doing. Are there other, um, uh, peer group, uh, companies like yours, you know, like themselves that are actually going through the transformation or have gone before and just kind of understand what were the drivers of that strategy and what were the outcomes that you can learn from them, get help from externals. >>Um, and whether they be technology partners, consultants, and actually hiring new skills and bringing in new perspectives to help you to own and drive that strategy important. This is super important and you can't outsource these things, right. This needs to come from within, especially when you think about things as purposeful and impactful as ESG. Um, those, those cannot be outsourced. Um, and I think those would be the, uh, the kind of the two key things. Um, but I always also say, um, take an outward in approach, as you're thinking about your new strategy, focus on what your employees are saying about, you know, your supply chain and how easy it is to actually understand and, and work within your supply chain. Talk to your suppliers, talk to your internal business partners, to really reflect and understand how do you make this process as easy as possible for them to comply with. >>I think one of the things I was reading, uh, in preparation for coming here is that some, some survey, a survey that that Cooper did of about 800 decision makers. And one of the things that was overwhelming as a theme is that a lot of organizations don't feel that they have the right data visibility to drive an ESG strategic initiative. So what Coupa does providing that visibility and the ability to collaborate and share across the community is, seems to be something that's going to be a business critical must have going forward. >>Yeah, a hundred percent, you know, many, uh, many of our clients operate under, you know, uh, not under like mandates or compliance, driven, um, kind of policies in the commercial world, many cases you have to influence the buying behavior. And so you can't do that without data. I'd like to think in this day and age presented with the right supplier options with them at the right point in time, you're able to influence and drive the spend to diverse candidates, sustainable options, you know, and there's, you know, not just savings, not just the lowest cost option, but there's so many other things to consider in this day and age. And I think that's where it's so important to be able to have a platform like Hoopa, to be able to gather that data acquire external sources of data, such as ESG related data and make that to, um, to, to all parties, um, and be that source of truth so that you can drive the >>Here's some truth. And also even something that was talked about this morning during the keynote is accountability. And have you heard Jon Taffer from bar rescue talking this morning, but he was talking about an 120 bar rescues. He goes, I've never met one person that has admitted from day one of the four days. They shoot that I'm responsible for the reason that my business is not successful. He goes, everybody has an excuse. There's no accountability until you really force someone to take probably that hard look in the mirror that they don't want to take, but that accountability within organizations within an overall business is critical. >>Yeah, I think, uh, I absolutely believe that went away to solve that is providing the data and making it available. And, um, and really once again, I think it goes back to driving that behavior that you want. And I think it starts with, uh, with, with leadership and I think the accountability, accountability of leadership, and to be able to drive that type of culture within your organization. Um, but absolutely you need data to be able to do that and, and be able to monitor that as well, you know, as a leader to make sure that that accountability is appropriately distributed. >>Right. But one of the things, I mean, I think patients has been in short supply the last two years have been, we've learned that. I think also that another thing we've learned is that access to real-time data is no longer, oh, then that would be great. It's you've got to have that for your business to be differentiated because the, you know, if we think about the consumer side, the consumers are so vocal on things like social media, if the experience isn't tailored, personalized and instantaneous, We have a very short Rob talked about the very short attention span that his kids have. I'm like three minutes. We don't even have that in business or on the consumer side. I don't think. >>Yeah, I, yeah, I see that in my kids and what he said today was, was spot on. Um, so, you know, when I think about my career and where I'm at, and he said the same thing, I mean, our kids are coming into the, there'll be in procurement organizations very soon, sooner than, you know, then, then I like to admit. Um, and as a result, I think that, um, we talked a bit about talent shortage and the challenge with keeping talent. And I think that what you had just expressed is very important is that that experience for the employee, but you come into a workforce and they expect you to have these quick turnarounds, but you've, you offered them tools that require spreadsheets and old archaic systems to be able to solve today's challenges. I think that you're not going to be able to retain your talent right along. Right. >>That's a great point. That's an absolutely fantastic point. Last question for you before we wrap here is so the changes that organizations need to make with respect to being prepared for ESG reporting requirements that are coming down the pike, obviously being, having a data strategy has got to be one of us. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, I think we, many procurement organizations were really geared around savings and a very compliance, driven manner. And when you think about ESG, I think you gotta be very data-driven. Um, and so that should be a priority focus of how do you retool yourself to be able to acquire mass amounts of data, figuring out where you need to go, um, to get that data, whether they be third parties, whether they be directly from the supplier, um, and be able to aggregate it and provide the insight into those reporting standards that are required. Um, and then to be able to actually measure progress along those sustainability or diversity goals that it might be established at, at, at the leadership level. So I think it's coming down the pike. It's a matter of time. I think it's, I think it's, uh, you know, it's something that I've been waiting for to see. Um, and it's interesting to see how, uh, how quickly that it's, it's come down. Um, but I think with the regulatory compliance coming down, um, this is going to be moving very quick and people need to get ready. >>That's good. They need to be ready. Excellent to be thank you for joining me on the program today, talking about what you were doing at KPMG, what it's doing with Kupa and how organizations really should be thinking about and approaching supply chain, digital transformation. We appreciate your insights. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. All >>Right. For Toby, you I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube in Las Vegas at Cooper inspire 2022 stick around. My next guest will join me shortly.

>>from around the globe, it's >>the cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM Hello welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube had a great conversation here about cloud data, AI and all things. C X O from KPMG is Vinod Swaminathan who's the strategy head of strategy of Ai data and cloud as well as the C. I. O advisory at KPMG you know thanks for coming on the cube. >>My pleasure jOHn thanks for having me. >>So you guys have an interesting perspective, you sit between the business value being created from technology and the clients trying to put it to work um and KPMG impeccable reputation over the years obviously bringing great business value to clients. You guys do that. Um you're in the middle of the hot stuff cloud data and Ai um Ai is great if you have the data and the architecture do that in cloud scale brings so many new good things to the table. Um how is this playing out right now in your mind because we're here at IBM think where the story is transformed, transformation is the innovation. Innovation does set the table for net new capabilities at scale. This seems to be a common thread here. What's your take on the current situation? >>Well, let me start with the fundamental premise that we're seeing playing out with many of our clients and that is, clients are beginning to connect the different silos within their business to better respond to what their customers are asking for. Um you know, we we tend to work with large enterprises, very well established businesses and we're also fortunate to serve the needs of high growth companies as well. So we're in a very unique position as a trusted advisor to both legacy companies transforming and high growth companies looking to drive the transformation in the industry as well. So there are a few things that we're seeing right the first and foremost is responding quickly and effectively to very rapidly changing customer needs. And I think the pandemic really you know put a spotlight on how fast organizations had to pivot and I have to commend a lot of these organizations and doing a phenomenal job, I would argue, spit band aiding and gluing together a response to what their customers expected. Right? So as I look at post pandemic, we're seeing a lot of clients now looking to take stock of things that they did during the pandemic, how they address customer demand to really smooth them out and streamline as a strategy, how they're going to become more customer driven at KPMG. We call this the connected enterprise where you really work effectively across the front, middle and back office in an enterprise to seamlessly address the client. Right? Anything you do in finance really is driven by what your customers want. It's no longer, hey finance sit in the back office, right. Anything you do in marketing is no longer hey I'm doing it just to address the demand side of the equation, right? It's very integral to connect marketing with fulfillment. Right? So we call this the connected enterprise. So that transformation is only possible if customers and our clients are able to effectively leverage cloud from an architectural perspective. And when I say cloud, what we're seeing, smarter clients of ours start to think about is cloud in its entirety. So it's not just the public cloud, it's the cloud architecture, right? The ability to scale up scale out right scale down, right, irrespective of where all of this sits from an infrastructure perspective. So cloud is very critical for becoming that connected enterprise. Uh The data pieces integral, I think the data business today represents trillions of dollars. I think everybody has bought into the fact that data is the new oil and all of that good stuff that we've heard. Uh but it really is a trillion dollar business and it has some unique challenges. So being connected requires, right? That are that an enterprise become very data driven? I think it's hard to escape ai it's everywhere. To the point where we don't even uh we're not even conscious of ai at work, Right? So I think uh five years ago a I was a novel concept today. It's the expectation of customers who interact with big brands that ai is an integral part of how they are being served. Right, So cloud data ai architecture sort of the ingredients if you will. And then cool technology really starts to bring this connected concept together and post pandemic. We're going to start to see a lot of rationalization uh and big investments and moving forward in this trajectory. >>It's interesting cloud data now you, the way you talk about it makes me think about like just the constant of the old Os I stack right? You have infrastructure and cloud, you have data in the middle layer and then A. I. Is that that wonder area where the upside takes advantage of that data? Um Very cool insight. You know. Thanks for sharing that. The question I have for you put the pandemic I want to get your reaction to some conversations I've had in the industry and they tend to go like this. Um When we come out of the pandemic this is like a C X. O. Talking to Ceo. Or C. I. O. Or C. So when we come out of the pandemic we need a growth strategy, we need to be hidden, we need to be on the upswing, okay, not on the downswing or still trying to figure it out. Um And and that's a cool conversation because there's been to use cases that we've identified companies that had no has had a headwind because of the pandemic, either because of business disruption or the second categories, they've had a tail when they had a business opportunity. So the ones that had a headwind, they would retool, they used the pandemic to retool and the ones that had the tailwind would use the pandemic to either bring net new capabilities or or transform and innovate. So either way that's a successful use case. The ones who didn't do anything aren't going to survive much. We know that, but in those two cases they're not mutually exclusive. That's what the smart money's been doing. The smart teams. What's your advice now that we're in that mode where we're coming around the corner? How do companies get on that uptick? What have you guys advise into clients? What are you hearing and what, what's your reaction to that concept? >>Well, I think every company that is going to be on the survivors list post pandemic actually has digitally transformed, um, you know, even if they don't want to acknowledge it right in a lot of different ways. Um, so I think that's here to stay. Um, what I, and I'll give you a simple example, um, you know, I, I belong to a local club, you know, kitchen shut down, you know, no activities. I was amazed that it took them only four days John four days to actually bring a digital reservation system online through their mobile app. So in the past, the mobile app was simply for me to go look at the directory. But now I can do so many more things. Right? And I was talking to my club CI. All right. I mean, really not a C I. O. But you know, it was uh, it was, it was a staff member who was charged with driving the digital transformation. So there you go >>right to consult you, you know. >>Um, but what he talked to me about was fascinating. And this is what we're going to see, right? So first he said, another was so easy to bring some of those, you know, interactive experience type capabilities online to serve our customer base. It made us think, why the hell didn't we do it before? Alright, so, back to your question, I think post pandemic, we're going to see a lot of companies recognizing that low code, no code, right? Cloud AI capabilities are very much within the reach of the average business user, right? In companies like IBM have done a phenomenal job of demystifying the technology and trying to make it much more accessible for the business user. We're going to see continued momentum, right? And adopting these kinds of simple technologies to transform right business processes, customer interaction, so on and so forth. Right? So we we see that coming out of the pandemic, there's no stopping that. I think the second thing we see is a very firm commitment at the leadership level um that you know, stopping or slowing down these kinds of activities is a non starter at the board level. That's a nonstarter at the management committee level, right? Don't come to me saying we need to slow down things. Come to me saying we need to speed up things, right? But that said, we're seeing rationalization, conversations begin to happen and that starts with the strategy, right, tailwind or headwind, irrespective of which side of the equation you fell right in that, in that dynamic, what we're seeing is clients coming back and saying, all right, we know our strategy needs to be different. Let's make sure that we have a strategy that aligns better with um where our customers want to go, where the industry is headed. And let's acknowledge that there are technological capabilities now, but actually turbocharge the execution of the strategy. Technology is not the strategy, it's still connected enterprise thought, How do I serve my customers whose expectations have dramatically changed coming out of the pandemic? And that's why I gave you the club example. I never want to call anybody to make a reservation anymore. I mean even the local hair salon has a queuing system and a reservation system because you know, that's just the way it is. Right? So there are some simple things that have happened on the customer side of uh, you know, the equation, which is forcing a lot of our clients to start, you know, accelerating their digital investments. Um, you know, rather than decelerating, >>it's interesting. That's great insight. I think just to summarize that, I think you're pointing out is the obvious, hey, it works the indifference of the digital to go the next level and see X. O. S and C I. O. S have had, you know, either politics or blockers or just will it work? And I think with the pandemic necessity is the mother of all inventions. You say, hey, we got to get back on business that the economics and the user experience is more than acceptable. It's actually preferred. I think that club example really highlights that expectation change and I >>think that's an interesting architecture discussion right? And I don't mean that technically I think businesses are starting to think about how are they architected, right. And this is where the connected enterprise concept from KPMG is resonating because now you know, we see our clients no longer thinking about finance, sales, marketing, right? And fulfillment right? That's how the architect of their business. Before now they're realizing that they need to sort of put it on its side. Right, I love the cube analogy, I'm going to borrow it, they're flipping the cube on the side and pulling out a whole new business architecture which by the way is enabled and supported by an underlying technology architecture that's very different. Right? So I think businesses are going to get re architected in technology companies like IBM and Red Hot are going to be right there helping clients go through that re architected along with partners like us, >>the script has been flipped, the cube has been turned and I think this was the revelation. The economics are clear. So I gotta ask you, I mean I've always been I've been joking with IBM the president like it, but I've been saying that, you know, business now is software enabled and the operating systems, distributed computing. As you mentioned, these subsystems are part of this fabric and red hat there and operating systems company. Um, so kind of in a good position with what Marvin's doing. If you think about if you look at squint through and connect the dots, I mean you're looking at an underlying operating system that's open and connected to business, it's not just software apps that run something like an ear piece system, it's an business software model for the entire company completely instrumented. This is what hybrid cloud is. Could you, could you take a few minutes to talk about the relationship that you guys have with IBM on how you guys are working together to bring this hybrid cloud vision to their customers into the market. >>So KPMG and IBM go back about 20 plus years long standing relationship. Um in fact, I kid around with many of my fellow partners here at KPMG that IBM is the only relationship that we did not divest off when we went through our let's flip management consulting off from our accounting business, so on and so forth that everybody went through. Right? So very long standing relationship, you know, we're a trusted partner of IBM but we're very different from a lot of the partners that IBM has were business consultants, right? We don't have, you know, we help clients think through their business first before we get into the technology implementation. So I don't have armies of IBM certified engineers sitting on the bench looking for work to do. It's actually the other way around. Right? So it's been a great marriage when IBM has phenomenal technology in this case, you know, they have been leaders in AI, we've got an AI based relationship now going back five years, um you know, where we consumed Watson proved to ourselves and the world that it can be done very innovatively supporting business transformation. And now we're able to together with IBM effectively have that conversation with clients, right? Because we're client number zero, uh we're big into a hybrid, multi cloud, um you know, we're big red hat customers. Uh you know, we use red hat in our own modernization of several different workloads. So our relationship with IBM is very strong, were a good supplier to them as well, so we help them with their strategy and go to market as well. So an interesting sort of relationship. Um look when we work with clients, we typically tend to, you know, take a trusted advisor role with clients. Our brand speaks to the trust that we're able to bring when we talk to clients. Uh I kid around um you know, when you're going through a transformation, you probably want the town skeptic holding your hand. That's us, right? We're very risk averse. We like working with clients who you know, kind of want that, you know, critical look when they're investing in technology driven transformation. Um you know, some of the things that IBM has done is pretty phenomenal. Right? So for example, I don't see um you know, I don't see a lot of providers out there who give clients the kind of options that IBM gives with their multi cloud capabilities. Right? So show me conversational ai capability that can run on private cloud, that can run on google amazon IBM and a whole bunch of other cloud providers. Right, So I think as IBM invests in that open right philosophy and obviously the Red hat acquisition only further enhances that. Right, um it's a great opportunity for us to be able to take very powerful KPMG value propositions um you know, enabled by this kind of IBM technology. Right, so that's how we tend to go to market. Um one of the solutions were offering with IBM is called the KPMG data mesh. It's built on IBM cloud pack for data, which is enabled by red hats open shift and it's a very innovative solution in the marketplace that fundamentally asked the question to clients, why are you spending inordinate amount of time and resources moving data around in order to become data driven? Uh it just amazes me john how much money is being thrown at, you know, moving data around, particularly as you get into this complex hybrid, multi cloud world. Right. How many times am I going to move data from, you know, a mainframe database into my, you know, cloud repository before I can start doing uh, you know, real higher value work. Right, So KPMG data mesh enabled by the IBM cloud back, the data says, hey, legal data, wherever it is. You know, we can take up to 30 of costs out and really get you on this journey to become data driven without spending the first nine months of every project building a data warehouse or building an expensive data where data lake. Right? Because all of those, frankly our 20th century mindset, right? So if I can leave the data where it is your favorite terminology virtually is the data and really focus on what do I do with the data as opposed to you know, how do I move the data? Right. It really starts to change the mindset around becoming data driven. Right, so that's a great example of a solution where we've married our value proposition to clients around connected and trusted and leveraged IBM technology right? In a hybrid multi cloud >>but no great insight. Love the focus. Hybrid cloud, congratulations on your KPMG mesh solution. Their cloud mesh awesome. Taking advantage of the IBM work and love your perspective on the industry. I think you you called it right. I think that's a great perspective. That's the way we're on big transformation innovation wave. Thanks for coming on the key. Appreciate it. >>Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me have a good day. >>Okay, Cube coverage of IBM think 2021. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit '21 virtual conference. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here with Kevin Martelli, Principal Software Engineer at KPMG, joining the conversation. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> John, thanks a lot for having me. >> So obviously Red Hat, a lot of action, cloud native, part of IBM now. A lot of talk going on around this growth around cloud. Massive new opportunities, new modern applications being shaped in, super exciting opportunities. So first, before we get into all that, tell us about your role at KPMG. >> Sure John, thanks. So my role at KPMG, I'm one of our cloud leaders at KPMG where I really help both from an internal perspective, so helping our internal enablement and digitalization, as well as, more importantly, helping to deliver solutions and applications to our clients as they go through these digital journeys. And really focusing on containerization and enabling it through the cloud. >> John: You guys have done a lot of AI work, I know which is cutting edge, it's pretty much data-driven. I mean, AI is, what everyone talks about, but underlying AI is automation, data, machine learning, really dealing with kind of new types of datasets, not just dealing with existing structures. You have a new platform called Ignite. Tell us what that is. What do you guys solve? What was the problem statement? And what's going on with it? >> Yeah, John, thanks a lot for asking. So Ignite, it's something that we developed internally initially, and it really helped to solve our AI initiatives. We called it our AI platform, but it's moreso an ecosystem. And it solves not only our own internal needs and internal use cases, but also choose to help support and deliver these solutions to the clients. One of the foundational principles of our platform is it's built on top of containerization, which we know is a hot area now, today in the marketplace really gives you the ability for scalability, flexibility, security, et cetera, but more important, what we're seeing large scale of adoptions in our clients, is using this platform to really get value out of both unstructured and structured data in a way that they're able to do this in a secured fashion and then easily get it deployed. It's a pretty scalable platform, and something that we've just recently received the patent for it. >> So what was the internal conversation to put this together? Was it the fact that there was business needs? Cloud native gave you that scale advantage? What was some of the drivers behind Ignite? 'Cause this is like, was it IoT? Was it, take us through the mindset. What were some of the first principles around building this? >> Hey John nice, it's a good question. And actually to be fair, this was probably a little bit before the time of IoT and some of these newer technologies were coming up. At this time, we were really kind of scratching on the surface of data science and advanced analytics. And what really generated the need for this is as you could imagine, working in a consultancy firm and many of our clients deal with tons of contracts and the lightboard documents for financial services, there was much rich information, these unstructured data documents and we had no way to get this information out. So really it was generated out of the need to get information out of a lot of these contractual documents that we had and pinpoint specific information. So really taking it holistically on ingestion on transformations, running NLP, algorithms, it really evolved into a whole end to end complete platform, running on top of a containerized ecosystem, such as OpenShift. >> John: Yeah, I think just not to go on a tangent here but I think one of the conversations we've been having on all these events and certainly with COVID was the highlight of all these silos. And you know the old days was about break down the silos. But now with containers and cloud scale, you can extract out data, kind of create that horizontal data plane if you will, or view observation space, some call it. This just seems to be a huge trend you guys were on it early. How has that, what's your take on that? The silos used to be kind of like an advantage if you had a monolithic application but now you have a lot of diverse distributed databases. What's your take? >> Kevin: Yeah, it's, it's good. And how we are kind of coining. It is really through the power of, some of the toying in OpenShift that really gives organizations the ability to defer risk. In the sense that allows you to run certain types of workloads on-prem in a private cloud containerized way. It allows you to burst certain other types of workloads into the different CSP provider. So you can get advantage of their scale, their capacity without maybe moving some sensitive data and then another benefit is with some of that vendor lock-in it sometimes clients are concerned about is being able to kind of easily deploy your workloads and applications from one cloud provider to another. And I think as we look at this distributed processing no one client will totally be in one cloud provider. So having the ability to move workloads quickly and fastly where they make sense, where the security and risk is aligned is something that would what makes a successful use cases deployments. >> John: Just let me ask you another question. You guys, KPMG obviously have your own big data effort going on with analytics. You've got clients that you serve and ultimately they have customers as well. So you have that Red Hat equation. What are some of the advantages that you guys see as your firm and your clients with Red Hat analytics, 'cause this becomes ultimately the number one conversation. Like, okay, what's in it for me? >> Yeah. That's a good point. I would say we're seeing a few things. Some of them are highlighted. One is, as you're well aware, we chose Red Hat's OpenShift as one of our strategic options to deploy our platform. And whenever you're deploying these platforms it's very important that you have the flexibility the agility, and the ability to scale and Red Hat underneath the hood really helps take care of a lot of that, for you in a way that not only can you do it on your own as mentioned earlier, your private cloud but also onto the public CSPs and multiple CSPs. In addition, some of the other things I think that we saw that were very beneficial, a lot of times as an application user. So application users of ignite, the developers, the data scientists, the business users, the analysts, they all need to interact with the platform. They want to worry about getting the insights about getting the efficiencies in the platform. They don't want to worry about how the infrastructure's being put together, how the workloads are being moved how the scalability is occurring, et cetera and Red Hat really takes a lot of that away from you having to worry about it. And one of the other things that's also important is, is we have a strategic relationship with Red Hat. And as we look to help to enhance and develop these capabilities and experiences as our clients are doing private cloud, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, we're really going to be able to let them take the power of open source, into their own control and how they want to deploy it in themselves. >> Well, got you on the topic there. I got to ask you the question. What would you say to the people out there that haven't really kicked the tires on Red Hat in a while? What's the modern update? How would you describe the current situation at Red Hat for people who are going to re-look and or bring the Red Hat conversation up a notch? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think we see this in any type of software in the industry today. There's so many choices and there's so many options out there. And how do you choose the right source for the right use case? For the right client, for the right company? And how we always like to talk with clients is that yes, there are a lot of choices in there and the orchestration for the standardization but when you're looking for something that's celebrated in the market that has the security built into it that many organizations are looking for that gives you the flexibility without having to do a lot of additional operational overhead of moving from on-prem into the cloud and the way that it can scale and kind of make the overall ecosystem operations and deployments easier, it's one of the benefits that we see have gone with a tool like Red Hat OpenShift. >> Well, Kevin, I really appreciate the comments there and on Red Hat, that's awesome. Red Hat Summit, honestly, a big event around Red Hat and future cloud and modern applications. So I got to ask you as a software engineering leader in the industry, you got to be pretty excited about artificial intelligence and machine learning as it relates to, what it can be doing for changing the software development paradigm. Obviously there's also the no code, low code, serverless. You've got cloud native, you've got containers you got all this new capability. So how does, how do you see those trends? What are the big trends around machine learning and AI as it relates to someone who's going to be building modern applications in the cloud. Because certainly there's a huge ups upside there. Some are saying that if you don't have AI that's going to be a table stakes and we'll lower the valuation of the software or the application. What's your take on all these big trends around AI? >> Yeah, I agree with that. We've actually done several studies. And what we're hearing industry leaders saying is it was quite a few things. One is, we at KPMG, COVID-19 whiplash. And really what that means is that the pace and acceleration of adoption in AI has been tremendous over the COVID 19 period of our pandemic period. And so much so that industry leaders are a little bit concerned about how fast this adoption is going. And is it going too fast? In addition, we recently published a study called Thriving In An AI world where we were able to identify that business leaders and insiders are really bullish on to your point of using AI and ML to make some poor, critical decisions. How can we make vaccines? What's the distribution process? Fraudulent analytics where financial services. However, what I will say is we're still seeing a lot, a lot of questions and challenges around AI. Its security, its ethics associated to it. How you keep managing governing your process then privacy associated to it. So there's a lot of points around those areas. I think that industries are still trying to struggle and figure out how to solve for. And one of the things that we are hearing is that what the new administration there's different think tanks and industry leaders that are feeling that the new administration, while open to a lot of these advanced techniques and technologies are going to put a little bit more rigor around and regulations around how AI can be used in the marketplace. So hopefully that would give some companies guidance around these security and privacy and ethics concerns. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking to a friend the other day who's a leader at a big company that's a customer of Red Hat and a lot of other clouds as well. And we were joking about the agility speed, oh, agility and speed. Of course, yeah, you get that with here but you got a lot of fast and loose situations going here. You got to know when to put the pedal to the metal. When there's a straight narrow, we can really kind of gas it with AI and machine learning and then know where the potential curves are. See, will use that metaphor because you can go fast but with speed comes dangerous new things for breakage. Is always, and you're seeing that all the time. You're seeing that, with software because you can push new update, but still, when you talk about operational integrity and security fast and loose, isn't always the best way to go. But if you know there's a straight and narrow, you can really push it. This was what we were saying, he's like, "Hey, we know when to go straight and narrow and go fast. And then when to slow it down, pull it back." What's your take on that? What's your assessment? >> No, I agree. I think you hit some valid points there. And sometimes what we do is we take some antiquated processes and we overlay them into these newer technologies and we try to think them as being the same way and they may not always hold true. But it's not only kind of the fast and narrow and then putting things in that maybe a little bit more simplistic, but it's also there's a whole change around how you productionalized. How do you get these things into deployment? How do you monitor these over time? So some of those biases or some of those privacy concerns don't end up creeping up into the algorithm over time. I still think that will work here and from industries. There are still struggles around that. There's still struggles around. There's a lot of technologies that can do a lot of these same things. Our business processes don't always align. And then how do we really take something from an innovation from a POC into production? Is there a fast track for something that is straightened narrow and something that has a little bit more complexity? But what we're seeing today, there's a lot sort of spout at the same road, which makes bringing more complex AI algorithms into production. Challenging. >> Yeah. And there's always that big trend of day two operations. Which is, hey, you deploy it's great. And then, okay, wait a minute stop, set in a break. We need better monitoring. We need better data analytics. What's instrumented. What's not. What services are being generated and terminated. These are all big cloud native kind of themes. With that, I got to ask you from a customer standpoint, these are new first-generation problems at scale that with this new cloud native environment, the pros and cons. How do you guys talk to customers? What are some of the things you're seeing around the challenges that they face with analytics? All these analytic activity? >> Kevin: Yeah. So I think one of the challenges and we've probably heard this year in year out is around data literacy. Like really having our folks understand the data and empowering them to be successful in the organization. And to be fair I would say data literacy was a little bit more narrowly focused in an organizations who needed it. I need some analysts to use it. I needed some data scientists and engineers, but what we're starting to see now is there's larger programs across the board where it's more holistic at an organizational level. Everyone should be involved in data. Everyone should be able to do their own reporting. So really data literacy and getting data kind of into the arms of the folks is important. Some of the other ones that we've also kind of talked to about it, and they kind of go hand in hand and maybe a little bit on our prior conversation was the technologies. Technology especially in open source is exploding. And as well as commercial. So how do you choose the right technologies the right tools? You don't have too many tools in your toolbox per se but use the ones that are really differentiating and try to standardize on the ones that are more standard. Finally it's bringing those processes and that wrapping them back into the technologies. Again, a little point we hit on earlier but what we're finding is as technology is rapidly increasing, you're able to use it for your analytics. Your processes are still antiquated and legacy processes which makes it a little bit harder for you to really take advantage of what you're trying to achieve in your organization from a digital transformation. And then one final one I would add in there is around the risk that organizations have. So there's a lot of concern about reputational risk. If they're doing these types of activities that people don't understand, the data they don't understand the algorithms. Are there some impacts that can be heard? And they're figuring out how to control that and then how not to. And then I think finally the workforce is, as we know, it's getting the workforce up to speed, retooling where need be and putting their people in the right place to be successful. >> Kevin that's great insight. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I got to ask you one final question. >> Go ahead. One more thing, you mentioned COVID whiplash means a lot of post COVID activity discussions going on. If you look at what's happened with COVID there's been an exposure of all the projects that need to be doubled down on, ones that may not be continuing. People working at home. Honestly, a change of the environment, you mentioned workforce is among others. What do you think the biggest conversation around your customer base or within KPMG right now around some of these growth strategies around post COVID? What are companies thinking around how to deploy the people, process and technology is a big part of this conversation. What is the post COVID general theme that you're seeing among large enterprises and businesses in general? >> I mean, that's a good question. So I think in general, we're seeing the acceleration of digital agendas that may have been pushed out for five years school moving closer. But one of the most interesting things I think that I've gathered out of working with the clients that we're working with is that before to get stuff into production, AI solutions even in any type of smaller production system that was taking months months, several months to get something in production. And it seemed to be once the COVID pandemic hit, organizations can accelerate that journey of the deployment of applications into production in very, very quick timeframes without hindering or impacting any types of control frameworks they have in place, but just working quicker. So I think some of the things I see as we move forward is that these digital channels are going to be push forward more quicker. The data list on POC is good our pilot's good, is long past. It's now they want to see the results in the outputs in the enterprise, in production. And I think they realize that they have the tools to do this in a period of time that is weeks versus months, and in some cases, years. >> So, would you agree then, just as a quick followup to that that obviously when we get back to real life, post COVID that the visibility and the economics and the productivity gains from this new environment is going to stay around longer and probably be permanent. What's your, do you agree with that statement? >> I hope it is. but we are creatures of habit. And sometimes you go back to back to the way that we had done things, but I'm hopeful that they were able to see to be successful in these types of environments and make these types of decisions that those processes that are evolving to take into consideration what we learned. One is terrible pandemic, and be able to apply that to the post pandemic. >> Yeah. Who would have known the word hybrid cloud actually means something more than just cloud technologies? Hybrid events, hybrid workforces, the word hybrid has been kicked around. Kevin, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE for Red Hat Summit coverage. Thanks for coming on. Great insight. >> Thank you, have a great day. >> Thanks. I'm John Farrow with theCUBE here for Red Hat Summit coverage, 2021 virtual. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From London, England. It's theCUBE covering Coupa Inspire '19 EMEA brought to you by Coupa. >> Hi welcome to theCUBE! Lisa Martin on the ground in London, at Coupa Inspire '19. Pleased to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Mads Fink Jensen, partner advisory from KPMG. Mads, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Lisa, it's a pleasure to be here. >> It's great to have you. So we have all this excitement around us, lots of folks here in London for Coupa Inspire. Talk to me about the state of procurement. Coupa talks about PIPE, procurement, invoicing, payments, expenses, but procurement has been changing a lot recently. You have a lot of experience in procurement. Talk to me about what the state of procurement is like today, and what some of those waves of disruption are. >> Yeah. So you could say traditionally, procurement has been very much about making agreements with suppliers. The business have had a need and asked or requested procurement to fulfill that need. Typically, it has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from the procurement departments, in many cases delaying projects and things like that. Businesses are much more agile now, they expect, you from, different back office functions, including procurement, they expect a much more agile approach to delivering services. So if you are running a projects in the business, and you go to procurement asking for a specific service or product, and procurement says, "Ah this will take "four to six months", that is absolutely not acceptable. So the businesses in general are now, you could say, transforming the way that they are requesting procurement services, which means procurement are now being disrupted quite a lot. They have to think very differently. They have to be more proactive instead of being a reactive business partner, you could day. So being proactive in the sense that they embrace the business and actually deliver the needs before they are asked by the business. So that's a way where procurement organizations they need to be much more predictive, and understand what's going on, both in the business, but also in the market. And then you could say, on the other hand, procurement traditionally, they do a contract, and then they finalize the contract, and then they kind of keep their hands off. So the future is that procurement, they do a contract of course, that's a key part of being a procurement department, but they also need to operationalize the contract. So in terms of making sure that the users in the business, that they can actually use the contract and buy under that specific contract. So a lot of things are changing in procurement, which also means that you will see now` different operating models. You will see different interaction with businesses, and you will see quite a lot of different expectations coming from the business to the procurement departments. >> I can imagine that will be, those are challenges for say, an incumbent Chief Procurement Officer, or financial decision maker who's used to certain processes with certain boundaries. How, in your advisory role, do you work with clients to help them even just embrace the cultural change that's required of this function, to be much more strategic, and much more impactful to a business? >> Absolutely. I mean, you know, we use Coupa as a platform to help clients transforming the way that they are doing procurement, and actually we don't see a Coupa implementation as an IT implementation project, we see it as a business transformation project. And the thing is that, one thing is that you start changing the way that you are doing things, but it's also a mindset change. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And the challenge here for CPOs, so for procurement officers, is actually to make sure that the procurement organization have the necessary challenges to make that transformation. And you know, a lot of the stuff that we are doing when we're implementing solutions like Coupa, is of course taking away all the transactional work. That's automated, and we are also providing insights. So insight into spend, insight into transaction, to transaction processes, to turn around times, to delivery, to you know, all these kind of things. And the challenge for the CPO is to make sure that the part of the organization that are currently doing very transactional processes, how can they transform to becoming more strategic thinking and proactive people. >> And tell me how, from KPMG's perspective, how is Coupa helping to drive that transformation for its customers? >> Yeah, it's a good question actually, because I mean, Coupa is a technology, but it's also much more than a technology, because as Coupa also emphasizes, it's also about a community. >> Lisa: Yes. >> So the thing is that, with a platform like Coupa, you get technology support for your processes, but you also get a lot more insight. So you get a lot of possibilities to act in a very different way. So for instance, you can see spend patterns, so in that way you can predict how businesses actually on an annual basis what their need will be. So in that way, you can also prepare for some of the stuff that are happening in the business. And also, you could say, as a procurement person, as a sourcing manager or category innovators, as Coupa is calling it, you now have the insight to actually think more strategic on your supplier base, on the market tendencies, you can see how other companies are procuring stuff, are they going from one type of vendors to another type of vendors, and how is that going. So you could say, Coupa is a tool, not only to structure processes and do transformations, but it's also a platform and a technology that changes the way that you think and you act. >> You mentioned the word predictive a second ago, and one of the things that, well the P in Coupa stands for prescriptive. Rob talked about, I think was over 22,000 prescriptions that were delivered through the community just in the last, I think he said 12 months, very short period of time. A lot of innovation there. Helping a business in whatever industry it's in, go from being reactive to proactive to predictive, is that a game changer, or is that something that you think every business has to become predictive to be relevant? >> Yeah, so you could say, of course it differs a little bit from industry to industry, there are many different ways of looking at the procurement, but a general thing across industries that doesn't really change whether it's manufacturing or fast moving consumer goods, or pharmaceutical or whatever, is that procurement needs to understand the business that they are serving, because traditionally, procurement they are a little bit isolated, like IT was 10, 15 years ago, didn't really understand what's going on in the business in many cases, in many cases it's not like that, but in many cases it is, you know, they are very transactional, they establishing contracts and things like that, but the thing is that if you don't understand your business, and if you don't understand the way that your business operates, you know, you can have annual cycles, you can have innovation cycles, you can have different demands in the market depending on the time of year and things like that. So in general, procurement organizations really need to change their mindset of getting out there, speaking with the business, understanding the business, understanding the strategies, aligning the procurement strategies into the general business strategy, and then embrace innovation, because, I mean, even though Coupa as a platform is at a really, really nice place right now, with a lot of transformational possibilities, I mean who know what comes tomorrow. There will be a number of different things changing over the course of two, six months, a year, two years, things like that. So I think in general, procurement organizations need to think in a much more agile way, adapting what the company in general is adapting. >> So tell me, let's dig a little bit deeper into what KPMG and Coupa are doing together to drive the future of procurement. >> Absolutely, so KPMG have developed a framework we call Powered Procurement, which is a framework that gives, you could say, clients a very, very structured way of doing a transformation, and that framework is actually built on top of the Coupa platform. So we have developed a model, which is, you could say, technology agnostic, but we have specifically developed a model that is placed on top of the Coupa platform, where we utilizes the possibilities the platform have, and one core thing is that the mantra of Coupa is measurable as business value, and the transformation that we want to do together with our clients is exactly open their eyes in terms of how do you get measurable business value, because how do you measure it, what is it that you want to measure, is it savings only? Not necessarily. It can be a lot of different things. And the Coupa platform you could say enable that transformation process in a really, really good way, because you actually don't really think about technology, you think about business transformation, and that's why I think the way that we utilize Coupa as a platform is quite unique. >> So thinking back to your long history in procurement advisory, your background as a supplier on the industry side, when you look at that compared to your day to day life where you're a consumer and you're buying things very easily through Amazon and different marketplaces, how is Coupa helping to bring in some of that consumerization and help meet the demands of people that want things to be, to your point, I don't want to be looking at a UI, or a technology, I want this to simpler like it is when I'm going to buy groceries online. >> Mads: Absolutely. >> Are they helping to really bridge that gap? >> So it's a really good question, actually, because you could say, in reality, the value comes from a meaningful experience, and you could say traditionally, when you have, you know, I was part of the Maersk organization, the Danish shipping company, and we did a lot of stuff on behalf of the business to make sure that they could execute their role and get the products and services they needed. It was typically a very cumbersome process, where people had to think in very complex processes and you know, how do I actually get this thing I need now? And what's happening now with a platform like Coupa is that you actually adopt the way of thinking coming from your private life as well. So it's kind of merging a little bit the way that you think when you do procurement because it's not a complex process. Of course, it takes longer in a business environment, you could say, also because you need to do different sourcing exercises, there are regulations in the public sector and so forth, but in the way that you're thinking of how you procure, and get access to the goods and services that you need for executing your role, it's a very different mindset. And that's where technologies like Coupa comes in as a, you could say, straightforward way of getting access to these things. >> So KPMG clearly has choice in who it chooses to partner with. Tell me a little bit more about what Coupa and the partnership means to KPMG, and the competitive differentiation it might deliver. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean there are a number of different platforms in the market, of course, and it's actually quite interesting this year because there's a lot of development. I actually started out a new company in 2001 where we developed an e-procurement platform, and I can tell that both the suppliers, and the market and the suppliers in general, have changed quite a lot since then. (laughs) >> Lisa: I can imagine. >> And a lot of more actors are coming into the market. And the interesting thing is that, you know, the traditional actors, they have quite some difficulties in following up with a company like Coupa. And you could say Coupa as a platform is really interesting because it, first of all it adopts the cloud technology, which means that companies doesn't have to think about you know, maintenance, operations, all these things that typically come with on premise solutions, and it has this ability to create this community, because the technology platform is developed and designed and architected in the way it is, which means you have a suite of components that all feeds into a common community, which create, you could say, a much, much better platform to innovate than what we see in the competing landscape. So in essence, when Rob today talked about the community, that's where we see a huge differentiator, the way that Coupa works with the community, and takes intelligence from the community, and based on that can actually come up with really, really impressive, innovative ideas. >> Last question for you, Mads. The category of business spend management that Coupa is working hard to define, what does that from KPMG's perspective? >> Yeah, so you could say, for me it's actually quite relieving that there is an actor in the market that starts to talk about business spend management. It's a new term that Coupa have introduced. I mean there have been variations on that subject, but it's the first time that you have a very clear pronunciation of what this is all about, because business spend management is much more than just than the, you could say, the narrow procurement bit. Procurement is of course a huge part of it, but I mean, there are expense management, as an example, you have all the procurement stuff, you have spend in a lot of different areas like salary, that's not kind of part of the platform yet, but which would make a lot of sense, you could say. So this is the first time where you actually have a suite that in all the different components and areas, embrace business spend management. And in essence, you could say, I think, Rob also mentioned it in a very good way, this is actually, it's the procurement department that manages a huge part of the value of the company, in terms of managing the spend. So it's an extremely important task that organizations have, and the good thing is that we see, increasingly see that procurement gets closer and closer to the strategic area of businesses. >> Well Mads, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE, and describing the procurement history that you have, what KPMG and Coupa are doing together. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you Lisa, it was a pleasure to be here. >> Likewise. For Mads, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London '19. Thanks for watching.

>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Coupa. Inspire 19 AMIA brought to you by Cooper. >>Hi. Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin on the ground in London a Coupa inspire 19 please to walk to the cube for the first time. Mads think Jensen partner advisory firm. KPMG. NADHs welcome to the cube. >>Thank you Liza. It's a pleasure to be here. >>Great to have you. So we have all this excitement around us. Lots of folks here in London for Coupa inspire. Talk to me about the state of procurement. Guba talks about P IPE procurement, invoicing, payments, expenses. The procurement has been changing a lot recently. You have a lot of experience in procurement. Talk to me about what the state of procurement is like today. What some of those waves of disruption are. >>Yeah, so you could say traditionally procurement has been very much about, you know, making agreements with suppliers. Uh, the business has have had an, uh, a need and asked or requested procurement to fulfill that need. Typically, it has taken a lot of time and a lot of effort from the procurement departments, uh, in many cases delaying projects. And, and things like that. Businesses are much more agile now. They expect, you know, from different back office functions including procurement, they expect a much more agile approach to delivering services. So if you are running a project, uh, in the business and you go to procurement asking for a specific surface service or product and procurement says, ah, this will take, you know, four to six months, that is absolutely not acceptable. So the businesses in general are now you could say transforming the way that they are requesting procurement services, which means procurement are now being disrupted quite a lot. >>Eh, they have to think very differently. They have to be more proactive instead of being a reactive business partner, you could say. So being proactive in the sense that they embrace the business and actually deliver the needs before they are asked by the business. So that's a way where procurement organizations, they need to be much more predictive and understand what's going on both in the business but also in the market. And then you could say on the other hand, procurement, traditionally they do a contract and then they finalize the contract. And then they kind of keep the hands off. Yeah. So the future is that procurement, they do a contract, of course that's a a key part of being a procurement department, but they also need to operate, operationalize the contracts. So in terms of making sure that the users in in the business that they can actually use the contract and buy onto that specific contract. So a lot of things are changing in procurement and which also means that you will see now different operating models. You will see different interactions with businesses and will see quite a lot of different expectations coming from the business to the procurement departments. >>I can imagine that will be, those are challenges for say an incumbent, a chief procurement officer or financial decision maker who's used to certain processes with certain boundaries. How in your advisory role do you work with clients to help them even just embrace the cultural change that's required of this function to be much more strategic and much more impactful to a business? >>Absolutely. I mean, you know, we use Kupa as a platform to, to help clients transforming the way that they are doing procurement. Eh, and, and actually we don't see a copayment implementation as an it implementation project. We see it as a business transformation project. And the thing is that one thing is that you start changing the way that you're doing things, but it's also a mindset change. And the challenge here for, for CPO so far, procurement officers is actually to make sure that the procurement organization have the necessary challenges to make that transformation. And you know, a lot of the stuff that we are doing when we are implementing solutions like Cooper is of course taking away all the transactional work that's automated. And we are also providing insight. So insight into spin, into to a transaction, to transaction processes, to turnaround times, to delivery, to, you know, all these kinds of things. And the, and the challenge for the CPO is to make sure that the part of the organization that are currently doing very transactional processes, how can they transform to becoming more strategic thinking and proactive people? >>And tell me how from KPMGs perspective, how is Kupa helping to drive that transformation for its customers? >>Yeah, it's a good question actually, because I mean Kubota's a technology, but it's also much more than a technology because as Cooper also emphasizes, it's also about a community. Yes. So the thing is that with a platform like Uber, you get technology support for your processes, but you also get a lot more insight. So you get a lot of possibilities to act in a very different way. So for instance, you can see eh spin patterns. So in that way you can predict how businesses actually on an annual basis, what their need will be. So in that way you can also prepare for some of the stuff that are happening in the business. And also you could see as a procurement person, as assaulting a manager or category innovators as Cooper's calling it, eh, you now have the insight to act. You think more strategic on your supplier, BS, on the marketing, on the market tendencies. You can see how other companies are procuring stuff. Are they going from one type of windows to another type of vendors and how is that going? So you could see Cuba is a tool not only to structure processes and to transformations, but it's also a platform and a technology that changes the way that you think and you act. >>You mentioned the word predictive, it's not going to go. And one of the things that that will, the P and Kupa stands for prescriptive. Rob talked about, I think the number was over 22,000 prescriptions that were delivered through the community just in the last, I think he said 12 months, very short period of time. A lot of innovation there going helping a business in whatever industry it's in. Go from being reactive to proactive, to predictive. Is that a game changer or is that something that you think every business has to become predictive to be relevant? >>Yeah, so you could say, of course it differs a little bit from industry to industry. There are many different ways of of looking at procurement, but a general thing across industries that, that that doesn't really change whether it's manufacturing or fast moving consumer goods or pharmaceutical or whatever is that that the procurement needs to understand the business that they are serving because uh, you know, traditionally procurement, they are a little bit isolated. Like it was, you know, 10, 15 years ago didn't really understand what's going on in the business. In many cases, in many cases it's not like that, but in many cases it is, you know, they are very transactional, they are establishing contracts and things like that. But the thing is that if you don't understand your business and if you don't understand the way your business operates, you know you can have annual cycles, you can have innovation cycles, you can have different demands in the market depending on the time of year and things like that. >>So in general, procurement organizations really need to change their mindset of getting out there, speaking with the business, understanding the business, understanding the strategies, aligning the procurement strategies into the general business strategy. And then embrace innovation. Because, I mean, even though coop as a platform is at a really, really nice place right now with a lot of transformational possibilities, I mean who knows what comes tomorrow. That will be a number of different things changing over the course of you know, two, six months, a year, two years, things like that. So I think in general, procurement organizations need to think in a much more agile way. Adapting, adapting, sorry. What the, what the company in general is adapting. >>So tell me a little bit, let's dig a little bit deeper into what KPMG and Coupa are doing together to drive the future of procurement. >>Absolutely. So KPMG have developed a framework we call power procurement, which F which is a framework that gives, you could say clients are very, very structured way of doing a transformation. And that framework is actually built on top of the Cooper platform. So we have developed a model, which is you could say technology agnostic, but we have specifically developed a model that a, that is placed on top of the Cooper platform where we utilize as a, you know, the possibilities that platform have. And one core thing is that the mantra of Cooper is is measurable business value and the transformation that we want to do together with our clients is exactly open their eyes in terms of how do you get that measurable business value because how do you measure it? What is it that you want to measure? Is it savings only? Not necessarily. It can be a lot of different things. And the Cooper platform you could say enable that transformation process in a really, really good way because you actually don't really think about technology. You think about business transformation and that's why I think you know, the way that we utilize this group as a platform is quite unique. >>So thinking back to your long history in procurement advisory, your background as a supplier and on the industry side, when you look at that compared to you know your, your day to day life where you're a consumer and you're buying things very easily through Amazon and different marketplaces, how is Coupa helping to bring in some of that consumerization and help meet the demands of people that want things to be? To your point, I don't want to be looking at a UI or a technology. I want this to be simpler like it is when I'm going to buy groceries online. Are they helping to really bridge that gap? >>Yeah, so it's a really good question actually because you could see in reality the value comes from a meaningful experience. And you could say traditionally when you have, you know, I was part of the mask organization, the Danish shipping company and eh, you know, we did a lot of stuff on behalf of the business to make sure that they could, you know, do the, execute the role and get the products and services they needed. It was typically a very cumbersome process where people had to think in very complex processes and you know, how do I actually get this thing I need now? And what's happening now with a platform like Kupa is that you actually adopt the way of thinking coming from your private life as well. So it's kind of merging a little bit the way that you think when you do procurement because it's not a complex process. Of course it takes longer in a business environment you can say because also because you need to do a different sourcing exercises. They are regulations in the public safety and so forth. But in, in, in the way that you are thinking of how you procure and get access to the goods and services that you need for, for, for, you know, executing your role. It's a very different mindset and that's where technologies like Cooper comes in as you could say, straightforward way of getting access to these things. >>So KPMG clearly has choice and who it chooses to partner with. Tell me a little bit more about what Kupa and the partnership means to KPMG and the competitive differentiation it might deliver.. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean they are a number of different platforms in the market of course. And, and it's actually quite interesting these year because there's a lot of development. I actually started out a new company in 2001 where we developed an e-procurement platform. And uh, I can tell that both the suppliers and the market and the suppliers in general have changed quite a lot since then. And a lot of more actors are coming into the market. And the interesting thing is that you know, the, the traditional actors, they have quite some difficulty in following up with, with a company like Cooper. And you could see Cooper as a platform is really interesting because it, first of all, it adopts the cloud technology, which means that eh, companies doesn't have to think about, you know, maintenance operations, you know, all these things that typically come with on premise solutions. >>And, and it has this ability to create this community because the technology platform is developed and designed and architected in the way it is, which means you have a suite of components that all feeds into a common community. Yes. Which create, you could see a much, much better platform to innovate than what we see in the competitive compete competing landscape. So in H in essence, when Rob today talked about the community, that's where we see a huge differentiator, the way that Cooper works with the community and takes intelligence from the community. And based on that can actually come up with really, really impressive, innovative ideas. >>Last question for you. The Mads, the category of business spend management that Coupa is working hard to define. What does that mean from Cape KPMGs perspective? >>Yeah, so so you could see for me it's actually quite eh relieving that eh, that those an actor in the market that that starts to talk about business spend management. It's a, it's a new term that the Cooper have introduced. I mean there have been variations on the, on the, on that subject, but it's the first time that you have a very clear pronunciation of what this all, what this is all about. Because business spend management is much more, more than just the, you could say the narrow procurement bit. Procurement is a course as a huge part of it, but I mean they are expense management as an example. You have all the procurement staff, you have spinned in a lot of different areas, like a salary that's not kind of the part part of the platform yet, but which would make a lot of sense. >>You could say. So this is the first time where you actually have a suite that in all the different components and areas embrace business, spend management, and in in essence, you could see, I think Rob also mentioned it in a very good way. This is actually, it's the procurement department that managers, you know, a huge part of the value of the, in terms of managing the spend. So it's an extremely important task the procurement, uh, organizations have. And the good thing is that we see increasingly see that procurement gets closer and closer to the strategic area of businesses. >>Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining me on the cube and describing the procurement history that you have, what KPMG a Kupa are doing together. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. It was a pleasure to be here. Likewise for a Mads. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Kupa inspire London 19. Thanks for watching.

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everybody watching the Cuban leader live tech coverage. We here covering the M I t CDO conference M I t CEO Day to wrapping up. Bob Parr is here. He's a partner in principle at KPMG, and he's joined by Streetcar Krishna, who is the managing director of data science. Aye, aye. And innovation at KPMG. Gents, welcome to the Cube. Thank >> thank you. Let's start with your >> roles. So, Bob, where do you focus >> my focus? Ah, within KPMG, we've got three main business lines audit tax, an advisory. And so I'm the advisory chief date officer. So I'm more focused on how we use data competitively in the market. More the offense side of our focus. So, you know, how do we make sure that our teams have the data they need to deliver value? Uh, much as possible working concert with the enterprise? CDO uh, who's more focused on our infrastructure, Our standards, security, privacy and those >> you've focused on making KPMG better A >> supposed exactly clients. OK, >> I also have a second hat, and I also serve financial service is si Dios as well. So Okay, so >> get her out of a dual role. I got sales guys in >> streetcar. What was your role? >> Yeah, You know, I focus a lot on data science, artificial intelligence and overall innovation s o my reaction. I actually represent a centre of >> excellence within KPMG that focuses on the I machine learning natural language processing. And I work with Bob's Division to actually advance the data site off the store because all the eye needs data. And without data, there's no algorithms, So we're focusing a lot on How do we use a I to make data Better think about their equality. Think about data lineage. Think about all of the problems that data has. How can we make it better using algorithms? And I focused a lot on that working with Bob, But no, it's it's customers and internal. I mean, you know, I were a horizontal within the form, So we help customers. We help internal, we focus a lot on the market. >> So, Bob, you mentioned used data offensively. So 10 12 years ago, it was data was a liability. You had to get rid of it. Keep it no longer than you had to, because you're gonna get soon. So email archives came in and obviously thinks flipped after the big data. But so what do you What are you seeing in terms of that shift from From the defense data to the offensive? >> Yeah, and it's it's really you know, when you think about it and let me define sort of offense versus defense. Who on the defense side, historically, that's where most of CEOs have played. That's risk regulatory reporting, privacy, um, even litigation support those types of activities today. Uh, and really, until about a year and 1/2 ago, we really saw most CEOs still really anchored in that I run a forum with a number of studios and financial service is, and every year we get them together and asked him the same set of questions. This was the first year where they said that you know what my primary focus now is. Growth. It's bringing efficiency is trying to generate value on the offensive side. It's not like the regulatory work's going away, certainly in the face of some of the pending privacy regulation. But you know, it's It's a sign that the volume of use cases as the investments in their digital transformations are starting to kick out, as well as the volumes of data that are available. The raw material that's available to them in terms of third party data in terms of the the just the general volumes that that exist that are streaming into the organization and the overall literacy in the business units are creating this, this massive demand. And so they're having to >> respond because of getting a handle on the data they're actually finding. Word is, they're categorizing it there, there, >> yeah, organizing that. That is still still a challenge. Um, I think it's better with when you have a very narrow scope of critical data elements going back to the structure data that we're talking it with the regulatory reporting when you start to get into the three offense, the generating value, getting the customer experience, you know, really exploring. You know that side of it. There's there's a ton of new muscle that has to be built new muscle in terms of data quality, new muscle in terms of um, really more scalable operating model. I think that's a big issue right now with Si Dios is, you know, we've got ah, we're used to that limited swath of CDs and they've got Stewardship Network. That's very labor intensive. A lot of manual processes still, um, and and they have some good basic technology, but it's a lot of its rules based. And when you do you think about those how that constraints going to scale when you have all of this demand. You know, when you look at the customer experience analytics that they want to do when you look at, you know, just a I applied to things like operations. The demand on the focus there is is is gonna start to create a fundamental shift >> this week are one of things that I >> have scene, and maybe it's just my small observation space. But I wonder, if you could comment Is that seems like many CBO's air not directly involved in the aye aye initiatives. Clearly, the chief digital officer is involved, but the CDO zehr kind of, you know, in the background still, you see that? >> That's a fantastic question, and I think this is where we're seeing some off the cutting it change that is happening in the industry. And when Barbara presenter idea that we can often civilly look at data, this is what it is that studios for a long time have become more reactive in their roles. And that is that is starting to come forefront now. So a lot of institutions were working with are asking What's the next generation Roll off a CDO and why are they in the background and why are they not in the foreground? And this is when you become more often they were proactive with data and the digital officers are obviously focused on, you know, the transformation that has to happen. But the studios are their backbone in order to make the transformation. Really. And if the CDO started, think about their data as an asset did as a product did us a service. The judicial officers are right there because those are the real, you know, like the data data they're living so CDO can really become from my back office to really become a business line. We've >> seen taking the reins in machine learning in machine learning projects and cos you work with. Who >> was driving that? Yeah. Great question. So we are seeing, like, you know, different. I would put them in buckets, right? There is no one mortal fits all. We're seeing different generations within the company's. Some off. The ones were just testing out the market. There's two keeping it in their technology space in their back office. Take idea and, you know, in in forward I d let me call them where they are starting to experiment with this. But you see, the mature organizations on the other end of the spectrum, they are integrating action, learning and a I right into the business line because they want to see ex souls having the technology right by their side so they can lead leverage. Aye, aye. And machine learning spot right for the business right there. And that is where we're seeing know some of the new models. Come on. >> I think the big shift from a CDO perspective is using a i to prep data for a That's that's fundamentally where you know, where the data science was distributed. Some of that data science has to come back and free the integration for equality for data prepping because you've got all this data third party and other from customer streaming into the organization. And you know, the work that you're doing around, um, anomaly detection is it transcends developing the rules, doing the profiling, doing the rules. You know, the very manual, the very labor intensive process you've got to get away from that >> is used in order for this to be scale goes and a I to figure out which out goes to apply t >> clean to prepare the data toe, see what algorithms we can use. So it's basically what we're calling a eye for data rather than just data leading into a I. So it's I mean, you know, you developed a technology for one off our clients and pretty large financial service. They were getting closer, like 1,000,000,000 data points every day. And there was no way manually, you could go through the same quality controls and all of those processes. So we automated it through algorithms, and these algorithms are learning the behavior of data as they flow into the organization, and they're able to proactively tell their problems are starting very much. And this is the new face that we see in in the industry, you cannot scale the traditional data governance using manual processes, we have to go to the next generation where a i natural language processing and think about on structure data, right? I mean, that is, like 90% off. The organization is unstructured data, and we have not talked about data quality. We have not talked about data governance. For a lot of these sources of information, now is the time. Hey, I can do it. >> And I think that raised a great question. If you look at unstructured and a lot of the data sources, as you start to take more of an offensive stance will be unstructured. And the data quality, what it means to apply data quality isn't the the profiling and the rules generation the way you would with standard data. So the teams, the skills that CEOs have in their organizations, have to change. You have to start to, and, you know, it's a great example where, you know, you guys were ingesting documents and there was handwriting all over the documents, you know, and >> yeah, you know, you're a great example, Bob. Like you no way would ask the client, like, you know, is this document gonna scanned into the system so my algorithm can run and they're like, Yeah, everything is good. I mean, the deal is there, but when you then start scanning it, you realize there's handwriting and the information is in the handwriting. So all the algorithms breakdown now >> tribal knowledge striving Exactly. >> Exactly. So that's what we're seeing. You know, if I if we talk about the digital transformation in data in the city organization, it is this idea dart. Nothing is left unseen. Some algorithm or some technology, has seen everything that is coming into. The organization has has has a para 500. So you can tell you where the problems are. And this is what algorithms do. This scale beautifully. >> So the data quality approaches are evolving, sort of changing. So rather than heavy, heavy emphasis on masking or duplication and things like that, you would traditionally think of participating the difficult not that that goes away. But it's got to evolve to use machine >> intelligence. Exactly what kind of >> skill sets people need thio achieve that Is it Is it the same people or do we need to retrain them or bring in new skills. >> Yeah, great question. And I can talk from the inspector off. Where is disrupting every industry now that we know, right? But we knew when you look at what skills are >> required, all of the eye, including natural language processing, machine learning, still require human in the loop. And >> that is the training that goes in there. And who do you who are the >> people who have that knowledge? It is the business analyst. It's the data analyst who are the knowledge betters the C suite and the studios. They are able to make decisions. But the day today is still with the data analyst. >> Those s Emmys. Those sm >> means So we have to obscure them to really start >> interacting with these new technologies where they are the leaders, rather than just waiting for answers to come through. And >> when that happens now being as a data scientist, my job is easy because they're Siamese, are there? I deploy the technology. They're semi's trained algorithms on a regular basis. Then it is a fully fungible model which is evolving with the business. And no longer am I spending time re architect ing my rules. And like my, you know, what are the masking capabilities I need to have? It is evolving us. >> Does that change the >> number one problem that you hear from data scientists, which is the 80% of the time >> spent on wrangling cleaning data 10 15 20% run into sm. He's being concerned that they're gonna be replaced by the machine. Their training. >> I actually see them being really enabled now where they're spending 80% of the time doing boring job off, looking at data. Now they're spending 90% of their time looking at the elements future creative in which requires human intelligence to say, Hey, this is different because off X, >> y and Z so let's let's go out. It sounds like a lot of what machine learning is being used for now in your domain is clean things up its plumbing. It's basic foundation work. So go out. Three years after all that work has been done and the data is clean. Where are your clients talking about going next with machine learning? Bob, did you want? >> I mean, it's a whole. It varies by by industry, obviously, but, um but it covers the gamut from, you know, and it's generally tied to what's driving their strategies. So if you look at a financial service is organization as an example today, you're gonna have, you know, really a I driving a lot of the behind the scenes on the customer experience. It's, you know, today with your credit card company. It's behind the scenes doing fraud detection. You know, that's that's going to continue. So it's take the critical functions that were more data. It makes better models that, you know, that that's just going to explode. And I think they're really you can look across all the functions, from finance to to marketing to operations. I mean, it's it's gonna be pervasive across, you know all of that. >> So if I may, I don't top award. While Bob was saying, I think what's gonna what What our clients are asking is, how can I exhilarate the decision making? Because at the end of the day on Lee, all our leaders are focused on making decisions, and all of this data science is leading up to their decision, and today you see like you know what you brought up, like 80% of the time is wasted in cleaning the data. So only 20% time was spent in riel experimentation and analytics. So your decision making time was reduced to 20% off the effort that I put in the pipeline. What if now I can make it 80% of the time? They're I put in the pipeline, better decisions are gonna come on the train. So when I go into a meeting and I'm saying like, Hey, can you show me what happened in this particular region or in this particular part of the country? Previously, it would have been like, Oh, can you come back in two weeks? I will have the data ready, and I will tell you the answer. But in two weeks, the business has ran away and the CDO know or the C Street doesn't require the same answer. But where we're headed as as the data quality improves, you can get to really time questions and decisions. >> So decision, sport, business, intelligence. Well, we're getting better. Isn't interesting to me. Six months to build a cube, we'd still still not good enough. Moving too fast. As the saying goes, data is plentiful. Insights aren't Yes, you know, in your view, well, machine intelligence. Finally, close that gap. Get us closer to real time decision >> making. It will eventually. But there's there's so much that we need to. Our industry needs to understand first, and it really ingrained. And, you know, today there is still a fundamental trust issues with a I you know, it's we've done a lot of work >> watch Black box or a part of >> it. Part of it. I think you know, the research we've done. And some of this is nine countries, 2400 senior executives. And we asked some, ah, a lot of questions around their data and trusted analytics, and 92% of them came back with. They have some fundamental trust issues with their data and their analytics and and they feel like there's reputational risk material reputational risk. This isn't getting one little number wrong on one of the >> reports about some more of an >> issue, you know, we also do a CEO study, and we've done this many years in a row going back to 2017. We started asked them okay, making a lot of companies their data driven right. When it comes to >> what they say they're doing well, They say they're day driven. That's the >> point. At the end of the day, they making strategic decisions where you have an insight that's not intuitive. Do you trust your gut? Go with the analytics back then. You know, 67% said they go with their gut, So okay, this is 2017. This industry's moving quickly. There's tons and tons of investment. Look at it. 2018 go down. No, went up 78%. So it's not aware this issue there is something We're fundamentally wrong and you hit it on. It's a part of its black box, and part of it's the date equality and part of its bias. And there's there's all of these things flowing around it. And so when we dug into that, we said, Well, okay, if that exists, how are we going to help organizations get their arms around this issue and start digging into that that trust issue and really it's the front part is, is exactly what we're talking about in terms of data quality, both structured more traditional approaches and unstructured, using the handwriting example in those types of techniques. But then you get into the models themselves, and it's, you know, the critical thing she had to worry about is, you know, lineage. So from an integrity perspective, where's the data coming from? Whether the sources for the change controls on some of that, they need to look at explain ability, gain at the black box part where you can you tell me the inferences decisions are those documented. And this is important for this me, the human in the loop to get confidence in the algorithm as well as you know, that executive group. So they understand there's a structure set of processes around >> Moneyball. Problem is actually pretty confined. It's pretty straightforward. Dono 32 teams are throwing minor leagues, but the data models pretty consistent through the problem with organizations is I didn't know data model is consistent with the organization you mentioned, Risk Bob. The >> other problem is organizational inertia. If they don't trust it, what is it? What is a P and l manage to do when he or she wants to preserve? Yeah, you know, their exit position. They attacked the data. You know, I don't believe that well, which which is >> a fundamental point, which is culture. Yes. I mean, you can you can have all the data, science and all the governance that you want. But if you don't work culture in parallel with all this, it's it's not gonna stick. And and that's, I think the lot of the leading organisations, they're starting to really dig into this. We hear a lot of it literacy. We hear a lot about, you know, top down support. What does that really mean? It means, you know, senior executives are placing bats around and linking demonstrably linking the data and the role of data days an asset into their strategies and then messaging it out and being specific around the types of investments that are going to reinforce that business strategy. So that's absolutely critical. And then literacy absolutely fundamental is well, because it's not just the executives and the data scientists that have to get this. It's the guy in ops that you're trying to get you. They need to understand, you know, not only tools, but it's less about the tools. But it's the techniques, so it's not. The approach is being used, are more transparent and and that you know they're starting to also understand, you know, the issues of privacy and data usage rights. That's that's also something that we can't leave it the curb. With all this >> innovation, it's also believing that there's an imperative. I mean, there's a lot of for all the talk about digital transformation hear it everywhere. Everybody's trying to get digital, right? But there's still a lot of complacency in the organization in the lines of business in operation to save. We're actually doing really well. You know, we're in financial service is health care really hasn't been disrupted. This is Oh, it's coming, it's coming. But there's still a lot of I'll be retired by then or hanging. Actually, it's >> also it's also the fact that, you know, like in the previous generation, like, you know, if I had to go to a shopping, I would go into a shop and if I wanted by an insurance product, I would call my insurance agent. But today the New world, it's just a top off my screen. I have to go from Amazon, so some other some other app, and this is really this is what is happening to all of our kind. Previously that they start their customers, pocketed them in different experience. Buckets. It's not anymore that's real in front of them. So if you don't get into their digital transformation, a customer is not going to discount you by saying, Oh, you're not Amazon. So I'm not going to expect that you're still on my phone and you're only two types of here, so you have to become really digital >> little surprises that you said you see the next. The next stage is being decision support rather than customer experience, because we hear that for CEOs, customer experience is top of mind right now. >> No natural profile. There are two differences, right? One is external facing is absolutely the customer internal facing. It's absolutely the decision making, because that's how they're separating. The internal were, says the external, and you know most of the meetings that we goto Customer insight is the first place where analytics is starting where data is being cleaned up. Their questions are being asked about. Can I master my customer records? Can I do a good master off my vendor list? That is where they start. But all of that leads to good decision making to support the customers. So it's like that external towards internal view well, back >> to the offense versus defense and the shift. I mean, it absolutely is on the offense side. So it is with the customer, and that's a more directly to the business strategy. So it's get That's the area that's getting the money, the support and people feel like it's they're making an impact with it there. When it's it's down here in some admin area, it's below the water line, and, you know, even though it's important and it flows up here, it doesn't get the VIN visibility. So >> that's great conversation. You coming on? You got to leave it there. Thank you for watching right back with our next guest, Dave Lot. Paul Gillen from M I t CDO I Q Right back. You're watching the Cube

>> Narrator: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas Nevada, it's The Cube. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin on the ground at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas for Coupa Inspire 19. This is a really exciting two day event. We're going to be here covering, talking all about spending smarter. Very pleased to welcome to The Cube for the first time from KPMG, Dipan Karumsi, procurement advisory practice leader. Dipan, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much, glad to be here, appreciate it. >> So this is an interesting event. Coupa in the last few years since becoming a public company really seems to be on this rocket ship. The momentum that CEO Rob Bernshteyn talked about this morning, there's now 1.2 trillion dollars of spend transactions going through the Coupa platform across companies in every industry from manufacturing to health care to retail. Loads of opportunity for businesses of any type to really get that control and visibility on spend. Talk to us about what KPMG is doing with Coupa. You're both a titanium sponsor here at Inspire 19 as well as a partner but give us a little bit of overview of your partnership with Coupa. >> Absolutely, so we've actually been coming to the conference for seven years now, I think since the very beginning and been the top level sponsor since the very beginning so it's been a fantastic relationship where we've helped a number of the customers that they talked about today, a lot of those customers were ours and we've had the opportunity to kind of get them live on the platform and see success by bringing spend through the platform and getting the visibility of those transactions. So we're fortunate enough we have 100 plus clients, globally, that we've been able to bring live on the Coupa platform across 90 plus countries and so we're really excited to be here. >> So some of the things I was reading about Coupa is that a lot of times, in the beginning, last 10 years or so, companies came to them looking for help with procurement or invoices. Now they're able to help companies get that visibility over all spend across procurement, invoices, expenses, travel management, payments. Talk to us about how you help some of those joint customers to really go from that siloed approach, going all right, we've got a few things under control, to getting that visibility because there is a tremendous amount of business impact that can come from getting that visibility into where all of your spend is coming from and where it's going. >> That's right. So I think in the beginning days as you kind of mentioned right, it was important to get the majority of the spend on the platform and so you looked at your indirect spend categories that are most commonly purchased, you get them onto the platform, you start analyzing that, more effective sourcing, drive value out of those categories. And as you look at the different categories that companies are spending in, they're evolving. More services spend, might be different categories in marketing, digital media, et cetera, and so as Coupa has expanded they've focused on some of the other categories and how to bring them in. So they bought companies that focus on contingent labor and those types of things. And so you start bringing all that spend together and all of a sudden you have a very nice pool of data from which you can analyze and from which you can make better decisions upon. So it's going to be a constant kind of proliferation of the tool and it's going to get broader and I think that's fantastic because organizations can see exactly what they're doing in a lot of different areas. >> Wouldn't it be nice if we all had that visibility in our personal lives as well? Well speaking of your relationship, you mentioned this is your seventh year sponsoring Inspire. Let's talk about how the role of procurement is changing, and the role of finance. Going from more tactical to much more strategic. Thinking about some of the disruptors like consumerization. You know, we're all consumers and we have this, we all have Amazon on our phone right, And we have this expectation that in our personal lives we can get anything at any time with the click of a button. And now when consumers are business buyers we want the same thing. Talk to us about what you have seen at KPMG as that procurement role has changed and what makes your implementation with Coupa unique. >> Yeah, that's exactly right, you put it exactly right there. You know, consumers or your employees internal of the organizations, are looking to buy in the way that they buy at home. They're looking to have visibility into when the shipment is, the products are going to arrive, they want to provide ratings as to what they thought of those products, they want to be able to have visibility into what they spent, and in fact where it's going is they want to be alerted when they should be buying something else. I mean, lot of the spend can actually be predicted as to what's going to be happening. And so think about an application that's going to alert you, it's probably about time that you need toner for this printer, or it's probably about time that you need XYZ to come and do this service for you. And so moving to that as you analyze the spend that's going to the platform is exactly what's happening. And I think it makes lives of employees better, easier, and it makes it a little bit more effective to kind of get spend through the application as well. >> When you're talking with customers, whether it's been a man or a woman who's been a CPO for a long time, where are they in terms of being receptive to having these predictive technologies? Is that a big cultural mind shift within whether it's a large manufacturing company or a smaller health care insurance carrier? >> It is, I mean the reality of it is with the data to be predictive there's a lot of things that have to be evaluated in the back. So you have to have clean supplier data, clean spend data, you have different applications that are integrating and you need end to end visibility in order to have a data set that's long enough and accurate enough to be able to predict from. So it's one thing to say okay we're going to go predictive, but it's another thing to be able to have the data to be able to accurately predict. So I think procurement organizations, kind of back to your other question of where are they going, you know historically procurement hasn't been one of the areas that CFOs are the first ones to jump into. And I think what organizations are realizing and was the C-suite is realizing is, this is the one place in the organization where we can see most of our third party spend. And so procurement has to quickly grasp, okay how can I get a handle on that information to be able to make better decisions and so show value to the organization. So that's how procurement's getting into the game, I think that's how they're going to show their value, by making that data set accurate, and that will lead them to kind of that predictive aspect of it. >> So what are those, what's the conversation like in terms of, all right there's many many sources of data, where we all know, you hear all the time data is the new oil, data is gold. It is if you have the ability to, like you said, make sure it's clean, but also be able to extract valuable insights from it faster than your competition. So from an infrastructure perspective, where does KPMG start with implementations with Coupa, are you first doing assessments with customers to understand all of the different data sources, how best to bring them together so that the power of AI can actually be applied to this massive pool of oil? >> That's right. So we start by kind of looking at the target operating model. What is it that the span of control for procurement's going to be? What is it that they want to do, what is it that they have ownership over? Then we identify kind of what are the technologies that are in place to house some of that information to help you make better decisions and to ultimately serve your end customers. And as we identify that architecture of what's going to be needed in the future, that's when we start getting into how we create and develop that oil infrastructure. And so as we look at the gaps in the infrastructure an application like Coupa can plug in with the appropriate procure to pay process, with the contracting process, with sourcing, spend analytics, whatever that may be, and it helps to plug the different gaps that allow you to kind of get all of that data into one place. >> Allowing customers to as Coupa says, spend smarter. I wanted to get your opinion on this BSM category that they are working to develop and lead. Business spend management. You guys recently, KPMG did a study on the future of procurement. Tell us a little bit about some of the interesting insights that came from that study and where you think business spend management is really going to be applicable and a big driver of business value. >> Yeah so, that's great, and I think business spend management, you know it continues to expand. I mean what Coupa's been every year, you've been to these conferences, is continuing to expand their portfolio and the modules that they have in order to kind of attack business spend management. And it's an important factor, a lot of spend happens through procurement and they need to have the application infrastructure to manage that. In the future procurement we talk a little bit about supplier centricity and customer centricity. So how is it that you're being able to work more effectively with your supplier, share information. Can they actually log in to the portal and see what the ratings are on the products that people are buying from them, I mean that's where we're kind of moving to. Customer centricity, giving them that Amazon-like experience so that they can go in on mobile and go in on any which way they want to, buy the things that they want, or be prompted to buy the things that they want. How are you innovating in categories, how are you using external data insights. You know the days of having that 20 year category manager who knows one category, sitting in one place, it's just not possible anymore. There's so much data and information out there you have to be able to leverage all of the external insights. And then of course using the digital platform to bring everything together. And that's where kind of Coupa plays, and the other e-procurement solutions, they're bringing all those insights together, allowing the foundation to be set so that you can execute on the processes that have to happen within it. >> We talk a lot about customer focus, customer centricity, Rob Bernshteyn talked about it this morning. Dig a little bit more into what you talked about with KPMG in terms of supplier centricity and some of the value that all of these suppliers are getting. How is KPMG helping some of these suppliers to really dial up their business, get better insights and really make a bigger impact with what they're delivering? >> Yeah, I mean it's really about visibility into the transactions that are happening and how their clients are using their products or services. So the more you can analyze around spend patterns, about the products that are being purchased, not purchased, the rigor of the catalog environment that's being created for your clients, the more they can analyze around that that allows them to be a little bit more focused in the way that they're dealing with their customers. And so we talk a lot about creating a very content rich environment. I mean if you went to Amazon today and you didn't see a picture, you didn't see ratings, you didn't see a description, would you purchase something? No. And that's what's happening inside organizations. Gone are the days where you have one line item that says this is it, and you don't know what you're buying. And so creating this content rich environment which is allowing and requiring suppliers to get into the environment to create their robust catalogs is really important. And so supplier's going to be a big part of what they're doing in the future to create this kind of appropriate spend management platform where the catalogs are set. >> I'm really getting on board to harness the power of that data. To your point, we have, the consumerization effect is so strong. We have this expectation that we can get anything and one of the things that Coupa was talking about this morning in the general session was not only the data, that they are now harnessing the power for their customers, for their suppliers, but also let's allow companies to go through the Coupa platform and search through software and products and deploy and manage and pay everything through that, bring in that consumerization approach to businesses in any industry. >> That's right. That's every right. So having it in one place makes it a little bit simpler, the visibility's there. I think the other thing that we can see a lot of is just self service. You walk into an airport, you do your own boarding pass. You come out of a parking garage, you pay for your parking and you leave. There's no people involved and frankly consumers like that. So being able to create an environment when you can do self service and things are being pushed to you to make decisions from versus having to go out and do a tremendous amount of research to make decisions is going to be a huge factor. I mean in the area of supplier risk management having bots and things that are mining social media in different areas for what's happening with your supplier so that you can be alerted to an event prior to making a large contractual obligation with them. You know, those are the types of things that we haven't seen in the past which I think we're going to get into now. >> It's so exciting. Dipan, I wish we had more time to get into it but thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing what you guys at KPMG are doing to help customers really extract a tremendous amount of value and spend smarter. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it. >> For Dipan Karumsi, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Mosconi North here in San Francisco, California. I'm student of my co host, A Volante. We're in day three of four days live. Walter. Wall coverage here at IBM think happened. Welcome back to the program. Talk about one of our favorite topics. Cube alarm. Steve Hill, who's the global head of innovation. That topic I mentioned from KPMG, Steve, welcome back to the program. >> Seems to have made good to see you. >> All right. So, you know, we know that the the only constant in our industry is change. And, you know, it's one of those things. You know, I look at my career, it's like innovation. Is it a buzz word? You know? Has innovation stalled out of the industry? But you know, you're living it. You you're you're swimming in it. Talkinto a lot of people on it. KPMG has lots of tools, so give us the update from from last year. >> Well, I think you know, we talked about several things last year, but innovation was a key theme. And and when I would share with you, is that I think across all industries, innovation as a capability has become more mature and more accepted, still not widely adopted across all industries and all competitors and all kinds of companies. But the reality is, innovation used to be kind of one person's job off in the closet today. I think a lot of organizations or realizing you have to have corporate muscle that is as engaged as in changing the status quo as the production muscle is in maintaining the status quo has >> become a cultural. >> It's become part of culture, and so I think innovation really is part of the evolution of corporate governance as far as I'm >> concerned. What one thing I worry about a little bit is, you know, I see a company like IBM. They have a long history of research that throws off innovation over the years. You know, I grew up, you know, in the backyard of Bell Labs and think about the innovation a drove today, the culture you know, faster, faster, faster and sometimes innovation. He does sit back. I need to be able to think longer, You know? How does how does an innovation culture fit into the ever changing, fast paced you? No need to deliver ninety day shot clock of reality of today. >> Well, I think innovation has to be smart, meaning you have to be able to feed the engines of growth. So your horizon one, if you will, of investments and your attention and efforts have to pay off the short term. But you also can't be strategically stupid and build yourself into an alleyway or to our corner, because you're just too short term thought through. Right? So you need to have a portfolio of what we call Horizon three blended with Horizon one and Horizon two types investment. So your short term, your middle term and your longer term needs are being met. Of course, if you think about it like a portfolio of investments, you're going tohave. Probably a smaller number of investments that air further out, more experimental and a larger proportion of them going to be helping you grow. You could say, almost tactically or sort of adjacent to where you are today, incrementally. But some of those disruptive things that you work on an H three could actually change your industry. Maybe you think about today where we are. Azan Economy intangibles are starting to creep into this notion of value ways we've never seen before. Today, the top five companies in terms of net worth all fundamentally rely on intangibles for their worth. Five years ago, it was one or two, and I would argue that the notion of intangibles, particularly data we'll drive a lot of very transformative types of investments for organizations going forward. So you've got to be careful not to starve a lot of those longer term investments, >> right? And it's almost become bromide. Large companies can innovate, but those five companies just mentioned well alluded to Amazon. Google, etcetera Facebook of Apple, Microsoft there, innovators, right? So absolutely and large companies innovate. >> Yes, clearly, yeah, but you have to have muscle, but it doesn't happen by accident, and you do put discipline and process and rigor and tools and leadership around innovation. But it's a different kind of discipline than you need in the operation, so I'll make him a ratio that makes sense. Maybe ninety five percent production, five percent innovation in an organization. That innovation engine is always challenging that ninety five percent Are you good enough? Are you relevant enough? Are you fast enough? Are you agile enough? You need that in every corporate organization in terms of governance to stay healthy and relevant overtime. >> So it's interesting. You know, I was in a session that Jack Welch talk wants, and he's like, I hear big companies can innovate is like big companies made up of people. People are the things that can innovate absolute. But, you know, I've worked in large organizations. We understand that the fossilization process and the goto market that you have, you know, will often kill, you know, those new flowers that are blooming, what separates the people that can drive innovation on DH? You know, put those positive place and kind of the also rans that, you know get left behind window disruption. >> Well, there's several. There's a couple things that I would highlight of a longer list, one of them we culture. I mean, I think innovation has been part of a culture. People in the institution have value innovation and want to be part of it. And there is, you know, a role that everyone can play. Just because you're in operations, if you will, doesn't mean you ignore change or you ignore the opportunity to improve the status quo. But you still have you get paid to operate what I find that is related to culture that gets a lot of people, you know, slow down or or roadblock is the disconnect between the operating part of the business and the innovative part of the business. If you try, if you build them to separately, what happens is you have a disconnection. And if you innovate the best idea in the world over here. But you can't scale it with production, you lose. So you have to make sure that, as as a leader overall, the entire enterprise you build those connections, rotations, leadership, You know, How do you engage the production, you know, engine into the innovation engine? It's to be very collaborative. It should be seamless. You know, everyone likes to say that, but that word, but relative seamlessness is, is heavy architecture. You've gotto build that, you know, collaboration into your model of of how you innovate >> and >> don't innovate in the vacuum. >> And it comes back to the cultural aspects we're talking about. Do you mentioned the ninety day shot? Clocks were here in the Bay Area. Silicon Valley. The most innovative place in the world. They've lived along the ninety day shot clock forever, and it seems to have not heard that so called short term thinking. Why is that? >> Well, there's so much start up here. I mean, at the end of the day, there is so much churn of new thinking and start up in V C. And there's so much activity that it's almost a microcosm, right? Not every place in the world smells, feels, looks like Silicon Valley, right? And the reason for it is in part because there's just so much innovation in what happens here. And these things change me. If you think about, uh, these unicorns that we have today. Today there's about three hundred ninety one unicorns. Just five years ago, there were one hundred sixty globally on before that. Hardly people didn't know they were hardly recognized. But that's all coming from pockets of innovation like Silicon Valley. So I'd argue that what you have here is an interesting amalgamation of culture being part of a macro environment region that that really rewards innovation and demonstrates that in in market valuations in capital raises, I mean, today one hundred million dollars capital raise is pretty common, especially for unicorns. Five, ten years ago. You never see me. It was very difficult to get a hundred million dollars capital, right? >> You mean you're seeing billion dollar companies do half a billion dollars raises today? I mean, it's >> all day, right? And some of them don't make a profit. Which is I mean, and that's kind of the irony, Which is, Are those companies? What did they get that the rest of us, you know, there was that live on Wall Street right out of in New York. What do we not see? Is that some secret that downstream there will be some massive inflow? Hard to say. I mean, look at Amazon is an example. They've used an intangible to take industries out that they were never in before they started selling books, and they leverage customer behavior data to move into other spaces. And this is kind of the intangible dynamic. And the infection >> data was the fuel for the digital disruption to travel around the world. You see that folks outside of Silicon Valley are really sort of maybe creating new innovation recipes? >> Yes. I think that what you see here is starting to go viral right on DH way that KPMG likes to share a holistic way to look at this for our clients. What is what we call the twenty first century enterprise. So the things that we used to do in the twentieth century to be successful, hire people, build more machines, right? You know, buy more assets, hard, durable assets. Those things don't necessarily give you the recipe for success in the twenty first century. And if you look at that and you think about the intangibles work that's been well written about there's there's all kinds of press on this today. You'll start to realize that the recipe for success in this new century is different, and you can't look at it in a silo to say, Okay, so I've gotta change my department or I've got a I've got to go change, You know, my widgets. What you've got to think is that your entire enterprise and so are construct called the twenty first Century prize. Looks at four things. Actually, it's five, and the fifth one is the technologies to enable change in the other four. And those technologies we talk about here and I have made him think which are, you know, cloud data, smart computers or a blockchain, etcetera. But those four pillars our first customer. How do you think about your customer experience today? How do you rethink your customer experience tomorrow? I think the customer dynamic, whether it's generational or it's technologically driven, change is happening more rapidly today than ever. And looking at that front office and the customer dementia, it is really important. The second is looking at your acid base. The value of your assets are changing, and intangibles are big category of that change. But do your do your hard assets make the difference today and forward. Or all these intangibles. Companies that don't have a date a strategy today are at peril of falling victim to competitors who will use data to come through a flank. And Amazons done that with groceries, right? The third category is as a service capabilities. So if you're growing contracting going into new markets are opening new channels. How do you build that capability to serve that? Well, there's a phenomenon today that we know is, you know, I think, very practised, but usually in functions called as a service by capability on the drink instead of going out and doing big BPO deals. Think about a pea eye's. Think about other kinds of ways of get access to build and scale very fucks Pierre your capabilities and in the last category, which actually is extremely important for any change you make elsewhere is your workforce. Um, culture is part of that, right? And a lot of organizations air bringing on chief culture officers. We and KPMG did the same thing, but that workforce is changing. It's not just people you hire into your four walls today. You've got contingent workforce. You have gig economy, workforce a lot of organizations. They're leveraging platform business models to bring on employees to either help customers with help. Dex needs or build code for problems that they like to solve for free. So when you talk about productivity, which we talked about last year and you start thinking about what's separating the leaders from a practical standpoint from the laggers from practically standpoint, a lot of those attributes of changing customer value of assets as a service growth and workforce are driving growth and productivity for that subset of our community and many injured. >> So when you look at the firm level you're seeing some real productivity gains versus just paying attention to the macro >> Correct, any macro way think proactive is relatively flat, and that's not untrue. It's because the bottom portion the laggards aren't growing. In fact, productivity is in many ways falling off, but the ones that are the frontier of those top ten percent fifteen hundred global clients we've looked at, uh, you know, you see that CD study show that they're actually driving growth and productivity substantially, and the chasm is getting larger. >> So, Steve, Steve, it's curious what this means for competition. I think about if I'm using external workforces in open source communities, you know, Cloud and I, you know, changes in the environment. A supposed toe I used to kind of have my internal innovation. Now I'm out in these communities s O You know, we're here than IBM show. You know, I think back the word Coop petition. I first heard in context of talking about how IBM works with their ecosystem. So how did those dynamics change of competition and innovation in this? You know, the gig. Economy with open source and cloud. May I? Everywhere. >> Big implications. I mean, I I think you know, and this is the funny point you made is nontraditional competitors, because I think most of our clients and ourselves recognized that we haven't incredible amount of nontraditional competitors entering our space in professional services. We have companies that are not overtly going after our space, but are creating capabilities for our clients to do for themselves what we used to do for them. Data collection, for example, is one of those areas where clients used to spend money for consultants coming in to gather data into aggregate data with tools today that's ah, a very short process, and they do it themselves. So that's a disintermediation or on bundling of our business. But every business has these types of competitive non Trish competitive threats, and what we're seeing is that those same principles that we talked about earlier of the twenty first century surprise applies, right? How are they leveraging there the base and how they leveraging their workforce? Are they? Do they have a data strategy to think through? Okay, what happens if somebody else knows more about my customers than I do? Right? What does that do to make those kinds of questions need to be asked an innovation as a capability I think is a good partner and driving that nothing I would say, is that eco systems and you made you mention that word, and I want to pick up on that. I mean, I think eco systems air becoming a force in competitive protection and competitive potential going forward. If you think about a lot of you know, household names relative Teo data, you know Amazon's one of them. They are involved in the back office in the middle ofthis have so many organizations they're in integrated in those supply chains. Value change, I think services firms, and particularly to be thinking about how do they integrate into the supply chains of their customers so that they transcend the boars of, you know, their four walls, those eco systems and IBM was We consider KPMG considers IBM to be part of our ecosystem, right? Um, as well as other technology. >> So they're one of one of the things we're hearing from IBM. Jenny talked about it yesterday, and her keynote was doubling down on trust. Essentially one. Could you be implying that trust is a barrier to ay? Ay adoption is that. Is that true? Is that what your data show? >> We we we see that very much in spades. In fact, um, you know, I I if you think about it quite frankly, our oppa has driven a lot of people to class to class three. Amalgamation czar opportunities. But what's happening is we're seeing a slowdown because the price of some of these initials were big. But trust, culture and trust are big issues. In fact, we just released recently. Aye, Aye. And control framework, which includes methods and tools assessments to help our clients that were working with the city of Amsterdam today on a system for their citizens that helped them have accountability. Make sure there's no bias in their systems. As a I systems learn and importantly, explain ability. Imagine, you know. Ah, newlywed couple going into a bank to get a house note and having the banker sit back and have his Aye, aye, driven. You know, assessment for mortgage applicability. Come up moored. Recommend air saying no. You Ugh. I can't offer you a mortgage because my data shows you guys going to be divorced, right? We don't want to tell it to a newlywed couple, right? So explain ability about why it's doing what it's doing and put it in terms that relate to customer service. I mean, that's a pretty it's a silly example, but it's a true example of the day. There's a lot of there's a lack of explain ability in terms of how a eyes coming up with some of its conclusions. Lockbox, right? So a trusted A I is a big issue. >> All right, Steve, Framework that you just talked about the twenty first century enterprise. Is there a book or their papers? So I just go to the website, Or do I need to be a client? Read more about, >> you know, absolutely. You can go to our website, kpmg dot com and you can get all the della you want on the twenty first century enterprise. It talks to how we connect our customers front to middle toe back offices. How they think about those those pillars, the technologies we can help them with. Make change happen there, etcetera. So I appreciate it that >> we'll check it out that way. Don't be left in the twentieth century. Come on. >> No, you can't use twentieth century answers to solve twenty first century challenges, right? >> Well, Steve, he'll really appreciate giving us the twenty first century update for day. Volante on student will be back with our next guest here. IBM think twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching you.

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back, this is theCUBE's live coverage, we're here in San Francisco, Moscone West for Google Cloud's big conference called Next 2018. The hashtag is GoogleNext18. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, our next guest is Traci Gusher, Principal, Data and Analytics at KPMG. Great to have you on, thanks for joining us today. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> We love bringing on the big system, global, some integrators, you guys have great domain expertise. You also work with customers, you have all the best stories. You work with the best tech. Google Cloud is like a kid in the candy store >> It sure is. when it comes to tech, so my first question is obviously AI in super important to Google. Huge scale, they bring out all the goodies to the party. Spanner, Bigtable, BigQuery, I mean they got a lot of good stuff. TensorFlow, all this open source goodness, pretty impressive, right, >> Yeah, absolutely. the past couple years what they've done. How are you guys partnering with Google, because now that's out there, they need help, they've been acknowledging it for a couple years, they're building an ecosystem, and they want to help end user customers. >> Yeah, we've been working with Google for quite some time, but we actually just formalized our partnership with Google in May of this year. From our perspective, all of the good work that we have done, we're ready to hit the accelerator on and really move forward fast. Some of the things that were announced this week, I think, are prime examples of areas where we see opportunity for us to hit the accelerator on. Something like what was announced this week with their new contact center, API suite, launched by the Advanced Solutions Lab. We had early access to test some of that and really were able to witness just how accelerated some of these things can help us be when we're building end-to-end solutions for clients. >> There's a shortcut to the solutions because with Cloud, the time to value is so much faster, so it's almost an innovator's dilemma. The longer deployments probably meant more billings, ( laughs) right, for a lot of integrators. We've heard people saying hey we've gone, the old days were eight months to eight weeks to eight minutes on some of these techs, so the engagements have changed. At the end of the day, there's still a huge demand for architectural shift. How has the delivery piece of tech helped you guys serve your customers, because I think that's now a conversation that we're hearing is that look, I can move faster, but I don't want to break anything. The old Facebook move fast, break stuff, that doesn't fly in enterprise. >> No, it doesn't (laughs). >> I want to move fast, but I need to have some support there. What are some of the things that you're seeing that are impacting the delivery from integrators? >> Well, some of the technology that's come, that's reduced the length of time to deliver, we see and a lot of our customers see as opportunity to do the next thing, right? If you can implement a solution to a problem quicker, better, faster, than you can move on to the next problem and implement that one quicker, better, faster. I think the first impact is just being able to solve more problems, just being able to really apply some benefits in a lot more areas. The second thing is that we're looking at problems differently, the way that problems used to be solved is changing, and that's most powerfully noted, as we see, at this conference by what's happening with artificial intelligence and with all the accelerators that are being released in machine learning and the like. There's a big difference in just how we're solving the problems that impacts it. >> What are some of the problems that you guys are attacking now, obviously AI's got a lot of goodness to it. What are some of the challenges that you're attacking for customers, what are some examples? >> Our customers have varying problems as they're looking to capitalize on artificial intelligence. One of the big problems is where do I start, right? Often you'll have a big hype cycle where people are really interested, executives are really interested, and I want to use AI, I want to be an AI-enabled company. But they're not really sure where to start. One of the areas that we're really hoping a lot of our customers do is identify where the low hanging fruit is to get immediate value. And at the same time, plan for longer strategic types of opportunities. The second area is that one of the faults that we're seeing, or failure points that we're seeing in using artificial intelligence is failure to launch. What I mean by that is there's a lot of great modeling, a lot of great prototyping and experimentation happening in the lab as it relates to applying AI to different problems and opportunities, but they're staying in the lab, they're not making it in to production, they're not making it in to BAU, business as usual processes inside organizations. So a big area that we're helping our clients in is actually bridging that gap, and that's actually how I refer to it, I refer to it as mind the gap. >> That is a great example, I hear this all the time, classic. Is it, what's the reasons, just group think, I'm nervous, there's no process, what's holding that back from the failure to launch? >> There's a few things. The first is that a lot of traditional IT organizations embedded in enterprises don't necessarily have all of the skills and capabilities or the depth of skills and capabilities that they need to deploy these models in to production. There's even just basic programming types of gaps, where a lot of models are being constructed using things like Python, and a lot of traditional IT organizations are Java shops and they're saying what do I do now? Do I convert, do I learn, do I use different talent? There's technology areas that prove to be challenging. The other area is in the people, and I actually spoke with an analyst this morning about this very topic. There's a lot of organizations that have started productionalizing some of these systems and some of these applications, and they're a little bit discouraged that they're not seeing the kind of lift and the kind of benefits that they thought they would. In most cases-- >> Who, the customers or the analysts? >> The customers. >> OK, alright. >> Yeah, I was having a conversation with an analyst about it. But in most cases, it's not that the technology is falling short, it's not that the model isn't as accurate as you need it to be, it's that the workforce hasn't been transitioned to utilize it, the processes haven't been changed. >> Operationalizing it, yeah. >> The user interfaces aren't transitioning the workforce to a new type of model, they're not being retrained on how to utilize the new technology or the new insights coming from these models. >> That's a huge issue, I agree. >> Isn't there also, Traci, some complacency in certain industries? I mean you think about businesses that haven't yet totally transformed, I think of healthcare, I think of financial services, as examples that are ripe for transformation but really haven't yet. You hear a lot of people say well, it's not really urgent for us, we're doing pretty well, I'll be retired by then, there seems to be a sense of complacency in certain segments of enterprises. Do you see that? >> I do. And I'll say that we've seen a lot more movement in some of those complacent industries in the last six to 18 months than we have previously. I'll also say going back to that where do I start element, there's a lot of organizations that have pressing business challenges, those burning platforms, and that's where they're starting and I'm not advocating against it, I'm actually advocating very much for that, because that's how you can prove some real immediate value. Some organizations, particularly in life sciences or financial services, they're starting to use these technologies to solve their regulatory challenges. How do I comply faster, how do I comply better, how do I avoid any type of compliance issues in the future, how do I avoid other challenges that could come in those areas? The answer to a lot of those questions is if I use AI, I can do it quicker, more accurately, etc. >> Are you able to help them get ancillary value out of that or is it just sort of, compliance a lot of times is like insurance, if I don't do it I get in trouble or I get fined. But are you able to, this is like the holy grail of compliance and governance, are you able to get additional value out of that when you sort of apply machine intelligence to solve those problems? >> That's always the goal. Solving the regulatory problem is certainly what I would say are the table stakes, right? The must-have. But the ability to gain insight that can actually drive value in the organization, that's where your aim really is. In fact, we've worked with a lot of organizations, take life sciences, we've worked with some life sciences organizations that are trying to solve some compliance issues and what we've found is that many times in helping them solve these compliance issues, we're actually gathering insights that significantly increase the capability of their sales organization, because the insights are giving them real information about their customers, their customers' buying patterns, how they're buying, where they might be buying improperly. And it's not the table stake of what we're trying to do, the table stake was maybe contract compliance, but the value that they're actually getting out of it is not only the compliance over their distributors or their pharmacies, but it's also over the impact that they're going to have on their sales organization. For something like an internal audit department to have value to sales, that' like holy grail stuff. >> Yeah, right, yeah. >> What about the data challenges? Even in a bank, who's essentially a data company, the data tends to be very siloed, maybe tucked away in different business units. How are you seeing organizations, how are you helping organizations deal with that data silo problem, specifically as it relates to AI? >> It used to be that the devil was in the details, but now the devil's in the data, right? >> I love that. >> There was a great Harvard Business Review article that came out, and I think Diane Green actually quoted this in one of her presentations, that companies that can't do analytics well can't do AI yet. A lot of companies that can't do analytics well yet, it isn't because they don't have the analytical talent, it's not because they don't know the insights they want to drive, it's because the data isn't in the right format, isn't usable to be able to gain value from it. There's a few different ways that we're helping our clients deal with those things. Just at the very basic level is good data governance. Do you have data stewards that are owning data, that are making sure that data is being created and governed the right way? >> That's a huge deal, I imagine-- >> Inequality and. >> It's huge. >> Inequality-- >> inequality, meta data. >> Garbage in, garbage out. >> Lineage of data, how it's transformed. Being able to govern those things is just imperative. >> It could be just a database thing, could be a database thing, too, it's one of those things where there's so many areas that could be mistakes on the data side. Want to get your thoughts on the point you said earlier which I thought was about technology not coming out and getting commercialized or operationalized. For a variety of reasons, one of them being processes in place, and we hear this a lot. This is a big opportunity, because the human side of these new jobs, whether you're operating the network, really they need help, customers need help. I think you guys should do a great job there given the history. The other trend that came out of the keynote today I want to get your reaction to is there's a tweet here, I'll read it, it says "GCB Cloud will start serving "managing services, enterprise workloads, including Oracle, RAC and Oracle exit data, and SAP HANA through partners." Interesting mind shift again, talk about a mind shift, OK. Partners aren't used to dealing with multi-vendors, but now as a managed service will change the mechanism a bit on delivery because now it's like OK, hey, you want to sling some APIs around, no problem. You want to manage it, we got Kubernetes and Istio. You want a little Oracle with a little bit of HANA? It brings up a much more diverse landscape of solutions. >> It does. Which makes the partners like sous chefs. You can cut the solutions up any way you want. To your point about going faster, to the next challenge. Normal, is that going to be the new normal, this kind of managed service dashboarding? You see that as the... >> I think it is, and I'll take it a step, sir, I'll take it a step further beyond managed service and actually get a little more discreet. One of the things that we're doing increasingly more of is insights as a service, right? If you think about managed service in the traditional sense of I've got a process and you're going to manage that process end to end for me, that technology end to end for me, I do think that that's going to slowly become more and more prevalent. That has to happen with our movement to putting our applications in the cloud, and our ERPs in the cloud. I think it is going to become more of the norm than the less but I also think that it's opening the door for a lot of other things as a service, including insights as a service. Organizations can't find the data science talent that they need to do the really complex types of analysis. >> Your insights as a service comment just gave me an insightful, original idea, thank you very much. >> You're welcome. >> I'll put this in the wrap-up, Dave, when we talk about it. Think about insight as a service, to make that happen with all the underpinning tech, whether it's Oracle or whatever, the insights are an abstraction layer on top of that so if the job is to create great experiences or insights, it should be independent of that. Google Cloud is bringing out a lot more of the concept of abstractions. Kubernetes, Istio, so this notion of an abstraction layer is not just technical, there's also business logic involved. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> This is going to be a dream scenario for KPMG, >> We think so. for your customers, for other partners. Cause now you can add value in those abstraction layers. >> Absolutely. >> By reducing the complexity. Well Oracle, that's not my department, that's HANA's, that's SAP, who does that? He or she's the product lead over it, gone. Insights as a service completely horizontally flattens that. >> Yeah, and to that point, there's magic that happens when you bring different data together. Having data silos because their data's in different systems just, that's the analytics of 1990. Organizations can't operate on that anymore, and real analytics comes when you are working at a layer above the system's and working with the data that's coming from those systems and in fact even creating signals from the data. Not even using the data anymore, creating a signal from the data as an input to a model. I couldn't agree with you more. >> Whole new way of doing business. This is digital transmitting, this is the magic of Cloud. Traci, great to have you on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> It's going to be a whole new landscape changeover, new way to do business. You guys are doing a great job, KPMG, Traci Gusher. Here inside theCUBE talking about analytics AI. If you can't do analytics good, why even go to AI? Love that line. theCUBE bringing you all the data here, stick with us for more after this short break. (bubbly electronic tones)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18 in Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We've got two guests for this panel. We have Katie Benedict who is director advisory people in change at KPMG and Michelle Esposito who is the AVP technology planning for JM Family Enterprises. Welcome Katie and Michelle. >> Thank you for having us. >> So I want to start out with you Michelle, explain to our viewers what JM Family Enterprises is. >> Sure, JM Family's, we're a privately held company located in south Florida. We have about 4,200 associates across the country and I describe us as a diversified automotive company. So we started 50 years ago, it's actually our 50th anniversary. Distributing Toyotas in the U.S. We were the first distributor and we still distribute to the five south eastern states but since then we've grown and expanded into other sectors of the automotive industry. Including auto finance and warranty and insurance products. >> Okay so diversified portfolio of services. >> Yes. >> So recently you had a situation, an implementation situation. Can you tell our viewers a little bit about it and then I want you to chime in Katie with how you worked on it too. >> Sure. So we were an existing ServiceNow customer. We implemented the product back in 2011 and at the time we really just tried to make it look like our old product. We wanted to minimize the disruption to the organization so we said let's just make it look and behave like the old product did. Seemed like a good idea at the time but with that and with the change that happened over time it became very complex to use and it really just wasn't meeting our needs. So, after much consultation with a lot of experts in the field we decided to re-implement ServiceNow. We believed in the platform, we believed in its capabilities and what it could do for us but we needed to start over. So with that comes a lot of change for our organization. People re used to doing things a certain way, they're used to the processes that we already had in place. So trying to get them on board and understand the why to what we were doing was really important. >> And Katie that's where you fit in. So tell us a little bit about KPMG's approach to making this easier, because as Michelle said. We are human nature, we're just resistant to change and sort of we like it the old way. This is hard. So how, what, can you tell us a little bit about your approach. >> Exactly. We were thrilled that JM Family chose KPMG as their implementation partner and really some of things we brought specifically to the table for this re-implementation. Was some of our accelerators. Our process packs to really optimize the new processes that JM Family was using but then also our organizational change management and learning and development capabilities. We specialize in IT transformation from a people perspective and group of a specialized in ServiceNow. We've done, well over 50 implementations of ServiceNow. So we wanted to look from that people perspective, how do we get the right level of buy in. How do we make sure that people understand why we're doing the change. Get that early, quick adoption. A continuous feedback loop we implement a change agent network. Which I've found was one of the most effective things we could have done especially at JM Family given the nature of their organization and given some of the cultural considerations there and it was a tremendous success there I feel. I mean the people there, the associates there were so involved in the initiative and really partnered with our team. As a single team, it wasn't JM Family and KPMG it was one implementation team working together in tandem to make this change happen. >> So what did you learn in the sense of what were people's, what were the sticking points? And then how did you overcome them? >> Yeah. Sure I can take that. As much as people were supportive of the re-implementation and really knew we needed to do it we found that they were still very much embedded with the way we did it today. So even going into this knowing what a huge change management effort it was I was still surprised at how much effort we had to put into it. So it took a lot of communication, a lot of different methods of communication and engagement to get people to really understand what we were doing and why we were doing it. Repetition really explaining it, the change agent network was huge for us and what we did there was. We pulled in some of our bigger supporters and some of our detractors and they were able to kind of permeate the organization in the different departments within IT to really help sell what we were doing. To bring back questions and concerns. So that was really key. >> What was that like bringing in the people who were really butting heads? I mean and how do you navigate between those two factions? >> Honestly I think it was great because I'd rather get that feedback while we're going through the process than hear about it later and hear the implementation not be successful. So in some cases when people brought that feedback that maybe wasn't so positive it was just a matter of more communication, more training but in other times it was you know we really scratched our head and said maybe we really need the rethink about this. Maybe they've got something here and we may need to tweak our approach or do something a little differently. But it was as Katie mentioned, the engagement level was phenomenal. So the positive and the negative we really had a very engaged team. >> So coming out of this Katie, what would you say are sort of the best practices for other leaders that are doing implementation, re-implementations and maybe dealing with some resistance? >> I would say definitely whether it's the implementation or a re-implementation. Don't forget about your people. The technology, especially ServiceNow is fabulous and your processes are generally are standard. You can align to idle processes but getting the adoption is really key and so remembering that this is a transformation. It's not just an implementation of the technology. Paying attention to the people, making sure that they're on board. They know what you're doing, why you're doing it and really what's in it for them is vital to making this a successful project. >> As you're looking at the ServiceNow platform and what you do for JM Family Enterprises what do you see looking ahead as sort of ways you can augment and enhance? >> Oh they have a lot of ideas going forward right now which is very exciting. >> It is, you know we focused in, we're in a second phase implementation. Our first phase really focused on the core ITSM functions and now we're dipping our toe into some other areas. The PPM suite, vendor management, performance analytics. So we're really continuing to mature our use of the product and even looking beyond that. You know we have interest in some of the security operations and even further than that into some of the financial management capabilities. So we definitely plan to continue invest in the platform and see what it can do for us. >> You're evolving just as ServiceNow is evolving too. >> Yes we are. >> Well Michelle and Katie thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. It was great having you. >> Thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have much more of the CUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18. Hashtag no 18 just after this.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 2018, #Know18. I'm Rebecca Knight your host, along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We have two guests joining us, we have Mitch Kenfield who is an Advisory Principal CIO advisory at KPMG, And Adrian Hubbard, Service and Process Manager at Linklaters, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Adrian, I want to start with you. Can you describe for our viewers what was sort of happening, what was going on at Linklaters, sort of the inflection point when you realized you needed to step up your game in this arena, and just lay that our for our viewers. >> Yeah, I think, from Linklaters' point of view, we're very much, kind of, use the telephone more than anything else, it's very much a contact organization through voice. And we wanted to implement a platform that would engage the users in a different way, more to be self-serving, more chats, more routes to service, if you like. And we saw ServiceNow as the right tool for that. We did some due diligence, an RFP process, but that wasn't enough, we had to build a strong business case to make sure we were doing the right things. And that's where we kind of reached out to KPMG to see what they could offer us in this space. >> Talk more about your business, and-- >> So we're a global firm, we're kind of part of the magical circle, so there's four or five in that arena we call our strong peers. And yeah, as I say, fairness can be very challenging, their day themselves needs to be very efficient and very effective, and they don't always want to have to tell Serve. So one of our challenges is the more time they spend with us the less time they're billing their clients, which is obviously the revenue of the firm. But then when you've got 450 plus partners they all feel they want to run the firm in a way that perhaps is regional, office-based. So some of those challenges play into delivering service also. >> You talked about doing your due diligence, how did you go about that? What was the, what was your process? >> So we engaged with a consultancy firm to help us through the process. Through that, we worked out where do we want to get to, our vision. We short-listed some top-set firms, there was about three or four on the list that we knew met the requirement. So we then went through the process of the next layer down and series of workshops with each provider. Obviously, there was a cost model, we got supplier guys involved from a contract perspective, tried to get the best price. But I think deep down we always felt ServiceNow was the right fit for us. And I've been at Linklaters six years, when I first joined Linklaters that time ago, we went through the same process. We chose the different tool then, but ServiceNow was in the list and we really would have liked to have gone there six years ago. But I think ServiceNow have improved a lot during that time, and now was the right time for us to choose them. >> It was the one that got away, and now you've brought it back. >> Absolutely, yeah, yeah. >> So, Linklaters reached out to you, so then describe about, describe how you sort of shepherded them through the process? >> Yeah, so they had reached out in our London office, and I guess I had happened to be there and jumped on the phone with them, and first of all, when Adrian mentions about the culture of a law firm, so we are a consulting firm you know, consultants and tax and audit and finance folks, so we kind of understand that, it's kind of like the industry where everybody's the boss and nobody's the boss. So we jumped on the phone, and one thing that I mentioned as Adrian was describing, is that we see this space as an opportunity to truly change the way the technology business is running, and therefore change the ultimate business. >> Adrian: Yeah. >> And so, we tell our clients a lot, if you're just going to kind of implement, it might not be the right thing for you. But if you're ready to transform the way you run technology, and the way that supports the business, we think we can help, and we brought something to them that we call Powered IT, which I can give some details on, but just at the highest levels it's our view of an accelerated transformation that includes some technology components, but more than that includes operating models and process to say let's not reinvent things, let's bring to you what's good, and that way we can spend our time focusing on the specifics for you, to get you to the business result you're looking for, and that was kind of that first conversation we had. >> Sure. >> The word "agile transformation" is popping into my head. It's such a common theme today, but is it relevant to what we're talking about? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'll start, Adrian, and maybe you can give your perspective on it. When we bring our view, and again, we call it Powered just as a tag, but really what it is, it's an acceleration. It's the components from an organizational aspect's process, metrics, supporting ServiceNow with some kind of near-the-box configurations to add in to that. And then, to your question, it's how do we deliver that in an agile way, where you see it constantly. We don't take six months before we show something, you're seeing it regularly and we can course correct and tweak to say we have a limited amount of effort we can spend, let's spend that in that agile methodology for things that transform you sooner and get it done. Would you, what was y'all's reaction? >> Yeah, to add to that, so what's really important for me is that we hadn't worked with KPMG before although, we were talking early doors, we didn't know what this Powered IT was, what it would bring us. So we made sure we had a number of kind of pre-sales workshops, where I could see the product and they've got a very strong environment where I could see exactly was I was going to get at the end, which is important for me because there's always a risky element, going in with a new incumbent, it was going to be success of this, or not, and I had to be sure that we did the right risk assessment. So actually, to be able to be provided with that kind of out-of-the-box experience, because often you go into sales call, or into the RFP process, and then you come out the back end of it and actually you see, actually getting what you saw in that sales demo. So it's important that we did that extra look. So I think we're able to see the end product, if you like, and then through talking with Mitch and the team and the UK guys, we then knew what the approach would be, very agile and quite aggressive as well. We delivered end-to-end in 14 weeks, which, considering that it took us from the old tool to ServiceNow, it took us from the old way of working to a new way of working on day one. We switched the old tool off on day one. There was a lot going on, it was... you know, we had to really stick to scope, as well, to manage mistake holders. >> I'm interested in how you managed risk, because that's the one thing that popped into my head. When you transform and your business processes are affected you know, you want to move fast, but there are dependencies. So how did you identify those, how did you guys manage the risks? >> I think, in terms of... We were quite strong on what our service improvement plans were looking like, we knew that we needed a new tool, we knew the tool would unlock it, but we didn't know is the extras that KPMG would bring through the Powered IT. So it's more than just the tool set itself, it's actually the processes and the policies. So because we're able to look at those day one, we knew what the end product was going to be. And plus we went with the preferred Powered IT platform. What we didn't try to do was to impose our current way of thinking. We took the KPMG way of thinking, which was the less risky approach, it meant that we weren't customizing, which was a big danger for us, potentially. So we also knew it was fully supported, because KPMG have put this Powered IT module together, built with other clients as well, so we knew we were adopting best practices from other clients. But actually it was fitting, the way we needed to get to from our vision. I think the thing that made me a little bit nervous was we'd been through a number of maturity assessments over the years that said our processes were quite mature. Where we were weak, really, was some of the reporting, the visibility of performance. So again, but they were kind of the key things from risk assessment, let's make sure the key things we could see working. And then we knew the risk was less. But, you know, as always, when you engage with a new incumbent for the first time, we had to make sure that we met the team as well, that was also a key part for us, to make sure the people we'd be working with, from day one, we met them at the beginning. And they stayed throughout. So that was also very good for us. >> So, Adrian, I'm curious about your particular experience, and then Mitch, I wonder if you could chime in on other clients that you might see. You always hear, "You got to have buy-in from the C-suite, top down." But when you go change the operating model, I often hear, the senior management goes, and then the rest of the company's like, "Well, we got to run the business," and they're trying to catch up. >> Yep. >> Is that a common problem? How do you guys deal with that? >> I think our senior team have been in place, they've been very supportive. There hasn't really been an issue there. And a lot of the senior team also supported the decision to go ServiceNow, which is important for me. I have to say, not all parts of the IT organization thought it was the right decision, but we had to demonstrate that as we went through, and the series of workshops was important, early doors. So we made sure we engaged the right stakeholders, they felt part of the whole solution end-to-end. And yes, people tried to push the scope at times, tried to scope creep, but actually senior management were very good and supportive of me to stick to scope. Stick to what we've agreed to do, help me push back certain people when they became challenging. And because we stuck to that scope, we delivered on-time. The fear would've been, as you know, you customize, you go off track-- >> I think what we see, to your analogy and I think your degree, you have to have that senior commitment. There can't be a question of why. But what breaks down often is that kind of next layer of key managers and stakeholders that maybe didn't show up to that meeting, and you know, didn't, you know... And those are the little things that can kind of take it off rail. And to your question earlier about agile, the great thing about a well-executed agile methodology is not about doing agile configuration it's about doing agile business transformation. It's about having regular interaction points where those stakeholders are involved in the process. And every day they're in those sessions and they're seeing something, and they get the chance, and we connect together. And that's what gets you to the end of it, to where instead of just in 14 weeks, we deployed a technology that kind of feels the same way we used to work. You deploy a technology and people are doing things different, and that's a key aspect. >> Dave: Lot of repetition. >> A lot of repetition. >> A lot of overcommunicating-- >> And we tell our clients a lot, it's going to be a rough 14 weeks, because you're going to be involved. This isn't the old-- >> Adrian: You didn't tell me that. >> Well (laughs). It's not where you're going to give me requirements we're going to go away and build something and hope we got it right and you're going to say, like you said, "That's not, wait, I thought I was going to get..." We're going to be in it and the teams are working collaboratively, stand up meetings, and all those kind of things. And it can be interesting, and for many of our clients, it changes the way they think about programs, right? >> So how's it going? I mean, what's the business impact been? >> It's been really positive. Of course, it talks for itself, it's really good. The fact that you've got 20 thousand people here kind of demonstrates that, but it is the industry platform, and there isn't anything that comes close to it, if we're being honest. But in terms of where we are now, we are gaining a lot of benefit from the dashboards, the reporting. We've still got to make sure the quality of data is good, of course, but actually visualizing our performance is really powerful. But we've also introduced new ways of interacting with our user base, so chat is a big thing for us. We now have a user pool to what we want to market out to the firm. So we're trying to get away from the telephone as the first point of contact, and move into other contact areas, like the portal. So that's the kind of areas that we need to kind of market outwards. But we're about three months in from go live. So we're now kind of looking back on some of the improvements already that we want to make, so looking at how we're using it, working with teams on using it better. So the improvement cycle is kicking in. And we've already made some minor improvements, and there will be more to come. >> So you avoided custom mods-- >> Yes. - Which is very important because the allure of custom modifications, it's so attractive, and then you know, you get technical debt and stuck with it. What have you learned, if you had a mulligan, would you choose anything differently? >> Yeah, it's an interesting point, because I think one of the things we could've done better already was the training. Because what was really powerful about Powered IT, there was training material, we had to kind of adapt that for our own change process, of course. Understanding our culture and how training with Linklaters, isn't necessarily the same as perhaps other technology firms, where they're expected to sell flurn. Very much the model at Linklaters is kind of classroom-led training, that tends to be our culture. And we perhaps didn't do enough of that before go live. So yes, everyone went live day one, they could log a ticket, but they couldn't unlock all the other benefits that we were really trying to deliver. So I guess that training's one of those areas that you could always overdo, but I think I would go back and arrange training earlier, make sure people know the training's coming, make sure their diaries are free as well, because we're all busy people. But I think, yeah, I think for now, I think we did a good job in the 14 weeks, but I'd come back and look at training again. >> And when was your go live? >> We went live on the 12th of February, this year. >> Oh okay, and single CMDB is the vision, or goal, or? >> Yeah, so we went live with the CMDB, we're now able to populate that out, and everyone knows that can be a pain point. So that's one of the kind of evolutions we're going through now, but as I said, we switched off the old tool on the day one, so we had to make sure the customer-facing processes were working, that we could may control changes, problem management could deal with issues that reoccur. So all of that was in place, but actually we've unlocked the power of the tool for visibility, managing the tasks across teams is quite big for us, as well. But that whole transparency of data has really improved the way we work. >> Rebecca: Great. >> I think one aspect, to play on your question, there are certain aspects of the platform in that transformation that you may not do all, but you need to design an architecture right the first time. So on the CMDB, you might not have it all the way populated, but if it's not architected with a good CMDB data model, it'll catch up later on, to your point. And so, a lot of, I think, that effort is a certain amount of time you have to show value, and then you lay that groundwork, you start improving, and then you make the decision of if and when do we expand into new things. When do we move into new areas, outside of the core, and those kind of things. >> For you know this, Mitch, too, and one of... I'm going to comment, maybe you could... You could give me your observations, early on in the ServiceNow, before the big ascendancy, a lot of mistakes were made, in terms of companies not standardizing, getting the CMDB architecture right, for a lot reasons, you had politics, people were trying to slide it in. And now you see a much more consistent vision around CMDB, how to architect it, single CMDB, one throat to choke, essentially. >> Yeah, I agree totally, and I think if you look at the ecosystem of what this all is, you have to level set on it, it was drastically different from a platform perspective, and three or four years ago to now. And to your point, I think there were a lot of relatively quick implementations, if you will. And again, quick implementation is okay, as long as it's architected and thought through for the long term, and I think we're seeing in the market some implementations that maybe made some short cuts, if you will, but to your point, the things that you got to get right, you got to get the CMDB and the data model, that layer, right. You got to get the employee experience right. You only get one chance to set an employee experience. If you underwhelm, then you've lost that audience, right? Then they're like, "Eh, well, yeah," you know? And you only get one chance to have some transformation, and it doesn't have to be going from crawling to, you know, sprinting, but if you go from crawling and it feels kind of the same way, you lose interest in expanding the capabilities. So I think that's, we've all, you know, the ecosystem has learned from that, and there are some things that you've got to get correct, and what we try to do with our clients is try to say, "Hey, let's not argue about those things, right, let's not start with a whiteboard and argue about the things that should be the same for Linklaters, that should be the same for anybody." Let's get that 80% where it's, let's focus on the things that are specific to you and not deal with that common stuff. >> Right, capture their attention right away. >> Absolutely. And we use a term internally, and sometimes with our clients too, everybody knows the 80/20 rule, right? You do 80% of it, you just should stop, it's not worth the effort. We switch that, we say 20% is what makes it work for you. We should just power through the 80% that should be the same for everybody else, and the 20% that makes it work for you. How do you deal with employee experience in a law firm, right, where everybody are knowledge workers, that have all, that's very different than employee experience in a, you know, industrial manufacturing firm, right? So that's what matters and what makes it transformational to a specific organization. >> And you're in Jakarta, or Kingston? >> We're on Jakarta-- >> Yeah, okay. - Yeah. >> Great. >> And again, because it's delivered through Powered IT, KPMG do a lot of the testing, once the new version's available, it's their offer to us in terms of making sure it's fit for purpose for their Powered IT platform. And as been said, it's the 20% that we've configured for Linklaters is what we need to test. >> So we're big believers, and John mentioned it this morning of only stay one behind at most. We're big believers in we should help our clients learn what's in the new upgrade, and how it applies to them. So we've heard this week, there's some great things coming out with London, some new things in the experience, and some automations, and so on. So our job is to bring that to our clients with Powered, and say, "Yep, we're ready, here's what's in it, and by the way, here's what they've advanced, and here's what you should look to add, and let's have that ready for you." >> So, you keep people, at worst, in minus one-- >> Correct. - Is really your objective-- >> And our general advice to clients, is if you need to go to N, if there's functional new capabilities that change your business, go to N right away. If it's more just add-ons, stay at N-1, learn from the others, and keep advancing, but never go later than that, absolutely. >> And but, ServiceNow will allow you to be N-2, right? >> They will. Going forward, they're going to keep you more to N-1-- >> Dave: Pushing you along, right? >> Exactly. So you want to save just one release back and you want to make sure, and again, to use that term I used earlier, as long as you stay near-to-the-box, you know, and out-of-the-box, if you turn it on, you need to add it, get it into your environment, you need tailor it, right? But there's a fine line between staying close to that and doing way too much, and over-configuring, not even customization, just making it to where it's really complex, and that's where we try to keep our clients away from. >> Do they still do cakes, you get a cake? >> Yes. >> Had a good one. >> Yeah, we had a really good one on go live. Yeah, it's actually on LinkedIn so yeah, go and have a look. >> A bunch of law books, it looks really smart. >> It looks really good. >> Yeah, it looked very good. >> And it tasted great, too. (laughing) >> That's important. Adrian, Mitch, thanks so much for coming on The Cube, we had a great time. >> Thank you both. >> You're welcome, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante, we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18, coming up just after this. (music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on Day One of our three days of coverage of IBM Think, the inaugural single event from IBM. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're at the Mandalay Bay in beautiful sunny Las Vegas, and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Steve Hill, the Global Head of Innovation at KPMG. Welcome. >> Thanks for having me here. >> So you are giving a talk Wednesday, you said, at the event. >> Yes. >> I want to get a little bit into your role at KPMG, as well as your session. So talk to us a little bit about what your role as the Global Head of Innovation. >> So Innovation is an overused word. I don't particular like the word innovation, but in the context of my role, it really is taking a look at our business and our clients, and saying what it is that our clients need for their futures. What's going to create relevance for our clients as we go forward, and how does our portfolio of services relate to that relevance? And if we have gaps where we see our services not serving them best, or not going to serve them best in the future, my job responsibility is to help for strategy purposes and for investment purposes, bring those points to bear, and to get either investment into those areas, right, or changes in the business as appropriate to make KPMG more relevant to our clients, and to their relevance to their clients, right, that's the whole idea. >> So, Lisa and I talk to a lot of people in theCUBE, and we talk lots about invention, startups inventing something or new technology that gets invented, but innovation to us, and I think KPMG is at the heart of this is taking an invention and actually applying it to effect change, getting it adopted, >> That's right. >> and changing a business, a societal change potentially, is that-- >> That's right, I mean, our short phrase for it is idea to cash for our clients, right. I mean at the end of the day, and I think this is profound in certainly corporate governance evolution, right. We've seen the advent of lots of escrow changes of how companies have been managed, enterprise has been managed, right. The Dutch started with the East Indian Trading Company, one of the first large global enterprises, and since that time we've seen the maturation, the new roles. The CIO role didn't exist much prior to 1950, right. Today we're starting to see innovation to be a very important skill and capability for all corporations, all enterprises, including government, right. And I think we're starting to see a maturation of corporate capability, I would say, in the innovation space, because the pace of change is so fast today, the political, economic, technological, social trends are so complex that you've got to get something in your muscle memory that helps you change your business as much as operate it effectively. >> I'd love to know who you're talking to within organizations. You mentioned CIO role, the CISO role, chief data officer. >> Steve: Right. >> Who are the minds that you're helping to bring together so that an enterprise that needs to digitalize to be competitive will survive, right, really survive these days? How do you help them really embrace a culture of innovation as really there's no other choice? How do you get these minds collectively agreeing, yes, this is the direction we need to go in? >> Yeah, I think, I mean first of all, this is a C-suite conversation and a board conversation in many cases, but the reality is when you start to look at the lack of innovation in an organization, right, and when the environment changes, competitors start to change, and the more complex it is, it's harder and harder for companies to pivot and to reinvent themselves. And we're seeing a lot of unbundling of businesses in today's environment, whether it's a company that moves packages, right, or a professional services firm, or a company that used to distribute videos, right. I mean things change and some of the irony is that sometimes the innovation in companies like Kodak, Steve Sasson invented digital camera, it took eight minutes to go from a snap to a picture, but they invented digital technology from cameras, and that the distribution of digital videos is that it actually would help to, further the demise of that organization. So that notion of how do you take change going on in the environment that you're working at, and more importantly your customers and clients, how does that convert into your business, that's a C-suite conversation, and I think innovation can be embodied in a person to help build process, meaning how do you take an idea, how do you look at the marketplace and get sensory input, convert that to ideas for strategy and for investment, and the investments have to be deployed to the field to the business, and that relationship, that whole lifecycle of innovation requires a lot of people from the enterprise to be involved in it. And I would argue the culture has to evolve because until recently most people, in fact, I would say, including current times, most people in organizations are rewarded for doing what they do well, not breaking what they do, not rethinking what they do. And the more you get into that operational mindset, that I want to wring all the efficiencies out of this process that I can. Right, the more you're wed to the status quo, the more somebody comes in from the side and takes you out. >> So I love this conversation 'cause Steve you're able to take the long view and then I want to sort of shorten it up, and then maybe put it into a longer term context. So over our, your guys 20-plus-year careers, mine a little longer, most of this industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law, that's where innovation came from. >> Yes. >> How do you take advantage of Moore's Law? How do you go to client server software, whatever it was, the innovation equation is changing now. It seems to be a function of, these guys have been hearing me say this all day but data that's not siloed, but data that you have access to, applying machine intelligence-- >> Yep. >> And then getting cloud, scale, economics and network effects, and then applying it to your business. >> Bingo. >> So talk about how you see the new wave of innovation in this world of digital or however you phrase it. >> Well, it's interesting, I mean, I don't hear a lot of people phrase it the way you do which I think is spot on which is, and my words are, ubiquitous access to technology which is cloud, data, and that's a huge question mark and a big C-suite conversation. Having a lot of data isn't the key, having the right lot of data is the key. Right so Dyson is moving into auto-making today, right. They have a lot of data and it's very different from what the incumbents have. Is it better or worse? We're going to see, right. And then of course smart computers which is the machine intelligence, right. Those three elements, I think they're fundamentally changing labor productivity. And what I would say is to your question is that innovation is really important here because if all you do is take those three elements and you just digitize a status quo process, you might get marginal benefits, you might get some labor productivity enhancement, you may get some marginal improvement, you may change an outsourcing agreement to an onshore RPA deal, but if that's all you do, you're setting yourself up for a disappointment because what's really going to happen with thinkers, i.e., those that have innovations, they're going to rethink the process. Most of our analog systems are created around people checking people, so you may have nine steps, I'm making it up, in a process, that in a digital world only requires one or two or zero when launching in some cases. And so if you can rethink that process to go from a nine-step to a zero-step process or a one-step that's a nano second long, that changes the dynamic of the process. In fact that's not even nirvana, right, the real nirvana is can you change your business model, right? And I would use IBM, since we're here, as an example of going from a big box with a lot of people running around it, called IBM of the past, Watson, to an API engine that David Kenny has helped to build that says, we're going to have a platform business model leveraging network effects, and I want to have a supply and a demand curve that are much faster growing than my sort of organic ways of growing a network could be, right, through people point clicking. That's innovation. >> IBM is an interesting company because it is a company with a lot of legacy, but I think gets, as you just described it, but you look at the top five companies by market value today, they're six, 700-billion dollar market companies, they are data companies not just with a lot of data, but they've put data at the core, so it's Amazon, it's Apple, it's Facebook, it's Google, et cetera. They've put data at the core whereas most organizations, I'm sure many that you deal with, they have human expertise built around other assets that aren't data. It might be factories, it might be the bottling plants, et cetera. So there's a gap, I don't know, machine, AI gap between sort of those that are innovating today, now granted the stock market can change and, >> Sure. >> Who knows, maybe the oil companies will be back involved, not to drop but how do you deal, how do you advice your clients on how to close that gap? That seems like a huge challenge. >> Well it is a huge challenge, and I think, going back to the three elements, it would be very easy for you to dive bomb into a transformation effort and say, I'm going to go and get some smart computers and hire a bunch of people that know machine intelligence and natural language process, and all that stuff, and put them in a room, and go create some applications, the bottom line is, that's not unimportant. You got to get your hand on the mountain and start climbing, but the data piece, I mean, if you don't understand how data is going to be relevant to your business and to your clients and their clients, right, in the future, you lose. And the reason why those five that you talked about earlier are so successful is they think a couple of steps ahead on the data strategy, right, and they're not thinking about, most organizations by the way, they'll say we want a data strategy and then they'll relegate the strategy thinking part to their businesses which are bifurcated, and they look at the world in silos. And they're doing exactly what they should do which is take care of those businesses, but when you step back into those five companies you've talked about, they step back from those silos and say, what is the enterprise implications, and how do I create new businesses with correlations of data that I didn't have before? I think that requires a whole different level of strategy. It's C-suite and board that has to guide those kinds of decisions. You don't see a lot of people really getting their hands dirty around intense forward-thinking data strategies at the enterprise level like we're talking about here. >> You believe we are entering or going to enter shortly a productivity renaissance. >> I agree, yes. >> That's sort of I'm talking about our off-camera conversation. Explain why you think that, compare it to sort of the Industrial Revolution. Take us through your scenario. >> Sure. So, I mean, when you think about labor, I mean, what are the things that I think those three elements will give us as a society, as a global community, is a pretty big S curve jump in labor productivity. In fact we have at KPMG some efforts to quantify what that might be, looking at what we call frontier firms, and applying those practices back to incumbents. 90% of most industry players is saying what are those differences that we can model. The fact of the matter is when you go back to the Mechanical Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, people did everything by hand prior, right. Equipment helped them do things whether it was, even the printing press saw changes in society and labor, but when you start to getting into heavy manufacture in the Industrial Revolution, productivity was enhanced dramatically, and instead of putting all of these people who were doing things by hand out of business and out of work, it actually created more jobs, a lot more jobs, and a lot more wealth for society. I think we're heading for a similar S-curve change with smart computers, cloud, and with data. And that the roboticism of people is going to be automated, and people are going to be allowed to practice and use what's between their ears a lot more. That's going to create value, insight, new questions to be asked. I mean, how many times have you ever heard this? Every time you answer a question on something that's very important, you want to understand there's two more questions to be asked. Medicine is that way for sure. But you're going to start to see massive advancement in areas where people have had to use a lot of cognitive skills, right. It's severely under-leveraged because they were doing so much roboticism and doing things that computers can start to do now. So I think you're going to start to see a renaissance, if you will, of people using their nogers in ways we haven't seen before, and that's going to change the dynamics of productivity and labor in a way that's going to create wealth for everyone. >> And it's going to change industry. So, okay, so I got a bunch of questions for you then. >> Steve: Yep. >> Here we go. And I asked this earlier but I didn't really get an answer. Will machines? >> Steve: From me or from somebody else? >> No, from somebody else. >> Steve: Okay. >> Will machines make better diagnoses than doctors and when? >> I mean, what's the regression line? I mean, the samples said, I think today you'll find machines giving better diagnoses than doctors in some cases. >> Dave: Okay. >> I don't know where the regression line sits today, but if you look at the productivity of doctors going a hundredfold, and the morals scattering around lung cancer, it's impressive. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And do you want a doctor involved? Yes, you do, because part of it is in an orthodoxy of trust which by the way ten years ago, you wouldn't put your credit card online to buy anything, right. It's the same kind of orthodoxy. But I do think that machines can read so much more data, interpolate so many more correlations than people that when you add that to an oncologist for example and cancer, you have a super oncologist capabilities which is really what you're looking for. We're not looking to replace the oncologist per se, what we're looking to do is get the productivity of the oncologist from two to 200. >> I was talking about diagnoses. So you would say yes, okay. >> Yep. >> Will large retail stores mostly disappear in your opinion? >> No, I think they'll change. I think that the customer experience is still, we're still people, we need physical space, and we need physical things to touch, smell, and feel. I think those things will change, but we'll still need experiences. >> I'm going to keep going 'cause Steve's playing along. Will driving and owning your own car become an exception? >> Yes. >> Okay. >> I can elaborate if you want. >> Please, yeah, go ahead. >> So, I mean, the first, I mean, we actually did at KPMG a study called islands of autonomy which modeled LA and San Diego, Atlanta and Chicago, and we modeled how do people move. And we did this for a reason because autonomous vehicles are often times amalgamated as one thing. Oh well autonomous vehicle is coming so you better sell your sports cars and your SUVs, not so fast. The reality is mobility is very different based on where you are. If you're in the middle of Kansas or something, you're going to need a truck to run around in your farm, but if you're in LA or Atlanta or Chicago, you're going to move with autonomy, with autonomous vehicles, and then you're going to really enable mobility as a service very clearly, but differently. The way people move in these cities is different, and if the US auto industry understands those differences, and extrapolates those to a global marketplace, they're going to be very advantaged as mobility as a service becomes real, but the first car that goes, I hate all of the viewers that love this category, but sedan is the first cars to go. I would say sports cars, I race cars, so I love sports cars. People still ride horses today but they don't need them for transportation. And SUVs, right, specialty vehicles that you may, it may not, the economies may not be there, but as we know transportation and car ownership, it's going to change fundamentally, and that's going to have a massive effect on FS, right, insurance companies, banks that are doing loans today. It's going to have a big effect on healthcare. Mobility as a service is going to transcend to healthcare, mobile healthcare in ways that we can't see. >> You got great perspective. I got one more for you, maybe a couple more. Do you think traditional banks will lose control over payment systems? >> Well, a lot of them are already nervous about that, wouldn't you think? >> Yeah, but it hasn't happened yet though. >> I understand, the bottom line is no 'cause I think the traditional banks are getting smarter and they're leveraging their own innovation horsepower to understand things like Blockchain, and how to incorporate those things into their business models. So the answer is I think the way they do, look, banks exist because of one reason, trust. They have trusted brands, right. As long as they can stay current enough to be relevant to your banking needs, you're going to stay with that trusted brand. I think the trick for banks is how do they move fast enough, leverage the technologies that make your life easier, and not waiting three or four days for bank clearing of a check, for example. >> That's they say if you're-- >> And get to that trust in a new way. >> Unless you're a Bitcoin millionaire or a billionaire. >> You still need a bank. >> Maybe somewhere down the line. >> Yeah. >> Okay, last one, I promise. Will robots and maybe even RPA reverse offshore manufacturing advantages? >> Yes. >> Can you elaborate and give us a sense of-- >> I think, first of all, if you really look at what RPA is doing in many ways, is disintermediating the value of geographic location in many ways, right. So where I may have had, again this is important that you understand, so I can still go offshore today and get labor arbitrage and get margin, but I'm not rethinking the business. What I really want to do is own, I want to have more control and I want to have more flexibility and growth in that back office function. So it would behoove when you think about our RPA, and bring in our RPA technology so I have it one onshore, two, leverage the data more securely potentially, and then leverage that data as part of my lake to say how do I use that data to correlate to get to what I really need which is customer relevance at the front office, right. So, look, I think that this whole notion of you're in a different country, and therefore the labor pools are different, and therefore their arbitrage will get benefits from that, those days are over. I mean, it's just a question of when does it die. >> Dave: The data value offsets that arbitrage advantage. >> Well, forget that. The arbitrage is dead itself because the machines, >> Yeah, yeah, right. >> You're talking about orders that have made it to a cheaper per unit cost for an RPA, for a bot to do something than it is for a person that has to eat, sleep, take vacation, and get sick, and all that stuff. And so no matter where they are in the world. So what I would say is that notion is dead. It's just not buried. And overtime we're going to migrate again to machines doing all that robotic stuff. But, again, those people, they're going to do different things. It's not like we're going to see hordes, hundreds of thousands and millions of people not be able to work, I think they're going to be doing different things using their heads in different ways. >> Lisa: I like that answer. >> That's a plan. >> Dave: It's good. >> There's a price somewhere? >> I'm absolutely wrong, I just don't know how wrong, right. >> Well, it's fun to think about, and you provided some context. It was very useful. So, thank you. >> And I imagine folks that are attending your session at IBM Think on Wednesday are going to hear a little bit more into that. So thanks for sharing. >> We going to see some specifics, yeah. >> Thanks for sharing your insights, Steve, and for joining us on theCUBE. You guys, the innovation equation is changing, and I thank you for letting me sit between a very innovative and informative conversation. >> Thank you both. It was fun. >> Thanks Steve. >> For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live on Day One of IBM Think 2018. Head over to thecube.net to watch all of our videos with our guests, and siliconanglemedia.com for all the written articles about that. Also check out Wikibon, find out what our analysts are saying about all things digital transformation, Blockchain, AI, ML, et cetera. Dave and I are going to be right back after a short break with our next guest. We'll see you then. (upbeat music)

(sweeping electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's the Cube, covering ServiceNow Knowledge17, brought to you by ServiceNow. (sweeping electronic music) >> We're back in Orlando, I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. Kerri Cullity is here, she's the Advisory Managing Director of Healthcare Solutions for KPMG. Kerri, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Dave: You're in Boston, the center of a lot of healthcare action going on in Boston. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Certainly your specialty. Give us the update, tell us about your role in the practice inside of KPMG. >> Yeah, absolutely. As you said, I work with KPMG as a Managing Director in Healthcare Solutions. I lead up our Enterprise Asset Management offering, our solution that healthcare organizations are now starting to actually take a look at. With all the mergers and acquisitions that have occurred in healthcare today, it's a good place for cost savings, and so we're seeing a lot of CFOs and other executive leadership really starting to take a look at their enterprise asset management strategy. >> How do you organize enterprise assets in healthcare? Hospitals are giant places, they've got a ton of assets from expensive MRI machines to lots of rubber gloves and everything in between. >> Yeah, so it's a big task. I mean, it's something that organizations haven't thought about. All these organizations are being asked to cut costs, and it's a really good place to start, because, as you said, there's some really high ticketed priced items such as MRI machines, IV pumps, also, so they look at it from a clinical perspective which is really clinical engineering, and they also look at it from a facilities perspective, which is the safety of not only your patients but also your customers as well. They're really looking at two different categories from a clinical and a facilities perspective. >> How does KPMG help these organizations? Maybe you could describe how they engage. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that KPMG does is we come in and actually take a look at what their systems look like today, look at their current state and and look at where their future state wants to be, so really do an assessment of their workflows, processes, people, and technology, and help them really put a road map in place to be successful in getting an enterprise strategy in place. >> When you do an assessment like that, is it, this big data collection exercise, you're going to get the right constituents in the room, you herd all the cats. Can you describe that and some of the challenges there? >> Yeah, absolutely. Some of the challenges is that today is that they have multiple disparate systems across the organization, so they could have 10 legacy systems that are not cloud based, that aren't online, everything's very manually driven, so we go in and we conduct business analysis workflows with their certain teams. We start either in facilities or clinical, depending upon where their biggest pain point is. Then we actually gather all that data and information and understand where they're not in sync with each other, because getting all of your folks at the same time at the right time, thinking, how do we standardize and consolidate across the organization is probably one of the biggest challenges they have today. >> How granular do you get in an assessment like that? >> It can be very granular. Sometimes we actually do physical inventory, so from a clinical perspective, especially if they had gone through mergers and acquisitions, they could have 14 different facilities with 14 different pieces of equipment in it. We can get down to the granular level of actually doing physical inventory accounts, because a lot of times, these, leadership doesn't even know, they could have the same piece of equipment in 14 different places and they're paying duplicate maintenance contracts, which is really, comes down to the vendor management aspect of it. We can go as granular as the physical inventory all the way up to the putting together the entire strategy around people, process, and technology. >> How does ServiceNow fit? >> ServiceNow, that's actually a great question. One of the things that organizations that have made the investment in ServiceNow is typically, especially in the healthcare setting, has made it in the IT space. This really allows them to leverage that investment and bring it out into other parts of their business, such as the clinical engineering, the facilities, and really, you start to see that standardized and consolidated platform across the organization. >> You work with your colleagues, this is obviously, a ServiceNow practice, right, and then you sort of hunt within those guys that have adopted, say, for instance, ITSM, and then say, OK, hey, look what else we can do for you. Is that right? >> Yeah, so we're working with a lot of the vendors that actually have built the enterprise management software. ServiceNow actually has an enterprise asset management solution as well. They've also, they partner with other organizations that look at it from a workflow, a whole entire work life cycle aspect of it. We work very closely with our ServiceNow team, because a lot of these organizations have built their ServiceNow platform, and we've been able to take that and bring it into other parts of the businesses, it's critical for success. >> KPMG obviously is independent, you're agnostic to technology, you're not supposed to play favorites. But like John Donahoe said yesterday, "My daughter's my favorite." >> That was classic. >> It was good. How do you, now at the same time, of course, you know certain technologies fit a particular use case, they have their strategic fit. Where is the ServiceNow strategic fit? >> Yeah, ServiceNow is in a lot of healthcare organizations today. When cloud became the big thing, they're already in a lot of our customers, so what we do, is we actually work with our ServiceNow counterparts, both from a ServiceNow perspective and also from a KPMG ServiceNow team and understand what those road maps look and how do they continue to mature in the ServiceNow platform. I would say 99% of the time, ServiceNow is the platform of choice because it's so easy to use. I'm sure you've heard that quite a bit. They can customize it to make it fit for them. A lot of times, because of our partnership with ServiceNow, it just is a good fit for both the client and for us and for ServiceNow. >> Are you managing a global organization? >> I manage the US right now. We have spoken to other large healthcare organizations. What's happening now is that we're seeing our clients are really starting to look at, OK, how do we look at our enterprise asset management from a physical contractual, help us make better enterprise wide business decisions. Now we're actually starting to see that go into not only the healthcare providers, but also into the clients that actually support them as well. We've worked with some large, in Germany, we were talking to them about how they can kind of start to play in this whole space as well. >> Just shifting gears a little bit, healthcare always gets knocked for being laggards on technology. But we've had a couple people on the show the last couple days that are involved in healthcare. I'm kind of curious of your perspective. Is that a legitimate knock? Is that changing? If it is changing, kind of, where do you see the opportunities for them to catch up, get ahead? Because it's such a big industry, it's such a big spend, so much facility. >> I think we're seeing it shift a little bit. I think they have been a little bit slow as far as technology goes, because there's been so many competing projects such as regulatory issues, the whole, now we're in the repeal and replace, so everyone's trying to figure out exactly what that means for them as an organization. We do see that shifting because it's becoming a very customer focused, the customer's driving, whether it be the customer or the patient, they're driving a lot of these organizations to start saying, we need technology, because we need, it's a very competitive market, as you said. We need them to stay within our organization or they're going to go elsewhere for the care. We're actually seeing, really, us as consumers of healthcare really pushing them in that direction that they need to start looking at technology more seriously. >> What's the vision? Where do you take this, midterm, long term? >> I think the vision is that, one, first is, it gives them an opportunity, as we said, to leverage the investments that they've made in their current technology such as ServiceNow to bring it into other parts of their business. It also allows them to start really putting the challenges that they have and to make enterprise wide business decisions as they move forward. I think you'll see them starting to look at, not only just from a facilities and clinical perspective, I think you'll start to see that really branch out into that entire continuum of care. >> How about this show? I know you're kind of doing it in and out. But have you had a chance to walk around, check out your booth? >> It's been amazing, it's been great. It's amazing the amount of partners that ServiceNow has in their ecosystem. I've learned a great deal. The keynotes have been fantastic. I'm looking forward to see what they do next year. I know that when they, last year it was 12,000 and this year it's up to 15,000, so it's quite a growth. >> Back to Vegas. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Bigger hallway. All right, Kerri, thanks very much for coming to the Cube, we appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, thank you for having me. >> Jeff: Thank you for coming by. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Jeff and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. (sweeping electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody, this is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Jeff Frick, our cohost. This is Knowledge17, #Know17. Jim Hebb is here, the Advisory Director for People in Change at KPMG. And he's here with Nate Channel, the Enabling Technology Lead at JM Smucker and Company. Systems integrator, customer, gents, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So let's hear the story, JM Smucker, you told me off camera that you just started in November. Right? >> Nate: Right, we went live in November. >> Take us back to that decision point, where you said, "hey we need to do something here." What was that like? >> Well, I guess we were asked by the CHRO of Smucker to look into a current state assessment of their HR Organization. And from that, one of the things we discovered was that, the company is a family owned company, had grown organically over the years, had a very family type os environment, and while that is a big selling point for the company, it also resulted in a more relaxed approach to delivering HR services. >> Love the vocabulary. (group laughing) Relaxed approach. >> Relaxed approach, so essentially, if you were an employer manager and needed help from HR, you had to know who to go to. So you had to have a name, you had to go find them, if they weren't the right person, then you got passed to the next person. Certainly there was no way to record, track, have a collaborative, sort of tool to use for HR service requests. There was no way to report on information related to where things stand. Employees couldn't see where their service requests are it was email, phone call, stop by the desk. That was a gap that we thought, if you really wanted to transform the organization and really ratchet up the level of service, we needed to do something. >> A lot of tribal knowledge. But, now you're in IT, is that correct? >> I'm actually in HR. >> You are in HR. >> Is that where you guys started? You started in HR or? >> I actually joined the company a little less than a year ago. So the project was was already under way, when I came in. Yes, I did start in HR, and I think that, just coming into the organization, kind of seeing it where it was when I came in, and how everything was kind of fractured because we had gone through a lot of acquisitions and that's how we grew, and we grew very quickly. Nothing was really consolidated, so seeing this transformation has really been fantastic. >> But did you guys have ITSM installed or no? >> No, no. >> Okay, so the company started at .. >> Which is unusual right. >> Yeah, I was going to say. >> It started with HR and from there they have now decided to adopt the IDSM platform, >> Right. >> And are going live in a month or so I think. >> Yes. >> It's really interesting that they started with HR. >> So tell us about the implementation, how did it go, I mean a lot of people will share with us, it's sometimes very complex to implement, you chose a partner, to obviously reduce the complexity, share the risk. >> Yeah, so it felt very fast for us. From an IT perspective, we're not prone to doing anything agile. I think having that agile development life cycle come in was a shock to the system. It put us into the position where we had to really focus on what wanted and needed, very quickly. And we were able to do that, and I think we were able to put something in place that will benefit us in the future. And I think, it's benefiting us now. We've transformed our organization. >> And how did you get it in? Were things just breaking or how did you get the opportunity to provide the initiative to bring in this agile new tool? >> So it was really part of a broader HR transformation that we were doing with the company. We were looking at everything top to bottom, their entire HR operating model, their HR org structure, all of their HR processes, all of the HR technologies that we were conturently doing, a Workday implementation with them. Building a new shared services center, looking at their entire North American models. As part of that, this was just a natural piece of the puzzle that needed to be added. >> So a lot of people are confused and ServiceNow's trying to constantly explain to people, we don't compete with Workday. Talk to the practitioner, where does Workday leave off and ServiceNow pick up, if I'm an employee of Smucker, what do I interface with, am I talking to ServiceNow, am I talking to Workday, both? >> Actually our design, we have the portal in place. We have the HR service portal and that's really our gateway for our employees. So it's part of ServiceNow, but it leads them into Workday, and a lot of our employees associate those two as one. They think that if they're having a problem, or anything like that they need to access something, they go through HR Home, but they're thinking they're going right into our deck. >> Dave: It's an HR portal to them. >> Right, exactly. >> Dave: They don't really know or care what's at the back end. >> Exactly. >> Nor should they really. >> Nor should they. And that was presumably the design point? >> Nate: Right, right. >> Again, not always common, right, you hear different stories of different stovepipes, but you seem to have some success with this approach. >> We have, we always try to take it from the perspective of what does the employee manager need, and how do they want to interact with HR. So it's not about, HR often has more of an insular approach to, well, we're thinking compensation or benefits, or providing this type of function. Employees and mangers come and say, I have an issue and I need help with it. They don't really need to know, if this is comp or benefits, they can say, I have an issue with my paycheck, it might be a benefit deduction, it might be an incorrect calculation from payroll, it might be something related to retirement plan, so they don't need to figure that out and have to find where they need to go, they should be able to come to HR and get help, right from the start. >> So onboarding is the classic example. How has that, as a relatively new employee, how has it affected the onboarding process? >> We are still kind of hashing through onboarding right now. We're really focusing on the Workday side to get everything kind of ironed out perfectly before we truly bring ServiceNow as a part of that into it. But from any perspective where there's any kind of problem, we're directing our future employees to utilize the tool, as possible. >> Take us through the project, when did it start and how long did it take? >> It actually started with an RFP process. So we facilitated that, so we had five different providers that we were helping Smucker evaluate. Methodology approach, functionality, technical alignment, business and cultural alignment, cost. And from that RFP process ServiceNow came out on top. That was the selection point that was earlier in 2016, first quarter 2016. Because we were doing an entire transformation, we staged everything in sequential order in terms of what we were doing with Workday, Shared Services, redesign of operating model, all of that good stuff, and we ended up, as Nate said, launching, doing a soft launch, right after Thanksgiving for the ServiceNow platform, full launch with Workday, ServiceNow, Service Center, everything on the December 14th. >> And the business impact, so far is early days, but so far, and what's expected? >> It was completely different than anything we're used to, >> Dave: In a good way. (laughing) >> Yeah, absolutely, it was fantastic. I think our employee population really jumped on board very quickly. Instead of following that traditional HR, you know, pick up the phone or send an email, they're calling a Service Center, and they're following up on cases, instead of following up on emails. >> Jeff: Total relief. >> Yeah, I think we've definitely consolidated all of that into the ServiceNow platform. >> Alright gents, we got to leave it there. Yet another happy customer. It actually doesn't get boring after a while, I love to hear the stories, because things change so much, it used to be ITSM, and now we're talking lines of businesses et cetera, so gents, thanks very much for coming on theCube, appreciate it. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, thank you. >> You're welcome. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. It's theCube, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge17. Be right back.

>>from around the globe, >>it's the cube with digital coverage of IBM >>Think 2021 brought to you by IBM Hello welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube had a great conversation here about cloud data, AI and all things. C X O from KPMG is Vinod Swaminathan who's the strategy head of strategy of Ai data and cloud as well as the C. I. O advisory at KPMG you know thanks for coming on the cube. >>My pleasure jOHn thanks for having me. >>So you guys have an interesting perspective, you sit between the business value being created from technology and the clients trying to put it to work um and KPMG impeccable reputation over the years obviously bringing great business value to clients. You guys do that. Um you're in the middle of the hot stuff cloud data and Ai um Ai is great if you have the data and the architecture do that in cloud scale brings so many new good things to the table. Um how is this playing out right now in your mind because we're here at IBM think where the story is transformed, transformation is the innovation. Innovation does set the table for net new capabilities at scale. This seems to be a common thread here. What's your take on the current situation? >>Well, let me start with the fundamental premise that we're seeing playing out with many of our clients and that is, clients are beginning to connect the different silos within their business to better respond to what their customers are asking for. Um you know, we we tend to work with large enterprises, very well established businesses and we're also fortunate to serve the needs of high growth companies as well. So we're in a very unique position as a trusted advisor to both legacy companies transforming and high growth companies looking to drive the transformation in the industry as well. So there are a few things that we're seeing right the first and foremost is responding quickly and effectively to very rapidly changing customer needs. And I think the pandemic really, you know put a spotlight on how fast organizations had to pivot and I have to commend a lot of these organizations and doing a phenomenal job, I would argue, spit band aiding and gluing together a response to what their customers expected. Right? So as I look at post pandemic, we're seeing a lot of clients now looking to take stock of things that they did during the pandemic, how they address customer demand to really smooth them out and streamline as a strategy, how they're going to become more customer driven KPMG. We call this the connected enterprise where you really work effectively across the front, middle and back office in an enterprise to seamlessly address the client. Right? Anything you do in finance really is driven by what your customers want. It's no longer, hey finance sit in the back office, right. Anything you do in marketing is no longer hey I'm doing it just to address the demand side of the equation, right? It's very integral to connect marketing with fulfillment. Right? So we call this the connected enterprise. So that transformation is only possible if customers and our clients are able to effectively leverage cloud from an architectural perspective. And when I say cloud, what we're seeing, smarter clients of ours start to think about is cloud in its entirety. So it's not just the public cloud, it's the cloud architecture, right? The ability to scale up scale out right scale down, right, irrespective of where all of this sits from an infrastructure perspective. So cloud is very critical for becoming that connected enterprise. Uh The data pieces integral, I think the data business today represents trillions of dollars. I think everybody has bought into the fact that data is the new oil and all of that good stuff that we've heard. Uh but it really is a trillion dollar business and it has some unique challenges. So being connected requires, right that are that an enterprise become very data driven? I think it's hard to escape ai it's everywhere to the point where we don't even uh we're not even conscious of ai at work, Right? So I think uh five years ago a I was a novel concept today. It's the expectation of customers who interact with big brands that ai is an integral part of how they are being served. Right? So cloud data ai architecture sort of the ingredients if you will. And then cool technology really starts to bring this connected concept together and post pandemic. We're going to start to see a lot of rationalization uh and big investments and moving forward in this trajectory. >>It's interesting cloud data now you, the way you talk about it makes me think about like this the constant of the old Os I stack right? You have infrastructure and cloud, you have data in the middle layer and then A. I is that that wonder area where the upside takes advantage of that data? Um Very cool insight. You know, Thanks for sharing that. The question I have for you put the pandemic I want to get your reaction to some conversations I've had in the industry and they tend to go like this. Um when we come out of the pandemic this is like a C X O. Talking to Ceo. Or C. I. O. Or C. So when we come out of the pandemic we need a growth strategy, we need to be hidden, we need to be on the upswing, okay? Not on the downswing or still trying to figure it out. Um And and that's a cool conversation because there's been to use cases that we've identified companies that had no has had a headwind because of the pandemic either because of business disruption or the second categories, they've had a tail when they had a business opportunity. So the ones that had a headwind, they would retool, they used the pandemic to retool and the ones that had the tailwind would use the pandemic to either bring net new capabilities or or transform and innovate. So either way that's a successful use case. The ones who didn't do anything aren't going to survive much. We know that, but in those two cases they're not mutually exclusive. That's what the smart money's been doing. The smart teams. What's your advice now that we're in that mode where we're coming around the corner? How do companies get on that uptick? What have you guys advise into clients? What are you hearing and what, what's your reaction to that concept? >>Well, I think every company that is going to be on the survivors list post pandemic actually has digitally transformed, um, you know, even if they don't want to acknowledge it right in a lot of different ways. Um, so I think that's here to stay. Um, what I, and I'll give you a simple example, um, you know, I, I belong to a local club, you know, kitchen shut down, you know, no activities. I was amazed that it took them only four days John four days to actually bring a digital reservation system online through their mobile app. So in the past, the mobile app was simply for me to go look at the directory. But now I can do so many more things. Right? And I was talking to my club CI. All right. I mean, really not a C I. O. But you know, it was uh, it was, it was a staff member who was charged with driving the digital transformation. So there you go. >>Good consultant, you, you know, uh >>but what he talked to me about was fascinating. And this is what we're going to see. Right? So first he said, another was so easy to bring some of those, you know, interactive experience type capabilities online to serve our customer base. It made us think, why the hell didn't we do it before. Alright, so, back to your question, I think post pandemic, we're going to see a lot of companies recognizing that low code, no code, right? Cloud AI capabilities are very much within the reach of the average business user, right? In companies like IBM have done a phenomenal job of demystifying the technology and trying to make it much more accessible for the business user. We're going to see continued momentum, right? And adopting these kinds of simple technologies to transform right business processes, customer interaction, so on and so forth. Right? So we we see that coming out of the pandemic, there's no stopping that. I think the second thing we see is a very firm commitment at the leadership level um that you know, stopping or slowing down these kinds of activities is a non starter at the board level. That's a nonstarter at the management committee level, right? Don't come to me saying we need to slow down things, Come to me saying we need to speed up things, right? But that said, we're seeing rationalization, conversations begin to happen and that starts with the strategy, right, tailwind or headwind, irrespective of which side of the equation you fell right in that, in that dynamic, what we're seeing is clients coming back and saying, all right, we know our strategy needs to be different. Let's make sure that we have a strategy that aligns better with um where our customers want to go, where the industry is headed. And let's acknowledge that there are technological capabilities now, but actually turbocharge the execution of the strategy. Technology is not the strategy, it's still connected enterprise thought. How do I serve my customers whose expectations have dramatically changed coming out of the pandemic? And that's why I gave you the club example. I never want to call anybody to make a reservation anymore. I mean, even the local hair salon has a queuing system and a reservation system because you know, that's just the way it is, Right? So there are some simple things that have happened on the customer side of uh, you know, the equation, which is forcing a lot of our clients to start, you know, accelerating their digital investments. Um, you know, rather than decelerating, >>it's interesting. That's great insight. I think just to summarize that, I think you're pointing out is the obvious, hey, it works the indifference of the digital to go the next level and see X O. S and C I O. S have had, you know, either politics or blockers or just will it work? And, and I think with the pandemic necessity is the mother of all inventions. You say, hey, we got to get back on business that the economics and the user experience is more than acceptable. It's actually preferred. I think that club example really highlights that expectation change and I >>think that's an interesting architecture discussion right? And I don't mean that technically I think businesses are starting to think about how are they architect right. And this is where the connected enterprise concept from KPMG is resonating because now you know we see our clients no longer thinking about finance, sales marketing right and fulfillment right? That's how the architect of their business before now they're realizing that they need to sort of put it on its side. Right, I love the cube analogy, I'm going to borrow it, they're flipping the cube on the side and pulling out a whole new business architecture which by the way is enabled and supported by an underlying technology architecture that's very different. Right? So I think businesses are going to get re architected in technology companies like IBM and Red Hot are going to be right there helping clients go through that re architected along with partners like us. >>The script has been flipped and the cube has been turned and I think this was the revelation. The economics are clear. So I gotta ask you, I mean I've always been I've been joking with IBM the president like it, but I've been saying that, you know, business now is software enabled and the operating systems, distributed computing. As you mentioned, these subsystems are part of this fabric and red hat there and operating systems company. Um so kind of in a good position with what Marvin's doing. If you think about if you look at squint through and connect the dots, I mean you're looking at an underlying operating system that's open and connected to business, it's not just software apps that run something like an ear piece system, it's an business software model for the entire company completely instrumented. This is what hybrid cloud is, could you, because you take a few minutes to talk about the relationship that you guys have with IBM on how you guys are working together to bring this hybrid cloud vision to their customers and to the market. >>So KPMG and IBM go back about 20 plus years long standing relationship. Um In fact, I kid around with many of my fellow partners here at KPMG that IBM is the only relationship that we did not divest off when we went through our let's flip management consulting off from our accounting business, so on and so forth that everybody went through, right? So very long standing relationship, you know, we're a trusted partner of IBM well we're very different from a lot of the partners that IBM has were business consultants, right? We don't have, you know, we help clients think through their business first before we get into the technology implementation. So I don't have armies of IBM certified engineers sitting on the bench looking for work to do. It's actually the other way around. Right? So it's been a great marriage when IBM has phenomenal technology in this case. You know, they have been leaders in AI, we've got an AI based relationship now going back five years, um you know, where we consumed Watson proved to ourselves and the world that it can be done very innovatively supporting business transformation. And now we're able to, together with IBM effectively have that conversation with clients, right? Because we're client number zero, uh we're big into a hybrid, multi cloud, um you know, we're big red hat customers. Uh you know, we use red hat in our own modernization of several different workloads. So our relationship with IBM is very strong, were a good supplier to them as well, so we help them with their strategy and go to market as well. So an interesting sort of relationship. Um look, when we work with clients, we typically tend to, you know, take a trusted advisor role uh with clients, our brand speaks to the trust that we're able to bring when we talk to clients. Uh I kid around um you know, when you're going through a transformation, you probably want the town skeptic holding your hand. That's us, right? We're very risk averse. We like working with clients who you know, kind of want that, you know, critical look when they're investing in technology driven transformation. Um you know, some of the things that IBM has done is pretty phenomenal. Right? So for example, I don't see um you know, I I don't see a lot of providers out there who give clients the kind of options that IBM gives with their multi cloud capabilities. Right? So, you know, show me conversational ai capability that can run on private cloud, that can run on google amazon IBM and a whole bunch of other cloud providers. Right? So I think as IBM invests in that open right philosophy and obviously the red hat acquisition only further enhances that, right, um it's a great opportunity for us to be able to take very powerful KPMG value propositions um you know, enabled by this kind of IBM technology, Right? So that's how we tend to go to market. Um one of the solutions were offering with IBM is called the KPMG data mesh. It's built on IBM cloud pack for data, which is enabled by red hats open shift and it's a very innovative solution in the marketplace that fundamentally asked the question to clients, why are you spending inordinate amount of time and resources moving data around in order to become data driven? Uh it just amazes me john how much money is being thrown at, you know, moving data around, particularly as you get into this complex hybrid, multi cloud world. Right. How many times am I going to move data from, you know, a mainframe database into my, you know, cloud repository before I can start doing uh real higher value work. Right, So KPMG data mesh enabled by the IBM cloud packed the data says, hey, legal data, wherever it is. You know, we can take up to 30 of costs out and really get you on this journey to become data driven without spending the first nine months of every project building a data warehouse or building an expensive data where data lake, Right? Because all of those, frankly our 20th century mindset, right? So if I can leave the data where it is, your favorite terminology virtually is the data and really focus on what do I do with the data as opposed to, you know, how do I move the data? Right. It really starts to change the mindset around becoming data driven. Right, so that's a great example of a solution where we've married our value proposition to clients around connected and trusted and leveraged IBM technology. Right? In a hybrid multi cloud one, >>you know, a great insight, love the focus. Hybrid cloud, congratulations on your KPMG mesh solution, their cloud mesh, awesome. Taking advantage of the IBM work and love your perspective on the industry. I think you you called it right? I think that's a great perspective. That's the way we're on big transformation innovation wave. Thanks for coming on the key, appreciate it. >>Absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me have a good day. >>Okay, Cube coverage of IBM think 2021. I'm John for your host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm >>mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Susic on digital brought to you by Susan. >>Welcome back. I'm stew minimum in coming to you from our Boston area studio. And this is the Cube's coverage of Silicon Digital 20. Happy to welcome to the program. Two of the keynote president presenters. First of all, we have Dr Mr Giacomo. He is the president of engineering and innovation and joining him, his presenter on the keynote stage, Daniel Nelson, who is the Vice president of Product solutions. Both of you with Souza. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you for having us. >>All right, So? So, Dr T let let's start out. You know, innovation, open source. Give us a little bit of the message for our audience that Daniel are talking about on stage. You know how you know we've been watching for decades the growth in the proliferation of open source and communities. So give us the update there, >>Andi. It's not stopping. It's actually growing even more and more and more and more innovations coming from open source. The way we look at it is that our customers that they have their business problems have their business reality. Andi s So we we have to curate and prepare and filter all the open source innovation that they can benefit from because that takes time to understand that. Match your needs and fix your problems. So it's Susa. We've always done that since 27 per sales. So working in the open source projects innovating they are, but with customers in mind. And what is pretty clear in 2020 is that large enterprises, small startups. Everybody's doing software. Everybody's doing, I t. And they all have the same type of needs in a way. They need to simplify their landscape because they've been accumulating investments all the way. Our infrastructure Joseph well, different solutions, different platforms from different bundles. They need to simplify that and modernize and the need to accelerate their business, to stay relevant and competitive in their own industries. And that's what we're focusing on. >>Yeah, it's interesting. I completely agree. When you say simplify thing, you know, Daniel, I I go back in the communities about 20 years, and in those days, you know, we were talking about the operating clinic was helping to, you know, go past the proprietary UNIX platforms. Microsoft, the enemy. And you were talking about, you know, operating system server storage, the application that it was a relatively simple environment and inherited today's, you know, multi cloud ai in your based architecture, you know, applications going through this radical transformation growth, though, give us a little bit of insight as to, you know, the impact this is having on ecosystems. And of course, you know, Susie's now has a broad portfolio that at all >>it's a great question, and I totally get where you're coming from. Like if you look 20 years ago, the landscape is completely different that the technologies were using or you're completely different. The problems were trying to solve with technology are more and more sophisticated, you know, at the same time that you know, there's kind of nothing new under the sun, every company, every technology, you know, every you know, modality goes through. This expansion of capabilities and the collapse around simplification is the capabilities become more more complex, manageable. And so there's this continuous tension between capabilities, ease of use, consume ability. What we see with open source is that that that that's kind of dynamic that still exist, but it's more online of like. Developers want easy to use technologies, but they want the cutting edge. They want the latest things. They want those things within their packets. And then if you look at operations groups or or or people that are trying to consume that technology, they want that technology to be consumable simple. It works well with others. People tend to pick and choose and have one pane of glass field operate within that. And that's where we see this dynamic. And that's kind of what the Susan portfolio was built. It's like, How do we take, you know, the thousands and thousands of developers that are working on these really critical projects, whether it's Linux is like you mentioned or kubernetes or for cloud foundry? And how do we make that then more consumable to the thousands of companies that are trying to do it, who may even be new to open source or may not contribute directly but have all the benefits that are coming to it. And that's where Susan fits and worse. Susan, who's fits historically and where we see us continuing to fit long term, is taking older is Legos. Put it together for companies that want that and then allow them a lot of autonomy and choice and how these technologies are consumed. >>One of the themes that I heard you both talked about in the keynote it was simplifying modernized. Telerate really reminded me of the imperatives of the CIO. You know, there's always run the business they need to help grow the business. And if they have the opportunity, they want to transform the business. I think you know, you said run improve in scale scale. Absolutely. You know, a critical thing that we talk about these days when I think back to the Cloud Foundry summit. You know, on the keynote stage, it was in the old way. If I could do faster, better, cheaper. Ah, you could use two of them today. We know faster, faster, faster is what you want. So >>it was a >>little bit of insight as to who you know, you talked about, you know, cloud foundry and kubernetes application modernization. You know, what are the imperatives that you're hearing from customers? And how are we with all of these tools out there? Hoping, You know, I t not just be responsive to the business, but it actually be a driver for the transformation of the business. >>It's a great question. And so when I talk to customers and Dr T feel free to chime in, you talked. You know, as many or more customers than then Ideo. You know they do have these these what are historically competing imperatives. But what we see with the adoption of some of these technologies that that faster is cheaper, faster is safer, you know, creating more opportunities to grow and to innovate better is the business. It's not risk injection when we change something, it's actually risk mitigation when we get good and changing. And so it's kind of that that that modality of moving from, um, you know, a a simplify model or very kind of like a manufacturing model of software so much more organic, much more permissive, much more being able to learn with an ecosystem style. And so that's how we see companies start to change the way they're adopting the technology. What's interesting about them is that same level of adoption that seemed thought of adoption is also how open source is is developed open source is developed organically is developed with many eyes. Make shallow bots is developed by like, Let me try this and see what happens right and be able to do that in smaller and smaller recommends. Just like we look at red Green deployments or being able to do micro services or binary or any of those things. It's like let's not do one greatly or what we're used to in waterfall, cause that's actually really risk. Let's do many, many, many steps forward and be able to transform an iterative Lee and be able to go faster iterative Lee and make that just part of what the business is good at. And so you're exactly right, like those are the three imperatives of the CIO. What I see with customers is the more that they are aligning those three areas together and not making them separate. But we have to be better at being faster and being transformed. And those are the companies that are really using I t. As a competitive advantage within the rich. >>Yeah, because most of the time they're different starting points. They have a history. They have different business strategy and things they've done in the past, you need to be able to accommodate all of that and the faster micro service, that native developments for sure, for the new APS. But they're also coming from somewhere on diff. You don't take care of that. You get are you can just accelerates if you simplify your existing because otherwise you spend your time making sure that your existing it's still running. So you have to combine all of that together. And, yeah, do you mentioned about funding and communities? And that's really I love those topics because, I mean, everybody knows about humanities. Now. It's picking up in terms of adoption in terms of innovation, technology building ai ml framework on top of it now, what's very interesting as where is that cloud? Foundry was designed for fast software development until native from the beginning, that 12 factor app on several like 45 years ago. Right? What we see now is we can extract the value that cloud foundry brings to speed up and accelerate your stuff by the Romans hikers, and we can combine that very nicely on very smoothly, simple in a simple way, with all the benefits you get from kubernetes and not from one communities from your communities running in your public clouds because you have records. They are. You have services that you want to consume from one public clouds. We have a great silicon fireside chat with open shot from Microsoft Azure actually discussing those topics. You might have also communities clusters at the edge that you want to run in your factory or close to your data and workloads in the field. So those things and then you mentioned that as well, taking care of the I T ops, simplify, modernize and accelerate for the I T ops and also accelerates forward their local themselves. We're benefiting from a combination of open source technologies, and today there's not one open source technology that can do that. You need to bundle, combine them, get our best, make sure that they are. They are integrated, that they are certified to get out of their stable together, that the security aspects, all the technology around them are integrating the services as well. >>Well, I'm really glad you brought up, you know, some of those communities that are out there, you know, we've been saying for a couple of years on the Cube. You know, Kubernetes is getting baked in everywhere. You know, Cisco's got partnerships with all the cloud providers, and you're not fighting them over whether to use a solution that you have versus theirs. I worry a little bit about how do I manage all of those environments. You end up with kubernetes sprawl just like we have with every other technology out there. Help us understand what differentiates Tuesday's, you know, offerings in this space. And how do you fit in with you know, the rest of that very dynamic and defer. >>So let me start with the aspect of combining things together on and Danielle. Maybe you can take the management piece. So the way we are making sure that Sousa, that we don't also just miles into a so this time off tools we have a stack, and we're very happy if people use it. But the reality is that there are customers that they have. Some investments have different needs. They use different technologies from the past. But we want to try different technologies, so you have to make sure that's for communities. Like for any other part of the stack. The I T stock of the stack. Your pieces are model around that you can accommodate different. Different elements are typically at Susa. We support different types off hyper visors. Well, that's focused on one. But we can support KPMG's and I probably this way, all of the of the Nutanix, hyper visor, netapp, hyper visors and everything. Same thing with the OS. There's not only one, we know that people are running, and that's exactly the same. Which humanities? And there's no one, probably that I've seen in our customer base that will just need one vendor for communities because they have a hybrid needs and strategy, and they will benefit from the native communities they found on a ks e ks decay. I remember clouds, you name them Andi have vendors in Europe as well. Doing that so far for us, it's very important that we bring us Sutro. Custom. Males can be combined with what they have, what they want, even if it's from the circle competition. And so this is a cloud. Foundry is running on a case. You can find it on the marketplace of public clouds. It could run on any any any communities. He doesn't have to be sitting on it. But then you end up with a lot of sales, right? How do we deal with that? >>So it's a great question, and I'll actually even broaden that out because it's not like we're only running kubernetes. Yes, we've got lots of clusters. We've got lots of of containers. We've got lots of applications that are moving there, but it's not like all the V M's disappear. It's not like all the beige boxes, like in the data center, like suddenly don't exist. You know, we we we all bring all the sense and decisions in the past word with us wherever we go. And so for us, it's not just that lens of how do we manage the most modern, the most cutting edge? That's definitely a part of it. But how do you do that? Within the context of all the other things you have to do within your business? How do I manage virtual virtual machines? How do I manage bare metal? How do I manage all those? And so for us, it's about creating a presentation layer on top of that where you can look at your clusters. Look at your V EMS. Look at all your deployments and be able to understand what's actually happening with the fire. We don't take a prescriptive approach. We don't say you have to use one technology. You have to use that. What we want to do is to be adaptive to the customer's needs. And so you've got these things here, some of our offerings. You've got some legacy offerings to Let's show you bring those together. Let's show you how you modernize your viewpoints, how you simplify your operational framework and how you end up accelerating what you can do with the staff that you've got in place. >>Yeah, I'm just on the management piece. Is there any recommendation from your team? You know, last year at Microsoft ignite, there was the launch of Azure are on. And, you know, we're starting to see a lot of solutions come out. There are concerns. Is that any of us that live through the multi vendor management days, um, you know, don't have good memories from those. It is a different discussion if we're just talking about kind of managing multiple kubernetes. But how do we learn from the past and you know, What do you recommend for people in this, you know, multi cloud era. >>So my suggestion to customers is you always start with what are your needs? What is strategic problems you're trying to solve, and then choose a vendor that is going to help you solve those strategic problems? So is it going to take a product centric view Isn't gonna tell you use this technology and this technology and this technology, what is going to take the view of, like, this is the problem you're gonna solve? Let me be your advisor within that and choose people that you're going to trust within that, um, that being said, you wanna have relationships with customers that have been there for a while that have done this that have a breath of experience in solving enterprise problems because everything that we're talking about is mostly around the new things. But keep in mind that there are there are nuances about the enterprise. There are things that are that are intrinsically bound within the enterprise that it takes a vendor with a lot of enterprise experience to be able to meet customers where they are. I think you've seen that you know in some of the some of the real growth opportunities with them hyper scaler that they've kind of moved into being more enterprise view of things, kind of moving away from just an individual bill perspective, enterprise problems. You're seeing that more and more. I think vendors and customers need to choose companies that meet them where they are that enable their decisions. Don't prescribe there. >>Okay, go ahead. >>Yes, Sorry. Yeah. I also wanted to add that I would recommend people to look at open source based solutions because that will prevent them to be in a difficult situation, potentially in the three years from now. So there are open source solutions that can do that on book. A viable, sustainable, healthy, open source solutions that are not just one vendor but multi vendor as well, because that leaves those open options open for you in the future as well. So if you need to move for another vendor or if you need to implement with an additional technology, you've made a new investment or you go to a new public clouds. If you based Duke Tracy's on open source, you have a little chance but later left >>I think that's a great point. Dr. T and I would you know, glom onto that by saying customers need to bring a new perspective on how they adjudicate these solutions, like it's really important to look at the health of the open source community. Just because it's open source doesn't mean that there's a secret army of gnomes that, you know in the middle of the night going fixed box, like there needs to be a healthy community around that. And that is not just individual contributors. That is also what are the companies that are invested in this, where they dedicating resources like That's another level. So what level of sophistication that a lot of customers need to bring into their own vendor selection? >>Excellent. Uh, you know, speaking about communities in open source. Want to make sure you have time share a little bit about the AI platform discussed in your >>Yeah, it's very, very interesting. And something I'm super excited about it, Sousa. And it's kind of this this, uh, we're starting to see ai done in these really interesting problems to solve and like, I'll just give you one example is that we're working with um uh, Formula One team around using AI to help them actually manage in car mechanics and actually manage some of the things that they're doing to get super high performance out of their vehicles. And that is such an interesting problem to solve. And it's such a natural artificial intelligence problem that even when you're talking about cars instead of servers or you're talking about race tracks, you know instead of data centers, you still got a lot of the same problems. And so you need an easy to use AI stack. You need it to be high performance. You needed to be real time. You need to be able to decisions made really quickly, easy, the same kinds of problems. But we're starting to see them in all these really interesting wheels in areas, which is one of the coolest things that I've seen in my career. Especially is in terms of I T. Is that I t is really everywhere. It's not. Just grab your sweater and go to the data center because it's 43 degrees in there. You know, it's also getting on the racetrack. It's also go to the airfield. It's also go to the grocery store and look at some of the problems being being being addressed himself there. And that is super fascinating. One of the things that I'm super excited up in our industry in total. >>Alright, well, really good to discussion here, Daniel. Dr B. Thank you so much for sharing everything from your keynote and been a pleasure washing. >>Thank you. >>Alright, Back with lots more coverage from Susan Con Digital 20. I'm stew minimum. And as always, Thank you for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is and episode in the Remote Works Citrix virtual series. >> Hello everybody, my name is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this cube conversation. You know, for the last several weeks, we've been interviewing key executives to really try to understand how they're responding to the COVID-19 crisis. And one of the key areas that we've been reporting on is the so called work from home offset, and I'll explain that in a little bit. But there are two great executives from Citrix that I'm really pleased to have on Donna Kimmel is the Executive Vice President and Chief chief people officer. Donna, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> And she she's joined by Meerah Rajavel, who's the CIO of Citrix. Meerah, thank you as well. >> Thank you. >> So, I mean, this thing has been amazing. We've been doing a lot of research and it just obviously came out of the blue guys, if you would actually bring up that that chart. I want to set up the conversation here. This is something that we've been reporting on for a while. This is an ETR survey from about 1300 CIOs and IT practitioners that we asked them, how is your budget going to change in 2020 as a result of COVID? And you can see the red, we all know the story in the red, it's ugly. But surprisingly, about 35% of the respondents said no change. They're actually going to plow ahead. But what's even more surprising was 20 plus percent, about 21% said we're actually going to spend more. And so you can see from the data, that it's actually would be a lot worse, we're not for the green. Now, the reality is that green is a function really have worked from home infrastructure. And guys, that's something that I really want to talk to you about today. So, Donna, let me start with you. I mean, this is we're always talking about people, people process and technology. I mean, we went from put your toe in the water with work from home infrastructure, to all in. Your thoughts I mean, this is just overnight. >> Absolutely, you know, I think when I think about remote work and working from home, it is really not business as usual and probably was the biggest change that businesses have experienced, even in my career and many others. You know this was pretty much thrust upon us the work from home. And we realized that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving and operating. Our home offices quickly became kitchen tables and basements and bathrooms and bedrooms. And, in addition to it, not necessarily being set up the way that we would normally set it up if we knew we were going to work from home. It also didn't generally involve caring for family members at the same time. And so, most people thought for the first couple of weeks well, I can get through this. You know, for, it's not an extended period of time, but the reality is it's become an extended period of time. And I think ultimately, you know when we step back and think we're as humans, we're all survivors, and we're resilient. And there's a number of ways that, you know, we can help our employees as they make the adjustment that was really sort of pushed on them. >> Now, the executives that I've been talking to they, to a person start with, look, the safety and health of our team is the most important. So you obviously had to communicate that. Donna, I wonder if you could talk about sort of the priorities, you know what is it the cadence of your communication? The transparency of your communication? What really was your kind of first move, if you will? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think for us, one of the first things we had to step back and think about is, who are we what is what is our culture, what's important to us and we recognize it Citrix, it's our talent that makes the business successful. So we to show understand as much of the experience as possible that are that our employees are having, and really come at it from, I think a place of, of empathy. Listening to what's important to them, thinking about what's going to enable them to be successful because when our employees are successful, they truly drive success and a great experience for our customers. They're the ones out there helping to support our customers to support our sales partners, and certainly, ultimately, our communities. But when we think about this, we're thinking about the challenges, the opportunities, trying to develop plans and programs, and making sure that we have continuous information that is provided to our employees. And I think part of it you know we'll have an opportunity to talk with Meerah as well. When we step back, we think about kind of three things from a future of work perspective, we always think about the culture of the organization. Which is the embodiment of the values, the who we are and what we do. All of this clearly is grounded in the business objectives. So the first piece is our is our culture. The second piece is our physical space. So what is our environment like that enables us to be as productive as possible. And then the third piece is our digital space. If you can think about all of those almost as a Venn diagram, and that really puts the employee at the center. When we think about what's going to enable our employees to be successful, we think about that in a very holistic way. And so culture is sorry, did you want to-- >> Oh no please. >> Yeah. Culture for us is really grounded in our ability to drive trust in the organization. It's about that human connection. Because the more we can be connected with each other's managers to employees and peers to employees, the better off we are, people will feel less isolated. Because without that face to face, it makes it, and face to face and I'll say in person makes it a lot more difficult. The second piece that we focus on is that physical environment. And I think for many employees because they were thrust into the situation when they compare it to the work environment, when you're in the office, there's almost a professional feel, in that work environment and so employees feel a fair amount of pressure to try to create that same professionalism in their home. And the reality is, it's hard to do that. So it puts a lot of pressure on employees when they recognize that the whole family is quarantined with them, right? There's homeschooling going on. There's no childcare or eldercare. There's interruptions at inopportune times, barking dogs and cats walking across keyboards and family members doing drive-bys while the video cameras on and I think one of the things that we've been able to do is to help employees feel comfortable with that's who you are, that's our humanity. And the more we can help people feel comfortable about creating that physical space that's open and welcoming. That really helps drive that experience. And then the third piece, as I mentioned, is the digital space. And that's really where the partnership with Meerah comes in is so, so important, do they have the right tools and technology at home to be able to drive that experience? And for us, you know as Meerah and I have talked that partnership between IT and HR is critical. We're almost like the new BFFs in order to drive variance to enable our employees to be as productive as possible in this work from home. >> All right, so Meerah, let's let's get into that. So once you've established the safety, the health of your your employees, obviously financial flexibility and runway and the like their physical digital space. Now, you're really under a microscope with the tech. Now, of course, Citrix has been in this business for decades. So you know a lot about this, but nonetheless, this is really new. You were thrust into it overnight. Your thoughts on on how you responded and you know kind of where we're at in that journey. >> Absolutely, absolutely. So one other thing Donna mentioned, right, the three aspects when we moved to work from home, the biggest piece of this aspect that made it like for example, she was telling, I mean, I myself, we are in transition. I'm moving from Austin, Texas to Florida when it is all in the middle. I'm right now in the middle of my transition, I'm not settled my new house. And literally I'm doing this interview with the sitting my laptop on top of cereal boxes right now. That's actually something that I empathize clearly with my employees. So the physical space when we are in an office location is not any more that we can control. So the digital space need to really compensate for the physical space. The culture is something I think we are very lucky being in Citrix, the notion of what we have been always been talking about remote work, and employee experience, we have got that ingrained. So when we have to go into this remote workspace, work force culture, the culture is something that I would say we had some foundation to stand on. But IT has to come in, it's not an easy job because we want to give people the ability to do they what they want to do in a productive fashion. But now digital need to compensate for the physical, you know efficiencies that are possibly lacking in a home environment. So I looked at it from three C's, right? It starts with connectivity, right? Connectivity being are we providing the right kind of connectivity, which is to a secure connection. At the end of the day my job here is to make the employee productive and secure at the same time. It's not just about the productivity, but also wrap it up with a greater experience. So we start looking at connectivity from a security point of view, from performance point of view, using you know technologies like SDVAN and maximizing their performance to the nearest, how we can, you know break out the circuits to maximize performance for our employees. We also need to take into account that there are countries we went into the last mile to understand where the true problem is. Because if you go to Asia, there are so many countries, you know even if we can provide superior experience, their experience is very dependent on the local connectivity. So we need to look at, okay, how do we ensure our heavy duty applications are in a way optimized so it doesn't become a productivity tip for the employee. The second is if you think about productivity for employees, and it's all about information sharing and content sharing, right? So I call the second C is the content. The ability for the employee to have the right data at the right place. So they can make decisions and they can be productive. So using things like whether it is your ShareFile or your OneDrive or your collaboration platform JIRA, it doesn't matter, but you have to really make sure that data and information are available. And we focused on making sure that we are streamlined that and communicating about that very vocally like to Donna's point. The third C we looked at was collaboration, right? I mean, that's actually where, we are now compensating for the physical touch with a digital touch. So that includes things like your audio conferencing platform, your video conferencing platform, your ability to bring these different facets together, right? I mean, the ability to share, a ability to whiteboard I had last week, three days off site, and it was a complete virtual off site with nine hours of working session. And we used all kinds of tools that literally we had digital stickies to move around that integrated into our video conferencing platform that integrated into our conference sharing platform. So whatever we are doing, these are all connected. At the end of the day I truly felt like you know what i can contribute to not you know adding to the carbon footprint of the globe, because we have people from all over the globe, all of a sudden, I'm getting feedback from employees saying now the playing field is completely level down, people who have been remote users before they felt they had a short stick. Now everybody's same. In fact, my staff actually talked to one of my permanent remote employees and say, hey, what is the tips that I can use from you to make sure I'm productive, right? So I see the culture aspect is super important. That's actually bringing us together, but it is from a technology and digital point of view, bringing your, you know connectivity, content and collaboration in a way that it's going to be secure and in a way that we are looking at it with the aspect of your culture and from the employee shoes is a super important thing from a technology point of view. >> So Donna, you mentioned the sort of BFF between between HR and IT now, of course, HR IT have always had a relationship but it really has been around that Human Capital Managers Software, whether it was simplified and efficient onboarding or certain, change management functions. What have you been able to learn from that relationship and apply and what's new? >> You know, I think, what we're doing together what Meerah and I and the IT in the HR organizations are really doing together is truly understanding what it means to enable productivity for employees. And when you think about having the right tools to enable employees to be productive, doing that in alignment with the culture of the organization, what is it that drives our sense of meaning and accomplishment? And then being able to do it in a way both in a physical environment whether that physical environment is in the office or if it is remote. We do Look collectively together at the change management, how do you get employees to adopt new ways of doing things? And utilize that and learn from it. So we experiment with certain types of productivity tools, as Meerah was, was talking about, which ones worked, which ones needed to change, what worked for some teams and didn't work for others, when she and I can do that together, and our departments can do that together that enables us to truly drive productivity across the organization. >> Yeah, I would probably add one more thing to what Donna said. I mean, one of the thing is, also if you think about it, you know the human resource, the talent organization has a much better understanding of the culture of the subcultures, right? I mean, I've never been in a company even when it's 1000 people company, you have subcultures. And HR is in involved in the culture of those subcultures as we are going through. From IT point of view, we look at it from user personas, okay? So a salesperson who's actually always on road or always like more of a remote worker versus an engineering person. I mean, we are a software company and R&D persona requires a different set of productivity tools, compared to a salesperson compared to an executive compared to an executive assistant, right? So for us, it's actually bringing that different functional line of business. And that type of personas. And HR is absolutely crucial because as we are looking at it, we're saying, hey, what is the success for this organization, and what's the culture of that organization and one of the primary job roles and we don't do just with HR but HR gives us so much you know content to get jumpstart, then when we engage with the real users, we are not going with a blank sheet of paper we are going with something that they can react to and they can add to it. So we are doing a design thinking with them with something they can begin start together rather than you know white canvas and telling, tell me what do you want? I mean, he's asked, what do you want, you'll be getting, you know finding the sky on the moon. >> Well, it's a good thing you have those virtual stickies to help with that design thinking, right? You know, one of the things that I've been been saying is that, you know we've never seen obviously anything like this before a forced shutdown to the economy, which is why we're going to remember it. And like 911, you know post 911 we are going to see some things here that that have permanence, bad post GDPR for example, it required, certain changes. So, Donna, I want to begin start with you. Just it's ironic that, you know we're starting a new decade with this crisis. We're not just going to go back and revert the 2019 there's not just going to be some, you know all of a sudden, everything is rosy again, it's not. There's going to be certain permanent changes. How much have you thought about that? And do you have any visibility on what those are going to be? >> Yeah, you know when I stepped back and I think about this, and I think a large part of it has to do with much of what Meerah was just talking about in terms of design thinking. It's really, I think, for all of us, it's coming back to recognize that this became almost a forced opportunity to focus on business continuity. And how do we think about what's right for us as we move forward? But the design of that is based on what is right? What's the context for that particular business? What's the culture of that organization? What are the products and services that, you know that business provides? What are the subcultures in the organization? So, for me, it really does step back to say, look, we need to focus on business continuity. And now we have a couple of new models where you know in the past, it would be really easy for managers to say, you know I don't think my team can work remotely or your job isn't possible to do remotely. And now what we're finding in many businesses is that many jobs can actually be done remotely if they're provided the right tools and the right resources. So for me it, I step back and say, as we think about the business continuity going forward, there is a new way to work. It is a combination of finding that flexibility between working in the office and remote work and providing the right tools that enable employees to be able to do it successfully. >> You know, Meerah, this notion that Don is bringing up of business continuance, I've sort of been noodling on this and thinking that going forward, one of the things that will change is that companies might be willing to sub optimize near term performance to put in better business resiliency. Now at the same time, I know how CEOs thing and they say, okay great, we're going to make that investment. Yeah, fine. We'll maybe sacrifice some short term performance, but I had a really interesting conversation recently with a chief data officer said you don't have to sacrifice necessarily, with with data in this new era, there actually are ways in which you can both drive business resilience and drive productivity and ultimately profitability. What's your thinking on on that sort of imbalance or balance, if you will? >> I agree with that statement. Because to me, you know today's business we need to look at I mean, especially with the cloud and some of the new technologies that we have, I mean, even I see this thing coming out of COVID there's going to be industries that are going to come out new business models that are going to emerge, right? I mean, think about telemedicine, we have been very, very hesitant about telemedicine for decades now. I mean, that's not a new concept, but we have been very hesitant. we said, I have to see the doctor. But today, pretty much everybody except for if you're seriously injured, you're getting telemedicine. That industry is going to work, right? So to me the statement you made is absolutely, absolutely, and for me, it's actually an opportunity coming out of an adversity that's going to come out. When I think about it, the most important thing I see is the businesses that are going to be successful. That's why even HR, you know partnership is even more greater. The businesses that has talent with digital dexterity are the ones that are going to win, right? I mean, regardless, you know whether you're in HR, whether you're in finance, whether you're in IT, you're in R&D, you're in manufacturing doesn't matter. Your digital dexterity of your company really makes you whether you win in the market, or you're you're one of those dinosaurs in the market, right? And how do you bring those together? That's a cultural change. That's actually educating, right? I mean, we don't want to leave, we already have talent shortage, and we don't want Want to leave a generation of population behind and focused on only the millennials and others because I mean, recently I've been going through the scaled agile framework, which is a lean agile and I really love the word of lean agile, lean has a lot of economies of scale. Agile brings a lot of agility. When you bring them together, you get both. And that's exactly what we need to do with our talent, bring the vision and bring this digital dexterity that we need to bring there. How we get it from a productivity? Of course, we want to be respectful of privacy. But as we have been going through we have been looking at different productivity metrics looking at, you know what is the usage pattern of our employees, how much code checking they've done? How was my MTTR being, I mean, in my organization, I've been looking at the velocity of our transaction processing and our issue resolution SLA times. And we also even, you know had a little because I think at the end of the day, we human we actually We are social animals, we need that patch. And we cannot forget, we are not mechanical, we are human. So we need that empathy and we need that emotional side of it. So we have been both qualitatively and quantitatively checking with our workforce, how they're feeling about it, and also looking at the data to see if the productivity is telling the story, what people are talking about. And to our surprise, you know 66% of our population, when we did this pulse survey said, they feel more productive in this situation, because many of them commented that, you know the time they save from not commuting, or the feel, just the sense of spending a little bit more time with the family is actually giving them that extra boost. And they can really do a work life integration, not like a work life balance they need to do. And we also heard about 11% felt pretty much they're in the same range. And but I also want to recognize it's not for everyone, right? I mean, we do have folks who are in manufacturing, they need to patch the physical things. And those jobs in certain days need to be, more physical. So there's about 3-5%, depending on your job function said, you know what I need access to the lab because I really deal with changing my connectivity, changing my or a dislike for the customer, I'm repairing their board, I really need to see that, those are the ones where we find kind of, you know absolute physical touch is required. >> You know, in a way, I mean, we're kind of lucky in the technology business talk about the digital transformation. I've been saying this is going to accelerate a lot of digital transformations. But for us, you look at the Cube, we've been up remote studios, no problem. You're a software company, you've already really transitioned largely to a subscription model so you can code remotely, but there are some industries in particular industries, where you guys sell a lot of product, I think about healthcare, you mentioned telemedicine, Meerah, financial services, defense, big users of VDI, they're highly regulated and secure industries. And while it's not, you know your main thrust, you talk to your peers and in those industries. So, and I've always said, you know some of these industries really haven't digitally transformed, they're actually kind of complacent. My feeling is that this is going to really accelerate, you know some of those-- >> Absolutely. Industries that haven't transformed and haven't been disrupted. I wonder if you could both comment from both a technology perspective and a people perspective. >> You know, I think, I think from the people perspective, it's really about mindset. And it and recognizing that how we approach these new problems and needs new ways of thinking about getting work done, is all about what our minds block us from thinking. And this pushed us into a situation where we've been able to demonstrate roles that we did not think could ever be done remotely, can actually be done remotely. And so for me, it is about a mindset shift. It's about enabling the dialogue sort of having the courage to have that dialogue inside of the organization to understand, again, what's the business context? What can we do in a more flexible way? And how do we continue to serve our customers the best that we can? >> I think for me, it comes down to you know protection is always an extinction, right? I mean, if you're trying to protect a current model, and if you're trying to be saying, you know, you don't want to be the dinosaur. Things are going to change and being proactive about the change and embracing the change will let you to some extent influence and control that change versus being the change being done to you. In this particular case, to me looking at it to see especially with today's technology around, you know manufacturing industry is probably going to see a lot of remote hands as well with IoT and robotics coming in. And I see that is going to be one area, you may see a drip down on type of talent that's getting extinct. On the other side, we are going to continue to see the demand on technology is going to continue to go up and especially which is already shortage. I mean, if I remember the last survey from KPMG, in December, the CIO survey said 60% of the CIOs responded, they are having challenges with the you know filling the roles and I also remember the other one is around Korn Ferry survey of technology talent shortage. By 2030, the expectation is we're going to leave around 8.7 billion or $7 trillion of revenue on the table and 85% will be unfulfilled. I mean, this is a time for, you know really how do you ensure there are industries that are going to transform which means there are certain skills, people need to reskill. I mean, even in technology that reskill and upskill is going to be a constant thing that's actually it's nobody is there, you know spark from that one, in my opinion in today's world. so that reskill and upskill is going to be the ones who are going to embrace that they're going to be in a bigger way and taking advantage of these transitions and transformations. I also think there are areas that we may see what we call the hype may have a broader adoption. So you'd mentioned about the chief data officer talking about how data can come in, I mean, I see automation accelerating and data is going to be a core component of acceleration. And you will see more and more you know things around how measurements becomes important as a start that leads to you know more data modeling that leads to more automation, that cycle is going to accelerate the influence of AI is going to accelerate even further than when we have said. I mean, I just wish some of the areas where, you know we have been slow in that option if you would have accelerated some of the challenges we are dealing with now with capacity, we wouldn't have been having problems. I mean, then I did a reflection with my team. The one of the highest one ranked by my leadership was we should have accelerated accelerated automation more. >> Well, I think what are some really, really interesting and deep points, but really no industry is safe, from disruption and in really Meerah to your points. If you're just paving the cow path, you're going to be in trouble. If you're trying to protect the past from the future, you're going to get disrupted. And I feel like you guys really have a good handle on this. And it's our pleasure to be able to post an interview such experts like yourselves, really appreciate you sharing your insights and your experience with with our audience. I mean, we're kind of all in this together. So thank you, Donna, Meerah, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. For my CXO series we will see you next time. (upbeat music)