>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. We're live with the Cube at Ansible Fest 2022. This is not only Ansible's 10th anniversary, John Wood. It's the first in-person event in three years. About 14 to 1500 people here talking about the evolution of automation, really the democratization opportunities. Ansible >>Is money, and this segment's gonna be great. Cub alumni are back, and we're gonna get an industry perspective on the automation journey. So it should be great. >>It will be great. We've got two alumni back for the price of wine. Scott Canine joins us, Director of Worldwide Automation at Kendra. A Nelson Shoe is back as well. Product marketing director at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you back on the, on the live cube. >>Oh, thank you for having us. And, and you know, it's really great to be back here live and in person and, and, you know, get a chance to see you guys again. >>Well, and also you get, you get such a sense of the actual Ansible community here. Yeah. And, and only a fraction of them that are here, but people are ready to be back. They're ready to collaborate in person. And I always can imagine the amount of innovation that happens at these events, just like off the show floor, people bumping into each other and go, Hey, I had this idea. What do you think, Scott? It's been just about a, a year since Kenel was formed. Talk to us about the last close to a year and what that's been like. Especially as the world has been so, chops >>The world been Yeah, exactly. Topsy turvy. People getting back to working in person and, and everything else. But, you know, you know, throw on that what we've done in the last year, taking Kendra, you know, outside of being a part of ibm Right. In our own company at this point, you know, and you know, you hear a lot of our executives and a lot of our people when we talk about it, like, Oh yeah, it's, you know, it's a $19 billion startup. We got freedom of action. We can do all these different things. But, you know, one of the ways I look at it is we are a $19 billion startup, which means we've got a lot of companies out there that are trusting us to, no matter what change we're doing, continue to deliver their operations, do it flawlessly, do it in a way so they can continue to, to service their clients effectively and, and don't break 'em. And, and so that to me, you know, the way we do that and the way I focusing on that is automation Ansible, obviously corridor strategy, getting there. >>Yeah. And I'd like to get your thoughts too, because we seeing a trend, we've been reporting on this with the cloud growth and the scale of cloud and distributed computing going cloud native, the automation is the front and piece center of all conversations. Automate this, make developers go faster. And with the pandemic, we're coming out of that pandemic. You post pandemic with large scale automation, system architecture, a lot more like architectural conversations and customers leaning on new things. Yeah. What are you seeing in this automation framework that you guys are talking about? What's been the hot playbook or recipe or, or architecture to, you know, play on words there, but I mean, this is kind of the, the key focus. >>Yeah. I mean, if you, one of the things that I com customer comp talks, I've been pulled into a lot recently, have all been around thinking about security, right? A lot in terms of security and compli, I think, I mean, think about the world environment as a whole, right here, everything that's been going on. So, so people are, are conscious of how much energy that's being used in their data centers, right? And people are conscious of how secure they are, right? Are they, you know, the, their end customers are trusting them with data information about them, right? And, and they're trusting us to make sure that those systems are secure to make sure that, you know, all that is taken care of in the right way. And so, you know that what's hot security and compliance, right? What can we do in the energy space, right? Can we do things to, to help clients understand better their energy consumption as, as, you know, especially as we get now in Europe to the winter months, can we do things there that'll help them also be better in that space, Right? Reduce their >>Costs and a lot more cloud rails obviously right there. You got closer and you got now Ansible, they're kind of there to help the customers put it together at scale. This has been the big conversation last year, remember was automate, automate, automate, right? This year it's automation everywhere, in every piece of the, the landscape edge. It's been big discussion tomorrow here about event driven stuff. This is kind of a change of focus and scope. Can you like, share your thoughts on how you see how big this is in terms of the, the, the customer journey >>In terms, I'm sorry, in terms of, >>In terms of their architecture, how they're rolling out automation, >>What's their Yeah, yeah. So, so in terms of their rolling out arch, arch in terms of them consuming architecture, right? And the architecture or consuming automation. Yeah. And rolling out the architecture for how they do that. You know, again, it, to me it's, it's a lot of, it's been focused around how do we do this in the most secure manner possible? How do we deliver the service to them and the most secure managers possible? How do they understand that it, that they can trust the automation and it's doing the right things on their environments, right? So it's not, you know, we're not pushing out or, or you know, it's not making bad policies >>And they're leaning on you guys. >>It's, it's not being putting malware out there, right? At the same time we're doing different things. And so they really rely on, on our customers, rely on us to really help them with that journey. >>I think a, a big part of that with Kendra as such a great partner and so many customers trusting them, is the fact that they really understand that enterprise. And so as, as Scott talks about the security aspect, we're not just talking to the IT operations people, right? We're talking across the enterprise, the security, the infrastructure, and the automation around that. So when we talk about hybrid cloud, we talk about network and security edge is a natural conversation to that, cuz absolutely at the edge network and security automation is critical. Otherwise, how are you gonna manage just the size of your edge as it grows? >>Yeah. And, and we've been, and that's another area that we've been having a a lot more conversations with clients on, is how do you do automation for IOT and edge based devices, right? We, you know, traditionally data center cloud, right? Kind of the core pieces of where we've been focusing on, but I, you know, recently I've been seeing a lot more opportunities and a lot more companies coming forward saying, you know, help us with the network space, help us with the iot space. We really wanna start getting to that level of automation and that part of our environments. And what >>Are some of the key barriers that customers are coming to you with saying, help us overcome these so that they can, you're smiling so that they can, can obviously attract and retain the right talent and also be able to determine what processes to automate to extract the most value and the most ROI for the organization. >>Yeah. And, and, and you know, that's, that's an interesting, the ROI conversation's always an interesting one, right? Because when you start having that with customers, some of the first things they think about, or the first, the natural place people go is, >>Oh, >>Labor takeout. I can do this with less people. Right? But that's not the end all be all of automation. In fact, you know, my personal view is that's, you know, maybe the, the the bottom 30%, right? That's kind of, then you have to think about the value you get above and beyond that standard operations, standardized processes, right? How are you gonna able to do those faster? How's that enabling your business, right? What's all the risks that's now been taken out by having these changes codified, right? By having them done in a manner that is repeatable, scalable, and, and, and really gets them to the point of, you know, what their business needs from an operational standpoint and >>Extracting that value. Nelson, talk about the automation journey from your perspective, How have you seen that evolve from your lens, especially over the last couple of years? >>It's a great question. You know, it's interesting because obviously all of our customers are at different stages of their automation journey. We have someone that just beginning looking at automation, they've been doing old scripts, if you will, the past. And then we have more that are embracing it, right? As a culture. So we have customers that are building cultures of automation, right? They have standups, they have automation guilds. It's, it's kind of a little bit of a, of a click. It's kind of, you know, building up steam in that momentum. And then we have, you know, the clients that Kindra works with, right? And they're very much focused on automation because they understand that they have a lack of resources, they don't have the expertise, they don't have the time to be able to deliver all this. Yeah. And that's really, Kendra really comes into effect to really help those customers accelerate their automation. Yeah. Right. And to that point, you know, we're doing a lot of innovation work with Kendra and we lean on them heavily because, you know, they're willing to make that commitment as a partner both on the, the, the day to day work that we do together as well as Ford looking at different architectures. >>Yeah. And, and the community aspect from our side internally has been tremendous in terms of us being able to expand what we'll be doing with automation and, and what a's been able to do with that community to get there. Right? Yeah. So to last month we did about 33 million day one, day two operations through automation, right? So that's what we've done. If you look at it, you know, if I break it down, it's really 80% of that standard global process stuff that we bring to the table. 20% of that is what our, our account teams are bringing specifically to their clients based on their needs and what they need to get done. Right. You know, one of my favorite examples of of, of this, right? We have a automation example out there for a, a client we've got in Japan, right? They tie, you know, they're, they're obviously concerned, you know, security a everything else that we've been talking about. >>They're also concerned about resiliency, right? In the face of natural disasters. Yeah. So they took our automation, they said, Okay, we're gonna tie your platform to seismic data that's coming through, and we understand what seismic data's happening. Okay, it's hitting a certain event. Let's automatically start kicking off resiliency operations so we can be prepared and thus keeps serving our clients when that's happening. Right? And that's not something like when you talk about a global team coming in and, and saying, we're gonna do all this. It's that community aspect, getting, getting the account focus, getting to that level, right? That's really brings value to clients. And that's one of the use cases, you know, and aaps enabled us to do with the a the community approach. We've got >>Now talk about this partnership. I think earlier when we were talking to Stephanie and Tom, the bottoms up Ansible community with top down kind of business objectives kind of come into play. You guys have a partnership where it's, there's some game changing things happening because Ansible's growing, continuing to have that scope grow from a skill set standpoint, expand the horizons, doing more automation at scale, and then you got business objectives where people wanna move faster in their, in their digital transformation. So to me, it's interesting that this part kind of hits both. >>It does really hit both. I mean, you know, the community cloud that Kendra has is so critical, right? Because they build that c i CF architecture internally, but they follow that community mantra, if you will. And community is so important to us, right? And that's really where we find innovation. So together with what we were call discussing about validated content earlier today becomes critical to build that content to really help people get started, Right? Validated content, content they can depend on and deliver, right? So that becomes critical on the other side, as you mentioned, is the reality of how do we get this done? Yeah. Right? How do we mature, how do we accelerate? And without the ability to drive those solutions to them to fix, if you are the problems that the line of business has. Well, if you don't answer those questions with the innovation, with the community, and then with the ap, it's, it, it does, it's gotta all come >>Together as, I mean, that community framework is interesting. I think we hear a lot in the cube, you know, Hey, let's do this. Sounds good. Who's gonna do it? Someone who's the operator. So there's a little skills gap going on. It's also a transformation in the roles of the operators in particular, and the dev, So the DevOps equation's completely going to the next level, right? And this is where people wanna move faster. So you're seeing a lot more managed services, a lot more Yes. Services that's, I won't say so much top down, but more like, let's do it and here's a play to get it done, right? Then backfill on the hiring, whether it's taking on a little bit of technical debt or going a little faster to get the proof points, >>Right? And I think one of the critical aspects is, you know, Ansible has it certified collections, right? And oftentimes we, we don't, I don't, I meet with customers two, three times a week, right? There's not a single one that doesn't emphasize the importance of partners and the importance of certified collections, Right? And kindra is included in that, right? Because they bring a lot of those certified collections. Use them, leverage them, it's helps customers get a jumpstarter, right? It's a few, it's their easy button, right? But they only get that and they value that because of the support that's there. >>Yeah. Right? They get the with >>The cert. Yeah. I was gonna say, just adding on the certified collections, right? We, so, you know, it was, it was great to see the hub come out with those capabilities because, you know, as we've gone through the last 12 months and, and change, one of the things that we focused more in on is network devices, network support, right? And, and so, you know, some of the certified collections out there for Cisco for F five, right? Some of those things we've been able to take back in and now build on top of with the expertise that we, we have in that space as well. And then use that as a starting point to more value for our clients. >>How is Kentrell working together with, with Red Hat and with Ansible to help organizations like you mentioned Nelson, they're on the journey varies considerably. Some are well on their way, others aren't. But for those to really start developing an automation, first culture, we talked a lot about cultural ship, we talked about it this morning. You can feel the power of that community and driving it, but how do you guys work together to help companies and any industry kind of really start understanding what an automation first culture is and then building it internally and getting some grounds? Well, >>Well, it's interesting, right? One of the, one of the things that really is we found really helpful is assessments, right? So you have silos and pockets of automation, and that's that challenge, right? So to be able to bring that, if you are automation community within an enterprise together, we often go out and we'll do an assessment, right? An automation assessment to really understand holistically how the enterprise could leverage automation not just in the pockets, but to bring it together. And when they bring that automation together, they can share, playbooks can share their experiences, right? And with Kindra and the multiple and the practices they have, right? They really bring that home from an industry perspective. They also bring that home, if you will, from a technology perspective. And they bring that together. So, you know, Kindra in that respect is the glue for our customer success. >>What's news? What's the next big thing that you guys see? Because if this continues down the road, this path, people are gonna get, the winds gonna get the successes. The new beachhead, if you will, is established. You got the edge around the corner. What's next for you guys in the partnership? How do you see it developing? >>No, we're looking at >>No, it's all good. So really, you know, I, I mentioned it earlier and, and the jour the automation journey paralleled by innovation, right? Customers today are automating, they're doing a great job. There's multiple tools out there. We understand we're not gonna be the only tool in the shed, but Ansible can come in and integrate that entire environment. And in a hybrid cloud environment, you want that there, right? I think what next is obviously the hybrid cloud is critical. The edge is critical, right? And I think that, you know, the needs and the requirements that Kindra hears that we have is kind of that future. And, you know, we, we often, often in, in Red Hat, we talk about a north star, right? And when I work with partners, ikin, do we talk about the North Star, where we want to get to? And that is the acceleration of automation. And I think both by the practical aspect of working with our customers and the innovation as partners, as business partners, technology partners will help accelerate >>That. Yeah. Scott, your perspective to bridge to the future is obviously hybrid and edge, how you bringing your customers along? >>Yes. So, so we see, you know, when we talk about my, when I talk about my automation strategy, our automated strategy, right? It's about being automated, orchestrated and intelligent, right? Kind of those, those three layers of the stack. We've been building out a lot of work, what we call our integrated AIOps layer for actionable insights, right? We've got a, you know, a goal to integrate that and, and we have integrated into our automation service for how we're delivering the whole package to our clients so they can better see opportunities for automation. What's the best way to go about it? You know, what are the, what are some of the, the issues they have, vulnerabilities they have in their environment and really bringing it to them in, in a real holistic manner. In fact, we internally, we call it our F five steering wheel, right? Based on the, the race thing, right? >>Because you think about the, the racing cars, f fives know they're right there, right? They got everything they need in front of 'em. Yeah. So our goal is been to, to include that into our automation view and service and build that out, right? So that's one way we're doing it. The additional way is, is through some announcements you probably heard, hopefully heard the last couple weeks through something called Kendra Bridge, right? Kendra Bridge is more the digitization of, of the way we deliver services for our clients to make it easier for them to consume and, and to, to make the barrier to entry for things like getting automation, getting it more in their environment, right? Lower as much as possible, right? So really integrated AIOps kind bridge. Those are really the two ways we see it as, as going forward. >>It's interesting, you know, we live through a lot of these different inflection points in the industry. Every time there's a big inflection point, there's more complexity that needs to be tamed, you know? And so you got innovation. If you got innovation coming and you got the clients wanna simplify and tame the complexity, this is a big part of what you guys do. >>Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, how do we, you know, most, when the clients come to us, right? Like I said, one, it's about trust. They trust us to do it because we can make it easy for them to not have to worry about that, right? Yeah. They don't have to worry about what it takes to secure the environment, manage it, run it, design it, build it for the, the cloud. We give 'em the ability, we give them the ability to focus on their core business while we do the stuff that's important to them, which >>Is absolutely critical that you, you can't emphasize trust in this relationship enough. I wish we had more time, guys, you're gonna have to come back. I think that's basically what this is boil down to. But thanks so much guys for talking with John and me about how Kendra and and Ansible are working together, really enabling your customers to, to unlock the value of automation across their organization and really make some big business changes. We appreciate your insights and your time. Fantastic. Thank you. Happy to do it and happy to do it any time. All right. Our pleasure. Thank you so much for our guests and John Furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago. This is day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 22. Don't go anywhere. Our next guest joins us in just a minute.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I am thrilled to be joined by Ramkumar Pandurangan. He is Practice Leader of the Cloud Advisory and Consulting Organization at Kyndryl. Ram, welcome. >> Thanks for having me, David, it's a pleasure. >> First time on theCUBE I believe. >> Ah, yes it is, so a little excited, and anxious as well, but it's great to be here. >> Fantastic. Well, when we're done, you'll be a CUBE alumni, which is actually a very distinguished badge of honor to have so. So, let's get started. Tell me about Kyndryl. I'm particularly interested in a bit of the history, how did Kyndryl come about? >> Yeah, so -- >> And what do you do now? >> I'm sorry. Before we talk about who we are and what we do, let me talk about Kyndryl's, philosophy, right? Basically so, people don't buy the cloud, people buy outcomes, and with this explosive growth in the market, as well as the complexity in which the technology has evolved, it's very challenging for everybody to find the right partner, as well as who to go to deliver it for them. And we do understand that technology is supposed to help drive your business capabilities, but not hinder. So, Kyndryl's primary philosophy is to how we can help enable our clients get the business capabilities using technology. So, having said that, we are a spinoff from IBM in 2021, and we have a strong base of 90,000 skilled professionals across a hundred countries. And, you know, we have almost 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, and we almost cater half of the Fortune 500 companies, just to give you a background. And we have people across applications, data, AI, you know, network, edge, security and resiliency across the globe, but of course, cloud. >> So, do you work with partners from a cloud perspective? What does that look like? >> We have a whole broad ecosystem of partners, and, you know, anywhere from all the hyper scalers, to all the large product companies. And we understand that with a combined force of our years of experience helping our clients to be successful, partnering with our partners to help drive their capabilities. And you know, let's talk about AWS. Everybody knows that AWS has been a pioneer in the public cloud, coming up with a whole catalog of services, which is there, available for anybody. And I would like to call them as construction materials. Right? So, you could take these services, assemble them, and it could be a simple house, or it could be as big as a very complex model, kind of an environment. So, this is where we partner with AWS and bring our years of experience and help our clients go through the journey and successfully deliver in whatever complexity that they have, their existing environments. So, just an example of how we partner with our partners. >> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. In fact, I heard someone once describe AWS as being like Home Depot, in the sense that they offer all of the bits and bytes. Of course, the AWS folks were like, "What? No, we're nothing like Home Depot!" It's like, well, you kind of are. (laughs) Because it really is important for an organization like Kyndryl to be there, to bridge the divide between the tools and the outcomes, as you mentioned. Well, what are some of the customers, or kinds of customers that you work with in this arena? >> Yeah. So, just to double click on what I said about the 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, we currently manage the top five ad lanes of all ad lanes, we probably manage four of the five largest retailers, and 49% of the mobile connections are supported for the customers, and 61%, or roughly around 60% of the top 50 banks assets are managed by our service. So, we have a huge portfolio across the financial services, public sector, you know, communications, and distribution market across the globe. >> So is it fair to say that each of these customers is somewhere along the digital transformation timeline? Are they all thinking in terms of transforming digitally, what that means? Whether it's application modernization, of course, movement to cloud is part of that, does that sound like the profile of a lot of your customers? >> Exactly. So, each of them are in various, what I call in the paradigm of everybody are trying to modernize, right? Modernization is the way to go. Even though in the last three years we saw that the physical slowdown of the world, like digital transformation took an explosive growth, so everybody realized that not doing the business in a traditional way is going to get to where they want to go. And traditionally, people are cutting costs, or trying to trim down, and trying to see how they can, you know, do incremental modernization. And then they realize, especially in the last three years, that they need to holistically look at how they need to be modernizing it. Right? And that is where either it's a datacenter-driven modernization, or it's an application-centric modernization, which is moving the transformation journey. Or in general, people are holistically looking at how they can improve their overall presence in the digital world. >> So, do you think that the pandemic accelerated that? >> Absolutely. I would say that everybody started realizing how critical, and the businesses who were already a leg up in that world were quickly able to grab that opportunity, and they were able to run with that, and everybody are trying to catch up on that journey. And, you know, a lot of people who started that journey have realized that if they do not have a proper strategy to start off with, they get stuck somewhere. And that is where we can go and help them, wherever they are. >> Talk to me about some of the challenges that you see out in the field working with the actual organizations that are seeking to transform, to go through this digital transformation. What are some of the things that might surprise someone looking in from the outside? >> Again, if you go back to the basics, right, in the digital transformation world, it's not just the technology which is driving everything. People who have not clearly mapped their business objectives to the technology drivers, or the imperatives, are the ones which are, you know, feeling the pinch, that they have some technology driven transformation, but once it is done, they don't see that it's translating back to a business objective which they are trying to accomplish. That's one of the larger things which I see. So, we are trying to go back and help clients to bridge that gap, to make sure that, first, their strategy is in place, and the strategy is holistically looked at. That's one part of it. The second, larger challenge, which I'm seeing a lot of people is, they were able to quickly, you know, grapple around the technology explosion and able to start the journey, but the process and the people associated the transformation regarding those two are a lot more associated with the culture and everything else. So, it's a combination of technical resources, with not able to quickly adapt the operating model, which is the newer operating model required for the digital transformation, are the challenge which is an ongoing one. And none of this is news to anybody, but, practically, when I walk into a company, those are the areas which I continue to see where people are struggling. >> So, Kyndryl isn't solely involved with the virtual movement of workloads from one place to another, you actually work with customers to make those kinds of organizational changes and operational environment changes that need to take place. Is that right? >> Absolutely. So, as I told you, we have a whole suite of clients whom we have been supporting for decades. So, we have one set of those clients who have trusted us for years. And then we have another set of clients who we are providing some kind of services, and now we have newer clients. So between all of them, they're starting to realize that we have the end-to-end capabilities. The differentiator is, we can start from building a business case for somebody, and then strategizing it, creating a roadmap, and then actually doing the design, implement it, and help them to migrate it. And once the migration is done, continue to help optimizing it, and then not only stopping there, but the key thing where everybody have, you know, fallen behind, is how do you operate, manage it once you start migrating it. So, this is where Kyndryl is sitting in a very sweet spot, because we already are managing most of our clients, or we have the client base, they're operating theirs either holistically, or some portions of it, and now when they're trying to go on their journey we are very well suited because we already understand their environment. And while they are transforming into the cloud space, we are also able to bridge that gap by managing their existing and to manage to the cloud. So, we can, end-to-end. >> And yeah, talking about true end-to-end, you know, we're talking to you from AWS Summit New York 2022, of course, so the focus is AWS, but Kyndryl works with other hyperscale cloud partners as well. So I mean, you are primarily an advocate for the customer. Is that a fair? That's what they call in the business "a softball question." (Ramkumar and David laughing) Because if you answer, "no, we're not primarily in involved in the business of advocating for our customers," we should just stop this conversation right now. But seriously, the point is, you are truly an objective consultant in this game. >> Absolutely. Thank you for asking that, (David laughing) because we are a vendor neutral service provider. So we go, and when we walk into the client, we like to hear from the client what their challenges are. Right? Where are they trying to be? If they already started the journey, where they are. They could be anywhere from an on-premises trying to just modernize some aspects of their, you know, operational, or from the application side, or they could be anywhere in the hybrid cloud. And most of them are hybrid multicloud. So, it's not just AWS, it could be Azure, GCP, OCI, Oracle, or IBM cloud. It doesn't matter. We go and meet the client where they are. If they ask us for a point of view, we will provide them once we understand what their objectives, and their technology workloads they are having, and how they want to do it based on that we can. But if they already started journey, we are more than happy to partner with them on any of the cloud journeys. And most of them are in the hybrid multi-cloud as I said, so we are very well suited to help them. And as I said, we are not completely an agnostic service provider. >> Well, if I am an existing business that's seeking to go through digital transformation, I would recognize that there is a lot of power in this idea that you have a history in on-premises IT, going back to, you know, the sort of DNA for IBM global services. And the reason why I think that's important is because anyone can stand up a net new service with nothing existing, in one of the hyperscale clouds. It's a whole different proposition when you have decades of legacy infrastructure and processes that need to be massaged and moved over. I wonder, does Kyndryl get a lot of mileage out of that in terms of being able to say, "Hey, we understand your existing environment because we've been working in this world for decades." Or is the message more, "Hey, we are super cool cloud kids too?" How do you come down on that? Maybe that's a little bit of inside info. (Ramkumar laughing) >> No, the reality on the ground basically, David, is not everybody can move all their workloads to cloud, and not all workloads are suited to go to cloud as well. So, it is us who need to make sure that we can help our clients make the right choices by doing a rationalization of their workloads, and make sure that we understand their business, their end clients whom they're servicing, their capabilities, and then based on that, we can help them to do both, right? Whether it's just on-premises modernization, or help them to take them in a hybrid cloud mode. So the answer is both, right? Even though we currently manage their environment, doesn't mean that we need to continue to support, but, you know, we are moving up the stack to help them, to support them in their hybrid cloud journey as well. And not only that, this gives us a capability or an ability to help them in a much more holistic way by looking at their full ops, right? That's a huge area where people are trying to go into the cloud, or they already started to go into the cloud, but how do they optimize their environment? Right? These are the areas where, and then if you want to modernize some of their operating model, right, how do we deploy the SRE, or the DevSecOps, or the DevOps? So, we kind of look up all those aspects as people are trying to move into the cloud aspect so we can help them both on-premises, or if they want to modernize much more we can do it in the hybrid cloud as well. I don't know whether that fully answered your question. >> Absolutely, it does. In fact, Ram, what you and Kyndryl are doing is what we at theCUBE refer to as having adult conversations about cloud with the clients that you serve. With that, looks like we are at the end of our time together. I really appreciate the chance to hear about what you're doing, and to hear all about Kyndryl. From me, Dave Nicholson, at theCUBE, I'd like to say, stay tuned for a continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022, and always stay tuned to theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2021 virtual; I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great power panel here from Kyndryl whose great company has spun out of IBM. IT services great, technology, great conversation. Scott Kinane, director of worldwide automation, Anand Gopalakrishnan, chief automation architect, love the title, from Kyndryl, and Lisa Chavez, automations architect from Kyndryl. Guys, thanks for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Looking forward to it. >> Thanks John glad to be here. >> Thank you. >> Scott, we covered you guys at IBM Think 2021, the new name, everything's happening. The extreme focus, the tactical execution has been pretty much on cloud, cloud native automation. This is the conversation. Knowing how much has gone behind the new name, can you just take a minute to share, give us an update on who Kyndryl is and how that's going? >> Yeah, I'd love to. You know, as Kyndryl, we really have the privilege of being responsible for designing, building, managing, and modernizing, you know, the mission critical systems that the world depends on every day, you know? When our thousands of clients span every industry and are leaders in their industries, right? You run the mission critical application environments for, you know, seven of the 10 largest airlines, 28 of the top 50 banks, right? All the largest mobile providers. You know, most of the largest retailers out there, and so on and so forth, right? That these companies really trust us to ensure that their business operations are really flawlessly being run. And operating our scale, and with the quality that these clients demand, is only possible by doing enterprise strength automation. Right? It's only, you know, it's not only about reactive automation, but using intelligent automation so we can predict and prevent issues before they really become a problem. Right? And because of our intelligent approach to automation, our clients have a... you know, they get tremendous business benefits for it, right? Retailers can open stores faster because systems and services are deployed more efficiently, right? Banks ATM's right, we all depend on those day to day, you know. They're working when you need them with our automation behind the scenes. You know, healthcare systems are more robust and responsive because we monitor for potential breaks and prevent them before they occur, right. Data processing systems, right. We hear about breaches all the time, right? Our clients are more secure because their environments are checked into, are checked to ensure that security exposures are quickly discovered and intermediated, right? So like automation, orchestration, intelligence, driving the world's digital economy, right. If you ask what Kyndryl is it, you know, that's our DNA. And it's really what we do well. >> Yeah, what's interesting, I want to get you to just quick followup on that because the name implies kind of a fresh perspective, working together. There's a lot of shared experiences and that. And the new normal now is honestly with hybrid and virtual continuing, people are doing things differently. And I would like you, if you don't mind taking a minute to share about the automation environment that you guys are operating in, because it's a different approach, but the game is still the same. Right? (John and Scott laugh) You got to make sure that these things are scaling and people are working again. So it's a combination of people and technology, in a new equation. Take a minute to talk about that. >> Yeah, I'd love to. You know, and you're right, right; the game is really changing. And automation is really ingrained into, needs to be ingrained in the way everybody's approaching what they do day to day. And if you talk about automation, in a way it's really included in what we do in our BAU delivery operations, right. And we do it at a tremendous scale, right. Where we have, you know, millions of infrastructure components and applications managed with automation, right. We're going to talk a little bit about CACF here in a few minutes, right? We've got over half a million devices themselves boarded onto that, and we're running over 11 million automations on a month to month basis through that, through the, the Red Hat technology that that's built on, right. We've got RPA as a key part of our environment, running millions of transactions through that on a yearly basis, right. And our automation's really covering the entire stack, right? It's not just about traditional IT, but we cover public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, you know, network components, applications and business processes, right? You talked about people, right. Help desk, right. We cover automation to automate a lot of the help desk processes are happening behind the scenes; security and resiliency. And it's really about driving all that through, you know, not just prescriptive reactions, but you know, us using our experience; insights we have from our data lakes, and intel, and AI ops technologies, and really making proactive based decisions based on that to really help drive the value back for our clients and to ensure that they're operating the way they need to. >> Yeah, that systems mindset, outcome driven focus is unique. That's awesome, congratulations. And onto Lisa, we're going to get into the architect side of it, because you're seeing more and more automation at the center of all the conversation. Reminds me of the machine learning AI vibe a couple of years ago. It's like, oh yeah, everything's MLAI. Automation, now everything's automation. Anand, your title is chief automation architect, love that title. What do you do? Like, I mean, you're architecting more automation, are you? Could you take a minute to explain your role? I love the title. And automation is really the technology driving a lot of the change. What do you do? >> Thank you, John. So let me first thank you for allowing us to come and speak to you and inform here about what we have done using Ansible and the other Red Hat products. So Ansible is one of the many products that we have used within Red Hat to support the solution that we have deployed, Paul, as our automation community framework, right? So, Scott touched upon it a few minutes earlier in terms of what are we doing for our clients? How do we make sure that our client's environment is secure? How do we make sure that our client environment is available all the time? So that... Are the infrastructure services that we're providing for our clients has a direct impact for their clients. So this is where the implementation of automation using the products that we have from Red Hat has helped us achieve. And we'll continue, we will continue to expand on supporting that, right. So let me break this into two parts. One is from an infrastructure standpoint, how we have implemented the solution and scaled it in such a way that we can support the number of devices that Scott was referring to earlier, And also the number of clients that we have touched on. And the second part, I'll let my colleague Lisa talk about the application architecture and the application scalability that we have, right? So firstly, we touch on infrastructure. So if you look at the way we needed to establish a capability to provide support for our clients, we wanted to make sure our infrastructure is available all the time, right? That's very important. So, before we even basically say, hey, we're going to make sure that our client's infrastructure is available all the time or our client's infrastructure is secure. And also we provide, we are able to provide the automation services for the infrastructure service that we're providing, right? So the stack that we built was to support our solution to be truly cloud native. So we began with of course, using OCP, which is the OpenShift cloud platform that we have. We relied on Red Hat CoreOS, which is basically enabling the automation platform to be deployed as a true cloud native application; that can be scalable to not just within one country, but multiple countries. Supporting data privacy that we need to have, supporting the compliance parts of that we need to support, and scalable to support the half a billion devices that we are supporting today. Right? So essentially, if you look at what we have, is a capability enabled on the entire stack of the Red Hat products that we have. And we are able to focus on ensuring that we are able to provide the automation by gaining efficiencies, right? If you look at a lot of automations that we have it's about biggest in complexities, right? So just think about the amount of risk that we are removing, and the quality that we are assuring from the qualified and standardized changes that we are basically implementing. Or, just, the amount of risk that we are able to eliminate by removing thousands of manual labor hours as well. So if you look at the automation need, it's not just about efficiency of the removal of labor hours, but efficiency of providing standards and efficiency of providing the capabilities that support our clients, who their needs; i.e. making sure that their infrastructure is compliant, their infrastructure is secure, and their infrastructure is highly available all the time. So it just basically making sure that we are able to address what we call as day one and day two activities, while we are able to support their day two infrastructure services activities; i.e. right from ground up. Building the server, which is provisioning, doing some provisioning activities, and deploying applications, and basically supporting the applications once they are deployed. So look at the scale, we have quite a bit there. >> So, you got the cloud native platform... >> Hey, careful Anand... >> You've got the cloud native platform, right? Let me just summarize that; cloud native platform for scale. So that means you're aligning, and targeting, and working with people who will want to do cloud native applications. >> Absolutely. >> And they want fast speed. (John laughing) >> Yes, and they want... >> They want everything to go faster. And by the way, the compliance piece is super important because if you can take that away from them, for waiting for the answers from the compliance department or security department, then that's the flywheel. Is that what you're getting at? This is the trend? >> Absolutely. So I'm going to turn it over to Lisa, who's going to help us. >> Yeah >> Go ahead Lisa >> Lisa, weigh in on the flywheel here. (Lisa chuckles) >> Yeah. Sure, sure. Yeah. So, so one of the things that CACF allows us to do, right, and it's again, as Anand described, `it's a very robust, powerful infrastructure. Supports many, many clients as we run a lot of applications through this infrastructure. And we do things like run security health checks on all our client's servers, and process the data real time and get that data out to our teams to address issues almost immediately, right? Scott touched on the fact that we are monitoring incident data real time and taking automated actions to correct problems in the environment. These are just really, really powerful capabilities that we're able to offer. We also have other use cases, we do a lot of identity management, primary and secondary controls through the CACF infrastructure. So we're able to have one point of connectivity into our client's environments. It's agentless, right, so you set up one connection to their servers and we can do a whole lot of management of various things through this single automation platform. So... >> So I, so that just to call this up, this is actually very powerful. And first of all, you mentioned the CACF that's the cloud automation community framework. >> Yes, correct. >> Right. >> Okay, so that's the platform. (Lisa chuckles) >> Yes >> Okay, so now the platforms' there; and now talk about the advantages. Because the power here is this truly highlights the transformation of DevOps, infrastructure as code, and microservices, coming around the corner where the developer; And I know developers want to build security into the applications from day one and take advantage of new services as they come online. That is now one. That puts the pressure on the old IT teams, the old security teams, who have been the NoOps. No, you can't do or slow, are slower. This is a trend, this is actually happening. And this culture shift is happening. Could you guys weigh in on that because this is a really important part of this story. >> Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you go back, circa 2019 or so, right. You know, we were back then and we were recognized as a leader in the automation space by a lot of the analysts. But we kind of look at that culture change you were just talking about and look at, you know, how do we become more agile? How do we go faster and what we're doing, right. And then I'm working with Jason McKerr and the Red Hat's Ansible automation platform team. We kind of define this platform that Lisa and Anand are talking to, right. Wrapping together, the OpenShift and Ansible, and 3scale with, you know, our services platform with Watson, and, and, you know, it really gave us the ability to leverage two of our core capabilities, right? The first, you know, in order for us to go faster, was our community model, right? Our community experience, right? So we've got a large delivery community that's out there really experts in a lot of, experts in a lot of technologies and industries. And, and by putting this in place, it gave us a way to really leverage them more in that community model development, so they could create, and we can harvest more of the automation playbooks. A lot of the different use cases that Lisa was talking incident remediation, patch scanning and deployment, security compliance, checking and enforcement. You know, basically anything that needs to get done as part of our what we'd call day one or day two operations we do for a client, right. And Steve's approach really to, to do a lot of high quality automation and get to the point where we could get thousands of automation modules that our clients could, that we could use as a part of our, a part of our services we delivered to the client environments. And, you know, that type of speed and agility, and being able to kind of leverage that was something that wasn't there previously. It also gave us a way to leverage, I guess they are one of our other core capabilities, right; which is a systems integrator, right? So we were able to focus more, by having that core engine in place, we were able to form focus more on our integrator experience and integrate, you know, IBM technologies, ServiceNow, ScienceLogic, VMware, and many more, right to the engine itself. So you know, basically, you know, all the applications out there that the, the clients then depend on for their business environments integrate directly with them; so we could more seamlessly bring the automation to their, to their environments, right. So it really gave us both the, the ability to change our culture, have a community model in place that we didn't before and really leveraged that services integrator expertise that we bring to the table, and act really fast on behalf of our clients out there. >> That's great stuff. Lisa, Lisa if you don't mind, could you share your thoughts on what's different about the community platform, and because automation has been around for a while, you do a couple of times, you do something repetitive, you automate it. Automate it out of way, and that's efficiency. Anand was the one saying that. >> Yeah but within Kyndryl, we have a very strong community and we have very strong security guidelines around what the community produces and what we deliver to our clients, right? So, we give our teams a lot of flexibility, but we also make sure that the content is very secure; we do a lot of testing. We have very strong security teams that do actual physical, penetration testing, right. They actually could try and come in and break things. So, you know, we really feel good about, you know, not only do we give our teams the flexibility, but we also, you know, make sure that it's safe for our clients. >> How's the relationship with Ansible evolving? Because as Ansible continues to do well with automation; automations now, like in automation as code, if things are discoverable, reuse is a big topic in the community model. How is Ansible factoring into your success? >> So... So firstly, I want to break this again into two discussions, right? One is the product itself. And second is how we have collaborated very closely with our colleagues at Red Hat, right? So essentially it's the feedback that we get from our clients, which is then fed into our solution, and then from our solution, we basically say, does it meet what our client's requirements are? If it doesn't, then we work with our Red Hat colleagues and say, hey, you know, we need some enhancements to be made. And we've been, we've been lucky enough to work with our colleagues at Red Hat, very closely, where we have been able to make some core product changes to support our clients requirements, right. And that's very, very important in terms of the collaboration from, with Red Hat, from a, you know, from a client standpoint. That's number one. Number two, from a product standpoint, Ansible, and the use of Ansible itself, right? Or Ansible Tower as the automation hub that we've been using. So we began this with a very base product capability, which was through what we call event automation. That was our first. Then we said, no, I think we can certainly look at expanding this to beyond event automation. I.e. can we do, when we say event that is very typically BAU activities, day two activities. But then we said, can we, can we do day one, day two infrastructure services automation? We said yes, why not? And then we worked again with our colleagues at Red Hat, identifying opportunities to improve on those. And we basically enhanced the framework to support those additional use cases that we basically identified. And as a matter of fact, we are continually looking at improving as well. In terms of not just hey, using the base product as is, but also receiving that feedback, giving that feedback to our Red Hat colleagues, and then implementing it as we go. So that's the, that's the approach we have taken. >> And what's the other half of the subject? Split it in two, What's the other half? >> Yep. But the other half is the actual implementation itself. So we like, which is basically expanding the use cases to go from beyond event automation to back from building the server, to also patching compliance. And now we're actually looking at even what we call service requests automation. By this is we basically want to be able to say hey user, we want a specific action to be performed on a particular end point. Can we take it to that next level as well? So that's where we are basically looking at as we progress. So we're not done. I would say we're still at the beginning of expansion. >> Yeah. >> Well no, I totally agree. I think it's early days, and I think a lot of it's, you mentioned day two operations; I love that. Day zero, day one, day two. Does anyone want to take a stab at defining what day two operations is? (John laughing) >> Do you want to go? >> Well, I got the experts here. It's good to get the definitions out there. >> Absolutely. >> 'Cause day one you're provisioned, right? >> Day zero, you provision. >> Day zero you provision. >> So day zero they look at... Yeah, so day zero you look at what is the infrastructure, what's the hardware that's there. And then day one you do what we call post provisioning activities, configuring everything that we need to do, like deploying the middleware applications, making sure the applications are configured properly, making sure that our, you know, the operating systems that we need to have. Whether it is a base operating system or operating systems for supporting the containers that are basically going to be enabled, all those will need to be looked at, right? So that's day one. Then day two is business as usual. >> Everything breaks on day two. (everyone laughs) >> Although I... >> Day one's fun, everything's good, we got everything up and running. We stood it up, and day two it breaks; And like, you know it's his fault. >> Exactly. >> Who's fault is it? (everyone laughing) So if you look at the approach that we took was, we said, let's start with the day two, then get to day zero, right. So which time where we have lots of lessons learned as we go through. And that's the expansion of how we are looking at Ansible. >> Well this is, all fun aside. First of all, it's all fun to have, to have to have jokes like that; but the reality is that the hardened operational discipline required to go beyond day one is critical, right? So this is where we start getting into the ops side where security downtime, disruptive operations, it's got to be programmable. And by the way, automation is in there too. So which means that it's not humans it's software running. Right? So, edge is going to complicate the hell out of that too. So, day two becomes super important from an architecture standpoint. You guys are the architects; what's the strategy, what should people be doing? What, what, how should, because day one is fun. You get it up, stand it up. But then it starts getting benefit; people start paying attention. >> Yep. _ And then you need to scale it and harden it. What's the strategy? What should people do? >> Yeah. I mean, if you think about automation, right? It's not... oh, I should, I meant to say John, you know, if it breaks, it's always Anand's fault, always Anand's. (John, Lisa, and Anand laugh) Don't ask any of that. >> I agree. >> Exactly. Thank you, Lisa. (everyone laughing) But, but automate, you know, you know, automation in a lot of conversations, people talk about it as gaining efficiency. And you know, it's not just that, you know, Automation is about de-risking complexities. Right? Think about all the risk that's removed, you know, and quality assured from the codified and standardized changes, right. Think about all the risk removed from eliminating, you know, tens of thousands of manual labor hours that have to be done. And those various things, right, that get done. So, for, we talk about day two operations, what we're doing, getting more automation in there, you know, our focus is definitely how do we de-risk changes? How do we make it safer for the clients? How do we make it more secure for the clients? And how do we ensure that their business operations, you know, are operating at their peak efficiencies? >> Yeah. And as I mentioned, we really go above and beyond on the security. We have much, much, much automated testing. And we also have the penetration testing I was talking about, so. We take security very seriously. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I think what's interesting about what you guys are doing with the platform is, it's cloud native. You start to see not just the replatforming, but the fun parts. When you start thinking about refactoring applications and benefits start to come out of nowhere; I go new benefits, new net, new use cases. So I think the outcomes side of this is interesting. A lot of people talk about, okay let's focus on the cost, but there's now net new positive, potentially revenue impact for your customers. This is kind of where the game changes a lot. What do you guys think about that; 'cuz that's, you know, you always have this argument with folks who are very cost centric, repatriated for getting off the cloud, or let's look at the net new opportunities that are going to be enabled by rapid programming, identifying new workflows, automating them, and creating value. >> Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, you're talking about the future where we're going, things that we do, you know, obviously getting more closer to, and being directly aligned with the DevSecOps teams that are out there. You talk about day two, you know, the closer we are to those guys, the better for, for us and everybody else that's going there, going forward. You know, and as you know, businesses keep returning to their pre COVID level levels, you know, automation gives the possibility and that ones that we were doing gives possibility for hopefully the clients to do more of that revenue capture, right. Being able to, you know, be ahead a little bit earlier, being able to stand up retail stores faster, right. Being able to deploy business-based applications that are, generating revenue for the clients at a you know, you know, at a moment's notice. Things like that are really possible with automation, and possible with the way we've done this solution with Red Hat and our clients, right. And I think we've got tons of benefits there. We're seeing, you know, we've got almost 900 clients supported on it today, right. You know Anand hit on, we've got half a million plus devices that are connected to this, right. And we're seeing things where, you know, the clients are, are, that are on this are, are getting results, you know, Something such as 61% of all tickets being resolved with no human intervention, you know, 84% of their entire service base server base is being checked automatically for security and compliance daily. And, and, you know, we could go through lots of those different metrics, but the, you know, the fact we can do that for our clients gives, gives through automation, gives, you know, our engineers, our delivery community, the ability to closely more closely work with the client to do those revenue generation activities; to help them capture more, more revenue in the market. >> We'll just put that in context, the scale and speed of what's happening with those numbers; I mean, it's significant. It's not like it's a small little test. That's like large scale. Scale's the advantage of cloud. Cloud is a scale game. The advantage is scaling and handling that scale. What's your thoughts? >> Absolutely. So if you basically, again, when we started this, we started small, right. In terms of the use cases that we wanted to tackle, the number of devices that we said we could basically handle, right. But then once we saw the benefits, the initial benefits of how quickly we were able to fix some of the problems from a day one day, two standpoint; or address some of the compliance and patching issues that we needed to look at, right. We, we quickly saw opportunities and said, how fast can we go? And in terms of, well, it's not just how fast can we go in terms of setting up our own infrastructure by you know, saying, hey, we are cloud native. I can just spin up another container and, you know, make sure that I can have another a hundred servers onboarded to support, or a hundred that network devices to be onboarded to support and so on, right. So it was also the scale from a automation standpoint, where we needed to make sure that our resources were skilled, to develop the automations as well. So the scale is not in terms of just the infrastructure, but the scale is also in terms of people that can do the automation in terms of, you know, providing the services for our infrastructure, right. So that's how we approached it. People and then an application and infrastructure. So that included providing education in, in Kyndryl today rose to about 11,000 people that we have trained on Ansible, the use of Ansible, and the use of Ansible Tower, and just even doing development of the playbooks using Ansible. That's a theme. if you look at, if you look at, it's not just infrastructure scale. It's infrastructure scale, application to be able to scale to that infrastructure, and people to be able to scale to what we're trying to do to support our clients as well. >> I think the people think is huge because you have a side benefit here as harmony, and the teams. You got cohesiveness that breeds peace, not war. (everyone laughs) >> Absolutely. >> That's between teams. >> If you look at the, you know, the words that we said; cloud automation, community framework. If you really break it down, right, it's a framework, but for who? It's for the community. >> Yeah. >> But, what are they doing? They're building automation. >> Yeah >> And that is what >> The Security team wants to, >> the cloud is about, right? >> The security team wants to, make the apps go faster, The apps want to be fast, they don't want to be waiting. Everything's about going faster; Pass, shoot, score, as they say in sports. But, but, okay, I love this conversation. I think it's going to be the beginning of a big wave. How do people engage and how do I get involved if I want to use the cloud automation community framework? What's the consumption side for, how do you guys push this out there, and how do people engage with you? >> Scott do you want to take that one? >> Yeah. I mean the, the easiest way is, you know, Kyndryl, you know, we're, we're out there. We're, coming forward with our company, a spin off from IBM, come engage with our sales reps, come engage with our, our outsourcing, our social risk management service delivery organizations, and, and, you know, happy to get them engaged, get them on board, and get them using the automation framework we've got in place. >> That's awesome. Great. Well, great stuff. Love the automation conversation. Automation and hybrid are the big, big trends that are never going to stop. It's going to be a hybrid world we live in. And the edge is exciting. It's got, you mentioned the edge; it's just more and more action. It's a distributed computing paradigm. I mean, it really the same. We've seen this movie before Anand. Yeah, in tech. So now it's automation. So great stuff. Lisa, thank you for coming on; I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you, John. We have coverage for Ansible Fest 2021. Power panel breaking down automation with Kyndryl. The importance of community, the importance of cohesiveness with teams, but more importantly, the outcome, the speed of development and security. I'm John for theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE.  With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> 'Kay. Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of the theCUBE. We here with a great guest, Maria Winans who's the CMO of the new spin-out, the name, Kyndryl. Maria, great to see you, CUBE alumni, thanks for comin' on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Yes, no, thank you. Happy to be here. >> So, I was really excited about this because the new name has been announced of the spin-out, Kyndryl it's the name. It's been some time. What's been the reception? Well, the strategy and the reception. I want to get into this, the brand. But what's been the reception so far of the name Kyndryl? >> Yeah. So, let me, so, let me start by saying that, really, again, excited to be here. This is Think 2021. And excited to kind of tell you a little bit about Kyndryl. Kyndryl, we announced it on April 12th. It was our reveal of the name, been long anticipated. So, I think the response has been positive. It's been long anticipated and it was very well received by the market, and by our own kind of internal employees that are part of Kyndryl. And the reason being that it's very different, it's very new. And it also signals directly where this company is going, and what this company is about. Because the underlining of the word Kyndryl is twofold. One, it's "kin," which is, stands for kinship. So, it's about partnerships, it's about the relationships, it's about the enduring and nurture relationships that we have work with our customers, as well as our employees, and the way that we work. And "dryl" is from tendril. Tendril is about growth. It's about new growth. It's about continuous growth. So, it's the growth that we want to set this company for, but more importantly, the growth around, you know, in conjunction with our customers. So, kinship, tendril, Kyndryl. And at the heart of our company, it's all about the people. And the relationships with our customers. >> Wow. That's awesome. Well, thanks for giving us some insight into the name. I was going to ask that question but you nailed it. So, I like this because the theme here, "Think" this year. And this is an industry theme, but it's really prominent how you guys are executing with the whole IBM red hat and the whole system coming together with hybrid cloud is, the word ecosystem is, has kind of this new meaning and this vibe of working together in a network effect, creating integrations, so it's like up and down the stack, whether it's technical or personal relationships, or business relationships, there's a communal effect here, whether it's API is integrating together. >> Right. >> Or relationships. So, I love the name. What was the process? I'm always curious like, how long does it take? (chuckles) Sure, it's like. >> Yeah! No, no, no, it's a great question, 'cause it's not like, it's not like we hate you like naming anything, right? It's not like naming your dog like somebody says it's, the corporate naming process is very rigorous. It has been a journey for us like any other corporate business that's naming you know, their strategy, their brand strategy. And we worked with, as you can imagine, with our legal teams, with our regulatory teams, we looked at linguistics. We worked with linguistic experts from around the world, over 70 because we're global company. So, it was very important for us, not only to understand how Kyndryl would land in our global markets, but more importantly also, is what it would stand for. And so we did a lot of interviews with our employees, we did interviews with obviously, with our customers and prospects. We looked at trends, we looked at our competitors, we did market research. And what, you know, and within that, we wanted to land on something that really was at the heart of what this company was about. And after all of those kind of legalities that we went to, it was, we were very, very fortunate that at the top of our list, was actually one of our favorites from the beginning. And that was Kyndryl because at the heart of Kyndryl, it really is about our people. And that's what really what we wanted this company to stand for. This is a business, that in a company, that at its foothold, is 90,000 experts in their field that are going to be part of this amazing company. And what we wanted to do is speak to what was that the kind of at the core of the idea behind this brand. What did we want to stand for and what were we going to be. And that it was that we were going to be a brand that stood at the heart of progress. That's our brand idea for not only the businesses that we are part of or with, but at the heart of progress, and at the core was our people and the work that we do. The work that we do for our customers. So, it's super exciting to be able to land on something that really can represent that and also differentiates us from the rest of our competitors in the market. >> So, I love the overview. Just real quick question on the language thing, was there, does it mean the same thing in different languages? >> Yeah, and that's something that now is what we're working on is, how do we land it into all the different markets in the appropriate meaning, again, that stands for relationships and growth. Relationships and growth. And that's the work that we have to do across all of our major markets where we do business. And that's the exciting part, to kind of work with our local teams. Because this company at its foothold, is what the work that we do in the markets that we compete with our people, and with our customers. >> You know, got to ask, you know what, I remember I look at some of the branding exercises that I've been involved in and talk to experts because I'm not a brand expert, but I see a lot of like, there's a lot of work that goes into it. You mentioned a little bit, insight into how that is there. Is there like an architecture for the brand strategy, 'cause you, at a high level, I love what you're bringing in, kind of the purpose of the brand. What's the brand strategy for Kyndryl? You mentioned some of the core principles, first principles. Is there like an architecture where here's the purpose, here's our mission, and here's like the founding principles. Take us through the brand strategy of Kyndryl. >> Yeah. Well, and at the heart, there is a brand idea, right? It is a little bit of what I talked about. The brand idea is that we are at the heart of progress. The people and the work that we do. And so, one of the things that we wanted to do is really look at the art and the science, bring humanity into the way that we were going to activate this brand. And that really is where our brand idea came about which is at the heart of progress. At the heart of progress because our purpose as a brand is that together, and that is at all levels together, each of us, you know, advances the vital systems that power human progress. Together, each of us advance the vital systems that power human progress. That is our purpose as a company. And the idea, the brand idea is that, you know, at a nutshell, we're at the heart of progress for our customers, for each other. And underlining that, it's about the beliefs. We want to really look at how do we instill this healthy digital economy to ensure that we accelerate humanity's progress. You know, and so that's, you know, the whole idea of healthy relationships, purposeful relationships that are about long-term and sustainability with our customers. The openness that we want to encourage in the diverse perspectives across our company. To promote stronger partnerships with our customers and with our strategic partners. And then more importantly, it really had to represent the belief that the right people, the right teams with the right mindset can do anything. And you know, that they want, anything can be accomplished. Again, at the heart where the people. But what was also important in this, is that we worked on our brand strategy and our purpose, our brand ideas, and what were going to be our beliefs around enduring relationships, open partnerships, right skills, right people. But at the same time, there was a culture platform. We wanted to be everything that we have been at IBM, brought the greatness of being part of the IBM company, but more importantly, and what our customers look to us for, but then more importantly, what is it that we want to lean into as we move forward? And what was very important was, how do we activate our experts and really bring the continuum that what our customers expect from us, the expertise, and that we're about with our people, and lean into this, we want to have and activate a culture where our people continue to be these devoted experts that are all about how they're focused and committed to shared success with our customers. We're empathetic and curious about really understanding where our customers are today, and where they want to go tomorrow. We're restless. And that's another word that we want to really activate in our culture was, we're restless. And that means we are continuously improving ourselves, our skills, and focused on the opportunity, and every opportunity with bringing energy and bringing excitement to the work that we do. And then we're anticipating, we're anticipating the what next. Bringing insights and looking at making these kind of connections outside of where our customers may be today, opportunities for tomorrow. And that really is at the heart of our culture platform that we developed in conjunction with our brand strategy in support of continuing to do business with our customers in the way that we have been and what they expect from us coming from IBM, but the platform that we're setting forward. >> That's a great master class gem you dropped there in terms of brand architecture and vision, great culture. I love the progress because it feels like that's what people want. They want to move faster and they want a positive future. And I think this idea of, you know, open, innovation, progress, inclusiveness, inclusion, diversity, community, it's the new way of working. What's, what do you look for in the future as this all comes together? What's most exciting to you? About the future- >> Yeah, what's exciting is that this company is about the service and our people. You know, so as part of any new independent company, at the heart of what we do, is, and really our offering, or the people. And that's why it's super important that here we are a company that is at the heart of progress because of the people and the work that we do. We design, we run, we manage the most modern, you know, efficient, and reliable technology that our customers expect from us. And they run crucial, crucial parts of their organizations, their business. You know, we're the heart and lungs, we're essential to these customers. And that's the opportunity ahead, is how do we continue to build those enduring relationships, and more importantly, what excites me as CMO for this brand is that the heart of what I get to do is really, our brand is our people. And how do we best show up, every single day. And how do we build a culture because building a culture is how you show up for each other, how you show up for your customers, and how you continuously improve and lean on each other in the way that we kind of have set ourselves forward. So, that to me is exciting to really work at the heart of progress because of the people, and then the work that we do for our customers. >> That's super exciting. I love that cultural vibe because what that is, is that's the future. And now, as people are connected, whether they're go back to hybrid office or remote, the working together progress creates bonds of creation. This co-creation, somethin' that we love here at theCUBE, we love working with you guys, co-creating content together. These experiences of the creation together, the solutions for the future really makes a big difference. This is game-changing as a psychology, also people want to be part of that. And that creates these expert, network, it creates the people value, the inclusiveness. If you can thread that needle, it's a magical formula. Don't you agree? >> Right. No, totally agree, it creates belief. And as much as that we like to say, we're super excited about the name, we're super, super excited about the way we're showing up. I don't know if you've seen even the brand creative, very different colors, very different twist on the way that our brand's written in a very warm red. That what's exciting about it is, you know, is the best of companies are not just the brand and the logo. It's really the brand experience. And that is the way that we need to show up with our best of service with the customer, you know, interactions that are best in class. And a culture platform that really you know, provides that experience and shows up as a company that Kyndryl has the opportunity to be and grow to be. >> Maria Winans, CMO, Kyndryl, great to talk to you. What a great career you've having, what a run. You're on a great wave here with a great brand, great brand promise. Love the progress, love the culture, love the name. Congratulations, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> No, thank you, and thank you for having me here. Appreciate it. >> Okay. This is IBM Think 2021 Cube coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (techno music) ♪ Da di ya ♪ ♪ Da ♪ ♪ Di ♪ (graphics tinkle)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The technology spending outlook is not pretty and very much unpredictable right now. The negative sentiment is of course being driven by the macroeconomic factors in earnings forecasts that have been coming down all year in an environment of rising interest rates. And what's worse, is many people think earnings estimates are still too high. But it's understandable why there's so much uncertainty. I mean, technology is still booming, digital transformations are happening in earnest, leading companies have momentum and they got cash runways. And moreover, the CEOs of these leading companies are still really optimistic. But strong guidance in an environment of uncertainty is somewhat risky. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights Powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we share takeaways from ETR'S latest spending survey, which was released to their private clients on October 21st. Today, we're going to review the macro spending data. We're going to share where CIOs think their cloud spend is headed. We're going to look at the actions that organizations are taking to manage uncertainty and then review some of the technology companies that have the most positive and negative outlooks in the ETR data set. Let's first look at the sample makeup from the latest ETR survey. ETR captured more than 1300 respondents in this latest survey. Its highest figure for the year and the quality and seniority of respondents just keeps going up each time we dig into the data. We've got large contributions as you can see here from sea level executives in a broad industry focus. Now the survey is still North America centric with 20% of the respondents coming from overseas and there is a bias toward larger organizations. And nonetheless, we're still talking well over 400 respondents coming from SMBs. Now ETR for those of you who don't know, conducts a quarterly spending intention survey and they also do periodic drilldowns. So just by the way of review, let's take a look at the expectations in the latest drilldown survey for IT spending. Before we look at the broader technology spending intentions survey data, followers of this program know that we reported on this a couple of weeks ago, spending expectations that peaked last December at 8.3% are now down to 5.5% with a slight uptick expected for next year as shown here. Now one CIO in the ETR community said these figures could be understated because of inflation. Now that's an interesting comment. Real GDP in the US is forecast to be around 1.5% in 2022. So these figures are significantly ahead of that. Nominal GDP is forecast to be significantly higher than what is shown in that slide. It was over 9% in June for example. And one would interpret that survey respondents are talking about real dollars which reflects inflationary factors in IT spend. So you might say, well if nominal GDP is in the high single digits this means that IT spending is below GDP which is usually not the case. But the flip side of that is technology tends to be deflationary because prices come down over time on a per unit basis, so this would be a normal and even positive trend. But it's mixed right now with prices on hard to find hardware, they're holding more firms. Software, you know, software tends to be driven by lock in and competition and switching costs. So you have those countervailing factors. Services can be inflationary, especially now as wages rise but certain sectors like laptops and semis and NAND are seeing less demand and maybe even some oversupply. So the way to look at this data is on a relative basis. In other words, IT buyers are reporting 280 basis point drop in spending sentiment from the end of last year. Now, something that we haven't shared from the latest drilldown survey which we will now is how IT bar buyers are thinking about cloud adoption. This chart shows responses from 419 IT execs from that drilldown and depicts the percentage of workloads their organizations have in the cloud today and what the expectation is through years from now. And you can see it's 27% today and it's nearly 50% in three years. Now the nuance is if you look at the question, that ETRS, it's they asked about IaaS and PaaS, which to some could include on-prem. Now, let me come back to that. In particular, financial services, IT, telco and retail and services industry cited expectations for the future for three years out that we're well above the average of the mean adoption levels. Regardless of how you interpret this data there's most certainly plenty of public cloud in the numbers. And whether you believe cloud is an operating environment or a place out there in the cloud, there's plenty of room for workloads to move into a cloud model well beyond mid this decade. So you know, as ho hum as we've been toward recent as-a-service models announced from the likes of HPE with GreenLake and Dell with APEX, the timing of those offerings may be pretty good actually. Now let's expand on some of the data that we showed a couple weeks ago. This chart shows responses from 282 execs on actions their organizations are taking over the next three months. And the Deltas are quite traumatic from the early part of this charter than the left hand side. The brown line is hiring freezes, the black line is freezing IT projects, and the green line is hiring increases and that red line is layoffs. And we put a box around the sort of general area of the isolation economy timeframe. And you can see the wild swings on this chart. By mid last summer, people were kickstarting things and more hiring was going on and the black line shows IT project freezes, you know, came way down. And now, or on the way back up as our hiring freezes. So we're seeing these wild swings in organizational actions and strategies which underscores the lack of predictability. As with supply chains around the world, this is likely due to the fact that organizations, pre pandemic they were optimized for efficiency, not a lot of waste rather than business resilience. Meaning, you know, there's again not a lot of fluff in the system or if there was it got flushed out during the pandemic. And so the need for productivity and automation is becoming increasingly important, especially as actions that solely rely on headcount changes are very, very difficult to manage. Now, let's dig into some of the vendor commentary and take a look at some of the names that have momentum and some of the others possibly facing headwinds. Here's a list of companies that stand out in the ETR survey. Snowflake, once again leads the pack with a positive spending outlook. HashiCorp, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Freshworks and ServiceNow, they round out the top six. Microsoft, they seem to always be in the mix, as do a number of other security and related companies including CyberArk, Zscaler, CloudFlare, Elastic, Datadog, Fortinet, Tenable and to a certain extent Akamai, you can kind of put them sort of in that group. You know, CDN, they got to worry about security. Everybody worries about security, but especially the CDNs. Now the other software names that are highlighted here include Workday and Salesforce. On the negative side, you can see Dynatrace saw some negatives in the latest survey especially around its analytics business. Security is generally holding up better than other sectors but it's still seeing greater levels of pressure than it had previously. So lower spend. And defections relative to its observability peers, that's really for Dynatrace. Now the other one that was somewhat surprising is IBM. You see the IBM was sort of in that negative realm here but IBM reported an outstanding quarter this past week with double digit revenue growth, strong momentum in software, consulting, mainframes and other infrastructure like storage. It's benefiting from the Kyndryl restructuring and it's on track IBM to deliver 10 billion in free cash flow this year. Red Hat is performing exceedingly well and growing in the very high teens. And so look, IBM is in the midst of a major transformation and it seems like a company that is really focused now with hybrid cloud being powered by Red Hat and consulting and a decade plus of AI investments finally paying off. Now the other big thing we'll add is, IBM was once an outstanding acquire of companies and it seems to be really getting its act together on the M&A front. Yes, Red Hat was a big pill to swallow but IBM has done a number of smaller acquisitions, I think seven this year. Like for example, Turbonomic, which is starting to pay off. Arvind Krishna has the company focused once again. And he and Jim J. Kavanaugh, IBM CFO, seem to be very confident on the guidance that they're giving in their business. So that's a real positive in our view for the industry. Okay, the last thing we'd like to do is take 12 of the companies from the previous chart and plot them in context. Now these companies don't necessarily compete with each other, some do. But they are standouts in the ETR survey and in the market. What we're showing here is a view that we like to often show, it's net score or spending velocity on the vertical axis. And it's a measure, that's a measure of the net percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular platform. So ETR asks, are you spending more or less? They subtract less from the mores. I mean I'm simplifying, but that's what net score is. Now in the horizontal axis, that is a measure of overlap which is which measures presence or pervasiveness in the dataset. So bigger the better. We've inserted a table that informs how the dots in the companies are positioned. These companies are all in the green in terms of net score. And that right most column in the table insert is indicative of their presence in the dataset, the end. So higher, again, is better for both columns. Two other notes, the red dotted line there you see at 40%. Anything over that indicates an highly elevated spending momentum for a given platform. And we purposefully took Microsoft out of the mix in this chart because it skews the data due to its large size. Everybody else would cluster on the left and Microsoft would be all alone in the right. So we take them out. Now as we noted earlier, Snowflake once again leads with a net score of 64%, well above the 40% line. Having said that, while adoption rates for Snowflake remains strong the company's spending velocity in the survey has come down to Earth. And many more customers are shifting from where they were last year and the year before in growth mode i.e. spending more year to year with Snowflake to now shifting more toward flat spending. So a plus or minus 5%. So that puts pressure on Snowflake's net score, just based on the math as to how ETR calculates, its proprietary net score methodology. So Snowflake is by no means insulated completely to the macro factors. And this was seen especially in the data in the Fortune 500 cut of the survey for Snowflake. We didn't show that here, just giving you anecdotal commentary from the survey which is backed up by data. So, it showed steeper declines in the Fortune 500 momentum. But overall, Snowflake, very impressive. Now what's more, note the position of Streamlit relative to Databricks. Streamlit is an open source python framework for developing data driven, data science oriented apps. And it's ironic that it's net score and shared in is almost identical to those of data bricks, as the aspirations of Snowflake and Databricks are beginning to collide. Now, however, the Databricks net score has held up very well over the past year and is in the 92nd percentile of its machine learning and AI peers. And while it's seeing some softness, like Snowflake in the Fortune 500, Databricks has steadily moved to the right on the X axis over the last several surveys even though it was unable to get to the public markets and do an IPO during the lockdown tech bubble. Let's come back to the chart. ServiceNow is impressive because it's well above the 40% mark and it has 437 shared in on this cut, the largest of any company that we chose to plot here. The only real negative on ServiceNow is, more large customers are keeping spending levels flat. That's putting a little bit pressure on its net score, but that's just conservatives. It's kind of like Snowflakes, you know, same thing but in a larger scale. But it's defections, the ServiceNow as in Snowflake as well. It's defections remain very, very low, really low churn below 2% for ServiceNow, in fact, within the dataset. Now it's interesting to also see Freshworks hit the list. You can see them as one of the few ITSM vendors that has momentum and can potentially take on ServiceNow. Workday, on this chart, it's the other big app player that's above the 40% line and we're only showing Workday HCM, FYI, in this graphic. It's Workday Financials, that offering, is below the 40% line just for reference. Now let's talk about CrowdStrike. We attended Falcon last month, CrowdStrike's user conference and we're very impressed with the product visio, the company's execution, it's growing partnerships. And you can see in this graphic, the ETR survey data confirms the company's stellar performance with a net score at 50%, well above the 40% mark. And importantly, more than 300 mentions. That's second only to ServiceNow, amongst the 12 companies that we've chosen to highlight here. Only Microsoft, which is not shown here, has a higher net score in the security space than CrowdStrike. And when it comes to presence, CrowdStrike now has caught up to Splunk in terms of pervasion in the survey. Now CyberArk and Zscaler are the other two security firms that are right at that 40% red dotted line. CyberArk for names with over a hundred citations in the security sector, is only behind Microsoft and CrowdStrike. Zscaler for its part in the survey is seeing strong momentum in the Fortune 500, unlike what we said for Snowflake. And its pervasion on the X-axis has been steadily increasing. Again, not that Snowflake and CrowdStrike compete with each other but they're too prominent names and it's just interesting to compare peers and business models. Cloudflare, Elastic and Datadog are slightly below the 40% mark but they made the sort of top 12 that we showed to highlight here and they continue to have positive sentiment in the survey. So, what are the big takeaways from this latest survey, this really quick snapshot that we've taken. As you know, over the next several weeks we're going to dig into it more and more. As we've previously reported, the tide is going out and it's taking virtually all the tech ships with it. But in many ways the current market is a story of heightened expectations coming down to Earth, miscalculations about the economic patterns and the swings and imperfect visibility. Leading Barclays analyst, Ramo Limchao ask the question to guide or not to guide in a recent research note he wrote. His point being, should companies guide or should they be more cautious? Many companies, if not most companies, are actually giving guidance. Indeed, when companies like Oracle and IBM are emphatic about their near term outlook and their visibility, it gives one confidence. On the other hand, reasonable people are asking, will the red hot valuations that we saw over the last two years from the likes of Snowflake, CrowdStrike, MongoDB, Okta, Zscaler, and others. Will they return? Or are we in for a long, drawn out, sideways exercise before we see sustained momentum? And to that uncertainty, we add elections and public policy. It's very hard to predict right now. I'm sorry to be like a two-handed lawyer, you know. On the one hand, on the other hand. But that's just the way it is. Let's just say for our part, we think that once it's clear that interest rates are on their way back down and we'll stabilize it under 4% and we have clarity on the direction of inflation, wages, unemployment and geopolitics, the wild swings and sentiment will subside. But when that happens is anyone's guess. If I had to peg, I'd say 18 months, which puts us at least into the spring of 2024. What's your prediction? You know, it's almost that time of year. Let's hear it. Please keep in touch and let us know what you think. Okay, that's it for now. Many thanks to Alex Myerson. He is on production and he manages the podcast for us. Ken Schiffman as well is our newest addition to the Boston Studio. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hoff is our EIC, editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE. He does some wonderful editing for us. Thank you all. Remember all these episodes, they are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante. Or feel free to comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. If you haven't checked that out, you should. It'll give you an advantage. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights Powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (soft upbeat music)

>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World 2022 Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited I dunno if you heard that. A group behind me very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave Vallante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johnston, the SVP of channel from Equinix. Jules, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> And those people back there are very excited if you heard that. Big applause going went live. So the vibe here is fantastic for the first live Dell Technologies World since 2019, a lot of people here, this expo hall is packed, lot of momentum here but there's also a lot of momentum at Equinix. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Well, you know, so many exciting things for Equinix and, you know, in this partnership of Dell, it sort of gives us a chance to share that with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about, and we just, we named to the Fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively but underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continents in 66 markets, but then interconnecting them so they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds, they have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers. So that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint, has set us on the path we're on today which we're very grateful to be at in and really the things that are happening with Equinix and Dell together couldn't be more of the moment. >> Talk to me about that. The last two years, the moments of the last two years have been very challenging. >> They have been. >> For everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >> Well, you know, we at together, Dell and Equinix what we're doing is really helping our shared interface customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation and digital transformation is hard, it's not of one and done and it's not an overnight solution and so what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell IT stack in an Equinix data center, to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to our all the clouds and everything else they need to participate in the ecosystem and then pairing that with, you know these interconnected enterprises. So Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution OnPrem, some of their solution in the cloud, access public clouds and use that collectively to define what we're calling the intelligent edge together and that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers, but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >> Eqiuinix's an amazing company, like you said, I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart it'll blow your mind, really incredibly successful and part of the reason is funny, you know, 10, 15 years ago people thought, well, oh, 10 years ago anyway, the cloud is going to hurt companies like Equinix. It was exact opposite and that's because, you know Charles Phillips used to joke, friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Yes. >> Right? And it's not a good use of capital for most companies unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course you have some of your own as a service offerings. >> We do. >> What's the overlap with Dell? How do they compliment each other? >> It's a good question because, you know, and we get that are you and Dell in fact competitors? And no we see them as wholly complimentary and in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call PowerEdge which involves their servers and PowerStore which involves their storage and then VxRail which is really the hyperconverged infrastructure and those are a few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell and if you think about metal and it's Equinix Metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance have the equipment placed in our data center so that they can access that capacity and according to spikes or needs that they have. That equipment in our data centers that's there for them to avail themselves to that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare metal as a service together. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from your partner community in terms of the partnership with Dell? Are partners must be excited the momentum there. What's going on in the partner community? >> So, you know, that's what near and dear to my heart since that's what I'm responsible for Equinix's global partnerships, and they are very excited about what we're doing with Dell and to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell so it makes sense that we bring it together. So, you know, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who we'll meet with the AT&T, Orange Business Services, those folks in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kyndryl, Deloitte, Accenture, Wipro all, DXC, all of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call power three that together we're better because as much as Dell and Equinix are delivering, the customers most often don't have the experience they need to execute it without a partner so they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own and so if they're excited about it, it's a big opportunity for them from a revenue services and an opportunity for them to step into a next level trusted advisor status so partners are excited and we're going to be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. >> Do you see Equinix, you know, 'cause these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships, it's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and growing. Are you a dot connector in a way? Can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >> Well, so our ecosystems that we provide wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, to the internet, things many and content providers that we are, we do see it as our role to, you know, the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers on six continents that provide those ecosystems, it is our mission to continue to grow that and enrich it because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider and it's the combination of the ecosystem that you find and the people you can connect to at Equinix and then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >> And there's a lot of technology underneath these, it's that first layer one I guess if you will of the data center, right? And so a lot of your customers or your partners customers, they just don't want to be in that business as we were saying before, I mean it's just too expensive, the power requirements are going through the roof so you got to be really good at managing power. >> You do. In fact, you know, so first of all, you're right, it's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that kind of commitment to keep a data center they would manage themselves at the level that Equinix is able to invest so it's very difficult for people to do it themselves but even show, another point you mentioned actually about the power is near and dear to our hearts because Equinix is super committed to sustainability and so we've made a commitment to wholly renewable energy and it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives or partners like AT&T meet their connected climate goals. So we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, so that, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. >> And that's, how do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air or is it being near the Columbia River? What's your strategy in that regard? >> It's sustainable. I have to be honest to you. I would be out of my depth if I didn't say. >> This is at high level. >> So we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that and then experts. People who, you know who all they do is really help us to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that and then also to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six continents it's not the same options to reduce your power consumption and your burden are different in Africa as we just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India or than they are in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that. >> But you're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >> And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it and we do see other people following which is a good thing for all of us. >> Well how important is that in your partnership conversations that partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has? >> Partners care a lot about it but customers ask us both all the time. I mean, we increasingly see a portion of an RFP or a scope of work asking, before I decide to go with Equinix and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment, tell me about your commitment and so we are committed to it but customers are demanding it too. >> So it's com-- >> Where do you. Go ahead please. >> Oh I was just going to say, it's coming from the voice of the customer which EquinIx is listening to we know Dell is listening to it as well. >> I'm sorry one more time? >> That the sustainability of the ESG demand is coming from the customers you were saying? >> It both, like I mean, we want to do the right thing and we've made commitments to it but our customers are holding us accountable to it and, you know, sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us and it is for companies like Dell and it is for our partners and customers. >> It really is. I mean, it's up there with security. >> It is. >> In terms of the board level conversation. Where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the next, let's call it three to five years? In your business you can look out that far. >> Well, you know, I think that they, our partners, and that I mean Dell's and our mutual partners, you know, we've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinix and Dell so our partners are going to be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey, whether they want to buy Apex as a service, whether they want to buy Equinix Metal, whether they want to have a partner put together bespoke do it yourself combination with other services. I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are going to embrace multiple versions of that so that they can, you know, to meet the customer where they are and take them. >> Well that's incredibly important these days to meet the customer where they are. The customers have a lot of choice. >> It is. >> But everything that we're all doing is for the customer ultimately at the end of the day. >> Yes, it is and, you know, the customers are getting savvier but we are all still early in this journey, as far as the edge, you know, I mean, I think we're all still grappling that. For right now we like to say that as customers are looking to define that, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an awfully robust set of choices for now and then we want to continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >> Well that's the thing about your business, it's optionality. I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. >> You can. >> And you can put anything in your data center, that's IT. >> You can, but you may not know what you need yet and so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions architects and our sales people together with Dell talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of OnPrem and in an Equinix data center and maybe some public and future proofing, leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud-based services a year to five years from now than the year you're even thinking about today and they may expand their edge over time because they may sort of see that at the customer end point. Today most businesses are still sort of using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change and so we want to be there when it does. >> Yeah, that's a great point because you don't want to necessarily have to rip it out every couple of years if you can have an architecture that can grow. Yeah sure, you might want to upgrade it. >> Well, and that's one of the most appealing things about services like metal, where they also, they do sort of prevent that sort of rip and replace but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So you know, this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages, and being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinix data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. >> Have you also seen this, you mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in the last few years, how much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap, on folks coming to Equinix saying help, we don't have the resources here to do this ourselves? >> We have been fortunate to to be... If you're asking about how the reservation has affected us as a company. >> No your customers. >> Oh our customers it has. >> Yes. >> Oh, okay. >> Yes. >> So it is a challenge for them but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent but partners are filling that gap and we've at Equinix have been fortunate to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest and so we put them together with our partners and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >> Well that's the most important thing, filling those gaps. >> You ever been inside one of these ultra modern data centers? >> I have not, not yet. >> It's pretty cool, isn't it? I mean-- >> Have you ever had a tour of one? >> I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind. >> Well I mean, they come with all the requisite, bio metrics and man traps and all of the sort bells and whistles that are actually the first layer of physical security, but then once you get into the data center then we have sort of, we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. So it's-- >> Yeah, it's good and you know, it's not like you drive by the data center and there's a big sign that says here's the data center, it is kind of, they're trying to stay a little hidden and then it's, getting in it's like getting into fork knots. It's probably harder but then, it's like this giant clean room, right? It's amazingly clean and just huge. It'll blow your mind. >> Inside these data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside the most direct RomReps to the cloud so you would expect. There's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure, clean-- >> Cooling systems and power systems and it's just. >> Pristine environment for sure. >> Amazing engineering. >> It is. >> So I need a tour. >> You should. Do you let people tour your data centers? >> Well I will bring both of you on a tour. >> Awesome. >> Be my guests. >> I would love to. Yeah, great. >> It sounds fantastic. >> We'd love to. >> So last couple-- >> We'll bring a camera. (both laugh) Oh, no, not allowed. >> Not today. No phones, no phones sequester. >> So what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we we've all gotten to be together in so long? >> So well, you know, we are excited about the conversations that we're going to have power of three that I was talking about. So you know, we really pride ourselves on sort of having that combination add up to more to benefit the customer and so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts for Equinix and Dell will meet with, you know almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us so I am most excited about those conversations and about the education I'm going to get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently because that is good choice for the market, that is good choice for the customer set so for the enterprises out there so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Awesome, sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week, but thank you for coming on Jules talking about-- >> Oh, my pleasure >> An hour of Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner, your program is growing and of course the momentum of the company. Can't wait to see what happens next year. >> Thank you. Thank you, we will aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. >> Thanks Jules. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's Live Coverage day one Dell Technologies World Live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got three great guests here to talk about IBM Cloud Satellite and AI operations. Laura Guio, GM of Global Cisco Alliance. Matthew Angelstad, IBM Partner, Lead Client Partner for Canada, Financial Services. And Kuberan Kandasamy, VP of Personal Insurance at Economical Insurance. Folks, thanks for coming on theCUBE, this great panel on Cloud Satellite and AI ops. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John, good to see you. >> Well, first, let's start with you. There's the General Manager for the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. Tell us more about the relationship as cloud has become hybrid and it's pretty much determined that's the standard and multicloud is right around the corner. The programmability of the infrastructure is critical. And so, obviously you can see the modern applications are doing that. Take us through the IBM-Cisco strategic partnership. >> Absolutely, so John, as you know, and we've talked in the past, it's a 25-year relationship between IBM and Cisco, long-standing. Now, if you look at Cisco in the past, they've really been known as a networking and hardware company. But with the evolution of Cisco and how they're changing, they're really switching to be more around a supporting technology and in the services and software areas. With that change coupled with Kyndryl, our spin-off of what we were previously calling NewCo, we have an opportunity now to refocus all of the work that we're doing as IBM and Cisco going forward. You couple that with the Red Hat acquisition that we did almost two years ago, we've got a three-way partnership here that's really bringing a lot of value to the marketplace. Now, when you look at that from a hybrid cloud perspective, we announced our Satellite product, which is built on top of Cisco technology with IBM in that as well. And then really taking the security elements of what Cisco does and bringing all of this into the fold around that hybrid cloud solution. So, we're super excited about this. >> Real quick while I have you, you brought up a couple of key points. I just want to get to, I know we're going to get to it later, but the operating model has shifted. You mentioned with the NewCo and these relationships, ecosystem relationships and network effect, not just like packets, but like businesses and APIs are critical. This new cloud operating model is really the center of that equation. How does that relate into all that? >> So, you know, these operating models and how we're going to market here is changing dramatically. And you take what Cisco's doing, and you know, we've got a client here with us today, Kuberan who's going to talk about what they're doing with some of this technology. But really taking that at the core of how do you bring value at the client. What are they doing to get that hybrid cloud solution put into place? And then what are all those surrounding elements around software, managing the ops and things that we need? This is where IBM and Cisco couple together, really great value. >> Kuberan, you got teed up beautifully there. So, I want to go to you and then I'll go to Matthew after. But, okay, tell us more about this IBM-Cisco dynamic. You guys are a hot growth company doing very well and continuing to grow. And sure, post-pandemic is looking good too. So, take us through why you decided to engage IBM and Cisco. >> Sure. Sure, John, thank you. You know, to appreciate how we got here and why we asked IBM and Cisco to help us, let me first start by providing some background. Our journey started back in 2016 when we launched Sonnet, an MVP. Sonnet is our fully automated, direct-to-customer digital channel, where customers can quote and buy home and auto policies online without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Then in 2018, we launched Vyne, another MVP. Vyne is our simplified self-serve and digitized broker channel, where our broker partners can quote and buy home and auto insurance policies for their customers, again, without the need to engage anyone at Economical. Both Sonnet and Vyne have won awards for innovation and both have been industry disruptors. You know, after launch, we heightened our focus on enhancing business functionality and user experiences. Given that we had started with MVPs, it made sense for us to put a lot of emphasis on enhancements initially. And, you know, we maintain the platform level monitoring capabilities at a macro level. And the way we did the enhancements where we stood up agile pods, you know, focused on very specific business mandate. This approach delivered desired results for our business, but as our excitement grew for our upcoming IPO and our business started ramping up their growth plans, we needed to increase our focus on fine-tuning key components, which included enhancing our focus on stability and predictability for our Sonnet and Vyne platforms. And we needed the ability to look deeper and get into the micro level, so that we can monitor the pulse of, you know, every component of our user's journey across both Sonnet and Vyne, and we needed help with this. And this is where we engaged IBM and Cisco to help us through this journey. >> On that vision real quick. How does the AI fit in? More on the automation side or on the app side? I mean, I can imagine with that growth in the IPO, you think in automation, I'm assuming, can you elaborate quickly? >> Absolutely. So, I mean, if you think about it, it's a lot of data that we get, like it's all digitized, so we have a lot of data in there. And this is where, you know, the ability to be able to actually mine that data and actually be taking proactive steps in terms of predicting, having predictability and all that, that's where the AI ops comes in. But that's part of our journey through this. >> Yeah, it's good. I mean, the theme here is transformation is the innovation at scale. Matthew, you lead the Financial Services division in Canada. What are you seeing as the hot topics with your clients and how are you responding? How is IBM participating? >> Yeah, absolutely. And Kuberan was touching on this from Economical's perspective. They already have two leading digital solutions in market with Sonnet on the retail customer side in Vyne with their broker network. But what we're seeing even more so in the past year so of the pandemic is a dramatic acceleration of that end-to-end digital experience. So, our clients and their customers are expecting digital native solutions that are contextually personalized, highly secure and always available or extremely resilient, right? That obviously plays into IBM's capabilities and our joint capabilities with our partner ecosystem such as Cisco AppDynamics around hybrid, multicloud and AI. >> So, if you don't mind, if you don't mind following up on that AppDynamics point. Can you tell me a little bit more about how that solution played out and how that evolved? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, this was based, again, on our long-standing relationship with Cisco AppDynamics that Laura was speaking about. And then the unique to what Kuberan in Economical was seeking of stitching together the data footprint across the infrastructure architecture but leveraging data in a business context. And I think that is the unique value that AppDynamics brings to this scenario here, is a market-leading solution that does bring together those multiple data sets but contextualizes them in a business context. So, you can understand from a user perspective that end-to-end journey right from initiation in the application, all the way through the technical infrastructure. And it becomes very preventative in terms of identifying and resolving potential issues before they even occur. >> So, AppD and these IBM services work well together right there. That's your key point, right? That's. >> Absolutely, and that's, the point is bringing together the best combination of solutions and services on behalf of our customer set. And this where AppDynamics and IBM and our other partners work incredibly well together. >> Well, we'll talk about the dynamics again. This is, again, this highlights the point of the better together combination here with the Cisco relationship and the IBM evolution you mentioned. What can other clients expect? I mean, this is going to be the playbook. (laughs) I mean, you got the Cloud Satellite. Take us through what this means. What does all this mean? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll start, and maybe even Laura can add as needed. But from an IBM perspective, absolutely. We're going to work with our partner ecosystem in the hybrid multicloud world. So, we've really evolved whether it's IBM Cloud, AWS, as some of our clients, including Economical and others. Microsoft Azure, Google. It is about bringing those together regardless of strategic decisions made on cloud platform, but understanding how the applications play together. And again, stitching together the data across those application sets to drive value out of it. This is where we're really seeing the evolution of IBM and our partner ecosystem, and the evolution of IBM services as well. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. And if you really look at what Cisco's trying to do, they've declared they're going to be in this hybrid cloud space. They bring the elements to the solution when you look at networking. We look at some of the security. And then when we start looking at how this combines with edge technology, we really start getting combinations between the IBM technology, the Cisco technology and how that completes a picture in a solution for the client. >> I love the end-to-end story. I see hybrid as distributed computer in my mind and now you've got multicloud as subsystems and all is going to have to be operated together. And the software that makes that happen. And I can see tons of head room opportunity there. Kuberan, talk about what you guys are seeing as results now. Because this is where you start to see the conversation shift to. It's not just go to the cloud anymore, it's make the cloud operational on all environments. That's really what people want to see. Can you share what you're seeing as a result and where do you go from there? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, what's awesome about all of this is first of all, in a very short time the team which really was composed of a cross-functional and a highly collaborative group of people, they've already delivered some key pieces that are giving us line of sight into what's going on for a business solution. And, you know, the implemented scope is already detecting symptoms and allowing us to be very proactive and it is also helping us to complete root cause analysis faster. It's helping us to reduce defect linkage through our quality assurance practices. So, you know, for us, as I mentioned earlier, this is a journey like, you know, unlike traditional approaches where implementations are driven by predetermined scope. We are changing the mindset, specifically because we're using a lot of telemetry and continuous discovery in helping transform how our platform is important. You know, it has become part of our philosophy where business and technology are now working closer together. And our vision is to navigate continuously towards having a highly automated monitoring solution that leverages cognitive insights and intelligence. So, you know, to be able to have a robust self-healing capability. And this is where it kind of ties with the whole cloud capability, because now you can actually enable the self-healing capabilities and with AppDynamics bringing in the dynamic capture of issues happening and things like that. And if you kind of step back a bit and if you think of this approach, this is no different than how we envisioned and how we implemented both Sonnet and Vyne, where it was a fully digitized end-to-end solution that provides services and value for, excuse me, for our customers. Right? So, hopefully that kind of stitches the picture for you. >> That's awesome, great insight. Laura, Matthew, Kuberan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. In the last minute that we have, let's go down the line. Laura, Matthew and Kuberan, we'll start with you guys. What's the bottom line for IBM and Cisco's relationship with the Cloud Satellite and AI. What should people walk away with? What's the bumper sticker? What's the summary? >> So, as IBM invest more and more in these strategic hybrid cloud solutions industry-focused, it's really bringing an industry-focused solution to clients without us having to reinvent that every time. And as you've heard from Kuberan here, I mean, we're bringing that value to our customers. >> All right. Matthew? >> Yeah, I'd just like to add, and this is a great example here of being able to co-innovate and collaborate with our partners and with our clients, Economical in this case, to evolve these solutions. And as Kuberan has stated, this is the first step in a journey here and there's lots of exciting things to come. >> Kuberan, take us home, final word. >> Thank you. What I would say is, what we've learned from this is really standing this stuff in more like a garage style kind of a situation where you can actually get something going rapid and you get business results and you start seeing ROI very quickly. So, that's the benefit I've seen. >> Awesome, great points. IBM and Cisco better together. This ecosystem, the co-creation, the new network effects is the new dynamic in the marketplace. This is the table stakes. Thanks for coming on, thanks for sharing the insights. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot, John. >> Okay, IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thank you for watching. (cheerful music)

>> From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of IBM Think 2021. The virtual cube. You know, the pandemic has caused us to really rethink this whole concept of operational resilience. So we're going to dig into that and talk about the importance of constructing a holistic resilience plan and get the perspective of some really great domain experts. Allen Downs is the Vice President in Global Cloud Security and Resiliency Services at IBM. And he's joined by Ms. Michelle Weston who is the Director of Cloud Security and Resiliency Offerings at IBM. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Now, before we get into it, I said, IBM, but I want to ask you Allen, about an announcement you made last month about Kyndryl, new spinout from IBM. What can you tell us? >> Very excited about the name. I think there's a lot of meaning in the name censored around new growth and censored around partnership and relationship. So if you look at the name that was announced, I think it really does typify what we set out to be as a trusted partner in the industry. All born around new growth, censored around strong partnership and relationship. So very pleased and excited. I look forward to the opportunity we have going forward. >> Yeah. Congratulations on that. Add some clarity, Martin Schroeder, new CEO, Cube alum, great exec. Love it. So good luck. Allen, let me stay with you for a second. I mean, operational resilience it means different things to different people. And we know from speaking with CIOs in our community during the pandemic, it doesn't just mean Disaster Recovery. In fact, a lot of CIO said that their business continuing strategy were too focused on DR. Allen, what does operational resilience mean from your perspective? >> So I'll answer it this way. Operational resiliency risk is defined as the quantifiable steps is defined as the quantifiable steps that any client needs to take in order to respond, recover from an unplanned outage. It sits squarely within operational risk and if you think about it operational risk is the kind of non-financial element of risk and defined within that category, operational resiliency risk is trying to identify those steps, trying to identify those steps, both preactive and reactive both preactive and reactive that a client needs to consider that they would have to take in the event of an unplanned disruption or an unplanned outage that would impact their ability to serve their clients or to serve their organization. That's how I define operational resiliency risk. >> Great. And I wonder Michelle if you can add to that, but I think, you know, I sometimes say that the pandemic was like a forced march to digital and part of that was business resilience but you know, where do we go from here? You know, we had 14 months shoved into our face and now we have some time to think about. So how should clients think about evolving their strategies in this regard? >> Yeah, well certainly with respect to what was called NewCo now, Kyndryl, our approach has been advisory-led. We will help clients along this journey. One thing that I'd like to point out and one of the journeys that we've been taking over the last couple of years is it really is about security and resiliency together. If you think of that planning and how to mitigate your operational risk, if the security and resiliency go hand in hand, they're the same people within the organization that are planning for that and worried about it. And so we had already started about three years ago to pull the two together and to have a unified value proposition for clients around security and resiliency both being advisory-led doing everything for a client from project-based to the digital consumption world, which we know clients live in today to a fully managed service all around security and resiliency together. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it's a really important topic. I mean, you heard Chair Powell last month. He was, he was on 60 Minutes saying, well, yeah, yeah. We're worried about inflation but we're way more worried about the security. So, so Allen, where, let's say you're in the virtual conference room with the board of directors, what's that conversation like? Where does it start? >> I think there is a huge concern right now with regards to security and obviously resiliency as well. But if you just think about what we've all been through and what's transpired in the last 12 months, the, what we call the threat landscape has broadened significantly. And therefore clients have had to go through a rapid transformation not just by moving employees to home base, but also their clients having a much higher expectation in terms of access to systems, access to transactions, which are all digital. So you referred to it earlier but the transformation our clients have had to go on driving a higher dependence on those systems that enable them to serve their clients digitally and enable them to and allow the employees to work remotely in this period has increased the dependencies that they have across the environment that are running many of the critical business processes. So the discussion of the boardroom is very much, are we secure? Are we safe? How do we know? How safe and secure and resilient should we be? And based on that facts about how fit, safe and secure should we be, where are we today as an organization? And I think these are the questions that are at the boardroom. It's basically from a resiliency, security perspective where should we be that supports our strategy, vision and our client expectation? And then the second question is very much, where are we today? How do we know that we are secure? How do we know that we can recover from any unplanned or unforeseen disruption to our environments? >> So Michelle, I mean Allen just mentioned the threat surface is expanding and we're just getting started. Everybody's like crazy about 5G, leaning in the Edge, IoT and that's just going to be orders of magnitude by the end of the decade compared to where it is today. So how do you think about the key steps that organizations should take to ensure operational resilience? You know, not only today, but also putting in a roadmap. >> Yeah. Yeah. And one thing that we do know from our clients is those that have actually planned for resiliency and security at the forefront. They tend to do that more effectively and more efficiently. It's much better to do that than to try to do that after an outage. You'll certainly learn a lot but that's not the experience that you want to go through. You want to have that planning and strategy in the forefront as Allen said. In terms of the threat vector, the pandemic brought that on as well. We saw a surgent of cyber attacks, opportunistic attacks. You know, we saw the best of people in the pandemic as well as the worst in people. Some of those attacks were on agencies that were trying to recover or trying to treat the public with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. So none of us can let our guard down here. I think we can anticipate that that's only going to increase. And with the emergence of these new technologies like Cloud, we know that there's been such a massive benefit to clients. In fact those that were Cloud-enabled sustained their businesses during the pandemic. Full stop. But with that comes a lot more complexity. Those threat vectors increased, 5G, I expect to be the same. So again, resiliency and security have never been more relevant, more important. We see a lot of our clients putting budget there and those that plan for it with a strategic mindset and understand that whatever they have today may be good enough, but in the future they're going to have to invest and continue to evolve that strategy, are those that have done the best. >> Yeah. The bolt-on strategy doesn't really work that well. But, and I, and I wonder if you think about when when we talk to CSOs for example, and you ask them, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say things like lack of talent. We got too many tools. It's just as we're under the hamsters on wheels. So I would think that's, you know, unfortunately for some, but it's good for your, your business. That's a dynamic that you can help with. I mean, you're a services organization. You've got deep expertise in this. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, that lack of talent that skills gap and how you guys address that. >> I think this is really the fit for managed services providers like Kyndryl. Certainly with some of our largest clients, if we look at Pettus as an example, that notion of phone a friend is really important. When it starts to go down, and you're not sure, you know, what you're going to do next, you want the expertise. You want to be able to phone someone and you want to be able to rely on them to help you recover your most critical data. One of the things clients have also been asking us for is a vaulted capability. Almost like the safe deposit box for your data and your critical applications being able to put them somewhere and then in the event of needing to recover, you certainly could call someone to help you do exactly that. >> Allen, I wonder if you could address this. I mean, I like IBM. I was, I'm a customer. I, I trust IBM, what's your relationship? Are you still going to, you know, be able to allow me to tap the pieces that I like and maybe you guys can be more agile in some respects? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, sure Dave. And many of our clients we have a long history with and a very positive experience of delivering, you know, market-leading and high, high quality of services and product. The relationship continues. So we will remain very close to IBM and we will continue to work with many of IBM's customers as well, IBM work with our customers going forward. So the relationship I believe whilst the different dynamic, will continue and I believe engenders an opportunity for growth. And, you know, we mentioned it earlier the very name signifies the fact that it's new growth. And I do think that partnership will continue and will continue together to deliver the type of service, the quality of products and services that our clients have you know, enjoyed from IBM over the last number of years. >> Michelle, I might take one of my takeaways from your earlier comments that you guys are hands on, consultative in nature. And I think about the comment I made about a lot of CIOs said we were way too, DR-focused, but when I think about DR, a lot of times it was a checkbox to the board. Hey, we got it. But when was the last time you tested it? Well, we don't test it because it's too risky to test. We do, we do fail over but we don't want to fail back because it's just too risky. Can I stress test? You know, my environment. Are we at the point now where technology and expertise will allow us to do that is that part of what you bring to the table? >> It is exactly what we bring to the table. So from a first of all, from a compliance and regulatory perspective, you no longer have that option. A lot of the auditors are asking you to demonstrate your DR plan. We have technology and I think we've talked about this before. About the automation that we have in our portfolio with resiliency orchestration that allows you to see the risk in your environment on a day-to-day basis, proactively manage it. I tried to recover this. There's a, there's a failure and then you're able to proactively address it. I also give the example from a resiliency work restoration perspective in this very powerful software automation that we have for DR. We've had clients that have come in scheduled a DR Test. It was to be all day they've ordered in lunch. And the DR Test fail over, fail back, took 22 minutes and lunch was canceled. (Dave laughs) >> I love it. >> So that is very powerful and very powerful with an auditor. >> That's awesome. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there. Really great to get the update. Best of luck to you. And congratulations. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's continuous coverage of IBM Think 2021. Be right back. (calm music)