>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path >>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube. We are here with UI path at forward for I'm Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante and a lovely setting at the Bellagio. We're going to be talking about automation from the CFO's perspective. Our next guest is our jet guard group financial officer at landmark group, or just welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. Thank >>You. Before we dig into your transformation strategy and how automation is a key to that, help the audience understand a little bit about landmark. >>Absolutely. So landmark is one of the largest, uh, non-food primarily retailer in the middle east and Asia, India, and now increasingly in Southeast Asia. So we've got about 50 brands, uh, more than half of them, which are homegrown our own brands and some franchise brands. So about 2,200 stores, uh, across 20 countries, 55,000 employees. Um, so 30 million square feet of retail space >>They company. When was the company founded, >>Uh, 48 years ago, >>Legacy institution you were mentioning before we went live that you guys have been working with UI path since 2017. So talk to me about that legacy institution, embracing cloud digital transformation and automation as a, from a visionary strategic perspective. >>Yeah. So look, I mean, you know, you get so many technologies that are being thrown at you. So I would say you have packed or robotic process automation was just another one like that. So I wouldn't say it was like part of a grand strategy. You know, it comes as it looks like, Hey, this is cool. You know, in the, in the back office, when somebody showed me first 10 desks with nobody sitting on them, it's kind of spooky. So he said, Hey, this, this looks very interesting. So it started off like that, but then it has just grown because we've stayed with it. So we've amongst things in the early part of your parts customers and, and it's been phenomenal, you know, what, uh, what we're able to do with, uh, with, uh, robotic process automation. Uh, I mean, you know, I've been in this industry with my past employers, like Proctor and gamble and Cadbury, Schweppes, and all, and essentially we used to follow the part of, you know, you eliminate all the non-value add you, then try and automate whatever your ERP system, then all allowed you to automate. >>Then what's left, you consolidate, and then you find the right shore, right. It can be offshore or wherever. So that was the sequence. But I think a lot could not be automated because there are huge gaps in the systems that are being offered and you have a mosaic of systems, every company will have. Right. Um, and then we would end up doing lot more offshore or, you know, other kinds of tactics, but then once RPA showed up on the scene, it's suddenly disrupted everything because now whatever the systems can do, or when you have to move data from one system to the other or make sense out of it, that's where this technology sits. And so that's, so that's very, I, you know, we've now got a pretty large, uh, robotic process automation practice. And, and, you know, we are touching started with finance and now we are pretty much enterprise wide. So all the, >>These technologies are coming together, automation, RPA, cloud AI, they're all sort of converging. And as a retailer, I'm curious as to what your cloud strategy is and how that fits and all, there's always a lot of sensitivity from retailers that don't want to be on Amazon, maybe some do. And they say, Hey, we've, we've we compete in other ways, what's your posture in that? >>So we've also been an early adopter of cloud, both. If I talk within the UI path thing, we were, I think the first ones to put it on the cloud, because we just saw, even before you are part, uh, we saw how people could tamper with it, you know, attended robots, you know, on the desktop one. So we went on the cloud and that was good, uh, way back. But overall, the company also has a very pro you know, Val defined cloud strategy. So we are, you know, pretty much all a large part of our systems are on the cloud with Azure. >>Yeah. So, which makes sense, right. As a retailer, go, go with Azure, plus somebody, Microsoft, you know, X, such a lot of Microsoft expertise out there that you can leverage. And I got to ask you because everybody's freaked out on wall street about power automate, you know, competing with UI path. And I've told people they kind of different parts of the spectrum, but I've talked to a lot of customers this week. So yeah, we use both. We use UI path for end-to-end automation. We use power automate for a lot of our personal productivity stuff. How do you guys, do you use, uh, the power automate? How do you see those two? Yeah, >>No, I think, look, it's inevitable. A lot of technologies will keep evolving. I think Microsoft is a fantastic company. I mean, the way they perfected teams right in time, you know, and pretty, always hit, uh, a year before COVID hit teams was not ready, you know? So I think I know power automate is good. We use it, but not as you know, it's not ready for enterprise wide. So I think more, I'm not an expert in power automate yet. Um, you know, what, it kind of seemed more like when it's linked to the office automation versus linking major enterprise wide or >>Which is really where you're headed. Yeah. Talk about the results that you've seen, the higher you're measuring the return and the whole business case. When you evaluate it as CFO, >>See it being a CFO, I wear two hats. Right. I'm trying to help digital transformation. Although I must say I'm not the only one our company has. Every function is these days talking digital. Right. Because it's almost like table stakes. Yeah. Uh, you, you can't be in business a leader and we are like a leader in all the markets we are, and there's no choice, but to be fully digital. Right. Uh, but being a CFO absolutely. You know, you do look at the hard dollars. Right. Um, and initially when you're pushing any technology to any functional head or your colleague or the CEO or the board, they do want to see the dollars because a lot of softwares talk about the soft benefits. Um, I think they gotta pay for themselves. So I think it's like, yes, if I can get the hard dollars and then I can demonstrate softer benefits, whether it is the quality of work, less errors, better compliance, right. >>Or I think employee, uh, work work-life balance, right. I mean, in, in, uh, we are, uh, in a growing company we've been growing for the last four decades and there's a constant struggle to help colleagues maintain better work life balance. So I think once the basic return is off the table, everyone's talking about the quality of work enabling. And I think now we've, we are proudly talking, you know, that, Hey, we've got a lot of people, um, we've hired them. But what we are using of them is their fingers, their eyes, ears, and that's about it. Can we now get them to use their brain? So it's like, Hey, it's a freebie. You got so many people let's start using the gray matter. And that's, I think what this technology does, it takes away the Gronk and you can then tell them, Hey, analyze the data, look at it, better business outcomes. And I think that's where the real value is. >>That is, so we've heard a lot about time saved hours saved. That's kind of the key, a key metric. And you look at that as hard dollars. How, how do you translate that to the income statement? >>So, so let's put it, uh, you know, I was looking at applied science, applied materials presentation, and they had a 150,000 hours saved. Uh, I just did our math. I mean, so we've so far saved 342,000 hours per annum removed out of the system. Right. But I would say not all I can say, I took them to the bottom line. So probably 70% of that, because the rest is probably gone back to people doing more value added stuff. >>So how does it hit the income statement? Is it hit it as new revenue or cost savings or savings reduction in >>Yeah. Or are you don't hire as many as you needed to? Uh, >>Yes. That's the missing link. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Is I was going to need to hire or what 1,100 people hire 10 or whatever it is. Okay. Now I'm sorry. Does that, is that, does that get into a debate? Like, cause I can see a lot of people, if we don't do this, we're going to, you know, and then as a CFO, you might say let's defend that a little bit. >>Seek cost avoidance is always debated. Yep. And that's why I said, as long as you can prove that the hard dollars taken to the bottom line are visible and you can put your finger on them, then people become more comfortable saying, okay, as long as you know, I've got my payback, I've got something I can, you know, make sure that my cost line is not going up because it's very easy to do, you know, kind of say, Hey look, all this soft benefits and now your cost has also gone up. So I think once the, the, the hard dollars that you can bank are out of the way, then you can talk about costs avoided, and then you can talk about the softer benefits. Are there, there is no doubt because you try and what we do is we tell people if they're in a cell, okay, we'll shut, shut it down. >>I say, Hey, wait, well, right then, you know, but so you have four years of data on this, so you can prove it. And by the way, soft dollars are where the real money is. I don't mean to denigrate that, but I get into a lot of discussions with CFO's like, okay, show me the hard dollars first and then the hard, the soft dollars or telephone numbers. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think I look at it as an inverted pyramid. Yeah. Where you start with the cost saved, which is the smaller part of the pyramid. And then you get speed, right. Because speed is actually a big thing, which is very difficult to measure. Right? I mean, I'll give you an example in none of our largest markets, right. In the middle of COVID, they announced all products that are being imported, which is for us about 80,000 of them, um, uh, need to have a whole bunch of compliance forms on the government portal, import certifications. And you got like a month to do all that work. So now you'll get an army of 20, 30 people train them. We did nothing. We built the barns and we were ready ahead of competition. And I think, and, and life continues. Now the supply chain officer will sign on the dotted line for you saying he would have had to hire 30 people. And he, it's not easy to hire suddenly, but we were compliant and, and now that's cost avoided. But I would say a big business benefit because we were the first ones to have all our products compliant with the market requirements. That's a >>Great example. >>I think about some of the IDC data that was, did you see that that was presented this morning, looking at, you know, the positive outlook as, as RPA being a jobs creator over time. Talk to me a little bit about how you've navigated that through the organization and even done upskilling of some of those folks so that they're not losing, but they're gaining. >>I think there is, you know, you have to take all these projections with a pinch of salt, you know, I mean, saying you will, the world will save $150 billion and all, I mean, if you add all the soft dollars. Yes. But in reality, you know, I lose joke about it. If you take all the technology initiatives in a company and you add all the MPVs and that they have submitted, that would be larger than the market cap of the company. >>It's true. All the projects add up to more value. >>I think, I think, you know, we don't get carried away by these major projections, but I think some of it is true. I mean, you know, I kind of talk about the Luddites, right? I mean, when the first, you know, weaving machines game in, in Northern England, near Manchester and these Luddites, they were called, they were going around breaking down these machines because they were supposed to take away jobs. Now reality is a lot of people did lose jobs who could not make the transition, could not retrain themselves. It is inevitable. It will happen. But over time I would say yes, there have been lot more employment. So I think both go hand in hand. Um, but yes, the more one can help retrain people, get them to, you know, say, Hey, you don't need to spend the rest of your life. Copy pasting and just doing data entry. Uh, you can look at the data and make sense out of it. How much >>Of that was a part of your strategic vision years ago? >>I think years ago we knew it, but it was more, let's get these, you know, simple. When you have hundreds of people in a, in a back office, how do I get them to do more work or have slate or meet my, you know, my productivity goals? I would say it starts with that. Okay. Uh, if you start, uh, deep down because I, I am, you know, I believe in technology, I knew it, it would happen that we would eventually go from, let's say, robotic process automation to intelligent process automation. Right. Which is coming for us. It's we are able to see it, you try and sell that as the lead in and people shut down >>Because they're seen by intelligent process automation. W what do you mean? And, and >>So it's look, if I've got, uh, my robots and the tech, the RP infrastructure, which is processing whole bunch of transactions right now, if I'm able to add in some machine learning or AI, or what have you on top of it, and then I can read the patterns I can, for example, you know, we, we now have built on top of all the various security in our payment systems. If you've got a bot, which then does a final check, which goes and checks the history of that particular vendor as to what is the typical payments being done to that. And then it flags, if it's V out and it stops the payment, for example, right? So, or it goes and does a whole bunch of tests. We're building constantly building tools. So that's kind of, you know, a bit more intelligent than just a simple copy paste or, or doing a transaction >>Because why that's their job or because they it's a black box. They don't know how that decision is made. Or >>I think a lot of these have been sold previously similar technologies and things that would be, you know, the next best thing since sliced water and people have lost fit. So you got to show them the money and then take them along the journey. If you go too fast and try and give this whole, you know, people are smart enough and it, it turns them off. >>It's one of the failures of the tech industry is the broken promises. I can, I can rattle many off >>Cultural shift. It is. It is. How did you help facilitate that? See, I mean, we, we took, you know, the bottoms up and top down approach, uh, you know, the top down was, uh, I have my whole leadership team and as a joke, we locked them up in the boardroom and we got them to build bonds a long ago. And we said, let each of you, you know, download your bank statement and send yourself, uh, you know, if you say any transaction above 10,000, whatever, um, send, send an email to yourself. So as simple as that, or download the electricity bill and, and send it to your wife, you know, something like that. And half of them were able to build a bot in that couple of hours. The other half looked at it, and obviously are, you know, many of them are not as tech savvy, but it helped build the kind of it's aha moment three years ago that, wow, you know, I can build a bot. Um, for some people it was like, oh, they taught these metallic 10 bots are going to walk into the room. >>I love it. The bottom who's responsible for governance. >>So we've got a, we've got a team across it and finance. Um, I mean, somehow I have kind of, you know, created the skunkworks team. The S the center of excellence sits with me. Um, uh, but overall it's a combination and they now run governance, uh, you know, 24 7, >>Uh, you know, sorry, I got to get my crypto question. I ask every CFO's, when are you going to put crypto in the balance sheet? I know I'm teasing, but what you see companies doing this? Has it ever come up in conversation? Is it sort of tongue in cheek joke? Or what do you make of the crypto? >>Yeah, I think personally I'm a big believer, uh, but not for, uh, for a company. I think the, the benefit case of a company, we are not that, you know, we have enough other face too, you know? Um, uh, I think, uh, it's a bit further out for a company to start taking balance sheet position because that's then a speculation, right? Because, so I'm a believer in the benefit of the blockchain technology. We actually did a blockchain experiment a couple of years ago, moving goods, uh, from China to Dubai and also making the payments through a blockchain to, um, so we see huge benefits. We are working with our bankers on certain other initiatives, but I think on the balance sheet sounds like speculation and use of capital. So yeah, if it brings efficiency, if it brings transparency, which is what blockchains do, uh, I think absolutely it's, it is here to stay >>Last question. And then the last 30 seconds, or so for your peers in any industry who are it was, we saw some of the stats yesterday, the amount of percentage of processes that are automateable that aren't automated. What's your advice, recommendations to peers about pulling automation into their digital transformation strategy? >>I think, um, digital transformation can be hugely aided and accelerated if you first put RPLs, because that is the layer, which goes between the humans and whatever technology is out there or whatever you keep buying. So I think because they will be in every area, new technologies coming up, it's better to put RPA first because you can then get more benefit from whatever other technologies you're bolting on. So I would say it's a predecessor to your broader digital transformation, rather than just a part of it. >>Got it. A predecessor, or just thank you for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what you're, how you're transforming landmark. Good luck in your presentation this afternoon. I'm sure a lot of folks will get some great takeaways from your talk. >>Thank you so much. It's been >>Great. Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas UI path forward for it. We'll be right back after a break.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Cover Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE! Lisa Martin, day three of Dell Technologies World coverage on theCube. Two sets, lots of CUBE coverage, we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time Andy Anglin, the Director of Cloud Strategies at Halliburton Landmark. Andy, thanks for joining me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. >> So Halliburton, everybody knows the Halliburton name. In fact, Halliburton's celebrating their 100th year anniversary this year. >> That's right, it's a big year. >> It is a big year. Halliburton Landmark, talk to us about what that is. >> So Halliburton is obviously an upstream oil and gas services provider. Landmark is the business unit within Halliburton that provides petrotechnical software solutions to our customers. >> Okay, so customers all across the country, all across the world. >> All across the world. We work with NOCs, with work with independents, we work with the majors, we work with everybody. >> Okay, so, here we are at Dell Technologies World. How is Halliburton Landmark working with Dell Technologies? We're talking about digital transformation of your business, enabling your customers. >> So we're helping our customers through their digital transformation and one of the things that we're helping them do is move their petrotechnical workloads to the cloud. So we're leading the way right now in providing petrotechnical solutions in the cloud. We do that both on public cloud and on private cloud. And for our private cloud solution, which we call Landmark Earth, we've been partnering with Dell EMC for about four years now on building that solution. >> And this is a co-engineered solution. >> That's correct. >> Talk to us about that. What does that entail? >> So what we did was we worked with the Dell EMC engineers. Originally it was the VxBlock technology, but we've since moved it to the VxRail technology. We took that technology and we built the solution, built an appliance and took our blueprint, put that on top of that and then had the two groups work together to co-engineer that, to bring optimal performance and reliability. We're then able to deploy that anywhere in the world. So initially, most of the customers that were interested in it were the customers that were in locations where you couldn't find any public cloud. But now, because of the performance and the reliability that it's able to deliver, we have customers even in places like North America, where most people were originally looking to go to public cloud, now they're looking for the solution. >> So this sounds like it's giving you quite the competitive advantage. >> Absolutely, yeah. We were a little bit ahead of the competition in putting the solution together. We're looking to push to the cloud quickly. >> That's a good place to be, is ahead of the competition. You talked about kind of the speed, reliability, performance. What are some of the other really key values, business values, that your customers are gleaning from this solution already? >> So, couple things. One of things that we can deliver is faster time to value. So a lot of our customers have tried to go do something on their own, and generally speaking, they've met with a lot of challenges trying to do that. They try to build something themselves. It takes a long time. Ultimately it doesn't really work, and so what we can give them is a proven solution that we can stand up very quickly and deliver value to them very fast. The second thing that I would say is that we can significantly lower their total cost of ownership. >> That's always good. >> So our petrotechnical workloads are a little bit unique from some other industries. They're very heavily dependent on GPUs. So our customers are used to having these really massive, powerful workstations, with heavy duty GPUs in them. And in order to manage that type of environment, not only do you have the upfront cost of buying all these workstations, but you now have to go and manage all these workstations individually with these petrotechnical solutions that you've deployed on them, by leveraging a hyper converged infrastructure like we have with the VxRail. With the Landmark Earth appliance, we can provide all of that in a single hyper converged environment, so now you can manage it in one place. So the total cost of ownership, for ongoing operations, is drastically reduced. We also see performance increases that are pretty significant, like we mentioned before, because one of the major things that we do is we load massive amounts of data. And when you're in a client/server environment, that mass of data is coming from a database that's somewhere else. But when you're in a hyper converged environment, your compute and your data are sitting right next to each other, so we can significantly reduce the time to load that data. >> So, how much of this is sort of a cultural shift for the upstream oil and gas industry? >> Absolutely. So oil and gas industry has historically kind of lagged a little bit behind in terms of keeping up with the latest technology. The oil and gas downturn that we went through in the last couple years has really been an impetus to drive that technology transformation, and so a lot of customers are looking for digital transformation strategies in general. And as part of that, this is something that a lot of them are looking into. A lot of the customers that we go talk to are still using that legacy client/server environment, then this is something new to them. And, you know, they don't expect that they would be able to take something and virtualize it somewhere else and get better performance than what they're used to seeing on the front end. >> How is it also, I've mentioned a few minutes ago, this is Halliburton's 100th year. >> Yep. >> Partnership with Dell EMC. How is what you're doing with them and with the Landmark Earth appliance, how is that changing Halliburton's business as well, and even from a cultural perspective? >> So one of the things that's changed in our business model and how we do this, is that we actually leverage the same environment internally. So as our R&D teams are building the solutions, they actually will build and test them on the same type of appliance, which means that when we go deploy it to a customer, the customer's actually deploying the solution on the same environment that it was tested on in the first place. >> That must give them a lot of confidence. >> It does. >> That you've done this. You've established high performance, the results that they have to get. >> Absolutely, yeah. Because a lot of times, when you download software and install it somewhere, a lot of the typical problems that you may run into may just be from nuances or differences in the environment that you're deploying to. So by deploying in the exact same environment that it was built and tested in, it gives you a level of confidence that it's going to perform. >> So, speaking of confidence, how has your confidence changed over the last three days? Lot of announcements from Dell Technologies. We heard, even on the first day, Michael and Pat and Jeff and Satya Nadella from Microsoft. A lot of collaboration, a lot of integration as well >> Absolutely. >> Give me your perspectives on that and how you think it will influence the direction that you guys are going in. >> Quite honestly, I'm really excited to see where things are going. I mentioned before, we deliver solutions but in the public cloud and in the private cloud. And so one of the challenges that we face is being able to manage these workloads across these different types of environments, and a lot of the announcements that they've made have been about they can simplify that process and make it where I can manage workloads, and even move workloads, across different cloud platforms, without having to go build that capability myself. So I'm kind of excited to see where this is all going. >> What are some of the things personally that you're going to be taking away from this? >> Personally, for me, I'm going to go back and have some of my technical folks talk a little bit more about what we can do with the Dell Technologies Cloud and the VMware Cloud solutions that have been announced. >> And also with the announcement to VxRail, looking at it really as a foundational component of the Dell Technologies Cloud, which was just announced a couple of days ago, how does that potentially impact the appliance that you've built, leveraging that technology? >> So I think what it does, is it gives us the opportunity to integrate that into our broader solution around, with the different cloud platforms. Since we already leverage the VxRail technology today, we already leveraged the VMware software stack on top of that, but now what we can do is we can layer on another management layer on top of that, that would allow us to look at that across multiple cloud platforms, and that's pretty exciting. >> And then in terms of market opportunities, how does this open the door even wider for you? As we talked about, you've got a lot of customers, you've been around for a long time, it's a well-established industry, who are still using a lot of legacy practices. What you've heard this week, how do you think that kind of kicks the door open for Halliburton Landmark? >> That's actually a great question. I mentioned before that, initially, most of the customers that were interested in the private cloud solution were in places where we didn't have public cloud And now, we're seeing more customers, even where there are public cloud capabilities, coming back to the private cloud because of either data privacy concerns or performance concerns or whatever, which we can deliver. But if we can actually manage this across multiple cloud platforms, then that enables you to create a hybrid cloud approach, where you could have some workloads in the private cloud and some workloads not in the private cloud, and could span out to public cloud for different things. So, for example, if you have workloads that are temporary in nature, so you don't have something that's permanent. You want something that you can send it out to public cloud and, you know, run a large scenario, some type of simulation on it, get some results back, and bring that back, but then use your private cloud environment to actually visualize the results of that. So, it creates some really cool opportunities. >> And the conversations around emerging technologies, AI machine learning, where are your customers, in the upstream oil and gas industry, where are they, with respect to embracing, acknowledging that there's a lot of potential there, I mean, the power of the cloud to harness the power of AI. Where are they with some of those emerging technologies? Is it still pretty early? >> It's something that everybody is looking into right now, right? So everybody is looking into how can these various digital transformation technologies be leveraged within the oil and gas industry. And there's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of places where you can plug it in. For example, there's a lot of physics-based modeling that happens in the petrotechnical workflows, but using AI, now you can start doing some AI-based workflows in places where you need a faster solution, such as at the edge. So at the edge, where you might need some kind of a result quickly, and you don't have time to wait 'cause you have to make a decision at the well, you can now do that with artificial intelligence, and you can couple the two together. >> And speaking of edge, one of the things that Jeff Clarke said yesterday, and I have to say this in a Game of Thrones accent, the edge is comin'. But a lot of people have said to us the last couple of days the edge is already here. In the oil and gas industry, there's so much remote, where are customers in terms of embracing what Dell Technologies are saying, it's edge, core, cloud. >> So, the edge is absolutely here, the edge is real, and everybody has varying levels of sophistication at the edge today, and that's another place where there's a lot of effort going on to understand what's the best value for what we can do. So there are places where you need a solution that may not be as expensive, because of the existing investment that you have. There are places where you may be willing to go out and completely overhaul everything, put something new in. There's also greenfield opportunities, where you're building it from scratch and you have opportunities to put things in place. So everybody's looking into the best way to leverage that right now, and that's something that we're working with our customers on. >> So it's already here, it's not coming. Last question, Andy, for you. How does being a partner with Dell Technologies, how is that enabling your business? How do they help you deliver the solutions that you need to to impact your industry? >> So we've worked very closely together from the very beginning, from initially co-engineering the solution. You know, Dell would bring resources out, we would work together to optimize the solution to make it work. But even the sales motions, I mean, we worked together on marketing efforts, we worked together on our sales efforts. We have global teams that work together, we have regional teams that work together, and we bring all those groups together for every opportunity to make the best of it and provide a solution that works best for the customer. >> Sounds like a pretty collaborative relationship. >> It has been. >> Andy, thank you you so much for joining us on theCUBE today and telling us what you're doing at Halliburton Landmark. Pretty cool stuff. >> You're welcome. Thanks for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. Thanks for watching. (synthetic rhythmic music)