Dominique Bastos, Persistent Systems | International Women's Day 2023
(gentle upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier host here in Palo Alto, California. theCUBE's second year covering International Women's Day. It's been a great celebration of all the smart leaders in the world who are making a difference from all kinds of backgrounds, from technology to business and everything in between. Today we've got a great guest, Dominique Bastos, who's the senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent Systems, formerly with AWS. That's where we first met at re:Invent. Dominique, great to have you on the program here for International Women's Day. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you John, for having me back on theCUBE. This is an honor, especially given the theme. >> Well, I'm excited to have you on, I consider you one of those typecast personas where you've kind of done a lot of things. You're powerful, you've got great business acumen you're technical, and we're in a world where, you know the world's coming completely digital and 50% of the world is women, 51%, some say. So you got mostly male dominated industry and you have a dual engineering background and that's super impressive as well. Again, technical world, male dominated you're in there in the mix. What inspires you to get these engineering degrees? >> I think even it was more so shifted towards males. When I had the inspiration to go to engineering school I was accused as a young girl of being a tomboy and fiddling around with all my brother's toys versus focusing on my dolls and other kind of stereotypical toys that you would give a girl. I really had a curiosity for building, a curiosity for just breaking things apart and putting them back together. I was very lucky in that my I guess you call it primary school, maybe middle school, had a program for, it was like electronics, that was the class electronics. So building circuit boards and things like that. And I really enjoyed that aspect of building. I think it was more actually going into engineering school. Picking that as a discipline was a little bit, my mom's reaction to when I announced that I wanted to do engineering which was, "No, that's for boys." >> Really. >> And that really, you know, I think she, it came from a good place in trying to protect me from what she has experienced herself in terms of how women are received in those spaces. So I kind of shrugged it off and thought "Okay, well I'm definitely now going to do this." >> (laughs) If I was told not to, you're going to do it. >> I was told not to, that's all I needed to hear. And also, I think my passion was to design cars and I figured if I enroll in an industrial engineering program I could focus on ergonomic design and ultimately, you know have a career doing something that I'm passionate about. So yeah, so my inspiration was kind of a little bit of don't do this, a lot of curiosity. I'm also a very analytical person. I've been, and I don't know what the science is around left right brain to be honest, but been told that I'm a very much a logical person versus a feeler. So I don't know if that's good or bad. >> Straight shooter. What were your engineering degrees if you don't mind sharing? >> So I did industrial engineering and so I did a dual degree, industrial engineering and robotics. At the time it was like a manufacturing robotics program. It was very, very cool because we got to, I mean now looking back, the evolution of robotics is just insane. But you, you know, programmed a robotic arm to pick things up. I actually crashed the Civil Engineering School's Concrete Canoe Building Competition where you literally have to design a concrete canoe and do all the load testing and the strength testing of the materials and basically then, you know you go against other universities to race the canoe in a body of water. We did that at, in Alabama and in Georgia. So I was lucky to experience that two times. It was a lot of fun. >> But you knew, so you knew, deep down, you were technical you had a nerd vibe you were geeking out on math, tech, robotics. What happened next? I mean, what were some of the challenges you faced? How did you progress forward? Did you have any blockers and roadblocks in front of you and how did you handle those? >> Yeah, I mean I had, I had a very eye-opening experience with, in my freshman year of engineering school. I kind of went in gung-ho with zero hesitation, all the confidence in the world, 'cause I was always a very big nerd academically, I hate admitting this but myself and somebody else got most intellectual, voted by the students in high school. It's like, you don't want to be voted most intellectual when you're in high school. >> Now it's a big deal. (laughs) >> Yeah, you want to be voted like popular or anything like that? No, I was a nerd, but in engineering school, it's a, it was very humbling. That whole confidence that I had. I experienced prof, ooh, I don't want to name the school. Everybody can google it though, but, so anyway so I had experience with some professors that actually looked at me and said, "You're in the wrong program. This is difficult." I, and I think I've shared this before in other forums where, you know, my thermodynamic teacher basically told me "Cheerleading's down the hall," and it it was a very shocking thing to hear because it really made me wonder like, what am I up against here? Is this what it's going to be like going forward? And I decided not to pay attention to that. I think at the moment when you hear something like that you just, you absorb it and you also don't know how to react. And I decided immediately to just walk right past him and sit down front center in the class. In my head I was cursing him, of course, 'cause I mean, let's be real. And I was like, I'm going to show this bleep bleep. And proceeded to basically set the curve class crushed it and was back to be the teacher's assistant. So I think that was one. >> But you became his teacher assistant after, or another one? >> Yeah, I gave him a mini speech. I said, do not do this. You, you could, you could have broken me and if you would've done this to somebody who wasn't as steadfast in her goals or whatever, I was really focused like I'm doing this, I would've backed out potentially and said, you know this isn't something I want to experience on the daily. So I think that was actually a good experience because it gave me an opportunity to understand what I was up against but also double down in how I was going to deal with it. >> Nice to slay the misogynistic teachers who typecast people. Now you had a very technical career but also you had a great career at AWS on the business side you've handled 'em all of the big accounts, I won't say the names, but like we're talking about monster accounts, sales and now basically it's not really selling, you're managing a big account, it's like a big business. It's a business development thing. Technical to business transition, how do you handle that? Was that something you were natural for? Obviously you, you stared down the naysayers out of the gate in college and then in business, did that continue and how did you drive through that? >> So I think even when I was coming out of university I knew that I wanted to have a balance between the engineering program and business. A lot of my colleagues went on to do their PEs so continue to get their masters basically in engineering or their PhDs in engineering. I didn't really have an interest for that. I did international business and finance as my MBA because I wanted to explore the ability of taking what I had learned in engineering school and applying it to building businesses. I mean, at the time I didn't have it in my head that I would want to do startups but I definitely knew that I wanted to get a feel for what are they learning in business school that I missed out in engineering school. So I think that helped me when I transitioned, well when I applied, I was asked to come apply at AWS and I kind of went, no I'm going to, the DNA is going to be rejected. >> You thought, you thought you'd be rejected from AWS. >> I thought I'd be, yeah, because I have very much a startup founder kind of disruptive personality. And to me, when I first saw AWS at the stage early 2016 I saw it as a corporation. Even though from a techie standpoint, I was like, these people are insane. This is amazing what they're building. But I didn't know what the cultural vibe would feel like. I had been with GE at the beginning of my career for almost three years. So I kind of equated AWS Amazon to GE given the size because in between, I had done startups. So when I went to AWS I think initially, and I do have to kind of shout out, you know Todd Weatherby basically was the worldwide leader for ProServe and it was being built, he built it and I went into ProServe to help from that standpoint. >> John: ProServe, Professional services >> Professional services, right. To help these big enterprise customers. And specifically my first customer was an amazing experience in taking, basically the company revolves around strategic selling, right? It's not like you take a salesperson with a conventional schooling that salespeople would have and plug them into AWS in 2016. It was very much a consultative strategic approach. And for me, having a technical background and loving to solve problems for customers, working with the team, I would say, it was a dream team that I joined. And also the ability to come to the table with a technical background, knowing how to interact with senior executives to help them envision where they want to go, and then to bring a team along with you to make that happen. I mean, that was like magical for me. I loved that experience. >> So you like the culture, I mean, Andy Jassy, I've interviewed many times, always talked about builders and been a builder mentality. You mentioned that earlier at the top of this interview you've always building things, curious and you mentioned potentially your confidence might have been shaken. So you, you had the confidence. So being a builder, you know, being curious and having confidence seems to be what your superpower is. A lot of people talk about the confidence angle. How important is that and how important is that for encouraging more women to get into tech? Because I still hear that all the time. Not that they don't have confidence, but there's so many signals that potentially could shake confidence in industry >> Yeah, that's actually a really good point that you're making. A lot of signals that women get could shake their confidence and that needs to be, I mean, it's easy to say that it should be innate. I mean that's kind of like textbook, "Oh it has to come from within." Of course it does. But also, you know, we need to understand that in a population where 50% of the population is women but only 7% of the positions in tech, and I don't know the most current number in tech leadership, is women, and probably a smaller percentage in the C-suite. When you're looking at a woman who's wanting to go up the trajectory in a tech company and then there's a subconscious understanding that there's a limit to how far you'll go, your confidence, you know, in even subconsciously gets shaken a little bit because despite your best efforts, you're already seeing the cap. I would say that we need to coach girls to speak confidently to navigate conflict versus running away from it, to own your own success and be secure in what you bring to the table. And then I think a very important thing is to celebrate each other and the wins that we see for women in tech, in the industry. >> That's awesome. What's, the, in your opinion, the, you look at that, the challenges for this next generation women, and women in general, what are some of the challenges for them and that they need to overcome today? I mean, obviously the world's changed for the better. Still not there. I mean the numbers one in four women, Rachel Thornton came on, former CMO of AWS, she's at MessageBird now. They had a study where only one in four women go to the executive board level. And so there's still, still numbers are bad and then the numbers still got to get up, up big time. That's, and the industry's working on that, but it's changed. But today, what are some of the challenges for this current generation and the next generation of women and how can we and the industry meet, we being us, women in the industry, be strong role models for them? >> Well, I think the challenge is one of how many women are there in the pipeline and what are we doing to retain them and how are we offering up the opportunities to fill. As you know, as Rachel said and I haven't had an opportunity to see her, in how are we giving them this opportunity to take up those seats in the C-suite right, in these leadership roles. And I think this is a little bit exacerbated with the pandemic in that, you know when everything shut down when people were going back to deal with family and work at the same time, for better or for worse the brunt of it fell on probably, you know the maternal type caregiver within the family unit. You know, I've been, I raised my daughter alone and for me, even without the pandemic it was a struggle constantly to balance the risk that I was willing to take to show up for those positions versus investing even more of that time raising a child, right? Nevermind the unconscious bias or cultural kind of expectations that you get from the male counterparts where there's zero understanding of what a mom might go through at home to then show up to a meeting, you know fully fresh and ready to kind of spit out some wisdom. It's like, you know, your kid just freaking lost their whatever and you know, they, so you have to sort a bunch of things out. I think the challenge that women are still facing and will we have to keep working at it is making sure that there's a good pipeline. A good amount of young ladies of people taking interest in tech. And then as they're, you know, going through the funnel at stages in their career, we're providing the mentoring we're, there's representation, right? To what they're aspiring to. We're celebrating their interest in the field, right? And, and I think also we're doing things to retain them, because again, the pandemic affected everybody. I think women specifically and I don't know the statistics but I was reading something about this were the ones to tend to kind of pull it back and say well now I need to be home with, you know you name how many kids and pets and the aging parents, people that got sick to take on that position. In addition to the career aspirations that they might have. We need to make it easier basically. >> I think that's a great call out and I appreciate you bringing that up about family and being a single mom. And by the way, you're savage warrior to doing that. It's amazing. You got to, I know you have a daughter in computer science at Stanford, I want to get to that in a second. But that empathy and I mentioned Rachel Thornton, who's the CMO MessageBird and former CMO of AWS. Her thing right now to your point is mentoring and sponsorship is very key. And her company and the video that's on the site here people should look at that and reference that. They talk a lot about that empathy of people's situation whether it's a single mom, family life, men and women but mainly women because they're the ones who people aren't having a lot of empathy for in that situation, as you called it out. This is huge. And I think remote work has opened up this whole aperture of everyone has to have a view into how people are coming to the table at work. So, you know, props are bringing that up, and I recommend everyone look at check out Rachel Thornton. So how do you balance that, that home life and talk about your daughter's journey because sounds like she's nerding out at Stanford 'cause you know Stanford's called Nerd Nation, that's their motto, so you must be proud. >> I am so proud, I'm so proud. And I will say, I have to admit, because I did encounter so many obstacles and so many hurdles in my journey, it's almost like I forgot that I should set that aside and not worry about my daughter. My hope for her was for her to kind of be artistic and a painter or go into something more lighthearted and fun because I just wanted to think, I guess my mom had the same idea, right? She, always been very driven. She, I want to say that I got very lucky that she picked me to be her mom. Biologically I'm her mom, but I told her she was like a little star that fell from the sky and I, and ended up with me. I think for me, balancing being a single mom and a career where I'm leading and mentoring and making big decisions that affect people's lives as well. You have to take the best of everything you get from each of those roles. And I think that the best way is play to your strengths, right? So having been kind of a nerd and very organized person and all about, you know, systems for effectiveness, I mean, industrial engineering, parenting for me was, I'm going to make it sound super annoying and horrible, but (laughs) >> It's funny, you know, Dave Vellante and I when we started SiliconANGLE and theCUBE years ago, one of the things we were all like sports lovers. So we liked sports and we are like we looked at the people in tech as tech athletes and except there's no men and women teams, it's one team. It's all one thing. So, you know, I consider you a tech athlete you're hard charging strong and professional and smart and beautiful and brilliant, all those good things. >> Thank you. >> Now this game is changing and okay, and you've done startups, and you've done corporate jobs, now you're in a new role. What's the current tech landscape from a, you know I won't say athletic per standpoint but as people who are smart. You have all kinds of different skill sets. You have the startup warriors, you have the folks who like to be in the middle of the corporate world grow up through corporate, climb the corporate ladder. You have investors, you have, you know, creatives. What have you enjoyed most and where do you see all the action? >> I mean, I think what I've enjoyed the most has been being able to bring all of the things that I feel I'm strong at and bring it together to apply that to whatever the problem is at hand, right? So kind of like, you know if you look at a renaissance man who can kind of pop in anywhere and, oh, he's good at, you know sports and he's good at reading and, or she's good at this or, take all of those strengths and somehow bring them together to deal with the issue at hand, versus breaking up your mindset into this is textbook what I learned and this is how business should be done and I'm going to draw these hard lines between personal life and work life, or between how you do selling and how you do engineering. So I think my, the thing that I loved, really loved about AWS was a lot of leaders saw something in me that I potentially didn't see, which was, yeah you might be great at running that big account but we need help over here doing go to market for a new product launch and boom, there you go. Now I'm in a different org helping solve that problem and getting something launched. And I think if you don't box yourself in to I'm only good at this, or, you know put a label on yourself as being the rockstar in that. It leaves room for opportunities to present themselves but also it leaves room within your own mind to see yourself as somebody capable of doing anything. Right, I don't know if I answered the question accurately. >> No, that's good, no, that's awesome. I love the sharing, Yeah, great, great share there. Question is, what do you see, what do you currently during now you're building a business of Persistent for the cloud, obviously AWS and Persistent's a leader global system integrator around the world, thousands and thousands of customers from what we know and been reporting on theCUBE, what's next for you? Where do you see yourself going? Obviously you're going to knock this out of the park. Where do you see yourself as you kind of look at the continuing journey of your mission, personal, professional what's on your mind? Where do you see yourself going next? >> Well, I think, you know, again, going back to not boxing yourself in. This role is an amazing one where I have an opportunity to take all the pieces of my career in tech and apply them to building a business within a business. And that involves all the goodness of coaching and mentoring and strategizing. And I'm loving it. I'm loving the opportunity to work with such great leaders. Persistent itself is very, very good at providing opportunities, very diverse opportunities. We just had a huge Semicolon; Hackathon. Some of the winners were females. The turnout was amazing in the CTO's office. We have very strong women leading the charge for innovation. I think to answer your question about the future and where I may see myself going next, I think now that my job, well they say the job is never done. But now that Chloe's kind of settled into Stanford and kind of doing her own thing, I have always had a passion to continue leading in a way that brings me to, into the fold a lot more. So maybe, you know, maybe in a VC firm partner mode or another, you know CEO role in a startup, or my own startup. I mean, I never, I don't know right now I'm super happy but you never know, you know where your drive might go. And I also want to be able to very deliberately be in a role where I can continue to mentor and support up and coming women in tech. >> Well, you got the smarts but you got really the building mentality, the curiosity and the confidence really sets you up nicely. Dominique great story, great inspiration. You're a role model for many women, young girls out there and women in tech and in celebration. It's a great day and thank you for sharing that story and all the good nuggets there. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE, and it's been my pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you so much for having me. >> Okay, theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto getting all the content, check out the other interviews some amazing stories, lessons learned, and some, you know some funny stories and some serious stories. So have some fun and enjoy the rest of the videos here for International Women's Days, thanks for watching. (gentle inspirational music)
SUMMARY :
Dominique, great to have you on Thank you John, for and 50% of the world is I guess you call it primary And that really, you know, (laughs) If I was told not design and ultimately, you know if you don't mind sharing? and do all the load testing the challenges you faced? I kind of went in gung-ho Now it's a big deal. and you also don't know how to react. and if you would've done this to somebody Was that something you were natural for? and applying it to building businesses. You thought, you thought and I do have to kind And also the ability to come to the table Because I still hear that all the time. and that needs to be, I mean, That's, and the industry's to be home with, you know and I appreciate you bringing that up and all about, you know, It's funny, you know, and where do you see all the action? And I think if you don't box yourself in I love the sharing, Yeah, I think to answer your and all the good nuggets there. Thank you so much for having me. learned, and some, you know
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Dominique Bastos, Persistent Systems | AWS re:Invent 2022
(bright music) >> Well, hey, everybody. John Walls here with theCUBE continuing coverage at AWS re:Invent '22. It has been three really fantastic days here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. And we still have more to come with us to talk about Persistent Systems, the Senior Vice President of Cloud at Persistent Dominique Bastos. Dominique, good to see you. >> Pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for joining us here on the queue. >> Thank you for having me. >> Oh, you bet. You bet. >> Thank you. All right. Tell us about Persistent Systems. So, first off, core focus, what you're up to and then we'll jump in from there. >> Sure, sure. So Persistent Systems is a digital engineering solutions and services provider. They've been around for 32 years doing software engineering, innovating in several areas within different verticals. There's over 22,500 people at Persistent now as of my last count. We're in 18 countries. >> Mm. >> And in October we hit the $1 billion annualized recurring revenue mark. >> Oh, that's a good number right there. >> It's a good number. It's a great company. It's been such an interesting journey. I was with AWS for almost seven years before recently joining Persistent, and it almost felt like a such a logical transition in terms of bringing what I've seen in my entire career of interacting with customers and businesses to what Persistent can provide as people are looking to make their journey to the cloud whatever stage they might be at so. >> Right. And we should point out is that SVP of Cloud, but your focus is AWS. >> My focus AWS. >> Other options, other opportunities. >> Right. >> But you're AWS all the way. >> Right. It's a multicloud company because, you know, we really don't believe in dictating to a customer what they need. I think the benefit, one of the differentiators for Persistent is the amount of legacy history that they have across these industries and customers. I mean, 32 years is a lot, and in terms of like software engineering. So it's like really doing the hard work, the heavy lifting. And then seeing what can actually be commoditized, repeatable building solutions within these verticals to help customers accelerate their transformations. >> Mm hmm. >> So... >> You know, when we talk about cloud, I mean, this has been something that's been on the forefront feel like a long time. Right? But yet there are still many and maybe you can help me out with that percentage, whatever of companies who are either haven't begun yet, are just beginning, they're really in a nascent stage of this transformation. And yeah, I found it curious this week as we've talked with different people about where are you in your journey and so and so forth. A lot of people are way back just starting pass go, and aren't as mature as I would've thought. I mean, do you find that to be the case? >> Absolutely. And there's many reasons for that. I mean, I think what I've started, I mean I've been seeing it over the years, but we all know IT and business back then was very much kept separate. >> Two separate animals. >> Two separate animals. >> Yeah. >> IT made the decisions, not in a vacuum, but almost in a vacuum, right? Now, obviously companies who know it's necessary and have embraced it, bring together the function of looking at the technological solutions that they're adopting to solve a business problem. Right? But that business problem really is dictated by the customer need. >> Mm hmm. >> So I think I have seen, you know, in terms of like the life cycle of a business adopting technology, post cloud, there's a lot of enterprises that are still, they've made such big investments in their legacy infrastructure. >> Mm hmm. >> And in actually, you know, the developers and the people that are maintaining those systems, and the different connections to put it in layman's terms between their systems and their customers systems, right? So, that entire scenario makes it very difficult for them to move. >> Mm hmm. >> It's like moving a mountain. So, I would say there's like three ways of looking at it. You have those that kind of want to revitalize their technology, right? Their backend systems, they want to optimize costs, they want to, and my background in technology is specifically in data, kind of I came up as a DBA and built data models, and I've always loved data before it was a thing to love data. (John chuckles) So... >> You were so far ahead of the curve. >> I was ahead of the curve. I was a trendsetter. >> What a trendsetter? >> I'm a trendsetter. (Dominique chuckles) So I think from that perspective they're looking at, you know, these enormous of amounts of data that they've been capturing in these legacy systems that they're so heavily invested in, but they're not able to derive the insights to better serve their customers or to even innovate new revenue streams from that data. But, they're taking the first step to say, look, you know, we can actually operate more smoothly at a lower cost by moving to the cloud. >> Mm hmm. >> So there's that. Then there are those that are looking to actually innovate and create new revenue streams, monetize their data, look at opportunities to integrate feedback that they've been getting from their customers to provide new services. So they're using the cloud journey, they've probably already moved into the cloud. They're starting to look at analytics, and potentially using AIML to facilitate creating these solutions and services. And then there's those that, you know, want to pioneer, and break into new inventions and ways of solving the big world problems. >> Mm hmm. >> Right? I mean, I think that's one thing I noticed in this re:Invent that I thought was so special is there's like a really big focus on humanity, on humans, on you know, as we were talking earlier everything and I myself have like holding books and I don't like people being on their phone when we're having a conversation. (John chuckles) >> Right. But I think, you know, we are where we are. The reality is the world has evolved in such a way that community is no longer, it takes a small village, all, you know everybody knows each other. You have face to face interactions. You're not doing that with your customers either. There's digitally native businesses that have for a long time cropped up in the FinTech space in you know, you name the space, there's a startup that was born in the cloud that can reach customers immediately, and can provide a service that an enterprise that's kind of like weighed down with their legacy systems. They can't pivot fast enough. So, I think, you know, the pioneers think beyond that. How do we use quantum computing? You know, how do we use 3D simulation to anticipate solving big world problems? Whether it's, you know, people no longer, I don't know what the statistics are, but it's very sad. That elderly people, you know, the amount of human contact that they have is very little. You know, and if you could provide, I don't know, an experience, an immersive experience where their memories are triggered, you know, to help them with dementia, or Alzheimer's. >> Sure. >> I mean, those types of things, those are the things that I think that's what excites me about the launches that I see at re:Invent. And I think the innovation, you know, you have to take that journey. Unless you're born in the cloud, you do have to kind of take that journey. >> You got to get there. >> You have to get there. >> Right. Sure. >> But it's so worth it. >> So how about, let's just say, if I'm a health sciences company, or I'm a pharmaceutical or whatever, and so I've got this desire to create this new opportunity you know, with a human, I say, but yeah, but if you're also Persistent Systems and you're working with you know, somebody in FinTech, or somebody in EEG or whatever, you can't really understand my challenges or my problems. I mean, how do you wear those different hats so you can identify not only what the focus of that client is, but also their technology and how you're going to get them to marry up so they can achieve their goals? >> Well, the beauty of being, you know, in a company with teams of people that you work with, I cut across industries. Right? So we have vertical leaders that have very deep subject matter expertise in any number of those areas. You know, we're working with genomics for example. So, for example, you know, we engage with a customer that we've been helping over the past 32 years use technology to bring services to their customers. And now we are seeing an opportunity to help them innovate to keep up for their business for obvious reasons, but also to supply their customers with the new innovative solutions within that industry, right? 'Cause you need that vehicle to kind of deploy and deliver what customers need. The way we do it is from end to end, right? So, we have in the partnership with AWS, we're a partner of AWS, and as such we are able to collaborate with AWS and their customers or bring our customers to the cloud for all the way from assessment to planning to execution. And even within Persistent, we have ways to main operationalize the maintenance of these solutions. So it's really very easy managed services type framework that we work under. In terms of like migration planning, we have competencies within AWS. For looking at migrations we have AIML, we have DevOps. So we have the various competencies aligned with AWS to be able to execute at whatever stage the customer is. But also in terms of like the accelerators that we provide or the frameworks to look at total cost, that cuts across, right? And then we don't kind of like, here's what you needed and buy, never speak to us again. (John chuckles) I mean, I think the beauty of this company and what I really loved when I was first speaking to them is the depth of the relationships with their customers and the longevity of them. So they've really seen their customers grow. And you can only do that if you're there for the long run. >> You've got to be present. >> You have to be present. >> Sure. So how do you handle if people are making this transformation and they're moving into the cloud, but the people they have on staff might not be familiar with it, right? They have great expertise in what they've been doing on these legacy systems, but now you're moving, you're migrating to a new world, new culture, new environment, and you got to get 'em up to speed. And that's not easy. >> No. >> Right? So what do you do, or what does Persistent suggest or what are you doing and with regard to closing that gap into making that bridge so that they can maintain a little bit on their own. >> Yeah. >> They can execute and implement on their own. >> Yep. >> A little bit. They don't need somebody there to stand over their shoulder the whole time. >> I won't geek out on having joined AWS in professional services way back when to migrate a major company to the cloud, and having lived through painstakingly all those problems and blockers and adoption roadblocks that you speak of. >> Mm hmm. >> You know, I think the way Persistent handles it is what I would've done myself, right? If I were to start a company and say how do we help customers simplify their cloud journey, and remove the complexity? I think that's what Persistent Systems does. We, there's training programs that we are aligned to with AWS. So there's up-skilling of development teams, application developers. We collaborate from the top down with executives to look at the resources that they have available. Obviously mission critical systems that cannot sacrifice having engineers pulled away for a new project. You know, you take that into account. I think, you know, when I spoke earlier about assessments, you're not just assessing what needs to be lifted and shifted or refactored or rearchitected, you're looking at, you know, all these applications that are going to move to the cloud. Who owns them? >> Mm hmm. >> You know, do you have a CI/CD pipeline, or a data pipeline built? Well, we're going to need that, right? So, the continuous integration, continuous development of applications, that type of DevOps, obviously security also DevSecOps, we look at it from end to end as well. We have a very strong security practice. So, all those advisory pieces we have, but we also have the capability to execute on it. Where we're not just coming in and saying well this is what you should do. We're kind of in there saying, this is what you should do, here's how we can get you started. And then, you know, it's a collaborative effort with our customers to see how much they still want us to stay versus how much they want to take over. >> Right. It's nice to have a friend. >> Yeah. (John laughs) Who doesn't need a friend. (Dominique laughs) And Persistent Systems is your friend. Dominique, thanks for the time. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> I appreciate it. >> Thanks again for having me. >> Thanks for being here on theCUBE. You bet. >> Absolutely. >> You are watching theCUBE as you well know the leader in high tech coverage. (soft music)
SUMMARY :
And we still have more to come with us Thanks for joining Oh, you bet. and then we'll jump in from there. and services provider. annualized recurring revenue mark. to what Persistent can provide And we should point in dictating to a customer what they need. I mean, do you find that to be the case? I mean, I think what I've started, that they're adopting to solve you know, in terms of like And in actually, you You have those that kind I was ahead of the curve. they're looking at, you know, you know, want to pioneer, on you know, as we were talking earlier But I think, you know, you know, you have to take that journey. Right. I mean, how do you wear Well, the beauty of being, you know, and you got to get 'em up to speed. So what do you do, or what implement on their own. to stand over their roadblocks that you speak of. I think, you know, when I spoke here's how we can get you started. It's nice to have a friend. Dominique, thanks for the time. Thanks for being here on theCUBE. as you well know the leader
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