(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)