>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World. We've been covering Dell Tech World since it started really. It used to just be Dell World and there was EMC World after the merger and this is the all virtual version but we're excited to be here and we've got a great panel coming up. I think you're going to enjoy it. Our first guest is Rajesh Janey. He is the Senior Vice President of Global Alliances for APJ for Dell Technologies. Rajesh, where are you coming in from today? >> I'm speaking to you from Gurgaon, India. >> Awesome. It's the power of the virtual, right? It's not all bad that we don't have to get on planes all the time. >> Absolutely. >> And joining him is Utpal Bakshi. He is the Vice President and Global Vertical Head High Tech for Wipro. Utpal, good to see you. >> Nice to see you. >> And where are you calling us in from? >> I'm from Dallas, Texas. Actually suburb outside of Dallas called South Lake. >> Oh, excellent. Great to see you and again didn't have to get on a plane to do this so not all bad. And also joining us is Satish Yadavalli. He is the Vice President and Global Practice Head, Cloud and Infrastructure Services for Wipro. Satish, where are you joining us from? >> Hi, I'm joining from Bangalore, India. >> Excellent. Welcome. So gentlemen let's just jump into it. Wipro's a huge services firm, does a lot of work with Dell so I wonder Rajesh if you can talk really about the importance of partnerships and the importance of having somebody like Wipro within the Dell ecosystem. >> Absolutely. Thank you for having us on with Wipro. Wipro and we have had a partnership which is over two decades old and we have a multifaceted 360 degree kind of relationship with Wipro. Wipro is a platinum partner and what's more while we bring a lot of technology and products and the depth of product which are relevant to customer's transformation scenarios today, coupled with Wipro's consulting and services and design abilities this becomes an unbeatable power house so to say whereby we can work closely with a customer to help them transform and live in what we are calling the next normal. >> Yeah that's great. Utpal to you there's a lot of interesting trends going on. We've had cloud and big data been going on for a lot but really the talk in social media is what's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CIO or COVID and we all know what the answer is. So we've got a lot of new stuff in terms of digital transformation, working from anywhere, workforce transformation. Wonder if you can speak a little bit about how COVID has accelerated some of the priorities that your customers are trying to get done. >> Yeah. I think that's a great point. Wipro has been transforming over the last several years. We were a strong, large scale system integration partner, large IT organization but over the last several years we pivoted hard into the digital transformation world moving into the design side, leading the design, moving to cloud and helping our clients help make that journey and all of that got accelerated with the whole COVID situation. The work from home became all pervasive and the whole virtualization of the workforce really pivoted with some of our key transformational ideas around live workspace and the virtual desk which we've been working very closely with Dell have taken shape. So that has been a big part of our ongoing strategy. Doing the modernization off the network has also accelerated the customer networks and infrastructure was not necessarily set up for enabling these hybrid work environment. A lot of our clients are coming back and saying they want to modernize and actually accelerate. So that has all changed with COVID. Some of it is very positive actually for the business. >> Right. >> From an SI perspective. >> Satish, you've got cloud and infrastructure in your title. Public cloud really changed the game when Amazon kind of came on the scene and now we're seeing this evolution and change over time between a public cloud and hybrid cloud and multi cloud and cloud on cloud. I wonder if you could speak to and then even have an AWS inside of other people's clouds. They're trying to get it out there. The evolution of cloud both as a technology but really more as a way of thinking in terms of rapid deployment of new functionality to support the business and what you're seeing with your customers today. >> So let me share a perspective, right? Enterprises today are looking at options to extract greater value from hybrid cloud investment. It's a brownfield environment today where customers have their existing data centers but the hyperscalers have really come into play now and right cloud is the strategy which most of our customers embrace to address the market demands which are primarily focused on business outcomes today. As Wipro we have invested in developing a holistic extensible platform led approach called Wipro BoundaryLess Enterprise to drive business outcomes to customers. So the BLE construct is all about providing a ready to use plug-and-play platforms making IT easily consumable from multiple stakeholder personas be it admins, be it line of businesses, developers and partners. So basically we have built a holistic solution and our BLE solutions has majorly five building blocks. The first building block would be the BoundaryLess Data Center. The second is the BoundaryLess Container Platform. The third is the BoundaryLess Data Protection Platform. The fourth is the BoundaryLess Cloud Exchange where we get together all the internet connections and define the software defined network part to give access to the workloads across hybrid environments and the BoundaryLess Integration Platform which we call it as BLIP. Basically this is what we have put together to deliver an outcome to the customers powered by BLE. >> So BLE again, you call it the BoundaryLess Enterprise. What's the most important components of BLE? What are the things that most people are missing to actually implement the strategy? >> So if I actually build on you, right? The five building blocks let me elaborate in detail. The first is on the BoundaryLess Data Center. This enables our clients to deliver an infrastructure as a service across data centers and public clouds and enables customers to seamlessly move workloads from Edge to Cloud and manage them in a consistent and efficient model. That's the first building block of our BLE. The second important building block is container, right? We all know today container orchestration is key across hybrid cloud and with micro services and architectures becoming more prominent we see huge search for managing various Kubernetes enrollments with our clients. So our BLCP platform leverages solutions like VMware Tanzu, which is again a Dell company to enable clients manage the multicloud Kubernetes enrollments through a single pane of glass and provide seamless migration and movement of workloads across cloud environments. That's going to be the key in the future with microservices being dominant and every enterprise embracing microservices architectures this becomes very important building block in our overall solution. The third important stuff is BoundaryLess Data Protection. Now that data is all cross in hybrid cloud environment and application actually consume this data it is important to protect the data which is intellectual property and very critical to every business. So with the BLDP platform we ensure that we deliver availability, solidarity, security and reliability of cloud adoption increasingly and rapidly across multicloud platforms. So our solution leverages the DTC of Dell and other existing Dell storages and data production solutions to offer seamless and right cost models which will be very critical for any cloud transformation and schedules as we move forward. The fourth point which I was talking about is BLCE. This is basically a cloud exchange where in a hybrid cloud environment you need to establish connectivities across PaaS and SaaS platforms as well as on-premise networks to provide seamless access to data and the workloads which are in multicloud scenarios. So that's about BLCE. With respect to BLIP it is an integration platform. Today we are in a software defined world and when I talk about providing a single pane of glass solution it is important for us to have an integration platform where I can bring all EPIs together and do northbound and southbound integrations with the architectures of clients and the cloud providers to spin off workloads, to commission, decommission and provide a seamless consumption experience to clients across multiple hyperscalers and on-premise infrastructure. >> Thank you for that summary. I think you hit on all the big trends. I want to go back to you Rajesh 'cause you said that this is a really unique time. You've been in the business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of other transformations and you've seen a lot of big trends. Why is this one different? What makes where we are today such a unique point in time in this IT industry journey? >> Excellent. I think I would say we are in a period of what is called an enforced innovation. While most of the time transformation in IT has been very, very sequential or continuous I think we are seeing an order of shift in the transformation and this whole situation is forcing everyone to accelerate the pace of innovation and transformation. There are two key priorities for every organization in this time. One, build resilient operations and second employee safety. These two parameters have forced the organization to look at their businesses differently, look at their IT infrastructure differently and created a sort of opportunity you can say which is ripe for Wipro's BoundaryLess Enterprise because there are no boundaries. People are working from home. They're no longer in an office confined or boundary. So that's smart. Coming back we are seeing an accelerated innovation. That means our partnership to deliver customer transformation at scale becomes all the more important. Bringing all the good technologies of Dell on one side and combining it Wipro's size, scale and services help us lead in the marketplace for customer transformation. And what's more, we are adding our Dell financial services solutions as Dell Tech on demand to enable all this to be consumed as a service and with flexible payment options which Wipro helps us translate it to customer offerings. >> That's great. Utpal, I want to go to you and get your perspective on how customers, in terms of this boundaryless, how things have changed since March 15th which at least here in the US, I don't know if in India it was on the same date when everything basically got shut down. So it was this light switch moment. Everybody worked from home, no planning, no thought like ready, set, go to now we're six, seven, eight months into this thing and clearly we're it's a marathon not a sprint and even if we go back to some semblance of what was the old normal the new normal is going to be different and everyone is not going to go back to work full time like they did before. So how, from a customer perspective, from a technology implementation perspective and from an initiative and getting this stuff done how has that changed pre-COVID then oh my goodness, it's the light switch moment and now it's, hey, we're in this for the long term. >> Yeah. I think Rajesh did hit upon that a little bit. This is truly that moment where it was a forced innovation. Some of it was happening anyways and it was bound to happen but I think the COVID kind of accelerated all of it. What has impacted is it all started with, okay, how do we enable work from home? And that is when the whole BoundaryLess infrastructure, the virtual desk solutions and all of that started getting impact. I think after that most companies have realized that this is not a short term fix. It is a longterm it's going to be here for staying so they wanted to have a longterm fix so they wanted to come in with innovation but at the same time from a business perspective they've had impact in business so they wanted very creative business models for them to get set with the technology innovation quicker but they didn't want to do it in a traditional way of paying it all upfront and moving it to that. So that is where the creativity in terms of joint innovation which we did with Dell, in flexible payment options, bringing in some kind of an asset lease model and things like that have gained traction. A lot more conversations are around we want to transform help us find a way to make the transformation sooner with maybe less investment upfront and find a way to fund this from the future savings we'll get so that we can be ready for the future without necessarily impacting the bottom line today. All of that has changed, I would say in summary, has accelerated the adoption and the rate of change but it has also led to all of us thinking some creative business models and new approaches to doing business. >> Right, right. Satish back to you. What are the big conflicts that always exist? There's innovation versus security, right? And enabling innovation and giving people more power, more tools, more data to do things at the same time now your tax surface has increased you don't necessarily have everybody locked down on their home infrastructure and they were forced into this. When people are talking about digital transformation, how do they continue to drive forward and how are you helping them on innovation and enabling innovation at the same time as you talked about keeping the data protected and really thinking about business resiliency and continuity in this to increase the tax surface not only because of mobile, but now with the working from home thing? It's increased exponentially. >> Yeah. So I would just take an example of how Wipro handled this pandemic when it hit us and what solutions we get. So let me just give you a perspective. As we all know the current pandemic has disrupted many industries and we were no exception. Basically COVID has brought to the forefront many crucial factors in terms of business continuity process, the quality of employee experience and the automation connected with the employees. So while we enable our employees to connect, collaborate, and communicate with ease from anywhere from any device in a secure way with a consistent user experience powered by Wipro LiVE Workspace platform which actually takes care of delivering a seamless onboarding of user via the Wipro LiVE Workspace platform and consume all the services the way they used to traditionally consume when they were working from office? So this is something which is the power of Wipro LiVe Workspace platform we have implemented to deliver a seamless employee experience access to the workspaces. That's one but also there are some learnings. When we implemented the solutions on the flip side as businesses we must also acknowledge and be cognizant of the fact that employees are trying hard to juggle between frequent interruptions at home and notifications from various applications we receive both on corporate and personal devices. Basically in a nut shell it is difficult to have the culture of corporate to be working from home. Basically that's another big learning. While all of us are adjusting to this new normal we are in constant touch with our employees and trying to improve the overall employee connect and experience. From a solution perspective let me just give you what we actually did. We have close to 175,000 employees across the globe. Suddenly started working from home post lockdown. What does this mean? The traffic pattern suddenly changed the directions which were traditionally moving on a East to West direction started moving North to South. Basically this means a 100% of the workforce in a corporate started coming from the internet to access the corporate infrastructure and then gain access to the customer network. So basically we had to quickly swing in with our solutions and got our engineering teams to re engineer and tweet the infrastructure and security architecture to this new normal. By leveraging our Wipro BLE and video architectures which is powered by Dell VxRail, NSX we were able to spin off and build capacity on on-prem as well as on cloud in less than 24 hours post one got approvals from the client. Lastly we also deployed a back to work IoT solution which helped our employees to get back to work safely. Basically the solution offers various security parameters. Apart from traditional COVID updates it also helps in scanning the employees' temperatures, employee movement within the office premises, bundled with video analytics and enables secure touch less access to the ODCs for employees who are coming back to work. So we are putting all these solutions together and we pretty much seamlessly were able to navigate from the pandemic situation and get our business back to operations in a matter of days. >> 175,000 People. It's really interesting to think about how that network traffic completely changed from inside the firewalls to everything coming from the outside. It's a lot of people to get working from home right away so congratulations on that. As we come to a close Rajesh, I want to come back to you and talk about again, partnership in the age of this rapid acceleration of technology adoption, new technology move. We talked about the work from home. We've talked about cloud. We haven't talked very much about there's this other big thing that's coming down the pike which is 5G and IoT and kind of this entirely new scale of communication that's machine to machine, not person to person and now these connected devices. The amount of traffic continues to go up into the right at an accelerating rate. Tell us a little bit about the meaningfulness of having a partnership like Wipro that you guys can build solutions around new cutting edge technologies and have that real close connection with the customer or with all the supporting services. >> We'd love to. And maybe first I'll give you a perspective on how our employee base started working from home. Some other statistics that they wanted to show maybe add on towards what Satish said. We transitioned 120,000 employees. Twice the normal to work from home within two weeks and every day we are running something like 20,000 meetings and 16 million zoom minutes per day. That's the kind of traffic IT has seen. >> 16 million zoom minutes per day? >> Zoom minutes per day. >> Wow. >> That's the kind of traffic and our VPN traffic user load just tripled. At software or IT we call Dell digital. It was just a smooth and seamless experience. Now coming back, you said rightly. While we have partnered so far to deliver to the solution which are here today and the customers needs which are here today, what are we going to do for the future needs especially ie 5G IoT? We believe as a corporation that Edge is going to be the next wave of innovation. And next way our customers will benefit. Therefore connectivity to Edge via 5G becomes critical. IoT devices and managing the traffic and contain it there itself rather than flowing it back to data center becomes critical. As an example Wipro and Dell technologies are using our hyper converge solutions along with VMware telco and software for a European telco to provide automation and AI to deliver rapid results for the customer. So these are just early parts of it. We are partnering with Wipro to build solutions around 5G as well as telecom related innovation that'll come into the picture. IoT Satish spoke about a simple example of employee attendance. Imagine this is a need which will only accelerate from every organization, multiply it with the automation and AI that needs to be built into machines and feeding all the data back to drive some intelligence and refine the processes, refine the business outcomes. So I think we are working together on many such things and what's important is in all this, when the universe just explodes to devices and millions of devices, security becomes a paramount feature and we are working with Wipro to build what is called an embedded security into each of the solutions that we are designing. Security cannot be an afterthought or a bolt on it's becoming an integral part of the overall solution as we move towards the Edge. >> Yeah, right. And I think as Satish talked about all the distractions and notifications there're a lot of great opportunities for applied AI too to help people know what to do next. It's hard to be context switching all the time, not only on your work, but also the spouses working from home, the kids are doing homeschooling. It's not an optimal environment at all. Gentlemen thank you for your time. Congratulations on your partnership and hope you have a fantastic Dell Tech World. Sorry we can't be in person but this is not too bad. >> Thank you. >> Jeff >> Thank you >> Thank you Utpal, thank you Satish for your partnership. >> All right. Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Alright. Stay with us for continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. I'm Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)