(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. As you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications and data workloads resilient on the cloud?" Meaning  how is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep. >> Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - There's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Prem Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Prem, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Prem phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Prem for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Prem said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Prem I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Prem what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity. And this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and HitachiVantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastry the SVP of Digital Solutions at HitachiVantara and Werner Mayer, head of group core IT and head of group data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. >> Great to see you both. >> And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI. Tell the audience a little bit about what the business is and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. >> Yes, thank you. So Raiffeisen Bank International is international working banking groups. So our core markets are Central Eastern European, Central Eastern Europe and Austria. And we are serving around 50 million clients in this market. So we active in 13 markets. >> Got it. Talk to me, Werner about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. >> Sure. Thank you for the question. So in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy. And the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So one of the important pillars for us was that we are adapting fast also for new technologies. And this was core pillar in our strategy. So we're searching for technologies which are fit in to our HR transformation. And we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So we tested that. We are building up also the competent centers for that and also established the group cloud platform for that. Because our invoice to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in. We have standard for that. We have to introduce large scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, We convinced the top management and we implemented this, this program. So one of the highlights was, of course, also the the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months. And it shows that let's say our platforms works. And let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. >> That's a big challenge. A lot of complexity especially with some of the global things going on. Adithya, these challenges are, are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack was the real issue is here? >> Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. And you know, before I answer your question, I do want to, you know, just say a couple of things about Raiffeisen Bank. And you know, we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now. And, and, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey is - should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation in terms of understanding, you know. How other companies have done it and what are the pitfalls. What's worked, and really what's the recipe for their, you know, journey, right? Which is very unique because, you know, you look at you know, being present across 30 different countries within central and eastern Europe as Werner said. And the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR and all these other issues that come with it, right? And not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, you know, phenomenal story there. The journey and the journey still goes, right Werner? It's not complete yet. But Lisa, to your question, you know. When we look at, you know, the complexities of this transformation, that most modern enterprises are going through. It's not very unique, right? What is unique for a Raiffeisen Bank is - has been the preparation. But as you get into this journey of moving workloads to cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc. One of the things that really is often overlooked is: "Are my applications applications and data workloads resilient on, on the, on the cloud?" Meaning are they - How is the performance? Are they just running or are they performing with high availability to meet your customers goals? Is it scalable? And are my cost in line with what I projected when I moved prep, right? Because that's one of the areas we are seeing where you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And, and, and a lot of it is dependent on are the cloud - are the applications and the workloads cloud, designed for the cloud? Or are they designed for on-prem which you just move to the cloud. >> So Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to, to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops. What's in? What's out? What is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? >> Thanks for the compliment, Lisa. And I think this is a great relationship also in the journey. Topic is, is, is a - is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. But it was mentioning the resilience. The course, we call it finops, security operations and so on have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are able enabling our teams and how we are ramping out the skills of our teams to deal with these multidimensional, let's say environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate at. Because card guard handling is, is different than before. Because beforehand you have central operations team. They do everything for you. But in this world let's say we are also putting the responsibility of the run component of the absent to the - in the tribes and the application teams. And they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have first central rules. We have monitoring functions. We have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and goes hand in - right, to go hand-in-hand. >> Yeah. Yeah. And if, if I could just add Lisa really quick and and Werner hit the nail on the head, right? Because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing, right? You cannot, you know, traditional managed services you had L1, L2, L3 and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum and then all of a sudden somebody calls you at some point, right? >> Werner: Exactly. >> And it really has flipped, right? To, to Werner's point. And Werner hit that name on the head because you really have to understand. Bring an engineering led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that you have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation. And then the problem is routed the right individual ie the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. Right? I think that the key - >> Yes. A very important point with that is said, yeah. So you cannot traditional transport let's say, the operation model what you have now into the cloud because this will not work, yeah. And finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. So super important point. My vision in the cloud and this is also something what we are working on is a sort of zero-ops environment, yeah? Because we're ultimately dealing with the automatization technologies and so on, you can that much - to much more compared to the traditional environment and the benefit of the cloud is: You can test it. You can give it feedback when it is not working, yeah? So it's a completely different operating model. What we try to establish in the cloud environment. >> So really what this seems like guys is is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for. Not the only delicate balance but Werner sticking with you. Talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. >> Thanks for the question. So in principle, we are doing very well on the cost side, surprisingly. And we also started the cloud journey that is said this is not the cost case. Because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster. But at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they found they - they were working much closer to the cost, and let's say monitoring the cost, then we headed into traditional environments, yeah? I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the cost were going on. To say who can save more To say who can save more and make more much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the cost are balance to the traditional environments in the data centers. But we also saw that let's say, the cost were brought down much more than before. So at the beginning we were relative conservative with the assumptions, yeah? But it turns out that we are really getting the benefit. The things are getting faster and also the costs are going down. And we see this in real cases. >> Yeah. And, and, and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right? Because - You know, there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of, it was, you know, the buzz the buzz was let's get to the cloud. We'll start to realize all these savings. And all of a sudden, everything kind of magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also, you know, companies or customers or enterprises that have started this journey about 5, 6 years ago and are about, you know, a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs have increased significantly to what their projections were early on. And the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a FinOps organization that's looking at, you know, the cost of cloud from a structure standpoint and support as a reactive measure. Saying, "Hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-prem, is there any benefit?" When in fact, one of the things that we have noticed really is: The problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams. Because if you are designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with, then you can manage the data cost issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how do we optimize cloud. >> So Adithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. >> Yeah, yeah. So, so one of the things we are doing, Lisa, when we work with customers, is really trying to understand, you know, look at their entire portfolio of applications, right? And, and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing, external customer, internal customer, high availability, production, etc., right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is envision, enable and execute. Which is really envision what the end stage should be regardless of what the environment is, right? And then we enable, which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads, to modernize, rearchitect, replatform, etc. And look at the benefit of that application on its destination. If it's a cloud - if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center, whatever it may be, right? And finally, you know, once we've proven the value and the benefit and and say and kind of monetize the, you know realize the value of it from an agility, from a cost, from security and resilience, etc. Then we go through the execution, which was look we look at the entire portfolio, the entire landscape. And we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it. And then we execute in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every 2-3 months. Because gone the days when you can do things as a science project that took 2-3 years, right? We, we - Everyone wants to see value, want to see - wants to see progress, and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. >> Those are incredibly important outcomes. You guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together. This sounds like a great relationship. All right, so my last question to both of you is: "If I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company, what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner, we'll start with you. >> I would pick up two things, yeah? The first one is: When you are organizing your company in HR way, then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation. Because HR teams needs HR technology. And the second important thing is, what I would say is: Cloud is a large scale and fast moving technology enabler to the company. So if your company is going forward to say: Technology is their enabler tool from a future business then cloud can support this journey. >> Excellent. I'm going to walk away with those. And Adithya, same question to you. I'm a, I'm a customer. I'm at an organization. I'm planning a cloud transformation. Top two things you want me to walk away with. >> Yeah. And I think Werner kind of actually touched on that in the second one, which is: it's not a tech, just an IT or a technology initiative. It is a business initiative, right? Because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive, you know, should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion, etc. So couple of things I would say, right? One is, you know, get Being and prioritize. Work with your business owners, with, you know with the cross-functional team not just the technology team. That's one. The second thing is: as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey, you know, keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey. Because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload, there is an impact to, you know receivables through omnichannel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you, right? And that comes with making making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware. So in turn the end customers are aware. So you know, it's not a one and done from an engagement, it's a journey. And bring in the right experts. Talk to people who've done it, done this before, who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to, right? That's the key. >> That's great advice. That's great advice for anything in life, I think. You talk about the collaboration, the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together. It really has to be - It's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach. Guys, thank you so much for joining me talking through what HitachiVantara and RBI are doing together. It sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well. We thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives. >> Thank you, Lisa. Werner, thank you again. >> Good stuff guys. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching our event: Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. (upbeat music)

(Upbeat music playing) >> Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. Welcome to this event of Building your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers. Please welcome Param Balasubramanian the SVP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara, and Manoj Narayanan is here as well, the Managing Director of Technology at GTCR. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. Excited to have this conversation about redefining CloudOps with you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Pleasure to be here >> Param, let's go ahead and start with you. You have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career. I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last, say, three to four years. >> It's a great question, Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself, the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being a backend infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies. If you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants. With that, as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations, there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them onto the cloud where they treated cloud significantly as an infrastructure. And the way they started to manage it was again, the same format they were managing there on-prem infrastructure and they call it I&O, Infrastructure and Operations. That's kind of the way traditionally cloud is managed. In the last few years, we are seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure. And what I mean by workload is in the cloud, everything is now code. So you are codifying your infrastructure. Your application is already code and your data is also codified as data services. With now that context apply the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else. So that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments. The second critical aspect is even that, even exasperates the situation is multicloud environments. Now, there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload. So there are companies that I reach out and I talk with. They've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be on the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon. And to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain. This becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload. When I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure, Azure as well as Google then, I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three. I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure, as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce, I need so many so much more skills that I need to build, right? That's becoming the second issue. The third one is around data costs. Can I make these clouds talk to each other? Then you get into the ingress egress cost and that creates some complexity. So bringing all of this together and managing is really become becoming more complex for our customers. And obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the, some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. >> Right. A lot of complexity in the last few years. Manoj, let's bring you into the conversation now. Before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR. What kind of company are you? What do you guys do? >> Definitely Lisa. GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm. We've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time, sell it to future buyers. So in a nutshell, we got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform to expectations. And my role within GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we are getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything. So how can technology be a good compliment to the business itself? So, my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology lures that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. >> I like that you said, you know, technology needs to really compliment the business and vice versa. So Manoj, let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR. Talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years. Give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Vantara. >> A a absolutely. In fact, in fact Param phrased it really well, one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management. So there's so many choices there, so much complexities. We have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening. So the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern. So, so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is a financial transparency. We need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from, what is the scale especially in the cloud environment. We are talking about an auto scale ecosystem. Having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that, it, these these become very, very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multicloud environment. >> Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and, and the challenges that it is eradicated. >> Yeah, so it end of the day, right, we we need to focus on our core competence. So, so we have got a very strong technology leadership team. We've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies. But where Hitachi comes in and HAR comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency. All of that is taken off the table from us and and Hitachi manages it for us, right? So it's such a perfectly compliment relationship where they act as two partners and HARC is a solution that is extremely useful in driving that. And, and and I'm anticipating that it'll become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associate workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. >> Right? That's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Param, you talked about the complexities that are existent today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years. What are some of your tips, Param for the audience, like the the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complimented by technology? >> Yeah, a big great question again, Lisa, right? And I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well. The first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration, modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud. Now there is no lift and shift and there is no way somebody else separately manages it, right? If you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud, you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it. So that's number one. Migration, modernization, management of cloud work growth is a single continuum and it's not three separate activities, right? That's number one. And the, the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought, right? People move the workload to the cloud. And I think, again, like I said, I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self-provisioning, every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth. Suddenly the CIO wakes up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right? And, and this is this is become a bit common nowadays, right? The the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought. But consider this example in, in previous world you buy hard, well, you put it in your data center you have already amortized the cost as a CapEx. So you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling, you don't care about the money you spent. But if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one, I am paying for the inefficiency. So if I realize it after six months, I've already spent the money. So financial discipline, especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought. It is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices, right? Those are my top two tips, Lisa, from my standpoint, think about cloud, think about cloud work, cloud workloads. And the last one again, and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again, get into the mindset of everything is code. You don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore. So you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage that infrastructure. It's codified. So your code should be managing it, but think of how it happens, right? That's where we, we are going as an evolution >> Everything is code. That's great advice, great tips for the audience there. Manoj, I'll bring you back into the conversation. You know, we, we can talk about skills gaps on on in many different facets of technology the SRE role, relatively new, skillset. We're hearing, hearing a lot about it. SRE led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skillset. If I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skillset within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to, to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business? >> Yeah. And so unfortunately there is no perfect answer, right? It's such a, such a scarce skillset that a, any day any of the portfolio company CTOs if I go and talk and say, Hey here's a great SRE team member, they'll be more than willing to fight with each of to get the person in right? It's just that scarce of a skillset. So, so a few things we need to look at it. One is, how can I build it within, right? So nobody gets born as an SRE, you, you make a person an SRE. So how do you inculcate that culture? So like Param said earlier, right? Everything is software. So how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is a common guideline and common objective that we are driving towards. So, so that skillset and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization. And that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization. That is one. The second thing is rely on the right partners. So it's not going to be possible for us, to get all of these roles built in-house. So instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us. So that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well. >> Absolutely. That partnership angle is incredibly important from, from the, the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to to redefine cloud operations and build that, as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud center of excellence that allows the organization to be competitive, successful and and really deliver what the end user is, is expecting. I want to ask - Sorry Lisa, - go ahead. >> May I add something to it, I think? >> Sure. >> Yeah. One of the, one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about SRE and to manages point is don't think of SRE as a skillset which is the common way today the industry tries to solve the problem. SRE is a mindset, right? Everybody in >> Well well said, yeah >> That, so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a cycle liability engineer. And everybody has a role in it, right? Even if you take the new process layout from SRE there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of AI talk to L one and L one contras all. They go to L two and then L three. So we, we, we are trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as a a issue routing or a incident routing model, right? Move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model. So you get to route to the right folks. So again, to sum it up, SRE should not be solved as a skillset set because there is not enough people in the market to solve it that way. If you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handhold of it. >> I love that. I've actually never heard that before, but it it makes perfect sense to think about the SRE as a mindset rather than a skillset that will allow organizations to be much more successful. Param I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are are innovating, they're moving more products and services to the as a service model. Talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable, cost efficient services. Are they working better together? >> Again, a a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't, there is still a big wall between development and operations, right? Even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure dev and ops works together. But what many companies have achieved today, honestly is automating the operations for development. For example, as a developer, I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction, right? There is automated testing, automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production, but after production, it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code, right? So there is more work that needs to be done for Devon and Ops to come closer and work together. And one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes, but more by focusing on a product-oriented single backlog approach across development and operations. Which is, again, there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev ops coming together much better now, again SRE principles as we double click and understand it more and Google has done a very good job playing it out for the world. As you think about SRE principle, there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog. And in HARC, Hitachi Application Reliability Centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog. And what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features. The SRE and the operations team try to put backlog into the say sorry, try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability, availability and financials financial optimization of your code. And there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you. So if you understand your spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team, right? So you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where SRE becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skillset because this is not an individual telling you to do. This is the company that is, is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features. >> Right. Great point. Last question for both of you is the same talk kind of take away things that you want me to remember. If I am at an IT leader at, at an organization and I am planning on redefining CloudOps for my company Manoj will start with you and then Param to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully? >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll go back to basics. So the two things I would say need to be taken care of is, one is customer experience. So all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not? So that's a first metric. The second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not? Otherwise we might get lost in the technology with surgery, the new tech, et cetera. But end of the day, if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI, everything else you just can't do much on top of that >> Now it's all about the customer experience. Right? That's so true. Param what are your thoughts, the the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company? >> Absolutely. And I think from a, from a company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely well, right? There is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end, again, I'll, I'll suggest two two more things as a takeaway, right? One, cloud cost is not an afterthought. It's essential for us to think about it upfront. Number two, do not delink migration modernization and operations. They are one stream. If you migrate a long, wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time. And an example of a wrong workload, Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is CapEx than amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement. But that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will it cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run. But that's, that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway. >> Excellent. Guys, thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Vantara and GTCR are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously. We appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence. Thank you both for joining me. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa. Martin, you're watching this event building Your Cloud Center of Excellence with Hitachi Vantara. Thanks for watching. (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing) (Upbeat music playing)

>>Hello, everyone, and welcome to track three off beyond. My name is being in Yemen and I am an account executive here at Thought spot based out of our London office. If the accents throwing you off I don't quite sound is British is you're expecting it because the backgrounds Australian so you can look forward to seeing my face. As we go through these next few sessions, I'm gonna be introducing the guests as well as facilitating some of the Q and A. So make sure you come and say hi in the chat with any comments, questions, thoughts that you have eso with that I mean, this whole track, as the title somewhat gives away, is really about everything that you need to know and all the tips and tricks when it comes to adoption and making sure that your thoughts what deployment is really, really successful. We're gonna be taking off everything from user training on boarding new use cases and picking the right use cases, as well as hearing from our customers who have been really successful in during this before. So with that, though, I'm really excited to introduce our first guest, Kathleen Maley. She is a senior analytics executive with over 15 years of experience in the space. And she's going to be talking to us about all her tips and tricks when it comes to making the most out of your center of excellence from obviously an analytics perspective. So with that, I'm going to pass the mic to her. But look forward to continuing the chat with you all in the chat. Come say hi. >>Thank you so much, Bina. And it is really exciting to be here today, thanks to everyone for joining. Um, I'll jump right into it. The topic of evolving your analytics center of excellence is a particular passion of mine on I'm looking forward to sharing some of my best practices with you. I started my career, is a member of an analytic sioe at Bank of America was actually ah, model developer. Um, in my most recent role at a regional bank in the Midwest, I ran an entire analytics center of excellence. Um, but I've also been on the business side running my own P and l. So I think through this combination of experiences, I really developed a unique perspective on how to most effectively establish and work with an analytic CEO. Um, this thing opportunity is really a two sided opportunity creating value from analytics. Uh, and it really requires the analytics group and the line of business Thio come together. Each has a very specific role to play in making that happen. So that's a lot of what I'll talk about today. Um, I started out just like most analysts do formally trained in statistics eso whether your data analyst or a business leader who taps into analytical talent. I want you to leave this talk today, knowing the modern definition of analytics, the purpose of a modern sioe, some best practices for a modern sioe and and then the role that each of you plays in bringing this Kuito life. So with that said, let me start by level, setting on the definition of analytics that aligns with where the discipline is headed. Um, versus where it's been historically, analytics is the discovery, interpretation and communication of meaningful patterns in data, the connective tissue between data and effective decision making within an organization. And this is a definition that I've been working under for the last, you know, 7 to 10 years of my career notice there is nothing in there about getting the data. We're at this amazing intersection of statistics and technology that effectively eliminates getting the data as a competitive advantage on this is just It's true for analysts who are thinking in terms of career progression as it is for business leaders who have to deliver results for clients and shareholders. So the definition is action oriented. It's purposeful. It's not about getting the data. It's about influencing and enabling effective decision making. Now, if you're an analyst, this can be scary because it's likely what you spend a huge amount of your time doing, so much so that it probably feels like getting the data is your job. If that's the case, then the emergence of these new automated tools might feel like your job is at risk of becoming obsolete. If you're a business leader, this should be scary because it means that other companies air shooting out in front of you not because they have better ideas, necessarily, but because they can move so much faster. According to new research from Harvard Business Review, nearly 90% of businesses say the more successful when they equipped those at the front lines with the ability to make decisions in the moment and organizations who are leading their industries and embracing these decision makers are delivering substantial business value nearly 50% reporting increased customer satisfaction, employee engagement, improve product and service quality. So, you know, there there is no doubt that speed matters on it matters more and more. Um, but if you're feeling a little bit nervous, I want you to think of it. I want you think of it a little differently. Um, you think about the movie Hidden figures. The job of the women in hidden figures was to calculate orbital trajectories, uh, to get men into space and then get them home again. And at the start of the movie, they did all the required mathematical calculations by hand. At the end of the movie, when technology eliminated the need to do those calculations by hand, the hidden figures faced essentially the same decision many of you are facing now. Do I become obsolete, or do I develop a new set of, in their case, computer science skills required to keep doing the job of getting them into space and getting them home again. The hidden figures embraced the latter. They stayed relevant on They increase their value because they were able to doom or of what really mattered. So what we're talking about here is how do we embrace the new technology that UN burdens us? And how do we up skill and change our ways of working to create a step function increase in data enabled value and the first step, really In evolving your analytics? Dewey is redefining the role of analytics from getting the data to influencing and enabling effective decision making. So if this is the role of the modern analyst, a strategic thought partner who harnesses the power of data and directs it toward achieving specific business outcomes, then let's talk about how the series in which they operate needs change to support this new purpose. Um, first, historical CEOs have primarily been about fulfilling data requests. In this scenario, C always were often formed primarily as an efficiency measure. This efficiency might have come in the form of consistency funds, ability of resource is breaking down silos, creating and building multipurpose data assets. Um, and under the getting the data scenario that's actually made a lot of sense for modern Sealy's, however, the objective is to create an organization that supports strategic business decision ing for individuals and for the enterprises the whole. So let's talk about how we do that while maintaining the progress made by historical seaweeds. It's about really extending its extending what, what we've already done the progress we've already made. So here I'll cover six primary best practices. None is a silver bullet. Each needs to fit within your own company culture. But these air major areas to consider as you evolve your analytics capabilities first and foremost always agree on the purpose and approach of your Coe. Successfully evolving yourself starts with developing strategic partnerships with the business leaders that your organization will support that the analytics see we will support. Both parties need to explicitly blocked by in to the objective and agree on a set of operating principles on bond. I think the only way to do that is just bringing people to the table, having an open and honest conversation about where you are today, where you wanna be and then agree on how you will move forward together. It's not about your organization or my organization. How do we help the business solve problems that, you know, go beyond what what we've been able to do today? So moving on While there's no single organizational model that works for everyone, I generally favor a hybrid model that includes some level of fully dedicated support. This is where I distinguish between to whom the analyst reports and for whom the analyst works. It's another concept that is important to embrace in spirit because all of the work the analyst does actually comes from the business partner. Not from at least it shouldn't come from the head of the analytic Center of excellence. Andan analysts who are fully dedicated to a line of business, have the time in the practice to develop stronger partnerships to develop domain knowledge and history on those air key ingredients to effectively solving business problems. You, you know, how can you solve a problem when you don't really understand what it is? So is the head of an analytic sioe. I'm responsible for making sure that I hire the right mix of skills that I can effectively manage the quality of my team's work product. I've got a specialized skill set that allows me to do that, Um, that there's career path that matters to analysts on all of the other things that go along with Tele management. But when it comes to doing the work, three analysts who report to me actually work for the business and creating some consistency and stability there will make them much more productive. Um, okay, so getting a bit more, more tactical, um, engagement model answers the question. Who do I go to When? And this is often a question that business partners ask of a centralized analytics function or even the hybrid model. Who do I go to win? Um, my recommendation. Make it easy for them. Create a single primary point of contact whose job is to build relationships with a specific partner set of partners to become deeply embedded in their business and strategies. So they know why the businesses solving the problems they need to solve manage the portfolio of analytical work that's being done on behalf of the partner, Onda Geun. Make it make it easy for the partner to access the entire analytics ecosystem. Think about the growing complexity of of the current analytics ecosystem. We've got automated insights Business Analytics, Predictive modeling machine learning. Um, you Sometimes the AI is emerging. Um, you also then have the functional business questions to contend with. Eso This was a big one for me and my experience in retail banking. Uh, you know, if if I'm if I'm a deposits pricing executive, which was the line of business role that I ran on, I had a question about acquisitions through the digital channel. Do I talk Thio the checking analyst, Or do I talk to the digital analyst? Um, who owns that question? Who do I go to? Eso having dedicated POC s on the flip side also helps the head of the center of excellence actually manage. The team holistically reduces the number of entry points in the complexity coming in so that there is some efficiency. So it really is a It's a win win. It helps on both sides. Significantly. Um, there are several specific operating rhythms. I recommend each acting as a as a different gear in an integrated system, and this is important. It's an integrated decision system. All of these for operating rhythms, serves a specific purpose and work together. So I recommend a business strategy session. First, UM, a portfolio management routine, an internal portfolio review and periodic leadership updates, and I'll say a little bit more about each of those. So the business strategy session is used to set top level priorities on an annual or semiannual basis. I've typically done this by running half day sessions that would include a business led deep dive on their strategy and current priorities. Again, always remembering that if I'm going to try and solve all the business problem, I need to know what the business is trying to achieve. Sometimes new requester added through this process often time, uh, previous requests or de prioritized or dropped from the list entirely. Um, one thing I wanna point out, however, is that it's the partner who decides priorities. The analyst or I can guide and make recommendations, but at the end of the day, it's up to the business leader to decide what his or her short term and long term needs and priorities are. The portfolio management routine Eyes is run by the POC, generally on a biweekly or possibly monthly basis. This is where new requests or prioritize, So it's great if we come together. It's critical if we come together once or twice a year to really think about the big rocks. But then we all go back to work, and every day a new requests are coming up. That pipeline has to be managed in an intelligent way. So this is where the key people, both the analyst and the business partners come together. Thio sort of manage what's coming in, decking it against top priorities, our priorities changing. Um, it's important, uh, Thio recognize that this routine is not a report out. This routine is really for the POC who uses it to clarify questions. Raised risks facilitate decisions, um, from his partners with his or her partner so that the work continues. So, um, it should be exactly as long as it needs to be on. Do you know it's as soon as the POC has the information he or she needs to get back to work? That's what happens. An internal portfolio review Eyes is a little bit different. This this review is internal to the analytics team and has two main functions. First, it's where the analytics team can continue to break down silos for themselves and for their partners by talking to each other about the questions they're getting in the work that they're doing. But it's also the form in which I start to challenge my team to develop a new approach of asking why the request was made. So we're evolving. We're evolving from getting the data thio enabling effective business decision ing. Um, and that's new. That's new for a lot of analysts. So, um, the internal portfolio review is a safe space toe asks toe. Ask the people who work for May who report to May why the partner made this request. What is the partner trying to solve? Okay, senior leadership updates the last of these four routines, um, less important for the day to day, but significantly important for maintaining the overall health of the SIOE. I've usually done this through some combination of email summaries, but also standing agenda items on a leadership routine. Um, for for me, it is always a shared update that my partner and I present together. We both have our names on it. I typically talk about what we learned in the data. Briefly, my partner will talk about what she is going to do with it, and very, very importantly, what it is worth. Okay, a couple more here. Prioritization happens at several levels on Dive. Alluded to this. It happens within a business unit in the Internal Portfolio review. It has to happen at times across business units. It also can and should happen enterprise wide on some frequency. So within business units, that is the easiest. Happens most frequently across business units usually comes up as a need when one leader business leader has a significant opportunity but no available baseline analytical support. For whatever reason. In that case, we might jointly approach another business leader, Havenaar Oi, based discussion about maybe borrowing a resource for some period of time. Again, It's not my decision. I don't in isolation say, Oh, good project is worth more than project. Be so owner of Project Be sorry you lose. I'm taking those. Resource is that's It's not good practice. It's not a good way of building partnerships. Um, you know that that collaboration, what is really best for the business? What is best for the enterprise, um, is an enterprise decision. It's not a me decision. Lastly, enterprise level part ization is the probably the least frequent is aided significantly by the semi annual business strategy sessions. Uh, this is the time to look enterprise wide. It all of the business opportunities that play potential R a y of each and jointly decide where to align. Resource is on a more, uh, permanent basis, if you will, to make sure that the most important, um, initiatives are properly staffed with analytical support. Oxygen funding briefly, Um, I favor a hybrid model, which I don't hear talked about in a lot of other places. So first, I think it's really critical to provide each business unit with some baseline level of analytical support that is centrally funded as part of a shared service center of excellence. And if a business leader needs additional support that can't otherwise be provided, that leader can absolutely choose to fund an incremental resource from her own budget that is fully dedicated to the initiative that is important to her business. Um, there are times when that privatization happens at an enterprise level, and the collective decision is we are not going to staff this potentially worthwhile initiative. Um, even though we know it's worthwhile and a business leader might say, You know what? I get it. I want to do it anyway. And I'm gonna find budget to make that happen, and we create that position, uh, still reporting to the center of excellence for all of the other reasons. The right higher managing the work product. But that resource is, as all resource is, works for the business leader. Um, so, uh, it is very common thinking about again. What's the value of having these resource is reports centrally but work for the business leader. It's very common Thio here. I can't get from a business leader. I can't get what I need from the analytics team. They're too busy. My work falls by the wayside. So I have to hire my own people on. My first response is have we tried putting some of these routines into place on my second is you might be right. So fund a resource that's 100% dedicated to you. But let me use my expertise to help you find the right person and manage that person successfully. Um, so at this point, I I hope you see or starting to see how these routines really work together and how these principles work together to create a higher level of operational partnership. We collectively know the purpose of a centralized Chloe. Everyone knows his or her role in doing the work, managing the work, prioritizing the use of this very valuable analytical talent. And we know where higher ordered trade offs need to be made across the enterprise, and we make sure that those decisions have and those decision makers have the information and connectivity to the work and to each other to make those trade offs. All right, now that we've established the purpose of the modern analyst and the functional framework in which they operate, I want to talk a little bit about the hard part of getting from where many individual analysts and business leaders are today, uh, to where we have the opportunity to grow in order to maintain pain and or regain that competitive advantage. There's no judgment here. It's simply an artifact. How we operate today is simply an artifact of our historical training, the technology constraints we've been under and the overall newness of Applied analytics as a distinct discipline. But now is the time to start breaking away from some of that and and really upping our game. It is hard not because any of these new skills is particularly difficult in and of themselves. But because any time you do something, um, for the first time, it's uncomfortable, and you're probably not gonna be great at it the first time or the second time you try. Keep practicing on again. This is for the analyst and for the business leader to think differently. Um, it gets easier, you know. So as a business leader when you're tempted to say, Hey, so and so I just need this data real quick and you shoot off that email pause. You know it's going to help them, and I'll get the answer quicker if I give him a little context and we have a 10 minute conversation. So if you start practicing these things, I promise you will not look back. It makes a huge difference. Um, for the analyst, become a consultant. This is the new set of skills. Uh, it isn't as simple as using layman's terms. You have to have a different conversation. You have to be willing to meet your business partner as an equal at the table. So when they say, Hey, so and so can you get me this data You're not allowed to say yes. You're definitely not is not to say no. Your reply has to be helped me understand what you're trying to achieve, so I can better meet your needs. Andi, if you don't know what the business is trying to achieve, you will never be able to help them get there. This is a must have developed project management skills. All of a sudden, you're a POC. You're in charge of keeping track of everything that's coming in. You're in charge of understanding why it's happening. You're responsible for making sure that your partner is connected across the rest of the analytics. Um, team and ecosystem that takes some project management skills. Um, be business focused, not data focused. Nobody cares what your algorithm is. I hate to break it to you. We love that stuff on. We love talking about Oh, my gosh. Look, I did this analysis, and I didn't think this is the way I was gonna approach it, and I did. I found this thing. Isn't it amazing? Those are the things you talk about internally with your team because when you're doing that, what you're doing is justifying and sort of proving the the rightness of your answer. It's not valuable to your business partner. They're not going to know what you're talking about anyway. Your job is to tell them what you found. Drawing conclusions. Historically, Analyst spent so much of their time just getting data into a power 0.50 pages of summarized data. Now the job is to study that summarized data and draw a conclusion. Summarized data doesn't explain what's happening. They're just clues to what's happening. And it's your job as the analyst to puzzle out that mystery. If a partner asked you a question stated in words, your answer should be stated in words, not summarized data. That is a new skill for some again takes practice, but it changes your ability to create value. So think about that. Your job is to put the answer on page with supporting evidence. Everything else falls in the cutting room floor, everything. Everything. Everything has to be tied to our oi. Um, you're a cost center and you know, once you become integrated with your business partner, once you're working on business initiatives, all of a sudden, this actually becomes very easy to do because you will know, uh, the business case that was put forth for that business initiative. You're part of that business case. So it becomes actually again with these routines in place with this new way of working with this new way of thinking, it's actually pretty easy to justify and to demonstrate the value that analytic springs to an organization. Andi, I think that's important. Whether or not the organization is is asking for it through formalized reporting routine Now for the business partner, understand that this is a transformation and be prepared to support it. It's ultimately about providing a higher level of support to you, but the analysts can't do it unless you agree to this new way of working. So include your partner as a member of your team. Talk to them about the problems you're trying to sell to solve. Go beyond asking for the data. Be willing and able to tie every request to an overarching business initiative on be poised for action before solution is commissioned. This is about preserving. The precious resource is you have at your disposal and you know often an extra exploratory and let it rip. Often, an exploratory analysis is required to determine the value of a solution, but the solution itself should only be built if there's a plan, staffing and funding in place to implement it. So in closing, transformation is hard. It requires learning new things. It also requires overriding deeply embedded muscle memory. The more you can approach these changes is a team knowing you won't always get it right and that you'll have to hold each other accountable for growth, the better off you'll be and the faster you will make progress together. Thanks. >>Thank you so much, Kathleen, for that great content and thank you all for joining us. Let's take a quick stretch on. Get ready for the next session. Starting in a few minutes, you'll be hearing from thought spots. David Coby, director of Business Value Consulting, and Blake Daniel, customer success manager. As they discuss putting use cases toe work for your business

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Special coverage sponsored by A. W s Global Partner Network. Hello. And welcome back to the cubes Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. Normally, were there in person doing the interviews, getting the signal from the noise. I'm John for your host. And where the cube virtual Got a great guest here. Aidan McDonald, Program manager, Justice through code the center of justice at the Columbia University. Um, this is a great story, Aiden. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate you taking the time to join me. >>Thanks so much for having me, John. >>So first of all talk about the mission of justice through code. This is such an awesome program. It really is impactful. It's one of those examples where, you know, people want to change the world. This is one. You can actually do it. And with code, take us through the mission. >>Yeah, So I think to understand the mission here, you have to understand a little bit about the problem, right? So the United States has, uh, 5% of the world's population, 25% of the global prison population. When people come home from prison, they're confronted with the reality that it's just very difficult to find jobs right. We have unemployment rates that are stratospherically higher than for the general population. And so, at the core of what we're doing in our mission is really to provide a pathway to career track employment for formerly incarcerated individuals to help support them and their families, and also to begin to change the negative stereotypes that air attached to the formerly incarcerated. >>It's an upwardly mobile mindset growth mindset. Also, there's new skills, always hard to do that, given the environmental conditions, what skills are you guys delivering? Take us through how it works. Give us a feel for kind of the skill sets and what gets what happens. >>Yeah, so we focused the program kind of in two distinct ways. So we have the technical skills aspect of the curriculum and the interpersonal skills. So as far as the technical skills go, we teach a version of a course that's taught to current Columbia MBA students eso that is set up. We teach the fundamentals of programming python, what we call phase one of the program. Then we move on to a P I S and data analysis. And then from there we do a Capstone software project. And for that project, groups of two or more students come together. Really? They conceptualize the design on day execute on building this project. And during that phase, of course, we actually pair students with mentors who are season software engineers from many of the top tech companies in the US and then in terms of the story in terms of the interpersonal skills, um, you know, we really focus on the skills that are necessary to success in the tech workforce s Oh, this is, you know, resumes, cover letters, interviewing skills and also really understanding that for many of our students, they don't have the networks that so maney people are fortunate enough to have that have gone through a traditional educational pathways. We bring in guest speakers from different corporations. Um, and, you know, having the students were quick mentors there really able to start to build that network to support themselves in their career transition when they complete the program. >>You know what's really amazing about what you're doing is and this really is so timing. The timing is perfect. Um, is that with the cloud and the tech scene, where we're at now is you don't you can come out. You can level up pretty quickly with things. In other words, you know, you could have someone go to an Ivy League school and be all the pedigree, and it doesn't matter because the skills now are different. You literally could be a surfing and be a couch potato surfing TV and get online and get an Amazon degree and through educate and and come out, make six figures. I mean, so there is definitely a path here. It's not like it's a slog. It's not like it's a huge leap, so the timing is perfect. We're seeing that across the board. There's more empty jobs, opening cybersecurity, cloud computing administration and with land in all these cool services, it's just gonna get easier. We hear that we see that clearly. What are some of the examples can you share of the graduates? What have they gone on to do? You mentioned some of the big tech companies. Take us through that that tipping point when the success kicks in. >>What s so you know, as I mentioned, one of the really integral parts of our program is this mentorship, right? So students finished the program. They often continue to work on their final projects, um, in conjunction with their mentors and then really focused during that time period on developing the skill sets that they'll need to have entering into junior level software development roles a tech companies For some of our students, this means, um, they've actually found out through the course of the class that they prefer front end web development, and they start working on JavaScript and full stack. And a few of our students have gone on to work it a or enter into apprenticeships that major tech companies, um, in those roles. And then we also have students who are focused on continuing in their development of their technical skill set with Python s. So we have some students who have actually entered into the Columbia University I t department on a big project. They're working on other students that have worked with freelance Web development agencies and projects really have a very diverse, talented group of students. And so from that we see that Everybody has different interests and definitely no one specific pathway but many successful pathways. >>How is Amazon Web services helping you guys? They contributing? They're giving you credits. What's their role here? >>Yeah, so they've provided kind of their expertise and support to the program. Just really excited to be collaborating with them on really looking at, How do we take this program to scale? Right. So we know that this is a problem that affect so many Americans, right? There's 77 million Americans currently with a criminal record. And so, um, you know, with the barriers to employment that come from having been incarcerated, I came to this work because I spent four years incarcerated for my own involvement in the marijuana industry in California Prior toe legalization. And so, you know, I saw a kind of these challenges, right? Firsthand of what it's like to try to get a job. And so, you know, we're just very invested in collaborating with AWS again. Thio bring this program to scale so we can really help uplift the communities that have been impacted by mass incarceration. >>It's interesting you talk about your personal experience, talk about this stigma that comes with that and how this breaks through that stigma. And this is really not only is a self esteem issues up this Israel, you could make more money. You have a career and literally the difference between going down or up is huge. Talk about the stigma and how this program changes the lives of the individual. >>Yeah, I think one important thing Thio consider hearing before understanding is this statement right? Is that unemployment or employment should say is the number one predictor of recidivism. Right? So we see that for people that have really jobs, they don't go back to prison on DSO. You know, we're just so invested in working on that and in terms of the stigma, uh, you know, it's just so prevalent, right? I can think through myself. Before I had going thio to prison, I had started to businesses. I was actually accepted. Thio go to Columbia University when I got out and I would apply the landscaping jobs, couldn't get to the final round, and the job offer would be rescinded, right? I mean, just this automatic sense of this person is not to be trusted because they have a history of incarceration. And so what we're really working on doing with our students is first redefining what people think it's possible, right? I saw this myself coming home from prison. The constant messaging is your life is over. You're never going to accomplish anything of meaning and so just kind of accept your lot on DSO. At first, we really focus on that with students in terms of sharing stories of success. Other people that we know that have taken this pathway on been really looking at providing leadership development. So when our students do enter into these companies, they're really able to service leaders and for people to understand that while you may have these assumptions because of depictions of people that have been incarcerated in the media, the end of they formerly incarcerated people, our brothers, sisters, family members and really deserve a chance in life. >>Yeah, And I got to say, you know, as someone who loves technology and been, uh, computer science when his early days, you know, there was a ladder, you have to have a requisite level now. I mean, you literally could be six weeks in and be fluent on Cloud Computing Administration as three bucket configurations. I mean, there are so many things that so many opportunities if you have some intelligence and some drive you're in, I mean, it's just Z pretty right? It's right there. It's great. It's attainable. It's not a fantasy, it's it's doable. And programs like yours are awesome. My hat's off to you for doing that. Thanks for sharing. >>Definitely. Thank you so much for having me >>final question before we go, How does people get involved? Can you share a minute? Give a plug for what you guys are doing? How do I get involved? How do I give support? Take a minute to >>get? Definitely. I mean, I think at the core like the most important thing that anybody can dio right is to look within the organizations that they work and work at and find out what your fair chance hiring practices are and see if if there's an opportunity to hire our students or other formerly incarcerated students. E think it also were very engaged, as I mentioned in our mentorship program s so people can confined US center for Justice that, uh, Colombia dot e d u on board, you know reach out, tow us about the mentorship program and really begin toe talk about this and share the stories of those who have succeeded and provide support Thio other people that will be returning home. >>All right. And thank you very much. Just a fur coat. Check it out. Columbia University 18 McDonald, Program manager. Thanks for joining us. I'm John for here in the Cube Cube Coverage Cube. Virtual coverage of reinvent 2020. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. >>It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. Normally, were there in person doing the interviews, getting the signal from the noise. I'm Sean for your host. And where the cube virtual Got a great guest here. Aidan McDonald, Program manager, Justice through code, the center of justice at the Columbia University. Um, this is a great story, Aiden. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate you taking the time to join me. >>Thanks so much for having me, John. >>So first of all, talk about the mission of justice through code. This is such an awesome program. It really is impactful. It's one of those examples where, you know, people want to change the world. This is one. You can actually do it. And with code, take us through the mission. >>Yeah, so I think to understand the mission here, you have to understand a little bit about the problem, right? So the United States has 5% of the world's population, 25% of the global prison population when people come home from prison, they're confronted with the reality that it's just very difficult to find jobs right. We have unemployment rates that are stratospherically higher than for the general population. And so, at the core of what we're doing in our mission is really to provide a pathway to career track employment for formerly incarcerated individuals to help support them and their families, and also to begin to change the negative stereotypes that air attached to the formerly incarcerated. >>It's an upwardly mobile mindset growth mindset. Also, there's new skills always hard to do that right. Given the environmental conditions. What skills are you guys delivering? Take us through how it works. Give us a feel for kind of the skill sets and what gets what happens. >>Yeah, so we focused the program kind of in two distinct ways. So we have the technical skills aspect of the curriculum and the interpersonal skills. Soas faras. The technical skills go. We teach a version of a course that's taught to current Columbia MBA students eso that is set up. We teach the fundamentals of programming python in what we call phase one of the program. Then we move on to a P I s and data analysis. And then from there we do a Capstone software project. And for that project, groups of two or more students come together. Really? They conceptualize the design on day execute on building this project. And during that phase, of course, we actually pair students with mentors who are season software engineers from many of the top tech companies in the US And then in terms of the story in terms of the interpersonal skills, um, you know, we really focus on the skills that are necessary to success in the tech workforce s Oh, this is, you know, resumes, cover letters, interviewing skills and also really understanding that for many of our students, they don't have the networks that so maney people are fortunate enough to have that have gone through a traditional educational pathway. So we bring in guest speakers from different corporations. Um, and you know, having the students work with mentors there really able to start to build that network to support themselves in their career transition when they complete the program. >>You know what's really amazing about what you're doing is, and this really is so timing The timing is perfect. Um, is that with the cloud and the tech scene, where we're at now is you don't you can come out. You can level up pretty quickly with things. In other words, you know, you could have someone go to an Ivy League school and be all the pedigree, and it doesn't matter because the skills now are different. You literally could be a surfing and be a couch potato surfing TV and get online and get an Amazon degree and through educate and and come out, make six figures. I mean, so there is definitely a path here. It's not like it's a slog. It's not like it's a huge leap, so the timing is perfect. We're seeing that across the board. There's more empty jobs, opening cybersecurity, cloud computing administration, and with land in all these cool services, it's just gonna get easier. We hear that we see that clearly. What are some of the examples can you share of the graduates? What have they gone on to do? You mentioned some of the big tech companies take us through that, that tipping point when the success kicks in? >>Yeah, so you know, as I mentioned one of the really integral parts of our program. Is this mentorship? Right? So students finished the program. They often continue to work on their final projects, um, in conjunction with their mentors and then really focused during that time period on developing the skill sets that they'll need to have entering into junior level software development roles a tech companies For some of our students, this means, um, they've actually found out through the course of the class that they prefer front end web development and they start working on JavaScript and full stack. And a few of our students have gone on to work it a or enter into apprenticeships that major tech companies, um, in those roles. And then we also have students who are focused on continuing in their development of their technical skill set with Python s. So we have some students who have actually entered into the Columbia University I T department on a big project. They're working on other students that have worked with freelance Web development agencies and projects, um, really have a very diverse, talented group of students. And so from that we see that everybody has different interests and definitely no one specific pathway, but many successful pathways. >>How is Amazon Web services helping you guys? They contributing? They're giving you credits. What's their role here? >>Yeah, so they've provided kind of their expertise and support to the program. Just really excited to be collaborating with them on really looking at, How do we take this program to scale? Right. So we know that this is a problem that affect so many Americans, right? There's 77 million Americans currently with a criminal record. And so, um, you know, with the barriers to employment that come from having been incarcerated, I came to this work because I spent four years incarcerated for my own involvement in the marijuana industry in California Prior toe legalization. And so, you know, I saw kind of these challenges right firsthand of what it's like to try to get a job. And so, you know, we're just very invested in collaborating with AWS again. Thio bring this program to scale so we can really help uplift the communities that have been impacted by mass incarceration. >>It's interesting you talk about your personal experience, talk about this stigma that comes with that and how this breaks through that stigma and this is really not only is a self esteem issues up this Israel, you could make more money. You have a career and literally the difference between going down or up is huge. Talk about the stigma and how this program changes the lives of the individual. >>Yeah, I think one important thing Thio consider hearing before understanding is this statement, right? Is that, um, unemployment or employment should say is the number one predictor of recidivism. Right. So we see that for people that have really jobs, they don't go back to prison on dso Um you know, we're just so invested in working on that and in terms of the stigma, um, you know, it's just so prevalent, right? I could think through myself. Before I had gone thio to prison, I had started to businesses. I was actually accepted. Thio go to Columbia University when I got out and I would apply the landscaping jobs, couldn't get to the final round, and the job offer would be rescinded, right? I mean, it's just this automatic sense of this person is not to be trusted because they have a history of incarceration And so what we're really working on doing with our students is first redefining what people think it's possible, right? I saw this myself coming home from prison. The constant messaging is your life is over. You're never going to accomplish anything of meaning and so just kind of accept your lot on DSO. At first, we really focus on that with students in terms of sharing stories of success. Other people that we know that have taken this pathway on been really looking at providing leadership development. So when our students do enter into these companies, they're really able to service leaders and for people to understand that while you may have these assumptions because of depictions of people that have been incarcerated in the media, the end of they formerly incarcerated people, our brothers, sisters, family members and really deserve a chance in life. >>Yeah, And I got to say, you know, as someone who loves technology and been, uh, computer science when his early days, you know, there was a ladder, you have to have a requisite level now. I mean, you literally could be six weeks in and be fluent on Cloud Computing Administration as three bucket configurations. I mean, there are so many things that so many opportunities if you have some intelligence and some drive you're in, I mean, it's just Z pretty right? It's right there. It's great. It's attainable. It's not a fantasy, it's it's doable. And programs like yours are awesome. My hat's off to you for doing that. Thanks for sharing. >>Definitely. Thank you so much for having me >>final question Before we go, How does people get involved? Can you share a minute? Give a plug for what you guys are doing? How do I get involved? How do I give support? Take a minute to >>get? Definitely. I mean, I think at the core like the most important thing that anybody can dio right is to look within the organizations that they work and work at and find out what your fair chance hiring practices are and see if if there's an opportunity to hire our students or other formerly incarcerated students. E think also were very engaged, as I mentioned in our mentorship program s so people can confined US center for Justice that, um, Colombia dot e d u on bond, you know, reach out, tow us about the mentorship program and really begin toe talk about this and share the stories of those who have succeeded and provide support Thio other people that will be returning home. >>All right. And thank you very much. Just a fur coat. Check it out. Columbia University 18 McDonald, Program manager. Thanks for joining us. I'm John for here in the Cube Cube Coverage Cube. Virtual coverage of reinvent 2020. Thanks for watching.

>> Live, from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2.0. Brought to you by, Lenovo. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform, here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We have two guests here on this segment, We have Kirk Skaugen, he is the president of Lenovo Data Center Group, and Brad Anderson, the Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Mobility for NetApp. Thanks for coming on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> So the big news of the day, the NetApp Lenovo partnership, explain to our viewers exactly what this means. These are two global powerhouses joining forces. >> Yeah sure, so I think Lenovo has had an amazing year. Last year in our Transform 1.0 we announced the largest server portfolio in our history. And this year we announced the largest data center, data management storage portfolio in our history. With a partnership with NetApp, so we're creating a multi-billion dollar global alliance, a multi-year alliance and it has a place in a joint venture in China as well as we'll be distributing NetApp products in over 160 countries in the world. >> So tell us about the background to this partnership. How did it come about? >> Well, you know, for NetApp we were looking for expanding our reach, and there was two markets that were kind of underserved in. One being kind of the commercial SMB SME channel, and Lenovo has a high-velocity channel there, a strong position. So Lenovo made complete sense in that space as well as in China, where we have a strong brand but we're underserved there as well, so who is better in China than Lenovo? So for us this is all about global market and then the fact that they're a server vendor is just icing on the cake, because the other two server vendors in the marketplace are also our competitors. And then, Lenovo is so much more compatible and complementary to our entire business. >> Kirk, maybe you could spend a little more, because when you look at storage today, storage is really built on servers. You know, NetApp is, you know, at it's heart a software company, even back in the day NetApp was never, some of the other storage companies spent a lot of time and money on the hardware pieces. And of course had reliable, good, trustable hardware, but maybe explain how much, kind of, I.P. goes into this partnership. >> Yeah, sure. So I think today we have about 15 percent coverage of the overall storage market within Lenovo. We've grown our flash array business over 100 percent over the last four quarters. IDC had us at 30% quarter to quarter growth. So we've done well, but we've only cover 15% of the market. After this announcement, and shipping now today, we'll cover over 90% of the market in more than 160 countries. So we're using our global supply chain which is ranked number five in the world by Garner. Manufacturing in Europe, in China, in Mexico et cetera. Really expand this out through our channel partnership program. And in China we're taking a very unique approach to this joint venture. This isn't about taking global products and just trying to force fit them into China. China has unique software solutions, unique hyper scale requirements. So we're pooling our R and D there. Lenovo will be a 51% owner, NetApp a 49% owner. Brad's going to be on the board and there we're going to be delivering products in China for China. >> Yeah, is it, you've got a lot of experience with that. You talk about coming in the future there's an NFV software and hardware solution in China, so Lenovo has some experience doing this kind of engagement, you know. >> Yeah, I think we have a more than 50% growth now, year on year in China. We retooled a lot of the operations that we had there. We have a really nice, broad portfolio now since we launched Think System and Think Agile so it's a nice place to grow on. But today we talked about the joint venture with NetApp and also the fact that over the next year we'll be building out a telecom NFV company after having China Mobile and China Telecom with us as at Mobile World Congress. As well as new edge gateway and edge server solutions. >> Brad, I know cloud is in your title for what you are doing, when I hear NetApp talking, I see NetApp at all the cloud shows we go to. It's a very different world than when I think about NetApp ten years or twenty years ago as like, you know, the Nas Filer company. So bring us up to speed of kind of the NetApp today the momentum and what this brings. >> Yeah, I mean we are going through our own transformation where we were principally a storage company and now we want to be a data company, and increasingly to be a data company you got to be a cloud company. And so, we continue to develop what we think are the, you know, the best storage products in the world, but they are all cloud connected. 'Cause we want data to be able to flow from prim to cloud and customers be able to, you know. That's what really kind of fuels these digital enterprises is that data is the new oil. And so in doing that we have kind of expanded NetApp's charter significantly to being the data authority in hybrid cloud. Hybrid being both the private and the public. And so part of my business is really focused on providing products and solutions so customers can have the same experience in building their own private clouds that they enjoy in the public. And then on the public side we have partnerships with all the hyper scalers to put NetApp's in there so they can deliver native cloud data services. And so, this is a very different company where we're getting more and more cloudy every day. (Rebecca laughs). And that's part of our transformation intentionally. >> So, the transformation, it's the theme of this conference and you were up on the main stage talking about Lenovo's turning this corner and really accelerating its growth, and also talking about the transformation from within the company. Changing the look of the leadership team in particular. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that strategy. >> Sure, so we acquired the IBM system X business in late 2014 and we did some things really well and we did some things that we've learned from. So we spent, you know, basically the last 18 months transforming the whole company. New channel programs, new system integrator partnerships, new training certifying over 11,000 people in the world now. Tripling the number of our solution recipes. And we have transformed The management team as well. We have replaced about 19 executives because we wanted the right balance of external and internal perspectives from our competitors as well as from ex-Lenovo and ex-IBM employees. So we feel like we have a very customer-centric organization now and, again, Gardner now is saying we are growing 49% year on year in units, IDC said we are growing 87% year on year in revenues. So I think customers are responding to the new product line. Over the last year the Think System brand truly meant the highest customer performance, the highest reliability, the highest customer satisfaction. And as a result it does take a while to transform. And I think that over the last 12 months you've seen that and we're exponentially growing now as a company. >> And you see it in your results. I mean, they are outstanding. >> So Brad, bring us inside the products a little bit. So we've got, it's the Think System DE and DM. Of course the storage industry very much, they need to trust it, they need to understand it. Gives little to understand, I believe DE maybe has something to do with the >> The E series >> The E series there and tell us the DM series, what's underneath there and how do people understand what's different and what's the same. >> Yeah, I mean the. We're taking platforms across our E series, our FAS and our all flash arrays. So the DE corresponds to the E series. The DM will have our FAS products as well as our all flash array products in there. So that's kind of the mapping. We're putting initially I think, ten products in there. We have the capacity to expand and I'm sure we're going to learn a lot because these are serving markets that NetApp doesn't typically serve. So I think not only is this going to give Lenovo the tools to compete, it's going to give us a lot of information to even build better products, better solutions for both NetApp and our Lenovo customers. So we're super excited about that. The second thing is, it's OnTab, it's the same core software, and all the value and performance testing and validation you get with NetApp. That all goes into the Lenovo branded products as well. And we have made it one of our hallmarks is our data fabric. All of the data services that are on top of this that you can move data and manage data between platforms, that is really important for the NetApp customer. All those values extend to the Lenovo customer. So if they also have NetApp in their environment, or vice-versa, they can share or move data between both those platforms. So that's, nowhere else in the industry is that possible across vendors let alone within. >> So how does it work when you are in the product development process. Two companies, both relentlessly focused on customers. This is part of your culture, part of your DNA. So how do you work together in terms of innovating and collaborating. >> Well, I think the first thing is you just look at the core business: our server business and NetApp branded storage, or Lenovo branded storage based on NetApp's portfolio. We're going to have a better together solution. So the first thing we're looking at is a set of solution recipes so that when you use NetApp and Lenovo together, you're going to get a better experience as a customer base. So that's why I am excited today. We've launched three times as many engineered solutions as we did a year ago. And trained these 11,000 people because we have a very solution oriented sales force and a very complementary channel. From a development perspective, we're going to be building X Clarity management into our portfolio. So the same systems management software that is mission critical for Lenovo server products will now manage the big system DE and DM products. So it's a very familiar management interface for customers, there's an engineering effort gone with that. And then on service and support, we're going to use over 10,000 people around the world that Lenovo has to go service and support these products. So we can deliver a premium customer experience. Whether you're buying the server or the storage. And back to the customer base: we're going to, especially in China, have deep engineering collaborations. Where we're walking into those customer bases and asking what's unique about the China market. >> And, and. It really helps that the two companies are very complementary. So NetApp has deep storage expertise, Lenovo has tremendous compute expertise. So they are very complementary and as customers want more and more complete solutions, we are learning, our engineers are learning from each other and it doesn't hurt the fact that we have a large engineering. We NetApp, have a large engineering population in the research triangle where Kirk's people are at. >> That's right. We're probably one kilometer away from each other in research triangle park. >> Geography matters, location location location. >> No, and our two support organizations are next door as well. So I think that proximity will only contribute to the collaboration. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Alright, so the storage industry actually has a relatively good track record of some deep, long partnerships. NetApp has had a number of them over the years. Tell us, what does success look like if we look back three years from now, what's this partnership. >> Well, what we said publicly is we plan to have a multi-billion dollar, multi-year alliance. So that's going to be fantastic as we grow in over 160 countries. We're going to use Lenovo's extensive supply chain network. So you know as one of the largest kind of procurers of componentry and things around the world, we get to leverage this global factory network to build even more value into that situation. And in China specifically, we've set a goal of being a top three storage player. So we both have probably single digit share in China but together with this collaboration we are setting sights quite high to be in the top three over the next several years. >> I think that's exactly right and I think those are all achievable goals. But right now, we want to get out the gate fast. I mean this is a partnership with two companies with a lot of momentum and I see this as a huge opportunity for both our companies to kind of amplify that momentum near term. And so while there's a lot of excitement on the future, I think success is going to look like, you know, some very exciting results that Kirk can share at Transform 3.0 next year. >> That's right. And for our customer base, we have already gone into production. Taking orders, as of today and tons of engineering, tons of manufacturing development. So we'll have a whole host of seed units and early access units. Our customers can get their hands on this stuff right away and start testing it in their environment. >> As you said, it is an audacious vision. You announced an audacious vision last year, you did another one again this year. So when you think about what you want to be talking about next year. You said what success looks like. What are some other things that you're working on? You said, this is a process, Lenovo has turned the corner and it's got a lot of momentum. But what else are you, what else do you have on tap that you're... >> Well, if we tell all of you that, (Rebecca laughs) we won't have this here next year. >> Yeah >> But I think today is about entry and midrange. About expanding Lenovo's breadth from 15 to 90% of the market and being very aggressive against our top competitors that have a combined server storage portfolio. And I think as I've gone around the world, I've been in Latin America, in India, our channel partners are incredibly excited about this. So I think while other customers might be taking business more direct, we've traditionally been very channel-centric. So, I've seen a lot of pull for choice in the market and I think that's what we're going to deliver to our channel partners. But we will have a lot more in store, that I can promise you. This is phase one of a multi-phase, multi-year plan. >> I think there's a lot of things, there's a lot of possibilities on the product development side and how we can do better products, but I think a lot of success is going to look, it's going to come in our global market. Already, Kirk, since I've been here, I've had a channel partner come up and said "Hey, this makes me rethink my channel partners all over again", because now that channel partner who's a Lenovo has the full breadth of the storage portfolio. So I think this is going to be really good for both of us. Particularly when, you know, Lenovo and NetApp are both very channel friendly partners and companies and I think this I going to be a catalyst to have more people on our side than ever before. >> Kirk, just last thing, just give you the opportunity to talk about some of the other breadth and choice and other things that Lenovo has going on. We're going to talk to some of your team about, you know, hyper converge and hyper scale and other hyper things, but yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> Well I think the good news about our growth now is that we're doing it across multiple segments in the industry. There isn't just one part of the market that growing. So last year we set an audacious goal of being the largest supercomputer company in the world by 2020. We've now crossed that actually this year. So we are the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers now are there. And we're expanding that into a lot of AI offerings as well with our four artificial intelligence centers, from China, Germany, Taipei, Beijing. All having customers bring their AI workloads into a controlled environment with our partners where there's intel and video or the FGBA vendors. So super-computing is alive and well and we continue to innovate with our warm-water cooling technology that's going to be here on display. We think we're building one of the largest supercomputers in Europe right now using that technology. So not just helping solve global warming but being more energy-efficient while we are computing on that as well. In hyper scale we've grown to about delivering six of the top ten hyper scalers products. And we're doing that through, basically starting with a white sheet of paper with our customers and building more than thirty customized products. In the motherboard, in the system, in putting it through our entire supply chain. Versus just, in the past maybe two years ago, maybe just leveraging ODM products, so. Significant growth in hyper scale where we're bringing on new billion dollar customers on a regular basis now. And then in flash arrays, our traditional business, we were over 100% growth year on year. So we're building off of momentum. We had great products but only covering 15% of the market, now much larger. Last but not least, we did announce since Transform, new divisions in embedded and IoT as well as in telecommunications NFVF software. We think each of those can be billion dollar groups within Lenovo, so that's probably a lot of what we would be talking about next year is announcements and innovations we've had. Would be Transform 3.0 probably. (Rebecca laughs) >> Well, we're already looking forward to the next Transform. >> 3.0 will be CUBEd so we look forward to that. >> Stu, very nice. Very nice. Excellent. Well thank you so much Brad and Kirk for being on the show, I really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform and theCUBE's live coverage, just after this. (intense electronic music)

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the cube's coverage here at IBM Think 2018. We are in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay, for IBM Think. Six shows are coming into one packed house. We have two great guests here, Brian Wallace, who's the CTO of Insurance for DXC technologies, and we have, Bala, The Bala, but goes by Bala, banking and capital markets CTO for DXC technologies. Guys, welcome to the cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It's our pleasure, yeah, thanks. >> So, the innovation sandwich, I'm calling it IBM strategy. You've got in the middle, the meat, is data. And the bread is blockchain and AI. Two really fundamental technologies powered by cloud and a variety of other things. Obviously, AI is disrupted, we know what that looks like. Block Chain now emerging as a viable infrastructure enabler that's creating token economics, a lot of cool things, certainly on the banking side, seeing a lot of controversy. Block Chain really is driving it. You guys are out on the front lines. You're doing a lot crowd chats, been following your digital transformation story that you guys have been putting out there. Really you're on this. So, what's the conversations like that you guys are having with block chain and AI; Share? >> Bala: So, let me begin with a couple of quick points on block chain. DXC has done some fantastic work around the world leveraging both the trust capability that block chain brings to bear in financial banking industry use cases, like KYC for instance, institutional KYC in particular, but also, in simplification of entire value chains such as lending. And we're doing very interesting work in lending where not only are we looking at the up-front origination process of lending but also the downstream securitization. Which is where the tokenization of principle and interest payments and those type of things happen. >> John: Energy too? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So there are a number of these creating type use cases that follow into securitization. And with that, we're doing some very interesting work. >> John: Bala, talk about the globalization because one of the things we're seeing in the US a shrinking middle class, but outside the US in emerging markets, a growing middle class. Thanks to mobile technology, thanks to data, thanks to block chain, you're seeing, you know, countries that "hey, we have infrastructure but we don't have the core and modern infrastructure but you throw in a decentralized capability, You've got all these capabilities, and the killer app in all this is money. You're in, that's your vertical. >> Bala: Yes. >> That's your industry. The killer app is money and marketplaces. Your thoughts? >> Bala: I think, the beauty of what these technologies are doing, is for the first time creating financial inclusion to happen and the very first case of where financial inclusion is enabled, is in payments. So, when we open up the banking system predominantly from a payment perspective, which is what things like blockchain and others enable, if we succeed in doing that, then for the first time we've enabled, that's 2 billion people unbanked or underbanked-2 billion. >> John: Yeah. >> Bringing them into this financial system allows for. >> And some people are discriminated against too because they don't have a track record. Banks can't handle some of the things that others are now filling the void with crypto and blockchain. >> Bala: Right, or they can't service them profitably. But for the first time now, you're looking at the economics that cloud, and AI, and blockchain, these technologies bring, not just into banking and capital markets areas but into insurance and I'd love to have my colleague, Brian, talk with the insurance cases are enabled as well. >> John: Brian, insurance- go. >> Yeah, so it's a slightly different dynamic. There it's the, if you think about the fundamental pattern of blockchain it's around eliminating a central or a middle-man or a central, you know, gatekeeper, if you will. And the entire insurance industry is largely made up of middle-men, right? You've got people with risk at one end and you've got sources of capital at the other end and everybody's playing a role between a broker, and a carrier, and a re-insurer. In sort of facilitating that management and that transfer of risk. >> John: So you've got to extract some efficiencies out of that. Business model opportunity. >> So efficiencies, there's a lot of conversations around efficiencies, around automation, but interestingly, it's around the disruptive business model, right? The technology is mildly interesting but it's the new business models that blockchain will enable. >> John: Yeah, I see banking picking up. The early adopter on blockchain but I see, maybe it lagging a bit in insurance but I definitely see some opportunity there. But short term, data is driving insurance because, you know, I don't have a Tesla but my friend has a Tesla. The insurance company will know exactly who is rolling through those stop signs. They know everything that he's doing, All the data is there, so AI becomes really the low hanging fruit for insurance in that industry. Do you agree with that? Comment, reaction? >> Brian: Yeah, and we're just at the beginning, right? Because as you say, data is the asset that we manage. So we have a lot of data in terms of transactional data, the traditional operational data. What we're discovering, and what we're sort of licking our lips over almost is all of this new unstructured data, whether it's sensor data, behavioral data, and you're right, 'cause the challenge that we had around automation and cognitive computing, if you will. We're here at IBM with the Watson tech, was enough data, and the consistency and quality of that data. So we have that now, and we're making tremendous strides around in particular here, with the Watson brand, and the Watson cognitive. >> John: You know, one of the things I wish, was Dan Hutches was here, he's not, he's the CTO in charge. You've guys have been doing all these crowd chats our software that we wrote. That's pretty interesting. I've personally enjoyed all the conversations and give a shout out to Dan and you guys for really great conversation. You guys know what you're talking about. It's clear in the data you guys are taking an outside-in approach and collaborating. But your topics are on target. You're talking about digital transformation kind of holistically, but then you start to dive down into specific use cases. So, Bala, what is the favorite, or the most popular digital disruptive topic that's being discussed within DXC and your clients and in the marketplace? >> So, at the outset, within DXC, as digital transformation takes hold with our customers and we aim to be the premier provider of that enablement, what we've realized ourselves is that we provide a lot of services to our clients across many industries but there are commonalities across what we provide in terms of service delivery. And so it made sense for us to, number one: look at the commonalities and create a platform that was common across industries, across offerings that we bring to the marketplace. That commonality is what we call internally, and externally now, as bionics. And it's a platform that we are bringing forward that for the first time ties together what we are talking about both here at this event but also with our clients. Ties together intelligence, orchestration, and automation which are the fundamental, >> John: It's called bionics? >> Bionics. And internally we call it platform DXC upon which all of our offerings and services are brought to market. >> John: Well there's disruption going on in your business. So, I want to talk about, double-down on that for a second. I'm seeing a trend, certainly in the public sector market where the use cases are well enough defined. So you're seeing automatic code generation becoming a real part of the delivery process. Now, what that's going to do is essentially, think of provisioning and configuration management in cloud. If you could apply actual process code that you've done before in the commonalities, this is going to change the delivery timeframe. So you're looking at essentially auto-provisioning software. Not just like, configuration management resources. No, I'm saying here's a value chain, here's a block chain, here's some AI, just configure it like a LEGO block, push. That could take months to deliver the old way. >> Bala: Right. >> Your thoughts to that? Are you guys on that? Do you guys see that as something that's going to be an opportunity for you? Some companies, I've seen, Global system integrator, is being disrupted by this, cause they don't have this. New SI's, new system integrators, are thinking this way and that's a DevOps mindset. Are you prepared for that, do you see it coming? And what's your answer to that? >> So we saw that coming about 3 and a half plus years ago. And our shift away from being a pure SI began then. And so we are an SI, but we are a service integrator rather than a systems integrator. And we began that trend in our journey, 3 plus years ago. And the reason we began that trend was what you pointed out. Today, infrastructure is delivered as a code. So not even as a service but as a code, and so imagine provisioning infrastructure and all the capabilities that ride on it, just as code. And that's where this is headed. In that model, we become provider and provisioner of services, rather than just a system. >> John: And the cost structure is completely changed because the services, Amazon has proven, and now IBM is following suit with their power platform and other things, that you can actually have the kind of compute but it's a catalog of services. So this is going to change the price competitiveness. So you know, big bids, that used to be billions of dollars, you guys can compete. I mean, am I seeing it right? >> Brian: That transition's already, that ship's sailed, so to speak, in terms of the large outsourcing deals the large, where there's apps or infrastructure, it's all moving to digital transformation consumption based commercial models. And it's really bionics that Bala mentioned a minute ago, that is our answer to the threat you described a minute ago. It's really about automating and digitizing and building intelligence into the entire, if you will, build, deliver, operate value chain of our business. >> John: Talk about the multi-vendor, multi-choice, technology-choice, as your customers and people in general on this journey of digital transformation. They have to make, they used to make technology decisions. Now they're making business logic decisions around how to reconfigure their value chains to optimize for new efficiencies and extract away inefficiencies. Blockchain is a great example, AI is another, automation is in the middle, all the cloud. So you have now business logic as the risk, technology not so much because infrastructure as code has proven that you can have server-less, you can have all kinds of coolness that can be managed in an agile way. So the business model aspect is key. How are you guys dealing with that, cause I know you're here at the IBM Think Show, their partner. I see you at the Amazon shows. We see you guys everywhere. So you're horizontally scaling. By design, is that what customers want? What is the DXC view on this? >> So our value proposition has always had partners as the key element of what we do. And so if you look at what we do, you can look at it from two perspectives. One, proprietary ways of thinking, proprietary systems are long since gone. >> And waterfall methodologies, gone, dead. >> Yes, those are all long since gone. >> If you're still doing that, note to self: you're going to be out of business. >> Exactly, so we've actually hinged a lot of what we do on our offerings, our capabilities, and so on around openness, around open source, and so forth. So that's number one. Number Two: In this world, it's no longer about just DXC or just IBM or just somebody, one person bringing everything to our clients. It's about how do you engage proactively and build co-innovation and co-services with our partners and bring that to our clients. >> I mean, IBM just announced that a deal with Google. They've got tensorflow and their deal. So you have all kinds of melting pot. Okay, let's talk about blockchain again. Go back to my favorite topic. So, if you look up that stack, you've got blockchain, you've got cryptocurrency, protocols, and what-not, mentioned securitization, you've got security tokens, you've got utility tokens. You can almost see where this is going. And then you've got on top of that, what's coming, is a mass in-migration of decentralized application developers. Okay, kind of cloud plus. You know, they know cloud, they know DevOps, infrastructure as code, but they're looking at it from a decentralization standpoint, different makeup. And you see, ICOs, initial coin offerings, I think this is an application of you know, inefficiencies around capital markets but that's, you know, put that aside for a second. But blockchain, crypto currency, and decentralized applications, how do you guys see that trend? What are you guys doing? Are you integrating it in? You mentioned token economics, you're in the banking field. Your thoughts on that? >> Bala: Sure, on the blockchain front, as I mentioned to you, there are a number of platforms that are out there. There is the R3 Corda platform. There's a platform that JPMorgan initiated that we're leveraging as well. >> John: Yeah, so they pooh-poohed Bitcoin but then they're back in the game again. (laughter) >> Bala: Yes, that's right. And then there is the Hyperledger Fabric as well. So these platforms are going to take their course of evolution and we are working across all of those platforms. Now, the more interesting thing that you mentioned is people and skills. What we've find today in the marketplace is with our clients is a dramatic shortage of skills in these areas. And so internally, what we have done at DXC is actually open our own service delivery to a vast pool of developers that you talked about earlier as being freelance, independent folks. We open our entire service delivery to them as well. And we look at that global talent pool for our own service delivery. >> Using community as a way to scale. >> Bala: Using communities, yes. And that's exactly what we're doing in our talent process. It's not just about our people, our employees, but our partners as well as what exists in the open marketplace. >> Brian, talk about the insurance area as a way to tease out other trends. Specifically, the question is What is the biggest things that people know they're walking into? What's the tail-wind that they see, that's going to give them hope? And then, What's the head-winds? What are the blockers? And what should they be aware of? What are some of the marketplace dynamics that translate into other industries? >> Brian: Well, let's start with the obvious blocker is legacy debt, right? So you talked about the risk of all that business knowledge, that domain expertise, that's all today encapsulated in existing, what you may call legacy systems, right? So that's the head-wind by far. The tail-wind is that unlike, say 15 years ago, and we were in the last sort of, dot-com boom, when it was all about the front office and customer experience, the customer is way ahead of us. So culturally, the customer is challenging industry to catch up. So that's the tail-wind in my mind. And the real opportunity is to think about it in terms of a dual agenda. So think about it in terms as progressively, simultaneously building new digital capability, whilst ultimately beginning to unbundle and tackle that legacy debt. And I think customers now are starting to see a path forward. We're in the market in both banking and insurance with digital platforms, with industry resource models, API fabrics that can go back in, modernize legacy systems. So there's a real fast time to market. >> And it changes your engagement with clients. It's not a one and done, you're sticking through the service layer. >> Brian: Oh it's a journey, but the difference, I think, between DXC and a lot of other people is that we are in the market, in production, with real assets. And you can show that journey. So it just becomes a conversation around what's your pain point? Where are you starting from? Where do you want to go? >> And you're bringing the community in to help on the delivery side, everyone wins. >> Brian: And that community is a combination of three things. That's our own employees, obviously within the industry, and within our offerings that know banking, that know insurance. It's all of the DXC people in the horizontals. Because we're bringing everything now. These platforms encapsulate infrastructure, security, service management, analytics, mobility, all of that is built into these platforms. And then, it's going out into our partner community. And then, it's going out into the open community. And we're tapping into all of those. >> John: Brian and Bala, thanks so much. 2 power CTOs here on the Cube, having a CTO conversation around how scale, cloud, AI, blockchain, new technologies are enabling new business models at a faster pace of change, with a lower cost structure, and more time to value. Again, it's all about the value creation. The killer app is money and marketplaces and community. Guys, thanks so much for sharing. I'm John Furrier here at IBM Think 2018 Cube Studios. More after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're at Data Privacy Day 2018, I still can't believe it's 2018, in downtown San Francisco, at LinkedIn's headquarters, the new headquarters, it's a beautiful building just down the road from the sales force building, from the new Moscone that's being done, there's a lot of exciting things going on in San Francisco, but that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about data privacy, and we're excited to have a return visit from last year's Cube alumni, she's Eva Velasquez, president and CEO, Identity Theft Resource Center. Great to see you again. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Absolutely, so it's been a year, what's been going on in the last year in your world? >> Well, you know, identity theft hasn't gone away >> Shoot. >> And data-- >> I thought you told me it was last time. >> I know, I wish, and in fact, unfortunately we just released our data breach information, and there was a tremendous growth. It was a little over 1000, previous year, and over 1500 data breaches... in 2017. >> We're almost immune, they're like every day. And it used to be like big news. Now it's like, not only was Yahoo breached at some level, which we heard about a while ago, but then we hear they were actually breached like 100%. >> There is some fatigue, but I can tell you that it's not as pervasive as you might think. Our call center had such a tremendous spike in calls during the Equifax breach. It was the largest number of calls we'd had in a month, since we'd been measuring our call volume. So people were still very, very concerned. But a lot of us who are in this space are feeling, I think we may be feeling the fatigue more than your average consumer out there. Because for a lot of folks, this is really the first exposure to it. We're still having a lot of first exposures to a lot of these issues. >> So the Equifax one is interesting, because most people don't have a direct relationship with Equifax, I don't think. I'm not a direct paying customer, I did not choose to do business with them. But as one of the two or three main reporting agencies, right, they've got data on everybody for their customers who are the banks, financial institutions. So how does that relationship get managed? >> Oh my gosh, there's so much meat there. There's so much meat there. Okay, so, while it feels like you don't have a direct relationship with the credit reporting agencies, you actually do, you get a benefit from the services that they're providing to you. And every time you get a loan, I mean this is a great conversation for Data Privacy Day. Because when you get a loan, get a credit card, and you sign those terms and conditions, guess what? >> They're in there? >> You are giving that retailer, that lender, the authority to send that information over to the credit reporting agencies. And let's not forget that the intention of forming the credit reporting agencies was for better lending practices, so that your creditworthiness was not determined by things like your gender, your race, your religion, and those types of really, I won't say arbitrary, but just not pertinent factors. Now your creditworthiness is determined by your past history of, do you pay your bills? What is your income, do you have the ability to pay? So it started with a good, very good purpose in mind, and we definitely bought into that as a society. And I don't want to sound like I'm defending the credit reporting agencies and all of their behavior out there, because I do think there are some changes that need to be made, but we do get a benefit from the credit reporting agencies, like instant credit, much faster turnaround when we need those financial tools. I mean, that's just the reality of it. >> Right, right. So, who is the person that's then... been breached, I'm trying to think of the right word of the relationship between those who've had their data hacked from the person who was hacked. If it's this kind of indirect third party relationship through an authorization through the credit card company. >> No, the, Equifax is absolutely responsible. >> So who would be the litigant, just maybe that's the word that's coming to me in terms of feeling the pain, is it me as the holder of the Bank of America Mastercard? Is it Bank of America as the issuer of the Mastercard? Or is it Mastercard, in terms of retribution back to Equifax? >> Well you know, I can't really comment on who actually would have the strongest legal liability, but what I can say is, this is the same thing I say when I talk to banks about identity theft victims. There's some discussion about, well, no, it's the bank that's the victim in existing account identity theft, because they're the ones that are absorbing the financial losses. Not the person whose data it belongs to. Yet the person who owns that data, it's their identity credentials that have been compromised. They are dealing with issues as well, above and beyond just the financial compromise. They have to deal with cleaning up other messes and other records, and there's time spent on the phone, so it's not mutually exclusive. They're both victims of this situation. And with data breaches, often the breached entity, again, I hate to sound like an apologist, but I am keeping this real. A breached entity, when they're hacked, they are a victim, a hacker has committed that crime and gone into their systems. Yes, they have a responsibility to make those security systems as robust as possible, but the person whose identity credentials those are, they are the victim. Any entity or institution, if it's payment card data that's compromised, and a financial services institution has to replace that data, guess what, they're a victim too. That's what makes this issue and this crime so terrible, is that it has these tentacles that reach down and touch more than one person for each incident. >> Right. And then there's a whole 'nother level, which we talked about before we got started that we want to dig into, and that's children. Recently, a little roar was raised with these IOT connected toys. And just a big, giant privacy hole, into your kid's bedroom. With eyes and ears and everything else. So wonder if you've got some specific thoughts on how that landscape is evolving. >> Well, we have to think about the data that we're creating. That does comprise our identity. And when we start talking about these toys and other... internet connected, IOT devices that we're putting in our children's bedroom, it actually does make the advocacy part of me, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Because the more data that we create, the more that it's vulnerable, the more that it's used to comprise our identity, and we have a big enough problem with child identity theft just now, right now as it stands, without adding the rest of these challenges. Child and synthetic identity theft are a huge problem, and that's where a specific Social Security number is submitted and has a credit profile built around it, when it can either be completely made up, or it belongs to a child. And so you have a four year old whose Social Security number is now having a credit profile built around it. Obviously they're not, so the thieves are not submitting this belongs to a four year old, it would not be issued credit. So they're saying it's a, you know, 23 year old-- >> But they're grabbing the number. >> They're grabbing the number, they're using the name, they build this credit profile, and the biggest problem is we really haven't modernized how we're authenticating this information and this data. I think it's interesting and fitting that we're talking about this on Data Privacy Day, because the solution here is actually to share data. It's to share it more. And that's an important part of this whole conversation. We need to be smart about how we share our data. So yes, please, have a thoughtful conversation with yourself and with your family about what are the types of data that you want to share and keep, and what do you want to keep private, but then culturally we need to look at smart ways to open up some data sharing, particularly for these legitimate uses, for fraud detection and prevention. >> Okay, so you said way too much there, 'cause there's like 87 followup questions in my head. (Eva laughs) So we'll step back a couple, so is that synthetic identity, then? Is that what you meant when you said a synthetic identity problem, where it's the Social Security number of a four year old that's then used to construct this, I mean, it's the four year old's Social Security number, but a person that doesn't really exist? >> Yes, all child identity theft is synthetic identity theft, but not all synthetic identity theft is child identity theft. Sometimes it can just be that the number's been made up. It doesn't actually belong to anyone. Now, eventually maybe it will. We are hearing from more and more parents, I'm not going to say this is happening all the time, but I'm starting to hear it a little bit more often, where the Social Security number is being issued to their child, they go to file their taxes, so this child is less than a year old, and they are finding out that that number has a credit history associated with it. That was associated years ago. >> So somebody just generated the number. >> Just made it up. >> So are we ready to be done with Social Security numbers? I mean, for God's sake, I've read numerous things, like the nine-digit number that's printed on a little piece of paper is not protectable, period. And I've even had a case where they say, bring your little paper card that they gave you at the hospital, and I won't tell you what year that was, a long time ago. I'm like, I mean come on, it's 2018. Should that still be the anchor-- >> You super read my mind. >> Data point that it is? >> It was like I was putting that question in your head. >> Oh, it just kills me. >> I've actually been talking quite a bit about that, and it's not that we need to get, quote unquote, get rid of Social Security numbers. Okay, Social Security numbers were developed as an identifier, because we have, you can have John Smith with the same date of birth, and how do we know which one of those 50,000 John Smiths is the one we're looking for? So that unique identifier, it has value. And we should keep that. It's not a good authenticator, it is not a secret. It's not something that I should pretend only I know-- >> Right, I write it on my check when I send my tax return in. Write your number on the check! Oh, that's brilliant. >> Right, right. So it's not, we shouldn't pretend that this is, I'm going to, you, business that doesn't know me, and wants to make sure I am me, in this first initial relationship or interaction that we're having, that's not a good authenticator. That's where we need to come up with a better system. And it probably has to do with layers, and more layers, and it means that it won't be as frictionless for consumers, but I'm really challenging, this is one of our big challenges for 2018, we want to flip that security versus convenience conundrum on its ear and say, no, I really want to challenge consumers to say... I'm happier that I had to jump through those hoops. I feel safer, I think you're respecting my data and my privacy, and my identity more because you made it a little bit harder. And right now it's, no, I don't want to do that because it's a little too, nine seconds! I can't believe it took me nine seconds to get that done. >> Well, yeah, and we have all this technology, we've got fingerprint readers that we're carrying around in our pocket, I mean there's, we've got geolocation, you know, is this person in the place that they generally, and having 'em, there's so many things-- >> It's even more granular >> Beyond a printed piece of >> Than that-- >> paper, right? >> It's the angle at which you look at your phone when you look at it. It's the tension with which you enter your passcode, not just the passcode itself. There are all kinds of very non-invasive biometrics, for lack of a better word. We tend to think of them as just, like our face and our fingerprint, but there are a lot of other biometrics that are non-invasive and not personal. They're not private, they don't feel secret, but we can use them to authenticate ourselves. And that's the big discussion we need to be having. If I want to be smart about my privacy. >> Right. And it's interesting, on the sharing, 'cause we hear that a lot at security conferences, where one of the best defenses is that teams at competing companies, security teams, share data on breach attempts, right? Because probably the same person who tried it against you is trying it against that person, is trying it against that person. And really an effort to try to open up the dialogue at that level, as more of just an us against them versus we're competing against each other in the marketplace 'cause we both sell widgets. So are you seeing that? Is that something that people buy into, where there's a mutual benefit of sharing information to a certain level, so that we can be more armed? >> Oh, for sure, especially when you talk to the folks in the risk and fraud and identity theft mitigation and remediation space. They definitely want more data sharing. And... I'm simply saying that that's an absolutely legitimate use for sharing data. We also need to have conversations with the people who own that data, and who it belongs to, but I think you can make that argument, people get it when I say, do you really feel like the angle at which you hold your phone, is that personal? Couldn't that be helpful, that combined with 10 other data points about you, to help authenticate you? Do you feel like your personal business and life is being invaded by that piece of information? Or compare that to things like your health records. And medical conditions-- >> Mom's maiden name. >> That you're being treated for, well, wow, for sure that feels super, super personal, and I think we need to do that nuance. We need to talk about what data falls into which of these buckets, and on the bucket that isn't super personal, and feeling invasive and that I feel like I need to protect, how can I leverage that to make myself safer? >> Great. Lots of opportunity. >> I think it's there. >> Alright. Eva, thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. It's such a multi-layered and kind of complex problem that we still feel pretty much early days at trying to solve. >> It's complicated, but we'll get there. More of this kind of dialogue gets us just that much closer. >> Alright, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your day, great to see you again. >> Thanks. >> Alright, she's Eva, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube from Data Privacy Days, San Francisco. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversations here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, it's been a little while, Brian Reagan who's the chief marketing officer at a local company, Actifio, we've been watching since the early days. Brian, so good to see you. >> Great to see you, Stu, thanks for having me in. >> All right, so Brian, you know, it comes as no surprise to you because you've worked on it in this industry for many years, but we've looked at our predictions at a Wikibon community. No matter which one of these big mega trends we're talking about, whether you're talking about machine learning, IOT, cloud, you know, data sits at the center of it and really is super critical. There's the old tried and true, "Data is the new oil," but bring us up to speed. You know, Actifio is a company that people probably started out as, you know, it's in this weird storage ecosystem today, but I think data's also at the center of your business. >> Absolutely, I mean, if you think just really simply about any business in the world, they have customers, they have partners, they have products, they have employees, all that's data and the problem with data these days is it just keeps getting big and when it's big it's slow. It's slow to use for application development, it's slow to use for insights and analytics. It's just slow to use if you want to move to the cloud. You know, Actifio has really been in business for nearly nine years now to help virtualize that data, make it more portable, make it easier to use for all those reasons to help drive those business, and that is our value proposition. You're right, we sort of started in that, "Are you a storage company?" We're storage agnostic and today we're cloud agnostic, it's about the data. >> Stu: Yeah, I mean, it's really... You're a software company, correct? >> We're a software company. >> So, you hit on a key thing that I've looked at for a while, is everybody is talking about how do I as a company, how do I become more agile, how to move faster. You know, CI-CD is kind of table stakes these days for so many companies. How does Actifio help companies prevent that storage from being an anchor weighing them down and slowing them down? >> Sure, sure, I mean, CI-CD is great and you can move at speed, as long as you're talking about very lightweight elements of an application, JSON files, the XML, all those lightweight application elements, you know, LOGIC. But when it comes to that big database sitting behind the scenes that's actually powering that application, that's the gravitational pull that slows CI-CD down. Typically that, we've seen it take 80% plus of the software development lifecycle just to stand up to those environments, so people make compromises, they subset it, they do all the crazy things to try and avoid the storage or infrastructure tax when it comes to setting up those environments. We can help bypass that, again, it's virtual data, so now we can start to port it, we can move it, we can parallelize it and we can get it ready for these developers through our automation and orchestration in minutes, as opposed to hours or days in many cases for the service levels. >> All right, so Brian, you mentioned developers there. Definitely kind of the infrastructure world has been like, "Oh, gosh, how do we do it "through the developers, how do we fit "in this whole world," you know, DevOps and like, infrastructure. A lot of times it's been oil and water. What are you hearing from your customers, how does that play into what they're doing? >> Yeah, I mean, developers for us are the consumers, right, they are the end users of that data and the infrastructure team or the operations or DBA teams are really the providers of that data and they have to stand it up. They have to stand up the infrastructure, they have to stand up the data, they have to do all the rolls, log rolls and the like, data prep, and so if we can help them really collapse that time to access the data, because it's always in its native format, prep the data so it's ready for use, and then parallelize it so that way we can actually do multiple test streams or multiple development streams or we can, you know, do those more agile scrum projects and get more done in a given calendar quarter. Now all of a sudden those consumers are happier because they're getting the data in its full state, more of it, more rapidly than they ever have, and the operations teams are happy because they don't have to buy more storage to do it, they can actually go on and do other projects instead of have to sit there and manually get data set for developers. >> One of the challenges we hear from customers these days is where they develop it and how they do that versus production, very different. A lot of times some things that we've been doing in my data center, some are in the public cloud, how does the whole where it lives fit into your environment. I know Actifio, you just had a big announcement around some of your cloud pieces. >> Sure, we just released our eighth major release of our software since our founding, and it was really probably, from an engineering time standpoint, the largest release since our first one and it was very cloud centric. Our starting point as a company was really to try and be infrastructure agnostic. Wherever you wanted to put your data from a storage or compute standpoint, we wanted to give you that freedom to do so. Now it's just as relevant in the cloud. You should be able to choose the cloud for the given workload or the given data payload. You know, don't have to get frozen into one or locked into one. Let you choose and then also, once you've chosen, giving you the freedom to actually port from cloud to cloud if need be because you might choose, whether it's economic arbitrage or whether it's just different paths, capabilities in different clouds suitable for different workloads. We want to give you that freedom. >> All right, but you know, public cloud, come on, it's supposed to be easy. They've got, you know, so many features. What's the gap, if I'm deploying, you know, choose your favorite public cloud whether AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle IBM, et cetera... >> Sure. >> What's the piece that Actifio delivers that's still needed by customers that's not kind of native? >> It just comes back to that data. Boy, it's always the data, it's always the can that gets kicked down the road because again, those lightweight elements of applications are so easy to move, and then we just get stuck with this big gravitational pull of data. And you know, the fallacy or the popular myth about public cloud is it's going to be easier and it's going to be cheaper, and it can be both and it can be both particularly when you can get the data in there and it's in a suitable state to actually use for these development analytics, all these different workload characteristics that, while it's stuck in non native format in its very large state, it's unusable in those clouds. >> Yeah, Brian, you meet with a lot of customers, you've been doing a lot of traveling recently. >> Brian: Yes. >> Any specific stories you can tell or kind of aggregate, what are they struggling with with cloud, what's working well with them. >> Yeah. >> Of course, how you're fitting into that. >> Yeah, you know, there's sort of three camps that I've seen over the last several weeks particularly. There's the camp that, whether it's regulatory pressures or just internal policy, they're not going to move but they still want to change their operating model to a cloud model, and so they're implementing and instrumenting their internal environments, their prior cloud to operate just like an Amazon or Azure or Google, but all behind the firewall. And they still need all of that capability for the data automation, they want their data on demand for those applications, they want self service, they want infrastructure as code, and they want to take advantage of Actifio to help power that internal cloud. That's camp one, and that's still a pretty hefty camp. Camp two is, you know, I would call more traditional companies who are not born in the cloud but have embraced the cloud and really want a fast on ramp to get their data into one or more public clouds so they can get out of the data center business, and they're using Actifio really as an on ramp first, but then once it gets into the cloud they're using the native data management capabilities that they can take advantage of in the public cloud so they can keep their agility moving at the speed of their VMs, at the speed of their lightweight components. And then the third camp, which has really been interesting to watch, is the born in the cloud guys, and really starting to realize that the native capabilities of these public clouds are very powerful, but they don't really take the place of traditional backup for example. There is no backup software native inside of AWS, an EBS snapshot is a great snapshot, it's not a backup though. You can't really use it as a time machine, and when you go region to region you do fulls, and so it becomes very heavy and very costly. So, Actifio can really play a role for even those native, born in the cloud applications to provide the enterprise class data management but in a public cloud. >> Brian, you know, bring us up to speed, kind of how do you characterize your customers, how many customers to do you have, how much of them are kind of the new class versus, "I've got my data center," kind of sitting on these things. >> Yep, well, since our founding we've really focused on that upper mid market and enterprise customer. We just crossed over the 3,000 customer mark at the end of the last quarter. We operate in 37 countries today, and I would say they run the gamut from the Fortune 50s to that sort of Fortune 10,000s, but they all have very common characteristics, you know. As you would expect, we thrive in environments where data is growing and growing fast, we thrive where data is regulated or under some sort of internal or external pressure around management, and we really thrive in environments and industries that are truly embracing this digital transformation. They know that, like you said, that data is the new oil, data is their best currency today, and in fact, CryptoData is currency, and so they're truly embracing that and they want to move faster and they want to move faster with the data that they have today. Whether they choose to do that on premise or in the cloud or in the cloud at some point in the time, they want the freedom to make that choice when it's right for their business. >> All right, Brian, personal question for you. You brought up digital transformations and today you're wearing a CMO hat. You've had a number of different roles, C-suite roles in the past, what is the changing role of of the CMO today, especially with that landscape of digital transformation? >> Right, yeah, it's fascinating to watch just the change of what my budget line items are aligned around. You know, I probably spend as much on software and other licensed models, SAS models, to support my business, to support my digital and inbound marketing efforts, to support my analytics efforts around what's working, what's not. How do I tune the best marketing mix to really cater to the changing role of a consumer of content, and then all of the contents indication and content marketing. So, you know, I... To some degree, I think part of the changing nature of a CMO is they have to be very technology... Or I should say technology aware, focused on the business outcomes but understanding how technology can play a role to really affect those business outcomes. In my case, whether that's increasing the exposure of the company, whether that's increasing the lead flow to our sales organization, whether that's making our different routes to market more optimized and enabled for higher velocity of sales. All of those things can be technology enabled today, so you have to be much more conscious about... It's almost like a CIO junior role inside of an enterprise. >> Yeah, really interesting, right. We've debated for years where will the IT budget be driven from, sounds like you've got an impact on that. I love the discussion you talked about, you know, kind of how technology's helping to transform businesses. Do you have any customer examples, customers that are just doing some cool stuff with technology that could kind of be useful? >> So, I'm going to use a company that would probably be the last industry you would expect me to bring up, but I think they're a fascinating use case. So, Waste Industries, they're in the trash disposal business, and the CIO has corrected me on numerous occasions, "It's okay to "say the word 'trash,'" and so we were talking. They used Actifio first to help them solve, you know, very classic, modernize my DR strategy, part of the business, but then they started to realize that the power of using that data for other purposes, to accelerate analytics, because it turns out in the trash disposal business they actually instrument a lot of things. They instrument their trucks, they instrument with sensors their canisters, they do route optimizations based on data that they're getting from all of these devices, so as this CIO is fond of saying, they're not in the internet things, they're in the internet of trash, and so they're using data to help them be a much more innovative and frankly optimized organization today, and then as they start to think about where the future of their business goes... Now that they're starting to become a data company they can start to really comprehend what does it look like with autonomous vehicles in trash disposal, what does it look like in terms of using different types of vehicles to do routes. Maybe even an Airbnb type of model or an Uber model where maybe it's not even just our people doing the routes, but it's other organizations so we can start to sell data, too, to help them become a greater part of our organization. Fascinating, you know, probably the company on the surface that you'd think would probably not be a data company at all, but I think it personifies where we are as an industry today. Every company is a data company and the companies that win in the market are the companies that truly embrace being a data company and taking advantage of that. >> Yeah, definitely not one I first would be thinking of. (laughs) All right, but last question I have for you, we're heading into 2018. >> Brian: Yes. >> What should we be looking for, you know, the brain of Actifio, people that are watching, what do we expect next year? >> So, I think, you know, very exciting year for us. As I mentioned, we just released this major software update. The customer adoption already has been tremendous. We see really the embracing the cloud, whether it's behind the firewall or embracing the public cloud, multi-cloud being a big theme for us. You know, I think that we have... A Gartner analyst said to me a few weeks back, he said, "You know, you've been around, "you're disruptive still, though, but you're proven, "and being disruptive and proven "is a really powerful thing," and so we feel like we've got a great punching weight in terms of market presence. We have amazing customers in every industry. We see this, you know, 2018 as a really great year to continue our scaling, continue to be a very profitable and growing organization, and really helping to meet the needs of some of these incredibly interesting use cases around data in the business. >> Wait, profitable and growing, you must be an east coast company. (laughs) >> Brian: That's right. >> All right, well, Waltham, Massachusetts. Appreciate having you on. >> Brian: Thank you, Stu. >> Especially a startup right down the road here from our east coast studios. Always good talking up and look forward to talking to you more next year. >> Next time. >> And thank you so much for watching us. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our interviews, all of our upcoming events, and hit us up if you have any questions. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the cubes coverage of the power of N and the collaborations between HPE Aruba and Pensando. Where the two companies are setting out to create a new category in network switching. Joining me now is Simon McCormack, who looks after product management at HPE Aruba. Welcome Simon. Good to see you. >> Good morning. Thanks for having me today. >> You're very welcome. So Simon, we've been talking all day about the Aruba switching fabric that you're bringing to market embedding the Pensando technology. Can you tell us what's the primary value prop that AFC brings to its customers? >> Sure. Aruba fabric composer. This is orchestration and management for the Aruba wide switching platform, primarily for data centers. It does a lot of things. I'll give you three key ones just to get a feel for it. So in data center, networking, there's a lot of complex technologies. I'm afraid to say, lease spines, overlays, underlays, EDPs, OSPs PGP. I can throw out loads of acronyms for you. Fabric composer can really simplify through a bunch of intent based workflows, the deployment and management of these fabrics. We can do it either interactively through a UI or fully API driven if you want to. So it really takes away a lot of the complexity there makes it dead easy to deploy these and that scale. Number two, in a data center, a lot of compute storage hypervisor technologies that you have to interact with with your network products. So in fabric composer, we built an integration layer into it, that interacts with other orchestrators. V-Center, VMware Vcenter is a good example of that. So an operator may make changes to V-Center that affect the network. You don't want to call the network team for it. Fabric composer can automate that network side configuration on the Aruba switch, making your day to operations, insertion of new services, much more simpler. And then finally, number three, because we've got all these capabilities I've just told you about. We actually have a great typology model that we build from it. And we can use that to visualize this virtual to physical network layer that is really powerful for troubleshooting the environment. >> Great, so three things actually for right simplify, you integrate and automate, and it's kind of two and two way I'm going to call it and then the visualization piece for troubleshooting. Awesome. What about security policy? How are you thinking about that in this release? >> Yeah, so that's where in this release, we're extending it with the Persando PSM technologies embedded into the 10 K. Now we can use Aruba fabric composer to actually orchestrate the policy in addition to the network. So you think about today, fabric poser does network primarily you bring policy into it, you've got one single pane of glass now that doesn't network in policy, it actually provides a really powerful capabilities for operators of different skill sets to be able to manage and orchestrate this environment. >> What about the sort of operational model as it pertains to the network and security, I'm interested in how flexible that is. Like for instance, if a customer wants to use their own tooling or operational frameworks or frameworks so what if they want to leverage multi-vendor fabrics like a third-party spine? How do you deal with all of that? >> Yeah, and I think that's, we built that into essentially the DNA of this technology is that where we're expecting to often go into brownfield environments where they've already got best practices for security and networking. They've already got networking vendors there. The 10 K the very powerful lease switch on its own. We want those lease switches to go in all of these different environments, not just Greenfield. It's really great for Greenfield. And I'm going to explain this a little bit in a few ways. First of all, the technology we have with Aruba fabric composer and Pensando PSM, you can do a pure operational split between them. SecOps, NetOps a lot of customers that's how they deal with it. They've got the security operations team network operations team. If they're split, you can use the two tools and make a fantastic product using that. However, they're not split and you've got a single policy for it. You can use Aruba fabric composer to do both of them. So you've got the options there and we fully embrace that in the architecture of what we built. This extends to multiple layers for the technology build as well. Again, as I said, the 10 K's at Leafs, which it can connect to third-party spines. So you could use fabric composer to manage this lead switch and the policy you could use fabric composer just to manage the lease switch and connect and inter-operate the Leaf's to a spine, or you can do a full Aruba solution, the full Rube Leaf spine and use that operating model. There's one final thing in this area is fabri Composers are a UI based orchestrator, API driven. Some customers love it. Some customers that love their CLIs, we fully embrace the operational model where customers still use their own API APIs and their own CLIs. So the customer may be using Ansible to automate through API. They can still use that directly to the switch and they can use it to AFC and mix the two. If you talk directly to a switch and change it, fabric composer detects it and basically sinks its configuration together. So we can insert all or any part of this solution into existing or new Networks. >> Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because I mean, so there's the network hard guys, they want that CLI access, so you you're accommodating that. And then as well, being able to bring those SecOps view and the NetOps view together is important because let's face it. A lot of organizations, especially some of the smaller ones, they don't actually have a full blown SecOps team, that's really the NetOps responsibility. And so that's nice flexibility. You can handle both worlds. How about segmentation? When a customer is telling you that they want regarding segmentation and how are you guys approaching that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's actually a key feature of what we're doing in this area. Now the land segmentation generates it's kind of a wide area with many layers to it and we could talk about it for hours. So let me talk briefly about some of the areas we're going into when it comes to the segmentation, particularly the compute-virtual type environment. So when you, you're typically creating policies in today's world, current policies based on addresses, IP addresses, or Mac addresses. You have lots of rules and big lists of addresses. It's really annoying. Customers generally don't talk in addresses. They talk in machines and names of machines. So if you think about what I've already told you with a fabric composer. We've already got these hooks in the compute hypervisor layer. So what do we know about the virtual machines? So it's undoubtedly a natural extension now for you to be able to create these policies based on the machines. So there's a scale problem in policy distribution, at two levels, at the top and the bottom. The top level is your chronic create the policy. You've got this massive distribution addresses. So fabric composer can really help you by allowing you to then create these groups, sensible groups, using the names. Then you can distribute the 10 K solution with the distributed architecture of the bottom layer, now allows us to distribute these policies and rules across your racks within your data center. So it scales really well, but that's one level I've described. You know, you're creating groups of machines with names, so it's easier to define it, but there's also an automation angle to this as well. You might not want to even create it interactively. A lot of customers with VMware Vcenter for example, are tagging the virtual machines. So the tag tells you a group information. Again, fabric composer can already get the tag within its database model. So we can use the tag now either to fully automate or use as a hint to creating these groups. So now I've got a really simple way to basically just categorize my machines into the groups so that now I can push rules down onto the, and there's one, final thing that I just want to tell you before we move on, There's often a zero trust model you want to do in the data center for segmentation, meaning I've got two virtual machines on the same network on the same host. Normally they can talk to each other, nothing's stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. You can do it in products like V-Center with PV land technologies. A bit cumbersome to configure on the VSphere side, you've got to match it with what you see on the switch side. It's one of those, that's a real headache, unless you've got an orchestrator to do it. So fabric composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution. You're now grouping the machines and you're saying they're isolated. We can do the smarts and both of the center side and the switch side, get them in sync, get it all configured. And now the masses can start to do this kind of segmentation at scale. >> Got it. Thank you Simon. Can the fabric composer kind of be used as the primary prism for troubleshooting? How do you handle troubleshooting and this art combined architecture? Who, who do I call when there's a problem? How do you approach that? >> Well, definitely start by calling me or actually call my product first, so fabric composer. If you're using it, use that as the front tool for what you're going to try and figure out what's going on. There is a global health dashboard. It encompasses networking security policy across the solution, across the fabric. So that's your tells you what's going on immediately, down to port stats on what's happening within the physical topology of the network down to the end to end view, we have in terms of policy connectivity between machines. So fabric composer is your first port of call, but we built a solution here that we don't want to hide the pieces underneath it. Any networking guy knows when they're deep troubleshooting networking stuff, they're going to end up at the switch. So you started the orchestrator, but sometimes in the deep troubleshooting, not day-to-day hopefully, you'll go to the switch and you'll troubleshoot that way. We've got the same technology here with the policy, with the firewall rules, with Pensando PSM, we still fully embrace. For deep troubleshooting, go to Pensando PSM. They have really advanced tools in their bag of tricks in the product to give you advanced troubleshooting down to the policy layer that they have a really powerful firewall log capability, where you can search and sort and see exactly what role is allowing or stopping any traffic going through the environment. And the two orchestrated model, we really like it because it scales really well. It allows fabric composer to remain lightweight, PSM focused on the policy orchestration bit. But again, if you're the customer that wants to do single pane of glass, use fabric composer for the standard day-to-day stuff. But you've got the tools there to do the advanced troubleshooting between the different elements that we have within the Pensando and the Aruber tools. >> Yeah, really well thought out, you get the simplification angle nailed, the integration automation we talked about that, the visualization and a topology map, zero trust, and then remediation with deepened spend inspection. Simon, thanks so much for taking us through the announcements, really appreciate your insights and time today. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Okay. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. More content from the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements, coming right up. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman, and this is we've actually reached the end of the cubes coverage of VM World 2020. Hard to believe. 11 years we've done lots of interviews here has been great to be able to engage with the audience talk, talk to the executives, talk some customers, but saving one more for you. So happy to welcome to the program is the first time on the Cube. But we've been talking to him since they came out of stealth. So I have the co founder and CEO of Minhai. Oh, and that is a non Babu Harry Asami A B. So nice to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank >>you too. Thank you for having me on the show. >>Alright. So we love when we get to talk to the founders of companies were gonna dig into your company. But before we do just frame for us, you're not really high performance. I Oh, I oh, is in the name of your company. Um, men might make me think that there's some miniaturization, but give us the VM Ware connection. Obviously, VM Ware talked a lot about Cloud this week. They've talked about going deep into a I and computing. So we know this ecosystem has changed a lot in the 11 years that we've been covering it. Tell us how you and your company high end >>sounds good. Yeah. So men in many of those stands for minimalism right somehow in the enterprise like it has always been like shiny, heavy, complex things, find complex solutions to simple problems and charge them a lot. That has been the trend in the past, right? That's what Cloud has recent in the Enterprise and men on mini Iot is actually about solving that data storage problem. A very large scale. And the solution is like find simple solutions to complex problems. And we grew in the cloud in the both in the public and Private Cloud, and we are now the fastest growing object storage for the private cloud. And now we, um, we're coming into the government, the territory we actually CVM where is set to lead the kubernetes race. And in the Cooper Natives, if you look for an object storage pretty much, many ways standard. And this is where we bring our ecosystem toe. Be aware. And we, um where brings the enterprise market of cloud And this is the start off the private cloud. In the long run, I think public and private cloud will look alike. >>Yeah, absolutely. We've We've been writing about this for for for for many years a b We saw the enterprises taking on more of the characteristics of the hyper scholars, the hyper scholars. Of course, they're coming more to the enterprise. Ah, lot of discussion about hybrid and multi cloud these days. But what I want you to explain a little bit when? When When when your company was formed. You talk about, you know, doing these kubernetes environment. You do partner with AWS and azure, but ah, lot of what you do is on premises and that strikes people as a little bit unconventional in the thing. Or definitely 2017 and even for 2020. So help us understand. You know what it is exactly that you know the technology bring and why you think it's the fit for if you extend making private cloud on par with public. >>Yeah, it's not surprising to us at all, but it made no sense when we started with the rest of the world, right? Even the investors like not our other investors but the typical venture community toe the rest of the world. They thought that an object storage if it is not useful inside AWS, there is no use but an object storage at all. And we our question was very simple that the amount of data the world will produce in the next 10 years bulk off the data. Where is it going to be? Right? And it's not going to be in the public cloud. And it didn't sound obvious back then, right? And we saw that in the long run, public and private cloud will look alike but bulk of the data if it's going to be generated outside AWS while AWS s three sets the standard, the rest of the world what are they going to do? So many who was raised to be the S three for the rest of the world and the rest of the world is the biggest market. And back then there was no private cloud. There was public cloud and public cloud. What meant only AWS, right? And this was not so long ago. We're talking like 56 years, right? And then soon multi cloud came from multi cloud private cloud came what really accelerated. This is basically kubernetes and containers, right? In fact, containers started the trend and then Coburn It has accelerated it further nowadays. If you if you see why it's no longer a dream, are a faith based model, right, it's actually we're we're talking about, like a $540,000. Actually, 540,000 doctors pulled a day, right? And 400 like 400 well million or so Dr Pools in aggregate. That shows that the entire industry has changed, and it's already the Coburn. It is even public or private cloud. It is the one hybrid infrastructure layer, and now it has now it's no longer private Cloud is that question right? And customers are now able to move between public and private cloud. The trend is hybrid hybrid cloud. I think it's irreversible. >>Alright, you talked about Dr Poles and the code there, so let's make sure our audience understand exactly what you are. Sounds like your software sounds like open source is a piece of it. Help us understand. You know how you fit with Because if we're talking about object storage, there's gotta be some infrastructure underneath that. What does mean I owe provide and where do you turn to the partners? >>Yeah, so just like server less, it means that it's not like there is no server, right? It's about a software problem. Similarly, storage right When store when object storage is containerized, we still need drives, right? That is where VM ware V Sand comes. Descends Job is to virtualized the physical layer toe the basically container layer. But end of the day if you see the it is a software problem and what may I would just like a database would solve the metadata data store problem. I mean, I will solve the blob data problem. And in the public, cloud object storage is the foundational piece. It is the primary storage, but we saw this as a software problem, and when customers started building these applications, they actually containerized their application and use Cooper notice to roll out their application infrastructure. And when they do that, they cannot possibly by a hardware appliance on the public cloud. And even on the on the private cloud, they when they when they completely orchestrate two containers, they cannot roll out hardware appliances. This is where the the industry the cloud native community always saw this as a software problem. It was obvious to them for the enterprise I t it was not so clear. And the storage industry giants, if you see everyone off them is a hardware appliance play, and they are in for a total shock. And we were basically as a as reset with their seven or to update one, if there is a lot of interesting things to come. >>All right, So if if I understand Here you sit from a VM Ware environment, I've got V sand underneath. I've got Tangguh above, and you're you're providing that object service in between. So for our for our friends in the in the channel market on when thinking about gear, anything that V san can sit on, you just can come along for the ride. Do I have that right? >>Yeah. So underneath the sand is basically bunch of J boards, right? These are like Dell and HP servers with the drives in them on This is not a hardware appliance anymore, right? You look at the storage market, it is. Stand our NASA plans. That is how the enterprise I t operated not in the club world. And as we and we're moves into the cloud world, everything looks cloud native and in this case, the sand. NASA plans have no role to play. Even the object storage hardware appliance has no role to play because we and we're becomes the end where Visa becomes the new block storage layer. And then they have positioned object storage database. Everything as a data data store are a data persist since layer. So only this software only the software that is contained race gets to play on top of, um, where in the new World, including the storage itself. And it's No, there is no appliance here. >>All right, so and your your solution is is listed as kubernetes kubernetes native. So now you mentioned VCR seven, VCR seven, update one Now house full kubernetes support. I'm assuming Then you can plug into tansy you you can plug into, uh, Amazon Azure. Other kubernetes options out there. Is that the case? >>Yeah, So from a customer point of view, right? If you are on the enterprise, I d. Environment Now from I t administrator point off you. Nothing changes much other than from the V Center console itself. You now get to see me, and I will in in the first suspend data services. You click and deploy entirely as a software without even learning to spell Cooper notice. You can build a private cloud storage multi tenant exactly like how public cloud storage outrage. And that is from the private cloud point a few right, and it's purely software. You're not waiting for six months, but the hardware to arrive and long procurement cycles and provisioning all that is now provisioned as a software container. In just five minutes, you can actually set up a private cloud in Prospector. That's for the private cloud, right? But why? The reason why customers want this to be a software problem is they roll out their software on the on the private cloud on the public cloud for burst, wear clothes and sustained work clothes on private cloud burst workloads on public cloud. Noncritical jobs are anything that is fast moving on, convenience based. They push it to public cloud. Customers do want tohave one leg here and one like there. And nowadays even the edge on decentralized on the from the telco space toe video on other other areas even the edges now growing toe. They want a your software solution. The entire data center software is now containerized. They can roll out Public cloud Our private cloud are on the edge On with me No, we solve the data side the compute side Then we're already has done a wonderful job on the networking side. They have done it on on the beast on the storage site dated the physical toe container layer movies. And now the data storage part is what we solved. Now what does this do to the end user? Now they can build software and truly deploy on public private our age without any modification on entirely it is a software problem. This >>great. What do you find? Or some of the more prevalent use cases, you know, sitting on top, What applications or the key ones that people are deploying your solution for >>Yeah, So in the public cloud, if you see, that's that. That's actually a good place to start if you see in the public cloud, right, starting from even simple static website hosting toe aml, big data, workloads toe. Even the modern databases like Snowflake, for example is built on object storage in the public cloud. It has become a truly horizontal play. And that is how it started right there. W started with history and then came everything else. And now that trend is beginning to percolate into the enterprise. And surprisingly, we found that the enterprise was the explosion of data. Growth is actually not about like cat videos, right? What? What are these touring? Mostly We found that bulk of the data that is drowning that crisis messing generated data. And these are basically like some kind of log data event data data streams that are continuously produced on that actually can grow from 10 terabytes to 10 petabytes in a very short time. This is where clearly object storage has become the right choice, just like in the public cloud. But customers are now adopting object storage as the primary storage and now multiple applications. Whether it is the cloud native applications in like the Hangzhou Application Service like spring boot and like all the clothes on re stack from their toe. So all the m l big data workloads pretty much everybody has been verging to object storage as there foundation. >>Yeah, absolutely. You seen some of those use cases very prevalent here in the VM Ware community. I heard you talking about it. I was expecting to hear you talk about Splunk data protection, something that's been a big topic of conversation in the last few years. Obviously, VM Ware has a number of key partners. So I'm assuming many of those air who you are also working with. >>Look, it felt good broad Splunk Splunk itself is actually is an important move that what we did recently with VM where finally we can run Splunk natively on BM where at large scale and without any performance penalty and at a price point that it becomes really attractive Now comparing Splunk Cloud, where's the Splunk on Prem? We can actually show like at least like one third off what it would cost to run on Splunk load. So I don't know Splunk themselves would like it, But I think Splunk as a company would like what customers like, right? And this is where Splunk actually now can sit on many, many us, all the all their data stores. They call it smart store underneath underneath me. I will now, when the previous original Visa incarnation, we couldn't actually your huge amounts of data. But now, with the visa and direct, we actually have access to the local drives and you can attach as many drives as you want. Then if you want more capacity, more more number of servers so you can pack thousands and thousands off drives at a price point that even public cloud cannot be anywhere closer. And this is actually important. Yeah, environment for the Splunk customers. Because for them, not only the cost right, even the data is sensitive for them. They cannot really, really push it to the public cloud data generated outside of the public cloud. If data generated inside Public Cloud, probably Amazon has their own solution, and Splunk cloud makes sense. But when data is produced outside, these are sensitive data and it's huge volume, and they produce on an average, like the kind of users VCs center about. It's a day on on, then it's only growing at an accelerated pace. And this is where the Visa and Direct and Mini Oh, you can now bring that workload onto the number. Finally, the ICTY can control the control, the Splunk deployments. This is something important for I t right in the past, if you see big data workloads always ran on bare metal and silos, something I d hated right This time it is flexible that it's not just flexible, exactly gets better. >>Well, it sure sounds like the technology maturation has finally caught up on the VM ware standpoint with the vision that you and the team had. So give us a little bit. Look forward now that you've got kubernetes really being embraced by VM where on and starting to see maturation in this space. Where do we go from here? >>So we were actually, If you see what they brought to the table this time, they didn't actually catch up with others, right? Typically, the innovation in the recent times happened in the open source space and then the large vendors will come and innovate. Startups and open source started the innovation large, large. When the large winters come in later. But this time around, remember, actually did the innovation part and these and direct. It's actually a big step forward in the Covenant of CSE space. And the reason why it's a big step is C s A. Traditionally is designed for the sand gnats vendors and using the same C s. A model, remember, was able to bring in large work clothes and that allowed entirely to use the local drive possibility. Right now it moving forward. What What we will see. What were said to see is the cloud native workload. Actually a ran as a silo in the Enterprise, right? There was big data workloads. There was the applications team that ran Cooper knitters and containers on their own. There are on their on their own develop shop on enterprise. I'd ran the idea introspect These three were not connected on finally this time around. By bringing cover natives native into the I T infrastructure, there is going to be a convergence. You will not. The silos will get eliminated. Big data, big data workloads, ml wear clothes on bare metal will now come toe come toe. Then I will be aware that the Governor disk combination and you will see the the coordinative applications space. They will hand over the physical layer infrastructure onto the VM Ware e and everybody coming together. I think it's the best. Big step forward. >>Well, maybe. I sure hope you're right. We love to see the breaking down of silos. Things coming together. We've been a little bit concerned over the last few years that we're rebuilding the silos in the cloud. We've got different skill sets different there, but we always love some good tech optimism here, uh, to say that we're gonna move these sorts of Thank you so much. Great to catch up with you and definitely look forward to hearing more from you and your customers in the future. >>Thank you to this. Wonderful to be on your show. >>All right. We want to thank everybody for joining VM World 2020 for day. Volonte John, for your big thanks to the whole production team and of course, VM Ware and our sponsors for helping us to bring this content to you. As always, I'm stew Minuteman and thank you for joining us on the Cube