(bright music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is a global special open program we're doing every year. We're going to continue it every quarter. We're going to do more and more content, getting the voices out there and celebrating the diversity. And I'm excited to have an amazing guest here, LaDavia Drane, who's the head of Global Inclusion Diversity & Equity at AWS. LaDavia, we tried to get you in on AWS re:Invent, and you were super busy. So much going on. The industry has seen the light. They're seeing everything going on, and the numbers are up, but still not there, and getting better. This is your passion, our passion, a shared passion. Tell us about your situation, your career, how you got into it. What's your story? >> Yeah. Well, John, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm glad that we finally got this opportunity to speak. How did I get into this work? Wow, you know, I'm doing the work that I love to do, number one. It's always been my passion to be a voice for the voiceless, to create a seat at the table for folks that may not be welcome to certain tables. And so, it's been something that's been kind of the theme of my entire professional career. I started off as a lawyer, went to Capitol Hill, was able to do some work with members of Congress, both women members of Congress, but also, minority members of Congress in the US Congress. And then, that just morphed into what I think has become a career for me in inclusion, diversity, and equity. I decided to join Amazon because I could tell that it's a company that was ready to take it to the next level in this space. And sure enough, that's been my experience here. So now, I'm in it, I'm in it with two feet, doing great work. And yeah, yeah, it's almost a full circle moment for me. >> It's really an interesting background. You have a background in public policy. You mentioned Capitol Hill. That's awesome. DC kind of moves slow, but it's a complicated machinery there. Obviously, as you know, navigating that, Amazon grew significantly. We've been at every re:Invent with theCUBE since 2013, like just one year. I watched Amazon grow, and they've become very fast and also complicated, like, I won't say like Capitol, 'cause that's very slow, but Amazon's complicated. AWS is in the realm of powering a generation of public policy. We had the JEDI contract controversy, all kinds of new emerging challenges. This pivot to tech was great timing because one, (laughs) Amazon needed it because they were growing so fast in a male dominated world, but also, their business is having real impact on the public. >> That's right, that's right. And when you say the public, I'll just call it out. I think that there's a full spectrum of diversity and we work backwards from our customers, and our customers are diverse. And so, I really do believe, I agree that I came to the right place at the right time. And yeah, we move fast and we're also moving fast in this space of making sure that both internally and externally, we're doing the things that we need to do in order to reach a diverse population. >> You know, I've noticed how Amazon's changed from the culture, male dominated culture. Let's face it, it was. And now, I've seen over the past five years, specifically go back five, is kind of in my mental model, just the growth of female leaders, it's been impressive. And there was some controversy. They were criticized publicly for this. And we said a few things as well in those, like around 2014. How is Amazon ensuring and continuing to get the female employees feel represented and empowered? What's going on there? What programs do you have? Because it's not just doing it, it's continuing it, right? And 'cause there is a lot more to do. I mean, the half (laughs) the products are digital now for everybody. It's not just one population. (laughs) Everyone uses digital products. What is Amazon doing now to keep it going? >> Well, I'll tell you, John, it's important for me to note that while we've made great progress, there's still more that can be done. I am very happy to be able to report that we have big women leaders. We have leaders running huge parts of our business, which includes storage, customer experience, industries and business development. And yes, we have all types of programs. And I should say that, instead of calling it programs, I'm going to call it strategic initiatives, right? We are very thoughtful about how we engage our women. And not only how we hire, attract women, but how we retain our women. We do that through engagement, groups like our affinity groups. So Women at Amazon is an affinity group. Women in finance, women in engineering. Just recently, I helped our Black employee network women's group launch, BEN Women. And so you have these communities of women who come together, support and mentor one another. We have what we call Amazon Circles. And so these are safe spaces where women can come together and can have conversations, where we are able to connect mentors and sponsors. And we're seeing that it's making all the difference in the world for our women. And we see that through what we call Connections. We have an inclusion sentiment tracker. So we're able to ask questions every single day and we get a response from our employees and we can see how are our women feeling, how are they feeling included at work? Are they feeling as though they can be who they are authentically at Amazon? And so, again, there's more work that needs to be done. But I will say that as I look at the data, as I'm talking to engaging women, I really do believe that we're on the right path. >> LaDavia, talk about the urgent needs of the women that you're hearing from the Circles. That's a great program. The affinity circles, the groups are great. Now, you have the groups, what are you hearing? What are the needs of the women? >> So, John, I'll just go a little bit into what's becoming a conversation around equity. So, initially I think we talked a lot about equality, right? We wanted everyone to have fair access to the same things. But now, women are looking for equity. We're talking about not just leveling the playing field, which is equality, but don't give me the same as you give everyone else. Instead, recognize that I may have different circumstances, I may have different needs. And give me what I need, right? Give me what I need, not just the same as everyone else. And so, I love seeing women evolve in this way, and being very specific about what they need more than, or what's different than what a man may have in the same situation because their circumstances are not always the same and we should treat them as such. >> Yeah, I think that's a great equity point. I interviewed a woman here, ex-Amazonian, she's now a GSI, Global System Integrator. She's a single mom. And she said remote work brought her equity because people on her team realized that she was a single mom. And it wasn't the, how do you balance life, it was her reality. And what happened was, she had more empathy with the team because of the new work environment. So, I think this is an important point to call out, that equity, because that really makes things smoother in terms of the interactions, not the assumptions, you have to be, you know, always the same as a man. So, how does that go? What's the current... How would you characterize the progress in that area right now? >> I believe that employers are just getting better at this. It's just like you said, with the hybrid being the norm now, you have an employer who is looking at people differently based on what they need. And it's not a problem, it's not an issue that a single mother says, "Well, I need to be able to leave by 5:00 PM." I think that employers now, and Amazon is right there along with other employers, are starting just to evolve that muscle of meeting the needs. People don't have to feel different. You don't have to feel as though there's some kind of of special circumstance for me. Instead, it's something that we, as employers, we're asking for. And we want to meet those needs that are different in some situations. >> I know you guys do a lot of support of women outside of AWS, and I had a story I recorded for the program. This woman, she talked about how she was a nerd from day one. She's a tomboy. They called her a tomboy, but she always loved robotics. And she ended up getting dual engineering degrees. And she talked about how she didn't run away and there was many signals to her not to go. And she powered through, at that time, and during her generation, that was tough. And she was successful. How are you guys taking the education to STEM, to women, at young ages? Because we don't want to turn people away from tech if they have the natural affinity towards it. And not everyone is going to be, as, you know, (laughs) strong, if you will. And she was a bulldog, she was great. She's just like, "I'm going for it. I love it so much." But not everyone's like that. So, this is an educational thing. How do you expose technology, STEM for instance, and making it more accessible, no stigma, all that stuff? I mean, I think we've come a long way, but still. >> What I love about women is we don't just focus on ourselves. We do a very good job of thinking about the generation that's coming after us. And so, I think you will see that very clearly with our women Amazonians. I'll talk about three different examples of ways that Amazonian women in particular, and there are men that are helping out, but I'll talk about the women in particular that are leading in this area. On my team, in the Inclusion, Diversity & Equity team, we have a program that we run in Ghana where we meet basic STEM needs for a afterschool program. So we've taken this small program, and we've turned their summer camp into this immersion, where girls and boys, we do focus on the girls, can come and be completely immersed in STEM. And when we provide the technology that they need, so that they'll be able to have access to this whole new world of STEM. Another program which is run out of our AWS In Communities team, called AWS Girls' Tech Day. All across the world where we have data centers, we're running these Girls' Tech Day. They're basically designed to educate, empower and inspire girls to pursue a career in tech. Really, really exciting. I was at the Girls' Tech Day here recently in Columbus, Ohio, and I got to tell you, it was the highlight of my year. And then I'll talk a little bit about one more, it's called AWS GetIT, and it's been around for a while. So this is a program, again, it's a global program, it's actually across 13 countries. And it allows girls to explore cloud technology, in particular, and to use it to solve real world problems. Those are just three examples. There are many more. There are actually women Amazonians that create these opportunities off the side of their desk in they're local communities. We, in Inclusion, Diversity & Equity, we fund programs so that women can do this work, this STEM work in their own local communities. But those are just three examples of some of the things that our Amazonians are doing to bring girls along, to make sure that the next generation is set up and that the next generation knows that STEM is accessible for girls. >> I'm a huge believer. I think that's amazing. That's great inspiration. We need more of that. It's awesome. And why wouldn't we spread it around? I want to get to the equity piece, that's the theme for this year's IWD. But before that, getting that segment, I want to ask you about your title, and the choice of words and the sequence. Okay, Global Inclusion, Diversity, Equity. Not diversity only. Inclusion is first. We've had this debate on theCUBE many years now, a few years back, it started with, "Inclusion is before diversity," "No, diversity before inclusion, equity." And so there's always been a debate (laughs) around the choice of words and their order. What's your opinion? What's your reaction to that? Is it by design? And does inclusion come before diversity, or am I just reading it to it? >> Inclusion doesn't necessarily come before diversity. (John laughs) It doesn't necessarily come before equity. Equity isn't last, but we do lead with inclusion in AWS. And that is very important to us, right? And thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk a little bit about it. We lead with inclusion because we want to make sure that every single one of our builders know that they have a place in this work. And so it's important that we don't only focus on hiring, right? Diversity, even though there are many, many different levels and spectrums to diversity. Inclusion, if you start there, I believe that it's what it takes to make sure that you have a workplace where everyone knows you're included here, you belong here, we want you to stay here. And so, it helps as we go after diversity. And we want all types of people to be a part of our workforce, but we want you to stay. And inclusion is the thing. It's the thing that I believe makes sure that people stay because they feel included. So we lead with inclusion. Doesn't mean that we put diversity or equity second or third, but we are proud to lead with inclusion. >> Great description. That was fabulous. Totally agree. Double click, thumbs up. Now let's get into the theme. Embracing equity, 'cause this is a term, it's in quotes. What does that mean to you? You mentioned it earlier, I love it. What does embrace equity mean? >> Yeah. You know, I do believe that when people think about equity, especially non-women think about equity, it's kind of scary. It's, "Am I going to give away what I have right now to make space for someone else?" But that's not what equity means. And so I think that it's first important that we just educate ourselves about what equity really is. It doesn't mean that someone's going to take your spot, right? It doesn't mean that the pie, let's use that analogy, gets smaller. The pie gets bigger, right? >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And everyone is able to have their piece of the pie. And so, I do believe that I love that IWD, International Women's Day is leading with embracing equity because we're going to the heart of the matter when we go to equity, we're going to the place where most people feel most challenged, and challenging people to think about equity and what it means and how they can contribute to equity and thus, embrace equity. >> Yeah, I love it. And the advice that you have for tech professionals out there on this, how do you advise other groups? 'Cause you guys are doing a lot of great work. Other organizations are catching up. What would be your advice to folks who are working on this equity challenge to reach gender equity and other equitable strategic initiatives? And everyone's working on this. Sustainability and equity are two big projects we're seeing in every single company right now. >> Yeah, yeah. I will say that I believe that AWS has proven that equity and going after equity does work. Embracing equity does work. One example I would point to is our AWS Impact Accelerator program. I mean, we provide 30 million for early stage startups led by women, Black founders, Latino founders, LGBTQ+ founders, to help them scale their business. That's equity. That's giving them what they need. >> John: Yeah. >> What they need is they need access to capital. And so, what I'd say to companies who are looking at going into the space of equity, I would say embrace it. Embrace it. Look at examples of what companies like AWS is doing around it and embrace it because I do believe that the tech industry will be better when we're comfortable with embracing equity and creating strategic initiatives so that we could expand equity and make it something that's just, it's just normal. It's the normal course of business. It's what we do. It's what we expect of ourselves and our employees. >> LaDavia, you're amazing. Thank you for spending the time. My final couple questions really more around you. Capitol Hill, DC, Amazon Global Head of Inclusion, Diversity & Equity, as you look at making change, being a change agent, being a leader, is really kind of similar, right? You've got DC, it's hard to make change there, but if you do it, it works, right? (laughs) If you don't, you're on the side of the road. So, as you're in your job now, what are you most excited about? What's on your agenda? What's your focus? >> Yeah, so I'm most excited about the potential of what we can get done, not just for builders that are currently in our seats, but for builders in the future. I tend to focus on that little girl. I don't know her, I don't know where she lives. I don't know how old she is now, but she's somewhere in the world, and I want her to grow up and for there to be no question that she has access to AWS, that she can be an employee at AWS. And so, that's where I tend to center, I center on the future. I try to build now, for what's to come, to make sure that this place is accessible for that little girl. >> You know, I've always been saying for a long time, the software is eating the world, now you got digital transformation, business transformation. And that's not a male only, or certain category, it's everybody. And so, software that's being built, and the systems that are being built, have to have first principles. Andy Jassy is very strong on this. He's been publicly saying, when trying to get pinned down about certain books in the bookstore that might offend another group. And he's like, "Look, we have first principles. First principles is a big part of leading." What's your reaction to that? How would you talk to another professional and say, "Hey," you know this, "How do I make the right call? Am I doing the wrong thing here? And I might say the wrong thing here." And is it first principles based? What's the guardrails? How do you keep that in check? How would you advise someone as they go forward and lean in to drive some of the change that we're talking about today? >> Yeah, I think as leaders, we have to trust ourselves. And Andy actually, is a great example. When I came in as head of ID&E for AWS, he was our CEO here at AWS. And I saw how he authentically spoke from his heart about these issues. And it just aligned with who he is personally, his own personal principles. And I do believe that leaders should be free to do just that. Not to be scripted, but to lead with their principles. And so, I think Andy's actually a great example. I believe that I am the professional in this space at this company that I am today because of the example that Andy set. >> Yeah, you guys do a great job, LaDavia. What's next for you? >> What's next. >> World tour, you traveling around? What's on your plate these days? Share a little bit about what you're currently working on. >> Yeah, so you know, at Amazon, we're always diving deep. We're always diving deep, we're looking for root cause, working very hard to look around corners, and trying to build now for what's to come in the future. And so I'll continue to do that. Of course, we're always planning and working towards re:Invent, so hopefully, John, I'll see you at re:Invent this December. But we have some great things happening throughout the year, and we'll continue to... I think it's really important, as opposed to looking to do new things, to just continue to flex the same muscles and to show that we can be very, very focused and intentional about doing the same things over and over each year to just become better and better at this work in this space, and to show our employees that we're committed for the long haul. So of course, there'll be new things on the horizon, but what I can say, especially to Amazonians, is we're going to continue to stay focused, and continue to get at this issue, and doing this issue of inclusion, diversity and equity, and continue to do the things that work and make sure that our culture evolves at the same time. >> LaDavia, thank you so much. I'll give you the final word. Just share some of the big projects you guys are working on so people can know about them, your strategic initiatives. Take a minute to plug some of the major projects and things that are going on that people either know about or should know about, or need to know about. Take a minute to share some of the big things you guys got going on, or most of the things. >> So, one big thing that I would like to focus on, focus my time on, is what we call our Innovation Fund. This is actually how we scale our work and we meet the community's needs by providing micro grants to our employees so our employees can go out into the world and sponsor all types of different activities, create activities in their local communities, or throughout the regions. And so, that's probably one thing that I would like to focus on just because number one, it's our employees, it's how we scale this work, and it's how we meet our community's needs in a very global way. And so, thank you John, for the opportunity to talk a bit about what we're up to here at Amazon Web Services. But it's just important to me, that I end with our employees because for me, that's what's most important. And they're doing some awesome work through our Innovation Fund. >> Inclusion makes the workplace great. Empowerment, with that kind of program, is amazing. LaDavia Drane, thank you so much. Head of Global Inclusion and Diversity & Equity at AWS. This is International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching and stay with us for more great interviews and people and what they're working on. Thanks for watching. (bright 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)

(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)

(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)

>> Instructor: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> And welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm John Furrier your host. This is theCUBE virtual. Special coverage of the public sector. Today Rebecca Wetherly, Director of Worldwide Public Sector System Integrator Partners for AWS. Great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. I'm glad to be here. >> So just the news we've been covering all through re:Invented priors, just the growth in public sector. The acceleration with the pandemic, it's just that this acceleration has been massive. So I want to just get get your take. It's been hard but also, it's been an opportunity for partners. >> You leading the Integrators. >> Sure. >> They're on the front lines. I got to ask you, (chuckling) what is AWS doing to support their partners, as the business models are forced really upon them to move faster? >> Yeah, sure. Thank you. Let me start with saying that, companies are really building a business in partnering with us. Because of global needs such as the pandemic. But we also have many partners that are coming to us because of our customer demand outside of COVID. Because we're a leader in cloud innovation, and because we've got a global field engagement and go-to-market strategy. You know AWS is a customer driven company, and our partners are also our customers. We have a full suite of programs for our partners and whether they be a consulting partner or a technology partner. We have tens of thousands of partners all across the globe, with more than 35,000 new partners since January 2016. And in our public sector space, we have over 1,500 partners with solutions and experience, delivering on a combination of government, education, and nonprofit customer missions all around the world. Consulting partners are really professional services firms. That help customers of all types and sizes design, architect, build, migrate and manage workloads and applications on AWS. They accelerate the journey to the cloud for our customers. And they often are implementing technology solutions. As you referred to around COVID, that our technology partners are actually developing. So consulting partners are SIs that I work with, Strategic Consultant Partners, Managed Service Providers, and also resellers. And they are providing really great value to our customers by providing strategic advisory services, implementation and migration services, Staffog. They also have great specialty depth and machine learning or AI. IOT, data lakes and analytics. And even in things like communication tools using technologies like we're doing today on zoom, and taking those to our customers. Our technology partners on the other hand they deliver hardware, connectivity services and software solutions that are hosted or integrated with AWS cloud. And they deliver components to broad customer solutions, often via our consulting partners. We have a great, a great way of delivering technology through our AWS Marketplace and we'll talk about that in a minute. But I will say, that our tech partners are helping our customers decrease their deployment times, provide cost optimization and infrastructure for DevOps and production workloads. They're also lowering their costs on code development by using our broad portfolio of services. And oftentimes for our public sector customers they are helping shorten the path to achieving regulatory requirements for our public sector needs. >> That's awesome. You guys have a lot to do there to support your partners. Obviously the main concern is, how do I maintain that profitability in the fast pace. And then making sure that their customers can also transition and ride the digital transformation wave. So I have to ask you, what programs are you guys offering to help these partners succeed because certainly it's beyond just the profitability. it's this new business model of Cloud-scale. So what programs specifically are you guys offering? >> Yeah, we have a lot of different programs at AWS. The first stop is really the AWS Partner Network. Which I'll refer to as the APN. This is really our global partner program for technology and consulting businesses to leverage Amazon Web Services to build solutions and services for customers. The APN is the first place where companies can build, market, and sell their offerings, and provide valuable business, technical, and opportunities for marketing with their customers. Our programs provide promotional support. We provide visibility throughout our website. We give partners opportunities to engage with customers for events, social media. And we provide access to funding and go-to market opportunities. I touched on briefly our AWS Marketplace . And this is really a great program offering to our customers both consulting partners and technology partners. The AWS Marketplace simplifies procurement and entitlement of provisioning software across 50 different categories. And we have more than 8,000 transactional listings. That marketplace connects customers with more than 1,000 different ISBs or independent software vendors to help meet their business needs. And we have more than 300,000 customers using software from the AWS Marketplace. The Marketplace is also available on 24 different regions. So when a customer chooses to use the Marketplace they have the opportunity to procure their software from our consulting partners and leverage the software and the technology from our from our tech partners. Other really cool programs we have are our Partner Transformation Program or SaaS Factory Program, and also our Migration Acceleration Program. >> Awesome. Great programs. What else are you guys besides programs, Are you guys doing >> Yeah. >> to help partners succeed. Because I know there's a lot of touches, there's some new things going on. What else do you guys do? >> Yeah, I think we have a lot of great resources available to our partners. Most of our partners have Partner Development Managers that are working with them on a daily basis. Access to our business development and sales teams, solutions architects and other subject matter experts. Really getting deep into the technology and having access to those folks to help our partners design, build, architect and validate a purchase with customers. Also our Professional Services Teams.Right? They are deep subject matter experts that our partners have the ability to tap into. And then of course, because of the way we go to market in public sector, access and engagement with our capture, bid, and proposal teams are super important. We also have to consider access for our partners to be trained and become certified. That's a real requirement that our customers need to help them achieve their goals. We offer digital and classroom training for our partners to be able to learn at their own pace or via an AWS instructor. And AWS training and certification helps our partners build competence, confidence, and credibility with our customers. We also have AWS competencies. And our competency program is designed to identify, validate, and promote APN partners that have demonstrated technical expertise and proven customer success. One of the most critical competencies for us is and these days is around our migration. Migration competencies allows our partners to accelerate their customer's cloud adoption journey by providing strategy, personnel tools, education, and tech support to their customers. One of those customers and partners is InterVision. They're a consulting firm that provide strategic advisory services to organizations to help them run, grow, and transform their business needs with the cloud via modern IT services. Their experts have a deep history in technology solutions and they have a deep bench of certified engineers and data scientists to excel delivering Managed Services and Migration Services to both public sector and commercial customers. And with the California Department of Technology. Which is a state agency that provides authority and responsibility over all aspects of technology for California state governments, they selected InterVision to work with them due to their expertise and their proprietary offering called Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance. And that offering provided that CDT, the ability, pardon me. To take advantage of their Cloud Migration operations and optimization specialty. So our partners are really getting great opportunities to build their business and to accelerate their their work with us through a variety of programs, and by really digging deep and leveraging all of the programs that are available to them. >> It's nice with the mix of programs, plus the field support, plus the care they're nurtured that, grow that. As you know in these in these markets where you have partnerships and channels and relationships. You need to be profitable. And profitability is about happy customers. >> Rebecca: Sure. >> And margins.(chuckles) Making money. >> Rebecca: Yeah. Sure. >> You got to make money to stay in business. So, this is a big opportunity as the new economics of cloud come into the channel. This is really a big conversation. Moving fast, scaling up, new kinds of services. The integrators are really having a good time here. And these are new practices. How can someone learn more? What's out there? How does someone get engaged with you guys? What information can they, is there a site? Is there a program? How does someone get the resources? What would they do? >> Yeah. Well, I will tell you. The first stop is really our website. And that may sound trivial but that is the best place to get started for us. You're going to find there by visiting https://aws.amazon.com. You can register to become an AWS partner very easily. Right there you're going to get step-by-step instructions and learning paths, as well as tutorials and how to get your business up and running, and how to become a partner. And the journey largely looks like this. Right? One. get on board. Get familiar. Establish your relationship and join the Amazon Partner Network. Go through some very basic training and get familiar with their services. Second. Develop those technical and sales skills. Develop a business model where AWS lends the greatest value to your partner business. And as you move through the tiers of maturity, we will co-invest in your business to help you scale. And then three, really go to market. Establish the pathways to your customers. Build out your differentiated approach. Look at the competencies we offer and decide which ones are going to be the most relevant to you. We want you to leverage the funding mechanisms we have, and we want you also to think about how we co-market together. There are so many roads to success and AWS offers lots of different partner programs and opportunities to develop your unique roadmap John. >> Yeah, that's great enablement. That is super valuable. Having the co-funding, the go marketing, and the tools and the programs. All there to enable services to be successful. Rebecca, thanks for sharing that program. >> My pleasure. >> Great to have you on. Rebecca Wetherly, >> Thank you so much. Director of the Worldwide Public Sector System Integrator Partners. A big growing part of the public sector when we need it the most, which is now and it's growing. So check them out. Thanks for watching. This is theCUBE coverage. CUBE virtual, for AWS re:Invent reinvent public sector, special coverage. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE's Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to be joined by Harshul Asnani, the Global Head of the Technology Business at HPE partner, Tech Mahindra. Harshul, great to have you on the program. >> Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So, tell me about Tech Mahindra. I see on the website abbreviated as Tech M, give our audience an overview of Tech Mahindra, what you guys do. >> Sure. So Tech Mahindra is digital transformation consulting and technology services company operating at the intersection of IT engineering networks and BPO services. We have about 125,000 people operating in our 90 countries with about 5.2 billion in revenue, and have about 1,000 customers across key strategic verticles our largest being communications, media, and entertainment. And then we have other strong word because like technology, manufacturing, HLS, BFSI, the retail, and energy, and utilities. So that's broadly what we do, being in existence for well over 30 years now. >> And tell me about your role as the Head of the Global Technology Business. What have you seen transpire and evolve over the last few years, and especially the last three months with COVID? >> Sure. No, absolutely. I think, you see, we have organized a company around six strategic business units. They are these customer facing business units and I lead the one that focuses on technology and the high tech industry, if you will. I'm based in the Bay Area. And in this business unit, a large part of our business is, in some sense, 360 degree relationship with our customers, where not only do we sell into our customers, we also sell with and sell through our customers and also buy from them. So in that sense, it's a little different model in which we operate as compared to, say, other verticals that we have like manufacturing or BFSI or healthcare, but the relationship is largely customer and a supplier relationship. We have a full blown 360 degree relationship. It's very unique from that standpoint. And things have, you know, in some sense, dramatically shifted in the last three years, rather three months where we are seeing that, you know, amount of digital transformation, which was to happen over the next two years, has kind of happened in the last two months. So this is kind of pivoting a lot of enterprises, and including the tech sector, into an era where we are saying, how do we reposition ourselves to bring in more COVID-related solutions, both from a commercial standpoint, as well as a humanitarian standpoint, to deal with this crisis. So that it does in terms of changes that are happening out there in the industry, as well as in Tech Mahindra, as we can't forget ready fore-global and post -lobal. >> If you look at some of the specific trends that you're seeing during the COVID crisis, in the high tech segment, what are they? >> So, a couple of things have, we've looked at very differently. Supply chain for example, which is very crucial to high tech, is undergoing, in some sense, a metamorphoses shift. It's undergoing a seismic shift in the way supply chains are kind of reconfiguring themselves. You're also seeing customer experience kind of dramatically changing. Another thing that is coming in very, very strongly from a change perspective, it's kind of a storm that is brewing out there is, is how do we enable people to work remotely? We at Tech Mahindra, ourselves, had to enable 80,000 people in India who work remotely in a matter of weeks. And it's by no means an easy task to do which in a country where working from home is not really a culture. And also where we work, out of secure customer premises, even in India, our secure offshore locations in India, and all those people have now moved to their homes, and work out with their living rooms and bedrooms. And that was a sizable shift in the way we had to deal with our engagements, and with our customers. And so far so good, knock on wood, We have not had any issues. >> So Harshul, pivoting so quickly, as Tech M did to get your 80,000 employees in India to be able to work from home connectivity, all the challenges associated with that, goes hand in hand with your business, being able to deliver an exceptional customer experience, customer experience being an issue that you say is a rising trend amongst your customers. Customer experience and work from home these days go hand in hand, right? >> Absolutely. No, I think we also surprised ourselves with the pace at which we could move these 80,000 people to work from home in a matter of days, as I was saying, and as without missing customers. Our task was unimaginable in the pre-COVID era. And we will also surprised ourselves at the pace at which we could turn around COVID-related solutions so quickly with the help of partners like HPE that are today helping us pivot ourselves from one kind of old age solutions to the new age solutions, to the new normal today. And yeah, of course, and at the same time, we are to ensure that we enable the customer experience, and doing this on that while we repurpose our people to work from home. It was a challenge, and frankly, we surprised ourselves the way we did. >> So Harshul, talk to me about what, in these COVID crisis times, HPE and Tech Mahindra are doing together to help your customers accelerate, maybe adoption of new technologies that they need to for their businesses to thrive. >> Yeah, sure. No, that's a great question, Lisa. Let me start by saying that HPE is a very strategic partnership for us, and we see it as a coming together of two market leaders to deliver a very differentiated playbook of solutions for our customers. There is a robust set of products and solutions and edge offerings, edge gateways, converged edge systems, and clear analytics, combined with HPE's great GreenLake offers, which is around flexible consumption-based services, which helps align our customers' IT spend to deliver pretty much everything as a service. We kind of have already robust partner in HPE. And when you combine this with a Tech Mahindra's industry domain and technology depth, and the systems integration wherewithal that we bring in, it makes form, I believe, a very potent combination to drive, serious value to our customers, right? And given the COVID situation, we have kind of defined our relationship along three broad vectors based on the mutual synergies and where we believe we can quickly drive value. Firstly, what the solution white spaces that we want to address together? Secondly, what are the geographies that you want to operate in and third is, what are the industry verticals that we believe we can quickly focus on? So from a solutioning standpoint, there are four broad trust areas that we want to sharply focus on. Firstly IoT. It's been a strong partnership with HP with IoT. And we would like to continue that followed. With HBE's edge offerings, and converged edge systems, we have kind of demonstrated the possibilities of IoT solutions across smart cities, factories of the future, of energy and utilities and of Costa Rico. And we have some good success stories we already have with HPE that would like to build on, we have won some for significant smart city projects in India, in four different cities of India. And we also, by the way, won the Systems Integrator Award for Edge and IoT from HPE last year, and also the SI Partner of the Year for HPE last year. So we would like to continue to build on that. We all see already have a COE on IoT set up in Bangalore. It's a very unique COE that we're built up where we have showcasing solutions around a smart city or IoT, and also brought in Aruba gear as well, but solutions that are smart campuses, so on and so forth. So, that's number one. Number two is data center transformation. As hybrid cloud kind of takes root through our customers are now looking at transforming their data centers as well. And particularly with HPE's GreenLake, it becomes a very strategic commercial tool for us to bring on demand paper, use models, elasticity, kind of the, as I was talking about, the flexible consumption services model, which is so unique today, as we help customers reduce their capex and get them to pay by the drink, if you will. Now that becomes very, very relevant in the COVID times. And last but not the least, our focus is also on network of the future. When I say that our partnership with HPE is really pivoted around 5G, as DNFE and private LTE solutions. For example, you know, HPE's private LTE network, which is essentially powered by HPE's EL300 and EL4000 converged edge systems. It's kind augmented by our industrial IoT expertise. And it includes a reintegrated, off the shelf, industrial IoT application from Tech Manhira. It's a kind of an end to end solution that uses the breakthrough innovation such as small sales EPC, and smart multi-access edge compute. So, we are staying sharply focused on these areas. And we started seeing the results, and given the goals in this scenario, we have evolved a bunch of use cases very quickly in multiple industry areas. And bought from a commercial library standpoint, and also importantly, on a humanitarian level, what we can do together. For example, in Italy, as the pandemic was raging. As many of you will know, a ship force can order into a hospital, probably 1,000 bed hospital, and HPE stepped in, and they brought in the Aruba gear to put up network together, the infrastructure and the connectivity to bring together, and take Manhira, which has a rapid response healthcare solution who help with remote patient diagnostics and monitoring. Kind of brought in that solution along with HPE, to bear in Italy as the pandemic was raging. So that's just an example of how we are partnering at multiple levels. You know, created a solution around workspace as a service, as an remote working becomes a new normal. >> Right. >> With HPE on that. So a bunch of other solutions as well, Lisa. >> Sounds like you guys have done a great job of, as you mentioned in the beginning of our time here, rapidly pivoting within Tech Mahindra, as you said, it actually kind of surprised ourselves to what you were doing with HPE to deploy rapidly in Italy, to I can only imagine helping customers accelerate projects like smart cities and smart factories where suddenly we need sensors on more things. Harshul, I thank you so much for spending time with us on theCUBE today. Exciting topics. We can't wait to see where this goes. >> Well, thank you so much, Lisa, for your time. It was great talking to you. >> Excellent. My pleasure. For Harshul, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, here on theCUBE, our live coverage continues here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands Exposition Center. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walsh. Glad to have you here with us on day one of our three days of coverage here. We're now joined by David Shacochis, who is the Vice President of Product IT Solutions and New Market Development at CenturyLink, and Jim Aluotto. Did I get it right, Jim? >> Jim Aluotto. >> Aluotto. We practiced this many times. Who is the Director of Cloud Provider Business, Americas, at VMware. Gentlemen, in all seriousness, thank you both for being with us. >> Jim: Thank you. >> We certainly appreciate your time. So talking software-defined data centers. First off, let's step really high level here, and just talk about main attributes, qualities. How would you, if your elevator speech would be about what the SDDC would be, how would you describe it, and what are the features? >> Sure, well I'll jump in front of the company that sort of coined the term, and get my answer first, and then let Jim expound from there. Really, I think we can sort of sum up the software-defined data center in a lot of what we've learned in creating a Managed Private Cloud, based on what you would call a software-defined data center platform, in that it minimizes the number of moving parts. We've been doing Managed Private Cloud for as long as Managed Private Cloud has been a thing. And what that used to mean, five, six, years ago, was provision to the network, provision to security devices, maybe it's a converge device, maybe it isn't, maybe it's two different vendors. Sure, you've got vSphere in the middle of it all, but now you're talkin' of different storage tiers. If you want different flavors of storage, you're talkin' to multiple vendors back there. Piecing together a private cloud solution used to mean talkin' to a number of different technology stacks, a number of different API frameworks. And so software-defined data center, where the rubber hits the road, and sort of, from the cold face, means just a simplified view of being able to automate all that together, have it all orchestrated, and have it be one common stack. >> Jim: Nicely done. >> Okay, well, you go do the bookish version. >> Well really, in its most simplistic form, spinning up end-to-end complete automation across compute, network, and storage assets. And lately we've gone to market with VMware Cloud Foundation, that CenturyLink is now spinning up as the root of their service that they're going to market with. And so we've gone through an evolutionary process over the years, where we've proven to the world the advantages of virtualization, virtualize and compute. VMware, in its Act II, is now virtualizing the network. We're virtualizing storage now with VSAN taking off like wildfire. But now we're stitching it all together, in the form of a complete, end to end, automated and provisioned, encapsulated, virtualized data center. >> And that's the big efficiency here, right? It's one-stop shop, basically. You don't have to go out and as you said, look for a number of different avenues, or different pieces of this puzzle. >> So it does, it drives efficiencies in the data center, but it also drives efficiencies and opportunities around the way you operate it. And one of the things that we've been seeing, and it's sort of foundational to our managed services practice, is that the software-defined data center actually drives software-defined managed services. You have to change the way you do managed services to take advantage of all that capability. We have a service we call Cloud Application Manager, which is really our tool that we use to model applications, deploy managed tooling to that application for 24/7 monitoring and management, and uptime and stability support, and then do analytics on that application, to be able to show cost-savings opportunities, best-practice opportunities, in more of an aggregated, reported way. So Cloud Application Manager is a much more automated version of managed services. It's not ITIL from 10 years ago, right? It's not up/down, just base-level ticketing. You need to be able to change the way you do managed services, and you can only do that if you have a reliable underpinning platform. So less moving parts, a software-defined data center lets you change that, let's you change the way you deliver managed services. >> So the CenturyLink has incredible technical chops. There's always a point where you have to decide, build versus buy. CenturyLink, you can choose to build all of this. You can take parts from the open source community, build extremely custom solutions. Why VMware? When you guys have the technical ability to build it, make a differentiating offering, why start with VMware as the base? >> Yeah, I think you go back to what VMware's been in the market doing, and I even sort of talked past it a second ago. The vSphere's foundation is really solid, right? The device, the flexibility you have with the hardware layer, the flexibility you have at the real core or nucleus of your compute and memory virtualization stack is super important. And then really the idea of building out into the software-defined very common ownership stack, and why VMware was great to partner with, with regards to building out our next-gen Managed Private Cloud offering, is because they've wired everything to work together. And you said there are things you could go and try to build on your own? I think it's interesting. What we're starting to see is that, just to use somethin' like OpenStack, as an example, building a private cloud out of OpenStack is certainly possible, but there's no one company owning it all end to end. And if you're a service provider, it's up to you to go figure it all out. Or you can go and work with maybe one integrator partner, but they're making their own set of choices, and now you're basically locked in to that particular deployment model. So I think working with VMware, what we found is, first off, they've accelerated our time to market, and our time to value around a Managed Private Cloud offering. There's a lot of interoperability in there. There's a lot we're able to do around hybrid applications, because something you deploy to VMware inside VCF is very similar to something you deploy in your own home-grown environment, to one of the Managed Private Clouds that we've been running for five or six years, where there's just a very clean migration and upgrade path with that interoperability. >> And really it's all about the market opportunity that VMware brings to the table. Our cloud strategy is incredibly simplistic, but yet it has such a compelling business and value proposition, not only to our mutual customers that we're going to market in joint pursuit with, but also to our cloud providers, 500,000 plus enterprise customers using VMware. As we take them along the journey, building out their private clouds, that represents over 60 million workloads, with the inevitability of them moving out to the cloud. So what we've teed up is a cloud provider community with our most strategic partner, like CenturyLink, to increase the odds of that, capturing those workloads onto a VMware platform. The market opportunity that we bring to the table for somebody like CenturyLink is quite extensive, let alone all the benefits that the mutual customer gets. They get to protect their data center, their data and application assets, all the reliability, compatibility, security, that they would expect from their own VMware infrastructure, they would expect from a VMware cloud provider, like CenturyLink. >> Well David, let's talk about the interface into CenturyLink. One of the things that customers are startin' to realize is that they have to differentiate, based on just internal IP. So there's the API to everything, now. What's, if you could describe, well, maybe there is. What's the API to CenturyLink, as I'm consuming this software-defined data center that you guys provide? >> Okay, so sure, so that's actually a really exciting opportunity for us, and it's one that we've been sort of pivoting. If you sort of look at the history of CenturyLink, there was a, and this sort of goes back 10 years, but there was a huge spike of CenturyLink's entry into the business to business market. Acquiring quests, getting the business that basically announced their entrance into the B2B marketplace. Then there was a number of more technology oriented and virtualization management oriented acquisitions, because it recognized two things: one, we needed to be in IT solutions, in cloud, in data center, but also that the network was heading towards a highly virtualized, highly orchestrated, highly software-defined model. The network of the 21st century was not going to be about buying a ton of big iron and putting it into pops anymore, it was going to be increasingly around managing x86 virtualization. So that set off a period of time within CenturyLink where we were acquiring managed services companies, IT solution companies, virtualization companies, that were helping really to increase two things: our ability to virtualize and manage virtualization, and then, secondly, develop software in new ways, and become much more familiar at the application layer. We spent about five or six years with companies like SAVAS, and Tier3, and Cognilytics, really adding to the company in terms of brain power, and know how, and workload fluency. And then now we've just recently closed on the merger and acquisition with Level 3. So now we're very much on a network scale ascendency. The interface into CenturyLink is really taking a lot of those assets that we've built up, and moving them together into more of a platform topology, which is re-architecting the way that we work. We've bought cloud companies, and we invested in virtualization to help us reorganize exactly what you're talking about, which is the way of interfacing with CenturyLink, driving customer experience, being able to have a common user experience, whether you're interacting with it at a CLI, or via an API call, or with a tutorial that you're following via an online interface, and having a common look and feel across those services. So it's a journey. We're still on our way there, but we have the very beginnings of a lot of commonality that's starting to occur, whereby if you log in to our public cloud management service, Cloud Application Manager, or if you log in to our network interconnect service, Network Exchange and Cloud Connect Solutions, or if you log in to our public and private cloud offerings, very common look and feel across the piece, where it's one identity, one billing collection, but then we allow each of those individual services to go and innovate on their own. And that's the key thing. You can go drive common user experience. That's super, but if you're waiting on a portal team to go design your UI for you, you're slowing down. And so we're really bein' able to design a framework whereby there's one common UI, but it's more design patterns that every internal team picks up and works with, and then integrates into their release. >> And it's very important for VMware as well, as we develop our IP that's relevant for cloud provider use cases, is to open up those APIs to do just that, give you the opportunity to own that customer experience and differentiate yourself within the marketplace. >> I think we talked about this last time, too, where VMware's entree into the service provider world really taught them some lessons, and they started adding things to their product that make it easier to be a service provider. And some of the things, like with vCloud Director, and some of the ways that you can now work with that at an HTML5 layer, and sort of create your own version around it, almost interact with vCloud Director at an API level, allows us to factor it in to that mentality of design pattern, thinking in a common UI across all of our services. Right now we're working with a lot of those features on vCloud Director to enable our Managed Private Cloud service. >> So what if the conversation is being then able to show it's all about making it real? What have the real conversations been? >> Yeah, so the real conversations with our customers that we're starting to have are really, and just to tie it a little bit back to this idea of a software-defined data center, I think they're excited by the possibilities. They're certainly looking to really drive instrumentation at more places than they ever were able to drive instrumentation before. And there's the obvious industry examples of IoT, and sensors, and things like that, but even things like business process, and being able to theoretically just rework the way a particular system works, turn it into a micro service, or an application that they can factor in to their overall IT strategy, but then have that start to feed in to a broader data lake that they can then start making business analytical decisions from. That's one of the big patterns that we see, whether it's occurring with a lot of our customers that we work with in the built environment, but in working with the customers that work with CenturyLink, in some of the most deep and influential ways, are the ones that are out there sort of "in space". And I don't mean in space, I mean out there in a geographic spread, like retail solutions, and physical facilities, and things like that, where you have people coming to your location, and you're tryin' to gather all that data back into more of a centralizing motion. That's where we're having some of our most interesting conversations, with those retail brands, with bigger facilities that we want to be able to bring on net, and basically have them turn into data sources for their data lake, that they can then start moving forward and analyzing with some either professional services or tooling, to go and start looking for where those insights lie. >> So for me this is music. What I'm seeing, customers want to wane off of IT functions altogether. They want to invest their resources around their core business. >> John: Their business, right. >> Yeah, exactly. So what they're doin' is, they're relying on the subject matter experts now. The whole notion of being concerned about security, and reliability out in the cloud, that's long gone. They recognize that folks like CenturyLink can deliver at greater economies of scale, more secure, highly available. >> Yeah, and one of the things, one of the best ways we can facilitate those conversations is to share a little bit of our own journey. And it's not because we want to stare at our own product catalog, and walk through it page by page, but to share some of our own journey with the perspective of realizing a long time ago that in our managed security business, it was a big data problem. It's not an implementation and controls problem. And so we've been driving a whole lot more of our story, and some of our service strategy is, not only is it, we feel a lot of these are very valuable services in their own right, but they show off a pattern of: instrument it, drive it back to a data lake, and then take more of an analytical approach to it to add value, as opposed to just being very transactional. >> We talked about the journey. It's been a good one, right? And continued success with that. >> Indeed. >> Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, and we appreciate the time. >> Okay. >> Good, thank you very much Dave and Jim. Back with more. You're watching theCUBE. We are live, here at Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. (percussive music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents On the Ground. (ambient techno music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to a special theCUBE presentation of On the Ground here at Oracle's corporate headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE, I'm here with Chai Pydimukkala, senior director of product management with Oracle. Welcome to On the Ground, appreciate you coming on. >> Thank you very much. >> So, talk about the data integration strategy and plans for Oracle, and what are some of the products that make that up? >> Oracle data integration, we've been around for more than 15 years. We've been helping our customers to move data from various systems, sources, and targets. Our products consist of a real-time data integration product, which is used for continuous availability of real-time replication, which is Oracle Golden Gate. It's our marquee product, it's been around for two decades. We also have a ETL product called Oracle Data Integrator, which is a product that actually takes the data, and then, it transforms the data in the source and the target itself. It's not like the older technologies, where you pull the data out of the system and process it in a middle tier. Instead of that, we actually leverage the power of the source of the target. And that's where we started. We have a data quality suite and a complete data governance foundation. We have about 12,000 customers, you know, talk about the largest banks, largest telcos in the world. Each and every one of them use our product, so that completes our data integration product portfolio. >> So, what is this new data integration cloud suite we've been hearing about because that's interesting, ties into that? Does that relate and how does that play? >> Absolutely, so what we have done is one of the things that we have been focused as Oracle is, we have had so much traction in the cloud space, so we have seen that when customers are moving their database systems or applications or platforms into the cloud, one of the key challenges remains is how do you get that data from on-premise to cloud, or cloud to on-premise. That's where data integration comes into play, and what we have done is we have taken the existing technologies that we have, like our Golden Gate, like Oracle Data Integrator, and data governance foundation, and we are making it as a part of a solution stack that gets available, that gets provisioned in cloud, so that any customer can come in and get these products, Oracle cloud integration stack, data integration stack, and then, they can start doing moving data from on-premise to cloud, or cloud to on-premise, or pure cloud use cases. And the stack that we are envisioning is we are not only looking at our traditional products that we have, like Golden Gate, which is a replication product, and ODI, Oracle Data Integrator, but we are also introducing couple of new products. One is Dataflow machine learning, which I'll talk about it in detail, and then, we also have a data-wrangling product called Big Data Preparation Cloud Service, which is already launched and available today, where people are going to look at data and start doing semantic extraction of the data. That's the biggest announcement is our customers will be able to come to us, and instead of focused on the real-time use case or a batch use case, they'll be able to get a solution stack, a platform, that they can use for data integration, be it real-time or be it batch or be it application integration or database integration. >> What's this Oracle Dataflow ML, machine learning thing about, Chai, because that's also kind of a new thing that's coming up? >> You know, I think one of the things that we have done at Oracle is we have been in the forefront of innovation, so a lot times we do solve enterprise level machine critical use cases, but one of the things internally that we have done is we have been embracing, constantly embracing, real-time and open source technologies, big data technologies, and cloud technologies. One thing that we observed in the marketplace is the traditional ETL is like driving a car using your rear-view mirror. You're not actually analyzing the data as it's coming in, you're actually have moved the data, transformed the data, and looking at the data, and started making decisions. Instead of doing that, what we think is we have built a new platform where we can analyze data as it's flowing through. So, let's say your transactions are coming in. You want to detect any fraud on your transactions, banking transactions, what we can do is now we can feed the data, capture the data using Golden Gate and feed it into this engine called Dataflow Machine Learning engine, and then, we'll be able to do a lot of fraud analytics in real-time on it. The whole paradigm of the batch ETL versus real-time ETL is evolving right now, and what we are introducing is a platform that's completely built on an OpenStack Spark-based platform. We are leveraging natural language processing and machine learning, so that as the data comes in, be it your transactional data, be it any other seeming data, we can actually look at the data and give you more insights in real-time so that either you can create alerts or events, or you can detect fraud, or you can actually get more insights and do transformation on the data and make it available to your business. >> How much does open source play into this? You mentioned that. A lot of people always ask me that, so I had to ask you. >> One of the things that we have consistently have managed to do is not to reinvent the same thing again and again. For example, when we actually talked about, envisioned about Dataflow machine learning, the technology itself, we had one thing in mind that we did not want to introduce another engine. If you look at the traditional ETL companies that are going obsolete right now, they're introducing their own engine where they feed the data into this engine. But what we think is the future is that this open source community is so rich, and there are so many people are working on it, we need to leverage those contributions. For example, our Oracle Data Integrator never had an engine, so we followed the same principle, and even in Dataflow, we don't have an engine, we use the Spark libraries, we use the machine learning capability, we use the algorithms from natural language processing, excuse me, and then, we actually combine all this information and we can process them natively on a Hadoop platform, which is the open source platform. And then, lo and behold, you can get more insights into your-- >> You're not restricting customers. You let them do whatever they want with the data if it's connected in, say, a big data appliance, and, or cloud suite. >> Yes. >> So, you kind of give them the choice. >> Yes, so, one thing that we have done very consciously at Oracle is, we acknowledge Oracle database as the number one database in the world. We have more than 50% of the enterprise customers, Fortune 500 customers, actually almost all of the Fortune 500 customers use us, right? But the point is we also realize that there are all these other heterogeneous sources where people have been using to store data. The polyglot architecture where people store graphs in a graph database or NoSQL key value pairs in a NoSQL type of database is valid, and we understand the use cases. So, all the product capabilities-- >> They're not mutually exclusive. A database now can be put where the data makes sense. >> Exactly. >> But you guys just still be the systems of record. >> Yes. >> 'Cause you're the CRM, the ERP, you have all these data systems that are powering business. >> Absolutely, so. >> Why would you restrict data coming in, right? >> Exactly, so one of the things that companies want to do and customers want to do is they want to be able to take the mission-critical transaction data that they have, and they want to be able to combine it with the social media data or the interaction data that they're getting, or the weblogs data, and they want to be able to correlate the information and get more insights. If you look at it like, you know, if you look at customer experience, if you want to really know your customers, what they are doing, you want to get the CRM data, which is their mission-critical data, but you also want to combine it with the social networking data, what do they like, what are they interacting with, what are they clicking on the website, so that you can combine both. We have been a heterogeneous platform, we have customers, we have got a customer who actually uses us only for non-Oracle systems, which is absolutely fine with us. We are in the business of data integration. We do it very well with Oracle technologies, but we can also support other technologies. >> I mean, you guys don't ask customers to be Oracle database everywhere, but in the key areas you do. The question I have to ask you is the one I get all the time from customers and people out in the field, practitioners, and I'm going to paraphrase kind of the pattern question. Oracle, you guys are amazing on the database side, but I want to just integrate other data sources, and I don't want to have to buy Oracle. That's what I'm looking for. What are you doing, Oracle, to make your database smarter? Because their, the customer's view is, okay, I've got Oracle database, you know. Can I get out of that swim lane and expand the intelligence of the Oracle database to a Hadoop, to a Spark, to another environment? >> We have done a lot of-- >> How do you address that? >> We have done a lot of innovation in terms of database, I just think data management in general. First of all, on the data integration side, we have had customers, the largest cell phone company in the world, moves data from an Oracle database to a Kafka-based queue to do further analysis. The largest electric car manufacturing company is actually trying to optimize their assembly lines in real-time so that they don't lose money if their assembly line goes down. We have done a lot of innovation where, and a lot of these customers are using big data type of technologies to get additional insight, so we don't stop them from taking data out from Oracle database or putting data back into Oracle database. Not only that, what we have introduced is. >> You're encouraging people to move data fast around to and from Oracle. Why not, right? >> Exactly, because if you want to get more insights, you want to combine all kinds of data, your interaction data, your NoSQL data, your weblog data. We are saying that bring it in, you can use a big data platform. We have an offering called Big Data Appliance cloud, Big Data Appliance, and we are offering it as a cloud service, too, where you can actually take an Oracle database, and you can take a big data system, and we can connect it, and we have connected it with NoSQL, with Big SQL adapters, so that you can issue SQL, and it can operate on both these sets of data. >> Operationally, that's a really easy way for a customer, rather than deploying a separate system, training assist admin. >> Exactly. >> Cost of ownership is probably going through the roof. >> Absolutely >> Do you see that as a key enabler? >> Absolutely, absolutely, and I think we are in the business of data integration. We treat all data sources and targets equally, and we'll try and support because when people are, when customers are making this journey to the cloud, it's important that we treat everybody equally. >> The old joke that we have, Dave Vellante and I on theCUBE, we say if customers wake up from a coma from 10 years ago and they're in today's world, and the data warehouse is all different, what do you say to that person? Well, welcome back to the real world, but I mean, that's the kind of awakening that these enterprises are having, where a lot of people haven't made the investment, but now are under a lot of pressure to modernize. They know Oracle database, they've had some great relationships, but now all of a sudden the world has changed. What do you say to those folks, what is the most compelling thing that's changed over the past five to 10 years, that's happening now that didn't happen then? >> I think the two big pivots that we have had in the industry are the big data pivot, where people are looking at multiple data management systems and the big data pivot, and then, the cloud pivot because cloud is very important, and we have seen our customers, we have been helping our customers to move entire data center into the cloud, in Oracle public cloud infrastructure, where they are saying I don't want, I want to reduce my total cost of ownership, improve productivity, I want to get all these tools that are already available out there, and I don't want to install this software on my system. Data warehouse as an analytical store will still exist, but what's happening is the transition where you move this data, transform the data, where you transform the data, and where you create operational data stores is changing, and that's where we come in and we say, if you have a big data system, you can create your operational data store over there, transform all the data over there and send it to your warehousing system. We are not, you know, we, because data warehousing again it's post-analysis. It's not real-time analysis as the data is flowing in, so I think, and then the cloud, you know, all we have made sure that for our customers, all the platforms that are available today, we have both infrastructure as a service platforms, SaaS-based service, and we also have data as a service, we are making sure that all these innovation platforms that we have created, including data integration, are available to our cloud customers. Anybody who wants to go to the cloud, and they want to get away from these other, older mainframe systems, they can come in and use our data integration technology, use our database, use our big data appliance cloud service, and just pivot to the cloud immediately, and don't have to wait. >> So, speed to the cloud, speed to a modern architecture. If I hear you correctly, you're saying that Oracle's philosophy and strategy is to have the best modern data management system given the customer's best choice. >> Absolutely. >> Would that be a fair statement? >> Absolutely. And to add to that-- >> Of course, buying some Oracle database, but using open source if they want to. >> Absolutely. >> Where the tool makes sense. >> Because one of the things that we have done on our cloud is we not only offer our platforms, we also offer big data platforms. If you want Kafka as a service, it's going to be available. Spark as a service, it's available. We have embraced Docker. A lot of these things are available. >> How 'about the competition, where do they stand compared to Oracle? >> You know what, can I say, I spent 10 years at a competitor, and then, I made the change, I joined Oracle three years ago, and that competitor is not even a public company anymore. On the data integration space, we have dominated, we have grown. We have got about 12,00 customers and it's growing. We are adding new logos everyday. >> John: And what's the difference, why is that, why are you guys competitive? >> Because the three things that we are focused on is no engine, so we did not invest in an engine for our transformation, so we don't pull in the data and transform it in our engine, that's one. Second is real-time. We are focused on real-time because we know that the future is people will want to analyze this data in real-time, so our real-time platform, which is Golden Gate platform, is world-class and it's the number one platform. And the last one is we make this, everything, we make it easily available in the cloud and for big data platforms. So, you don't have to change anything, it's fairly simple. >> Chai, thanks for spending some time with me on the ground here at your headquarters. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm John Furrier here, exclusive coverage of Oracle here On the Ground with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)