>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. Welcome >>back everyone to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting alongside of Dave Volante. We have two guests for the segment. We have Chris career. He is the senior director of service delivery at century link. Thanks so much for coming on the show. And Kumar, he is the client partner at Infosys. Thank you so much for joining us. So show G I'm going to start with you. We're hearing so much about this automation first era and when you are partnering with a company, we hear that automation first requires this real mindset shift. So I'm wondering if you could walk us through the process of when you are partnering with a company and you are saying we will help you add more automation to your work processes. How do you do it? How do you get the company to sort of adopt that mindset shift? >>So it is basically changing the mindset of the individual contributor. So the first thing is how do we make them adapt? Those changes into the organization and making sure that the learning experience and the Cuban experience are getting tased, are adapting by the individual contributor. That is more important for Infosys as a client partner to Centrelink. We are always striving for. >>So Chris, maybe talk a little about your role. Your title is, has service delivery in it. What does that, what does that mean? So we're, we're of course we're a telecommunications providers, so of course we sell our products, we have an extensive product portfolio. Uh, once it's sold, we have to fulfill those products. And that's what our service delivery comes in. Uh, everything from order entry all the way through to activation and delivery to the customer of the final solution of whatever it is they purchase from us. All right, let's get into it. So we just had Gardner on, they were saying, Hey, you know, there's a, there's a lot of things that can be cleaned up, cleaned up in there, >> a lot of things in there. Um, if you think about technology today, telecommunications, especially as a, as a industry, um, it's an industry of aggregation at this point. >>And it has been for a number of years. So with aggregation you, you end up with is um, I use kind of a phrase where we have an aim over the front door and that's the name of how we do business. Uh, that's, that's becomes a brand behind the front door. We're still operating as many of those individual companies still. So we're trying to stitch together in the background, the various networks, delivery options, products, et cetera, in a seamless way for our customers. So to do that, of course using automation becomes a very powerful tool for us right now to do everything that we would have to stitch together with human glue. Um, that's something that we have to deal with on a day in and day out basis. An area of the I focus on is ordering. I'm ordering in our space is highly manual. You're doing a lot of transcription, so to give sales the right tools so they can sell a, you give them a very elegant front end of the house. >>And many of the discussions we've had today, uh, have centered around the front of the house, looks very elegant and very smooth. And the back of the house is where a lot of the stitch together work happens. And that's where that automation comes into play. So partnering with somebody like a shadier, uh, trying to get onto the front end of how do we smooth those things out internally. Um, we're an operations organization. What we are always challenged with is how do we provide the service and product to our customers at an efficient price point. Um, people is a, is a margin drag at the end of the day. Um, but also we want our folks to be doing things that are more interesting. Uh, which is what automation is really about is that digital transformation and how do you transform your employees with you. Uh, and I'm definitely in an area where I have an opportunity there. >>And so that is, that is, that is what you, I've had this really selling, it's this idea that here are your, your employees who are doing these mundane tasks, these dreariness, this Drudge drudgery. And we are giving them an opportunity to do more of the creative work to use their brains. And more interesting and compelling ways. Shoji I mean is, is that the value props, I mean, how much are customers buying into that? I mean, is that, and is that immediate? Is it immediately clear to them, Oh, since I don't have to do that type of data entry anymore, I can now do this. I mean, is it obvious how you'll spend your, the rest of your time? >>So it is more about the analyzing the, what is happened in the history and making sure that how their data can be used and put it into the AI and making sure that how the automations can be revealed through that. That is a way to, you know, out of power we are making as a journey in central link as well, like in, along with the, the other telco organizations we are doing here. So specifically that is what, yea and automation we are specifically into making sure that how the customers can take advantage of the practice using the tools, like a UI path. >>So where's your expertise? automation, RPA, telecommunications, ordering, all of the above. So my ex >>is telecommunication. I have been with the telecommunication companies for about 25 years now. I'm majorly going through the raw from >>push button telephones to the era now it is standing up to fighting. So that's my, uh, expedience. You sound like an old man. Yeah. So Chris, when you do a business case for doing in RPA, I mean, I know a lot of CFOs and where's the hard dollars? You know, where are we going to save money? Well, we're going to, we're going to shift people from here to here and they going to do more productive work. Where's my hard dollars? Did you go through that or is it so blatantly where the potential >>is? Talk about the business case. It's not always a blatantly obvious, right? So when I'm building a business case, there's a number of things as an operations leader that I have to focus on, right? I own budget for my organization. So at the end of the day, I own making sure that I hit my budget targets for the business businesses. Always you're finding those, um, based on our opportunities in the marketplace, so forth. But I also have a lot of people that work for me. So part of the bigger area for me, and it's an area that I've spent a lot of time with consultants like shot to you on, is how do I transform my workforce? How do I bring them with me? How do I make it less scary for my employees? Because the first reaction, human reaction to employees who have been doing a function for so long, we heard it today about the cognitive changes, opening up your brain path, so on and so forth. >>Um, and the first reaction to them is going to be that shortest path to, Oh my God, I'm gonna lose my job and I have to then become a salesperson in addition to operations leader in addition to a budget manager to say, no, this is an opportunity for you to do something more interesting. You have that 20 years of experience in the industry. I want to use that knowledge in a different way. I want to open up some doors and career paths for you. Uh, so for me it's interesting and trying to break a sedentary workforce into a more dynamic workforce to initiate them into the digital age. When I write a business case, mostly what I'm looking at is very some of the it classical things. How do I save those dollars? What's my payback? What's my return on investment? More and more in the automation space, we're thinking much more customer first employee experience first. >>How do I provide the customer a better experience? How do I provide an employee a better experience? So the business cases have become a little bit more challenging, uh, cause you're also have offering some soft benefits, which is our employee experiences is a really big deal. Our customer's experience is going to be how we differentiate ourselves, uh, could be in the difference between the next sale and not making the next sale. So those have to get factored into the business cases and it becomes a bit, uh, art and science on how to quantify that. So there's a lot to unpack there. I want to start with kind of the, the, the sentiment of, Hey, I'm gonna lose my job. How did you deal with that, uh, with your team? Is it carrot stick combination so they can try it. I think a lot of it is first listening. >>Um, at least my style as a leader is to listen to what my people are saying first and then address it with as many facts as I possibly can. Right. Um, most folks think emotion first. Um, and, and you can end up in an adversarial type of situation there where you really don't want to be in an adversarial situation with your employees. You want your employees to support the change, the transformation that, that shift into a digital space. So for me, I have to listen to a lot first. And depending on who I'm listening to, I'm getting a very different story. I have employees from millennials to baby boomers. So as a result, each one of them were coming from a very different place, a carrot versus stick. Interesting concept because from a carrot perspective, the companies getting the care that the employee may not necessarily see that at first where we're saying, Hey, we want you to do more interesting work. >>But to them, they feel it. It's more of a stick at first. Uh, so it's interesting. Um, in my space it's been a, I've consulted with, with other folks, I've talked to a lot of my peer leaders, um, seeking a lot of advice on how do we navigate this cause we're cutting a new path as leaders. Um, I'm more akin to a baby boomer and a Jenner in, you know, a gen X type of a person. That's who I came up under an industry. So I have to temper my own thinking. Um, so it's interesting because for instance, I looked at my people managers and maybe it's a little bit more stick with my people managers where it's very much of a, gives me ideas. How do we crowdsource that, that information, our employees are going to be the best source of our, of our ideas for automating. >>What do we automate? How do we automate the things that they really disliked doing first? Right? So you're kind of giving them a carrot with, you're giving them a little bit of quick wins. We've heard about that today as well. Um, but then it becomes a matter of what about the individual contributor developer, right? How do I take somebody today who hasn't maybe been retooled from a career perspective in many, many years and give them the ability to say, no, you're not a programmer but you can automate things and UI path gives us some of those tools to do that with the purveyors of RPA would ha would tell you that people actually love it because it's taking away that undifferentiated heavy lifting. Once they get a taste for it and they can do other things, frees up time. Having said that, they may be really good at entering data into a form. >>They may not be good at doing other strategic things, so there's gotta be some kind of retraining exercise to. My question is, are you seeing either specifically at century link or broadly in the industry some kind of notion of gain share? In other words, if you're going to save this much time slash money and your business case, we'll give you back a portion, I don't know, 30% 50% whatever, so that you can retrain people. You can actually advance their careers. So you see you having conversations like that or is it actually where I think we're having conversations akin to that. Not necessarily have that conversation. Um, conversations that I'm having are more of the nature of, you know, chicken and the egg kind of a thing. When it comes automation, you're under budgetary pressures. How do you take out your employee, retool them and train them on how to automate something using UI pads, tool suite, um, and then re-invest that same knowledge, right? >>Because if you automate something, you free up somebody else you can train to do more automation. Um, a lot of our, our employees who are first adopters, if you will, the willing hands that are going up. Some are millennials, some are many other generations. Um, but it's, it's been there very interesting because it's very powerful for those who have learned the tools and is very powerful and a peer to peer solicitation of, look what I can do for you. We've been complaining about this manual step for 20 years. How come it, we're still having to do it. So it the becomes a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, right? You get those who evangelize it based on learning the new technology and then they train into their peers. Um, retooling employees is something that you brought up or at least that's what a little bit of what I heard. >>Um, you know, many areas, Hey, I've been doing data entry for a long time. What else am I good at? And a lot of that just becomes creativity. Who else? Who do you interact with the most? Who are the employees or who are the customers, who are the sales organizations, et cetera, where you end up, they know your name, they're going to call you because you know that answer. Well guess what? You're a knowledge base for them. And that often becomes where I ended up retooling and re shifting employees. They see new opportunities that they never seen before. One of the most interesting things I think I hear constantly is I never expected to be in sales, uh, from an operations type of person. They always think of a salesman as that salesperson kind of personality. And they don't see themselves in it, but they never think of themselves as sales support, which is that, that's what they end up becoming. Um, and they always were to begin with. They just never thought of themselves that way. So we're moving a lot more of my customers or my employees, if you will, closer to the customer than they ever saw in themselves. And RPA is enabling that. So that's, that's kind of a, a knowledge revolution. It's a self actualization change. It becomes a skill add that they never thought they had. Um, they're all interesting concepts, but they all, you know, I'm learning something new every day as a leader. >>Well, and you're bringing up so many interesting points that, that what this revolution actually means for people's careers. I mean, the really the re rebooting of work and really changing how we spend our time at the office and changing what we do during the course of our day is shadier. I mean he, he, Chris has been talking about how people are now closer to the customer and therefore the human, the soft skills are becoming increasingly important. So how are you helping companies think through those challenges to make sure that their people do have the appropriate skills? And as Chris said, it can be the difference of not making a sale versus making a sale. >>So it is about, uh, it's about learning. Learning can make, uh, the people transform as well as the company's transformed. So while we are adopting technology, we needed to ensure that how do we ensure the learning platforms are brought in to ensure the, that is part of their curriculum. Like what we have done in four school or colleges in the organization, make it live enterprise for the every organization to move into a live organization. It is always about learning. So what emphasis does is about, it's about the knowledge, what we carry. So we have created platforms like legs for internal to our organization. And wingspan is an AR is an external customized version for all of our external customers that is plugging into all the transformation programs. What we do to ensure that the learning is Paladin for the transformation, why you are path, you look it up. >>There's um, um, we have looked at, looked at others and I think in my career you're always going to have multiple partners. Um, so when it comes to the UI path, it's one of those UI path invested very early. You know, they wanted to be that partner. I think today part of the message we heard, uh, from some of the UI path executives were that, uh, we want to be humble. Um, and therefore it's not always about, Hey, how do I win this dollar so much as I, how do I educate on technology? Um, and how do we help you transform and pull you forward to a certain degree. Um, so I think UI path has a lot of, um, very human possibilities and human traits and how it, it educates its clients. >>Judge generally just a question as a, as a buyer and a practitioner, if you have a choice between best of breed, um, and you know, a suite, right? Let's say, I don't know if you're an ERP customer, but some ERP vendor all of a sudden bolts, you know, RPA on to their solution. How do you decide the convenience of Oh yeah. All in one versus the best of breed? >>Um, I think it depends on the size of your firm because throughout my career I've seen many different answers to the same question. Um, shadier is probably had a relationship with me for a number of years, uh, in various forms if you will, as a consultant and a partner. Um, what he often hears from me is both I'm gonna do both. Um, because some way I'm going to learn something from each of those engagements. So more often than not, the answer is you do a lot. You do both. You don't just pick a single partner. Um, the smaller you are, the more likely you are to do a single partner. The larger you are, the less likely you are to do a single partner. Diversity is a good thing. And so was competition >>where it's still live by Chris shot. Thank you so much for coming on the Kiva. Great conversation. That's going. Sorry. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Volante. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of UI path forward.

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering Dell technologies world 2019 to you by Dell technologies and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world 2019 here in Las Vegas at the sands Expo I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host do minimun we are joined by Steve Nolan he is the lead product manager private cloud at CenturyLink thank you so much for coming and direct from st. Louis Missouri thank you thanks for having me today so let's start by having you tell our viewers a little bit about CenturyLink ok centrelink is a very large carrier international with our recent acquisition of level 3 we have a little over 500,000 fiber optic miles belong to us we're wired into over a hundred thousand buildings globally across approximately 60 countries connected into over 300 data centers so that's kind of our telecom network story I actually work within a division of essentially that handles managed hosting products it's through an acquisition they did a number of years ago called a company called sabes where we now have about 20 years a little over 20 years and managed hosting services to customers in the business and there's been a lot of news this week at Dell technologies world and you your CenturyLink had a big announcement just this morning yes we just released a press release on a two-prong option we've been working on for about six months now it's for a private cloud product that I manage that I released actually a year and a half ago we just added it now Dell options for that product based on the Dell PowerEdge six are 640 server and that of course we did that to be able to expand options and choices for our customers to UM open up the opportunities to those situations where we weren't able to get into before so we're very excited about it so it's it's new it's it's exciting it's of course a great great platform very very amazing technology so Steve that the term private cloud you know is it's almost about 15 years old now but there were many years that we didn't all agree as to what private cloud should be you know I run article recently about hybrid cloud and you know even hybrid cloud was basically like oh I had private cloud and public cloud and a bunch of pieces and I put them together and like well the hybrid multi-cloud stories were hearing this mean many of their shows very different we're trying to get our heart around this so you know I'm familiar with Savas you know I've seen century like many times at vmworld so bring us inside that private cloud it tell us a little bit about you know what you've been seeing in the environment some of those key use cases to what customers are doing and and how this is different than you know the virtualized environments of the past certainly so so what we've been seeing happen in the industry and and it's some and you go back a number of years a few years well to the cloud and you have six people what does cloud me and you get six definitions right but what we've seen is that there's this huge move towards public cloud over the last number years the hyper cloud all-day activity we see plenty of it and there's been challenges associated that you don't find out day one you find out over time certain things that were challenged to work with and in a public cloud type of scenario customers at you know what I still want to hold on to some infrastructure and what we're seeing now also do what private cloud is it is a an infrastructure there's a hum percent dedicated to one client and a story all of that infrastructure belongs to one one one company one entity it is not shared nothing is shared that is true private cloud and so that's what what I manage for our company is our private cloud products we're and we've we have one that's been with us not for about 15 years it's on VMware we're a large VMware shop where a hundred percent VMware today we've been working with VMware for I think a total 15 years a little over 15 years and the various types of products and solutions and platforms we work with them for a year and a half to be able to create our new private cloud product that is a hyper conversion infrastructure software fine networking based on VMware's VMware cloud foundation software suite right so that's where the movements are and and what's happening with this now a we want to go into kind of what's happening in the industry in the world is the way that you built infrastructure historically right as you build your compute your network your storage and your security those are the four minimum columns of which technology you need for a solution and then you connect it all together it's some by four different groups for different subject matter expert groups and and it can be very time-consuming to piece all that together now we roll into this hyper-converged world and you just give me a stack of servers that have some cpu some RAM some disks and I layer on some very well designed and architected software like some VMware Cloud Foundation and I define everything from one interface through software it makes of the ability for enterprise customers to be able to move a much faster or making change to the environment I can spin up a firewall in minutes a several a balancer a router that's very powerful compared to how it was done in the past so Steve one of the years expertise I know CenturyLink has is on the networking side of it's something we've heard Dell talking about their networking and how that's expanding the HCI market today and as well as if you talk about that hybrid or multi cloud environment networking is a critical component things like an ST when put into so can you help you know where does that those those pieces fit into your environment where we see that that going and is these are it's a common theme and that we've been talking through a little over a year now and this this topic of milliseconds matter is the edge and so that's where it's really evolving to and that's what we're working towards as well so so one of the things we're doing with our products is moving in our products out to them the data centers many more data centers what we've done in the past and then taking that a step further we go to edge computing because of our telecom expertise and experience and our thousands of points of presence we can put those systems into a pop if you would we can put those systems of course on customer Prem getting the response times down to just a few milliseconds which is critical to business's response times delivery companies or various comers where that that's important to the middle of stiffens milliseconds matters because it saves them money because they're very able to be more responsive to their customers that's exactly what I want to drill into a little bit you say milliseconds matter which is which is absolutely true and you're talking about how customers feel this need to move so much faster and we know about the breakneck speed of technological change can you give us a real business impact I mean as you said this this really is game-changing for so many companies can you just give us an example of a customer you're working with and how this really the ROI on the stuff yeah okay so we're working with some shipping companies who of course they've got the little responders when they delivered the package they have hundreds maybe as many as a few thousand locations they want to be able to put that data right neck in those locations so that the response on that package gets that information faster they they get closure on that they are able to bill faster they're able to move on to the next item faster provide the information to their customers faster those are the real live examples that we're seeing with the Middlesex and spanner type of scenario we actually did a demo of this at vmworld last year we just give an example where and we did a test of going across the internet and then going across a dedicated circuit and we painted us one page one screen and it took a second going across the internet and it took a half a second to go across the dedicated circuit and so it's like will you take that one page and it's the thousands of pages that one of your employees goes through in a day and then multiply it by your thousands of ploys that's not where we're adding up to cost savings more efficiencies of your employees when they can get that information faster all right so one of the important areas here is that is the management piece so we can understand your partnering deeply with VMware is it primarily the V realized suite for from management tooling anything what's what's special about the CenturyLink offering so relative to my product offering is in the private cloud we actually have because here's the situation customers don't just have one cloud we all know the true story is it's it's not about public or private it's about both it's not about one cloud or one other cloud is about many and so we actually through an acquisition we had done we created a product called cloud application manager it's a multi cloud management product that is designed today to support from one interface I can have a W us as your Google my private cloud product we call the centrally private cloud on VMware cloud foundation our public cloud product all from one interface I can manage my workloads I can monitor the oasis we will manage a monitor those OS as an application for the customer Larrin will be call our managed services anywhere a methodology - for customers that want that management to provide that for them right so it's it's really about it being able to take all those different environments in that hybrid IT solution the vast majority of enterprise folks either have one or are stuck with right and be able to trim it down to singular interfaces to be able to support them how closely are you working with customers on the actual implementation onboarding of these new technologies and making sure that employees are also really onboard with these things so well first of all when we work through solutions with our customers we don't just say here pick this from a menu and so we sit down and design for them so so we're very specific in how we've designed our products to where we actually allow over a thousand configuration options so we want that you have to right-size the infrastructure that's what you start that's the foundation your right size that infrastructure for your work environment for what it is that you're trying to accomplish and you allow flexibility to be able to grow it and so we have flexibility to be able to have RAM or storage to those systems or add more systems give the flexibility to grow as you need to grow whatever but it is you want to push it's growing on you fine so so that's where we start with this in that design aspect of this and that's how we solution all of our mana Hosting sub products great well Steve you started this conversation at cube Ricky you're ending a cube alum so thanks so much for coming on the show well thank you for having us having me all right appreciate it I'm Rebecca Nightforce - minimun we will have much more of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world coming up in just a little bit