>> (lively music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got an alumni joining me and a brand new guest to the CUBE please welcome Paul Papas, the Global Managing Partner, for IBM Global Business Services, this is transformation services. Paul, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thanks Lisa great to be here with you today. And Dominique Dubois is here as well. She is the Global Strategy and Offerings Leader in business transformation services or BTS at IBM. Dominique, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, great to be here. So, we're going to be talking about accelerating business transformation with intelligent workflows. We're going to break through all that, but Paul we're going to start with you. Since we last got together with IBM, a lot has changed so much transformation, so much acceleration of transformation. Talk to me from your perspective, how have you seen the way that businesses running change and what some of the changes in the future are going to be? >> Well, you hit on two key words there Lisa and thanks so much for that question. Two key words that you hit on were change and acceleration. And that's exactly what we see. We were seeing this before the pandemic and if anything, with the pandemic did when things started started kind of spreading around the world late or early last year, around January, February timeframe we saw that word acceleration really take hold. Every one of our clients were looking for new ways to accelerate the change that they had already planned to adapt to this new, this new normal or this new abnormal, depending on how you view it. In fact, we did a study recently, an IBV study that's our Institute of Business Value and found that six out of 10 organizations were accelerating all of their transformation initiatives they had already planned. And that's exactly what we're seeing happening right now in all parts of the world and across all industries. This acceleration to transform. >> So, one of the things that we've talked about for years, Paul, before the pandemic was even a thing, is that there was a lot of perceived technical barriers in terms of like the tech maturity for organizations and employees being opposed to change. People obviously it can be a challenge. They're used to doing things the way they are. But as you just said, in that IBV survey, nearly 60% of businesses say we have to accelerate our transformation due to COVID, probably initially to survive and then thrive. Talk to me about some of those, those barriers that were there a little over a year ago and how businesses 60 plus percent of them have moved those out of the way. >> You know at IBM we've got a 109 year history of being a technology innovation company. And the rate of pace of technical change is always increasing. It's something that we love and that we're comfortable with. But the rate and pace of change is always unsettling. And there's always a human element for change. And the human element is always the rate, the rate setter in terms of the amount of change that you can have in an organization. Our former chairman Ginni Rometty, used to say that growth and comfort cannot co-exist. And it's so true because changing is uncomfortable. It's unsettling. It can be, it can be nerve-racking. It can instill fear and fear can be paralyzing in terms of driving change. And what we also see is there's a disconnect, a lot of times and that IBV study that I was referring to before, we saw results coming back where 78% of executives feel that they have provided the training and enablement to help their employees transform to new required skills and new ways of working but only half of the people surveyed felt the same way. Similarly, we saw a disconnect in terms of companies feeling that they're providing the right level of health and wellness support during the pandemic. And only half of the employees responded back they feel that they're getting that level of support. So, the people change aspect of doing a transformation or adapting to new circumstances is always the most critical component and always the hardest component. And when we talk about helping our clients do that in IBM that's our service as organization. That's the organization that Dominique Dubois is representing here today. I'm responsible for business transformation services within our organization. We help our clients adapt using new technologies, transforming the way they work, but also addressing the people change elements that could be so difficult and hitting them head on so that they can make sure that they can survive and thrive in a meaningful and lasting way in this new world. >> One of the hardest things is that cultural transformation regardless of a pandemic. So, I can't imagine I'd love to get one more thing, Paul from you before we head over to Dominique. IBM is on 109 year old organization. Talk to me about the IBM pledge. This is something that came up last year, huge organization massive changes last year, not just the work from home that the mental concerns and issues that people had. What did IBM do like as a grassroots effort that went viral? >> Yeah, so, it's really great. So, when the pandemic started, we all have to shift it, We all have to shift to working from home. And as you mentioned, IBM's 109 year old company, we have over 300,000 employees working in 170 countries. So, we had to move this entire workforce. It's 370,000 humans to working in a new way that many of which have never done before. And when we started experiencing, the minute we did that, within a few weeks, my team and I were talking Dominique is on my team and we were having conversations where we were feeling really exhausted. Just a few weeks into this and it was because we were constantly on Webex, we were constantly connected and we're all used to working really hard. We travel a lot, we're always with our clients. So, it wasn't that, you have a team that is adapting to like working more hours or longer hours, but this was fundamentally different. And we saw that with schools shutting down and lock downs happening in different of the world the home life balance was getting immediately difficult to impossible to deal with. We have people that are taking care of elderly parents, people that are homeschooling children, other personal life situations that everyone had to navigate in the middle of a pandemic locked at home with different restrictions on when you can go out and get things done. So, we got together as a group and we just started talking about how can we help? How can we help make life just a little bit easier for all of our people? And we started writing down some things that we would, we would commit to doing with each other. How we would address each other. And when that gave birth to was what we call the IBM Work From Home Pledge. And it's a set of principles, all grounded in the belief that, if we act this way, we might just be able to make life just a little bit easier for each other and it's grounded in empathy. And there are parts of the Plex that are pledging to be kind. Recognizing that in this new digital world that we're showing up on camera inside of everyone's home. We're guests in each other's homes. So, let's make sure that we act appropriately as guests at each other's home. So, if children run into the frame during the middle of a meeting or dog started barking during the middle of a meeting, just roll with it. Don't call out attention to it. Don't make people feel self-conscious about it. Pledged the support so your fellow IBM by making time for personal needs. So, if someone has to, do homeschooling in the middle of the day, like Dominique's got triplets she's got to do homeschooling in the middle of the day. Block that time off and we will respect that time on your calendar. And just work around it and just deal with it. There are other things like respecting that camera ready time. As someone who's now been on camera every day it feels like for the last 14 months we want to respect the time that people when they have their cameras off. And not pressure them to put their cameras on saying things like, Hey, I can't see you. There's no reason to add more pressure to everyone's life, if someone's camera's off, it's all for a reason. And then other things like pledging to checking on each other, pledging to set boundaries and tend to our own self-care. So, we published that as a group, we just again and we put it on a Slack channel. So it's kind of our communication method inside the company. It was just intended to be for my organization but it started going viral and tens of thousands of IBM members started taking, started taking the pledge and ultimately caught the attention of our CEO and he loved it, shared it with his leadership team, which I'm a part of. And then also then went on LinkedIn and publicly took the pledge as well. Which then also got more excitement and interaction with other companies as well. So, grassroots effort all grounded in showing empathy and helping to make life just a little bit easier for everyone. >> So important, I'm going to look that up and I'm going to tell you as a person who speaks with many tech companies a week. A lot of businesses could take a lead from that and it gets really important and we are inviting each other into our homes and I see you're a big Broadway fan I'll have to ask you that after we wrap (giggles) Dominique I don't know how you're doing any of this with triplets. I only have two dogs (Dominique laughs) but I'd love to know this sense of urgency, that is everywhere you're living it. Paul talked about it with respect to the acceleration of transformation. How from your lens is IBM and IBM helping customers address the urgency, the need to pivot, the need to accelerate, the need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation actually getting it done? >> Right, thanks Lisa, so true our clients are really needing to and ready to move with haste. That that sense of urgency can be felt I think across every country, every market, every industry. And so we're really helping our clients accelerate their digital transformations and we do that through something that we call intelligent workflows. And so workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done. But intelligent workflows are how we infuse; predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility, end to end across a workflow. So, pulling those processes together so they're not solid anymore and infusing. So, simply put we bring intelligent workflows to our clients and it fundamentally reinvents how they're getting work done from a digital perspective, from a predictive perspective, from a transparency perspective. And I think what really stands apart when we deliver this with our clients in partnership with our clients is how it not only delivers value to the bottom line, to the top line it also actually delivers greater value to their employees, to the customers, to the partner to their broader ecosystem. And intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements. The first is around better utilizing data. So, aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data, and then using that insight not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage. So we talked about AI, automation, IOT, blockchain, all of these technologies require vast amounts of data. And what we're able to bring both on the internal and external source from a data perspective really underpins what these emerging technologies can do. And then the third area is skills. Our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients deep, deep expertise, partner expertise, expertise from the ecosystem at large and pulling all of that together, is how we're really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations because we're helping them shift, from a set of siloed static processes to an end-to-end workflow. We're helping them make fewer predictions based on the past historical data and actually taking more real-time action with real time insights. So, it really is a fundamental shift and how your work is getting done to really being able to provide that emerging technologies, data, deep skills-based end to end workflow. >> That word fundamental has such gravity. and I know we say data has gravity being fundamental in such an incredibly dynamic time is really challenging but I was looking through some of the notes that you guys provided me with. And in terms of what you just talked about, Dominique versus making a change to a silo, the benefits and making changes to a spectrum of integrated processes the values can be huge. In fact, I was reading that changing a single process like billing, for example might deliver up to 20% improved results. But integrating across multiple processes, like billing, collections, organizations can achieve double that up to 40%. And then there's more taking the intelligent workflow across all lead to cash. This was huge. Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from that. So that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make. >> Right, I mean, it really is when we see it really is about unlocking exponential value. So, when you think about crossing end to end workflow but also, really enhancing what clients are doing and what companies are doing today with those exponential technologies from kind of single use the automation POC here and AI application POC here, actually integrating those technologies together and applying them at scale. When I think intelligent workflows I think acceleration. I think exponential value. But I also really think about at scale. Because it's really the ability to apply these technologies the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value. >> So let's go over Paul, in the last few minutes that we have here I want to talk about IBM garage and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Talk to me a little bit about what IBM garage is. I know it's not IBM garage band and I know it's been around since before the pandemic but help us understand what that is and how it's delivering value to customers. >> Well, first I'm going to be the first to invite you to join the IBM garage band, Lisa so we'd love to have you >> I'm in. no musical experience required... >> I like to sing, all right I mean (laughs) We're ready, we're ready for. So, let me talk to you about IBM garage and I do want to key on two words that Dominique was mentioning speed and scale. Because that's what our clients are really looking for when they're doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale, but do that with speed. And that really becomes the critical issue. As Dominique mentioned, there's a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that's kind of like a throw away piece of work that maybe proves a point or just proves a point. But even if it does prove the point at that point you'd have to restart a new, to try to get something that you could actually scale either in the production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization. And that's where IBM garage comes in. It's all a way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then cooperate, innovating at scale. So, we use methods like design thinking inside of IBM we've trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. We use technologies like neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what's amazing for me is that, the cause of the way we were, we were doing work with clients in a garage with using IBM garage in a garage environment before the pandemic. And one of our clients Frito-Lay of North America, is an example where we've helped them innovate at scale and speed using IBM garage over a long period of time. And when the pandemic hit, we in fact were running 11 garages across 11 different workflow areas for them the pandemic hit and everyone was sent home. So, we all instantly overnight had to work from home together with relay. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the garage method to working in a virtual world. To being able to run that same type of innovation and then use that innovation at scale in a virtual world, we did that overnight. And since that time which happened, that happened back in March of last year throughout the pandemic, we've run over 1500 different garage engagements with all of our clients all around the world in a virtual, in a virtual environment. It's just an incredible way, like I said to help our clients innovate at scale. >> That's fantastic, go ahead Dominique. >> Oh, sorry, was just said it's a great example, we partnered with FlightSafety International, they train pilots. And I think a great example of that speed and scale right is in less than 12 weeks due to the garage methodology and the partnership with FlightSafety, we created with them and launched an adaptive learning solution. So, a platform as well as a complete change to their training workflow such that they had personalized kind of real-time next best training for how they train their pilots for simulators. So, reducing their cycle time but also improving the training that their pilots get, which as people who normally travel, it's really important to us and everyone else. So, just a really good example, less than 12 weeks start to start to finish. >> Right, talk about acceleration. Paul, last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left I know this is an ecosystem effort of IBM, it's ecosystem partners, it's Alliance partners. How are you helping align right partner with the right customer, the right use case? >> Yeah, it's great. And our CEO Arvind Krishna has really ushered in this era where we are all about the open ecosystem here at IBM and working with our ecosystem partners. In our services business we have partnerships with all the major, all the major technology players. We have a 45 year relationship with SAP. We've done more SAP S 400 implementations than anyone in the world. We've got the longest standing consulting relationship with Salesforce, we've got a unique relationship with Adobe, they're only services and technology partner in the ecosystem. And we just recently won three, procedures Partner Awards, with them and most recently we announced a partnership with Celonis which is an incredible process execution software company, process mining software company that's going to help us transform intelligent workflows in an accelerated way, embedded in our garage environment. So, ecosystem is critical to our success but more importantly, it's critical to our client success. We know that no one alone has the answers and no one alone can help anyone change. So, with this open ecosystem approach that we take and global business services and our business transformation services organization, we're able to make sure that we bring our clients the best of everyone's capabilities. Whether it's our technology, partners, our services IBM's own technology capabilities, all in the mix, all orchestrated in service to our client's needs all with the goal of driving superior business outcomes for them. >> And helping those customers in any industry to accelerate their business transformation with those intelligent workloads and a very dynamic time. This is a topic we could keep talking about unfortunately, we are out of time but thank you both for stopping by and sharing with me what's going on with respect to intelligent workflows. How the incremental exponential value it's helping organizations to deliver and all the work that IBM is doing to enable its customers to be thrivers of tomorrow. We appreciate talking to you >> Paul: Thanks Lisa. >> Dominique: Thank you >> For Paul Papas and Dominique Dubois I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think the digital event experience. (gentle music)

(lively music) >> From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got an alumni joining me and a brand new guest to the CUBE please welcome Paul Papas, the Global Managing Partner, for IBM Global Business Services, this is transformation services. Paul, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thanks Lisa great to be here with you today. And Dominique Dubois is here as well. She is the Global Strategy and Offerings Leader in business transformation services or BTS at IBM. Dominique, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, great to be here. So, we're going to be talking about accelerating business transformation with intelligent workflows. We're going to break through all that, but Paul we're going to start with you. Since we last got together with IBM, a lot has changed so much transformation, so much acceleration of transformation. Talk to me from your perspective, how have you seen the way that businesses running change and what some of the changes in the future are going to be? >> Well, you hit on two key words there Lisa and thanks so much for that question. Two key words that you hit on were change and acceleration. And that's exactly what we see. We were seeing this before the pandemic and if anything, with the pandemic did when things started started kind of spreading around the world late or early last year, around January, February timeframe we saw that word acceleration really take hold. Every one of our clients were looking for new ways to accelerate the change that they had already planned to adapt to this new, this new normal or this new abnormal, depending on how you view it. In fact, we did a study recently, an IBV study that's our Institute of Business Value and found that six out of 10 organizations were accelerating all of their transformation initiatives they had already planned. And that's exactly what we're seeing happening right now in all parts of the world and across all industries. This acceleration to transform. >> So, one of the things that we've talked about for years, Paul, before the pandemic was even a thing, is that there was a lot of perceived technical barriers in terms of like the tech maturity for organizations and employees being opposed to change. People obviously it can be a challenge. They're used to doing things the way they are. But as you just said, in that IBV survey, nearly 60% of businesses say we have to accelerate our transformation due to COVID, probably initially to survive and then thrive. Talk to me about some of those, those barriers that were there a little over a year ago and how businesses 60 plus percent of them have moved those out of the way. >> You know at IBM we've got 109 year history of being a technology innovation company. And the rate of pace of technical change is always increasing. It's something that we love and that we're comfortable with. But the rate and pace of change is always unsettling. And there's always a human element for change. And the human element is always the rate, the rate setter in terms of the amount of change that you can have in an organization. Our former chairman Ginni Rometty, used to say that growth and comfort cannot co-exist. And it's so true because changing is uncomfortable. It's unsettling. It can be, it can be nerve-racking. It can instill fear and fear can be paralyzing in terms of driving change. And what we also see is there's a disconnect, a lot of times and that IBV study that I was referring to before, we saw results coming back where 78% of executives feel that they have provided the training and enablement to help their employees transform to new required skills and new ways of working but only half of the people surveyed felt the same way. Similarly, we saw a disconnect in terms of companies feeling that they're providing the right level of health and wellness support during the pandemic. And only half of the employees responded back they feel that they're getting that level of support. So, the people change aspect of may doing a transformation or adapting to new circumstances is always the most critical component and always the hardest component. And when we talk about helping our clients do that in IBM that's our service as organization. That's the organization that Dominique Dubois are representing here today. I'm responsible for business transformation services within our organization. We help our clients adapt using new technologies, transforming the way they work, but also addressing the people change elements that could be so difficult and hitting them head on so that they can make sure that they can survive and thrive in a meaningful and lasting way in this new world. >> One of the hardest things is that cultural transformation regardless of a pandemic. So, I can't imagine I'd love to get one more thing, Paul from you before we head over to Dominique. IBM is on 109 year old organization. Talk to me about the IBM pledge. This is something that came up last year, huge organization massive changes last year, not just the work from home that the mental concerns and issues that people had. What did IBM do like as a grassroots effort that went viral? >> Yeah, so, it's really great. So, when the pandemic started, we all have to shift it, We all have to shift to working from home. And as you mentioned, IBM's 109 year old company, we have over 300,000 employees working in 170 countries. So, we had to move this entire workforce. It's 370,000 humans to working in a new way that many of which have never done before. And when we started experiencing, the minute we did that, within a few weeks, my team and I were talking Dominique is on my team and we were having conversations where we were feeling really exhausted. Just a few weeks into this and it was because we were constantly on Webex, we were constantly connected and we're all used to working really hard. We travel a lot, we're always with our clients. So, it wasn't that, you have a team that is adapting to like working more hours or longer hours, but this was fundamentally different. And we saw that with schools shutting down and lock downs happening in different of the world the home life balance was getting immediately difficult to impossible to deal with. We have people that are taking care of elderly parents, people that are homeschooling children, other personal life situations that everyone had to navigate in the middle of a pandemic locked at home with different restrictions on when you can go out and get things done. So, we got together as a group and we just started talking about how can we help? How can we help make life just a little bit easier for all of our people? And we started writing down some things that we would, we would commit to doing with each other. How we would address each other. And when that gave birth to was what we call the IBM Work From Home Pledge. And it's a set of principles, all grounded in the belief that, if we act this way, we might just be able to make life just a little bit easier for each other and it's grounded in empathy. And there are parts of the Plex that are pledging to be kind. Recognizing that in this new digital world that we're showing up on camera inside of everyone's home. We're guests in each other's homes. So, let's make sure that we act appropriately as guests at each other's home. So, if children run into the frame during the middle of a meeting or dog started barking during the middle of a meeting, just roll with it. Don't call out attention to it. Don't make people feel self-conscious about it. Pledged the support so your fellow IBM by making time for personal needs. So, if someone has to, do homeschooling in the middle of the day, like Dominique's got triplets she's got to do homeschooling in the middle of the day. Block that time off and we will respect that time on your calendar. And just work around it and just deal with it. There are other things like respecting that camera ready time. As someone who's now been on camera every day it feels like for the last 14 months we want to respect the time that people when they have their cameras off. And not pressure them to put their cameras on saying things like, Hey, I can't see you. There's no reason to add more pressure to everyone's life, if someone's camera's off, it's all for a reason. And then other things like pledging to checking on each other, pledging to set boundaries and tend to our own self-care. So, we published that as a group, we just again and we put it on a Slack channel. So it's kind of our communication method inside the company. It was just intended to be for my organization but it started going viral and tens of thousands of IBM members started taking, started taking the pledge and ultimately caught the attention of our CEO and he loved it, shared it with his leadership team, which I'm a part of. And then also then went on LinkedIn and publicly took the pledge as well. Which then also got more excitement and interaction with other companies as well. So, grassroots effort all grounded in showing empathy and helping to make life just a little bit easier for everyone. >> So important, I'm going to look that up and I'm going to tell you as a person who speaks with many tech companies a week. A lot of businesses could take a lead from that and it gets really important and we are inviting each other into our homes and I see you're a big Broadway fan I'll have to ask you that after we wrap (giggles) Dominique I don't know how you're doing any of this with triplets. I only have two dogs (Dominique laughs) but I'd love to know this sense of urgency, that is everywhere you're living it. Paul talked about it with respect to the acceleration of transformation. How from your lens is IBM and IBM helping customers address the urgency, the need to pivot, the need to accelerate, the need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation actually getting it done? >> Right, thanks Lisa, so true our clients are really needing to and ready to move with haste. That that sense of urgency can be felt I think across every country, every market, every industry. And so we're really helping our clients accelerate their digital transformations and we do that through something that we call intelligent workflows. And so workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done. But intelligent workflows are how we infuse; predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility, end to end across a workflow. So, pulling those processes together so they're not solid anymore and infusing. So, simply put we bring intelligent workflows to our clients and it fundamentally reinvents how they're getting work done from a digital perspective, from a predictive perspective, from a transparency perspective. And I think what really stands apart when we deliver this with our clients in partnership with our clients is how it not only delivers value to the bottom line, to the top line it also actually delivers greater value to their employees, to the customers, to the partner to their broader ecosystem. And intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements. The first is around better utilizing data. So, aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data, and then using that insight not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage. So we talked about AI, automation, IOT, blockchain, all of these technologies require vast amounts of data. And what we're able to bring both on the internal and external source from a data perspective really underpins what these emerging technologies can do. And then the third area is skills. Our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients deep, deep expertise, partner expertise, expertise from the ecosystem at large and pulling all of that together, is how we're really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations because we're helping them shift, from a set of siloed static processes to an end-to-end workflow. We're helping them make fewer predictions based on the past historical data and actually taking more real-time action with real time insights. So, it really is a fundamental shift and how your work is getting done to really being able to provide that emerging technologies, data, deep skills-based end to end workflow. >> That word fundamental has such gravity. and I know we say data has gravity being fundamental in such an incredibly dynamic time is really challenging but I was looking through some of the notes that you guys provided me with. And in terms of what you just talked about, Dominique versus making a change to a silo, the benefits and making changes to a spectrum of integrated processes the values can be huge. In fact, I was reading that changing a single process like billing, for example might deliver up to 20% improved results. But integrating across multiple processes, like billing, collections, organizations can achieve double that up to 40%. And then there's more taking the intelligent workflow across all lead to cash. This was huge. Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from that. So that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make. >> Right, I mean, it really is when we see it really is about unlocking exponential value. So, when you think about crossing end to end workflow but also, really enhancing what clients are doing and what companies are doing today with those exponential technologies from kind of single use the automation POC here and AI application POC here, actually integrating those technologies together and applying them at scale. When I think intelligent workflows I think acceleration. I think exponential value. But I also really think about at scale. Because it's really the ability to apply these technologies the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value. >> So let's go over Paul, in the last few minutes that we have here I want to talk about IBM garage and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Talk to me a little bit about what IBM garage is. I know it's not IBM garage band and I know it's been around since before the pandemic but help us understand what that is and how it's delivering value to customers. >> Well, first I'm going to be the first to invite you to join the IBM garage band, Lisa so we'd love to have you >> I'm in. no musical experience required... >> I like to sing, all right I mean (laughs) We're ready, we're ready for. So, let me talk to you about IBM garage and I do want to key on two words that Dominique was mentioning speed and scale. Because that's what our clients are really looking for when they're doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale, but do that with speed. And that really becomes the critical issue. As Dominique mentioned, there's a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that's kind of like a throw away piece of work that maybe proves a point or just proves a point. But even if it does prove the point at that point you'd have to restart a new, to try to get something that you could actually scale either in the production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization. And that's where IBM garage comes in. It's all a way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then cooperate, innovating at scale. So, we use methods like design thinking inside of IBM we've trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. We use technologies like neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what's amazing for me is that, the cause of the way we were, we were doing work with clients in a garage with using IBM garage in a garage environment before the pandemic. And one of our clients Frito-Lay of North America, is an example where we've helped them innovate at scale and speed using IBM garage over a long period of time. And when the pandemic hit, we in fact were running 11 garages across 11 different workflow areas for them the pandemic hit and everyone was sent home. So, we all instantly overnight had to work from home together with relay. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the garage method to working in a virtual world. To being able to run that same type of innovation and then use that innovation at scale in a virtual world, we did that overnight. And since that time which happened, that happened back in March of last year throughout the pandemic, we've run over 1500 different garage engagements with all of our clients all around the world in a virtual, in a virtual environment. It's just an incredible way, like I said to help our clients innovate at scale. >> That's fantastic, go ahead Dominique. >> Oh, sorry, was just said it's a great example, we partnered with FlightSafety International, they train pilots. And I think a great example of that speed and scale right is in less than 12 weeks due to the garage methodology and the partnership with FlightSafety, we created with them and launched an adaptive learning solution. So, a platform as well as a complete change to their training workflow such that they had personalized kind of real-time next best training for how they train their pilots for simulators. So, reducing their cycle time but also improving the training that their pilots get, which as people who normally travel, it's really important to us and everyone else. So, just a really good example, less than 12 weeks start to start to finish. >> Right, talk about acceleration. Paul, last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left I know this is an ecosystem effort of IBM, it's ecosystem partners, it's Alliance partners. How are you helping align right partner with the right customer, the right use case? >> Yeah, it's great. And our CEO Arvind Krishna has really ushered in this era where we are all about the open ecosystem here at IBM and working with our ecosystem partners. In our services business we have partnerships with all the major, all the major technology players. We have a 45 year relationship with SAP. We've done more SAP S 400 implementations than anyone in the world. We've got the longest standing consulting relationship with Salesforce, we've got a unique relationship with Adobe, they're only services and technology partner in the ecosystem. And we just recently won three, procedures Partner Awards, with them and most recently we announced a partnership with Celonis which is an incredible process execution software company, process mining software company that's going to help us transform intelligent workflows in an accelerated way, embedded in our garage environment. So, ecosystem is critical to our success but more importantly, it's critical to our client success. We know that no one alone has the answers and no one alone can help anyone change. So, with this open ecosystem approach that we take and global business services and our business transformation services organization, we're able to make sure that we bring our clients the best of everyone's capabilities. Whether it's our technology, partners, our services IBM's own technology capabilities, all in the mix, all orchestrated in service to our client's needs all with the goal of driving superior business outcomes for them. >> And helping those customers in any industry to accelerate their business transformation with those intelligent workloads and a very dynamic time. This is a topic we could keep talking about unfortunately, we are out of time but thank you both for stopping by and sharing with me what's going on with respect to intelligent workflows. How the incremental exponential value it's helping organizations to deliver and all the work that IBM is doing to enable its customers to be thrivers of tomorrow. We appreciate talking to you >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you >> For Paul Papas and Dominique Dubois I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think the digital event experience. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the release show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hi everybody this is Dave Valenti, welcome back to our RPA Drill Down. Ted Kummert is here he is Executive Vice President for Products and Engineering at UiPath. Ted, thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Dave, it's great to be here, thanks so much. >> Dave your background is pretty interesting, you started as a Silicon Valley Engineer, they pulled you out, you did a huge stint at Microsoft. You got experience in SAS, you've got VC chops with Madrona. And at Microsoft you saw it all, the NT, the CE Space, Workflow, even MSN you did stuff with MSN, and then the all important data. So I'm interested in what attracted you to UiPath? >> Yeah Dave, I feel super fortunate to have worked in the industry in this span of time, it's been an amazing journey, and I had a great run at Microsoft it was fantastic. You mentioned one experience in the middle there, when I first went to the server business, the enterprise business, I owned our Integration and Workflow products, and I would say that's the first I encountered this idea. Often in the software industry there are ideas that have been around for a long time, and what we're doing is refining how we're delivering them. And we had ideas we talked about in terms of Business Process Management, Business Activity Monitoring, Workflow. The ways to efficiently able somebody to express the business process in a piece of software. Bring systems together, make everybody productive, bring humans into it. These were the ideas we talked about. Now in reality there were some real gaps. Because what happened in the technology was pretty different from what the actual business process was. And so lets fast forward then, I met Madrona Venture Group, Seattle based Venture Capital Firm. We actually made a decision to participate in one of UiPath's fundraising rounds. And that's the first I really came encountered with the company and had to have more than an intellectual understanding of RPA. 'Cause when I first saw it, I said "oh, I think that's desktop automation" I didn't look very close, maybe that's going to run out of runway, whatever. And then I got more acquainted with it and figured out "Oh, there's a much bigger idea here". And the power is that by really considering the process and the implementation from the humans work in, then you have an opportunity really to automate the real work. Not that what we were doing before wasn't significant, this is just that much more powerful. And that's when I got really excited. And then the companies statistics and growth and everything else just speaks for itself, in terms of an opportunity to work, I believe, in one of the most significant platforms going in the enterprise today, and work at one of the fastest growing companies around. It was like almost an automatic decision to decide to come to the company. >> Well you know, you bring up a good point you think about software historically through our industry, a lot of it was 'okay here's this software, now figure out how to map your processes to make it all work' and today the processes, especially you think about this pandemic, the processes are unknown. And so the software really has to be adaptable. So I'm wondering, and essentially we're talking about a fundamental shift in the way we work. And is there really a fundamental shift going on in how we write software and how would you describe that? >> Well there certainly are, and in a way that's the job of what we do when we build platforms for the enterprises, is try and give our customers a new way to get work done, that's more efficient and helps them build more powerful applications. And that's exactly what RPA does, the efficiency, it's not that this is the only way in software to express a lot of this, it just happens to be the quickest. You know in most ways. Especially as you start thinking about initiatives like our StudioX product to what we talk about as enabling citizen developers. It's an expression that allows customers to just do what they could have done otherwise much more quickly and efficient. And the value on that is always high, certainly in an unknown era like this, it's even more valuable, there are specific processes we've been helping automate in the healthcare, in financial services, with things like SBA Loan Processing, that we weren't thinking about six months ago, or they weren't thinking about six months ago. We're all thinking about how we're reinventing the way we work as individuals and corporations because of what's going on with the coronavirus crisis, having a platform like this that gives you agility and mapping the real work to what your computer state and applications all know how to do, is even more valuable in a climate like that. >> What attracted us originally to UiPath, we knew Bobby Patrick CMO, he said "Dave, go download a copy, go build some automations and go try it with some other companies". So that really struck us as wow, this is actually quite simple. Yet at the same time, and so you've of course been automating all these simple tasks, but now you've got real aspiration, you're glomming on to this term of Hyperautomation, you've made some acquisitions, you've got a vision, that really has taken you beyond 'paving the cow path' I sometimes say, of all these existing processes. It's really trying to discover new processes and opportunities for automation, which you would think after 50 or whatever years we've been in this industry, we'd have attacked a lot of it, but wow, seems like we have a long way to go. Again, especially what we're learning through this pandemic. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I'd say Hyperautomation. It's actually a Gartner term, it's not our term. But there is a bigger idea here, built around the core automation platform. So let's talk for a second just what's not about the core platform and then what Hyperautomation really means around that. And I think of that as the bookends of how do I discover and plan, how do I improve my ability to do more automations, and find the real opportunities that I have. And how do I measure and optimize? And that's a lot of what we delivered in 20.4 as a new capability. So let's talk about discover and plan. One aspect of that is the wisdom of the crowd. We have a product we call Automation Hub that is all about that. Enabling people who have ideas, they're the ones doing the work, they have the observation into what efficiencies can be. Enabling them to either with our Ask Capture Utility capture that and document that, or just directly document that. And then, people across the company can then collaborate eventually moving on building the best ideas out of that. So there's capturing the crowd, and then there's a more scientific way of capturing actually what the opportunities are. So we've got two products we introduced. One is process mining, and process mining is about going outside in from the, let's call it the larger processes, more end to end processes in the enterprise. Things like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, helping you understand by watching the events, and doing the analytics around that, where your bottle necks, where are you opportunities. And then task mining said "let's watch an individual, or group of individuals, what their tasks are, let's watch the log of events there, let's apply some machine learning processing to that, and say here's the repetitive things we've found." And really helping you then scientifically discover what your opportunities are. And these ideas have been along for a long time, process mining is not new. But the connection to an automation platform, we think is a new and powerful idea, and something we plan to invest a lot in going forward. So that's the first bookend. And then the second bookend is really about attaching rich analytics, so how do I measure it, so there's operationally how are my robots doing? And then there's everything down to return on investment. How do I understand how they are performing, verses what I would have spent if I was continuing to do them the old way. >> Yeah that's big 'cause (laughing) the hero reports for the executives to say "hey, this is actually working" but at the same time you've got to take a systems view. You don't want to just optimize one part of the system at the detriment to others. So you talk about process mining, which is kind of discovering the backend systems, ERP and the like, where the task mining it sounds like it's more the collaboration and front end. So that whole system thinking, really applies, doesn't it? >> Yeah. Very much so. Another part of what we talked about then, in the system is, how do we capture the ideas and how do we enable more people to build these automations? And that really gets down to, we talk about it in our company level vision, is a robot for every person. Every person should have a digital assistant. It can help you with things you do less frequently, it can help you with things you do all the time to do your job. And how do we help you create those? We've released a new tool we call StudioX. So for our RPA Developers we have Studio, and StudioX is really trying to enable a citizen developer. It's not unlike the art that we saw in Business Intelligence there was the era where analytics and reporting were the domain of experts, and they produced formalized reports that people could consume. But the people that had the questions would have to work with them and couldn't do the work themselves. And then along comes ClickView and Tableau and Power BI enabling the self services model, and all of a sudden people could do that work themselves, and that enabled powerful things. We think the same arch happens here, and StudioX is really our way of enabling that, citizen developer with the ideas to get some automation work done on their own. >> Got a lot in this announcement, things like document understanding, bring your own AI with AI fabric, how are you able to launch so many products, and have them fit together, you've made some acquisitions. Can you talk about the architecture that enables you to do that? >> Yeah, it's clearly in terms of ambition, and I've been there for 10 weeks, but in terms of ambition you don't have to have been there when they started the release after Forward III in October to know that this is the most ambitious thing that this company has ever done from a release perspective. Just in terms of the surface area we're delivering across now as an organization, is substantive. We talk about 1,000 feature improvements, 100's of discreet features, new products, as well as now our automation cloud has become generally available as well. So we've had muscle building over this past time to become world class at offering SAS, in addition to on-premises. And then we've got this big surface area, and architecture is a key component of how you can do this. How do you deliver efficiently the same software on-premises and in the cloud? Well you do that by having the right architecture and making the right bets. And certainly you look forward, how are companies doing this today? It's really all about Cloud-Native Platform. But it's about an architecture such that we can do that efficiently. So there is a lot about just your technical strategy. And then it's just about a ton of discipline and customer focus. It keeps you focused on the right things. StudioX was a great example of we were led by customers through a lot of what we actually delivered, a couple of the major features in it, certainly the out of box templates, the studio governance features, came out of customer suggestions. I think we had about 100 that we have sitting in the backlog, a lot of which we've already done, and really being disciplined and really focused on what customers are telling. So make sure you have the right technical strategy and architecture, really follow your customers, and really stay disciplined and focused on what matters most as you execute on the release. >> What can we learn from previous examples, I think about for instance SQL Server, you obviously have some knowledge in it, it started out pretty simple workloads and then at the time we all said "wow, it's a lot more powerful to come from below that it is, if a Db2, or an Oracle sort of goes down market", Microsoft proved that, obviously built in the robustness necessary, is there a similar metaphor here with regard to things like governance and security, just in terms of where UiPath started and where you see it going? >> Well I think the similarities have more to do with we have an idea of a bigger platform that we're now delivering against. In the database market, that was, we started, SQL Server started out as more of just a transactional database product, and ultimately grew to all of the workloads in the data platform, including transaction for transactional apps, data warehousing and as well as business intelligence. I see the same analogy here of thinking more broadly of the needs, and what the ability of an integrated platform, what it can do to enable great things for customers, I think that's a very consistent thing. And I think another consistent thing is know who you are. SQL Server knew exactly who it had to be when it entered the database market. That it was going to set a new benchmark on simplicity, TCO, and that was going to be the way it differentiated. In this case, we're out ahead of the market, we have a vision that's broader than a lot of the market is today. I think we see a lot of people coming in to this space, but we see them building to where we were, and we're out ahead. So we are operating from a leadership position, and I'm not going to tell you one's easier that the other, and both you have to execute with great urgency. But we're really executing out ahead, so we've got to keep thinking about, and there's no one's tail lights to follow, we have to be the ones really blazing the trail on what all of this means. >> I want to ask you about this incorporation of existing systems. Some markets they take off, it's kind of a one shot deal, and the market just embeds. I think you guys have bigger aspirations than that, I look at it like a service now, misunderstood early on, built the platform and now really is fundamental part of a lot of enterprises. I also look at things like EDW, which again, you have some experience in. In my view it failed to live up to a lot of it's promises even though it delivered a lot of value. You look at some of the big data initiatives, you know EDW still plugs in, it's the system of record, okay that's fine. How do you see RPA evolving? Are we going to incorporate, do we have to embrace existing business process systems? Or is this largely a do-over in your opinion? >> Well I think it's certainly about a new way of building automation, and it's starting to incorporate and include the other ways, for instance in the current release we added support for long running workflow, it was about human workflow based scenarios, now the human is collaborating with the robot, and we built those capabilities. So I do see us combining some of the old and new way. I think one of the most significant things here, is also that impact that AI and ML based technologies and skills can have on the power of the automations that we deliver. We've certainly got a surface area that, I think about our AI and ML strategy in two parts, that we are building first class first party skills, that we're including in the platform, and then we're building a platform for third parties and customers to bring their what their data science teams have delivered, so those can also be a part of our ecosystem, and part of automations. And so things like document understanding, how do I easily extract data from more structured, semi-structured and completely unstructured documents, accurately? And include those in my automations. Computer vision which gives us an ability to automate at a UI level across other types of systems than say a Windows and a browser base application. And task mining is built on a very robust, multi layer ML system, and the innovation opportunity that I think just consider there, you know continue there. You think it's a macro level if there's aspects of machine learning that are about captured human knowledge, well what exactly is an automation that captured where you're capturing a lot of human knowledge. The impact of ML and AI are going to be significant going out into the future. >> Yeah, I want to ask you about them, and I think a lot of people are just afraid of AI, as a separate thing and they have to figure out how to operationalize it. And I think companies like UiPath are really in a position to embed UI into applications AI into applications everywhere, so that maybe those folks that haven't climbed on the digital bandwagon, who are now with this pandemic are realizing "wow, we better accelerate this" they can actually tap machine intelligence through your products and others as well. Your thoughts on that sort of narrative? >> Yeah, I agree with that point of view, it's AI and ML is still maturing discipline across the industry. And you have to build new muscle, and you build new muscle and data science, and it forces you to think about data and how you manage your data in a different way. And that's a journey we've been on as a company to not only build our first party skills, but also to build the platform. It's what's given us the knowledge that to help us figure out, well what do we need to include here so our customers can bring their skills, actually to our platform, and I do think this is a place where we're going to see the real impact of AI and ML in a broader way. Based on the kind of apps it is and the kind of skills we can bring to bear. >> Okay last question, you're ten weeks in, when you're 50, 100, 200 weeks in, what should we be watching, what do you want to have accomplished? >> Well we're listening, we're obviously listening closely to our customers, right now we're still having a great week, 'cause there's nothing like shipping new software. So right now we're actually thinking deeply about where we're headed next. We see there's lots of opportunities and robot for every person, and that initiative, and so we're launched a bunch of important new capabilities there, and we're going to keep working with the market to understand how we can, how we can add additional capability there. We've just got the GA of our automation cloud, I think you should expect more and more services in our automation cloud going forward. I think this area we talked about, in terms of AI and ML and those technologies, I think you should expect more investment and innovation there from us and the community, helping our customers, and I think you will also see us then, as we talked about this convergence of the ways we bring together systems through integrate and build business process, I think we'll see a convergence into the platform of more of those methods. I look ahead to the next releases, and want to see us making some very significant releases that are advancing all of those things, and continuing our leadership in what we talk about now as the Hyperautomation platform. >> Well Ted, lot of innovation opportunities and of course everybody's hopping on the automation bandwagon. Everybody's going to want a piece of your RPA hide, and you're in the lead, we're really excited for you, we're excited to have you on theCUBE, so thanks very much for all your time and your insight. Really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks Dave, great to spend this time with you. >> All right thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Velanti for theCUBE, and our RPA Drill Down Series, keep it right there we'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming instrumental music)

(funky music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE Conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Donald Klein. Today, we're here to talk about digital transformation, and the challenges many enterprises face in helping employees adopt the new applications that drive their business. To have that conversation, we're joined by Vara Kumar, CTO and co-founder of Whatfix . Vara, welcome to the show. >> Thanks, thanks Don for inviting me to the show. >> Great, so looking forward to this. Tell us a little bit about Whatfix, what you guys do and a little bit of the history here. >> Sure. Whatfix is a digital adoption platform. So essentially it overlays on top of applications and makes employees to use applications faster and better. So, we are five years old company, so we have offices in four different countries, and we have 500 customers, and 60 Fortune 500 users, including companies like Amazon, UPS, Facebook, Microsoft, Western Union, Western Digital. The users are a variety of applications like CRMs, VRPs, SCMs. >> Great, fantastic customer base, that's really good. So when you say you're a digital adoption platform that kind of provides an overlay, what specifically you're talking about? You're talking about notifications inside of an application? Tell us a little more about that. >> Sure, sure. So Whatfix helps employees through all their journey in their applications. As they onboard to the applications for the first time, Whatfix welcomes them and holds them to the application. So we provide these, what we call as flows, so these are step-by-step guidance to the users for using the applications and processes and not only within the application, Whatfix guides the users across applications that the employee is faced with, so for example-- >> So cross-application workflows, that kind of thing. >> That's correct, that's correct. For example Anaconda executive, so they have to manage opportunities in the CRM, and then to create a code they have to go to the CPQ and then to submit a purchase order, probably they will have to go to a digital workplace to maintain the code and proceed to the contract. So Whatfix can guide the users through all this and that process. >> Great, so it's not just about the challenges of learning about one particular application, it's actually learning an entire workflow that might stretch across multiple applications. >> That's accurate. >> Some sort of end to end process that gets very complex because you're moving from one interface to the next. >> That's accurate, that's accurate. >> And I guess another challenge would be that, many, in a large enterprise, right, many of the applications that come from the well-known vendors get highly customized for that particular business environment is that correct? >> That's completely true Don, so, Salesforce instance of UPS looks very different from Salesforce instance of Western Union because it's completely customized to the organization business workflows and the nature of their business. So this customization also brings in lot more adoption challenges because even though I'm an account executive who has seen Salesforce in my past experience it looks very different from my current job. So that's more challenging for the enterprises to train their employees and make them use. >> Great, understood, okay, very good. So the problem that you guys are really trying to solve is around this challenge of getting employees to adopt the new applications as part of their overall digital transformation journey, is that right? >> That's true, it's not only new applications now with the so much of cloud movement. So the applications are actually getting updated more faster as you must have heard so much about as well being used in the enterprises for the IT rollouts and IT deployments. That means changes are constant so because you are reinventing your business process as you're learning. So now employees, actually, it impacts more the employee experience because every update employees have to be on top of those. So Whatfix can help them with these updates and making sure that employees are self-served. >> Understood, okay, very good. So now, this has become really such a widespread problem across many of these large enterprises that it's now become quite a mature category of software solutions, is that right? >> That's accurate, Gartner called this category as digital adoption solutions, DAS. >> Digital adoption solutions, okay DAS. >> That's correct, and then they coined this term only a quarter back, and they published reports, in terms of seller productivity and how it will influence the digital workplace, and such kind of things. >> Great, okay, great. So this category now is becoming more widespread, and people really see these types of solutions as being key to enabling digital transformation in the enterprise, right? >> That's accurate. >> Okay great, so then what are the trends that are driving this problem, what is it that's making this such a problem area that companies really need to focus on dedicated solutions to solving? >> Yeah, so one primary is the cloud migration. Yes, more and more the companies, wants to move to the cloud, for example you no longer hear CRM being on-prem, so people are using all the cloud CRMs. So the migration to the cloud, and then the digital, overall the digital transformation of these business practices to suit this cloud migration, that'll also, it's all putting pressure on employee experience. So impacting and making sure that employees are getting used to these new applications and the constant rollouts. >> Got it, got it, okay. So with all this happening, right, more and more applications moving to the cloud, the applications themselves are evolving much faster, the interfaces are changing, and then moreover they're getting more complex, because they're getting more interconnected, right? And so you have this step by step kind of work flow that helps people navigate all of these integrated applications to actually perform a single workflow. >> That's accurate, that's accurate and at the same time given that Whatfix is on top of these applications we are learning a lot about the user, this particular user and what they are doing, what they are good at, what they're not good at, this is helping us to make our content more personalized to the users, just like Google, you search for the same keyword, I search for the same thing, we both see different results. Because it's personalizing to our taste and our knowledge and expertise. So that's exactly it's getting into. And it's not only guidance, we are also helping users to be more productive by automating certain steps. Let's say you do a certain activity every day, then Whatfix can do that automatically for you so that you're becoming more and more faster in your job. >> Interesting, that's interesting. So it's not only helping provide guidance for people moving through these applications but it's actually collecting data about how users are interfacing with it, right, and then delivering a more kind of personalized experience in terms of the guidance that it offers. >> Accurate, accurate, that's accurate. >> Great, so that's really kind of, I guess that would really be the main kind of area of innovation I would imagine for a system like this, right, the ability to capture data about how users are interfacing with the application and then provide recommendations on how to do it better. >> Yes, that's definitely one of the area there's several reasons why customers choose us. We believe in the concept called adoption everywhere, so that adoption everywhere, that means employee need not be on the application all the time, they may want to interact with the application when they're outside of the application. So be, maybe you're on the wiki, you're looking for something then you wanted interface with application, so Whatfix is present across all touchpoints wherever the employee may decide and guide them to the application and help them use the application. And second, we are very easy to deploy and maintain, so we invested heavily on this, because we realize that we don't have to, we shouldn't be providing a platform which is technically more complex for the business guys to create these kind of process flows, we kept them very low tech, and our authoring environment is very easy for them to use and maintain. And then we are, we are very open in terms of how our API is just like Salesforce, which is very open in terms of integrations because we do understand that enterprises are, wants more of interconnected applications so, our allowed APIs are open and we work well with the enterprise ecosystem. And our customer success is highly regarded, so we are best among in the software vendors in terms of the highest customer satisfaction. And we care a lot about real user privacy and security so we don't really collect PII information for the recommendations and personalizations as I spoke about. >> Okay, very good. And so then the, tell us a little bit more about which kind of applications are you guys finding, which categories of applications really kind of benefit most from this kind of guided, walkthrough capability? >> Sure, so the applications are widespread so but more commonly people use us on CRMs, ERPs, and SCMs, and digital workplaces. These are the kind of applications where customers commonly use us on. >> Okay, so ERP and CRM would be the kind of core, would you say? >> Yeah, CRM, ERP and SCM. So these will be the core I would say. And, it's not only the applications that the customers are purchasing from outside, but Whatfix can work on any application that is internally built, any applications that are their IT team is customizing, Whatfix can work on those. >> Great so, bespoke applications developed internally inside companies are equally suitable for this, as are the the packaged applications they might be customizing for their business processes. >> That's correct. >> Okay, that's great. So I just, on the kind of conclude here, let's talk a little bit about maybe some of the customer success stories, that you guys have had. And I'm not asking you to necessarily name names, but maybe talk about some of the areas where you've seen some real value creation from implementing a system like this. >> Sure, sure, our customers have seen that our onboarding time of employees into the applications have reduced one third, because of using Whatfix, because now employees are learning in the flow of work, you no longer have to train them to use the applications, and we've also seen that organizations telling that their content creation times and their amount of planning preparation time has reduced 85%, because of our easy to use authoring environment, and easy to maintain authoring environment. And we've also seen organizations have reduced internal support tickets by 60%. Yeah, so we have also seen that the overall productivity of the employees increased by 35% because they're able to find things and be able to self serve, and do more faster in the applications. >> Got it, so the old days of sitting down and sort of expecting the employees to read the user manual page by page, right, before they dive in, is kind of gone now right? >> It's gone. >> What people want to see is they want to get into the application and then they want to be able to be guided through what they need to do to solve their particular problem. And they want it done in real time. >> That's true, that's right Don. >> And even better they have that whole guide through maybe customized to their particular problem. >> That's accurate Don, that's the digital option solutions for you. >> Great, well that sounds like a fantastic solution, understand the role it plays fantastic, I think you guys are doing great work. So, want to maybe just kind of touch on this last point, where do you see this kind of industry going in the future? This is fantastic innovation but how do you see this trending as digital transformation becomes more widespread? >> Yeah, sure. So adoption as the problem statement more and more organizations understand, and more and more software vendors understand today, we are at Dreamforce now, so if you see the number of sessions around adoption is phenomenal. So, when the Gartner called out that only six to 7% of our enterprises have adopted to the solutions like Whatfix, so there has to be more awareness, some people, enterprises understand that adoption is a problem, but they are not aware that there are solutions that exist to tackle that problem. So we see that's going to be the future for us as we go forward, having more and more enterprises adopt these kind of solutions. >> Great, okay, well if you happen to be at Dreamforce, folks, stop by and talk to Whatfix. So, Vara Kumar thank you for coming on TheCUBE. So thanks for joining us for another CUBE Conversation, I'm Donald Klein and we'll see you next time. (funky music)

>> Announcer: From Denver, Colorado it's theCUBE. Covering Super Computing 17, brought to you by Intel. Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Super Computing 2017 in Denver, Colorado talking about big big iron, we're talking about space and new frontiers, black holes, mapping the brain. That's all fine and dandy, but we're going to have a little bit more fun this next segment. We're excited to have our next guest Bernie Spang. He's a VP Software Defined Infrastructure for IBM. And his buddy and guest Wayne Glanfield HPC Manager for Red Bull Racing. And for those of you that don't know, that's not the pickup trucks, it's not the guy jumping out of space, this is the Formula One racing team. The fastest, most advanced race cars in the world. So gentlemen, first off welcome. Thank you. Thank you Jeff. So what is a race car company doing here for a super computing conference? Obviously we're very interested in high performance computing so traditionally we've used a wind tunnel to do our external aerodynamics. HPC allows us to do many many more iterations, design iterations of the car. So we can actually kind of get more iterations of the designs out there and make the car go faster very quicker. So that's great, you're not limited to how many times you can get it in the wind tunnel. The time you have in the wind tunnel. I'm sure there's all types of restrictions, cost and otherwise. There's lots of restrictions and both the wind tunnel and in HPC usage. So with HPC we're limited to 25 teraflops, which isn't many teraflops. 25 teraflops. >> Wayne: That's all. And Bernie, how did IBM get involved in Formula One racing? Well I mean our spectrum computing offerings are about virtualizing clusters to optimize efficiency, and the performance of the workloads. So our Spectrum LSF offering is used by manufacturers, designers to get ultimate efficiency out of the infrastructure. So with the Formula One restrictions on the teraflops you want to get as much work through that system as efficiently as you can. And that's where Spectrum computing comes in. That's great. And so again, back to the simulations. So not only can you just do simulations 'cause you got the capacity, but then you can customize it as you said I think before we turned on the cameras for specific tracks, specific race conditions. All types of variables that you couldn't do very easily in a traditional wind tunnel. Yes obviously it takes a lot longer to actually kind of develop, create, and rapid prototype the models and get them in the wind tunnel, and actually test them. And it's obviously much more expensive. So by having a HPC facility we can actually kind of do the design simulations in a virtual environment. So what's been kind of the ahah from that? Is it just simply more better faster data? Is there some other kind of transformational thing that you observed as a team when you started doing this type of simulation versus just physical simulation in a wind tunnel? We started using HPC and computational fluid dynamics about 12 years ago in anger. Traditionally it started out as a complementary tool to the wind tunnel. But now with the advances in HPC technology and software from IBM, it's actually beginning to overtake the wind tunnel. So it's actually kind of driving the way we design the car these days. That's great. So Bernie, working with super high end performance, right, where everything is really optimized to get that car to go a little bit faster, just a little bit faster. Right. Pretty exciting space to work in, you know, there's a lot of other great applications, aerospace, genomics, this and that. But this is kind of a fun thing you can actually put your hands on. Oh it's definitely fun, it's definitely fun being with the Red Bull Racing team, and with our clients when we brief them there. But we have commercial clients in automotive design, aeronautics, semiconductor manufacturing, where getting every bit of efficiency and performance out of their infrastructure is also important. Maybe they're not limited by rules, but they're limited by money, you know and the ability to investment. And their ability to get more out of the environment gives them a competitive advantage as well. And really what's interesting about racing, and a lot of sports is you get to witness the competition. We don't get to witness the competition between big companies day to day. You're not kind of watching it in those little micro instances. So the good thing is you get to learn a lot from such a focused, relatively small team as Red Bull Racing that you can apply to other things. So what are some of the learnings as you've got work with them that you've taken back? Well certainly they push the performance of the environment, and they push us, which is a great thing for us, and for our other clients who benefit. But one of the things I think that really stands out is the culture there of the entire team no matter what their role and function. From the driver on down to everybody else are focused on winning races and winning championships. And that team view of getting every bit of performance out of everything everybody does all the time really opened our thinking to being broader than just the scheduling of the IT infrastructure, it's also about making the design team more productive and taking steps out of the process, and anything we can do there. Inclusive of the storage management, and the data management over time. So it's not just the compute environment it's also the virtualized storage environment. Right, and just massive amounts of storage. You said not only are you running and generating, I'm just going to use boatloads 'cause I'm not sure which version of the flops you're going to use. But also you got historical data, and you have result data, and you have models that need to be tweaked, and continually upgraded so that you do better the following race. Exactly, I mean we're generating petabytes of data a year and I think one of the issues which is probably different from most industries is our workflows are incredibly complex. So we have up to 200 discrete job steps for each workflow to actually kind of produce a simulation. This is where the kind of IBM Spectrum product range actually helps us do that efficiently. If you imagine an aerospace engineer, or aerodynamics engineer trying to manually manage 200 individual job steps, it just wouldn't happen very efficiently. So this is where Spectrum scale actually kind of helps us do that. So you mentioned it briefly Bernie, but just a little bit more specifically. What are some of the other industries that you guys are showcasing that are leveraging the power of Spectrum to basically win their races. Yeah so and we talked about the infrastructure and manufacturing, but they're industrial clients. But also in financial services. So think in terms of risk analytics and financial models being an important area. Also healthcare life sciences. So molecular biology, finding new drugs. When you talk about the competition and who wins right. Genomics research and advances there. Again, you need a system and an infrastructure that can chew through vast amounts of data. Both the performance and the compute, as well as the longterm management with cost efficiency of huge volumes of data. And then you need that virtualized cluster so that you can run multiple workloads many times with an infrastructure that's running in 80%, 90% efficiency. You can't afford to have silos of clusters. Right we're seeing clients that have problems where they don't have this cluster virtualization software, have cluster creep, just like in the early days we had server sprawl, right? With a different app on a different server, and we needed to virtualize the servers. Well now we're seeing cluster creep. Right the Hadoop clusters and Spark clusters, and machine learning and deep learning clusters. As well as the traditional HPC workload. So what Spectrum computing does is virtualizes that shared cluster environment so that you can run all these different kind of workloads and drive up the efficiency of the environment. 'Cause efficiency is really the key right. You got to have efficiency that's what, that's really where cloud got its start, you know, kind of eating into the traditional space, right. There's a lot of inefficient stuff out there so you got to use your resources efficiently it's way too competitive. Correct well we're also seeing inefficiencies in the use of cloud, right. >> Jeff: Absolutely. So one of the features that we've added to the Spectrum computing recently is automated dynamic cloud bursting. So we have clients who say that they've got their scientists or their design engineers spinning up clusters in the cloud to run workloads, and then leaving the servers running, and they're paying the bill. So we built in automation where we push the workload and the data over the cloud, start the servers, run the workload. When the workload's done, spin down the servers and bring the data back to the user. And it's very cost effective that way. It's pretty fun everyone talks often about the spin up, but they forget to talk about the spin down. Well that's where the cost savings is, exactly. Alright so final words, Wayne, you know as you look forward, it's super a lot of technology in Formula One racing. You know kind of what's next, where do you guys go next in terms of trying to get another edge in Formula One racing for Red Bull specifically. I mean I'm hoping they reduce the restrictions on HPC so it can actually start using CFD and the software IBM provides in a serious manner. So it can actually start pushing the technologies way beyond where they are at the moment. It's really interesting that they, that as a restriction right, you think of like plates and size of the engine, and these types of things as the rule restrictions. But they're actually restricting based on data size, your use of high performance computing. They're trying to save money basically, but. It's crazy. So whether it's a rule or you know you're share holders, everybody's trying to save money. Alright so Bernie what are you looking at, sort of 2017 is coming to an end, it's hard for me to say that as you look forward to 2018 what are some of your priorities for 2018. Well the really important thing and we're hearing it at this conference, I'm talking with the analysts and with the clients. The next generation of HPC in analytics is what we're calling machine learning, deep learning, cognitive AI, whatever you want to call it. That's just the new generation of this workload. And our Spectrum conductor offering and our new deep learning impact capability to automate the training of deep learning models, so that you can more quickly get to an accurate model like in hours or minutes, not days or weeks. That's going to a huge break through. And based on our early client experience this year, I think 2018 is going to be a breakout year for putting that to work in commercial enterprise use cases. Alright well I look forward to the briefing a year from now at Super Computing 2018. Absolutely. Alright Bernie, Wayne, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day, appreciate it. You're welcome, thank you. Alright he's Bernie, he's Wayne, I'm Jeff Frick we're talking Formula One Red Bull Racing here at Super Computing 2017. Thanks for watching.

okay we're back this is Dave vellante Wikibon org i'm here with jeff Frek we're here at knowledge service now is big customer event we're at the aria hotel a lot of enthusiasm a lot of great stories we're seeing a pattern emerged IT is essentially this collection of disparate processes we have a lot of activity going on spreadsheets people using email to really keep track of what's going on many many systems trying to keep track of inventory assets process these problems incidents changes etc etc and it's just this big web of mess here comes service now a single system of record a cmdb that allows you to essentially tailor your processes to your business as opposed to some kind of technology module or some other kind of software system jason wu yan is here he's the vice president of operations for a cloud sherpas works within the ServiceNow business unit at Cloud Sherpas was a big sponsor of the show Jason welcome to the cube thank you very much so you heard my little intro of guys must be excited big sponsor a lot of a lot of action going on in this this event how do you feel we feel outstanding we're happy to be a part of the the event this is my third knowledge conference and of course as the director of training in service now I like to say there are more people in training at this conference that attended the entire knowledge 11 conference so it's a pretty phenomenal event so how was it progressed over the years this is my first knowledge and so I don't have that history I'd say that you know we leave a long legacy with service now all the way back to some of the very first knowledge conferences that occurred in first knowledge conference we probably could have had a the entire conference in this table right and of course today with almost four thousand attendees it's it's certainly grown tremendously we've got somewhere the neighborhood 1,200 people that have gone through training at this event alone we did a big part of providing that training for on behalf of service now with other partners as well and it's an exciting event there's a large buzz here as I'm sure you've seen there really is yes sir Cloud Sherpas other than a great name you know tell us about the company it's a great it's a great story to tell Gartner likes to turma cloud services brokerage and so first and foremost we're cloud services brokerage we have three strategic partnerships we are a Salesforce a partner we are one of the largest Salesforce partners in the world actually top five from a certification standpoint we're the largest Google Enterprise integrator in the world we're actually Google Google's partner of the year in 2011 and 2012 of course we like to think we're pretty good at servicenow as well a little background on us in the ServiceNow business unit we were the first partner in the United States Forest Service now we are the first partner to achieve preferred status at servicenow and the only partner to achieve that status globally today so how's it work so a customer wants to implement service now or google enterprise or Salesforce you basically are that brokerage layer in between so talk about how that works well we help customers adopt manage and enhance their cloud solutions of course focusing on this particular context service now and we are there from day one we're there to help them bring the platform into their environment we're help there to help them refine their processes and practices and of course ultimately align that to the service now a tool and help them manage that through their life cycle so how do you get ready for this what do you tell customers they need to do I tell customers commonly it's best to start where you're at with any improvement activity and ultimately in an enterprise deployment of software you're going to take that as an opportunity to improve I say start where you're at take the time to understand how you do things today you'd be surprised to see how often customers don't aren't all on the same page as to how they perform incident or what the key processes are underneath that or even what the key performance objectives are for that of course we recommend starting where you're at of course we have requirements workshops opportunities we have a number of I tell practices and other types of areas where we can help elaborate those requirements and better align them to their business needs but first and foremost you need to understand what you want your environment to look like some a requirement standpoint the workflows are key so what are the big obstacles that you see people running into when they try to do implement like this I would say in general taking too big of a bite you know there are over twenty two applications as an example in service now you don't want to start day one with 22 applications it's not because ServiceNow wouldn't be able to handle it ServiceNow can deploy very rapidly you really start simple start where you're mature or start where you have the most profound opportunity to improve and align to better practices get the foundation of the platform in place stabilize that and then move on to your next phase and progressively adopt more and more of the application so it's with the pattern that's emerging here we're hearing from customers people starting with incident problem management change management you know why there why why do we see that pattern emerging I think more across the industry that it tends to be a place where customers have have focused on over time so that tends to be where they're more mature they tend to have a better understanding of maybe what their shortcomings are today in those spaces so they tend to be an easier place to start what percentage of them are displacing some other legacy software versus we've heard about I'm not counting excel in that in that list or lotus notes because we hear a lot about that but I would presume there's other software out there that they're displacing we see a lot of software that gets this place down there of course point solutions where there's a lot of databases and homegrown applications handling change your change approvals or cab boards or those types of things of course it's a good opportunity to consolidate that and of course you know service now is known within the industry is being a pretty proficient solution but there are other solutions and we are offering seen that we're offsetting those as well you have we have the steam of no.2 now do you have any you know favorite examples that you can share with us or what are you some of your customers doing ha we've got a lot of good examples i would say probably most recently we just helped a very large clothing manufacturer an american good american company that had nine support environments globally and they had nine different ways of doing everything and they look use this as an opportunity to consolidate those and get to a single source of record get to a single workflow globally and in that they also transformed and improve their processes and and that was something that they couldn't have accomplished with really any other project or really any other tool in the market they of course chose to go down the path with with service now and you know a short few months later they're implemented across incident problem changed service request Service Catalog a very profound Service Catalog spanning literally hundreds of request items employee self-service portal that's been branded to their to their corporate brands there's been a lot of excitement in their injuries or community because they look like their company when they're when they're asking for support and they get a much more automated and in much more efficient process what was the genesis of that was it again something was breaking they had to change it was it let's just take a step back there's opportunity that we wanted to do this or were the easing service now and some other minor role and said wow you know we can actually use this tool to take advantage and do something transformation and generally what we see is service now it's really the enabler it's the enabler to transition transform now we've seen global sis do this forever that's their big thing we're going to help you consolidate and get your hands around it I think service now gives you the ability to to do that neutral of a partner or neutral of an outsourcing provider you can get your arms around it on your own and again many customers are relatively mature and incident problem and change and so it's a good opportunity for them to find those areas where they can aspire to better practice better process and to implement that into service count tool how was your business involves I mean it's so interesting because the poster child of SAS and Salesforce you guys obviously you know chose well that was 1999 may we are in 2013 it's really taking a long time Google Enterprise okay that's make sense but Google you know big whale I see you know guys like workday you know service now come out why do you think it's taken such a long time for these applications to catch on and and how has cloud sherpas you know progressed over those over that time frame well what i would say is the notion of a cloud services brokerage didn't exist eight to ten years ago right that that aggregation point didn't really exist it was those point solutions were always provided by those point providers or their tightly coupled partners in that space and of course with the emergence of this notion of a brokerage that's helping aggregate and manage and enhance low solutions you know we're seeing a lot of degrees of freedom so you know where we started we started as a firm that was focused on Google that emerged into Salesforce and now is through in a company called Navitus a few earlier or late last year now the ServiceNow practice as well and you know moreover it's it's it's where things are going right the truth is is that end-users and corporations and and whether it's you on your iPhone and for personal use or business use you want those applications available you want to have a solid user experience ServiceNow was really first in this space to be able to offer that in a way that was truly platform neutral that just worked whether it was a smart phone or an iPad or a desktop or laptop of what happened so talk about your strategy clouds share purrs and talk a little bit about how you differentiate well we differentiated in a number of ways but specific in the ServiceNow business unit and III don't think it's it could be said enough the cloud services brokerage is a huge differentiating point for us right having the scale that we do globally having you know several key strategic partners enables us to see areas and aspects of the industry that I don't think other partners can but from a service town business you know perspective I think we have a live a couple a couple differentiating points when is we were one of the first adopters of the platform from a partner perspectives so obviously we have a lot of deep skills in this we've done over 320 implementations of service now to date to have and of course 320 over 320 and through that history we've seen we've seen a lot of heuristics we've seen a lot of customer success stories we've seen a lot of things in the platform that customers are asking for time and time again and we've been able to fit that need both by my IT service management but also by industry as well a great example of that is we've got a number of custom applications that we've developed one of them as is a document management document processing application that a lot of legal firms are using in fact what we found is we built it for one company a few years ago Morrison forest or better known as mofo and now five or six legal firms later they've all asking for that same application and so we're finding that there's also you know real opportunity from an industry perspective to align to some of those point solutions extend the platform and just include those in the solution here's so much today about Big Data and you know it's all about this unstructured mass of information a bring structure to unstructured data maybe lending structured and unstructured some people don't even like those terms because it's all sort of blending how does analytics play into this whole IT Service Management IT automation there's a lot of metrics so they get this automating this forms based process is there a place for that or is is there not right now because everybody's kind of doing their own thing you know ten years ago I t was all about the tnit right it's all about the technology now it's all about the eye it's all about the information a great examples we're seeing a lot of partner solutions emerge in the ServiceNow ecosystem that are trying to better rationalize data there are tools like mere 42 for example which it's whole purpose is to is to bolt onto service now and provide a more comprehensive analytic package and there are many other examples of that as well in truth it's a services lead operation at this point it's not a technology led operation the only way to really ensure that you're delivering any quality of services or support is the quality of data that you provide and that starts with your requirements and those requirements need to bridge the performance measures in those performance there is just being an easy way to be accessible transparent and manageable and of course that's a big part of what service now does so how do you see this cloud brokerage you know space evolving over the next three to five years what's going to change you're going to hear a lot more from Cloud Sherpas in the space in the next three to five years that's for sure you know I think what we're going to find is is that more and more you're going to you're going to see gsis and other types of firms moving to this sort of model right I mean we're only we're going to take a lot of business away from them and and in that process you know it's going to get the right levels of attention you know what what I really think that cloud services brokerage is is it's a firm that is extremely experienced in the platform and the products they sell but more importantly the underlying reason for selling that product in the first place you know services IT services in this case it's a company that's known for being a little bit more nimble than some of those GS is you know getting the proposals out quickly and being effect effective and efficient and not looking to establish this enormous agreement but but a series of agreements that gets a customer to to where they need to go and I think what we're going to see is it is time and time again that the the early adopters in the cloud services brokerage spaces are going to be are going to be growing at rates like our business unit for example are business units currently growing at one hundred and fifty percent it's a tough tough job to keep up with but tools like ServiceNow certainly help us manage that and keep us on track with our own projects your own time carts and our own tasks yeah so you guys are great on the rocket ship with good service now pulling them along are they pulling you along a little bit of both like bikers drafting yeah so hexcel and I Jason we'll listen thanks very much for coming on the cube and sharing the cloud sherpas story will give you the last word here what advice would you give to folks that are you know maybe kicking the tires and mostly thirty percent of the audience here are not ServiceNow customers they're thinking about it what would you tell those guys have a good understanding of where you're at have a good vision of what you want to achieve and don't be afraid to go to the cloud it's not as not as hard as it sounds its clouds not scary just jump right in the water's fine hi Jason thanks very much for coming on really appreciated a good luck with managing that crazy growth and pleasure meeting you thanks very much all right Jeff reckon I'll be back with our next guest keep right here this is the cube we drop it of these events and we're covering the wall-to-wall service now knowledge will be right back from Las Vegas right after this