 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. I'm Lisa Martin. Terrence Wampler joins me next. General Manager at Workday Financial Management at Workday. Terrence, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. Nice that we can still do these events virtually even though we are quite socially distanced. So the last year has bought lots of changes, one of them being IBM Think and theCUBE being virtual. But I'm curious to get your perspectives and your observations. We've seen many finance organizations have to rapidly pivot and accelerate their digital transformation, making it a priority. What are some of the key priorities that you've seen that the C-suite, the CFO are dealing with? Yeah, well, I think what's happening is what we've seen are new ways to work and using remote access, having to do mobile technologies. What's happening is that's actually driving more risk for companies. And so as companies get more risk, that's driving the needs to have more scrutiny on those business processes. And that's forcing them to want to accelerate what they're doing in terms of a digital transformation, other stuff like that. It's also forcing them to think more about the data they have and the information they have looking forward and how they're doing planning and how they can do planning in terms of bringing people back to work, in terms of new business models, in terms of what may be next, in terms of opportunity for them, or even doing catastrophe planning as they work through this stuff. And as they start to look at that, they're really thinking about how to make their business process and much more agile. And so it's kind of a complicated thread that you start to pull as people start to change how things work. Yeah, that risk is a big factor and that pivot was so quick for so many businesses where suddenly so many of us and so many of us are still remote. I'm curious what some of the things are though that you're hearing with respect to organizations looking to start opening things back up and bringing some of their folks back on campus. Yeah, it's a very interesting dilemma because what's happening is people have learned how to work remotely now. And so they're trying to figure out how they're gonna bring people back to be more collaborative. But at the end of the day, the first and most important thing they've learned is that especially for a finance function, they no longer wanna be transaction operators. What they wanna start doing is pushing that work to more automated tools to have that be done for them and try to promote themselves to be more like analysts or even advisors to the business or even a partner to the business. And as they go through that evolution, what they're really trying to do is unlock all of the potential of the people they have, of the processes they have and of the data they have. So what it's really made companies do is look at everything in its entirety and want to change all of it. But they have to go at different paces. Definitely, talk to me about what Workday and IBM are doing together to help customers tackle these challenges, adjust their priorities and accelerate that transformation. Yeah, certainly. So one of the things that we've done is gotten together and created this go-to-market strategy called enterprise finance. And what enterprise finance does is it really tries to meet the customer where they are. So while all of these customers are looking to accelerate their digital transformation, they come from very different places, right? And their journey to that transformation is gonna be very different. And that means that some of them are going to want to be able to do a full transformation right away and do it globally and make a big change because they've just been hit very hard by this or they see it as an opportunity to grow. And others are gonna come from a very complex environment and that complex environment could include complicated manufacturing components in their solution. And they need to look at something like just a corporate finance layer that has kind of an integrated planning solution, consolidation, close capabilities for them to be able to run their business and be a little bit more agile at the top line. So a spectrum of you said meeting them where they are, there's a lot of customers in different places. I'm curious what some of the things are that you've observed over the last year that really are kind of unique ways that finance leaders are approaching this new way of working? Yeah, so there's probably two examples I can give you. One is a generic example where we have customers that have participated in merger or acquisition activity over the past year as it happens to be or customers that have even spun up new divisions with new business models trying to introduce new services or think about things that they can take advantage of or even shifting away from all this months that have been impacted by what's happening. And as they do that, they will look to do a transformation around finance in that function only or for that subsidiary or for that division. And so that's probably the first example. The second example that I'll give you is companies having to do something they never thought they would do before. I'll give you a simple example. We have a large number of insurance companies here in the United States as customers. And we all probably got our rebate check from the insurance company for our automobiles, right? So what happened is most of the large insurance companies identified that, hey, we actually don't have much risk because people aren't driving and they're paying us these big premiums. And so the insurance regulatory bodies put pressure on those insurance companies. So they had to figure out a business process model and a mechanism by which to go out, forecast what the premium reduction should be, what the business should look like, what that risk should be, do all of that planning and then think about it for their future actual or early old stuff and then figure out a process by which to get those rebates delivered out to customers. So there's interesting things like that happening in process and if somebody wasn't running a remote system that didn't have good agility, they wouldn't be able to make that quick pivot and get us all those rebate checks that we were so happy to have. Yes, very happy to have that. It sounds like that was done in a pretty fast turnaround time. So I imagine you're also dealing with customers who have sort of a TBD time schedule where there's still so much dynamics going on in the market today. Well, that's exactly right. Because you're looking at different business models in different industries. I picked insurance there, but you can pick other extremes like how are retailers reopening? What are they thinking? You can look at hospitality places. How are they going to reopen? How are they going to generate revenue? How are they going to do planning? How are they going to account for things? And it's a range. So what's happened is everybody's looked at this as it's now an opportunity to not think in terms of years or even longer range plans. It's really an opportunity to be much more agile and think about being able to dynamically move in quarters or half year kind of increments. Yeah, we've been having a lot of conversations about how that timetable has shifted and it's getting smaller and smaller because there's been so much flux and so much change that these organizations are really figuring out, how do we actually shift? And not just organization but culturally as well to be able to adapt to these changes that can be pretty sudden and pretty significant. I am curious too, Workday has historically focused its financial management solutions on really very much people intensive industries but you do have customers that are outside of that in the services. You talked about insurance, getting value from Workday. Talk to me about some of those other expansion of opportunities there and the more services oriented industries. Well, that makes a lot of sense and so I'll call it product based industries but you can think about it as manufacturing your other components but it's people that have systems around product. And while they might have complex supply chains that Workday isn't able to support for them right now, they are looking at doing either that corporate transformation layer or they're looking at a solution we have around accounting center. What accounting center allows them to do is bring in high volume of data from those source transaction systems and then generate accounting from it but it gives them the ability to mix that operational data with that accounting data to do exactly what you're describing be able to pivot more quickly and do more planning because they have a better foundation for their data accuracy than the consistency of that data. So they may be running multiple ERP systems and as they're running those they can bring that data together through accounting center kind of in a federated way and get better insight into what they need to do to plan more rapidly to roll things out. So they can kind of keep that execution system of record system and then they can basically promote this more of a operational planning and analysis type function. Have you noticed in your conversations with customers the financial management changing in terms of being elevated up to the C-suite or a board level conversation with businesses now suddenly being very laser focused on understanding that reducing risk and did that any of that change and shift in terms of visibility in the last year? Yes it did and the primary reason is because finance has always been the stewards of that information really curate the data they do all of that work and then other people take it and do analysis. The finance department has taken more control of not only being the curator of that information but also being the team that does more of the analysis and has engaged more with corporate strategy or the chief revenue officer or something like that and trying to bring forward the ability to do analysis and have a voice in terms of what are the business models we should be doing what are the strategic growth initiatives we should be doing how should we be looking at running the business not just doing a finance function but really doing that advisory role and it really has become because the data is so important to make those decisions so everyone wants these data-driven decisions and they are the curator of that data or the steward of that data so they've kind of helped promote themselves to do that. What are some of the things that if you look out into your crystal ball for the rest of 2021 what are some of the things that you think we're going to see in some of the key industries that are working hard to return retail manufacturing the supply chain, we just had that big traffic jam in the Suez Canal and a lot of challenges there what are some of the things that you think are opportunities that we're gonna see unfolding this year? Yeah, so I think it's going to be first around getting back to work so it's back to office stuff which we'll start on the HR side but it's going to lead to facility costs it's going to lead to work or safety stuff and reporting it's going to lead to how you manage healthcare or other tracking of things it's going to lead to how you engage with customers remotely it's going to be a number of factors that are related to how do we transition back into real life because what we've started to see is in different parts of the country or the world even parts of retail open up but we haven't seen mass return to lots of offices like here in the United States and I think that will drive a lot of different processes in terms of about how people do working shifts how they do meetings, how they do analysis and there will be a desire then to have those business processes automated the results of the transaction that comes from that et cetera. That's a good point that you bring up that there's so many things that I hadn't really considered in terms of what it's going to take for businesses to return and have folks come back to campus the extraverted me just wants to go back but you bring up a great point that there's so many other facets that they had to deal with rapidly last year that have to be reconsidered and so it makes sense that automation is something that they're looking at is coming in and really helping to automate certain processes to help reduce risk, reduce cost. Last question for you Terrence working customers go if they are looking to get back on the track, how can they engage IBM and Workday together to help transform? Yeah, so the best and easiest way is we have some joint blogs that we've worked together but first there's this cube and then there is the joint blogs that we've worked together to talk about enterprise finance and how we're going to market and then enterprise finance talks about the spectrum of a full finance transformation to a division to a corporate layer. Excellent and I did see your blog it sounds like you've been very busy in the last year which is excellent but thanks so much Terrence for coming by and sharing with us all the dynamics that are going on in financial management and beyond and the acceleration of elements of transformation that organizations have to look at now it's very interesting, we appreciate your time. Well, thank you for having me. For Terrence Wambler, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching The Cube.