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