 Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's virtual coverage of HP's big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition and we're going to dig into transformations, the role of technology and the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it. HPE has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years. So it makes a great example and case study. And with me is Rashmi Kumar who's the senior vice president and CIO at HPE. Rashmi, welcome. Come on inside theCUBE. Hi, Dave. Nice to be here. Well, it's been almost a year since COVID changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CIO specifically and generally IT has changed? I mean, you got digital, zero trust has gone from buzzword to mandate, digital. Everybody was complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated, remote work, hybrid. How do you see it? Absolutely, as I said in the last discover that COVID has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the companies. I see CIO's role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running. That's become a table stake. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience, engage with our customers in different ways but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end of the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the COVID hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another. A global company like HPE had to look into its supply chain differently, had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together but how to create the same level of collaboration coordination as well as delivery of faster goods and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So CIO and IT's role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to different level of employee experience as well as enabling day to day operations of the companies. CEOs have realized that digital is the way to go forward. It does not matter what industry you are in and now CIOs have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now which is a technology company, irrespective you are in oil and gas or mining or a technical product or a car or a mobility company end of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. So I want to ask you about that because you've been a CIO and a leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and were non-technology selling to IT companies and as you point out, those worlds are coming together. Everybody's a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the CIO? Because it always seemed to me that there was a difference between a CIO and a tech company. You know what I mean by that and a CIO and sort of every other company. Are those two worlds converging? Absolutely. And it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma to entertainment to utilities and now at a technology company. End of the day, the issues that IT deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have a little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem. Even at HP, look, I was fortunate at HP because of Antonio's leadership. We had topped out mandate to transform how we did business and I talked about my next gen IT program in last year's CUBE interview. But at the same time, while we were changing our customer partners' experience from ordering to order processing to supply chain to finance, we decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot, it's pretty common if it was a technology company or non-technology company. At HPE, we were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us. Now we are becoming as a service or a subscription company and IT played a major role to enable that code to cash experience which is very different than the traditional experience around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term digital exhaust which results into data which can result into better insight and you can not only upsell, cross-sell because now you have more data about your product usage but first and foremost, give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, they are a pizza sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies. Ikea, which is a furniture manufacturer across the board, we have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider and remember when HP says edge to cloud platform as a service, edge is the product, the customers who we deal with and how do we get that help them get that data, understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that we serve. I think you've been at HP now, I think around three years and I've been watching, of course, for decades, HP, well, HP then HP is, I feel like it's entering now the sort of third phase of its transformation. You know, phase one was okay, we got to figure out how to deal or operate as separate companies, okay, that took some time and then it was okay, now how do we align our resources and what are the waves that we're going to ride and how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place and all in on as a service and now it's like, okay, yeah, how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations, you talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? Yeah, that's a great question. So as I mentioned, first, your second phase which was becoming a standalone company was the Next Gen IT program where we brought in S4 and 60 related ecosystem application where even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 120 billion company, we are a 30 billion company, we need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line across the globe and I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of Next Gen IT transformation where we have brought in new customer experience through low-touch or no-touch order processing a very strong S4 capabilities where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together and I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years but at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do order management supply chain and data and analytics platforms we also made the pivot to go to as a service now for as a service and subscription selling it needs a very different code to cash experience for our customers and that's where we had to bring in platforms like Brim to do subscription billing, conversion charging and a whole different way to address but we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data analytics platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior as well as how they're using our product real time for our operations teams. Well they say follow the money in the queue we love to say follow the data and data is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage, business value so you talk a little bit more about the role of data I'm interested in where IT fits you know a lot of companies they'll have a chief data officer or CIO sometimes they're separate sometimes they work for each other or CDO works for CIO how do you guys approach the whole data conversation? Yeah that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of CEOs, CIOs chief digital officers in many different companies the way we have set it up here is do we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of technology and platform and data lake within IT look the way I see is that I call the term data torture if we have multiple data lakes if we have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out of the source system we end up with data swarms and it's very difficult to drive insights it's very difficult to have single version of truth so HP had two pronged approach first one was as part of this next gen IT transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe it's called entity master data and product master data program these were very very difficult program we are now happy to report that we can understand a customer from code stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system it's been a tough journey but it was effort well spent at the same time while we were building this master data capability we also invested time in our analytics platform because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint how do we link our data lake to our SAP and Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team at the same time we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making and analytics they need around product around customer around their usage around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward so this creates efficiencies in the organization if you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment that's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization work very very closely to understand each other needs sometimes out of the possible where do we need the data processing is it at the edge is it in the cloud what's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward and they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us superior results and I have done data analytics in many different companies this model works where you have focus on insight and analytics because data without insight is of no value but at the same time you need clean data you need efficient fast platforms to process that insight at the functional non-functional requirement that our business partners have and that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently as of now I want to ask you kind of a harder maybe it's not a harder question it's a weird question around single version of the truth because it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications, workloads that require that single version of the truth the operational systems, the transaction systems the HR, the sales force clearly you have to have a single version of the truth I feel like however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product and it's early days in that but I want to and maybe not the right question for HPE but I wonder if you see it in your ecosystems where it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics got to have that nailed down data quality, everything else but then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom they need more latitude to create are you seeing that and maybe you can help me put that into context that's a great question Dave and I'm glad you asked it so I think Tom Devonport who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality it's all that most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving companies operations incrementally because you have very clean data you have very good understanding of how my territories are doing how my customers are doing how my products are doing how am I meeting my SLAs or how my financials are looking there's no room for failure in that area the other area is though which works on the same set of data it's not a different set of data but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new ones in customers or new business models that we go with the way we have done it is we do take this data take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space but that's this entire data available to our business leader not real time because the need is not as real time because they are doing more what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics and we work very closely with business units we educate them, we tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their analytics I think as we talk about hindsight, insight and foresight hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have a quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available Great, thank you for that, interesting discussion you know digital transformation is a journey and it's going to take many years in a lot of ways, not a lot of ways 2020 was a forced march to digital if you weren't a digital business you were out of business and so you really didn't have much time to plan so now organizations are stepping back saying okay let's really lean into our strategy the journey and along the way there's going to be blind spots there's bumps in the road when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations That's a great question Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer term view on this topic in what's top of my mind recently is the whole topic of ESG environmental, social and governance most of the companies have governance in place because they are either public companies or they are under some kind of scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or whatnot even if you're a startup you need to do things with our customers and whatnot it has been there for companies it continues to be there we the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance right privacy, right governance in place now we'll talk about cybersecurity I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space however we have the setup within our companies to be able to handle that challenge now when we go to social what happened last year was really important and now as each and every company we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that and not only the bigger companies leaders at our level I would say that between last March and this year I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic which was all virtual but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity which is also very big objective for HPE and Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in US at the world economic forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities if we want to continue to be successful in this world to create innovative product and services we need to sell it to the broader cross-section of populations and to be able to do that we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people HPE has taken many initiatives and so are many companies I feel like the momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important I am also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones as you know in the Bay Area to create better delivery methods of food or products the third piece which is environmental is extremely important as well as we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental HPE recently published it's a living progress report we have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions we help our customers through those processes again if our planet is on fire none of us will exist so we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better now I'm happy to report I myself as a person solar panels, battery, electric cars whatever I can do but I think something more needs to happen as an individual I need to pitch in but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof which again creates a different kind of ways going forward so when you ask me about disruptions I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have ESG top of their mind and think of product and services from that perspective which creates equal opportunity for people which creates better environment sustainability going forward and you know our customers our investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause for bigger cross-section of companies and I'm most of the time very happy to share with my CIO cohort around how our HPE FS capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy how much e-waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills our green lake capabilities how it reduces the e-waste going forward as well as our sustainability initiatives which can help other CIOs to be more carbon neutral going forward as well you know that's a great answer Rashmi thank you for that I got to tell you I hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about ESG but that was a very substantive thoughtful response that I think tech companies in particular are have to lead and are leading in this area so I really appreciate that sentiment I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber it's obviously you know escalated in in the news the last several months it's always in the news but you know ten or fifteen years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire now we realize hey they're going to get in it's it's how you handle it cyber's become a board level topic that you know years ago there was a lot of discussion oh you can't have the sec ops team working for the CIO because that's like the the fox watch in the hen house that's changed uh... it's been a real uh... awakening a kind of a rude awakening so the world is now more virtual you've got a secure physical uh... assets i mean any knucklehead can now become as a ransomware attacker they can they can they can buy ransomware as a services in the dark dark web so that's something we've never seen before you're seeing supply chains get hacked and self-forming malware i mean it's a really scary time so you got these intellectual assets it's a top priority for organizations are you see a convergence of the the c-so role the cio role the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations yeah this is a great question and uh... this was big discussion at my public board meeting couple of uh... days ago it's as as i talk about many topics if you think digital if you think data if you think is the it's no more one organizations business it's now everybody's responsibility i i saw wall street journal article couple days ago where somebody has compared cyber to nine eleven type scenario that if it happens for a company that's the level of impact you feel on your on your operation so you know all models are going to change their c-so reports to cio at hpe we are also into products security and that's why c-so is a peer of mine who i work with very closely who also work with product teams where we are saving our customers from lot of pain in this space going forward and hpe itself is investing enormous amount of efforts in time incoming out of products uh... which are which are secured and i'm not vulnerable to these types of attacks the way i see it is c-so role has become extremely critical in every company big part of that role is to make people understand that cyber security is also everybody's responsibility that's why in itv propagate def sec ops uh... as we talk about it we are very very careful about picking the right products and services this is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing you have to continuously looking at cyber security architecture you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our company stays secure the training not only for individual employees and anti fishing or what does cyber security mean but also to the executive committee and to the board what cyber security means what zero trust means but at the same time doing dry runs we did it for business continuity and disaster recovery before now this time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared as you mentioned and we all say in tech community it's always if not when no company can thumb their chest and say oh we are fully secure because something can happen going forward but what is the readiness for something that can happen it has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic or earthquake or a natural disaster and assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when something like this happens so i'm a huge believer in the framework of protect, detect, govern and respond as these things happen so we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody's aware of the part that they play day to day but at the same time when some event happened and making sure we do very periodic reviews of IT and cyber practices across the company there is no more differentiation between IT and OT that was 10 years ago I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of IT and guess what happened WannaCry and Petia and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected so if it's a technology it needs to be protected that's the mindset people need to go with invest in education training awareness of your employees your management committee your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happened see it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data our customers operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our product and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens Rashmi very generous with your time thank you so much for coming back in the queue it was great to have you again thank you Dave it was really nice chatting with you and thanks for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HPE Discover 21 this is Dave Vellante you're watching the virtual cube the leader in digital tech coverage be right back