 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit, presented by NTT Research. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE's coverage of Upgrade 2020, the Global Research Summit for NTT. And always happy when we get to talk about digital transformation. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest on the program, Eric Clark. He is the chief digital officer with NTT data. Eric, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you, glad to be here. All right, so Eric, let's start, you know, CDOs. First of all, there's lots of CDOs. We've done lots of events with the chief data officers, which I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about data, but the digital officers, of course, digital is so important in general and even more so in 2020. But let's understand your role as chief digital officer. What's your charter? Where are you sitting in New York? What are you responsible for? Yeah, definitely. And, you know, it's a good question. I often start conversations with our customers by talking about exactly that because chief digital officer means something different to different companies. So for us, it's primarily market facing. And what that means is I spend most of my time looking at research, looking at R&D, looking at what our competitors are doing in the market and looking at where trends are going to make sure that we have the right offerings and capabilities to bring to our customers, to make sure that they will remain competitive at their markets. That's great. You know, we've been talking for years about the digital transformations that companies have been going through. One of our definitions has been, if you're not at the end of it more data-driven, you probably haven't done the right thing. But Eric, this year with 2020, you know, anecdotally, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously there's certain initiatives that get frozen or, you know, we'll take a little bit longer but those digital initiatives which are supposed to rely on data and help us move fast and be more agile seem to be at the top of the list and are accelerating because if I can't respond to, you know, the daily and weekly changes that have been great in 2020, you know, I might have a tough time surviving. So what are you seeing, you know, how does that live in your world? Yeah, you're exactly right. And that's what we're seeing from our client base as well. So early on in the pandemic, there was a lot of freeze, you know, hold everything, stop, stop spending and let's figure out where we are and where this is going. But very quickly that turned to, we've got to react. We're going to be living with this for a while and we can't afford to sit back and wait and see where it goes. We've got to react and we've got to direct our future. And very often the way that comes out is with digital. So, you know, customers are looking for opportunities to leverage digital, to grow revenue, to improve customer engagement and to drive more of their revenue through digital channels. Interesting, the one thing I didn't hear in there but I'm sure is part of it. What about the employees themselves? One of the big things, of course, is that we've made this wonderful corporate environment. You got the great internet there and now wait everybody's at home and scrambling as to what they do. So how about the kind of the EX to go along with the CX? Yeah, exactly. And that was actually one of the first places that we focused as a company because we do a lot of, you know, what we refer to as workplace services. So making sure that our customers employees have the tools they need to do their jobs successfully. So immediately when offices started closing and people started going home, our big challenge was let's make sure that our customers can connect from anywhere, you know, from wherever they need to be working from and have access to the applications and the tools and the products that they need to perform their jobs remotely. And that's really turned into a significant business of its own, you know, really addressing those needs not only for our customers, but also for our employee base. You know, we have 50,000 people that we sent home more than 90% of overnight. And, you know, many of these are our employees that are interacting with our customer base on a daily basis. So we had to make sure not only that they had connectivity, but it had to be secure. So it was a very big switch. I think I personally was really impressed not only with what we did, but what we saw the industry do to make that transition very safely and seamlessly. Well, let's, Eric, I'd love you to expand a little bit on that, you know, which pieces of that full solution is NTT offering and how do you and your partners, you know, help your customers through, you know, those rapid adoptions that they need. Yeah, so we're a full suite provider. So we're focused on digital operations, which is, you know, digitizing your back office from your workplace services to your hybrid infrastructure network, et cetera, all the way through bringing, you know, what we refer to as journey to the cloud. So how do we help you identify what applications and what data you need in the cloud? CX and EX, very big focuses for us. In fact, we take a lot of pride in while we do go to market and sell CX specifically, we consider CX part of everything we do. So if we're talking about workplace services or hybrid infrastructure or security, we want the employee experience to be solid and we want the employee experience to be consistent across all of those things. So we think that our customers should not expect to have different interfaces and different portals and different user experiences when they do work with us across infrastructure and application and cloud, et cetera. That's excellent, Eric, you know, we spent the last six months talking about how do we react to the pandemic? And now, at least, you know, here in the US, the children are back in school. If they're back though, it tends to be a hybrid model. And when we look at work, often we know we're gonna have this elongated kind of new abnormal, if you will. So yes, you might be back in the office some, but chances are you will spend some time remote and therefore it's not work from home or back to work. It's work from anywhere is what I need to be able to do. So how are you preparing? How are you helping your customers through that? Because, you know, it's one thing if it was just, you know, a switch that says I'm either here or there, but it's changing and it's very fluid. Yeah, and you're exactly right. It is work from anywhere, but there are some of our customers that don't have the luxury of work from anywhere. So when you think about manufacturing facilities and different hospitality companies, there are people that need to go into physical places. We do a lot in the healthcare space. We need doctors in the hospitals. So we've done a lot to help our customers figure out safe ways to return to work. Recently we've seen universities and as you mentioned, you know, high schools and elementary schools all going back with varying degrees of success, right? Some of them have failed and they've had to take a pause and figure out how they're going to restart. We've also seen professional sports leagues and now college sports leagues. And when we see them having issues, we see protocols adjusting and we see them looking for what can we do to make this safer, more effective and more successful for whether it's our sports team, our school or our business. So we've taken a very active approach in that. And we're leveraging technology and creating ID that starts with pre-arrival, registering in advance and opting in for things like tracking social distancing and tracking the use of masks, then using cameras in facilities to monitor it, to make sure people that are adhering to social distancing and adhering to wearing masks. And in the events that they aren't, we can send instant notifications to their phone. If we have repeat violators, we can prohibit them from coming back to the office so we can have very strict controls and adherence to whatever the protocols may be as the protocols change. And then the other thing that allows us to do is in the event someone would test positive with COVID, we will know exactly who they've been within six feet of without a mask over the past X number of days. All that is stored in the cloud for us to use for reference and use for audit purposes. So that gives us the ability to then use our app to direct all the people that the person that was positive was in contact with, let them go get tested, come back with a negative test before they return to the office. So basically what we've done is we've created all kinds of technology using automation and AI and facial recognition to bring more safety and more security to the workplace, whatever that workplace might be, whether again, school, university, manufacturing facility or a hotel. Really interesting topic. Tracking and tracing so critically important, we've seen in many countries around the world that's really helped them get their arms around and control that. We talked at the top of the interview about digital means, leveraging the data. And if I don't have the data, I can't respond to what's happening there. Here in the US, I haven't heard as much about the tracking and tracing. Is this a company by company thing? Do they have the expense all on them to do it? And of course it raises the concerns about, well, I'm concerned about my privacy and that balance between the public interest and my right to privacy. How do you help your customers sort through some of those issues? Well, privacy is definitely a big issue. And you notice that when I was explaining that, I said in pre-arrival, you opt in. So the way we've approached it is it is an opt in. So those that don't wanna opt in to that kind of tracking and tracing won't be those that will be allowed to come back to the office. And that goes back to your other point of work from anywhere. Many of those people can still successfully work from anywhere. But those that feel like they're more effective, more successful or have a need to be in an office or a need to be physically, again, in a manufacturing facility or a hotel, we have a way to do that safely. All right, well, Eric, one of the things I love about research events like yours is a little peek into what's coming on down the road. So any other things you'd like to share about some of the things that are exciting you, some things we should be looking at a little bit further down the road? Well, I think for us, as you know, we spend a significant amount of money each year on research and we really get excited about these opportunities and these showcases. So you'll see a lot of exciting information and a lot of what's coming in the future. A lot of it right now, obviously, because of the times, you'll see themes of safety and security, but you're also gonna see just a whole lot of really thought-provoking forward-thinking technology. Always take the opportunity, even when there are crisis is out there, there's the opportunity for innovation and acceleration of what's happening. Eric, thanks so much, a pleasure talking with you and definitely looking forward to hearing more from the event. Great, thank you, enjoyed it. And stay with us for more coverage from Upgrade 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks as always for watching theCUBE.