 Welcome to theCube's continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022. I'm Dave Nicholson and I am thrilled to be joined by Ramkumar Pandurangan. He is Practice Leader of the Cloud Advisory and Consulting Organization at Kindral. Ram, welcome. Thanks for having me, David. It's a pleasure. First time on theCube, I believe. Yes, it is. Little excited and anxious as well. Fantastic. Well, when we're done, you'll be a Cube alumni, which is actually a very distinguished badge of honor to have. So let's get started. Tell me about Kindral. I'm particularly interested in a bit of the history. How did Kindral come about? What do you do now? I'm sorry. Before we talk about who we are and what we do, let me talk about Kindral's philosophy, right, basically. So people don't buy technology. People buy outcomes. And with this explosive growth in the market, as well as the complexity in which the technology is involved, it's very challenging for everybody to find the right partner as well as who to go to deliver it for them. And we do understand that technology is supposed to help drive your business capabilities, but not hinder. So Kindral's primary philosophy is to how we can help enable our clients get the business capabilities using technology. So having said that, we had a spinoff from IBM in 2021. And we have a strong base of 90,000 skilled professionals across 100 countries. And we have almost certified of the 100 Fortune 100 companies. And we almost catered half of the Fortune 500 companies just to give you a background. And we have people across applications, data, AI, network edge, security, and resiliency across the globe, but of course, cloud. So do you work with partners from a cloud perspective? What does that look like? We have a whole broad ecosystem of partners. And anywhere from all the hyperscalers to all the large product companies. And we understand that with a combined force of our years of experience, helping our clients to be successful, partnering with our partners to help drive the capabilities. And, you know, let's talk about AWS. Everybody knows that AWS has been a pioneer in the public cloud coming up with a whole catalog of services, which is there available for anybody. And I would like to call them as construction materials. So you could take these services, assemble them, and it could be a simple house, or it could be as big as a very complex mob kind of an environment. So this is where we partner with AWS and bring our years of experience and help our clients go through the journey and successfully deliver in whatever the complexity that what they have their existing environments. So just an example of how we partner with our partners. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. In fact, in fact, I heard someone once describe AWS as being like Home Depot in the sense that they offer all of the bits and bytes. Of course, the AWS folks were like, what? No, we're nothing like Home Depot. It's like, well, it kind of are because it really is important for an organization like Kindrel to be there, to bridge the divide between the tools and the outcomes, as you mentioned. Well, what are some of the customers or kinds of customers that you work with in this arena? Yeah, so just to double click on what I said about our 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies, we currently manage the top five airlines of all airlines. We probably manage four out of five largest retailers and 49% of the mobile connections are supported by the customers. And 61% or roughly around 60% of the top 50 banks assets are managed by ourselves. So we have a huge portfolio across the financial services, public sector, communications and distribution market across the globe. So is it fair to say that each of these customers is somewhere along the digital transformation timeline? Are they all thinking in terms of transforming digitally what that means, whether it's application modernization, of course, movement to cloud is part of that? Does that sound like the profile of a lot of your customers? Exactly. So each of them are in a various, what I call in as in the paradigm of everybody are trying to modernize. Modernization is the way to go. Even though in the last three years, we saw that the physical slowdown of the world, the digital transformation took an explosive growth. So everybody realized that not doing the business in a traditional way is going to get to where they want to go. And traditionally, people are cutting costs or trying to trim down and trying to see how they can do incremental modernization. And then they realize exactly in the last three years that they need to holistically look at how they need to be modernizing it. And that is where either it's a data center driven modernization or it's an application-centric modernization, which is within the transformation journey, or in general, people are holistically looking at how they can improve their overall presence in the digital world. So do you think that the pandemic accelerated that? Absolutely. I would say that everybody started realizing how critical and the businesses who were already a leg up in that world were quickly able to grab that opportunity and they were able to run with that. And everybody is trying to catch up on that journey. And a lot of people who started that journey have realized that if they do not have a proper strategy to start off with, they get stuck somewhere. And that is where we can go and help them wherever we are. Talk to me about some of the challenges that you see out in the field working with actual organizations that are seeking to transform to go through this digital transformation. What are some of the things that might surprise someone looking in from the outside? Again, if you go back to the basics, the digital transformation world, it's not just the technology which is driving everything. People who have not clearly mapped their business objectives to the technology drivers or the imperatives are the ones which are feeling the pinch that they have some technology-driven transformation. But once it is done, they don't see that it's translating back to a business objective which they are trying to accomplish. That's one of the larger things which I see. So we are trying to go back and help clients to bridge that gap to make sure that first their strategy is in place and the strategy is holistically looked at. That's one part of it. The second larger challenge which I'm seeing a lot of people is they are able to quickly grapple around the technology explosion and able to start the journey. But the process and the people associated, the transformation regarding those two are a lot more associated with the culture and everything else. So it's a combination of technical resources with not able to quickly adapt the operating model which is a newer operating model required for the digital transformation or the challenges which is an ongoing. None of this is a news to anybody, but practically when I walk into a company, those are the areas which I continue to see where people are struggling. So kindrel isn't solely involved with the virtual movement of workloads from one place to another. You actually work with customers to make those kinds of organizational changes and operational environment changes that need to take place. Is that right? Absolutely. So as I told you, we have a whole suite of clients whom we have been supporting for decades. So we have one set of those clients who have trusted us for years. And then we have other set of clients who we have providing some kind of services. And now we have a newer clients. So between all of them, they're starting to realize that we have the end to end capabilities. The differentiator is we can start from building a business case for somebody and then strategizing it, creating a roadmap, and then actually doing the design, implemented, and help them to migrate it. And once the migration is done, continue to help optimizing it, and then not only stopping them, but the key thing where everybody are falling behind is to how do you operate, manage it once you start migrating it. So this is where Kindrel is sitting in a very sweet spot because we already are managing most of our clients where we have the client base. We are operating theirs either holistically or some portions of it. And now when they are trying to go into the journey, we are very well suited because we already understand their environment. And while they are transforming into the cloud space, we are also able to bridge that gap by managing their existing and to manage to the cloud. So we can end to end. And talking about true end to end, we're talking to you from AWS Summit New York 2022, of course, so the focus is AWS. But Kindrel works with other hyperscale cloud partners as well. So I mean, you are primarily an advocate for the customer. Is that a fair? That's what they call in the business a softball question. Because if you answer no, we're not primarily involved in the business of advocating for our customers. We should just stop this conversation right now. But seriously, the point is, you are truly an objective consultant in this game. Absolutely. Thank you for asking that because we are a vendor and neutral service provider. So we go and when we walk into the client, we like to hear from the client what their challenges are, right? Where are they trying to be? If they already started the journey where they are, they could be anywhere from an on premises trying to just modernize some aspects of their operational or from the application side, or they should, they could be anywhere in the hybrid cloud. And most of them are hybrid multicloud. So it's not just AWS. It could be Azure, GCP, OCI, in order to our IBM cloud doesn't matter. We go and meet the client there. If they ask us for a point of view, we will provide them once we understand what their objectives and the technology workloads they are having and how they want to do it. Based on that, we can. But if they already started the journey, we are more than happy to partner with them on any of the cloud journeys. And most of them are in the hybrid multicloud, as I said. So we are very well suited to help them. And as I said, we are not a completely an agnostic service provider. Well, if I am an existing business that's seeking to go through digital transformation, I would recognize that there is a lot of power in this idea that you have a history in on-premises IT going back to the sort of DNA from IBM global services. And the reason why I think that's important is because anyone can stand up a new service with nothing existing in one of the hyperscale clouds. It's a whole different proposition when you have decades of legacy infrastructure and processes that need to be massaged and moved over. I wonder, do you, does Kindrel get a lot of mileage out of that or in terms of being able to say, hey, we understand your existing environment because we've been working in this world for decades? Or is the message more, hey, we're super cool cloud kids too? How do you come down on that? Maybe that's a little bit of inside info. No, the reality on the ground basically, not everybody can move all the workloads to cloud. And not all workloads are so good to go to cloud as well. So it is us who need to make sure that we can help our clients make the right choices by doing a rationalization of their workloads and make sure that we understand their business, their end clients, whom they are servicing, their capabilities. And then based on that, we can help them to do both, whether it's just on-premise modernization or help them to take them in a hybrid cloud mode. So the answer is both. Even though we currently manage their environment, doesn't mean that we need to continue to support, but we are moving up the stack to help them to support them in their hybrid cloud journey as well. And not only that, this gives us and capability or an ability to help them in a much more holistic way by looking at their phenops. That's a huge area where people are trying to go into the cloud, or they already started to go into the cloud, but how do they optimize their environment? These are the areas where, and then if you want to modernize some of their operating model, how do we deploy the SRE or the DevSecOps or the DevOps? So we kind of look up all those aspects as people are trying to move into the cloud as well. So we can help them both on-premises, or if they want to modernize much more, we can do it in the hybrid cloud as well. I don't know whether to fully answer your question. Absolutely it does. In fact, Ram, what you and Kindrel are doing is what we at the Cube refer to as having adult conversations about cloud with the clients that you serve. With that, it looks like we're at the end of our time together. I really appreciate the chance to hear about what you're doing and to hear all about Kindrel. From me, Dave Nicholson at the Cube, I'd like to say stay tuned for a continuing coverage of AWS Summit New York 2022 and always stay tuned to the Cube.