 Welcome to theCUBE live coverage from Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. This is Google Next 23. I'm here with my co-host, Rob Streche, and we've got two wonderful guests, Gaga Nreen and Blair Stewart from Wipro, and they're going to tell us a bit about the Wipro Google Cloud Alliance. First, for those that may not be familiar with Wipro's services, tell us a little bit about the business and how that works with Google. Absolutely, thanks, Rob. So obviously, you know, Google, Wipro is a professional services company, and we've been down the block for the last 30 or so years, you know, making a lot of advances in software services. Of late, you know, we've gone into this full stride cloud growth, which is all about cloud services provider, and Google Business Unit that I lead is sort of the newest kid on the block, and over the last, I would say, couple of years, it has quadrupled in our revenue, in our traction, you know, with customer adoption. At present, you know, we have close to 50 plus client engagements that we're doing in the Business Unit. We've got over 5,000 people certified. We've got tons of specializations, you know, over 100 specializations. We just won the partner of the year award yesterday from Google. Congratulations. You know, and having been at Google prior to my Wipro stint, you know, I kind of feel really good that, you know, they're starting to embrace the Googliness and the Google culture, and that's being sort of reflected as part of my organization as well. So in terms of growth, you know, I would say we are now at the top six GSI's that support Google in terms of, you know, delivery, in terms of adoption, new areas like innovation, like Generative AI, where we were one of the launch partners, and we signed a trusted tester agreement that Google socialized three months ago, and we were the early adopters there as well. Yeah, and I think it's interesting that you have a Business Unit dedicated to Google. It would seem like, again, you're making investments in that. It has to be significant. It definitely is, and I would say, Wipro's investment into full stride cloud is the catalyst of the birth of the Google Business Unit, because three years ago, it did not exist, but, you know, with our CEO theory del party going very big on the cloud growth, and thinking about the next five to 10 billion coming from cloud and AI, that's really what helped us to kind of achieve, and a lot of us folks, you know, Blair and me and others, we're all new. We've all sort of been here just a year or so, you know, so we've come from different companies and bringing our experience from the ecosystem to launch the Business Unit, and then eventually go into the areas like AI, you know, most recently we invested a billion dollars, and we, in an initiative on AI, we call it AI 360, and the whole idea over there is to bring the best of, you know, some of our advances in AI that have been going on over the last 10 years within the workforce of Wipro, and eventually reaching our clients. And as an output of that, we now have 250,000 employees at Wipro that are AI centric, that are leveraging AI processes, and 50,000 of them are trained on gen AI. And out of those 50,000, if you go towards the Google Business Unit, we have 600 level three certified gen AI practitioners as part of the business unit, all across the globe. So yes. Blair, maybe you can talk a little bit about the, what's special about Google Cloud here with respect to AI, and how your clients are perceiving, you know, the Wipro and Google working together. So along with the investment in AI 360 and sort of bringing that forward, the real value we have is that we've been in this game for the last 10 years doing AI work and activity, actually from a cloud sort of migration perspective and part of what we actually won the wonderful award this year. Our clients are looking us now to actually bring that value forward and actually drive the value-based conversations for the migrations and modernizations, the rollouts of the gen AI use cases, et cetera. And I think you were talking about, there were some customers in certain industries that were really experiencing how they can leverage this and really you're helping them early on with that. 100% and we're early partners in the ramp program that Google are doing for that rapid migration. So unsticking the stuck cloud migrations, the new way of moving forward, thinking around monetizing data as the way of actually helping self-fund that migration program and taking it through. We've been very fortunate that Google has leaned in with us and actually bought their cloud value team and sort of customer value team and to help us drive that case for change, that case for value and take it forward from there. Where do you see some of the adoption challenges? Maybe pitfalls, friction, headwinds from your clients and how do you help them pass that in terms of adopting AI and... A great question. I would say with all the elements of fear of missing out on the gen AI wave that's been ongoing in the last year or so. And I would also say Google was a little late to the party in the sense, when I was working at Google, they were very impressive with the Transformer models, large language models back in 2016, 17. But the go-to-market side was still not there. And it was all inherent within the brain team. So now, with that advent of launching BARD and some of the frameworks back in February where Google's a little late, but then they signed GSIs like Wipro, what we are capitalizing is the use cases. Okay, you guys give us the framework. Your framework is one of the most cutting edge on the planet. But how do we apply that to let's say call center optimization? How do we make sure there's a cost reduction impact that applies to a particular customer? And we've actually cranked a few deals with Google together. It's sort of completely joint place, partnering with them and customers starting to see that value. In the same sense, Google launched the Kodi APIs. Now here we are talking about DevOps optimization that you're doing in leveraging the language models within the stack. Now again, clients don't even know what it means. What it means is you're actually going down within the stack, building your Python code, optimizing your Terraform scripts and making sure your migration ready. Things like that that are very simple to achieve that took like hours and sometimes months to do that for developers, right? But there's an interesting part there as well about what's net new? What's driving a different change in the actual market here? The data comment I made before was a healthcare client that's actually looking at that different way of doing things, driving it forward. Some of the advances in what Google has achieved over the last couple of years have actually helped us move and to save for an automotive client. Modernization around PCF. The tooling that's there, what we've created with our cloud studio, the abilities that we've brought on as part of that growth and the capability ourselves, that's giving us a bit of a paradigm change and a different conversation with the clients we've got. Yeah, what's the driver there? Is it efficiency? Is it new lines of revenue? Is it adoption of innovation and better productivity? End of life for some things or I don't want to be pacing for that extra piece of licensing, apologies. Or it is the cost and efficiency play. That's a risk playing and it's absolutely sort of enlabeling some form of cash flow or capability to do the new GNI stuff. Yeah, and I think you hit on a good point there which is risk and security and how do you deal with those concerns when you're, because that's all the, we've been asking everybody from the Google side, hey, how do you handle security? How do you keep it separate? How do you keep the models from having data leakage? If I may take this on the way through, for a financial services client, one of the things we're actually doing with them is we're actually coming in and saying, right, to do what you want to do, you need to make sure that data foundation is secure. The governance around that is actually secure. The responsible AI component on the way through. So we're helping clients actually go back and reset that for the models they need to tow forward. I think one more thing to add to Blair's point is, Google's obviously taken the lead in responsible AI. That's embedded within the stack. They put a lot of guardrails, checks and balances and you take it down to your ITGC controls, you know, within the stack. And that's important because when a customer gets audited, you need to have those, you know, and I've been in the big four worlds, so I kind of understand the control side of the pond really good. I would say they have literally gone deep into areas like sovereign cloud, where they are offering a cloud very distinct to a customer. The security is embedded within the landscape. Data cannot leak out. They don't care. It's all customers' private data. And then they have those APIs enabled within the stack. So when you think about the stack, you've got something known as model garden, which has out of the box model and some of those achieve responsible AI embedment. And then you obviously can talk to the customer's models because those models are all open source and it's a very open stack. And that's always been Google's policy is, make the stack open, be a little different than the other CSPs and let partners and ISVs kind of work on top of that. And eventually helps them achieve more consumption. As well. So the advances with mandium, with Chronocore, with the way that we've actually pulled that into our DevSecOps for the abilities that we've been doing for the decades of outsourcing that we've got experience of bringing on board. We're seeing a new change in that. That means that we're actually putting some good value based sort of services for things that people don't tend to think about. They just want to get in there and get the data going and get it moving. Now there's a broad spectrum of technologies that Wipro is working on. No 5G is near and dear to your hearts. There's relation there to the cloud, certainly to Edge. Certainly AI plays now. With models and inferences at the Edge. Bring that all together for us. So we've actually recently launched a 5G innovation center in Austin. Which we've been working on through the year. The best town. The best town. And part of what's driving that is the data story. So we've had the fortune of actually partnering with some of our telco clients and actually building out the broader story around what Google can offer in the space and what we can actually help in as the wrapped around services too. It is a data play. It is the, you know, there's a lot of use cases that are driving there forward. And it's another sort of expansion of what that new platform is or the new way of the broader cloud capability is that's coming to market. It's a data play. You're speaking Rob's love language. I don't know how I'm gonna dig into that. I was going to say that it is about the data and the scalability, where the data lives, how do I keep it secure. How are you helping your customers through that whole process? Because let's, I mean, be honest, not everything is in Google all the time. I can elaborate quite a lot of that. So, you know, a couple of things on the data side. So when you think of a GCP cloud provider, right, it's very different than the other two because they lead with data. They lead with a transformation story around data. And that's always been Google's motto. You know, and many times it's a combination of on-premise, other CSPs, other SaaS companies because companies like Databricks, No Flakes, all these, you know. And this is where I compliment Google, especially Kevony Sperani, who runs the corporate channels. The strategy that he has in opening up the stack with all the partners. So you can actually run a GCP engagement with a Databricks. I've done this at a client with a topology we laid out with a data lake sitting on Databricks, which was a big lake. Then you had BigQuery to do a lot of the BI work. And then you obviously had data coming from different source systems embedded to both of them streaming into BigQuery. Right, so this kind of model is very easy to achieve. Now to your point about privacy and security, that's always a big play, you know. And again, Google has a lot of inherent capabilities, you know, and now with Mandiant, they're starting to make sure there's a threat wear and all the ports are properly cyber secured and whatnot, which was not there like three years ago. And they're constantly advancing that and making sure customers are very secure. So a combination of security, data, and then business intelligence, you know, which is now part of Looker within the stack. And even there, you could have a Tableau running on top of BigQuery. You could have business objects or SAP doing that. The stack is very open. But it makes our life as consultants much easier to build a topology for a customer because Google's giving us all the tools to do that. I just been surprised that they hadn't talked much about that part of it today. It's almost like they're assuming. It's the GNI way. Yeah, I know, it's the GNI AI. But you got to talk about the nuts and bolts, which is why we're here now. Yes, 100%. I think one of the things that gives us the one Wipro perspective of what we can do, we've been in that conversation around security. We've been in that data conversation and it may have been Google related, but with all of the advances we've done, with all the leaning in we're doing with them to actually kind of bring to market the likes of the manual expectations, the managed services we want to build around that, we wrapped that into the 5G conversation as well with our network provider friends and build out something that is actually a cross Wipro, cross us and our partners offering. But I can't reinforce more that secure data foundation if you haven't done that, that's one thing you absolutely have to do. Well, I think that's super interesting. Tell me a little bit about your approach. I'm assuming there's probably a proactive aspect of designing security, shifting left, doing that early and often, but also responsive, right? The threat's never in. Yeah. So I think the best way we go to market is the way we are architected at Wipro. It's a very good model. We've got a cloud consulting which talks more about strategy, talks more about going to customers, looking at a landscape, doing assessments, and we bring together an arsenal of solutions that are embedded within a product that we launch called Cloud Studio. It's very centric to Wipro. It's got all the security checks and balances within there. You can scan a customer's landscape. You can have a good depiction of what threat wear and how secure it is, customized by the cloud provider. And that is something we can spin out very easily with a few weeks assessment or maybe a workshop to kick off things. And our client has a good sense about how secure the landscape is. Now we get into designing workloads that we can optimize and start to migrate. And that's again, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. As Blair said, so like clouds, we are doing the RAM program. The tool already does a lot of this for you. What we need to do is educate our customers on how it actually works. And we've spent like six years in evolving this whole product. Then it comes to okay, now you kind of have that sense, what is the Phenops view? What is the consumption view? How much cost you are looking at, right? And then eventually in the last three or six months we've added Genai wrappers to it. So now it's a company, okay fine. Can we use leverage based in a call center model? Can we actually do prompt design, prompt engineering on top of this tool? And again, Google's leaning on us because they don't have the tools to do it. They're giving us a framework and saying, okay, embed that with cloud studio, with Wipro's cloud studio and that gives you the Wipro differentiation. And then the next six months or so you will see a lot about Wipro kind of taking the lead especially with a billion dollar investment. And a lot of that is sort of targeted towards cloud providers and Google is sort of taking the lead in that right. And that's where we are in. I think the partnership with Google as well, we've worked closely with their team to develop effectively packs that can be like reference architectures that come out. So for the financial services plan I was talking about where they have a sort of a structure that needs repairing, we have reference architectures, we have the cloud studio sort of capability to come back in there and rapidly go, here's a gap you can plug. Have that agreement that it's actually something that means something to the CISO as well. Maybe I might put a duet AI into that to have some kind of conversation there. But we can do that directly. And one more thing to add to Blair's point, you know now in the last year or so there's a lot of new faces, you know you'll see. We all came from the outside world where we are actually talking to the CFOs, the CISOs, you know we've traditionally been targeting the CIO in Wipro, right? But now it's okay getting towards the CFO, getting towards the CEO, getting them to understand the transformation impact when it comes to building out a ESG story. And what's the genia and the embedment over there when you're building out your environment reports, you know you have different kind of landscape, different kind of rules, different contracts, you know around things, how do you embed all of that in just that, within the APIs and spin out some offerings. We don't go to a client with an empty slate. We give them a solutions catalog, catalog of use cases to choose from so they can start getting into their design thinking mode. And then get them going. These are, this is the way genia, this is the way traditional AI works, here's the differences, you know, things like that. And this is all a new way of thinking that was probably not there a couple of years ago, you know, and you'll see more of this. So thank you. Switching gears just for a second for our last question. I think we understand Wipro is a very much mission driven company and culture. I think you wanted to tell us a little bit about, you know how Wipro fits into the greater global community. Absolutely, it's a topic very near and dear to me and one of the reasons what drew me to Wipro last year was, you know we have something known as the Aziz Premji Foundation, who was a founder of Wipro and it's all about, you know, giving back to the community. And at present, you know, over 66% of a profitability goes into a foundation that gives back to the community in areas like poverty stricken areas, like a school, in a remote area of India. And this is very near and dear to Aziz Premji and even to our CEO and our chairman at Wipro. Because you know, it's all about, okay, everybody makes money, but how do you kind of make an impact? You know, and then it's all about getting philanthropy going and making sure people really get a sense of, you know, the impact that Wipro is making to the society and then eventually also making sure that we have a net zero story by 2040. And that's- So we love ESG. We actually have it as- Every day. I was going to say that we could do an entire topic on that and go through your scope one, two, and three, but that would take an entire hour probably. But I would love that in another time to go into that to the ESG portion of it. Absolutely. I mean, that's just fascinating and I'm sure you get tremendous response from your clients and customers. We do, and a lot of credit goes to our founders, you know, and the board members and folks that have, you know, the principles that Wipro has stood for in the last 30 years, you know, when I was a kid growing up in India, everybody knew Wipro, you know, but the way Wipro has been growing now, especially in cloud, AI, some of the new areas, it's an exciting time to be here. An exciting time in the next three to five years, you will see our growth as we propel momentum. Absolutely amazing. All right, with that, this has been theCUBE live coverage at Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google Cloud 23. On behalf of myself, Dustin Kirkland, Rob Streche, our other hosts, John Furrier and Lisa Martin, stay tuned. We've got another half day of interviews coming up. Thanks for having us.