 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Well, we are nearly two days strong into our coverage here of AWS re-invent. You can look behind us here on the set. This show for still jam-packed, still a lot of activity, as 40,000 plus have made the way to Las Vegas for this year's show. Along with Justin Moran, I'm John Walls. We're joined now by Josh Gulesh, who is the CEO of T-Max Off, and Shri Akula, who is the CIO of Health Plan Services. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Glad to have you. Thank you for having us. Yeah. Let's just share the story at home a little bit about T-Max Off and Health Plan, what your core functions are, and then we'll get to why you're here. Sure, great question. So T-Max Off, one of the key things that we're doing right now is helping companies take their old legacy mainframe applications and moving them into the future, running them on the cloud, enabling that digital transformation of taking the old integrated in with the new. And you're one of those companies, I assume, Shri. Yes, we are one of those companies and we are a technology solutions company in the healthcare, and we are the market leaders in providing the platform for the alcohol business, and then we have a group and other healthcare solutions as well. All right, so you got to get rid of the old at some point. You got to move over to the new at some point. You can't do it all at once. How do you start making those decisions about what legacy, what are we moving? What aren't we, what are we going to redo? I assume a lot of it's budget, but there got to be other implications and other considerations as well. Yeah, and some of these systems have all over the last two decades, especially on healthcare, and I think it's fair to say healthcare has been lagging in adapting the cloud technology, whether it be PII or PHI or HIPAA regulations, but now starting to embrace cloud more, and that opens up the opportunity for us to take investments which works them and move to the cloud so that we can get agility into our systems and then get some efficiency so that we can develop the modern technologies and get more to our customers and members. That's often a challenge about how you choose which ones to do at what time, because I mean, IT projects don't have a great track record of being completed successfully, so when you decide to move something to cloud, you are taking on a bit of risk there, so you need to be able to manage that sort of risk reward. How do you consider which projects you should be running so that I can get a bit of short-term gain now but also to make those more strategic decisions about, well, we actually wanted to have this happen over a longer period of time and we're willing to take a little bit more, how do you balance that risk reward ratio? I think there's multiple lenses we apply to get that and A, first you need the right technology to get out of the mainframe and then you need the right partner, not just the technology, but to understand the nuances of software you want over decades to get to that. And also, we want to, the change, if the change is less, is working, don't fix something is not broken, but still bring the agility and then leverage the cloud, what cloud has to offer. I think that's where T-Max comes into picture where helps us from a technology and there's a partner to guide us through this journey, identify the path, you can't do some isolation. You've got to have the right technology and the right partner to help us to get to a better place. Yeah, and Josh, with the customers who are running through this, there's plenty of customers out there, I'm sure who are considering this and are struggling with this themselves, what are some of the behaviors you see from people who do this well? So when you've seen people who are succeeding at this transformation journey, what are some of the key things that you look at and say, these are the markers of someone who really understands how to do this well? Sure, that's a great question. So everybody wants to do this. Nobody really wants to stay in the past. The people that do it successfully are the people that have a change agent mentality that understand, if I ignore the problem, my business, not just my IT, but my business is going to suffer. And the IT leaders and the CIOs that can see that vision are the ones that enable the business to move forward and give them a competitive differentiator. So that's us is what we really see as the differentiator for who's successful faster versus who isn't. I see. Justin was talking about the long view, right? And having a firm strategy and taking a much deeper perspective. But how do you do that when you know that whatever chart of course that you're going to take is going to change because there's going to be a new technology, there's going to be a wrinkle, it's going to come along and it's going to upset the Apple cart. And it might happen in six months. Amazon will announce something this afternoon. Yeah, so how do you have that long view strategy, both of you, when you know that whatever road we're going on right now, a year from now, it's probably not going to look like this. Yeah, I'll take a stab at it probably Josh has looking at other customers may have more insights into it. The way at least I see is, what is the member experience is the key right now. You know, the digital journey is all revolving around member experience. We take any vertical, client facing, client touching is changing, evolving much faster. But your core systems don't need to change that faster. So if you take the core systems and move to, you know, which are legacy, move to your modern and then embedded with, you know, maybe mobile, native, you know, multi-omni-channel digital and they're probably don't want to modernize it. You know, the most systems they don't even stay there anyway. So take something core, data changes low, move them to cloud and monetize and then get the most ROI of the investment you make. That is, that's what we are looking at it. Yeah, I think we see the same thing with most of our customers. So when they look at, well, how do I get off the mainframe? These things have been around 20, 30, 40 years. If it was easy, they would have done it. It's not, it's a very closed, difficult to disrupt system. And when they think about, well, we'll rewrite our application or we'll do something else. That's a five to 10 year journey on average. So then your disruption, well, the new thing comes out in a year, it impacts that project for them and it makes it very difficult. So we've helped them move off six to 12 months on average. So now you can more rapidly solve your initial pain and then look at your longer-term journey in a way that allows you to do it all at once. Right. And over time. Right. I think being able to react to what's coming new, as you said, John, but also have that longer-term vision, that's a tricky thing to be able to do, but it is so important to be able to balance that short-term benefits that then actually support the longer-term vision. That's part of it. So get the TCO under control now and then that gives us a flexibility to rewrite, which is going to be more forward-looking and not necessarily rewriting the same world in a new way as well. And it builds credibility with the rest of the business and with customers as well. If you were to go and try something like this, that actually disrupts the business and disrupts customers, then they're probably not going to trust you when you try to do this again. But if you've got a few wins onto the board, then they're going to trust you with a slightly bigger project and you can actually get further with it, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And I think what we've seen and we're working with Health Plan Services and all of our customers in the same way is they can free up cash from their operational spend in IT very quickly, that they can then invest into innovation. And everything that you see here at the show, they can now go do those things where before most of their money is stuck in operating, just keeping the lights on, keeping the lights on on something 40 years old. Now you can invest in innovation without disrupting the customer. The experience is the same. Performance is the same. All of those things are the same, but they get that value of we can make it new as well. Yeah, I know there's plenty of CFOs who'd be very happy to hear that because you want me to invest how much of new money? It's like, oh no, no, we found plenty of money. It was just sort of lying over here we were setting it on fire for some reason. Let's not do that. Yeah, and it's an easy conversation as a CIO getting into CEO say, hey, I'm going to take the cost out, invest back into the product. That's an easy conversation to have. Josh talks about this, I guess, multifaceted process that you're going to go through, right? How do you decide on the customer side, how do you prioritize, particularly in your space in healthcare, what's going to go first, what's going to go second, and then what can we put off long enough that there's probably going to be something else coming that we can adopt a different approach? So, I mean, who are your stakeholders? Who are the answer to? How do you come up with that? You know, multiple ways to look at it, especially in our domain, at least the technology team access to offer, they're taking up most of the risk for us because it's a lot of lift and shift and the technology wall so much, they're minimizing the risk and the timeline's also shrinking because the longer it takes, by the time you realize the ROI and the projects move on, the changes, I think that's where the technology maturity coming in is really helping us a lot. And again, we look at more member experience, we do ground up building, take the core assets, do lift and shift and shrink the time that, you know, again, Josh, if there is one thing I look is if the timeline could further shrink. I know it used to be two years, 18 months to 24 months, coming to nine months to 12 months. I think if, I would like to see that more and more happen, maybe six to nine months, I think that gives us more leverage and more confidence to customers. The longer the projects take, the failure rate goes up higher and higher. Right, right, yes. Well, for everybody, we all want it now. Yeah, I want it now. All right, so Josh, go deliver. Would you please? That's the goal. You've got the mission. No, thank you for the time. We appreciate it. Wish you both success down the road. Hey, thank you very much. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. We're back with more. We're live at AWS re-invent in Las Vegas, Nevada.