 Hey everyone, welcome to this event, Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so, my guests and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw in our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Ventura's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Ventura. Please welcome both of my guests. Primbala Subramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Ventura and Suresh Muthukuru, SVP Customer Success, Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Great to have you. Thank you, Lisa. First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you faced with respect to that. Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. When we were talking about a single cloud that's Azure, AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we're talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure, we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are not thinking about whether we should be cloud-native or cloud-agnostic. So I think sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, when you go to cloud, everything is simplified. Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. And the next one is pretty important is, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS, they might not know, an individual resource might not know what all the services. We see that's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these clouds. Well, it doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO, the CIO and the senior leadership level is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud will eat you up if you cannot manage it, if you don't have a good cloud governance process because every minute you're in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me, Prem, about some of the other challenges that you're saying within the customer landscape. So yeah, I agree, Lisa. These are not very specific to JCA but there are specific issues in JCA, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team has done some phenomenal steps around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case, I think it's slightly more exaggerated because every cloud provider, BADWS, JCP or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody including many of us, right? We learn every day nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all. Well, technically people can claim as a part of sales but in reality, all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you take, if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds, the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing in Suresh's team has been experiencing and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security, talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before, before we move away from this question is if you think about cloud operations as a concept evolving over the last few years and I've touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've grown into microservices, we've gone into all these serverless architectures, all the fancy things that we want that helps us go to market faster, be more competitive as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development, we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button, put some code in the repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations, we're still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, Suresh Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload. And how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automated. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner, thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multicloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Ventura, how is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers, isn't it? So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Ventura for that. Really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket, it talks about open blue platform. This is what JCI is building, is that we are building this open blue digital platform. And within that, my team along with Prem's or Hitachi, we have built what we call as pullers. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, for me to scale, I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent, but they also brought what he was talking about Hark. They have set up a lab and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this call, a concept called IPL, okay? What is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for JCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. How do you do that? So I think partners, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case, Hitachi is really working very well for us in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them, you started with support. Now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering, and then even in the engineering spaces. And they are my end-to-end partner right now. So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about, and sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Ram, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Hark, talk a little bit about what Hark is, and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Hark strategy. Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Hark is, Liz, again, I know we've been using the top. Hark stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Hark was, like I said, in the beginning of this segment, there is an evolution from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, serverless, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in your development methodology from waterfall to agile to DevOps, to lean agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme programming, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge, humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore. You buy it, buy a click of a button, you don't know the size of it, all you know is a, it's M1, M2, M3, whatever that name means. Just go provision it on the fly, go get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced, when you think about operations, people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Hark was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Hark is. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP. We work with best of the big part per ecosystem, and I'll talk to that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas, and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Hark facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened. And these are facilities from where we deliver Hark services for our customers as well, right? And then we're expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23, that's kind of the plan that we're thinking through. However, that's what Hark is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem, right? You got it. And it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit, but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role. And JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago. JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi, Ventura for my group in the SRE space and the cloud operations space. And they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners, we really know with Accenture, HCL, and even on the tooling side, we use Datadog and PortPorks. All these guys are major partners of course, because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go and pick the right partner who's going to really make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you're a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skill set is needed for this customer for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need. We rely on the partners. And partners bring the right skill set. They can scale. I can tell Prane tomorrow, hey, I need two parts by next week. And I can guarantee he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer in today's day and age to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me, moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners, they make you innovate whether they know it or not, but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, hey, tell me why you are doing this? Can I review your architecture? You know, and then they will try to really say, I don't think this is going to work because they work with so many different clients, not JCI. They bring all that expertise and that's what I look for them, you know, just not, you know, do a TNM job for me. I ask you to do this. They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi Ventura is definitely one of the good partner from that sense, because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. It sounds like a flywheel of innovation. I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here. Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Ventura's perspective? So before I get to that question, these are the partners that we work with are slightly different from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners, there are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose, especially in the hog space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused, that are really, really nimble and can change for our customer's need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for hog, my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case, because we've got Suresh and GCI on, we are able to operate dire environment with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they are expecting from us. And whatever I don't have, I need to get from my partner so that I bring the solution to Suresh as opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of the ratio. And that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do? From, and we've always done this. So we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with XYZ, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking, either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you and we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps, we're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Etachi, the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud, I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh, if I'm putting my Suresh's app. And it's not easy at all, it's so confusing. That's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers. And we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification, not just making one. That makes perfect sense there. There really is a very strong symbiosis. It sounds like in the partner ecosystem and there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth. It sounds like as well, which is really to your point, it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you, which is the same one. If I'm a partner, what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine cloud ops at my company? I'll keep it simple. I mean, we've touched upon in multiple facets in this interview about that. The three things, first and foremost, reliability. In today's day and age, my products has to be reliable, available, and make sure that the customer's happy with what they're dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I have to keep my costs low. So these three is where what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Ventura and JCI. What are you doing together? We'll have to talk to you again to see where things go, but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Thanks, Lisa. Thanks for having us. My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching.