 Hello and welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson and we're running an incredible event this year, one of the most important technology events. It's a hybrid event with two live stages, two sets here in Las Vegas, two studios. We've interviewed more than 100 guests and two distinguished guests that I have here from Infosys today have joined us. Thank you very much. Mr. Anant Adya, who's the executive vice president of Infosys is Cobalt and we'll talk about what that is exactly in a moment. Along with David Wilson, I'm sorry, senior vice president and head of global alliances in the partner ecosystem for Infosys. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. So let's cut right to the chase, Cobalt. And when you tell your family that you're executive vice president of Cobalt, do they just smile and immediately nod like they know what it is? Absolutely. In fact, it is so exciting for us what we did at Infosys just to define Cobalt in one sentence. It is a set of services, solutions and products that we are bringing together to sort of accelerate our customer's journey or what we call as the customer's digital journey. So instead of everybody talking about cloud in a different way with different narratives, different value proposition, we at Infosys, and by the way, we were the first ones in the world to combine all of this under one brand called Cobalt. So that's essentially what Cobalt is. So anything and everything that we do in cloud, it's all under this brand called Cobalt and that's Infosys Cobalt. So does Infosys Cobalt include a combination of bespoke, solutioneering for people as well as packaged standardized things? How do you strike a balance? Because you can't have a one size fits all. What does that look like? How do you segregate those things? Yes, great question. So essentially what we have done with Cobalt is we look at Cobalt in two ways. One is there are customers who want solutions to solve technology problems. It could be getting out of data centers. It could be migrating workloads to cloud. It could be analytics on cloud, ERP on cloud. There is mainframe modernization and getting out of mainframes. And at the same time there are industry verticals like financial services, retail, manufacturing and of course life sciences and many more who want to understand what are the business solutions and what are the solutions that we have for solving their business problems. So essentially Cobalt is a bespoke solutions. It has products, it has platforms and we have brought all of this together and we take it to our customers. So essentially these are industry blow prints. These are reference architectures. So we have 250 industry blow prints and around 25,000 assets that we can actually take to our customers to help their digital journey. So David, I imagine that key to the success of Cobalt is the idea of partnerships. Talk about the alliances that you're involved with. Specifically the way that Cobalt interacts with the AWS universe. Absolutely, so as we designed our Cobalt strategy the partners were a major component of this. They contribute to it, they're part of the design and ultimately when we go to the clients with these solutions, these assets, our partners components are baked right into the solution. In the case of AWS we've been so successful with it that we were recognized this week as their industry solutions partner of the year. Congratulations. Yeah, so Danott was joking we should bring our trophy and put it in between us here. You could have, you could have. Infosys has invested heavily in developing the partner ecosystem. Gone are the days where our clients are putting on an RFP and purchasing individual piece parts and then searching out an SI. They're looking for business outcomes and Infosys along with our Cobalt strategy is able to work with partners like AWS and go there and sell an outcome and accelerate the whole transformation. You mentioned RFPs. What is your, what is your go-to-market strategy look like in terms of engaging with those end user clients? Is it in partnership with AWS? Is it led by Infosys bringing in AWS where appropriate? Some mix of the two, what does that look like in this world of cooperation and co-opetition that we're in? So it's actually a mix of two. So essentially the way we go to market is there are solutions that Infosys has built on AWS that we will take to our customers. There are solutions that we have built which are cloud-neutral and those are some things that we take to the customers. And the third one which is very important is co-creating solutions for our customers along with AWS. So our go-to market is a combination of all of them and that's what makes it exciting for us. So Anant is running Cobalt. You're responsible for alliances. You guys are probably in contact a lot with one another. All of these crazy new things are announced at AWS. I'm sure you get a little bit of a preview of it. It's not a complete surprise when you arrive, but you've got to be screaming for teams and solutions to leverage some of the cool stuff within Cobalt. How does that conversation go? Yeah, so David and I work very closely. In fact, the way we do things is our go-to market cannot be complete without partners. So similarly, my strategy and our strategy on Cobalt cannot be complete without David. So we actually work together to identify. In fact, we have been visiting a lot of booths. We got a lot of great ideas. We want to see how we can bring them into the Cobalt framework and bundle some of that as part of our solutions. So we keep looking at those. We look at the announcements that were made and we'll sort of identify many more sales motions that begin to date to the market. So David, talk about some of the things you've seen here at ReInvent this week that are specifically relevant for Cobalt and Infosys customers. Well, one of some of the most exciting discussions we've been having is with not only AWS themselves about the announcements and the way in which we can leverage them and go to market, but AWS has built it at their own partner ecosystem that we then interact with. So we've had some exciting conversations with AWS's ISV partners, their other solution providers about how we can bring this together and go to market together. One example we had a lot of discussions this week was about how we're doing the mainframe services that were announced and how we can support them in building out our industry specific asset. So taking a kernel of what AWS provides and then wrapping our secret sauce around it in partnership with other companies and then take it to our clients. The good part is we can quickly go from a discussion to a go-to-market dialogue with our direct clients who are also here, which have been in real time having those discussions. So Infosys Anant has been a trusted advisor for clients predating the dawn of cloud, if you will. And I'm sure that certain slices of your revenue, don't want to make this too uncomfortable a question, certain slices of your revenue are still dependent upon all of that 80% of IT that's still on-prem. How do you manage that? You're laser focused on cobalt and you've got alliances. Everybody's looking towards the cloud. How do you balance that with the very real needs of Infosys as a business? Aren't you in the same boat as your customers in terms of transformation? Well, you know, I would, if I could jump in there. My eyes go back and forth. Yeah, I told you it was going to be easy for us to have a conversation. Yeah, jump in, Dave. When you look at the different partners out there, we have a discussion about being asset heavy, asset light. Infosys, we grew up through application management. And now as we're seeing these transformations go forward. The last thing we wanted to be is server huggers. We're ready to accelerate these transformations as fast as possible. And partners like AWS are recognizing that a non-steam can go in there and be the disruptor to actually accelerate those transformations. Absolutely. In fact, when we spoke to some of the AWS executives, we want to be the challenger, right? Because we don't carry any baggage. We clearly believe, as Gartner says, that cloud is going to be the foundation for business innovation. And we want to drive innovation and transformation for our customers. So essentially, we want to make this relationship with AWS much bigger and better. We want to be the partners with our clients to drive business innovation with industry segments, industry clouds, solutions that drive opening new markets, building better products and solutions, helping get better customer intimacy and those kind of things. And so that's essentially what our thought process is with what we want to do. It's been mentioned a few times here that somewhere around 80 to 85% of IT spend is still on premises. It's not in the cloud yet. So despite how large we all think the AWS universe has become so far, we're really just at the beginning stages. But what are you seeing in terms of clients' hesitancy towards cloud at this point? Has that changed over the last couple of years? What are the inhibiting factors that you see? What are the accelerants that you see at this stage of the game? Well, in fact, COVID, unfortunately, COVID, while it was overall a very bad thing, but it actually helped accelerate customers' journey to cloud. In fact, we have several customers who used to say that, you know, everybody has to come to office to work. Nobody can work remotely because there are security constraints. There is, there would be impact to the security posture. But when we hit March 2020 and everybody had to work remote, it's the same set of customers who decided to go to cloud and start leveraging the power of cloud. So I would say COVID in short has accelerated customers' knowledge about cloud. They are no longer worried about security. They are no longer worried about latency and bandwidth. I think I don't see any major hesitancy at this point of time, but the trend that we are seeing towards cloud is, cloud is going to be used more for innovation and it's not just going to be about take my data center and move it to cloud, right? So it's not going to be just those tactical reasons. And that's exactly what we did. We actually came out with a report which says moving from cloud chaos to cloud clarity and it talks about all these facets of what are those trends that customers should look for. So that's essentially what we are seeing. So I imagine COBOL, one of the kind of main ideas behind it is to remove friction associated with that move to cloud to the extent that you can not be reinventing the wheel every single time you're engaging a customer. Is that a fair statement? Absolutely. In fact, you know, many customers of ours and in fact, almost all of them are saying we do not want to reinvent the wheel. So how can you help us? So what we have done as part of COBOL is to bring these reference architectures, right? So for example, if a financial services customer wants to fight fraud, fraud analytics is a reference architecture that we have. If the telco customer wants to implement 5G, we have a framework and a reference architecture for OSS, BSS on cloud. If there is life sciences customer who wants to basically look at drug discovery, we have an architecture for that. So we want to make it more and more reference architecture based without reinventing the wheel and bring the best practices from other customers to drive those scenarios. So that's essentially what we're doing. So COBOL, underway, you've been recognized for performance to this point. It's a lot of pressure for 2022. So what are you going to slap on the desk in 2022 when we get back together? Well, we do plan to have bookends by this time next year to be able to bring here. It is perfectly acceptable, by the way, to share both the 2021 and 2022 award on stage because we have to make up for 2019 when we were here physically. Yes, absolutely. But to build off of what Anant was saying about the, what's gone on in the last 18 to 24 months, we're seeing clients now that we have one that came to us with 114 and a list of products that they bought from various partners, either directly through distributors and such and saying, listen, we no longer want to be in the procurement function. We want to take these 114 products. We recognize we're going to get it down to 30 or 40 of the key ones, obviously shifting a lot of that to cloud and we were able to leverage emphasis COBOL to actually accelerate that and incorporate our partner components to help that shift. So I think next year, I think that will be a major theme that you're seeing clients recognize that the way in which they procure and they develop their IT platform will be much different and emphasis with the design we put in place will be in a key position to support them with that. Well, we recorded this. I'm not sure if you realized we were actually recording this. So we're going to go, we can go back and review this tape next year and we'll see and I hope to see you then. And not, David, thank you so much for joining us here at theCUBE. And for theCUBE here in our continuous coverage at AWS re-invent 2021 live in Las Vegas, I'm Dave Nicholson saying stay tuned because there's always more on theCUBE. And I'd like to remind you that we are your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.