 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Sponsored by Intel and AWS. We continue our coverage here in theCUBE of AWS re-invent 2020 and we're now joined by Guru Vasudeva who is the Chief Technology Officer at Nationwide Insurance and Guru, good afternoon to you. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Good afternoon. Yeah, big announcement for you folks in terms of AWS and making that connection that you have even deeper and even broader, going with AWS now as your preferred cloud provider. Let's just talk about making that kind of a commitment first off on your end, what were some of those key factors, those drivers that led you to say, okay, this is where we really wanna sync our resources. Yeah, our journey with this started almost two years ago and what we were looking for was a partner who is leading edge in the cloud capabilities as well as the ones that are creating new services. And obviously AWS is definitely a great partner to do that. And then we also found that they have this AWS Next program, Enterprise Next program. So we found that to be pretty attractive as well because it's not just about migrating the applications but also modernizing them, innovating. So they were going to really give us not only the technical capability but also access to talent and best practices. So we really entered into this partnership with AWS to achieve all of the above. Yeah, there's this, as you know, it's very popular or in vogue, obviously to talk about digital transformations, right? Yeah. Every woman's undergoing that and is complete metamorphosis of your IT structure. But this is where you are. And you were already kind of in the throes of this or in the midst of this, in terms of accelerating that process and refining that process, what is AWS now bringing to your table and what did you want? What did you need from them to get to going a little bit quicker maybe in the direction you were already going? Yeah, you know, one of the, like I will give you two answers. One on the technology side, they've got a huge array of services available in AI, machine learning, data and analytics. So they're constantly innovating those things. So it makes it easier for us to really stitch together solutions that gives a better experience for our customers or for agents or our financial advisors, right? On the process side, what they really brought to bear is their own internal methodology for innovation. So they, we've been able to really partner with our business partners and AWS to apply that methodology to really see, can we really do those kinds of things in an insurance company, right? And we have found that methodology to be of equal value. You know, I mean, the fact is your portfolio is so broad or, you know, you're arsenal, if you will, 2,000 plus applications, right? You got up and running and you're moving a little less than half of them and AWS. I mean, this is a huge undertaking and the idea obviously to maintain business operations as usual. So talk about that tightrope act. I mean, how do you manage that and keep business going, keep operations still humming? And in fact, you're already looking for new kind of efficiencies and new processes that make you even a little sharper, a little leaner. Yeah, you know, the approach that we took is, it's a methodology that I've used with many of our transformations that I've had the opportunity to lead here at Nationwide where we use a very methodical repeatable process and we call it, we started with diagnostics and then once you do the diagnosis, you build a plan and then you execute the plan and then you go back and see, did it really give you the results and tweak the loop, right? So our diagnostics methodology starts with looking at an existing application, for us, for example, our claim system or our policy admin system, right? These are very critical systems for a company like us and you can just, you know, migrate them and hope that it'll work out, right? So instead we did a very methodical approach of diagnosing and saying technologically, architectural wise, what needs to change? What are the opportunities for optimizing them instead of just migrate them likewise as is, can we really optimize it and migrate it at the same time? How about security? What are the different things that we need to do on security-wise, right? And then last but not least is money, right? What does it cost for us on-prem and can it cost cheaper? And if we were to really apply all of these different levels, can we make it cheaper in the cloud? So we did all of those four different elements and we found that methodology to be instrumental in our success story. This year, we migrated our claim system, we migrated our commercial lines policy admin system, our personalized policy admin system, our nationwide.com and all of our financial services front ends. So it's a huge, like it's like the heart and soul of the company and they have gone extremely well and we really attribute that to the methodical approach of looking at all these dimensions. I don't know how you slept. I mean, that's a full slate. And to go back to the four points you were talking about earlier about the gains that you got, the last one that caught my attention there was about the bottom line, the fact that you've reduced costs, that you did save money. So it is possible that this cloud migration, again, this is on an overarching level, you can make this migration and go through this enormous transformation and still cut your money. Yeah, adds to the bottom line. Yeah, so the, you know, many people these days you read in the articles, oh, well, cloud migration not necessarily saves you money or that's not the real reason to do it. I didn't really want to accept that as an answer. Instead, what we really said is we want it to be better, faster, cheaper, all of the above, right? So we have challenged ourselves to say, what would it cost if we were to really keep it on prem and what changes we need to make in order to get the efficiency? For example, our claim system, if we were to migrate it like for like, it would have cost us 25% more to run in the cloud. We said, no, we're going to tweak how we have architected, how many, how much storage we need, what kind of things we provision. So we changed the architecture and the underpinning and the engineering and we were able to find around 20% savings, right? So if you think about it, that's like a 45% swing. If we had not done the diagnostics after the migration, I would have been like, oh my God, it actually costs us more money and that we couldn't really do. What's been the big gain in terms of, you talked about claims, obviously a heart and soul of your company, insurance policies, both on the commercial one and the residential side or the personal user. I mean, what's been the biggest impact, if you will, in terms of your core business and then introducing these new technologies and these new efficiencies into the process? You know, this year for us, if you take a look at property and casualty companies like insurance companies, has been a very eventful year, not only with COVID, but also with all the weather events that happened with the fires and the various tornadoes and so on. So when we have more claim volume, we can actually take our environment up and down seamlessly, right? We can add more capacity very seamlessly. So that's a base premise, if you will, of the cloud is that you can actually consume more and you don't have to really wait for adding additional capacity. That part has actually worked out really well and the reverse is true as well. We've been able to actually reduce capacity when we don't need it, right? That's on the base level and on the more innovation level, we've been able to tap into AI machine learning kind of capabilities and stitch together new experiences in our commercial line space to deliver new types of insights, new types of solutions for our business partners. So we have been very pleased with how we've been able to stitch together solutions by kind of tapping into the various services that AWS provides. You've been talking about all these tremendous innovations in terms of how you go about your business and how you do your business. And certainly you're realizing great benefit and gain from that. What about the other side? Your customers, millions of customers that you have and as you said, experiencing a number of challenges this year to say the least. But at the end of the day, what has been the bottom line or what is going to be the bottom line for them? For them, our kind of vision is completely transforming the customer experience that we provide them by digital capabilities, right? So they should be able to get to any answer that they want whether it's beyond their cell phone or their computer and to do that, to provide that kind of service. I think these kind of technologies actually enables us to really deliver that kind of digital transformation. What about the security side of all this? I know that's part of your concern too. I mean, it's certainly an area that is receiving and understandably a lot of attention these days in terms of providing more secure solutions and making sure that this customer data which is so precious is protected. In terms of all this activity that you're doing you've got to put in that layer of security on top of that, right? Which is paramount to your success these days as a company. What kind of focus have you maybe reconfigured in that respect now with regard to security and your customers and your operational security too? Yeah, so in the diagnostics methodology that I talked about, security is one of those dimensions that we looked at. How do we secure the information on-prem versus in the cloud? They're not like for like, we need to apply different techniques, sometimes different technology. So we built that in from the beginning. And then the great thing is, we have also learned a lot by working with Amazon about how do they do it in-house, right? I mean, they obviously run the biggest, if you will, online shopping capability out there and how do they do it? So that's the other kind of access to talent that's been really helpful. And we look at this constantly. It's something that's evolving as new threat actors come on board or new techniques of attack comes on board. We're constantly evaluating and making sure that we are fine-tuning that security, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. What are your headlights hitting? Now, when you look down the road, I know you're not done with this by any means. Certainly understand that, but in terms of the next 12 to 18 months, what kind of progress do you want to make and where do you think that you're gonna have to where you want to make it the most? So on the efficiency side, we've got a pretty big goal to reduce our expenses by hundreds of millions of dollars. We spend well over a billion dollars on technology every year. And our cloud migration and optimization is definitely a key lever that we are pulling. And so for me, we have a target of applications that we want to migrate to the cloud. And we will be done with around 32% of them by the end of this year. And now there are 30 to 32% next year. So we've got ways to go, but in the next couple of years, we would be well over way to really migrating what do we want to migrate to the cloud? So that's definitely a big focus area while delivering savings. On the innovation. Excuse me, go ahead, please, go ahead. On the innovation side, I think there is so much more to be done, whether it be internet of things or providing new offerings for our customer, for our agents, for our financial advisors. So there are so many new things that we can do. And now that we've got a repeatable pattern for migration, our energy is gonna really shift towards those more innovation, more new digital experiences. That's where our energy is gonna really shift. We took a big step today, certainly with the announcement. I know the AWS partnership is one that you put a lot of value on. It certainly has been successful for you and we wish you all the continued success as well as you head on into 2021. But thank you for joining us here today. Thanks, John.