 TheCube presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Okay, we're back at HPE Discover 2022. This is day three. We're kind of in the midpoint of day three, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Wall-to-wall coverage. I think there's our 14th HPE slash HPE Discover. We've sort of documented the history of the company over the last decade plus. Anant Adya is here. He's executive vice president at Infosys and Saju Sankaran Kudi is the CTO and vice president of Infosys. Infosys doing some amazing work in the field with clients. Guys, thanks for coming on TheCube. Thank you. Thank you for not watching AD. Yeah, absolutely. So digital transformation. It's all the buzzword. Kind of pre-pandemic. It was sort of, yeah, you know, we'll get there. A lot of lip service to it. Some started on the journey and then of course pandemic. If you weren't digital business, you were out of business. What are the trends that you're seeing now that were exiting the isolation economy? Yeah, as you, again, as you rightly called out, pre-pandemic it was all about using sort of, you know, innovation at scale as one of the levers for digital transformation. But if you look at now post-pandemic, one of the things that we see, it's a big trend, is at a broad level, right? Digital transformation is not about cost takeout. It's all about growth, right? So essentially like what we hear from most of the CEOs and most of the customers and most of the executives in the tech company, digital transformation should be used for business growth. And essentially it means three things, right? That we see, three trends in that space. One is how can you build better products and solutions as part of your transformation strategy? How can you basically use digital transformation to expand into new markets and new territories and new regions? And the third is how can you better the experience for your customers, right? So I think that is broadly what we see as some of the things and essentially if you have better customer experience, they will buy more. If you expand into new markets, your revenue will increase. If you actually build better products and solutions, consumers will buy it, right? So it's basically like a sort of an economy that goes hand in hand. So I would say the trend is clearly going towards business growth than anything else when it comes to digital transformation. You know, I'll follow up on that. We had IDC on yesterday and they were sharing to some of their high level numbers. We've looked at this and it seems like IT spending is pretty consistent. Despite the fact that for example, B2C, the consumer business is sort of tanking right now, are you seeing any pullback or any evidence that people are pulling the reins back on their digital transformation or they're just going? Because if they don't keep moving fast, they're going to fall behind. What are you seeing there? Oh, absolutely. In fact, what we call them as the secular headwinds, right? I mean, if you look at the headwinds here, we see digital transformation is in the minds of everybody, every customer, right? So while there are budget constraints, where are all these macro tailwinds as we call with respect to inflation, with respect to what's happening with Russia and Ukraine, with respect to everything that's happening with respect to supply chain, right? I think we see some of those tailwind headwinds, but essentially digital transformation is not stopping. Everybody is going after that because essentially they want to be relevant in the market and if they want to be relevant in the market, they have to transform. And if they have to transform, they have to adopt digital transformation. Basically there's no hiding anymore. No hiding anymore. You can't hide the projects and kind of give lip service. Totally. Because there's evidence of what the consequences are. Totally. And it can be quantified. Yes. If you lose business, you lose money. You mentioned some of the, I won't say cost takeouts, growth issues. So given the trends and the headwinds and the tailwinds, what are you guys seeing as the pattern of companies that came out of the pandemic with growth and what's going on with that growth driver? What are the elements that are powering companies to grow? Is it machine learning? Is it cloud scales and integration? What are some of the key areas that's given that extra up until the right? Yeah, so I would say there are six technologies that are defining how growth is being enabled. So I think we call it as cloud, AI, edge, 5G, IoT, and of course everything to do with AI and ML. So these are the six technologies that are powering digital transformation. And one of the things that we are seeing is more and more customers are now coming in saying that we want to use these six technologies to drive business outcomes. For example, we have a very large oil and gas customer of ours who says that we want to basically use cloud as a lever to drive decarbonization. ESG is such a big initiative for everybody and ESG is in the minds of everybody. So their outcome of using technology is to drive decarbonization and make sure that they achieve the goals of ESG. There is another customer of ours in the retail space. They are saying we want to use cloud to drive experience for our employees. So I would say that there is pretty much all these drivers which are helping not just growing their business but also bettering their experience and meeting some of the organization goals that they have set up with respect to cloud. So I would say cloud is playing a big role in every digital transformation initiative of the company. Sajju, how do you spend your time? What's the role of a CTO inside of a large organization like Infosys? So one is in terms of bringing in an outside in view of how technology is making an impact to our customers and looking at how do we actually start leveraging some of these technologies in building solutions which can actually drive value for our customers. That's one of the focus areas, what I do. And if you look at some of the trends what we have seen in the past years as well as what we are seeing now, there's been a huge spend around cloud which is happening with our customers and predominantly around the cloud native application development, leveraging some of the services what's available from the cloud providers like AI, ML and IoT. And there's also a new trend, what we are seeing off late now which is in terms of improving the experience, overall experience, leveraging some of the technologies like technologies like blockchain as well as AR, VR, right? And this is actually creating new set of solutions, new demands for our customers in terms of leveraging technologies like Metaverse, leveraging technologies like factory, photo, and these are all opportunities for us to build solutions which can improve the time to market for our customers in terms of adopting some of these things because there has been a huge focus on the improved end user experience or improved experience, improved productivity of employees which has been a focus post pandemic, right? Which has been something which is happening pre pandemic but it's been accelerated post pandemic. So this is giving an opportunity for my role, right? Now in terms of leveraging these technologies, building solutions, building value propositions, taking it to our customers, working with partners and then trying to see how we can have this tightly integrated with partners like HPE in this case and then take it jointly to the market and find out what's the best we can actually give back to our customers. We've been following you guys for a long, long time. You've seen many cycles in the industry and what's interesting, I want to get your reaction to what we're seeing in a lot of acceleration points whether it's cloud native applications but one is the software business is no longer there. It's open source now. But cloud scale, integrations, new hybrid environment kind of brings and changes the game so there's definitely software, plentiful. You guys are I know doing a lot of stuff with the software, how are customers integrated? We're seeing more and more customers participating in the open source community. You saw what Red Hat's done, they're transforming the open shift so as cloud native applications come in you get scale open source software, cloud scale performance and integrations are big. Do you guys agree with that? Absolutely, absolutely. So if you look at it right from the way we conceptualize our solutions, open source is something what we have embedded big way, right? into the solution footprint, what we have. One is the ability for us to scale. The second is the ability for us to bring in a level of portability, right? And the third is ensuring that there is absolutely no lock-in into something what we are building. We are seeing this being resonated by our customers too because one is they want to build agile and scalable applications. It's something where the whole, I would say the whole dependency on the large software stacks, the large software providers is slightly diminishing now, right? It's all about how can I simplify my application portfolio leveraging some of the open source technologies? How can I deploy them on a multi-cloud world leveraging open standards so that I'm not locked into any of these providers? How can I build cloud native applications which can actually enable portability? And how can I work with providers who doesn't have a lock-in into their solutions? And security's got to be embedded in everything. Absolutely. So security is embedded right from the design phase, right? We call it a secure by design. And that's something what we drive for our customers right from our solutions as well as for developing their own solution. As opposed to secure by bolt-on after the fact. Yes. What is the cobalt go-to-market strategy? How does that affect or imply how you do business within the HPE ecosystem? Talk about that. Sure, absolutely. I think what we did in 2020, we were the first ones to come out with an integrated cloud brand called cobalt. So essentially our thought process was to make sure that we talk one consistent language with the customer. There is a consistent narrative. There is a consistent value preparation that we take, right? So essentially if you look at the cobalt go-to-market, it is based on three pillars. The first pillar is all about technology solutions, getting out of data centers, migrating workloads to cloud, ERP on cloud, cloud native development, legacy modernization. So we'll continue to do that because that's the most important pillar and that's where our bread and butter business is, right? The second pillar is more and more customers are asking industry cloud. So what are you specifically doing for my industry? So for example, if you look at banking, they would say we are focused on modernizing our payment systems. We want to reduce the financial risk that we have because of anti-money laundering and those kind of solutions that they're expecting. They want to better the security posture and of course they want to improve the experience, right? So they are asking for each of these imperatives that we have in banking, what are some of those specific industry solutions that you are bringing to the table, right? So that's the second pillar of our cobalt go-to-market and the third pillar of our go-to-market, as Saju was saying, is looking at what we call as horizon three offerings, whether it is Metaverse, whether it is WebTRA 3.0, whether it is looking at something else that will come in the future and how do we build those solutions which can become mainstream the next 18 to 24 months? So that's essentially the go-to-market. So that's interesting. So take that banking example where you've got a core app, it's probably on-prem and it's good. You're not going to necessarily shove that into the cloud necessarily, but they have to do things like anti-money laundering and know your KYC. How are they handling that? Are they building microservices or are you building for them microservices layers around that that actually might be in the cloud or cloud-native on-prem and green-layer? How are customers modernizing? Absolutely, brilliant question. In fact, what we have done is, as part of cobalt, we have something called a reference architecture or it's basically a blueprint. So if you go to a bank and you are engaging a banking executive, the language that we speak with them is not about private cloud or public cloud or AWS or HP or Azure, right? I mean, we talk the language that they understand, which is the banking language. So we take this reference architecture and we say, here is what your core architecture should look like. And as you rightly called out, there is KYC, there is retail banking, there is anti-money laundering, there is security experience. There are some APIs and those kind of things, banking APIs or open banking, as we call. How do we actually bring our solutions, which we have built on open source and something that are specific to cloud and something that are cloud-neutral? And that's what we take them. So we have built this array of solutions around each of those reference architectures that we take to our customers. Final question for you guys. How are you guys leveraging HPE and New Green Lake and all the new stuff they got here to accelerate the customer's journey to edge the cloud? Awesome. So I would say around three areas, right? One is obviously we are working very closely with HPE in terms of taking our solutions jointly to the market and leveraging the whole Green Lake model and providing what I call it as a hyperscaler-like experience for our customers in a hybrid multi-cloud world. That's the first thing. The second thing is, Anand talked about the cobalt, right? It's an important, I would say, an offering around cloud from our side. So what we have done is we have closely integrated the assets, what Anand was referring to, what we have in our cobalt, under our cobalt umbrella, very closely with the HPE ecosystem, right? It can be tools like the Infosys Poly Cloud Platform or the Infosys PolyNet Platform very tightly integrated with the HPE stack so that we could actually offer the value proposition right across the value chain. The third is we have actually taken the industry pivot, like what Anand again mentioned, right in terms of rather than talking about a public cloud or a private cloud solution or an edge computing solution, we actually talk about what exactly are the problem statements, what is there in manufacturing today or it's there in financial industries today or it's in a bank today or whatever it's relevant to the industry. That's an industry pivot. So we talk right from an industry problem and build that industry pivot solutions leveraging the assets what we have and the framework what we have within the cobalt plus the integrated solutions what we bring along with HPE. That's those are the three things what we do along with HPE. Yeah, and that industry piece is new. There's a whole data layer emerging. Those industries, those companies, they're building their own clouds and working with companies like you because they want to monetize, that's a big part of their digital strategy. Guys, thanks so much for coming on the queue. Thank you. I really appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Thank you for that. Thank you for watching. John and I will be back. John Ferrier, Dave Vellante at HPE Discover 2022. You're watching the queue.