 Welcome everyone to our continuous coverage on theCUBE of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm your host, Dave Nicholson, and I am absolutely delighted to be joined by two folks from Unisys, a company that has been in the business of helping people with everything related to IT for a very, very long time. We heard a talk about data modernization, app modernization with Anupriya Ramraj, Vice President of Cloud Solution Management at Unisys, along with Anupam Sahai, VP and CTO of Cloud Solution Engineering at Unisys. And just so that we keep everything clear, I'm just going to call you Anu and Anupam, and we'll all know who we're talking to. Sure. The funny thing is, I'm David Nicholson, or Dave Nicholson. Dave Vellanti is one of the founders of SiliconANGLE theCUBE. So usually it's two Dave's battling it out. Today's two Anu's. Two Anu's, yes, so two Anu's. So I get to be David and he's Dave, typically. So we're completely used to this. So tell me about what Unisys is doing in the arena of app modernization and data modernization and migration into cloud. Unisys has a long and storied history of managing IT in people's environments, in the sort of on-premises world. As well as cloud now. But Anu, tell us a little about what Unisys is doing in this space and then we'll double-click and dive in. Absolutely, Dave. So you're probably very, very familiar with the six Rs of modernization, right? All the way from migration modernization, all the way from re-platform, re-hose to the other side of the spectrum, re-factor and re-architect, right? So what Unisys does is that it takes clients on that journey, right? So we see clients in different stages of that journey. There are clients that come to us, we recently brought on board a pipeline. They're very early in their journey. They're just talking about their first set of migrations. There are clients that have taken the leap and done 75% of their workload is on cloud. Even for Unisys, 95% of, more than 95% of our workload actually runs on cloud, public cloud. Right, so different stages of the journey. But no matter where they are in the journey, really moving the needle on modernization, right? And what do we mean by modernization? It's taking advantage of the innovation in cloud, whether it's serverless or containers or AI and bringing that to the client so that they can drive those business outcomes. That's what we are passionate about doing, right? And we can talk to you about a couple of clients where we've done this on, but I'd like to Anupam to add on. Sure, I know. And just before you dive in, Anupam, I want to hear specifically about the inhibitors that you're seeing, the things that are causing friction in movement to cloud. Yeah, so cloud is a transformative technology, is disruptive, and it brings about lots of benefits that are very well understood, but not realized. Lower total cost of ownership, higher security, innovation and agility. But the challenges that you see for customers who really benefit from moving and migrating to the cloud are related to security and compliance that comes up to be the top pain point followed by cost of ownership. There are optimizations that you need to do before you can benefit from really leveraging the benefits from the cloud. And then innovation and agility, how to derive that? And there are certain things around app and data modernization, data analytics, AIML, that really helps realize those values, but it needs a concerted effort and a drive and a push to transform your infrastructure from where you are today to really get to derive the true benefits from the cloud. And we do a cloud barometer study of about thousands of organizations from a UNISIS perspective, Dave. And as Anupam was saying, more than 60% of our clients say security is the biggest inhibitor. They want help with security. You're saying the inhibitor to going to cloud is security? To accelerating the cloud journey. They want it. Is that perception or is that hesitancy just perception or is it reality? That's a great question, Dave, so. And you don't have to be gentle with me like you might with a client. You can reach over and smack me and say, get over it. You're going to be fine, Dave. Actually, Anupam leaned into it already. In many cases, when you actually get your cloud configuration right, you're probably more secure in the cloud. But it's getting clients confident with that setup. That's where the rubber meets the road, right? And that's where we come in to say, do you understand the shared responsibility model with cloud? What does the cloud provider do? What is being here at AWS re-invent? What does AWS bring to the table for security? This is what the client is responsible for. For example, application security is completely their client's responsibility, in most cases. So just working with the client so that they understand the shared responsibility model and then making sure we protect all the different layers of the stack with security, right? Even as apps are developed, you need to have DevSecOps pipeline, right? So I didn't say DevOps. I said DevSecOps because we want to make security a part of developing your applications and deploying them in cloud as well. So that's what we bring to the table making sure clients feel confident in accelerating their cloud journey. So Arupa, you can deal with customers like me who truly believe that my money is safer in a coffee can buried in my backyard than it is in a bank, right? With all those banking people wandering around. So when you start looking at an environment and you look at the totality of an IT infrastructure landscape, how do you go about determining what is the low hanging fruit? What makes sense to move first from, and is that always an ROI discussion that comes into play? And are your customers, I like to give like five questions at the same time to confuse you, and are your customers expecting to immediately save money? How big is the ROI conversation in this? It's a great question. So a couple of things need to be considered. First is to understand where is the customer in the digital transformation journey? Are they a green field where they only have on-premises data center and they're trying to get to the cloud? Or they already have tipped their toes and moved to the cloud and in the cloud, how far advanced are they in their transformation journey? Have they done apps and data modernization? Do they have management and operations capability for day one and day two, cloud ops and fin ops and security ops? And are they leveraging the power of the cloud, the copious amounts of data that cloud brings to the table? The important thing to understand is that 80% of the tools that work in the on-prem do not work in the cloud. So you have to understand the very nature of the cloud and to deal with it differently. The same old tools and tricks will not work in the cloud. And I call it the three Vs in the cloud. Velocity, volume and variety of data is different in the cloud. So when you're talking about security, you need to look at the cloud infrastructure, posture management. You need to look at the cloud workload posture management. You need to look at data that's available and analyze and harness the data using AIML and data analytics. So you need a new set of tricks, as it were, to really harness the power of the cloud to derive the benefits from increased security, lower cost of ownership and innovation and agility. That makes sense. I think Anupam touched on it with FinOps, right? And you asked the question, Dave, around, is that the biggest driver in terms of savings to get to the cloud? And I think it's definitely one of the bigger factors because, and we believe, to realize that, we offer a FinOps service. And a FinOps service, not just for a cloud, purchasing models are different, right? It's not like your data center planning. Anupam talked about the tools being different. It's more than the tools, right? So you could do reserved instances or you could do spot instances, completely different ballgame with AWS, right? Or you could do AWS savings plans. Are you maximizing all of that? And even beyond that, are you thinking beyond that into AWS Container Support, EKS? Are you talking about serverless? And that could completely change your bill and your total cost of ownership. You talked, Dave, about past databases, right? So platform as a service and that could completely change your total cost of ownership there as well. So are you really maximizing that? And do you have a FinOps service around that? Do you have a trusted partner who can help you with FinOps? Is I think an important consideration there. Well, Anupriya, I know you're dying to talk about a customer example. Oh, sure. Make it real for us. Give us an example of this process in action where Unisys has helped a customer on the journey. Absolutely, Dave. So one example that comes to mind is a large public university and they've got about a half a million students and they've got 20 plus campuses around the US in California, so I might have given myself away there. And what they've done is initially, they are big into AWS and they are into their cloud journey big time and they are a hybrid deployment at this point. And initially, when they subscribed to our FinOps service, we brought in all the different thinking around working with the different organizations. Really it's like business planning. You need to know which is your most significant apps and what do you want to invest in them in terms of modernization and in tuning your AWS spend. And so we did that and so we got them about a 33% cost saving. And what they did was then, they looked at all of their AWS accounts across the campuses and said, we want FinOps across all of them. Let's consolidate all of them. So that's the power of a FinOps service, about a 33% saving right there. Well that is particularly exciting for me because I assume that they're going to be lowering my kid's tuition next year. So I'll be looking forward to that. And now Anupam, we know why she was kicked out of the intelligence agency. Can't keep it a secret. Let's talk about an amusement park, famous for its rodents, but I'm not going to say the name. So Anupam, talk about the technology space that we're in the midst of here at AWS re-invent. Each time we have a keynote, we're hit with almost a mind boggling number of announcements. Customers can't keep this stuff straight. There are 475 different kinds of instances. Used to be, we have S3 and we have EC2. Would you like one or would you like both? How do you help customers make sense of this? Yeah, no, that's a great question because the cloud has three weeks, velocity, variety and volume of data, and the new kinds of services that are available day by day, it's growing. The key is to really figure out, again, map the business objectives that you as a customer or company are trying to achieve. Understand where you are in your digital transformation journey and then based on the two, and assess where you, and companies like Unisys can work with the customer to assess their, what I call, the digital transformation posture, which will then give us clear indications or recommendations on what are the next stages in the transformation of journey. So whether you want to improve your security posture, whether you want to improve your cost of ownership posture, whether you want to go to the cloud and leverage DevSecOps to benefit from the innovation and agility, we can help you. Unisys has DevSecOps as a service, containers as a service where we can help our customers and partners migrate to the cloud, modernize the apps, and again, based on research that's out there, you can speed up app deployment and development by 60% by leveraging the power of the cloud. So the benefits out there for customers to get access to, it's a question of finding the right combination of people, process, and technology to get you there. And Unisys being a very trusted advisor is certainly able to help you accelerate that journey and get you to meet your business outcomes. So let me ask the two of you what might be an uncomfortable question. And that is, obviously Unisys is in the business of managing things that aren't in cloud, also. You have very, very large existing customers that are spending money with you, and if they'll just stay still and not do anything and not change, you'll keep making money into the future. Aren't some of these things that you're doing as a trusted advisor almost counterintuitive from a finance perspective at Unisys, at least in the short term? How do you balance that? It's a great question, Dave. And for us, we are customer obsessed. So that's, I know one of the AWS principles and we live by that as well, right? So customer comes first and doing the right thing by them, whether it is the total cost of ownership, whether it's getting the security posture right, that comes first for us. And if moving them to a public cloud will help them achieve that, we will do that, right? So even if it means that our bill is going to be lower, so we'll give you a great example there. Unisys, as you know, Dave, has been in the mainframe business and we've got customers that are still on ClearPath, right? So even with those customers, we help them with both transitions, we can run ClearPath today on public cloud and we also help with modernization, right? So we always do the right thing by the customer. It's really the customer's choice in terms of what does the business warrant? How much business disruption are they willing to take as we do this modernization journey? And that's what determines us and that's what makes us trusted advisors. We're not looking out for the bottom line there in terms of how much our bill would be. Well, that's actually a great place to wrap up. I think it's hilarious that you mentioned mainframe since you were five years old. You gave me a blank stare when I mentioned stuff Unisys was doing 20 years ago. Anupriya Anupam from Unisys, thank you so much. It's a great point to close on. You're a trusted advisor when you're doing things that are truly in the customer's best interest and not just in your own company's best interest. I'm Dave Nicholson for theCUBE. We'd like to thank you for joining our continuous coverage at AWS re-invent 2021. Stay tuned because we are your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.