 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Well, hi everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE as we continue our IBM Think initiative and today talking with Clemens Reynon who is the global CTO, cloud and DevOps leader at Capgemini and Clemens. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Good to see you today. Thank you, thank you very much. Nice to be here. Yeah, tell us a little bit about Capgemini, if you will. First off, our viewers at home might not be familiar with your services. Tell us a little bit about that and maybe a little bit more about your specific responsibilities there. So who doesn't know Capgemini in the system integrator world, in the IT world? Has we lived on the stone, eh? So Capgemini is a worldwide system integrator with offerings in all kinds of spaces in all areas there. My responsibility is mainly around cloud and DevOps and taking care of our countries or delivery centers have the right knowledge around clouds, the right capabilities around DevOps to support our customers and with their journey to the cloud and to a digital organization. Yeah, everybody's just talking about digital these days, right? Everybody. It's magical digital transformation that's occurring that's been going on for quite some time. What does it look like to you? And when you start defining, you know, digital organizations and digital transformations, what are the kinds of things that you're talking about with organizations in terms of that kind of migration path? Yeah, so it's quite interesting to start discussion about how does a digital landscape looks like for an organization who wants to start transforming to a digital organization? And then when you are looking at that, I'm always starting with discussion with business capabilities. An organization wants to create business capabilities either to interact and engage with their workforce, have to make them work in the most efficient way. And what you are using for that are all kinds of different digital channels. And those digital channels that can be a mobile app, I'm working with my mobile app to connect with my work. I'm calling, I'm using Zoom, I'm using Teams and that kind of stuff. I'm also using chatbots for IT devices. And that's what the normal workforce expect nowadays, all have to have all those digital channels to interact with the business. That's also on the other side, the customer side, organizations want to engage and grow on the customer side and have the nice interaction there. And again, they are using those digital channels, all the different digital channels, maybe IoT, maybe APIs to interact with those customers, to bring them the engagement, the interaction they really want to have. And in that transformation part, definitely they are looking at what kind of challenges I have with working with customers like this and working with my workforce. Now everybody's working from home, challenges with maybe with connections and that kind of stuff. But they also started to leverage and that's where the transformation and migration start with their on-prem systems, their legacy systems to move those kinds of capabilities and enrich that with cloud native capabilities to all kinds of enterprise solutions, like the ones from IBM for example, to expose that to their digital channels, to their organizations. And that's the landscape, how it looks like. And then we have the discussion with organizations, how do you want to engage with your customers? What kind of digital channels do you need? What are the business systems you have and how can we enrich them and expose them to the outside world with all the enterprise solutions around them? And when you talk about a process like this, which sounds holistic, right? You're looking at what do you have? Where do you want to go? What are your business needs? Which all makes great sense. But then all of a sudden you start hitting speed bumps along the way, right? There are always challenges in terms of deployments, there are always challenges in terms of decisions and those things. So what are you hearing again from on the customer side about what are my pain points? What are my headaches here? As I know I want to make this jump, but how do I get there? And I have these obstacles in my way. Yeah, definitely. And the ones I explained already, which are on the workforce side and on the customer side, you want to have the engagements there, you ought to have the interactions there. And then you have that whole digital landscape, which comes with some interesting challenges. How do I implement this landscape in the right scalable way? How do I expose my data in such a way that it is secure? How do I leverage all the capabilities from the platforms I'm using? And how do I make all these moving parts consistent, compliant with the regulations I need to work towards to? How do I make it secure? So those are definitely big enterprise challenges, like compliance, security and that kind of stuff, but also technology challenges. How do I adopt those kinds of technologies? How do I make it scalable? How do I make it really an integrated solution on its own? So that my platform is not only working for the digital channels we know right now, but they are also ready for the digital channels we don't know yet, will start come, huh? That's right. Yeah, we'll have to take this challenge just after. Yeah, I'll get into that a little bit later too, because you've raised a great point. Well, let's just jump right now. We know what the here and now is, but you just talked about building for the future, building for a more expansive footprint or kinds of capabilities that, frankly, we're not even aware of right now. So how do you plan for that kind of flexibility, that kind of agility when it's a bit unpredictable? Yeah, and that's what every organization tries to be. Agile, flexible, resilient. And you need to build your system conform that. And where we normally start with, you need to have a clear foundation. And then the foundation when, for example, when you are using the cloud for it, every organization is cloud for it. You want to have that foundation in such a way that those digital channels can connect really easy to it. And then the capabilities, the business capabilities created are done by product teams. Product and feature teams are creating those kinds of capabilities on top of that cloud foundation. And in that foundation, you want to put everything in place. What makes it easy for those teams to focus on that business functionality, on those business capabilities. You want to make it very easy for them to do it the right thing. They always love to say that. That's what you want to put in your cloud foundation. And that's where you are harnessing your security. Every application who's landing on the foundation has secure. You are embracing a standard way of working, although not every DevOps team is like that. They want to be self-organizing and that kind of stuff. But when you are having 50 or 100 DevOps teams, you want to have some kind of standardization and provide them away. And again, the easy way should be the right way to provide them templates, provide them technologies so that they can really focus very quickly on those kinds of business capabilities. So the cloud foundation is the base. That needs to be in place. You've been doing this for a long time. And the conversation used to be, should we move to the cloud? Can we move to the cloud? Now it's about how fast can we move to the cloud? How much do we move to the cloud? So looking at that kind of the change in paradigm, if you will, what are organizations having to consider in terms of the scale, the depth, the breadth of their offering now, because innovation, as you know, can happen at a much faster pace than it could have just a very short time ago. Yeah. And then I'm reflecting again, back to the easy thing should be the right thing. That's what you want to do for your business. I love that concept. And that's where you should focus on as an organization. For example, what we put in place, we put a lot of standardization, a lot of knowledge in place in what we call in an inner source library. And in that inner source library, for example, we put all kinds of scripts, all kinds of templates, all kinds of standardization, for teams who either want to deploy OpenShift on that platform or want to start working with certain cloud packs that they can set it up very easily, conforms the standards of the organization and start moving from there. And then in the cloud foundation, you have your cloud management, the IBM cloud manager, because organizations are definitely going towards the hybrid scenarios, different organizational units wants to start using different clouds in there, and also for the migration part, you want to have that grow from there. And standardization, inner source, and having those templates ready, it's key for organizations now to speed up and be ready to start juggling around with workloads on any cloud where you want to have, that's the idea. Sure, so Red Hat's involved in that issue, and IBM involved as well, obviously in your partnership working with them. Talk about that kind of merger of resources, if you will, and in terms of how, what the value proposition is to your clients at the end of the day to have that kind of firepower working in their behalf. Yeah, and that's, for example, IBM is, for us, a very important partner. Definitely on the hybrid, multi-cloud scenarios where we can leverage open shift on those kinds of platforms for our customers. We created what I said, templates, scripts, we use the IBM Garage project for it to create deployments for our teams in a kind of self-sourcing way to deploy those open shift clusters on top of the cloud platform of their choice. And then for sure with the multi-cloud manager from IBM, we can manage that actually in the landing zone. And that's actually the whole idea. And you want to give the flexibility and the speed to your DevOps teams to be able to do the right thing is the easy thing and then manage it from your cloud foundation so that they are comfortable that when they put in the workloads in that whole multi-hybrid cloud platform that it is managed to organize all in the right way. And then that's definitely where IBM, Red Hat, Open Shift comes in play. And because they have already such a great tool sets ready, they really think DevOps. That's what I really like. And also with the migrations, it comes with a lot of DevOps capabilities in there, not plain lift shift, but also the modernization immediately in there. And that's what I like about our partnership with IBM is they are DevOps in mind also, that's cool. Yeah, what about the speed here just in general, just about the almost the pace of change and what's happening in that space? Because it used to be like these kinds of things took forever it seemed like, right? Or evolutions, transitions were, for take a long period of time, it's not the case anymore. Things are happening in relatively lightning speed. So when you're talking with an organization about the kinds of changes they can make and the speed at which they can do that, marry those up for me and those conversations that you're having. And if I'm a CIO out there and I'm thinking about how am I gonna flip this switch? Convince me right now for the key factors, right? And how easy, how right will this be for me? So as a CIO, you want to have your scalable and your flexible organization. Probably at this moment, you are sitting with your on-prem system with probably a very large relational database with several components around there. And now you want to fuel those digital channels there. And a great way with IBM, with Red Hat is that we can deploy, open shift container solutions everywhere and then starting to modernize those small components around that big relational database. We are starting to do that. We can do that really at light speeds. And then there are, we have a factory model up and running where we can put in the application landscape of a customer and look at it and say, okay, this one is quite easy. We are running it to our modernization street and it runs into a container. And from there you start to untangle actually the hair ball of your whole application landscape and starting to move those components and you definitely want to prioritize them. And that's where you have discussions with the business which is most valuable to move first and which one to move there. And that's actually what we put in place is the factory model to analyze an application landscape of a customer having the discussions with those customers and then say, okay, we are going to move these workloads first, then we are going to analyze the code of these and then we are going to move these and we really start rocking fast moving their workloads to the cloud. And so that they can start enrich those digital channels you want to do there. Right, well, a great process. And I love your analogies, by the way. You talk about hair ball there. I totally get it. Hey, Clemens, thank you for the time today. I appreciate hearing about the Cap Jim and I story and about your partnership with IBM. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. All right, so we have learned one thing. The easy thing is the right thing. And that's the Cap Jim and I way of getting things done. You've been watching part of the IBM Think Initiative here on theCUBE.