 Hey everyone, hello from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin here with you, and I'm on the show floor at Reinvent, but we have a very special program series that theCUBE has been doing called Women of the Cloud. It's brought to you by AWS, and I'm so pleased to have an excellent panel of women leaders in technology and in cloud to talk about their tactical recommendations for you, what they see is found, where they've helped organizations be successful with cloud. Please welcome my three guests, Charu Kapoor, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Consulting and Digital Transformations at NTT Data. We have Rachel Moushawar, AWS head of North America Partner Sales from AWS, and Jumi Barnes joins us as well, Managing Director Investment Banking Engineering at Goldman Sachs. It is so great to have you guys on this power panel, I love it, thank you for joining me. Thank you. Charu, let's start with you, give us a little bit of your background at NTT Data, and I understand NTT has a big focus on women in technology and in STEM. Talk to us a little bit about that, and then we'll go around the table. Thank you, thank you. So brand new role for me at NTT Data. I started three months back, and it's a fascinating company. We are about $22 billion in size. We work across industries on multiple innovative use cases. So we're doing a ton of work on edge analytics in the cloud, and that's why we are here with AWS. We're also doing a ton of work on the private 5G that we are rolling out, and essentially building out industry-wide use cases across financial services, manufacturing, tech, et cetera. Lots of women at entity. We essentially have a women-run cloud program today. We have a gal called Noreen Hansen who is our practice leader for cloud. We have Madeline Latifa, who's our AWS cloud leader. We have Molly Ward who leads up solutions on the cloud. We have an amazing lady in Mona who leads up our marketing programs. So a fantastic plethora of diverse women driving amazing work at entity on cloud. That's outstanding to hear, because it's one of those things that you can't see, right? We all talk about that. Rachel, talk a little bit about your role and some of the focus that AWS has. I know they're big on customer obsession, I'm sure they're obsessed with other things as well. Sure, so Rachel Moushawar, please to be here again. I think this will be my third time, so a big fan of theCUBE. I'm fortunate enough to lead our North America partner and channel business. And I'll tell you, I've been at AWS for a little under two years. And honestly, it's been probably the best two years of my career, just in terms of where the cloud is. Where it's headed. The business outcomes that we can deliver with our customers and with our partners is absolutely remarkable. We get to make the impossible possible every day. So I'm thrilled to be here and I'm thrilled to be part of this inaugural women of the cloud panel. Oh, I'm proud to have all three of you. One of the things that feedback, kind of pivoting off what Rachel, one of the things that you said that some of several of our guests have said is that coming out of Adam's keynote this morning, it just seems limitless what AWS can do. And I love that, it gives me kind of chills what they can do with cloud computing and technology with its ecosystem of partners, with its customers like Goldman Sachs. Jimmy, talk to us a little bit about you, your role at Goldman Sachs. You know, we think of Goldman Sachs as a huge financial institution, but it's also a technology company. Yeah, I mean, since the age of 15, I've been super passionate about how we can use technology to transform business and simplify, modernize business processes. And I'm so thrilled that I have the opportunity to do that at Goldman Sachs as an engineer. I recently moved about two years ago into the investment banking business and it's best in class, one of the top companies in terms of mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, et cetera. But what surprised me is how technology enables all the businesses across the board. And I get to be leading the digital platform for building out the digital platform for in the investment banking business where we're modernizing and transforming existing businesses. These are not new businesses. It's like sometimes I liken it to trying to change the train while it's moving. These are existing businesses, but now we get to modernize and transform on the cloud, right? Not just efficiency for the business, but efficiency for technologists as well. Right, right. Sticking with you, Jimmy, I want to understand, so you've been interested in tech since you were young. I only got into tech accidentally as an adult. I'm curious about your career path, but talk to us about that. What are some of the recommendations that you would have for other women who might be looking at, I want to be in technology, but I want to work for some of the big companies and they don't think about the Goldman Sachs or some of the other companies like Walmart that are absolutely technology driven. What's your advice for those women who want to grow their career? I also, growing up I was interested in various things. I love doing hair. I used to do my own hair and I used to do hair for other students at school. And I was also interested in running an entertainment company and I used to actually go around performing and singing and dancing with a group of friends, especially at church. But what amazed me is when I landed my first job at a real estate agent and everything was being done manually on paper, I was like, wow, technology can bring transformation anywhere and everywhere. And so whilst I have a myriad of interests, there's so many ways that technology can be applied. There's so many different types of disciplines within technology. It's not, there's hands up, like I'm colder, I like to cold, but they're product managers, they're a business analyst, they're infrastructure specialists, they're a security specialist. And I think it's about pursuing your passion, right? Pursuing your passion and identifying which aspects of technology pique your interest and then diving in. Get involved. I love that, diving in. Rachel, you're shaking your head. I am. You definitely are in alignment with a lot of what you do. I am. So, you know, interesting enough, I actually started my career as a civil engineer and eventually made it into, into technology. So very similar. I saw in, you know, heavy highway construction how manual some of these processes were and mind you, this was before the cloud. And I sat down and wrote a little computer program to automate a lot of these manual tasks. And for me, it was about simplification of the customer journey and really figuring out how do you deliver value, you know, and fast forward, say 20 plus years. Here I am with AWS who has got this amazing cloud platform with over 200 services. And when I think about what we do in tech from business transformation to modernizing to helping customers think about how do they create new business models? I've really found, I've really found my sweet spot. And I'll say for anyone who wants to get into tech or even switch careers, there's just a couple words of advice that I have. And it's really two words. Just start. Yes. That's it. Just start. Because sometimes later becomes never and you know, fuel your passion. Be curious. Think about new things and just start. I love that. Just start. You should get t-shirts made with that. Charu, talk a little bit about some of your recommendations. Obviously, just start as you're great when you follow your passion. What would you say to those out there looking to spend the latter? So, you know, my story is a little bit like Jumis because I did not want to be in tech. You know, I wanted an easy life. I did well in school and I wanted to actually be an air hostess. And when I broke that to my father, you know, the standard Indian persona, he wanted me to go in and be an engineer. So I was actually pushed into computer engineering, graduated. But then really two things today, right? When I look back, really two pieces, two areas I believe which are really important for success. One is, you know, we need to be competent. And the second is we need to be confident, right? It's so much easier to be competent because a lot of us diverse women, diverse people tend to over-rotate on knowing their technical skills, right? Knowing technical skills is important, but you need to know how to potentially apply those to business, right? Be able to define a business ROI. And I see Jumi nodding because she wants people to come in and give her a business ROI for programs that you're executing at Goldman Sachs, I presume. The more difficult part, though, is confidence. Absolutely. It's so hard, especially when we're younger, we don't know. Raise your hand because I guarantee you either half the people in the room or on the Zoom these days weren't listening or have the same question and are too afraid to ask because they don't have the confidence. Let's pivot on confidence for a minute, Jumi. Let's go back to you. How would you advise your younger self to find your confidence? That's a tough one because I feel like even this older self is still finding confidence to be real. But I think it's about, I would say it's no praise. I think it's about praising yourself, like recognizing your accomplishments. When I think about my younger self, I think I like to focus more on what I didn't do or what I didn't accomplish instead of majoring and focusing on all the accomplishments and the achievements and reminding myself of those day after day after day. And I think it's about celebrating your wins. I love that, celebrating your wins. You agree, Rachel? I do. Here's the hard part. And I look around this table of amazing business leaders and I can guarantee that every single one of us sometime this year woke up and said, oh my gosh, I don't know how to do that. Oh yeah. But what we haven't followed that by is I don't know how to do that yet. Right. And here's the other thing I would tell my younger self is there will be days where every single one of us falls apart. There will be days when we feel like we failed at work. There will be days when you feel like you failed as a parent or you failed as a spouse. There will be days where you have a kid in the middle of target screaming and crying while you're trying to close a big business deal and you just like, oh my gosh, is this really my life? But what I would tell my younger self is, look, the crying, the chaos, the second guessing yourself, the successes, every single one of those are milestones and it's triumphant, it's tragic. But every single thing that we have been through is fiercely worthwhile and it's what got us here. Absolutely. Absolutely. We have all the trials and tribulations and zigs and zags that got you to this table right now. So, Charlie, you brought up confidence. How would you advise the women out there, we won't say your younger self, the women out there now that are watching, those that are watching right there, hi. How would you advise them to really find their ability to praise themselves, recognize all of the trials and the tribulations as milestones, as Rachel said, and really give themselves a seat at the table, raise their hand regardless of who else is in the room. You know, it's a more complex question just because confidence stems from courage, right? Confidence also stems from the belief that you're going to be treated fairly, right? Now, in an organization for you to be treated fairly, you need to be surrounded by supporters that are going to promote your voice and very often women don't invest enough in building that support system around them, right? We have mentors and mentors are great because they come in and they advise us and they'll tell us what we need to go out and do. We really need a team of sponsors who come in and support us in the moment, in the business, give us the informal channel because very often we are not plugged into the informal channel, right? So we don't get those special projects or assignments or even opportunities to prove that we can do the tough task. So, you know, my advice would be to go out and build a network of sponsors and if you don't have one, be a sponsor for someone else. A great way to win sponsorship is by extending it to others. And sometimes too, it's about, honestly, I didn't even know the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a few years ago and I started thinking, who are mine? And then I started realizing who they were. And some of the conversations that we've had on theCUBE about women in technology, women at the cloud, with some of the women leaders have said, build, and this is kind of like what you were saying, build your own personal board of directors. And then, oh, it gives me chills. It's just, it's so important for not just women, anybody, but it's so important to do that. And if you think about LinkedIn as an example, you have a network, it's there. You realize it. Figure out who your mentors are, who your sponsors are, who are going to help you land the next thing. Start building that reputation, but having that board of directors that you can kind of answer to or have some accountability towards, I think is hugely important. Very important, very important. You know, just for those that are listening a really important distinction for me was mentors are people that you have that help you with, hey, here's the situation that you were just in. They advise you on the situation. Sponsors are the people that stick up for you when you're not in the room, right? Sponsors are the ones that say, hey, I think so and so, not only needs to have a seat at the table, but they need to build the table. And that's a really important delineation between mentors and sponsors. And everybody's got to have a sponsor both within their company and outside of their company, someone that's advocating for them on their behalf when they don't even know it. I love that you said that build the table. It reminds me of a quote that I heard from Will I Am, I know, very random. It was a podcast he did with Oprah Winfrey on AI. He's very into AI and I was doing a panel on AI so I was doing a lot of research and he said, similar to Rachel to build the table, don't wait for a door to open, you go build a door. And I just thought, God, that is such brilliant advice. It's hard to do, especially when the four of us in this room, there's a lot of women around here, but we are in an environment where we are the minority, women of color are also the minority. What do you guys think where tech is in terms of DE and I and really focusing on DE and I as really a very focused strategic initiative? Tara, what do you think? So I spoke earlier about the women that we have at Entity Data. We have a fabulous team of women and joining this team has been a moment of revelation for me coming in. I think to promote DNI, we all need to start giving back. So today, I would love to announce that we at Entity would like to welcome all of you out there, folks that have diverse ideas, ISV partners with diverse solutions, thought leaders out there who want to contribute into the ecosystem, right? Customers out there who want to work with companies that are socially responsible. We want to work with all of you, come back, reach out to us and be a part of the ecosystem because we can build this together. AWS has an amazing platform that gives us an opportunity to do things differently, right? Entity Data is building a women-powered cloud team and I want to really extend that out to everyone else to be a part of this ecosystem. But a fantastic opportunity. When we talk about diversity and inclusion and equity, it needs to be intentional for organization. It sounds very intentional at MTT. I know that that intention is definitely there at AWS as well. What are your thoughts on where tech is with respect to diversity? Even thought diversity, because a lot of times we tend to go to our comfort zones. And so we tend to start creating these circles of kind of like think tanks and they think alike. We need to be able to go outside of that comfort zone. That's part of building the table. Building the table and getting people from outside your comfort zone to come in and bring in diverse thought because can you imagine the potential of technology if we have true thought diversity in an organization? Right, it's incredible. So one of the things that I always share with my team is we've got the opportunity to really change the outcome, right? As you talked about will, I am. I'm going to talk about Bono from you too, right? One of his favorite quotes is, we are the people we've been waiting for. And when you think about that, that is us. There is no one else that's going to change the outcome and continue to deliver some of the business outcomes in the innovation that we are. If we don't continue to raise our hand and we don't continue to inspire the next generation of leaders to do the same thing. And what I've found is when you start openly sharing what your innovation ideas or how you're leveraging your engineering background, your stories and your successes and frankly some of your failures become the inspiration for someone you might not even know. Absolutely. And that's the key. You're right. Inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility Yes. Have to be at the forefront of every business decision. And I think too often companies think that inclusion, diversity, equity and accessibility is one thing and business outcomes are another. And they're not. They are one in the same. You can't build business outcomes without also focusing on inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility. That's the deliberate piece. And it has to be deliberate. Jimmy, I want to ask you, we only have a couple of minutes left but you're a woman in tech, you're a woman of color. What was that like for you? You were very intentional knowing when you were quite young what you wanted to do but how have you navigated that because I can't imagine that was easy. It wasn't. I remember I always tell the story and the two things I really wanted to emphasize today when I thought about this panel is representation matters and showing up matters. And there's a statement, there's a quote I don't know who it's attributed to but be the change you want to see. I remember walking through the doors of Goldman Sachs 15 years ago and not seeing a black female engineer leader. And at that point in time I had a choice. I could be like, oh, there's no one that looks like me. I don't belong here. Or I could do what I actually did and say, well I'm going to be that person. Right? I'm going to be the change. I'm going to show up and I'm going to have a seat at the table so that other people behind me can also have a seat at the table. And I think that I've had the privilege to work for a company who has been inclusive, who has had the right support system, the right structures in place so that I can be that person who is the first black women tech fellow at Goldman Sachs who is one of the first black females to be promoted up the rank as a from analyst to managing director at the company. That was not just because I determined that I belong here but because the company ensured that I felt that I belong here. Right. That's a great point. They ensured that you felt that. You need to be able to feel that. Last question we've only got about a minute left. 2023 is just around the corner. What comes to your mind, Jimmy will stick with you as you head into the new year. Sorry, can you repeat? What comes to mind priorities for 2023 that you're excited about? I'm excited about the democratization of data. I'm excited about a lot of the announcements today. And I think there is a huge shift going on with this whole concept of marketplaces and data exchanges and data sharing. And I think both internally and externally, people are coming together more, companies are coming together more to really democratize and make data available. And data is power. A lot of our businesses are running on insights, right? And we need to bring that data together. And I'm really excited about the trends that's going on in cloud, in technology to actually bring the data sets together. Terry, what are you most excited about as we head to 2023? I think I'm really excited about the possibilities that NGT data has. Right here, right now, city of Las Vegas, we've actually rolled out a smart city project. So saving citizens' life, using data, edge analytics, machine learning, being able to predict adverse incidents before they happen and then being able to take remediation action, right? So that's technology actually working in real time to give us tangible results. We also sponsored the Indica Races. Lots of work happening there in delivering amazing customer experience across the platform to millions of users real time. So I think I'm just excited about technology coming together. But while that's happening, I think we really need to be mindful at this time that we don't push our planet into peril. We need to be sustainable. We need to be responsible. Absolutely. Rachel, take a cell. What are you most excited about going into 2023? So there are so many trends that we could talk about, but I'll tell you, at AWS, we're big. We impact the world. So we've got to be really thoughtful and humble about what it is that we do. So for me, what I'm most excited about is one of our leadership principles is about with broad responsibility brings, you've got to impact sustainability and many of those other things. And for me, I think it's about waking up every day for our customers, for our partners, and for the younger generations and being better, doing better, and making better for this planet and for the future generations to come. So I think your tagline at just start applies to all of that. It does. It has been an absolute pleasure. And I'm really an honor to talk to you on the program. Thank you all for joining me, sharing your experiences, sharing what you've accomplished, your recommendations for those others who might be our same generation or older or younger. All really beautiful advice. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. We appreciate it. Thank you. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Thanks for watching.