 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the digital version, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by a couple of guests from Unisys. Please welcome Anupam Sakai, the VP and Cloud CTO. Anupam, great to have you on the program. Thanks for joining me today. Great to be here, Lisa. And Anupri or Anu Ramraj, VP of Cloud Services. Anu, welcome, great to have you on as well. You're great to be here in this virtual AWS re-invent. Great, thank you for having us. Very socially distanced, we're following all the guidelines here. Anu, let's start with you. I'd love to get just kind of a vision of the AWS Unisys partnership. I know you guys are advanced consulting partner, MSP. Tell me about that partnership. Absolutely, Lisa. We see our clients on a cloud journey, which we accelerate with Unisys Cloud Services and AWS partnership is a big piece of that. So again, through the row, we have been rated an AWS MSP partner, come out very, very highly from those MSP audits. And we're investing in multiple competencies across the board as well. And we work very closely with AWS in terms of innovating and sharing our platform, Cloud Forte for Roadmap, and looking at what our customers are looking around the corner, what services could be co-developed. So we're looking at some potential IoT engagements jointly with AWS as well. So we're always co-inventing and it's a great partnership with AWS. Excellent, Anu, let's stick with you following on hybrid cloud journey. You mentioned the Cloud Forte platform. I wanted to understand what that platform is, how you're co-developing that with AWS and how your customers are benefiting. Absolutely, Lisa. Every year, Unisys does a cloud barometer study across thousands of our clients and we got some interesting takeaways from that. Essentially, two-third of our clients that have started this cloud journey believe they didn't fully realize the benefits out of that. And up to 53% of the respondents said they needed some help with cloud security. And this is where we believe that Unisys cloud services has a strong viewpoint and can combine their AWS journey, no matter what challenges they're facing, whether it's budgetary challenges on optimizing AWS and whether it's getting IT operations right when you move your applications to AWS and is it getting the right DevSecOps models established? So no matter where clients are in their journey, we look to accelerate with our set of solutions and services. And we're very proud about the fact that we respond very quickly to make sure our clients can innovate and achieve the business outcomes that they need. For example, with California State University, we were able to work with them on their AWS journey, fully set up an AWS Lake and analytics on top of it. So we could actually predict and influence graduation rates for students. Our scores are higher than any of our common because of the outcomes that we deliver for our clients. And it's really about business outcomes and Forte platform, which helps us drive those outcomes. Any problem, do you want to add on with our Cloud Forte platform? Sure, Anu. So as Anu was saying, Cloud Forte platform provides a set of capabilities that allows us to create and offer highly differentiated services with Unisys IP. And as was mentioned earlier, our cloud solutions are able to help customers no matter where they are in their cloud journeys, whether it's a greenfield opportunity where the customers are intending to move to the cloud or if it's a brownfield opportunity where they already have adopted the cloud and are looking to manage and operate and optimize their deployments. Cloud Forte platform and our cloud solutions are able to provide a customized solution for that customer context to really deliver the solution that addresses some of the pain points that Anu talked about. The key pain points really relate to security, to get secured, it also relates to cost optimization and then optimizing the cloud per se, cloud deployment, hybrid cloud deployment is a key requirement. So our Cloud Forte platform helps drives the key use cases, the key pain points that our customers are looking for through a combination of accelerators, the number of Cloud Forte accelerators that enable customers to rapidly provision customers and to rapidly migrate to the cloud with God rails so that they're secure, they're compliant. And then we've got the Cloud Forte cloud management platform for ensuring provisioning and management and operations along with cost optimization capabilities and valid operations. So it's a comprehensive suite of services and solutions that addresses the key business outcomes that our customers are looking for. Outcomes focused is absolutely critical, especially these days. Anu, I wanted to go back to you for a second. You talked about the Unisys barometer study and I like the name of that. When was that done? And I'm just wondering if there are certain things that you saw this year from a customer cloud journey need perspective because of the pandemic that have really influenced that barometer. Great question, Lisa. And the barometer study, the last version of it was done late last year and we're still waiting on the ones from this year. So that we're starting to see some of the trends that were influenced by the pandemic. We saw a rush to cloud when the pandemic hit because businesses opt to remote workers to do more digital selling. And then seeing our CIOs kind of struggle with optimizing and maximizing the results of their cloud spend. So that's a unique challenge that we're seeing based on our client interaction. So the rush to the cloud and the ask for more spend optimization. And in terms of spend optimization that's an interesting facet because it cuts through multiple angles. It's cuts through having the platforms around being able to do the right predictions on where you spend is going. And then it also, it's a cross-collaborative effort. Phenopsis, we see it, we call it as a Phenopsis that we bring to our clients. It's passing with multiple organizations including finance to sometimes figure out where will this business be? Where should the spending be? What should be the reserve instance buys? So combining cloud knowledge with financial knowledge and organizational and business knowledge and that's the service that we bring to our clients with our Phenopsis services. Lisa, great question about how is pandemic and the current business climate affecting our operating models? Like we said, there's increased ask for Phenopsis and increased ask for security ops because security threats have only amplified. And then the entire cloud ops model I think hybrid cloud operations, it's prompted us to rethink a lot of how do we do IT operations? And we're investing a lot in terms of automation and then underpinning that by AI led operations. So Anupam talked about the cloud management platform making sure we've got robust automation and processes which are repeatable around all the way from just doing provisioning to data operations to optimization. Just making all of that robust and repeatable is such a value add to clients because then the CSOs can sleep at night knowing that everything is taken care of and the CIOs can be rest assured that, hey, they're not gonna get that AWS bill that's going to make them hit the roof. So making sure we've got the right checks and balances and approval flows all a part of our cloud management platform. And Anupam, I know you're really passionate AI and the role that it plays in operations and the entire cloud management platform and cloud forte platform. So your thoughts, Anupam? Yes, Anu. Thank you. So yeah, AI led operations is really part of the bigger question and the pain point that customers are faced with which is I've reached the cloud. Now how do I optimize and get benefits from the cloud? And the benefits is around utility for on-demand access to resources, this cost optimization potential and the security, cloud security potential that if not managed properly can really blow up in the face. And unfortunately, that's been the case. On the AI ops led operations side that's again, a huge fertile area where Unices is investing a lot of IP and creating a lot of differentiation. And the objective there is to as customers adopt cloud forte as they adopt Unices cloud services, they're able to take advantage of cost optimization capabilities which essentially looks at historical usage and predicts future usage based on a number of AI, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies that is able to give you predictions that are otherwise very hard to get. And in the cloud environment, because of the sheer velocity, volume and variety of the data, doing that in a manual fashion is very, very hard. So automated machine learning driven approach is very productive, is very effective and some of the outcomes that we've achieved is just amazing. We've been able to save up to 25% of infrastructure costs through AI led operations, about 40% of infrastructure incidents have been reduced due to root cause analysis. So and up to 35% of mean time to resolution, improvements in time. So huge customer benefits driven by AI led operations, the IML approaches to solving the problem. Anupama, if I could stick with you for a second, big numbers that you just talked about and we talked a few minutes ago about outcomes and it's all about outcomes. Right now with this rush to cloud, as Anu said, and we talk about this on theCUBE all the time, we've seen that the last eight months, there is an acceleration on this digital transformation. I'm just curious Anupama from your perspective as the VP and CTO cloud, how are you, what are some of the things that you advise customers to do if they need to rush to the cloud, to one, just move their business quickly and not have a stay on life support? What are some of the things that you advise them to do when they're in this, maybe a few months ago when they were in the beginning of this? Yeah, that's a very interesting question and a lot of our clients are faced with that question as they either, they're already in the cloud or they're deciding to migrate to the cloud and the whole journey, customer journeys for either stepping on the cloud or managing and operating, the optimizing the cloud deployments is very key. So if you look at the market research that's out there and what we hear from our customers, the key challenges are really around how do I migrate to the cloud without facing a lot of bottlenecks and challenges and how do I overcome them? So that's the key pain point. And again, cloud photo advisory services and the cloud services that we offer allows customers to take out, to work with us and we work with the customer to ensure that they're able to do that. And then rapidly migrating to the cloud, managing and operating their operations, the hybrid cloud operations in optimized fashion is a huge challenge. How do they migrate with security and compliance not being compromised? Once they're in the cloud, ensuring cloud security and compliance is maintained, ensuring that the cost structure is optimized so that they're not paying more once they move to the cloud compared to on premises. And then taking advantage of the whole cloud deployments to ensure you're looking at data, harnessing the data to derive meaningful business outcomes. So it's the entire end-to-end customer journey that needs to be looked at, optimized and that's where Unices comes in with our cloud four-day platform where we work with the customers to enhance the journeys. And in this case, I want to mention CSU which is the California State University where they approach Unices to really work with them to deliver cloud services by enhancing the objective was to enhance the student learning experience to enable adoption of the technology by the students but also to achieve better performance, better adoption, cost savings and we were able to deliver about 30% better performance, help realize about 33% cost savings and 40% plus growth in adoption. And this was for about half a million student bodies with 50,000 plus faculty staff spread across 23 campuses. So deploying, optimizing and managing the infrastructure is something that Unices does that and this is an example of that. Anu, you want to add anything to that? Absolutely, Anupamin, it's really well and it's also securing, making sure security is at the journey. It's so key for a hybrid cloud at least I'm sure you're aware of the Unices tagline is securing tomorrow. So who better? So we really, really take that really, really seriously in terms of making sure we secure clients cloud journeys. And you probably heard this statistic from about 80% of cloud breaches are due to misconfiguration and this could have been prevented and there's an element of the human handle in there. We believe strongly that we can automate using our platform. So we've got 2000 plus security policies which again enables our clients to be compliant as well. So no matter what compliance standards, we've got several of our clients, for example, in the financial sector that are hosted on AWS and they've been managed and they have to, especially in the US, they have to comply with NYDFS, the New York Department of Financial Services and making sure that they're compliant with all the standards out there which is NIST++ in this case. So that's part of what we do in enabling those journeys. And then just keeping up with the rate of change like Anupamin was talking about the variety and velocity of the data and the rate of change of the applications out there, especially as businesses react to the pandemic and have to cope with the changing business paradigms out there, they have to be quick. So we've got a drug maker, one of the most premium drug makers in the US who is hosted on AWS and they are racing for the cure and they are always looking at how do they get drugs quicker to the market and that means accelerating applications and we know that based on research by the Dora study that if you adopt DevOps paradigms you can accelerate 200 times faster than if you didn't but then you have to underpin back with security as well. So really helping this adopt DevSecOps in all their deployments to AWS so that they can really race for the cure. That's the kind of business outcomes that we really are really, really proud to drive for our clients. Excellent, Anupamin, let's wrap this up with you. We've just got about 30 seconds left sticking on the security front. It's such a huge topic right now. It has been for a long time but even more so during these unprecedented times. When you're talking with customers what makes Unices unique from a security perspective? So first thing is to understand what it takes to solve the hybrid cloud security problem. Like you said earlier that's the biggest pain point that we hear from customers, from our clients and it's all over the market research. All the breaches that have happened like the Zoom breach that happened that compromised about half a million user logins and then there was also the Marriott breach where about half a billion users' names and credentials were leaked out. So it's very easy for customers, potential customers to become like in headline. And our job really as a company is to make sure that they are not the next Capital One or the next Marriott showing up in the newspaper. So we kind of look at their customer deployments situation and we put together a comprehensive end-to-end hybrid cloud solution, hybrid cloud security and compliance solution that includes look securing their cloud infrastructure, their cloud workloads in terms of applications that they might have secured and also to look at securing their applications which may or may not be running on the cloud. So we kind of take a very holistic approach using our homegrown solutions and partner solutions to create a comprehensive robust hybrid cloud solution that really fits the customer context. And so we are essentially a trusted advisor for our clients to create the solution, which again, as I said, Cloud Forte Assure, which is a cloud security posture management solution. We have a cloud workload protection solution and then Stealth, which is a full stack security solution if combined together with the other Cloud Forte platform components. And we wrap this up in a managed security services offering that allows us customers to have complete peace of mind as we take care of assessment, remediation, monitoring and then continuous posture management. Anu, do you want to add anything to that? If I'm thinking in terms of closing, I think like you covered it while we've got platform components and services that run the gamut of the life cycle from migrations to transformations. And one thing that I think in terms of outcomes that these, when the service built around it have really helped us drive is kind of responding especially to our public sector clients. We're very passionate about enabling cloud journeys for our public sector clients and we'll take the example of Georgia Technology. So this is the GTA is the technology agency for all services, 14 of the agencies in Georgia. And many of these public sector agencies had to quickly adopt cloud to deal with the remote workers whether it was VDI, whether it was chatbots on cloud. It was a brand new world out there, the new normal. And it was just using the cloud management platform that Anupam was referring to. We were able to kind of take them from taking three months plus to be able to provision workloads to less than 30 minutes to provision the workloads. And this is a class hybrid cloud. So, and this is with all the... That's a big outcome, especially in this time where things were changing so quickly. Well, I wish we had more time guys because I can tell you have a lot more that you can share. So you're just going to have to come back. And I like that the tagline securing tomorrow adding onto what Anupam said. So your customers don't become the next headline I think they would all appreciate that. Thank you both so much for joining me on theCUBE today and sharing what's the latest with UNSF. We appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you for having us. All right, my pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE.