 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World. We've been covering Dell Tech World since it started. Really, it used to just be Dell World and there was EMC World after the merger. And this is the all virtual version, but we're excited to be here and we've got a great panel coming up. I think you're going to enjoy it. Our first guest is Rajesh Jani. He is the Senior Vice President of Global Alliances for APJ for Dell Technologies. Rajesh, where are you coming in from today? I'm speaking to you from Gurgaon, India. Awesome. It's the power of the virtual, right? It's not all bad that we don't have to get on planes all the time. Absolutely. All right, and joining him is Udpal Bakshi. He is the Vice President and Global Vertical Head, high tech for Y-Pro. Udpal, good to see you. Nice to see you. And where are you calling us in from? I'm from Dallas, Texas, actually. Suburb, outside of Dallas, called Southlake. Oh, excellent. Great to see you. And again, didn't have to get on a plane to do this, so not all bad. And also joining us is Satish Yadavalli. He is the Vice President and Global Practice Head, Cloud and Infrastructure Services for Y-Pro. Satish, where are you joining us from? Hi, I'm joining from Bangalore, India. Excellent. Well, welcome. So gentlemen, you know, let's just jump into it. I mean, Y-Pro is a huge services firm. Does a lot of work with Dell. So I wonder, Rajesh, if you can talk really about the importance of partnerships and the importance of having somebody like Y-Pro, you know, within the Dell ecosystem. Absolutely. And thank you for having us on with Vipro. Vipro and we have a partnership which is over two decades old. And we have a multifaceted or a 360-degree kind of relationship with Vipro. Vipro is a platinum partner. And what's more, while we bring a lot of technology and products and the depth of product which are relevant to customers' transformation scenarios today, coupled with Vipro's consulting and services and design abilities, this becomes an unbeatable powerhouse, so to say, whereby we can work closely with our customer to help them transform and live in what we are calling the next normal. Yeah, that's great. And Utpal, TU, you know, there's a lot of interesting trends going on. I mean, we've had cloud and big data been going on for a lot, but really, you know, the talk in social media is what's driving your digital transformation, the CEO, the CIO or COVID. And we all know what the answer is. So we've got, you know, a lot of new stuff in terms of digital transformation, working from anywhere, workforce transformation. Wonder if you can speak a little bit about how, you know, kind of COVID has accelerated some of the priorities that your customers are trying to get done. Yeah, no, I think that's a great point, you know. So, see, Vipro has been, you know, transforming over the last several years. You know, we were a strong, large-scale system integration partner, large IT organization. But over the last several years, we pivoted hard into the digital transformation world, moving into the design side, leading with design, moving to cloud and helping our clients help make that journey. And all of that got accelerated with the whole COVID situation. You know, the work from home became all pervasive and the whole virtualization of the workforce and, you know, really pivoted with some of our key transformational ideas around live workspace and the virtual desk, which we've been working very closely with Dell, have taken shape. So that has been a big part of our ongoing strategy, you know, doing the modernization of the network, you know, has also accelerated the customer networks and infrastructure was not necessarily set up for enabling these hybrid work environments. So some of, a lot of our clients are coming back and saying they want to modernize and actually accelerate. So that has all changed and, you know, with COVID, some of it is very positive actually for the business from an SI perspective. And Satish, you've got cloud and infrastructure in your title. I mean, public cloud really changed the game when Amazon, you know, kind of came on the scene and now we're seeing this, you know, kind of evolution and kind of change over time between public cloud and hybrid cloud and multicloud and cloud on clouds. I wonder if you could speak to and then we're even having, you know, AWS inside of other people's clouds are trying to get it out there. You know, the evolution of cloud, both as a technology, but really more as a way of thinking in terms of, you know, rapid deployment of new functionality to support the business and what you're seeing with your customers today. Yeah. So let me share a perspective, right? And enterprises today are looking at options to extract greater value from hybrid cloud investments. So it's a, it's a brownfield environment today where customers have their existing data centers, but the hyperscalers have really come into play now and right cloud is the strategy which most of our customers embrace to address the market demands which are primarily focused on business outcomes today. We pro, as we've invested in developing a holistic extensible platform-led approach called a Wipro Boundless Enterprise to drive business outcomes to customers. So the BLE construct is all about providing a ready to use plug and play platforms making IT easily consumable from multiple stakeholder personas like so be it admins, be it line of businesses, developers and partners. So basically we have built a holistic solution and our BLE solutions has majorly five building blocks. The first building block would be the Boundless Data Center. The second is the Boundless Container Platform. The third is the Boundless Data Protection Platform. The third, the fourth is the Boundless Cloud Exchange where we get together all the internet connections and define the software-defined network power to give access to the workloads across hybrid environments and the Boundless Integration Platform which we call it as BLIP. Basically this is what we have put together to deliver an outcome to the customers powered by BLE. So BLE again, you call that the boundaryless, the boundaryless enterprise. So what's the most important components of BLE? What are the things that most people are missing to actually implement this strategy? Yeah. So if I actually peel down here, right? The five building blocks let me elaborate in detail. The first is on the Boundless Data Center. This enables our clients to deliver an infrastructure as a service across data centers and public clouds and enables customers to seamlessly move workloads from edge to cloud and manage them in a consistent and efficient model. That's the first building block of our BLE. The second important building block is containers, right? We all know today container orchestration is key across hybrid clouds. And with microservices and architectures becoming more prominent, we see huge search for managing various Kubernetes environments with our clients. So our BLCP platform liberated solutions like VMware Tanzu, which is again a Dell company to enable clients manage their multi-cloud Kubernetes environments through a single pane of glass and provide seamless migration and movement of workloads across cloud environments. That's going to be the key in the future with microservices being dominant and every enterprise embracing microservices architectures, this becomes very important building block in our overall solution. The third important stuff is Boundless Data Protection, right? Now that data is all-crossed in hybrid cloud environment and applications actually consume this data, it is important to protect the data which is intellectual property and very critical to every business. So with the BLDP platform, we ensure that we deliver availability, sovereignty, security and reliability of cloud adoption increasingly and rapidly across multi-cloud platforms. So our solution leverages the DTC of Dell and other existing Dell storages and data protection solutions to offer seamless and right cost models, which will be very critical for any cloud transformation initiatives as we move forward. The fourth point which I was talking about is BLCE. This is basically a cloud exchange where in a hybrid cloud environment, you need to establish connectivity across pass and SaaS platforms as well as on-premise networks to provide seamless access to data and the workloads which are in multi-cloud scenarios. So that's about BLCE. With respect to BLIP, it is an integration platform, right? Today we are in a software-defined world and when I talk about providing a single pane of glass solution, it is important for us to have an integration platform where it can bring all APIs together and do northbound and southbound integrations with the architectures of clients and the cloud providers to spin off workloads to commission, decommission and provide a seamless consumption experience to clients across multiple hyperscalers and on-premise infrastructure. Thank you for that summary. I think you hit on all the big trends. I want to go back to you, Rajesh, because you've said that this is a really unique time. You've been in the business for a very long time. You've seen a lot of other transformations and you've seen a lot of big trends. Why is this one different? What makes where we are today such a unique point in time in this kind of IT industry journey? Excellent. I think I would say we are in a period of what is called an enforced innovation. While most of the time transformation in IT has become, has been very, very sequential or continuous, I think we are seeing an order of shift in the transformation. And this whole situation is forcing everyone to accelerate their pace of innovation and transformation. There are two key priorities for every organization in this time. One, build resilient operations and second, employ safety. These two parameters have forced the organization to look at their businesses differently, look at their IT infrastructure differently and create a sort of opportunity you can say which is right for Vipro's boundary-less enterprise because there are no boundaries. People are working from home. They are no longer in an office confined or boundary. So that's smart. And we, and coming back, we are seeing an accelerated innovation. That means our partnership to deliver customer transformation at scale becomes all the more important. Bringing all the good technologies of Dell on one side and combining it with Vipro's size scale and services help us lead in the marketplace for customer transformation. And what's more? We are adding our Dell financial services solutions as Dell Tech on demand to enable all these two being consumed as a service and with flexible payment option which Vipro helps us translate into customer offerings. That's great. Udpa, I want to go to you and get your perspective on how customers in terms of this boundary-less, how things have changed since kind of March 15th which at least here in the U.S. If in India it was on the same date when everything basically got shut down, right? So it was this light switch moment. Everybody worked from home. No planning, no thought, like ready, set, go. To now, we're six, seven, eight months into this thing and clearly it's a marathon, not a sprint. And even if we go back to some semblance of what was the old normal, the new normal is going to be different and everyone is not going to go back to work full time like they did before. So how, from a customer perspective, from a technology implementation perspective and from kind of an initiative and getting this stuff done, how has that changed kind of pre-COVID and oh my goodness, it's the light switch moment and now it's, hey, we're in this for the long term. Yeah, no, I think Rajesh did hit upon that a little bit. So this is truly that moment where it was a forced innovation. Some of it was happening anyways and it was bound to happen. But I think the COVID kind of accelerated all of it. What has impacted is it all started with, okay, how do we enable work from home? And that is when the whole boundary less infrastructure, boundary less, the virtual desk solutions and all of that started gaining impact. I think after that, most companies have realized that this is not a short-term fix. It is a long-term, it's going to be here for staying. So they wanted to have a long-term fix. So they wanted to come in with the innovation, but at the same time, from a business perspective, they've had impact on business. So they wanted very creative business models for them to get set with the technology innovation quicker, but they didn't want to do it in a traditional way of paying it all upfront and moving it to that. So that is where the creativity in terms of joint innovation which we did with Dell in flexible payment options, bringing in some kind of an asset lease model and things like that have gained traction. A lot more conversations are around, we want to transform, help us find a way to make the transformation sooner with maybe less investment upfront and find a way to fund this from the future saving. We'll get so that we can be ready for the future without necessarily impacting the bottom line today. So all of that has changed. I think I would say in summary has accelerated the adoption and the rate of change, but it has also led to us, all of us thinking some creative business models and new approaches to doing business. Right, right. Satish, back to you, right? What are the big conflicts that always exist as kind of innovation versus kind of security, right? And enabling innovation and giving people more power, more tools, more data to do things at the same time now your attack surface has increased. You don't necessarily have everybody locked down on their home infrastructure and they were forced into this. So when people are talking about digital transformation, how do they continue to drive forward and how are you helping them on innovation and enabling innovation at the same time as you talked about keeping the data protected and really thinking about business resiliency and continuity in this kind of increased attack surface, not only because of mobile, but now with the working from home thing, it's increased exponentially. Yeah, so I would just take an example of how Wipro handled this pandemic, right? When it hit us and what solutions we did. So let me just give you a perspective, right? As we all know, the current pandemic had disrupted many industries and we were no exception. And basically COVID has brought to the forefront many crucial factors in terms of business continuity process, the quality of employee experience and the organization connect with its employees. So while we enabled our employees to connect, collaborate and communicate with ease from anywhere from any device in a secure way with a consistent user experience powered by Wipro Live Workplace platform, which actually takes care of delivering a seamless onboarding of user via the Wipro Live Workplace platform and consume all the services the way they used to traditionally consume when they were working from office. So this is something which is the power of Wipro Live Workplace platform we have implemented to deliver a seamless employee experience access to the workspaces, that's one. But also there are some learnings, right? When we implemented the solutions on the flip side, as businesses we must also acknowledge and be cognizant of the fact that employees are trying hard to juggle between frequent interruptions at home and notifications from various applications we receive both on corporate and personal devices. Basically in nutshell, it is difficult to have the culture of corporate to be working from home. And basically that's another big learning. While all of us were adjusting to this new normal, we are in constant touch with our employees and trying to improve the overall employee connect and experience. From a solution perspective, let me just give you what we actually did. We are close to 175,000 employees across the globe. Suddenly started working from home post-workdown. What does this mean? The traffic pattern suddenly changed the directions which were traditionally moving on an east to west direction started moving north to south. Basically this means 100% of the workforce in a corporate started coming from the internet to access the corporate infrastructure and then gain access to the customer network. So basically we had to quickly swing in with our solutions and got our engineering teams to re-engineer and tweak the infrastructure and security architecture to this new normal. By leveraging our Vipro BLE and VDI architectures which is powered by Dell VxRail, NSX, we were able to spin off and build capacity on on-prem as well as on-cloud in less than 24 hours post visa what got approvals from the clients. Lastly, we also deployed a back to work IOT solution which helped our employees to get back to work safely. Basically the solution offers various security parameters apart from traditional COVID updates. It also helps in scanning the employees temperatures, employee movement within the office premises, bundled with video analytics and enable secure touchless access to the ODCs for employees who are coming back to work. So we put in all these solutions together and we pretty much seamlessly were able to navigate from the pandemic situation and get our business back to operations in a matter of days. 175,000 people, that's an interesting, it's really interesting to think about how that network traffic completely changed from inside the firewalls to everything coming from the outside. That's a lot of people to get working from home right away. So congratulations on that. You know, as we come to a close Rajesh, I want to come back to you and talk about again partnership in the age of this rapid acceleration of technology adoption and new technology. I mean, we talked about the work from home, we've talked about cloud. We haven't talked very much about is this other big thing that's coming down the pike which is 5G and IOT and kind of this entirely new scale of communication that's machine to machine, not person to person and now these connected devices and the amount of traffic continues to go up into the right at an accelerating rate. Again, tell us a little bit about, you know the meaningfulness of having a partnership like with pro that you guys can build solutions around new cutting edge technologies and have that real close connection, you know with the customer with all the supporting services. Would love to. And maybe first I'll give you a perspective on how our employee base started working from home. Some of the statistics that I wanted to show maybe add on to what he said. Sure. We transitioned 120,000 employees twice the normal to work from home within two weeks and every day we have some running something like 20,000 meetings and 16 million zoom minutes per day. That's the kind of traffic IOT is seeing and then zoom minutes per day. Wow. That's the kind of traffic we have. And our VPN traffic user load just tripled as soft to our IT we call Dell Digital. It was just a smooth and seamless experience. Now coming back, you said rightly while we have partnered so far to deliver to the solution which are here today and the customers needs which are here today what are we going to do for the future needs especially IE, 5G, IOT. I think we believe as a cooperation that edge is gonna be the next wave of innovation and next wave where customers will benefit. Therefore connectivity to the edge via 5G becomes critical. IOT devices and managing the traffic and contain it there itself rather than flowing it back to data center become critical. And as an example, Vipro and Dell Technologies are using our hyper-converged solutions along with VMware telco hardened software for a European telco to provide automation in AI to deliver rapid results for the customer. Right, so these are just early parts of it. We are partnering with Vipro to build solution around 5G as well as telecom related innovation that will come into the picture. IOT Satish spoke about a simple example of employee attendance. Imagine this is a need which will only accelerate from every organization. Multiply it with the automation and AI that needs to be built into machines and feeding all the data back to drive some intelligence and refine the processes, refine the business outcomes. So I think we are working together on many of such things. And what's important is in all this, when the universe just explodes to devices and millions of devices, security becomes a paramount feature and we are working with Vipro to build what is called an embedded security into each of the solutions that we are designing. So security cannot be an afterthought or a bolt on, it's becoming an integral part of the overall solution as we move towards the edge. Yeah, right. And I think as Satish talked about all the distractions and notifications and a lot of great opportunities I think for Applied AI too, to help people know what to do next, right? And it's hard to be context switching all the time, not only on your work, but also the spouse is working from home, the kids are doing homeschooling. So, you know, it's not an optimal environment at all. Well, gentlemen, thank you for your time. Congratulations on your partnership and hope you have a fantastic Dell Tech world. Sorry, we can't be in person, but this is not too bad. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. Thank you, Satish, for your partnership. All right, thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. All right, so stay with us for continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. I'm Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching.