 Hello, and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, chief technologist for cloud and infrastructure services and Jay Dowling, America's sales lead for cloud and infrastructure services, both with DXC technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to theCUBE. Great, thanks for having us. Thank you, Dave, appreciate it. So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing the application portfolio. You got to think about your business model and really think about transforming your business, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is what role does the cloud play in modernization? Well, there are really three aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization, and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social and governance, also being more efficient with your IT investments, but that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation, and that can be achieved through automation and productivity, a speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment, which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience, and I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience, to be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. So thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you in the current climate, everybody's still concerned and there's not great visibility on the macro. So Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's top of mind today. I think everybody really understands the innovation and agility piece, at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because prior to the pandemic, people, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow, my business may not be that resilient. So Jay, my question to you is, what are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? You know, the priority is often overused term of digital transformation. You know, people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But you know, with DXC's philosophy, not everything goes to, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases you can run applications, you know, in your own data center or on-prem or in other environments, in a hybrid environment or a multi-cloud environment and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the, bring the things to the business that the clients are, you know, their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera, trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know, business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it and we advocate for, you know, there's not a single answer to that. We'd like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model, you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. So let's talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility and resilience, but there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We always talk about people, process and technology. Technology, oftentimes, CIOs will tell us, well, that's the easy part. We'll figure that out, whether it's true or not. But I agree, people and process is sometimes the tough one. So, Jay, why don't you start? What do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? I think people need to let the guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from the standards that are being built by best-in-class models. And there's many people that have got on cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a change management aspect that you need to look at with the environments. There's a skill set environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people to deliver with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of different elements. It's not just that this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that we're being as much of a consultative advocate for the client for where they wanna go, what their destiny is and based on what we've learned with other clients and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own their own challenges, if you would. So they need advocacy to help bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through technology advances which Jim is really good at doing for us. Yeah, Jim, is the big barrier skills issue, bench strength, are there other considerations from your perspective? Well, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach, a well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments are really important to get it maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously, you have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. You know, I mentioned multi-cloud just then. We had in January 17th, we had our SuperCloud 2 event and SuperCloud is basically, it's really multi, what multi-cloud should have been, I'd like to say. So it's just creating a common experience across clouds. And you guys were talking about, you know, there's different governance, there's different security, there's different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event and talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is, you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table and what is DXC's unique value? I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. Great. I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC given the size and the history of the company. I can use several examples, one of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. So it's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're on the edge, they're, you know, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now and they've really brought, you know, a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there's somebody, you could look at Dell Technology as somebody that might, you know, have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscaler activity and all the cloud activity, but they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and say, listen, not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment. And they'd like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know, both private and public, you know, to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and what's, you know, what's the best optimal running environment, you know, for us to be able to bring, you know, the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know, and, you know, the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of, you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced as well, partners with us well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know, their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know, work together hand in hand in front of our clients. Yeah, you know, Jim, Matt Baker who's the head of strategic planning at Dell talks about it's not a zero sum game. And I think, you know, you're right, Jay. I think initially people felt like, oh, wow, it's, it is a zero sum game, but it's clearly not. And this idea of, of whether you call it super cloud or Uber cloud or multi cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction. And I've, you know, look at some of their future projects. There's their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is, is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help us understand that. Help us figure this out, Jim here. Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table. And we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now, pre-dates, you know, the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to how you would respond to what's unique. You know, you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition, Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? I think- I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments at the right time and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include mainframe, it might include an on-premises infrastructure, it could include private cloud, public cloud and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. Yeah, and Jay, please, it was a complicated situation for a lot of customers. Chime in here. And if you were speaking still specifically to Dell here, like they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell and arm and arm in front of clients. And it's not a winter take all thing at all. It's really true partnership. They brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QBR meetings. We have regular executive touch point meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client, with the partners and the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there and continue to show a lot of support, both for them. There's other OEM partners, of course, in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients, but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and in our go-to-market strategy. Well, I think too, just my observation is a lot of us about trust. You guys have both earned the trust kind of over the years, taking your arrows over decades and that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? That's right. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it very much. Thank you. JJ, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on theCUBE. Right back.