 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SousaCon Digital, brought to you by Sousa. Hi and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of SousaCon Digital 20. Happy to welcome to the program Glenn Fitzgerald. He is the Chief Data Officer for Fujitsu, products in Europe coming to me from across the pond. Glenn Toh, great to see you. So thanks so much for joining us. Last two, thanks, very glad to be here. All right, so first of all, Fujitsu products in Europe, Chief Data Officer, give us a little bit, your role and responsibility inside Fujitsu. Of course, the Fujitsu products Europe is, as the name suggests, that part of the Fujitsu corporation that is dedicated to delivering our product set through the European geography. Fujitsu's product set runs the full range of ITC components from tablets to PCs to servers, to big storage devices, to network switches, to integrated systems and the software stacks that sit on top of them, it's a wide portfolio. And my role has been to be the Chief Technology Officer for that organization for several years. Recently, we have as an organization adopted a new approach to take to the marketplace and that has necessitated a slight change in my role to one that's more focused on enabling customers to get value out of their data and it's their data repositories and the correlation of that data to generate business value. A long description, but I think necessary. Yeah, no, super important, Glenn. One thing we've actually been saying for more than a year on theCUBE now is when you have that discussion of digital transformation, one of the things that differentiates companies before they've gone digital and if they are truly to call themselves, have gone through this transformation is they need to be data driven. Data needs to be how they are making their decisions. It was definitely a key theme that we heard from SUSE in the keynote. So maybe talk a little bit about how digital transformation in the partnership with SUSE fits into your world. Absolutely, so in terms of the transformation of our business and the changes that we're trying to make to it, as a product organization, traditionally our relationships with our customers is kind of transactional. We sell stuff and they buy stuff and that relationship with customers is increasingly less viable. It's increasingly challenged and I think it's challenged by the many things that have happened in the marketplace. It's a sign of a maturing industry. So you have the cloud and you have the ISVs who are providing compute power and storage capacity and network capability to our customers in a different way. They're delivering it on the click of a button on an internet browser and that's suitable for some customers in some situations. It isn't suitable for others, but it's definitely here to stay and it's definitely going to change the way the marketplace has worked and it has. So we've recognized inside our organization that we need to leverage some of the capabilities that exists inside the Fujitsu services organizations. Fujitsu is a large company. It also has very significant managed services capabilities. We deliver to huge customers all across Europe in terms of German government, British government, a lot of the big manufacturing industrials in Europe and a lot of the travel and insurance financial sectors. So leveraging some of that to take a more consultant led approach to our marketplace to our customers. So what we want to do with them is take them through this story of data transformation. And as you said, and I quite agree, the marketplace is becoming increasingly data-driven. You've only got to look at some of the well-known examples and I'm not going to rehearse them again because everybody's heard them and knows who they are. But every organization, however large or small, has to derive business advantage and discrimination from its data. Otherwise they'll go the way of, I hate to say it, the high street. You can see in this recent pandemic or the COVID-19 stuff, I don't know what it's like in the US, but absolutely in the UK and in Europe, those retailers that have been able to provide a online presence have survived and some of them have thrived. And those retailers that haven't been able to provide that presence aren't here anymore. And that's just, it's a current and rather violent example of this change of how to manage data and get the best value out of it. Now, in order to take that to our customers, the Fujitsu product team needs to change some of its capabilities. It needs to introduce some of those consulting capabilities into its portfolio, which we're doing. It needs to work with some of our partners to deliver the capabilities either as an installation or a service. And SUSE are one of our prime partners in that sense. Both in terms of delivering their computing platform standards, the SUSE Data Hub, although I believe it's changed its name that, the SUSE Data Hub as I know it, is core to our offerings in this space. We have just launched in Germany, for example, a manufacturing optimization application which runs on the SUSE infrastructure and uses the SAP database and database management systems above that to deliver things like predictive maintenance and just-in-time parts delivery and in-factory automated routing of little robots carrying the bits to the right place. And that's an example of something that was led by a consulting activity between Fujitsu and our customer, in this case, a large manufacturer. We recognized during that consultancy that some of the stuff we needed to do to deliver the solution that would deliver the data derived business benefit the customer needed was not in our immediate scope. We got some of our larger partners, SUSE and SAP, in this case, involved in it and the outcome has been happy for everybody. There are some lessons in all that that Fujitsu is still learning, if I'm frank, like how to price it. When you have consultant-led activities that are generating very great benefit for your client, it's not too great for the supplier to still be charging that just on consultant-day rate. That can lead you to not getting the value out of what you're providing to your client. So there's lessons there. There's lessons in how to interact between ourselves and some of our services partners and clients to make sure that the optimum route to market is delivered, but that essentially is due, is the story. It's a change from a transactional approach to a consultant-led approach and the generation of a large ecosystem of partners, like SUSE, like SAP, with the capabilities to build stuff with us to deliver business outcomes to clients, not a stack of things. Excellent. So Glenn, what about kind of emerging requirements, what you're hearing from your customers? AI is an area that we heard quite a bit in the keynote from SUSE. Where do you see that fitting into the entire discussion? Obviously, a key leverage of data when you talk about AI. Absolutely, and to talk about that in two ways. The first issue with that is exactly the point you make to your own data. So AI, which is not artificial and not intelligent, it's just maths. It's statistical mathematics acting upon a large set of data. And if you have a large set of the right data, it can produce fantastic results for the client. But without that data, it's a relatively meaningless exercise. Once that data is assembled, we're beginning to see very significant results produced by the application of neural networking and machine learning to technology-based data-derived solutions for our clients. And there are many examples. I'll give you just one or two. We are working with a large financial institution in the city of London that wants to produce basically an artificial knowledge base that will perform the task of insurance underwriting. Don't ask me how that works. I'm not a financial guy. But apparently insurance underwriting is a relatively mechanical task. You have a set of actuarial tables. You have a set of risks. You compare one with the other and produce a premium. We're working with them on that. There is a lot in the manufacturing space and a surprising amount in healthcare. One of the most personally rewarding examples I've been involved with was the delivery of intelligent part monitoring to clients with pacemakers. So the pacemaker is made intelligent and it dumps to a blue just connected device in the patient's home. And that uploads to an AI based knowledge system in the cloud. And the cloud says, sit down. You're going to have a heart attack. And the important element of that is that it says, sit down. You're going to have a heart attack before you've had a heart attack. So you don't have one. And a really fantastic example of human centric infrastructure. So I think as a separate subject, AI is largely of academic interest. But as a component of a data-driven solution for a customer, it's rapidly emerging as an important element in our armory, as indeed as some other technologies like data annealing and like data analytics and to a slightly lesser extent at the moment, but I think it will come a block check. Excellent. So Glenn, one of the things we always like talking about when we talk to a CDO is how are companies getting along with their data strategy? So, you know, I think back, you know, four or five years ago when we were first hearing about CDO as a role, it was, you know, the CDO, where do they fit compared to the CIO? What is the changing role of the CIO? So, you know, like you were saying about some of these things, you know, data, you know, often can be an afterthought or not, you know, necessarily connected, but, you know, just as we were saying, data needs to be, you know, a critical piece of how companies plan. You gave a great example of medical, you know, obviously, you know, the data can really help transform lives in that environment. So, you know, bring us inside what you're hearing from customers. How are they structuring? And, you know, are they really being, you know, I guess data driven is one of the terms that I... It's a very good question. And the answer is yes, to everything. So, one of the most difficult things to estimate, if you're going into a customer with a client, especially if it's a client that you don't know very well, is exactly what their point of reference is going to be, what their comfort with some of these things is. As a result, we had Fujitsu invested a good deal of effort in going out to our client base and asking them the necessary questions to generate a thing we call the data maturity model. Now, the data maturity model is not a new concept. It's a very solid and sound concept. It's been around for a long time. I think what we're trying to do is to bring more rigour to that with a very large sample base of our customers. And the model is what you'd expect. There are five levels within it from level one, what is data, to level five, where data is continually monitored, continually exploited and continually developed as part of the business that the organization delivers. So there's a spectrum. In my experience, slightly controversially, perhaps the state of organizations on that maturity index varies with geography. And I think it's something to do with acceptance of risk. I think it's something to do with security, concerns and liabilities. It's my observation that in the Anglophone world, in England and in the US, certainly, there is a higher average awareness of the importance of data and the need to derive business benefit from it than there is, for example, in the Germanophone world, where there are more concerns around security and more regulations around security that are quite constraining. And as a result, where organizations are a bit more traditional, a bit less aware of the value to be derived from the data. So people, organizations sit everywhere on this scope, this plane of awareness of data and its potential, but it's definitely the case that the average is always going up. You only have to look at some of the public stuff, some of the stuff in the public domain to observe that that's happening all the time. Yeah, Glenn, I'm curious with the global pandemic happening. Are you seeing any impact on that? I've heard some anecdotal data that you talk about some of the companies that might not be interested in doing cloud adoption because they're concerned about security and all of a sudden realizing they need to take advantage of certain solutions. Or if you look at something like the tracking and tracing, obviously people are rightfully concerned about personal information and having rights infringed upon. So what will, in your opinion, are you seeing any early indications as to what this impact will be on how we think about data? I think there are, again, there are two different dimensions. There's a Darwinian element in the attitudes toward commercial data. As we said, right at the start of the conversation, in the current environment, you can see large retailers disappearing at a rate of knots because they haven't been data aware and data-reducting. That lesson is not lost on other retailers. So retailers are beginning to do things that in the past they wouldn't have done because of that sort of security concern, but also because of concerns about things like function and performance and the sheer security that you have in owning your own stuff and therefore being certain of its ownership by you and your retention of the IPR involved. So there is definitely a slackening of that concern and a faster adoption of data exploitation technologies in the commercial sector. In the domestic sector, I think it's very mixed and, again, extremely geography different. In the UK, we have, if I could just talk about my own country for a second, we have this trial of a smartphone COVID-19 tracking gap going on on the Isle of Wight. The British media is full to brimming with discussions of the implications of that upon individual liberty, of whether or not it's the Nanny State gone mad, of whether or not we should all be not cooperating with it and catching the damn disease anyway because it's a step too far. In Germany, they just implemented it. And everybody went right. So there are these different cultural adoptions of these things, but always and forever, the trend is upwards. Similar debates around video surveillance technology. So you've got the pressure of security and protecting the public against intrusion and violation of individual rights. And that debate has got to the stage now where there have been some pilots for threat detection based on video surveillance in the UK that have been stopped. Not so much in Germany. In the US, I don't know, but I guess you're even more libertarian than we Brits are. So it's probably more the other way, further the other way. But with all of these discussions of differences of culture and nation and area and geography, the trend is definitely upward. So however, the British people resolve that stress, you have to have a tracking gap if you want to beat this disease and that will happen in due course. Excellent. Well, Glenn, I'll give you the final takeaway. SUSE-CON20, talk about the importance of the Fujitsu and SUSE partnership. I think it's a growing part of the base of an ecosystem that's required for all organizations like Fujitsu, like SUSE that want to reach out and deliver solutions to our customers' business problems, which is after all what we're here for and what we're all about because let's face it. In any sizable organization, the data landscape is unbelievably complicated. Have different formats of data in RDBs, in unstructured file store, in whatever floats around employees' devices on social media for God's sake. Getting all of that out, understanding its relationship to infrastructure, understanding its relation through infrastructure to application stacks and service delivery and then being able to transform that into new applications and new service paradigms that deliver the business benefits that our customers are looking for is an incredibly complex app and no one organization is going to be able to do it on its own. So I see the feature as one of these growing ecosystems of people that work together some of the time, compete some of the time, are in what we might call a frenemy relationship because we all have to work together to deliver what the customers need. Fujitsu is working with SUSE and our other partners at the forefront of that trying to build economic and commercial and technical partnerships and I'm sure they will continue through SUSE come 20 and into the future. All right, well, Glenn Fitzgerald, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate the updates. I've enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. All right, lots more covered from SUSEcon 20 Digital. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.