 Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching The Cube. We're here with Manav Sadana, who is the global head of sales and market development for cognitive business operations at Tata Consultancy Services, TCS. And we're going to dig in to digital transformation and take a deeper dive into the customer journeys. Welcome, Manav. Thank you, Dave. Thank you for inviting me to this appreciate and looking forward to have an intriguing dialogue with you and David. Me too. I mean, we talk about digital transformation all the time prior to the pandemic. You know, a lot of it was kind of buzzwordy and there was a lot of complacency around it. But as we know, if you weren't digital during the pandemic, you were out of business. But people were forced into it. They were rushed into, I call it the forced march to digital. So you really didn't have time to be planned full. And now people are stepping back and saying, okay, now we have an opportunity to get digital right. I'm going to put that in air quotes. How do you think about digital transformation? What do you mean by that? Okay. See, I think the way we look at it at TCS, I will probably take a step back wherein, while the digital transformation has been in play, not just over the last year since the pandemic began, but even before then where the shift in the customer organization that we have been seeing is largely from being product-centric to be purpose-centric, wherein the whole focus of the entire existence is to be able to serve the purpose for their consumers, their customers, and so on, so forth. And if you look at it, for example, total energies, right? They're looking to sell or produce fuel. They are looking to be a responsible energy company producing reliable, affordable and clean energy for the consumers, right? Similarly, there are other examples, diamond shipyards, who are looking to be more of a maritime solutions provider rather than just a ship-building company. So what's really happening when the purpose is being the driving force behind any organization's agenda or even a reason of existence, that purpose is actually the driving force also for the digital transformation that is basically shifting the pace of the way businesses are looking to drive consumer experiences, time to market, and so on, so forth, right? And if you see our, we launched our new brand positioning in the last quarter that's building on belief. And that's basically centered around this whole purpose-driven mindset. What that means is that we believe that in the technologies enabling digital transformation are going to be the pillar of the whole shift of the re-imagination of the business models wherein businesses are coming together across industries and driven by the key goal of serving the customer in terms of driving the enhanced experience rather than just selling a product. So that's basically is really happening. And having said that now in the last year or so, what pandemic has done is basically accelerated the pace by quantum leap, right? So in that sense, some of the organizations that were not ready at that point, they are also kind of transformation and taking that leapfrog I would say. So from that perspective, and then going back again, my our brand positioning statement, building on belief, right? That's really helping towards that particular thing. The overall journey is three horizon basis. And I'll come to that in a minute, but I hope it is answering your question of what digital transformation and how pandemic has really helped it. I just want to get one point of clarification, Manav. You said, and you cut out there for a second. You said go from product-centric to... Purpose-centric. Platform-centric. Got it. Purpose-centric. Oh, purpose-centric. Ah, building on belief. Got it. Okay, so something else you said that I picked up on, you talked about actually crossing industries. And this is something that's new and that's enabled by digital. I wonder if I get your thoughts on it. I mean, if you look at industry structures historically, whether it's manufacturing or automotive or financial services or healthcare or media and entertainment, whatever it is, there was a value chain. There is a value chain that's built up in that business. It might be R&D, sales and marketing, service, manufacturing, et cetera. And if you were in that industry, you largely stayed in that industry forever. Now you're seeing a lot of big company, a lot of big tech companies having a dual disruption agenda, not only horizontally tech from a technical standpoint, but you're seeing Amazon get into grocery. They're buying studios. You're seeing Apple get into finance. And so the enabler is data and digital. And that talks to the business model reimagination that you're talking about. Absolutely, and absolutely, exactly what is happening. That's what I'm really talking about. And we are firmly believing that boundaries or those boundaries are going to be blurred even more so going forward. As I took a few examples and you also talked about Apple or even Amazon or the Netflix, for example. So all these technology companies are just being disruptors. So having said that, that's data being the new fuel, at the same time, cloud being the new ERP. Now, cloud as a technology that is enabling the business model reimagination is not just on the cloud side, but also on the edge side. And that's where the boundaries are becoming so closer between edge and the cloud. And how do we give that flexibility to the customers to be able to adopt those digital technologies across the enterprise, right? That's what the shift that we've been seeing. How do you see ecosystems playing in this? I mean, it's kind of, I know it's an overused term, but it seems to me to be increasingly important. It's power of many versus the resources of one or a few. How do you see ecosystems driving this purpose driven business that you talk about? Very, very closely, I would say. And I'll give you examples also in that sense, right? First, if I talk about the journey, I mentioned briefly earlier about three horizon based journey, right? The first and foremost being the setting up the digital foundation. That basically could be through the combination of cloud, IoT, analytics, artificial intelligence, and so on and so forth, right? And then eventually moving on to reimagination of business models and then leveraging the purpose led ecosystem. Now in the horizon one, when we are setting up the digital foundation, that is where the whole ecosystem comes into play. Where in, if I talk about our co-innovation network partners like HPE, where we are working together to really bring in that flexibility for the customers, even in on-premise environment, giving them that kind of features that they can experience also on the cloud to be really able to leverage the whole power, be it at the edge or at the cloud. So that's where the kind of ecosystem coming together. And those are also some of the challenges that we have seen that customers are facing today to be able to achieve the first horizon in that journey. The challenges like accelerated or the time to market, challenges like, are they able to achieve the flexibility to be able to offer to the business? And challenges like, are they able to achieve transformation at scale or is it just a pointed POC sort of thing, right? So bringing the ecosystem together is able to help customers address those challenges, be it in terms of consumption-driven, addressing the flexibility needs, be it in terms of the pre-integrated solutions, addressing the challenges related to time to market, and so on and so forth. Can we stay on the challenges for a minute? As I said, pre-pandemic, there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen that meme of the wrecking ball coming in and sort of a tongue-in-cheek joke, but the complacency is gone. So there's also, but still, organizational challenges. It's not complacency anymore, but what's the right regime? What's the right approach? Everybody wants to get digital right, but a lot of people, you know, that's a, do you see that as a challenge, actually not knowing where to prioritize it? And, you know, how can you help in that regard? Yeah. So, and I would also like to talk about what we have done in certain, with certain customer, with some of the challenges. Some of the things, I'll introduce TCS Cognix here. This is our platform, which basically brings together the capabilities in a pre-integrated, for pre-defined solutions, accelerators or value builders, as we call it, for customers to be able to just integrate their environments to be able to manage the whole infrastructure of the landscape in a completely automated and analytics-driven manner, right? So that's one way of addressing those challenges. What it also does is it gives that power to the stakeholders in the organization to be able to address that key challenge of time to market because it is giving out or coming out in a pre-integrated manner and be able to achieve that benefits or realize the benefits of transformation in an accelerated time frame instead of waiting for 18 to 24 months, how can it be done in three to six months, for example, right? That's one set. And similarly, if I talk about the flexibility, right? Consumption-driven manner is extremely, extremely important. And if I talk about hybrid cloud, so to say, right? Today, about one to 2% of the on-premise infrastructure is actually in a consumption-driven manner, while cloud is always in a consumption-driven manner. The trends that we are seeing is that by next year, about minimum 15% of the on-premise infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment will be about, or will be delivered in a consumption-driven manner. And that's what is going to address where is the opportunity, as well as the challenge to address that particular aspect of flexibility. And that's where the ecosystem with the likes of us, TCS and HPE, coming together to provide solutions that are addressing those needs of our consumers. And when you talk about the consumption-driven, obviously you talk about things like HPE GreenLake, that's a model that enables that kind of consumption model. You know, I feel like, I mean, I feel like that's kind of table stakes, to be honest with you. I mean, you pointed out one to 2% of it. I said, wow, cloud's been around for a long time. And now, but now we're seeing the rapid adoption, 15%. And we're also seeing, I mean, I think I give HPE some props on this, because they've got their whole company behind it. But there has to be a complimentary shift in the mindset of, okay, we're not now selling boxes anymore. And I think HPE has done a pretty good job of this. They've made some announcements recently to that effect. They're doing it in HPC. We just saw some storage announcements. So it's no longer, hey, here's a box to sell. And this is where a company like TCS comes to play. You've never had that box mentality. You have a solutions mentality. And so the industry is moving in a very rapid pace now. My question is, are the customers ready for it? Are they ready for it because they have the cloud experience? Are they ready for it on-prem? And what do they need to do to get ready for that? See, to answer your first question, are they ready? And what really is the trigger point for them being ready? The answer is yes, okay. I would say a large percentage of the customer base was ready even before pandemic, but pandemic has really made it even more prominent in the customer and that has become a need. We are seeing so many customers today. I mean, in my global role, I'm seeing across industries and across markets, right from North America to Australia, Japan, wherein the need for having consumption driven is even at on-premise. While cloud is definitely there, but even at on-premise is so much, so that's really is the trigger. At the same time, now what is really driving that trigger apart from pandemic is to be able to offer that flexibility to their business. Businesses are basically reimagining their whole, where they are reaching out to their customers, where they are expanding into the newer markets and the speed is extremely, extremely important. And that's what is really bringing the whole consumption driven. Let's peel the onion on that. Somebody asked me this the other day, why? Why as a server, I said the same thing, flexibility. And they're like, yeah, okay, but give me some examples. And so I said, well, first of all, they're paying by the drink. So it's a much fairer for the customer model instead of, okay, charge them for what they're not even going to use or what they might use for a day or two or a month. The other is experimentation. It seems to me that in the digital world, you got to fail fast. You don't know, you don't know what you don't know. And so these consumption models allow you to spin up experiments very quickly and cheaply and only pay for what you use. Am I getting that right? Absolutely, absolutely. And that's exactly what the model is that we as a partner together that we are offering. Only one thing that I would want to highlight here is while that's the foundation, as I said, it is setting up the digital foundation, giving the customers the flexibility. And if I talk about example, one of our British large OEM who really is leveraging this technology for them to be able to bring more resilience and more engineering and sales departments to be able to, you know, on their manufacturing line and ultimately driving to the sales value chain. So those are the things that are happening. And you took an example of basically talked about consuming purely as a service what you use. This model is basically expanding everywhere. Very recently, I mean, I saw an ad of bicycle as a service. I mean, instead of buying a new bicycle, I'm just able to get one bicycle, use it for a month, return it back to the owner to be able to use it only when I need it, let's say for example. So that's what is really happening even in the digital transformation. I just need it for a time basis, for a particular purpose. I serve that purpose, ultimately driving the business resilience, agility and then ultimately serving that purpose, yeah. I mean, I think I'd love your thoughts on this. I think the real opportunity here is for technology companies like HPE working with TCS to create a layer, I call it a layer that spans on-prem, name your favorite cloud or multiple clouds goes across clouds, goes out to the edge. That's a layer that hides all the underlying complexity. You're going to take care of that for me because it's complicated, no question about it. The bigger the universe gets, the more complicated it gets but as a customer, I want to hide that complexity because I don't want people doing plumbing. I want people focused on strategic initiatives. And that to me seems to be the killer app, if you will, of infrastructure in the future. Is that abstraction layer? Do you see it that way? Absolutely, and that's where TCS Cognix comes into play very strongly, right? As I said earlier, it's basically, it's actually an AI driven human machine collaboration suite. So what that really means is it is bringing together capabilities from analytics to AI with our machine-first principles and really giving that abstracting layer in a pre-integrated manner from edge right up to the cloud and bringing it all together for the customers. So that's exactly how we are really helping the customers achieve that, again, addressing those challenges of accelerated time-to-market flexibility and more importantly, unifying the entire landscape into one single view. If I am a CIO or if I am a CFO, I want to see what is important to me rather than going to multiple different dashboards, so to say, right? So that's where TCS Cognix plays an important role in abstracting everything and presenting that unified view and in a transformed service delivery model for the customers. So the history of TCS is pretty amazing. You guys have, I mean, the ascendancy of the company over the decades is actually so impressive. Now, in your relationship with HP, and now, of course, HP, it goes back, I think it goes back to the 90s. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that relationship, where it's come from, how it's evolving and where you want to see it going. So I think it's a, when you go back so long, right, the only way you are able to sustain that long relationship when then there is a value that we have been able to deliver to each other and more importantly, the value that we have been able to deliver to our customers, right? And that has always been the mantra of the whole relationship and that continues to be going forward as well. So in that regard, I mean, while I would rather focus more on the future, history is definitely good, but I think going forward, the kind of work that we are doing together to be able to serve some of our customers globally across the base, across the industries is extremely valuable, both to us as well as to HP, I'm sure, and that's where we are really looking to have providing real value to our customers, not just from the technology perspective, ultimately elevating that value, how do we help them solve the business problems and not just the technology solutions? Well, I think we've learned that. That's the one big thing we learned from the cloud is if you just shove all your stuff in the cloud and lift it and shift it, so what? It's that operating model that we talked about earlier that really is how you drop, if you're a large company, you're talking about billions to the bottom line, not hundreds of thousands or millions, but that's a game changer. I'll give you a final word, Manav. Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, as I said, I think, I hope I would not end up repeating my message, but that solving the business problems, leveraging technology and irrespective of the location where the technology is based, be it on Edge or on the cloud, it's the whole model of addressing the customer demands and the customer's need is extremely, extremely important. So that's what the whole mantra is, and that's what is really driving us forward together in this journey. Major shifts in industry, digital is the driver, and Manav, thanks so much for being on theCUBE, really appreciate your time. Sure, thank you, thank you for having me. And thanks for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital tech coverage. Keep it right there.