 Well, hi everybody, John Wall is here and welcome to theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage. Glad to have you aboard us. We continue our coverage here of ReInvent22. We're out of the nation in Las Vegas. A lot of energy down on that exhibit floor, I promise you. We're a little bit away from the Maddening crowd, but we're here with the executive summit sponsored by Accenture. Got two guests I want to introduce you to. Jason Byer, who's the Vice President of Data and Analytics at Bridgestone Americas. Jason, good to see you, sir. Hello, John. And Josh Von Schomburg, who is the Managing Director and North America lead for AWS Security at Accenture. Josh, good to see you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, first off, just quick take on the show. I know you've only been here about a day or so, but just your thoughts about what you're seeing on the floor in terms of energy, enthusiasm, and I think turnout, right? I'm really impressed by it. We've got a lot of people down there. Yeah, I've been certainly impressed, John, with the turnout, but just, as you say, the energy of the crowd, the excitement for the new things coming. It seems like it's a really pivotal moment for many organizations, including my own, and really excited to see what's coming over the next couple of days. So let's jump in the Bridgestone, then. I kind of kidded you before we started the interview, saying, all right, tires and golf balls, that's what I relate to. But you have a full array of consumer products and solutions you're offering, and your responsibility is managing the data and the analytics and making sure those business lines are as efficient as possible. Absolutely, John. So in my role, I have the privilege of being in an enterprise position, so I get to see the vast array of Bridgestone, which it is a large, highly vertically integrated company all the way from raw material sourcing of natural rubber to retail services in the automotive industry. We're at scale across those areas. The exciting thing about the company right now is we're going through this business transformation of building on that heritage and that great legacy of having high quality, high performance, highly focused on safety products to becoming a product and solutions company, and particularly a sustainable solutions company. So what that means is we're bringing not only those great products to market, tires, golf balls, hoses, all kinds of rubber, air springs, products to market, but thinking about how do we service those after they're in the market? How do we bring solutions to help fleets, vehicle owners, vehicle operators, operate those in a sustainable way in a cost effective way? So those solutions of course bring all new sets of data and analytics that come with it and technology and moving to the cloud to be cloud native. So this new phase for the organization that we refer to as Bridgestone 3.0 and that business strategy is driving our cloud strategy, our technology strategy and our data strategy and AWS and Accenture are important partners in that. Yeah, so we hear a lot about that these days about this transformation, this journey that people are on now and Josh, when Bridgestone or other clients come to you and they talk about their migrations and what's their footprint going to look like and how do they get there? In the case of Bridgestone when they came to you and said, all right, this is where we want to go with this, right? We're going to embark on a significant upgrade of our systems here. How do you lead them? How do you get them there? Yeah, I think there are a couple key cloud transformation value drivers that we've emphasized and that I've seen at Bridgestone in my time there. Number one, just the rapid increase in the pace of innovation that we've seen over the last couple years and a lot of that is also led by the scalability of all the cloud native AWS services that we're leveraging and in particular with the CDP platform, it really started off as a single use case and really a single tenant data lake and then through the strategic vision of Jason and the leadership team, we've been able to expand that to 10 plus tenants and use cases and a big reason behind that is the scalability of all these AWS services, right? So as we add more and more tenants, all the infrastructure just scales without any manual provisioning, any tuning that we need to do and that allows us to go really from, you know, from idea to POC to production and really a matter of months when traditionally it might take years. So if I can build upon that John, the CDP or central data platform is part of a broader reference architecture that reflects that business strategy. So we looked at it and said, we could have taken a couple of different approaches to recognize that the business challenges we're facing. We needed to modernize our core, our ERP, our manufacturing solutions, you know, move to smart factory and green factories, our PLM solutions, but at the same time, we're moving quickly. We have a startup mindset in our mobility solutions businesses are where we're going to market on our customer and commerce solutions. And we needed to move at a different pace. And so to decouple those, we, in partnership with Accenture and AWS, built out a reference architecture that had a decoupling layer that's built around a data fabric, a data connected layer, integrated data services as well. A key part of that architecture is our central data platform built on AWS. This is a comprehensive data lake architecture using all the modern techniques within AWS to bring data together to coalesce data as well as recognize the multiple different modes of consumption, whether that's classic reporting, business intelligence, analytics, machine learning, data science, as well as API consumption. And so we're building that out, you know, a year ago, it was a concept on a PowerPoint and you know, just show and kind of reflect the innovation and speed. As Josh mentioned, we're up to 10 tenants, we're growing exponentially. There's high demand from the organization to leverage data at scale because of the business transformation that I mentioned and that modernization of the core ecosystem. That's crazy fast, right? All of a sudden, whoa! Faster than I expected. Almost snap overnight. You know, and you raised an interesting point too, I think when you talk about how there was a segment of your business that you wanted to get in the startup mode, whereas I don't think Bridgestone, I don't think about startup, right? I think, you know, in a much more, I wouldn't say traditional, but you've got big systems, right? I mean, and so, how did you kind of inject your teams with that kind of mindset, right? That, hey, you're going to have to hit the pedal here, right? And I want you to experiment. I want you to innovate. And that might be a little bit against the grain for what they were used to. So just over two years ago, we built and started the organization that I have the privilege of leading our data and analytics organization. And it's a COE, it's a center of expertise in the organization. We partner with specialized teams in product development marketing, other places to enable data and analytics everywhere. We want it to be pervasive. It's a team sport. But we really embraced at that moment what we refer to as a dual speed mindset. Speed one, we've got to move at the speed of the business. And that's variable. Based on the different business units and lines of business and functional areas, you know, the core modernization efforts, those are multi-year transformation programs that have multiple phases to them. And we're embedded there, building the fundamentals of data governance and data management and reporting operational things. But at the same time, we needed to recognize that speed of those startup businesses where we're taking solutions and service offerings to market, doing quick, minimum viable product, put it in a market, try it, learn from it, adapt, sometimes shut it down and take those learnings into the next area as well as joint ventures. We've been much more aggressive in terms of the partnerships in the marketplace, the joint ventures, the minority investments, et cetera, really to give us that edge in how we corner the market on the fleet and mobility solutions of the future. So having that dual speed approach of operating at the speed of the business, we also needed to balance that with speed two, which is building those long-term capabilities and fundamentals. And that's where we've been building out those practical examples of having data governance and data management across these areas, building robust governance of how we're thinking about data science and the evolution of data science and that maturity towards machine learning. And so having that dual speed approach, it's a difficult balancing act, but it's served us well. Really partnering with our key business stakeholders of where we can engage, where what services they need and where do we need to make smart choices between those two different speeds. You just hit on something I want to ask Josh about, about how you said sometimes you have to shut things down, right? If it's one thing to embark on, I guess a new opportunity or explore new avenues and then to tell your client, well you might have, it might be some bumps along the way. A lot of times people in Jason's position don't want to hear that. He was like, I don't want to hear about bumps. We want this to be, again, working with clients in that respect and understanding that there's going to be a learning curve and that some things might not function the way you want them to. We might have to take a right instead of a left. Yeah, and I think the value of AWS is you really can fail fast and try to innovate and try different use cases out. You don't have any enormous upfront capital expenditure to start building all these servers in your data center for all of your use cases. You can spin something up easily based on idea and then fail fast and move on to the next idea. And I also wanted to emphasize I think how critical top-down executive buy-in is for any cloud transformation. And you could hear the excitement in Jason's voice and any time we've seen a failed cloud transformation, the common theme is typically lack of executive buy-in and leadership and vision. And I think from day one, I mean, Bridgestone has had that buy-in from Jason throughout the whole executive team and I think that's really evident in the success of the CDP platform. Absolutely. And what's been your experience in that regard then because I think that's a great point, Josh, Ray, is that you might be really excited in your position but you've got to convince the C-suite. And there's a lot of variables there that have to be considered that are kind of out of your sandbox, right? It's up for somebody else to make decisions based on a holistic approach, right? So... I could tell you now, talking with peers of mine, I recognize that I've probably had a little bit of a privilege in that regard because the leadership at Bridgestone has recognized to move to this product and solutions organization and have sustainable solutions for the future. We needed to move to the cloud. We needed to shift that technology forward. We needed to have a more data-driven approach to things and so the selling of that was not a huge uphill battle, to be honest. It was almost more of a pull from the top, from our global group CEO, from our CEOs in our different regions, including in Bridgestone Americas. They've been pushing that forward. They've been driving it and as Josh mentioned, that's been a really huge key to our success. Is that executive alignment to move at this new pace, at this new frame of innovation because that's what the market is demanding in the changing landscape of mobility and the movement of vehicles and things on the road. So how do you two work together going forward then? I mean, because you're in a great position now, you've had this tremendous acceleration in the past year. You're talking about this 10-fold increase and what the platform's enabled you to do, but as you know, you can't stand still, right? Yeah, I mean, there's so much excitement, so many use cases in the backlog now and it's really been a snowball effect. I think one of the use cases I'm most excited about is starting to apply ML, machine learning to the data sets and I think there's an amazing IOT predictive maintenance use case there for all of the censored data collected across all of the tires that are solders in immense amount of data and ultimately we can use that data to predict values and make our roads safer and help save lives. It's hard to not take a long time to explain all the things because there is a lot ahead of us. The demand curve for capabilities and the enabling things that AWS is going to support is just tremendous. As Josh mentioned, the AI ML use cases ahead of us, incredibly exciting. The way we're building and co-innovating things around how we make data more accessible in our data marketplace and more advanced data governance and data quality techniques. The use of creating data hubs and moving our API landscape into this environment as well is going to be incredibly empowering in terms of accessibility of data across our enterprise globally as well as both for our internal stakeholders and our external stakeholders. So I'll stop there because there's a lot of things in there. We could be here a long time, but it is an exciting time and I appreciate you're both sharing your perspectives on this because you've got a winning formula going and look forward to what's happening and we'll see you next year right back here on the Executive Summit to measure the success in 2023. How about that? 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