 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to be joined by Parshul Asnani, the global head of the technology business at HPE partner, Tech Mahendra. Parshul, great to have you on the program. Glad to be here, thanks for having me. So tell me about Tech Mahendra, I see on the website abbreviated as TechM, give our audience an overview of Tech Mahendra, what you guys do. Sure, so Tech Mahendra is a digital transformation, consulting and technology services company operating at the intersection of IT, engineering, networks and BPO services. We have about 125,000 people operating in around 90 countries, about 5.2 billion in revenue and have about a thousand customers across key strategy corticals, our largest being communications, media and entertainment and then we have other strong verticals like technology, manufacturing, HLS, BFSI, retail, energy and utilities. So that's broadly what we do be in existence for well over 30 years now. And tell me about your role as the head of the global technology business. What have you seen transpire and evolve over the last few years and especially the last three months with COVID? Sure, no, absolutely. I think, see, we have organized a company around six strategic business units. They are these customer facing business units and I lead the one that focuses on technology and the high tech industry, if you will, based in the Bay Area. And in this business unit, a large part of our business is in some sense a 360-degree relationship with our customers where not only do we sell into our customers, we also sell with and sell through our customers and also buy from them. So in that sense, it's a little different model in which we operate as compared to, say, other verticals that we have like manufacturing or BFSI or healthcare where the relationship is largely customer and a supplier relationship. We have a full-blown 360-degree relationship. It's very unique from that standpoint. And things have, in some sense, dramatically shifted in the last three years, rather three months, where we're saying that the amount of digital transformation which was to happen over the next two years has kind of happened in the last two months. So this is kind of pivoting a lot of enterprises and including the tech sector into an era where we are saying, how do we, the reposition ourselves to bring in more COVID-related solutions, both from a commercial standpoint as well as a humanitarian standpoint to deal with this crisis. So there are tons of changes that are happening out there in the industry as well as in tech, Mahindra as we kind of get ready for COVID and post-COVID. If you look at some of the specific trends that you're seeing during the COVID crisis in the high-tech segment, what are they? So a couple of things have riveted very differently. Supply chain, for example, which is very crucial to high-tech is undergoing, in some sense, a metamorphosis shift. It's undergoing a seismic shift in the way supply chains are kind of reconfiting themselves. You're also seeing customer experience kind of dramatically changing. Another thing that is coming in very, very strongly from a change perspective, it's kind of a storm that is brewing out there, is how do we enable people to work remotely? We at Tech Mahindra ourselves had to enable 80,000 people in India to work remotely in a matter of weeks. And it's by no means an easy task to do, which in a country where working from home is not really a culture. And also where we work out of secured customer premises, even in India, our secure offshore locations in India, and all those people have now to move to their homes and work out in the living rooms and bedrooms. And that was a sizable shift in the way we had to deal with our engagements and with our customers. And so far, so good. And up on board, we have not had any issues. So Harshal, pivoting so quickly as TechM did to get your 80,000 employees in India to be able to work from home, connectivity, all the challenges associated with that, goes hand in hand with your business being able to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Customer experience being an issue that you say is a rising trend amongst your customers. Customer experience and work from home these days go hand in hand, right? Absolutely. I think we also surprised ourselves at the pace at which we could move these 80,000 people to work from home in a matter of days, as I was saying. And without missing any customers, there is a task imaginable in the pre-COVID era. And we also surprised ourselves at the pace at which we could turn around COVID related solutions so quickly with the help of partners like HPE that are today helping us pivot ourselves from kind of old age solutions to the new age solutions to the new normal today. And yeah, of course, and at the same time, we had to ensure that we enabled the customer experience and don't miss a beat on that while we repurpose our people to work from home. It was a challenge and frankly, we surprised ourselves in the way we did it. So Harshal, talk to me about what in these COVID crisis times, HPE and Tech Mahendra are doing together to help your customers accelerate maybe adoption of new technologies that they need to for their businesses to thrive. You know, Shono, that's a great question, Lisa. Let me start by saying that HPE is a very strategic partnership for us. And we see it as coming together of two market leaders to deliver a very differentiated playbook of solutions for our customers. With it's a robust set of products and solutions and edge offerings, edge gateways, converged edge systems and real time analytics combined with HPE's great green lake offers which is around flexible consumption based services which helps align customers IT spend to deliver pretty much everything as a service. We kind of have a very robust partner in HPE and when you combine this with Tech Mahendra's industry domain and technology depth and the systems integration wherewithal that we bring in, it makes for a very potent combination to drive serious value to our customers. And given the COVID situation, we have kind of defined our relationship along three broad vectors based on the mutual synergies and where we believe we can quickly drive value. Firstly, what are the solution white spaces that we want to address together? Secondly, what are the geographies that you want to operate in? And third is what are the industry verticals that we believe we can quickly focus on? So from a solutioning standpoint, there are four broad trust areas that you want to sharply focus on. Firstly, IoT. It's been a strong partnership with HPE, with IoT and we would like to continue that forward with HPEs, no edge offerings and converged edge systems. We have kind of demonstrated the possibilities of IoT with solutions across smart cities, factors of the future, energy and utilities and of course, telecom. And we have some good success stories we already have with HPE that we would like to build on. We have won some four significant smart city projects in India in four different cities of India. And we also, by the way, won the Systems Integrated Award for Edge and IoT from HPE last year and also the SI partner of the year for Asia Pacific for HPE last year. So we would like to continue to build on that. We also already have a COE on IoT set up in Bangalore. It's a very unique COE that we've built up where we have showcasing solutions around smart cities, around IoT and we also brought in Aruba gear as well with solutions around smart campuses, so on and so forth. So that's number one. Number two is data center transformation. As hybrid cloud kind of takes root, a lot of customers are now looking at transforming their data centers as well. And particularly with HPEs GreenLake, it becomes a very strategic commercial tool for us to bring on demand, paper use models, elasticity, kind of the, as I was talking about, the flexible consumption services model, which is so unique today as we help customers reduce their capex and get them to pay by the drink, if you will, that becomes very, very relevant in the COVID times. And last but not the least, our focus is also on network of the future. When I say that our partnership with HPE is really pivoted around 5G, SDNNFE and private LTE solutions. For example, HPE's private LTE network, which is essentially powered by HPE's EL300 and EL4000 Converged Ed Systems. It's kind of augmented by our industrial IoT expertise. And it includes a reintegrated off the shelf industrial IoT application from TechMantra. It's kind of an end-to-end solution that uses the breakthrough innovation such as small sales, EPC, and smart multi-axis edge computing. So we are staying sharply focused on these areas and we started seeing the results. And given the COVID scenario, we have evolved a bunch of use cases very quickly in multiple industry areas. And both from a commercial viability standpoint and also importantly on a humanitarian level, what we can do together. For example, in Italy as the pandemic was raging, as many of you would know, a ship was converted into a hospital, probably a thousand bed hospital. And HPE stepped in and they brought in the Aruba gear to put up network together, the infrastructure and the connectivity to bring together. And TechMantra, which has a rapid response healthcare solution to help with remote patient diagnostics and monitoring kind of brought in that solution along with HPE to bear in Italy as the pandemic was raging. So that's just an example of how we are partnering at multiple levels. We've created a solution around workspace as a service, as remote working becomes a new normal of a joint solution with HPE on that too. So a bunch of other solutions as well, Lisa. Sounds like you guys have done a great job of as you mentioned in the beginning of our time here, rapidly pivoting within TechMantra. As you said, it actually kind of surprised ourselves to what you were doing with HPE to deploy rapidly in Italy. So I can only imagine helping customers accelerate projects like smart cities and smart factories where suddenly we need sensors on more things. Harshal, I thank you so much for spending time with us on theCUBE today. Exciting topics. We can't wait to see where this goes. No, thank you so much, Lisa, for your time. It was great talking to you. Excellent, my pleasure. For Harshal, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020. Thanks for watching.