 Hey everyone! Welcome to this event, Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and I have two guests here with me today to talk about the hybrid cloud, the multi-cloud trends, and specifically the complexity. While we know these trends provide agility and flexibility for customers, they also bring in complexity, and this session is going to focus on exploring that with RBI and Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome my guests, Adithya Sastri, the SVP of Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara, and Werner Mayer, head of Group Core IT and head of Group Data at RBI International. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you, Lisa. Werner, nice to see you again. And Werner, we're going to start with you. Talk about RBI, tell the audience a little bit about what the business is, and then we're going to get into your cloud transformation journey over the last couple of years. Yes, thank you. So, we have some banking international working banking groups, so our core markets are Central Eastern Europe and Austria, and we're serving around 50 million clients in this market, so we're active in 30 markets. Got it. Talk to me, Werner, about the cloud transformation journey that RBI has been on over the last couple of years and some of the complexities that you've experienced as you've launched it. Sure, thank you for the question. So, in 2020, we decided that we have to renew our IT strategy, and the aim of the strategy was to change the organization in a way that it can react and adapt fast to the future challenges. So, one of the important pillars for us was that we adapted fast also for new technologies. This was core Bill and all strategy. So, we're searching for technologies which are fitting to our HR transformation, and we found that the cloud and the public cloud environment fits to this venture. So, we tested that, and we're building up also the competence centers for that, and also established a group platform for that, because our aim was to onboard our international group with the 13 units to this group cloud platform. So, that means we have a lot to do to hardening the platforms in terms of security to put in the high standards for that. We have to introduce large-scale programs to train hundreds of engineers. We tested the approach, we convinced the top management, and we implemented this program. So, one of the highlights was of course also the safeguarding of the Ukraine, let's say, banking environment. So, we had to lift and shift the complete bank in three months, and it shows that let's say our platforms works and let's say the approach is proven that we can scale it over the group. That's a big challenge, a lot of complexity, especially with some of the global things going on. Edithya, these challenges are not unique to RBI. A lot of your customers are facing challenges with complexity around cloud management, cloud ops. What can you unpack what the real issue is here? Yeah, Lisa, absolutely. Before I answer your question, I do want to just say a couple of things about Raphison Bank, and we've had the pleasure of working with them for about a year, a little bit more than a year now, and the way they approach the cloud transformation journey should be a template for a lot of the organizations in terms of the preparation, in terms of understanding how other companies have done it, and what are the pitfalls, what's worked, and really what's the recipe for their journey, which is very unique because you look at being present across 30 different countries within Central and Eastern Europe, as Werner said, and the complexities of dealing with local regulations, GDPR, and all these other issues that come with it, and not to mention the language variation from country to country. So, a phenomenal story there, the journey, and the journey still goes, Werner, it's not complete yet, but Lisa, to your question, when we look at the complexities of this transformation that most a lot of enterprises are going through, it's not very unique. What is unique for Raphison Bank has been the preparation, but as you get into this journey of moving workloads to the cloud, be it refactoring, modernizing, migrating, etc., one of the things that really is often overlooked is, are my applications and data workloads resilient on the cloud? Meaning, are they, how is their performance? Are they just running, or are they performing with high availability to meet your customer's goals? Is it scalable? And are my costs in line with what I projected when I moved from, right? Because that's one of the areas we're seeing where, you know, what enterprises projected from a cost savings to what they're realizing a year and a half into the journey is a pretty big delta, right? And a lot of it is dependent on are the applications and the workloads designed for the cloud, or are they designed for on-prem, which you're just moving to the cloud. So, Werner, it sounds like what Adithya said is a compliment to you guys and the team at RBI in terms of this being a template for managing complexity. Give us, Werner, your perspective in terms of modern cloud ops, what's in, what's out, what is it that customers really need to be focusing on to be successful? Thanks for the compliment, Adith, and I think it's a great relationship also in the journey. I mean, the whole topic is a complex program where a lot of things have to fit together. Adith was mentioning the resilience, the cost, we call it FinOps, security operations and so on, have to come together and have to work on spot. At the end, it's also, let's say, how we are enabling our teams and how we are ramping up the skills of our teams to deal with this multi-dimensional, let's say, environments. And this is something what we spend a lot of time in order to prepare it, but also to bring up the people on a certain level that they can operate it, because cloud cloud handling is different than before. Because beforehand, you have central operations teams that do everything for you, but in this world, let's say, we're also putting the responsibility of the run component of the apps in the tribes and the application teams, and they have to do much more than before. On the other hand, we have central rows, we have monitoring functions, we have support functions on that in order to best support them in their journey. So this is a hybrid between, let's say, what the teams have to do with the responsibility in the teams, but also with the central functions, which are supporting them. And everything have to work together and go hand in hand. Yeah, and if I could just add Lisa really quick, and Werner hit the nail on the head, because you cannot look at cloud operation the way we have traditionally looked at managed services. That's the key thing. You cannot, you know, traditional managed services, you have L1, L2, L3, and then it goes into some sort of a vacuum, and then also somebody calls you at some point, and really has flipped to Werner's point, and Werner hit that nail on the head because you really have to understand, bring an engineering-led approach to make sure that the problems, you know, when you see an issue that we have some level of automation in terms of problem isolation, and then the problem is rather the right individual, i.e. the application engineering team or the data engineering team for resolution in a rapid manner. A very important point what Adel said here, so you cannot traditional transport, let's say the operation model what we have now into the cloud because this will not work, and finally at the end you will not benefit on the technology possibilities there. It's a super important point. My vision in the cloud, and this is also something what we're working on is a sort of zero ops environment, because without the heat dealing with the optimization technologies and so on, you can do much more compared to the traditional environment, and the benefit of the cloud is you can test it, you can give it the back when it is not working, so it's a completely different operating model what we try to establish in the cloud environment. So really what this seems like guys is quite a delicate balance that you're solving for, not the only delicate balance, but Werner sticking with you, talk to us about some of the challenges that you've had around cloud cost management in particular. Help us understand that. Thanks for the question. So in principle we're doing very well on the coast side, surprisingly, and we also started the chaotic journey that they said this is not the coast case, because as I said before, let's say one of the pillars in the strategy was the enablement of technology to the benefit of the customer solutions to be adaptive, to be faster, but at the end it turned out that let's say with giving the responsibility of the operation to the dedicated team, they were working much closer to the coast and let's say monitoring the coast than we had in the traditional environments. I also saw some examples in the group where sort of gamification of the coasts were going on to say who can save more and make much more out of that what you have in the cloud. And at the end we see that in minimum the coasts are balanced to the traditional environments in the data centers, but we also saw that the coasts were brought on much more than before. So at the beginning we were relatively conservative with the assumptions, but it turns out that we are really getting the benefit, the things are getting faster and also the coasts are going down and we see this in real cases. Yeah and Lisa, if I could add something really quick, right, because you know there's been a mad rush to the cloud, right? Everybody kind of it was you know the buzz was let's get to the cloud, we'll start to realize all these savings and all of a sudden everything magically gets better, right? And what we have seen is also you know companies for customers or enterprises that have started this journey about five six years ago and are about you know a few years into it. What we are realizing is the cloud costs having increased significantly to their projections were early on and the way they're trying to address the cloud cost is by creating a Phenops organization that's looking at you know the cost of cloud and the structure standpoint is important as a reactive measure saying hey if we move from Azure or one provider to another, is there any benefit? If we move certain applications from the cloud back to on-premise, is there any benefit? When in fact one of the things that we have noticed really is the problem needs to shift left to the engineering teams because if you're designing the applications and the systems the right way to begin with then you can manage the cost of issues or the cost overruns, right? So you design for the cloud as opposed to designing and then looking at how to be on the cloud. So Dithya, you talked about the RBI use case as really kind of a template but also some of the challenges with respect to hybrid and multi-cloud are kind of like a chicken and egg scenario. Talk to us kind of like overall about how Hitachi is really helping customers address these challenges and maximize the benefits to get the flexibility to get the agility so that they can deliver what their end user customers are expecting. Yeah, so one of the things we are doing Lisa when we work with customers is really trying to understand you know look at their entire portfolio of applications right and look at what the intent of the applications is between customer facing external customer, internal customer, high availability, production etc, right? And then we go through a methodology called E3 which is Envision Enable and Execute which is really envision what the end state should be regardless of what the environment does, right? And then we enable which is really kind of go through a proof of value to move a few workloads to modernize rearchitect, replatform etc and look at the benefit of that application on its destination if it's a cloud if it's a cloud service provider or if it's another data center whatever it may be right? And finally you know once we've proven the value and the benefit and kind of monetized the you know realize the value of it from an agility from a cost from security and resilience etc then we go through the execution which was look we look at the entire portfolio the entire landscape and we go through a very disciplined manner working with our customers to roadmap it and then be executed in a very deliberate manner where you can see value every two to three months because gone are the days when you can think as a science project that took two to three years, right? We everyone wants to see value, want to see progress and most importantly we want to see cost benefit and agility sooner than later. Those are incredibly important outcomes you guys have done a great job explaining what you're doing together this sounds like a great relationship. Alright so my last question to both of you is if I'm a customer and I'm planning a cloud transformation for my company what are the two things you want me to remember and consider as I plan this? Werner we'll start with you. I would pick up two things here the first one is when you're organizing your your company in the HR way then cloud is the HR technology for the HR transformation because HR teams need HR technology and the second important things what they would see is cloud is a is a large scale and fast moving technology enabled to the company so if your company is going forward to say technology is they enabled to from a future business then cloud can support this journey. Excellent I'm going to walk away with those and yeah same question to you I'm a customer I'm at an organization I'm planning a cloud transformation top two things you want me to walk away with. Yeah and I think Werner can actually touch on that the second one which is it's not a tech just an IT or a technology initiative it is a business initiative right because ultimately what you do from this cloud journey should drive you know should lead into business transformation or help your business grow top line or drive margin expansion etc so a couple of things I would say right one is you know get buying and prioritize work with your business owners with you know with the cross functional team not just the technology team that's one. The second thing is as the technology team or the IT team shepherds this journey you know keep everyone informed and engaged as you go through this journey because as you go through moving workloads modernizing workload there is an impact to you know receivables through omni-channel experiences the way customers interact and transact with you right and that comes with making sure your businesses are aware your business stakeholders are aware so in turn the end customers are aware so you know it's not a one-and-done from an engagement it's a journey and bring in the right experts talk to people who have done it done this before who have kind of stepped in all the pitfalls so you don't have to right that's the key that's great advice that's great advice for anything in life I think we talk about the collaboration the importance of the business and the technology folks coming together it really has to be it's a delicate balance as we said before but it really has to be a holistic collaborative approach guys thank you so much for joining me talking through what Hitachi Vantara and RBI are doing together sounds like you're well into this journey and it sounds like it's going quite well we thank you so much for your insights and your perspectives thank you Lisa winner thank you good stuff guys for my guests I'm Lisa Martin thank you so much for watching our event build your cloud center of excellence our founder Namae Odaera had the vision of converting Japan from coal fired steam power to hydroelectric power Hitachi designed and built the first hydroelectric generator in Japan sustainability is in the DNA of our family of companies we're in this for everyone at Hitachi Vantara we're making data centers not only eco-friendly but eco-first and foremost reducing carbon emissions and consuming 65% less energy Hitachi Vantara for the planet for the data driven hey everyone thanks for joining us today welcome to this event of building your cloud center of excellence with Hitachi Vantara I'm your host Lisa Martin I've got a couple of guests here with me next to talk about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers please welcome Prembala Subramanian the SBP and CTO at Hitachi Vantara and Manoj Narayanan is here as well the managing director of technology at GTCR guys thank you so much for joining me today excited to have this conversation about redefining cloud ops with you pleasure to be here yeah Prem let's go ahead and start with you you have done well over a thousand cloud engagements in your career I'd love to get your point of view on how the complexity around cloud operations and management has evolved in the last say three to four years it's a great question Lisa before we understand the complexity around the management itself the cloud has evolved over the last decade significantly from being infrastructure or infrastructure as a service for many companies to become the business for many companies you think about a lot of these cloud bond companies cloud is where their entire workload and their business wants with that as a background for this conversation if you think about the cloud operations there was a lot of there was a lot of lift and shift happening in the market where people lifted their workloads or applications and moved them on to the cloud where they created cloud significantly as an infrastructure and the way they started to manage it was again the same form as they were managing there on from infrastructure and they call it I know infrastructure and operations that's kind of the way traditionally cloud was managed in the last few years we're seeing a significant shift around thinking of cloud more as a workload rather than as just an infrastructure and what I mean my work workload is in the cloud everything is now code so you're codifying your infrastructure and applications already code and your data is also codified as data services with now that context applied the way you think about managing the cloud has to significantly change and many companies are moving towards trying to change their models to look at this complex environment as opposed to treating it like a simple infrastructure that is sitting somewhere else so that's one of the biggest changes and shifts that are causing a lot of complexity and headache for actually a lot of customers for managing environments the second critical aspect is even that even exasperates the situation is multi-cloud environments now there are companies that have got it right with things about right cloud for the right workload so there are companies that I reach out and I talk with they've got their office applications and emails and stuff running on Microsoft 365 which can be the Azure cloud whereas they're running their engineering applications the ones that they build and leverage for their end customers on Amazon and to some extent they've got it right but still they have a multiple cloud that they have to go after and maintain this becomes complex when you have two clouds for the same type of workload when I have to host applications for my end customers on Amazon as well as Azure as well as Google then I get into security issues that I have to be consistent across all three I get into talent because I need to have people that focus on Amazon as well as Azure as well as Google which means I need so much more workforce I need so many so much more skills that I need to build right that's becoming the second issue the third one is around data costs can I make these clouds talk to each other then you get into the English egress cost and that creates some complexity so bringing all of this together and managing is really becoming more complex for our customers and obviously as a part of this we will talk about some of the some of the ideas that we can bring for in managing such complex environments but this is what we are seeing in terms of why the complexity has become a lot more in the last few years. Right a lot of complexity in the last few years Manoj let's bring you into the conversation now before we dig into your cloud environment give the audience a little bit of an overview of GTCR what kind of company are you what do you guys do? Definitely Lisa GTCR is a Chicago based private equity firm we've been in the market for more than 40 years and what we do is we invest in companies across different sectors and then we manage the company drive it to increase the value and then over a period of time sell it to future buyers so in a nutshell we've got a large portfolio of companies that we need to manage and make sure that they perform the expectations and I work with GTCR is from a technology viewpoint so where I work with all the companies their technology leadership to make sure that we're getting the best out of technology and technology today drives everything so how can technology be a good complement to the business itself so my role is to play that intermediary role to make sure that there is synergy between the investment thesis and the technology levers that we can pull and also work with partners like Hitachi to make sure that it is done in an optimal manner. I like that you said technology needs to really complement the business and vice versa so Manoj let's get into the cloud operations environment at GTCR talk to me about what the experience has been the last couple of years give us an idea of some of the challenges that you were facing with existing cloud ops and the solution that you're using from Hitachi Ventara. Absolutely in fact Prem phrased it really well one of the key things that we're facing is the workload management so there's so many choices there so much complexities we have these companies buying more companies there is organic growth that is happening so the variables that we have to deal with are very high in such a scenario to make sure that the workload management of each of the companies are done in an optimal manner is becoming an increasing concern so that's one area where any help we can get anything we can try to make sure it is done better becomes a huge value at each. A second aspect is financial transparency we need to know where the money is going where the money is coming in from what is the scale especially in a cloud environment we are talking about an auto-scaled ecosystem having that financial transparency and the metrics associated with that these become very very critical to ensure that we have a successful presence in the multi-cloud environment. Talk a little bit about the solution that you're using with Hitachi and the challenges that it is eradicated. Yeah so end of the day right we need to focus on our core competence so we have got a very strong technology leadership team we've got a very strong presence in the respective domains of each of the portfolio companies but where Hitachi comes in and how comes in as a solution is that they allow us to excel in focusing on our core business and then make sure that we are able to take care of workload management or financial transparency all of that is taken off the table from us and Hitachi manages it for us right so it's a perfectly complementary relationship where they act as two partners and Hark is a solution is extremely useful in driving that and I'm anticipating that it will become more important with time as the complexity of cloud and cloud associated workloads are only becoming more challenging to manage and not less. Right that's the thing that complexity is there and it's also increasing Prem you talked about the complexities that are existing today with respect to cloud operations the things that have happened over the last couple of years what are some of your tips Prem for the audience like the top two or three things that you would say on cloud operations that that people need to understand so that they can manage that complexity and allow their business to be driven and complemented by technology. Yeah a big great question again Lisa right and I think Manoj alluded to a few of these things as well the first one is in the new world of the cloud I think think of migration modernization and management as a single continuum to the cloud now there is no lift and shift and there is no somebody else separately manages it right if you do not lift and shift the right applications the right way onto the cloud you are going to deal with the complexity of managing it and you'll end up spending more money time and effort in managing it so that's number one migration modernization management of cloud work roles is a single quantum room and it's not pre separate activities right that's number one in the second is cost. Cost traditionally has been an afterthought right people move the workload to the cloud and I think again like I said I'll refer back to what Manoj said once we move it to the cloud and then we put all these fancy engineering capability around self provisioning every developer can go and ask for what he or she wants and they get an environment immediately spun up so on and so forth suddenly the CIO waits up to a bill that is significantly larger than what he or she expected right and this is this has become a bit common nowadays right the challenge is because we think cost in the cloud as an afterthought now consider this example in previous world you buy hard value put it in your data center you've already amortized the cost as a capex so you can write an application throw it onto the infrastructure and the application continues to use the infrastructure until you hit a ceiling you don't care about the money you spent but if I write a line of code that is inefficient today and I deploy it on the cloud from minute one I am paying for the inefficiency so if I realize it after six months I've already spent the money so financial discipline especially when managing the cloud is now is no more an afterthought it is as much something that you have to include in your engineering practice as much as any other DevOps practices right those are my top two tips Lisa from my standpoint think about cloud think about cloud cloud workloads in the last one again and you will see you will hear me saying this again and again get into the mindset of everything is code you don't have a touch and feel infrastructure anymore so you don't really need to have foot on the ground to go manage the infrastructure it's codified so your code should be managing it and think of how it happens right that's where we're going as an evolution for this everything is code that's great advice great tips for the audience there but I should bring you back into the conversation you know we can talk about skills gaps on in many different facets of technology the sre role relatively new skill set we're hearing a lot about it sre led DevSecOps is probably even more so of a new skill set if I'm an IT leader or an application leader how do I ensure that I have the right skill set within my organization to be able to manage my cloud operations to to dial down that complexity so that I can really operate successfully as a business yeah so unfortunately there is no perfect answer right it's such a such a scarce skill set that any day any of the portfolio company ctos if I go and talk and say hey here's a great sre team member they will be more than willing to fight with each other to get the person that's right it's that scares the skill set so so a few things we need to look at it one is how can I build it within right so nobody gets born as an sre you you make a person an sre so how do you inculcate that culture so like Prem said earlier right everything is software so how do we make sure that everybody inculcates that as part of their operating philosophy be they part of the operations team or the development team or the testing team they need to understand that that is the common guideline and common objective that we're driving towards it so that skill set and that associated training needs to be driven from within the organization and that in my mind is the fastest way to make sure that that role gets propagated across organization that is one the second thing is rely on the right partners so it's not going to be possible for us to get all of these roles built in house so instead prioritize what roles need to be done from within the organization and what roles can we rely on our partners to drive it for us so that becomes an important consideration for us to look at as well absolutely that partnership angle is incredibly important to from from the beginning really kind of weaving these companies together on this journey to redefine cloud operations and build that as we talked about at the beginning of the conversation really building a cloud centered excellence that allows the organization to be competitive successful and and really deliver what the end user is is expecting something to it I think sure yeah one of the one of the common things that I tell customers when we talk about sre and to Manoj's point is don't think of sre as a skill set which is the common way to really industry tries to solve the problem sre is a mindset right everybody well said yeah that's well so everybody in a company should think of him or her as a site reliability engineer and everybody has a role in it right even if you take the new process layout from sre there are individuals that are responsible to whom we can go to when there is a problem directly as opposed to going through the traditional ways of a i talk to l1 and l1 contrast all they go to l2 and then for l3 so we're trying to move away from an issue escalation model to what we call as the issue routing or incident routing model right move away from incident escalation to an incident routing model so you get to root to the right folks so again to sum it up sre should not be solved as a skill set because there is not enough people in the market to solve with that pain if you start solving it as a mindset I think companies can get a handle of it I love that I've actually never heard that before but it makes perfect sense to think about the sre as a mindset rather than a skill set that will allow organizations to be much more successful probably I wanted to get your thoughts as enterprises are innovating they're moving more products and services to the as a service model talk about how the dev teams the ops teams are working together to build and run reliable cost efficient services are they working better together again a very polarizing question because some customers are getting it right many customers aren't there is still a big wall between development and operations right even when you think about DevOps as a terminology the fundamental principle was to make sure deaf and ops works together but what many companies have achieved today honestly is automating the operations for development for example as a developer I can check in code and my code will appear in production without any friction right there is automated testing automated provisioning and it gets promoted to production but after production it goes back into the 20 year old model of operating the code right so there is more work that needs to be done for dev and ops to come closer and work together and one of the ways that we think this is achievable is not by doing radical org changes but more by focusing on a product oriented single backlog approach across development and operations which is again there is change management involved but I think that's a way to start embracing the culture of dev and ops coming together much better now again sre principles as we double click and understand it more and google has done a very good job laying it out for the world as you think about sre principle there are ways and means in that process of how to think about a single backlog and in heart hitachi application reliability centers we've really got a way to look at prioritizing the backlog and what I mean by that is dev teams try to work on backlog that come from product managers on features the sre and the operations team try to put backlog into the system try to put features into the same backlog for improving stability availability and financials financial optimization of your code and there are ways when you look at your SLOs and error budgets to really coach the product teams to prioritize your backlog based on what's important for you so if you understand you're spending more money then you reduce your product features going in and implement the financial optimization that came from your operations team right so you now have the ability to throttle these parameters and that's where sre becomes a mindset and a principle as opposed to a skill set because this is not an individual telling you to do this is the company that is embarking on how to prioritize my backlog beyond just user features right great point last question for both of you is the same top kind of takeaway things that you want me to remember if I'm an IT leader at an organization and I am planning on redefining cloud ops for my company Manoj will start with you and then Prem go to you what are the top two things that you want me to walk away with understanding how to do that successfully yeah so I'll go back to basics so the two things I would say need to be taken care of is one is customer experience so all the things that I do end of the day is it improving the customer experience or not so that's the first metric the second thing is anything that I do is there an ROI by doing that incremental step or not otherwise we might get lost in the technology wizardry the new tech etc but end of the day if the customers are not happy if there is no ROI everything else uh it's just garnish on top of that now it's all about the customer experience right that's so true from one of your thoughts the top things that I need to be taking away if I am a leader planning to redefine my cloud eye company absolutely and I think from from uh company standpoint I think Manoj summarized it extremely bit right there is this ROI and there is this customer experience from my end again I'll suggest two more things as a takeaway right one cloud cost is not an afterthought it's essential for us to think about it up front number two do not deeming migration modernization and operations they are one stream if you migrate along wrong workload onto the cloud you're going to be stuck with it for a long time and an example of a wrong workload Lisa for everybody that that is listening to this is if my cost per transaction profile doesn't change and I am not improving my revenue per transaction for a piece of code that's going to run in production it's better off running in a data center where my cost is capexed and amortized and I have control over when I want to upgrade as opposed to putting it on a cloud and continuing to pay unless it gives me more dividends towards improvement but that's a simple example of when we think about what should I migrate and how will that cost pain when I want to manage it in the longer run but that's that's something that I'll leave the audience and you with as a takeaway excellent guys thank you so much for talking to me today about what Hitachi Ventura and GTC are doing together how you've really dialed down those complexities enabling the business and the technology folks to really live harmoniously we appreciate your insights and your perspectives on building a cloud center of excellence thank you both for joining me thank you for my guests I'm Lisa Martin you're watching this event building your cloud center of excellence with Hitachi Ventura thanks for watching data centers account for about four percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and it's about to rise Hitachi Ventura is committed to changing that we look at every aspect of our storage business it actually has reduced the annual carbon footprint of VSP by up to 86 percent since 2014 we are in this for everyone at Hitachi Ventura we're making data centers not only eco-friendly but eco-first and foremost reducing carbon emissions and consuming 65% less energy Hitachi Ventura for the planet for the data driven hey everyone and welcome to this event build your cloud center of excellence I'm your host Lisa Martin in the next 15 minutes or so my guests and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations and application modernization for customers and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process as you saw on our first two segments we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations we talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems this segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Ventura's partners are really helping to speed up that process we've got Johnson controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Ventura please welcome both of my guests Primevala Subramanian is with us SVP and CTO digital solutions at Hitachi Ventura and Suresh Muthukuru SVP customer success platform engineering and reliability engineering from Johnson controls gentlemen welcome to the program great to have you thank you Lisa first question is to both of you and Suresh we'll start with you we want to understand you know the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex we've talked a lot about that in this program talk to us Suresh about some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you faced with respect to that thank you I think it's a great question I mean cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years you know when we were talking about a single cloud that's Azure AWS and GCP and that was complex enough now we're talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson controls we have Azure we have AWS we have GCP we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem so the architecture has become very very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are not thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic so I think I think it's I mean sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think oh when you go to cloud everything is simplified cloud does give you a lot of simplicity but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it so and the next one is pretty important is you know generally when you look at cloud services you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud 100 150 services 200 services even within those companies you take AWS they might not know an individual resource might not know about all the services we see that's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these you know clouds well it doesn't matter which one that is and the third one is pretty big at least at the CTO the CIO and the senior leadership level is cost cost is a major factor because cloud you know will eat you up if you cannot manage it if you don't have a good cloud governance process because every minute you're in it it's burning cash so I think if you ask me these are the three major things that I am facing day-to-day and that's where I use my partners which I'll touch base perfect we'll talk about that so Prem I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson controls or JCI as you may hear it hear us refer to it talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're saying within the customer landscape so yeah I agree these are these are not very specific to JCA but there are specific issues in JCA right so the way we think about these are there is there is a common issue when people go to the club and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses right so JCI and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward I think solution is to see if it's done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity but there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is they don't go to Alibaba they don't have footprint in all three clouds so their multi cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost around security around talent talent is a big thing right and in Suresh's case I think it's it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider be it AWS, JCP or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody including many of us right we learn every day now nowadays right it's not that there is one service integrator who knows all while technically people can claim as a part of sales but in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape and if you take if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow and that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing and we've been working together but the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this right those are those are my three things and one last thing that I would love to say before before we move away from this question is if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years and I've touched upon this in the previous episode as well Lisa right if you take architectures we've grown into microservices we've gone into all these serverless architectures all the fancy things that we want that helps us go to market faster be more competitive as a business but that's not simplified stuff right that's complicated stuff it's a lot more distributed second again we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service services on the cloud that we are consuming right in the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model we kind of click a button put some code in the repository the code starts to run in production within a minute everything else is automated but then when we get to operations we're still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure right so you've got an infra team you've got an app team you've got an incident management team you've got a soft lock everything but again Suresh Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload and how do I apply engineering to go manage this because a lot of it is codified right so automated anyway so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward Suresh let's talk about that taming the complexity you guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud especially multi-cloud environments that you're living but Suresh talk about the partnership with Hitachi Ventura how is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities I mean I always you know I think I've said this to Prem multiple times I treat my partners as my internal you know you know employees I look at Prem as my co-worker or my peers and that's so the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa isn't it I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating and I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Ventura for that really been an amazing partnership and as he was saying we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers so if you look at my jacket it talks about open blue platform this is what JCI is building is that we are building this open blue digital platform and and within that my team along with Prem's or Hitachi we have built what we call as Polaris it's a technical platform where our apps can run and this platform is automated end to end from a platform engineering standpoint we stood up a platform engineering organization a reliability engineering organization as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role as I said previously you know for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at and Hitachi not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about Hark you know they have set up a lab and now we can leverage it and they also came up with some really interesting concepts I went and met them in India they came up with this call a concept called IPL okay what is that they really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively which is self-healing you know how you do that so I think partners you know if they become really vested in your interests they can do wonders for you and I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us in many aspects and I'm leveraging them are you starting with support now I'm leveraging them in the automation the platform engineering as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces and that like they are my end-to-end partner right so you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership from I want to go back to so I just mentioned Hark talk a little bit about what Hark is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Hark strategy great so let me spend like a few seconds on what Hark is Liz I've again I know we've been using the term Hark stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors now the reason we we thought about Hark was like I said in the beginning of this segment there is an evolution from an architecture standpoint to be more modern microservices serverless reactive architecture so on and so forth there is an evolution in your development methodology from waterfall to agile to DevOps to lean agile to path program whatever right extreme programming so on and so forth there is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see savers anymore right you buy it buy a click of a button you don't know the size of it all you know is a it's M1 M2 M3 whatever that name means let's go provision it on the fly get go get your work done right when all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back right that's the issue and Hark was conceived exactly to fix to fix that particular problem to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload right that's exactly what Hark is so it brings together finest engineering talent so the teams are trained in specific ways of working we've invested and implemented some of the IP we work with best in best of the big part per ecosystem and I'll talk to that in a minute and we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas which is a Hark facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers and then back in Hyderabad we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Hark services for our customers as well right and then we're expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23 that's kind of the plan that we're thinking through however that's what Hark is Lisa right that's our solution to this cloud complexity problem right got it and it sounds like it's going quite global which is fantastic so Suresh I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays you talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about yeah sure I think partners play a major role and JCI is very very good at it I mean I've joined JCI 18 months ago JCI leverages partners pretty extensively as I said I leverage Hitachi Ventura for my you know a group and they're sorry space in the cloud operation space and they're my primary partner but at the same time we leverage many other partners you know Accenture, HCL and even on the tooling side we use DataDog and PortPorks all these guys are major partners of ours because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go and pick the right partner who's going to really you know make you successful by investing their resources in you and what I mean by that is when you're a partner partner knows exactly what kind of skill set is needed for this customer for them to really be successful as I said earlier we do we cannot really get all the skill set that we need we rely on the partners and partners bring the right skill set they can scale I can tell Prem tomorrow hey I need two parts by next week and I can guarantee it is going to bring two parts to me so they let you scale they let you move fast and I'm a big believer in today's day and age to get things done fast and be more agile I'm not worried about failure but for me moving fast is very very important and partners really do a very good job bringing that but and then they also really make you think isn't it because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because you know they will come and ask you questions about hey tell me why you are doing this can I review your architecture you know and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work because they work with so many different clients not JCI they bring all that expertise and that's what I look for them you know just not you know do a TNM job for me I ask you to do this go they just bring more than that that's how I pick my partners and that's how you know Hitachi's Ventura is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that it sounds like it sounds like a flywheel of innovation yeah I love that last question for both of you is we're almost out of time here Prem I want to go back to you so I'm a partner I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company what are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Ventura's perspective so before I get to that question these are the partners that we work with are slightly different from the partners that again there are some similar partners there are some different partners right for example we pick and choose especially in the hog space we pick and choose partners that are more future focused right we don't care if they are huge companies or small companies we go after companies that are future focused that are really really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need right when I pick partners for her my ultimate endeavor is to ensure in this case because we've got Suresh and GCI on we are able to operate dire environment with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they are expecting from us and whatever I don't have I need to get from my partner so that I bring this solution to Suresh as opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh and that's how I think about partners what do I want them to do from and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners we just don't go by tools when we say we are partnering with XYZ we do workshops with them and we say this is how we are thinking either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you continue to leverage you and we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps we're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers and our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner our intention is to just fill the white space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers so always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with it actually the biggest thing is tools brawl especially on the cloud is very real so every problem on the cloud I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my Suresh's app and it's not easy at all it's so confusing that's what we want we want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making them that makes perfect sense there there's there really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like in the partner ecosystem and there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well which is really to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting so our last question for you is which is the same one if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to to consider as I'm planning to redefine cloud ops at my company I'll keep it simple in my view just I mean you've touched upon in multiple facets in this interview about that the three things first and foremost reliability you know in today's day and age my products has to be reliable available and you know make sure that the customer is happy with what they're really dealing with number one number two my product has to be secure security is super super important okay and number three I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I have to keep my cost low so these three is where what I would focus and what I expect from my partners great advice guys thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Ventura and JCI what you're doing together we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives thank you thank you Lisa thanks Lisa thanks for having us my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin thank you so much for watching