 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit, presented by NTT Research. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Upgrade 2020. It's the NTT Research Summit covering a lot of really deep topics around a lot of basic core research that NTT is sponsoring, kind of like the old days of Mabel or some of the other kind of core research. And we're excited to have our next guest to go a little bit beyond the core research and actually talk about working with people today. So we'd like to welcome in Alex Bennett. He is the global Senior Vice President of the Intelligent Workplace for NTT. Alex, good morning. Good morning, Jeff. How are you doing? Terrific. So I think for a lot of people, probably know the NTT name, certainly in the States, but are not familiar with, I think, the degree of which you guys have this huge business around services and workplace collaboration. I wonder if you can give us kind of a high level summary of the services angle at NTT, beyond just putting in communications infrastructure equipment. Yeah, definitely. And NTT, as you said, it's a huge organization, very well known in Japan and growing. And last year, we brought together about 32 different brands under the NTT Limited brand. And we have NTT data services as well. So our role is really to look at the client requirements, the business needs that they have, and be able to provide end-to-end solutions and wrap them with our services to make sure they've got efficiency gains, but also improved employee experience and experience around improving how they connect to their customers as well. Right, right. So obviously COVID-19, what was kind of a light switch moment back in March has now turned into kind of an ongoing new normal. Here we are six months plus into this thing, really no end in sight in the immediate term. So people were thrown into this situation where work from home, work from anywhere had to happen with no prep. You've been in the business for a long time working on solutions. So there's the obvious things like security and access, but what are some of the less obvious things that people should be thinking about when they think about supporting their employees that are not now coming into the office? Well, I mean, it's been interesting, right? Instead of being in this sector for a long time, and a lot of the themes have been the same for the last 10, 15 years. You know, how do we improve employee experience? How do we start to look at things like well-being? You know, how does that have an impact on productivity? And how do you make sure that we make it simple for people to carry out their tasks? Now, something I get asked a lot is this idea of how do we make it frictionless? A lot of the time people don't really care about the brand or the technology. They just want to be able to carry out their role from whatever industry sector they are and do it efficiently and do it well, but also to be able to interact. I think it's been really important and this pandemic has brought about this view that people haven't been able to socialize in the same way they have in the past and work is really about people. You know, the workplace is also about people on how we connect those people into customers and provide efficiencies in that area. So the conversations I've been having in the last, you know, six to seven months, it's been quite interesting that the programs they were taking 18 months, 24 months, 36 months over, have had to be accelerated and really deployed in about three months. And then that's brought about loads of operation on policy concerns. So as you mentioned, as you start to have this new, what we call, you know, distributed workforce, especially those organizations which have been perhaps more enterprise specific, which are going into carpeted office environments. They've been requested by governments to only work from home. And that's brought about a huge impact to how people work, but also socialize. So from a technology standpoint, you've asked people, right, you're gonna work from home. Actually, do you have network connectivity? Can you actually connect with a technology tool like, you know, collaboration to be able to speak to your customers, to speak to your peers? What device are you actually working on? So we saw this real drive around what was this sort of immediate business continuity requirement for a secure remote worker. And that brought about other concerns as well. Right. So there's so many layers to this conversation I'm psyched to dig into it. But one of the ones I want to dig in is kind of tools overload. You know, this idea of collaboration and, you know, trying to get your work done and trying to get barriers removed. At the same time though, it just seems like we just keep getting more tools added to the pallet that we have to interact with every day whether it's Slack or Asana or Salesforce or Box or, you know, the list goes on and on and on. And the other thing that just seems strange to me is that, right, all of these things have a notification component. So it's almost like the noise is increasing. I don't hear a lot of people ripping out old tooling or ripping out old systems. So how do you help guide people to say, you know, there's all these great collaboration tools. There's all these great communication tools, but you can't have all of them firing all the time and expect people to actually have time to get work done. Yeah, and look, it's also, you know, some people are used to that. You might have a digital native who's used to using multiple tools, but you'll have others that actually haven't been taught or a learning program about how to use different tools for different applications. And that becomes, you know, that person becomes frustrated and their productivity levels can go down. I think what we'd really try and do is understand what are the business requirements by the persona? You know, so if you think of that distributed worker that's now having to work from home and go into the office for specific tasks that are allowed, are they a salesperson? You know, are they actually working in HR? What do they need and what are the tasks they need? And then start to provide the right types of tools and technology specifically for them and make sure they have a learning path that's driven around how they actually enable that technology. But you're right though, I think one thing that COVID found is that that doesn't happen overnight. You know, that's an engagement process. COVID hit and everyone was at home straight away. So we did see this huge transition from what may have been a legacy on premise application to starting to use more cloud-based applications and almost everyone is thrown in at the deep end, right? Well, here you go, just get on and use it. And at the same time they had WeChat where they had other types of application like WhatsApp and all these channels were happening and that also had an impact on things like compliance and security because all of a sudden, you're not using a corporately approved platform and solution and you're starting to talk about perhaps confidential information that's not in a way that is actually retained inside of a corporate network for the compliance and regulatory components. So it's been a really interesting time in the last few months. Right, well, so let's just touch on security for a minute because obviously security is a huge concern. As you said, there's a whole bunch of security, you know, kind of new security issues. One is just everybody's working from home, whether they've got a VPN or not or they're on their cable provider. You don't know what devices they're on, right? There's so many different devices and two is these apps have proliferated all over all these devices, whether access Salesforce on my phone or on my laptop or on my computer at work, right? All very different. When you look at the kind of security challenge that has come from distributed workforce with this super acceleration, how many customers are ready for it as this just caused a complete kind of hair on fire reaction to get up to speed or a lot of the systems of the modern systems relatively well locked down. So it wasn't a giant kind of adjustment back in March. It really depends on the type of company and culture it was before. You know, what we've actually seen from some research we've done very recently across 1500 different companies, those organizations that have really invested and become more digital disruptors. You know, they've embedded an idea of agility. They've actually already got a distributed workforce. They've already started to move a lot of their platforms and applications to the cloud. They'd started to think about these IT policies and security previously. They've been very successful on how they've been able to pivot and drive this business continuity. I think for others that have been, have large install base of employees, have set policies in place, it's been harder for them to transition. And what we've seen is that they're the organizations that have really tried to integrate some of the new technologies into the old and that's quite difficult sometimes. So, you know, around security, out of those 1500 organizations, nearly 70% of them said that they have a higher level of risk and concern about their security and compliance today than they had prior to the pandemic. Right. What also is brought about is this idea of moving from sort of perimeter security, where you'd come into an office and you have this perimeter where the network secure, the physical location is secure and you containerize the applications. And you've got to empower employees more now because, you know, people are going to be mobile. They're going to be using multiple devices in different locations, you know, all around the world. So we're seeing this transition as people move to cloud-based platforms, security starting to get embedded into the application. And it goes back to that persona aspect. So you can start to initiate things like, you know, data loss protection and rights management about the content an individual has based on their location or the confidentiality of that document or piece of information. So that's where we're seeing this move is sort of really accelerating to the move. Take the stress away from the employee embedded into an actual system and an application. And that has the intelligence to work out security and the compliance on behalf of the individual. Right. Now, where I was going to go is, you know, there's a lot of conversations now about certain companies announcing that people can just work from home for the foreseeable future, especially here in Silicon Valley. And you mentioned that, you know, for some people that were already kind of down a digital transformation path, they're in good shape. Other people, you know, weren't that far. And of course, all the memes on social media are, you know, what drove your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO or COVID? And we all know the answer to the question. So I just want to get, you know, kind of a long-term perspective. You've been in this space for a long time. I think there's going to be, you know, significantly increased percentage of people that are working from home, a significantly increased percentage of the time, if not 100% of the time. How do you see this kind of, you know, extending out and how will it impact the way that people motivate? Because at the end of the day, you've written a ton of blog posts on this, you know, motivation equals profitability. You know, motivated, engaged people do better work and get better results on the bottom line. How do you see this as it's unspools for six months, 12 months, 24 months when there's some mishmash of combination of work from home and work from the office? I think probably the first thing to say is that from the research you've done, we think that's going to differ by different geographies. I mean, it's interesting when you look at areas like India and perhaps South Africa where the network connectivity home is actually not as good as in Northern Europe or North America. It actually becomes quite hard to carry out your role and task at home and it can become really frustrating. There's also sort of health and safety components to also working at home. We've had a lot of people, especially the younger generation who are in shared, you know, home shared facilities. You know, who's going to pay for the internet, the bandwidth, you know, and actually you don't, you only have your bedroom and is it healthy to work out your bedroom all day? So when you really sort of peel back the layers of this, it's a really complex environment and it's also dependent on the industry sector you are. You're actually driving. But at a high level, one thing we're really seeing is most people still want to have a level of human interaction. We as humans like to work together and engage together. And in fact, about 80% of the respondents of our report actually said they want to come back to the office. Now, this speaks to this idea of choice and flexibility because it's not just about coming back for five days a week, eight to five, it's about going, actually I've got a task to carry out. I'd be really helpful if I was with my team face to face. And I can come in for four hours, book my time in that physical space, carry that out and then I can go home and do that sort of really the research-based work which I can do in the safety of my own environment. So that's what we're seeing across the industry. Whereas before, now I think everyone's trying to build these really nice big offices that look fantastic and were huge and talked about your brand. Most organizations now are repurposing space because they're not going to have as many people inside of those physical locations but they're motivating for them to come in for creative work. To be social, to think about how they do cross agile team development. And that's what we're really nice to see today. Yeah, it's really interesting. You think of some young engineer that just graduated from school, gets a job at Google and you get all your food there and they'll do your dry cleaning and they'll change the oil in your car and they'll take care of everything and then this little growth of these little micro houses. Well, guess what? Now you don't have any of that stuff anymore. The micro house with no kitchen or kitchenette doesn't look so attractive. But I want to shift gears a little bit more detail on NTT, we've talked to lots of people about new ways to work, IBM, Citrix, VMware has a solution and you work with big companies. So how does NTT fit in kind of a transformation process bit on the big scale but more kind of an employee engagement and a work from anywhere type of engagement? How do you guys fit within big system integrators like Accenture that are driving organizational change and kind of all this other suite of technology that they might already have in place? Yeah, I mean, we sort of sit in that role of a service delivery organization as well as systems integrator. So our role is to actually go into those clients and sit down with them, which is now virtually rather than in person a lot of the time and really understand what are those business KPIs they have and help them shape that strategy. And to do that, you've got to understand what they have today, that view of the as-is and that goes across multiple components as you said from desktop applications, security, inclusive of culture, property assets, network. And what we do is really take a holistic view of those areas and go for you to reach that business goal, that KPI. This is the project that you're going to have to do and anything around employee engagement ultimately is fed also by how good your network is and how secure that network is to deliver those applications efficiently for the employee to carry out their task in that frictionless way. So we have a very holistic view about how we then deliver, upgrade the core infrastructure. We do that secure by design is our sort of policy and everything we do, you know, security is embedded into what we do. And then we deliver that outcome, but then we wrap things like, you know, adoption services. I think one thing in the past, you know, people say, here's a technology, go on and do it. Now, especially nowadays, you've got quite complex platforms. You've got to really understand how do you give information to people to self-serve them, that sort of nudge technology so they can understand how to carry it out. And that idea of adoption training and change of management is becoming ever-increasingly important for our clients. Right. So I want to shift gears again, Alex, and talk about the show upgrade, 2020. A lot of really heavy science going on here in healthcare, in IT, in a whole bunch of areas. Pretty exciting stuff. You know, we've talked to some other guests about some of the real details and I'm definitely going to attend some sessions and have my brain exploded, I'm sure. But I'm just curious of how it fits with what you're doing. You know, you've been involved, as you said, not necessarily with NTT, but you've been involved in kind of workplace collaboration tools for a long, long time. You know, how do you see, you know, kind of basic research and some of this really fundamental research, you know, kind of helping you and your customers and your solutions, you know, as we kind of move down the road. I mean, the main conversation we're having with executives today is, you know, this idea of employee wellbeing and experience is fundamental to the success of their business because it drives, you know, customer centricity productivity gains. You've got to think about how technology can underpin that and deliver insights to you. So, you know, the new currency is data. And what I find really interesting around, you know, what we're talking about with Upgrade 2020 is this ideas of digital twins. So, when you think of this concept of a digital twin, it all is based on this idea of extensibility. So, all your decisions that you're making right today, you know, these short-term decisions you're having to do for business continuity, you've got to think about the long-term impact of how you're going to be able to ingest that data from all those systems into a central area to give you insight. Now, from that insight, you've then got the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to actually say, right, for this component, how many of my employees really are well? Are they doing well in the productivity gains? And from my property estate, you know, how many of my properties are actually reducing the energy consumption? Are we adhering to our sustainability goals? Are they well so the actual physical environment is safe for those employees? So, all of those disparate platforms have to come together into that one area and give you insight. So that the marrying of physical space with how humans interact all onto a digital twin, I think is really interesting and something I'm speaking to clients about day in, day out. I love that, that is awesome. You know, we were first exposed to the digital twin concept years ago doing some work with General Electric because they were doing a lot of digital twin work around, you know, engines on airplanes and, you know, simulate an airplane engine that's running on a plane in the Middle East that's going to act very different than a plane that's running in Alaska. And then, you know, I love the concept of digital twin around the context of people in medicine, right? And modeling a heart or modeling a behavior or system or cardiovascular system. How are you talking about digital twins? Because it sounds like you're talking about kind of a combination between, you know, kind of individual people and how they're doing versus some group of people as a unit and organization. And then you even mentioned, you know, sustainability goals and buildings. So when you're talking about digital twin in this context, what are the boundaries? How are you organizing that thing that you can then do, you know, kind of tests and kind of predictive exercises to see how the real thing is going to do relative to what the digital twin did. Yeah, but it goes back to defining those business outcomes and most of the discussions we're having is, yeah, obviously increased productivity, but it's also reducing costs. A big one we've seen in my area is attraction, retention of talent, you know, intellectual property is going to differentiate organizations in the future as technology sort of standardizes. But sustainability, again, from the research we've done is really high up on the executive's agenda. You know, the idea that we as, you know, NTT as well, we have a duty to society to actually start giving back a view of how technology can improve the sustainability goal. In fact, we've just become the business avenger for the UN sustainability goal number 11 around that idea of communities and smart cities. So the clients that I'm speaking to when they're looking at those business objectives are, you know, 10, 15% of my actual costs associated to my property. We've now got a new distributed workforce, but I've got a huge amount of energy going into those properties. Now we can actually connect now building management systems into, you know, that digital twin. We can also start to look at, you know, other platforms such as lifts, you know, also all the heating and air ventilation and start to get the data that allows us to model and predict when certain issues may occur. So, you know, as less people start coming in, you'll have occupancy data. You'll be able to say, actually this location has only been used 30% capacity. We could reduce the amount of space we have. Or in fact, we don't need that space at all. And in that space, we know that we're running an HVAC system and air conditioning 100% of the time. You start to actually reduce that and you can reduce energy consumption by 30%. Now that goes back to this whole idea of extensibility and one building that can have a big impact, but across 500 buildings that we are NTT have, that's a significant amount of energy that we can change. And also you can then start to think about the idea of, you know, more a different type of power purchasing agreement with sustainable energy going into those environments. So many, you know, kind of so many interesting twists and turns on this journey since, you know, the COVID hit and it is going to be really fascinating to see kind of what sticks and, you know, and the long-term ramifications because we're not going back to the way that it was. I think that's not even a question. Just the last thing on kind of the data. You know, we saw some really, I think not such great things early on in this thing where, you know, you could put us basically a sniffer on and, you know, are people sitting in front of their computer all day? I saw some nasty thing on Twitter the other day. My boss wants me to be on Zoom calls all day long. I mean, do people get it that, you know, there's an opportunity to increase motivation, not decrease motivation by, you know, a responsible use and a good use of this data versus, you know, a potential perception of, well, now they're just big brothering me to death. It's such a hot topic, right? I mean, even before COVID, we had, you know, the GDPR compliance in Europe, but that ultimately is a global compliance and the West Coast America have also got a similar one now about what data you actually keeping about me as an individual and I should have access to that and I can speak to my company about it. And is it big brother or actually using that data to help inform me as an individual ways of improving the way I work or working in a way that has a better balance for me as an individual. And we're having these conversations with our clients right now about how we do this because they're having to work with workers, councils and countries like Germany because track and trace does have that view of that sort of big brother. Well, where are you? What are you doing? And how long have you been on your computer? I think it's down to the culture of your business and the purpose that you have and how you engage with your employees that you show that data to be about or benefiting them as an individual. Now, I'm going back to that digital twin that the view of ingesting data then from perhaps platforms like Cisco WebEx or Office 365 and you can see how long they're actually in front of their screen. You can then start to predict and see where you may have burnout or in fact affect change where you say our HR policy should dictate you shouldn't be working 14 hours a day that's not good for you, it's not good for us and actually nudge them teach them about taking time away from the desk and actually having a better work balance. And that's important because it all goes back to increases the productivity long-term but it's great brand association and it's good for attraction or attention of talent. Right, right. Well, I think the retention and attraction is a huge thing you keep talking about productivity and obviously in your blog post talking about engagement, right? And engagement is such a direct tie to that. And then at the bottom line it's kind of like diversity of opinion. It actually makes good business sense and you actually put more money in the bank at the end of the day when you do some of these more progressive, you know kind of approaches to how you manage the people because they're not machines, they're people. Yeah, and you should allow them to make decisions. You know that again distributed working you ought to think of how to empower them with the tools that gives them the choice to make decisions. And you know that decision making is more democratized inside of organizations that are successful. But if you don't have the technology that allows them to do that it goes back to a hierarchical decision making and that takes time is slower to market and then you know you're not as successful as your competition. So we're really trying to prove that this idea of thinking about people first using the data that backs it up with empirical data to show the benefits is the way forward for organizations today. Yeah, Alex, great conversation. Certainly nothing but opportunity ahead for you and what you do in this really fast evolving and transformative space which is so important which is how do people work? How do they feel good? How are they engaged? How are they productive and really contribute? And at the end of the day it is good business. So exciting times, good luck on the show and some of this crazy research coming out of it on the digital twin and we look forward to continuing to watch the story unfold. Thank you very much, Jeff. All righty. He's Alex, I'm Jeff. You're watching Upgrade 2020. The continuous coverage from theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.