 Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. Day one, HPE Discover 2023, Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante coming to you live from Venetian Expo. Dave, this is day one of our coverage. We've had some, there was a lot of news this morning. A lot, you said last year, I think you were talking about HPE and its partner ecosystem and kind of some of the beefiness they needed to do. We've got a partner up next. It was lauded on stage this morning by Antonio. I think Lisa, the strong ecosystem is a hallmark of any cloud company, you know, not just the public cloud companies, but the hybrid cloud companies as well. So yeah, I think that's really important. I agree. We've got two guests from Infosys joining us next. Two alumni, I should say, Uma Lakshmiapathy is here, SVP and regional head, Amia, Cloud Infrastructure and Security Services at Infosys and Saju San Karankati, the CTO, Cloud Advisory SVP Infosys. Guys, it's great to have you. I lost talk to you in person two years ago. Great to see you back in person. Thank you, Lisa. Uma Shankar, I run the cloud and infrastructure business and it's great to be back and discover and good conversations as usual. Absolutely, as usual. Saju, give us a little bit of background about you. So thank you and again, and thank you for having us back here. So I'm with the company for the last 20 years. I look at the strategy, the technology strategy for the cloud and infrastructure business. I also head the hybrid cloud business for us globally and we're running some very large transformation on cloud for some of our, some marquee customers across the world. Apart from that, I also own two platforms. Basically, the platform is something where we deliver our services through and we'll talk more about our platform while we talk through the interview today. Excellent. Uma, lead us up, give us some background of the cloud infrastructure and security business unit at emphasis. How are cloud solutions enabling and powering organizations to transform, grow their businesses? What's that backstory? The story for us started about 20 years back when we decided as a company that we would go into the infrastructure business. Looking back, it's been a great growth story. A story about 30% year on year growth from the time we started this business. And all economies, whether you talk about geographies in North America, whether geographies in Europe, Middle East, Africa, or the Asia Pacific, I think it's been an all-rounded growth for us in this business. We kind of have different solution set offerings across various market segments. The growth story has been great. It's fueled the economies of all markets for us. Of course, we have a great platform called Cobalt. We'll be talking about it. But most importantly, I think we've tried to help all segments, enterprise segments, and large clients deliver programs for them. Digital transformation has been a central theme for all these clients. And we've been a digital first company, a cloud first company. Five to 10 years back, we took a cloud narrative that we're going to be hybrid. And today, you can see everybody's talking hybrid. And that's the story behind our cloud and infrastructure work. Great marquee of clients across all industry segments, whether it's banking, whether it's finance, whether it's telecom, whether it's... And we have a good plethora of what I would call as enterprise client sets that we work on at different levels of transformation. That's interesting that you're seeing consistency across the board like that. I mean, even HPE in its last quarter said, yeah, North America a little soft. I mean, because we watch the news in North America and interest rates are going up and there's going to be a recession. And everybody goes, oh, hold on, but you're not seeing that. What do you attribute that consistency? See, I think the IT companies in general did well in the COVID era. In the sense that people are getting to work from home, so we have to enable them to work from home. We had to put secure systems so that people can work securely from home and have their applications secured. We continue to do business because we are in the infrastructure world. So we had to add the basics working for many of our clients. So I think we saw a lot of digital enablement that happened for our clients as part of this digital transformation that we did for these clients. And now we're seeing the entire fruits of what we did, of the seeds that we sow in the COVID era, and we helped clients come through their digital transformation. So we are now seeing the whole momentum of moving into the next business models because companies have learned to survive, companies want to now thrive. So I think that's really helping the agenda for digital transformation. And that's been the mantra of success, I would say. Sajid, can you talk a little bit about some of the emerging and current technologies that fall under Cobalt? Cobalt 2.0, what's going on there? Sure, I think it's a great question, and Omar touched upon Cobalt. Let me quickly introduce what is Cobalt, right? Cobalt is a set of services, solutions, and platforms, which is basically to help customers accelerate their journey to cloud. This is something what we launched way back in 2020. And if you look at it today, we have around 35,000 assets around Cobalt and around 300 plus industry blueprints, what we have developed as a part of these offerings. Now, fast forward into 2023. Now, when we look at the associated technologies around cloud, which is, one is data, the second is AI, third is AI VR, and fourth is IoT, fifth is 5G. So what we are seeing is the cloud and associated technologies, they are actually making a huge impact into our, the so-called our businesses, right? And it's all about solving the problem of cloud and these associated technologies for the industry problems, whatever our customers are facing. And that's where we have actually brought in the Cobalt 2.0. So the Cobalt 2.0 is all about focusing on these, developing these industry solutions. Now, if you look at, when I say the industry solutions, if you look at some of the industries what we work with, if you go to a banking customer, and the banking customer, and the whole question to us is, how can I make my solutions more secure, right? And if I go to a retailer, it's all about how can I make my customer experience more, more better? And how can I have smart stores which can actually improve my sales? And if I go to some of my manufacturing customers, you know, their question is more about how can I have a smart factory which can actually improve my productivity? So now, when we look at all of these use cases, and when we start applying these technologies, right, which is cloud and these associated technologies, that's where we started creating these industry blueprints and industry platforms which can actually help our customers to drive transformation on their business. I'll give you some of the examples. You know, one of our solutions is around, it's Helix, right? You know, it's a platform that we have built. It's an AI-first people-centric digital care platform, right? Whatever we have built for our customers. The second one is energy as a service. You know, energy as a service, it's a platform for the industries and cities, basically to, it is basically to improve the energy efficiency of their infrastructure, right? And how do we measure the energy efficiency and how do we actually report it? And how do we ensure that their goals around the decarbonization can be met? So these are some of the industry problems what we are solving as a part of our Cobalt 2.0 offering. And I think just to add to what Sajju, I think he'd give a great explanation to how we've launched Cobalt. It's our marketing brand. And it's the first marketing brand to be launched by a system integrator. And just to add to all these technologies and the solution offerings that Sajju talked about, I think the most important and one of the most important aspects of Cobalt has been to build an ecosystem of people being able to work and get this access to this platform. It's not only employees, it's the ecosystem of partners like HPE, partners like universities and you know, the startups. So the whole community coming in and helping develop this platform and it's just not a pure, just an emphasis platform but it's a platform for the ecosystem. And that's a great point. It's for the ecosystem, it's for the community and the community together makes it better together, right, with all this collaboration that's going on. And it brings its experiences to us. Yes. How do you make sure that that platform can evolve? As technologies change, you know, obviously generative AI is the next new thing, even though it's been around for a while. Is that an architecture that you sort of build into Cobalt? Is it the partnerships that you form that allow you to advance that over time? So I'll start with it and probably I'll Sajju to add on but it's kind of an open platform, right? It's not a closed sourced platform and we're not trying to use this to subscription and make this into a revenue perspective. What we are trying to use the Cobalt is to enable the 200 plus thousand infotions to be able to access ready blueprints that they can take to their clients when the clients want to do a certain level of commoditization, customization, et cetera. We had all of these assets but they were in islands within the organization. So we bought Cobalt, brings all of this into a central theme. And at the same time, I've talked about how Cobalt is working with the ecosystem of partners, ecosystem of universities, ecosystem of startups. And we have some great examples there. We worked in the COVID time, we had a bank in Norway and they were given a very big order from Amazon to deliver to the home. And they didn't have the ability of their IT systems to cater to that capability because it was the volume was so high in a short period of time. So they came to us with this problem and we looked at Cobalt and we looked at the solutions that we have done with them but we were not very sure whether this would be able to scale. So we took it back to a university and we asked them to check if the solution that we did can take that scale. So technically the solution that came was not an emphasis solution but solution driven through the Cobalt framework to deliver to a business challenge to deliver Amazon in Norway through the post office. Now you can know what the names of the clients are but this is the story. So just to add to what Uma said and to answer your one part of your question David in terms of how the technology, the evolving technology landscape is helping us in terms of building up on the Cobalt, right? One is, Uma talked about the community part of it, right? We have the community which is focused on four areas. One is definitely in terms of building knowledge assets and this knowledge assets are basically the foundation of everything what we build. So as and when we have new sets of technologies coming in these are actually calibrated as knowledge assets which comes into the community. So people who are actually contributing or accessing this community has access to these knowledge assets about the new technology. Now the second comes the domain assets. Now the domain assets are nothing but the industry blueprints. Now the knowledge assets are leveraged to solve problems of industry assets, right? Or the domain assets. Now with that we create technology assets, right? So these technology assets are actually built on these technologies. You know it can be an air technology or it's leveraging 5G or IoT. So if you look at it and then we have something called platform assets. So all of these four assets all together, it's nothing but it's like where you start building right from the technology, the knowledge to technology, knowledge to domain and to technology. It's like a Lego blocks, right? Different Lego blocks coming together and that's how we are able to sustain this. So with new technologies getting added, knowledge assets gets created. The domain assets are being leveraged in terms of applying this technology into these domains and we could actually create the business assets. That's how we sustain this. And to reiterate what Sajju just said and I talked about it, it's pretty open sourced. So the ability for us to navigate from one technology or one platform to another platform is pretty easy because it's all open. Yeah, which gets you into the whole hybrid message, the whole multi-cloud theme. What we call super cloud sometimes, right? Which is that cross-cloud experience which has got to be consistent. Different from multi-cloud, which was we work on this cloud and we work on this cloud and we work on this cloud but there are three separate, four separate experiences from on-prem. Now you have the edge. How close are we as an industry to that vision of a consistent experience across all those locations? Today was a great example. I don't know if you've been to the keynote and Antonio talked about how Infosys helped a client. And this is a wind energy company. And people would think that we know when we went in and we know it came from two companies, Siemens and Games, merging. So they had a huge amount of assets and they need a consolidation, et cetera. And that's how we went in with the approach. And we landed with the problem that, you know, we had these windmills and Gamesa was very popular for building windmills in the sea. And if you travel to London, you will see that when you cross the ocean and you will find the windmills in the sea. And that's built by Gamesa. So the challenge for us was to connect that edge to the data centers in Frankfurt. So and the amount of data these windmills do send is significant. And three years back this was, and we created an edge story along with HPE and Aruba at that time. And it was pretty popular for the first time. Of course it took us three years to get to the keynote, but we got there. And we got it from Antonio. And that's the greatest recognition of the work that we do is when you actually see the benefits of two organizations coming together. We have great stories like that. We have a great story in an automobile sector. We are consolidating a very large set of data centers and stuff like that. Again, creating a great edge hybrid story along with HPE. And I think this partnership has really collaborated well. And today we have a great 360 degree relationship with HPE, the great leaders Antonio and Salil at right at the top. And they're driving the whole governance across the organization. And today we're seeing the benefits of that success. Well congratulations guys on that success. Continued success with emphasis, your partner ecosystem and especially with HPE. We thank you so much for joining us back on theCUBE today. Discover. Thank you Lisa. Thank you Dave. It's a great talk with you. Our pleasure. Thank you. For our guests, I'm for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. What's next you ask? HPE and Veeam are going to be here talking about continued partnership between these two juggernauts and what they're delivering customer outcomes wise. Stick around.