 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Got a great conversation here about cloud data AI and all things CXO from KPMG as Vinod Swamathon, who's the head of strategy of AI data in cloud as well as the CIO advisory at KPMG. So no, thanks for coming on theCUBE. My pleasure, John. Thanks for having me. So you guys have an interesting perspective. You sit between the business value being created from technology and the clients trying to put it to work and KPMG impeccable reputation over the years, obviously bringing great business value to clients. You guys do that. You're in the middle of all the hot stuff, cloud data and AI. AI is great if you have the data and the architectures do that and cloud scale brings so many new good things to the table. How is this playing out right now in your mind? Because we're here at IBM Think where the story is transformation is the innovation. Innovation does set the table for net new capabilities at scale. This seems to be a common thread here. What's your take on the current situation? Well, let me start with the fundamental premise that we're seeing playing out with many of our clients and that is clients are beginning to connect with different silos within their business to better respond to what their customers are asking for. We tend to work with large enterprises, very well established businesses and we're also fortunate to serve the needs of high growth companies as well. So we're in a very unique position as a trusted advisor to both legacy companies, transforming and high growth companies looking to drive the transformation in the industry as well. So there are a few things that we're seeing, right? The first and foremost is responding quickly and effectively to very rapidly changing customer needs. And I think the pandemic really put a spotlight on how fast organizations had to pivot. And I have to commend a lot of these organizations and doing a phenomenal job of, I would argue spit bandating and gluing together a response to what their customers expected, right? So as I look at post pandemic, we're seeing a lot of clients now looking to take stock of things that they did during the pandemic, how they address customer demand to really smoothen out and streamline as a strategy, how they're going to become more customer driven. At KPMG, we call this the connected enterprise where you really work effectively across the front, middle and back office and enterprise to seamlessly address the client, right? Anything you do in finance really is driven by what your customers want. It's no longer, hey, finance sit in the back office, right? Anything you do in marketing is no longer, hey, I'm doing it just to address, the demand side of the equation, right? It's very integral to connect marketing with fulfillment, right? So we call this the connected enterprise. So that transformation is only possible if customers and our clients are able to effectively leverage cloud from an architecture perspective. And when I say cloud, what we're seeing smarter clients of ours start to think about is cloud in its entirety. So it's not just the public cloud. It's the cloud architecture, right? The ability to scale up, scale out, right? Scale down, right? Irrespective of where all of this sits from an infrastructure perspective. So cloud is very critical for becoming that connected enterprise. The data piece is integral. I think the data business today, you know, represents trillions of dollars. I think everybody is bought into the fact that data is the new oil and all of that good stuff that we've heard, but it really is a trillion dollar business and it has some unique challenges. So being connected requires, right? That an enterprise become very data driven. I think it's hard to escape AI. It's everywhere to the point where we're not even conscious of AI at work, right? So I think five years ago, AI was a novel concept. Today it's the expectation of customers who interact with big brands that, you know, AI is an integral part of how they are being served, right? So cloud data, AI, architecture, sort of the ingredients, if you will, and then cool technology really starts to bring this connected concept together. In post pandemic, we're going to start to see a lot of rationalization and big investments and moving forward in this trajectory. It's interesting, cloud data now, the way you talk about it makes me think about like just the concept of the old OSI stack, right? You have infrastructure in cloud, you have data in the middle layer and then AI's at that wonder area where the app side takes advantage of that data. Very cool insight, you know, thanks for sharing that. The question I have for you brought up the pandemic, I want to get your reaction to some conversations I've had in the industry and they tend to go like this. When we come out of the pandemic, this is like a CXO talking to CEO or CIO or CISO, when we come out of the pandemic, we need to grow strategy, we need to be hitting, we need to be on the upswing, okay, not on the downswing or still trying to figure it out. And that's a cool conversation because there's been two use cases that we've identified, companies that had a headwind because of the pandemic, either because of business disruption or the seconds categories, they've had a tailwind, they had a business opportunity. So the ones that had a headwind, they would retool, they use the pandemic to retool. And the ones that had the tailwind would use the pandemic to either bring net new capabilities or transform and innovate. So either way, that's a successful use case. The ones who didn't do anything aren't going to survive much, we know that. But in those two cases that are not music exclusive, that's what the smart money's been doing, the smart teams. What's your advice? Now that we're in that mode where we're coming around the corner, how do companies get on that uptick? What have you guys advised into clients? What are you hearing? And what's your reaction to that concept? Well, I think every company that is going to be on the survivor's list post-pandemic actually has digitally transformed, even if they don't want to acknowledge it, right? In a lot of different ways. So I think that's here to stay. And I'll give you a simple example. I belong to a local club, kitchen shutdown, no activities. I was amazed that it took them only four days, John, four days to actually bring a digital reservation system online through their mobile app. So in the past, the mobile app was simply for me to go look at the directory, but now I can do so many more things, right? And I was talking to my club, CIO, right? I mean, really not a CIO, but it was a staff member who was charged with driving the digital transformation. So there you go, right? He's got a good consultant in you, I'm the team, so hey, you know. But what he talked to me about was fascinating and this is what we're gonna see, right? So first he said, Vinod was so easy to bring some of those interactive, experience type capabilities online to serve our customer base. It made us think why the hell didn't we do it before, right? So back to your question, I think post pandemic, we're gonna see a lot of companies recognizing that low code, no code, right? Cloud AI capabilities are very much within the reach of the average business user, right? And companies like IBM have been a phenomenal job of demystifying the technology and trying to make it much more accessible for the business user. We're gonna see continued momentum, right? And adopting these kinds of simple technologies to transform, right? Business processes, customer interactions, so on and so forth, right? So we see that coming out of the pandemic. There's no stopping that. I think the second thing we see is a very firm commitment at the leadership level that stopping or slowing down these kinds of activities is a non-starter at the board level. That's a non-starter at the management committee level, right? Don't come to me saying we need to slow down things. Come to me saying we need to speed up things, right? But that said, we're seeing rationalization conversations begin to happen. And that starts with the strategy, right? Tailwind or headwind, irrespective of which side of the equation you fell, in that dynamic. What we're seeing is clients coming back and saying, all right, we know our strategy needs to be different. Let's make sure that we have a strategy that aligns better with where our customers wanna go, where the industry is headed. And let's acknowledge that there are technological capabilities now that actually turbocharge the execution of the strategy. Technology is not the strategy. It's still the connected enterprise stock, right? How do I serve my customers whose expectations have dramatically changed coming out of the pandemic? And that's why I gave you the club example. I never wanna call anybody to make a reservation anymore. I mean, even the local hair salon has a queuing system and a reservation system because, you know, that's just the way it is, right? So there are some simple things that have happened on the customer side of the equation, which is forcing a lot of our clients to start accelerating their digital investments rather than decelerating. It's interesting, that's great insight. I think just to summarize that, I think what you're pointing out is the obvious, hey, it works. The indifference of the digital to go the next level and CXOs and CIOs have had either politics or blockers or just will it work? And I think with the pandemic, necessities of mother role inventions, you say, hey, we got to get back on business. That the economics and the user experience is more than acceptable, it's actually preferred. I think that club example really highlights that expectation change. And I think that's- Well, it's an interesting architecture discussion, right? And I don't mean that technically, I think businesses are starting to think about how are they architecting, right? And this is where the connected enterprise concept from KPMG is resonating because now, you know, we see our clients no longer thinking about finance, sales, marketing, right, and fulfillment, right? That's how they architected their business before. Now they're realizing that they need to sort of put it on its side, right? I love the Cuban allergy, I'm going to borrow it. They're flipping the cube on the side and pulling out a whole new business architecture, which by the way is enabled and supported by, you know, an underlying technology architecture that's very different, right? So I think businesses are going to get re-architected and technology companies like IBM and Red Hat are going to be right there helping clients go through that re-architecting along with partners like us. The script has been flipped and the cube has been turned. And I think this is the revelation. The economics are clear. So I got to ask you, I mean, I've always been, I've been joking with IBM, although they probably don't like it, but I've been saying that, you know, business now is software enabled and the operating systems distributed computing. As you mentioned, these subsystems are part of this fabric. Hell, Red Hat, they're an operating systems company. So kind of in a good position with what Arvin's doing, if you think about it, if you look at squint through and connected dots, I mean, you're looking at an underlying operating system that's open and connected to business. It's not just software apps that run something like an ERP system. It's a business software model for the entire company, completely instrumented. This is what HyperCloud is. Could you take a few minutes and talk about the relationship that you guys have with IBM and how you guys are working together to bring this hybrid cloud vision to their customers and to the market? So KPMG and IBM go back about 20 plus years, longstanding relationship. In fact, I kid around with many of my fellow partners here at KPMG that IBM's the only relationship that we did not divest off when we went through our let's split management consulting off from our accounting business, so on and so forth that everybody went through, right? So very longstanding relationship. We're a trusted partner of IBM, but we're very different from a lot of the partners that IBM has. We're business consultants, right? We don't have, we help clients think through their business first before we get into the technology implementation. So I don't have armies of IBM certified engineers sitting on the bench looking for work to do. It's actually the other way around, right? So it's been a great marriage when IBM has phenomenal technology. In this case, you know, they've been leaders in AI. We've got an AI based relationship now going back five years, you know, where we consumed Watson, proved to ourselves and the world that it can be done very innovatively supporting business transformation and now we're able to together with IBM effectively have that conversation with clients, right? Because we're client number zero. We're big into hybrid multi-cloud. You know, we're big Red Hat customers. You know, we use Red Hat in our own modernization of several different workloads. So our relationship with IBM is very strong. We're a good supplier to them as well. So we help them with their strategy and go to market as well. So an interesting sort of relationship. Look, when we work with clients, we typically tend to, you know, take a trusted advisor role with clients. Our brand speaks to the trust that we're able to bring when we talk to clients. I kid around, you know, when you're going through a transformation, you probably want the town skeptic holding your hand. That's us, right? We're very risk averse. We like working with clients who, you know, kind of want that, you know, critical look when they're investing in, you know, technology driven transformation. You know, some of the things that IBM has done is pretty phenomenal, right? So for example, I don't see, you know, I don't see a lot of providers out there who give clients the kind of options that IBM gives with their multi-cloud capabilities, right? So, you know, show me a conversational AI capability that can run on private cloud, that can run on Google, Amazon, IBM, and a whole bunch of other cloud providers, right? So I think as IBM invests in that open, right? Philosophy, and obviously the Red Hat acquisition only further enhances that, right? It's a great opportunity for us to be able to take very powerful KPMG value propositions, you know, enabled by this kind of IBM technology, right? So that's how we tend to go to market. One of the solutions we're offering with IBM is called the KPMG data mesh. It's built on IBM's cloud pack for data, which is enabled by Red Hat's OpenShift. And it's a very innovative solution in the marketplace that fundamentally asks the question to clients, why are you spending inordinate amount of time and resources moving data around in order to become data driven? It just amazes me, John, how much money is being thrown at, you know, moving data around, particularly as you get into this complex hybrid multicloud world, right? How many times am I going to move data from, you know, a mainframe database into my, you know, cloud repository before I can start doing, you know, real higher value work, right? So KPMG data mesh enabled by the IBM cloud pack for data says, hey, leave your data wherever it is. You know, we can take up to 30% of costs out and really get you on this journey to become data driven without spending the first nine months of every project building a data warehouse or building an expensive data lake, right? Because all of those, frankly, are 20th century mindset, right? So if I can leave the data where it is, your favorite terminology, virtualize the data and really focus on what do I do with the data as opposed to, you know, how do I move the data, right? It really starts to change the mindset around becoming data driven, right? So that's a great example of a solution where we've married our value proposition to clients around connected and trusted and leveraged IBM technology, right? In a hybrid multi-cloud one. But no, great insight, love the focus, hybrid cloud, congratulations on your KPMG mesh solution, their cloud mesh awesome. I think an advantage of the IBM work and love your perspective on the industry. I think you called it right. I think that's a great perspective. That's the way we're on, big transformation innovation wave. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. Absolutely, my pleasure, thanks for having me. Have a good day. Okay, CUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.