 Good afternoon. Q is live at VMware Explorer. Lisa Martin here in San Francisco with Dave Nicholson. This is our second day of coverage, talking all things VMware and its ecosystem. We're excited to welcome from DXC technology, James Bion, Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud offering manager to have a conversation next. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much. Welcome. Talk to us a little bit about before we get into the VMware partnership. What's new at DXC? What's going on? So DXC is really evolving and revitalizing into a more of a cloud-orientated company. So, you know, we are really driving change in our customers at the moment. We take them on that cloud journey, but we're taking them in the right way, in a structured mannered way. So we're really excited about it. We kicking off our cloud first type, cloud rights sort of story and helping customers on that journey. Yesterday in the keynote, VMware was talking about cloud, customers are on this cloud chaos phase. They want to get to cloud smart. You're saying they want to get to cloud right. Talk to us about what DXC cloud right is. What does it mean? What does it enable businesses to achieve? That's a very good question. So, DXC has come up with this concept of cloud right. We looked at it from a services and outcomes. What do customers want to achieve and how do we get it successfully? This is not a technology conversation. This is about putting the right workloads at the right place at the right time at the right cost to get the right value for your business. It's not about just doing it for the sake of doing it. There's a lot of changes. It's not technology only. You've got to change how people operate. You've got to work through the organizational change. You need to ensure that you have the right security in place to maintain it. And it's about value, really about value proposition. So, we don't just focus on cost. We focus on operations of it. We focus on security of it. We focus on ensuring the value proposition of it. And putting not just for one cloud, it's the right place. Big focus on hybrid and multi-cloud solutions. In particular, we're very excited about what's happening with VMware Clouds on, maybe AWS or et cetera. Because we see there's a real dynamic change for our customers where they can transition across to the right cloud services at the right time, at the right place, but minimal disruption to the actual operation of their business. Very easy to move a workload into that place using the same skill resources, the same tools, the same environment that you have had for many years, the same SLAs. Customers don't want variance in the SLAs. They just want an outcome at a right price in the right time. Right. What are some of the things going on with the VMware partnership? And anything, here we are at the event called, the theme is the center of the multi-cloud universe, which I keep saying, sounds like a Marvel movie. I think there needs to be some superheroes here. But how is DXC working with VMware to help customers that are in multi-cloud by default, not by design? That's a very good one. So DXC works jointly with VMware for more than a thousand clients out there. Why diversity of different clients? We go to market together, we work collaboratively to put roadmaps in place for our clients. It's a unified team. On top of that, we have an extremely good VMware practice, joint working VMware team working directly with DXC dedicated resources. And we deliver real value for clients. For example, we have a customer experience zone. We have a customer innovation zone. So we can run proof of concepts on all the different VMware technologies for customers. If they want to try something different, try and push the boundaries a little bit with the VMware products, we can do that for them. But at the end of the day, we deliver outcome-based services. We're not there to deliver a piece of software but a technology. We show the customer the value of the service that they can receiving within that. So we bring the VMware fantastic technologies in, and then we bring the DXC managed services, which we do so well and we look after our customers and do the right thing for our customers. So what does the go-to-market strategy look like from a DXC perspective? You know, we say that there are a finite number of strategic seats at the customer table. DXC has long-standing deep relationships with customers. So does VMware. So do, and probably over a shorter period of time, the hyperscale cloud providers, how are you approaching these relationships with customers? Is it you bringing in your friends from the cloud? Is it the cloud bringing in their friend DXC? What does it look like? So we have relationships with all of them, but we agnostic. So we are the people who bring it all together into that unified platform and services that the customers expect. VMware will bring us to the table and we'll bring VMware to the table. Equally, we work very collaborative with all the cloud providers and we work in deals together. They bring us deals, we bring them deals. So it works extremely well from that perspective, but of course it's a multi-cloud world these days. We don't just deal with one cloud provider. We'll normally have all of the different services to find the right place for our customers. And one thing that's been mentioned from DXC is this idea that Cloud First, which has been sort of a mantra that scores you points if you're a CIO lately, maybe that's not the best way to wake up in the morning. Why not, why not, why not, why not saying Cloud First? So we have a lot of clients who've tried that Cloud First journey and they've aggressively taken on migration of workloads. And now that they've settled in a few of those, they're discovering maybe the ROI isn't quite what they expected it was going to be. That transformation takes a long time, a very long time. We've seen some of the numbers around averaging, 100 apps can take up to seven years to transition and transform, that's a long time. It makes you almost less agile by doing the transformation quite ironically. So DXC's Cloud Right program, it really helps you to ensure that you assess those workloads correctly, you target the ones that are going to give you the best business value, possibly the best return on investment using our cloud advisory practice to do that. And then obviously off the back of that, we've got our migration teams and our run services and our application modernization factories and our application platforms for that. So DXC Cloud Right can certainly help our customers on that journey and get that sort of hybrid multi-cloud solution that suits their particular outcomes, not just one cloud provider. So Cloud Right isn't just cloud migration. No, people sometimes confuse digital transformation with cloud migration. So to be clear, Cloud Right in DXC has the ability to work with customers on not just, oh, here, this is how we box it up and ship it out, but what makes sense to box up and ship out? Correct, and it's all about that whole end-to-end lifecycle. Remember, this is not just a technology conversation. This is an end-to-end business conversation. It's the outcomes are important, not the technology. That's why you have good partners like DXC who will help you on that technology journey. So let's talk about, in the dynamics of the market the last couple of years, we saw so many customers in every industry race to the cloud, race to digitally transform. You bring up a good point of people interchangeably talking about digital transformation, cloud migration, but we've saw the massive adoption of SaaS technologies. What are you seeing? Are you seeing customers in that sort of cloud chaos as VMware calls it, that you're coming in with the Cloud Right approach saying let's actually figure out, you may have done this because of the pandemic, maybe it was accelerated, you needed to facilitate collaboration or whatnot, but actually this is the right approach. Are you seeing a lot of customers in that situation? We're certainly seeing some customers going into that chaos world. Some of them are still in the early stages of their journey and are taking a more cautious step towards, in particular, the companies that would die on systems to be up available all the time. Others have gone too far the other extreme are in the chaos world. And our Cloud Right program will certainly help them to pull that chaos back in, identify what workloads are potentially running in the wrong place, get the framework in place for ensuring that security and governance is in place, ensuring that we don't have a cost spend blowouts in particular, and make sure that security is key to everything that we do and operations is key to everything we do. We have our own intelligent platform, X as it's called, our service management platform, which is really the engine that sits behind our delivery mechanism. And that's got a whole lot of AI analytics engines in there to identify things and practically identify workload placements, workload repairs, scripting and hyper-automation behind that to keep available here and there. And that's really some of our Cloud Right story. It's not just sorting out the mess, it's sorting out and then running it for you in the right way. So what does a typical customer engagement look like for a customer in that situation? So we would obviously engage our client right advisory team and they would come in and sit down with your application owners, sit down with the business units, identify what success needs to look like. They do all the discovery, they run it through our engines to identify what workloads are in the right place, should go the right place, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. And that's an important thing. So we will come back with that and say, this is where I think your Cloud Roadmap journey should be. And obviously that takes an iterative process, but we then can pick off the key topics early at the right time and that low-hanging fruit that's really going to drive that value for the customer. And where are your customer conversations these days? Are they, I mean, from a Cloud perspective, digital transformation, we're seeing everything escalate up the C-suite. Are you engaging the executives in this conversation so that they really want to facilitate? Let's do things the right way that's the most efficient that allows us as a business to do what we're best at. So where we've seen programs fail is where we don't have executive leadership and bought in from day one. So if you don't have that executive and business driver and business leadership, then you're definitely not going to be successful. So to answer your question, yes, of course we are, but we also work directly with the IT departments as well. So you just brought up an insight, executive alignment, critically important. Based on what you've experienced in the real world, contrast that with the sort of message to the world that we hear constantly about Cloud and IT. What would be the most shocking thing that you can share with us that people might not be aware of? It's like, what shocks you the most about the disconnect between what everybody talks about and the reality on the ground? Don't name any names of any one, but give us an example of the like, this is what's really going on. So we certainly are seeing that big sort of move it to Cloud quickly. And then the big build shock comes. And just moving a workload across doesn't mean you're in Cloud. It's a transition and transformation to those SaaS and MPOW services is where you get your true value out of Cloud. So the concept that just because it's in Cloud is cheap is not always the case. Doing it right in Cloud is definitely going to have some cost value, but it's going to bring other additional values to that business. It's going to give them agility. It's going to give them resilience. So if you look at all three of those platforms, cost agility and resilience and live across all three of those, then you're definitely going to get the best outcomes. And we've certainly seen some of those where they haven't taken all of those into consideration. Quite often it's cost is what drives it, not the other two. And if you can't keep your operations working efficiently, then you're in a lot of trouble. So Cloud wrong comes with sticker shock. It certainly does. What's on the horizon for DXC? We're certainly seeing a big drive towards apps modernization and certainly helping our customers on that journey. DXC is definitely a cloud company. May that be on hybrid cloud, private cloud, public cloud. DXC is certainly leading that edge and pushing it forward. Excellent, James, thank you so much for joining us on the program today, talking about what cloud right is, the right approach, how you're helping customers really get to that right approach with the people, the processes and the technology. We appreciate your time. Thank you very much. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily, so don't change the channel.