 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the digital version. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm here with Todd Carey. Todd is the global head of the AWS business group at Cognizant. Todd, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks Lisa, great to be here. Unfortunately, we're not all crammed together in a massive space in Las Vegas, but it's great that we still get to come together virtually. So why don't you just give our audience kind of an update on the Cognizant AWS strategic partnership? What's going on there? Sure, so a lot of exciting things. I mean, it's been a tough year obviously for all of us in 2020, but one of the bright spots and one of the exciting things for us as Cognizant has been the announcement of the AWS business group. And it really is strategic relationship with AWS. It's just a great statement to the market that we're taking cloud seriously, we're taking AWS seriously. And it really is a core component of our go-to market. It's a core component of how our customers right now are looking at what their plans are post pandemic, right? And how we survive 2020. If you look at just the explosion of cloud, we all understand how critical now cloud computing is to all businesses, regardless of vertical or not, regardless of industry and what you're trying to accomplish. So for us, it was really about putting a stake in the ground and saying AWS is going to be a critical player for us in our go-to market for 2020 and obviously beyond. And beyond, I think we're all looking forward to that beyond. Talk to me a little bit about the core purpose, the mission and how customers are reacting to this news about this strategic shift. Well, there's a couple of tracks. I mean, if you're a large company looking at cloud, you're going down the cost takeout, right? We're going to go and we're going to be more efficient or we're going to go down the innovation track. And for us, we really want to be able to serve our customers running both of those tracks in parallel. And so the role of the business group is to really be an innovation venture is to get into those deep detailed layers of where clients are going through planning and assessments and trying to figure out how they want to leverage AWS. And on the other side, you know, there's a lot of legacy applications and appliances out there environments. And so how can the AWS business group at Cognizant go in and help with that cost takeout, go accelerate the move from legacy applications and on-prem to cloud. And so for us, it's as much about the technology as it is about the outcome and is exactly how we're accomplishing that. And so what I mean by that is that really being more creative, being an active player, an active investor and bringing AWS in early in the solutioning cycle, figuring out how we can drive ultimately the outcome for the customer. Because I think AWS will tell you as we will tell you, it's really not about technology. It's not about Cognizant, it's not about AWS. It's about clients figuring out what they want, how to get it and making sure that AWS and Cognizant can deliver that outcome together. It is all about outcomes, especially in these times when businesses have pivoted multiple times in the last nine months, probably will continue to do so and need to have not just the right technology foundation, the right partners and the right culture to be able to get on board and continue to pivot. Talk to me though, talk about have your conversations within customer organizations changed like knowing how much acceleration we're seeing of digital transformation? Is this a board level C-suite conversation? Is that where you're starting? What's kind of that conversation like these days? Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's happening at all levels. One of the main things that's happened about cloud is that it's impacted literally every level of an organization. And now most of the time though, we're seeing conversations enter at the business level. So whether that's a new product to bring to market or maybe it's cleaning up critical systems, maybe like policy administration or supply chain systems, whatever the outcome in the business problem that they're trying to solve, that's really where the conversation starts. And that really starts at the C, really C-suite all the way down to even the programming and application level and those types of groups of really looking at AWS and Cognizant as an enabler to solve those kinds of business issues. And it's really driven out of really 2020. So obviously we exposed a lot of stuff with clients and worker productivity with security, remote access to information. It's been a really tough year, but it's also exposed a lot of gaps and a lot of deficiencies. And those gaps and deficiencies didn't care if that was at the C level or that was at a programming level or a regional level or a vertical. It just exposed everything. And so, and that's where we saw cloud consumption go up but most companies weren't ready for that. They weren't prepared and weren't optimized and ready to take on that kind of cloud consumption. And the overarching theme here of customer experience, employee experience, how do we fix all those problems and also deliver really a limitless bandwidth experience to that individual user and ensure that while we're solving outcome, we're also gaining traction, same with customer acquisitions or we're quickly deploying applications. We're doing something good at every turn when we talk about AWS. I like that. And as I was thinking and speaking of doing something good that what you were talking about with the new business group opportunities that come out of, they always say stuff for these mother of invention but you saw those gaps and they were exposed by this particular time but it's just an opportunity to be able to identify them, help them and help customers with this light switch moment of especially those that were kind of caught off guard. Oh my gosh, we can't operate. We can't get to our data centers. We've got to be able to have a remote workforce and get accessibility. How did you help them from that cultural perspective of that light switch moment of adopting cloud knowing that it's maybe in the beginning was a survival mechanism? Sure, and there's been a couple of light switch moments. I mean, one of them is certainly you hit on it is people in process. Cloud is certainly about technology but the people in process, the organizational change management, the impact that cloud has on a developer community, on a company as a whole, the acceleration, the pace at which you have to change and be flexible and agile to embrace a cloud native architecture is unlike most companies have ever done before. And so it's a failed strategy to just simply focus on the tech. You have to look at change management, people and culture and systems and how these everything works together in unison. And the other light switch moment has been how hard cloud is. We saw early adoption. I mean, we jumped out of the gate and that first 10, 20, 30% of workloads just flew to the cloud. This was simple. Everyone was giving some amazing public statements of how much we were going to embrace cloud. What's happened is that we've got to the hard stuff like the on-prem, the legacy, the workload, the stuff that just is stuck. It doesn't want to move. And it really requires some deep dive systems analysis, business analysis, cost analysis to try to figure out what services and data and everything is connected and how do we disconnect that, move to the cloud, transform that, optimize it but then also manage the company in between because a lot of companies now in fact almost 90% of CXOs will tell you they've had to embrace a hybrid architecture for this reason. So now how do we help our clients manage applications in different environments, moving at different paces and make sure that we're transforming and optimizing and getting to a digital state as fast as possible. And so look, there's a lot to unpack there but that's really the purpose of the AWS business group is to focus on all of these things all at the same time, being able to drive that outcome we talked about earlier but also making sure that we're keeping our clients' lights on, right? We're keeping the boat afloat and that they can be successful in a very complex environment, very challenging environment but then also from a technology standpoint. Something that we've talked about a number of times in terms of the people and the processes and the culture. I'm curious, are you having conversations with customers or helping them kind of bring, as you said, this is not just about the technology. Knowing that business drivers are leading this. Are you helping customers have those conversations between business units and the IT folks to really understand, this is what we've done so far. This is the complexity that we have but we've got to get over here as quickly as possible and we've got to bring these two cultures together. Right, we talked about it a little bit earlier. There's the connectivity problem that companies have because again, there's that tech track and then there's people tracks and you've got to be able to blend those two and that really when you boil down the role of the AWS business group within Cognizant and within our client environments, that's really what we're working on. It's how do we pull in all of these disparate pieces and I like to just, you wanna grab the front seat when you're a teenager and everybody's driving and call Shotgun. Well, we wanna bring our clients along in that Shotgun position, right. Be able to see how an enterprise class deployment works, how app transformation and modernization works. A lot of our clients are very open and transparent. So like I don't really know how all of this is going to work. I'd really love to see, I love to see this in motion. And so for us, we are very transparent in these types of engagements. This is not a Cognizant showing up and delivering an output or an outcome for a customer. It's making our clients better. It's making them more aggressive and more interested and more excited about cloud and transformation because the first couple of steps like we talked about in cloud typically is easy. It gets more complex, but as we solve for these complexities, we open up new pockets of data and new applications and new groups and regions and things that could move. And as soon as we start to move some of those heavier pieces, new opportunities absolutely explode. And that's really what we wanna do is take that message to our clients internally, evangelize the opportunity they have with AWS to take advantage of that. And really challenge the mindset through innovation, through new products, new go-to-market initiatives. What do they want to accomplish? Because really we're in a time that's very rare as far as I can start, been in technology a long time. This is the first time that I can remember that a client could come to us and come to AWS, ask for an outcome, ask for something and we could deliver it and it's not gonna be a science project. We can actually commit to it. Not rocket science. So for those customers who would be on shotgun and gotten an opportunity with you guys, what are some of the best practices that you've seen that you'd recommend our audience pay attention to? Definitely assess. You see a lot of companies that they've marked the finish line. And I always tell customers that there is no finish line in digital, there is no finish line in cloud. And they've pretty much marked it and this is what success looks like. I think success in cloud is absolutely a journey. It's a work in progress always. And so you need to assess and look at where you want to be not in six months, not in 18 months. Where do you wanna be next month? What are your immediate plans and immediate business pressures, things that you need to solve right now? And that's what we focus on. But we need to understand the environment. We need to understand the applications and work and what's in play. And really get a true assessment of the estate. And then we blend that with business outcomes not technical, not a bunch of letters and acronyms and things like that. We don't wanna convolute that. Really the effort is to try to figure out what you wanna accomplish. And then from an advisory standpoint, really put those hooks in and build a solid plan. And then we can execute. Now, whether we execute that plan at 100% pace or a 30% or 40% pace, it's about having that plan in at least the right direction, but a direction that's quickly attainable because as we've seen anything can happen. You're not kidding. We haven't seen that anything can happen. So as we look into going into calendar year 2021 and hoping for a lot of great things, what are some of the key areas that Cognizant's AWS business group is gonna be focusing your investments on? Well, what we've seen from clients and we hear them loud and clear is to hear from them about industry and vertical specific solutions. And so we are in emotions right now across the globe and my team building out vertical specific and IP based offerings on AWS, things around SAP, things around Amazon Connect, things that really impact a client's business because it is hard. I mean, it's just to be in total transparency as a global systems integrator, it's hard to rise above a lot of noise. And how you rise above that is really to be unique on AWS. And so from a client standpoint, one of the things they're going to get different from Cognizant from some of our larger competitors. And I would say one of the things obviously is complete commitment. We have an AWS business group that gets up in the morning is only concerned about our clients' success on AWS. And so some of the things that are gonna be born out of that direction are these vertical specific solutions and development of IP. We've had amazing run with AWS and cloud. I mean, we have over 600 projects deployed over almost 10,000 certified resources. And so for us, super excited to bring that talent to market along with solutions. But again, it's not about what we have, it's really about what our clients need. But it's great advice that you're telling your clients, look short-term because we've gotta be able to get just to here and to here. It's not necessarily about having this 2020 vision. I don't think anybody wants that anymore about what's going to happen in 12 months or 18 months. It's we've got to be able to get businesses to pivot quickly and leverage the technology to fuel those business outcomes, as you said, in kind of shorter and faster time increments. Cause as we all know, 2021 calendar changes and we're probably still going to be in quite a pickle, I guess, for a time longer. But I also, from what you've said, Todd, it seems like you're uncovering so many opportunities that what companies that can do with AWS, what you can deliver for businesses and how you can help the cultural shift so that these businesses thrive going forward. We get out of that survival mode and actually be able to take advantage of all those data sources that you talked about to deliver new products and new services, maybe even get into new markets. Yeah, most definitely, it is about time to market. And one of the things that we've seen too is clients are getting away from this modernization first, then migration. And that was really a big thing when we started down this cloud journey, we saw the market reaction. Well, let me get my house in order. Let me start modernizing. Let me clean up some service layers. Let me solve some anti-patterns. Let me figure all that out and then I'm going to go to cloud. And we've seen really the direct opposite of that, especially with COVID and during a pandemic is, okay, how fast can I get these systems and data to the cloud, all right? And then we'll worry about transformation. And so for us, we've pivoted, I think, very well as cognizant overall as a company and then specifically with AWS Business Group to really maintain multiple work streams that run on-prem, right? To be able to fix and attack those workloads and make that on-prem environment efficient, but move those applications while we're doing that, move those to AWS and then concurrently build a transformation plan around those applications and things that are now in the cloud around AWS. Excellent, Ty, well, you've been busy. So I'm going to let you get back to work, but great stuff that you guys are working on together with AWS. We look forward to seeing what's to come. Great, thank you, Lisa. For Todd Carey, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE.