 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here at IBM Think 2018. We are in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay for IBM Think. We're six shows, we're coming into one, it's packed house. The two great guests here, Brian Wallace, who's the CTO of Insurance for DXC Technologies. And we have Bala, VBala, but it goes by Bala, Banking and Capital Market CTO for DXC Technologies. Guys, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. Thank you. It's our pleasure, yeah, thanks. So, the innovation sandwich I'm calling an IBM strategy. You got in the middle, the meat is data, and the bread is blockchain and AI. Two really fundamental technologies, powered by cloud and variety of other things. Obviously AI is disruptive, we know what that looks like. Blockchain now emerging as a viable infrastructure enabler that's creating token economics, a lot of cool things, certainly in the banking side, seeing a lot of controversy. Blockchain really is driving it. You guys are out in the front lines, you're doing a lot of crowd chats, been following your digital transformation story that you guys have been putting out there. Really, you're on this. So, what's the conversations like that you guys are having with Blockchain and AI share? So, let me begin with a couple of quick points on Blockchain. DXA has done some fantastic work around the world, leveraging both the trust capability that Blockchain brings to bear in financial banking industry use cases like KYC, for instance, institutional KYC in particular, but also in simplification of entire value chains such as lending. And we're doing some very interesting work in lending where not only are we looking at the upfront origination process of lending, but also the downstream securitization, which is where the tokenization of principal and interest payments and those type of things happen. Energy too? Oh yes, absolutely. So, there are a number of these trading type use cases that follow into securitization where we're doing some very interesting work. Well, I'll talk about the globalization because one of the things that we're seeing is in the U.S., a shrinking middle class, but outside the U.S. and the emerging markets, a growing middle class, thanks to mobile technology, thanks to data, thanks to Blockchain, you're seeing countries that, hey, we have that infrastructure, but we don't have the core modern infrastructure, but you throw in a decentralized capability, you've got all these capabilities, and the killer app and all this is money. You're in, that's your vertical. That's your industry. The killer app is money in marketplaces. Your thoughts? I think the beauty of what these technologies are doing is for the first time creating financial inclusion to happen. And the very first case of where financial inclusion is enabled is in payments. So, when we open up the banking system predominantly from a payment perspective, which is what things like Blockchain and others enable, if we succeed in doing that, then for the first time we've enabled, there's two billion people unbanked or under-banked, two billion bringing them into this financial system. A lot of discriminated against too, because they don't have a track record, banks can't handle some of the things that others are now filling the void with crypto and Blockchain. Right, or they can't service them profitably, but for the first time now, you're looking at the economics that Cloud and AI and Blockchain and these technologies bring, not just into banking and capital markets areas, but also into insurance. And I'd love to have my colleague, Brian, talk to the insurance use cases that are enabled as well. Brian, insurance, go. Yeah, so it's a slightly different dynamic. There, it's the, I mean, if you think about the fundamental pattern of Blockchain, it's around eliminating a central or a middleman or a central gatekeeper, if you will. And the entire insurance industry is largely made up of middlemen, right? You've got people with risk at one end and you've got sources of capital at the other end and everybody's playing a role between a broker and a carrier and a reinsurer in sort of facilitating that management and that transfer of risk. So you can extract some efficiencies out of that. So there's a lot of conversations around efficiencies, around automation, but interestingly, it's around the disruptive business model, right? It's the technology is going to mildly interesting, but it's the new business models that Blockchain will enable. I see banking picking up early adoption on Blockchain, but I see maybe lagging a little bit on insurance because, but I definitely see some opportunity there. But short-term, data is driving insurance because I don't have a Tesla, but my friend has a Tesla. The insurance company will know exactly he's rolling through those stop signs. They know everything that he's doing, all the data is there. So AI becomes really the low-hanging fruit for insurance in that industry. Do you agree with that? Comment, reaction? Yeah, and we're just at the beginning, right? Because as you say, data is the asset that we manage. So we have a lot of data in terms of transactional data, the traditional operational data, what we're discovering and what we're really sort of just, just, you know, licking our lips over almost is all of this new unstructured data, you know, whether it's sensor data, behavioral data. And you're right, because the challenge we had around automation and cognitive computing, if you will, we're here at IBM with the Watson Tech, was enough data and the consistency and quality of that data. So we have that now, and we're making tremendous strides around in particular here with the Watson brand and the Watson cognitive. You know, one of the things I wish Dan Hutchison was here, he's not, he's a CTO in charge. You guys have been doing all these crowd chats, our software that we wrote, that's pretty interesting. I've personally enjoyed all the conversations and give a shout out to Dan and you guys for really great conversations. You guys know what you're talking about, it's clear. In the data, you guys are taking an outside-in approach and collaborating, but your topics are on target, right? You're talking about digital transformation, kind of holistically, but then you're starting to dive down into specific use cases. So, Bala, what is the favorite, or the most popular digital disruptive topic that's being discussed within DXC and your clients and in the marketplace? So at the outset within DXC, as digital transformation takes hold with our customers and we aim to be the premier provider of that enablement, what we've realized ourselves is that we provide a lot of services to our clients across many industries, but there are commonalities across what we provide in terms of service delivery. And so it made sense for us to, number one, look at the commonalities and create a platform that is common across industries, across offerings that we bring to the marketplace. That commonality is what we call internally and externally now as Bionics, and it's a platform that we are bringing forward that for the first time ties together what we are talking about both here at this event, but also with our clients, ties together intelligence, orchestration, and automation, which are the fundamental Bionics, and internally we call it platform DXC upon which all of our offerings and services are brought to market. Well, there's disruption going on in your business, so I'm going to talk about for a double down on that for a second. I'm seeing it trend certainly in public sector market where the use cases are well-invent defined. So you're seeing automatic code generation becoming a real part of the delivery process. Now what that's going to do is essentially think of provisioning and configuration management in cloud, if you can apply actual process code that you've done before the commonalities, this is going to change the delivery timeframe. So you're looking at essentially auto provisioning software, not just like configuration management resources, don't worry about saying here's a value chain, here's a blockchain, here's some AI, just configure it like a Lego block, push that could take months to deliver the old way. Your thoughts to that, are you guys on that, you guys see that as something that's going to be an opportunity for you? Some companies I've seen global system integrators being disrupted by this, because they don't have this. New SIs, new system integrators are thinking this way, that's a DevOps mindset. Are you prepared for that? Do you see it coming and what's your answer to that? So we saw that coming about three and a half plus years ago and our shift away from being a pure SI began then. And so we are an SI, but we are a service integrator. Rather than a systems integrator. And we began that trend in our journey three plus years ago. And the reason we began that trend is what you pointed out. Today infrastructure is delivered as a code. So not even as a service, but as a code. And so imagine provisioning infrastructure and all the capabilities that ride on it just as code. And that's where this is headed. And if in that model, we become a provider and a provisioner of services rather than just a system. And the cost structure has completely changed because of services. Amazon has proven, and now IBM's following suit with their power platform and other things, that you can actually have the kind of compute but it's a catalog of services. So this is going to change the price competitiveness. So big bids that used to be billions of dollars that you guys can compete. I mean, am I seeing it right? That transition's already, that ship sailed so to speak, right? In terms of the large outsourcing deals, the large, whether it's apps or infrastructure, it's all moving to digital transformation, consumption-based commercial models. And it's really bionics that Bala mentioned a minute ago that is our answer to the threat that you described a minute ago. It's really about automating and digitizing and building intelligence into the entire, if you will, build, deliver, operate value chain of our business. And talk about the multi-vendor, multi-choice, technology choice, as your customers and people in general on this journey of digital transformation, they used to make technology decisions. Now they're making business logic decisions around how to reconfigure their value chains to optimize for new efficiencies and abstract away inefficiencies. Blockchain's a great example, AI's another, automations in the middle, all the cloud. So you have now business logic is the risk. Technology, not so much because infrastructure's code has proven that you could have serverless, you could have all kinds of coolness that can be managed in an agile way. So the business model aspect is key. How are you guys dealing with that? Because I know you're here at the IBM Think Show, their partner. I see you at the Amazon shows. We see you guys everywhere. So you're horizontally scaling by design. Is that what customers want? What's the DX view on this? So our value proposition has always had partners as the key element of what we do. And so if you look at what we do, you can look at it from two perspectives. One, proprietary ways of thinking, proprietary systems are long since gone. And waterfall methodologies. Yes, those are all long since gone. If you're still doing that, note to self. You need to be out of business. Exactly. So we've actually hinged a lot of what we do. Our offerings, our capabilities and so on around openness, open source and so forth. So that's number one. Number two is in this world, it's no longer about just DXC or just IBM or just somebody, one person bringing everything to our clients. It's about how do you engage proactively and build co-innovation and co-services with our partners and bring that to our clients. I mean, IBM just announced a deal with Google. They got TensorFlow in their deal. So you have all kinds of melting pot. Okay, let's talk about blockchain again. Get back to my favorite topic. So if you look at that stack, you got blockchain, you got cryptocurrency protocols and whatnot, mentioned securitization, you got security tokens, you got utility tokens. You can almost see where this is going. And then you got, on top of that, what's coming is a mass in migration of decentralized application developers. Kind of cloud plus, they know cloud, they know DevOps infrastructure as code, but they're looking at it from a decentralization standpoint, different makeup. And you see ICOs, initial coin offerings. I think that's just an application of inefficiencies around capital markets, but that's, put that aside for a second, but blockchain, cryptocurrency and decentralized applications. How do you guys see that trend? What are you guys doing? Is it you're integrating it in? You mentioned token economics. You're in the banking field, your thoughts on that. Sure. On the blockchain front, as I mentioned to you, there are a number of platforms that are out there. There's the R3 Cordo platform, there's a platform that JPMorgan initiated, that we are leveraging as well. After they poo pooed the coin, but then they're back in the game again. That's right. And then there's a hyperledger fabric as well. So these platforms are going to take their course of evolution, and we are working across all of those platforms. Now, the more interesting thing that you mentioned is people and skills. What we find today in the marketplace with our clients is a dramatic shortage of skills in these areas. And so internally, what we have done at DXC is actually opened our own service delivery to a vast pool of developers that you talked about earlier as being freelance independent folks. We've opened our entire service delivery to them as well. And we look at that global talent pool for our own service delivery. Using community as a way to scale. Yes, and that's exactly what we are doing in our own talent process. It's not just about our people, our employees, but our partners, as well as what exists in the open marketplace. Brian, talk about the insurance area as a way to tease out other trends. Specifically, the question is, what is the biggest things that people know they're walking into? What's the tailwind that they see that's going to give them hope? And then what's the headwinds? What are the blockers? And what should they be aware of? What are some of the marketplace dynamics that translate into other industries? Well, let's start with the obvious blocker is legacy debt, right? So you talked about the risk of all that business knowledge, that domain expertise. That's all today encapsulated in existing what you might call legacy systems, right? So that's the headwind by far. The tailwind is that unlike, say, 15 years ago when we were in the last sort of dot-com boom and it was all about the front office and customer experience, the customer's way ahead of us. So culturally, the customer's challenging industry to catch up. So that's the tailwind in my mind. And the real opportunity is to think about it in terms of a dual agenda. So think about it in terms of progressively, simultaneously building new digital capability whilst ultimately beginning to unbundle and tackle that legacy debt. And I think customers now are starting to see a path forward. We're in the market in both banking and insurance with digital platforms, with industry resource models, API fabrics that can go back in, modernize legacy systems. So there's a real fast time to market time. And it changes your engagement with clients. It's not a one and done. You're sticky through the service layer. It's a journey, but the difference, I think, between DXC and a lot of other people is we are in the market in production with real assets. And you can show how that journey. So it just becomes a conversation around what's your pain point? Where are you starting from? Where do you want to go? And you're bringing the community in to help on the delivery side. Everyone wins. And that community is a combination of three things. That's our own employees, obviously, within the industry and within our offerings that know banking, that know insurance. It's all of the DXC people in the horizontals because we're bringing in everything now. These platforms encapsulate infrastructure, security, service management, analytics, mobility, all of that is built into these platforms. And then it's going out into our partner community and then it's going out into the open community. And we're tapping into all of those. Brian and Bala, thanks for coming on. Two power CTOs here on theCUBE having a CTO conversation around how scale, cloud, AI, blockchain, new technologies enabling new business models at a faster pace of change with a lower cost structure and more time to value. Again, it's all about the value creation. The killer app is money and marketplaces and community. Guys, thanks so much for sharing. I'm John Furrier here at the Think IBM Think 2018 CUBE Studios, more after this short break.