 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020. This is the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE and I'm joined by a couple of guys who are going to talk through one of HPE's longest partnerships. We've got Shels Narayan and the Senior Director, Ecosystem Sales for North America at HPE, and Dr. Rajesh Srinivasan, the Global Head of Sales and Solutions for the TCS Cloud Gentlemen. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Good job. Thank you. So, Chels, first question for you. As I mentioned, HPE and TCS have been partners for over 30 years. Talk to our audience about the partnership and how it has evolved to where it is today. Yeah, thank you, Lisa. Firstly, I'm pretty excited to be part of this CUBE interview with Dr. Rajesh. I know him personally for over five years through various interactions globally and this new role for North America. TCS is our Strategic Global System Integrator Partner, and this is a long-standing partnership between HPE and TCS. It has grown multi-folds over the last 30 years. We pretty much enjoyed every single, I would say, transactions or the business engagements what we have had so far, and we leverage each other for our internal IT requirements and also to drive joint good market initiatives across the world, thus making this truly a 360-degree partnership. There is a lot of heritage, mutual trust and respect between both organizations at all levels, and the complementary offerings, which you will hear a lot more in the next couple of questions, we bring to table together a very unique and very differentiating to the clients we join in each. Excellent. Dr. Rajesh, walk us through some of those joint offerings that TCS, Cloud and HPE are delivering. Yeah, so first of all, thanks. I just want to thank the HPE team for giving me the opportunity to talk to a larger audience and in this new normal, this is the first time I'm doing an interview like this. So thanks for that experience, actually. As Chels mentioned, this relationship goes a long way. I'm talking about the larger TCS, we had a long relationship. And specifically on the TCS Cloud, we started this journey in a very, very tactical way five years back. It was started in a very, very small trial and error basis. We started this relationship for TCS Cloud. But at this point in time, after five years, we have taken this into a new norm, actually. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the example is we have a very major retailer in Germany, which we work together. It was a multi-million dollar deal. And TCS and HPE has given a unique offering to the customer in the SAP HANA space. And that is really growing a lot and that's the one offering I would like to tell to the audience that really it has picked up and strengthened our relationship in the German region. Now we are trying to take that offering across the other regions also. So that is one of the key offerings which we are doing it. The other offerings or multiple offerings we are doing, but again, I want to highlight the storage as a service offering. It's a very, very key in the industry today. And we are experimenting that in the initial stages in Australia, we started in Australia as a small offering. And now we are expanding it in the US geography in a big way. And this year, we are going to make that as a unique offering and we are going to offer that to all our cloud customers as a storage as a service offering also. So there are multiple other offering, Lisa, but I just thought that I will highlight these two which are making our business, we are making a lot of business together with these two offerings. Is the SAP opportunity that you mentioned, is that the HANA as a service that TCS is delivering? That's correct. That's correct. So it's HANA as a service, but the uniqueness of that particular offering is we jointly created the architecture so that the customer can use that like a service as a service model, right? So it was not available that time in the industry so easily like what we have offered at that point in time, two and a half years back, we offered that particular service to the customer. And interestingly, that particular offering, the customer was using SAP themselves as a service initially and they migrated that to us actually. From SAP, we cook the service and both HPE and TCS service the customer on the SAP HANA platform. So that's the interesting story on that offering. If we dig into that just a little bit further, I want the audience to understand the impact that this partnership has HPE and TCS delivering HANA as a service for your customers. What are the benefits there than what the customer, as you said, was doing previously? Yeah. See, I think I just want to highlight three or four points that make this offering very unique and that helps the customer. Number one is as a service model. So the customer has got the complete flexibility of going up and down like a true cloud model, right? So which is a very unique proposition at that point in time where the customer need not have to worry about using less for some time and then using more sometimes. So it's kind of a complete flexible model that we offered at the time. Number two is it's a complete customization is possible. It is not like a fixed architecture. The architecture is so flexible so that the customer business needs can be met through the architectural changes. So it is not like normally people think that cloud is highly standardized architecture, right? So that has gone out and we were given a flexible architecture for the customer, that is the number two. Number three, obviously the cost, end of the day, it is a business case, which we need to make it work for the customer. So obviously with the TCS and HPE coming together, we were able to give the cost advantage to the customer. That is the third advantage of that. The last but not the least is the quality of service, right? It is all about, I always used to tell my partners that selling is easy, delivering it is what it's important. It is which will make the customer to stick with you, right? So we have given a delivery quality experience to our customer so that I think that makes a very unique proposition from a technology perspective, from a pricing perspective, from an architecture perspective and also from the delivery perspective. So those are the few things I just thought that I will highlight it here. Excellent. So a couple of words that you mentioned popped into my mind as really even more, we'll have a different meeting as we're in summer 2020, flexibility and unique offering. Charles, back to you from a go to market perspective, how is that relationship with HPE and TCS changing in the COVID era? Oh yeah, it's pretty interesting. And I would like to quote an example of what TCS has achieved themselves during the COVID times. It also came in the press, about close to 90% of the workforce were 100% productive. And they have a plan to go 75% of the employees being remote by 2025, right? So that's a journey they're taking on. And another thing which we noticed is a lot of the, during the COVID times, many of the customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure. So they wanted their employees to be productive while they're at home. And in the other area of focus was like a BCP. How do I kind of make sure all the applications are available to the customers and also to their internal organizations, et cetera. So we've seen in a lot of, I would say engagement with the TCS architecture team and also the solution team to address these requirements of the market jointly. When we look at certain things that now might even be more important with this new normal, if you will, that the fact that most companies are still in phase one of this work, everyone works from home, trying to get to a phase two that might see some, some maybe by function groups coming back to the office. And then getting to this third, maybe it's the new Nirvana of some hybrid workforce where there's going to be some that come back permanently and some that don't. Antonio Neary, Charles, I saw it was quoted last month as saying, he thinks that 50% of the workforce will, only 50% will come back. So in this new, not only hybrid IT environment in which your customers live, but now this new pending hybrid workforce environment, how are you addressing some of the concerns together with respect to the network, connectivity, security? So I'll just take the question. I think it's a very, very interesting, Aliza, when we all ended up in this pandemic in March, we were very, very nervous actually because everyone has to operate remotely and we are dealing with the customer's data. It's very, very important that we have a high security environment to access the information. And at the same time, maintain the integrity of the data and also the quality of the research, right? So those are the two primary objective for us. We don't want to compromise on quality. We don't want to compromise on security from a cloud perspective. So the solution we have put in very, I just give you one example. There was one airline, UK based the airline industry, airline company, which they need their workforce overnight. They want everybody to go remote because you know, UK, they just put a condition that nobody can work from the office overnight and the entire workforce has to work from home. So TC has implemented the solution for them on our cloud overnight and make their thousand employees to work from home the next day morning. All of them started working with the full quality of services and also with the full security aspect of it has been taken care overnight on the solution we have deployed for them. Very interesting case study and the important thing we have done is use the technology to the core. Use all kinds of technology to make sure that the employees work from home. We took care of the network connectivity. We took care of the security aspects of the data from the security aspects. We have implemented all the security functions from a VDI perspective, virtual desktop perspective and make the workforce enable that. But now you are talking about millions of workers going to work from home, right? Because this is one example for one company we have done that. Now, TCS themselves has got more than 400,000 employees. And we are talking about millions of workforce going to work from home and going forward. So that is, I am seeing this as a big opportunity. It's not that everybody has addressed this at this point in time. I am seeing this as an opportunity where the cloud, TCS cloud kind of solution is going to help them to achieve this. And this is a great opportunity for not only for TCS but also for HPE, because the solution we are putting together with the HPE is more on the digital workforce, how we can enable the people to work from home, not compromising on, as I mentioned, from a security perspective and compliance perspective. So I'm seeing this as a opportunity for both the organization and it's a long way to go. Lisa, we need to work on this. It's not a, we don't have a magic wand to make the millions of workers to work from home. But it is going to evolve soon and probably in the next year or so, we may achieve this entire 50% of the workforce is going to go remotely on this result. So that's what I might take on this. So the impact that HPE and TCS are being able to make for customers who've had to massively transform their entire workforce overnight, as you said, to work from home, talk to me about some of the new, maybe new solution or new business opportunities that HPE sees partnering with TCS. Shels, we'll start with you in this new era. Yeah. So if you look at, you know, just taking it again, an extension of Dr. Rajesh, what he just mentioned about the percentage of employees going remote, Lisa, across industries today, I would say less than 20% of the employees are actually working remote or they have the ability, or the organizations have the ability to support the employees going forward. And if we have to take it to 50%, so you can look at the kind of opportunity we have both as HPE and as TCS. So we bring in a lot of best in grade infrastructure from, for enabling the employee workforce in our various, I would say capacity of workloads and it's all workload specific. And what TCS does is, or when we work with TCS, we kind of bundle that, creating a reference architecture or a joint architecture, addressing the customers by industry verdict. So because one, what suits for one vertical may not be really a suiting well for a different vertical. For example, if you take a banking sector, a trade-off workstation solution would look very different from somebody's doing a remote work in a retail industry. So we kind of continuously engage with TCS and that's where both of us have a joint lab as well, where our technologists and TCS technologies come together to working on joint solutions and assessing the market in terms of where the opportunity lies. And we offer this as part of TCS digital workplace offering. Are your conversations, Dr. Rajesh will go to you, are your conversations when you're jointly selling, changing in terms of who your audience is, is this now a C-level conversation since these leaders, and we've heard leaders of Google and Facebook already last month saying work from home extended till 2021, is this now at the C-suite level where you guys are helping them really understand how to completely change and digitize their entire way of doing business? Absolutely, I think it's a great question, Lisa. Actually the opportunity goes beyond the work from home solution as you rightly pointed out that it is all about digitization. It is all about digitizing their whole business process. It is not anymore infrastructure or an application solution. It is more about redefining their business process, redefining the way the business is going to operate in future is the discussion we are having. So a lot of these discussions are happening at a very, very high level and with the business team also directly. So earlier you used to interact with the technology partners of our organization, but now we are interacting directly with the head of business or the C-level exec of the company and that is the reason, the exact reason is you, if you want your workforce to be productive remotely, you can't just offer them a network and you can't offer them just a solution to work from home, but you need to redefine your whole business process. You need to digitize your infrastructure, you need to digitize your application, you need to rethink your whole process of your operating on it. So that's where I'm seeing it's not only an opportunity for players like a TCS cloud, but it is an opportunity for a bigger opportunity for TCS and HPE, not only in terms of an infrastructure or a cloud business, it goes beyond that, Lisa. So that is the kind of an opportunity we are seeing, especially in the sectors of healthcare, you are seeing major reforms are happening in the healthcare industry as we speak. And obviously manufacturing is going to go through a lot of changes also from that and retail obviously has gone through a lot of changes already in terms of online stuff, but now that also going to go through changes in this new era. Yes. Shells, talking about redefining, that's a word that we've seen so many years in a row at tech conferences, right? This technology of redefining this business or that industry, and now of course we're being redefined by an invisible virus, but how is the sales process being redefined? Is it a lot more accelerated because businesses have to put together new plans to continue operations? Yeah. Again, a great question, Lisa. This, you have to, you know, I would say it's divided by industry world. It's not a uniform thing by, as Dr. Rajesh was saying, every industry has got its own set of challenges and its own set of opportunities. And some of them are really actually doing well even in times like COVID. And some of them have seen really, I mean, like travel or transportation or, you know, some of those industries and even hospitality that's kind of affected big time. So our view of, you know, the entire sales engagement or processes, we are spending more time on where we really need to focus and which can help improve the businesses, right? So the conversations vary from how do I take the cost out in terms of how can I make a little more investment to get greater returns from the business? So it's like, it's a completely, I would say an interesting time and engaging conversations and decisions are happening. So we, if you look at us from an North America perspective, the entire HP sales team is armed with various virtual tools, like, you know, we use Zoom, we use Skype, we use MS teams. So all the tools available to make sure that we are able to connect with all our partners and customers and to enable a joint business together. I just want to add to it, Lisa. One, one, one point I want to add very interesting change I am seeing on the sales is, normally we respond to ask from a customer. That is the way sales happens. I want this, can you guys do it? And then what you can give us a solution? That is the normal sales process. What I have seen that has changed completely is we go and tell the customer, this is what you need actually to make you yourself, your business better. This is the new offerings I am having it. And this offering is going to help you to solve the problem what you are having today. So we are engaging a different level of sales conversation today with our customer. We know the problem of the customer because we are working with them for many years and we know exactly what they are going through. And we also know what new offerings we are having in this. So we are engaging a discussion with the customer telling that this is my new offering. This is going to help you to solve this problem. So that is a different angle of sales we are seeing nowadays in this pandemic. So last question, Chels, for you. We started our interview today talking about the HPE TCS relationship. You've talked about how it's evolved. Last question for you, talk to me about HPE's strategy. How does it match TCS's alpha cloud offering? Yeah, so again, a great question Lisa. If you look at our strategy is to accelerate the enterprises with eccentric and cloud-enabled solutions which are workload optimized and delivered everything as a service. And whatever you heard from Dr. Rajesh through this entire conversation was about how do we give as a service model? He gave an example of HANA. He gave an example of optimizing workloads for VDI and getting employees to be able to be productive remotely. And all of it kind of extremely resonate well with what TCS alpha enterprise cloud offering is bringing to the table for the customers. And the underlying platform, we kind of collaborate extensively and closely with the TCS architecture team to have the HPE portfolio of the compute and storage portfolio integrated as part of their offering. And we go together to market and addressing and kind of an as a service model to the end customers. Excellent. Well, Shels, Dr. Rajesh, pleasure talking with you both today about what TCS and HPE are doing together and some of the ways that you're really helping businesses move forward in these uncertain times. We appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa, for all the questions. Thanks, Chels. Thank you, Dr. Rajesh. Absolutely. Thank you very much. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020 the virtual experience. Thanks for watching.