 Hey everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas. theCUBE is live at the Venetian Expo Center for AWS ReInvent 2022. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of people here joining myself. Lisa Martin at Dave Vellante. Dave, it is great to see the energy of day one alone. People are back, they're ready to be back, they're ready to hear from AWS and what it's going to announce to you. Yeah, all through the pandemic, of course we talked about digital transformation, but the conversation is evolving beyond that to business transformation now. Deeper integration of the cloud to really transform fundamental business operations. And that's a new era. It is a new era, it's exciting. We've got a couple of guests that we're going to unpack that with. Anand Berger joins us, the President of Digital Business Services at HCL Tech and Prabhakar Apana, SVP and Global Head of AWS Business Unit also from HCL Tech. Guys, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Good to see you. Let's talk about some of the latest trends. Anand, we'll start with you. What are some of the latest trends in digitalization, especially as it relates to cloud adoption? What are you hearing out in the marketplace? Yeah, I think you said it, right? The post pandemic, every industry, every enterprise in every industry realize that for resilience, for their ability to change and adapt change, and their ability to increase velocity of change so that they can move fast and keep up with the expectations of their consumers, their partners, their employees, they need to have composability at the core and resilience at the core. And so digital transformation became all about the ability to change and ability to pivot faster. Now it's easier said than done, right? Larger enterprises, especially as you move into complex regulated industries, you know, oil and gas, manufacturing, life sciences, healthcare, utilities, these are industries that are not easy to change. They're not adaptable to change. And yet they had to really become more adaptable and they saw cloud as an enabler to all of that, right? So they started looking at every area of their business, business processes that make up their value chains and really look at how can they increase the adaptability and the ability to change these value chains so that they can engage with their customers better, their partners better, their employees better, and also build some of the composability and what might mean that is that just kind of like Lego blocks, they don't have to make changes that are sweeping and big that are difficult to make but make them in parts so that they can make them again and again. So velocity of change becomes important. Cloud's become an enabler to all of this and so if I look at the last four years, every industry, whether regulated or not, B2C, B2B2C, B2B is adopting cloud for digital acceleration. I'm curious to what you're seeing in the front lines, given the macro headwinds, you mentioned business resilience and during the pandemic, it was a lot of CIOs told us, wow, we were kind of focused on disaster recovery but our business wasn't resilient. We were really optimizing for efficiency and then they started to build in that business resilience but now you've got the economic headwinds. People are tapping their brakes a little bit, there's some uncertainty, a longer sales cycle, even the cloud's not immune, even though it's still growing at 30% plus per year, what are you guys seeing in the field with the AWS partnership? How are customers dealing with some of those more strategic transformation projects? Yeah, so first off, one thing that's changed and is different is every industry realizes that there is no choice. They don't have a choice to not be resilient, they don't have a choice to not be adaptable, the pandemic has taught them that, the markets and the macros are increasingly changing supply chains, it's changing customer behavior for their own industries, it's changing their pricing and their cost models and for all of that, they need to continue on their digital journeys. Now what's different though is they want to prioritize, they want to prioritize and do more with less, they want to adapt faster but also make sure that they don't just try to do everything together and so there's a lot of focus on what do we prioritize, how do we leverage cloud to move faster and cheaper in terms of our change and also to decide where do we consume and where do we compose, we'll talk a little bit more about that. There are certain things that you don't want to invent yourself, you can consume from cloud providers, whether it's business features, whether it is cloud capabilities and so there's a shift from adopting cloud just for cost takeout and just for resilience but also for composability which means, let's consume what I can consume from the cloud and really build those features faster so squeeze the go to market time, squeeze the time to market and squeeze the price to market, that's the change. And really driving those business outcomes as you talked about. Prabhakar, talk to us about how HDOTech and AWS are working together, how are you enabling customers to achieve what Anand was talking about? Absolutely, I mean our partnership has started almost 10 years back but over the last one year we have created what we call as AWS dedicated business unit to look at end to end stack from an AWS perspective. So what we see in the market as Anand has explained is more drive from clients for TCO optimization, driving app modernization, driving consolidation, looking at the cost sustainability angles, looking at the IoT angle, manufacturing platforms, industry adoption, all this is actually igniting the way the industry would look at AWS and as well as the partnership. So from an HDOTech and AWS partnership we're actually accelerating most of these conversations by building bespoke accelerated industry solutions. So what I mean is, for example, there is an issue with the manufacturing plant and take COVID situation, people can't get into a manufacturing plant. So how can AWS help put it in the cloud, accelerate those conversations? So we are building those industry specific solutions so that it can be everybody from a manufacturing sector can adopt and actually go to market, as well as you can access all this applications once it is in the cloud from anywhere, any device with a scalable options. That's where our partnership is actually igniting a lot of cloud conversations and client conversations in the market. So we see a lot of traction there. Incredibly important during the last couple of years alone. Absolutely, I mean, last couple of years has been groundbreaking, right? Especially with the COVID, for example, Amazon Connect. We used Amazon Connect to roll out call center in the cloud, right? So you don't have to walk into an office. For example, people are working in the banking sector, especially in the trading platform, they were not able to get there. So but they need to make calls. How do you do the customer service? So Amazon Connect came right at the junction. So call center in the cloud and you can access dial the number. So the customer don't feel the pain of somebody not answering, it's accessible. That's where the partnership, the HCL Tech partnership and AWS comes into play because we've been the scale, the skill set capability with the services of AWS, Amazon and that forms a concrete story for the client. That's one such example. And many such examples are in the market that we are accelerating in the discussions. I mean, Connect is a good example, Lisa, we were talking earlier about Amazon doubling down on the primitives, but also moving up market as well, up the value chain and it needs partners like HCL to be able to go into various industries and apply that effectively. And that's where business transformation comes in. Absolutely, absolutely. I think some of the aspects that we are looking at is while we do most of this cloud transformation initiatives from an HCL Tech perspective, what we are doing is we are encompassing them into a story which we call it as Cloud Smart, right? So we are calling it as Cloud Smart which is a go-to-market offering from HCL Tech where the client doesn't have to look at each of the services from various vendors. So it's a one-stop shop, right from strategy, consulting, look implementation, underpinned by app modernization, consolidation and the operational. So we do that as end-to-end service with our offerings which is quite helping us actually accelerate conversations in the cloud. What happens is the clients are also building these capabilities. More and more often you see a lot of new services are being added to AWS. So not many clients are aware of it. So it is the responsibility of system integrator like us to make them aware and bring it into a shape where the client can consume in a low-cost option in an optimized way. That's where I think it's working out very well for us with the partnership of AWS. So you curate those services that you know will fit the customer's business. You know the ingredients that you can put together the dinner. Absolutely, you're preparing a dish, right? So you're preparing a dish. You know where the ingredients are. So the ingredients are supplied by AWS. So you need to prepare a pasta dish, right? So how spicy you want to make it, how bland you want to make it, you know, what sauce you want to use. How do you bring all those elements together? That's what HCL tech has been focusing on. And you use the word curation, right? Curation is really industry process down. Depending on your industry, every industry, every enterprise, there are things that are differentiating them. There's a business processes that differentiate you. And there are business processes that don't necessarily differentiate you but are core to you. For example, if you're a retailer, you're retailing, you're merchandising, how you price your products, how you market your products, your supply chains, those differentiate you. How you run your general ledger, your accounting, your payables, HR, is core to your business but doesn't differentiate you. And the choices you make in the cloud for each of these areas are different. What differentiates you, you compose. What doesn't differentiate you, you consume. Because you don't want to try and compose what doesn't differentiate you. Exactly. Oh my gosh, this is so good. Our biggest examples are in tech, perhaps. Right, right, they're omnichannel marketing. You know how they connect with their consumers. How they do their billing systems. How they do their pricing systems. Those are their differentiations. And things that don't, they want to consume. And that's where cloud adoption needs to come with really a curation framework. We call it the Phoenix framework. Which defines what differentiates you versus not. And based on that, what are the architectural choices you make at the applications layer, the integration layer, the data layer, and the infrastructure layer. All from AWS and how do you make those choices? Talk about a customer example Anand that really articulates that value. I'll give you an example that sort of everybody can relate to. A very large tools company that manufactures tools that we all use at home for remodeling our houses, building stuff, building furniture. Their business post pandemic dramatically shifted in every way possible. Nobody was going anymore to Home Depot and Lowell's to buy their tools. Their online business surged by 200%. Their supply chains were changing because their manufacturers originally were in China and Malaysia. They were shifting a lot of that base to Taiwan and Germany and Latin America. Their pricing model was changing. Their last mile deliveries were changing because they were not used to delivering you and me last mile deliveries. So every aspect of their business was changing. They hadn't thought of their business in the same way. But guess what? That business was growing, but the needs were changing and they needed to rethink every value chain in their business. And so they had to adopt cloud, they leverage AWS at their core to rethink every part of their business, rebuilding their supply chain applications, modernizing their warehouse management systems, modernizing their pricing systems, modernizing their sales and marketing platforms, every aspect you can think of, and all of that within 24 months because otherwise they would lose market share in any given market. And all of this while they were delivering their day to day business, they were manufacturing the goods and they were shipping products. So that was quite a lot to achieve in 24 months and that's not just one example. There's across industries examples like that that would happen. The best business transformation examples I think I've heard. Absolutely, absolutely. And so cloud does need to start with a business transformation objective and that's what's happening to the cloud. It's changing away from an infrastructure consolidation discussion to business transformation. Because I know you guys have a theater session tomorrow on continuous modernization. It was experiencing cloud transformation and continuous modernization. That's the theme. Pre-cloud, it was just, you'd rip and replace your infrastructure and it was a big application portfolio assessment and rationalization. It just became this years long, like an SAP installation. How has cloud changed that? And tell us more about that session and that continuous modernization. So we are doing a joint session with a client on how HCL Tech helped the client in terms of transforming the landscape and adopting cloud much faster into the ecosystem. So what we are currently doing is, so it's a continuous process. So when we talk about cloud adoption transformation, it doesn't stop there. So it needs to keep evolving. So what we came up with a framework for all such clients who are on the cloud transformation path need to look at, which we call it as smart ways to cloud, cloud smart, where once it is in the clouds, smart ways to cloud, for cloud and in the cloud. So what happens is, when it is to cloud, what do you do? What are the accelerators? What are the frameworks? Smart ways for clouds, how do you look at the governance of it? Okay, consolidation activities of it. Once it is in the cloud, how do you optimize? What do you look at security aspects, et cetera? So the client doesn't have to go to multiple ecosystem partners to look at it. So he's looking at one such service provider who can actually encompass and give all this onto the plate in a much more granular fashion with an accelerated approach. So we build accelerated solutions, frameworks, which helps the client to actually pick and choose in a much lower cost. I think, and it has to be a continuous modernization for the client. So why we are calling it as a continuous modernization is, we're also creating what we call cloud foundries and factories. What happens is the client can look at not only in a transformation journey, but also futuristic. When there are new services are adopted, how this transformation and factories helping them in a lower cost option and driving that acceleration story. So we're addressing it in multiple ways. One on the transformation front, one on the TCO front, one on the accelerated front, one on the operational front. So all this combined into one single framework, which is what is a continuous modernization of cloud adoption from HCL tech. When you apply this framework with customers, how do you deal with technical debt? Can you avoid technical debt? Can you hide technical debt? Or is it like debt and taxes? We're always going to have technical debt because Amazon, you know, they'll talk about they don't ever deprecate anything. Yeah. You know, are they going to, are we going to see Amazon take on tech? How do you avoid that or at least shield the customer from that technical debt? So every CIO, right? Key ambitions are digital, cloud, TCO optimization, sustainability. So we have a framework for that. So every CIO would look at, okay, I want to spend, but I want to be optimized. My TCO should not go up. So that's where a system integrator like us comes. We have a FinOps story where, which does the complete financial analysis of your cloud adoption as to what estate and what technical debt client already has. How can we optimize that? And how can we overlay on top of that our own services to make it much more optimized solution for the client? And there are several frameworks that we have defined for the CIO organizations where the CIO can actually look at some of these elements and adopt it internally within the system. You want to pick it from there? Yeah, I think it's a great question. First of all, there's a generational shift in the last three years where nobody's doing lift and shift of traditional applications or traditional data systems to the cloud. As you said, nobody's taking their technical debt to the cloud anymore. Business value is not there. There's no business value, right? The value is really being cloud native, which means you want to continuously modernize your value chains, which means your applications, your integration, your data to leverage the cloud and continuously modernize. Now, you will still make priority decisions, right? Things that really differentiate you, you will modernize them through composition. Things that don't, you'll rather consume them. But in both factors, you're modernizing. I use the word surround and drown. Enterprises are surrounding their traditional environments and drowning them over a period of time. So over the next five years, you'll see more and more irrelevant legacy because the relevance is being built in the cloud for the future. That's the way I see it. Speaking of, take us out here, speaking of business value, Anand, we're almost out of time here. If there's a billboard on 101 in Palo Alto regarding HCL tech, what's the value problem? What does it say? It's a simple billboard. We say we are supercharging our customers, our partners, our employees. We are supercharging progress. And we believe that the strength that we bring from learnings of over 200,000 professionals that work at HCL, working at over half of, you know, 500 of the largest portion thousands in the world is really bringing those learnings that we continuously look at every day, that we live with every day across all kind of regulations, all kind of industries in adopting new technologies, in modernizing their business strategies and achieving their business transformation goals with the velocity they want. That's kind of the supercharging progress mantra. Supercharging progress, love it. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about- Thank you for having us. Our pleasure, what's going on with HCL tech, AWS, the value that you're delivering for customers. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Have a great time. Take care. For our guests, I'm Lisa Martin. He's Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.