 Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage. Day two of Red Hat Summit 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm John Furrier, your host with Rob Stretcher, breaking down the analysis. We're here with HCL Tech. We're going to unpack business transformation, talk about CloudSmart, Red Hat, all the action happening in Cloud. We've got two great guests, Kajinya Kumar, Dharma Varapu, also known as DK. Now you got that right, you got a great long last day and a title. Global Go-To-Market Professional Services, head of IBM Red Hat Ecosystem at HCL Tech. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Tom. Mitch Gordon, Global Go-To-Market Head for IBM Red Hat Ecosystem for HCL Tech. Guys, thanks for coming on. Pleasure. It's a pleasure. You guys are exposed to a lot of use cases, a lot of customer and big deals, a lot of integrations, transformations, lift and shift, refactoring. AI's wave is here, Cloud is right sizing or cost-optimizing, whatever word you want to do. I won't say repatriation because I don't think it's actually that. I think it's more cloud operations. That's my opinion, but a lot going on. What's going on with you guys with Red Hat here? Talk about what's happening in your world here. I think it's a good intro from Europe. Thanks a lot. From an HCL standpoint, right, HCL Tech standpoint, hybrid cloud is about the capability. It's not about an end state, right? And it's not about having this percentage on a public cloud, private cloud, or a bare metal, it's all about the ability and the capability to move, adopt, adapt and adjust as you see how it fits best upon your needs actually. So that's the main element. And just moving forward from there, when I say ability, right? Ability is about the technology competencies that we're going to have. And we feel that the Red Hat gives that portfolio which is comprehensive for us in hybrid multi-cloud with the platform approach around the enterprise Linux, OpenShift and Ansible. And that's the new announcement yesterday, even more amazing in terms of the AI ML infusions actually, right, Rob, that's amazing. And the second piece is on the capability. Capability, the way that we look at HCL Tech is that how do we expand the digital leadership for ourselves by differentiating our services and offerings and the software portfolio. And we want to be one of the leading digital partner for the global 2000 enterprises in all our chosen markets. And then if you see the latest transformations that are going on, sustainability becomes an important thing, right? So we are going to view that one into the stuff. So when I bring these elements, HCL has the capacity capability to bring the knowledge of the client, the domain expertise, the resources that are required and the IP and assets from various parts of this field together. So that is the crucial element for us as we look at this whole hybrid multi-cloud digital transformation story. And what's your role at HCL Tech? You've got professional services and the ecosystem. What specifically do you work on? I think as we look at the market, right, that's why we use the word competence and capabilities that we need to have both the things coming together. Right, and why, what we've viewed is that as we build the go-to market strategy around the hybrid multi-cloud, the most important thing is how do you help the client through this journey? That is why the professional services and the GTM goes together for us. Mitch, what's your take on the strategic nature of Red Hat? Obviously, they've checked the box on hybrid, pretty strong. Absolutely. You got Roso with AWS. You got Edge developing. I mean, Ansible, those guys are gods, the way they can do that, configures now they're at automation coming into the mainstream. I mean, Ansible engineers, they're loyal. They're strong. That's scaling into the mainstream. They're on the keynote. That day one was dominated pretty much by Ansible so that AI has got traction. Well, there's certainly a buzz here that it's not at every conference. Red Haters and Red Hat developers are super passionate and you can feel it. You can really feel it. The way we're structured at HCL tech, it's quite a differentiator in the way we see it. I mean, we are a typical large GSI. We're very much a matrixed organization just like Red Hat is, just like IBM is. We're both ex-IBMers. You fit right in then. Yeah, yes. So we have our vertical sales teams, four verticals, financial services, healthcare. We call it Mega LT, which is manufacturing energy utilities, logistics transportation, then we have TMT, tech media, telco, retail, CPG, and then we have our horizontals that practices that deliver for those vertical sales teams. We're pretty well known for infrastructure work so we call that digital foundation. And we have digital business, which is application layer data analytics growing really fast. And then we have engineering and research services, which is also quite a differentiator. We're quite famous. You get the horizontal scalability of the infrastructure. So you have the horizontal. And the vertical specialization where the AI is now doing extremely well and so balance that out has become, that's the big wave. Absolutely. Absolutely. Where I think where we are super unique is where DK and I belong in the ecosystems. We actually have ecosystems. Of course, IBM, Red Hat is where we belong. We have a Microsoft, a Google, AWS. How many ecosystems are out there, right? We have the three hyperscalers, IBM and Red Hat, and then we have Dell, we have Cisco. We have- There's VMware in there? VMware, yes, absolutely. And Intel has an ecosystem with us too. Wow. Red Hat's got an ecosystem. Well, we're special, of course we're special. But we're really special because we work with all of them. And that's largely because of Red Hat. And so that gives us a special and unique position at HCL to really collaborate with everybody. That's an interesting- I know Rob wants to get a question and I want to jump in here. I will say that open source, we're just at the open source summit and the conversation we had there that was dominating, that was new, we've been covering it for decades, is that the ecosystems are forming in open source, which is like at the Google Memo that was leaked a couple of weeks ago. If you saw that, they're saying these moats are developing within the projects. So it's a whole nother level of action. Yeah. And you're right, Rob. I think that requires the 360 degree approach when we go in this digital transformation. That's where ecosystems become so much important. Every mile has to be covered. Right. Yeah, and I think what's interesting about the whole CloudSmart initiative is really about right place, right time. Is it cloud-native? Is it not cloud-native? Things of that nature. And I think that how does Red Hat and IBM play into that? How do you take advantage of the openness of this ecosystem? I think it's very, very important, I think. I'll just connect it to the, if you analyze the market, right, the top three tech trends that are going on, right? The ability to build a new business capabilities at speed, right, the clients all looking at speed. And we need to use hybrid multi-cloud to drive that one. The second one was that cloud-native is a new language of really addressing the digital business. Third trend you're seeing is that the ability to observe, analyze, and act on customers generated data. Right, these three becomes very important trends. And so when you take those things, we at HCL Tech have realized that we need to have a unified approach as a side, like an ecosystem, to solve these challenges that the clients are going to face. So CloudSmart is like a consultative led approach to provide one HCL Tech cloud industry solutions for clients by having an approach from innovation and it focus on continuous modernization. And then what happens is that CloudSmart is actually an industrialized services which are more like an outcome driven, which are highly automated and repeatable processes, but built on standard products and platforms so that we can build a scale with it, actually. Then at HCL Tech, the way we look at the CloudSmart strategy is that we have almost 100 plus industry cloud solutions and 20 plus type of horizontal offering solutions we already built. And this really drives and mitigate the risk that the clients will go through actually, right? So. And you're also working across hyperscalers as well, like you said, so with Red Hat, you're doing Arrow with Azure, you're doing Rosa with AWS. And that's all part of that ecosystem, even though they have their own ecosystems onto themselves as well. I think the reason why it becomes so important for Red Hat to be at the corner of this important point you raised was that Red Hat is like, the way we look at it is like, the way it was articulated in Switzerland of this whole hybrid multi-cloud digital transformation story. They glue, they are the digital transformation element that really glues this various hyperscalers, right? They able to bring the physical, they're able to bring the public cloud, private clouds, or the bearables, anything we talk about. So that's why they're uniquely positioned for us. And Red Hat becomes a core part of our CloudSmart strategy. And what we really look at is that, how do you modernize the digital core with CloudSmart with Red Hat? The reinvent the client experiences with the new way the things are happening and then you maximize the business value, right? And it really accelerates in terms of the various factors, the factors around the continuous innovations that we can bring in with CloudSmart or a comprehensive cloud culture that is required in the clients or create a sustainable future actually. So that is the reason when this question came up, it became so much important for us that Red Hat being the center of this whole strategy that we are evolving. DK and Mitch, talk about the customer use cases and also the time it takes. We seem to be in an accelerated world. Matt Hicks came on day one saying about this AI wave and this new next-gen cloud and people building these super clouds are going to accelerate super fast. The old days was like, hey, transformation is going to take 10 years. Now it's like 10 months, now it's 10 days, it's a 10 hours. The shrinkage on time. So talk about the time it takes to get these projects going, how you guys scope those, how you take customers through that and give a use case of a customer, take us through the day of life of, what's changed just going a few years back to today? Yeah, well, I'm a sales guy and a sales cycle is still rather long. HCL is really good with RFPs and when there's an RFP, that typically means there's a pretty long period of time even from RFI, RFPs, short listing and then doing the final pitches and getting, you know, final decision. So it is short and every one of our customers is in this journey, whether it's in the beginning or in the end, nobody's done, right? So I wouldn't say it's like over and done. The pre-sales is obviously, they got to pay attention to the requirements. It's like building a product. Absolutely. But on the delivery side to the value, time to value, has that changed at all? How do you see, or can projects be broken down differently or how do you guys attack that versus that? We do break down day zero, day one, day two. And our team, we cover all of that. Our ecosystem, we even have a Red Hat day zero team in India. All they do is proof of concept, proof of value, proof of technology. It's a big differentiator for HCL because we have these real kind of Navy SEAL folks that really know the technology. That's probably the quickest period of time when they're doing those tests. But the day one and day two, that's, those are very long. Yeah, I can, I'm totally imagining that. Business transmission not going to happen overnight. Yeah, it's like. Yeah. But the thing is, is that with Red Hat, you're seeing a lot more, no use cases. I guess my next question would be, what are some of the hot areas right now with the Red Hat in the ecosystem side of it? What's the hot, low-hanging fruit, some of the key things that people are jumping on right now that's notable? Yeah, so I think it's, the hybrid multi-cloud is the biggest opportunity we see. And part of that one will be that the application modernization, transformation stories, very strong actually, what we observe. Then the clients are looking for automation. So it means that the AI ML becomes important. The second is the runbook automations, the events-driven automations is very important, right? So if I correlate this one, it connects to what Matt was mentioning yesterday, if you see, right? I really liked the way they brought the OpenShift AI. You could take the Ansible part of the evolution that is happening, right? So those are the really hot areas that we really look at actually. Yeah, and it's exciting too because it is hyped up, I will say that, but it's legit next-gen action. Papers are being published, I've seen more great academic papers that have a lot of good beat on the bone. And it's legit, acceleration's happening. So, super exciting. Really appreciate you guys coming on, as we wind down day two. With the last minute that we have left or so, since you're sales guys, let's go hear the pitch. You have me sold, HCL Tech, give the pitch. What's the differentiator? Why should folks work with you guys and why Red Hat Ecosys IBM partnership? What's the pitch? Go ahead, Mitch. DK has been with the HCL. Like I said, we have day zero, day one, day two. We are very, very well-known in infrastructure space. We have engineering service, research service, very well-known. The DNA side, we are expanding rapidly on the application level. We are a 360 degree ecosystem team. We work with IBM and Red Hat. We actually do work for Red Hat as well. So, it's a really deep, deep partnership that's getting really deep. You asked about our meetings. We've had such great meetings. Red Hat is really, really accessible. And we have a great alliance team that supports us and we're really an extension of them. Red Hat's high-quality people and their transparent. DK, what's your pitch? Go. I think for us, HCL Tech is an end-to-end digital transmission partner for the clients. For us, the CloudSmart is one of our strength points. Actually, it's a consolidated approach. We bring the one HCL to solve the client's challenges as he wants to get on to the hybrid, multi-cloud transformation journey, actually. So, as I said, the digital cloud and the engineering services will be able to bring all these three things together to solve the client's problems using CloudSmart. Yeah, I tweeted yesterday that the multi-cloud is really going to be the big opportunity. Hybrid right now is where people are landing. Absolutely. That's their base camp. Correct. And then multi-cloud will be the action. That would include edge. I consider edge in that whole phenomenon. Absolutely. That's the enabler for all of that. Yeah, I mean, I can see their moves. It's an operating system play. It's like, I get it. I can see it. Distributed computing's here forever. Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and rounding out our day two. Yeah, thanks a lot. DK, Mitch, HCL Tech here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Rob Strecce. We'll be back with our closing summary after this short break.