 From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering Upgrade 2020, the NTT Research Summit, presented by NTT Research. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Upgrade 2020. Of course, it's the NTT Research Summit and happy to welcome to the program someone that's watched theCUBE for a long time, but first time on the program, Simon Walsh, he is the new CEO of NTT Americas. Simon, great to see you and thank you so much for joining us. Thanks very much Stu, good to be here, nice to see you. As I mentioned, your previous companies that you've worked for are ones that theCUBE and theCUBE audience are well aware of. As a matter of fact, when I worked for some of those companies, NTT is one of the large global companies that I had the pleasure to interact with over the years, but if you could maybe let's start with just a little bit of your background and as I said, it's only been a few months that you've been the CEO, so what's it like coming into a role like this during the situation that we're all faced with in 2020? Yeah, thank you. I mean, my background is really in the platforms that enable the customers to run their technologies and I've spent some of my time in Europe and in India and then, you know, Latina, the last five plus years in the Americas, I have to say, I really enjoy it. It's a much better environment and if I think about it from a GDP and an economy perspective, it's a really dynamic place to work. I've worked with companies, you know, headquartered from Europe, running America's and I've worked with companies that were headquartered in the Americas running some of the European businesses. So I've crossed the continents, if you like. And I recently joined NTT and I have to say, you know, it was a pretty lengthy process to explore, but that was partly interviews and due diligence because you want to make sure that, you know, you're buying into a company that, you know, number one, you can have a cultural compatibility with but also somebody who you see really investing in technology that can solve for, you know, the business agenda of the markets. So that's really a bit about my background. And then, you know, joining, I mean, I literally joined last week of June. So my whole time has been through lockdown in terms of employment. It's been very unique taking on a new post exclusively remote. And I was a bit worried, you know, at a human level, just, you know, how do you connect with people? What I would comment is I've actually had the ability to really meet a lot more people in person because you can physically get to people's schedules a lot easier. So that's certainly helped. You know, and I've done my activities of meeting our clients. So they've been very amenable to connecting, talking to our business partners and spending, you know, considerable amount of time with my colleagues in the Americas and around the world. And it's actually been very rewarding. I think, funnily enough, you're probably physically closer because you're on a screen and you're probably like 24 inches away from each other. Whereas in a meeting room, you'd be the other side of a table. So it's been unique, but so far so good. Well, yeah, absolutely. The new abnormal as we've sometimes say, we're all used to looking in the screens all day, talking to various people there. The impact on business though has been, you know, obviously a lot of different things depending on the company. But that discussion of digital transformation, a few years ago, it was like, oh, I don't know if it's real. Is it a buzzword? But the spotlight that's been shown here in 2020 is what is real and what is not. Leveraging cloud services, giving people agility, being able to react fast because boy in 2020, if we needed to react fast. So help bring us inside a little bit. And your time there, the discussions you're having with customers, that adoption, moving along that journey for digital transformation, the impact that you're seeing and how's entity helping its customers as they need to accelerate and respond to the realities that we see today. Yeah. So you're right, Stu. I mean, digital disruption has been ongoing for multiple years. We used to call it technology and change. And now we call it digital disruption or digital transformation. So it's not necessarily new. I think the thing that's really accelerated in 2020, as a consequence of the pandemic is really the word distributed in that customers are undertaking their digital transformations, understanding what it is to modernize processes, modernize the customer experience. And then they're finding that actually they don't meet in a boardroom and discuss the performance of the business. So they now need to have distributed access to data. And I think the topics that we see very prevalent is the distributed nature of the workforce. And obviously there's always been a field workforce and we've had systems, CRM systems and other systems that were built for a distributed workforce. But now we have to think about our supply chain management systems and our HR systems, the P and L and all of the activities that a business undertakes with an entirely distributed workforce. And it's quite abnormal. And I think what we've learned is where is the data? And how do I amalgamate data from distributed systems? And so I see, and we're doing a lot of work with our clients relating to digital transformation, but really about how do I join data from system A to system F in a distributed manner? And most importantly, securely, timely and in an interface that is usable. And it sounds really easy. It's like, oh, great. Yeah, it's just two different data points, connect them together, make it secure, make it visible, create transparency. But we all know that the world is full of, you know, technical debt, legacy systems and platforms, very expensive and significant historical investments. And those things don't modernize themselves overnight. And quite often the dollars to modernize them don't justify themselves. So we then end up layering on, you know, new technology. So, you know, what I'm seeing in digital transformation is really about how do we handle distributed data, distributed decision-making and how do we do that in a secure manner and through an interface that is user-friendly? Yeah, we obviously know that there's had to be some prioritization. You know, the joke I've had, everybody came into 2020 with, okay, here's what I'm gonna do for the first half of the year. Here's the objectives that I have. And we kind of throw those in the shredder rather early on. Number one priority I still hear, it was probably that the number one priority coming into the year and it stays there. And you've mentioned it multiple times. It's security, you know, is absolutely front and center still, how overall though, how are your customers, you know, the CXO suite, how are they adjusting their priorities? Are there certain projects that just go on hold? Are there certain ones that get front and center? Obviously, you know, that distributed work from anywhere, telemedicine, you know, teach and learn from anywhere have been top of mind. But any other key learnings you're finding or prioritization changes, some of which are gonna probably stay with us, you know, for the long term. Absolutely. We've definitely seen to you customers reprioritizing. And I think there is obviously an inevitability to this as a consequence of the pandemic. I mean, if you were undertaking, you know, a campus upgrade, you might just put that on pause for the moment and we've absolutely seen that. But what we've really seen as a prioritization has been how do we get our information to our users, whether the user is a customer or whether the user is an employee. You know, there's examples where there's lots of companies who say they've got like online detail, great. But now they've got to do curbside pickup because they've actually got inventory in the stores but the stores couldn't open. So what you've seen is a reprioritization to say, well, when we look at our inventory management and the supply chain systems, are we factoring in that the inventory we have in a store could also be seen as inventory across the stores. And in fact, what we've really got now is a distributed warehouse. We've got inventory in the warehouse like wholesale ready for distribution. And then we've got inventory in a store retail ready for consumer consumption. Well, we don't want that to be separate inventory. We want that to be holistic. And then how do we enable any consumer anywhere to be able to arrange for curbside pickup which we didn't used to do because we would come into the store or arrange for mail order. But the inventory may come from, I may send something from San Francisco to somebody in Boston because it was in a store in inventory in San Francisco. Now, sure, it's got some freight cost but I've also got some other efficiency savings and I'm reducing my working capital and my inventory expense. So we've seen prioritization for really how to take advantage of this. I come back to it, this word distributed is very simple in principle but everything is now working on a new dynamic. So that's some of the prioritization we've seen. You mentioned one of the things that might get put on hold is, wait, if I was doing a corporate network update that might not be the first thing. We absolutely, we've gotten some great data on just the changing traffic patterns of the internet but the network is so critically important. Everybody from home is dealing with children doing their Zoom classrooms while we're trying to do video meetings. NTT obviously has a strong network component to what its business is. So to help us understand the services that are important there, what you're working with customers and how has this kind of transformed some of those activities? Yeah, sure, thank you. You're so right. I mean, I have to say I'd just like to pay my respects to colleagues and fellow workers around the world who are not just working from home but also homeschooling in parallel. Our kids are fled the nest, they're working from the cells now. So we don't have the extra activity of homeschooling but I can really have a lot of respect for colleagues who are trying to do both. It's a real fine art. And we've seen a lot of, actually just talking of reprioritization, we've seen a lot of companies including ourselves. So say to our colleagues, look after your children, homeschool them, do everything you can to support your families and then get to your work. So that reprioritization just in behavior has been a key change that we've seen a lot of people do. That flexibility to work is something you do, not somewhere you go. And therefore, as long as the work is done, we can flex around your needs as a family. So that's one prioritization we've seen actually. But to your point on the network, it's quite amusing to me that we've been for years now talking about cloud on demand, subscription services and actually the one asset that you need to really enable cloud is the network and it's historically been the least cloud like that you could possibly imagine because you still need to specify a physical connection. You still need to specify a bandwidth about the value. You still need to specify the number of devices you're going to attach to it. I think this is really a monstrous change that we're going to experience and really are experiencing the network as a service. I mean, we talk about IaaS, Paz, SAS, but what happened to NAS? I mean, really, did we just think that everything was about computing software? The network is the underpinner and so really we see a big change and this is where we've been very busy in the network as a service, enabling customers to have dynamic reallocation of resources on the network so that they can prioritize traffic, prioritize content, prioritize events. A lot of customers are now doing activities such as hosting their own event, their own digital conference and you want to prioritize what the user experience is when you host one of those events over perhaps a back office process that can quite frankly wait a few days. So we see a significant opportunity. This is where we've been very busy the last few months in really building out much more dynamic network as a service solutions. The cloud network and I think the whole software defined network agenda has materially accelerated. That's one major area. And then the other area has just been the phenomenal shift to IP voice and soft phone and actually almost the deletion of the phone in its entirety. Everybody using teams or Skype or Google Hangouts to really use as their collaboration mechanism. And then we're providing all the underlying transportation layer, but as IP voice creates a much more integrated collaboration experience and it creates a cost saving because you're taking away the classic voice services. Yeah, Simon, boy, I'm excited for that. I remember when I got my first blackberry and they were trying to sell me some things. I'm like, wait, this is an internet endpoint. I can do all of these things there. And of course, it's taken the last dozen years if gone a certain far, and we always joke. It's like smart phones, we don't use them for phones anymore. We use them for all the messaging and all those services. So the data and the network are so critically important. Simon, I want to turn to, you know, upgrade 2020. And I want to be excited about this, you know, we've talked about, you know, the major impacts of what's happened in 2020 and we're looking at the here and now. But it's great in technology when we get to be able to look forward and look at some of the opportunities out there. So I'd love to hear from your standpoint some of the areas, what's exciting you, what's exciting that we can look forward to some of the areas and pockets of research that we see at the event. Yeah, thank you, Stu. You know, I think what I like about our event is the investment that we make to work with, you know, scientific community, academia and really invest in, you know, forward-looking, future-proofing, you know, how physics and different technologies might play a role in the future. And, you know, some of these investments and some of this research yields commercial products and some of it doesn't, but it's still a very valuable opportunity for us to really look at, you know, where technology is going. I think the areas that particularly appealing to me on a personal level, just the whole thing of quantum computing, this is, you know, I know we're already exploring the capabilities of quantum computing in, you know, some labs and some academia centers and really to understand and go, how can we take advantage of that? But I think if you then say, and you take another area that we're exploring through the event, you know, biosciences, if you then take the two together and you think, okay, how do we take quantum computing and we take biosciences and you think about healthcare and then you think about the pandemic, you know, are there things that we can do with simulations and technologies in the future that really would give us a greater comprehension and ability to accelerate understanding, understand, accelerate testing and then really contribute to, you know, the health and welfare of society. And I think that's really quite an exciting area for us. So that's a specific topic that, you know, I'm particularly interested in. I'm glad to see us doing a lot in that space, quantum computing as well as, you know, biosciences. And I'd say, you know, one other area where I still think we're all trying to ascertain, you know, how it serves the business is really the area of blockchain. I think this is intriguing. I'm still mentally trying to master the subject. No amount of white papers has managed to overcome the topic in my brain yet. So I'm still working on it. And then I think cryptography, I come back to the same subject security. I mean, we are dependent as citizens, businesses and nations on technology now. And our data is available, how we secure it, how we make sure that it's encrypted is absolutely gonna be critical. You see an increasing push nationally and globally to ensure that there is, you know, security of data. And I think the subject of cryptography and how we go forward with, you know, beyond 128 bit is gonna be a very difficult and critical subject. So these are the areas I'm very impressed with. Wonderful. Simon, I wanna give you the final word from Upgrade 2020. Yeah, thanks, Joe. Just thanks very much to anybody that's attending. What you'll find through various workshops is lots of insight, you know, from strategic partners, from research scientists, from academia, from ourselves. So thank you very much for participating. You know, we always value your feedback. So please tell us what we could do to improve the content to help you with your businesses. And we look forward and hope that everybody stays safe. Thank you for connecting with us virtually. Well, Simon Walsh, thank you so much. Great having a conversation and glad to have you in our CUBE alumni now. Thank you very much, too. Have a good day. All right, and stay tuned. More coverage from Upgrade 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE.