Navigating Disruption: New Truths in Cloud

Shade Vaughn (00:04):

Hi, everyone, thank you for joining us today. We’re going to show you the next level of our Navigating Disruption webinar series on thought leadership. If you missed our initial wave, we did a series of broadcasts on the way that different companies are navigating disruption through people, business performance, supply chain and operations, and customers. Today, we’re going to take a deeper dive into cloud and the area of our business where we are seeing a tremendous amount of questions and activity.

Shade Vaughn (00:36):

My name is Shade Vaughn, I’m the CMO for North America for Capgemini. I am joined today by two esteemed colleagues, Kaushik De, who’s our go-to-market leader for the application and cloud technologies practice, and Ryan Murphy, who leads our cloud center of excellence at Capgemini. We’re going to present a short point of view on some of the trends that we’re seeing in cloud today. We’ll then go through a series of questions, panel-discussion style. And if you have questions throughout, we’ll also tackle those, just feel free to enter them into the chat window or submit the question through the webinar platform, and we’ll answer those questions as well, or as many of them as we can get to.

Shade Vaughn (01:18):

So, with that, Kaushik, I’m going to turn the floor over to you.

Kaushik De (01:23):

Thank you, Shade. Hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you’re joining from. I’m Kaushik De. As he said, I lead the application and cloud technology go-to-market for Capgemini. So, what you’re seeing right now displayed, I want to start by putting some context setting. So, if you really look at our current environments, that’s shifting very rapidly with business leaders thinking of technology as an enabler to business outcomes.

Kaushik De (01:51):

So, the core expectations have not changed at all. If you look at the left-hand side, you still see your operational excellence, cost reduction, move to cloud, automation is still there. But where the paradigm has shifted is more towards the digital-transformation expectations. So now, your IT KPIs are driven by business outcomes, you need continuous innovation. So, continuous innovation is no more a value-added service, it’s part of your core solution. And then also, how do we modernize your IT estate? Whether you bring new technology, new architecture, people, process, or skills.

Kaushik De (02:25):

So, how do we enable to reduce [the] shadow IT, so that your IT can become a faster, nimble enabler to business? [This] is what we’re going to discuss today of what you’re seeing in the market. So, if you go to the next slide, please, if you look at the journey of our typical business agility and, for the clients that we have been interacting with, that journey could be anywhere in this whole roadmap. You don’t have to start from one point, but it’s a good time to take a step back and evaluate where are you on your journey? So, if you look at from the bottom of this slide deck…

Kaushik De (02:59):

Make infrastructure invisible. So, a lot of the clients right now heavily have a lot of technical debt, legacy systems, haven’t really moved to the cloud. So those clients are right now looking into, how do I better my operational excellence? Move to the cloud, move away from your CapEx to OpEx, get some of the cloud agility off, spanning up your VMs on demand, shutting them down when you don’t need to. So, a lot of cost-savings discussions. The middle tier is where you start looking at agility from, how do I get rid of my technical debt? How do I start transforming my application to a more agile DevOps, which we’re going to talk a little bit more down the line?

Kaushik De (03:38):

And also, get myself ready to start addressing some of the business agility that is in the market. And then the top part of that, where you see that “Embraces Mondays ideas as Fridays realities,” truly you have got your people, your process, and your technology to a state where you can go into a … and from an IT enablement perspective, into an IT estate, whether it’s microservices architecture, emerging technology stack, where today’s ideation, you can quickly prototype and pilot it into the market. So, that’s where truly your next generation of the market leaders, that you see some of the clients we are working with, are there.

Kaushik De (04:17):

Where, anytime business needs to quickly react to customer feedback, the IT is always ready to implement those features and services and customer experience. So, let me give a very quick example of some of the things that we are doing with our clients. So this is a very, very well-known theme park. We have been working with them for the last 10-plus years. And we started the journey for, if you remember the roadmap that I just talked about five minutes back, we started the journey with a lot of traditional AD work.

Kaushik De (04:51):

And now, right now, we are 100% on agile. But basically, if you look at some of the details around release frequency, from quarterly to twice monthly, the incidents have reduced from 750 to less than 70. The agile adoption has gone 200%. These are very IP-centric KPIs. But what does this drive from a business KPI? So, one of the business KPIs was the client in this theme part, a lot of customer experience with mobile development, mobile app, was ordering food in the theme park. And when you go to the food part, you order your food, but you’re walking around taking rides.

Kaushik De (05:26):

So, by the time you reach that food stall, your food might be cold, right? Bad customer experience. So, what we did was basically we created geo fencing, geo sourcing, IoT sensors on also the mobile device, where we can know where exactly a customer is when they’re ordering the food. So, the preparation in the kitchen starts when they’re close enough to the food stall, so that the food that is served is hot and fresh. So, big customer experience. And basically, those are the business drivers that are driving some of these IT KPIs you’re seeing on the screen.

Kaushik De (05:56):

Into the next slide. Another client we’re working on, a very big wireless carrier. One of the key messages from the CEO was how do I get one million customers in a quarter? And to do that, they wanted to do a lot of promotions. So pricing and promotion are a big component of that. As you know, telecom providers [use] big mainframe systems for the pricing. To implement that feature, it needs a lot of time, anywhere between nine to 12 months. And the other thing to put the icing on the cake on the complexity is, they wanted to give a promotion where if you get a new family plan with them, you get six months of Netflix free.

Kaushik De (06:33):

So, now you’re actually bringing a whole separate company into the mixture of how do those customers get aligned with the account set up in Netflix? So, what we did with these customers was, we obviously cannot touch a mainframe system of a telecom client and just throw it away. So, we built APIs on top of the mainframe system, and then all of the pricing and promotions, we build microservices, cloud-native architecture, so that in real-time you can generate these loyalty programs, which can feed the mainframe data for the pricing.

Kaushik De (07:01):

Right now, we have matured, we have been on the account for more than five years, we have taken that whole logic into blockchain. Again, if you look at some of the matrix, very IT-centric metrics, but again I want to drive home the fact that, all these IT-centric metrics are driving a business behavior. So that’s the main idea of working with these kinds of clients and driving business outcomes. And the last example I’m going to give, is a big QSR restaurant chain. Internet of beer. They serve beer on the tap, they have 24 beers on tap.

Kaushik De (07:32):

What we did with them is, they wanted to understand [their] beer sales by demographic, by location. Data is a big component. So, that’s another aspect: data is becoming the new API economy. So, we put sensors on their beer barrels to understand what beer sells better, when is the time to actually change the barrel of a beer, so that reduces your liability cost for the bartenders and also, how much beer is being consumed in a day., So a lot of those details analytics was done using IoT sensors and an analytics platform we built for this company.

Kaushik De (08:06):

And also, one of the big things is, during this COVID, they did a home delivery in a day of 150,000-plus transactions, which generated more than 4 million-plus sales for them. So, basically our architecture on this API drove that scale. So, the agility of cloud and the scale is one of the big business drivers for this company that we’re working with.

Shade Vaughn (08:29):

Great, thank you Kaushik. So, let’s pivot and tackle a few of the questions that we’re hearing quite frequently right now. And Kaushik, let’s start with you. What are the most important considerations right now, when moving to cloud and embarking on a digital-transformation journey?

Kaushik De (08:49):

I think the big component that I’m seeing a shift in the market is, business KPI is driving IT KPI. So, if you really look at three to five years back, you want your server to be 99.99. The four nines, the five-nine discussion. I want all my SLAs to be met, my P1 tickets to be resolved in two hours. That has changed. Now, when clients are talking about how do you want me to work with you, they’re all driven by business drivers. IT is an enabler to business. So, one big key component [of] IT transformation is about business outcomes, and that core solution.

Kaushik De (09:22):

It is no more innovation as an afterthought. The second is, you’re moving away from traditional SLAs. Now, CIOs, CEOs, CDOs, they don’t care about the traditional SLAs. What they are caring about is, how do you make sure that I get my business outcomes? So, some of the new work that we are seeing in the market is, make sure that your SLAs around productivity, around agility. Yes, you still have to fix your P1 tickets, but I don’t care about how you fix a P1 ticket. Am I still getting my new revenue streams, my business outcome that is coming in? So, that’s the two key themes that we’re seeing are the new discussion that we’re having in any kind of…whether you’re talking about business transformation, whether you’re talking about IT outsourcing, or whether you’re talking about AD or AM.

Shade Vaughn (10:03):

So, Ryan, bringing you into the conversation, what are your thoughts right now on what should our business leaders be doing to respond to disruption in the short term?

Ryan Murphy (10:14):

Yeah, thanks Shade. So, based on the current environment that we’re in, and the return to business, I think right now the big focus is all around leveraging cloud to reduce costs. So, I think all organizations should be looking to leverage a cloud-first strategy for new applications. Existing environments in the cloud: folks need to take a really close look at their cloud economics and their governance around that. So, having as part of your governance structure a really good tagging architecture, is going to enable you to closely monitor your resource utilization of storage and compute environments.

Ryan Murphy (10:47):

It allows you to implement a waste-management process to dispose of underutilized resources. And a good cloud-governance structure will go a long way towards preventing cloud sprawl, and help with cloud cost containments. Lastly, as you move new applications to the cloud, you should look to leverage native past services for resiliency and scalability, as well as the ability to further introduce automation to reduce the total cost of ownership of these applications.

Shade Vaughn (11:14):

Kaushik, back over to you, and in today’s environment of disruption, what should business leaders be doing to ensure long-term resiliency?

Kaushik De (11:24):

So, I think that the key thing is, invest in transformation. And what I mean by that is, you can see that as we have seen through COVID, and now that we are coming out of COVID-19, there’s a new embrace of business models. So, restaurant chains, they have started delivering food service, the brick-and-mortar store are going down and there’s a lot of online eCommerce, right? So, leveraging APIs is becoming a big component. So, for example, the whole internet of beer example I was giving. A lot of restaurant chains now wants to quickly start delivery service.

Kaushik De (11:54):

Connect to Uber Eats, connect to Grubhub. How do you do that? Basically, quickly plug-and-play an API to connect to these services and start delivering the new revenue stream. Business continuity is a big thing. And business continuity from a few angles. One is, people aspect. And that’s where we’re going to talk a little bit later around how we are going into a virtual delivery model, POD model, agile setup in a virtual distributed environment. The second is cloud. You’re not having to depend on infrastructure.

Kaushik De (12:24):

With a cloud, you can spin up an environment in real time anywhere in the world, and start working on it. So, I think three things. The big new business model, which will be driven by the APIs and the API economy, and then how do you make sure that business continues happening because they will move into the cloud, so that helps you spin up an environment or depend on a physical data center, are the key things that will help you ensure long-term resiliency.

Shade Vaughn (12:49):

Good. What changes should business leaders be making to ensure that IT drives business value as you continue to unpack that?

Kaushik De (12:59):

So, if we look at the business problems right now they have, one is obviously the whole cost pressure that we talked about, moving to the cloud helps you save costs. But the other thing is business is trying to say, how do I focus on my core competency and not worry about applications, infrastructure, all of the operation-centric work? Because that is something that is not our core business driver. My people, from an industry perspective, whether you’re talking about any industry, they want to focus on what is the core business.

Kaushik De (13:29):

So, it’s becoming more and more what we call X-as-a-Service. And what I mean by that is, what a lot of the CIOs and CDOs are saying is, whoever they’re working with, let’s say Capgemini or others, is, take care of my application and infrastructure management as a service. How typically SaaS products works. Like, when you use your email, you’re not thinking about an infrastructure setup or an application setup, you’re basically [using] the SaaS provider. There’s a lot of things happening behind the scenes. I’m more focused on what is my driver, sending emails.

Kaushik De (14:01):

Similarly, if you look at your application or IT stack, it’s moving more towards that as a service. We take care of all the operational aspect of things. I want to focus on my business aspect. And that’s the discussion we are having with a lot of our clients. How do we take them to that X-as-a-Service, so that they spend more time on driving business value and revenue, compared to focusing on how do they manage there and to keep their lights on and operations?

Shade Vaughn (14:25):

And what about shifting to an outcome-based model?

Kaushik De (14:29):

Yeah, so that’s a good point to bring up. So, basically when you look at an outcome-based model, typically how the industry has been working is that, you have a whole AMS component, the Application Management Services component, where you are keeping your managed-services model, giving productivity with an FT model, and then also keeping the lights on. And then you have your AD, where all the projects come, and those projects could be enhancement to your current estate, or some of the business needs. I want to implement a big transformation because that’s what the customer demand is looking into.

Kaushik De (15:03):

What has now happened is that is shifting towards the pure ADM model. And what I mean by pure ADM is, there is no more an application team and an AD team, a development team. It has been merged together as ADM, so basically the whole concept of agile, DevOps, POD-based teams, is more around you build it, you own it. So basically what that means is, if you are managing an application and enhancing that, you’re not just only doing development of the application, but making sure that from the platform, to the application, to all the tickets that come in, you’re managing those as a POD, and creating a bunch of automation, so that you can quickly react to the business demand.

Kaushik De (15:41):

So, if today business says I want to implement a new pricing engine, a promotion, a supply-chain feature, or a customer experience, I don’t have to figure out with my AM team, what are all bug fixes I need to do. That same team is going to enhance that, make sure all the bugs are current, and put into production. So agility becomes a new ADM model in this.

Shade Vaughn (16:01):

So, Ryan, how should clients be thinking about taking further advantage of automation?

Ryan Murphy (16:08):

Yeah, so the first step of the cloud journey was very much infrastructure focused. Organizations were moving to the cloud to reduce CapEx challenges, and most of the automation was around the infrastructure aspect. Basic things like patching, backup, monitoring, things of that nature. But as organizations move to cloud-first strategies, and their cloud adoption grows, and they start moving to things like outcome-based models like Kaushik’s describing and agile methodologies, they look to modernize those applications and embrace cloud-native technologies for agility and scalability in their new applications.

Ryan Murphy (16:49):

So, as they move to agile methodologies and start leveraging DevOps tooling, it’s led to a convergence in the development and operation teams, as build and release management have become automated through infrastructure as code, things like Terraform and Ansible and CI/CD pipeline tool chains. What we’re seeing now is that, that next step, what no Ops is starting to become a reality.

Ryan Murphy (17:15):

The keeping the lights on that Kaushik refers to is starting to be more and more automated with less need for manual processes and people, and being conducted through tooling, and we’re seeing intelligent monitoring solutions that heavily leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to further automate and drive down incidents and the need for operational support through predictive analytics and self-healing.

Ryan Murphy (17:40):

These attributes are representative in all the major APM-type partners and tools that are out there today. So, folks are starting to leverage that and further reduce their need for cost and labor around the operation side.

Shade Vaughn (17:59):

Okay. Kaushik, what about customer experience? How are we seeing that shift? And clearly, in some instances, things have rapidly shifted as a result of COVID-19? What should businesses be thinking about?

Kaushik De (18:15):

Sure. So, I think the big component of this whole customer experience is that, as people are moving more towards online, data is becoming the big new revenue stream. So, if you really look at data, it was always important. Whether you’re doing analytics, whether you’re understanding your customer preferences, especially a lot of the eCommerce companies have been using that to promote promotions and customer loyalties, and all those things. But, now more and more clients are going towards this whole digital online format of doing business. So, whether you’re talking about even other industries,

Kaushik De (18:54):

like if you look at some companies who have gone from being a quick-service restaurant to delivering groceries, if you’re looking at some of the gyms have closed down, so a lot of the home equipment are spinning up in terms of the whole healthcare. How do I get data to do predictive maintenance? To understand how do we use that data for new business models? AI/ML is becoming a key advantage for that. So, if you look at a lot of like … I’ll give an example like my car company. The dealer said that, “Okay, now with COVID, you cannot bring your car over for maintenance but, we can actually have sensors that are already there in the car, we can actually look at what is your state, and we can tell you whether you can defer the yearly service, or is there some critical parts that needs to be changed.”

Kaushik De (19:46):

So, the model is changing where data is becoming a new revenue stream for customer experience, for generating new ideas, and also driving a business. So, I think that would be another key area that we need to focus on, is how do we build those platforms that can collect that data, and then using AI/ML, IoT features, we can actually take business decisions and business drives to get more customer loyalty.

Shade Vaughn (20:12):

Ryan, what are some of the biggest challenges that you’re seeing when embarking on a transformation?

Ryan Murphy (20:17):

Well, anytime an organization goes through a digital transformation or a cloud transformation, they’re going to come up with a bunch of different challenges. Any large program has its trials and tribulations, but I see a lot of the same things recurring over and over again. So, one of it is technology, and its impact on people. Technology is evolving faster now than ever before, making it increasingly difficult for organizations to keep up with the latest trends and also evaluate tools, when they’re looking to go down a transformation and to pick the right partners, the right vendors.

Ryan Murphy (20:54):

I also see that technology puts a strain on the existing workforce. Training and upskilling on the latest technologies, it doesn’t become a one-time thing. I remember back in the early 2000s, when everybody moved from C++ programming to Java and web services, that was a training and a change that lasted for the better part of a decade, and in some situations is still occurring. But now, the training and upskilling is so rapid and the technology is changing so fast that this needs to be a continuous process that’s looked at with a very programmatic approach to how they’re going to consistently train and upskill their people, both to keep up with current technology trends, but to also retain their workforce.

Ryan Murphy (21:39):

I also think that when you implement a transformation strategy that encompasses things like agile methodologies, and some of the new outcome-based models and ways of working that Kaushik refers to, you really have to set a strategy that gets the buy in of the existing employee base. This is one of the biggest areas that inhibits transformation is when there fails to be employee and user adoption. And then lastly, change management. The pace of change and the amount that you’re transforming needs to be directly correlated to the appetite for change and the ability to manage change within your organization.

Ryan Murphy (22:14):

Thus, leaders need to plan accordingly when they put together their transformation agendas. Because many times this is an area where organizations will bite off too much at one time, and it’ll have a negative impact on day-to-day operations, and then adoption fails to continue to increase.

Shade Vaughn (22:31):

Kaushik, sticking with this same question. Obviously, we’re in a situation now where a lot of business leaders are focusing on cost reduction, optimization, creating better efficiencies: what advice would you give to somebody who needs to create a business case, whether it’s to their CEO or maybe a CEO making a case to their board, of investing right now? And I guess there’s a second part to that question, what are we thinking in terms of how we work with our clients? Or how are we evolving our offering, to help address the current environment?

Kaushik De (23:11):

Sure. That’s a good question. So, let me take each of them. So, the first one, and actually we have been interacting with a lot of clients on that area. Because as all of the clients are coming out of COVID, cash is becoming king. So, how do they create a business case around moving to cloud? There are two components to that. One is the immediate cost savings. And the second is how do they funnel that cost savings into becoming business resilient in the long term, to be competitive? So, if we look at how we are working with some of our clients, one thing is, we are looking at, let’s say their application and infrastructure or disposition of today, what they are spending.

Kaushik De (23:50):

And it doesn’t have to be an accurate number. There’s a lot of components to it. But you at least ballpark, as most clients know what they’re spending today on their infrastructure and applications. And then what we are doing or working with them is, if we move these applications to the cloud as is, you get the benefit of the CapEx to OpEx. If we move to a cloud, you have a lot of options with our cloud providers around spot pricing, around reserve pricing, so that you get a lot of benefit of actually just moving workloads to the cloud. That’s one component of it. The second is the whole transformation.

Kaushik De (24:23):

So today, if you have, let’s say X number of people managing those application, and Y number of people trying to do enhancement of those applications, so more of the customer-facing apps which has frequent changes, we can get into this whole new model that I was talking about with agile, DevOps POD with automation, that will bring down significantly your workforce, to manage those application, enhance, but at the same time, you can do more for less. So, you become agile, and that also has an opportunity cost.

Kaushik De (24:52):

So, there is a bottom-line cost of moving to cloud purely from an infrastructure saving, but also a top-line cost of the agility, the services of AI/ML and cloud that you can bring in, which also gives them opportunity cost savings…so, like the example I gave for this carrier, instead of waiting nine months to implement a product, you can do it in let’s say two to three months. And that’s a savings of all of their development costs and maintenance costs for that set of applications.

Kaushik De (25:16):

So, those are the two business cases that we are working with clients hand in hand to put in, because that’s what the CIOs and the CEOs want to hear, right? Immediate cost savings because I want to make sure that I can save costs, and then, how do I make sure those cost savings can be funneled into business resiliency and competitiveness in the market?

Shade Vaughn (25:37):

Great. A couple more questions here before we open it up, and if anybody wants to enter any questions into the chat window, please feel free to do so. Kaushik, can we unpack a little bit the POD model? How does that work exactly, and how does it fit into agile development?

Kaushik De (25:57):

Sure. This is something also that is comparatively new in the market. So, let me take a little bit of a step back to understand how this whole philosophy works. So, everybody has heard about going into agile and even DevOps for that matter. So, what you do basically in agile and DevOps, you’re moving more towards automation, continuous improvement, continuous integration, continuous development of your application stack. And what the POD model has done is, if you think about where the industry is going, they’re becoming more product-centric organizations.

Kaushik De (26:30):

So, instead of taking applications by silos, now every line of business wants to understand how they can be more agile. So, if you’re talking about supply chain, finance, warehouse management, whatever your lines of business are, each of those lines of business wants to basically accelerate their business journey. So, what we do in this POD model is, we decompose the application stack into what are the key lines of business that a company needs to have, to drive that agility that we talked about.

Kaushik De (27:00):

And then which of the upstream/downstream applications will fit into those lines of business? So, once you have that mapping done, then what will happen is you create this POD teams, who are a full-stack developer, you have your back-end developer, you have your VA, your tester, your DevOps automation engineer, along with your Scrum Master. And then the product owner sits on it, who can prioritize what app enhancements, break fixes, customer needs, needs to go into those PODs, so that then quickly for those business lines, you can accelerate.

Kaushik De (27:33):

So, let’s say for example, I’ll give an example of…finance and supply chain might be a big component for all companies. So, from a supply-chain perspective, we create a POD who can quickly react to all of the supply-chain needs that are coming right now, but there is an interaction with the finance because that drives some of the pricing and revenue and logistics part of it. But these PODs are not operating as application stacks, they’re operating with finance domain, logistics domain, and how do we quickly innovate in those areas?

Kaushik De (28:01):

And to just put the icing on the cake, basically what we are seeing new to the COVID situation, it has accelerated the digital journey in the sense that now these PODs have become virtual in nature. So you don’t even have to have a team who needs to sit there physically. The POD can be anywhere, it could be in the US, Canada, India, wherever, in Europe, it doesn’t matter. It’s outcome based. So, a POD has a capacity of how much productivity they have, and over time, they can increase that productivity.

Kaushik De (28:28):

But from a time perspective, they’re just looking at, “I’m going to pay for you this amount of POD, I want this productivity in agility, to make sure all of my business drivers are done.” And that is another component where, coming out of it is long-term resolution, comes into the page. Because you move to the cloud, you’re not dependent on your infrastructure, you go into this POD, where it’s managing your AD and your operations, and these are all virtual and outcome based. So that’s a prime example of where the market is going to go in the next three to five years, where everything will become resilient to let’s say…hopefully nothing will happen, but for the next COVID.

Shade Vaughn (29:05):

Ryan, a question for you, and it’s going back to one of the points you made earlier. What skills are going to be the most critical for the next three to five years as businesses think about upskilling and reskilling their team members?

Ryan Murphy (29:20):

Yeah, so I think you’re going to see folks from the infrastructure side highly embrace automation, and so skilling around platform engineering. Anything that embraces infrastructure as code, things like Terraform and Ansible that move to that space. And then from the software side, the cloud-native development tools, things around containerization, microservices. That’s where you’re going to see your traditional application developer start to build and enhance skill sets in, so that they can create environments that again, highly automated, reduce the total cost of ownership of applications.

Ryan Murphy (29:59):

You’re going to need to have those skills specifically in the different hyperscalers, Kubernetes platforms. So AKS, EKS, you see Google coming out with a hybrid and multi-cloud Kubernetes platform. And even some of your traditional data-center software providers, folks like VMware, those folks are starting to get in and build solutions that leverage cloud-native development environments and hybrid-cloud environments. So, taking your data-center applications and having those applications still running in your data center that maybe you want to keep close to home, built in a cloud-native manner and extendable to public cloud.

Ryan Murphy (30:39):

So, I think that’s where you’re going to see the technology continue to evolve, and where you’re going to see folks starting to build skill sets.

Shade Vaughn (30:47):

Anything you’d add to that, Kaushik?

Kaushik De (30:51):

Yeah, no, I agree and just to add on that, what Ryan is saying, the technology as he’s been alluding to, the technology is becoming a big driver to transformation. So, if you look at the containerization example that Ryan was talking about, if you do a containerization from your on-prem to the cloud, you actually reduce your number of VMs. So, that’s a big cost savings. But also, with that, there is a whole agility around portability and platform independence. So, when you go to the contraction story, you can move platform very easily, and that is also the flexibility that drives a lot of the business challenges we have right now.

Kaushik De (31:27):

So, definitely, what I think we have to map is, how do some of these technology decisions and some of these IT decisions map back to some of the business outcomes and business strategies, more importantly? If you’re going to containerization, is that your end state, or maybe containerization is a landing zone and later you’re going to take those applications and move to a microservices architecture. So, those are some of those discussions that are very important upfront, to understand what is the vision of your three-to-five-year journey, and yes cloud and IT and business will drive it,

Kaushik De (32:00):

but there are certain technological decisions we need to take to make sure that you’re getting the best out of those ROIs.

Shade Vaughn (32:08):

In just a minute, I want to get into any sector-specific examples that you’ve seen generally with cloud. But you mentioned at the top about how restaurants are using APIs to create a much more agile dynamic service offering for their customers. Can you unpack that a bit more? How should we be thinking about APIs?

Kaushik De (32:31):

Yeah, so what I was alluding to last time when I was presenting this slide was, the API’s a new economy. And what I mean by that is, if you look at some of the clients we have been working with, we have built APIs which connect to third-party companies, like for example, a lot of the QSR restaurants using APIs are connected to the delivery services, like the Uber Eats and the Grubhubs of the world. If you look at typically the whole carrier example, the telecom carrier example I gave, if you get a six-month family plan, you get Netflix free.

Kaushik De (33:09):

But how do you connect to Netflix and say, open an account for this customer? That’s an API. Then, if you look at the current problems that customers are very quickly adapting themselves into, you used to be a QSR restaurant, and now you’re going into grocery-delivery service. So, what has happened is there’s a whole plug-and-play and speed that comes into the picture, and the scale. Because as more and more customers are going to the online, there’s two key things that are benefiting with this API model. One is, how do I quickly fit these APIs and get into the new business fleet?

Kaushik De (33:44):

Because for a restaurant to start delivery service, they don’t have months or years to get all these APIs built, customize it, and put into Uber Eats. They want to start tomorrow or maybe today. So, how do we quickly build some of these libraries and assets so that you can plug-and-play? A lot of the companies are asking us for that, “Hey Capgemini, do you have APIs that I can plug-and-play to my Uber Eats?” So that’s one part of it. The second part of it is that, as we are going to APIs, scale is becoming important. The example I was giving is, in one day, they had to go 150,000-plus transactions.

Kaushik De (34:17):

So, you have to make sure that as you build this API economy, we need to look at the architecture and the scalability. How many customers do you think are going to interact with you on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on an hourly basis, right? And make sure that your infrastructure and the tools behind those APIs are catering to that spike. It’s not just …Fourth of July or the Thanksgiving sales anymore you’re talking about. You’re talking about the new normal is, a lot more customers are going to go into using online commerce.

Kaushik De (34:46):

And so, how do you manage that? So for example, if you look at…Peloton, what they’ve done is, they used to have about 500, 700, a thousand people in their classes. Now, because everybody’s working from home, they had a class last time where 55,000 people joined online. How do you manage to scale up for those kinds of customer demand? And you cannot lose this opportunity. And that’s where I think API plays a big component. One is, how do we quickly connect to those third-party systems? And how do you scale up to the online demands that are coming because of the current situation?

Shade Vaughn (35:21):

I noticed you had the Peloton bike behind you. Bit of a commercial for Peloton. So, you guys serve clients across every major industry and sector. What are some of the next-generation solutions that you’re seeing that really get you excited?

Kaushik De (35:42):

So, I think a lot of the industry solutions are taking a big precedence on how you can quickly adapt and manage some of the customer demands, right? So, if you look at right now, as we are going back into the field, look at factories, manufacturers, they want to open their factories, they want to open their warehouses, but they need to still keep those six-feet distances and all of the guidelines that are coming from the regulatory authorities. What is the easy way to do that? So, if you have let’s say, a management productivity offer, where you can track your worker productivity, you can see the geo fencing of where your workers are, you can do contact list, check if somebody has been affected with any COVID situation, who all were intimately in the neighborhood of that worker at that time of day.

Kaushik De (36:36):

Those kinds of things are very good in terms of kick starting some of these go-back-to-work models. So digital worker productivity is one area we’re seeing a lot with all of the manufacturing and physical locations and you start. Then you look at, let’s say, predictive maintenance. A lot of the clients have … and since we talked about Peloton but also, you’re getting a lot of equipment at home, or car service, how do you start getting those IoTs to build in the automotive, in the healthcare, in the whole space of doing these kinds of predictive maintenance, so that you don’t have to go to a shop to fix something.

Kaushik De (37:12):

And the last part from our sector solution is look at healthcare right now. You are not going to the hospitals that much. How do you get into this video conferencing with the doctors, with the physician, to understand and do those regular checkups? So, definitely, building a platform for the healthcare service is a big component. So, I think these sector solutions, are accelerating the business outcome, the business drivers that I’m talking about, a lot of times they’re coming and saying, “These are my real-life problem, and I can start from scratch.”

Kaushik De (37:42):

But if you have a sector solution that addresses this problem, I want to customize it, but quickly put it into the feed.

Shade Vaughn (37:49):

Good. All right, I’m going to ask each of you to share your final thoughts, any key takeaways you want attendees to keep in mind. Before we get into that, if any of you would like to schedule a private office-hours session with Kaushik or Ryan or any of our experts, please email Ruben Garcia. His email address is ruben.a.garcia@capgemini.com, and we’ll be happy to schedule a video conference for you and your team. We’ll take good advantage of the opportunity now, while most people are working from home, and we’ve got a wealth of proprietary solutions and offers in this space that we would be happy to share more information about.

Shade Vaughn (38:32):

So, with that, let’s start with you, Ryan. Any final thoughts or key takeaways you want listeners to keep in mind?

Ryan Murphy (38:39):

Yeah, I just wanted to just go back over some of the things we said about the journey to cloud. It doesn’t always have to be about costs. It can most certainly be about agility. It can be about building new revenue streams. It can be about new models of working that allow you to get products and solutions out to your customers faster. But it can also be about business resilience and continuity. And what we’ve learned over the last, I would say, eight weeks or so, is that, traditionally when we looked at business-continuity planning, we plan for natural disasters, but a lot of organizations were ill prepared for long-term work from home policy.

Ryan Murphy (39:17):

So leverage the cloud. Use that to build out virtualized workforce solutions and collaboration tools, utilize it to move workloads out of your data center and put it into high availability, highly resilient compute and storage models. I’ll give an example of an organization that’s not only survived during the COVID-19 crisis, but it’s thrived – is Netflix. If you’re anything like me, you’re spending probably more time than ever watching Netflix. This is an organization that built their entire model and their entire platform with a cloud-first strategy and public cloud.

Ryan Murphy (39:54):

And not only have they been able to continue to provide service with a work-from-home workforce that’s shut down pretty much the entire State of California, but they’ve been able to handle the increased network bandwidth and scale up applications so that they can continue to provide high-quality service to their customers. So, when you think about cloud, think about it as a lot more than just a cost-saving area. It’s really business agility, scalability, and resiliency.

Shade Vaughn (40:21):

Kaushik, how about on your side?

Kaushik De (40:23):

Sure. So, I think, first of all, echo Ryan’s message. I absolutely agree. I think if you look at that whole roadmap slide that I talked about, I think the key thing that I would leave everyone with is that, take a step back and look where you are in the journey. It’s not all about move everything to the cloud, is not about a move everything to agile, DevOps. It’s not about, “Hey, how do I make sure that everything has to be in a POD model.” There is a journey, there are certain lines of business that need to be a little bit further in the maturity curve than the rest. So definitely, just cloud from a cost savings, no brainer.

Kaushik De (41:01):

But there is a lot more to be discussed. So, look at it where each of your lines of business needs to be, where they need to mature, and create a game plan. The second is, technology plays a big component. We talked about containerization and talked about automation. We need to create a strategy. Let’s not just jump into the bandwagon and say, “Well, cloud is the buzzword. Let’s start off without thinking through the strategy.” And that’s where we can help each other. Let’s take a step back. Let’s see what are the best practices, where it makes sense, where it does not make sense, keep a strategy.

Kaushik De (41:35):

And then the third part is, as we are looking at the short-term and long-term resiliency, it becomes more and more important to understand, how do we work in this new paradigm shift of accelerating your digital? Whether it’s a virtual POD, whether it’s the whole cloud model, whether it’s contactless, how do we bring some of the sector solutions because, once COVID is over, we’re not talking about the next year, the next six months this plan is, we’re talking about the next five years, 10 years, how the paradigm has shaped. How do you get the best value out of this outcome-based model, business KPI to IT KPI?

Kaushik De (42:10):

So, that’s the strategy we need to address to and work towards. So that’s all I would leave back.

Shade Vaughn (42:16):

Great. Well, a big thank you to both of you for taking time today and sharing your thought leadership. We will have a recording of today’s webinar hosted on capgemini.com. If you’d like to share it with any colleagues, friends that might be interested. We also have a couple of webinars taking place, one next week, one the following week. Sunday, same day of the week, same time. Next week, we’ll be talking about cybersecurity, and then following that we’ll be talking about data. So, thank you very much for joining us and we wish everybody a good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Thank you.

Ryan Murphy (42:54):

Thank you.

Kaushik De (42:55):

Thank you.