STEVE D'AURORA: Hello, and welcome
to "The Three P's of a Fast, Successful Migration
and how TELUS International Put Them into Practice."
My name is Steve D'Aurora.
I'm the Solution Manager for Application Migration on Google
Cloud, and I'm joined today by Michael Ringman,
the CIO of TELUS International.
MICHAEL RINGMAN: Hey, everybody.
STEVE D'AURORA: So what we're seeing in 2021
is that companies will continue to focus heavily on migration--
59%, in fact.
And they call it a major focus for 2021,
and maybe you're one of those companies.
OK, but despite that focus, only half
of everyone's workloads and data are in the Cloud.
That means the other half is still on-prem.
Literally millions of VMs and containers and servers
and hard drives, just hanging out on-prem
despite a significant focus on migration.
Why, and why does this happen?
Well, because migration pathways aren't always
easy to determine.
Yes, if migration was easy, everyone
would have done it by now.
But it's not, and we're here not to lie to you about that,
because it isn't easy.
But it doesn't have to be hard.
With the right structure and help and partnerships,
you can cross this chasm easier than you might think.
So where do you begin?
As I said up front, there's no one size
fits all answer for migration.
I wish there was, but there isn't.
Every company is different, and every migration
will be its own special snowflake.
The trick, believe it or not, is to ask the right questions
and knowing what questions to ask
and how those answers should shape your migration plan.
That's the secret.
Let's explore that by talking about
three fundamental questions you need to ask first.
So why do you want to migrate in the first place?
It could be because of business drivers,
technical or situational drivers,
or customer-related drivers.
And then for planning, let's dig in a little bit.
Before you really start crafting your migration plan,
you've got to build your business plan.
This is a culmination of some of the things
we talked about in part 1.
What is driving you to the Cloud?
Is it leaving a data center?
Is it an executive mandate?
Is it for performance reasons?
What goals are you hoping to achieve?
is it to be Cloud native, improve customer experience,
or to have faster release cycles?
What constraints are you working against?
Small IT staff, tight budgets--
do you have a low risk tolerance?
The answer to those questions will
help shape your business plan.
Once you've got the business plan,
then the migration plan, in many ways, almost writes itself.
With Google Cloud and our partners,
we'll extrapolate the migration plan and your workloads
based on that business plan.
And this surprisingly is crucial,
making sure you go in this order.
Trying to reverse engineer the business plan out
of the migration plan can often cause issues down the line--
things like unclear goals, unexpected constraints,
and so on.
So we've talked a lot about building your business plan
and migration plan.
These things are important.
But here is the thing about planning--
it's actually a balancing act and more is not always better.
I've seen many customers get so bogged down
in planning that they end up going nowhere for 12 months.
Planning is absolutely worth its weight in gold,
but you have to avoid analysis paralysis.
At some point you have to ask yourself
if you have a good plan, and if you do,
take action, then iterate as you go.
There is no perfect migration plan.
And if that's your bar, you'll never hit it.
And your competitors are likely to take
advantage of your delays, so time is really of the essence
here.
So let's take a minute to look at prioritization.
We've talked about planning before,
and a good migration plan is going to have four phases.
First, your assessment phase where
you work to understand exactly what you have.
Second, based on that assessment,
you start to plan what you should move and how.
Third, you start to execute the migration itself,
and fourth, you fine tune and optimize what you've migrated.
Now we've represented this migration plan
as a single circle, but in reality it's
a bit more recursive in that you have your high-level migration
plan, but then you also have groups
of apps called migration waves that
have their own specific plan as well.
And each subsequent plan, in theory,
is adopting the lessons from previous migration waves.
It's all about building that migration muscle memory.
This is also where prioritization comes into play
because it means you're picking out what workloads
or applications get moved when.
So let's talk more about that.
How do you get to a point of good prioritization?
First, for phase one, you've got to understand what you have
because you can't prioritize what you don't know.
So what's the answer?
Doing a comprehensive discovery and assessment
of your IT landscape.
And believe me, every customer that
does an assessment ends up finding tons of resources
they didn't even know existed.
And it's better to bubble those surprises up now
versus during the migration itself.
The good news?
Well, there are many amazing tools that can do this for you.
Second, Google Cloud actually offers a free discovery
and assessment.
So if you're interested in understanding
exactly what you've got, we'll do that for you
at no cost and no obligation.
But it's a great way to understand what you have
and what your Cloud costs might look like.
And once you're done, you'll have a nice inventory
of what you've got in addition to a way
to model the transition to the Cloud
and what it might look like with varying migration
options and budgeting.
Now once you've got that inventory,
it's time to prioritize.
To that end, application sorting is going to be your best friend
and it works like this.
You take a list of questions that may or may not
be important to you based on the business plan you've laid out,
then you go down your list of applications
and answer them honestly.
Based on your goals and your answers,
you'll be able to see some patterns which
will help reveal what your migration waves might look like
and who should go first.
Basically, the apps that hit more of these questions
in the affirmative are the strongest candidates
to move first.
Given those questions that were the most important
to my organization, I can create buckets for applications
based on how easy or difficult they might be to migrate.
In this case, three buckets--
easy, medium, and complex.
From the slide before you'll recall my organization's
top migration concerns were business criticality,
connectedness, and cutover downtime.
Based on that, we can create a table
with our priorities on top and then difficulty for each row.
Now let's segue into seeing how one of our customers
put these three P's into practice
for their own migration.
And I'm happy to introduce Michael Ringman,
CIO of TELUS International.
MICHAEL RINGMAN: Thanks, Steve.
My pleasure to be here today.
My name is Michael Ringman, and I am
the CIO at TELUS International.
At TELUS International we design,
build, and deliver digital IT and customer experience
solutions for leading global brands.
Today I will share how we applied
the three P's to the migration of Verint, a customer
engagement application to GCP.
So let's dive right in.
If you've ever heard, "this call may
be recorded for quality assurance purposes,"
then you're at least somewhat familiar
with part of the customer engagement services
that Verint provides.
TELUS International has developed
a long-term reciprocal partner with Verint as both a client
and as a partner over the past 15 years.
As a client, we use Verint's Voice of the Customer
and workforce optimization technologies
to drive efficiencies in our daily operations.
Their Voice of the Customer application
helps us with call and screen recording
to monitor customer interactions,
and their Workforce Management solutions
track peaks and valleys and call volumes
in order to determine-- to help us optimize our scheduling
and minimize customer wait times.
As one can imagine, the call and screen recordings
from each customer interaction result
in large file sizes which can be difficult to manage
in an on-premise environment.
At TELUS International, we've seen a great success
with our own applications operating on the GCP,
especially in terms of accessibility, storage,
scalability, and flexibility.
In fact, our Cloud-based infrastructure
provided us with the agility to quickly pivot
to meet the changing client demands
and absorb shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
We decided that it was time to migrate
one of our most-used third party applications to the Cloud,
sparking the migration of Verint to the GCP
to further optimize performance.
Now keep in mind, at the time Verint was not supporting
a Cloud deployment on GCP.
At best, they had certified a small instance
on a competing Cloud instance.
My engineers were interested in migrating the application
to the Cloud, but only if Verint would support the application
once it was moved there.
Why did we migrate to GCP?
Because it makes it easier for TELUS International to store
the files from call recordings due to the straightforward
nature of provisioning Cloud Storage.
It also offers greater efficiencies
in speed and data management and cost effectiveness.
In addition to these critical reasons,
we knew that migrating Verint to GCP
would also greatly improve the team member experience
by quickly providing them with access to relevant interaction
data regardless of channel.
And as a result, team members were
able to quickly solve customer inquiries resulting
in faster resolution times.
So once we decided to proceed with the migration,
the first step entailed supporting Verint's GCP
certification with a proof of concept,
as well as validation followed by the necessary testing.
And this needed to be completed in a four to six week window.
Next we considered our then on-premise footprint
and determined what hardware we may need over the next 12
months.
With our plan and requirements in place
and Verint certified on GCP, we were
able to stand up the new environment in roughly one
week.
The process to stand up the new infrastructure
would have taken us three to six months
in an on-premise environment, which
we had done the previous year.
However, including the GCP certification process,
it took us only a matter of weeks
and we were able to very quickly migrate 30,000 of our Verint
users from on-premise to the Cloud
over the course of a weekend with very limited service
disruptions.
As I mentioned before, TELUS International
has had a great success story with many
of our own applications running on GCP.
Verint, however, was the first third-party application
that we migrated to GCP.
So this is a big deal for TELUS International,
as typically applications can only
migrate if the vendor has already
vetted out the solution.
But we were able to work closely with Verint
and bring this migration to life.
With over 30,000 Verint users, migrating the application
to GCP has been greatly beneficial to the productivity
of our team members and the organization.
Having the data from Verint's application in the Google Cloud
makes it so much more accessible and opens up new possibilities,
such as data analytics and integration
with our other customer experience services
which are also on the Google Cloud.
We have found that once programs and their data
are in the Cloud, it's a lot easier for us
to enable our business.
First of all, having Verint enabled on the GCP
has enabled our team members to work
faster and with greater efficiency
than when they were on the on-premise app.
Now team members are more able to quickly access
customer information, resulting in lower handle
times and faster resolutions.
Team members are also now able to generate reports
on customer interactions in minutes, as opposed
to the hours it would take before.
Secondly, due to significant reduction in lead time
that were required to install new servers
and set up configurations, we were
able to significantly reduce the time
it takes to get our clients up and running.
This process used to take us three to four times longer
than when we were on-premise with Verint.
This serves as a significant advantage
to our prospective clients and has
been a market differentiator for TELUS International
and an integral part of our go-to-market strategy.
Further, the flexibility and scalability of the Cloud
allows us to shift with market trends
so that we are able to quickly scale
in minutes to help with rush launches
or to assist larger workloads.
We can better respond to the end customers for the brands
that we support.
And as an example, in the first half of 2021,
we have recorded already over 34 million calls
and transcribed 3.2 million calls.
Finally, we've been able to significantly cut down
on costs since migrating Verint to the GCP.
On a monthly basis we are seeing roughly $6,000
of monthly savings due to GCP providing
tighter monitoring of our servers and the required
resources.
Annually we are seeing a savings of up to $150,000
by reducing the required space and power that the servers used
to consume.
We've also seen significant one-time savings.
A reduced dependency on servers has
resulted in a roughly $2.8 million cost avoidance for us,
as well as roughly $250,000 annually
on network connectivity and network devices.
So with all of these amazing results, what's next?
At TELUS International, we are known for our courage
to innovate an ability to embrace change in order
to constantly be on the leading edge
for the benefit of out clients and our team members.
Our 10-year-long relationship with Google has been
instrumental in supporting our clients' evolving digital
transformation strategies and digital customer experiences.
Google Cloud technology has been vital in helping
our global team members stand up virtual desktops, which
enabled us to ensure business continuity during the pandemic.
We will continue to find ways to optimize the Verint
platform on the Google Cloud and determine new ways to work
together to continue to be able to pass along
the benefits to our clients and team members around the world.
And due to the success of this migration,
we are already looking at moving additional third-party
applications to the Google Cloud.
Sure excited about what's ahead for TELUS International
with GCP and the Google Cloud team by our side as a trusted
partner.
And I'll turn it back over to you, Steve.
STEVE D'AURORA: Thank you, Michael.
Let's take a minute to recap the three
P's of fast, successful migration.
They're purpose, planning, and prioritization.
The question is, is it really that easy?
I think the moral of this story is that not all applications
are created equal, and so many of them
will require their own migration wave plans.
We keep coming back to our North stars--
understanding your drivers, goals, and constraints, even
for your applications, and then pick the best path for them.
Don't think that you need one migration
strategy for your entire digital transformation.
You can, and almost definitely will, mix and match.
Your migration plan is like your home decor or your clothing--
there are many options and you have
to pick what's best for you, or in this case,
your organization.
Keep your North stars in mind.
Always keep your business plan and Cloud rationale handy.
Start with the easy stuff first, and never be afraid to shift
or evolve your strategy if you're hitting issues.
But there is another really important way
you can help ensure your success,
and that is to find a great partner--
a partner that's got experience and is
willing to invest in truly helping
you achieve your business goals through migration.
They're are fresh set of eyes that
will help you plan, migrate, optimize,
and modernize further down the road.
No organization should feel like they've got to go it alone,
and help is available through your Cloud provider
and/or experienced partners.
We're all here to help, so don't be shy.
To that end, at Google Cloud we aim
to be a total migration partner, making sure
that we provide the expertise you
need to meet your near- and long-term business goals.
We're here to help, and we'd love
to talk more about your drivers, goals, and constraints.
If you want to learn more, check out Cloud.Google.Com/Migrate.
And you can also sign up for that free discovery
and assessment I mentioned earlier
by clicking the button at the top of the page that says Free
Migration Cost Assessment, or check out
either of these related sessions, INF211 or INF103.
Thank you so much for attending today's session.
It was my pleasure and privilege to talk to you about the three
P's of migration.
I also want to thank Michael for joining us
from TELUS International.