SPEAKER: Andy, thank you for coming.
We're very excited to have you with us.
Tell us a little bit about how your IT organization is solving
your key business problems.
ANDY ZITNEY: First of all, thanks for allowing McKesson
to be part of Google Next.
We do appreciate it.
For McKesson, Google Cloud's much more than the technology.
For us, it's more about the culture and what
it brings to the table, not only the IT,
but truly the culture of Google to the table.
We're a 180-year-old company.
We've been dealing with suppliers, partners,
customers for 180 years.
It's critical for us to take a look at the emerging
technologies and how we change the way we do business
and what we deliver to the workforce.
It's my job to take a look at the emerging technologies
that we can bring in for the business,
and enable them to deliver at speed.
It's more important now than ever.
And if you take a look at the technology
that Google Cloud brings, it fits that space
and allows us to deliver at speed.
Several years ago, McKesson started
a journey looking at what we should do moving to the cloud.
We partnered with a few people, few other companies,
and had looked at selling our data centers,
getting rid of some of the legacy equipment
and really forcing the move to cloud services to eliminate
a lot of the complexity that an on-prem data center gives you.
Our existing cloud strategy was a lift and shift.
It really wasn't getting the job done for us.
After four years, we looked back.
We didn't make the progress that we really
thought we should of at that point in time.
So we had to look for a new partner.
And once again, that's where Google came in
and Google Cloud.
In the meantime, we were running an analytics projects,
looking at POCs, and those two conversations sort of
came together.
Looking at reinventing the infrastructure, but then,
the Google Analytics platform too.
Google, it became apparent, really understands health care.
They understood our business.
They understood the regulatory and compliance issues
and complications that it brings.
It brings the customer focus to the table,
plus we needed to move faster.
And Google really brought that culture
of moving with speed and engineering mindset
to the table.
SPEAKER: Well, that sounded like a strong signal.
ANDY ZITNEY: Yeah, it was really interesting for us.
Google came to the table and made
us forget everything that we knew-- basically tore
up and blew up all of our processes,
challenged everything that we did,
and brought a software engineering
mindset to the table, and an automation first mindset that
really made us rethink.
Google has been around for a long period of time, now.
It's not a startup anymore, but they still
have that move-at-speed and move-with-agility mindset.
And that really made us start to think
we can do different things.
The work approach that Google brought
was really a shift in our culture.
Google Cloud became a natural contender for our major shift
in transformation projects.
They competed well by showing up much differently
than the others.
And it really comes back to that culture and mindset
of moving with speed and enabling the business
through the technology.
To be honest with you, at the beginning,
I think my team was taken back by Google's approach
because it wasn't just the lift and shift.
The team seemed a little bit frustrated
from a partner coming to the table and telling us
we needed to significantly change
the way we were delivering and think differently.
The leadership viewed that as an opportunity
to change things significantly much faster
than we had in the past.
We looked at it as, maybe we should be stepping back,
thinking more like a software company--
a software engineering company-- as Google is.
It's not what we were doing at the current point in time.
Our incumbents were telling us lift
and shift was the way to go, make it
a cost-saving initiative.
That's not the case, right?
Google said, reinvent yourself, make yourself better.
We sent the engineer teams back out.
We met with our peers.
We met with Google engineers.
And it became very clear Google was winning
a lot in this space, not just small accounts,
but large enterprise accounts.
Pretty quickly, the resistors that were in the teams
sort of gave in, saw what we could do for the company,
and really how much IT could shift
from being a back office function to a differentiator
for the business.
My director of strategy, Trevor, always says,
we want to shift IT from being the people that just maintain
technology to being people and a team that
is driving differentiation to the business
and enabling them to deliver product at speed.
That means the move to the cloud for us
and a cloud architecture needs to be put in place so that we
can deploy features faster, continuous deployment,
continuous testing, and deliver and fix
security across the board in a seamless manner,
enabling that speed once again.
This moves us from below the line,
low value added services in IT to above that line
and delivering value to our business,
and not just business as usual.
SPEAKER: That's a great outcome.
Thank you so much for your partnership
and thank you for coming to Google Next.
ANDY ZITNEY: Appreciate it.
Thanks for having us.
SPEAKER: Thank you, Andy.