>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube,
covering AWS Reinvent 2017, presented
by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners.
(ambient music)
>> We're back live here on the Cube,
along with Stu Miniman, I am John Walls and we're live here
right smack dab in the middle of the show floor.
A giant show floor here at the Sands Expo
between the Palazzo and the Venetian, Las Vegas.
Reinvent AWS putting on a four day extravaganza.
Keynotes this morning, they were jammed pack.
The show floor continues to be just all a buzz
with a lot of positive vibe and activity
and here to talk about not only what's happening here
but what's happening at CA Technologies is Sushil Kumar,
who's the SVP of Product Management there, or an SVP.
Sushil, nice to have you with us.
Thanks for being here on the Cube.
>> Thank you it is my pleasure, thanks for having me here.
>> Let's talk about first off your idea
about what's going on here,
as far as the show goes, you said
this particular event has a different feel to you
than others you been at in the past.
How so?
>> Absolutely, you know, and that starts
with the name itself, right?
It's called Reinvent and what is very different
about this show is this is all about creation,
so all the conversation is about
how can we use the latest and greatest technologies
to build something new, right?
And kudos to Amazon for creating that environment
where they position themself as enabler
rather than creators and the power
of creation lies in masses, right,
so it's amazing to see the energy and the creativity
and truly it's infectious, right, so.
>> So Sushil, it's interesting, I've seen
a lot of AWS ads at airports.
They're targeting, you know, their audience are builders
and that's why I think exactly what you're saying.
Want to hear what you're hearing from customers
because you know, for some customers that's super exciting.
You talk about the developer community.
For some customers it's like wait,
hold on, are they talking to me?
Are they leaving me behind?
I'm curious what you're hearing from the customer.
>> You know that's a great question
because look, we have been a 40 year old company
and the only way you survive
for so long is you constantly adapt yourself
to the changing needs that customers have.
And one of the biggest challenges that customers have today
is around reinvention, right?
Which is in, whether you call it digital transformation,
whether you call it software-defined business,
businesses across all industries and segments,
they're all trying to reinvent and become as creative as,
you know, some of the start-ups from Silicon Valley.
And one of the biggest challenges that they are facing is
how to go about that process, right?
And we know a thing or two about that
because we ourself have been a 40 year old company.
So, our motto as a company is around helping our customers
become modern software factories,
which is all about how to become an agile and iterative,
and essentially be obsessively focused
around customer experience, because that's one thing,
you know, people may have a lot of definitions
of digital transformation, but one thing
that separates Amazon and Netflix of the world
is obsession on customer experience.
And, we are playing a part, right?
The whole model of software factory is
about making these businesses much more customer-centric.
And the part of business that I come from
is all about how can we provide
other customers the to ability to
measure customer experience, use that information
to improve their product and always constantly iterate
so that they meet or exceed customer experience.
So one of the products that we have is called
Digital Experience Insights, right.
It's a product that essentially provides a holistic overview
of what I call the entire digital delivery chain,
which starts all the way with the user's device,
which could be a mobile device, could be web,
all the way to the layers of business transactions,
and then the maze of entrusted care,
which may involve cloud, maybe more than one cloud,
maybe even in some cases even mainframes,
so that's another thing that we see
customers struggling with because many times,
as geeks, we tend to paint the picture black and white.
Either you are modern or you are legacy.
A lot of customers fall somewhere in the middle.
And, you know, they are looking up to us
to help successfully navigate that transformation.
And that's exactly what we are focused on.
That's why Amazon has been such a great partner.
>> I want to, you've used the term reinvent a bunch,
and when I think about the analytics space,
we've gone through a bunch of waves here.
Big data, one, lot of discussion,
some mixed results from customers.
Real renaissance in what's happening
really in the analytics space.
Amazon, of course, participating in that.
What are you seeing, what's new at CA
in working with AWS on that?
>> You know, again, if you look
at the problem that I described,
you know, the problem statement is very simple.
We all want to understand customer experience.
We all want to put ourself in the shoes that customers have.
We live in a world where the customer
attention span is three seconds.
If within three seconds, your page doesn't load,
or something that they expect doesn't happen,
you have lost that customer forever.
But in order to solve that simple problem,
which is to be proactive and, you know,
and have empathy for customers,
the challenge is that you need so much of data, right?
You need data from the customer's handheld devices,
you need data from all the servers, all the applications.
You need log data, you need metric data,
you need event data, and all of the sudden you realize
that there is so much of data that the commercial way
of monitoring, which around dashboard alerting,
doesn't work anymore, right?
What you truly need to do is to take
all of these signals and automatically analyze
to extract insight, that one or two actionable insight
that helps you stay ahead of the curve.
And that's all about analytics.
In fact, I cannot think of a better use case
for analytics than this whole digital experience management,
because it's not that the customers
haven't had these data points.
They have had all the data points,
but mostly they have been siloed,
and like we saw this morning in Andy Jassy's announcement,
the machine learning and AI field is constantly evolving,
but the machines can only do so much
unless you help feed them the data, right?
And that's one of the things that we are trying to do
with our operational intelligence solutions
as well as Digital Experience Insight,
is to bring all the data together,
feed it to the machines, and algorithms,
so that they can make sense out of that,
and extract holistic insight
that helps customers stay ahead of the curve.
I'll give you three examples.
For example, you know, we have a major broadcast partner,
who did a mobile ad during the election time,
and they needed to engage their customers better.
They needed to understand what customers going through,
and through the use of the application experience analytics,
they were able to iterate applications and within
three months their user retention increased three-folds.
There's another customer which is
a major broadcaster based out of Europe.
They use our product to essentially
get the data from the cycling events
to provide their customers
a very unique second screen experience.
And that's I think the exciting part.
As much as we all love our products and tools,
it's all about what unique opportunity
provide to our customers to innovate
and succeed in the marketplace.
>> Now, we've talked about reinvent as a term.
It's necessary, right, but it's scary too.
I mean, if I'm a company and I'm just moving along,
my life's fine, right?
I don't want to have to upset
my applecart if I don't have to.
And yet, when you bring these notions to me
of new capabilities, of putting OI
to practice for me, new analytics,
my eyes start to roll a little bit,
my head starts to spin a little bit.
So what kind of hand holding do you have
to do at the end of the day to show them
that there is a better mousetrap,
there is a better way, and that if you don't change,
your success today is going to be gone tomorrow.
>> And that's a really great question.
I think what we see from all customers,
almost all of them want to change.
But, in oftentimes the magnitude of the exercise
is so big that they're daunted.
They don't even know where to start.
>> John: Like where do I bite first?
>> Yeah, and that's exactly what we're doing
as part of a modern software factory,
because this process involves cultural transformation.
It's just not about tools.
It's just not about technology.
It's about how do you become iterative, right?
Going from this year-long development process
to being able to build something in two weeks, right?
So that's why what we have done is to bring together
a set of solutions that definitely includes our product
but as a company, we have one of the largest agile coaches.
So we essentially meet customers halfway in terms
of handholding them, and doing everything that we can do
to walk the journey with them step by step.
The same thing we do in terms of providing customer
the flexibility on how they want to navigate this journey.
So for example, now we have both SASS
as well as on-prem product.
Some customers are ready to go all into cloud,
other customers need time, and that's why we have adopted
a very practical approach of maintaining a single code base.
You can use our product in SASS,
or we can deliver that product
in a more private single-tenant mode,
or we can give you the same code on-prem.
And the whole goal is to walk the journey with you
at the pace that you are comfortable.
And I think of our partnership with Amazon,
there is also of equally importance
because customers now need to take their technology
from Amazon, products from us, kind of marry it altogether
and the more alliances, and the closer partnership
that industry we can build, like we have with Amazon,
the easier, it becomes an easier task for our customers.
>> That's kind of how you characterize this show too, right?
Collaborative, collegial, enabling.
>> It's very collaborative, very collaborative,
very energetic and very inspiring too.
>> John: Alright, thanks for the time.
>> Thank you so much, thank you.
>> John: Thank you for being with us
and good luck down the road.
Thanks for being here on the Cube.
>> My pleasure being here.
>> We're back with more live coverage here from Reinvent.
We're at AWS in Las Vegas and Stu and I will
be back with more right after this.
(ambient music)