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- Hello and welcome to Conversations With Leaders.
My name is Ishit Vachhrajani.
I'm an enterprise strategist with AWS.
And I'm excited to be joined by Frank Tarsillo
from IHS Markit.
Frank, welcome.
- Thank you. Thank you for having me.
- Frank, could you please introduce yourself
and tell us a little bit about your role at IHS Markit?
- My name is Frank Tarsillo,
I'm chief architect for IHS Markit,
I work in what we call the Office of the CTO.
I'm responsible, generally, for what good looks like
from a architecture perspective in the firm,
but I'm also responsible,
partly responsible for the cloud strategy
that we have in the firm.
Again, mainly focused on the building
of our products and services
as we engineer them into the cloud.
- Fantastic, really excited
to be talking to you today, Frank.
IHS Markit has been going through a large transformation.
Could you tell us a little bit
about what's all the change that is going on?
- Like most companies,
we've had traditional architecture built,
delivering our information products.
Through that time,
there's been advancements in cloud technology
to support really, business velocity,
which is what we want to really focus on into the future.
And we saw teams over that period of time,
over the past five years,
shifting over to cloud technology,
independent of a wider organizational strategy.
And we felt it was creating,
you know, problems within our organization,
as it relates to, again,
running what we have traditionally on premises,
and then moving portions
of what we run on premises into the cloud.
So we had to make a longer term bet on technology
and how we operate that technology,
which triggered that transformation,
although it was happening kind of, again,
in independent pockets.
- Great, so it was already happening bottoms up,
and you realize that, well,
business agility is so critical,
like any other business.
In last two and a half years through this journey,
what are some of the benefits that you've seen?
- Within that progression,
you'll see advancements in technology.
We've adopted a lot of the practices that come with cloud,
that create more efficiency
in how we deliver that traditional product.
In this case, it was a enterprise software product.
We'll run and optimize that,
for that particular domain or industry,
and show an immediate benefit again, to all parties,
both internally in terms of revenue growth,
but also again, the benefit to our customers
'cause they no longer need to manage that software.
So, taking through a microscopic lens,
you're looking at it and saying,
"Well, why did that work?"
And we would go into our executive teams
and explain to them how it worked.
And it was funny when they saw that,
they said, "Keep on going."
That was the response.
And they said, keep on going,
because we wanna see how this evolves.
Now, during that journey,
we saw other splinters in the company.
So, you saw other business units saying,
"Well, there's value in, you know,
"what we're seeing in that particular organization,
"let's do the same."
And that's a positive.
We wanna see the innovation in our firm,
and as a business.
We saw those business units going and deploying,
and managing, and delivering cloud tech products
and using cloud technologies,
but with very little control
and very little organized view
of how we look at it holistically.
And what we get to in that particular,
what I like to say, movie, is simply,
we're kinda creating Swiss cheese.
We're creating Swiss cheese in our existing footprint,
in terms of cost and management.
We're individually up-skilling parts of the organization,
but lack of consistency.
But we need to bring that together somehow.
So, the value, really, was business-led.
So in other words, it wasn't a technology initiative.
It was the business to come around
and understand the value that the technology brings,
and to make a bigger bet to maintain the cost
and the controls that we have to have
as part of a large enterprise firm.
- So Frank, that was a very scrappy start,
but the key like you said,
was to treat that as a business project
and not something that happens in silo in IT.
- Yeah, I think probably a lot of the viewers here,
know about technology-led projects
that are trying to be strategic,
a lot of them fail.
- [Ishit] Right, sure.
- Especially if you are asking for a large batch.
And I think what we see in our world and our leadership,
is an understanding of what technology
can deliver to the business.
And we knew that as technologists,
understanding the dynamics
of what we have today,
what we had, and where we need to go
as a technology organization.
And we took the tact of sitting down
with our executive teams, describing,
again, the journey to that point,
which it was scrappy, as you said,
but it evolved and it was splintering.
And that's the best way to describe it.
And show that there was not just a cost concern,
in terms of how we manage.
There was control concerns.
There was, you know, holistically,
where did we wanna be in the industry?
And do we wanna double down again
to meet our customer demand?
And we saw where the customers were going,
especially with data explosions,
lots of things there to consider
in the industries that we serve.
And I think that the business realized that,
and the commitment came down in terms of, okay,
what is our strategy?
First, the question was, what is our strategy?
And we felt that the focus of,
on the destination, that's easy.
You say you want to be in the cloud.
And it's not just being in the cloud,
you want to be a more agile organization,
You want to see business as value,
in terms of the investments that you put in.
And you wanna create velocity,
obviously from the technology that provides that velocity,
or underpins that velocity.
And I think what was more important is how do you get there?
So how do you achieve that goal?
And what we worked on extensively,
understanding what our bubble cost really,
which was the cost drivers in terms of,
I think everyone should understand
what bubble cost is by now,
but I'll say it again.
So it's the transition from where you are today,
into the cloud over time.
And the fact that you have to run
in two different locations at a given time.
And you really wanna focus in on that
from a cost perspective.
Very tangible, very visible.
So, we have a view of that,
and we focused in, again,
on that Swiss cheese effect of our data centers.
So identifying data centers as a major cost issue.
At the same time of migrating to the cloud
as an innovation project,
we had to really create a structured program
to actually support that activity.
So in other words, be able to control the cost
through a structured program
that shuts down data centers as a whole,
so that you're not just taking
one or two products out of a data center,
you're taking all the products out of the data center
and shutting the lights off, which is what was key.
- Frank, you talked about a diversity of products,
but you also deal with many different types of customers
with different regulatory compliance and security needs.
How do you account for that?
- Yeah, so as we were migrating to the cloud,
we have various products
that deal with governmental concerns,
data privacy concerns, data sovereignty concerns,
and for specific aspects of a product,
we will actually align that into our cloud strategy
for a regional perspective.
So, we might deploy a specific workload,
say in FedRAMP, in the US is a good example
because we have to meet, again, US obligations.
Or we might put some of the data sets in a Ireland region,
or, again, a region outside of specific purview.
And again, that's important for us
that we have that flexibility
from a data center perspective,
from a location and a data center perspective,
because we have to meet those obligations.
Now, keep in mind,
we go through a lot of due diligence
with our legal teams and our customers,
to make sure everyone understands the transition
of the workload,
and more importantly, where the data lives.
- Gotcha.
You talked about the partnership
and I've heard from your AWS team that you like to say,
"If you see something, say something."
- Yeah.
- What do you mean by that?
Tell us a little bit more about it.
- So, you know, that's what I ask of them.
Our partnership with AWS goes way back.
Again, way back before the large migration project
that we put in place.
And I see AWS as a true partner
where they are allowed,
I'm just gonna use that term "allowed",
to speak to anyone in the technology organization,
work through any projects that our teams are focused on,
and then obviously help them,
but not just help them,
when they see that their team
might be going down the wrong direction,
for whatever reason.
And there's no malintent here,
there's no, you know, people make mistakes all the time.
But when they see something not aligned
with our technical strategy,
I just mentioned the guard rails that I,
earlier on in the conversation,
not aligned to company policy,
and they very much understand,
they as teams, understand our policies and our direction.
They have the ability to escalate that accordingly,
not only to the development team that they're working with,
but also all the way up to the senior leadership.
So, I sit down with our account team regularly
to go over, how's it going?
What are you seeing?
How can I help?
And when they inform me of things,
it's more proactive, right?
Because then I have the ability
to create the positive change necessary
to get over those obstacles.
Instead of, you can imagine,
waiting to the end of a project.
Two, three months in
and finding out that something was done improperly.
So for us, it's a good relationship like that.
No one looks at AWS in the organization as a negative thing.
They think of AWS,
the team that operates within IHS Markit,
as a support function for them.
- I wanna switch gears a little bit
and ask you about what's ahead?
You've talked about being serverless first.
What do you mean by that?
What are you excited about coming down the pipe?
- Yeah, so, well, I'm gonna mix it a little bit.
So I'm gonna say,
we are going through more of a lifting re-hosting activity,
and I think everyone knows the formula here.
So as you go through a lifting and re-hosting,
keeping some of the traditional architecture,
optimizing that architecture, as you moving into the cloud.
It helps, but it's still gonna be a higher cost
and higher run rate as you go.
So, we see teams re-hosting,
but having a plan for the future,
off the back of that re-hosting
to go to a more serverless type of approach,
which was the original red line
that we drew in the organization before the migration.
Which means you're leveraging AWS resources and services,
more SAS Base, PAS Base capabilities.
You're going into a less compute, focused,
type of architecture.
Things like Lambda, which is a great example.
Containerization of your environments.
Leveraging, again, going back to services,
whether it's streaming through Kinesis or Redshift
or other technologies, invest in that.
Because what you'll see is a reduction in cost over time.
Now, I wanna be clear 'cause most people say,
"Moving to cloud is not a cost reduction."
It's not because you're gonna be growing
along that same line.
So you're gonna see consistent growth,
but you're gonna manage that growth more effective,
if you invest more into your serverless technology.
The other thing I would say is immutable pipelines.
And this is very, very important for us.
A lot of organizations, just lift and shift.
They take with them all of their bad practices,
in terms of delivery,
getting their solutions updated on a regular basis,
their release management side of it.
We're creating large investment,
in automation on the development processes side.
So when I get excited about serverlesses,
it's not just leveraging the services
to create a more streamlined architecture for cloud,
but it's the development processes equally transforming.
Because we're forcing a very specific type of pattern
to create more releases for a particular product.
So, I say serverless on that,
but automating through serverless technology,
on the development engineering side is equally important,
because it creates two sides of the coin.
It's gonna create the velocity in the development process,
while in serverless, we're not, you know,
it's no infrastructure's code,
and through those capabilities that you provide,
lowering cost and creating more efficiencies.
If you create both, you'll create more business value.
- Sure, and that's the goal,
it's to take out more and more undifferentiated work,
both from the technology and infrastructure,
but also from the process and the development life cycle.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today.
Thank you for your time.
And I look forward to seeing
what comes up next for you and IHS Markit.
- Great, thank you.
Nice to be here.
Thank you for having me.
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