(upbeat electronic music)
>> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage
of AWS Summit New York 2022.
I'm Dave Nicholson,
and I am thrilled to be joined by Ramkumar Pandurangan.
He is Practice Leader of the Cloud Advisory
and Consulting Organization at Kyndryl.
Ram, welcome.
>> Thanks for having me, David,
it's a pleasure.
>> First time on theCUBE I believe.
>> Ah, yes it is,
so a little excited, and anxious as well,
but it's great to be here.
>> Fantastic.
Well, when we're done,
you'll be a CUBE alumni,
which is actually a very distinguished badge of honor
to have so.
So, let's get started.
Tell me about Kyndryl.
I'm particularly interested in a bit of the history,
how did Kyndryl come about?
>> Yeah, so --
>> And what do you do now?
>> I'm sorry.
Before we talk about who we are and what we do,
let me talk about Kyndryl's, philosophy, right?
Basically so, people don't buy the cloud,
people buy outcomes,
and with this explosive growth in the market,
as well as the complexity
in which the technology has evolved,
it's very challenging for everybody
to find the right partner,
as well as who to go to deliver it for them.
And we do understand that technology
is supposed to help drive your business capabilities,
but not hinder.
So, Kyndryl's primary philosophy
is to how we can help enable our clients
get the business capabilities using technology.
So, having said that,
we are a spinoff from IBM in 2021,
and we have a strong base of 90,000 skilled professionals
across a hundred countries.
And, you know,
we have almost 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies,
and we almost cater half of the Fortune 500 companies,
just to give you a background.
And we have people across applications, data, AI,
you know, network, edge,
security and resiliency across the globe,
but of course, cloud.
>> So, do you work with partners from a cloud perspective?
What does that look like?
>> We have a whole broad ecosystem of partners,
and, you know,
anywhere from all the hyper scalers,
to all the large product companies.
And we understand that with a combined force
of our years of experience
helping our clients to be successful,
partnering with our partners
to help drive their capabilities.
And you know, let's talk about AWS.
Everybody knows that AWS has been a pioneer
in the public cloud,
coming up with a whole catalog of services,
which is there, available for anybody.
And I would like to call them as construction materials.
Right?
So, you could take these services, assemble them,
and it could be a simple house,
or it could be as big as a very complex model,
kind of an environment.
So, this is where we partner with AWS
and bring our years of experience
and help our clients go through the journey
and successfully deliver
in whatever complexity that they have,
their existing environments.
So, just an example of how we partner with our partners.
>> Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
In fact, I heard someone once describe AWS
as being like Home Depot,
in the sense that they offer all of the bits and bytes.
Of course, the AWS folks were like,
"What? No, we're nothing like Home Depot!"
It's like, well,
you kind of are. (laughs)
Because it really is important
for an organization like Kyndryl to be there,
to bridge the divide between the tools and the outcomes,
as you mentioned.
Well, what are some of the customers,
or kinds of customers that you work with in this arena?
>> Yeah.
So, just to double click on what I said
about the 75 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies,
we currently manage the top five ad lanes
of all ad lanes,
we probably manage four of the five largest retailers,
and 49% of the mobile connections
are supported for the customers,
and 61%, or roughly around 60%
of the top 50 banks assets are managed by our service.
So, we have a huge portfolio
across the financial services, public sector,
you know, communications, and distribution market
across the globe.
>> So is it fair to say that each of these customers
is somewhere along the digital transformation timeline?
Are they all thinking in terms of transforming digitally,
what that means?
Whether it's application modernization,
of course, movement to cloud is part of that,
does that sound like the profile of a lot of your customers?
>> Exactly.
So, each of them are in various,
what I call in the paradigm of
everybody are trying to modernize, right?
Modernization is the way to go.
Even though in the last three years
we saw that the physical slowdown of the world,
like digital transformation took an explosive growth,
so everybody realized that not doing the business
in a traditional way
is going to get to where they want to go.
And traditionally, people are cutting costs,
or trying to trim down,
and trying to see how they can, you know,
do incremental modernization.
And then they realize,
especially in the last three years,
that they need to holistically look
at how they need to be modernizing it.
Right?
And that is where either
it's a datacenter-driven modernization,
or it's an application-centric modernization,
which is moving the transformation journey.
Or in general,
people are holistically looking at how they can improve
their overall presence in the digital world.
>> So, do you think that the pandemic accelerated that?
>> Absolutely.
I would say that everybody started realizing how critical,
and the businesses who were already a leg up in that world
were quickly able to grab that opportunity,
and they were able to run with that,
and everybody are trying to catch up on that journey.
And, you know, a lot of people who started that journey
have realized that if they do not have a proper strategy
to start off with,
they get stuck somewhere.
And that is where we can go and help them,
wherever they are.
>> Talk to me about some of the challenges
that you see out in the field
working with the actual organizations
that are seeking to transform,
to go through this digital transformation.
What are some of the things that might surprise someone
looking in from the outside?
>> Again, if you go back to the basics, right,
in the digital transformation world,
it's not just the technology which is driving everything.
People who have not clearly mapped their business objectives
to the technology drivers, or the imperatives,
are the ones which are, you know,
feeling the pinch,
that they have some technology driven transformation,
but once it is done,
they don't see that it's translating back
to a business objective which they are trying to accomplish.
That's one of the larger things which I see.
So, we are trying to go back
and help clients to bridge that gap,
to make sure that, first, their strategy is in place,
and the strategy is holistically looked at.
That's one part of it.
The second, larger challenge,
which I'm seeing a lot of people is,
they were able to quickly, you know,
grapple around the technology explosion
and able to start the journey,
but the process and the people
associated the transformation regarding those two
are a lot more associated with the culture
and everything else.
So, it's a combination of technical resources,
with not able to quickly adapt the operating model,
which is the newer operating model
required for the digital transformation,
are the challenge which is an ongoing one.
And none of this is news to anybody,
but, practically, when I walk into a company,
those are the areas which I continue to see
where people are struggling.
>> So, Kyndryl isn't solely involved
with the virtual movement of workloads
from one place to another,
you actually work with customers
to make those kinds of organizational changes
and operational environment changes
that need to take place.
Is that right?
>> Absolutely.
So, as I told you,
we have a whole suite of clients
whom we have been supporting for decades.
So, we have one set of those clients
who have trusted us for years.
And then we have another set of clients
who we are providing some kind of services,
and now we have newer clients.
So between all of them,
they're starting to realize
that we have the end-to-end capabilities.
The differentiator is,
we can start from building a business case for somebody,
and then strategizing it, creating a roadmap,
and then actually doing the design,
implement it, and help them to migrate it.
And once the migration is done,
continue to help optimizing it,
and then not only stopping there,
but the key thing where everybody have,
you know, fallen behind,
is how do you operate, manage it
once you start migrating it.
So, this is where Kyndryl is sitting in a very sweet spot,
because we already are managing most of our clients,
or we have the client base,
they're operating theirs either holistically,
or some portions of it,
and now when they're trying to go on their journey
we are very well suited
because we already understand their environment.
And while they are transforming into the cloud space,
we are also able to bridge that gap
by managing their existing
and to manage to the cloud.
So, we can, end-to-end.
>> And yeah, talking about true end-to-end, you know,
we're talking to you from AWS Summit New York 2022,
of course, so the focus is AWS,
but Kyndryl works with other hyperscale cloud partners
as well.
So I mean, you are primarily an advocate for the customer.
Is that a fair?
That's what they call in the business
"a softball question."
(Ramkumar and David laughing)
Because if you answer,
"no, we're not primarily in involved in the business
of advocating for our customers,"
we should just stop this conversation right now.
But seriously, the point is,
you are truly an objective consultant in this game.
>> Absolutely.
Thank you for asking that,
(David laughing)
because we are a vendor neutral service provider.
So we go, and when we walk into the client,
we like to hear from the client what their challenges are.
Right?
Where are they trying to be?
If they already started the journey, where they are.
They could be anywhere from an on-premises
trying to just modernize some aspects of their, you know,
operational, or from the application side,
or they could be anywhere in the hybrid cloud.
And most of them are hybrid multicloud.
So, it's not just AWS,
it could be Azure, GCP, OCI,
Oracle, or IBM cloud.
It doesn't matter.
We go and meet the client where they are.
If they ask us for a point of view,
we will provide them
once we understand what their objectives,
and their technology workloads they are having,
and how they want to do it
based on that we can.
But if they already started journey,
we are more than happy to partner with them
on any of the cloud journeys.
And most of them are in the hybrid multi-cloud as I said,
so we are very well suited to help them.
And as I said,
we are not completely an agnostic service provider.
>> Well, if I am an existing business
that's seeking to go through digital transformation,
I would recognize that there is a lot of power
in this idea that you have a history in on-premises IT,
going back to, you know,
the sort of DNA for IBM global services.
And the reason why I think that's important is because
anyone can stand up a net new service with nothing existing,
in one of the hyperscale clouds.
It's a whole different proposition
when you have decades of legacy infrastructure and processes
that need to be massaged and moved over.
I wonder,
does Kyndryl get a lot of mileage out of that
in terms of being able to say,
"Hey, we understand your existing environment
because we've been working in this world for decades."
Or is the message more,
"Hey, we are super cool cloud kids too?"
How do you come down on that?
Maybe that's a little bit of inside info.
(Ramkumar laughing)
>> No, the reality on the ground basically, David,
is not everybody can move all their workloads to cloud,
and not all workloads are suited to go to cloud as well.
So, it is us who need to make sure
that we can help our clients make the right choices
by doing a rationalization of their workloads,
and make sure that we understand their business,
their end clients whom they're servicing,
their capabilities,
and then based on that, we can help them to do both, right?
Whether it's just on-premises modernization,
or help them to take them in a hybrid cloud mode.
So the answer is both, right?
Even though we currently manage their environment,
doesn't mean that we need to continue to support,
but, you know, we are moving up the stack to help them,
to support them in their hybrid cloud journey as well.
And not only that,
this gives us a capability or an ability to help them
in a much more holistic way
by looking at their full ops, right?
That's a huge area
where people are trying to go into the cloud,
or they already started to go into the cloud,
but how do they optimize their environment?
Right?
These are the areas where,
and then if you want to modernize
some of their operating model, right,
how do we deploy the SRE, or the DevSecOps, or the DevOps?
So, we kind of look up all those aspects
as people are trying to move into the cloud aspect
so we can help them both on-premises,
or if they want to modernize much more
we can do it in the hybrid cloud as well.
I don't know whether that fully answered your question.
>> Absolutely, it does.
In fact, Ram, what you and Kyndryl are doing
is what we at theCUBE refer to as
having adult conversations about cloud
with the clients that you serve.
With that,
looks like we are at the end of our time together.
I really appreciate the chance
to hear about what you're doing,
and to hear all about Kyndryl.
From me, Dave Nicholson, at theCUBE,
I'd like to say, stay tuned for a continuing coverage
of AWS Summit New York 2022,
and always stay tuned to theCUBE.
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