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>> Interviewer: Hello, and welcome
to theCUBE's Continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021.
I'm Dave Nicholson,
and we're running an incredible event this year,
one of the most important technology events.
It's a hybrid event with two live stages,
two sets here in Las Vegas.
Two studios, we've interviewed more than a hundred guests
and two distinguished guests that I have here
from Infosys today have joined us.
Thank you very much, Mr and Anant Adya
who's the executive Vice President of Infosys Cobalt.
And we'll talk about what that is exactly
in a moment along with David Wilson, I'm sorry,
Senior Vice President and head of Global Alliances
in the partner ecosystem for Infosys gentlemen, welcome.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you very much.
So let's cut right to the chase, Cobalt.
And when you tell your family
that you're executive Vice President
of Cobalt, do they just smile and immediately nod,
like they know what it is?
>> Absolutely. (laughs)
>> In fact, in fact, it is so exciting for us,
what we did at Infosys, just to define Cobalt
in one sentence, it is a set of services, solutions,
and products that we are bringing together
to solve, you know, accelerate our customer's journey
or what we call as the customer's digital journey.
So everybody talking about Cloud in a different way
with different narratives,
different value proposition we had in forces.
And by the way, we were the first ones in the world
to combine all of this under one brand called Cobalt.
So that's essentially what Cobalt is.
So anything and everything that we do
in cloud, it's all under this brand called Cobalt
and that's Infosys Cobalt.
>> So does Infosys Cobalt include a combination
of bespoke solutioneering for people
as well as packaged standardized things?
How do you, how do you strike a balance?
Because you can't have a one-size-fits-all,
what does that look like, how do you segregate those things?
>> Yes, great caution.
>> So so essentially what you are done
with a Cobalt is we look at Cobalt in two ways.
One is there are customers
who want solutions to solve technology problems.
It could be getting out of data centers,
it could be migrating workloads to Cloud.
It could be analytics on cloud, ERP on cloud,
that is mainframe modernization and,
you know, getting off mainframes.
And at the same time,
there are industry verticals like financial services,
retail, manufacturing, and of course,
life sciences and many more who want to understand
what are the business solutions and what are the solutions
that we have for solving their business problems.
So essentially Cobalt is a bespoke solutions.
It has products, it has platforms, and we have brought all
of this together and we take it to our customers.
So essentially these are industry blueprints.
These are reference architectures.
So we have 250 industry blueprints
and around 25,000 assets that we can actually take
to our customers to help their digital journey.
>> So David, I imagine that key
to the success of Cobalt is the idea of partnerships.
Talk about the alliances,
that you're involved with specifically the way
that Cobalt interacts with the AWS universe.
>> Absolutely, so the, you know,
as we designed our Cobalt strategy,
the partners were a major component of this.
They contribute to it, they're part of the design.
And ultimately when we go to the clients
with these solutions, these assets, our partners,
components are baked right into the solution.
In the case of AWS,
we've been so successful with it that we recognize
this week as their industry solutions partner of the year.
>> Interviewer: Congratulations.
>> Yeah, so I was joking.
We should bring our trophy and put it in between us.
>> Yeah, You could have, You could have.
>> Yeah I know.
But we, if Infosys is invested heavily in developing
the partner ecosystem, you know, gone are the days
where our clients are putting out
an RFP and purchasing individual piece parts,
and then, you know, searching
at NSI, they're looking for a business outcomes
and Infosys along with our Cobalt strategy
is able to work with partners like AWS
and go there and sell an outcome
and accelerate the whole transformation.
>> Well, you mentioned RFPs.
What is your, what is your go-to market strategy look like
in terms of engaging with those end user clients?
Is it, in partnership with AWS?
Is it led by Infosys
bringing in AWS where appropriate some mix of the two?
What does that look like
in this world of cooperation and cooperation that we're in?
>> So it's actually a mix of two.
So essentially the way we go
to market is there are solutions that Infosys us
built on AWS that we will take to our customers.
There are solutions that you have built,
which are cloud neutral,
and those are some things that we take to the customers.
And the third one, which is very important
is co-creating solutions for our customers along with AWS.
So our go-to-market is a combination
of all of them and that's what makes it exciting for us.
>> So a non is running Cobalt.
You're responsible for alliances.
You guys are probably in contact a lot with one another.
All of these crazy new things are announced at AWS.
I'm sure you get a little bit of a preview of it.
It's not a complete, it's not a complete surprise
when you arrive, but you've got
to be screaming for teams and solutions
to leverage some of the cool stuff within Cobalt.
How does that conversation go?
>> Yeah, so David and I work very closely,
right in fact, the way, the way we do things is
our goal in the market cannot be complete without partners.
So similarly my strategy
and our strategy and Cobalt be completed without David.
So we actually work together to identify.
In fact, we have been visiting a lot of boots.
We got create, we got a lot of great ideas.
We want to see how we can bring them
into the Cobalt Framework
and bundle some of that as part of our solutions.
So we keep looking at those, we'll look at the announcements
that were made and we'll solve, you know,
identify many more sales motions
that we can take to the market.
>> So David talk about some of the things you've seen here
will re-invent this week that are specifically relevant
for Cobalt and Infosys customers.
>> Well some of the most exciting discussions
we've been having is with not only AWS themselves about
the announcements and the way
in which leverage them and go-to-market.
But AWS has built out their own partner ecosystem
that we then interact with.
So we've had some exciting conversations
with AWS's ISV partners, their,
their other solution providers about how we can bring
this together and go-to-market together, you know,
when an example, we had a lot of discussions this week
was about how we're doing
at the mainframe services that were announced and how we can
support them in building out our industry specific assets.
So you know, taking a Kernel of what AWS provides
and then wrapping our secret sauce around it,
in partnership with other companies
and then take into our clients,
you know, that's what where,
the good part is we can quickly go
from a discussion to a go-to-market dialogue
with our direct clients who are also here,
which have been in real-time having those discussions.
>> So Infosys on and has been a trusted advisor
for clients predating the dawn of cloud, if you will.
And I'm sure that
certain slices of your revenue don't want to make
this too uncomfortable and question certain slices
of your revenue are still dependent upon
all of that 80% of IT that's still on prem.
How do you manage that?
You're laser focused on Cobalt you've got alliances.
Everybody's looking towards the Cloud.
How do you balance that
with the very real needs of Infosys as a business?
Aren't you in the same boat
as your customers, in terms of transformation?
>> Oh, I would.
>> Am sorry if I get (indistinct)
(laughs) >> My eyes go back and forth.
(indistinct)
See, I told you it was going to be easy for us
to have a conversation.
Yeah, jump indeed.
>> When you look at the different partners out there,
we have a discussion about being asset heavy, asset light.
Infosys we, we grew up through application management
and now as we're seeing these transformations go forward,
the last thing we want it to be is a server huggers.
We're ready to accelerate these transformations
as fast as possible,
and partners like AWS are recognizing
that a non steam can go in there and be the disruptor
to actually accelerate those transformation.
>> Absolutely, in fact, when we spoke to some
of the AWS executives, we want to be the challenger,
right because we don't carry any baggage.
We clearly believe as Gardner says
that cloud is going to be the foundation
for business innovation, and we want to drive innovation
and transformation for our customers.
So essentially we want to make this relationship
with AWS much bigger and better.
We want to be the partners
with our clients to drive business innovation
with industry segments,
industry clouds, solutions that drive opening new markets,
building better products and solutions,
helping get better customer intimacy
and those kinds of things, and so that's essentially
what our thought process is with what we want to do.
>> It's been mentioned a few times here
that somewhere around 80 to 85%
of IT is spend is still on premises.
It's not in the cloud yet.
So despite how large we all think the AWS Universe
has become so far, we're really
just at the beginning stages.
But what are you seeing
in terms of clients hesitancy towards cloud at this point,
has that changed over the last couple of years?
What are the inhibiting factors that you see?
What are the accelerates that you see
at this stage of the game?
>> In fact, in fact, COVID unfortunately
COVID, while it was all a very bad thing, but it actually
helped accelerate customer's journey to Cloud.
In fact,
we have several customers who used to say that, you know,
everybody has to come to office to work.
Nobody can work remotely
because there are security constraints,
that is there will be impacted the security posture.
But to when we hit March, 2020,
and everybody had to work remote,
it's the same set of customers who decided
to go to cloud and started leveraging the power of cloud.
So I would say COVID in short
has accelerated customers knowledge about cloud.
They are no longer worried about security.
They are no longer worried about latency and bandwidth.
I think I don't see any major hesitancy
at this point of time,
but the trend that we are seeing towards cloud
is cloud is going to be used more for innovation.
And it's not just going to be about,
take my data center and moving to cloud, right?
So it's not going to be just those tactical reasons.
And that's exactly what we did.
We actually came out with a report,
which says, moving from cloud chaos
to cloud clarity, and it talks about all these facets
of what are those trends that customers should look for.
So that's essentially what we use.
>> So I imagine Cobalt,
one of the kind of main ideas behind it
is to remove friction associated with that move to cloud,
to the extent that you can not be reinventing the wheel
every single time you're engaging a customer.
Is that a fair statement?
>> Absolutely, in fact you know, many customers
of ours, in fact, almost all of them are saying,
"we do not want to reinvent the wheel".
So how can you help us?
So what we have done as part of Cobalt,
is to bring these reference architectures, right.
So for example,
if a financial services customer wants to fight fraud,
fraud analytics is the reference architecture that we have.
If the Telco customer wants to implement 5G,
we have a framework and a reference architecture
for OSS BSS on cloud.
If there is licenses customer who wants to basically look
at drug discovery, we have an architecture for that.
So we want to make it more
and more reference architecture based
without reinventing the wheel and bring the best practices
from other customers to drive those scenarios,
so that's essentially what we doing.
>> So Cobalt underway,
you've been recognized for performance to this point.
It's a lot of pressure for 2022.
So what are you going to slap on the desk in 2022
when we get back together?
>> We do plan to at bookends
by this time, next year, to able to bring you.
>> It is perfectly acceptable
by the way, to share both the 2021 and 2022 award
on stage, because we have to make up for 2019.
When we weren't here physically.
>> Yes >> Yep.
>> But to build up forward and what I saying
about the, you know, what's going on in the last 18
to 24 months, you know,
we're seeing clients now that we have one
that came to us with a
114 list of products that they bought from various partners,
either directly through distributors and such and saying,
listen, we no longer want to be in the procurement function.
You know, we want to take these 114 products.
We recognize we're going to get it down
to 30 or 40 of the key ones, obviously a shifting a lot
of that to cloud.
And we were able to leverage Infosys Cobalt to actually
accelerate that and incorporate our partner components
to help that shift, so I think next year,
I think that will be a major theme
that you're seeing clients recognize
that the way in which they procure
and they develop their IT platform will be much different.
And Infosys with the design we put in place
be in a key position to support them with that.
>> Well, we recorded this I'm not sure if you realized
we were actually recording this?
(laughs) >> Yes.
>> So we're going to go, we can go back
and review this tape next year and we'll see.
And I hope to see you then.
Anant, David, thank you so much
for joining us here at theCUBE.
And for theCUBE here in our continuous coverage
at AWS re:Invent 2021 live in Las Vegas.
I'm Dave Nicholson saying,
stay tuned because there's always more on theCUBE.
And I'd like to remind you that we are your leader
in hybrid tech event coverage.
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