Technology Magazine - February 2022

February 2022 | technologymagazine.com

LYFT:

The meaning of Lyft

SUNRISE UPC: More wow together

ALVAREZ & MARSAL: The key to a successful security programme

UST: THE BEST KEPT SECRET IN TECHNOLOGY Disruptive solutions for the world’s best companies, Niranjan Ramsunder and Kuruvilla Mat discuss

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Chief Corporate and Sustainability Officer

Covestro

Tiger Brands Limited

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The Technology Team SENIOR EDITOR

ALEX TUCK EDITOR

PRODUCTION EDITOR

JANET BRICE CREATIVE TEAM

GEORGIA ALLEN DANIELA KIANICKOVÁ

OSCAR HATHAWAY SOPHIE-ANN PINNELL HECTOR PENROSE SAM HUBBARD MIMI GUNN JUSTIN SMITH REBEKAH BIRLESON JORDAN WOOD

PRODUCTION MANAGERS

VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER

CATHERINE GRAY EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

SCOTT BIRCH

PRODUCTION DIRECTORS

PHILLINE VICENTE JANE ARNETA ELLA CHADNEY

KIERAN WAITE SAM KEMP

DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

EVELYN HUANG JACK NICHOLLS MARTA EUGENIO ERNEST DE NEVE THOMAS EASTERFORD DREW HARDMAN

MARKETING MANAGER

SAJANA SAMARASINGHE MARKETING DIRECTOR

ROSS GARRIGAN

MEDIA SALES DIRECTOR

MOTION DESIGNER

TYLER LIVINGSTONE

JOE MARRITT JASON WESTGATE JAMES WHITE

PROJECT DIRECTORS

MANAGING DIRECTOR

KRIS PALMER MIKE SADR BEN MALTBY TOM VENTURO RYAN HALL SUJAN JESURAJA

LEWIS VAUGHAN

CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

STACY NORMAN CEO

GLEN WHITE

FOREWORD

Smells like team spirit

“More than ever, CSR is the mirror of authenticity in terms of brand values”

W

hile 2021 was a record year for VC investment in many of the world’s leading technology markets, another significant investment has branched from the IT environment: people.

Internal cultures at tech companies are under the microscope like never before, because, rather unsurprisingly, happy staff produce better results for both themselves and the company. Many of our contributors this month speak of the importance of their culture and team spirit, which has been reflected in the positive tone in my interviews and the drive of these leaders. This includes initiatives with diversity and inclusion, sustainability and within the community.

More than ever, CSR is the mirror of authenticity in terms of brand values.

Watch out for Total Experience: the disciplines of user experience (UX), customer experience (CX), multi-experience (MX), and employee experience (EX) working in harmony. In terms of digital transformation, this is 2022’s clearest reflection of this trope.

ALEX TUCK TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

alex.tuck@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

technologymagazine.com

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CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 14 Big Picture 16 The Brief 18 Timeline: How Survey Monkey rebranded as Momentive 20 Trailblazer: London Tech Club 24 Five Minutes With: Benedict Ireland

42

Digital Transformation AI in Human Resources

30

UST Global

Delivering innovative digital transformation solutions

52

Sunrise UPC

More Wow together!

102

Enterprise IT

Are you ready for the Total Experience?

76

Cloud & Cyber

Living on a serverless cloud

110

Bell Food Group

Refining the transformation digital strategy

84 Lyft

Lyft, the universe and the internet of everything

122

AI & Data Analytics

Now you see me: AI in Surveillance

Enabling educators.

Empowering students.

Explore how we accelerate student discovery, learning and innovation with our Digital Education 3D Experience.

EXPLORE THE 3D EXPERIENCE

132

Alvarez & Marsal

The key to a successful security programme

148

Vodafone Ziggo

The digital expedition

180 Top 10

Technology Leaders

166

OpenColo

Customer service at the heart of a boutIQue data centre

192

Capgemini

World-leading finserve support through digital transformation

CONTENTS

240 Sify

206

Sify Technologies: Simplifying digital adoption

University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust

Accelerating its digital transformation post COVID

254

Plains All American Pipelines Where Information Services meets Risk

222

270

First steps to an autonomous network

A human forward approach brings rewards for all

Virgin Media O2

Randstad

000

316 000 Correctional Service of Canada

CSC: preparing for the future of corrections

286

332

Automating the experiences of insurance

Build your digital enterprise with cloud

Virtusa Ganeshlyer

Virtusa Anirudh Joshi

344 PwC

Trust in people and technology

300 NTT

Human-centred solutions to put the customer first

358

Sandstone Technology

Leading banks into the digital era

COMING SOON FOL LOW NOW

E D UC AT E • M OT I VAT E • E L E VAT E

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BIG PICTURE

Sierra Space Flickr Orbital Reef

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February 2022

Orbital Reef Space

Sierra Space is working in close conjunction with Blue Origin, Genesis, ASU, Redwire and Boeing to develop the future of space habitation. Orbital Reef opens up new, more robust commercial and scientific activities in space, allowing for discoveries that will impact the entire planet. technologymagazine.com

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THE BRIEF “A modernised correctional service has the ability to drive greater effectiveness of rehabilitation during program delivery, greater offerings in services.”

Simon Bonk

Chief Information Officer, Correctional Services Canada  READ MORE

“For PwC as consultants, lawyers or tax advisors, technology is the only way to create a sustainable outcome with our clients.”

Philippe Trouchaud

Partner PwC France, Chief Technology and Products Officer, PwC  READ MORE

“At Virtusa we drive transformation at the pace and passion of a startup, with expert execution at global scale.”

Anirudh Joshi

Senior Vice President and Head Cloud Americas, Virtusa  READ MORE

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February 2022

BY THE NUMBERS The significance of AI and automation within business in

2022

78% Of employees ready to learn new skills to accommodate this new technology

71% Of business owners that believe AI technology will give them an upper hand

Siemplify: Google Cloud’s latest security acquisition Acquired by Google Cloud, Siemplify will become part of Google Cloud’s security team ‘to help companies better manage their threat response’.

LambdaTest launch world-first platform 'HyperTest' LambdaTest has claimed HyperTest is the fastest website and webapp testing platform ever made.

 MACHINE LEARNING

What’s in store for video game technology?

Gaming technology has changed massively over the years. From PC and console gaming to the Nintendo Switch and the portable console revolution, the industry is constantly evolving.

The question on many people’s minds is what’s the next big thing in gaming technology and how will AR/VR play a role?

The potentially convoluted future of the gaming industry At this year's CES 2022 conference, held in Las Vegas, the show found manufacturers presenting completely different visions of how gamers should play.

Whilst some remained team ‘PC experience’ showcasing monitors with new features, others focused heavily on portable gaming with the introduction of laptops with specialised gaming features.

Gaming in the Metaverse As companies attempt to build a connected universe of virtual realities, gaming may have found a new home.

A recent survey that 59% of industry experts said that gaming will dominate VR investments for the next few years. 64% also said that gaming has the highest potential to benefit from VR, among all other use cases.

According to Ocado Technology, creating a personalised experience that is trusted has become more important than ever.

As a result, the pandemic has brought data and ML to the forefront of technologists’ minds.

 INTEL US microchip maker Intel apologised following a backlash over its letter urging suppliers not to source products or labour from China's Xinjiang region.

The company's letter sparked criticism in China, with calls for a boycott.

W I N N E R S FEB22

 ZILLOW’S HOUSEBUYING ALGORITHM Zillow’s error was using its estimates to purchase homes itself, sight unseen, in order to flip them and collect transaction fees.

It soon learned that its algorithm didn’t correctly forecast changes in housing prices.

 META Formerly known as Facebook, Meta faced a tumultuous 2021 and may struggle to regain the number of users the company once had. The platform has been heavily criticised for prioritising profits over everything else.

L O S E R S

technologymagazine.com

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TIMELINE How Survey Monkey rebranded as Momentive In June last year, the iconic SurveyMonkey, a brand familiar to millions around the world, chose to relaunch itself as Momentive.

Founded by Ryan Finley and Chris Finley, the company also counts Serena Williams and Sheryl Sandberg on it’s board of directors.

Here, we look at the evolution of the brand over time..

2009

1999

SurveyMonkey swings in Started in Madison, Wisconsin, Ryan Finlay developed the business on a shoestring budget and no marketing budget. 2004 would see a move to Portland Oregon, where interest in this powerful but simplistic looking website grew. Some in the media would begin to ridicule the name, despite the usefulness of its tool.

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February 2022

Momentum building FinleySpectrum Equity and Bain Capital acquired a majority interest in the company in 2009, providing a massive boost. This same year, the ex-husband of Sheryl Sandberg, Dave Goldberg, would join as the new CEO of SurveyMonkey — providing a visionary new leader with serious ambitions.

October 2021 2016 -2018

From B2C to B2B Zander Lurie becomes CEO in 2016, a business guru renowned for growing unicorns. The company became a member of Forbes Cloud 100 list and in 2018, based on demand from its own customers and the rise of the feedback economy, the business shifted its focus towards the enterprise.

As of 2022, it would count 9,000 enterprise customers including Allbirds, Carrefour, IBM, and Intuit.

June 2021

Launch of new brand SurveyMonkey becomes Momentive, a leader in agile experience management.

SurveyMonkey will still exist as the survey’s product brand. Designed to elevate the overarching enterprise story, Momentive is a market research solution that helps “reshape and reimagine your customer experience, your product, your industry, and maybe, our world.”

Zendesk acquire Momentive for USD $4.13 bn Commenting on the acquisition, Mikkel Svane, CEO & Founder of Zendesk said: “The SurveyMonkey brand is iconic and we’ve admired their business from afar since the inception of Zendesk. They truly democratised an industry— almost everyone in the world has responded to one of their surveys at some point.”

technologymagazine.com

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TRAILBLAZER

LEADING LONDON’S MOST EXCLUSIVE TECH CLUB

in 1992 after my graduation from the University in Moscow. I grew the business to more than 5,000 people and 1 billion revenue with offices in 18 different countries.

I was probably the first Russian who started to build these kinds of businesses outside of Russia.”

Konstatin Sidorov explains how he founded the London Tech Club

W

hen Konstantin Sidorov came to London, he was taken aback by the number of member’s clubs. However, being from an IT environment himself, he was surprised to learn that despite London being such a rich place for startups to thrive, there was no community for investors and tech professionals.

This led to the foundation of the London Technology Club, a platform for investing, networking as well as an exchange of ideas and experience.

With access to excellent tech companies seeking investment, which are often hidden or closed for many investors, Sidorov could pool professional expertise and experienced investors together, opening up a wealth of previously closed opportunities.

According to Sidorov, “the club has a very simple aim: to bring together investors and late stage tech companies to create value.”

“I'm a serious entrepreneur and I started my first tech business, CIS,

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February 2022

The switch from entrepreneur to investor happened very organically, as Sidorov went into the venture capital world.

“From building and developing companies myself, it helps me to understand the young entrepreneurs who are trying to do the same,” he added.

After selling his Eastern European businesses nearly a decade ago to the NASDAQ-listed, US-based Ingram Microphone, Ingram became one of the largest distributors in the world.

LTC aims to raise a pledge fund of USD $50 mn for investments in AI and FinTech in

2022

Sidorov built an extensive network of data centres in Europe, but his first exit as an investor was with Spotify.

“My friend Alexandre Mars recommended the company to me.

I didn't know anything about the music streaming concept at all. I just love the idea, love the management.

Konstatin Sidorov Founder, London Tech Club technologymagazine.com

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TRAILBLAZER

I didn’t do proper due diligence so it probably was not a scientific approach at this point! It was just an emotional decision, which is actually very important when you invest in startups too”, he said.

With private investment fraught with access issues with growth-stage startups, Sidorov knew the answer was institutional investment: “I like to invite my friends in tech to invest together. London is the capital of clubs, but I was really surprised that there were no clubs around technology. I thought: why not build the London Technology Club? We now have 85 members and are always looking for new members as investors. I'd like to have another hundred people knocking on my door for membership.”

Established in 2018, the club’s successes include Didi, Lyft, WeWork and a remarkable 500% return with fintech Revolut.

The club utilises members with different expertise and leverages this knowledge for the benefit of the collective.

London is seen as Europe’s capital for tech investments and tech entrepreneurs, receiving capital of up to GBP 14bn over the first 7 months of 2021, already well up on 2020. Financial services and the disruption of FinTech startups has been a key factor in creating a hot-bed of investment opportunities.

According to Sidorov, the best tech 22

February 2022

“London is the capital of clubs, but I was really surprised that there were no clubs around technology”

talent is also available from world class universities.

2021 was a great year for LTC, seeing a record number of unicorns in Europe - three times as many as China: “Our sweet-spot is between GBP 100mn to 2bn. The liquidity is in the market.

With the likes of Tiger Global coming

in with us, it only increases the appeal for private investors to be part of a collective effort like ours.”

Members include June Felix, CEO of IG Group, Peter Nathan, Chairman of Nestle and renowned investor and Non-Executive Director of Agronomics, Jim Mellon. technologymagazine.com

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5 MINUTES WITH...

BENEDICT IRELAND UNLIMITED is the largest independently owned agency group in the UK. The award winning group serves B2B and B2C and includes Nelson Bostock, Fever, TMW, Splendid!, Wal | Nut, Sport Unlimited and Health Unlimited.

Q. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR ROLE?

» I'm Benedict Ireland, Chief

Experience Officer for Unlimited Group across the four divisions of Marketing, Communications, Data Insights and Digital Experience. My responsibilities, broadly speaking, is to ensure that anything we do is in accordance with the best experience we can deliver for the brand. I work cross-divisionally to ensure excellence of experience, consistency and appropriateness.

Q. SO WHAT DOES A CXO DO?

» It’s really a different set of skill

sets that you need in order to define those experiences for a website or an app, because you need to conjoin them from a brand perspective so the interaction is consistent.

A holistic role.

I've got to tell our agencies and our CEO what we are going to be doing and why and for which clients, and then we've got to explain that to the client themselves as well. It's about creating that kind of single coherent relationship between all aspects of the business, so they work in the most efficient way for both the business and the customer.

We provide value by understanding the KPIs and metrics that the business

“ IT IS NEVER THE SAME CHALLENGE TWICE” 24

February 2022

technologymagazine.com

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5 MINUTES WITH...

Splendid Digital Transformation

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February 2022

“ WE PROVIDE VALUE

BY UNDERSTANDING THE KPIS AND METRICS THAT THE BUSINESS OPERATES ON” operates on, and determining if those remain the correct KPIs, and undergo a cost benefit analysis of each of the individual things we could do within the strategy.

Monzo is a brilliant example of a really well delivered holistic experience from a brand perspective, from the way they write their job ads to the way that they handle their on-boarding process. All under one brand voice, so it's consistent.

Q. KEY CHALLENGES IN YOUR ROLE?

» The first thing we do is digital

strategy definition. Depending on the size of the business, you might call in someone like Deloitte or Gartner to help you out with an overall business strategy, but a digital strategy needs to be defined to align with that.

We work with quite large businesses, many of whom don't really have data

analytics and may be siloed. So quite often you're taking siloed information and trying to figure out actually what that means at a holistic level. You can start changing the dial a little bit in some areas, but actually we're looking for wholesale change here.

Speed is another. Technology changes very rapidly, and there's speed of adoption too. If we work with cryptocurrency, for instance, it can be very bleeding edge.

Budgets are always a good one. It's the holy grail of what we could do vs what is affordable. That's where we do that value analysis. By providing this transparency, that cements our relationship with clients because they then trust us to do the right thing for them.

Q. WHAT DO YOU LOVE ABOUT THIS ROLE?

» The role is ever-changing, but that

is what I really love about what we do - it is never the same challenge twice.

You're always having to re-learn and challenge yourself and the status quo.

We're now working with digital experience platforms (DXP) , so we can unify those experiences in a much easier way. Our motto is 'digital made human', so how do you make the experience human to a customer and how do we come across to our clients?

The role is becoming ever more systematic, coupled with the everevolving needs of users, and therefore clients, alongside the march of technology. I think those are the things that primarily change this role to something truly rewarding. technologymagazine.com

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DISCOVER WHO MADE THE CUT. Top 100 Companies in Technology Read Now

A BizClik Media Group Brand

Creating Digital Communities

DELIVERING INNOVATIVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SOLUTIONS WRITTEN BY: SCOTT BIRCH

PRODUCED BY: JOE MARRITT

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February 2022

UST

technologymagazine.com

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32

February 2022

UST

UST uses technology to engineer a better future, helping the world’s best companies succeed through digital transformation with disruptive solutions

U

ST could be the biggest technology firm you may never have heard of, even though it has been established for more than 20 years, has a billiondollar-plus valuation and employs some 28,000 experts worldwide.

However, that lack of recognition does not bother Chief Technology Officer Niranjan Ramsunder, he is more than happy delivering excellence to the select roster of clients that rely on UST to provide solutions to their digital transformation problems. It’s what they do.

Ramsunder says that the UST only works with a select number of clients from the Fortune 1000 who have an average tenure of 12 years with UST. Its competitors would have around two or three times the number of clients but UST feels strongly about providing more focused attention in building and maintaining both business executive and working level relationships.

“We work very deep with those companies and rely on word of mouth,” he says. “That's why we are the best-kept secret.

We do not spend a lot of time publicising ourselves to a wider audience because we don’t have to.”

Ramsunder explains that part of UST’s success over the past 20 years has been built on trying to understand their customers better, by moving operations ‘to the left’ – to better understand the motivation behind technologymagazine.com

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UST

UST – delivering innovative digital transformation solutions

business objectives rather than simply providing the solution. Adopting this approach allows UST to not only better understand its customers, but also deliver better solutions.

He talks about how technology constantly adapts and how expectations and touchpoints have increased – especially since the onset of the pandemic.

“When you look at our customers’ digital ambitions and what they want to achieve, they really want to change the way their customers perceive them and use their products and services,” says Ramsunder.

“Those digital ambitions have to be supported with what we call an initial problem discovery approach – the problem is the biggest find, it's gold for us.”

How UST does that is unique, and that is why global clients turn to UST for their biggest digital transformation challenges.

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February 2022

Ramsunder is a problem-solving hero and his closest ally, Kuruvilla Mat, is a future thinker steeped in experience design with a keen love for emerging technologies and how to evolve them with a focus on usefulness.

Mat is UST’s Chief Innovation Architect, and he says one key reason why customers keep coming back to UST is their ability to come up with brilliant solutions in days rather than months.

“That has always been a great interest to me – why do customers choose us?” says Mat. “What I've been able to understand is that they choose us because of the solutions that we can produce in a short period of time. When an RFP is given out, we are able to create amazing solutions in a matter of days. The comprehensiveness of the solution and the ideas that we bring to solve those problems in an elegant manner really showcases the strengths that we have.”

Niranjan Ramsunder TITLE: CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER INDUSTRY: I NFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SERVICES

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: UNITED STATES Niranjan Ramsunder is UST's Chief Technology Officer and Head of Data Services. In his role, Niranjan drives technical innovation and integrates best in class agile methodologies, DevOps, test automation, and cloud development to meet customers’ most challenging business needs. His work is instrumental in helping clients leverage cutting-edge big data engineering and analytics while ensuring strong data governance, security, and stewardship.

Niranjan is also responsible for the success of key UST portfolio companies, all of which bring unique, specialised competencies.

“ THOSE DIGITAL AMBITIONS HAVE TO BE SUPPORTED WITH WHAT WE CALL AN INITIAL PROBLEM DISCOVERY APPROACH – THE PROBLEM IS THE BIGGEST FIND, IT'S GOLD FOR US”

Kuruvilla Mat TITLE: CHIEF INNOVATION ARCHITECT INDUSTRY: I NFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SERVICES LOCATION: UNITED STATES

EXECUTIVE BIO

Kuruvilla Mat is the Chief Innovation Architect and General Manager at UST. He helps clients solve their technology and techno-functional problems through innovation, exploring new business models and applying technology, creative methods, and as well as the insights of his versatile and talented team. He runs UST's Innovation Labs and Innovation Garages, where ideas are brought to life. An Enterprise Architect and a technologist by trade, Mat has over 25 years of experience in product and services development in various industries working with Fortune 500 clients worldwide.

“WE’VE GOT THE LABS, THE SOFTWARE, THE HARDWARE, AND WE GET STARTED RIGHT AWAY. CLIENTS REALLY APPRECIATE THAT WITH UST – OUR COMMITMENT BEFORE CONTRACT”

UST

Without giving away too many trade secrets, this agility and speed is ‘baked in’ to UST’s way of working, and was originally born out of necessity. As a fledgling family business in 1999 with just 14 employees, teams had to be small, and that has worked so well that the model has been retained.

However, UST’s winning formula is not just based on the concept of smaller teams.

Mat says they have organised their teams into small, self-organised squads that have the ability to pivot – word of the moment – in hours to refocus on the problem at hand.

“We're talking about sprints that are oneweek sprints and demos that we do every day, “ he says. “We can work to a 24-hour cycle for solving certain problems and the clients see that this makes a huge difference.

Our competition is not able to do that, they are able to do it at best once a week.”

Mat also talks about the advantage UST has due to having its own labs and “innovation garages” to test new products quickly. He says it is a significant differentiator, especially when clients don’t have their own environments ready.

“I've got clients that I'm working with today that don't have the environments,” he says.

“By the time they get ready, time would have passed. We’ve got the labs, the software, the hardware, and we get started right away.

Clients really appreciate that with UST – our commitment before contract.

Another area that UST really focuses on is on upskilling the teams to make sure they are utilising the very latest, innovative techniques and technology.

Mat recounts a story of some analysts visiting UST and noting the behaviour that its teams were exhibiting and the kind of work they were doing. What struck him was that the analysts said while they had seen this level of commitment, it was the first time they had seen genuine passion for the work.

“Everyone on the team is passionate about driving forward the solution they have come up with,” he says. The team creates journey maps but use unique methods and techniques – from dioramas to graphic novels and stop animation. It’s an unusual approach that has even caught the attention of large social media companies, checking out UST’s processes that deliver innovation and creativity at scale.

Ramsunder and Mat both talk at length about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the impact it has had on the world as it has shifted to digital, but life has also changed in so many ways as consumer expectations and demands have morphed.

Life in 2022 is very different from 2020, and that change is only going to accelerate as technology is utilised in new, smarter ways. technologymagazine.com

37

Problems and needs are different, from how people use transport to expectations around instant customer service. Even relatively new companies, seen as recent disruptors, are now in danger of falling behind – even digital banking.

Mat says some digital banking companies have changed their products and services significantly as they cater to consumers’ needs.

“As consumers, we want our banks to be catering to our needs,” he says. “I don't want to be put into constraint – if there is a constraint, I'm just going to walk off with my deposit to another bank that is going to serve my needs.

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February 2022

US$1bn of value created for clients

140+

clients in the global 1,000

12+

years average client tenure

28,000+ employees in 25 countries

UST

“ THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION IS ALWAYS HOW MUCH CONTROL AM I WILLING TO LOSE VERSUS HOW MUCH RISK I WANT TO REDUCE WHEN MOVING TO THE CLOUD, AND THEN MAKING A CHOICE BASED ON THE BUSINESS VALUE” NIRANJAN RAMSUNDER

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, UST

“So what we've done is we have helped understand those problems, solve those problems and then get in front of reimagining those businesses and new business models. Businesses need to provide services and build new microservices and new technologies that will really bring experiences to the customer in a much more elegant fashion. That really has been our big focus and helping clients overcome some of those challenges.”

Ramsunder says that expectation is driving change for customers and he believes it will continue to change the technology roadmap – pushing UST ahead of where they want to be as a technology company.

“I love it because we want to be ahead of where we are but we also want to provide value,” he says. “There is an opportunity to provide that value right now, whether you want to retain employees, retain your vendors and suppliers, or want to improve the experience of your end customers – all of that is being driven by phenomenal changes in underlying technology.”

Ramsunder is in his element, as a vastly experienced CTO, as the conversation shifts to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, Big Data, and all things cloud. Of course, many of these are inter-connected, and it is all built on cloud.

He says the biggest decision companies have to make when considering their cloud is losing control but also reducing risk in the process.

“Going to the cloud means losing control in some ways because you no longer own the hardware, you no longer own the operating system – all of that is outsourced. But against this loss in control you are not worried so much about security because the latest updates are being handled by a third party,” says Ramsunder.

“Increasing your need from AWS or Azure or Google is simple and you suddenly have the ability to deploy your solution at speed, in multiple countries, so that kind of flexibility is a key benefit.”

“How you decide on your cloud strategy is not based on an enterprise-wide position to move to the cloud but is based on specific business functionality and their future and their growth. The fundamental question is always how much control do I want to lose versus how much risk I want to reduce, and then make a choice based on the business value.” technologymagazine.com

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UST

App modernisation at UST Business leaders reading this, especially CFOs and CTOs, may wonder what costs are associated with this constantly evolving landscape, and how that impacts existing, legacy systems. UST has created more than a billion dollars of value for its clients, while also helping them to stay relevant to their customers, and more efficient in their way of working.

It’s not so much a nice-to-have as an essential approach for a sustainable business. However, UST believes that many organisations are misunderstanding what app modernisation entails. Mat uses the analogy of companies taking a hammer to their existing systems and beating them into a different

shape rather than performing a proper assessment of their current and future needs.

Some organisations will need a transformation, others may require ongoing tweaks. Transforming everything, or hitting everything with that hammer, would be too expensive for all but the deepest pockets, and is unlikely to be required.

“We create what is known as a disposition map, and that tells you how much is it going to cost you, what kind of resources you need, what kind of business benefit you would see,” says Mat. “All these factors need to be considered as app modernisation is not just one app – it's like 700 apps built on 1,000 different technologies and it becomes really complicated really fast.”

“APP MODERNISATION IS NOT JUST ONE APP – IT'S LIKE 700 APPS BUILT ON 1,000 DIFFERENT TECHNOLOGIES AND IT BECOMES REALLY COMPLICATED REALLY FAST” NIRANJAN RAMSUNDER

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, UST

UST

What the future looks like for UST and its clients When it comes to looking to the future, technology moves increasingly quickly.

Ramsunder says companies can no longer afford to try and plan 10 years in advance and need to focus on the next two years. He outlines blockchain and quantum computing as particular areas of interest and opportunity, while also recognising an increased appetite for cyber security as attacks increase and companies have become more reliant on digital.

According to Mat, UST saw clients reimagine business models as they went through some serious legacy transformation and digital solutions during the pandemic, and admits that UST and its clients need to continue to pivot.

“We know now that what we thought of 12 months back, we'll have to rethink,” he says. “So the next 12 to 18 months is about making sure that we are making the right decisions for our clients – the best design choices, the best technology choices, so we are building a solution that will be in the market for a long period of time.

“Our focus is on making sure that we are executing to perfection, to make sure that all the pivots that we have to do we are doing. We're making the right choices for our clients as they go forward.”

technologymagazine.com

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HUMAN CAPITAL

IN HUMAN RESOURCES In the wake of The Great Resignation, how is HR using AI to bridge the employment gap and make better hiring decisions?

WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

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J

ust a few months ago, the UK alone faced a record-high number of 1.1 million job vacancies creating a sizable HR task that companies are increasingly looking to solve through technological means, and in particular, the use of artificial intelligence (AI). The term AI was first coined in the 1950s, but it is still very much in its infancy, falling short of many promises and claims of human-level AI. According to Chris Underwood, MD at executive recruitment and leadership specialists, Adastrum Consulting, it’s important not to over-estimate its sophistication or intelligence: “AI requires

massive amounts of data to turn a narrow set of tasks into predictable outcomes. Its binary responses are only as good as the quality and parameters of the dataset it uses to solve what is essentially a mathematical problem and it is important to understand that it is incapable of understanding the complexities of the human personality.”

Adoption of AI now widespread in recruitment Any HR professional will know that in prescreening, recruiting and onboarding new staff requires huge volumes of data to be processed. As a result, it can be easy for bottlenecks in the hiring funnel to emerge, technologymagazine.com

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HUMAN CAPITAL

“ AI requires massive amounts of data to turn a narrow set of tasks into predictable outcomes” CHRIS UNDERWOOD

MANAGING DIRECTOR, ADASTRUM

especially when there are large numbers of applicants or vacancies. AI brings such benefits as automated communications between candidates and employers, real-time hiring process alerts and document tracking.

As Underwood puts it: “Through emulating human actions by using a computer just as a human would, only virtually, software robots can take on much of this manual work allowing HR teams to focus more time on interviewing or supporting new starters.”

UiPath are world leaders in Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Managing Director for Northern Europe, Gavin Mee, recalls the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in one of its clients needing to quickly hire 100,000 new warehouse and delivery workers to keep up with a sudden increase in demand for online shopping. This project required the processing of nearly one million job applications.

“To ease pre-screening pressures, ten unattended software robots were introduced into the workforce to check if the applicant was a former employee, ensure that they were eligible for rehire and to kick off background checks as required.

This significantly increased the efficiency of the pre-screening process and ensured that HR teams were quickly presented technologymagazine.com

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HUMAN CAPITAL

The Role of Data and AI in Digital Business Transformation

with the applicant information they needed to push forward the urgent hiring programme,” said Mee. Mee cites the software robots that lend a helping hand to HR staff with the onboarding process by taking over repetitive, manual tasks, and eliminating error. Specifically, the technology can verify a candidate’s information, fill in and process new hire forms, transfer new hire information into the company’s database and send notifications to new employees.

“A global IT company found that the new hire setup process, which involved highvolume manual work, was costly and had a high error rate due to data being manually copied and pasted. It took 30 minutes for an employee to go through the process—not including the time necessary to review and correct errors later on. With a combination 46

February 2022

of attended and unattended UiPath robots, the company was able to reduce the process time to 3-4 min per new employee. The increased accuracy of the automation also eliminated the time previously necessary for reviewing and correcting errors. The solution proved to be easily extensible during higher volume hiring times, and by monitoring the automated process, the company was able to improve data input, allocation of resources and error handling,” said Mee. In a world where working from home has become the norm, Mee says that some firms are even using automation to request new IT equipment from suppliers to ensure that employees can get off to a flying start on their very first day with the correct IT setups.

“In short, if a task requires data to be processed, a software robot can likely

HUMAN CAPITAL

“ Freedom from bias and discrimination is not a standing goal post, but an ever-moving target” SHASHIN MISHRA PUBLICIS SAPIENT

help. If robots can undertake a significant volume of the manual work required within the recruitment process, then prospective employees can be identified and onboarded efficiently.”

Counteractive to efforts for hiring diverse talent Shashin Mishra is Director of Data Science and Analytics at digital consultancy Publicis Sapient, and his colleague Sray Agarwal is the Associate Director of Data Science and

Analytics and co-author of the business book ‘Responsible AI: Implementing Ethical and Unbiased Algorithms’.

Agarwal believes that companies tend to hire in their own image and much work is required to ensure more diverse candidates are hired.

“There was a case where a top technology firm was using AI for screening applications and the system taught itself that male candidates were preferable for a particular role, thus ending up penalising applications that included the any female applicant, any applicant with words related to females, and all applications that came from universities that had “female” words in their titles (so, for example, anyone who attended St Mary’s University, or St Hilda’s College, Oxford, would be eliminated).

Finally, the tech company edited the AI application and made it free from stereotypical patterns. The problem was not

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“ In short, if a task

requires data to be processed, a software robot can likely help” GAVIN MEE

MANAGING DIRECTOR NORTHERN EUROPE, UIPATH

with the AI system itself, but with the data that enabled the model to learn human stereotyping behaviour.”

Bias against job applicants and employees based on gender and ethnicity, introduced by historical data, can in turn be learned by machine learning models. This can lead to 48

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bias becoming systemic because of an AI model’s partial or full dependence on the machine to make decisions.

Can recruiting algorithms ever be free of bias and discrimination? Yes they can, according to Mishra, who said that “freedom from bias and discrimination is not a standing goal post, but an evermoving target, as our own awareness of existing biases and discrimination grows. The evolution of recruiting algorithms needs to match pace with the evolution of our own awareness. It also needs to bring in local flavour to address high priority issues that may have more significance than elsewhere, within a local context.”

There has also been an increase in people writing CVs specifically for AI, something that should be discouraged, according to

HUMAN CAPITAL

Intelligent Chatbots for Human Resources (HR)

Underwood: “Especially for management and leadership roles. While the computer may rank their CV highly, it often creates a poorly written document and ultimately reflects poorly on candidates.”

The future of AI in recruiting Agarwal states that the future of AI in recruiting will change the way people are hired: “I envisage that the future of recruitment is an AI-assisted human audited process, where AI will be used to screen applications without bias and stereotyping. The screening will be followed by a few rounds of AI-led discussion with the candidate, with AI being used to verify the identity of applicants, and to assess any quantifiable skills needed for the job. Moreover, AI will be able to track

any human bias and raise the flag if that happens during any part of the process that is manual,” he said.

Barry Stanton is Partner and Head of Employment at law firm Boyes Turner.

He insists that AI is set to grow in the recruitment process, even if it can’t avoid inevitable issues around discrimination and doubts as to whetehr it can secure the best candidates.

“If initial interviews are conducted using chatbots, this allows candidates to be sourced more widely and will save significant time, provided the appropriate cues are used to help resource the issue. Using chatbots can help eliminate unconscious and not so unconscious bias, if the background data on which it is based is not skewed. Conducting interviews through the use of chatbots may, technologymagazine.com

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“ It is crucial to start by reviewing gaps in your current process” JAMES BROOK

CEO & FOUNDER, TALENTPREDIX

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HUMAN CAPITAL

for some, be impersonal and dehumanising.

If the initial selection process is made using AI and chatbots, managers may need to spend more time with candidates getting to know them and showing the personality of the business.”

According to James Brook, creator of TalentPredix, a next generation of talent assessment technology, it is important for recruiters and business leaders to remember that candidates should be treated with the utmost respect, dignity, and fairness at all times.

“Emerging technologies such as machine learning, video screening, gamification, predictive assessments, and data analytics can all enable and improve your strategy and processes, however, they need to be sourced, implemented and evaluated in a robust and considered manner that prioritises the candidate experience,” he said.

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make, according to Brook, is to purchase the latest Applicant Tracking System, video interviewing application, AI-based candidate screening tool or other recruitment technology without getting the basics right first.

“It is crucial to start by reviewing gaps in your current process, what you’d like the future process to look like and your specific recruitment technology needs. This includes internal stakeholder and candidate feedback, time-to-hire stats, cost-perhire, retention rates, internal progression rates, performance of new hires, and DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) data.

Only once you have created a strategy for achieving your desired future state and defined your sourcing criteria, should you proceed with building your tech stack to improve recruitment and retention.” technologymagazine.com

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MORE WOW TOGETHER! WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE 52

February 2022

PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY AND LEWIS VAUGHAN

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SUNRISE | UPC

Perfect partners Sunrise UPC converge 5G technology and the best gigabit broadband network to become the national champion in Switzerland

T

he drive to be Switzerland’s top telecommunications company and ‘national champion’ is within touching distance for Sunrise UPC — who count tennis legend Roger Federer as one of their brand ambassadors — and are the new partner of the Swiss-Ski team as they prepare for the Olympics.

Seeded two is no longer an option for Sunrise UPC. The company is one step closer to becoming the leader for communications and entertainment in the country following the epic merger in 2020 when 5G technology from Sunrise converged with the best gigabit broadband network in the form of UPC. “Together more Wow” is what the customers of Sunrise UPC are now promised

by Fabio Pellegrino, Senior Director, Platform Delivery, who describes himself as “not your traditional IT guy” as he comes from a background in customer care, which gives him first-hand knowledge of providing a first-class customer experience.

“I am able to bring emotional intelligence to my role in IT and like to use technology as an enabler for our customers to have the best experience. IT is all about the customer experience nowadays,” said Pellegrino from his office in Zurich.

Pellegrino is excited by the potential power of the two companies coming together, which he says will offer “intelligent connectivity of the future”. In one of the largest mergers of two companies in recent

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Fabio Pellegrino Senior Director Platform Delivery, Sunrise UPC

SUNRISE | UPC

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“ Sunrise UPC offers 360° communication solutions for the digital, mobile, and secure workplace.

5G and IoT solutions increase the agility, innovative strength, and productivity of companies” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

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Swiss history, Sunrise and UPC are now perfectly placed to meet the changing habits of their customers, who have adopted hybrid working due to the pandemic, and offer even more business power to the selfemployed, SMEs and large-scale companies.

“The combination of Sunrise and UPC will give our customers a greater ‘Wow’ experience,” said Pellegrino. “We bring together the passion and technology of two companies and are now competing for the number one slot in Switzerland. We will grow together and offer a good price tag and technology to be the national champion.

“Together, more speed and entertainment. Sunrise and UPC complement one another perfectly as customers benefit from the fastest 5G

SUNRISE | UPC

FABIO PELLEGRINO TITLE: S ENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY LOCATION: ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

network from Sunrise and the reliable UPC Giganet,” he said.

Liberty Global acquired Sunrise in November 2020 for a reported US$7.4bn in order to create a stronger challenge to incumbent Swisscom.

The company focuses on innovation, untethered connectivity, personalised entertainment, and digitisation. It offers a wide range of broadband, TV, mobile, and telephony services to its two million customers. This includes an extensive range of TV channels, seven days of replay, and thousands of films and series available on-demand plus the MySports (www. mysports.ch) channel and online platform esports.ch which offer the best sports entertainment.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Fabio Pellegrino started his career, next to his studies, supporting the end customers in customer care. During the years, he has led customer care support and moved to IT, developing system integration in the BSS stack and ending up leading the development from an end-to-end perspective.

As a doer, he achieved an honest leadership style, using his emotional intelligence in relationships with national and international leaders that enabled him to speak at Dreamforce 2019. During the merger between Sunrise and UPC he led a full IT organisation achieving the promised benefits. Pellegrino is married and has a son.

SUNRISE | UPC

Sunrise UPC is continuing to expand the next-generation network structure, including 5G and future technologies, to be able to supply up to 90% of Swiss households with gigabit internet during 2021. The speed will gradually be increased to 10 Gbit/s.

With entertainment offers, the combined business is providing a winning combination.

Focus on platform delivery “My role as CIO of platform delivery is to focus on the development and run of the main platforms like CRM, billing, service delivery, network inventory, middleware,

1931

Year Founded

Telecom Industry

3,000

Number of Employees

762.5m Revenue CHF

2020

Sunrise merge with UPC

10 year

Partnership deal with national Swiss-Ski team

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provisioning in the field and in general, operations of the major applications in B2B and B2C,” commented Pellegrino.

“Even if today, the customer experience is supported through the webstack, it needs a reliable backend that can offer capability in real-time to support customers initiated processes. For this, there are reliable and fast systems needed that can provide the relevant information in the surrounding systems.”

Pellegrino outlined his role in platform delivery — which is the biggest department in CIO of Sunrise UPC — and how he focuses on the stacks of B2B and B2C. “During the

SUNRISE | UPC

merger, my role was to safeguard the UPC IT department overall as we had to achieve the set end-of-year targets. A merger brings immediately the wish to align, and to discuss the future, but the duty of achieving the revenue remains.

“The market is highly competitive and we have seen that the concurrence was launching attractive promotions — assuming we would be fully occupied with the setup of the merger. With me ‘left behind’ we were able to give a clear response and achieved the target, next to the big effort of my colleagues to set up the merger.

“ We bring together the passion and technology of two companies and are now competing for the number one slot in Switzerland.

We will grow together and offer a good price tag and technology to be the national champion” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

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It utilizes software-as-a-service as part of the architecture. twim is an official partner of Netlify, a complete cloud platform for Jamstack, which provides a built-in content delivery network for optimal performance, and an official partner of Storyblok, a headless CMS that offers highly interoperable web APIs. The Jamstack architecture is already being

used in many projects.

Marketing and corporate sites, landing pages and campaigns, high traffic sites and user portals are just a few examples of projects that have been implemented.

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“At the beginning of 2021, we took the time to think about the future and what functions we would need in this special situation and it was clear that we need, next to the classic departments, a strong architecture and partner management.

To be able to give the focus on customer journeys, the capability of digital was set up as an own department — strongly collaborating with platform delivery.

“You probably think that this could be a problem, mainly if you think about the delivery cycle, as the digital departments are fully agile and platforms are going with bigger releases, and you are right. This difference in delivering, that we had to overcome, was changing the cycles and in giving slots, so that we can accommodate all the wishes coming up,” said Pellegrino.

He highlighted the challenges of the merger during the pandemic and how they used technology for colleagues to work from home. “The homework policy was introduced at the same time as the new organisation was being set up and we ended up working with leads only through technical channels and web conferences.

“Without having the opportunity to read the body language, or to even get to know each other, the main key was the clear communication and listening was crucial during this very challenging period for both our employees and customers,” he said.

“Next to the difficulties of having a lot of new systems from one day to another, it was also key to understand the new culture along with the emotional intelligence.”

“ Together, more speed and entertainment.

Sunrise and UPC complement one another perfectly as customers benefit from the fastest and most reliable 5G network from Sunrise and Switzerland’s leading gigabit fibre optic cable network” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

Customer experience In the past, the main interaction between customers and Sunrise UPC was through phone or shops but the customer experience and expectation has changed. technologymagazine.com

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POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS

SUNRISE | UPC

Pellegrino outlined the importance of their partnership with the following:

“ To achieve those targets there is the need to use existing know-how through our partners. Our philosophy is to keep the knowledge in the company and leverage the effects of our partners who are the experts in what they do. This leaves us to focus on what we do best”

ACCENTURE

TWIM

“Accenture helped in various areas, focusing on the end-to-end approach on the deliveries. From architecture until the release management, all the functions have been supported by them, so also design, delivery, testing and release. As we decided to introduce Salesforce in the B2B landscape, they helped us to implement the full suite in only 15 months, which I mentioned also at dreamforce. Currently, they are driving the unification of the two salesforce instances.”

“With our innovative partner twim, we replaced our B2B website, from an on-promise instance to a cloud-based solution where we used the latest and greatest innovative CMS systems. What started as a POC changed into the solution based on the advanced functionality and stability.”

CLOUDSENSE

“Prodapt is a true partner in all the delivery skills and testing, providing best-in-class knowledge, including shift left approaches and development skills. Through this, Prodapt established a great partnership with our motherhouse LGI and is providing a lot of innovative services, also in the mobile sector.”

“CloudSense is a true partner in understanding the needs of their customers.

By providing the CPQ in Salesforce, we went on a journey with them as they allowed us to contribute to their product roadmap and participate in their innovation.”

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PRODAPT SOLUTIONS LTD

SUNRISE | UPC

NETCRACKER

INFOSYS

“In the cable industry, the topology and inventory of your network and end customer devices are key. That’s why we collaborate with Netcracker as it gives us the insights of our network with ease to use, driving the upgrades of the platform so that we can use the latest and greatest in this area.”

“Over the years we have been working with Infosys that is helping us in various areas like development of the web capabilities, like e-commerce and omnichannel approaches.

Through their size they can give answers to any demand from our side, like architecture, development, operations and therefore became a strategic partner of us and LGI.”

Pellegrino concluded:

“ We want to rely on the experience and the capability of the partners by having the internals in the driving seat. This allows us to focus on the target by introducing the best- in-class application. I’m explicitly talking about partners and not vendors because this is only possible once you involve them in what you want to achieve.

All of our partners are part of the journey and solution. By bringing the best they have, we at Sunrise UPC, we can achieve the expectation of the market. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel but

use the wheel to build an astonishing sports car for the race” inally, with Federer on their bench as F the ultimate doubles partner, it won’t be long before it’s game, set and match to Sunrise UPC as they take their place as the ‘national champion’ in the Swiss telco market.

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SUNRISE | UPC

“ I am able to bring emotional intelligence to my role in IT and like to use technology as an enabler for our customers to have the best experience” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

“Looking at the millennials, but also at the general expectation, the customer wants to be free and not attached to any opening hours or printout of documents,” commented Pellegrino.

“Today, the customer wants to have everything at his/her fingertips and be able to change subscriptions at any time.

Through the real-time capabilities, we enable a customer to watch the main football match when they want by clicking in our app, and to find the charge on the next bill. Also, the consumption of content needs to be tailored to the expectation of the customers: Having a ‘second roomsolution’ where you can continue to watch your movie in the exact same second as in the living room, is basic today.

“Our customers want to be device independent so that they can continue even on their mobile phones. This is where our 5G network comes into play. Having a strong infrastructure and tremendous speed will allow us to consume seamless

WOW! SKI SPONSORSHIP Sunrise UPC will be joining the Swiss snowsports family as the new, main Swiss-Ski partner as of the 2022/23 season for the next 10 years.

The collaboration with Sunrise UPC in the next Olympic cycle and beyond marks a further milestone in Swiss-Ski history. The new, main partner offers the umbrella association of Swiss snowsports a comprehensive package and excellent planning certainty due to the long-term nature of the engagement.

Urs Lehmann, President of SwissSki said: “Sunrise UPC will provide us with fresh impetus in various areas.

We're looking forward to these new opportunities.”

André Krause, CEO of Sunrise UPC, added: “This partnership is enabling us to continue building on our success.

Snowsports are part of the Swiss tradition and the combination with world-class performance sports fits perfectly with our positioning.

“Thanks to the partnership with SwissSki, we can anchor our company even closer and more emotionally with our customers. Sport is an ideal medium for us to do this as it shows our values passionate, bold and one.

“We've been able to build on this image even more by expanding from our partnership with Roger Federer to now also include Swiss snowsports.”

technologymagazine.com

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We help our clients navigate their digital transformation journey in an age of constant disruption Today’s top organizations are constantly seeking an edge to stay competitive, win new markets and create shareholder value. And with an influx of new digital innovations permeating our world at a rapid pace, we realize the task for today’s business leaders is as great of a challenge as ever.

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SUNRISE | UPC

Sunrise UPC: More Wow together!

“In the end IT is all about customer experience nowadays” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

amounts of content both during the pandemic and into the future where we expect new models of working, focusing on output and not time presence.

“This behaviour is also valid for business customers. From the SOHO to the large enterprises where they want to use the services in real time, make adaptations and also add on services in real time, like security options. The option of doing this through the cloud is not far away.

“Everything that I mentioned sounds great, but it also has another side of the medal.

By providing those services, a lot of data is transferred from one system to the other.

This requires an adequate data-privacy and security concept, especially when we are talking about personalised data. The Telco Act in Switzerland is very specific here and relevant for our business customers where security of data is the main promise — we offer all those solutions,” he said. technologymagazine.com

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SUNRISE | UPC

“ Through the real time capabilities, we enable a customer to watch the main football match when they want by clicking in our app and to find the charge on the next bill” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

A game-changing commerce and subscriber management platform built for the Convenience Revolution Unlock higher revenues through commercial innovation, increased efficiency and exceptional customer experiences on Salesforce

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LIFE OUTSIDE THE OFFICE What is your ‘Wow moment’?

The moment I heard that Sunrise UPC is going to be sponsoring the Swiss Ski Team - this is fabulous.

“Sunrise and UPC complement one another perfectly as customers benefit from the fastest 5G network from Sunrise and the reliable UPC Giganet.”

With Sunrise UPC’s mobile and hybrid cable network, customers can do all of these things without experiencing a loss of performance.

The network has the technological advantage that it can increase the internet capacities to several Gigabits per second if needed — without any construction work being necessary — paving the way for future digital trends.

“Sunrise UPC offers 360-degree communication solutions for the digital, mobile, and secure workplace. 5G and the internet of things (IoT) solutions increase the agility, innovative strength, and productivity of companies,” he said.

He said this was a very exciting period for the company and predicted they will use technology to go beyond their traditional

Drink of choice Wine Favourite cuisine?

Spaghetti vongole Favourite holiday destination?

Florida and Sardegna?

Most precious possession?

My health Favourite movie?

Heat Life’s most valuable lesson?

Don’t crack under pressure – in the end you will win!

Favourite music?

Metallica

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SUNRISE | UPC

“ Together more Wow” FABIO PELLEGRINO

SENIOR DIRECTOR PLATFORM DELIVERY, SUNRISE UPC

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SUNRISE | UPC

services. “The main key here is to adapt the platforms to be able to perform the request.

The means of any IT solution in this industry that is not selling any tangible products, that cannot put nice ribbons around its goods, cannot provide a touch and feel experience, will only make the difference when it’s reliable, fast and data consistent.

“Whatever we do, the targets consist of systems that are fast and reliable processing, ease of use, sustainable and flexible — even if we decide to sell tyres in the future, the systems should cope with that.”

Sunrise:

UPC:

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Living on a Serverless

As many companies move into the serverless cloud, there’s seemingly no stopping the momentum.

But is there more to this than we imagine?

WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK 76

February 2022

CLO UD HYBRID CLOUD

G

oing serverless is certainly alluring for the potential cost savings of only paying for what you use, and saving on lack of infrastructure related expenses such as maintenance. It enables greater scalability compared to on-site servers, allowing for quick accommodation to evolving market demands and developers like serverless as they can focus on code and not on the infrastructure too.

But there are possible performance issues involving code ‘spin down’ with low-latency apps, increased difficulty with debugging and monitoring, possible vendor lock-in and issues migrating apps created through particular function-as-a-service offerings.

Main benefits of serverless Andrew de Rozario, Lead Engineer at AND Digital, says that the serverless value-based technologymagazine.com

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HYBRID CLOUD

“ You could say that serverless represents the purest form of cloud application development available” ANDREW DE ROZARIO LEAD ENGINEER, AND DIGITAL

consumption model really changes the playing field in terms of risk vs reward, by ensuring costs incurred to companies are directly correlated to value delivered to the end user.

“It’s the next-generation of cloud computing. As a term in its own right the word ‘severless’ is a bit of a misnomer: servers are still actually involved. However, the key difference with more traditional

forms of the tech is in how the servers are implemented and managed,” he said.

Going serverless means the service provider or vendor takes care of provisioning a larger proportion of the infrastructure and many of the associated responsibilities.

This means organisations can save themselves the time and hassle spent on server provisioning, ensuring functionality, creating test environments, or maintaining server uptime.

“You could say that serverless represents the purest form of cloud application development available,” said de Rozario.

One of the overriding benefits to serverless, according to de Rozario, “is that computing can become event-driven and 100 percent automated, meaning it only dedicates underlying computing resources technologymagazine.com

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HYBRID CLOUD

What is FaaS (Functions as a Service)?

“One particular drawback of serverless is the cost of running in the public cloud”

to what is absolutely be spun up at a faster rate necessary. It doesn’t even and on a more regular require the full interaction basis. Not only does this or maintenance of humans provide developers with – unlike more traditional greater job satisfaction, it servers, some of which also means that business can be extremely labour can stay ahead of the intensive to maintain competition,” he added. and operate.”

“Speed is everything in The pay as you go approach today’s competitive global The pay-as-you-grow CRAIG KITTERMAN market. Cloud by its very pricing model that’s enabled VP PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, nature provides businesses by serverless database DATASTAX with the agility and speed services is extremely they need to meet the digital demands of attractive to cost-conscious enterprises, customers and end-users. As serverless as they only pay for consumed storage requires zero hardware maintenance, and database operations that are actually engineering teams are freed up to focus executed. You can use serverless so that on innovation. As a result, new applications complexity gets taken care of in the backend and enhancements to existing ones can automatically. Any developer can achieve 80

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HYBRID CLOUD

what they want to around scale. Capacity planning will be a thing of the past.

Tom Christensen, Global Technology Advisor and Executive Analyst at Hitachi Vantara, says that the demand for innovation amid the pandemic has resulted in many organisations experiencing the urgency to containerize their legacy applications to stay competitive.

“There are several reasons why serverless cloud and its ‘pay as you go’ approach is favoured by many Chief Information Officers (CIOs). Throughout the pandemic, there has been extensive pressure on CIOs to create applications much faster than they have done in the past. To address their business goals in their current state and as they evolve over time, CIOs need the best infrastructure choice for every workload, with the ability to leverage on-premises interchangeably with public cloud services. This is exactly what a serverless cloud can offer.”

Drawbacks of serverless Craig Kitterman, VP Product Management at DataStax, remarks that companies and developers have been looking to adopt serverless architecture for its ease of deployment and reduced cost, but only a few organisations truly know exactly how many servers they’ll require to handle their database needs for any given period of time.

“For most large enterprises whose success depends upon flows of multiple terabytes of data in often unpredictable surges, this is rarely the case. Capacity planning is a guessing game, especially when an organisation’s lifeblood is real-time, streaming data that enables it to perform real-time analysis to deliver rich and engaging interactions to users.

With storage that’s connected via the network, and thus decoupled from compute, scaling a database no longer requires

rebalancing the data, and scaling up and down becomes easier—and faster. This has opened the door for truly “serverless” database services, according to Christensen, where data is stored separately from computers.

“One particular drawback of serverless is the cost of running in the public cloud.

While it may be cost-effective in the long run, many organisations are first required to pay an upfront cost, while also investing in the time and effort taken to upskill the workforce needed to manage their applications.”

“Even for advanced cloud users – i.e., the organisations that have used cloud for some

GigaOM According to GigaOM, running open source database Apache Cassandra in a serverless deployment worked out as 75% less expensive than self-managed Cassandra. When GigaOM tested running this, they found serverless Cassandra to have 95% fewer production costs, three times less migration complexity, and 22% lower infrastructure costs than it would take to manage a Cassandra cluster in the cloud.

HYBRID CLOUD

time and built up their cloud experience – cloud spend can quickly become an area of concern. Wasted cloud spend is a major issue and becomes more critical as cloud costs continue to rise. When working with customers to identify waste, some organisations have found that, on average, waste can amount to 35 percent or even higher. This is why a private cloud within a cloud operational model is imperative.”

Success with serverless cloud is often reliant on a positive, forward thinking workplace culture that is committed to achieving cloudenabled, next-generation infrastructure.

Likewise, due to the cross-collaboration required between teams, serverless could even call for an organisational restructure or long-term effort to upskill the entire workforce – an expense not all could afford.

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“You’ll also need to be fully aware of service provider lock-ins”, says de Rozario.

“Third-party vendors restrict resource limits, which means serverless computing is not ideal for high performance computing operations. Even if there were no such limits, certain applications would not be cost effective from a third-party vendor. As with any cloud service, you’ll also want to be aware of vendor lock-in, and what you’d need to do in order to switch serverless providers,” he said.

FaaS explained Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) can be perceived as the expression of the “cloud”. Based on our recent report – key benefits of the cloud include time to market, agility and ability to scale – FaaS is the leader to deliver that value.

HYBRID CLOUD

“ Some people still perceive the cloud as “someone else’s computer” KRZYSZTOF SZABELSKI HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY, FUTURE PROCESSING

“Some people still perceive the cloud as “someone else’s computer” – they only see the cloud as an infrastructure provider, that it brings limited value in scalability, and availability on demand. But true value comes with higher levels of services, where common administration concerns like maintenance, updates, security management or capacity planning are

automated. Delivering a new feature is nearly as easy as it is to develop it,” said Krzysztof Szabelski, Head of Technology at Future Processing.

“However, implementing a FaaS approach doesn’t come without its challenges. For example, it is nearly impossible to “migrate” to FaaS as systems or the parts need to be designed and developed specifically. Sometimes specific vendors and costs of potential exit are high. What’s more, there is a lack of skilled architects and engineers in the market as it's still considered a new concept and technology”, he added.

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Lyft, the universe and the internet of everything

WRITTEN BY: SIMON HOWSON-GREEN PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

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Zach Greenberger explains Lyft’s growing ‘rideshare’ business and how it is hitting super aggressive targets, in partnership with Oracle

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o digital enterprise is an island entirely of itself. They need strong, well-suited partnerships, realistic but ambitious targets, and some creative “beyond the box thinking.”

That’s how Zach Greenberger approaches his pivotal role at Lyft. Greenberger is a supply chain guy. He knows it link by link. He hails from an impressive background. IBM and Tesla. He’s been with Lyft for three years.

“My focus is delivering value to the endto-end supply chain for our broader business and then fostering partnerships that drive incrementality and loyalty to our customer base,” he says. In other words: growing a business step-by-step and ensuring you don’t lose your loyal customers along the way.

To do that Greenberger says he needs working relationships with suppliers who become long term partners, with similar goals and a matching culture.

“I’ve always been one who believes mature supply chain organisations play critical roles, not only driving efficiencies to the business through its supply base, but also becoming trusted advisors, operators and problem-solvers for our stakeholders.

“Most people know Lyft as a rideshare company. But, we are focused on a broader mission improving people's lives with the world's best transportation,” says Greenberger.

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When your usual course is blocked, how do you find new streams?

ey.com/tmt

HOW EY IS HELPING LYFT RAISE ITS POST IPO GAME

designing their internal controls, redesigning the chart of accounts to scale with their targeted growth, and supporting the company’s financial transformation.

Lyft raised more than two billion dollars in its 2019 IPO. Timing these events is often a hit or miss affair. Lyft nailed it with huge success. But keeping up that growth momentum and spending the money wisely while steering a route through the new regulatory constraints going public took serious teamwork.

‘Sanjay is spot on,’ says Greenberger.

EY brings a ton of expertise to support and augment our team and make sure we are building that proper foundation for long term success.’

And if that wasn’t enough, Lyft and EY had to exploit the benefits of a successful funding round just as the global pandemic took hold.

According to Khunti, with so many separate business lines and units being developed under the Lyft banner – from rideshare to scooter hire to product delivery to name just three – EY needed to take a holistic approach.

‘The IPO was a super exciting time for us,’ says Greenberger. ‘It necessitated a level of maturity and growth we needed to properly scale business operations.’

He says this is where Lyft’s relationship with EY became so critical.

Khunti agrees. ‘Absolutely. Lyft being in hyper-growth mode…but then having to face the requirements of being a public company meant it found itself in an interesting position. Working with EY at the Speed of Lyft, as we call it, meant they had a successful IPO and built a strong partnership.’

‘Operating in the public domain with a host of new regulations, laws and expectations from investors was just the tip of the iceberg.’

‘EY helped them through setting up their internal audit and SOX functions,

‘One major step was to implement Oracle Financial Accounting Hub (FAH)’, he says. This gave Lyft a more scalable accounting system which was auditable, traceable and provides a complete and accurate picture of their financials and the data they need to make the right business decisions.

‘That was really the first step in getting this transformation journey started and it’s providing successful outcomes for our ongoing work together,’ says Khunti.

Learn more

LYFT

How Lyft Is Raising The Stakes In The Supply Chain

Sounds good? But what does that mean?

“We are developing and innovating products that address the end-toend value chain of all of our customers' transportation needs. From our core rideshare business to micro-mobility, we offer everything from on-demand vehicles, bikes and scooter solutions, and even vehicle servicing and rentals.

Ultimately, our goal is to create products that effectively eliminate any barriers to transportation and make them accessible and enjoyable for everyone.”

This may sound like a well-rehearsed mission statement, but behind these words is a culture where providing the best services is deeply engrained.

“At its core, we need a supply chain that delivers the best experience to our customers and stakeholders, so we are, in fact, able to focus on how we progress against our mission.”

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“ Mature supply chain organisations play a critical role, not only driving efficiencies to the business through a world class supply base but also becoming trusted advisors, operators and problem solvers for our stakeholders” ZACH GREENBERGER

HEAD OF STRATEGIC BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & GLOBAL SUPPLY MANAGEMENT, LYFT BUSINESS

LYFT

“This vision really ‘jives’ perfectly with Lyft’s mentality as a broader company. We have an exceptional culture that promotes healthy debate,” he says.

Greenberger expands on this and what he means when it comes to setting goals: “I take significant pride in the trust and reputation that we have built with our internal team members, and to me, that defines the power of our team's ability to deliver against super aggressive targets.”

“Super Aggressive Targets?” That sounds impressive but what does that mean?

Greenberger explains: “Data-driven decision making and focusing on our core competencies is priority thinking. It’s that mentality that is really a supply chain team’s dream, and helps us focus on hitting aggressive goals we set for ourselves.”

Greenberger is driven to ensure his teams at Lyft are undeniably ‘best in class’.

“They really differentiate themselves from other supply chain teams in the industry,” he says. “Not only does that play out in our results as a supply chain team, but I also see how we support our internal stakeholders has unlocked efficiencies for the business to deliver against the company’s core mission without distraction.”

The upshot of this, according to Greenberger, is allowing his people to ‘hyper focus’ on customers and make sure they are being delivered the best products day-to-day.

TITLE: H EAD OF STRATEGIC BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & GLOBAL SUPPLY MANAGEMENT INDUSTRY: TRANSPORTATION LOCATION: SAN FRANCISCO Zach Greenberger is the Head of Strategic Business Development & Global Supply Management at Lyft, where he leads efforts on Lyft’s growth partnership strategies and delivering value to the end-to-end supply chain.

Zach has not only brought a strong procurement background to the role, but he’s also always had a passion for emerging technologies and prioritised a customer-centric approach. Prior to joining Lyft, Zach was integral to the Global Supply Management and Operations team at the Tesla Corporation and before that, he spent 3 years at IBM as a Strategic Sourcing Consultant. With an impressive list of over 20 technology patents under his belt, Zach stays committed to driving loyalty to Lyft's customer base while continuing the company’s mission to improve people’s lives with the world’s best transportation.

EXECUTIVE BIO

2012

Year founded

ZACH GREENBERGER

LYFT

“ It was critical that we took every step we could to effectively run our business, while also building a foundation that would allow them to scale, and this is precisely where Oracle came in” ZACH GREENBERGER

HEAD OF STRATEGIC BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & GLOBAL SUPPLY MANAGEMENT, LYFT BUSINESS

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Consulting with Oracle Greenberger says he wants the driving force behind Lyft’s supply chain to always be its ability to influence decision making and truly partner with stakeholders to help drive the best results for Lyft. “Growing businesses survive and prosper by nurturing the right working culture and innovative thinking.”

At this point, it is clear Greenberger can’t take this narrative any further until he talks about Oracle. The two businesses ‘hitched a ride’ together some time ago and the journey has become more comfortable and successful with each passing year.

“Oracle was the foundational solution that was able to solve our end-to-end needs

LYFT

and really give us the tooling that we needed to scale business operations long term,” says Greenberger.

“So, one of the main things that we've really enjoyed by having a very strategic partnership is the ability to discuss and roadmap solutions that historically haven’t been offered in the market.”

“Oracle is very focused on helping unlock infrastructure efficiencies for Lyft every day.

The partnership overall has been fantastic and I do believe a lot of that is because we see so many similarities within our cultures.”

Greenberger says Oracle was a fundamental element of Lyft’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) journey. technologymagazine.com

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“ Ultimately, I believe as IoT develops, we are going to see the offerings that we've built become crisper and easier to consume” ZACH GREENBERGER

HEAD OF STRATEGIC BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & GLOBAL SUPPLY MANAGEMENT, LYFT BUSINESS

“It was critical that we took every step we could to effectively run [the] business, while also building a foundation that would allow it to scale, and this is precisely where Oracle came in.”

“Implementing Oracle's ERP infrastructure really unlocked access to data that our finance and supply chain teams needed while simultaneously providing leadership a more holistic view of how we conduct resource planning and execute strategies through our evaluation of the market.’

Focus, focus, focus Zach Greenberger attributes Lyft’s ability to step up several gears to the company’s successful IPO just before the pandemic.

He also believes Lyft had a head start over its competitors by originating as a digital platform. technologymagazine.com

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Oracle Native Applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Oracle’s cloud native services driven modern application development by using standards-based technologies giving developers a comprehensive, standards-based platform for a building, deploying, and managing applications.

CONSULTING THE ORACLE Lyft Reimagines the Future of Transportation with Oracle “Oracle’s culture is all about innovation - It has been from the beginning. Forty years on and it is still leading the way.” That’s according to Trey Parsons, Group VP at Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure Group.

“Our mission statement is to help people, our clients and partners, see data in new ways, gain valuable insights and discover endless possibilities” says Parsons.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has created a platform for companies to innovate and Oracle’s own culture of innovation translates to the accounts that our Cloud Venture team covers: ‘Unicorn’, cloud native, high growth accounts.

Oracle’s four-year relationship with the ride share business, Lyft Inc. is a

perfect example of how this brand of collaboration and partnership works.

“Lyft is a ‘cloud first’ company,” says Parsons. “Oracle’s Enterprise Fusion ERP application is one of the best in the business. It is an integrated, scalable suite. Lyft has gone from running hundreds of thousands of transactions to billions. Oracle’s scalable platform played a fundamental role in achieving this.”

Lyft’s first collaboration with Oracle was by adopting its Fusion Accounting Hub. This was implemented in a record 4 months.

They then successfully implemented Oracle Cloud Applications, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Oracle Analytics Cloud.

When Lyft successfully implemented Oracle Cloud it had the capability to close its books in half the time and to significantly improve relevant processes.

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“ One of the unique things that Lyft provides is building is the fleet management capability to be able to maintain and operate autonomous vehicles in a way that most effectively utilises them, given the daily supply and demand signals in the marketplace” ZACH GREENBERGER

HEAD OF STRATEGIC BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT & GLOBAL SUPPLY MANAGEMENT, LYFT BUSINESS

“The initial public offering has certainly benefited us,” he says. “One of our differentiators in the market is that we are hyper-focused on our mission. We don't get distracted with other things that aren't directly tied to that mission of improving people's lives with the world's best transportation. Every day, we are ruthlessly prioritising projects and products that continue to bring us closer to our goals.”

To infinity and beyond So, that was then. We’ve covered now what of the future?

No interview with a leading supply chain ‘guy’ is complete these days without drilling down where they see their business going in the future, especially in the Covid age. So, where does Zach Greenberger expect Lyft

DID YOU KNOW...

LYFT

LYFT MARKET SHARE AND GROWTH SINCE IPO Ride-hailing startup Lyft Inc raised US$2.2bn in its initial public offering on T pricing 30.77 million shares at US$72, the top of its already elevated US$70 to US$72 per share target range.

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to lead the charge in innovation, particularly in the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) as driving forces?

Greenberger claims Lyft is uniquely placed to take the market into uncharted territory here and can overcome perhaps the biggest obstacle to the expansion of automated transportation: Economics, not technology which will hold the market back.

“We've seen a tonne of progress in the acceleration of autonomy within vehicles, right?” he says. “One of the unique things

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that Lyft provides is the fleet management capability to be able to maintain and operate autonomous vehicles in a way that most effectively utilises them, given the daily supply and demand signals in the marketplace.”

“We see that with the vehicles that are operated on the platform today. Even though the vehicles are progressing towards full autonomy, there is also a lingering question on how the economics will pencil out long term.”

This is where Greenberger thinks Lyft comes into its own. Creating demand is one

thing. Turning that demand into a viable business is another. The two don’t always travel together.

“Not only do we have millions of customers looking to connect to transportation needs daily, but we are also providing the necessary fleet management capabilities that are ultimately required for a vehicle to be able to operate at maximum efficiency in the marketplace.”

“This is probably one of the most interesting parts of where we're headed with autonomy, but of course, it's a long road to get there.”

Greenberger brings this narrative back down to earth at this point. He’s back to his key skills in supply chains.

“These are natural progressions of technologies [referring to AI and IoT] that are going to be incredibly critical to every business' strategy, but I think more specifically as it relates to supply chain,” he says.

“I have a very strong conviction that evolving tech such as IoT and AI will play a key role in upskilling supply chain professionals to be more strategic and less transactional than they've historically been. We've seen a transformation on the impact that supply chain organisations can drive to an enterprise over the past decade.”

“I believe IoT and AI in the supply chain can give businesses the tools they need to execute against transactional needs without too much intervention. They are critical factors in how we think about long term product offerings - whether that is simply through connectivity, or the role played in autonomous vehicles.”

“My mentality on these technologies is that, as they develop, they expand the art of the possible. We’re cultivating what can be offered both in the supply chain and from a broader business innovation perspective.

That includes embedded systems that are providing better telematics to our owned and operated fleet or IoT devices deep within the heart of our supply chain hardware – our vehicles – making it easier to assess and predict optimal vehicle positioning, asset utilisation, more accurate ETA estimates and so on.”

“Ultimately, I believe as IoT develops, we are going to see the innovative offerings that we've built, become crisper and easier to consume.”

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Are you ready for the Total Experience?

Customer experience, employee experience and end-user experience make up a new hybrid concept known as TX. Technology Magazine explores this concept.

WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

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ong existing as separate roles, customer experience, employee experience and end-user experience are now being compounded into one role: Total Experience (TX). There’s been some great examples of TX in B2C with items like the MagicBand+, introduced by the Walt Disney World Resort, where guests can enjoy a hands-free experience; unlocking extra features in the parks, ordering food and merchandise, photos and booking and entering hotels.

Benedict Ireland, Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at UNLIMITED, a fully integrated agency group, says: “It's a funny term, isn't it [TX]? It’s like atomic design.

Something we've been doing for years, but it just didn't have a name.”

The ability to align the business' view of how they use each of the channels in a consistent way for a customer is really where the value sits, according to Ireland.

“Businesses can align their brand values across all touch points. It’s inconsistent to enter a slick high street store, be greeted by someone trained to speak in a certain

ENTERPRISE IT

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Content Management and Process Automation Content Management and Process Automation

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ME to develop and implement enterprise-wide document and records management management solutions.

ICC Community Development Solutions is a subsidiary of the International Code Council, and provides software solutions for municipalities andisbuilding safety “Our solutions make easier ICC Community Development Solutions a subsidiary ofprofessionals. the International Code Council, anditprovides to get work done faster for local governments,” said Dan professionals.

Foster, General“Our Manager, ICC Community software solutions for municipalities and building safety solutions make it easier Development Solutions, speaking from their headquarters in Rochester, New York. to get work done faster for local governments,” said Dan Foster, General Manager, ICC Community Development Solutions, speaking from their headquarters in Rochester, New York.

With Laserfiche records management ICC Community Development Solutions is helping local jurisdictions digitize documents and records, giving you the ability toSolutions search, retrieve, andlocal share With Laserfiche records management ICC Community Development is helping files internally and with the public.

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ENTERPRISE IT

“ Investing in a role that ensures customer experience, employee experience, and enduser experience are viewed holistically can reveal important insights that are essential to business success” CELINE MAHER

REGIONAL VICE PRESIDENT, RKI AT ZENDESK

way, but then go to the website and have a completely different experience. One of the benefits of TX is that you get to align that brand expression. We look at holistic customer life cycles rather than individual

journeys, allowing us to create a much more consistent experience across those touchpoints.”

“We would also work with the internal teams working with the in-store experience, the web experience, the app experience, the call centre experience and start marrying them up, on and offline. This creates massive operational efficiencies,” said Ireland.

TX in healthcare According to Professor Luciano Nardo, Founder of NOW-fertility.com, a trailblazing new digital platform set to revolutionise the assisted conception journey: “TX will be particularly important in the new, digital age of assisted conception. Traditionally, individual technologymagazine.com

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Disney World’s MagicBand+

“Businesses can align their brand values across all touch points”

IVF clinics operate in commitment to marketing silos, which presents and advertising. disadvantages for clinics, “Clinicians benefit clinicians, and their patients.” from data-driven, clinical “It will be typified by decision support and a digital portal run by a digital platform that experienced physicians, fosters greater interaction nurses and counsellors with both patients, BENEDICT IRELAND offering 24/7, personalised and other healthcare CXO, and supportive consultancy professionals,” he said.

UNLIMITED and care. This ‘always-on’ approach empowers the patient to be The demands of the role in charge of their own treatment cycle, As the Director of Product and User while negating unnecessary time, stress, Experience for Utelogy, a software-based and costs.” platform which aims to improve overall According to Professor Nardo, the user experience, Nicole Corbin works clinic benefits from acquiring and sharing very closely with the executive leadership specialist knowledge, plus improved team, customer success team, and margins and an expanded geographical development teams to craft new products reach, and a reduced financial and vision for the company, as well as 106

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ENTERPRISE IT

“ My position has drastically shifted to being a leader within the company pushing the need for the concept of total experience, both internally and for our products”

been more important. Investing in a role that ensures customer experience, employee experience, and end-user experience are viewed holistically can reveal important insights that are essential to business success.

“Connecting your customer experience with your employee experience can point to quick-win investments for all involved. For example, an automated chatbot, a powerful helpdesk, or simple omnichannel tools that make it easier for your customers to reach out on platforms of their choice, can benefit both parties,” said Maher.

NICOLE CORBIN

DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT AND USER EXPERIENCE, UTELOGY

figure out the best way to bring these experiences to market.

“When I first started at Utelogy my role was a bit more focused on the UX design of our software, but not necessarily the experience as a whole. In the last few years, my position has drastically shifted to being a leader within the company pushing the need for the concept of total experience, both internally and for our products. We are now pushing for industry standards around security and agnosticity,” said Corbin.

Challenges facing TX adoption Celine Maher, Regional Vice President, UKI at Zendesk, says that one of the toughest challenges in embracing the “Total Experience” mindset is convincing business leaders to look beyond the bottom line, and to take learnings from their customer experience team’s feedback.

“While some may think that the current climate means investment in experience can take a backseat to so-called ‘keeping the lights on’ investments, I believe it’s never

The four steps to being successful in total experience management: • Visualise - present EX and CX insights in a singular view.

• Analyse - examine the links between EX and CX. • Involve - widely include employees in your EX programmes.

• Converge - Align the EX and CX technologies.

Stephanie Barton, EMEA MD at Qualtrics

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“ More than one in three (36%) of business leaders state that a core benefit of the future workplace will be a stronger alignment between employee and customer experience” DAVE PAGE

CEO, ACTUAL EXPERIENCE

Benedict Ireland’s agency, UNLIMITED, works with major brands every day. In his mind, TX can only improve the businesses he works with, and would encourage internal roles to be created: “If I'm looking from the CEO's perspective, it’s really to improve the relationship with the customer, which in turn improves the business.”

Since the pandemic struck in 2020, companies have become increasingly vocal about expressing their broader purpose, and with that has brought the shift in focus toward the Employee Experience (EX), and to a certain extent, the wider ‘Total Experience’ (TX).

Dave Page is the CEO and Co Founder of Actual Experience, who run people analytics for HR. He says: “Business leaders have been more accessible than ever and communicating purpose has been key to interactions with employees and customers alike. From an employee perspective, this has helped give meaning to work when people feel isolated and cut off from normal work structures. For customers, it is the understanding of the ‘why’ of a business and to help nurture brand loyalty, which 108

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became crucial during lockdown especially.

“The term ‘micro-moments’ refers to small customer experiences that play a disproportionately large role in shaping their perceptions of a brand. It’s about paying attention to small interactions such as how easy it was to access customer service - and how they make someone feel, rather than simply focusing on bigger milestone moments - such as an all-singing, all-dancing sales landing page.”

Over the horizon Ireland sees privacy and the ownership of data or identity as a key trend, saying: “As we move further away from people just being quite happy to sign up for everything,

give lots of information. It's a privacy issue.

There's a business called Yoti who we've worked with, a digital identity provider. The idea there is you have one account with Yoti. It is backed by the government and verified from your passport or your driving licence. And it holds as much data as you want them to hold about you. So when you interact with a brand, they use the Yoti ID so they’re the only ones who hold data on you,” he said.

Dave Page said: “our recent report, Reconfigured, found a clear shift toward improved employee experience as a key driver for the C-Suite. More than one in three (36%) of business leaders state that a core benefit of the future workplace will be

a stronger alignment between employee and customer experience. However, this will be dependent on a greater understanding of employee requirements, both digitally and personally. 29% of respondents claim this to be one of the top challenges management faces.

“As an example, as digital working has become more embedded, companies have had to shift focus to the employee and have sought to draw on lessons from CX that they can apply to EX. This involves thinking carefully about employee journeys and building emotional connections with them from the moment they first engage with the organisation to the moment they leave,” he said. technologymagazine.com

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REFINING THE TRANSFORMATION DIGITAL STRATEGY

WRITTEN BY: GEORGIA WILSON PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

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BELL FOOD GROUP

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BELL FOOD GROUP

Sven Friedli, CIO of Bell Food Group talks through the group’s digital transformation journey and how it is fine-tuning its strategy

A

passionate manager with almost 20 years of experience in telecommunications, enterprise architecture, and organisational development, Sven Friedli, CIO of Bell Food Group studied Computer Science and Business Economics at the University of Applied Science in Bern. Following his studies, Friedli worked for a startup in software development and later in his career in several roles at Swisscom.

“In my career at Swisscom, I learned a lot about managing and delivering IT projects and telco services as well as steering the IT strategy and enterprise architecture of the company.

Today, I lead the IT of Bell Food Group, and I am responsible for ensuring stable IT operation for our production plants, networks, data centres and digital processes. This is quite a challenge with all our locations spread over Europe. My job is to push the digitalisation of the company and to show the business the value of new technologies and opportunities that we can bring to the business, how we can automate our processes and find new business opportunities,” says Friedli.

The digital transformation journey so far…

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BELL FOOD GROUP

Bell Food Group

has completed its initial intelligence (AI) and “This is a huge effort, strategy and is now finemachine learning (ML) which requires a lot tuning its results. components. We use “In the last year, I of cultural change, we these technologies to have learnt more about improve our product are not 100% there our main challenges quality and optimise our and priorities as a yet, in terms of where daily processes. business. So as part of “The third is to create I want to be, but our strategy, I had four value for our employees pillars that I focused to collaborate together I think step by step, on. The first is the without boundaries we’re getting there” standardisation of and ensure they are our infrastructure and properly informed. application to control The Microsoft 365 SVEN FRIEDLI CIO, and gradually simplify product range and BELL FOOD GROUP the complexity of our our communication environment. The platform, called second priority is increasing productivity Beekeeper, will have an important role and processes. So we have to optimise our in helping us on our journey. Finally, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system continuous improvement and optimisation landscapes, introducing manufacturing of our processes and infrastructure to execution systems (MES), adopting ensure that our downtimes and disruptions new cloud technologies with artificial are as low as possible."

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SVEN FRIEDLI TITLE: CIO INDUSTRY: FOOD PRODUCTION LOCATION: BASEL, SWITZERLAND

EXECUTIVE BIO

Some of the main achievements made by Bell Food Group include implementing SAP S4 HANA into all processes including finance, controlling, production, logistics, and planning in June 2021 for Bell Switzerland.

“We first tried this in Easter, but we faced some issues, mostly around communication with our endpoint devices, to not risk our production, we had to roll back the implementation. I am really proud of my team that they have not lost heart after this failure. We further optimised the migration, conducted more tests so that two months later we had a much smoother rollout,” comments Friedli.

Another achievement for the group includes the rollout of a new ERP implementation with CSB at Eisberg Switzerland. With a great combined effort from key users, the infrastructure team, the management and the CSB project team, Bell Food Group successfully, after two years, introduced the ERP system in November.

“We have in total 63 locations spread across 15 countries, and we’re on the last steps to harmonise our MPLS network over the entire group,” says Friedli. “We have also launched a pilot with Beekeeper. With this platform, our trainees can collaborate and communicate together. We are now ready to scale this platform out to other parts of the company, to also reach out to our first line workers with digital information. We will be able to provide personal planning, site information, achievements, and much more information via their mobile device or on digital screens at the plant.

“With Microsoft and Accenture we are introducing a new workplace strategy based on Microsoft 365 technology, right now we are moving all our exchange mailboxes to the cloud. Finally, we are also in the last stages of introducing an

Passionate manager with almost 20 years of experience in it, telecom, enterprise architecture, manufacturing and organizational development. Before Sven entered Bell Food Group he spend the past 12 years in the telecom industry.

He started his career in studying computer science and business economics at the university of applied science in Bern and worked for a startup in software development. Within Swisscom Sven first was responsible for several managing roles in the enterprise business group, mostly focusing on managing and delivering IT projects and telco services.

In the last five years, he was responsible for the architecture, technology and innovation steering among Swisscom.

Since October 2020 Sven is now managing the IT of Bell Food Group. He has to keep the balance in order to master the increasing complexity in IT, to ensure the daily 7/24 operation of the company and to make sensible use of the opportunities of digitization for Bell Food Group.

IGZ & Hilcona: Digital production with SAP MES Discover how IGZ has been supporting Hilcona AG to digitalize its production with SAP MES Being a leading international active food manufacturer and part of Bell Food Group, Hilcona AG, as part of its digitisation initiative, has been pursuing its goal to introduce a future-proof and uniformed manufacturing execution system (MES) for its production.

The challenges Faced with many individual and partly obsolete systems at their ‘end of life’, Hilcona had no comprehensive MES available for all areas. As a result, the company experienced a lack of inventory transparency and traceability, failure to exploit potential productivity improvements, and a lack of ability to exploit process optimisation.

As such the company looked to IGZ to replace its obsolete systems, implement a comprehensive MES for all areas, reduce paper-based order execution, and integrate an end-to-end dynamic machine integration for more efficient production control and the ability to determine OEE/ KPIs and key figures difficult to implement with existing systems (standardisation).

Implementing SAP MES Hilcona’s implementation of SAP MES started in 2018. At the beginning of this complex project IGZ initiated a pilot phase at its in Schaan site for central filling production, focusing on scale integration and the replacement of existing subsystems for the production of semi-finished products.

Following the initial pilot stage, Hilcona rolled out the pilot to other departments at the Schaan site as well as its additional production site in Orbe. In the next step the SAP MES basis template for batch production was extended by flow manufacturing processes for Schaan and Orbe. Thereby Hilcona could replace the existing non-SAP control

station (IMT) to allow the organisation to determine KPIs and operational equipment efficiency (OEE) in line with “Weihenstephaner Standard”, including evaluation and monitoring as well as reporting by means of IGZ best practice OEE 4.0 (cross-departmental).

How did Hilcona benefit from this SAP MES integration?

With this integration of SAP MES, Hilcona gained a highly dynamic machine and shop floor integration concept that is reliable and easy to scale. The integration allowed Hilcona to install reliable processes with online worker guidance, reduce manual data entry with automated processes, increase work ergonomics and efficiency with demanddriven production replenishment and mobile applications instead of stationary dialogues, higher level of traceability down to the individual container level, improved quality with in-process inspections, and paperless production.

Discover more

BELL FOOD GROUP

“ I am really proud of my team that they have not lost heart after this failure. We further optimised the migration, conducted more tests so that two months later we had a much smoother rollout” SVEN FRIEDLI

CIO, BELL FOOD GROUP

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MES with our partner IGZ. This will be a big step in the digitalisation journey of our production at Hilcona.”

Refining the process When it comes to a digital transformation strategy, Friedli explains that defining and implementing a strategy like this is really hard work. You really have to understand the needs of the business. You also have to be willing to challenge them in their daily routines and processes to drive real value into their daily work with the new technologies. Just rebuilding existing processes with digital tools is not the way.”

Navigating a digital transformation In order to successfully navigate a digital transformation strategy, Friedli outlines

DID YOU KNOW...

INDUSTRY 4.0 - SVEN FRIEDLI “In a production company like ours, industry 4.0 is key, which is why we built up a central team called smart technology to strongly push this initiative. The goal of the team is to learn from partners, to understand what kind of opportunities new technologies are bringing, and to define and align groupwide standards to build up a common collaboration ecosystem. It is also important, that the team ensures an open collaboration and communication across all companies and locations to share their needs, challenges, and achievements made to learn from each other.

“We’re on our way to optimise our demand forecasting and demand planning at our sites, with weather forecasting, customer behaviours, and information about seasonality. By doing this you can optimise your planning to ensure that you can fulfil the needs of your customers and also reduce your costs in the production process.

When it comes to cloud technology, we are currently trying to get the most out of our use of Microsoft 365, as a cloud platform we are focusing on Azure. But the cloud transformation is also pushed by using several software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to bring value to our process chain.”

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PARTNERS...

BELL FOOD GROUP

“For me, it is very important that we have a collaboration on eye level with our partners. With this kind of relationship, you can overcome challenges and tough times together as a common team. I think you have to know each other and you have to define common goals and a common understanding of your culture and needs.

“What I am looking for in our partners is transparency. They have to provide me with an outside/in view, support my needs, and they should show me how to use the newest technologies and how they can make our company get better. Another very important factor for me is that they take over responsibility and commitment in this journey, and they act as a true partner, even in difficult times.”

that first and foremost you have to define and communicate a clear strategy. You have to have the right balance between central governance and de-centralised empowerment: “You really have to understand the needs and challenges of your business units. And you have to be able to make fast decisions and short term adoptions, on the journey if needed.

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“ For me, it is very important that we have a collaboration on eye level with our partners, with this kind of relationship, you can overcome challenges and tough times together as a common team” SVEN FRIEDLI

CIO, BELL FOOD GROUP

that make a difference. So you have the right people and a clear, understandable strategy, I think this is the key success factor of digital transformation.”

Since joining Bell Food Group in 2020, Friedli has implemented quite some changes in IT. Highlighting the management team and all his employees, Friedli says: “I think we really grew together as one team supporting each other, and we are focusing on aligned priorities. We managed to overcome failures and learn from them in order to do it better next time.”

“We have also started to focus more on business outcomes than on technology implementations. And I think, in summary, we learned to talk better the language of our business and we try to find clever ways to support their needs. This is a huge effort, which requires a lot of cultural change. We are not 100% there yet, in terms of where I want to be, but I think step by step, we’re getting there together,” he concludes.

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AI IN SURVEILLANCE

NOW YOU SEE 122

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As the technology moves beyond basic consumer needs, what is the true cost of AI in surveillance - and is it out of control already?

WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

A

rtificial intelligence (AI) is intertwined in airports, entertainment venues, stadiums, hotels, casinos, shopping centres and in particular, police forces.

In 2019, at least 75 countries were using artificial intelligence-enabled surveillance.

Irish start-up Liopa is trialling a phone application that can interpret phrases mouthed by people, and VisionLabs, which is based in Amsterdam, claims it is able to tell if someone is showing anger, disgust, fear, happiness, surprise or sadness; with the aim of tracking productivity and even make hiring decisions.

Concerns around facial recognition Nigel Jones, Co-Founder of the Privacy Compliance Hub, former Google executive and head of its legal team for Europe, said: “While undoubtedly technology can be a force for good, and can and does track and find criminals, it can go too far and actually become a threat to people going about their everyday lawful business. Today, from unlocking your iPhone, to employers tracking productivity and police forces surveilling protests – facial recognition technology is becoming more and more embedded into our everyday lives. But there are several reasons why we think there are reasons for concern when it comes to facial recognition software and privacy. These tools work a lot better in the lab than they do in the real world. Small factors such as light, shade and how the image is captured can affect the result,” said Jones.

Jones says that many critics argue that users have not consented to being scanned, and that going out in public should not be considered consent to be tracked.

Even knocking on a friend’s door (complete with a Ring doorbell) could see you added to a police database of images.

Without law and order, facial cognition for surveillance could be dangerous for those caught on

“ Limiting data collection by central authorities is a good way of limiting government interference” ALAN CALDER

CEO, GRC INTERNATIONAL GROUP

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ETHICAL AI

“ Customers must believe their digital identities and personal information are protected” AMIR NOORIALA

CHIEF COMMERCIAL OFFICER, CALLSIGN

camera, according to Shawn Tan, CEO of Skymind, the world's first dedicated AI ecosystem builder, enabling companies and organisations to develop their own AI applications.

“For far too long, there have been too many cases where biased datasets have been used by companies to develop AI that discriminates against the society it is meant to serve. It also leads to backlash for businesses and shuts out too many people from accessing goods and services.

Companies must seriously consider algorithm interpretability and testing. New, robust legislation puts a renewed sense of responsibility on those developing and implementing AI to be transparent and call out biases in datasets. Without legislation, companies have no incentive to put in the extra resources required to overcome such biases," said Tan. Sea change for Big Tech The scale of mass surveillance doesn’t get any greater than Google’s use of cookies, but along with others, the company has announced that it will end cookie usage.

This needs changing to : The scale of mass surveillance doesn’t get any greater than Google’s use of cookies, but along with others, the company has announced that it technologymagazine.com

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VisionLabs how it works

will end cookie usage. IBM, defence firms in the past.

“Even knocking Microsoft and Amazon have Criminals can use this on a friend’s door all either pulled out of the information to commit (complete with a facial recognition software identity fraud, harass or Ring doorbell) could market altogether or are stalk victims. Biometric limiting their work with data is not something you’d see you added to police forces in the US. want to fall into the wrong a police database But companies selling hands,” he added. of images” facial recognition software Peter Galdies, the Senior have compiled huge Consultant of DQM GRC, a databases to power their specialist data protection NIGEL JONES CO-FOUNDER, algorithms – including and privacy consultancy, PRIVACY COMPLIANCE HUB some 3 billion images that added: “Speaking from Clearview AI scraped from a privacy perspective, Google, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and it's noteworthy to mention Meta's Venmo) that it can search against. recent decision to shut down it's facial According to Jones, these systems are recognition system. Meta acknowledged a real security risk: “Hackers have broken the situation as a complex social issue, into databases containing facial scans and the rebranded 'Meta' seems to used by banks, police departments and be shifting its approach as to how this 126

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ETHICAL AI

complex biometric data is stored and processed. Part of its reasoning for this could be that the company realised the nature and type of consent gained may not have met the existing, or future, standards that regulators may expect for sensitive biometric data.

It can therefore be concluded that commercial users of such data would also be somewhat sceptical of forming a business relationship with Meta on these matters - considering the previous litigations that Facebook has been involved in with privacy regulators.”

Leading biometric authentication firm ID R&D takes consent very seriously.

Transparency is the solution, according to President Alexey Khitrov: “Meta's change of identity came alongside the announcement that it will end the use of its facial recognition software, but many believe facial recognition is highly likely to be used in future metaverses. Users need to choose whether to opt-in or out – and Meta acknowledges this. Nobody should be using face recognition without consent or prior knowledge.”

Six key questions Genevieve Bell proposes six key questions that we can use as a guideline when discussing AI in surveillance: • Is the system autonomous?

• Does the system have agency/ control?

• How do we think about its assurance/ safety/ does it function properly?

• What is the interface between systems?

• What will the indicators be that show that systems work well/efficiently?

• What is the systems' intent, what is it designed to do?

ETHICAL AI

Skymind Artificial Intelligence Powered by people

“ Transparency must give control of the biometrics to its rightful owners - the people themselves,” he said” ALEXEY KHITROV PRESIDENT, ID R&D INC

“Transparency must give control of the biometrics to its rightful owners - the people themselves. An AI Bill of Rights will allow people to know exactly what 128

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information is being used and how,” said Khitrov.

Is facial recognition technology vulnerable to corruption?

Facial recognition mechanisms are obviously a huge boon for law enforcement, according to Andy Patel, researcher with F-Secure’s Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence.

Surely people would be fine with such mechanisms replacing manual examination of CCTV footage, allowing generation of real-time alerts when suspects or known perpetrators pass CCTV cameras?

Patel insists that most haven’t considered the downsides – such as what happens if the data is stolen and used for malicious purposes – or how such a mass surveillance system might be used if their country turns into a corrupt regime.

“At the present moment, no system is impervious to security breaches, so it should be assumed that facial recognition data will eventually be stolen. With this in mind, law enforcement agencies should use such technologies selectively and via appropriate legal processes. They should also ensure that any data associated with specific individuals be stored in a very secure manner,” said Patel.

Callsign is a pioneering digital trust through proprietary technology that uniquely mimics the way humans identify each other in the real world.

Amir Nooriala, Chief Commercial Officer, said:“A layered approach to stopping cybersecurity breaches offers an effective solution without invading individual user privacy. Mass surveillance cannot be a solution to protecting people and personal

data when there are better methods on offer.

Customers must believe their digital identities and personal information are protected, otherwise these newly minted digital services will never be a source of sustainable growth.”

Who is regulating AI? Nigel Jones believes that the use of facial recognition software has real implications for fundamental human rights, including the right to protest, and the right to a private life. In China, the gaming giant Tencent is using facial recognition to stop children playing games between 10pm and 8am. Between these times, players will have to give a facial scan to prove they’re an adult.

“It’s particularly insidious as we might start to see it as normal. It’s a slippery slope. One of the risks of children being technologymagazine.com

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monitored at a young age is the acceptance of facial recognition technology as they grow into adults.”

The use of facial recognition tools is already governed by the GDPR in the EU and the UK, but as technology companies themselves are calling for stronger regulation, there isn’t enough transparency about what happens to stored images, how they’re processed and for how long, according to Jones.

One of the challenges faced by regulators is that the technology is moving incredibly fast. Close-box technology systems used by police forces were not trusted by 29% of individuals surveyed by the Ada Lovelace Institute back in 2019; citing a lack of faith that the police will use the data ethically.

With 25 years’ experience in data regulation and practices as CEO at GRC International Group, a global provider of IT governance, risk management and compliance solutions, Alan Calder believes that centralised data gathering is a critical issue: “The more data that is centrally gathered, the more likely it is that there will be abuses and breaches – cyber criminals will obviously attack large stores of valuable personal data, all of which can be sold or re-used to craft other attacks – and most governments have a tendency toward repression and enforcement, for which access to large quantities of personal data is essential. Limiting data collection by central authorities is a good way of limiting government interference.”

Skymind’s Shawn Tan added that "like many other firms in the AI sector, we are in favour of the EU rules introduced in May, which will help to determine how companies use artificial intelligence. The rules are the first of their kind to introduce regulation to the sector, and the EU’s approach is unique in the world. They can also address the ethical issues around AI.” technologymagazine.com

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THE KEY TO A SUCCESSFUL

SECURIT Y

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ALVAREZ & MARSAL

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Youssef Oujdi, Chief Security Officer, Alvarez & Marsal reflects on the company’s cyber security partnerships for effective risk and threat management.

F

alling into the management consultant industry quite by chance, Youssef Oujdi, Chief Security Officer, Alvarez & Marsal graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in Business Information Systems, with a focus on information technology (IT) & Security.

“After graduating I happened to find a role in IT at Alvarez & Marsal, a professional services firm which resulted in my quick introduction to the industry. And from there the rest was history,” says Oujdi.

Being a privately held organisation since its founding in 1983, Alvarez & Marsal is a global professional services firm. Delivering tangible results for corporates, boards, private equity firms, law firms and government agencies for those that face complex challenges, “Alvarez & Marsal is notable for its work in turnaround management and performance improvement, but over the last decades has expanded into multiple other service lines. One of its core missions as a business is to continue providing clients with highquality services driven by leadership and ultimately results.”

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The key to a successful security programme

Dealing with so many clients globally, Alvarez & Marsal handle many data types in order to serve them effectively. “As a result, we have built a robust security programme aligned to the ISO 27001 standard. This programme allows us to continuously manage our information security risk and treat it in accordance with the globally recognised standard,” says Oujdi.

Alvarez & Marsal and its security partnerships When it comes to external partners Alvarez & Marsal’s approach has always been: “we’re not here to just be sold a product or a platform,” says Oujdi. “We're here to create a relationship where we can truly embark on a journey with a chosen organisation and 136

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have input, to help develop their solutions in a way that accommodates our needs and requirements. We’re always looking for partners who are interested in our business and are truly interested in helping us solve the complex issues that we encounter.

“Working with our strategic partners has allowed us to transform our security programme to one that is aligned to various leading standards. With the help of Microsoft, Cisco, SpyCloud and many more partners we have been able to position ourselves in a way that allows us to rapidly come up with solutions to an ever-changing threat landscape in the cyber security world.

We're also in a position where we have full support from our partners and we continue to nurture those relationships.

EXECUTIVE BIO YOUSSEF OUJDI TITLE: CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER LOCATION: LONDON Youssef Oujdi serves as the Chief Security Officer with Alvarez & Marsal in London. He specialises in assessing, developing and implementing comprehensive information security programmes through a blend of team building, cutting-edge operations and visionary leadership.

With nearly a decade of cyber operations experience, Oujdi has led global information security teams in delivering robust security services to multiple business lines ranging from business restructuring, finance and banking to disputes and investigations.

Oujdi also holds a CISSP and CEH professional membership. He is a member of the Microsoft Security Advisory Council and Cisco Security Advisory Board where he has thought leadership input on developing cyber technology.

Oujdi earned a bachelor’s degree in business information systems from the University of Westminster.

A British national, Oujdi is fluent in both English and Moroccan.

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Make recaptured data your best defense.

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ALVAREZ & MARSAL

“ Alvarez & Marsal is notable for its work in turnaround management and performance improvement, but over the last decades has expanded into multiple other service lines” YOUSSEF OUJDI

CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, ALVAREZ & MARSAL

SpyCloud SpyCloud is a very interesting organisation.

We came across them in their very early days.

They’re a relatively small organisation and growing, based out of Austin, Texas. SpyCloud operates in the dark web space, looking at ways to help organisations secure themselves from account takeovers (ATO).

“Having access to billions of dark web records, SpyCloud can provide insights into which records belong to your organisation whether it’s usernames, passwords, or other credential type information. With this service, we were able to work alongside them on a solution that allows us to check if these types of information are still in use, and if they are, automate a password reset so that those credentials are no longer valuable to the potential buyer in the dark web,” says Oujdi.

Founded in 2016 by Ted Ross (CEO), David Endler (Chief Product Officer), and Alen Puzic (CTO), SpyCloud protects its global clients from compromised identity.

SpyCloud’s solutions provide actionable information to prevent fraud and power many popular dark web monitoring and identity theft protection offerings. technologymagazine.com

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DarkTrace “DarkTrace help us with the monitoring and detection of our internal network. As we have about 65 offices globally, DarkTrace is positioned on our internal network to look at the traffic and help us to detect abnormal activity. It provides the security team with the intelligence and visibility to look into and determine whether an event is malicious or not to keep our internal network secure from any threats,” says Oujdi.

Founded in 2013 by Poppy Gustafsson (CEO), DarkTrace is a global leader in cyber security AI, protecting worldwide customers from advanced threats, such as ransomware, cloud and SaaS attacks.

“I think when it comes to cyber security it is not about building rockets and flying to Jupiter, it’s more about how can we focus on getting all the basics right and doing them well” YOUSSEF OUJDI

CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, ALVAREZ & MARSAL

DarkTrace applies self-learning AI to understand a given business and then autonomously defend it.

ReliaQuest “ReliaQuest, is a very important partner to us. They help us with our security operations centre. With our 24/7 SOC, ReliaQuest act as an extension of that providing us an initial first layer monitoring and analysis of our global network. They are a highly effective group of people who are on the ball when it comes to keeping up with the latest cyber trends and threats. ReliaQuest provides a robust service to monitor our network technologymagazine.com

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Autonomous Cyber AI

ALVAREZ & MARSAL

throughout the environment, helping us find that ‘needle in the haystack’” says Oujdi.

Founded in 2007 by Brian Murphy (CEO), ReliaQuest is a global leader in Open XDRas-a-Service, the company’s solution ‘GreyMatter’ unifies detection, investigation, response and resilience when it comes to cyber security threats. ReliaQuest offers its 24/7/365 expertise and the power of technology to provide others with the visibility and coverage they require to make their cyber security program more effective.

The challenges of cyber security When it comes to cyber security, Oujdi is big on the basics. “I think when it comes

to effective cyber security it is not about building rockets and flying to Jupiter, it’s more about how can we focus on getting all the basics right and doing them well. If you look at any cyber breach report you will see that 90% or more of organisations experience a breach because of a lack of the basics. So if an organisation can get the basics right and can do them very well, they can significantly reduce the risk of a cyber security breach.”

Reflecting on the challenges of cyber security, Oujdi explains “thinking about the foundations of a programme, there are so many vendors, there are so many solutions, and there are some many different areas within cyber security that you can sometimes get lost in the weeds. So I think one of the challenges is that organisations fail to pinpoint the specific objectives needed in order to achieve an effective security programme. A lot of organisations technologymagazine.com

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“ We have built a robust security programme driven by the ISO 27001 standard.

This programme allows us to continuously manage our information security risk and treat it in accordance with the standard” YOUSSEF OUJDI

CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, ALVAREZ & MARSAL

fail to do the essentials, they think if they build something amazingly intelligent it will be the key to the challenge, it’s important to start with the essentials.

“Another challenge is the lack of talent and resources, it is extremely difficult to find good people in this market from a talent acquisition perspective. Additionally, these threat actors are constantly innovating in order to penetrate an organisations network or system, so finding the right people to help protect against

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“ We have been able to position ourselves in a way that allows us to rapidly come up with solutions to an ever-changing threat landscape in the cyber security world” YOUSSEF OUJDI

CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, ALVAREZ & MARSAL

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the ever-changing threat landscape is a huge challenge.

Over the next 12 to 18 months, Oujdi sees an uptake in vulnerabilities. “As technology continuously evolves and changes so will the vulnerabilities, and I think we've already seen that in the past 6 to 12 months. I also believe that organisations globally will become more and more interested in how their data is being protected, both from an internal

perspective and also from a supply chain perspective. Lastly, I believe that regulators will become more aggressive on how they approach cyber security and data protection across different industries to raise national standards,” concludes Oujdi.

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© Peter de Jong

VODAFONE ZIGGO

THE DIGITAL EXPEDITION WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE

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VODAFONE ZIGGO

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© Peter de Jong

As VodafoneZiggo embarks on its network of the future, technology strategist, WILCO DEKKER, equates the journey to the focus he used to climb Everest

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© Wilco Dekker

A

s VodafoneZiggo works towards a network of the future, technology strategist and Dutch adventurer Wilco Dekker equates the ‘digital expedition’ to the focus he used to conquer Mount Everest.

As Dekker drives the digital journey of VodafoneZiggo, at a time when the Netherlands is ahead of the curve compared to any other European country in their consumption of data, he applies the same focus and vision he adopted to climb the world’ highest mountain, to chart success for the communication provider.

“An explosion of happiness” is how Dekker describes the moment he stood on the roof of the world. But he soon realised the ascent of Everest was only half the story as the descent was still to come. “The real achievement is when I got to base camp.

Then I could celebrate. On the way up, I had a problem with my oxygen bottle in the Dead Zone, and it was a life or death decision, what to do. Preparation and instinct came into play.”

Dekker admits this achievement appeared like ‘mission impossible’ a few years before his climb in 2019. He now uses the same motivation he needed for this feat of human endurance as an analogy for success within VodafoneZiggo and other businesses as they embark on the ‘digital expedition’ to industry 4.0.

“I take companies through the same seven steps I went through to climb Everest to prepare them for the future, which is essentially unexplored terrain. It’s an area where nobody has ever been, so how do we prepare for that?” said Dekker speaking from the Technology office of VodafoneZiggo in Amsterdam.

“If you want to get the job done, you have to prepare for it well in advance, fail fast, learn quickly, and then you will enjoy the ride.

2017

joint–venture Vodafone and Ziggo founded

€4bn

revenue with €800+ million reinvest in the network

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“Before starting on any journey, you have to be aware of the goal before identifying the direction and how to get there. For me, the success of getting there exists with 80% preparation and 20% execution,” said Dekker, who cites the seven steps to success as: • Awareness • Preparation • Leaving your comfort zone • Research • Practise • Conviction • Overview He is now drawing on them in his role as Manager Technology Strategy with VodafoneZiggo to help navigate its digital transformation to ‘build for the future’.

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Following the merger of Vodafone, which entered the Dutch market in 1995 under the name Libertel, and Ziggo in 2017, the company adopted the name VodafoneZiggo and now serves 5.2 million mobile customers.

Dekker joined VodafoneZiggo in 2014 and is helping to shape their pledge to build a 'network of the future' with smart connections. This includes providing fixed, mobile, and integrated communication and entertainment services to consumers and businesses. They offer consumers entertainment from TV, sports, movies and series and help entrepreneurs on their way with impactful business operations.

“Technology as a facilitator allows us to enjoy our lives to the max,” commented Dekker.

COMPANY NAME

Wilco Dekker TITLE: TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY MANAGER COMPANY: VODAFONEZIGGO INDUSTRY: COMMUNICATION PROVIDER LOCATION: AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS

WILCO DEKKER

TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY MANAGER, VODAFONEZIGGO

© Peter de Jong

EXECUTIVE BIO

Wilco Dekker is responsible for the Video–, HFC and Access domain of the VodafoneZiggo network.

Dekker, who climbed Mount Everest in 2019, worked on the first Pay–TV system and introduced the first digital TV platform in the Netherlands. After the merger of Vodafone and Ziggo, he is now an internal advisor.

Dekker’s role at Liberty Global was as VP Broadcast & Media Services and was responsible for all digital broadcast services.

In 2011 Dekker worked for Doctors without Borders in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In 1994, he worked on the transformation of the one–way CATV network into a bi–directional multimedia telecom network.

“ I TAKE COMPANIES THROUGH THE SAME SEVEN STEPS I WENT THROUGH TO CLIMB EVEREST TO PREPARE THEM FOR THE FUTURE, WHICH IS ESSENTIALLY UNEXPLORED TERRAIN”

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VodafoneZiggo: The digital expedition

One step ahead of the competition “In the corporate world, it is important you are prepared for your digital journey and start before your competition does so,” said Dekker, who cited five reasons why he thought the Netherlands is growing faster than any other European country in their consumption of data.

• Good infrastructure with many homes connected • High capacity networks • High internet usage • Digitally skilled people • High number of smart TV’s and connected homes “All this means there is more data going through our network than in other countries.

In an exponentially growing data market, that means that 30% of a little is still a little, but 30% of a lot is serious business. Knowing this, we can 154

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take precautions and look at an early stage at potential changes and other technologies.

“VodafoneZiggo is on top of the digital transformation. We made it one of our strategic pillars to ‘go digital’. We have a dedicated department in charge of transformation and reach out to all of our employees to create awareness about the

“ VODAFONEZIGGO IS ON TOP OF THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION. WE MADE IT ONE OF OUR STRATEGIC PILLARS TO ‘GO DIGITAL’” WILCO DEKKER

TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY MANAGER, VODAFONEZIGGO

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need to change. Many processes, platforms and systems have to change, and that takes time. But it all starts with the belief of the people who operate all of this that we have to make this move.”

VodafoneZiggo is a joint venture between Liberty Global, the largest international TV and broadband internet company, and the Vodafone Group. As a provider of entertainment services, Ziggo has four million television and internet customers and 5.2 million mobile telephony service subscribers (1.5 million converged). With 457,977km of coaxial cable and fibre optic cable – which they claim would ‘stretch to the moon’.

The four strategy pillars of VodafoneZiggo are: • Live up to the customer promise • Go digital • Hero products • Invest for the future

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VODAFONE ZIGGO

DID YOU KNOW...

READY FOR THE FUTURE IN MAASTRICHT The latest roll–out of super–fast internet has been completed in Maastricht to almost 59,000 households and businesses. Download speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second are now possible in the municipality of Limburg.

In total, Ziggo provides more than 3.3 million Dutch households and companies with gigabit speeds with this latest connection. In the course of 2022, VodafoneZiggo will offer all customers access to a download speed of up to 1 Gbps via the existing network.

Ziggo's network has recently been improved by smart technology. As a result, it was not necessary to break open the street.

The 1 Gbps download speeds are therefore available immediately. There are no waiting times or delays.

"The roll–out of super–fast internet in the Netherlands fits in completely with VodafoneZiggo's ambition to prepare the Netherlands for the digital future", says Jeroen Hoencamp, CEO VodafoneZiggo.

"Under the name GigaNet, the powerful network of Vodafone and Ziggo, we invest hundreds of millions annually in a stable, innovative and secure network. 'Gigabit without digging' is an important part of this.”

Ziggo's fixed network is a typical hybrid network consisting of fibre optic and coax.

In April, VodafoneZiggo achieved a download speed of 10 gigabits per second on the existing fixed network during a test. At this speed, an average two–hour 4K movie is downloaded in 10 seconds.

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5.2mn

million mobile customers

3.9mn

fixed customers (7.3 million homes passed) – of which 1.5 million have a combined subscription

2mn

reach with social program

1st

provider to offer 5G in the Netherlands

VODAFONE ZIGGO

“IN THE CORPORATE WORLD, IT IS IMPORTANT YOU ARE PREPARED FOR YOUR DIGITAL JOURNEY AND START BEFORE YOUR COMPETITION DOES SO” WILCO DEKKER

TECHNOLOGY STRATEGY MANAGER, VODAFONEZIGGO

Build for the future Commenting on how the company has become stronger since the merger of Vodafone and Ziggo, Dekker said there is now a focus to ‘build for the future’.

“It was a strategic decision to combine the fixed with the mobile world and offer more with less investment due to many synergies that can be gained. For a start, it is about two strong mother companies coming together.

We can learn from one another and combine product offering and backbone traffic.”

Vodafone offers 4G+ coverage in more than 250 municipalities across the Netherlands.

There are more than 4,500 4G masts and small cell towers. They are the driving force behind Dutch digitisation but also the builder of the infrastructure that should help to guarantee the digital lead of the Netherlands in the future.

It is predicted the company's network will see mobile and fixed connections connect even closer to each other and are ‘stable, smarter and faster,’ with internet speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second – which is needed due to the growth of data needs in the Netherlands.

“If we fast forward, I foresee a further increase in fixed and mobile data usage. The internet signal from our datacenter to the customers home follows for 97% via fibre which will be a great base for a dense network to support future roll–out of 5G mmWave and getting prepared for 6G in 2030,” said Dekker. technologymagazine.com

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1 Gbps download speed on the fixed network

50%

reduction of CO2 with VodafoneZiggo social program

457,977km of coaxial cable and fibre optic cable – which they claim would ‘stretch to the moon

“We have to create ‘bandwidth rich’ networks that will be integrated. The access network for the customer will be a wireless experience, being Wi–Fi or Pico cells.

There will be new products tailored to the customer's needs.

“Essentially, customers simply want connectivity and access to the services

“ TECHNOLOGY AS A FACILITATOR ALLOWS US TO ENJOY OUR LIVES TO THE MAX” WILCO DEKKER

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they are looking for. There is no distinction anymore what type of network they are using,” he said.

Digital expedition “Be flexible, adapt to the situation, have confidence, trust yourself,” are quotes from Dekker’s description of his ascent of Everest, but how does he think these qualities could be relayed to enterprises hesitant about embarking on their digital journey?

“Digital transformation has become a kind of a buzzword, but what is it exactly? I refer to it as a digital expedition. It's a journey to become digital. But the next question is, how do you deal with it?” said Dekker.

“I think that in general where there is doubt, you should not freeze but get in an active mode. In all cases, it starts with good preparation work. You have to invest on the forehand without a 100% guarantee that you

© Peter de Jong

VODAFONE ZIGGO

QUICK FIRE QUESTIONS: How did the challenge of your Mount Everest expedition prepare you for the challenges faced during the pandemic?

Climbing Mount Everest puts a lot of things into perspective. It covers questions like: • How dedicated are you?

• Are you willing to prepare?

• How to deal with surprises?

• What is really important to you?

The pandemic forced us to do things differently.

Personally, I took it as a new challenge and dealt with the new situation. However, it came with a new set of rules that we all had to adapt. There was not really another choice.

Luckily VodafoneZiggo’s telecommunications infrastructure is in such a shape that it could deal with the increase of people working from home.

What advances in technology are you personally most excited about?

With the evolution of technology, we have already changed our way of living in relation to smartphones (apps and nanotechnology), over

the top content (IP streaming) and virtualisation (cloud services).

I predict that more and more customers will expect a wireless connection inside and outside the house to be always available. We should converge fibre with 5G, 6G and small cells, and there will be a focus on ‘QCSA’: Quality, Capacity, Security, Accessibility along with IP streaming, apps, cloud solutions, automation, data lakes, AI and customisation. I am also excited about the advances in Quantum computing, blockchain, 6G and biometrics.

What is the secret of success for VodafoneZiggo?

A combination of different cultures and networks opens the mindset to trigger new ideas and delivers more to the customer in the shape of state of the art products with good deals and pricing. There are great minds looking into the long term strategy making sure VodafoneZiggo will continue to be a number one player in the Dutch telecom market.

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LIFE OUTSIDE THE OFFICE

Do you have any other challenges you would like to achieve?

An expedition is on the horizon to climb Mount Vinson in Antarctica.

When we can travel again – what will be your first holiday destination and why?

Camping with my family on one of the Dutch Islands. To keep my balance in a fully connected world, I need to be disconnected every now and then.

Most inspiring book?

The Whole Elephant Revealed by Marja de Vries What is your favourite cuisine?

In winter, nothing beats the traditional Dutch stew. In summer, I favour the Asian kitchen Favourite drink?

A mojito, but during my descent of Mount Everest, it was a Chinese cup of tea – that was the best ever!

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© Wilco Dekker

What inspired you to climb Mount Everest?

It had never been on my bucket list, but it came on my path because I followed my passion step–by–step. It came from the belief that we can do way more than we think we can, and the fear you feel when doing something scary can be managed and will lead to exponential joy and happiness.

What is your most precious possession?

My curiosity: it is the creator of all my experiences. I am not that related to materials.

Favourite movie?

Braveheart and The Shawshank Redemption.

What advice would you give to a young Wilco Dekker?

“Get inspired. Follow your intuition. Never lose your curiosity, get inspired by others but follow your own path, trust your intuition. In a complex world, it is key to understand the main players and differentiators. Focus on connecting the dots and projecting this in the long term. This will become your strategy and makes it a lot easier to make good decisions.

© VodafoneZiggo

VODAFONE ZIGGO

will succeed. You need a firm belief that you Prepare to be agile did all you could and did more than others Commenting on what gave VodafoneZiggo would ever do that makes the difference. its competitive edge during the pandemic, “It also means to expect surprises and Dekker said: “First of all, COVID–19 forced deal with them when everybody to work from home. they appear. With all the This caused an increase in preparation you went data on our network, both KEY FACT through, the skills you upstream as downstream. gained, and the time you Due to the many Zoom practised, you will be VodafoneZiggo achieved and Teams meetings, the able to deal with them. a download speed of 10 quality had to be excellent.

But it indeed means that gigabits per second on the “Due to the size and quality you have to start at the existing fixed network during of our network and the daily beginning and take time a test. At this speed, an work of many hundreds of to understand what it all average two–hour 4K movie network technicians, we could entails you are getting is downloaded in 10 seconds. deal with the increase of data into,” he said. instantly. It was not so much a technologymagazine.com

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“ MOUNT EVEREST WAS MY OBVIOUS SUMMIT, BUT THE NEXT SUMMIT FOR ENTERPRISES IS THE FUTURE AND INDUSTRY 4.0, SO LET'S WORK TOGETHER, AND WE WILL GET THERE” WILCO DEKKER

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Mount Everest 2019 Tibet North Route

peak increase but an overall increase during the day that required adequate monitoring and high standards in field services daily.

Dekker said they would continue to be agile to the needs of the consumer by being “quick to respond to any change in the market”.

“All our systems and network elements must support this way of working. An important requirement that sounds simple but always creates a lot of hassle. It often means that legacy systems must be phased out. This often results in an exchange of CPE and additional budget requirements.

It requires automated processes and systems that can provide the data to align on. It requires smart cooperation between departments. Architectures, processes, and people will be impacted and need to change.

“Agile sounds simple, but it requires a lot of preparation. You can go as fast as the budget available. We engineer and develop to make sure that our customers get an

amazing experience and can offer anything the customer wants.

Dekker points out how VodafoneZiggo is focused on quantum computing, blockchain, IoT, 5G, 6G and Artificial Intelligence as they move forward. “It's a logical sequence we're going through with all these technologies.

Quantum computing will speed up the calculation power, and blockchain will create a trusted environment. All of these technologies will make life easier and help us to do things faster.

Commenting on the digital expedition to Industry 4.0, Dekker concluded: “We want to do a lot of things tomorrow, but it takes time to get there. Mount Everest was my obvious summit, but the next summit for enterprises is the unknown future, so let's work together, and we will get there.”

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WRITTEN BY: SAM STEERS PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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OPENCOLO

Customer service at the heart of a

BOUTIQUE DATA CENTRE

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Customer service is at the heart of boutique data centre provider OpenColo’s mission to deliver industry-leading customer experiences

S

mall enough to care, but large enough to deliver. That is the motto that boutique data centre service provider OpenColo lives by, and the company ensures that this guiding principle shines through in every aspect of its operations.

Their smaller footprint means that they are able to provide excellent customer service as a number one priority. “We strive to provide the best possible customer experience when providing customer service and support to our customers,” says Jonathan Bitran, OpenColo’s Chief Operating Officer. “As we were a tenant at other data centres prior to owning our own, we took a closer look at what we liked and disliked when we needed support or service.

That helped us build the best possible customer experience team.”

Before OpenColo, the company launched in 2003 as a host of Counter Strike gaming servers under the name EGIHosting.com.

At this time, eighteen years ago, bandwidth cost around US$350 a Mbps. Discussing the origins of the company, OpenColo’s Chief Executive Officer, Sally Simkiss, reflects: “Getting started during the fallout from the dot com crash, we were determined to grow and spend in a very disciplined way. For this reason - and because of our desire to remain completely independent - we have never taken VC money and have always grown organically over the years.”

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“ Getting started during the fallout from the dot com crash, we were determined to grow and spend in a very disciplined way” SALLY SIMKISS CEO, OPENCOLO

In the beginning, OpenColo relied on other companies’ data centres for its business operations. “For the first 15 years, EGI operated out of multiple third party data centres. We found ourselves frustrated with corporate data centres’ inflexibility as well as opaque and overly complicated billing. It was hard to rapidly grow without signing long-term contacts that could prove risky for a small company like ours,” Simkiss explained.

However, with corporate data centres increasingly feeling like a bad fit, OpenColo’s owners decided it was time to take operations into their own hands. “Our founders decided that to best control our business and pricing, and meet our customers’ growing needs, we should own and operate our own data centre,” Simkiss said.

Turning this idea into reality, though, was no small task. EGI spent four years looking for the ideal location for its new facility. By the end of 2019, the company completed the design and build process of its very own site, a boutique data centre located in Santa Clara, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. That data centre operates under the brand OpenColo.

The facility was born from the conversion of a 71,000 sq ft logistics centre which, once fully transformed, housed the data centre itself and company offices.

Explaining why Santa Clara was chosen for the location, Simkiss said that it was “ideal in that the power comes from Silicon Valley Power (SVP), which is the most reliable and least expensive power in California. Additionally, our corner of Santa Clara is one of the most fibre-dense locations in the country, with dark fibre from and to almost every major provider.

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OpenColo’s 71,000 sq ft boutique data centre implements N+1 cooling, an above industry-standard 2N power redundancy to compliment our 100% uptime SLA, and a busway power delivery system for custom power configurations and faster power upgrades.

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“We have small streaming customers that pay a few dollars a month as well as large enterprise corporations. Every customer gets superior customer service” SALLY SIMKISS

CEO, OPENCOLO

to find collocation in the area ourselves, we set up the data centre with flexibility foremost in our minds.”

What is a boutique data centre and how does OpenColo differ from major providers?

OpenColo and its services are not the same as other major data centre and colocation providers. Discussing what differentiates the company from other major organisations in the industry, James Chen, VP of Sales Engineering, explained: “Around us in Santa Clara are a dozen or so other data centres, so we need to differentiate ourselves from them. As a result, we’re extremely responsive and interested in our customer’s success.”

Simkiss noted that OpenColo is a “little unusual” in that it does not have any one target customer. “We have small streaming customers that pay a few dollars a month as well as large enterprise corporations with sizeable colocation footprints in our space.

Every customer gets superior customer service. We designed our data centre for maximum flexibility in order to serve the needs of any customer,” she said.

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SCOTT BROOKSHIRE TITLE: CO-FOUNDER AND CTO COMPANY: OPENCOLO LOCATION: SAN JOSE, US

SALLY SIMKISS TITLE: CO-FOUNDER AND CEO COMPANY: OPENCOLO

EXECUTIVE BIOS

LOCATION: SANTA CLARA, US

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Sally Simkiss is the CEO of OpenColo and EGIHosting. She graduated with a BA in American Studies from Trinity College in Connecticut. Sally spent five years in the art market, buying and selling antique paintings before taking 10 years off to focus on raising her two daughters. In 2003, she and her husband founded a small gaming and streaming server hosting company that has grown into the hosting and data center enterprise she oversees today. Passionate about superior customer service, Sally seeks to bring the ethos of a “mom and pop” business to the often impersonal world of IT.

February 2022

Scott Brookshire is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at OpenColo. He drives and develops the company’s technical strategy and provides technical direction and insight.

He is hands-on in providing the OpenColo leadership with the necessary tools and insights to further the company’s mission and goals.

Scott has a Bachelor's degree from Cogswell Polytechnical College and brings with him over 20 years of working inside and out of the datacenter space.

He emphasizes developing long lasting relationships with customers, vendors and partners and is continually striving for win-win opportunities.

JONATHAN BITRAN

JAMES CHEN

TITLE: CO-FOUNDER AND COO

TITLE: VP SALES ENGINEERING

COMPANY: OPENCOLO & ENERGY GROUP

COMPANY: OPENCOLO & ENERGY GROUP

NETWORKS LLC

NETWORKS LLC

LOCATION: SAN FRANCISCO, US

LOCATION: SANTA CLARA, US

Jonathan Bitran is Chief Operating Officer for Energy Group Networks LLC and OpenColo. Before launching the company in 2003, Jonathan spent 8 years as a Data Center Engineer for Pelephone Communications Ltd, one of Israel's largest mobile network operators. Jonathan co-founded Energy Group Networks LLC as Stream Hosting, Game servers, Bare Metal and Colocation services provider.

Jonathan brings over 20 years of experience in the data center and hosting industry. In the early 2000's, passionate about music and telecommunications, Jonathan was a pioneer in internet radio, building and operating one of the largest internet only radio stations at the time.

James Chen serves as VP of Sales Engineering at OpenColo. James also serves as General Manager of Energy Group Networks LLC, a leading provider of colocation services and bare-metal servers in Silicon Valley.

James has more than 20 years of Technology Consulting experience, holds a BA in Anthropology and Molecular Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and has multiple technical certifications.

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“ While there is more and more consolidation of data centre properties in the valley, we are one of the only, if not the only, independent data centres left in the area” SCOTT BROOKSHIRE

CO-FOUNDER AND CTO, OPENCOLO

the Valley, we are one of the only, if not the only, independent data centres left in the area. In a field that is dominated by “Big Tech,” we are highly responsive and personal.

When you tour our facility, you will do so with one of the owners,” Simkiss added.

“As a privately-owned company, we are not beholden to shareholders who demand ever-increasing revenue and profits. We are able to offer custom solutions and terms the big guys would never consider. Since I give many of the tours of the facility, I’ve become familiar with all of our customers. When they succeed and grow, we are also able to grow and succeed,” she said.

Power delivery and the N+1 cooling system As essential as industry-leading customer service is to OpenColo's value proposition, so too is running its facilities to worldclass standards of power management and cooling. Here too, explains Brookshire, the company is taking a boutique approach.

“When we first looked at the power plant design of OpenColo, it was clear to us that we had to design things with maintainability in mind. Since OpenColo is our flagship location, we decided to design the power plant with 2N redundancy.

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upgrades without long waits and costly set-up charges,” he explains.

As for the cooling plan, OpenColo implemented N+1 cooling for its first buildout phase, Pod 1. “Like the power design, this solution allows us to rotate off units to perform critical maintenance without risk of thermal runaway. We also needed a system that would continue to deliver lower PUE value as we scale up,” Brookshire said.

“We understand the importance of being able to offer 100% power uptime SLA and what that means for our reputation and for customers’ confidence entrusting us with their critical infrastructure,” he continues, adding that setting a very high safety standard for OpenColo’s staff, customers, and vendors has also been a top priority for the company. ”We designed a busway power system that allows us to provide power 178

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Outlook for the future and company partners SVP is one of OpenColo’s partners and provides the power for its data centre facility.

“In addition to providing the power for the facility, we work with them to select the blend of renewable power sources for our customers. These power sources can vary from wind, solar, and hydroelectric power and can help customers with meeting their renewable power initiatives,” said James Chen, commenting on how OpenColo collaborates with Silicon Valley Power.

“ We took a closer look at what we liked and disliked when we needed support or service. That helped us build the best possible customer experience team” JONATHAN BITRAN

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, OPENCOLO

Looking to the next twelve to eighteen months, OpenColo’s next major project will be building out its Pod 2 facility, which will be either for their own use or in partnership with a larger enterprise customer looking for a fully custom design.

“We are also implementing platforms for improved customer experience, including

a new website and streamlined ordering system with instantly deployed bare metal dedicated servers for EGIHosting. Next on the horizon are updated audio and video streaming offerings,” Simkiss explained.

She points out that OpenColo’s vision for the future, however, will see the company staying true to its values, commenting: “That said, we aren’t trying to offer every new service, disrupt anything or change the world. We are focused on what we know and do best - running a first-rate, reliable, and secure data centre and providing collocation and bare metal servers.” It looks as though the future of OpenColo, a small, yet very capable data centre provider from California, is going to be very, very bright indeed.

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TOP 10

TECHNOLOGY LEADERS

We look at those men and women at the forefront of the industry, driving their businesses forward financially, culturally and with innovation WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

W

e focus this particular list on technology companies rather than looking at technology leaders across industries. While financial success will always carry the most weight in business, many elements contribute to this. Brand recognition and reputation are paramount in such saturated fields, but no less are CSR initiatives, sustainability and green goals, cultural impact and global reach and innovation and agility to fight off competition and exceed customer expectations. Truly impactful transformations happen outside and well as inside the business, changing the world for the better. Behind these businesses are extraordinary human beings with incredible drive and vision.

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10

Susan Wojcicki CEO

YouTube There can’t be too many women in Big Tech who are happily married, have five children and can still be the CEO of a leviathan such as Youtube - but that is exactly what Wojcicki has achieved. Wojcicki was involved in the founding of Google and was its first marketing manager in 1999. After leading Google's online advertising business and original video service, Wojcicki proposed the acquisition of YouTube by Google in 2006 and has served as CEO of YouTube since 2014.

“ Wojcicki was involved in the founding of Google and was its first marketing manager in 1999” 182

February 2022

09

Antonio Neri

President & CEO

Hewlett Packard Enterprise When Antonio Neri speaks about the industry, everyone listens. Since HPE split from its founding company HewlettPackard (credited for birthing Silicon Valley in Palo Alto garage, back in 1939), he leads the new incarnation towards a March 2022 launch of GreenLake.HPE. com. Its new platform has proven attractive, uniting all of HPE’s edge-to-cloud GreenLake as-aservice and subscription offerings into a single platform, including partners. Neri is renowned for his personal commitment to partners, customers and employees.

TOP 10

“The Co-founder and former CEO of Twitter is one of the world’s most influential tech entrepreneurs”

08

Satya Nadella Chairman & CEO

Microsoft

Hailing from Hyderabad, Satya Nadella is Microsoft’s Chairman and Chief Executive Office. Before he was named CEO in February 2014, Nadella held leadership roles in both enterprise and consumer businesses across the company.

His journey with Microsoft began in 1992, where he would quickly become known as a leader who could transform the technologies behind Microsoft’s biggest product offerings. The LA Times said he has brought Microsoft back from the brink of irrelevance.

07

Jack Dorsey Founder & CEO

Block

The Co-Founder and former CEO of Twitter is one of the world’s most influential tech entrepreneurs. He is now the Founder and CEO of Block, the payment company formerly known as Square. Dorsey is a massive believer in cryptocurrency and even has a litigation fund for businesses threatened with lawsuits. His latest plan is to create an open bitcoin mining ecosystem "based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide." technologymagazine.com

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DISCOVER WHO MADE THE CUT. Top 100 Companies in Procurement Read Now

A BizClik Media Group Brand

Creating Digital Communities

TOP 10

05

Larry Ellison

Co-founder, Executive Chairman, CTO

Oracle

06

Meredith Whittaker Co-founder

AI Now Institute Minderoo Research Professor at New York University, Meredith Whittaker is also the founder of Google's Open Research group.

While extremely talented in her field, it was actually her activism against sexual harassment, gender inequality and systemic racism that sparked a global movement during Google Walkouts. Her influence can also be felt in the world’s most powerful office, as President Biden invited AI Now to shape government AI policy.

When you are wealthy enough to buy an entire Hawaiian island, you’ve certainly made it. But for this boy from the Bronx, the journey has seen startup struggles, open trash talking of his rivals, near bankruptcy and eventual breakthrough to the top tier; resulting in Ellison’s unique character turning into one of a tech playboy. Regardless of your thoughts about him, his story is one of phenomenal resilience and persistence, allowing Oracle to make huge acquisitions.

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04

Tobi Lütke

Founder & CEO

Shopify

A programmer turned entrepreneur, Tobi Lütke began his ecommerce journey in 2004 with Snowdevil, selling snow gear online. Today, Shopify powers more than a million online shops, driven by Lütke’s obsession with using systems to automate repetitive tasks and a focus on the customer experience. In recent times, and after record breaking 2021, Shopify has recently announced a tie-up with JD in China, which is a trailblazing deal to help US merchants sell in China.

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03

Kai-Fu Lee CEO

Sinovation Ventures Formerly President of Google China and a Senior Executive at Microsoft, SGI and Apple, Kai-Fu Lee is now the CEO of VC Sinovation Ventures - that focus on the Chinese market but also serve the United States - and the author of ‘AI Superpowers’. The Taiwanese is a powerful voice of AI in recent times, seeking to build bridges between American enterprise companies and the manufacturing might of China.

He is co-chair of the Artificial Intelligence Council at the World Economic Forum.

02

TOP 10

Andy Jassy CEO

Amazon

As his friend Jeff Bezos is suborbital and popping champagne corks, Amazon’s CEO has his feet firmly on the ground to take over the running of the business.

Known for connecting well with his people, Jassy has been busy tackling regulators and leading the extraordinary success of Amazon Web Services in the enterprise world, a business he steered from 57 employees to many thousands and annual revenue of more than $50 billion - with revenue totalling USD $16.11 bn in the Q3 2021, up almost 39% from 2020. The subject of reverent business-school case studies already, can Jassy maintain his nice-guy reputation while managing a $1.75 trillion company and its 1.4 million employees?

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Elon Musk CEO

Tesla & SpaceX Who else could lead us off but the iconic South African, Canadian and North America citizen Elon Musk?

The world’s richest person, with a net worth of USD$ 267 bn, Musk has largely enjoyed this status due to Tesla’s market valuation of a staggering USD $1.05 tn. After taking a back seat from running the iconic car company, Musk is back in the hot seat once again, not as a CEO but as a ‘technoking’, showing his disregard for lofty c-suite titles. Another rather ambitious company he is also (in name) the CEO of is SpaceX, who have invested heavily into their new mega-rocket ‘Starship’, which some believe may make or break the space industry.

“ Musk is back in the hot seat once again, not as a CEO but as a ‘technoking’, showing his disregard for lofty c-suite titles”

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CAPGEMINI

WORLD-LEADING FINSERVE SUPPORT THROUGH DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WRITTEN BY: JOANNA ENGLAND PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE

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Gareth Wilson, Vice President and Head of Banking and Capital Markets, talks us through Capgemini’s role in transformation services

D

Gareth Wilson, Vice President and head of banking and capital markets

igital transformation has been sweeping across industries for the past decade. But the last two years have seen extraordinary changes ushered in as the global pandemic resulted in millions of companies shifting their focus to online services.

The financial markets were, in the main, already in the transformational zone. But despite this, support and guidance as well as robust leadership, have been essential in maintaining stability in the space as transformative innovations have been introduced.

Technology has played a leading role in bringing the finserve and banking industries to their online roles, and after servicing almost 30 years in the IT industry, Wilson brings a wealth of knowledge to the position that sees him lead consulting support to some of the world’s biggest financial institutions.

He says, “I would say my background is probably heavily transformation-focused.

And certainly what we've seen over the course of the last 20 years in financial services and in banking, and probably in society in general, is the increasing relevance and importance that technology plays in the context of operating models and in the context of customer and client engagement.”

Wilson explains that although there's a very strong technology element to his experience and to the team at Capgemini, the primary focus is finding ways to leverage that for transformation. Today, they are technologymagazine.com

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Capgemini: World-leading support via digital transformation

“ I think the banks are seeing a new level of competition for the ownership of the consumer” GARETH WILSON

VICE PRESIDENT AND HEAD OF BANKING AND CAPITAL MAKETS, CAPGEMINI

busier than ever before as the pandemic has driven extraordinary changes.

“In the context of financial services and the banking industry,” he explains, “COVID has further accelerated the implications of technology, enabling people to work from home, enabling banks to engage with their customers and clients in a more remote fashion. Technology has been a key enabler on that basis.”

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The view at Capgemini is that the importance of technology in the context of transformation is only going to become more important as they look at the industry going forward, Wilson says.

Capital markets and the banking industry The role played by capital markets and their contribution to the financial services industry has driven some key trends, in terms of investment, wealth management, and the use of data.

In the context of a low-interest-rate environment, Wilson believes capital markets have been a key source of revenue and a funding source across the banking and financial services industry.

“I think capital markets have played a really important role in that context,” he says, “but also in terms of the themes and the implications capital markets, technology and data has continued to be increasingly important. We've seen the investment

CAPGEMINI

banking and the asset managers and then the wealth managers look to take advantage of data and technology to enable their growth and to enable their relevance both to their customers and to the broader industry.”

But there has also been a reemergence of the universal bank. And the traditional investment banking organisations are continuing to build out their retail banking relationships. Wilson says Goldman Sachs is a good example because it comes from a very strong investment banking heritage.

The organisation is building out its retail proposition, which is called Marcus, and leveraging technology to effectively stand up that business.

He points to another example in the UK, citing JPMC's introduction of a retail franchise, using their Chase branding and franchise, which looks to technology to differentiate that proposition in the mind of the customer.

TITLE: V ICE PRESIDENT AND HEAD OF BANKING AND CAPITAL MARKETS INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY & SERVICES LOCATION: LONDON A leader with a proven track record of developing long term client relationships and the successful management of large scale, complex, business critical client engagements.

Strong business management skills combined with an understanding of clients' value drivers, and an ability to both shape and deliver sound commercial propositions, evident through business integration success at several clients most notably Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Customer positioning in a changing marketplace Ultimately, the role of the customer has changed the focus of many businesses in the wake of the pandemic. This has been especially true within the banking and financial services industry, although the transformation was afoot long before covid hit.

“The customer is the key element in terms of a business or a bank's ability to be relevant.

Technology has evolved over the course of the last 20 years, alongside customer expectations.

We've all become used to instant access, to carrying a significant amount of data and function around on our mobile phones and our handsets.”

As a customer and as a consumer, Wilson points out that we've become comfortable with that context. Still, our expectations have also increased in terms of being able to transact instantaneously and having access

GARETH WILSON

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to products and services through our mobile devices or internet-enabled computers.

He says, “from a financial services industry point of view, what the banks have had to do is develop and to ensure that they’re relevant to those changing customer expectations and requirements. I think in many respects, the financial services industry has done a good job. You look at how mobile banking has evolved over the last 15 years, but also at the emergence of the fintechs. I think the banks are seeing a new level of competition for the ownership of the consumer.”

Traditional banks and fintechs side by side The agile nature of fintechs and their ability to scale and introduce products and services to the marketplace quickly, has jolted the traditional banking and financial services industry into action, as disruptive technologies cater to customer demands for more personalised services. Wilson uses Wise as an example of a fintech that has morphed according to climate and customer requirements.

He says, “where Wise was originally targeting that cross-border, FX, multi-currency, the product they developed and secured a significant customer engagement, both with the customer experience, but also with the ease of access. The traditional banks have had to respond to that competition in terms of competing against fintech propositions, as well as working with the fintechs to enable banks to be equally relevant and bringing more engaging and positive customer experience to bear.”

As a result, the partner ecosystem is becoming increasingly essential, with companies looking to scale and digitise, and banks needing to partner with fintechs to stay ahead with customer services. But it’s not a clear-cut space. Negotiation is tricky 198

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– with alignment and transparency on both sides, essential to success.

“I think successful partnerships are also in alignment between the values and the culture of the respective organisations,” he says. “I think a big part of that is what the proposition, the technology, or the product can bring to that partnership. But a large element is also how we help the fintechs engage and align with larger organisations that potentially have different cultures, different governance, and different expectations.”

Wilson says establishing that alignment on a softer more cultural relationship basis is as important to the success of the partnership as the technical aspects. “We've seen partnerships that are able to evolve. I think evolution is really important because the market and the industry are moving at pace. It’s a relationship that has to evolve in the context of both new

“ COVID-19 has been a very good example in terms of companies having the ability to move an operation or a team from working in a centralised manner to a very distributed manner” GARETH WILSON

VICE PRESIDENT AND HEAD OF BANKING AND CAPITAL MAKETS, CAPGEMINI

challenges, new opportunities, and that pace of change. If you don't have the softer alignment at a relationship and a governance and a cultural level, then those partnerships are less likely to be successful.”

Banking intelligence and the legacy system Even though fintechs have the support of the younger, mobile-ready generations, traditional banks have trust and history on their side. Research shows that customers have faith in the systems. And therefore, traditional banks are maintaining their relevancy as they digitally transform.

“Traditional banks becoming more intelligent, I think the advantage that banks have and our recent research has reinforced this,” says Wilson, who goes on to explain that trust in banks has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We feel very comfortable in terms of the banks being able to execute our transactions,” he explains. “Potentially, in terms of the pure integrity of the banking transaction, I think the banks have got a very, very strong trust position.” technologymagazine.com

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“ I think the pace of transformation is only going to increase over the next five to 10 years” GARETH WILSON

VICE PRESIDENT AND HEAD OF BANKING AND CAPITAL MAKETS, CAPGEMINI

CAPGEMINI

Data is the second biggest advantage, according to Wilson. Banks benefit from a significant amount of data and information about consumers, whether that be a retail banking customer, a commercial customer, or a corporate customer. Those two aspects give the banks a tremendous advantage. However, he says, they do need to be more responsive in a customer context.

“I think banks need to be more agile in terms of how they take advantage of that data, how they take advantage of that trust and potentially take advantage of this broader ecosystem. The legacy challenges with banks are technology constraints, but I think one of the larger constraints is the speed of decision making and their ability to respond quickly.”

Wilson says that although some banks come from robust governance and a control perspective, in some respects, it inhibits and limits their ability to respond and change at pace. However, he believes there is an opportunity for the banks to take advantage of the trust and their data-rich position. Banks also need to become more agile in terms of how they change to address the market opportunities.

Thirdly, Wilson believes they can participate more actively in that ecosystem to take advantage of some of the cloud-native technology that has developed over the last decade. “We've seen a significant increase of the hyperscalers, the cloud platforms, whether it be Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform or Microsoft Azure,” he says. “It's certainly a multifaceted challenge. And I think that's probably why the transformation of the industry is both such a complex issue, but also such an exciting opportunity.”

Customer centricity and services Customer centricity has become central to all finserve operations that are successful. technologymagazine.com

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Fintechs, he explains, have become part of that ecosystem, and they are becoming more global. Indeed, banks can learn from the fintechs in terms of how they've captured the consumer and captured the customer's expectations.

However, Wilson is also quick to point out that it’s not a one-way street. “I think there are also some things that the fintechs can learn from the banks in terms of that journey from popularity to profitability.

And I think the banks have very much been on that journey and as they become more global, we see convergence in terms of the fintechs gaining scale. But I think the banks need to learn to be more agile and more customer-centric and probably more innovative too.”

Expectations are evolving and will continue to play a dominant role in the direction and core principles of companies. Since COVID-19, the drive has been exacerbated, and customers demand products and services that deliver instantaneous results in a cost-effective manner.

“In many respects, that's a new norm,” says Wilson. “I think for the financial services industry and for the banks, changing consumer and customer expectations is a feature of the environment that we're all operating within. We've also seen some of the fintechs grow from, what I would describe as popularity, with a kind of a niche product or a monoline product, which challenges the status quo, which meets some of that particular customer expectations.”

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The company culture Much of this willingness to learn from each other comes down to each company’s culture because if neither entity believes they can learn from each other, the partnership won’t reap success. “Risk and control are important,” says Wilson, “because in financial services, we always need to maintain that kind of regulatory governance.”

He continues, “being responsive and increasing the speed to market is also key. And again, I think the talent that we have within the financial services industry is incredibly important. We're certainly seeing the war for talent across financial services and across the industry, because there's a very strong recognition that we don't just have to change in the context of our products and services, we also have to change in the context of our culture and the talent that enables that.”

He explains that traditionally, the banking industry has been quite conservative, and the talent pool invested and focused on has

CAPGEMINI

“ I think evolution is really important because the market and the industry is moving at pace” GARETH WILSON

VICE PRESIDENT AND HEAD OF BANKING AND CAPITAL MAKETS, CAPGEMINI

come from a banking industry heritage and perspective. However, with the advent of the hyperscalers and engineering technology across other industries there's an opportunity for banks to take advantage of that talent, but also bring some new perspectives in terms of how to become more agile, and how to change more quickly. technologymagazine.com

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Strategic partnerships and goals Alongside agility comes the question of resilience. If industries across the board have learned anything over the past two years, it’s that when a crisis hits, they must be ready to manage it. And this needs to be facilitated across multiple levels. Technology again, is stepping up and providing those options.

Wilson says, “we have enabled some of that resilience naturally through the development of technology. Within the industry, it’s partly being promoted by the regulators. But we're seeing a greater level of comfort with the kind of public cloud propositions that are enabling the banks and the financial services industry to take advantage of that.”

He continues, “COVID-19 has been a very good example in terms of companies having the ability to move an operation or a team 204

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from working in a centralised manner to a very distributed manner. I think it's really important at a leadership level that the banks, the leadership, and the executive team have that resilience very much in the forefront of the strategy and the design and the culture for their organisation.”

The next decade and beyond The next 10 years look set to usher in unimaginable changes to the financial services and banking space. From central bank digital currencies and crypto to NFTs and ewallets, as well as blockchain, technology will be a key disrupter. Then there will be the market shifts, rocked by a global pandemic, reeling from fluctuating interest rates and suffering from instability across global wide industries as supply chains struggle to recover their flow.

Coupled with this is the customer expectation, ESG directives, data gravity, advances in 5G and more. The future – even in just 10 years, almost seems difficult to envisage.

Wilson agrees. He says, “I think the pace of transformation is only going to increase over the next five to 10 years. We've talked about the customer's expectations. We have talked about how the banks are very data rich, but not necessarily very data-centric.

“We've talked about the speed with which technology is evolving and becomes a kind of a key enabler for future business models and future growth. And we've talked about the ecosystem and how the fintech community is going to become increasingly important as we look forward across the financial services industry.

“So there's a number of factors which I think will continue to be very important to the financial services industry, to our banking and capital markets clients.

He adds, “our aspiration from a Capgemini point of view is to be relevant on all those dimensions, namely, enabling the banks to build ecosystems and participate within those ecosystems, enabling them to take advantage of technology as it evolves and innovates, and then finally, enabling those organisations to have the appropriate culture and leadership and talent to take advantage of the opportunity we see across the industry.”

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UHSFT

Accelerating

ITS DIGITAL

TRANSFORMATION WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY

post-COVID

PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

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Adrian Byrne, CIO, and Ashwin Pinto, Chief Clinical Information Officer, discuss the Trust’s digital strategy and how it supports patients

A

s one of the largest singlesite NHS Trust’s in the country, the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHSFT) has a number of different units at its sites dedicated to supporting different patients with specialist needs.

Included at the site is a children’s hospital with one of the very few paediatric cardiac surgery programmes in the country, a cancer hospital, neuro hospital, adult cardiac services, a major trauma centre and a women’s hospital.

“We are one of the biggest single-site hospitals in the country,” said Ashwin Pinto, Joint Chief Clinical Information Officer and Consultant in Clinical Neurology at UHSFT. He added: “We're unusual in that everything's been centralised on this site.”

As well as serving its patients, UHSFT is also a University teaching hospital.

This means it teaches future medical professionals as well as embarking on medical research.

Pinto outlined the research the Trust has done in recent years: “In the pandemic, we were either the second or third most active research hospital in the country in terms of recruiting people to COVID trials. We were one of the leaders in the COVID vaccine trials. We actually nationally led the COVBoost study that allowed us to recommend booster vaccinations.”

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UHSFT

Accelerating its digital transformation post-COVID

“ We are one of the biggest single-site hospitals in the country” ASHWIN PINTO

JOINT CHIEF CLINICAL INFORMATION OFFICER AND CONSULTANT IN CLINICAL NEUROLOGY, UHSFT

Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic The healthcare industry has been impacted unlike any other during the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only has the NHS had to deal with an overwhelming amount of patients in its care, but it has also had to become more digitised to respond to restrictions and changes imposed by the pandemic.

Although COVID brought its challenges for 210

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UHSFT, in terms of digitalisation and IT, it had a lot of solutions in place previously that supported them, as Pinto explained: “The IT team were well prepared. We had the right things in place at the right time.”

Continuing, he said: “We were lucky enough that we already had a plan in place.

We could see how we could change things, make simple changes that had far-reaching consequences for clinicians and particularly for patients.”

One solution which has helped the Trust, and has undoubtedly helped many

ASHWIN PINTO TITLE: JOINT CHIEF CLINICAL INFORMATION OFFICER AND CONSULTANT IN CLINICAL NEUROLOGY INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE, TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM

organisations around the world transition to remote working where possible, was Microsoft Teams.

Having already recognised how this could streamline and facilitate more meetings, as well as helping connect up clinicians and other people to deliver services to the Trust, UHSFT “had already done a lot of the groundwork behind implementing this technology,” said Pinto.

“Although we had to deploy Teams at scale, we deployed at scale very fast as we had a little bit of understanding of what we

EXECUTIVE BIO

Dr Ashwin Pinto is Joint Chief Clinical Information Officer (CCIO) and consultant in clinical neurology at University Hospital Southampton NHS FT. Dr Pinto graduated from the first cohort of the NHS Digital Academy in 2019 and was appointed joint CCIO shortly after. Key digital interests include clinical data integration between primary and secondary care and the development of untethered personal health records (PHRs).

InterSystems: accelerating UHSFT’s digital transformation InterSystems’ David Hancock discusses how the company supports the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust with its digital transformation.

With its HealthShare platform, InterSystems connects providers, patients, and payers through a unified care record and analytics, that span the care continuum.

HealthShare was named a KLAS Category Leader for 2019 and 2020, and also received an exceptional 91/100 approval rating based on customer feedback.

David Hancock, Healthcare Executive Advisor at InterSystems explained how he works to support the healthcare industry through InterSystems: “I work with our customers on how they’re able to successfully adopt integration and interoperability solutions into their operations as part of their digital transformation programmes.”

“InterSystems is a major supplier to the NHS around integration and interoperability as well as specific data platforms and electronic patient records,” he added.

As it can be used across many industries, InterSystems’ technology is highly adaptable.

To support the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust (UHSFT) on its journey towards digital transformation, InterSystems supplies the Trust with its technology.

Adrian Byrne, Chief Information Officer at UHSFT commented on the partnership: “We’ve been working together for a long time and we migrated from other integration technology into the InterSystems suite.”

Outlining the partnership, Hancock said: “What we’ve been able to do as part of University Hospital Southampton’s digital strategy is to help it integrate its solutions. If you’re going to go with a number of different separate solutions, like UHSFT are, you need to integrate them together well.”

Adding to this, Hancock discussed the Trust’s unique strategy: “The University Hospital Southampton has a quite distinctive digital strategy because of how it’s going to be able to support the organisation. What Southampton has always done is work in a best-of breed kind of way. UHSFT, rather than buying a single solution, is doing something more incrementally to retain control over some of the things it does.”

@InterSystemsUKI linkedin.com/company/intersystems-UK

UHSFT

were deploying. We knew the advantages and what we could gain out of it because we'd actually done a lot of that appraisal before we deployed to the organisation,” he added.

Looking at more patient-focused technological initiatives, Pinto outlined how technology supported the Trust during COVID. During this time, it was imperative medical staff had real-time notification of when a patient received a COVID diagnosis so they could be appropriately isolated and treated.

“We had a system in place that meant in real-time, clinicians had access to positive results, they knew immediately on their device that a patient was positive. This was great for infection control, as the patients could be moved to a safe area and they could start their treatment,” he said.

“You couldn't really get a better example of being well-prepared, because we'd already started to think about this, and then we could just turn that into a project that had immediate benefit for patients,” Pinto added.

Looking at UHSFT’s digital journey so far Adrian Byrne, Chief Information Officer at UHSFT reflected on the impact of COVID in the context of his 18 years of work as CIO of the Trust: “I know people like to talk about the change under the pandemic and I say it's kind of obvious because of the impact of it.

We would never go from 100 people using a system to 5,000 people using a system in two months the way that we did.

“But if you look at the organisation transformation over 10 years, going from an organisation that used to prescribe on paper, that now electronically prescribes; from an organisation that didn't have a wireless network to one that has a complete wireless network. Those kinds of things are much more impactful in the longer run, I like to think,” he added. Despite the Trust’s 214

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willingness to invest in digital over the past years, Byrne did commend his team’s efforts to keep their spending on digital technologies as low as possible.

“If you look at our model hospital data, you will see that we're well into the lower quartile in terms of spending. In terms of the size and complexity of our organisation, we are low on the spending chart, but we've achieved quite a lot,” Byrne explained. UHSFT has adopted

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UHSFT

“ Communications technology is going to really take us on to a level where we can monitor patients from secondary care in a much better way than we have”

ADRIAN BYRNE TITLE: CIO INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE, TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM “As Chief Information Officer at UHSFT Adrian oversees the strategy and operational digital services for a large University Teaching Hospital with more than 1,200 beds and £1Bn turnover. Adrian's experience includes project and IT management over more than 20 years. A keen supporter of open data platform approaches to health systems, he has worked with a multivendor integrated electronic medical record, and a cloud based connected personal health record called My Medical Record.

Adrian was also chair of the Health CIO network for six years until 2021, but is still on its advisory panel, where one of the key aims is to improve the professional standing of the Health CIO.”

ADRIAN BYRNE

many different digital strategies and technologies to support its operations ultimately improving patient services.

“One of the things that we do as an organisation is run a personal health record service called My Medical Record. We've got more than 100,000 patients on that now and it's growing around 5,000 a month,” said Byrne.

“It's a big thing for us. We're a leader in it, in terms of secondary care. You can see the impact of technology. Communications technology is going to really take us on to a level where we can monitor patients from secondary care in a much better way than we have, and in fact, do things that we could never even think of doing even five years ago.

The pace of change is rapid,” he added.

Pinto celebrated the work Byrne and his team have executed over the years: “What's really interesting is that Adrian's time at the Trust as the CIO has been coincident with this rapid, just extraordinary expansion in services over that time.”

EXECUTIVE BIO

CIO UHSFT

“ We were one of the leaders in the COVID vaccine trials” ASHWIN PINTO JOINT CHIEF CLINICAL INFORMATION OFFICER AND CONSULTANT IN CLINICAL NEUROLOGY, UHSFT

DID YOU KNOW? UHSFT’s 12,000 staff provide a range of secondary care services to our local population and specialist tertiary services for nearly 4 million people across the south of England and beyond. It achieved Foundation Trust status in 2011, which enables greater local accountability and greater financial freedom.

Adopting technology from partner companies To accelerate its digital journey, the Trust needs to invest in technology that will 218

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support operations as it becomes more digitised. Pinto explained that some technologies “will be able to do some really clever things with the data that we get from patients to risk-stratify patients and make sure they get the right follow-up.” However, he added that he doesn’t believe the technology is ready yet.

Another challenge with introducing new technologies into the NHS is the regulation around it.

“Any technology that is developed effectively has to be regulated in the same way that a new bit of monitoring equipment might have to be in the hospital or a new scanner and

UHSFT

so on. That's mighty complex in its own right,” said Pinto. Despite these challenges, UHSFT has partnered with InterSystems, an industryleading vendor for database management, rapid application development and integration.

With InterSystems, UHSFT utilises its HealthShare platform that sits at the centre of the Trust’s systems. By integrating its solutions, InterSystems has been a key partner in UHSFT’s digital transformation.

Continuing with UHSFT’s digital strategy to improve operations At the heart of all of the Trust’s initiatives is its patients. Pinto believes in order for

UHSFT’s digital strategy to be successful, it needs to consider both inpatients and outpatients. Discussing outpatients, Pinto said, “I'm a great believer that what we need to do is empower patients to have the information they need to help them manage their care, and if they're a long-term patient in the hospital, they can easily access that when they need it. That, without any question, is a real focus on personal health records and sharing data with patients; asking them where appropriate to rate their symptoms. It's called patient-reported outcome measures, which we then share with their clinical teams.” technologymagazine.com

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“ We've achieved quite a lot” ADRIAN BYRNE CIO UHSFT

He also noted the significance of wearable technology in outpatients for monitoring and improving remote healthcare. The global wearables market is expected to record a value of US$116.88bn in 2025, rising at a CAGR of 17.12%, for the time period of 2021-2025.

“There's amazing work that goes on in heart failure in our hospital, which I would never have dreamt we would have been able to do that sort of level of monitoring at home. We're already there in certain areas, said Pinto.

Looking to the future, he said: “What we need to do is make that available to virtually everybody who attends the hospital as an outpatient.”

To continue to improve inpatient services, Pinto explained it is imperative the Trust’s inpatient record continues to become more digitised, he explained: “We've been very successful in digitising our inpatient record, but not to an extent that would allow us to gain some of the real advantages from it.”

“How does that benefit the patient? it will improve efficiency, so that right at the start of a patient's inpatient journey, we have a much better handle on their trajectory in the hospital and how long they're likely to be in for. Plus, we know what treatment they might need and we can plan our services in a much more proactive way, which is much better than how we used to collect data before,” he concluded.

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AUTONOMOUS NETWORK

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VIRGIN MEDIA O2

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Self-healing autonomous network will deliver a seamless customer experience as Virgin Mobile O2 rolls out 5G following £31bn merger rust is the most valuable commodity in the world, according to Matias Quintanilla, Head of Customer Experience Monitoring at Virgin Media O2, who is working to ensure a seamless move into an automated world where networks can run via Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms and a service orchestration layer.

Quintanilla points out how Virgin Media O2 is already working to achieve autonomous networks through data analytics and AI “one use- case at a time” as such a monumental shift cannot be resolved with a “big bang”.

“It is a journey where you need to build your automation by defining one use-case at a time - what I call the magic triangle - which is data, processes and platforms,” comments Quintanilla, who joined O2 (Telefonica UK) in 2018, transferring from Telefonica in Argentina.

Two years later Quintanilla was working in London when the £31bn merger, by O2 owner Telefonica and Virgin Media parent Liberty Global took place in June 2021 - one of the biggest UK mergers in a decade and the largest UK telecoms deal ever. According to O2’s website, O2 and Virgin Media will continue to exist separately, as well as together as they move forward.

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VIRGIN MEDIA O2

First steps to an autonomous network

“ It is a journey where you need to build your automation by defining one use case at a time - what I call the magic triangle - which is data, processes and platforms” MATIAS QUINTANILLA

HEAD OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MONITORING, VIRGIN MEDIA O2

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said Quintanilla whose role is to focus on customer experience monitoring.

“The shift to an autonomous network is a marathon not a sprint,” said Quintanilla. The future network is designed to run with minimal human intervention, and is able to configure, monitor, and maintain itself independently.

For a man who has the human touch always working to ensure the welfare of his colleagues and customers - Quintanilla is now focused on building trust in the future of autonomous networks as the repercussions of the merger start to settle.

MATIAS QUINTANILLA TITLE: HEAD OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MONITORING COMPANY: VIRGIN MEDIA O2 INDUSTRY: TELCO

How Virgin Mobile O2 will supercharge the market As two of the most iconic brands Virgin Mobile and O2 - which combine 47 million+ broadband, mobile, phone and home subscribers, and around 18,000 employees - have come together in the merger to give the UK more choice, value and pave the way for 5G across the UK. O2 is the UK’s biggest mobile phone operator with around 41.6 million customers across its networks, which also include giffgaff, Tesco Mobile, Sky Mobile and Lycamobile.

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM Young, dynamic and risktaking, describes Matias Quintanilla, Head of Customer Experience Monitoring at Virgin Media O2.

Quintanilla started working in teleco at 19 with his father who founded Skynet Communications, a small ISP company in Buenos Aires while studying for his Telecommunications Engineer degree.

He then worked for Alcatel Lucent and Huawei before joining Telefonica Argentina and rose to Head of Planning while finishing his MBA. Quintanilla transferred to the UK in 2018 to head the Performance Management & Data Analytics team at O2 Telefonica UK. In 2019 he was appointed Head of Customer Experience Monitoring at Virgin Media O2.

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HOW VIRGIN MEDIA O2 IMPROVES CUSTOMER NETWORK EXPERIENCE Matias Quintanilla, Head of Customer Monitoring at Virgin Media O2, shares how Ookla® Spatialbuzz helps prioritise network improvements Evolving network technology now makes it easier for operators to deliver lightning-fast network speeds and broad coverage. So how do the world’s leading mobile network operators differentiate their services in highly competitive markets?

Virgin Media O2 has transformed their business by connecting data from digital customer interactions to the Service Operations Center (SOC). By partnering with Ookla, the global leader in network intelligence, and adopting the Spatialbuzz™ platform for customer-driven network improvement, VMO2 empowers their customers with self-serve digital tools — and provides proactive, transparent communication to customers. As a result, the operator has emerged as a leader in the U.K. for customer network satisfaction.

Network prioritisation driven by customer data Every mobile network operator must manage ongoing service disruptions. Most prioritise network fixes based on traditional network alarms or escalations from the call centre.

However, leading-edge operators like VMO2 know that network improvements should be prioritised based on the volume and severity of impacted customers.

Spatialbuzz provides consumers with a simple interface to check their network status and receive network updates. It connects this subjective network feedback with device radio measurements, and delivers the data to the teams who need it most: the Network Operations Centre (NOC) and SOC. By putting customer experience at the heart of their network operations, VMO2 delivers network improvements where they matter most to customers.

“Spatialbuzz has made a tremendous impact on our customer satisfaction scores,” Quintanilla says. “We’re fixing and improving the things that matter most to our customers, faster. We are giving them crucial information at the right time — so that they don't even need to pick up the phone to tell us something's wrong.”

Happier customers on a better network To the customer experiencing a disruption, clear and proactive communication means the difference between a happy customer and a dissatisfied customer. Since adopting Spatialbuzz, VMO2 has seen vast improvements in Net Promoter Score™ (NPS). Customers report a high level of satisfaction with the increased transparency of VMO2’s messaging.

By communicating that they’re working on the network — often before a customer even realizes there might be an issue — VMO2 delivers both a superior network experience and a superior digital customer experience.

LEARN MORE

“ The tools allow us to self heal the network whenever we are having a problem if certain parameters are in place” MATIAS QUINTANILLA

HEAD OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MONITORING, VIRGIN MEDIA O2

Virgin Media has around 5.7 million customers.

“The merger is a 50/50 joint venture between, Liberty group and Telefonica group, who decided to take us on this adventure which is very exciting,” said Quintanilla who will be overseeing the customer experience during this journey and is keen to focus on the future of autonomous networks, the rollout of 5G and how the merger will benefit customers.

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“We are supercharging our proposition with our service called Volt and the best thing is that simply being a customer of both brands already gives you benefits, such as twice the broadband speed, plus twice the mobile data, and supercharged connectivity at home or on the move.”

A total of 210 UK cities currently have access to 5G, but Quintanilla says there is a drive to upgrade by 2023 which will benefit its business and domestic customers.

“We already have 99% population coverage with 4G and we have made a promise to upgrade our fixed network to full fibre to the premises (FTTP) by 2028, which is a huge upgrade of our network, and see 50% population coverage with 5G in 2023.

By offering 5G and gigabit broadband all under one roof, Virgin Media O2 customers can experience next-generation connectivity both in and out of the home,

VIRGIN MEDIA O2

SUPERCHARGING WITH VOLT

KEY PARTNERSHIPS

Supercharge your world – Volt from Virgin Media O2

“ We are supercharging our proposition with our service called Volt and the best thing is that simply being a customer of both brands already gives you benefits, such as twice the broadband speed, plus twice the mobile data, and supercharged connectivity at home or on the move” MATIAS QUINTANILLA

HEAD OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MONITORING, VIRGIN MEDIA O2

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VIRGIN MEDIA O2

June 2021 merger of Virgin Media and O2

47m+

broadband, mobile, phone and home subscribers

£2.6m

Revenue in Q3 (0.7% YoY)

15.5m+ premises with broadband

DID YOU KNOW...

ON TARGET FOR 100% GIGABIT BROADBAND IN UK

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Virgin Media O2 predicts it is on schedule to complete the rollout of gigabit broadband across its entire cable network of 15.5m homes.

It has been reported that 1.6 million properties, located across Lincoln, Bath, Lancaster, Fife, Huddersfield, Ipswich, Slough, Salisbury, can now access the company’s fastest speeds of 1.13Gbps, bringing the total number to 14.3 million which means they are now on track to reach the target of 15.5m.

Lutz Schüler, Chief Executive Officer at Virgin Media O2, said: “We’re making great strides ahead in upgrading the UK and are within touching distance of bringing the benefits of future-proof gigabit broadband to everyone on our network.

“With our gigabit rollout progressing at an unmatched pace, we’re building the next-

February 2022

generation broadband network that’s ready for the technology of tomorrow.”

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport – using ThinkBroadband data – revealed that more than 50% of UK homes now have access to gigabit broadband and praised Virgin Media O2 for its major contribution.

Virgin Media O2 has also recently announced its intention to upgrade its fixed network to full fibre to the premises (FTTP) with completion in 2028. This technology is capable of delivering symmetrical 10Gbps download and upload speeds meaning Virgin Media O2 will build on its existing leadership position today and be well equipped for the decades ahead as the demand for speed and capacity continues to rise.

“ The shift to an autonomous network is a marathon not a sprint. But you have to start and take it one use-case at a time” MATIAS QUINTANILLA

HEAD OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MONITORING, VIRGIN MEDIA O2

allowing them to take advantage of the latest technology on offer.

“We believe this is what our customers need,” said Quintanilla. “I think 4G and 5G are

both very important pillars in this merger. We have upgraded more than 85,000 postcodes this year with 4G and reached 210 cities with 5G. Plus we have started delivering low band spectrum sites, which will increase the coverage that 5G offers to our customers, especially indoors.

Magic triangle of autonomous networks “The shift to an autonomous network is a marathon not a sprint. But you have to start and take it one usecase at a time,” said Quintanilla.

An autonomous network is designed to run with minimal intervention, and is able to configure, monitor, and maintain itself independently. Automation itself, and the idea that technologies could be self-provisioning, technologymagazine.com

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VIRGIN MEDIA O2

“ In the end it all comes down to whether your customers and partners trust you to do business with you and help you achieve your potential as an organisation” MATIAS QUINTANILLA

HEAD OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MONITORING, VIRGIN MEDIA O2

self-diagnosing, and self-healing, has been around for some time. But with advances in AI and cloud technologies, it is rapidly becoming a reality.

“There is not a big bang solution - you do not go from not being automated to suddenly being fully automated. It is a gradual journey to build your automation, through data analytics and AI, by defining one use-case at a time - what I call the magic triangle - which is data, processes and platforms.

“You start by automating one part of your day-to-day work. Make sure that you have the right data, the right processes and the right platforms in place, once you have that you develop that use case, and then you start the next and then the next one until you get to that fully autonomous network of the future that we all think about today.”

Quintanilla commented it is vital you engage your employees on your journey to autonomous ways of working. “One of the biggest problems is that people believe their jobs are going to be taken over by machines.

In fact automation should be about enabling people to do more interesting jobs - rather than repetitive jobs - that can deliver better value to the company.”

Self-healing networks Commenting on how far Virgin Media O2 is on their road map to an autonomous network Quintanilla said they are “where they need to technologymagazine.com

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99%

population coverage with 4G

210

UK cities delivering 5G

18k+

Number of employees

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“SpatialBuzz is a platform that allows us to monitor our customer status checks - it’s all about putting the customer's lens on everything we do” MATIAS QUINTANILLA

HEAD OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MONITORING, VIRGIN MEDIA O2

be” and highlighted how they are already using tools to self heal the network which is improving the customer experience.

“The tools allow us to self heal the network whenever we are having a problem if certain parameters are in place.

DID YOU KNOW...

FOCUS ON SUSTAINABILITY WITH ELECTRIC VEHICLES [EVs] Virgin Media O2 has revealed the first electric vehicles (EVs) to be deployed across its fleet. The company has also ordered 280 new Vauxhall e-Vivaros to help engineers carry out installations and services, with a view to making its entire fleet of 4,300 vehicles electric by 2030.

“With a fleet of 4,300 vehicles visiting millions of homes and businesses every year, we have a responsibility to swap to cleaner, more sustainable alternatives as soon as possible,” said Tracey Herald, Head of Corporate Responsibility & Sustainability at Virgin Media O2.

Virgin Media O2 is also a participant in the 5G Connected & Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) testbed and has a jointventure called Liberty Charge which will use its cable infrastructure and expertise to support the deployment of charging points.

For example if you were in the centre of London, where you have a lot of sites nearby, and one of the sites suddenly goes out of service the rest can pick up the load and make small adjustments to ensure coverage is maintained.”

Quintanilla said it is vital for Virgin Media O2 to focus on autonomous networks today as the rollout of 5G across the UK will create more complex networks so they need to be ready.

“The future for VMO2 and the rest of the industry should look simple and see less from a customer experience perspective.

The network should be able to ensure the highest level of service availability and the customer should not even care about which technology they are using. The only thing that should matter is whether they have connectivity or not and that’s it. Having connectivity should allow our customers to use all the services they require whenever they want it.”

Why trust is the most valuable commodity Quintanilla points out how Virgin Media O2 is working to reinforce the trust of its customers and partners. “When we talk about the most valuable commodity, I thought at one point it was having the data to make the right decisions, or even money, but I came to realise the most valuable commodity you can have in the world is trust. In the end it all comes down to technologymagazine.com

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“ The dramatic change has been in being able to send bespoke messages telling our customers what was happening while they were having the incident” MATIAS QUINTANILLA

HEAD OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MONITORING, VIRGIN MEDIA O2

whether your customers and partners trust you to do business with you and help you achieve your potential as an organisation.”

Commenting on how the newly-merged company is focusing on this Quintanilla said it was all about clear communication, openness and clarity. “It is also important to 238

February 2022

be timely for our customers.

This means getting a message to them before they realise they are having a problem and that gives them the confidence that Virgin Media O2 is dealing with it.”

Power of partnerships Quintanilla pointed out that Virgin Media O2 has two very specific partners who are helping them on their customer experience journey. These include Ookla, who recently acquired Spatialbuzz, and Nokia.

Ookla's Spatialbuzz platform combines digital customer engagement tools with real-time insights into network issues and customer dissatisfaction. With Spatialbuzz,

VIRGIN MEDIA O2

network improvements are prioritised based on customer impact — resulting in happier customers on a better network.

“Spatialbuzz is a platform that allows us to monitor our customer status checks it’s all about putting the customer's lens on everything we do. If there's a lot of customers telling us something's wrong with the network, we set up an investigation for that area and we try to understand what's going on. At the same time we give customers the possibility to sign up so we can keep them posted with messages directly sent to their mobile phone.

“The dramatic change has been in being able to send bespoke messages actually telling our customers what was happening while they were having the incident, keeping them updated and then telling

them the problem is solved which has been absolutely fantastic,” said Quintanilla.

“Clear and timely communication is vital for a positive customer experience and this was highlighted in our NPS surveys. I believe that this has been critical for the work we do from a customer experience perspective and helps us to build their trust.”

Virgin Media 02 is working with Nokia on the Customer Service Operations Centre tool which will allow them to bring together data sets from different data feeds that focuses on performance, configuration or active incidents in the network.

“With Nokia, we are in the last stages of implementing the solution which will give us the capability to be able to look at our customer services one by one. The perspective of data, and different services within data, will enable Virgin Media O2 to do a variety of things that will help us understand our customers better and give them better propositions. For example, enabling us to send more bespoke messages to them whenever we see that something's wrong. We will also get that root cause analysis that we need in a very automated way.

“We have been working with Nokia on this for the last two years. It has been a fantastic collaboration exercise and we are now starting to see its fruition.”

Commenting on plans for the future Quintanilla said; “There's a lot of benefit in bringing the mobile world and the fixed world together. Both companies have a wealth of experience so now that we're Virgin Media O2, we need to find a way to get the best out of the two former organisations.”

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Sify Technologies: Simplifies digital adoption WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Sify Technologies has put Cloud@core at the heart of its products and services to simplify Digital adoption for Enterprises

T

hey say a football match is a game of two halves and this is an analogy that can also be applied to the business world. Every successful team or company needs a visionary leader, and this is where Kamal Nath, CEO Sify Technologies, steps in as he has navigated the transformation of this Indian ICT services and solutions company for the past decade.

Named CEO of the Year by the World Leadership Congress, Nath has 30 years of experience in this sector of industry and is a lifelong football fan who cites the late Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona as his inspiration. “Maradona was an extremely passionate footballer and a great leader who broke the boundary between football and life.

“I imbibe lots of management lessons from sport. I played football extensively and passionately follow the game. I derive lots of philosophies from the game which I practice and preach in my professional life,” said Nath who feels the ability of Sify to remain relevant to its customers has set it apart from its competition. “We have always felt that in some services we were ahead of our time.”

Headquartered in Chennai, India, Sify, a Nasdaq-listed company, is a comprehensive ICT solutions provider with global service capabilities. With Cloud@core at the heart of their product and services portfolio, Sify is focused on transforming the ICT requirements of the emerging digital

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21 YEARS

OF PIONEERING INDIA’S DIGITAL ICT ECOSYSTEM

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SIFY

Sify Technologies: Simplifies digital adoption

economy and the resulting demands from large, mid and small-sized businesses, cutting across all verticals.

Sify’s infrastructure comprising top of the line Data Centres and Cloud, the largest Enterprise MPLS network, DC and Cloud interconnects, and partnership with global technology majors, vast expertise in business transformation solutions modelled on the cloud, make it the first choice of enterprises.

More than 10,000 businesses across multiple verticals have taken advantage of its data centres, networks and security services and conduct their business seamlessly from more than 1,600 cities in India. Internationally, Sify has a presence across North America, the UK and Singapore.

DNA of transformation With its birth in 1995, Sify heralded the internet revolution in India. Through Sify, 244

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millions of Indians experienced internet for the first time. Sify cybercafe’s across the country brought Internet closer to homes at a time when the last mile communication was a big challenge in India.

In 2006, Sify took a bold decision to move away from an established consumer-facing business model to a 100% enterprise focussed company over the subsequent years. This has paid off very well for the company.

Sify’s journey in the last ten years is a testimony of the company’s DNA of transformation-led growth. Nath says, “The biggest challenge for any company is to remain continuously relevant and strategic for clients in the midst of multiple disruptive shifts in the industry.”

Today, Sify has evolved as India’s leading Digital ICT Services company based on the strength of its key assets of Data Centres, Network and Cloud and related digital services.

KAMAL NATH TITLE: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER INDUSTRY: INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: INDIA Kamal Nath is Chief Executive Officer of Sify Technologies.

As CEO, he has successfully led Sify’s transformation from an Enterprise Network and Data Centre Service Provider to a Converged ICT Solutions and Services organisation. In the last 9 years, under his leadership, Sify has consistently grown in revenue and profitability and has emerged as a preferred Service Provide Partner for Enterprises, Public Sector & Government in India. Sify is currently uniquely positioned as both Service Provider as well as Systems Integration Partner for organisations driving their digital transformation journey.

Prior to joining Sify, Kamal Nath had a 17-year tenure at HCL Technologies, where in his last assignment as Country Sales & Business Head he led various transformational engagements with large Enterprises, incubated new business services, created innovative business models, and developed new and highgrowth vertical customer segments.

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SIFY

“ Sify actually pioneered 3 key building blocks of the ICT industry in India - the Internet, Enterprise MPLS Network and Data Centre” KAMAL NATH

CEO, SIFY TECHNOLOGIES

Nath joined Sify in 2012 and led it’s transition into the most comprehensive ICT solutions and services provider in India.

Sify has consistently grown in revenue and profitability and has emerged as a preferred service provider partner for enterprises, public sector and government in India.

“Sify was always a thought leader and pioneer. From spearheading internet adoption and penetration in the country to setting up the first commercial Data Centre, setting up the first Enterprise MPLS network in India, Sify always led the way.”

Nath pointed out: “You will not find any other company formed back in 1995 as an ISP, which has sustained, grown and remained relevant in the midst of so many disruptions in technologies and market. This speaks volumes about Sify’s resilience as a company and ability to change with time.”

Advantage of Hyperscale Cloud Provider partnership Nath pointed out that beside Sify’s own Data Centre infrastructure they have partnership with three leading hyperscale Cloud Service providers hosted at Sify’s 248

February 2022

SIFY

Data Centre. “The advantage of this is we are able to create a hybrid cloud platform by virtue of the proximity of our data centre and the hyperscale cloud. The customers get a very good choice and option of hosting applications, either in a hosted model, or in one of the hyperscale clouds, or in multiples, which get interconnected through DC or Cloud interconnects.”

“While the customers drive digital objectives, or digital innovation initiatives, they can be rest assured of the underlying fundamental infrastructure. Our infrastructure platform provides flexibility, agility and choices to our customers.”

How agility helped during COVID-19 Nath pointed out that “when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we had to re-organise our priorities. I can now say that we walked a tight rope being concerned about our employees and families and at the same time preparing our employees to new ways of working.

We also had to support our customer’s mission-critical business in sectors like BFSI, e-commerce, healthcare, utilities, and our employees were in the respective facilities or in the field, to keep customers critical infrastructures running. All this, while, remaining focused on their well-being” “We helped enterprises by managing their business and helping them to achieve business continuity in such a challenging situation. But the toughest part was the change management and working to ensure we sustained our own business.

We have had to look at how we do business with our customers and how we generate new contracts. It has been a huge learning curve but will go a long way to building our customer engagement models in the future.”

“It is not an exaggeration to say that we at Sify, by virtue of our resilience and ability technologymagazine.com

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“ You will not find any other company formed back in 1995 as an ISP, which has sustained, grown and remained relevant in the midst of so many disruptions in technologies and market. This speaks volumes about Sify’s resilience as a company and ability to change with time”

us to bring global technology into our data centres which enables us to build worldclass data centres, which are suitable for global customers and particularly the hyperscale Cloud Service providers which are expanding in India.”

“The other aspect I want to highlight is organisations like Schneider are building manufacturing facilities in India. With respect to the data centre technology, the big differentiator from Schneider and Caterpillar is the ability to provide equipment at a costeffective price. This is possible by virtue of the fact they are manufacturing in India.”

Innovation and investment Looking ahead to the next 12-18 months, it will all be about customer relationships and engagement, investments in infrastructure, and remaining closest to customers’ innovation journey.

KAMAL NATH

CEO, SIFY TECHNOLOGIES

to change with situations, were relatively better prepared to face a situation like the pandemic. For the entire Sify team, the learning curve during COVID-19 was shorter and angular, than steep,” he said.

Power of partnerships Nath explains how Sify has leveraged the expertise of key partners • Schneider • Caterpillar • Siemens “Partners like Schneider, Caterpillar and Siemens play a significant role. They help technologymagazine.com

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SIFY

“ I find lots of management lessons in sport. I played football extensively and passionately follow the game.

I derive lot of philosophies from the game which I practice and preach in my professional life” KAMAL NATH

CEO, SIFY TECHNOLOGIES

“COVID-19 has completely changed the priorities of customers. Every customer is taking digitalisation and digital transformation as the top priority. They are doing things which was never done. So, innovation is the key priority for Sify, over and above our existing Digital infrastructure and capabilities. We are also partnering with new age technology and platform companies and co-create newer models.

“We have a large annuity customer base.

So, every customer’s digital transformation journey is an opportunity for us.”

We continue to remain relevant to our customers and build on our legacy and the trust of our customers, while we innovate in this disruptive age,” said Nath - a leadership message which could equally apply to a football club or global organisation.”

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PLAINS ALL AMERICAN PIPELINE

WHERE INFORMATION SERVICES MEETS RISK WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

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PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

PLAINS ALL AMERICAN PIPELINE

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Al Lindseth is SVP at Plains All American Pipeline. He elaborates on the culture and successes that have kept him in the company for 22 years

I

n 2019 alone, $1.3tn was spent on transformation initiatives and upwards of 70% of these projects failed or their needs weren’t met. According to Al Lindseth, SVP of Technology, Process and Risk Management at Plains All American Pipeline, this is often due to factors upstream of technology: “Business people can approach transformation as a laundry list of technology projects. But their success is actually dependent on things like culture and behaviour, starting with the leadership team, the processes, and the business design differences.”

It all started on a napkin Greg Armstrong was CEO when Lindseth was thinking about joining the business. Enron and other trading firms in Houston had inquired, but a sit-down with Greg at a hotel bar resulted in discussions and strategies, plans drawn on napkins; risk management and commercial strategies that ended up helping the company for years afterwards.

“I thought, ‘I need to work for this guy’.

The story of what he and Harry [Pefanis] did and how they started the company, taking a risk building storage tanks when there was little economic incentive to store with where the market was at that time. The other rule Greg had was ‘never run out of cash!’, which I think is tied to some of those early years and experiences that they had.”

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1981

Year Founded

Energy Industry

4,094

Number of Employees

23.29bn Revenue 2020

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Lindseth came on board around the turn of the millennium, when the company had experienced a rogue trading loss from an employee who kept his positions hidden from management. Formerly a risk management consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers, his first task as Corporate Risk Manager was to shape the right team and implement process redesign to deliver incremental changes and improvements throughout their risk management programme.

In just over a year, the infectiously positive Lindseth would also assume control over IS & Operational Accounting in order to improve them, while building and strengthening the company's risk culture and technological capabilities. At the age of just 33, Lindseth 258

February 2022

would become one of PAA’s three SVPs, overseeing three areas: Technology, Process and Risk Management.

“Once I got the promotion to SVP, my plan was to continue the path of improvement, going group by group, department by department, modernizing the systems where it made sense and was worth the investment. The idea behind the title was to overhaul everything on top of a really strong business model and get a real jump on the competition.”

Riding the wave After those initial bumps, for almost 12 years, in almost every single quarter, Plains met or beat earnings guidance. It hit double digit annual growth - turning into a Fortune 100

PLAINS ALL AMERICAN PIPELINE

AL LINDSETH TITLE: S VP, TECHNOLOGY, PROCESS AND RISK MANAGEMENT LOCATION: T EXAS, UNITED STATES Al joined Plains All American in 2000 from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Al is responsible for the design and functionality of Plains’ risk management policies and procedures, information systems and business processes.

EXECUTIVE BIO

company. “The energy to redesign everything faded. Everyone was just too busy doing deals and acquisitions, myself included.” I had a process improvement group that marshalled the process optimisation work through.

And that became a project management organization with all the new system work arising from growth. The last number of years, as the energy industry downturn has caught up to midstream, the focus on streamlining and re-engineering to optimise has returned.

We call it efficiency mode.”

Through the company’s growth period, Plains was able to protect the downside and capture upside in a way that made sense, through a lot of different and volatile supply/ demand and price cycles, through its risk management programme.

“ BUSINESS PEOPLE CAN APPROACH TRANSFORMATION AS A LAUNDRY LIST OF TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS”

XaaS. Cybersecurity.

Enterprise Solutions.

At our core we are specialized architects and engineers whether it be in Everything-as-a-Service, Cybersecurity, or Enterprise Solutions. Our process allows to take a proactive approach in many different environments.

We tailor our approach and solutions, not custom build it, so when you are ready to evolve, we can evolve with you.

Creating lifelong partnerships through trust Worth Davis, President at Computex, reveals how the technology solutions provider invests in its staff, research and service levels to build customers for life.

As President of Computex, Worth Davis’ role is to delight the customers at all levels, ensuring that Computex does all it can to keep customers and employees happy, creating a relationship of trust designed to last a lifetime. The more complex the project, the more Davis tends to enjoy it: “I like the complexity and the fact that we’re going to have a major impact on the growth of the client’s business.”

On the Computex approach, Davis says that “we only bring in technologies that are vetted, so it brings success for clients.

Tried and tested enterprise solutions and cybersecurity solutions. We continuously adapt to new technologies, as the technology landscape changes rapidly.”

Plains All American Pipelines A key client for Computex is Plains All American Pipelines. Davis remembers his first engagement with them around a data centre in their office in downtown

solutions@computex.net

Houston: “We needed to get it out of that building for technical and disaster liability reasons but it’s location was designed for CEOs and CFOs, not a billion dollar company with massive infrastructure.

It was a good project, and we rebuilt a lot of this old site at multiple plant sites, designing their networking, connectivity and backup data centres.

As proven with Plains, the bigger the project, the more Davis tends to like it: “I like the complexity and the fact that we’re going to have a major impact on the client.”

“A company like Plains is there to run their pipelines and have a solid financial model, one that’s good for their employees, their board and their shareholders at the end of the day. They’re actually not a technology company. So they’re looking for technology partners that provide maintenance, with clear licensing programmes and great references within the oil and gas industry”, he said.

Learn more

computex.net

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“There was a lot of volatility over that 12-year period that we were able to ride out, because of our programme and the whole culture we created.”

“Plains is different from other organisations which have a separate CIO, CISO, or Chief Risk Officer. Here I'm the face to the board for all those functions.” There’s a lot of succession planning, delegation and leadership development constantly taking place so I can wear those different hats effectively. The business has a Canadian affiliate as well, where Dan Reinbold managed the IS organisation historically, working closely with Al. Three years ago Plains decided to converge its US and Canadian entities. For this to work, IS had to converge first. Al put Dan over a converged IS North America group. With Dan reporting to him still, Lindseth moved into the role of senior-level influencer focused on those elements upstream of technology, to help broker and pave the way for these larger and more complicated projects.

“Dan took the traditional North American CIO role, focused on tech, with my support.

He's done a great job. Getting the technology piece was critical. No one on the business side was going to be able to think about bringing together their applications or consolidating business processes if we didn’t get that right. It was table-stakes. People, process, culture and bringing business designs together: I took on that role. That’s how we split it up.”

Influencing the market through cybersecurity Al kept the business risk program side throughout all this. Lindseth also helped Plains build its cybersecurity abilities from the ground up using those same fundamental risk concepts, and the field, along with Plains programme, continues to evolve. With 262

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“ WE PLANNED TO OVERHAUL EVERYTHING ON TOP OF A REALLY STRONG BUSINESS MODEL” AL LINDSETH

SVP, TECHNOLOGY, PROCESS AND RISK MANAGEMENT, PLAINS ALL AMERICAN PIPELINE

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Plains Profile: Where Information Services meets Risk

cyber, for instance, Lindseth says there’s four main objectives: “You're trying to prevent an incident. You're trying to detect it as it happens. You're trying to respond to it. You're trying to predict it or get ahead of it. Looking at vulnerability threats and magnitude, you're using those same fundamental techniques that you use in business risk management.

Lindseth has found his influence extending outside of the organisation and into the community: “A rising tide lifts all boats in the oil and gas industry”. Greg Armstrong was the chairman of the National Petroleum Council and the former Plains’ CEO, for example, who pulled Al into a large NPC Report focused on midstream. Before COVID, Lindseth was invited up to the Department of Energy in Washington to present the cyber security recommendations from that Report. One component focused on technology and particularly cybersecurity, which Lindseth led and which received the most attention of the entire piece of work. technologymagazine.com

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“We looked at operational technology (OT). IT business systems are more likely to get attacked, but you can have a much greater magnitude and severity of an attack on an operational technology system. These form the backbone of industrial control systems, handling uptime, reliability, safety, compliance. This would result in much larger economic or physical disruption and impact environmental health and safety.”

With OT cyber, there are many overlaps to Al’s focus on non-technology elements.

“With all energy companies, you’ve got many different factors in trying to apply modern technology, cyber or otherwise, in the field like remote areas, user adoption issues and historical ways of doing the work. These projects are very complicated and difficult to pull off. And if you don't deal with a lot of those foundational elements, so that you have organisational readiness to take this on, to optimise the work process, and lead people through the change, it's very difficult to succeed. This is a transformational change for those groups.”

According to Lindseth, technology is there to help to enhance things, but it doesn't make up for poor processes or team or individual ineffectiveness. A combination of bringing legacy habits and practices together with more modern behaviours is necessary when trying to use data to improve decision-making.

“You must empower those people and give them more authority. It's much bigger than just technology,” he said.

“I'm also on the board of the Oil and Natural Gas Information Sharing and Analysis Centre (ONG-ISAC). Every critical infrastructure sector has one of these ISACs and they are really important entities. We could be doing a lot more with them. The idea is that if a member company gets hit, they provide the threat intel to the other member companies.”

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Risk assessment in action Lindseth has always approached IT using the tools of a business risk manager. “It’s just what I know.” For example, he was in charge of a major trucking project, where he and the project manager sat down and figured out the 15 to 20 things that they could do to improve the odds of success of the project. Then, Lindseth suggested they quantify how much they could improve, helping them to prioritise.

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“ THERE WAS LOT OF VOLATILITY OVER THAT 12 YEAR PERIOD THAT WE WERE ABLE TO RIDE OUT” AL LINDSETH

SVP, TECHNOLOGY, PROCESS AND RISK MANAGEMENT, PLAINS ALL AMERICAN PIPELINE

“We picked certain ones and we executed them. Our initial assessment estimated putting these risk mitigation strategies in place would increase the odds of success by 70%. The quantification put the project after risk mitigation strategies were put in place at a 95% success vs an estimated 25% success had we not executed those actions. It’s difficult to know how it would have ended up for certain, but I am confident without those extra steps it would have been a failure.”

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What is Your Legacy? Al Lindseth (CIO Plains All American Pipeline)

“This was a dual mode, satellite and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) implementation to gather key data from our trucking fleet. The CDMA didn’t reach in a lot of areas and satellite was problematic with the amount of data we were transmitting. We went above and beyond because we knew what a large issue that was - measures like putting WiFi at the truck stations, actually talking to the carrier to try and influence their rollout plan. We built a lot more data push into our dispatch programme so the data would get transmitted when the trucks were most likely to be at the main yard. If we had not 266

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done that, we would have had about 35% of our truck fleet in North America that would not be able to send critical data at the right times. The trucks would have been sitting a lot longer. Time is money. It would have been a real problem,” said Lindseth.

Over the years, the business has used stress testing, experience analysis on the business side and reports that show what the impact is to hedging programmes and other commercial activities. Al has done this on the IS side as well. “For example, we took a number of different scenarios that would trigger our disaster recovery programme, such as fires, flooding, power outages and hurricanes

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and factored results of those scenarios into recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives, then weaved these exercises into the architecture of the programme.”

Computex and modern infrastructure Plains has relied on a lot of trusted partners over the years, which it views as an extension of its team. It's all about achieving the goals, according to Lindseth.

“If you think about the ecosystem that we're in, forecasts before COVID had 50% of S&P 500 companies going out of business within 10 years. The average tenure of an S&P 500 company was 40 years in 1977. By 2027, technologymagazine.com

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“ I SPEND A LOT OF TIME MENTORING AND DEVELOPING PEOPLE” AL LINDSETH

SVP, TECHNOLOGY, PROCESS AND RISK MANAGEMENT, PLAINS ALL AMERICAN PIPELINE

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it's expected to be 12 years. Companies need to be hyper-focused on their business model and their design and identifying disruptors and managing those to get ahead of them, if they want to be around in 10 years. Partners and the skills and perspectives they bring are a huge part of doing that,” he added.

“For example, Computex has been a huge help to us over the years. They helped us design and implement our data centre and did the same thing around our disaster recovery programme.”

Other areas Computex have been involved include a redesign of the Plains field networks: “They've been a great partner, very flexible. We accomplished pretty significant things in a very short amount of time.” said Lindseth.

Houston as a technological hive Unlike Silicon Valley, where it is high risk and potentially high reward, there's a lot of companies in Houston that are highly profitable, but haven't gotten the most out of technology. Lindseth believes it really increases the opportunity and also decreases the risk.

“The city is set up to have a great trajectory over the next 10 years, I think it'll continue to be the energy capital of the world, even as it transitions into renewables.

And part of the value of collaborating is diversifying into other industries and seeing how they do things just a little bit different.

I speak and collaborate a great deal, both in oil and gas and outside of it. I’ve learned a lot that way, and there's ample opportunity to do that here.” said Lindseth.

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A HUMAN FORWARD APPROACH BRINGS REWARDS FOR ALL WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK PRODUCED BY: KRISTOFER PALMER

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Recruiting giant unites from within to drive a superior service for clients, candidates and employees.

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hen Abdul Manik, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Randstad UK&I, joined the company two-and-a-half years ago, he was tasked with helping the recruitment giant to completely transform the front, mid and back office technologies and associated processes.

After his initial observations, speaking to a multitude of people across the business at different levels, he realised that while Randstad UK&I was a very complex business, it was more complex than it needed to be.

As Abdul recalls, this “made serving our candidates and clients much harder. Building the relationship was much harder too.”

After a collective discussion as a leadership team, Randstad UK&I looked at how it could simplify the business from all angles, from a change, technology and process perspective. This is how the change programme began; incorporating people, process and products.

The five core pillars of the Randstad digital transformation Governing Randstad’s digital activities are five core pillars. The first, according to Abdul, is the “client pillar”. It means transforming the whole customer engagement from top to bottom; transforming the experience that clients have when they do business with Randstad technologymagazine.com

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A human forward approach brings rewards for all

“ We are combining multiple front offices into one single front office, on multiple brands” SHONA RILEY

DIRECTOR OF BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, RANDSTAD

day-to-day, whether it’s an SME, enterprise, new or existing client.

“We really wanted to transform the experience they have with us. We also think about the client space, and this is where automation machine learning plays a key role.

The second is the talent pillar. This is all about our candidates. Again, we follow their journey and experience, not just 274

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for a transactional event, but also repeat engagement and repeat connection with us as a human resource provider. The UFO project ties in with both the first and second pillars.”

The third pillar is based around the employee: “We do have recruitment consultants who will provide the recruitment, but we also have shared service functions, such as our resource teams, candidate teams or fulfilment teams.

ABDUL MANIK TITLE: CIO & CTIO INDUSTRY: RECRUITMENT/HR SERVICES

Change comes from three angles Finally, pillar four is cyber security and pillar five is change. Abdul also looks at things from a three-dimensional viewpoint, saying “you have products when you're transforming anything or changing anything. It's the product change.

If the process changes, people change and it varies in the impact on each other.”

It’s not just digital transformation, but actually a business transformation, according

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: UK Abdul Manik is the Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Innovation Officer for specialist recruiter, Randstad (UK & Ireland). In addition to owning Randstad’s technology strategy, Abdul also drives overall business transformation; including change management and strategic programme delivery.

Prior to working at Randstad, the global leader in the HR services industry, Abdul had experience with digital transformation for magic circle law firm Clifford Chance LLP and AON Consulting. He was also the Director for Avon Cosmetics for Europe, the Middle East and Africa regions - covering 34 countries.

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The Temp Worker Everything I need, on any device...

The Recruiter Everything I need, available anywhere...

The Manager Everything I need, any time...

We accelerate the digital transformation of the Staffing Industry

M|ployee: Making people’s lives easier M|ployee and Randstad UK create a winning combination for the staffing industry Roel Waals founded M|ployee in 2009, with a vision “to build staffing software in the cloud that connects every stakeholder in the most agile and accelerated way.”

M|ployee was recently voted for the second time in a row as one of the top 50 fastest growing tech companies in Benelux by Deloitte in 2020.

Recently, M|ployee have partnered with Randstad UK, one of the leaders in the UK Market.The staffing company was undergoing a massive digital transformation, and the company needed a partner it could rely on to tackle such a large technical challenge.

Under one vision Chief Operating Officer, Diana van der Boon, explained that the partnership was strong from the beginning: “When we started the project with Randstad UK, we quickly understood their difficulties with the previous technology. They needed to automate the front and mid office. They determined the scope of the project with a clear vision and managed the change on their side.”

The M|ployee staffing platform has been built from the ground up to give consultants everything they need. It’s fully developed and easily tailored to business workflows.

Solutions built around client’s needs The staffing industry is a big industry globally, and according to CEO Pieter Smits, Mployee’s highly scalable solution is built to be implemented in every country across the globe: “That means that in every country it works with the same solution, same core but different configuration for customisation. We keep on being focussed on staffing, be it long-term staffing or short term staffing - it’s going to grow.”

Van der Boon added that “when you look at the average staffing company, they use six, seven, maybe 10 different solutions to manage that process and a lot of manual inputs. What you need as a staffing company is control. So when people come into the company, you want to know who they are and when they’re going to work. The drive to make sure that more staffing companies manage their core processes in one solution and on one platform - making people’s lives easier.”

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“ Our core integration engine is all built around microservices and API, bringing our front office, middle office and back office systems together” ABDUL MANIK CIO & CTIO, RANDSTAD

to Abdul: “transformation is also about process transformation and then people/ cultural transformation. So change looks at all three angles.”

As Abdul openly admits, change cannot come through just one person. The tech element often proves easy, it’s the change buy-in/adoption/management that’s hard.

Shona Riley is Director of Business Transformation and Continuous Improvement.

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to working with the business and leadership team to drive initiatives that increase productivity and business performance.

Shona says, “we are combining multiple front offices into one single front office, on multiple brands. What has come out of it so far is that we’re different, but the same. The first challenge was each vertical market, as they have very different needs to the others and very different problems. We actually started the journey with the real users, but when you put any new technology forward, you will hit some change resistance and limiting beliefs. We actually interviewed 60+ consultants throughout the UK to find out what their challenges and their key problems were.”

Shona knew the size of the task at hand.

She had to field questions like ‘how do we embrace change as leaders?’ and ‘how do we get behind the change leaders?’ and ‘how are we going to drive it?’

As Shona sees it, change must be communicated through to senior management and to branch management level to drive the change. Starting topdown, taking leadership on the change journey, equipping it with the right tools to support the managers who will drive change.” She adds that “change approach

needs to be top down, bottom up and peer to peer.”

Mindset is key for Shona and her team, making sure everybody is ready for the change: “we had a clear communication strategy to ensure we communicated consistently and regularly, we led workshops with the business and ensured we reviewed our processes to ensure they did not conflict with the adoption of the technology and the new changes.”

Underlining the importance of a clear vision, Shona adds “from the beginning of the technologymagazine.com

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journey as a business, it is your responsibility to own the requirements and your vision and share that. And the supplier needs to be on the journey with you, so they deeply understand and can support you with the solution because they’re the experts.”

Another question is how the organisation manages that change. Shona has the answer, saying “you have to make change personal, you can't blanket change. That’s very much part of our tech and touch approach. It takes effort from all people involved. The change has to be perceived as a business initiative, not as a project. We work very closely with managers to coach and support them.

We mentor them in terms of combating a limiting belief to draw out the benefits to that particular individual on how it's going to help achieve their targets.”

M|ployee the key partner for Randstad With its roots also in the Netherlands, M|ployee has been a key consultant and enabler with its highly innovative staffing software solutions, the company was a logical fit. As Caryn Barnes, Head of Talent Technology & Innovation, states: “We've been working heavily with M|ployee to develop those technical processes. They're advising us, especially on how to build things.

They not only helped Randstad UK get to the launch stage of UFO but they are helping us get into that ‘business as usual’ process.

We're developing, creating and producing things every two weeks.”

The partnership came at an important time for Randstad, in terms of utilising many new technologies: “We wouldn't be able to do it without them at the moment, especially as we grow our team.”

It’s clearly a relationship for the foreseeable future, according to Barnes: “M|ployee will be heavily involved with how 280

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“M|ployee will be heavily involved with how we're integrating products like smart artificial intelligence” CARYN BARNES HEAD OF TALENT TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION, RANDSTAD

we're integrating products like smart artificial intelligence (AI) as well. They understand the goal; we want to get to the vision of one place for everything. That's the overall vision for me. We're looking to grow with Salesforce and M|ployee.”

Microservices, machine learning and RPA Microservices is a fundamental part of Randstad’s digital transformation strategy.

As Abdul remarks: “The reason for that is microservices bring everything together. It allows you to integrate legacy, non-legacy and internal and external systems and processes in a much more flexible way. Our core integration engine is all built around

microservices and API, bringing our front office, middle office and back office systems together. It brings the multiple front office data input and output together.

Abdul and the team combined used Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as a big driver for legacy system & data integration as well as efficiency improvements.

Abdul insists that automation plays a big role alongside machine learning and data intelligence in Randstad UK's digital transformation plan: “we are definitely benefiting from having very experienced, knowledgeable experts in those areas internally, but also working very closely with our partner channel in that space.”

Swimming in a data lake We need to find a way of aggregating that data into our data lake. So we can then join data from multiple platforms to create meaningful insight and dashboards. We technologymagazine.com

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“ We're really focusing on hyper automation to really drive the efficiency” ABDUL MANIK CIO & CTIO, RANDSTAD

slightly changed our approach now with aggregating the data within the data lake where we can surface them into Tableau, for users to access. We would now ask the question of ‘what problem are you trying to solve & what is your desired outcome?’, so we can make sure that we're providing the right solution rather than just providing more data in the form of a report. So we can make sure that by orchestrating the data, combining it from multiple systems in the data lake, we can drive better behaviours in the SIS, in the business.”

Pandemic accelerates programme The pandemic has changed the market dynamic for Randstad. While they had a digital transformation plan before the pandemic happened, the pandemic expedited it. Abdul: “It was supposed to be a two to three year programme, but the low period caused by the drop in demand from candidates and clients in 2020 gave us an opportunity to really fast-forward that transformation plan.”

He went on to say the market has moved from being client-led in 2020 and the early part of 2021 (where there were not a lot of jobs available and a lot of candidates available with a lot of follow-up), to now seeing a lot more candidate scarcity and a lot more client demand.

“When we come out the other side and the demand starts to grow, we’re in a much better position to grab the market growth, as we’re a lot more lean and a lot more efficient and agile as an organisation to react to it,” he continued.

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AUTOMATING THE EXPERIENCES OF INSURANCE WRITTEN BY: JOHN O'HANLON PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

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VIRTUSA

Virtusa is a rock star of DPA and technology delivery.

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nsurance is an old industry. The earliest insurance contract found dates back more than 3,000 years. The concept of laying off risk was well established in medieval Europe, and it's well known that the structure of the modern insurance industry took shape following the Great Fire of London in 1666.

It's nothing if not a mature industry, and it is all about managing risk. The mindset of insurers is cautious and does not readily embrace changes to long-established practices. So, it is no great surprise the sector has been slower than some, like manufacturing or distribution, to enter the cloud-enabled, data-driven era.

The industry has managed to adapt to the gradual shift in demographics from Baby Boomers to Gen X to Millennials and now to Gen Z, through its standard time-tested measures, says Ganesh Iyer, Head of Insurance at Virtusa. As with everything, however, the landscape changed dramatically once COVID-19 sent everyone home. “Never before has the insurance ecosystem ever had to deal with a situation that completely shut down physical and in-person interactions. Even their most technology-averse customer has had to adapt to dealing with insurance companies remotely through different media.”

As the leader of the insurance vertical, Iyer has a clear view of this huge sector: Virtusa is already relied on by the largest insurers in the United States and globally, helping them navigate the uncharted seas ahead without compromising traditional prudence.

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Automating the Experiences of Insurance

The DPA rock star Once they choose their Core technology platforms and trust them with their data, insurers are reluctant to change. There are so many companies operating in this huge and diverse sector, each with its own insurtech products reflecting its specialisations, as well as legacy systems it may have accumulated through M&A activity and its brokerage ecosystem. There is a danger in addressing problems in piecemeal, as they arise.

The answer to this is digital process automation (DPA).

Virtusa isn't the only DPA service provider in the field, but it does stand out: in its Q3 2020 report. Forrester evaluated 13 of the most significant digital process automation providers across their current offerings, strategies, and market presence, and concluded that “Virtusa is a technology and delivery rock star.”

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“ It's only when you create a multi-talented team that the magic can happen!”

GANESH IYER

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & HEAD CLOUD AMERICAS, VIRTUSA

title, but he also describes himself as chief solution architect for intelligent automation, and with 25 years as a software developer and architect behind him, much of it in the insurance industry, his job is hard to encapsulate in a few words. The practice he leads spans multiple verticals, but he confesses to a particular fascination for insurance clients.

Process automation and digitisation through DPA are essential for two main reasons, driving efficiencies to compete

VIRTUSA

on price, and raising customer experience from acceptable to remarkable.

“Insurance may have been something of a laggard but it's waking up to the possibilities of hyper-automation, which is like DPA with an aggressive agenda to create automation that spans across multiple different processes to tell the living story right across the value chain and silos. Hyperautomation transcends these: “We're able to lay an orchestration layer across the stovepipes. Essentially, we deal in the digitisation and automation of the process to remove friction from the customer experience and to optimise efficiency.”

TITLE: E XECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, INSURANCE LOCATION: UNITED STATES Ganesh Iyer is responsible for driving revenue growth and setting strategic direction for Virtusa’s Insurance business in North America. He has over 30 years of experience in the Technology services, including outsourcing, systems integration, and consulting services.

With over two decades of working with Insurance, he has a deep understanding of the unique challenges faced by the Insurance sector and the factors

EXECUTIVE BIO

Architectural pace-layering Virtusa’s architectural approach places a low-code-no-code DPA platform on top of the insurer's legacy systems and permits a 360-degree view of the customers and their history in a channel-less environment – to be customer-centric, not policy-centric or risk-centric. “Insurance carriers don't want any interference with their brittle legacy systems of record. We must provide cohesive articulation of processes over the top to relieve their burden of technical debt.

The architectural paradigm is called pacelayering wherein systems of record remain unaltered, systems of differentiation is enabled through DPA platform, and systems of innovation on top enable new efficiencies and experiences. It allows us to change our systems of differentiation frequently without touching and adding risk to their systems of record.”

That applies to all the insurer's systems, not just the records that may have been in place 30 years or more, he adds. If the insurer is implementing a core insurance system like Guidewire, then resist the temptation to meddle with it because that

GANESH IYER

impacting the successful implementation and execution of solutions, change management, and effective operational governance programs leveraging global delivery models. Prior to joining Virtusa, he has held leadership positions in large consulting organizations in the Insurance, Healthcare and Life Sciences business.

will just increase technical debt. “Every time you customise, you get further away from the product lifecycle that is carefully managed by Guidewire. Instead, if you really need to customise, do it in the differentiation layer.”

To deliver on their automation agenda, Virtusa helps insurers to 'pick a right swim lane', aka process for specific automation technologies. Reach for the optimal amalgamation of tools, or accelerators, to adopt from the width of available technologies, eg business process management (BPM) suites, such as Pega, Appian, IBM Smarter Process and some technologymagazine.com

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Ready to crush business complexity?

For three decades, we’ve been living our values in what we say and do. We’re cutting through complexity with the power of Pega – and doing things you never thought possible. Contact us to know more.

Pega and Virtusa Pega with Virtusa develops true low-code no-code software platforms for insurance carriers “If we face a really complex problem, we reach for Pega,” says Greg Price, Chief Architect for Intelligent Automation at Virtusa.” Founded 39 years ago, Pega now has revenues of over $1bn. Much of this growth has been driven in the last five years by the insurance market, where Pega is now seen as an essential partner.

Michelle Gaertner, Pega’s Managing Director of Enterprise Accounts, specialises in this key sector. “We’re focused on helping insurers find new ways to harness untapped economic value using Pega lowcode no-code software, for the intelligent automation of business applications.

Customers can view all transactions through a single pane of glass – a customer decision hub that allows them to up-sell, cross-sell, and retain their clients.”

Pega acquires data in real time unlike many competitors that replicate it in their applications, and derives insights applicable to any business process. “Our software handles both simple and highly complex transactions, through what we call the situational layer cake. It allows us to

define things that are common across the enterprise; and users to manage complex variations without rework or duplication.”

In the early days, Virtusa built the engine that generates the core Java code that underpins Pega’s architecture, so their relationship couldn’t be closer – it’s also a key modernisation partner for many Pega customers. “Virtusa is our key partner in helping customers transform and leverage their legacy Pega investments into an adult, channel-less customer experience application. When my team gets to work with Virtusa in deploying Pega applications, we know that the longterm success of the customer is in really good hands. They are a key partner, especially in the insurance space.

“We’ve built the industry’s leading realtime AI engine, integrated with the best digital automation tools available, handling millions of interactions a day.

Insurance carriers want straight-though claims, underwriting, and complaints processing.” Pega Process Fabric, another recent innovation, facilitates the faultless user experience insurers strive for.

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Outstanding collaboration Among the many hundreds of collaborations Michelle Gaertner recalls redefining the global claims process for one of the largest global insurers was memorable. “Our customer had a global claims process that had become fragmented, with over 140 disconnected legacy systems across 90 countries, unconsolidated data and uncontrolled TCO leading to inaccurate claims settlement. Virtusa and Pega partnered together to successfully establish a collaborative multi-vendor ecosystem that helps them, improve the claims handling significantly.”

This is precisely the problem that will be recognised by almost all insurance carriers, she says, and one which is resolved by the 'layer cake' architecture these companies have refined to allow users to manage complex variations without rework, duplication, or interference with core systems. “Most of our successful customers have leveraged that capability to deploy 40-plus applications across their organisation on Pega's platform.”

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open source solutions like Red Hat, jBPM or Camunda.

“We maintain partnerships with most of these, also with robotic process automation (RPA) specialists like Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, WorkFusion, and low-code platforms like Pega, Unqork and Outsystems We know that the properties of an automation word problem will really guide our way. If we let the process tell us what it needs, we'll know what tool to reach for. If we face a really complex problem, we might reach for Pega. I feel like I’m an objective architect, eager to do what is right for the customer and what’s appropriate for the business’ word problem. But I calibrate Pega a little differently from other DPA-

“Insurance carriers are seeking a unified customer experience, and a unified view of the customer” GANESH IYER

EXECUTIVE VP INSURANCE, VIRTUSA

type platforms. Pega seems to be the most complete amalgamation of DPA capabilities in one platform.

For insurers, the technical debt they carry is like innovating with a piano on your back, says Price. On the most basic level they need to eliminate paper, something they hold onto stoically in the fear that their older users aren't ready for digital transactions, but he feels that is unfair to the techsavvy 'baby boomers'. But more carriers are beginning to focus on removing paperbased processes and adopting OCR and ICR, and Process Fabric, a business architecture pioneered by Pega that weaves together business processes, case management, and workflows across all systems and platforms. technologymagazine.com

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“I think insurers are overcoming their fear of artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud and are less worried that they will be taken somewhere they don't want to go.” Virtusa as a long time partner with Google, Amazon Web Service (AWS), SAP and others can be very confident in the security of these cloud environments.

“We're seeing that carriers are starting to come along and develop a cloud-first agenda with any modernisation work they're doing.”

Pegged to Pega From what Price says, it is clear that Pegasystems (Pega) has something special.

The two companies are more than partners and have an organic relationship going back to 2002. Virtusa is Pega's most tenured partner and the only one to partner with it in developing products for the financial

GREG PRICE TITLE: C HIEF ARCHITECT AND PRACTICE LEADER FOR INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION LOCATION: HOUSTON Greg Price is the practice leader

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and chief architect for Virtusa’s

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Digital Process Automation with nearly 30 years’ experience providing transformation strategic consulting, enterprise and solution architecture, engineering services, and innovation with responsibilities for competency development, practice building, solutions curation, and client adoption of process enablement technologies.

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services, insurance, healthcare, telecom, media, and manufacturing industries.

As Pega's Insurance Director, Michelle Gaertner explained: “Nearly 20 years ago, Pega joined forces with Virtusa, at that time a software engineering firm, to help the construction of product level configuration and build out some of our strategic applications. That gives Virtusa's product engineers a unique intimacy with the underpinning of Pega's architecture.”

To this day, Virtusa has engineers working inside Pega. It has executed more than 200 DPA programmes that include some of the largest Pega Implementations in the world.

Iyer also is keenly appreciative of the bond between the companies. “As a foundational partner, Virtusa is one of the few who really understand the Pega architecture.”

Automating the Experiences of Insurance

Multi-faceted differentiation Virtusa stands out in many ways as an enabler for transformation. With an overview from a vantage point of his 30 years in technology services, however, Ganesh Iyer can show how his organisation is uniquely structured.

“When you look across the spectrum, you see at one end the consulting players who tell you how to do it without actually doing it and at the other a number of lowcost outsourcing providers. Virtusa's strategy sits in the middle, so we can consult, design and also execute. That places us in a unique position. Technology used to enable business, now technology is business!”

Iyer says coming out of a software engineering, rather than development, background gives Virtusa a unique DNA. “We don't see development as a one-time

activity but as something we can constantly reuse. What sets us apart more than anything is this DNA, and the fact we are a truly digital engineering company.”

This also means that Virtusa is ideally placed to help insurance customers navigate the post-pandemic landscape they suddenly find themselves in. “Insurance carriers are used to making in-person transactions conducted through brokers,” Iyer says, “so remote working radically changed the dynamics of an industry that finds itself dealing with customers who expect a seamless experience irrespective of how they communicate. This revolution sets us squarely in a place where we can help those customers who are figuring out how to become truly digitally savvy.”

He cites the example of a mediumsized insurance company that is part of a technologymagazine.com

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large Japanese conglomerate, that wanted to modernise and cast off the shackles of tradition. “They looked at how to ensure that their brokers and agents could react seamlessly with their systems. They put in a lot of time and effort into a platform connectivity strategy that we are developing for them to modernise the whole exchange of information between them and all third parties through employee, agent, and other portals.

“At a larger scale, we're helping one of the largest insurance carriers globally to

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ensure that there is one look and feel for everybody who deals with it and its local companies. Each country may operate its own different systems. Virtusa helped them set up a global service platform, and to conceptualise it from an architectural standpoint. We then set about executing it so they have the same base functionality repeated in every country.”

At the end of the day, he concludes, what insurance carriers always have as their priority is user experience.

VIRTUSA

“ Pace-layering allows us to change our systems of differentiation frequently without touching their systems of record” GREG PRICE CHIEF ARCHITECT AND PRACTICE LEADER FOR INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION,

“They are seeking a unified customer experience and a unified view of the customer. A large global insurance company wants multinational underwriting, the ability to manage multiple underwriters using a single contract. We built it for them – the most sophisticated platform, future-proofed using the latest technology.”

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NTT DATA

WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

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Manel Martorana, Partner, Head of Digital Experience Europe at NTT DATA Europe & LATAM, explains the company’s world-leading approach to customer experience

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TT DATA is the sixth largest IT company in the world in terms of market share, and one of the fastest-growing brands, appearing among the 10 biggest IT and business service providers at the global level. Headquartered in Tokyo, the company helps clients transform through consulting, industry solutions, business process services, digital & IT modernisation, and managed services Manel Martorana is Partner, Head of Digital Experience for NTT DATA Europe and Latin America. A core part of his focus at NTT DATA is human-centred solutions. Using his technology expertise and knack for business orientation, he aims to achieve memorable digital experiences and boost customer engagement for every client.

Agile software development is a key pillar for Martorana in delivering a deep digital transformation. Recent projects include artificial intelligence (AI) based virtual agents to improve contact centre efficiency and training courses using virtual reality and augmented reality to optimise costs.

“We’re true innovators, with access to US$3.6bn of investment research and development from NTT Data. We have delivered 31 years of growth in a row and we have an objective to be in the top five global players in the market by 2025. Currently, we’re the sixth,” said Martorana.

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Manel Martorana, NTT DATA

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“Agile methodology is a core pillar of our digital transformation. We have experienced this with several clients, where we have created huge teams working on the digitalisation of their process, helping them to boost the velocity of the transformation. We have improved the time to market, especially of the digital projects, and also the quality of customer experience.”

Agile provides a clear differential in the NTT Data approach with clients, with hundreds of people working on different products for the same clients. The magic formula is blending human-centred design, technology expertise and business orientation to achieve a memorable digital experience and to boost customer engagement.

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“We mix those three disciplines, putting the user in the centre of the design process, having the right knowledge on the technology that we’re using to make those outstanding designs become real; and a deep understanding of the business challenges that our clients are facing.”

In regards to product-oriented development, Martorana says that, according to a study, 65% of developers were concerned with the customer experience when working with Agile. Asking the same question to developers working in a more project-oriented approach, more classical, only 30% are worried about the customer experience.

“We create agile teams with different skills and different specialties, from design to more technical parts, but also for measuring

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One Platform, Endless Solutions for Customer-Centric Experiences with Liferay and NTT DATA NTT DATA and Liferay partners to deliver end-to-end solutions capable of tackling the most complex business challenges to achieve best-in-class digital experiences centered in the personas and boost customer engagement.

Download Paper

Boosting the customer engagement Carolina Moreno, VP of Sales for EMEA/GM South of Europe

Liferay helps companies to build portals, intranets, websites, and connected experiences on an extensible digital experience platform (DXP). Liferay offers its customers the ability to create great digital personalized solutions and boost engagement from their end-users. Carolina Moreno, VP of Sales for EMEA and GM for the South of Europe explains, “large companies from all over the world use Liferay to address complex business challenges and demands: Optimizing the digital conversation with their clients, increasing the online revenue, and integrating solutions that help them digitalize their business in order to provide best-in-class experiences for their customers/ employees/partners, among others.”

Liferay has a longstanding relationship with NTT DATA, dealing with large customers across EMEA and Latin America.

“NTT Data has a strong and demonstrable history of creating the ecosystem required to implement successful projects both onpremise and into the cloud with experience

with large customers around the world and a track record in innovative solutions combining technology and talent.”

Going forward, Moreno sees the DXPs on the cloud as only becoming more vital to providing a good customer experience.

“For the digital experience solution market, which Liferay and NTT DATA are part of, we need to provide companies with the capabilities to face any challenge our customers have or may have in the future. This means agility on the implementation, flexibility to customize experiences, test new approaches fast, robust integration capabilities, and better support for engaging customers to a number of new and emerging conversational technologies and digital channels. Digital experience platforms and solutions on cloud offer capabilities that simplify process management while saving IT resources in order to allow companies to focus on the most critical thing: Deliver what the customers, employees, partners, and stakeholders need with a strong customer-centered strategy to boost customer engagement.”

NTT DATA

“ WE’RE WORKING ON APPLYING DATA AND ANALYTICS TO WHAT IS HAPPENING ACROSS THE DIFFERENT CHANNELS TO HYPERPERSONALISE THE EXPERIENCE” HEAD OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE EUROPE, NTT DATA

TITLE: H EAD OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE EUROPE

INDUSTRY: I NFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & SERVICES LOCATION: SPAIN

EXECUTIVE BIO

MANEL MARTORANA

Manel Martorana

Martorana has spent his entire career in the consulting industry, from consultant to executive positions at NTT DATA. He has 20+ years of experience envisioning, designing, and building end-to-end world-class digital experiences for large organizations, applying the latest technology.

Specifically, he holds deep knowledge of the Customer eXperience transformation from an omnichannel point of view, also in emerging channels like metaverses or conversational AI. His strong technological background allows him to advise on how to transform the business from a pragmatical point of view and ensure real business outcomes.

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the experience and the results and for testing. We’re really focused on not just delivering the product, but also the features of the product with a bigger flexibility than you’d get working to classic deadlines”, said Martorana.

One of NTT Data’s key partners is Liferay, who build portals, intranets, websites and connected experiences on a highly extensible digital experience platform. NTT DATA recently won Liferay’s partner of the year. The business started working with them in Spain at the beginning in 2009, expanding over the years into other countries in Europe and America, such as the UK or Brazil.

Martorana adds that “one of the aspects they value from us is our capacity to collaborate in different countries. As a company, we have a cross-country vision of the business. We’re really comfortable with Liferay because they’re one of the best solutions for digital platforms for our clients, who are typically large organisations with complex demands.”

How large companies are embracing VR and AR The big companies are still struggling to adopt those technologies, because the general consumer markets are also struggling to adopt them, according to Martorana.

“But we see especially in training, in industries where it is expensive or dangerous and involves long travels to different facilities, we’re creating virtual reality environments where they can simulate the actual situation. Employees taking this kind of training give us really good feedback on how effective the learning is.

These experiences are two to three times less expensive than training people in a physical or traditional scenario.”

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“ WE HAVE AS OBJECTIVE TO BE IN THE TOP FIVE GLOBAL PLAYERS IN THE MARKET BY 2025” MANEL MARTORANA HEAD OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE EUROPE, NTT DATA

“We’re also working with them more in the customer experience scenario, led by Facebook with the creation of Meta. Our AR/VR platform Naka (a Japanese word meaning to be in the middle of something), is especially designed to have this kind of meta experience at scale.

We created an experience, for example, for an airline company, to train the ground staff to cope with different airports layouts and with aeroplanes composed of different components. The client can create more than 60 courses, just combining the different models”, said Martorana.

Not replacing staff, but assisting them By providing conversational AI, businesses can handle a lot more traffic, a lot more conversations, with the same team they already have. This allows the human team to focus on the conversations that really require human talents, such as high empathy.

Bots can provide a really good experience for the final user, so they feel like they are speaking or chatting with a human, but Martorana says his team doesn't try to fool people.

“We don't try to pretend there is a human being where there is not. If the client (or the complexity of the problem) demands it, we’ll redirect the conversation to a human. technologymagazine.com

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“ MANAGING THE OMNICHANNEL APPROACH EFFECTIVELY IS A BIG FOCUS MOVING FORWARD” MANEL MARTORANA

HEAD OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE EUROPE, NTT DATA

It's about focusing on where we and the machines can bring more value. We can reduce the cost of running the contact centres dramatically, especially when the demands are higher in times such as holiday seasons or around new product launches.

We have seen NPS scores rise by 30 points.

So it's not just about reducing cost. It's also about improving the customer experience.”

Aside from the contact centres, NTT Data is investing into its digital analytics capabilities.

“We truly believe that you cannot improve what you are not measuring. We have specialised teams focused on analysing the experience of the users. We are increasingly more sophisticated in how we measure the experience. And we’re focusing a lot on what we call the ‘emerging devices’. On the evolution of mobility, the business has seen usage of many different kinds of devices, which users interact with in different ways. Managing the omnichannel approach effectively is a big focus moving forward,” said Martorana.

Proudest achievements Martorana has spent the majority of his career based in his native Barcelona, a city he calls home, and working across Europe.

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When he reflects on his greatest professional achievement, he doesn’t hesitate in saying the creation and development of his team.

“We’re really a big family. We’re 800 people in the European Digital Experience team, built one by one over the last 15 years. We work really closely with each other to help the clients, and to help us individually to become better people and better professionals. Our company is not a competitive environment, it’s a partnership model where we work all for one objective and to create more value for our clients. I think this really makes a difference between us and other enterprise environments. I also enjoy the opportunity to participate in really meaningful projects for clients, those that really have an impact on society and use the technology for good,” he added.

“What really motivates me though is the people that I work with, this is the most important thing. We work on technology because we are passionate about technology. And we work on customer experience because we really love improving the customer experience of our clients but, during my career, I've been really lucky to have really good bosses, really good mentors and colleagues, that helped me develop my skills that helped me understand the technology and the purpose behind it. This helps me find the right talent for the team and to give them the space and support to develop themselves in the same way I did.

My mentors are one of the reasons I'm still here after 16 years!”, said Martorana.

On hyperpersonalisation In terms of providing customers with the right information, at the right time and in the right place; Martorana believes that as an industry, this is not being achieved “because the reality is that we’re retargeting a lot.” technologymagazine.com

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“ IT'S ABOUT FOCUSING ON WHERE WE AND THE MACHINES CAN BRING MORE VALUE” MANEL MARTORANA

HEAD OF DIGITAL EXPERIENCE EUROPE, NTT DATA

“At NTT Data, we’re working on applying data and analytics to what is happening across the different channels to personalise the content. This is one of the promises that we as industry are not fulfilling’ both to our clients and to society. It’s been promised for the last five or six years that we will be delivering this hyperpersonalised experience”, said Martorana.

“I think that one of the main challenges is learning how to give the pressure or intensity that is needed when users are searching for topics. If you do this wrong, what you achieve is the opposite effect you want to produce.

“This is problematic particularly in larger companies, where everything is less personalised. And you feel that each channel works as a silo and you’re starting your relationship with this company or with this organisation every time you have attachment with them.

“It’s about recognising who you are and knowing when your last interaction with the brand was, so it can start talking from this point and not from scratch every time”, he added.

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CORRECTIONAL SERVICE OF CANADA

CSC: PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE OF CORRECTIONS WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY PRODUCED BY: KRISTOFER PALMER

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Simon Bonk, CSC’s CIO speaks to Technology Magazine to discuss how he is utilising modern technology to prepare for the future of corrections

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esponsible for administering sentences of two years or more as imposed by the courts, the Correctional Services of Canada (CSC) is a federal government agency that actively encourages and assists offenders in their rehabilitation and reintegration journey of becoming lawabiding citizens.

“At the core of it, CSC is about ensuring the safety and protection of Canadians, by equipping offenders with the tools they need to successfully return to our communities” explained its CIO, Simon Bonk.

“Our business line is unique compared to other government departments. We're not a policy department. We deal with folks that have made bad choices in their life.

We need to provide them with the support and tools to be able to make better choices.

The vast majority of the people that come to our institutions return to society, so they're going to be your neighbour or in your neighbourhood. We have a duty of care to create a safe and secure environment that allows offenders of various backgrounds to focus on the correctional programs that have been tailored to them. This makes for a really dynamic environment,” he added.

In his role, Bonk looks at the ways technology can both enable and inspire transformation to support CSC in meeting the demands of its complex offender population. In doing so, he has assisted the

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CSC: digitally transforming rehabilitation in corrections

organisation in reimagining how corrections can operate differently, through the support of technology, to modernise.

“A modernised correctional service has the ability to drive greater effectiveness of rehabilitation during program delivery, greater offerings in services such as education, addictions management and mental health, and be adaptable to the diversity of offenders, in particular, addressing the diversity amongst Indigenous offenders.” Bonk noted.

Within the last two years, CSC has introduced new technologies such as Wi-Fi, in contained areas of the institution, mobile devices for officers’ specified use, and; RFID tags to increase the effective management of offenders. It has also made substantial investments in its network and infrastructure, to ready CSC for the future of corrections.

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“The innovation opportunities in corrections are endless, and the industry has lots of room for evolution,” said Bonk.

The impact of COVID-19 on CSC As with all industries and organisations around the world, CSC has had to respond to changes brought about by the Coronavirus pandemic.

Although in some cases, it has hindered activity and organisations have struggled, Bonk believes it has been an invaluable

CORRECTIONAL SERVICE OF CANADA

SIMON BONK TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER INDUSTRY: CORRECTIONS

catalyst in the agency’s ability to adapt and adopt new technologies. He explained: “For my organisation, I would actually argue that our productivity has increased since COVID, due to the technologies and capabilities that we introduced.“ “We've been able to keep the business of corrections going and I think quite successfully.”

Bonk continued: “We have drawn from our service providers and our partners, like Cistel Technology Inc., to assist us in navigating the

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: CANADA In his role as CIO at Correctional Service of Canada, Simon is responsible for engaging with his business partners to identify opportunities where the enablement of technology and information management services can address business challenges. Partnership and collaboration are important philosophies for Simon. He has exemplified these philosophies by cultivating stronger relationships with the corrections industry, within Canada as well as internationally. He has helped shift the dynamic with vendors, to that of partners working together to develop a more mutually beneficial relationship, working to facilitate better business outcomes. Simon is currently exploring thinking in the space of digital strategy and industry modernisation.

Through technology, data, and modern business processes, he sees opportunities to continue to revolutionise business and societal outcomes.

A TALE OF TWO DIGITAL CITIES Canada’s prison services could hold the keys to unlock the digital future for cities across the globe in the 21st Century? Colin Smith from Cistel Technology and Simon Bonk from the CSC think so.

The Pandemic is focusing minds. Innovation and digital migration move at a far faster pace because of Covid.

Colin Smith puts it like this: ‘We went to bed feeling unwell in 2020 and we woke up in 2030.’ Whatever your take on the Coronavirus journey it has forced many public institutions and private businesses rethink on a seismic scale. That includes the Correctional Services of Canada (CSC).

Simon Bonk from CSC compares its Prisons to huge, vibrant cities. They need a healthcare, sanitation, and a welfare infrastructure; the population needs to be fed, kept warm, educated, and protected. ‘The only real difference is the inhabitants cannot leave,’ says Bonk. Take that argument further and Bonk says the work being done by CSC has the potential to impact the way some services could be delivered within the municipal context. ‘If a service delivery model is successful with corrections, perhaps it can be used as a proof of concept for something on the municipal scale’ says Bonk. This is the digital age in action.

‘Traditionally, I’ve always seen public services as importers of technological innovation. But now I’m thinking things could move in the opposite direction,’ says Bonk. ‘It is a very real possibility the corrections model – especially

in terms of the technology it uses and how that technology needs to be highly robust and error free – could drive and inspire large tech gains in the outside world.

‘I don’t want to overstate but we are examining ways for corrections institutions to be used to pilot new technologies or methods for service delivery that could be scaled up for municipalities. Correctional institutions could be used as a test bed for some of these ideas and would be an ideal low-risk scenario.’

Testing new technologies in prisons means exposing offenders to these technologies, which could in turn be part of the prep to reintroduce them into society and that notion of normalcy links in nicely here.

But the CSC cannot do this alone. It needs strong and highly collaborative partners it can trust.

This is where Colin Smith and Cistel Technology come in. Smith is the Principal Consultant for Microsoft Solutions Practice at Cistel Technology.

‘It’s not just about the technology.’ Says Smith. ‘It’s about enabling the business of corrections. It’s an exacting business with its own stresses, strains and challenges.’ It’s about really understanding this business with twenty thousand employees and tens of thousands of “guests”.

‘We effectively run 43 hospitals across the country,’ adds Simon Bonk. ‘Corrections is a unique business. We have a duty of care for

those who live in our institutions, also to our staff and our stakeholders so when IT systems go down lives are at stake.’

Bonk concedes that CSC has been a later starter. ‘We have walls three feet thick and a century old. Wi-Fi is not enough. We need to be far more innovative with the way we monitor, gather data and run multi-level systems.’

CSC, with the help of its longtime partner Cistel Technology is embracing IoT. They both call this the modernization of corrections.

Cistel Technology has been in the cloud since 2014. CSC is a recent migrant. Together, with the added pressure of the pandemic, minds have been even more focused on the future and delivering IT solutions faster than ever.

Both agree that this approach is creating ideas and opportunities which could go beyond the prison service.

‘These challenges have crystalized the thinking within our organization,’ says Bonk. ‘There is a real opportunity – not just our bricks and mortar strategy but also our digital infrastructure and our cultural evolution. Cistel Technology is turning this vision into a reality.

Smith explains how:

‘Our R&D department is a trailblazer. We are developing sensor networks, tracking and location services using IoT thinking.

Initially this was for disaster mitigation to help first responders.

‘Now, this thinking and technology is finding a place in the corrections and incarceration business. There are innovative ways to use the intelligent edge of IoT to ensure the safety of inmates in different ways.

Bonk cites the routine but continual and vital process of bed checks. ‘Low emission blue tooth and sensors to monitor provide early indications of any inmate in distress.

This means warders can carry out other tasks instead of doing time inefficient “rounds”.

Another technology Cistel Technology and CSC is developing is handheld devices linked to RFID which improve reporting and monitoring across a range of duties and responsibilities.

Learn more

www.cistel.com

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CORRECTIONAL SERVICE OF CANADA

“ THERE'S AN OPENNESS TO RETHINK HOW WE'VE DONE CORRECTIONS IN THE PAST, WHICH IS THE FIRST POINT AND MOST CRITICAL POINT” SIMON BONK

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CORRECTIONAL SERVICE OF CANADA

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unknown. Through partnerships, we were able to augment our talented workforce to advance initiatives such as Microsoft 365 and Teams, which have been critical to CSC’s ability to operate during these unprecedented times.”

In response to public health policies and nationwide lockdowns, CSC drew on the opportunity to do things differently by increasing its uptake of virtual technologies.

Bonk described it as a “silver lining” and explained: “We had to think about our business differently and become more

innovative. As an example, before the pandemic loved ones could visit inmates, which was no longer possible due to isolation and social distancing protocols.

“To ensure families and friends remained connected, a critical ingredient to successful reintegration, we increased our video visitation usage by 300%. Similarly, we expanded our telemedicine program across Canada, to provide both virtual physical and mental health services to offenders, while respecting public health guidelines,” Bonk explained.

Not only did the organisation expand its use of video visitation and telemedicine programs to allow for the continuation of institutional services for offenders, but they also introduced a Virtual Correctional Program Delivery Model to support the rehabilitation of offenders by ensuring access to correctional programming anywhere, at any time.

“We were still trying to give them their rehabilitative programming to ensure their success when they are released,” said Bonk “To do this, we had to increase our bandwidth and review our network infrastructure to facilitate our need for virtual services for offenders, but also for our staff,” he added.

However, this is a small drop in the ocean compared to what CSC could be doing with its adoption of digital technology.

Describing the institutions as “small cities”, Bonk said: “Corrections agencies are similar to small cities, with an interconnected web of services and technologies. We have education, we have health, we have libraries, all of the things that a small city has to deal with. We need to look at all of our services and solutions holistically, to ensure we are able to realise all of the benefits of modernisation, without missing opportunities or implementing incompatible technologies or processes.”

Overcoming challenges in the adoption of emerging technologies While the pandemic provided an opportunity for CSC to reimagine how it operated and delivered programs and services, it also highlighted some of the new correctional business capabilities that are required to modernise and adapt in a constantly changing environment. In order to modernise effectively, Bonk said technologymagazine.com

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that the organisation is “planning a strategic way forward, that will be driven by business transformation and business outcomes to ultimately enhance the safety and prosperity of Canadian communities.”

Adding to this, he said: “We are approaching modernisation through three pillars: modernising our technical and real property infrastructure, focusing on driving a digital-first mentality and design, and; most importantly, preparing and supporting our people and our culture in successfully embracing new and improved correctional infrastructure, policy, processes and practices. Our people are critical in facilitating change.”

In terms of readying for the future, there are a number of challenges Bonk

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needs to consider when choosing the most appropriate technology for CSC’s institutions, including the thick walls of the institutions and remote location of its prisons: “A lot of our sites are not in the big metropolitan cities, they are in a smaller location, and spread out across the country.

CSC’s jurisdictions span 3.85 million square miles and 3.5 time zones. Canada's a big country and high-speed internet isn't available everywhere,” Bonk said.

Not only does CSC have to overcome geographical challenges when it comes to implementing new technologies, but it also has to consider the infrastructure of its institutions and how this will affect the technologies introduced.

Bonk explained: “Some of our institutions are 100 years old. We're talking about walls that are three feet thick with rebar. We have to think differently about how we can provide these services in a modern way while considering that some of the infrastructures are dated.”

Modernising corrections can have profound impacts on society To ensure that the organisation’s adoption of digital technologies keeps increasing, Bonk highlighted that investment and support from partnering companies and central agencies are essential. With this, he said: “Corrections globally needs to think about how to position itself effectively to optimise investment from central agencies.” Bonk continued, “recidivism, and the ways to reduce it, is spoken about a lot in corrections. To elevate the narrative around correctional facilities and the role they play, CSC wants to demonstrate the linkage between how well equipped we are to reduce reoffending and how these positive correctional outcomes strengthens Canadian society more broadly.”

Outlining this, Bonk explained: “Modernisation can have broader impacts to Canada’s urban, rural and remote communities; strengthening employment opportunities for offenders, developing a skilled workforce in the communities where CSC has a presence, and supporting improvements in community social services are just a few ways CSC can positively impact the communities it is connected with.”

Harnessing partnerships to improve correctional services Partnerships are invaluable to the success of CSC, by elevating this conversation and showcasing the societal benefits to rehabilitation, Bonk hopes this will strengthen the case for larger investments from

“WE'RE GOING TO BE CREATING A WORK ENVIRONMENT THAT'S HEALTHY, AND MORE SECURE AND MORE PRODUCTIVE” SIMON BONK

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CORRECTIONAL SERVICE OF CANADA technologymagazine.com

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“ CORRECTIONS REALLY NEED TO THINK ABOUT HOW TO POSITION THEMSELVES EFFECTIVELY TO GET THAT INVESTMENT FROM THE CENTRAL AGENCIES WITHIN THE GOVERNMENT CONTEXT” SIMON BONK CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CORRECTIONAL SERVICE OF CANADA

central agencies. In turn, supporting the organisation as it continues to adopt digital technology to enhance outcomes for Canadians, staff and offenders.

He explains: “We'll be not just thinking about how we use technology, but also how we get those improved correctional outcomes that really benefit society. And we want to do that in a way that's inclusive, that 328

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works with our vendor partners as well as other correctional jurisdictions.”

Showcasing the significance of partnering with other organisations, is CSC’s partnership with Cistel Technology Inc. Cistel is a leader in the systems and telecommunications market. The company provides technical expertise and constant innovation to the civil security sector.

Bonk explained that the support and knowledge brought through the ongoing relationship with Cistel have been invaluable: “We would not be where we are today in enabling the business of corrections without their help. With Microsoft Teams and the cloud environment, Cistel has been instrumental in augmenting our skilled workforce, and helping us to position

ourselves with the right talent and execution plan to gain a secure cloud environment.”

“CSC was one of the first seven departments in the Government of Canada to be able to access a secure cloud environment, and Cistel was instrumental in helping to do that. They're great partners, they understand where we're going and are able to work with us to make that happen,” Bonk added. technologymagazine.com

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CSC’s strategic approach to modernisation In order to continue on this journey towards a modernised Correctional Service of Canada, Bonk and CSC are dedicated to building a modernisation approach that encompasses all aspects of CSC’s environment. This holistic approach considers the needs of CSC staff, stakeholders and offenders. It will allow for increased access to tailored and timely interventions, offer an environment within the institutions that is reflective of the communities offenders will be reintegrated to, and strengthen decision-making and transparency for the benefit of all Canadians.

“What COVID has provided, is a two year proof of concept about the opportunity that technology can present,” said Bonk.

He went on to add he is keen to build upon this foundation built by the pandemic in the coming years.

“CSC is an incredibly interesting and dynamic business line, and there's a lot of opportunities to transform and modernise and drive those better outcomes that lead to a better society.”

He concluded: “Change of this nature, however, is unlikely to occur organically. The modernisation of corrections will require advocacy, investment, and a clear vision of what modernisation means in the context of the business of corrections. It will require us to focus on our bricks and mortar, our technical capabilities, and most importantly our people and our culture, to embrace new and improved correctional infrastructure, policy, processes and practices. However, the potential for benefits realised over time by adopting a holistic approach could reshape corrections as we currently understand it.”

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BUILD YOUR DIGITAL ENTERPRISE WITH CLOUD

WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO technologymagazine.com

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Virtusa is driving cloud transformation at the pace and passion of a startup, with expert execution for its customers.

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oving to cloud is not a question of if and why, but when and how, is the message from Anirudh Joshi, Senior Vice President and Head Cloud Americas, at Virtusa.

Joshi outlined the benefits of why companies should move to the cloud, pointing out this will give them “scalability, flexibility and the competitive edge” during his timely chat with Technology magazine.

Speaking from his office in Toronto, Joshi highlighted it was more important than ever that organisations move to the cloud as COVID-19 has reshaped the industry landscape and those that had taken the step are proving to be more successful than those who hesitated.

Joshi leads the cloud transformation in the Americas (which makes up 80% of global business). He highlights how Virtusa brings its engineering expertise in cloud transformation to provide digital infrastructure, analytics and intelligence, customer experience, applications, DevOps, and security – to help build the digital enterprises of tomorrow.

“It became very clear during the pandemic that those businesses on cloud recovered much faster than those that were not.

They were able to cope with the pandemic, and disruptions, much better than businesses that were not on cloud. This was due to their flexibility, scalability and speed, which cloud offers and is difficult to match by alternate technology.

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VIRTUSA

Build your digital enterprise with cloud

“The sooner we put our technologies on cloud, and leverage the power of cloud, the easier it will be for companies to accelerate their innovation and gain a competitive edge.

This is why moving to cloud is not a question of if and why, but when and how.”

Power of delivering digital transformation Founded in 1996, Virtusa is a strategic digital engineering partner to some of the world’s most reputed companies in banking and financial services, insurance, healthcare, telecom, life sciences, media and entertainment and high-tech. Its Digital Transformation Studio (DTS) provides a unique combination of engineering tools, industry assets and an enabled team to drive more than 30% efficiency in speed in delivering digital transformation.

Using a combination of digital strategy, digital engineering, business implementation, and IT platform modernisation services, Virtusa helps 336

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clients execute successful end-to-end digital business transformation initiatives.

Virtusa engages its clients to re-imagine their business models by introducing innovative products and services. As a result, its clients are able to drive business growth through digital-first customer experiences, while also consolidating and modernising their IT application infrastructure to support digital business transformation.

“At Virtusa, we drive transformation at the pace and passion of a startup, with expert execution at a global scale,” said Joshi, who started with the organisation in October 2020.

“My role is building the solutions and service offerings that we take to our customers and look at how we can partner them in accelerating them on the journey to cloud. We look at how we can help them move faster, make it more efficient and give them an advantage in their business both in the digital and non-digital side.”

VIRTUSA

“ It became very clear during the pandemic that those businesses on cloud recovered much faster than those that were not”

25 countries 50+ locations

ANIRUDH JOSHI

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & HEAD CLOUD AMERICAS, VIRTUSA

30,000+ world-class professionals

Joshi said as companies move forward on their cloud journeys, Virtusa has a unique value proposition in influencing those journeys, at scale, in three different dimensions – ideate, accelerate, and optimise.

Combining frictionless technology delivery and deep industry expertise, helps businesses move forward faster. Virtusa helps their clients advance to their optimal business state and achieve quick and continued returns on their investments.

ANIRUDH JOSHI TITLE: S ENIOR VP AND HEAD CLOUD AMERICAS LOCATION: CANADA An accomplished IT leader with rich experience across technologies and verticals across geographies. Anirudh has delivered results in challenging roles in sales, business development, consulting, solution architecture, and new services development.

How Virtusa empowers its client relationships:

Cloud services include: • Strategy and assessments • Migration • Cloud-native engineering • Data and analytics • SaaS applications • Open Innovation Platform • Security • Managed cloud

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• Speed at scale • Deep engineering history • Business and industry focus • Digital Transformation Studio • Talent development pipeline

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Unleash the Power of Cloud On Your Terms CoreStack, an AI-powered multi-cloud governance solution, empowers enterprises to rapidly achieve continuous and autonomous cloud governance at scale. CoreStack enables companies to realize outcomes such as 50% increase in cloud operational efficiencies, 40% decrease in cloud costs, and 100% assurance with cloud security and compliance by proactively governing operations, security, cost, access and resources, and providing complete visibility in a single pane of glass.

CoreStack: AI-powered Multi-Cloud Governance at Scale

When looking to innovate faster and make the most of the resources, large organizations use CoreStack, a Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) platform, that provides the utmost simplicity and flexibility in multi-cloud governance. Unlike other solutions, CoreStack allows full visibility of cloud infrastructure across the major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle), providing the best opportunity to proactively manage cloud costs, security risks, compliance needs, and operational

complexities. With a customer base of over 300 enterprise clients and a network of strategic partners, CoreStack serves mid-tolarge organizations across many industries such as healthcare, financial, media, gaming, and retail. CoreStack helps its customers cut costs, make operations more efficient, and ensure 100% compliance with standards such as ISO, FedRAMP, NIST, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, Azure CIS, AWS CIS, and AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Unleashing the Power of Cloud

CoreStack was founded in 2016 with the mission to helping companies unleash the power of the cloud through continuous and autonomous cloud governance at scale. As a SaaS platform provider, CoreStack offers a broad service from

applications of shared, browser-based products for clients to manage their services to white labeling of complete solutions, allowing customers to leverage their partner ecosystems.

Partner-first for Customer Success “We have tiers of partnerships starting from cloud vendors, including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, to MSPs/SIs/ Resellers to Global Systems Integrators,” CoreStack’s CEO Ezhilarasan Natarajan explained. “CoreStack is the only platform that provides a single pane of glass for cloud operations, financial operations and security operations.”

The company has identified the importance of partnerships in developing the customer experience, and its strategic partnership with Virtusa has allowed CoreStack to fill a gap in the market. Focusing on digital transformation and cloud adoption for its customers, Virtusa was looking for a solution that could help them be more efficient at driving customer satisfaction, lowering operating costs, and providing best-in-class service. Virtusa became one of CoreStack’s premier partners and leverages the CoreStack platform to flawlessly execute cost management and optimization (FinOps), security and compliance (SecOps), and automation and governance (CloudOps).

Learn more

VIRTUSA

Virtusa is working to accelerate migration and modernisation of cloud for its clients by pointed solutions, commented Joshi.

“We have built, and we continue to build, specific pointed solutions, which we build ourselves and in partnership with some of the specialist niche companies in the industry.

This is so that companies can accelerate the movement to cloud. Building patterns, tools and assets can integrate with the technology so that it meshes seamlessly with how technology is adopted and moved to cloud.

Virtusa’s solutions like vPaac (Patterns as a Code - focus on migration and modernisation through IaC) and vGovern ( Multi-cloud governance solution) are examples of solutions that were built to help enterprises to accelerate and stabilise their cloud journeys through automation, DevOps and security.

Automated governance Commenting on automated governance in a multi-cloud environment, Joshi said: “Companies do not want to put all their eggs in one basket, in terms of putting everything on Azure or AWS or GCP. Private cloud companies are using multiple clouds, so governance cannot just be a certain process practice where people and manual governance is out of the question. When you have such a complex landscape of multiple clouds and multiple technologies, automated governance, which focuses on continuous compliance with security with the data operations, definitely is becoming a necessity and a norm rather than a good to have.”

Joshi said the next 12 to 18 months is focused on helping customers scale to the cloud and establish secure, robust operations.

“We have to look at how we differentiate the solutions that we have and how we help our customers scale their journey to cloud from pilots to applications. We also have to 340

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establish secure, robust cloud operations with multi-cloud governance, which takes care of governance and continuous cost optimisation. Doing both of these will be a very solid foundation of security and compliance. Striking the right mix of rhythm between all these areas is the key for Virtusa moving forward.”

Partnership with CoreStack As a leading services provider, Virtusa has established extensive relationships with prominent technology organisations.

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One of their key partnerships is with CoreStack, which Joshi said had been successful.

He highlighted the importance of having CoreStack within its ecosystem. “CoreStack’s combination of being a startup focused on artificial intelligence (AI) based cloud governance and flexibility, and their vision of how technology would evolve made it suitable for us in terms of our own plan in this space.”

CoreStack actualises cloud governance best practices for cloud operations, security, compliance, access and resource by implementing a well-architected framework,

VIRTUSA

“ At Virtusa, we drive transformation at the pace and passion of a startup, with expert execution at a global scale” ANIRUDH JOSHI

which helps to achieve integrated and continuous governance across FinOps, SecOps & CloudOps. Joshi summed up the urgency for companies to move to cloud, saying it is difficult for a single on-premise system to match. “Cloud offers flexibility in terms of a wide range of innovation services available.

Moving to the cloud today is not an option, it's a necessity.”

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TRUST in people and TECHNOLOGY WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

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The New Equation from PwC is building trust in the ingenuity of people and innovation of technology to meet today’s challenges in business

P

wC has invested €12bn to accelerate the technology footprint for their global clients.

This investment in technology has come as a result of a new strategy called The New Equation which is paving the way for the global consultants to become a more technology-enabled company.

Philippe Trouchaud, Partner PwC France, Chief Technology and Products Officer and Matthieu Lemasson, Partner PwC France, Advisory Market LoS Leader spoke to Technology magazine from their offices in Paris about how the company is combining human ingenuity, experience and technology innovation to deliver sustained outcomes and build trust among their clients during the next four years.

Trouchaud and Lemasson also highlight the talent war currently going on within industry and highlight how PwC is working with key universites to help address upskilling and encouragement for more women to follow a career in technology.

“Technology is the heart of the next big thing,” pointed out Lemasson who has been advising PwC clients for the past seven years.

With offices in 156 countries and more than 295,000 people generating a turnover of US$45bn in 2021, PwC is among the leading professional services networks in the world.

They help organisations and individuals create the value they are looking for, by delivering quality in assurance, tax and advisory services.

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PwC is regarded as a community of solvers combining human ingenuity, experience and technology innovation to deliver sustained outcomes and build trust for their clients both today and tomorrow.

“The New Equation means we will become a technology-led company,” said Trouchaud.

“For PwC as consultants, lawyers or tax advisors, technology is the only way to create a sustainable outcome with our clients.

“We will invest in technology in order to transform the way we deliver value to the client and improve the customer experiences. It will also enable us to become more agile. We are focusing on technology and need to do it as quickly as possible.

That is what we mean by becoming a giant.”

Lemasson echoed his views saying: “The sum of €12bn is a huge investment and it will be used to accelerate the footprint of technology in PwC and act as an enabler for our clients. We want to use this technological asset as an accelerator for 348

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“ We will invest in technology in order to transform the way we deliver value to the client and improve the customer experiences.

It will also enable us to become more agile.

We are focusing on technology and need to do it as quickly as possible” PHILIPPE TROUCHAUD

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY & PRODUCTS OFFICER, PWC FRANCE

PWC

PHILIPPE TROUCHAUD TITLE: C HIEF TECHNOLOGY & PRODUCTS OFFICER INDUSTRY: ACCOUNTING LOCATION: FRANCE Philippe Trouchaud, Partner PwC France, Chief Technology and Products Officer has been with the company since 2002.

Trouchaud is an expert on new technologies and his focus is to support the transformation of companies to take the best advantage of technologies.

“I'm particularly interested in the human side of these major changes.

Over the next three years PwC has the major project to be a technologyled company. We want to transform ourselves and also our client experience based on technology.

“Before taking up this role I was leading our cyber security on our cloud transformation practice.”

What is The New Equation?

According to PwC, The New Equation is a global strategy that is human-led and techpowered and where people and technology work hand-in-hand. The company outlines how ‘human ingenuity combined with technology innovation and experience’ will be used to deliver faster, more intelligent and better outcomes while building trust with stakeholders across the value chain.

The New Equation will focus on creative ways to ‘build trust, deliver sustained outcomes and help clients solve their most important problems’.

EXECUTIVE BIO

our global clients to achieve their goals. We want to use technology in all aspects of our business from finance to cloud and cyber security to achieve both our goals and our clients' goals.”

“Technology is a lever, technology is an accelerator and in my view, technology is king,” he said.

PWC

“We’re combining everything we offer in new, creative ways to build trust, deliver sustained outcomes and help clients solve their most important problems,” said Trouchaud.

PwC is already investing €1bn a year in skills and new capabilities and technology to empower their people, to bring together people from different backgrounds, with diverse experiences and viewpoints, and are committed to investing alongside their clients to deliver results that make the difference.

How technology with benefit PwC clients PwC is helping clients from Finance, E&U, R&C, health and the A&D industry.

As aerospace, defence and security are entering a new era, PwC sees the intense market shifts and accelerating cost and margin pressures. The complexity of this environment demands innovation with agility and organisations must modernise operations, prepare their teams and invest in digital technologies.

“In terms of defence it is about looking at technology, from cloud to data or Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a key enabler especially in relation to faster productivity within budgets.

“We are currently helping a client who faces major challenges to identify optimisations and product competitiveness (design-to-cost exercise) for current and future projects in order to : technologymagazine.com

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• Reduce costs, in particular, non-recurring costs

MATTHIEU LEMASSON TITLE: ADVISORY MARKET LOS LEADER

• Achieve right first time

INDUSTRY: ACCOUNTING LOCATION: FRANCE

• Be focus on priorities and value

Matthieu Lemasson works in the Advisory Practice of PwC and leads Market + Aeronautic, Defence and Space Division for PwC. He is a member of the Consulting ExCo as Market Leader.

Matthieu focuses on helping large organisations translate their business objectives into strategies that maximise business impact.

His current focus is in helping large organisations identify transformational operating model changes necessary to accelerate end-to-end delivery of business value while improving customer experience leveraging enterprise agile, continuous deliver and digital technologies such as data, new Tech, cloud and analytics.

Prior to joining PwC, he was Managing Director in other well-known Consulting firms.

• Secure business case & RO and project execution • Leverage lessons learned and scale Lemasson provided some examples of how PwC has worked with clients when it comes to digital technologies such as data, cloud and analytics.

“We help our clients to identify what would be the key architecture that could

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PWC

help them to benefit from the pool of data.

Clients generate lots of data specifically in manufacturing.

What we know today is that data is the new oil - the new gold. If we look at manufacturing, we capture the data, we identify the data to bring in new ways of productivity, efficiency, and fine tune the process for better productivity.”

War on talent PwC, has transformed itself through a global digital upskilling initiative that took seven million hours of routine work and redirected it towards higher-value activities that clients needed and the employees enjoyed doing.

People and tech working together for a better outcome.

“ Technology is a lever, technology is an accelerator and in my view, technology is king” MATTHIEU LEMASSON

PARTNER, ADVISORY MARKET LOS LEADER PWC FRANCE

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How PwC is finding global solutions PwC is always looking at problems from new angles to uncover solutions that deliver sustained outcomes and build trust. By bringing together unexpected combinations of skills, experience and technology, PwC helps shape the future in the following ways: Green energy targets When a client needed a way to meet its green energy targets, PwC Norway built a team which combined risk, consulting, tax and legal expertise with a Norwegian software developer to create a solution to combine biofuel compliance and commercialisation and excise tax reporting into one system.

Making the world accessible to people with disabilities with AXS Lab Hand in hand with AXS Lab, PwC US’s digital

But this is not always the case in the companies they advise as there is a major talent challenge reverberating around industry. “We have two main challenges concerning talent. One is the war on talent that was started a few years ago and the second is to try and encourage more women within technology,” said Lemasson.

“When it comes to talent, we're all fishing in the same pond. We also need to be more inclusive and we also need to diversify the way we welcome people into our companies, industrial companies, but also consulting firms.

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team put end-users at the heart of design to help transform their platform into a userfriendly web and accessible app that can rapidly expand, engaging new audiences worldwide.

Using our BXT Works approach, a fast, sprintstyle framework combining business strategy, user experience design and technology, PwC relaunched AXS Map into the market.

Virtual care solution in the ME The health ministry of a Middle East government became concerned, during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, that people who needed medical attention were staying away from hospitals and clinics. PwC Middle East worked with health ministry officials, clinicians, patients and technology providers, to develop a virtual care solution which will help save lives not just today, but for many years to come.

“ The sum of €12b is a huge investment and it will be used to accelerate the footprint of technology in PwC and act as an enabler for our clients” MATTHIEU LEMASSON

PARTNER, ADVISORY MARKET LOS LEADER PWC FRANCE

PWC

your personal life but your professional life. It will be used in the way you interact with your peers, with your colleagues, the impact it will have on products or systems or methodology. If you want to be part of that and contribute to change - and have fun at the same time - then choose a career in technology” Trust is top of the agenda for every company, pointed out Trouchaud. “Trust is key and the only factor that brings business to life. But I think there is also a challenge with cyber recruitment. There are many companies that find it difficult to spend money on cyber and it is always difficult to acquire and retain the key talent when it comes to cyber security.”

“Second challenge is welcoming more women to work in technology. This is really key because what we know it's when we have women working with us that brings a new spirit and a new way of thinking and it's helped a lot to identify new levers and new operating models into an organisation.”

Lemasson pointed out that PwC works with universities to encourage more intake among women and diverse groups. “My message to anyone thinking about a career in technology is this: Technology is the heart of the next big thing.

It will be at the heart of what we do in the future.

“Technology can bring new opportunities and in the future it will not only be about

Four steps towards closing skills gap A new report by Generation Unlimited, PwC and UNICEF highlights the talent shortage and looks at four steps to close the gap. It states young people across the world aren’t able to identify or acquire the skills needed for today’s job market, contributing to a global skills gap and exacerbating youth unemployment.

Young people are standing on the edge of a precipice: the compounding threats of deepening inequalities, lack of opportunities, and COVID-19 disruptions will have lifelong consequences for youth globally.

It calls on business executives to come together and join forces with young people to address the systemic challenges that hold younger people back from reaching their full potential. The need is urgent, the time is now, and 1.8 billion young people are waiting.”

The report provides four steps that businesses and government leaders could take to address the skills gap and youth unemployment. technologymagazine.com

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“What we know today is that data is the new oil - the new gold. If we look at manufacturing, we capture the data, we identify the data to bring in new ways of productivity, efficiency, and fine tune the process for better productivity” MATTHIEU LEMASSON

PARTNER, ADVISORY MARKET LOS LEADER PWC FRANCE

• Create a skill mapping system to define skills, categories and ways to measure competence.

• Use corporate training to support a national skills-building engine.

• Build a national digital skills verification trust.

• Develop regional and national skills forums to improve information sharing among key stakeholders including employers, educators, governments, associations and youth PwC partnership with Celonis PwC works with Celonis which is a data processing company which sells Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) to improve business processes. The Celonis Execution Management System provides companies a modern way to run their business processes entirely on data and intelligence.

They pioneered the process mining category 10 years ago when they first developed the ability to automatically X-ray processes and find inefficiencies.

“Working with Celonis helps us to explain to our clients where they should invest and

why,” commented Lemasson. “It’s a factbased approach that gives the right level of trust about the system, but also gives the client the best way to manage the changes they need to apply at a company level. So working with Celonis helps our client to make the right decision.

“We design what a process should be according to the best practice, for whatever the function is from the HR function, treasury. engineering or transportation.

Then we rework this with the clients on the gap between the current process and what should be the process with the clients so we can improve a department's efficiency by up to 30% - depending on their budgets.”

As PwC moves forward as a technologyled company is focusing on breaking down the silos within industry. “Data is a key enabler that can help our clients to identify the potential of new productivity or a new manner of working both internally or with their own suppliers and their partners to become more profitable,” said Lemasson.

As Lemasson stressed “data is the new oil” which now looks set to fuel the ambitions for many of the clients at PwC.

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Michael Phillipou, Chief Executive Officer discusses how Sandstone Technology brings banks and financial institutions into the digital era

F

Michael Phillipou, Chief Executive Officer

intech digital transformation can be made much simpler if partners are willing to drive value in the direction of their customers. With more innovation taking place in the industry, the ability to meet the customers’ needs is what sets a company apart from the rest. As the world continues along its current trajectory towards digital payments and banking services, organisations like Sandstone Technology — with multiple technological capabilities — are encouraging the adoption of fintech among consumers and businesses.

Talking with the Chief Executive Officer of Sandstone Technology, Michael Phillipou, he explains just how important it is for companies in the fintech space to learn from existing digital businesses and continuously develop technology offerings, with the help of investment, to provide clients with market-leading value propositions.

Sandstone Technology alongside its 300 technical employees, has been committed to the digitisation of retail banking operations for over 25 years and has since built up an omnichannel repertoire of digital banking products, including internet banking, banking apps, and an end-to-end banking product origination platform, Sandstone Technology also leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities. technologymagazine.com

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Sandstone Technology: leading banks into the digital era

Transforming financial institutions in a digital age The company’s aim to provide value for its customers is supported by continuous investment in its products, leveraging existing platforms for its current customer base while developing capabilities for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). On top of this, the company is expanding its partner ecosystem to deliver better functionality. “We continue to build out our partner ecosystem to provide a more complete marketplace offering. This is very much in line with where we see the market moving, as per customer requirements to work with fewer vendor partners,” Phillipou explains.

“Ultimately, our strategy is to expand our market share in our existing markets in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and take an entry into other markets, which we are now well placed to do.”

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“ Data is an exceptionally valuable asset, provided companies can make use of it in a compliant way to add value to their consumers” MICHAEL PHILLIPOU

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SANDSTONE TECHNOLOGY

alongside its current loan origination and intelligent document processing functions.

These capabilities will add to its platforms and will be offered to both existing and prospective customers, which will also cater for banks and financial institutions who offer small-tomedium enterprise (SME) banking products and solutions. But, what benefit could this provide to Sandstone?

SANDSTONE TECHNOLOGY

Phillipou says: “When we complete an implementation project, the best possible compliments we can receive materialise when our customers win awards and are recognised by the industry and their peers.”

He continues, “one of our customers was recognised by Forbes as Australia’s number one bank, as well as being voted the number one bank in Australia by mortgage customers. Across the Tasman, one of our New Zealand customers was recently awarded as having the most satisfied customers, based on customer experience, according to Canstar, and one of our UK customers was recognised as Bank of the Year in the 2021 Dealmaker Awards.”

While discussing the inspiration for Phillipou’s career in fintech, he explained how other successful businesses and leaders led him to his current line of work.

How did you become interested in financial technology?

“My interest in financial technology was piqued in 2013 to 2014, reading about the likes of TransferWise — now Wise — disrupting payments and the international payments vertical in particular. Moreover, I followed companies such as Credit Karma, Revolut, N26, Monzo and Starling in the B2C space.”

Delivering a partner ecosystem through a single platform Sandstone identified its customers’ demands for access to a variety of functions, managed by a single provider for an effortless user experience. To achieve this, the company works with third parties as it builds its partner ecosystem to offer a comprehensive suite.

Over the years, the company has identified some of the key organisations that drive its vision for both digital banking and origination.

“We partner with a range of fintech companies, across eIDV, property valuation

What inspires you the most?

“I am inspired by the ability to grow businesses through delighting customers.

Accordingly, Financial technology impresses me because, through the use of automation, it can be used by banks to provide frictionless customer experiences, which in turn can delight customers and enable banks to enhance their customer satisfaction and advocacy, while also gaining market share.”

Which industry leaders inspire you the most?

“The way Co-founders, & Co-CEO’s,

63,000+

New customer accounts in less than two years.

27%

less time spent on loan applications

DID YOU KNOW...

of AfterPay, Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen have built and scaled the business to be a global force in under 10 years, is nothing short of inspirational and incomprehensible.”

“From a business to business perspective, Temenos’ CEO, Max Chuard has been very impressive in guiding Temenos to be a global market leader in cloud & SaaS technology.”

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Flexible, international payments software.

Highly scalable and configurable platform, multiple payment provider integrations that gives access to cost effective and the fastest solutions worldwide. Available via banking connectors or a standalone solution.

Learn more

capabilities, credit decision-making and many more,” Phillipou says, as he divulges the company’s key third-party technology and fintech providers. “A couple of exciting partners include Brilliance, which provides pricing and profitability capabilities, Codat, which is a data aggregation platform, and Cymonz, which offers international payments capability. While they are not exclusively fintech, we are exceptionally well supported by AWS from a cloud hosting perspective and have recently partnered with DOMO to power our internal and customer business intelligence and automated analytics.”

In the coming months, Sandstone will leverage its partner ecosystem to create its fintech vision. “We’ll be focusing our efforts on three key areas in order to deliver exceptional business, customer and people outcomes,” says Phillipou. The first aspect of its development is its customer-centricity.

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“With our existing customer programmes, where we are collectively delivering new platforms, features or capabilities, it’s key that we delight our customers.” He also explains how the company will leverage its existing platforms. “Secondly, we will continue our investment in both our retail and SME platforms and products to enable us to deliver more value to our existing customers, as well as the focus on onboarding new prospective customers.”

“Finally, and very importantly, we will continue to focus and invest in our people and culture, ensuring that our team is set up for success and highly engaged in all streams of work across the business,” Phillipou says.

Digital payment solutions are the future It has become more apparent that having physical money is of less importance to a growing number of individuals and is almost non-existent in business.

SANDSTONE TECHNOLOGY

“ In order to provide best in class features and functionalities, there are times where we will partner with third parties, who offer exceptional capabilities” MICHAEL PHILLIPOU

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SANDSTONE TECHNOLOGY

MICHAEL PHILLIPOU TITLE: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER INDUSTRY: COMPUTER SOFTWARE LOCATION: NORTH SYDNEY, NSW MBA, B.Sc. (Maths), ADFS (Fin. Planning), Cert IV FS (Finance / Mortgage Broking) Michael Phillipou is responsible for the performance of Sandstone Technology's Global Operations. Deeply passionate about people leadership, banking, financial services & technology, Michael has over 20 years of experience in financial services holding Executive people leadership roles in Advice, Retail & Business Banking, Digital Banking, and Enterprise Technology Sales & Transformation programs for Westpac, MLC-aligned businesses and Bendigo Bank. In addition, he co-founded a disruptive digital banking business, Lodex. Michael holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA), Bachelor of Science (Maths), Advanced Diploma of Financial Services (Financial Planning) and Certificate IV in Financial Services (Finance / Mortgage Broking).

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SANDSTONE TECHNOLOGY

“The use of physical money or cash is diminishing markedly,” Phillipou explains as he discusses how he thinks payments will become increasingly digital in years to come. He continues, “boasting first-class online payment capability is essential for banks or businesses. Data is an exceptionally valuable asset, provided companies can make use of it in a compliant way to add value to their consumers. From a payment solutions perspective, I think we’ll see more and more partnerships where the key endto-end payment solution providers will work with companies that boast significant user bases or customers and enable them to offer market-leading payment capabilities.”

“ It’s logical that there is one global currency that has utility in every country across the world in the end” MICHAEL PHILLIPOU

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SANDSTONE TECHNOLOGY

Another key factor that will shape the future of the fintech industry is the use of digital currency and how organisations look to use it for everyday transactions. Phillipou believes “it’s logical that there is one global currency that has utility in every country across the world in the end. That said, in my view, that won’t be bitcoin, but more likely a stable coin that is pegged to the world’s major currencies.”

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“ I would expect to see the big data companies and financial institutions ramp up their partnerships and make a number of acquisitions in the space” MICHAEL PHILLIPOU

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SANDSTONE TECHNOLOGY

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SANDSTONE TECHNOLOGY

through the strategic acquisition of fintech companies. “Similarly, I think banks will continue to invest heavily in their financial technology strategies and systems to maintain and grow their market share,” Phillipou says. “In order to execute on these outcomes, I would expect to see the big data companies and financial institutions ramp up their partnerships and make a number of acquisitions in the space, which will further bolster up their internal technology Intellectual property.”

Through many careful investments and innovations, Sandstone Technology will undoubtedly support its banking clients through the ever-changing digital landscape. As an aggregator of functions from various members of its partner ecosystem, its clients will benefit from the effortless implementation and continuous improvement in line with industry trends.

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