Technology Magazine - March 2021

March 2021 | technologymagazine.com

How Microsoft is driving defense innovation READ NOW

Singapore Pools: Transforming Culture and Customer Experience LEARN MORE

Women in Tech READ NOW

Software 2.0: The Next Generation READ NOW

CPO Keith Tice on the radical transformation that’s upgrading procurement processes READ NOW

GoDaddy : Tuning in to Change

READ NOW

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EDITOR'S LETTER

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

PADDY SMITH DEPUTY EDITOR

WILLIAM SMITH

DIGITAL MARKETING EXECUTIVE

ANDREW STUBBINGS

PROJECT DIRECTORS

KRIS PALMER MIKE SADR BEN MALTBY CREATIVE TEAM TOM VENTURO OSCAR HATHAWAY CRAIG SOPHIA FORTE KILLINGBACK SOPHIE-ANN PINNELL MEDIA SALES HECTOR PENROSE DIRECTORS SAM HUBBARD JAMES WHITE MIMI GUNN RICHARD TURNER JUSTIN SMITH MARK CAWSTON EDITORAL DIRECTOR

SCOTT BIRCH

PRODUCTION DIRECTORS

GEORGIA ALLEN DANIELA KIANICKOVÁ PRODUCTION MANAGERS

OWEN MARTIN PHILLINE VICENTE JENNIFER SMITH PRODUCTION EDITOR

JANET BRICE

VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER

EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT

JORDAN HUBBARD SALES AND MARKETING DIRECTOR

JASON WESTGATE MANAGING DIRECTOR

LEWIS VAUGHAN CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

STACY NORMAN PRESIDENT & CEO

GLEN WHITE

KIERAN WAITE DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

SAM KEMP EVELYN HUANG MATTHEW EVANS TYLER LIVINGSTONE

TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

People are the next tech revolution Technology is changing its look. The spring/summer 2021 collection has abandoned its metallic, shiny clothes in favour of a cosier look. And it’s not just a passing fad. It’s driven by people.

Cast your mind back to the mid-00s. Remember the pixel wars? An entire planet of consumers were being lured into buying a camera because the sensor had more pixels than the one next to it. Five megapixels turned to 10, 20, 30 before anyone so much as mentioned the actual quality of the pictures (it turned out the image noise from packing ever more millions of pixels on to a tiny sensor was gradually reducing overall image standards, not the other way around).

And we haven’t given up. I venture in 10 years we’ll all be reminiscing about when internet connections were measured in speed (not uptime, latency, jitter, packet loss, security, not ISP customer service). But times are changing. I’ve been particularly heartened recently talking to CIOs, CTOs and CDOs about the increasingly important role of people and culture versus numerical technological advantage.

It turns out you can’t do one without the other, and once the technological seesaw passes the point where numbers really matter, people become the heavier side of the equation. The next chapter is not about what the technology can do for us, but about what we can do with the technology. That’s a fashion we should all get behind.

PADDY SMITH

paddy.smith@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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CONTENTS

09 Big Picture

SpaceX smashes launch record

10 The Brief

09

The rise of multicloud, the end of passwords, and stock market winners

12

Global News

14

People Moves

16

Timeline: Mobile Data

18

Legend: 'Pony’ Ma Huateng

From malware takedowns in the Netherlands to Google’s fracas down under

Intel gets a new CEO and Salesforce a new President

5G is with us, but how did we get here? Here is a quick history lesson

He’s the founder and face of tencent, Asia’s most valuable company. But what makes ‘Pony’ Ma Huateng a legend?

20

20 Five Mins With: Boris Krumrey Automation leader UiPath’s Boris Krumrey discusses automation, leadership and the new normal

10 18 4

March 2021

CONTENTS

22 54 84 Enterprise IT

Strategic vendor management gets complicated

22 GoDaddy.com

Tuning in to the dynamics of change in procurement: Keith Tice, Chief Procurement Officer, walks us through the comprehensive transformation that has radically upgraded GoDaddy’s procurement processes

38 Digital Transformation The covid-inspired digital workplace: one year in

46 Rapid7

Securing every layer: How Rapid7 manages vulnerabilities

54 Cloud & Cyber

How networks are keeping pace with digital transformation

62 NTT Global Sourcing The power of one

92 MTM, Inc.

So much more than just a lift

106 AI & Data Analytics

Software 2.0: The next generation

112 NTT: Kirk Compton

Supporting a new generation of SAP capability in the cloud

126 Landmark Dividend

Investing in our digital future

138 Newmont

Making technology the future of mining

148 Singapore Pools

Digitally Transforming Culture and Customer Experience

162 SAP Cloud for Utilities

Building solutions for utility companies and industry cloud technologymagazine.com

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CONTENTS

174 City of Hamilton

Technology for growth

184 University at Buffalo

234

The connected campus

198 Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust

The digital transformation of Manchester's hospital trust

210 Kearney

Cost. Service. Agility.

Supply chain’s new troika

222 The Gym Group

The Gym Group's digital journey through Covid-19 and beyond

256

234 The Travel Corporation

Technology enabling success

246 City of Memphis

The City, the CIO, Covid and collaboration

256 Microsoft

How Microsoft is driving defense innovation at the speed of relevance

268 Dell Technologies

Security in digital transformation

280 Datorama, a Salesforce Company

AI-powered marketing intelligence

292 SonicWall

Keeping cybersecurity agile and adaptable

280

302 SAP SEE

Guiding governments through digital transformation technologymagazine.com

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Digital Transformation.

Made real every day.

Find out how big advances in AI have made it easier than ever to unlock the power of data, create value, insights and a new level of intelligent security. From Individuals, to small organizations, to the Global Fortune 100, AI and machine learning are improving businesses and lives everywhere.

Learn More

BIG PICTURE SpaceX Smashes Launch Record

Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida SpaceX’s Transporter-1 mission, which launched on 24 Jan, comfortably beat the previous record of 108 satellites launched

by Northrop Grumman in 2018.

With a total of 143 satellites and other payloads on board, SpaceX also more than doubled its own record of 64. The launch was part of the company’s SmallSat Rideshare Program, which boasts launch costs as low as $1mn to launch 200kg to orbit, opening up the frontier of space to much smaller businesses.

Photo by Airman First Class Thomas Sjoberg, U.S. Space Force

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THE BRIEF “If you don’t get the culture right, that technology is not going to take. Period.”

BY THE NUMBERS The rise of multicloud

The benefits of multicloud – security, avoiding vendor lock-in and a pick ‘n’ mix attitude to new technology – are well known. But what are the stats?

Kate Maxwell

CTO, Defense & Intelligence, Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector 

According to Gartner, public cloud was worth:

READ MORE

$32.4bn

“[The pandemic] has highlighted the vital role that networking technology plays in modern society”

2018

$24.7bn 2017

Alex Connors

Head of Strategy UCC, Vodafone Business  READ MORE

“When we have freed the knowledge workers from the mundane, we can look at automating what remains” Neil Kinson

Chief of Staff, Redwood Software  READ MORE

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March 2021

75%

55%

Midsize and large Organisations organisations will using two or have adopted more public a multicloud or clouds hybrid IT strategy by 2021 (Gartner Predicts) Find out more about Gartner 

79% $950m

Companies Worldwide using container multicloud or management hybrid “struggle revenues by to achieve 2024 (Gartner) synergy” (IDG) READ MORE

Did you know that having started the month at $17.25, video game retailer Gamespot’s stock price soared to $325 by the end of January, buoyed by retail investors following the WallStreetBets subreddit.

ARE PASSWORDS BECOMING PASSÉ?

Beyond Identity is on a mission to eradicate passwords from our lives, and increase security as it does so Beyond Identity hopes to rid the world of one the bugbears of modern life: passwords.

The company is fronted by Jim Clark (Netscape) and Tom ‘TJ’ Jermoluk (@Home Network).

HOW DOES BEYOND IDENTITY WORK?

Beyond Identity logs users in with X509 certificates. That’s the same certification used by your browser for ‘https’ web pages.

CAN COMPANIES USE BEYOND IDENTITY?

They’re the primary focus of Beyond Identity’s work. The company claims ditching passwords will save money and strengthen security.

IS BEYOND IDENTITY EXPENSIVE?

No, it’s just become free to use with unlimited users and upgrades. There is an ‘advanced’ package (at $6/month) which allows more elaborate installments.

SO THE FUTURE IS PASSWORD FREE?

If Beyond Identity has its way, yes. The days of ‘forgot password’ links and stringent character rules could soon be over.

 APPLE Apple achieved record quarterly sales, buoyed by strength in China and the increasing importance of its services business.  MICROSOFT Managing to thrive amid the COVID19 pandemic, strong quarterly results were built on the backs of gaming and cloud. TESLA Tesla’s position in the middle is only due to the tailing off of the precipitous stock market rise it experienced in 2020.  GOOGLE CLOUD Google’s Cloud business is less developed compared to competitors, with the company revealing it lost $5.6bn in FY2020.  IBM The venerable IBM experienced its fourth successive quarterly fall in revenue, despite a renewed focus on cloud and AI.

W A Y U P MAR21

W A Y D O W N

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GLOBAL NEWS 3

MICHIGAN, UNITED STATES

Ford partners with Google in latest tieup of tech and cars Ford and Google, two giants in their respective industries, announced a coming together for the development of connected cars. Starting in 2023, Ford and Lincoln vehicles will have Google’s Android operating system built-in, with updates being provided over-the-air.

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CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES

Is Apple about to join the cloud computing fray?

Apple has been acquiring talent that points to a possible move into the cloud. Already offering a consumer-focused storage option in the form of iCloud, the company has been snapping up engineers from AWS and Google Cloud.

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March 2021

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FLORIDA, UNITED STATES

Whose satellites did SpaceX launch in world record flight?

SpaceX’s record flight, which carried a total 143 satellites and other payloads, boosted a number of innovative companies' offerings into orbit. Among them were high resolution imaging satellites from San Francisco-based firm Planet, and others powered by specialty plasma propulsion engines intended for satellites and manufactured by Phase Four.

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NETHERLANDS

Emotet botnet malware taken down by global police sting A botnet dubbed the “world’s most dangerous” was disrupted by global police action. Emotet allowed cybercriminals to gain unauthorised access to computer systems across the globe. Attackers would then sell access to other criminal groups.

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AUSTRALIA

Google vs Australia: the lowdown Google’s disagreement with the Australian government heated up, with the latter accusing the company of infringing on the copyright of its news organisations.

Threats by Google to pull out of the country altogether have been met with calls to move to rival search engine Bing.

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INDIA

India’s Jio tests 5G and aims to rid country of 2G networks Indian digital services company Jio, a subsidiary of the Reliance industries Conglomerate, began tests for 5G in the country.

The tests saw throughputs of 1 Gbps achieved via 5G radio and smartphones integrated in Jio’s 5G core network, as part of the company’s ambition to rid India of old 2G networks.

technologymagazine.com

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PEOPLE MOVES PAT GELSINGER FROM: VMWARE TO: INTEL WAS: CEO NOW: CEO Previously the CEO of VMware since 2012, Gelsinger became the CEO of US chipmaker Intel on 15 January, replacing the outgoing Bob Swan. Gelsinger spent the first 30 years of his career at Intel, having served as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer and involved in the development of technologies including USB, Wi-Fi and early Intel processors.

"I am thrilled to rejoin and lead Intel forward at this important time for the company, our industry and our nation."

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March 2021

KATHERINE AINLEY FROM: BT TO: ERICSSON WAS: MANAGING DIRECTOR OF VENTURES IN ENTERPRISE NOW: CEO, UK AND IRELAND Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson appointed Katherine Ainley to become its new CEO, UK and Ireland, at a crucial stage in the 5G transition, with the company planning to upgrade 20,000 UK network sites by 2024. She joined from telecommunications rival BT in February, where she was Managing Director of Ventures in Enterprise.

DAVID SCHMAIER FROM: VLOCITY TO: SALESFORCE WAS: CO-FOUNDER AND CEO NOW: PRESIDENT AND CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER Enterprise software leader Salesforce chose David Schmaier to become its new President and Chief Product Officer, with a remit of leading the company’s global product team.

He was previously co-founder and CEO of Vlocity, a provider of industry-specific cloud and mobile software, and newly a subsidiary of Salesforce.

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TIMELINE

MOBILE DATA 5G is with us, but how did we get here?

Here is a quick history lesson

1983

1991

1998

1G

2G

3G

Haven’t heard of it?

Well, it was a long time ago (1983) and it wasn’t called 1G until 2G came along. In fact, it was so early in the cycle of generational technology that the 1G moniker never really took off.

Also 1G offered a forgettable 2.4kbps of analogue data load. Pathetic.

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March 2021

Known at the time as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), 2G bumped up the speeds to 40kbps, enough to send SMS messages from device to device. More than that, and you were in for a long wait.

Perhaps that’s why EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution was such an exciting upgrade to the 2G package. It afforded what, at the time, were described as “blazing” speeds. 384kpbs of blazing, that is.

It’s not a stretch to say that 3G was transformative for mobile communication. By today’s standards, it offered a plodding 1-8Mbps, but that was enough to get full-fat internet (or, more likely, the newly minted and thankfully short-lived mobile ‘optimised’ version of it) and crucially it meant your inbox could annoy you when you went on holiday. Previously, roaming email had been BlackBerry’s game. The iPhone 3G (confusingly Apple’s second mobile phone) came with email and Angry Birds. BlackBerry didn’t stand a chance.

2009

2019

4G

5G

4G wasn’t transformative. It just made 3G look a bit fuddyduddy. But its increased speeds (up to 100Mbps) led to an unexpected transformation in personal computing. The phone was the computer. Not as well, but instead. Video streaming and conferencing were about to enter our lives.

3G was forgotten like an old BlackBerry.

Did you know TeliaSonera was the first operator in the world to commercially launch 4G in 2009, deploying first in Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden.

Unlike 4G, 5G is going to give us more than a speed boost.

With data transferring at up to 10Gbps, it will transform AI, the Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing. It’s the missing link for self-driving cars and robotic everything. It’s a genuine alternative to wired internet connections for much of the world, empowering swathes of humanity with access to the internet’s boundless reserves of knowledge and cat pictures.

A game changer. technologymagazine.com

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LEGEND

‘ Pony’ Ma Huateng He’s the founder and face of Tencent, Asia’s most valuable company.

But what makes ‘Pony’ Ma Huateng a legend?

Share percentage of Tencent

9.7%

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March 2021

H

e’s one of the world’s richest men and the founder of a technology empire. His name?

Ma Huateng, or Pony Ma to his friends and disciples (Ma means ‘horse’).

Unlike Alibaba founder Jack Ma (no relation), Huateng keeps a low profile, but the influence he wields is like that of few others.

Huateng was the first Chinese person to hit the top 10 of Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people.

His investment strategy has been compared to that of the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett. But his wealth creation stems from Tencent, the company he founded in 1998.

Tencent’s killer app is WeChat, the ubiquitous Chinese communication app that also bakes in banking, ecommerce and much else besides.

But Huateng is also fiercely acquisitive and has amassed a wealth of further opportunities in the tech space.

He has also set up a charitable foundation – the Ma Huateng Global Foundation – to which he donated $2.3 billion worth of Tencent stock in 2016.

Huateng started out designing software for pagers, for which he is reported to have been paid $176 a month. He now owns property and artwork valued at around $150 million, not to mention that all important 9.7 per cent share of Tencent.

“Huateng keeps a low profile, but the influence he wields is like that of few others”

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FIVE MINS WITH...

BORIS KRUMREY AUTOMATION LEADER UIPATH’S BORIS KRUMREY DISCUSSES AUTOMATION, LEADERSHIP AND THE NEW NORMAL OF COVID-19

Q. COULD YOU GIVE ME AN OVERVIEW OF YOUR POSITION AND WHAT IT ENTAILS?

» I lead a team that helps design

automation innovations for our customers. Automation is quite an abstract concept so we asked ourselves – how can we show how it would work in daily operations?

We decided that there was no better place to do this than in a lab where people can experiment with automation and learn about what it means for their business.

Therefore, I led the creation of the UiPath Immersion Labs, where we show the art-of-the-possible in automation and help customers build breakthrough automation prototypes in their business context. Of course, due to the pandemic, this is all virtual for now.

Q. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE?

» My leadership style is very

collaborative but with a clear directive towards the anticipated outcome. If you run a team of technically skilled and creative individuals, you need to give them all the freedom to work in the way they work best and then reunite them on the joint vision.

I also ensure that I am very hands-on.

I am talking about being able to become a pair of hands to my team if needed. Following this thought, I believe managers need to have a good understanding of how any delegated task should be done, otherwise how will they be able to verify the result?

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March 2021

“DECISION MAKERS SHOULD CONSIDER INTRODUCING INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION INTO EVERY FACET OF THE BUSINESS, WHILE PROVIDING EVERY EMPLOYEE ACCESS TO THE TECHNOLOGY” Q. HOW HAVE YOU REACTED TO THE NEW NORMAL OF COVID-19?

» The ‘new normal’ has forced the

UK to change the way it operates and many turned to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for help. For example, our entire immersion lab delivery has been virtualised as a web site, with embedded videoconferencing and interactive web apps doubling the amount of visitors and influenced revenues and having robots to do most of the administration.

At UiPath, we have focused on providing support to businesses investing in automation. This includes the training needed to understand how automation works, as well as ensuring that our software robots are accessible and easy to create and deploy.

Q. TO WHAT EXTENT HAS THE PANDEMIC IMPACTED EXISTING PROJECTS?

» Before the pandemic, many

organisations had already started implementing automation but undoubtedly the sudden change in business climate forced them to accelerate these efforts.

1 | The Future of Work: A Pandemic Spotlight, Forrester/UiPath (June 2020).

Businesses had to find new ways of working. For many this included RPA. In fact thirty-one percent of decision makers recently surveyed said their firms increased their spending on RPA in the past three months.1

Q. WHAT ARE YOUR PRIORITIES GOING FORWARDS?

» Going forwards, helping customers

$750mn Value of latest Series F funding round

2005 Company founded in Bucharest

discover what full automation can do in our virtual Immersion Lab continues to be our top priority.

Decision makers should consider introducing intelligent automation into every facet of the business, while providing every employee access to the technology. As a result, everything that can be automated will be automated and as such, more time will be handed back to employees to do work that really counts. technologymagazine.com

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GODADDY

GoDaddy: Tuning in to the dynamics of change in procurement Keith Tice, Chief Procurement Officer, walks us through the comprehensive transformation that has radically upgraded GoDaddy’s procurement processes WRITTEN BY: WILL GIRLING

I

've been with GoDaddy just shy of eight years: I came in May of 2013, just as GoDaddy was beginning a new transformation,” states Keith Tice, Chief Procurement Officer. “When I joined the company, procurement essentially did not exist here.” It’s a bold conversation opener, and one which perfectly anticipates the details of both Tice’s and GoDaddy’s accomplishment, which saw a function primarily managed by business stakeholders and a legal contracts team become a developed, dynamic, and digital process of its own.

Founded in 1997, GoDaddy’s stature as one of the US’ foremost internet domain registrars and web hosting companies has only grown over the years. Now with over 20 million customers worldwide spread across almost 60 different markets and 9,000 employees in 14 offices speaking roughly 30 languages to 22

March 2021

PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE service them, this Scottsdale, Arizona business is one of the internet age’s most enduring global success stories.

Although Tice arrived with a significant challenge to overcome when he first joined, his expert level of experience gained from over 20 years of work in purchasing gave him the clear vision needed to begin overhauling procurement at GoDaddy. “I brought a mindset that focused on how we structure, separate and categorize the various spend aspects of what we're doing, particularly in terms of understanding suppliers and how they fit in the company,” he explains. Integrating this mindset required good oversight and command of data, something which was made difficult by legacy infrastructure. Tice’s goal was to spearhead a digital transformation that would go above and beyond the solutions he’d worked on previously.

GODADDY

technologymagazine.com

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GODADDY

“ When I joined the company, procurement essentially did not exist here” KEITH TICE

CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER, GODADDY

The first step of Tice’s plan required a broad evaluation of GoDaddy’s supplier network, “prior to my arrival the company had about 10 times the number of suppliers that we have today.” Following a six-month period of rationalizing the available data, he made the decision to shift away from difficult-to-manage Excel spreadsheets to an integrated platform that provided a single pane of glass visibility into the

Keith Tice: Insights to vendors and suppliers @ GoDaddy.com

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March 2021

GODADDY

KEITH TICE TITLE: CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER LOCATION: ARIZONA, UNITED STATES INDUSTRY: INTERNET SERVICES

• Why are you doing this?

• Why this vendor in particular?

• Why does it cost this much?

• Why are we paying for that?

• Why is it necessary?

Tice’s next move was to transmit the idea that each and every vendor is “expendable”, acting as a challenge for them to proactively justify GoDaddy’s spend through competitive service and delivery. “Step three was then

EXECUTIVE BIO

company’s spend with each supplier. “I needed to figure out what makes sense for GoDaddy, and I did that through a series of interviews with internal stakeholders about why they have certain vendors performing certain tasks for us.” Tice used the ‘five whys’ as his model:

Keith grew up in a very small town in the northern high plains of Texas. After attending college at Tarleton State University, Keith began his career working in the protein industry for IBP, Inc., which is now a part of Tyson Foods. The goal Keith had set after leaving Tarleton was to establish a career in Procurement. His first role came in 1997 with The Dial Corporation, not a part of Henkel. Keith initially managed Procurement for the Armour Star Brand of food products, a division of The Dial Corporation. As he progressed through the various functional areas within Procurement for Dial/Henkel, Keith was recruited to build a Procurement function and organization at GoDaddy.

Starting in May 2013 the transformation and building of the Procurement organization with GoDaddy began as a team of three focused on IT requirements alone.

Today, the organization and team Keith has built is managing all third party spending through the efforts of 12 staff located around the world.

Drive Demand.

Drive Action.

Drive Results.

Turning results into revenue. Performance marketing focused on business outcomes.

Learn more

GainShare: Transparency and Accountability in Performance

Bryan Walkey, CEO of GainShare Performance Marketing, discusses the company’s partnership with GoDaddy alongside its mission and culture.

With a career spanning over 30 years, Bryan Walkey is the CEO of GainShare Performance Marketing.

“I joined the firm full-time four years ago, but I've had an association as an advisor to the firm for over 30 years. Before joining as a partner and CEO, I had worked with Gainshare to coordinate teams and delivery in both Toronto and Chicago. The goal today is to drive seamless delivery and results across teams, tactics, and markets.”

Known as Northern Lights Direct for more than 35 years, the company recently rebranded as GainShare Performance Marketing. “We started in DRTV, and so we felt it best to change our brand name to better represent who we are today. We now do so much more than direct response TV. As a performance marketer, we coordinate the customer journey across all channels, and we wanted to ensure we showcased that scope.”

GainShare’s relationship with GoDaddy Discussing GainShare’s partnership with GoDaddy, Walkey explains, “GoDaddy is a performance culture, and they're looking for a high return on their ad spend, and we help them accomplish that and acquire customers in the most efficient way possible.

We provide strategy, media planning, buying, optimization, and analytics. We work with a number of their teams, including performance & brand video, creative and business intelligence.”

“With GoDaddy, it is truly a collaborative effort.

We feel like we're part of their team. Because they're a performance-driven company, they hold us to account every day, every week, and every month. We're in contact with them multiple times a day, measuring daily and continually optimizing.

At the end of the day, it is all about performance,” he adds.

What makes GainShare different from its competitors?

“As a performance marketer, we provide transparency, accountability, and we're driving return on investment, return on ad spend,” begins Walkey. “There's been a lot of moaning in the marketing community about procurement driving the price to zero. Well, we believe it’s essential to drive the cost of marketing and investments directly to the bottom line.

We are excited to work with CMOs, CFOs, and Procurement equally because we're focused on business outcomes,” he continues.

“We talk about return on investment, return on ad spend, we profess transparency and accountability, all things that resonate with both procurement and finance. We deal with the marketing team on the things that are important to them. And we plan and answer procurement on the things that are important to them as well. So, it's a true business relationship.”

gainshare.com

GODADDY

$3.32bn Revenue in FY 2020

1997 Year Founded

9,000+ Number of Employees

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March 2021

GODADDY

to renegotiate and/or add the right suppliers categorically across the company to service our business needs adequately, not just the way people perceived our needs,” continues Tice. “That shift, while difficult, put us in

“I brought a mindset that focused on how we structure, separate and categorize the various spend aspects of what we're doing, particularly in terms of understanding suppliers and how they fit in the company” KEITH TICE

CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER, GODADDY

a position where the relationships with vendors have become very strong. To take us to the next level of innovation, we needed to bring in vendors that could change the game for us: new technologies and new ways of working.”

In addition to consolidation, GoDaddy’s digital roadmap meant that the daily admin of procurement needed to modernize. Dispensing with rote manual tasks that introduced margins for error as information was traded from one system to another through automation was key, as was incorporating spend analytics and e-procurement platforms. Of course, no tech-based transformation story of the last 12 months could avoid the effect of COVID19, and it is in this regard that Tice adds special praise to GoDaddy, “I really have to emphasize how well the company did moving everyone quickly from the office to remote working.” However, the challenge technologymagazine.com

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Digital Transformation — Driving IT Growth in the Next Normal.

These are unprecedented times for businesses everywhere.

Zones has what it takes to strategize and execute your digital transformation. Our IT solutions and services will ensure maximum return on technology investment, reduce modernization costs, optimize operations for a more effective workforce, and enable scalable cloud infrastructure for future growth.

Learn more

Partnership goals: Zones LLC and GoDaddy on DT

Zones LLC is a strategic partner of GoDaddy. We chat to Sean Hobday, SVP of Global Business Development, about digital transformation on a global scale.

Sean Hobday, SVP of Global Business Development for Zones LLC, has had an exciting 12 months. The company is a strategic partner to GoDaddy - the internet domain registrar and hosting company based in Arizona.

Zones offers a wide variety of solutions. At the company's core, Global Supply Chain as a Service (GSCaaS) has been in overdrive since the start of the pandemic in early 2020.

Hobday says, "Making sure that businesses and enterprises can get the IT hardware, software, and solutions that they need domestically within the US, but also all around the world, has been a critical differentiation to ensure clients’ success for Zones during COVID." Hobday describes the relationship Zones LLC has with GoDaddy as evolutionary because it has grown significantly since the companies formed the partnership.

From working on projects in one location for the global internet and hosting company, Zones LLC now handles much of the corporation's IT logistics worldwide.

"GoDaddy approached us because they had a business problem in one of their locations, and they needed

quick fulfilment of hardware to support a small office.

We were able to do that efficiently and effectively."

He continues, "GoDaddy is a company that continually acquires smaller companies within their space around the world to enhance their growth. We were a good fit because Zones has offices and fulfillment centers in key locations to align globally.”

Flexibility in the current working climate is also essential; Hobday points out. “We make sure that at our core DNA, we have the right flexibility and processes frameworks that allow for adaptability to help clients succeed in their digital transformation” The work-from-home mandates have been challenging; however, it is essential for businesses to navigate the complexity, Hobday states. "The solutions that we offer bring tremendous and immediate value to ensure GoDaddy's business continuance with a distributed workforce.”

He adds, "As our partnership grows, we'll be able to address and fortify other solutions within data center, security and networking areas as well.

zones.com

GODADDY

Keith Tice: Talks to us about user experience @ GoDaddy.com

was far from being merely a technical one: procurement, he states, is strongly rooted in person-to-person negotiation on both sides of the table. Reflecting on the beginning of the pandemic, Tice claims that he genuinely feared the effects of losing this important aspect, “I was becoming increasingly worried that the effectiveness of my team was going to start to decline because they just don't have that ability to work with the vendor one-on-one.”

Despite his concerns, GoDaddy’s saving grace turned out to be the ready availability of conferencing software like Zoom. Tice’s team quickly adapted to the new paradigm and didn’t miss a beat; turning in a 2020 32

March 2021

performance that was equal to or better than the previous year, Tice states that he was pleasantly “shocked” by the results.

“It’s gotten to the point now where I've recently hired two new permanently remote employees. I didn't hire them with any intention whatsoever to move them into one of our hub offices. Whatever the new normal looks like, I don't see my team going back to how things were unless specific needs arise.”

The spirit of embracing change at GoDaddy is easily visualized by its recent rebrand that features a slick image of the word ‘go’ shaped into a heart. “With our logo change, we're thinking about over 20 million customers out there: what’s their

GODADDY

“ To take us to the next level of innovation, we needed to bring in vendors that could change the game for us: new technologies and new ways of working” KEITH TICE

CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER, GODADDY

philosophy and what can we do to support them? ‘Go’ exemplifies all that we want them to do; it captures that entrepreneurial spirit and it's paying homage to the importance of humanity and joy that we wanted in that logo.”

Focusing on CX (customer experience) is a big part of fulfilling the renewed promise of that logo. “A few years ago, if you went to GoDaddy with the intention of buying a domain, adding hosting or email, or any of the various products that we're offering, you would have found a front of site architecture that was cumbersome,” says Tice. Subsequently, this was improved by reducing the amount of clicks customers technologymagazine.com

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EPAM and GoDaddy Join Forces to Help Small Businesses Succeed After a decade of strong growth, internet pioneer GoDaddy recognized the need for a strategic partner to help navigate the ever-increasing pace of digital transformation and constantly evolving customer demands.

“We needed a highly-skilled workforce that could hit the ground running,” says Keith Tice, Chief Procurement Officer at GoDaddy. “We trust EPAM’s quality of service, their people, attention to detail and leadership. They are a partner we can grow with.”

EPAM offered what GoDaddy was looking for: the ability to accelerate roadmaps, re-prioritize technology plans, transition to a modern AWS Cloud architecture and engage the right mix of professionals to get it all done seamlessly.

GoDaddy started as a domain registrar and is now the world’s largest services platform for entrepreneurs around the globe. GoDaddy is the place where entrepreneurs and small business owners come to name their idea, build a website, attract customers and sell their products and services online. Today, GoDaddy has more than 20 million customers.

Over the years the need for engineering resources at GoDaddy has grown dramatically.

The small business owner that once came to GoDaddy for just a domain name and hosting services, now looks to the company for everything from eCommerce to social media marketing.

In 2020, GoDaddy and EPAM kicked off projects to modernize GoDaddy’s eCommerce platform and deliver a more streamlined single sign-on experience for its online customers.

Previously, the customer sign-on and signup experience was focused on security more than convenience. GoDaddy wanted both. Already, A/B testing has shown significant success in changes delivered by EPAM. GoDaddy’s customers now have easier access to the company’s products in a highly secure environment.

Meanwhile, EPAM engineers on the eCommerce project team are ensuring that the existing architecture is seamlessly supported as they build a more scalable and flexible platform that will further GoDaddy’s ability to offer solutions that meet customers’ unique needs. At the same time, GoDaddy gets the tools they need to be more agile in responding to demands.

As GoDaddy continues to grow, company leaders wanted to ensure that whatever project they initiate to help their customers, they would have the right partner to make it happen. EPAM is excited to be a part of this journey helping GoDaddy and its customers build businesses globally that will grow and thrive as we all discover new ways to harness the power of digital.

Learn more

GODADDY

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March 2021

GODADDY

“ Go’ exemplifies all that we want [customers] to do; it captures that entrepreneurial spirit and it's paying homage to the importance of humanity and joy that we wanted in that logo” KEITH TICE

CHIEF PROCUREMENT OFFICER, GODADDY

need to perform to find what they need.

GoDaddy also introduced automated chatbots to streamline its communication channels and ensure queries are resolved diligently. “We’ve brought in chat automation so that our customers can come in, get what they need, and then move on. Speaking with a GoDaddy care representative is a fantastic experience, but, at the end of the day, running their business is what's important for our customers.”

This sense of technological pragmatism combined with a refreshingly adaptable mindset will form the bread and butter of GoDaddy’s approach to procurement in

2021. However, Tice has grander visions for his department beyond cost reduction, value creation and capital management. “We now are very focused on reducing supply risk and members of my team have goals set against that - we call it ‘joining forces’. I've also moved our organization into becoming more of a strategic advisor to the business as a whole. We now understand their roadmaps and where they're headed, and we're able to align suppliers and or technologies to match that.” As digital transformation continues to accelerate there will still be challenges, particularly relating to properly onboarding and training new remote-based team members, but Tice is certain that “every dollar spent” will enhance procurement’s influence, build supplier relationships, and facilitate its growth. Times are changing, he reasons, and those who can’t keep up with the new program are in danger of being left behind.

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

THE COVID -INSPIRED DIGITAL WORKPLACE: ONE YEAR IN We look at the changes wrought by COVID-19, and why the advent of the digital workplace is opening up changes in not just where but how we work WRITTEN BY: WILLIAM SMITH 38

March 2021

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

“ A DIGITAL WORKFORCE IS ABOUT MORE THAN JUST REPLICATING HOW TASKS ARE COMPLETED” KALYAN KUMAR CVP AND CTO, IT SERVICES, HCL TECHNOLOGIES

T

he ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has brought changes that, prior to its impact, many would have said to be impossible. One of the most visible of those changes is the precipitous uptake in remote working as offices closed in the face of the virus. Now, a year since many first felt its impact, it’s worth looking back at the changes COVID-19 has wrought and the future of the newly minted digital workplace.

Even once the pandemic eventually recedes, for many that change will become, to varying extents, permanent. As Kalyan Kumar, CVP and CTO, IT Services, HCL Technologies, explains: “There will definitely

be long-lasting impacts from a remote working perspective, even after the pandemic’s immediate and urgent effects have eased off. Of course, there will be situations requiring face-to-face meetings occasionally, but the majority of employees will continue to work from home at least some of the time going forward.” Partly that’s down to the investment in remote working that companies have been forced to make, such as training in the various communications platforms that have risen to the fore. “Organisations must have the foundations in place to allow employees to access their workspace in any location and from any device,” says Kumar. technologymagazine.com

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

“ LEADERS WILL SEEK TO FIND THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS, CREATING MORE FLEXIBLE HYBRID MODELS OF CO-LOCATED AND DISTRIBUTED WORK” ANDREW‌ ‌DUNCAN PARTNER‌ ‌AND‌ ‌UK‌ ‌CEO‌, ‌ INFOSYS‌ ‌CONSULTING

The persistence of remote working means companies will have to change their approach and do away with the accepted standards of just one years ago.

“Organisations must also regularly review applications to ensure they’re as userfriendly as possible, because technical problems are much harder to rectify when employees aren’t all in one place,” says Kumar. As part of that, a focus on security and compliance procedures must prevail.

“Traditional security solutions won’t always offer the right protection when employees

are accessing data from a new location or device, so ensuring only the people who are authorised to access information can do so is vital. Ensuring all systems and devices are compliant as per the organisation’s policy is another important aspect to be dealt with while remote working continues.”

While admittedly there are downsides to working remote, both employers and employees are seeing the benefits, as Andrew‌ ‌D uncan,‌ ‌P artner‌ ‌a nd‌ ‌U K‌ ‌C EO‌ ‌at‌ ‌Infosys‌ ‌Consulting, explains. “In 2021, organisations will look to create seamless working experiences regardless of employee location. Rather than considering offices vs. remote working, leaders will seek to find the best of both worlds, creating more flexible hybrid models of co-located and distributed work. These new work practices technologymagazine.com

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DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

There are a raft of technologies on hand to assist human efforts.”Cognitive process automation (CPA) is of particular note,” says HCL’s Kumar, “and is one of the most sought after technologies that emulates human intelligence to solve problems and automate processes. CPA has been in significant demand of late, and has seen considerable implementation across different verticals and domains.” Taken together, emerging technologies can supercharge human efforts in almost all areas of the workplace.

“There’s also AI, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP) and the cloud.

“ WHEN WE HAVE FREED THE KNOWLEDGE WORKERS FROM THE MUNDANE, WE CAN LOOK AT AUTOMATING WHAT REMAINS” NEIL KINSON CHIEF OF STAFF, REDWOOD SOFTWARE

will prove their worth in multiple ways, from increased resilience to a better worklife balance for employees. For example, a virtual working model can offer a unique opportunity to tap into different pools of talent, which may have traditionally been harder to access due to location and geography restrictions.”

That rapid digital transformation of where we work has increased the pace of progress in how we work too, with automation a particular area of focus.

Far from software and hardware robots taking our jobs, instead the emphasis is on doing away with the drudge work and unleashing our collective productivity.

“If you look at the reality of the day to day work in many organisations, the value that people can deliver is not constrained by their lack of intellectual capacity. It is that they are drowning in tedious and repetitive tasks that prevent them from being their best selves,” says Neil Kinson, Chief of Staff, Redwood Software. “The focus should be on freeing the people from the things that automation can do better, so they are free to do the things people do best.”

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March 2021

How to succeed with Hyperautomation according to Deloitte: 1 | Define the purpose and Identify the use cases with expected key business outcomes in terms of revenue, expenditure, and business risks 2 | Optimize the existing processes and standardizing data inputs and decision logic

3 | Identify relevant Hyperautomation tools 4 | Implement process automation with AI as augmented intelligence.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

I say these all in one breath as it’s difficult to separate them. These technologies form a key pillar for improving employee productivity, and enable the training of machines to complete existing mundane tasks, or to augment the business processes that humans execute.”

Achieving that vision is not simply about implementing technology such as robotic process automation (RPA), but also trusting workers. “The ultimate goal should be equipping your people with the best information and analysis such that they can make the best-informed business decisions,” says Kinson. “When we have freed the knowledge workers from the mundane, we can look at automating what remains, but few organisations have yet reached this level.”

Going forwards, new technologies have the potential of combining with new cultural approaches to create a truly digital workplace, with such an approach sometimes being known as hyperautomation. “A digital workforce is about more than just replicating how tasks are completed; it’s about thinking strategically about how automation can be looped into the process, so that humans can do their jobs in the quickest, most efficient way possible,” says Kumar. technologymagazine.com

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RAPID7

SECURING EVERY LAYER: HOW RAPID7 MANAGES VULNERABILITIES

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March 2021

RAPID7

Rapid7’s Victoria Sitcawich and Bria Grangard discuss the importance of visibility and effective prioritisation to modern cyber threat remediation WRITTEN BY: WILL GIRLING PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE & CAITLYN COLE

T

he evolution of technology has always run parallel with larger socio-economic trends, and the nature of cyber threat is no different. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, has uprooted operating paradigms and shifted workers away from the relative safety of siloed corporate networks and towards the security minefield of remote working. Solid vulnerability management requires an ability to navigate the unexpected and know the best course of action to remain protected using cutting-edge tools guided by industry expertise. We spoke to Victoria Sitcawich, Product Marketing Manager, and Bria Grangard, Product Marketing Manager, to find out how security specialist Rapid7 can offer both.

Rapid7’s approach is characterised by its broad scope of coverage, which isn’t restricted simply to traditional network environments but extends to an organisation’s entire infrastructure, including web applications, virtual environments and remote assets. “We view vulnerability management as being a holistic process of identifying the assets in your environment, evaluating them for risk, prioritising that risk, and treating the identified vulnerabilities through remediation or mitigation,” explains Sitcawich. The company enables customers to do this with a suite of dedicated, cloudbased products, including InsightVM and InsightAppSec. technologymagazine.com

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RAPID7

Victoria Sitcawich and Bria Gangard from Rapid7 talk about vulnerability management

InsightVM allows the user to understand business risk in the context of their entire digital environment, prioritise their focus, and report on findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. “Not every asset is created equal; your payroll systems should probably be considered more critical than an individual laptop,” continues Sitcawich.

“InsightVM translates that security risk into business risk and helps our customers look at key metrics to track success.” InsightAppSec, Grangard explains, is similar: the highestrated DAST (dynamic application security

“ One of the key takeaways is the importance of securing every layer of your modern attack surface” VICTORIA SITCAWICH

PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER, RAPID7

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March 2021

testing) solution according to Gartner for three consecutive years, InsightAppSec automatically assesses web applications to identify common vulnerabilities. “When developing the product we thought, ‘How can we help test, monitor and ultimately prevent the exploitation of vulnerabilities or weaknesses at the application layer?’ A lot of components from our InsightAppSec and tCell products come into play here: InsightAppSec brings testing and monitoring together so that clients can understand how their apps are being attacked in real-time.”

When it comes to designing and implementing a quality vulnerability risk management strategy, time is one of the most important factors to consider, not just in ‘speed of response’ terms but also overall focus. Rapid7’s five-point process (identification, assessment, prioritisation, remediation, and measuring progress) aims to reduce risk through greater environmental visibility and prioritisation acuity, “Everyone

RAPID7

“ Not every asset is created equal; your payroll systems should probably be considered more critical than an individual laptop” VICTORIA SITCAWICH

PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER, RAPID7

BRIA GRANGARD TITLE: SENIOR PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER An award-winning Product Marketer and technology subject matter expert at Rapid7 with experiences in leading GTM strategies, owning and participating in a podcast, and speaking opportunities across Europe, Australia and the U.S.

VICTORIA SITCAWICH

MEET THE TEAM

has the same 24 hours in a day; we want to help you focus on what's most important,” states Grangard. Part of Rapid7’s mission, says Sitcawich, is to establish reasonable expectations with its customers amid a highly complex threat landscape: “It's unrealistic to think that you're going to be able to fix every vulnerability as soon as it appears in your environment. You're going to have to make tough decisions, but, at the end of the day, a vulnerability management programme is meant to reduce risk, and you're not achieving that until you start remediating.” Essentially, customers should define a vision of successful cybersecurity and pursue core goals in attaining it, without being paralysed into inaction by an overwhelming number of possibilities.

Developing strong partnerships with key vendors who are able to troubleshoot any problems can support this even further.

While Rapid7’s products and services are able to secure every layer of an enterprise’s digital environment, it is also worth reflecting on root causes of vulnerabilities in the first instance. Neglecting to follow the aforementioned five-point process and other imposed limitations conspire to make addressing security issues more difficult in real-world situations. “Broken authentication (when authentication credentials are compromised) and misconfiguration are two common examples, particularly as companies make the shift to the cloud,” says Sitcawich. “SQL injections and cross-site scripting are also frequent,” adds Grangard.

“These are where attackers will try to gain personal information by injecting code into either the website or the application itself.”

There are many circumstances that can precipitate these attacks: a lack of resources and expertise are significant factors, but, once again, nothing is so deleterious as a

TITLE: PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER Product Marketing Manager for Vulnerability Management at Rapid7, responsible for executing on go-to-market strategy for InsightVM.

technologymagazine.com

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RAPID7

ADVERT PAGE GOLD lack of time. “If customers tell us, ‘I don't have the time or the energy’, or ‘this isn't where I want to focus my time’, we inform them that Rapid7 has a group of security experts and a dedicated customer advisor to manage vulnerabilities day-to-day.”

Also, it should be remembered that some forms of attack cannot be predicted. This is why keeping informed should go hand-inhand with testing and monitoring to identify vulnerabilities early, “We encourage all of our customers to look at the OWASP Top 10 if they want to stay educated on the most common application security risks.”

When considering the technologies that are changing how vulnerabilities are managed and resolved, Sitcawich has an emphatic 50

March 2021

“ Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day; we want to help you focus on what's most important” BRIA GRANGARD

SENIOR PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER, RAPID7

answer: automation. “Our InsightConnect solution is specifically dedicated to it.

Automation is truly key to helping keep processes efficient.” A no-code platform

RAPID7

containing over 290 plugins to connect tools and enable workflow customisation, InsightConnect is envisioned as a tool for liberating teams from routine or mundane tasks and enabling them to be redeployed in more valuable areas; retaining the human element in the remediation process is still vitally important. “Similarly, on the application security side, we’re always exploring which tasks can be automated to make your life easier,” explains Grangard. “We're not losing the human element; we're trying to amplify what humans can do via automation.”

Despite offering comprehensive products, services and insights, Grangard states that Rapid7 does not want to foster customer dependency. On the contrary, it encourages

clients to gain confidence using its tools and independently grow their respective vulnerability risk management programmes, “if they feel they have the expertise and can handle it on their own, we absolutely support that.” In instances where a customer’s in-house security creates tension by redirecting other teams towards non-priority goals, Sitcawich adds that Rapid7 can act as a mediating force by establishing a “common language” and creating understanding around critical business objectives. This is particularly important for organisations that are now adopting cloud for the first time because of COVID-19, which has had the dual effect of introducing cloud network vulnerabilities and increasing the surface area for attack on enterprise IT. “There's been a push for businesses to change the emphasis on how they work: ‘mom and pop’ restaurants who relied on in-store patronage technologymagazine.com

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RAPID7

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RAPID7

have had to adopt a greater online presence.

Rapid7 has always talked about the power of digital transformation, and COVID-19 has accelerated that faster than any of us could have predicted,” says Grangard.

Summarising the qualities of a strong vulnerability management strategy, both Sitcawich and Grangard highlight the importance of regarding security as a collection of individual activities that merge into one holistic solution. “One of the key takeaways is the importance of securing every layer of your modern attack surface,” says Sitcawich.

“Not just network infrastructure, but also the cloud and web applications. There needs to be visibility over all of it so that you can prioritise effectively and remediate efficiently, especially as new technologies come into play.” Therefore, Rapid7’s vulnerability risk management tools empower companies to achieve the requisite level of understanding, confidence and agility to thrive in an

“We're not losing the human element; we're trying to amplify what humans can do via automation” BRIA GRANGARD

PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER, RAPID7

increasingly complex cyber threat landscape.

“We all need to think about scaling security simultaneously with some of these newly adopted technologies,” concludes Grangard.

“It's not just traditional devices anymore; there's so many different layers that must be considered now.”

technologymagazine.com

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CLOUD AND CYBER

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CLOUD AND CYBER

How networks are keeping pace with digital transformation Even before the pandemic struck, factors such as hybrid cloud meant network management was becoming an ever more complicated affair. We take a closer look.

WRITTEN BY: WILLIAM SMITH

N

etworks are taken as a given in the modern world. We expect unbroken connectivity and security, but it’s not often we think about the network management that makes that possible.

Digital networks themselves are a surprisingly recent development. Packet switching technology, which allows data to be sent in chunks rather than as an unwieldy unbroken string, was first demonstrated only fifty years ago at London’s National Physical Laboratory.

Other landmarks are more familiar to us — the World Wide Web in 1990 being the most prominent.

Networks are still very much in flux.

In the business space, one of the major trends in recent times has been softwaredefined wide area networking, or SD-WAN. Put simply, the practice is an evolution of traditional wide area networking, which was intended to allow employees access to servers hosted in an enterprise’s data centre. Clearly, times have changed and that approach is becoming rarer every day. technologymagazine.com

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CLOUD AND CYBER

“Although the pandemic has brought significant upheaval, it has highlighted the vital role that networking technology plays in modern society” ALEX CONNORS

HEAD OF STRATEGY UCC, VODAFONE BUSINESS

ACCORDING TO DELOITTE, SD-WAN’S BENEFITS RANGE ACROSS AREAS INCLUDING:

SECURITY VISIBILITY SCALABILITY AUTOMATION VIRTUALISATION PERFORMANCE Hence why SD-WAN exists - allowing administrators much finer control to ensure performance and security is maintained, as Alex Connors, Head of Strategy UCC at Vodafone Business, explains. “One of the main benefits of SD-WAN is the visibility it provides and,

therefore, the flexibility and control it gives businesses that they simply haven’t had before. With a single, real-time view, and centralised control of the business’ entire network, it gives them the means to respond. IT teams can see where the demand is and solve issues before they become a significant problem by changing network policies, bandwidth or implementing new network features.

Additionally, a virtual network enviro­ nment makes it easier to update your security measures and react quickly to threats, across all sites, devices and the cloud.”

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has only intensified existing trends for the decentralisation of networks - a move technologymagazine.com

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CLOUD AND CYBER

“ With the rise of hybrid cloud and software-as-a-service applications, the traffic that networks must process has risen hugely - leading in the worst cases to possible data vulnerability”

SD-WAN is resistant to, as Todd Kiehn, VP Product Management at GTT, points out.

“The prioritisation and business policy applications of an SD-WAN will slowly transition to run at the user’s laptop or mobile device, as well as the overall corporate network. This will deliver better performance for remote users and allow them to participate in corporate priorities and policies, meaning IT has a better understanding of business needs and adapting network provisioning accordingly.”

As networks spread out, cybersecurity measures will have to come along for the 58

March 2021

CLOUD AND CYBER

ride. That might include the introduction autonomy - networks that can detect cyberattacks in real time and change the firewall in response. “These networks are similar and comparable to how selfdriving cars will work,” says Connors. “If there is traffic, the car will automatically reroute. If there is a person in the road, the vehicle will break to avoid collision.”

But it will also simply involve treating every user the same. “We are likely to see businesses adopt a ‘zero trust’ approach to security – where employees face similar access, credentials, and authentication

measures regardless of location,” says Kiehn. “No matter where a worker is based, the experience of connecting to corporate systems will feel the same.”

Networking is truly at a point of unprecedented change on multiple fronts.

Perhaps the best established by now is the cloud revolution, and the The market is responding to the pro­ liferation of things a network manager has to consider with products that err more towards being jacks of all trades. “The philosophy won’t be about having lots of different technologies to cover the whole of the network stack,” technologymagazine.com

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CLOUD AND CYBER

Hybrid Cloud Explained

“ We are likely to see businesses adopt a ‘zero trust’ approach to security – where employees face similar access, credentials, and authentication measures regard­ less of location” TODD KIEHN

VP PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, GTT

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March 2021

says Kiehn, “but rather looking at the solution that can best cover it all. It won’t be a matter of ‘best of breed’ but ‘best for the business’; fewer solutions that cover everything well, rather than a myriad of solutions tailored to every system.”

Then, of course, there are the changes mandated by COVID-19 - pushing workers out of the office and into home environments.

“Although the pandemic has brought significant upheaval, it has highlighted the vital role that networking technology plays in modern society and forced businesses to adapt, seeking more flexible and resilient systems,” says Connors. Even when the pandemic recedes,

CLOUD AND CYBER

the investments made by IT teams network consumption which will seems sure to mean some level appear seamless to the business.” of remote working is here to stay.

What all this adds up to is an “Ubiquitous hybrid working will undoubted headache for IT teams According to Deloitte, also change how networks are and network managers. Overcoming 30% of network transformations are delivered and consumed,” says that will involve developing a holistic cost-driven Kiehn. “Currently, businesses will view of the whole network, and all typically buy network bandwidth its decentralised aspects, as Kiehn for a location for a certain amount. In time, explains. “To tackle this complexity, IT teams however, this approach will change so that it will need to think more carefully about how is focused on the users and the usage rather they connect to the larger cloud ecosystem. than the location – so that businesses are not They will need to consider the different cloud committed to bandwidth for offices, when providers and where they are located, and in a significant portion of users are working at turn the connectivity best suited to deliver the home. This will make for much more flexible best performance.”

30%

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NTT GLOBAL SOURCING INC.

NTT Global Sourcing: The Power of One Arvind Kumar, Global VP of Indirects at NTT Global Sourcing, on partner ecosystems and how a novel approach to indirect sourcing delivers true value WRITTEN BY: RHYS THOMAS PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE & CAITLYN COLE

Arvind Kumar

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March 2021

It is 4 am in Houston, Texas, when Arvind Kumar checks his emails and preps for the day ahead. The Global Vice President of Indirects at NTT Global Sourcing has an important call with a team in India, 11 hours ahead, and will be working right through to the early evening. It is a demanding role, but one that Kumar relishes. He is an executive energised by the prospect of big picture programmes and an emphatic champion of bringing businesses together to achieve through collaboration that which would be impossible alone.

Kumar’s values very much align with the shared philosophy of the NTT Global Sourcing team, a 60-strong global outfit that was assembled two and a half years ago

by CEO Mark LeNeve to advance the role of sourcing within NTT and centralise the group’s buying power. Commanding upwards of $30bn in annual spend, it is a powerhouse of procurement.

From the outset, the startup identified three core areas that would need to be modernised and reformed to excel in the modern landscape, and to realise the vision of the group’s top executives. NTT GS’s primary directive is to leverage the group’s combined influence and unify the hundreds of companies and entities that operate under its banner. “Our whole focus has been to

NTT GLOBAL SOURCING INC.

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accurate, risk-free, reliable, repeatable and costoptimised operation by providing predictive and collaborative analytics.

Arul C.T, founder and CEO of HelixSense, holds more than 25 years of global experience in automation and venture exits calls HelixSense a “disruptive digital transformation company”. HelixSense aims to leverage technology and literally disrupt and reimagine how companies manage their assets.

Integrated Facility Management HelixSense provides stakeholders with real-time insights on assets, allowing one to take a proactive stance and mitigate risks with data-driven decision making that extends the life cycle of assets and improves returns.

Helixsense’s very own platform “Hsense” integrates people, processes and technologies. Arul describes the entire digital asset management process using four simple words -Connect, Compute, Monitor, Control and a four-step process to bring digital transformation.

Using unique edge analysers, the HSense platform collects data from assets and makes them self-reporting.”

Using the cloud only for secondary analytics, “HSense” orchestrates digital asset management, while following maintenance standards and allowing for highly reliable risk mitigation.

The process consists of IT-OT integration where “big data” is collected by connecting IT databases and building management systems to “HSense,” integration of people with process standards such as ISO55K and SMRP practices, analytics and AI with structured, relevant and auditable data. AI-powered reports alert on trends and predictions providing actionable insights.

Another game-changer is Helix’s R-FIT IOT ready to fit technology which accelerates transformation, creating Return on Investment (ROI) from the start.

Combining the Internet of Things (IoT) and operation technology, HelixSense’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) replaces traditionally siloed functions with a fully integrated digital ecosystem that leverages data for the betterment of all stakeholders, resulting in

Digital Twins “A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical object. In the case of building construction, a digital twin can tell you how to build, help you collaborate between stakeholders and assist you in maintaining and managing with optimum eff iciency. We are currently building a number of digital twins (cobots) to assist managers and technicians in using virtual reality. Our digital twins can also provide reports and prescribe risk mitigation actions.

“HelixSense partners with NTT Global Sourcing on their transformation road map. NTT supports us with an extensive global customer base. We collaborate to create new joint revenue models for our customers,” says Arul.

NTT GLOBAL SOURCING INC.

“NTT has created a meeting platform which allows everybody to work together seamlessly.”

Arvind Kumar

Global VP of Indirects, NTT Global Sourcing

bring the strength of NTT as a group into one programme. Our job is to make sure we bring projects into a central focus area that can help us drive the big picture value and give back to the various operating companies across the group.”

First, NTT GS established a common platform through which these decentralized

entities could bring their initiatives together.

Better planning and strategic sourcing allows for the consolidation of spend across the business and its categories. The team also identified roughly 200 best-in-class vendors with which to build long-term partnerships.

Kumar’s role with this newly minted procurement division is indirects, a broad remit that encompasses payment solutions, everything to do with real estate – from land acquisition and construction through to lease back and infrastructure built for data centres – and managing all the facility workplace services around the globe. It is also involved in the digital transformation programmes within the group, though “there's a slight difference in our approach,” Kumar explains.

The implementation of new digital platforms such as SAP Ariba are group-level decisions that roll down to the company level.

In this regard – in the traditional definition of digital transformation – Kumar’s division has little involvement. “But what we do in

Arvind Kumar; An insight into NTT Global Sourcing

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2018

NTT Global Sourcing Inc. founded

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Number of Employees for NTT Global Sourcing Inc.

80+ Projects

$100m Estimated Savings

contributing to the digitalisation efforts is to look at the pre-existing programmes and processes across the group and within the categories that we manage. We also ensure there is automation, enforce digitalisation, and transform the category and processes from legacy to next-generation.”

Ecosystem of value This process of upscaling and reshaping legacy systems is also evident in Kumar’s approach to indirect sourcing. Traditionally, procurement is a one-way process of assessing and negotiating terms with a vendor to supply a product or service. Kumar’s model has upended this linear structure, instead creating an ecosystem of partners with an economy of shared capabilities, ideas and revenue generation opportunities.

“I’m very passionate about this,” Kumar says.

“I truly believe there's a larger picture that a lot of procurement organisations don't realise. The supplier partner ecosystem we are building on a strategic level provides vast opportunity to create and add incentives to businesses within

Executive Profile:

Arvind Kumar Title: Global VP of Indirects Industry: Strategic Sourcing Arvind Kumar joined NTT Global Sourcing when it was established in 2018, and oversees the group’s indirect sourcing as Global Vice President Indirects. His remit covers payment solutions, real estate construction, land acquisition, and managing all the facility and workplace services for NTT Group globally.

An experienced executive, Kumar’s 20-plus year career has seen him work with market-leading organisations in banking, real estate, sourcing, and telecommunications, among others. Prior to joining NTT, he held several senior roles at French multinational Capgemini, including Global Head Workplace Transformation / Furniture & Fixture Standardisation, and Regional Chief Procurement Officer for India, UAE and APAC.

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our group, and for partners to work together to generate new income and business. I am a big proponent of building a supplier ecosystem, depending on certain projects, initiatives or categories, and promote collaboration with NTT in the middle of it as an incubation hub.”

Kumar envisions NTT Global Sourcing as the “choirmaster” of this global network,

standing with an overview of the entire ecosystem, driving strategy and aligning these partners to work together – the upshots of which are beneficial to the entire value chain. “Not only does it help us generate better value with the partners, but also for our partners to work together in collaborative programmes,” Kumar says. “As a result, NTT technologymagazine.com

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has created a meeting platform, which allows everybody to work together seamlessly.”

He explains that today, partners that never knew each other before aligning with NTT are now working closely in conjunction to create new business and revenue opportunities.

At the same time, these collaborative projects strengthen NTT’s supply chain and develop go-to-market solutions that benefit the group’s existing and new clients.

Building the future This complex network of partners will soon be enshrined in a major capital project that has been in the works for some years and, in many ways, sits at the heart of NTT’s future. In Sunnyvale, California, the group is readying the unveiling of One NTT Vision Campus, a smart, sustainable building that is a physical manifestation of its capabilities

“ [One NTT Vision Campus] is a living, breathing showcase of our ecosystem partners and what they deliver together with us.”

Arvind Kumar

Global VP of Indirects, NTT Global Sourcing

NTT Global Sourcing

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Community impact

Supporting local partners is central to the One NTT Vision NTT is a global conglomerate, but remaining local and supporting the communities it works in is central to the One NTT Vision. Arvind Kumar, Global VP of Indirects at NTT Global Sourcing shares more: “I think it's our responsibility as a strategic sourcing arm of a company to maximize the benefit for everybody in the supply chain,” says Kumar. "We do that by making sure the vision and mission for a company gets translated to everybody that's in that combined team, whether internally or externally, because in many cases these are an extension of NTT.

At the same time, we must keep a focus on impacting the community.

“I strongly believe when you do projects in my space, in real estate, we should always look to local partners, local players who are in the community, because they need a lot of help through COVID. It’s a combination of taking the big boys that we work with and integrating it with the smaller partners in the community that are in a five, 10, 20-mile radius of our office. We want to bring value to them and make sure that they're sustainable, make sure they get through this hurdle, and give them an opportunity to truly live and breathe. At NTT these are the missions and values we stand by, the One NTT Vision, and that touches all these elements as a company.”

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Arvind Kumar: Sunnyvale, the one NTT vision substainable campus

and future goals. Upon its mention, Kumar is instantly energised.

“That is a very special project, very dear to my heart and the work I do every day because I've always wanted to be part of a sustainable, smart building programme.

This is the vision of our CEO, bringing NTT companies together in one common real estate platform, one common office, but also make it a smart and intelligent workplace which focuses on employee experience, sustainability, wellness – all the key measures that today are important. At the same time, it has state of the art technology in terms of sensors, automation, IoT, and so on. And on top of that, it is a sustainable building, which means we have a solar captive fuel cell hybrid system with backup power being managed to back up the building and save utility energy costs.

“This is a living, breathing showcase of our ecosystem partners and what they deliver together with us, how we use it

internally, and how we give back to employees.

And also it becomes a showcase to show clients what we can do for them with these kinds of platforms and technologies as a solution provider.”

For Kumar, the central role NTT Global

“The key for sourcing organisations in the future must be a solutions-driven approach.”

Arvind Kumar

Global VP of Indirects, NTT Global Sourcing

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Sourcing played in the Sunnyvale project illustrates how his division deviates from the traditional procurement function.

“Sunnyvale is a classic example of how we brought that spirit to life and really demonstrated that we go above and beyond standard procurement negotiation and other sourcing activities. We were also there

advising, guiding, developing the strategy, supporting the business, integrating the partners, bringing the ecosystem, creating this whole smart building concept of the One NTT Vision.”

The outbreak of COVID-19 threatened to derail this construction project, and Kumar vividly recalls the onset of the virus.

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“ I truly believe there's a larger picture that a lot of procurement organisations don't realise.”

Arvind Kumar

Global VP of Indirects, NTT Global Sourcing

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Returning from Sunnyvale to Texas on a flight last February, he awoke the next day to find companies shutting down, airports beginning to empty out, and individuals and businesses standing still, not quite sure how to react.

“Now imagine, I'm running a construction project in Sunnyvale, I'm sitting in Texas, and we are in the heart of COVID. But we still have a timeline to meet, and we are pressured, and there's a cost impact associated with shutting down, then reopening, and other delays.”

Here, indirect sourcing came into its own.

“We played a big role, as you can imagine.

In terms of procurement, we needed safety gear, PPE, masks, hand sanitiser – all of these things that were in short supply. On the other hand, we also had to help our clients

NTT GLOBAL SOURCING INC.

procure these things, so we used our supply chain to support them through that process.”

In the end, construction never stopped on the One NTT Vision campus. “We are close to completing the building and looking ahead to the big launch,” Kumar says. “We never stopped. We actually pulled through the technologymagazine.com

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Arvind Kumar: Expresses his opinion on small businesses during these difficult times

times and really made it happen against all odds. We kept people-focused, kept people safe and positive, and ensured that the business could continue.”

With the global vaccine effort now well underway, Kumar believes we should remember the lessons learned during this turbulent period. “The key for sourcing organisations in the future must be a solutiondriven approach, focused on the value the supply ecosystem brings to the company when you build strategic partnerships. I think we need to look at a larger focus on that because in the next world that we're living in post-COVID, the supply chain partners and suppliers can add a lot of value in terms of not only managing the cost structure but being resilient to these activities.”

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ENTERPRISE IT

STRATEGIC VENDOR MANAGEMENT GETS

With an increasing number of vendors, sometimes replicating services, strategic vendor management (SVM) is becoming more complicated. Yet its core values remain the basis of this important business function WRITTEN BY: PADDY SMITH

S

trategic vendor management (SVM) is a critical tool in technology procu­ rement and partnership building.

At a time when the number and nature of technology partners is exploding, it has never been more important to structure insights and measure returns on individual or co-dependent technology vendors.

There has been a seismic change in the way technology vendors operate, and in how they are assessed by customers. The rise of easier implementations and multi-vendor strategies has increased complexity and competition. No longer do companies commit to lengthy contracts with a single vendor, and the benefits of strategies such as multi cloud – security, reliability,

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compliance and avoidance of vendor lock-in – are becoming corporate gospel.

And the shift to multi-vendor strategies as added complexity to SVM, which must now delineate where responsibility lies in the event of security breaches or operational failure.

“ NO LONGER DO COMPANIES COMMIT TO LENGTHY CONTRACTS WITH A SINGLE VENDOR, AND THE BENEFITS OF STRATEGIES SUCH AS MULTI CLOUD ARE BECOMING CORPORATE GOSPEL”

ENTERPRISE IT

technologymagazine.com

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Between hope and possible there’s a bridge.

There from the beginning to where we stand today. And to where we will go from here. One company. One promise.

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ENTERPRISE IT

SPECIALISED SVM

This means that SVM is no longer something that can be scrawled in the margins of a white paper. It requires dedicated talent that can balance the complicated process of onboarding the right new partners, while monitoring ongoing relationships and products with a careful eye. Done at any kind of scale, this requires vendor management organisations (VMOs), who specialise in exactly this line of work.

Deloitte, which offers a managed consultancy service for VMOs adapting to this new world, thinks there are a few key strategies a VMO must pursue. “[They] must adapt to a new generation of outsourcing models with multiple vendors and different service types,” it begins.

“ THE RISE OF EASIER IMPLEMENTATIONS AND MULTIVENDOR STRATEGIES HAS INCREASED COMPLEXITY AND COMPETITION” “To achieve the benefits from Outsourcing 3.0, VMOs have to be equipped with new vendor management capabilities to manage a complex multi-vendor ecosystem. We recommend a service integrated and converged approach to overcome the arising challenges of increasing complexity, transparency and the rising requirement towards vendor collaboration.” technologymagazine.com

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ENTERPRISE IT

3 STEPS TO IMPROVE STRATEGIC VENDOR MANAGEMENT STEP 1: DATA AND INSIGHT “Begin by building a holistic picture of the vendor and what it delivers to your organization This entails the identification, collection, aggregation and presentation of the vendor profile, performance and market data.”

STEP 2: REVIEWS “The second step is to create the governance framework for how the collected data is communicated with the vendor and across the organization’s key stakeholders. Ideally, this is a schedule of review meetings that are agreed upon at the point of procurement or during the onboarding process.”

STEP 3: ACTION PLAN “To help build buy-in from stakeholders, build standard agendas that can be used for each review type consistently across all providers. Then pilot the process with one or two strategic vendors. Use these pilots to evaluate the best timing, deliverables and participants, which may vary between vendors and internal stakeholders.”

Source: Gartner

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ENTERPRISE IT

ALL CHANGE

And vendors themselves are changing.

Whereas once they positioned themselves as transactional partners – you spend, but you save – the new playbook cuts them to different lengths. Those transactional partnerships survive, but have become secondary (even tertiary) to deeper relationships with ongoing vendors who continue to offer more breadth and benefit in a consolidated product, or strategic partners, whose products and services help a given company to achieve its strategic goals.

The management of this tiered system of vendors is a tricky balance, not least because of the complexity. And companies will see short-term (actual) costs rise as they employ manpower and software to examine their options and the fruits of their decisions.

Where a multi-vendor approach is taken, costs will again be higher. You can’t balance risk by hedging. Longer range forecasting and disaster planning should be able to justify the case for higher spend, and should be considered part of a wider business strategy.

Most importantly of all, KPIs must be set to identify the ongoing success or otherwise of any given vendor relationship.

SHARED INITIATIVES

Keith Murphy, from Purchase Control, thinks KPIs can do more than tell you whether your partner is delivering according to contract.

“Such monitoring can help both parties identify and leverage opportunities they might not have detected otherwise, allowing for shared initiatives for growth, penetration into new markets or the development of additional production refinements and new products.”

As a purveyor of a cloud-based procure­ ment system, he is also unsurprisingly greatly in favour of using technology to manage vendors, including AI. technologymagazine.com

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ENTERPRISE IT

“ COMPANIES WILL SEE SHORT-TERM COSTS RISE AS THEY EMPLOY MANPOWER AND SOFTWARE TO EXAMINE THEIR OPTIONS”

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ENTERPRISE IT

“Automated processes and complete data access and management make it much simpler for your procurement team to establish and enforce the standards vendors are required to meet in order to gain, and keep, your business,” he says. As well as collating swathes of high-visibility data within the business, he advocates for using AI to automate “low value and repetitive tasks like data entry, template population and customer service requests.”

“Your team can dedicate its time and talents to high-value strategic work and still be able to jump in when needed.”

OLD HABITS

Although the pendulum has swung towards using SVM to manage increasingly complex vendor rostas, the old justifications for using

vendor management systems remain. In fact, as scrutiny on the tech sector has grown, so has the importance of keeping an audit trail and maintaining a high degree of accountability over potential or actual security threats.

Governance, risk management and competence firm Quantivate has compiled a questionnaire for vendors who may be at risk during the Covid-19 pandemic. It includes questions on business continuity, service interruption, impact over time, security risks arising from a work-from-home policy and, perhaps most pertinently, asks whether they have asked their own vendors and suppliers similar questions.

The company says, “Proactive action to reassess the risk levels of your critical vendors is a must in these uncertain times.” technologymagazine.com

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SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST A LIFT 92

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MTM INC.

By creating an ecosystem of collaborative partnerships fueled by innovation, MTM removes barriers and brings a whole-person approach to healthcare WRITTEN BY: LAURA V. GARCIA PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

B

y focusing on doing the right things, MTM has created a beautiful thing; An ecosystem of collaborative partnerships, fuelled by innovation, all focused on the same goal— removing community barriers and bringing a whole-person approach to healthcare while doing right by our planet, and its people.

Having experienced immense growth over the last ten years, MTM now runs an estimated 20 million trips per year and is the number one private healthcare transportation provider in the USA, across 32 states. And with good reason.

By remaining unrelentingly focused on its core principles and objectives, MTM has unlocked a whole new level of value for its clients, reducing program costs while increasing satisfaction rates. As Rick Holbrook, CTO at MTM, says, what MTM has built is more like a community of likeminded business partners who are always looking at the bigger picture of improving health outcomes for members.

When you remain focused on the mission rather than a static idea on how you get there, ideas flourish, and innovation prospers. In the end, everyone wins.

Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) From The World Health Organization (WHO), “Social determinants of health are the conditions in which people are born, grow, technologymagazine.com

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live, work and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources at global, national and local levels.”

The organization further states, “The social determinants of health are mostly responsible for health inequities – the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries.”

Availability of transportation, food insecurity, and inaccessibility of nutritious food choices are examples of SDOH, which MTM hopes to help combat.

“Our real mission as a company is to remove barriers to individuals to access community and resources. But what we really want to do is accommodate people so that getting their health care is easy and cost-effective. That's why we exist.” said President and CEO Alaina Maciá.

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“ As the population ages and wants to age in place, we want to transport them where they need to go, but we also want to bring services to them. So we're expanding our platform to allow for meals and grocery, as well as home care coordination and home modifications” ALAINA MACIÁ

PRESIDENT AND CEO, MTM INC.

MTM INC.

The Art of Grabbing a Lift “If the technology works, people are going to adopt. We believe that, and it’s part of our strategy.”- Rick Holbrook, CTO, MTM Inc.

TAMARA CARLTON TITLE: D IRECTOR OF SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH AND PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT INDUSTRY: HOSPITAL & HEALTH CARE LOCATION: ST LOUIS, MISSOURI, USA As MTM’s first Director of Social Determinants of Health and Product Development, Tamara leads the organization’s strategies for helping clients remove community health disparities among the populations they serve. Tamara joined MTM in 2016, leading the company’s Product Development team. She has more than twenty years of experience in marketing, operations, and product management for Fortune 500 companies in the healthcare, transportation, retail, and financial industries. Tamara holds a Bachelors of Science from Bradley University and an MBA from Saint Louis University.

EXECUTIVE BIO

MTM is re-imagining healthcare with a value-based business model focused on identifying and removing the SDOH that are the cause of health disparities through a holistic, whole-person approach that drives client value and promotes superior outcomes by focusing on the well-being of members. By expanding into providing services such as meals, groceries, and home modifications, MTM is hoping to further assist those who want to age in place so they can do so safely, happily, and healthily.

These services will also be extended to any individuals who require the resource, whether private pay or Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries. “People want to live a healthy life, but if they don't have access to good quality food, fruits, and vegetables, if they have trip hazards in their home, these things put them at risk and impede their ability to do so. That’s why MTM looks at the whole member experience and what we can do to address social determinants of health.”

Maciá said.

Following their commitment to taking a whole-person approach to healthcare, MTM further plans to extend its service. Maciá says, “As the population ages and wants to age in place, we want to transport them where they need to go, but we also want to bring services to them. So we're expanding our platform to allow for meals and grocery, as well as home care coordination and home modifications. Because as people age in place, they need modifications to their homes like turning a tub into a shower, et cetera. And we believe our job is to help people age in place, happy and healthy.”

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ServiceNow; making the world work better people ServiceNow; making the world of of work better forfor people

digital transformation journey.

“ServiceNow is the Underpinned a people-first culture, digital transformation journey.

“ServiceNow is the Underpinned by aby people-first culture, platform or platforms for digital workflows.

And ServiceNow is making world of work better platform or platforms for digital workflows. And we we ServiceNow is making the the world of work better deliver those workflows across the organisations for people digital workflows solutionsdeliver those workflows across the organisations in in for people withwith theirtheir digital workflows solutions

the silos systems within them, creating A great workflow is the underpinning of great the silos andand systems within them, thusthus creating a a A great workflow is the underpinning of great seamless enterprise system with action that enables experiences.

ServiceNow provides digital workflows seamless enterprise system with action that enables experiences.

ServiceNow provides digital workflows great employee customer experiences that make for a smarter way to workflow, bringing great employee andand customer experiences andand that make for a smarter way to workflow, bringing unlocks productivity.

The Now platform is scaleability, safeguarding business continuity, productivity. The Now platform is the the scaleability, safeguarding business continuity, andand unlocks foundation forof allthose of those workflows across empowering productivity. foundation for all workflows across an an empowering productivity. organisation.

And we really pride ourselves in being customers serving of the organisation. And we really pride ourselves in being WithWith overover 62006200 customers andand serving 80%80% of the one platform, one data model, with one architecture.

Fortune become defining enterprise one platform, one data model, with one architecture.

Fortune 500500 has has become the the defining enterprise not only dohave we have purpose-built workflows AndAnd not only do we purpose-built workflows for for software company of the 21st century. software company of the 21st century.

IT, employees, and customers, we’re also able IT, employees, and customers, we’re also able to to integrate communicate across of systems the systems ServiceNow, putting people-first integrate andand communicate across all ofallthe ServiceNow, putting people-first of record and infrastructure that may be in place, Cathey Regional Sales Director at ServiceNow of record and infrastructure that may be in place, Jeff Jeff Cathey Regional Sales Director at ServiceNow providing our customers with a single pane of glass explains ServiceNow’s people-first culture our customers with a single pane of glass explains howhow ServiceNow’s people-first culture has has providing to get their work done. helped them there.

“ServiceNow is making helped them get get there.

“ServiceNow is making the the to get their work done. of those customers is MTM. Having expertise world of work better for people.

Our cloud-based OneOne of those customers is MTM. Having expertise world of work better for people. Our cloud-based in the healthcare industry has helped ServiceNow platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that in the healthcare industry has helped ServiceNow platform and solutions deliver digital workflows that in working to leverage its platform create great experiences unlock productivity in working withwith MTMMTM to leverage its platform andand create great experiences andand unlock productivity succeed in its goal of breaking down community for employees in the enterprise.

ServiceNow prides succeed in its goal of breaking down community for employees in the enterprise. ServiceNow prides barriers by removing streamlining workflow, on being a people-centric organisation by removing silossilos andand streamlining workflow, itselfitself on being a people-centric organisation thatthat barriers and providing them with the connectivity that’s wins as a team.

We always try to stay hungry and and providing them with the connectivity that’s wins as a team. We always try to stay hungry and required for their people, processes and systems. humble.

Diversity, inclusion and belonging are required for their people, processes and systems. humble. Diversity, inclusion and belonging are essential to who we are, to how grow, ServiceNow to support organisations essential to who we are, to how we’llwe’ll grow, andand howhow ServiceNow waswas builtbuilt to support organisations just just continue to innovate. like MTM drive meaningful outcomes. we’llwe’ll continue to innovate. like MTM drive meaningful outcomes. success is dependent on our people “Our“Our success is dependent on our people andand on on servicenow.com those people having talent those people having the the rightright talent andand the the rightright servicenow.com mentality to be able to deliver the future of work to mentality to be able to deliver the future of work to our customers. our underpinnings around our customers.

AndAnd withwith our underpinnings around culture and people first, ServiceNow has grown culture and people first, ServiceNow has grown to to $4 billion in revenue 13,000 employees overover $4 billion in revenue withwith 13,000 plusplus employees and thousands of customers around the world, and thousands of customers around the world, including MTM, that renew with us at a rate including MTM, that renew with us at a rate of of about Soof allthat of that serves mission about 99%.99%.

So all serves our our mission wellwell and helps ServiceNow become the defining and helps ServiceNow become the defining enterprise software company of 21st the 21st century.” enterprise software company of the century.”

digital journey, service TheThe digital journey, howhow service nownow cancan helphelp

Cathey, regional sales director at ServiceNow Jeff Jeff Cathey, regional sales director at ServiceNow explains how ServiceNow helps enterprises on their explains how ServiceNow helps enterprises on their

MTM INC.

MTM Technology

20mn

Scheduling trips

12mn

members nationwide

NEMT broker one of the most established in North America

7.5mn calls every year

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For over twenty years, MTM has collaborated with carefully chosen partners to develop innovative solutions that promote independence, remove barriers, and help connect community resources with the people that need them. By leveraging the capabilities of today’s deep tech and partnering with just the right people, MTM has been able to build a user-friendly digital platform that streamlines workflows.

Digitization also avoids the errors and limitations of manual, paper-based processes. And all while increasing the quality of life of members.

MTM has mastered the art of grabbing a lift. MTM Link mimics all the best qualities of Uber and Lyft that make for a user-friendly experience while unburdening users from

MTM INC.

the hassle of paper-based claims processes and easing scheduling for their network of transportation providers. They even send appointment reminders and monitor app usage to help clients ensure maximum adoption rates and decrease no-shows.

The ‘Where’s My Ride’ feature connects drivers with users and drops a pin to identify a more exact location than an address can provide, highly beneficial at large, multi-building medical facilities. Personal profiles, auto-fill capabilities, appointment reminders, mileage tracking, and electronic gas mileage claim submission all ease the process of arranging for a ride. Credential checks, quality monitoring, and a user rating and complaint system keep members safe, happy, and arriving at their scheduled

appointments on time, helping to increase efficiencies.

For less tech-savvy customers or even those who simply prefer human interaction,

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MTM INC.

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BUILD YOUR SOLUTION cprime.com

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March 2021

MTM INC.

MTM has fully staffed 24/7 call centers.

They have also designed a streamlined digital experience for their network of subcontracted transportation providers, so they can quickly and easily accept, deliver and claim trips.

Driving Client and Partner Success “The thing about technology is that you can't just throw technology at something and expect it to work. You could be automating a bad practice. So you have to reinvent yourself a little bit. You have to find the right technology and the right partners as well. We look for technologies that enable or open up our platform to be intuitive and easy to use,” said Holbrook.

RICK HOLBROOK CTO, MTM INC.

ALAINA MACIÁ TITLE: PRESIDENT AND CEO Named among the 2012 Most Influential Businesswomen by the St. Louis Business Journal. Alaina has taken the non-emergency transportation management business to a new level by focusing on strategic planning, proven management processes, and continued business and personal improvement.

MEET THE TEAM

“ We spend a lot of time looking for the right partners. We don’t use the ‘P’ word lightly when it comes to our technology partners.

We find ones that are flexible, that are open, that allow us to flex the system in whatever manner that makes sense so we can streamline workflows”

RICK HOLBROOK TITLE: CTO Driven entrepreneurial and innovative Chief Executive with nearly 35 years of leading healthcare industry organizations. Expertise in founding numerous inventions, emerging markets and software solutions.

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Alaina Macia talks about how MTM is helping people

He goes on to explain, “We spend a lot of time looking for the right partners. We don’t use the ‘P’ word lightly when it comes to our technology partners. We find ones that are flexible, that are open, that allow us to flex the system in whatever manner that makes sense so we can streamline workflows and

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make life easier for the people who need to leverage our system and so we can deliver on our promises in the best way possible.”

The platform was carefully designed with users at heart to ensure optimal extraction of benefits for all parties, from the end-user to service partners, and is at the forefront of MTMs success.

A digital claims process eliminates the likelihood of errors and speeds up the claims process, which improves cash flow, and safeguards against fraud, waste, and abuse.

Driver complaints are investigated and validated through GPS records. MTM is also able to monitor who downloads the app and uses the information to offer assistance and help increase adoption rates.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. As all members have a personal profile and the app downloaded onto a device, they can send out targeted marketing to help clients

MTM INC.

“ At heart, MTM is a company that cares about community impact, and we feel very strongly about diversity, equity, inclusion, and climate change.

And so we take a stand on these positions” ALAINA MACIÁ

PRESIDENT AND CEO, MTM INC.

Addressing Social Determinants of Health Access to Quality Healthcare Economic Stability Neighborhood & Physical Environment Education Food Quality & Stability Community & Social Contact

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Top 5 reasons customers are choosing AWS Guru Gurushankar, PhD, Worldwide leader of medical devices, shares five reasons customers are choosing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Guru Gurushankar, PhD, is the worldwide leader for medical devices within AWS’s healthcare and life science practice and holds over 25 years of healthcare and medical device experience. Dr Gurushankar took a moment to share the top reasons he believes customers are choosing AWS. Agility “AWS lets customers quickly access resources as they need them, deploying hundreds or even thousands of servers in just minutes. This means customers can very quickly develop and roll out new applications, and it means teams can experiment and innovate more quickly and frequently.

If an experiment fails, you can always de-provision those resources without risk.”

Cost savings “If you look at how people end up moving to the cloud, almost always the conversation starter is around cost.

AWS allows customers to trade capital expense for variable expense, and they only pay for IT as they consume it.

And the variable expense is much lower than what customers can do for themselves because of AWS’s economies of scale.”

Elasticity “Customers used to over-provision to ensure they had the capacity to handle their business operations at peak level of activity. Now they can provision the resources that they actually need, knowing that they can instantly scale up and scale down along with the needs of their business, which reduces the cost.”

Innovation “The fourth reason is the speed of innovation. Because customers can focus their IT resources on developing applications that differentiate their business and transform their customers’ experiences, instead of spending time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing their infrastructure and data services.”

Globality “AWS allows customers to deploy globally in minutes. AWS has the concepts of a region, which is a physical location around the world where we have a cluster of data centres.

AWS customers leverage around 76 availability zones across 24 geographic regions worldwide. And we are continuously adding new regions. We have had more than two, three regions announced very recently, and we don’t plan to stop there.”

One such customer is MTM, a leading non-emergency medical transportation broker based in the United States. Dr Gurushankar shares how the culture and mindset at AWS helps drive successful objectives-based customer partnerships.

“AWS customers have come to appreciate that our culture is really different. We are unusually customer-focused versus competitive focused. In fact, 90% of all the things we build are driven by what customers like MTM tell us and how they matter to them. We’re also pioneers, and we hire builders. We’re always looking at how they can reinvent flawed customer experiences. And finally, we are unusually long-term oriented. We are trying to build relationships and businesses that will outlast all of us.”

MTM INC.

get a word out. Contract protocols such as two-day notice requirements are built in to ensure compliance. And for their logistical partners, drivers are able to see open orders and route and schedule pickups. MTM also has a dispatch team to ensure lastminute requests are fulfilled and help with any issues.

For their clients, MTM provides a near real-time customizable dashboard that can monitor KPIs and provide decisionmakers with real-time data to help drive improvements.

Through their unwavering dedication to delivering the highest quality of service and their ability to develop comprehensive

“ We look for technologies that enable or open up our platform to be intuitive and easy to use” RICK HOLBROOK

provider networks, they help clients accomplish their objectives while achieving their vision of communities without barriers.

And they do it all while remaining committed to working towards sustainability and fairness for all. “At heart, MTM is a company that cares about community impact, and we feel very strongly about diversity, equity, inclusion, and climate change. And so we take a stand on these positions. We talk about it frequently, both publicly and with our employee base. And we know that our employees are aligned with our mission and our vision. And these are societal commitments to make our community better,” says Maciá.

The proof is in the pudding. MTM boasts an incredibly long list of awards and accolades, but most notably in corporate culture and wellness, aligning with their core values.

As we said in the beginning, by focusing on doing the right things, MTM really has created a beautiful thing.

CTO, MTM INC.

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AI & DATA ANALYTICS

2.0

SOFTWARE

The Next Generation

Software is reinventing itself (sometimes literally). Here are some of the biggest shifts, and the companies leading the charge

S

oftware is evolving to the extent that increasingly even the word ‘software’ is falling from favour. In a world of platforms, ecosystems and solutions, we need to understand the direction of travel for what is, when all’s said and done, code.

So what are the trends driving this new age of software, where is it taking us, and who is at the wheel. Read on to find out.

THE TREND

THE SOFTWARE

The single biggest trend in software right now is containerisation, a magic box of application deployment that exists outside everything else, and yet within it. Fast, accessible from anywhere, on anything, it’s the very definition of a magic bullet and tmakes virtual machines look like penny farthings up against a racing car. Of course, it’s also fabulously complicated to implement, requiring specialised engineers and deeply clever integration, but when it works, it makes applications faster, more reliable and safer. And the first green shoots of containerisation becoming mainstream – well, more affordable – are starting to appear.

With only two serious players in the containerisation market – Docker and Kubernetes – it’s always seemed likely that one would streak ahead. Kubernetes is that one, but don’t rush out to buy shares yet. K8s, as it’s known to its friends, is an open-source platform and everyone who’s everyone is building parallel code they can tweak to their own needs. Expect to see heavy competition in the Kubernetes-core branded product market as this trend develops.

CONTAINERISATION

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KUBERNETES

AI & DATA ANALYTICS

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AI & DATA ANALYTICS

THE TREND

EDGE COMPUTING Moving data closer to where it’s needed makes everything work faster. After the flurry that was cloud computing, companies are starting to realise that pushing everything back and forth is a relatively slow and painful process when you can keep it nearby and have data speeds really fly. With the advent of 5G, edge computing is about to become a staple of enterprise IT at scale, particularly when deployed as part of an IoT network.

THE SOFTWARE

AWS IOT GREENGRASS The two big players in edge are Microsoft (Azure) and AWS, which unsurprisingly has a variety of edge data projects up its sleeve.

IoT Greengrass is a runtime environment for edge computing which can work alongside the company’s Snow suite of infrastructure products to streamline edge networking in a localised environment, without leaving big brother’s world-beating data management universe. technologymagazine.com

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THE TREND ENTERPRISE DATA PLATFORM

THE SOFTWARE

It may not be new or sexy, but enterprise data management has seen a steep rise in its curve as companies take advantage of Covid-19 to reassess – and in most cases, accelerate – their digital transformation. That’s why there has never been a more important time to be at the top of your end-to-end data software game, from harvest to management to visualisation. As companies shop for the product that works for them in the medium to long-term, they’ll be looking for unified data solutions and enduring partnerships.

Snowflake is a relative newcomer to the data world but its product, Data Cloud, is taking the business world by storm, allowing fast and secure access to sharable data and promising an end to data silos and vulnerabilities. Set up by former Oracle employees in 2012, it has bullied its way to the top ranks of enterprise data management, no mean feat when the incumbent companies are stalwarts with deep pockets and long-held relationships.

Expect to see more great things from Snowflake as time goes on.

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SNOWFLAKE

AI & DATA ANALYTICS

THE TREND NO CODE / LOW CODE It’s an appealing prospect, but no code / low code (NCLC) is big business, particularly when it comes to the swathes of middleranking companies who can’t invest in expensive integrations that require teams of engineers writing bespoke code. The theory is simple: NCLC is less customisable than custom development, but it can be tuned by the relative layman to produce comparable results to the more costly solutions available to those with deeper pockets and more complicated needs.

Perversely for something that manages to work almost magically, it’s also prized for its lack of smoke-and-mirrors coding which appeals to technologically naive managers.

THE SOFTWARE BUBBLE When it comes to NCLC, Bubble has it locked. An intuitive drag-and-drop interface, twinned with basic logic patterns makes producing HTML more like a computer game than a development task. For the doubters, Bubble has a tool on its website allowing the casual browser to edit the company’s own homepage. There’s a huge amount of customisation available and Bubble will also host and deploy, eliminating the need for further partners.

THE TREND DATA STREAMING Stop thinking about Netflix. We’re talking about data streaming which… okay, Netflix is, but in a limited way. Data streaming is becoming – and is about to become even more – important, with data gathering in businesses a core part of the DX strategy. But streamed data isn’t easy. There’s bounded data, which exists in totality and should only be computed once it has all been gathered, and unbounded data, which continues to collect in a theoretically endless stream. Those two entities need to be managed alongside each other, as well as balancing computational capacity in a sensible manner.

THE SOFTWARE APACHE FLINK Flink is difficult to describe, either as an application, or as a runtime or as an architecture. But its massive computational brain will take multiple data streams and organise them into workable data snapshots – easier said than done, hence the complexity. Its functionality is also critical for automation of event-driven applications, where activity is triggered by a certain data state. The Apache Foundation’s Spark should also get an honourable mention in large-scale data processing.

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NTT LTD.

NTT: Supporting a new generation of SAP capability in the cloud How NTT’s SAP capabilities on Azure can provide a trusted path for enterpriseready innovation in the cloud

WRITTEN BY: DAN BRIGHTMORE PRODUCED BY: CRAIG KILLINGBACK

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NTT Ltd. is helping its customers bring the intelligence, agility and security of Azure to their SAP applications. Kirk Compton, Vice President of Cloud & Enterprise Application Management Services for NTT Ltd. in the Americas, explains how NTT is partnering with Microsoft and SAP on a global scale working towards automation and standardization to help solve operations challenges. “When our customers are looking to move their workloads to the Azure platform, we've got the data center space, the network, and the people who can enable them to successfully migrate to a cloud strategy.”

That partnership has matured over the past year. In December 2020 NTT announced a broader alliance with SAP around global supply chain and sustainability which will see the two working together to help develop the next generation of solutions for enterprise customers. Along with a partnership with Microsoft, announced in 2019 to develop global initiatives with Azure, the three companies are now in a unique position to offer solutions that draw on a collective synergy.

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“ We’re able to remove the barriers to cloud adoption and help our customers modernize SAP architecture to optimize processes and increase productivity.”

Kirk Compton

Vice President Cloud & Enterprise Application Managed Services, Sales, Americas, NTT Ltd.

Automation & Standardization For many organizations the SAP environment is a behemoth; a core application for business operations. It touches most business units and is critical to financial transactions, supply chains, HR, payroll and more. So, when customers are thinking about moving to the cloud the key considerations will always be time and cost.

“If I'm a CIO and I want to figure out what it's going to take to get me into the cloud environment. I've got to dedicate members of my team to analysing that proposition just to figure out my strategy; and that can be very expensive,” reasons Compton. “At NTT we’ve partnered with Microsoft and developed a micro-site with an assessment tool that allows customers to build that picture for free; they don’t need to hire us to make that assessment. What does their SAP environment look like? What applications do they have? What is the size of the environment? And through that intake, we're able to provide a report providing that picture and how long it might take to migrate these environments; and perhaps most importantly, what the estimated cost would look like. What is your business going to be like in the cloud environment? Is it truly a cost saving? Where is the ROI?” This assessment strategy is all about the automation and standardization of new

DP NTT Kirk Compton

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NTT LTD.

Migrating SAP to Azure cloud – the big business benefits • Optimize cost efficiencies Move from CapEx to OpEx, and drive down costs through pay as you go pricing models for both managed services and cloud consumption.

• The agility to prepare for the future Imagine having an IT infrastructure that can flex with seasonal business requirements and achieve greater agility with Azure Virtual Machines.

• Scale while reducing risk Safeguard your SAP platform against unforeseen events with our cutting-edge, proven technology. High availability options are simple when your ERP system is hosted on Azure.

• Gain valuable business intelligence Accelerate innovation with actionable data on your SAP systems to improve your decision making.

• Empower your business to do more, on a global scale Enterprises have been fast to adopt cloud for non-critical applications but maybe nervous about migrating mission-critical SAP applications. Azure cloud is about speed, automation, scalability, time-tovalue, and innovation. Today, the cloud becomes more than just a deployment option, it becomes an enabler of expanded capabilities.

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NetApp: Agile and secure data handling Enabling visibility over performance, future proofed stability for upgrades and enhanced data management

by Dan Brightmore

NetApp drives digital transformation for organisations migrating their data and SAP workloads to the cloud. You can trust the storage specialists to deliver business continuity, whether that’s in a private on-prem data center or in a public cloud with Azure, with a unified view.

Data transformation “We’re on this journey with our customers when one of the key things they need is consistency,” explains Michael Zakariudakis, Business Development Manager for the SAP Alliance at NetApp. “They need guaranteed flexibility to scale up and down as required, and with our NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP solution we enable a seamless data transformation experience for them.”

Secure speed of change When it comes to speed of execution, NetApp works with NTT to ensure their joint customers have the agility and visibility to execute change when their business needs to innovate. “When they need to act rapidly in a continually shifting market, we’re there for them,” assures Zakariudakis. “We make sure we can affect a total cost of ownership that considers operational change, business process change, and not just technology. Jointly with NTT, we provide the ability to transform their SAP application architecture securely.”

Future-proofed data stability Dealing with numerous landscape refreshes there are many iterations to navigate during a business transformation. “We can help our customers invest in the capacity and the performance they need at any point in time on their journey,” maintains Zakariudakis.

“Over-investment in a certain capacity, performance, tier, or stack can happen, and businesses find themselves locked in when faced with critical decisions. How can they move on with this transition? We help them invest in the right capacity performance at that key point in time.”

Learn more

NTT LTD.

strategic partners, help our customers reach their targets as quickly as possible so they can modernize SAP architecture to optimize processes and increase productivity.”

Following on from the assessment process, NTT runs workshops fuelled by a design thinking methodology to make sure business and IT are aligned on a strategy with the right priorities to move forward.

Business Intelligence Moving your enterprise environment to S/4HANA provides the ability to get access to your data faster with the accumulation of good data strategies one of the great benefits. Moving to that environment in the cloud allows businesses to take advantage of other Microsoft components and analytics solutions.

“There’s a significant amount of collaboration going on between the companies with the Microsoft Azure IOT hub and the SAP Leonardo solutions suite helping customers navigate the IOT space,” notes Compton. “It's amazing to see how artificial intelligence and machine learning are really starting to become operational in nature for our customers. Alongside this, at NTT, we’re also developing our smart solutions evident solutions, reducing impact and cost for customers to be able to get to the cloud more efficiently with limited business disruption – a key component to these upgrades.

“Downtime is something most companies don’t have the opportunity to factor in,” adds Compton.

NTT uses its S Discover tool that goes out across the network analysing every application and data point coming into a company’s SAP environment. “With our assessment we’re able to remove the barriers to cloud adoption and, with the support of our 118

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“ NetApp’s toolsets and capabilities help our clients get visibility into their performance and where their data is being secured and stored.”

Kirk Compton

Vice President Cloud & Enterprise Application Managed Services, Sales, Americas, NTT Ltd.

NTT LTD.

1952

Year NTT founded

USD11bn NTT Ltd. global revenue

40,000

Number of NTT Ltd. employees globally

in our work with the Las Vegas smart city project, the Tour de France and the IndyCar Series. We’re providing a lot of the live data analytics being used by sports broadcasters which shows how our collaboration with SAP on Azure provides speedy results.”

Partner smart to prepare your business for 2027 and beyond…

With mainstream support for the SAP ECC platform ending in 2025, and all core SAP products set to be optimized for the SAP HANA database, now is the time to consider transforming your SAP platform into an agile and flexible one that will remove complexities, improve efficiencies and drive your organization’s success for years to come. NTT believes Microsoft Azure is the ideal platform to support that migration and open up a world of new opportunities driven by continued innovation and business intelligence.

NetApp is a key strategic partner supporting these migration efforts. “The way they manage file systems for data, means that when businesses make that move to the Azure platform they can specifically call out their storage strategy,” explains Compton.

“NetApp’s toolsets and capabilities really help

Executive Profile:

Kirk Compton Title: VP Cloud & Enterprise Application Managed Services, Sales, Americas, NTT Ltd. Industry: Information Technology & Services Kirk Compton has a proven track record of continued success in delivering growth in global and regional leadership roles.

A market leader in client focused solution development, delivery and management, Compton drives enterprise growth by aligning corporate strategy ahead of market conditions and ever-changing technology solutions. He has held expansive roles at NTT Ltd. providing global, regional, and vertical leadership across multiple technology platforms – including ERP, hyperscalers, private cloud and most recently Smart solutions.

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NTT LTD.

Reacting to a Covid-19 world “The big trend we’ve seen during the global pandemic is consolidation,” explains Compton.

“With the work from home/work from anywhere methodology many organizations are looking to reduce their real estate spend on everything from office space to data centers. Moving a data center from a physical location that you're paying for to a cloud environment, that could be consumption-based, can help companies transition through the current challenges. As you migrate workloads, being able to spin up and spin down environments, to be able to do projects on demand without having to acquire infrastructure, without having to acquire a network, are part of that transformational

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experience for customers. How do I transform faster?”

“Allied to the push towards consolidation, the other big trend we’re seeing at NTT is organisations facing up to their staffing challenges and the need to up-skill,” reveals Compton. “SAP has produced a few reports over the last two years around the lack of skills in S/4HANA trained individuals due to cost constraints and budgeting. But that's really where our sweet spot is at NTT. We have the right skills, capabilities, and partnerships to be able to provide strategic solutions using a shared service model that’s becoming more and more attractive in the current climate.”

NTT LTD.

NTT Ltd.’s Managed Services client testimonial video

our clients get not only the visibility into their performance and where their data is being secured and stored, but as SAP matures, as the environments move forward, we've also got the NetApp capability to futureproof stability for our clients to handle upgrades and caching while managing the data that goes along with that.

All of this makes it a really critical component.”

Intel have also been investing in strategic partnerships with both NetApp and Microsoft for a number of years. “Using their IP, we’re utilising capabilities that have influenced our drive for automation and standardization,” reveals Compton. “It's the only way we can help customers reduce cost – that cost comes in many different areas across the decisionmaking process. Partnering with Microsoft to do the assessment, whether that's the actual performance of the environment or the

standardization of moving your environment to the Azure cloud, using the tools from NetApp and Intel are huge drivers for our customers.”

Certifications, Compliance & Security Setting up a network infrastructure with a strong foundation on Azure in NTT’s

“ Using Intel’s IP we’re utilising capabilities that influence our drive for automation and standardisation.”

Kirk Compton

Vice President Cloud & Enterprise Application Managed Services, Sales, Americas, NTT Ltd.

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AWAKEN YOUR DATA The only data center CPU with built-in AI acceleration. The latest 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors feature Intel Deep Learning Boost to accelerate your AI inference up to 30x*.

LEARN MORE

*Compared to previous generation hardware. For more complete information about performance and benchmark results, visit www.intel.com/benchmarks

THE COLLABORATIVE POWER OF THE ECOSYSTEM DELIVERING SUCCESS As an industry leader with the purpose to create worldchanging technology that enriches the lives of every person on earth, Intel has been and is at the forefront of technology growth and development, catering for all business solution needs.

Through a broad ecosystem, Intel is focused on delivering an end-to-end data portfolio that stretches from the edge to the cloud, powered by artificial intelligence all while being more secure. All of this is enabled and achieved through the strong collaboration of the ecosystem mentioned.

An often overlooked though integral part of the ecosystem is the Service Integrators (SI), also known as Solution Integrators, like NTT Limited, who have a global alliance with Intel, where together they solve difficult challenges and deliver business outcomes.

The role of said Service / Solution Integrators is to influence IT decisions, recommend on the architectural designs and deployment across on-premise and cloud, and ultimately deliver complete end-to-end hardware and software solutions together with the broader ecosystem of OEM & ISV partners like SAP and Cisco.

With enterprises embracing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and big data analytics, the solutions are required to access and handle large data sets faster, which can be addressed by Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory (PMem) which removes I/O bottlenecks to maximize CPU utilization. Intel & SAP have collaborated to bring Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory support to SAP HANA and Intel and the OEMs, like Cisco, have collaborated on system designs that support Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory modules allowing for a variety of configurations to suit all customer needs.

Intel and NTT Limited have collaborated for a number

of years, designing solutions that meet customer needs in industries such as enterprise, manufacturing, agriculture, automotive, financial, and more all around the world, with great success being realized when forces are combined with the greater ecosystem.

It is through insights gained while working through these relationships that Intel is able to create technologies like Intel® Software Guard Extensions (SGX). SGX enhances the last part of the data journey by securing data-in-use, enabling for example AI workloads to be performed on otherwise untapped data sources. In fact, 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors are the only mainstream data center CPU with built-in AI acceleration enabling organizations to deploy highly performant applications without using complex and expensive new hardware. By collaborating with Intel, along with Service / System Integrators like NTT Limited and the technology ecosystem clients can feel comfortable in the knowledge that their business challenges can be addressed, delivering the best possible outcomes.

THIS IS YOUR DATA ON INTEL Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. No product or component can be absolutely secure. Your costs and results may vary. © Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.

Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

NTT LTD.

“ We have the vertical expertise across the globe to manage SAP environments for our customers and help them implement systems, automate their environments, deliver on business outcome strategies, examine the different vertical solutions they want to run and operate new revenue channels.”

Kirk Compton

Vice President Cloud & Enterprise Application Managed Services, Sales, Americas, NTT Ltd.

data centers allows the company to stack up from an applications perspective with industry leading certifications, compliance and security. “We're Azure experts,” says Compton. “We've got the highest level of certifications from an SAP perspective.

Every year, SAP audits our operations and our data centers to make sure we stay at the highest level of compliancy for SAP environments. We’re really proud of the fact that for the past couple years, we've been the highest rated partner in the SAP ecosystem for these certifications with the highest level of security.”

Compton maintains that the process of optimizing an environment makes it even more important to ensure data is secure, optimal, being backed up and stored properly to perform at the highest level. “We have the vertical expertise across the globe to manage SAP environments for our customers and help them implement systems, automate their environments, deliver on business outcome strategies, examine the different vertical 124

March 2021

solutions they want to run and operate new revenue channels. But in the end, the real differentiator is that we have the best SAP people working for our customers.”

Time to transform The speed of business transformation, as witnessed in 2020, is changing. Legacy SAP solutions aren’t capable of meeting today’s

NTT LTD.

business challenges. Meanwhile, the public cloud is past the tipping point of enterprise adoption. NTT are making it possible to run your business better with SAP applications, and their data, in the Azure global hyperscale cloud.

“To succeed in today’s disruptive environment, it’s time to be decisive and start planning the move of your SAP systems to Azure,” affirms Compton. “By marrying your

SAP data to other data on Azure’s agile cloud platform, you’ll be able to use end-to-end, realtime insights to quickly enter new markets, fend off the competition, improve your margins, and grow your business.” So why wait?

There’s never been a better time to migrate.

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LANDMARK DIVIDEND

INVESTING IN OUR

DIGITAL FUTURE Landmark Dividend helps to develop investment, ownership and operating structures in cloud, colocation and critical infrastructure WRITTEN BY: DAN BRIGHTMORE PRODUCED BY: CAITLYN COLE

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T

he Digital Infrastructure team at Landmark Dividend collectively boasts decades of experience developing, owning and running data centers – working for the likes of Equinix and Digital Realty.

Leading that team is Christof Hammerli, the former Director of Corporate Development for Equinix (the world’s largest IBX data center and colocation provider).

“We might have competitors that, on paper at least, are bigger than us or have more capital available, but what differentiates us at Landmark is that we have a deep understanding of the industry from an operational perspective and can walk the walk and talk the talk with data center owners,” says Hammerli. “We’re not simply investment analysts, we speak their language. And it’s a specific technical language once you're on site. On the surface, it might be a real estate investment that you're making, but it’s a very specialized investment. I think our experience gives people on the other side of the transaction a lot of comfort that the group that's buying

LANDMARK DIVIDEND

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LANDMARK DIVIDEND

Christof Hammerli: Landmark Dividend

their data center actually knows what they're talking about and understands why this asset is mission-critical, and why it needs to be up and operational at all times. It makes a big difference and makes us a better buyer.”

Agility & Expertise Landmark has the expertise and agility to handle transactions from a million to hundreds of millions of dollars (a recent 18-month period saw the acquisition of 16 data centers) and has a broad appetite across the spectrum from a risk perspective.

“We acquire stabilized, core-type assets where there's a single tenant in place with a 10 to 15-year lease and very few moving parts,” offers Hammerli. “We also work with assets subject to very short leases, with tenants moving out or partial leasebacks in place, where we have a portion of a building that needs to be leased. In some cases, we take over operations with our partner, or provide a comprehensive service level 128

March 2021

agreement and actually take over ownership, to make sure that the equipment and infrastructure will deliver on expectations and provide the guaranteed uptime for the tenants to execute their businesses.”

Hammerli believes Landmark’s flexibility makes the company a true partner. During the three years since he arrived at Landmark and put the Digital Infrastructure team together, more than 30 transactions have been closed with brokers, bankers, engineers, large operators and enterprises. “They know who we are, that we know the space and that we do what we say we’re going to do.

When we agree to terms, they come back the exact same way from our attorneys and we don't take somebody to the closing table and re-trade at the last minute. That sets us apart from the competition much more so than us paying the highest price or having the cheapest capital.”

Landmark Dividend is a partner for the longterm with many long-standing

LANDMARK DIVIDEND

relationships with tenants over a decade or more. “In many cases we’ve known the CEO, CFO and CTO since a company’s inception and can offer the right advice and support for the challenging times we’ve experienced over the past year during the global pandemic,” says Hammerli. “Whether that’s looking at extending payment terms to navigate the step change of a COVID-19 world or improving sites. We don't buy an asset and let it sit there and merely collect the rent. We work actively with our tenants and partners to provide additional dollars to regenerate and expand sites to continue adding value to make sure these assets remain viable and keep up with the times. For example, you can increase power density or cooling. This approach positions Landmark well for success going forward, with continued growth expected in the U.S. and Canada, and international expansion, particularly in Europe.

Rising to the Challenge in a COVID-19 World Landmark saw its business double year-overyear in 2020 with industry growth accelerating

TITLE: HEAD OF DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE COMPANY: LANDMARK DIVIDEND INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY

EXECUTIVE BIO

European Expansion When COVID restrictions relax, Hammerli expects to hit the trail to Europe to push Landmark’s global expansion plans. “I grew up in Switzerland and worked in Europe as an equity analyst earlier in my career and later as Director of Corporate Development with Equinix, so I know the market well and have relationships with a number of the major operators,” he says. “It’s a natural move for the company to expand the portfolio and would be beneficial, not only for us, but also for many of our tenants and partners that have a global presence in Europe and the U.S. and need to provide a service across borders. We plan to set up a small team in Europe and actively source opportunities in the coming months.”

CHRISTOF HAMMERLI

Christof leads the Digital Infrastructure division at Landmark and has over 20 years of experience in various finance, risk management and corporate development roles. He is responsible for sourcing, negotiating and closing acquisitions with continued responsibility for asset and property management. Prior to joining Landmark, Christof was Chief Acquisitions Officer of Carter Validus. At CV he was instrumental in leading the development, acquisition, strategy and execution of two of the firm’s CV Mission-Critical REIT (Real Estate Investment Trusts) Data Center platforms. He was responsible for sourcing, negotiating, structuring and closing acquisitions, as well as strategic and operational leadership. Previously, Christof was Director of Corporate Development for Equinix, the world’s largest IBX data center and colocation provider, and the world’s largest public data center REIT (as measured by enterprise value), from 2007 through 2011, and before that worked for MetLife from 2004 to 2007, and Credit Suisse and Ernst & Young.

BCLP: MULTI-DISCIPLINARY DATA CENTER EXPERIENCE

JAMES GRICE @ BCLP LAW

MEETING THE LEGAL NEEDS OF THE DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE ECOSYSTEM ON A GLOBAL SCALE FROM M&A ASSET TRANSACTIONS TO ENERGY PLANNING The Data Center & Digital Infrastructure Team at international law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner draws from a deep well of knowledge and experience to help clients address all aspects of mission critical development, including tax incentives, construction, acquisition and sales, financing arrangements, operations, leasing, subleasing and co-location along with environmental permitting, power purchases, power procurement strategies and agreements, user agreements, SLAs and maintenance agreements.

ADDING VALUE “We’ve structured our service offering to provide a comprehensive perspective on all the disciplines that are relevant to both the digital infrastructure investor and the developer, owner and operator,” explains BCLP Partner James Grice. “We’re a force multiplier for companies like Landmark Dividend seeking to scale as needed on their projects with everything from a compressed timeline on diligence to transactional real estate documentation for a build-to-suit.”

GLOBAL SCALE As a global law firm, BCLP can draw on a team of 1,400 professionals with one of the largest real estate teams in the world, allowing it to deploy resources when and where necessary. The ability to scale smartly sets the firm apart and leaves it well placed to meet the growing demand for digital services and the infrastructure required to support them.

“The overall data center ecosystem is on the path to double digit annual growth in the foreseeable future,” forecasts Grice. “BCLP is in tune with the totality of that ecosystem and the infrastructure layer driving the internet, e-commerce and the digital economy.

For example, the hyperscale market is forecast to grow by at least 25% annually over the next five years with many new investors trying to penetrate the space. We have the experience and skill to support the virtual layer with data security and software, while also focusing on the infrastructure layer needed to drive that digital growth. We’re going to see more division and subsets develop within the asset class. Whatever shape that takes, we’re well placed to navigate the marketplace.” bclplaw.com

LANDMARK DIVIDEND

“ We have a deep understanding of the industry from an operational perspective and can walk the walk and talk the talk with data center owners.”

CHRISTOF HAMMERLI HEAD OF DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE, LANDMARK DIVIDEND

due to the work from home/work from anywhere requirements. The need for greater connectivity affected all aspects of the digital world including a multitude of environments that need connectivity from hyperscale services or in the cloud and at the edge.

Hammerli notes that closing transactions which require on-site appraisals has proved difficult, but business is booming.

“Everything initially took longer than usual, but the team did an amazing job figuring out that puzzle and putting it back together, and we have actually closed a record number of transactions. Raising additional capital has been impacted by the COVID restrictions.

While there is record interest from capital sources in the space, it's difficult to close a fund with new investors if they can't travel to see you or tour your sites.”

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Building a Business with Trusted Partners Mission-critical infrastructure investments require not only the expertise to drive frictionless connectivity across borders but also the boots on the ground to deliver vital support services. Landmark works with a trio of key partners: The company has in-house counsel but also teamed up with BCLP when the Digital Infrastructure division was launched, and they needed a legal partner to get to market quickly. Experts in negotiating data center leases, BCLP has a team dedicated to digital infrastructure and experience working with Fortune 50 companies and large enterprises.

“BCLP has the bandwidth to handle the volume of transactions we're processing, with multiple deals in parallel, and negotiate contracts and service-level agreements (“SLAs”) with large operators.

LANDMARK DIVIDEND

MARKING THE TRENDS

DID YOU KNOW...

“5G capabilities will bring new technologies that you and I don't even know that we need to have today,” reasons Hammerli. “And if we talked again in five years, we would say, ‘How did we ever do without it?’ These new technologies will need not only the 5G connectivity, but also the data centers behind it to handle, manipulate and store the data. I believe that this will drive the rise of edge computing, which in turn will drive data center growth overall.”

Hammerli believes there’s more need for data center space at the edge… “There are two separate trends going on at the same time. One is clearly the edge and building comparatively small data centers in many locations, in every city. Yet, at the same time, we're seeing the opposite trend, where hyperscalers are building massively large, highly efficient data centers that are not only driving down the cost of compute, but also driving the efficiency of the data centers themselves, and making them

greener. So, fewer data centers, but much, much larger in size. Those are the data centers located on a campus that may offer 100 megawatts of power, for example, versus an edge data center, which may offer less than a megawatt, in terms of power only.”

Hammerli also expects the colocation space to grow in between. “All of these different pieces need to be connected together, from the low latency that needs to be right where the end user is located, to the assistance in things like self-driving cars, all the way to the data that's on the largest scale that needs to be manipulated,” he notes. “Overall, I expect the space to grow.

Over the last four years a massive amount of capital has expressed interest in investing in this space. Four years ago, investing in data centers was considered an alternative asset class. Today, we're starting to work our way out of that definition and more into a core food group where the largest investors all now have an allocation.”

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LANDMARK DIVIDEND

Our Experience Delivers Results.

DH Capital is a private investment banking partnership combining deep industry expertise in digital infrastructure, telecommunications and SaaS having completed over 60 deals in the past 5 years aggregating over $18 billion in transaction value.

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LANDMARK DIVIDEND

“Four years ago, investing in data centers was considered an alternative asset class. Now it’s becoming a core food group for larger investors.”

CHRISTOF HAMMERLI

Their expertise gives us the confidence that they know the difference between real and perceived risks. They’re deal-makers,” says Hammerli. “It’s our plan to grow internationally, so BCLP is a true partner that has the experience to represent us on that stage. They’ve also made introductions and opened doors for us.”

DH Capital is a leading advisor to the data center and managed hosting sectors – having completed over 185 transactions totaling more than $30 billion. “They’re a niche investment banking firm within the digital infrastructure space,” explains Hammerli. “They’re one of the most important players – certainly the best connected with everyone from bankers

HEAD OF DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE, LANDMARK DIVIDEND

to operators to private equity groups. They’re very nimble at what they do and have been working with Landmark for the best part of the last ten years. They're incredibly creative partners and knowledgeable of the space.

They provide great research for us and we work with them on a number of fronts. Mostly deal-based and transaction-based, where we engage with them in helping us complete a deal or where they represent a seller on the other side, and then work with us to finalize the transaction.”

BCS is a Dallas-based end-to-end facility management solutions provider. “They’re technologymagazine.com

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“ BCLP has the bandwidth to handle the volume of transactions we're processing, with multiple deals in parallel, and negotiate contracts and SLAs with large operators.”

CHRISTOF HAMMERLI HEAD OF DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE, LANDMARK DIVIDEND

probably the most important factor for our tenants,” explains Hammerli. “They offer a complete turnkey solution where they provide anything from janitorial to security services, all the way through to infrastructure management and preventive maintenance. As landlords, we're not staffed or qualified to do this sort of work ourselves. Our customers and tenants interact with their teams on a daily basis so it’s an important relationship for us and a key extension of our service offering. They’re a true side-by-side partner and involved with us from the beginning on transactions as we look to negotiate SLAs. They have experience 136

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providing a range of services for systemically important data organizations that keep the country running, with every certification that could be required. They are trusted with the most important data in the world and are incredibly important to Landmark.”

2021 Landmark is planning to expand its portfolio in 2021, with a focus on larger acquisitions.

“We want to build on our success from 2020 and deliver an even better year this year,” maintains Hammerli. “From a total acquisitions perspective, we're looking

LANDMARK DIVIDEND

to grow that number again with portfolio acquisitions that include multiple data centers in one package. Traditionally, we focused almost exclusively on individual asset acquisitions where every transaction we closed was one building and one data center. With the help of our capital partners, we plan to pursue existing portfolios with as many as 15 assets in one acquisition.”

Hammerli reveals that there will also be greater emphasis on buildto-suit hyperscale projects. “We’ll focus our efforts this year on brand-

new development opportunities with large enterprises, typically hyperscale providers, that are looking for new buildings, a new shell in a particular market, and we provide the capital – from acquisition of land to construction and all the way to take-out.”

With the team Hammerli has put in place, and the bench depth of key partners at Landmark’s disposal, you should not bet against them in doubling down again this year.

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NEWMONT

Luis Canepari CIO, Newmont

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NEWMONT

Newmont:

MAKING TECHNOLOGY

THE FUTURE OF MINING

How the world’s leading gold miner is digitally transforming to rethink the mining life cycle, unlock productivity, improve safety, reduce costs and support sustainability

N

WRITTEN BY: DAN BRIGHTMORE

ewmont’s considered implementation of technology is a key part of the digital journey towards operational efficiency and sustainability across its global operations. Chief Information Officer, Luis Canepari, is championing the company’s digital transformation efforts as it seeks to embrace automation and electrification.

Automation “The era of manual processes in mining is over,” states Canepari. “Blasting, drilling, hauling, the processes at mills – all will become increasingly automated over the next 20 years. Whether we like it or not as an industry, that's where we're going to have to go if we want to remain competitive.”

PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE The process of automation is well underway at Newmont’s Boddington Mine in Australia, which will be the first open pit gold mine in the world with an autonomous haul truck fleet (AHS). Boddington’s autonomous haulage trucks feature rigorous safety controls to reduce employee exposure to potential vehicle interactions. Newmont is also executing a robust people strategy at Boddington, providing opportunities for reskilling and redeployment of haul truck drivers to other roles supporting the AHS. Artificial Intelligence “Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics go hand-in-hand with automation,” adds Canepari. “Access to data is key for our technologymagazine.com

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Luis Canepari: Newmonts biggest challenges

operations. Correlating our drill data with the block modelling allows us to make faster decisions based on real insights. If you look at the success ratio for exploration in mining, it's pretty low; if we can improve that by a couple of percentage points, it will have a significant impact on our reserves. With data being generated across our organization, the ability to use artificial intelligence to tell us where our next drill site should be is a game-changer.”

Digital Transformation Compared to other industries, mining has been slow to adapt to new technologies. Canepari pledges Newmont is aiming to rethink the mining lifecycle. “We’ve had a huge success with our first electrified mine at Borden, and we’re taking all the lessons learned from projects like these, and making them part of our Newmont mining model. Every new mine we're building, we're trying to re-create that digital transformation experience from our other mines.”

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Rapid Discovery with IBM Digital transformation has been a major undertaking for the IT department at Newmont. “The partnership with vendors like IBM, supports our work to consolidate our systems and further realize the synergies we have across the business since the acquisition of Goldcorp in 2019.”

IBM was brought in through a rigorous RFP process. “We demonstrated to Newmont that we would bring top talent, and keep them there, to effect the changes needed successfully and bring these two companies’ systems together across finance, master data and supply chain management,” recalls Gene Allen, a Partner at IBM Global Business Services.

“We had to learn how to dance together. We are both 100-year-old companies, but we used Rapid Discovery, an Enhance Program Launch and Agile methodology to help us deliver successfully together smoothly and efficiently.”

IBM implemented Rapid Discovery to support this delivery. “We were looking at

NEWMONT

the five-year roadmap for Newmont to plan how everything should be sequenced and budgeted to accelerate this digital journey together,” explains Allen. Because change is rapid in the mining industry, it was important to identify the different constituencies in Newmont and how the move to a digital core should be sequenced to modernize, eliminate redundancies and sequence their systems changes in years to come.”

Canepari highlights that Newmont piggybacked on IBM’s M&A experience to place all systems into one single landscape.

“Rapid Discovery was about bringing our key stakeholders together across every business function for the most optimal outcome.”

LUIS CANEPARI TITLE: CIO INDUSTRY: MINING LOCATION: USA

“ With the migration of all our systems to the cloud, we’ve managed to shut down five data centers already.”

LUIS CANEPARI CIO, NEWMONT

EXECUTIVE BIO

Operational & Technological Alignment Canepari’s team are focused on catering to all stakeholders, from the mining sites to the back office. “We build trust and reliability. For us to enable automation, AI and push forward with this digital transformation our system needs to be reliable, even during a global pandemic, and our networks need to remain operational at all sites, no matter how remote their locations,” he says.

Luis Canepari joined Newmont in April 2019 as Vice President and Chief Information Officer; having most recently served as Goldcorp’s Vice President, Technology since 2012.

As CIO, Luis leads Newmont’s information technology organization and is responsible for driving and overseeing enterprise-wide plans to further realize value from Newmont’s strategic business and technology investments.

Luis has a history of leading major transformation and innovation initiatives.

He was honored with a 2017 CIO 100 Award for business and technology innovation, and the 2014 Business in Vancouver Forty Under 40 Award.

Before joining Goldcorp, Luis was Director of Engineering and Construction at AES Corporation, responsible for leading major capital projects in Latin America and recognized for his significant community contributions. Prior to that, he held various IT leadership roles at AES and ExxonMobil Corporation. Luis holds an MBA from Georgetown University. He also holds a Bachelor in Science in Systems Engineering from Universidad Metropolitana. He is also a Certified Information Security Manager and a Certified Information Security Auditor.

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The pressure of the global pandemic has allowed Canepari’s IT team to test out new ideas. “With so many of us working remotely it's been the biggest experiment for remote operations that we’ve ever had as a company,” he notes.

“We have thousands of employees working from home. It has completely shifted the mindset from the idea that we all needed to be sitting at the mine site. This past challenging year has given us the opportunity to learn how to make our operations more efficient.

Everything we’ve invested in, is beginning to pay off. We have resilient networks and a reliable infrastructure backbone that allows us to work remotely. And now that we have tested them to the fullest, we can factor these into our operations.

Working remotely is also enabling Newmont’s IT organization to attract a more diverse workforce and overcome the challenge of what Canepari identifies as the misconceptions around the risks of a job in the mining industry. “By widening the net for outsourcing we’ll be able to attract even more talent to our IT organization.”

SUSTAINABILITY

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DID YOU KNOW...

Technology will continue to support Newmont’s sustainability efforts as the business looks to develop onsite renewable power generation and energy efficiencies. It’s all part of a new ethos for the business spearheaded

by CEO Tom Palmer. The work from home/work from anywhere paradigm prompted by the global pandemic has seen Newmont, like many other businesses, embrace proven methods of business interaction offering the flexibility that connects the boots on the ground to the boardroom. How the business is powered, both by people and fuel, is under constant review.

“Both new and existing mines are going to significantly reduce our emissions in the future. We have committed to a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030, with an aspiration of reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050,” says Canepari.

“It’s one of our biggest priorities and will be supported by the continued electrification of our mines.”

Strategic Partnerships Consolidating the approach to partnerships since the merger with Goldcorp has been vital for Canepari and his team. “At the end of the day, more than half of my IT organization is outsourced,” he says. “Therefore, it’s really important to work with the right partners to create lasting collaborations that can support ERP and our business transformation. Our partners are helping us drive the outcomes we’re expecting in the short term. They allow us to scale and de-scale, depending on our needs. Just as important is how they culturally fit with our organization. We aim to work with companies who can easily adapt to our style and understand our requirements for a higher

NEWMONT

Luis Canepari: Newmonts Digital transformation

level of detail. It is that higher level of detail that keeps our employees safe.”

To leverage automation and artificial intelligence, a robust and stable network is key. Newmont is working with Starlink and other private LTE providers to enable connectivity across all areas of its mines and at remote exploration sites across the globe.

“Starlink doesn’t rely on traditional ground infrastructure,” says Canepari. “This type of satellite connectivity can deliver highspeed broadband internet ensuring the low latency that can support our efforts in remote locations.”

Innovation in the cloud “The migration to SAP S/4HANA and bringing our infrastructure to the hybrid cloud - has given us more agility; we can deliver projects faster and move more rapidly,” reveals Canepari. “It also gives us the opportunity to experiment with proven tools from other industries. We’re getting out of the

“ Blasting, drilling, hauling, the processes at mills – all aspect of mining will become increasingly automated over the next 20 years.”

LUIS CANEPARI CIO, NEWMONT

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Luis Canepari: Newmonts Latest Achievements

“ Borden’s electric underground fleet eliminate diesel particulate matter from the underground environment and lower greenhouse gas emissions.”

TOM PALMER CEO, NEWMONT

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NEWMONT

infrastructure business and re-training our team to move away from supporting servers to focus on finding opportunities to make our operations more efficient.”

Canepari adds that cloud adoption is driving value by allowing him to deploy his team on more meaningful projects. “With the migration of all our systems to the cloud, we’ve managed to shut down five data centers already.

We're starting to explore the possibilities of Edge Computing and what that means for our mines.”

BORDEN – ‘MINE OF THE FUTURE’

DID YOU KNOW...

Technology is the future of mining Mining companies are becoming technology companies and Canepari is excited by the chance to both boost production levels as well as ensure the safety of employees across the globe. “With more and more sensors and

In 2019 Newmont inaugurated its Borden Gold Project, Ontario’s mine of the future, featuring state-of-the-art health and safety controls, digital mining technologies and processes, and low-carbon energy vehicles.

Anchored in a mutually beneficial partnership with local communities, Borden achieved commercial production on schedule within budget.

At 1,000 square kilometres, Borden’s land package represents additional exploration upside, as the deposit remains open at depth in a favourable mining jurisdiction.

“Borden opened a new gold mining district in Ontario and profitably extended operations at the Porcupine complex near Timmins,” explains Newmont CEO Tom Palmer. “In addition, Borden’s electric underground fleet eliminate diesel particulate matter from the underground environment and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

This will help reduce energy costs, protect employee health and minimize impacts to the environment.”

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CYBERSECURITY

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DID YOU KNOW...

Cybersecurity has taken on greater significance for Newmont in the age of autonomous trucks and drills.

Canepari points out that, unlike securing SAP or payroll data, safety is at stake.

“As CIO, I’m focused on how we ensure the right controls in place to secure this new technology, when just ten years ago it wasn’t even on the agenda. We need to provide true segmentation across the network with innovation and compartmentalization so we don't have the entire company exposed at any given time. A production system in Africa needn’t be exposed to a risk that we may have in Australia and so forth. We’re trying to contain risk to smaller components and manage it better.”

Canepari measures success more in his team’s ability to respond rather than their ability to prevent. “It’s not just about firewalls,” he says. “We must develop the ability to quickly identify the risk, any breaches, and respond rapidly to them.

That’s the biggest change in culture that I see from a cybersecurity perspective.

It’s about really focusing on the response time, and the recovery is paramount.”

NEWMONT

“We had to learn how to dance together.

We are both 100-year-old companies, but we used Rapid Discovery, an Enhance Program Launch and Agile methodology to help us deliver successfully together smoothly and efficiently.”

GENE ALLEN

PARTNER, IBM GLOBAL BUSINESS SERVICES

devices connected to our operations we can analyze the data via the cloud in real time to improve efficiencies and safety at every level.

The role of a CIO has changed significantly; from providing systems to providing the value that delivers safer working conditions.”

Canepari also sees it as his team’s responsibility to enable the company to meet its emissions reduction targets and allow operations to become more environmentally friendly. “As CIO, system abilities are part of my DNA and I believe as a company, we need to leverage technology to develop our systems to better harness energy management, emissions controls and water management as they will be significant drivers in terms of the success of a mining company over the next 20 years.”

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Yeo Teck Guan, Chief Business Technology Officer

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SINGAPORE POOLS PRIVATE LIMITED

DIGITALLY TRANSFORMING CULTURE AND CUSTOMER

EXPERIENCE Yeo Teck Guan discusses change management, COVID-19, and the digital transformation of Singapore’s state-owned gambling organisation.

WRITTEN BY: HARRY MENEAR

Y

eo Teck Guan is a man on a mission.

Since joining Singapore Pools Singapore’s state-owned gambling non-profit - in 2012, Yeo has worked tirelessly to enact a complete digital overview of the organisation’s capabilities and strategy. “Digital transformation is key. So it has been important to figure out how Singapore Pools, as a very traditional company with a long history, could leverage technology,” he explains. “Along the way we've learned a lot about how best to shape the customer experience and better support our customers.”

This month, we sat down with Yeo to discuss the ongoing digital transformation strategy he is spearheading, enhancing Singapore Pools to be a more agile, digitallyempowered business.

PRODUCED BY: KRISTOFER PALMER A Safer Bet When Singapore gained its independence in 1965, the new government found itself faced with a number of challenges, one of which being illegal gambling. However, the new government was aware that a blanket ban - like Prohibition in the United States - would simply drive those activities underground, putting more money in the pockets of triads and illegal bookkeepers, creating an unsafe experience for Singaporeans looking to bet.

“During that time there were a lot of illegal activities, including gambling, that were causing problems for the country,” explains Yeo. “So, in 1968, the government set up Singapore Pools to provide people who wanted to bet with a safe and trusted means to do so, and to use the funds to support our community.” technologymagazine.com

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SINGAPORE POOLS PRIVATE LIMITED

The organisation is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Tote Board, which is a statutory board under the Ministry of Finance.. Over the past 50 years, Singapore Pools as played a leading role in combating the country’s illegal gambling scene.

“Our mission was to provide those people who bet with a safe and trusted environment in which to do it, and ensure that the surplus revenue from gambling in Singapore could be channelled back into supporting the community through charities, rather than lining the pockets of illegal syndicates,” Yeo explains, adding that, in the decades since its inception, Singapore Pools has earned the trust of the country’s citizens.

First and foremost, winnings are tax-exempt, so winners get to keep every dollar of their prize money. “Unlike in a lot of other countries, if you win a million dollars, you get to keep a million dollars,” says Yeo. And all the surplus 150

March 2021

revenue is channelled back to the government where it's used to build national stadiums and so forth.”

In the 2019/2020 financial year, Singapore Pools collected close to S$9bn. Of that total, S$6.3bn - 70% of the total - was returned to the winners, 22% was collected by the government as tax revenue, and 5% was channelled to the Tote Board to be redirected to charities and grants that support the arts, community development, charity, education, health and sports sectors, with the remaining 3% representing the organisation’s operating costs.

Digitally Transforming the Customer Experience The first step Yeo and his team took was transforming the Singapore Pools’ customer touchpoints, which were very traditional counter-service based and in-person when he arrived.In 2016, the team launched an

SINGAPORE POOLS PRIVATE LIMITED

enhanced Singapore Pools Account service that allowed customers to manage their accounts and place bets online. The platform is also supporting Singapore Pools’ efforts to work with the authorities on combating illegal gambling activity.

Next, Yeo and his team rolled out new, digital branches. “Traditionally, customers come into our physical locations, speak to someone at a counter to place their bets, pay their money and so forth,” Yeo explains. “The digital branches allow our customers to access our services using new technologies, and conduct transactions in a way that is paperless, cashless and queueless.”

YEO TECK GUAN TITLE: CHIEF BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY OFFICER COMPANY: SINGAPORE POOLS INDUSTRY: GAMING LOCATION: SINGAPORE

“ Our mission is to provide those people who like to bet with a safe and trusted environment in which to do it” YEO TECK GUAN

CHIEF BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SINGAPORE POOLS

EXECUTIVE BIO

Socially Responsible Gambling Both the Singapore Pools app and digital branches will explore facial recognition in their onboarding process, not only to make the customer experience more frictionless and improve security, but also

Yeo Teck Guan is the Chief Business Technology Officer of Singapore Pools, a subsidiary of Tote Board. He is responsible for leading digital transformation and innovation within the organisation, while providing leadership to spearhead all Information Technology initiatives.

As a digital evangelist at heart, his passion is to drive innovation and the digital acumen within the organisation, to grow its strengths as a contributor to the community.

Outside of Singapore Pools, he is active within the business and professional community to contribute his expertise and knowledge to fulfil the mission and objectives of non-profit organisations and committees.

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Adoption of digital technology to transform services and businesses Cisco has been proud to partner with Singapore Pools, helping them enhance their data center infrastructure. They have pivoted well to a digital-first world and we were proud to help them develop their various digital channels.

Through our time with them, we have also helped Singapore Pools develop a comprehensive centralised platform for iShine Cloud, which was set up to provide charities with an affordable IT platform.

Learn more

ADVERT DIAMO PLATI

Cisco and Singapore Pools: Innovation, Security and Trust

SPREAD OND OR INUM

Andy Lee, Managing Director of Cisco Singapore & Brunei, on working with Singapore Pools on their digital transformation journey.

Cisco Systems is a pillar of the digital age, helping companies of all sizes develop a roadmap for their digital transformation journey, transforming the way people connect, communicate and collaborate.

“We use technology as the bridge between hope and possibility,” explains Andy Lee, Cisco’s Managing Director for Singapore and Brunei. “We help our customers build simpler, more secure and more cost-effective networks, in order to help them, not only unlock today’s opportunities, but also to ensure they are ready for the future.”

Cisco was chosen by Singapore Pools as a key technology partner, helping them leverage technology from AI and big data to automation and cyber security in order to make better, more informed decisions. It’s a long-standing relationship built on mutual trust and a shared enthusiasm for innovation.

“We have a deep understanding of Singapore Pools’ core vision, business priorities and how they run their operations,” says Mr. Lee, emphasising just how important “collaboration and trust” are to the success of their joint venture.

During the past 12 months, as the world found itself thrown into a new, often uncomfortable reality, Cisco has been an essential part of Singapore Pools’ support structure, as the company made the transition to a remote working model “almost overnight.”

Mr. Lee stresses just how important technology has been as an enabler in managing that transition, something that has only served to elevate Cisco’s importance to its partners. By leveraging its cutting edge networking solutions, Cisco has been able to help partners like Singapore Pools “ease the transition to the new digital reality of a remote and distributed workforce.”

Both Mr. Lee and Mr. Yeo are irrepressible disruptors whose work is never done. Mr Yeo has big plans for Singapore Pools, and Mr. Lee plans on being there to help every step of the way.

“We are proud to partner with Singapore Pools on their digital transformation journey to streamline and automate all their manual processes,” says Mr. Lee. “We look forward to working closely with them to drive productivity, efficiency and long term business resiliency, in order to ensure a seamless transformation from the old to the now to the new.”

SINGAPORE POOLS PRIVATE LIMITED

TYPES OF PRODUCTS Singapore Pools' roster of products has evolved over the years, offering an alternative to illegal gambling avenues while also keeping to the organisation’s mission to promote socially responsible gambling.

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DID YOU KNOW...

Toto is a 6-out-of-49 state lottery game.

First played in 1968, Toto is Singapore Pools’ oldest, and one of its most popular products.

The Singapore Sweep was introduced in 1969, and involves a seven-digit sweepstake drawn once a month.

4D is Singapore Pools’ third lottery. The four-digit game hit the market in May of 1986 and holds prize draws every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday.

Lastly, in 1999, Singapore Pools added sports betting to its portfolio, initially covering football, but adding motorsport in 2008 and horse racing in 2019.

to help further the organisation’s mission to promote socially responsible gambling.

“By leveraging on facial recognition, we will be able to protect the security of our mobile app users, to prevent unintended bets through unauthorized access” Singapore Pools is a member of the World Lottery Association (WLA), which comprises more than 80 countries and oversees socially

SINGAPORE POOLS PRIVATE LIMITED

responsible gambling practices across the globe. “We have achieved the highest level of certification from the WLA, which we have maintained since 2012,” says Yeo. At the same time, Yeo adds that they partner with the Singapore government and the National Council on Problem Gambling to promote safer play, and work towards minimising the dangers of problem gambling to their customers

In the Wake of COVID-19 The Coronavirus pandemic had a dramatic effect on the operations of enterprises across the world, with some being better prepared to meet its challenges than others. “COVID-19 has created a number of pain points for us, and solving them has required a change mindset,” says Yeo. Singapore went into lockdown for two technologymagazine.com

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IMPOSSIBLE DOES NOT C O M P U T E. Technology that turns ideas into reality.

DellTechnologies.com

DELL TECHNOLOGIES AND SINGAPORE POOLS: TRANSFORMING IT

ERIC SEOW OF DELL TECHNOLOGIES ON WORKING WITH SINGAPORE POOLS TO DELIVER IT TRANSFORMATION IN THE FACE OF CHANGING CONSUMER DEMAND In 2015, Yeo Teck Guan, Singapore Pools’ Chief Business Technology Officer, needed a strategic technology partner that had the ability to deliver essential technological innovation and support those innovations throughout their lifecycle.

“He saw this in Dell Technologies,” says Eric Seow, Financial Sector District Sales Director for Dell Technologies Singapore. “We delivered what Singapore Pools needed: highly resilient, highperformance infrastructure that powers their 24/7 digital platform.”

Since 2015, Dell Technologies has remained a key strategic partner of Singapore Pools, helping them use digital channels to better engage their community of consumers, as well as unlock the potential of new, innovative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), blockchain, IT automation and the adoption of hybrid cloud. “Our partnership has grown even stronger and we have embarked upon several initiatives to inject new IT capabilities and greater resiliencies into their organisation,” says Seow.

At the heart of this ongoing relationship, Seow explains, are commitment, empathy and trust. He adds that, “Having a close collaborative relationship is one of the key ingredients for any successful outcome. To develop that kind of relationship, there must be trust at every level. We have earned that trust through years of successful engagement and delivering on our promises.”

Going forward into 2021, Dell Technologies will continue to support its valued strategic partners including Singapore Pools - as it facilitates success in the new normal, and helps organisations leverage increasingly vital digital platforms and applications to drive successful outcomes.

“We are seeing digital platforms becoming more vital for organisations to connect and deliver their differentiators to the consumer; blockchain becoming an intrinsic technology that will strengthen the security portfolios of businesses; the rollout of 5G driving new use cases for IoT; and AI, ML and automation as essential success factors in this new data driven era,” says Seow. “Dell Technologies has made vast investments over the years in all of these key technological advancements, with many of them being incorporated into the design of our latest products and solutions.”

This year, Seow sees Dell Technologies’ relationship with Singapore Pools reaching new levels of engagement and innovation, as the two organisations “continue to explore new use cases for these advanced technologies and assess how we can deliver meaningful, enriching capabilities for Singapore Pools and their community of consumers.”

SINGAPORE POOLS PRIVATE LIMITED

months during 2020. “We were all working from home. We were lucky that our digital journey was already well underway when the pandemic hit,” Yeo adds. “We had already transitioned to Office 365, which meant we were well positioned to make the jump to working remotely. Singapore Pools' staff basically faced no difficulties during the lockdown.”

However, Yeo notes that the shift to remote work elevated the cyber security risks that Singapore Pools faced. With some older staff working remotely in the cloud for the first time in their careers, Yeo explains that the whole company “needed to be extra vigilant when it came to cyber attacks.” In response, Singapore Pools has been conducting regular antiphishing campaigns to better train its staff to recognise and report any suspicious activity.

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“ The digital branches allow our customers to access our services using new technologies, and conduct transactions in a way that is paperless, cashless and queueless” YEO TECK GUAN

CHIEF BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SINGAPORE POOLS

SINGAPORE POOLS PRIVATE LIMITED

Training has been an essential part of managing cultural change amid a digital transformation and the constraints of COVID19. “There's been a lot of training and teaching over the past year. During the pandemic we've also held quarterly virtual town halls which we use to keep employees informed, and to educate them about upcoming changes,” Yeo says. “Change mindset needs to be top down and also bottom up. The senior management needs to provide support and leadership on our initiatives and instil confidence in the staff.

Bottom up is about understanding whether our staff like and see the value in different tools and initiatives.” Yeo’s team set up forums for Singapore Pools staff to share their opinions, comments and suggestions on new initiatives, which were then incorporated into the company’s ongoing strategy.

DID YOU KNOW...

MAKING THE MOST OF DR OPEX “Traditionally, any CIO will tell you that you run your digital services on one data centre, and have a second running passively for disaster recovery (DR) backup,” Yeo notes. “Our DR has always been a big operational expense and, with the latest technology available, we're looking at using our DR facility to support the operational capacity of our standard data centre, meaning we have as much as 200% capacity to support customer demand for our digital services.”

Unlocking additional capacity has become even more essential during the COVID-19 crisis, which caused a global spike in data demand which, combined with the Singapore Government’s recent moratorium on new data centre builds, means that getting the most out of available digital infrastructure is a higher priority than ever.

“My team and I are trying to get rid of our DR data centre and pivot towards using it to better support our customers,” says Yeo, adding that Singapore Pools’ strategic partner, Dell EMC, “has been chosen to help us with this because their position in the technology landscape gels nicely with what we’re looking to accomplish.”

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Leveraging on IT infrastructure to help charities digitalise Singapore Pools has always aspired to be a “Company for Good” and is committed to leverage their strengths to achieve this goal.

Leveraging their technology capital and IT expertise to benefit the community, Singapore Pools set up iShine Cloud in 2018. iShine Cloud is a charity that provides other charities with an affordable and integrated suite of charity-specific solutions via a secure cloudbased IT platform. Using Singapore Pools’ IT infrastructure, as well as other resources, iShine Cloud aims to improve the productivity, governance and efficiency of operations of charities, thus enabling them to focus on better serving their beneficiaries.

With iShine Cloud, Singapore Pools is able to help keep charities running amid the COVID-19 crisis. While the rest of Singapore forges ahead with various Smart Nation initiatives, the nonprofit sector has been struggling to pick up the pace. Digitisation is therefore paramount to address these challenges. iShine Cloud has since onboarded 31 charities with 1,512 users and is looking to expand its solutions and support more charities in the future.

2021 and Beyond Yeo is always looking for the next project. He admits that, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a few strategic goals weren’t accomplished in 2020. “Because of COVID-19, things were obviously slower last year; instead of nine or 10 megaprojects, we only did five. Having said that, we still managed to go ahead with some essential projects,” he says. “This year, we will continue on our journey to upgrade and consolidate our major systems, bringing in our global partners to help us move forward and improve.”

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“ Ultimately, it is with the support of this very team that I am confident that we can continue our transformative success here in Singapore Pools” YEO TECK GUAN

CHIEF BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, SINGAPORE POOLS

As for what the future holds, Yeo adds that the achievements in digital transformation thus far would not have been possible without his capable and forward-looking team. “Ultimately, it is with the support of this very team that I am confident that we can continue our transformative success here in Singapore Pools.”

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BUILDING SOLUTIONS

FOR UTILITY COMPANIES AND INDUSTRY CLOUD SAP Cloud for Utilities’ directors Mateu Munar and Stefan Engelhardt outline how it is strengthening its cloud propositions and building more partnerships with small and large companies WRITTEN BY: DOMINIC ELLIS PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

I

t’s appropriate that two of SAP Cloud for Utilities’ key directors are in attendance for today’s Zoom interview as the company is embracing transformation at the double. Mateu Munar, Senior Director, Industry Business Unit Utilities, and Stefan Engelhardt, Global VP Go-To-Market Strategy Industry Business Unit Utilities, spend exactly an hour talking me through all the exciting cloud developments that enable utilities to pursue new digital business models and achieve sustainable growth.

We start by focusing on solutions, reflecting on the major changes that have occurred since 2019, before discussing more significant changes coming up.

“We started this programme a couple of years ago to bring to the market an alternative to our own on-premise offering, and go with a new proposition that addresses the new market needs,” said Munar. “We began with Utilities Retail, and the focus of the development is on the end-to-end process requirements from our customers.

Even though we have different cloud solutions, a key objective of the programme is to make sure they work as one and technologymagazine.com

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“ Our partnership with Badenova shows the industry is going new ways to open new revenue streams, and the cloud is designed to support those new innovative business models.”

STEFAN ENGELHARDT,

GLOBAL VP GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY INDUSTRY BUSINESS UNIT UTILITIES SAP CLOUD FOR UTILITIES

consumed either as a whole or in a modular way. Integration is a fundamental stream in our development, integration among cloud solution and integration with S/4HANA Utilities as well.”

He proceeds to outline the new extension of SAP’s One Domain Model for Utilities, which from a data management and integration perspective, works as one orchestration layer between the individual cloud solutions, providing consistency of data and processes – what is called Cloud for Utilities Foundation. “If we get – for example – a new customer from the commerce system, the data around it is properly maintained across all the different solutions that are going to consume that data,” adds Engelhardt.

Another important focus of Cloud for Utilities is on a Market Communication solution, ensuring smooth data exchanges between distributors, retailers and meter data service providers based on the local market standards.

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“We see the changing dynamics of the energy market as an opportunity for utility companies to transform into multi-serviceoriented companies, and SAP provides a suite that addresses the non-commodity space with products that are complementary to traditional energy services,” added Engelhardt.

Badenova shows partnership potential To illustrate SAP Cloud for Utilities’ desire to maximise the digital potential for all its customers, Engelhardt illustrates the work it is doing with Badenova, an innovative energy service provider and distribution grid operator in the South of Germany.

As Germany has a heterogeneous market structure, with many small municipalities that would like to offer innovative multiservice offerings but can’t afford to build their own platforms, Badenova helps plug the gap – running and operating the platform and whole logistics.

“They have created an own e-commerce platform that bundles energy services with

SAP CLOUD FOR UTILITIES

STEFAN ENGELHARDT TITLE: GLOBAL VP GOTO-MARKET STRATEGY INDUSTRY BUSINESS UNIT UTILITIES Stefan joined SAP in 1997 and held since then various management positions within SAP’s Industry Business Unit Utilities. He became Vice President Utilities in 2007 and is today responsible for SAP’s global Go-to-Market strategy for the utilities industry. Stefan studied GeoSciences and holds a PhD degree for Natural Sciences from the University of Heidelberg. Before joining SAP, Stefan worked at Technische Werke Ludwigshafen AG as Head of Energy Consulting.

MATEU MUNAR TITLE: SENIOR DIRECTOR, INDUSTRY BUSINESS UNIT UTILITIES

MEET THE TEAM

attractive new offerings of any kind,” he says. “They are becoming themselves a service provider, leveraging our platform as backend. This White-Labeling of own IP shows the industry is going in new ways to open revenue streams, and Cloud for Utilities is designed to support those innovative business models.”

Munar says SAP is currently integrating all its relevant industry solutions in a hybrid deployment model with out-of-the box integration flows, which will be available in the first quarter of 2021, ahead of a full cloud suite being completed next year.

SAP has since completed two successful test cycle rounds for its end-to-end integrated solution.

“Two major and successful test cycles of the end-to-end processes have happened, the first one in June (2006 Release) and the second one in November (2011 Release).

Tests were focused on the execution of the end-to-end scenario for selling and billing of commodity and non-commodity products and services.”

To date, it has involved 20 customers globally, from Germany, US and UK to Portugal, New Zealand, Hong Kong. “We align with them our development strategy, functionalities being developed, and they tell us their current and future needs and requirements, and they test the solutions, this will help us to build a solution that is fully aligned with the market expectations,” he added.

“One key element is that this first release will enable existing customers to easily connect their back-end solutions with cloud components, helping them capitalize on their previous SAP Industry Solutions investments.

That is a key achievement and supports the end-to-end process. We are working with our customers in different pilots and co-development of the solution.”

Mateu is currently working as Senior Director in the Industry Business Unit for Utilities, he’s responsible for the Go-to-Market of the SAP Cloud for Utilities Program. Mateu has over 20 years of experience in the Utilities Industry; before joining the Industry Business Unit Utilities, he played several roles in the Industry, first as Consultant and Solution Architect implementing the SAP for Utilities Solutions and afterwards leading the Utilities Consulting Team in the EMEA region. He has a wide experience working with Utilities customers in the different market roles, different countries and through the full cycle of the SAP for Utilities Solution.

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INFOSYS CATALYST INGENIOUS. INTERACTIVE. INTUITIVE. Pre-configured processes

Unique processes designed separately for each segment of electric, water and gas utilities

Platform solutions for the new age

Pre-identified interfaces and enhancements

Complete Data Migration solution

30-40% reduction in time and effort by Infosys Data Services Suite (iDSS)

Cloud Platform Use Cases 50+ use cases for efficiency and ease-of-use

Embedded Analytics

Traceability with SolMan focused build, Fiori Dashboards and rule based security

RAPID DEPLOYMENT | REDUCED IMPLEMENTATION COST | 70% + RE-USABILITY Infosys Catalyst reduces the adoption timeline of SAP S/4HANA by

53%

and SAP S/4HANA CIS by

44%

AMPLIFY YOUR UTILITY BUSINESS MODEL WITH INFOSYS COBALT Utility companies are under pressure to upgrade their portfolio mixes and value propositions to meet mandates for carbon reduction, emergency response systems, smart grids, distributed generation, completion, and changes in customer expectations.

Infosys helps utility firms reimagine their business models using solutions that include a converged SAP S/4HANA-cloud solution, Infosys Catalyst for the utility industry, and Infosys Cobalt assets. We drive application modernization and re-platforming so that businesses can respond quickly, innovate at scale, and provide comprehensive security.

Backed by deep expertise, proven methodology, and cutting-edge tools, Infosys simplifies the enterprise cloud journey using a three-step approach to: • Assess change: Evaluate the current ERP landscape and discover problems and opportunities for SAP S/4HANA on cloud • Accelerate modernization: Streamline cloud adoption using the assessment findings and the 'Safe Passage Approach', part of Infosys Cobalt • Amplify value: Leverage smart Infosys-built solutions for customer experience, asset management solutions, electric vehicle charging, vegetation management, and renewable installations on top of Infosys Catalyst Infosys Cobalt is a set of services, solutions, and platforms that acts as a force multiplier for cloud-powered enterprise transformation.

www.infosys.com

© 2021 Infosys Limited, Bengaluru, India.

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In the Cloud space, partners are becoming more pivotal.

“We have launched a big partner enablement programme to develop together and incorporate in our endto-end suite the solutions that partners are developing on top of our platform, we call it Industry Cloud. We will pay special attention to that in 2021, and want to have as many complementary partners as possible,” said Engelhardt.

More than ever, the role of customers as co-innovation partners is crucial for the agile development of industry-specific cloud offerings.

“E.ON and SAP announced in summer 2020 the joint development of a new cloud standard solution for the Energy Distribution

“I don’t know if there’s one clear direction – beyond everyone wanting to become green, and offering more sustainable products.”

STEFAN ENGELHARDT,

GLOBAL VP GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY INDUSTRY BUSINESS UNIT UTILITIES SAP CLOUD FOR UTILITIES

Business. Thus EON is a Cloud for Utilities customer and more importantly, an important partner, co-developing market standards – the same with Badenova in the Retail space. We must ensure the scope of our solutions is meeting market demands, opening new revenue streams and securing efficiency improvements for our customers.

What is clear is in this new cloud world, utility companies have multiple requirements, and we need partners to complement what we are bringing.” technologymagazine.com

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RISE for Utilities - Experience the latest features delivered by the SAP Cloud for Utilities Program

Industry Cloud focus in 2021 Engelhardt anticipates two key product streams in the next 5 to 10 years. Firstly, the on-premise world, which will be deployed more and more on private cloud environments (incorporating the S/4HANA Utilities suite) and secondly, native cloud solutions that come with highly modularized architectures and simplified business processes.

The latter won’t support the same functional complexity of traditional on-premise solutions but are faster to implement and provide significant TCO advantages. “We believe most utilities will require a mix of both – at least until the majority of the traditional business processes has been fully transformed to the digital age,” he said. “A lot of traditional business processes cannot be supported

by native cloud applications unless the industry changes massively – and I don’t see that happening quickly. So having a solution strategy that supports both worlds, like S/4HANA on premise with the cloud, I think that’s very important. We can support both narratives – a complete end-to-end process on-premise and by the end of next year, a complete end-to-end in the native cloud, and any combination of both.”

Consequently, SAP’s on-premise solution will be further developed in parallel to SAP’s investment in the cloud, he added, identifying markets and segments which need it. “The good thing is we can offer the complete on-premise suite through a subscription model in a private cloud environment, leveraging hyper-scaler qualities,” he said. Other priorities include: technologymagazine.com

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“ A lot of processes cannot be supported by cloud-only unless the industry changes massively – and I don’t see that happening. So having a solution that supports everything, like S/4HANA with the cloud, I think that’s very important.”

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• The integration of solutions around Marketing Communications, ensuring they can work with on-premise or cloudnative – taking advantage of the new One Domain Model for Utilities • Building proper meter-to-cash engine using SAP’s cloud-native solution Subscription Billing • Focusing on adoption, ensuring customers properly adopt SAP solutions, and learn how to implement systems Engelhardt said it must simplify how customers transform from current landscapes to new ones. “We are working on ways to automate what’s possible.

When you move from an on-premise, IT environment – that was designed 10 to 15 years ago – and you go to a cloud environment, you always have a lot of change management, and technical things to consider. SAP has plenty of tools, and we’re looking to enhance them for utilities, and automate more processes.”

Asked about the industry’s future direction, Engelhardt said: “I don’t know if there’s one clear direction – beyond everyone wanting to become green, and offering more sustainable products. The trend to become customer-focused multiservice providers will definitively impact the underlying IT requirements at all Utilities.

“We see some customers saying ‘we can only achieve what we need with the most modern products’, but the majority are going step-by-step. Every company has to find the way that fits best to its strategy and we at SAP are committed to support this journey with all of our industry expertise.”

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CITY OF HAMILTON:

TECHNOLOGY FOR GROWTH Cyrus Tehrani, Chief Digital Officer at the City of Hamilton, on the city’s extensive digital programmes and the benefits they have provided through COVID-19 WRITTEN BY: WILLIAM SMITH PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

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yrus Tehrani is Chief Digital Officer at the City of Hamilton, a role which attracted him due to its unusual specifications. “They were filling a Chief Digital Officer role and looking to do some creative things. Many cities don't have CDOs yet and the opportunity to help shape the direction of digital transformation was what attracted me to the role. ” Despite the ‘Digital’ in his job title, Tehrani’s influence extends beyond that domain. “It’s a bit of an odd portfolio in the sense of a CDO per se, where my focus isn't solely on the digital service channel deliveries that the city has.”

Instead, Tehrani oversees a diverse portfolio based around digital transformation as well as being a champion to promote the digital transformation occurring across the wide range of services the city provides.

“That involves looking at processes both internally and externally. For instance, our digital communication team is in the midst of a project to completely refresh

CITY OF HAMILTON

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We Are Hamilton

our website, ensuring it’s multilingual and in-line with new web standards for those with disabilities.” Other initiatives include corporate partnerships and standing up additional digital services to give people the ability to interact with the city across multimodal channels. “We've launched a digital online engagement platform where we can put up projects and have people interact with them and give us feedback on those projects – which

“ My focus isn’t solely on the digital service channel deliveries that the city has” CYRUS TEHRANI

CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER, CITY OF HAMILTON

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has been really great due to COVID and the inherent limitations on in-person engagement activities.”

A significant part of Tehrani’s role sees him overseeing smart city initiatives, partnerships as well as innovation. The city recently introduced a transit app to make it easier to plan trips thanks to estimated arrival times and trip planning functionality. “Our transit division worked with the software developer that creates our scheduling and transit management systems, which were already pretty advanced. Bus stops have phone number where you could text to get detailed route information, and we have an interactive voice system where you could call in and get information but the new app further enhances the service experience for our transit riders.” Also implemented have been measures to further simplify the experience of citizens, with digital payment solutions at parking meters and upgraded digital library selections.

CITY OF HAMILTON

Enhancements to city digital services delivery is prioritized based on value to citizens as Tehrani explains. “We’ve launched an online engagement platform, where people can pin places on a map, if they're talking about a park for instance, and tell us what features they do or don't like. From that, we can engage them with surveys and provide them with a timeline and visibility of who's listening to their concerns.” Another important issue for a city of Hamilton’s size and mix of urban, suburban and rural environments is internet access, especially in the age of COVID-19, and it has subsequently embarked on a broadband survey to

CYRUS TEHRANI TITLE: CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER INDUSTRY: GOVERNMENT

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: ONTARIO, CANADA Cyrus Tehrani is Chief Digital Officer at the City of Hamilton, a role which attracted him due to its unusual specifications. “They were filling a Chief Digital Officer role and looking to do some creative things.

Many cities don’t have CDOs yet and the opportunity to help shape the direction of digital transformation was what attracted me to the role. ” Despite the ‘Digital’ in his job title, Tehrani’s influence extends beyond that domain.

“It’s a bit of an odd portfolio in the sense of a CDO per se, where my focus isn’t solely on the digital service channel deliveries that the city has.”

Instead, Tehrani oversees a diverse portfolio based around digital transformation as well as being a champion to promote the digital transformation occurring across the wide range of services the city provides. “That involves looking at processes both internally and externally. For instance, our digital communication team is in the midst of a project to completely refresh our website, ensuring it’s multilingual and in-line with new web standards for those with disabilities.

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1846

Year founded

8,300 Number of employees

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identify connectivity requirements.

Tehrani affirms that the ethos behind such initiatives is all about getting people to better interact with the city. “It's not necessarily about the shiniest technology solutions. It’s more about making sure you improve the processes around how people engage with the city.”

“We can provide a timeline and visibility of who’s listening to their concerns” CYRUS TEHRANI

CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER, CITY OF HAMILTON

The digital measures and programmes already in place were undoubtedly beneficial in the city’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including keeping the wheels of democracy turning. “The city was able to move quickly to virtual council technologymagazine.com

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meetings, virtual committee meetings,” says Tehrani. “We worked closely with our local network provider, a local cable channel and with our IT group to be able to have all of our counselors meet and vote virtually on a virtual voting platform and conduct meetings via Webex.”

Among its other responses to the virus was a partnership between the city, the public library, two school boards and its regional innovation centre. “That involved collecting up all of the 3D printers that were present across those organisations and setting them up at the central library branch. This resulted in a lab of 25 to 30 devices printing PPE face shields, which were then distributed and provided back to the city and then also distributed out to agencies in need.”

The city’s initiatives are supported by the work of trusted partners, including Cisco which provides much of the city’s 180

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“ We’ve gone from, historically, a mostly manufacturingbased economy to a mix of technology, life sciences, creative industries, goods movement, agribusiness and food processing, tourism and advanced manufacturing” CYRUS TEHRANI

CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER, CITY OF HAMILTON

operating hardware. “We have a large footprint of buildings and infrastructure within the city – over 200 facilities that are connected across our infrastructure, whether that be wired or wireless. All of our public buildings are generally wifienabled, including recreation centers, senior centers, pools, arenas, libraries and civic buildings, where citizens would go to interact with citizen services. Cisco provides that backbone core network infrastructure for the city.”

There is a lot of innovation also occurring in the city including the McMaster Innovation Park. “It's under development and continues to grow, but in terms of square footage, it will be one of the largest of its kind in North America,” says Tehrani. The idea behind the park is in converting research projects into commercialisation. “It will have conference space, hotel space, and room for a broad mix of startups, SMBs and more established companies. It's literally an entire city block.”

That’s very much in line with the city’s vision for the future, having historically been an industrial steel town. “Hamilton has really diversified its economy,” says Tehrani.

“We've gone from, historically, a mostly heavy manufacturing-based economy to a mix of technology, life sciences, creative industries, goods movement, agribusiness and food processing, tourism and advanced manufacturing .” Hamilton has duly been recognised as among the Top seven Intelligent Communities of 2020 by the Intelligent Community Forum. “That looks at several economic domains such as connectivity, work and innovation as well as social and cultural growth such as engagement, inclusion and sustainability. It’s with the idea of moving from a view of ‘smart’ cities, which might be a little bit more focused on the technology side of things, to a more holistic technologymagazine.com

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“ The city was able to move quickly to virtual council meetings, virtual committee meetings” CYRUS TEHRANI

view of the programmes that a city and partner institutions deliver.”

Going forwards, Tehrani is focused on continuing to improve digital means of service delivery, as people become accustomed to multimodal delivery common to tech companies. “Everything we do is underlined with the aim of using technology with the goal of supporting ease of access to service delivery and the economic growth of the community,“ he says.

CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER, CITY OF HAMILTON

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The CONNECTED CAMPUS Brice Bible, VPCIO, explores how technology is expanding the vibrant campus experience beyond the buildings and lawns of University at Buffalo WRITTEN BY: RHYS THOMAS PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

C

ampus life is the beating heart of any great university. Students hurry to their next class, ideas are exchanged over cups of coffee, and chance meetings spark friendships that last a lifetime. The past 12 months has, in many cases, put this bustle of social and educational collaboration on hold. But at the University at Buffalo, that vibrancy has continued relatively uninterrupted.

A well-respected and metropolitan higher educational institute, UB is split across three campuses, where close to 32,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students from 105 countries study, conduct research, and engage in experiential learning and extra curricular enrichment. Technology plays a key role in ensuring all students and faculty get the most from their UB experience, “from the student in the fifth row, all the way through the student that might be learning remotely in the Bronx,” says Brice Bible, Vice President and Chief Information Officer (VPCIO).

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steer the overarching position of technology as a tool to enhance the experience of everyone on campus. He is also an emphatic proponent of inclusivity and ensuring that students have equal access to resources wherever they choose, or are forced in today’s circumstances, to study. It’s a philosophy that is wholeheartedly supported by an exemplary leadership team, he says.

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fellow Vice Presidents into the institution,” Bible says. "So, right off the bat, I’m fortunate enough to work with a leadership team that is high performing, and has the skills and capabilities, and collaborative mindset, to effectively meet the needs of the institution.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in early 2020, UB was already well prepared to respond as the result of this pragmatic approach to continued development. “It's obvious, but as a CIO for around 20 years, I still have to remind myself that it's my job to not just be serving today's needs,

UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

BRICE BIBLE TITLE: VPCIO COMPANY: UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO INDUSTRY: HIGHER EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

but to project what those needs are going to be in three to five years,” says Bible. A pandemic was, of course, never a core focus of that planning, but UB’s strength as a “multidimensional” learning institute by design gave it a strong foundation from which to react.

Bible considers the simple matter of maintaining lines of communication between students and faculty: “They needed simple, robust, synchronous video capability for their classes.” But a one-size fits all approach did not work. Zoom was not ideal

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: BUFFALO, NY, USA “We have what we call the Tech Squad, a student service out of our organisation. A student can go on the website and pick a time and we will show up at their room wherever they live and help them with the technology. We don't go into physical rooms currently, we made that virtual so students still could go and say, ‘Look, I need some help, and I'm free between three and four. I want that slot.’ And so we virtualised the tech squad so that students could still get that one-on-one help.

“In the one-on-one process used back before COVID, we would ‘storm through the dorms’ at the beginning of the semester - all 4,000 dorm rooms - and see students as they moved in and offer assistance. We could do that physically before, but now we can’t.

So we flipped it so that we now do it virtually and offer that same assistance.

I think it was very helpful. This is just another way that we've tried to retain the look and feel of campus using the technologies we have at our disposal, so the students still felt like they were a part of something bigger.”

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Ivy.ai: advancing AI in higher education Mark McNasby, CEO, Ivy.ai discusses the company’s natural language omni-channel AI, as well its partnership with the University at Buffalo Mark McNasby, CEO, Ivy.ai has been an EdTech entrepreneur for the last 20 years. “I started a company in 2001 called OptimalResume where we sold into the career centers at universities.” One of the challenges McNasby found his customers facing was that students weren’t coming to the career center, “so we came up with this idea for my second business called br.im, which was basically a virtual collaboration platform, allowing somebody who was in the career center to work with students who are remote”.

He co-founded Ivy.ai in 2016, of which he is CEO, a natural language omni-channel AI chatbot, available on websites, SMS, Facebook messenger, Amazon Alexa, and even email. “When someone asks the chatbot a question we compare what they’ve asked to a large database of questions and data that we’ve used to train the model. Once the bot understands what the person is asking, it provides them with a particular answer,” he says.

“Ivy.ai has two main goals. One is the dissemination of information - someone asks a question, we give them an answer - but it is also very useful for collecting information. For example, perhaps for a prospective applicant interested in attending a school the bot can

ask them for their contact information, which can be implemented into the engagement strategy that the school has.” McNasby added that AI chatbots also collect valuable transactional data that provide a real-time feedback loop as to what is most relevant to students and when.

Ivy.ai’s partnership with the University at Buffalo “One of the main problems that we solve is that Ivy.ai levels the playing field for all different types of students.

Student equality is a big theme which is tightly related to accessibility. So our chatbot creates the same level of service and answers for students regardless of their circumstance.”

In partnering with the University at Buffalo, Ivy.ai is helping the university to achieve its vision of making information accessible to anyone wherever they are.

“The pandemic essentially highlighted some deficiencies for the university, and how they were delivering their services to stakeholders who don’t necessarily have equal access to technology and systems. Part of their strategy of digital transformation is to use a chatbot to make all information accessible to all users. So their plan is essentially to start with the IT help desk, and then ultimately roll it out to the wider campus through a departmental deployment strategy.”

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7,000

Wireless access points on campus.

100%

Starting in their first year, 100% of UB students can get involved in research, service or experiential learning.

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for performance-based classes, for example, which needed a platform for high-speed, real-time video. “So we would work with them to build a solution for those kinds of things, and we could then expose that to the rest of the faculty, who would look at that and go, ‘Hey, that kind of fits me so I can use that too’. Those faculty members were the best. They know what they're doing, they know the content they need to get across to their students. That's their role, that's their expertise. And our job was then to listen and help them find technological ways to effectively do that.”

This is just one example of a digital ecosystem that fuels UB’s hybrid approach, where students can study on campus

“I’m fortunate enough to work with a leadership team that is high performing, and has the skills to effectively meet the needs of the institution” BRICE BIBLE

VPCIO, UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

and off in disparate but equally rewarding fashion. While maintaining social distancing was of paramount importance to the university’s leadership, so too was retaining the fundamentals of its tight-knit culture of collaborative, hands-on learning. “We're an on-premises campus, and we want to be that,” says Bible. “We’re a research school, we are hands-on collaboration, and we want our students to have that multidimensional relationship. So during the pandemic we never went 100% remote. We did not at the end of spring semester, and we did not all the way through the fall semester. Our technologymagazine.com

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UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO Lead your institution through the new normal and beyond

Today’s learners and faculty have high expectations, requiring an integrated and flexible learning experience that operates seamlessly and intuitively. By partnering with Blackboard, you can enhance your institution’s brand by providing students and faculty with a holistic and integrated modern learning ecosystem.

Blackboard helps lead institutions through the new normal and beyond. We bring together the technologies and services our clients need to lead their institution through the digital transformation.

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Brice Bible on University at Buffalo's UBIT system

students are actively engaged in out of class activities, whether clubs for student groups, or a host of other things. And so we wanted to provide technology tools that helped them stay connected and still feel part of the institution.”

Students and faculty have access to a broad array of digital resources to expand their learning and extra curricular support beyond the confines of the lecture hall.

Many of these services can be accessed through the UB portal, a secure and intuitive platform that ties the online learning experience together, underpinned by a fast and reliable infrastructure.

Partners have been integral to that seamless hybrid approach learning at UB, “and I can’t thank our vendors enough,” says Bible. “Many

of them have put profits a little bit aside and focused on need. And you remember who those people are and we appreciate it very much.”

“Our underlying infrastructure is HP Aruba, our wireless network of choice with 7,000 access points. I appreciate HP Aruba’s immediate assistance, not just with making sure that it runs, but also with regards to data: where are the students, how many are there?

That was data that we had not typically used, other than performance-based, and they

“By using these technologies there are opportunities for closer relationships to be formed” BRICE BIBLE

VPCIO, UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO technologymagazine.com

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aggressively worked to help us in that space.

“And I can’t say enough about Blackboard.

We moved to Blackboard in the cloud more than a year ago, so that put us in a good position. When our faculty and our students are accessing our LMS of choice here, we ensure they've got robust access, not just from campus, but also when they're away from campus somewhere. As you can imagine, the data and the content that's inside of Blackboard has dramatically ramped up.”

Bible says that he was “so impressed” with the creative ways faculty and students have been using these tools. But he admits that they are not as intuitive as plug-and-play solutions like Zoom, and as a result learned a fundamental lesson that has helped refocus UB’s digital transformation.

“We need to ramp up that personal relationship with the student,” he says. “We need that AI tool that will help guide faculty through the complex questions that they may have about using technologies, or even pedagogically, to be able to change things in their classroom.”

UB has partnered with Ivy.ai to bring artificial intelligence to campus for the first time. “I appreciate Ivy in their role because I think they've helped us, as with other schools, in aggressively transitioning to meet the one-on-one needs of our institution. And can I say that's one of the big challenges, is retaining relationships, retaining the connected feel of the institution.”

This is a critical point in Bible’s vision of the role technology will play for UB classes of 2025 and beyond, illustrated during an autumn forum, in which the UB President was interviewed through video conferencing, and joined by 300 IT staff members online.

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“We wanted to provide technology tools that helped [students] stay connected and still feel part of the institution” BRICE BIBLE

VPCIO, UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO technologymagazine.com

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“ It’s my job to not just be serving today's needs, but to project what those needs are going to be in three to five years” BRICE BIBLE

VPCIO, UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO

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“His face was this close,” Bible says, motioning to the size of his own head in the Zoom window through which the interview for this report was being conducted. “And the staff on the call could all see that the President has a sense of humour, that he’s personable. Typically most people would see and interact with him in a formal setting, much further away, and with a more rigid structure, depending on what the occasion is. So one of the benefits that's come out of this is, by using these technologies, are opportunities for closer relationships to be formed. That applies with the faculty and their students, because now each student in a class of 200 sees their faculty member as close as sitting around a table.”

What is clear is that people will continue to be the central focus of UB’s digital strategy. Bible outlines two disparate, but very likely scenarios for students learning remotely during the pandemic. One retires to a cosy cottage in Cape Cod, with all the amenities and luxuries one could desire.

Another moves back into a cramped co-living environment in the city, above a busy shop, and with limited access even to high speed internet.

“Why should one have better than the other?” he says. “The technology then becomes the decision-maker of who's going to be successful. So that's shame on us. As the CIO, I'm kinda technical,” he says. "I have problems when I'm at home connecting and I get frustrated by it.

And so if I'm frustrated by it and I know who to call to get help, what about the faculty member or the student? This is somewhere I think we need to, and will work towards, being better.”

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THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF MANCHESTER'S HOSPITAL TRUST

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MFT

Dr Veronica Devlin, Chief Transformation Officer at one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK, tells us about building their electronic patient record, adopting a digital culture, and being digitally inclusive.

WRITTEN BY: LEILA HAWKINS PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

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anchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) was formed in 2017 following the merger of two of Manchester's hospitals, making it one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK with around 22,000 staff.

As its Chief Transformation Officer, Dr Veronica Devlin is overseeing the transformation element of a vast project that aims to integrate and simplify a mosaic of around 2,000 different systems, operating in 10 hospitals. The goal is to make the trust a data-driven organisation, and a key part of this is developing a new electronic patient record (EPR) system.

Working towards a go live date in summer 2022 while a global pandemic is ongoing has been a challenge, Dr Devlin explains, "but adversity does bring opportunity sometimes, and what we've all reflected on is how much more effective we could have been had we had a single electronic patient record before COVID came along. It has put a lot of unexpected demands on all our services and our need for data, for interoperability and the ability for staff to work flexibly across different areas. Having a standard approach for everything across the organisation would simplify this." technologymagazine.com

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It will also benefit research initiatives, and encourage use of other technologies.

"Capturing information digitally instead of on paper opens up opportunities to use things like artificial intelligence to make predictions, on emergency department demand for example.

"We'll also be moving much more into technology to manage people's healthcare at home. We already do some of that with our cardiology team for example, remote monitoring patients with rhythm disturbances. But I think more and more of that will be happening in conjunction with our community partners" Dr Devlin adds.

The EPR will also incorporate a patient portal, where people can book appointments and communicate with their clinical team. "That in itself all of a sudden changes the relationship between the caregiver and the patient, making them much more of a team rather than the patient being the recipient of care.

Patients can become much more engaged and involved in their healthcare, which is what they want."

Another key development will be in medical imaging, as the Trust has recently signed a deal with Siemens Healthineers to upgrade their equipment. “Demand for our imaging services is increasing by 5%-10% every year, yet we’ve had to reduce our throughput to deal safely with COVID-19,” Catherine Walsh, Divisional Director of Imaging for MFT explains.

“This new relationship gives us the confidence that we’ll be able to continue to invest in the latest technology with the flexibility to adapt it to our needs, now and into the future. All associated factors such as maintenance and budgeting are taken care of. Ultimately, the partnership will enable us to focus on delivering the best 200

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“ Capturing information digitally instead of on paper opens up opportunities to use things like artificial intelligence to make predictions” DR VERONICA DEVLIN

CTO, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

MFT

DR VERONICA DEVLIN TITLE: CTO COMPANY: MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY NHS FOUNDATION TRUST (MFT) INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE LOCATION: MANCHESTER, UK

2017

Year founded

22,000

Number of employees

EXECUTIVE BIO

patient experience while at the same time helping us to attract and retain leading talent, and develop staff to unlock their full potential.”

“This is so much more than a transaction. It’s a 15-year Value Partnership, a relationship enabling

Dr Veronica Devlin initially trained as a GP in Glasgow, working in emergency medicine for more than 20 years. In 2005 she became involved in the improvement of clinical services. Helping to set up the first ambulatory care unit in Scotland, she got involved in several national improvement programs.

A change of direction led to Dr Devlin becoming the National Clinical Lead for Emergency Care Pathways for NHS Scotland. Following this she moved to healthcare consulting with GE Healthcare as Medical Director for EMEA, involved in large scale transformation projects and technologyenabled change, and after five years Dr Devlin returned to the NHS in her current role at MFT.

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Value Partnerships Creating more value for you

We work in partnership with NHS Trusts across the UK, supporting them to optimise operations, expand capabilities and advance innovation. From technology management and refresh, through to comprehensive reviews of approach and workflow, our innovative business models help you to increase enterprise-wide value to meet both your immediate and future goals.

Optimise: enhance processes, streamline operations, and improve patient experience Expand: add new capabilities and scale up existing ones to transform care delivery while maintaining quality and financial sustainability Advance: elevate the quality and precision of care delivery by advancing the level of innovation in your organisation Value Partnerships optimise care delivery to create more value for you.

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Siemens Healthineers and MFT: improving patient outcomes

Siemens Healthineers has signed a 15-year deal with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) - we found out how this will impact the region.

MFT, one of the largest hospital trusts in the UK, has signed a 15-year deal with Siemens Healthineers that will see them upgrading and maintaining all the trust's imaging equipment. Nancy West, Head of Enterprise Services at Siemens Healthineers in Great Britain and Ireland, explains that they’ll be supporting the Trust in delivering best in-class clinical outcomes and safety, in an environment that will help to enhance patients’ experience as well as improve staff satisfaction.

"At the core of the partnership is the provision of access to innovative technologies. Over the next 15 years, we'll support the imaging team with a technology-refresh programme, and we'll manage all of the imaging equipment which will help them solve that continual challenge of how to keep pace with innovations that transform care delivery” West says.

This will include around 350 installations, covering the selection of equipment, comprehensive training, and world class maintenance support through Siemens Healthineers' onsite team.

"Working together, we'll be embracing the opportunity to change and improve care delivery to help improve

the health and lives of many people across the area" West says. "The Value Partnership will see us really very deeply engaged with the team to improve patient pathways from referral right through to reporting, helping to improve diagnostic wait times, which is really important when we consider the impact that COVID has had on cancer and elective operation wait times" Catherine Walsh, Divisional Director of Imaging for MFT, adds: "In terms of innovation to pathways we absolutely want to work with Siemens Healthineers to provide for patients in response to the local health care plan, making sure that we've got equity of access for patients, and that we've got parity of services across all the sites."

"We are very excited to have this partnership in place.

We've been working on it for a number of years and to see it come to fruition is absolutely wonderful. All our staff are awaiting the go live date - it just consolidates all the effort we put into developing the contract over the last few years. We don't see it as a transaction, it's a relationship that can only go from strength to strength.” siemens-healthineers.co.uk/value-partnerships

MFT

Veronica Devlin discusses Manchester University Foundation Trust's digital strategy

“ The electronic patient record will allow patients to become much more engaged and involved in their healthcare, which is what they want” DR VERONICA DEVLIN

CTO, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

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us to provide the very best in care delivery for the people of Greater Manchester” she adds.

Internally, the trust has adopted RPA in the finance department, automating admin tasks so they can free up staff, which is helping them to address clerical staff shortages exacerbated by the COVID crisis. They've also been working closely with Siemens on interoperability between their electronic patient records and imaging systems, so information can be seamlessly brought across from people's records to be accessed by clinicians.

Dr Devlin says the pandemic has encouraged people to make quick decisions, and even take risks they

MFT

wouldn't have done before, to make resources available where needed.

"A huge amount of the operational teams' time is going into supporting the clinical staff, seeing how far and how fast we can go with change to support what they need to do. That's brought a massive amount of goodwill and we've seen it right across all of the NHS, with teams helping out other teams, even though people are tired."

One of the most obvious changes has been implementing virtual consultations, which happened very quickly despite the challenges. "We were able to set up some of the infrastructure and train clinicians on how to use the portal before we had all of the equipment, as some of it came behind

because there were delivery delays," Dr Devlin explains.

Despite this, clinicians adopted it with ease, and it was rolled out in a peer-to-peer way. Another benefit to implementing telehealth was that it forced MFT to confront issues with wifi connectivity in parts of its buildings.

"People put up with the fact that they don't have signal on their phone or can't get emails in a certain part of the building, but when you try to do a video consultation all of a sudden you see how problematic it can be. So it has flushed some of these issues out."

Now that it's been implemented, she believes telehealth is here to stay. "Younger technologymagazine.com

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“We're thinking about how library or other public internet access can be made available, so that people can access care in a different way. We're thinking five to 10 years down the line, not just for the next 18 months to two years” DR VERONICA DEVLIN

CTO, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

patients seem to expect it now, and I think now that people have been consulting with their GP like this, we'll see this is how a large proportion of the country wants to carry on."

Her own partner is an example of how beneficial remote consultations can be.

Despite living in Scotland, he had complex heart surgery in London, and following that had to travel to London once a year for evaluations.

Now this can be undertaken virtually.

"This will be a big difference for us from the point of view of specialist intervention," she says. "It makes collaboration between his clinician in Scotland and the clinician in London much more feasible, and the communication seems to be much better."

However, large number of consultations will still need to be carried out by phone in the immediate future, as Greater Manchester has a huge amount of digital poverty.

Recent research showed that nine million people in the UK experience digital poverty, having little or no access to the internet; of this figure, 40 per cent are based in northern England.

"That's one of the reasons telephone consultations have remained high, because we have a big digitally excluded technologymagazine.com

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“ We're thinking about how we ensure access for everyone, such as people with sensory impairments or for multiple first languages, and how we build all that into the technology we use so everybody has equal access” DR VERONICA DEVLIN

CTO, MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY NHS FOUNDATION TRUST

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population here. That will slowly change, but in the meantime there's a lot we can do by phone."

Digital poverty is one of the inequalities the pandemic has thrown into the spotlight, and while there is no easy fix, there is a big piece of work on digital inclusion currently happening within Greater Manchester.

"The digital strategy for North Manchester General Hospital, which is the largest hospital in the trust, is very much centered around recognising that the local population has a high level of deprivation on all fronts.

There's a completely different model of care planned for that facility and digital access is a critical part of it, because the plan is to build a new health and care campus there

MFT

which is very heavily dependent on digital and new technology in general."

"We're thinking about how library or other public internet access can be made available, so that people can access care in a different way. We're thinking five to 10 years down the line, not just for the next 18 months to two years" she adds.

"There's a huge amount of work to be done, but we carry out equality impact assessments as part of our COVID Recovery and Resilience Programme. We have multiple workstreams looking at outpatients including virtual clinics, elective care, urgent care and flow. It's thinking about how we ensure access for everyone, such as people with sensory impairments for example or with multiple first languages, and

how we build all of that into the technology and communications we use so that everybody has equal access to care."

Dr Devlin sees this as a very exciting time to work at MFT, with the opportunity to use technology to provide very high quality patient care. "Ultimately it's about making things better for patients, for the people of Manchester, but also for the staff because it has to be something that makes their working life better.

That's where our skills in Transformation come in, to try and help people adjust and motivate them when change gets hard - it's hard for everybody at some stage."

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Cost. Service. Agility.

SUPPLY CHAIN’S

NEW TROIKA Suketu Ghandi, Kearney’s Global Leader in Digital Supply Chain and Plan on Sense and Pivot and supply chain’s new troika; cost, service, and agility WRITTEN BY: LAURA V. GARCIA PRODUCED BY: CAITLYN COLE/ GLEN WHITE

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hat was at first thought to be a one-time disruption, the ultimate black swan event, has now become the new normal. The hardwon lessons of COVID-19 have shown us that moving forward supply chain resilience will be as imperative to business as cost and performance.

Suketu Gandhi, partner and global product leader, Digital Supply Chain and Plan is helping companies the world over set a new plan for the “new normal”. Gandhi shows clients the way to achieving their targets by building agile supply chains that leverage today’s best tech to sense and pivot with fast, informed decision making.

Real resilience is far more than performing “what if” scenario analysis and disaster response planning. It’s about increasing capabilities and building lighting fast reflexes, so you can respond to fluctuations in demand and an ever-changing business landscape with dynamic resource and capacity planning.

As CEOs, COOs and CPOs now look to restructure their business model with the technologymagazine.com

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“ Our success as consultants will depend on the essential rightness of the advice we give and our capacity for convincing those in authority that it is good” ANDREW THOMAS KEARNEY

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aim of increasing organisational resilience and agility, produced in partnership with MIT Technology Review, Kearney offers a comprehensive resilience stress test.

Speaking with clients such as Mars and Johnson and Johnson, MIT and Kearney took a tech-centric view of data needs and how AI can help.

The report says that at the core of company efforts to increase resilience and agility there should be two strategic priorities; decreasing complexities and using data to increase visibility at every node in the supply chain, and developing action plans to efficiently respond to change and disruption.

Ghandi walks us through.

Reducing Complexity Complexity must be managed, not expunged.

“You have to step back and look at your business a few years out and think, what are the three things I should do? What are the structural changes that I should make?

KEARNEY

SUKETU GANDHI TITLE: PARTNER AND GLOBAL PRODUCT LEADER, DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAIN & PLAN COMPANY: KEARNEY INDUSTRY: MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCY

LOCATION: CHICAGO

EXECUTIVE BIO

You must be very deliberate in the choices that are made based on the options that are available,” Gandhi says.

“One of the key dimensions is finding commonalities and what can be done to standardise further. The more common you can make things, the easier manufacturing, assembly and sourcing become. Although it seems quite logical, unfortunately, we don't find people doing that.”

“Another key element is inbound and outbound transportation, what we call geography. Where do you manufacture?

Where do you sell? Now that's a simple question, but then you must also look at the geographical boundaries you cross and how many political boundaries as well. And that second question, political boundaries, is a loaded one because that can cause issues.

Brexit is a good example of that.

“The other part of geography is that countries like China and India are going to start insisting that if you sell in their

Suketu Gandhi is a recognized industry leader and subjectmatter expert in digital transformation, IT strategy and enterprise architecture, technology’s role in retail, the Internet as a channel, outsourcing and offshoring, IT organization evolution, and the use of technology for highly mobile assets. He is frequently published on digital transformation topics in outlets ranging from MIT Sloan Management Review to the Wall Street Journal. Suketu’s consulting work focuses on the impact of digital on business models, customer experience, operations, and IT. Suketu is a partner, based in Kearney's Chicago office.

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We Make It Happen Aera Technology is the Cognitive Automation company that makes business agility happen.

With our partners, we deliver the digital platform that integrates with your existing systems to make and execute business decisions in real time.

Aera Technology: redefining agility in supply chains

Gonzalo Benedit, GM EMEA, Aera Technology on how Cognitive Automation is redefining agility in supply chains, as well as the company’s partnership with Kearney With 15 years of experience in various enterprise software leadership roles, Gonzalo Benedit joined Aera Technology in 2020 as General Manager, EMEA. “Aera is a digital platform that enables Cognitive Automation for large enterprises, such as FORTUNE 500 companies. So pretty large scale organisations operating mostly within the Consumer packaged goods (CPG), pharma chemicals and discrete manufacturing industries. At Aera Technology, we help them to digitise, augment, and automate decision-making at scale,” says Benedit. Whilst Aera Technology is headquartered in Mountain View, California, the company operates worldwide, with more than 450 colleagues across Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Empowering leaders with Cognitive Automation When asked: what makes Aera Technology’s Cognitive Automation platform unique? Benedit believes “its uniqueness comes from the fact that it’s a single platform that is able to address the core dimensions that are critical to deliver Cognitive Automation at scale: data, science, process, and change.”

Breaking down the four core dimensions, Benedit adds that “when it comes to data, Aera Technology is able to build a single data model. We’re able to connect with all the transactional systems of an enterprise and build a single end-to-end data model. When it comes to science, we help our customers to apply and deploy deterministic

logic, machine learning (ML), and simulations. In terms of process, it’s about digitising the way decisions are being made in a certain company, division or country. Last but not least, the fourth dimension is about change on which we not only deliver an intelligent experience that allows users to easily engage with the platform, but also generate a digital record of all the decisions that have been made and the context under which those decisions were made.”

Aera Technology’s partnership with Kearney After recently announcing a strategic alliance with global consulting firm Kearney, Benedit explains that Aera Technology is “incredibly excited about our partnership.

This means a lot to us, and I would say there are two core components to this partnership - transformation and opportunity. For us, it’s an amazing opportunity working with Kearney; it gives our customers access to incredible experience built throughout almost a century, so that’s invaluable. Combine that knowledge with our ability to deliver at a very fast pace, Cognitive Skills, and a digital platform for Cognitive Automation, together we can enable self-driving enterprise. That’s a pretty unique value proposition for our customers.”

MEET AERA

KEARNEY

1926

Year founded

3,500+ Number of employees

$1.4bn Revenue USD (2019)

country, then you must manufacture in their country. You have to give back some of what you take. So those are the type of political considerations you must take into account when building a strategy. You must decide where to manufacture, understand costs, service, agility and resiliency and put it all together.

When looking to drive out complexity, Gandhi warns to set boundaries and suggests leaving the customer out of it, as customer-facing changes may have you in an unending loop. “What we have found is 216

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that having that as a constant is absolutely critical. Don't change that proposition because otherwise, you end up with a situation of circular logic, and you never reach an end.

“If you start to look at things like changing features, then you have to consider if the customer will be willing to pay for it and you start to go around and around. New product development starts to fight with supply chain, who fights with the CPO, who fights with sales and marketing, and you never make your way out of it. That's why I say,

KEARNEY

emerging because the CFO used to call the CPO only to reduce cost. Whereas now he has to be a part of the discussion of risk. Our strong perspective is boards are going to start asking this question regularly.

“The fundamental equations of being a CPO or running a supply chain have not changed. The math is still the same, but the granularity, however, has changed. It used to be that people would look at things at a country level, then geographical, then segment, then region. Now you’ve got to be at a customer individual order level. That's the level of granularity needed.”

Gandhi says another change has been a move away from a one-size-fits-all approach to technical solutions, “There was this view

“The fundamental equations of being a CPO or running a supply chain have not changed. The math is still the same, but the granularity, however, has changed” SUKETU GANDHI

PARTNER AND GLOBAL PRODUCT LEADER, DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAIN & PLAN, KEARNEY

leave that constant, don't mess with it and move forward.”

“However, no amount of effort will protect you against every shock. That's the first thing we tell people; you can’t protect against everything. So, what are the choices you want to make? And that becomes a CPO, CEO and CFO question.”

Cost. Service. Agility. Supply chain’s new troika.

The emergence of supply chain’s new troika.“So now we have a new Troika

that says a general solution for one is easily applicable to the other one. Now, what we are finding is that as we get into the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, AI allows you to identify the parameters that matter.

“For example, if we buy a standard shoe, versus an athletic one, one may be sold on price and the other one on features. That quite significantly changes how supply chain should look at it. And so now general solutions lose their power because it's easy to find a very specific solution.” technologymagazine.com

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Lastly, Gandhi points out the maturement of risk tolerance, a factor Sense and Pivot looks at, shifting from implicit to explicit.

Sense & Pivot Kearney started on the Sense and Pivot journey almost three years ago after spotting the trends around the difficulty of forecasting, the inflexibility of distribution centres, manufacturing facilities and transportation networks.

However, there was still resistance to change. Ghandi says, “What COVID did was fundamentally accelerate the trend. What we thought would take another year to two years all of a sudden just came to life.

It’s what I call the shift left phenomenon; years became months and months became weeks.”

Just how unpredictable the world can be was a hard-earned lesson. Supply chains quickly realised they need to adapt and perform against plan despite the business challenges brought on by the disruptions and the limitations that lay within the supply chain. Sense and Pivot helps organisations to mitigate the impacts of risks such as extreme weather, geopolitics and unpredictable changes in consumer demand, creating a dynamic, highly responsive and resilient supply chain.

Ghandi says the companies should be asking is if they are set up to sense the right information in order to pivot assets.

Real-time information can be pulled from a myriad of resources such as business partners, social media, manufacturing facilities (for machine capacity or handling times), or even point of sale information.

This information can then trigger an action or inform decision making. The trick is in aligning the right data to the companies goals.

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“ No amount of effort will protect you against every shock.

That's the first thing we tell people; you can’t protect against everything. So, what are the choices you want to make?”

SUKETU GANDHI

PARTNER AND GLOBAL PRODUCT LEADER, DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAIN & PLAN, KEARNEY

KEARNEY

Suketu Gandhi from Kearney talk about resilience in Supply Chain

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Sense and Pivot is aimed at companies unique organisational objectives, such as cutting costs, meeting new demand requirements or achieving scalability. By leveraging advanced technology to sense information signals, Sense and Pivot goes beyond the collecting and analysing data and improves business performance by creating opportunities for proactive actions and well-informed decision making.

At one customer, using advanced analytics and sensing daily inventory consumption demands at the SKU and store level, the company is able to pivot and quickly adjust shipments to reallocate inventory, 220

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reducing stockouts, returns and inventory waste, increasing it’s annual operating income by 10%.

However, none of it can be accomplished without the right people doing the right things.

Ghandi On People “We love technology. Absolutely. Who doesn’t? But you don’t want to over-index on that either.”

The Building resilient supply chains report states “Initiatives to drive digitalisation and supply chain resilience must include components of people and process change

KEARNEY

“ So now we have a new Troika emerging because the CFO used to call the CPO only to reduce cost. Whereas now he has to be a part of the discussion of risk” SUKETU GANDHI

PARTNER AND GLOBAL PRODUCT LEADER, DIGITAL SUPPLY CHAIN & PLAN, KEARNEY

management. This is a critical step for ensuring that data and insight drive real decisions at every stage of the value chain.”

Gandhi recollects a saying that is all too fitting, “a colleague of mine told me if processes and software could rust, that would be wonderful because then we would rebuild. Unfortunately, they don't.”

The signs of an outdated process in need of a redesign are harder to see than rust on a machine part. But processes can no longer be allowed to become stagnant.

“It used to be that you would design a strategy and you went to sleep and then just executed it every day. And hope that

in three years, you got to look at it. That model is dead. Now we have a continuous design and execution model. That’s a big change, and that’s the essence of Sense and Pivot.

Ghandi points out that just as it takes a skilled driver to drive a fast car, as technology expedites how we do business, the need for leadership and expertise matters even more.

Because, of course, the faster you go, the harder the impact.

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THE GYM GROUP

S ' P U O R G M Y Y G E E N R TH U O J L 9 1 A T I D DIG GH COVI U O D R N O TH Y E B AND 222

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THE GYM GROUP

Jasper McIntosh, Chief Information Officer at The Gym Group, tells us how technology is enabling the business to successfully adapt to customers' needs in the new post-Covid world WRITTEN BY: LEILA HAWKINS

J

asper McIntosh, Chief Information Officer at The Gym Group, met John Treharne, the founder of the company, in 2011 when he was running a boutique technology company. Treharne set up The Gym three years earlier with a vision to be genuinely disruptive - to create a chain of low cost, no contract gyms open 24 hours a day, making them more accessible to the many people who needed early or late opening hours.

"John had taken some existing technology, like building access control systems and online subscription models, and applied them to the gym business" McIntosh says. "By looking at overseas models he saw that he could reduce running costs by using technology to support the sales process and enable the business to keep the doors open 24-7. This technology enabled low cost model means that more

PRODUCED BY: KRIS PALMER than a decade later membership fees are still on average less than £20 a month."When McIntosh joined the company there were 15 sites. Today, there are more than 180 across the UK. "The model had been proven, so we took the idea and scaled it out across the country" he says.

Up until March 2020 the company had been steadily growing. Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, but McIntosh explains that its challenges have led to a lot of innovation.

One example of this is their partnership with fitness app Fiit, which McIntosh says, "is really enabling us to expand our health and fitness experience outside of the four walls of the gym."

Additionally, some sites have been trialling dedicated Fiit areas. "These are custombuilt Fiit 'pods' where people can experience

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digital content inside the gym, but individually.

We've also converted an area of these gyms to custom-build Fiit studios where we deliver the content in a larger group exercise space, with immersive LCD displays and a fantastic audio experience,” he explains.

"We're coming at this from all different angles - there's the typical in-gym experience, there is bringing a digital experience into the gym environment, delivering a digital gym experience outside of the gym environment, and then there are digital product enhancements that wrap around all these to bring to other areas of people's exercise regime."

While the Fiit pods seem designed for social distancing, they were actually created before the pandemic. "The implementation went live in the post-Covid environment, but the thinking behind it pre-dated the pandemic,” says McIntosh. “The experience of group exercise is really powerful in a group of people, but also has value outside of a group setting.

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“ We made a price pledge during that national lockdown that we wouldn't charge anyone for a day that the gyms weren't open” JASPER MCINTOSH

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, THE GYM GROUP

An individual may feel connected and engaged with the content they see on the screen, but may not necessarily want to do that in a group environment, or there may not be a group session running at the time they want to do it.

It's about providing the member with options to have that experience in different settings and at a time that suits them."

During the UK's first lockdown period all gyms had to close to the public. McIntosh says this was an extremely busy time for The Gym Group, as they looked for new ways to keep

THE GYM GROUP

their members engaged. "We closed all our gyms at very short notice and took immediate steps to stop any payments being taken from members and communicate that we were closing and weren't sure how long for.

"We made a price pledge during that national lockdown that we wouldn't charge anyone for a day that the gyms weren't open.

When the dust settled on that initial piece of work, we took a multi-pronged approach to how we could manage our membership base through a period of high uncertainty, and also how we could start to build a product we thought members would want when we started to emerge from that first lockdown."

The launch of their Fiit collaboration was brought forward to offer members

JASPER MCINTOSH TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER INDUSTRY: HEALTH & FITNESS

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM Jasper started working with The Gym Group in 2011, when the company was 3 years old and had 15 sites. Over the following 9 years, the company has grown to more than 180 locations and had more than 790,000 active members (at 31 Dec 2019), becoming the 2nd largest gym business in the UK and the 4th largest in Europe. The Gym Group serviced over 35 million member visits in 2019, delivering on the company’s vision to provide affordable access to exercise facilities and expertise to every person who wants to improve their wellbeing.

In 2015, Jasper was part of the management team that led the company through a successful IPO process, concluding with a full market listing on the London

Stock Exchange. Since then he’s focused on building new technical capabilities that allow the company to deliver its aggressive growth plans and increase customer engagement by constantly improving the member experience. In the last 3 years, he’s led a major programme of digital transformation, re-positioning inward- and outward-facing systems, and introducing significant new data and analytics capabilities.

Before starting at The Gym Group, Jasper spent a number of years in technology consultancy.

Prior to moving into technology, Jasper headed a financial derivatives trading desk for a major investment bank in London and New York.

The Gym Group & Okta – partners in strategy

Jasper McIntosh, CIO and Geoff Tinegate, Head of Infrastructure at The Gym Group, explain how Okta has supported them strategically, both throughout the pandemic and with their day—to—day business.

The Gym Group has a unique business model with a contract-free, low cost approach that has enabled them to grow into a successful business with over 180 sites in the UK. Technology has been a key enabler, and facilitating that technology, has been Okta.

“Okta plays a key part in our technology stack, fundamentally improving our security model, and enabling more features around things like multi-factor authentication” McIntosh says. “It’s got context-based policies around location-based awareness, and it’s really key for health-first strategy based applications that can help us scale. As we continue to grow as a business this is crucially important.”

The Gym Group has multiple cloud applications and a workforce that’s spread out all over the UK with diverse skills. “When we were evaluating Okta, we were looking for something that would fit with a wide range of different authentication processes that were in our existing applications” McIntosh says.

“We wanted to primarily provide an interface to our staff that was intuitive for them to pick up. It was really important that we had a level of reporting and understanding of how the tool was being used, where it was being used, and what our security profile was, so that we can bring new applications in confidently and understand how our staff are using them.”

With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic they had to quickly adapt processes, and Okta helped ease these changes. “Okta’s absolutely helped us with that approach, automating a number of the identity access management features and access to applications that all our staff benefit from” Tinegate says.

“With the features of Okta around automated lifecycle management, and licence provisioning, it’s really helped remove those manual steps that are prone to error and reduce support calls, and also help staff on the ground and in the office be much more productive.”

Like so many other businesses, the Gym Group is looking forward to being fully operational once the pandemic is under control so they can get on with future plans. “We’re really excited to get back to the day job of delivering the gym experience to hundreds of thousands of members” McIntosh says. “Behind that initial re-enabling of the business, we’re looking to grow both in terms of our core products, and also affiliated products and services that we can bring in.

We see Okta having a major role to play in both of these strategies.” okta.com/uk

THE GYM GROUP

GEOFF TINEGATE

“ Particularly since Covid, people are looking at their health through a quite different lens and realising that without too much effort they can make a real change.”

TITLE: HEAD OF IT INFRASTRUCTURE INDUSTRY: HEALTH & FITNESS LOCATION: UNITED KINGDOM

Geoff joined The Gym Group’s technology leadership team in 2017. He has over 15 years’ experience in international and national senior technology roles in a broad range of industries including ecommerce travel, retail, health and leisure.

At The Gym Group, his focus has been on consistently improving processes, operations, infrastructure, data protection and information security. Before joining The Gym Group, Geoff was EMEA Director of Enterprise Architecture at the corporate real estate firm JLL.

JASPER MCINTOSH

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, THE GYM GROUP

EXECUTIVE BIO

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a high quality, at-home digital experience.

Additionally, they leveraged the expertise within their staff to deliver free content on social media.

"While we were closed, we were able to tell members we had content going out on all our social channels that was free for them to access and share with friends and family. If they wanted a more rounded, comprehensive digital package they could try the free trial with our collaboration with Fiit. That really got the ball rolling."

They adapted their offering for the new post-Covid world by freezing membership fees until members were ready to return and implementing a monitoring tool for people to determine when the least busy time of day to visit was. While many public places - such as museums - reopened with a booking system, The Gym Group took this novel approach to ensure members had complete flexibility and a safe exercise environment.

"We built a tool that provides real time information on how busy the gym is, relative to its maximum capacity" McIntosh says. It also has a graph showing how busy it is at different times of day and on different days of the week.

We put this information into the hands of members both through the website and the app, giving them the maximum amount of flexibility.

"What we've seen, amazingly, is that the usage patterns in our gyms have changed quite fundamentally. Before, we had evening peaks or morning peaks in some sites, now we're seeing members choose to use gyms at different times of day. This gives them the best possible experience because it fits in with their new lifestyle and enables them to choose times when the gyms are less busy."

Data has been crucial to making these adaptations, however McIntosh explains this focus began some 18 months ago, prior to technologymagazine.com

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The Gym group: Jasper McIntosh shares an insight into gym groups new technology

Covid-19. "Our business model lends itself particularly well to modern data methods, because we generate a lot of data. We're a contract-free subscription model so pricing, tenure and churn are fundamental metrics.

"With an automated access control system, we have something that most people in retail would really value because we know exactly who is in our gym. We can build a detailed picture of member engagement by combining this data with usage data from our digital products. We can understand when people visit, how often, for how long and how their visit patterns are changing.

"As part of our wider digital transformation programme, we created a roadmap to develop a first class data environment, in terms of both the infrastructure we use to 230

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capture and process data, and the team we build to create value with it."

This has been hugely valuable to help deal with the challenges of the pandemic. "All of a sudden the business started asking more questions about things we hadn’t previously prioritised, like the maximum capacity of gyms, how many members used to visit but are no longer visiting, and how can we design communications and products to support members in this challenging new environment."

Along with technology, this access to data is helping the company move into new areas and make the business more efficient. They recently implemented Okta to streamline their operations, as McIntosh explains that their growth over the last five years led to an increase in the number of systems that are

THE GYM GROUP

2008

Year founded

2,000 Employees

Health & Fitness “ Our business model lends itself particularly well to modern data methods, because we generate a lot of high quality data.”

JASPER MCINTOSH

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, THE GYM GROUP

being used across the organisation. This growth brings new challenges around coordination, synchronisation of user accounts, and the need to continually raise the bar with regards to data security.

"We're bringing Okta in to replace our active directory and other authentication products. It

£153mn Revenue (FY ending 2019)

enables us to centralise these critical activities in a way that it makes it much easier for us to manage our people and our systems, and it provides a much higher standard of overall identity management and security. The initial implementation has seen us launch Okta across the business for our priority systems. Over time, in a series of phases, we will implement more of the features of the product to provide granular multi-factor access, implement tighter controls around international access into systems, and provide new security features and services for our staff."

Looking ahead, McIntosh says there is still huge opportunity for growth, despite the uncertainty presented by Covid. "We continue to see exponential growth in fitness and fitness technology, whether that's products like Peloton, innovation from big players like Apple technologymagazine.com

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“ We're seeing continuing exponential growth in fitness technology, whether that's new products like Peloton, innovation from big players like Apple Fitness+, or the amalgamation of technology and fitness” JASPER MCINTOSH

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, THE GYM GROUP

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THE GYM GROUP

The Gym group: Geoff Tinegate shares with us how the gym group utilises efficiency

Fitness+, or the amalgamation of technology and fitness through a whole array of new products and services. There's a lot of change happening out there.

"Particularly as a result of Covid, people are looking at their health through a quite different lens and realising that without too much effort they can make a real change. When we look at what we're really good at, which is providing high quality exercise environments, a high quality digital experience, and connecting with many hundreds of thousands of people already on that exercise journey, we see some great opportunities to improve the health, fitness and wellbeing of an ever wider audience.

Technology really is at the heart of that opportunity."

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TECHNOLOGY ENABLING SUCCESS

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Gunjan Verma, Chief Technology Officer of The Travel Corporation, discusses the role of tech­ nology in transformation and combatting COVID-19

WRITTEN BY: WILLIAM SMITH PRODUCED BY: KRIS PALMER

L

ast year, The Travel Corporation (TTC) celebrated its hundredth anniversary. The globe-spanning organisation incorporates around 40 brands as part of the TTC family, as well as a number of Hotels. “Each of those brands is known in their categories to provide exceptional customer service and travel experiences at their core,” says Gunjan Verma, Chief Technology Officer of The Travel Corporation, and previously of one of those brands, Contiki.

“We’re passionate about making travel experiences personal, with a huge focus on sustainability. What­ever we do is with the aim of making travel matter.”

A large part of enabling that vision comes from technology. On the data front, the company is midway through a journey to maximise its data utilisation.

“There are two key initiatives to further leverage our data underway,” says Verma.

“We have made a significant investment in building a multi-system, multi-source data ecosystem. Over the next two to three years will see us taking data from Salesforce, from our reservation system, from our website, all coming into an AWS scalable platform for us to then start using that data to assist decision-making.” technologymagazine.com

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THE TRAVEL CORPORATION

Gunjan Verma discusses how The Travel Corporation is making travel easier

“WE FEEL THAT AS A TRAVEL OPERATOR WE ALSO HAVE TO PLAY OUR PART IN MAKING SURE THAT PEOPLE ARE LOOKED AFTER AND TAKEN CARE OF”

AI is another emerging The customer area into which Verma experience is at the core is looking to improve of the travel experience performance across the TTC offers. “We have company, including the a platform called My sorting of business leads.

Travel Portal,” says “We use some rules Verma. “We use it to right now to prioritize build excitement even some leads over others. before a vacation has We are now looking at begun. What are you how to use AI to say going to see? What this lead is better than are you going to eat GUNJAN VERMA the other in order to including any dietary CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, THE TRAVEL CORPORATION take that to the next requirements? What are level. Of course we the local experiences also employ AI in the customer experience that will be available to you? It also allows space on the digital front. When a customer our customers to express their travel comes to our website, their experience is passions. For example, you may say you’re personalised. The first time they might see actually very interested in architecture, while some inspirational imagery, but the next your partner may say they're very interested time we can detect that you have come in food and wine. We capture all of that before and, based on some rules, alter your detail.” Beyond that, it also has simplifying web experience.”. functions such as taking the technologymagazine.com

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“ WE’RE PASSIONATE ABOUT MAKING TRAVEL EXPERIENCES PERSONAL” GUNJAN VERMA

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, THE TRAVEL CORPORATION

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GUNJAN VERMA TITLE: CTO COMPANY: THE TRAVEL CORPORATION

EXECUTIVE BIO

INDUSTRY: LEISURE, TRAVEL & TOURISM Gunjan Verma is the Chief Technology Officer for The Travel Corporation (TTC.com), the world leader in travel. With a strong background in consumer internet, Gunjan brings with him a wealth of experience, driving technology, innovation & the digital agenda across TTC's global business.

Prior to joining TTC, Gunjan was at Groupon, as Managing Director of Operations in Australia and New Zealand, overseeing functions including customer operations, merchant operations, supply chain and key strategic/technology projects. He has also worked in various senior transformation, operations and technology roles within Accenture, Coca-Cola and Linde Group.

Gunjan received a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Delhi College of Engineering, India and a Graduate Diploma in Management from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

He loves travel (obviously!), reading, and following cricket, which he played at university.

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TOGETHER TRAVEL COMPANIES

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Salesforce and TTC: Transforming the customer experience

SPREAD OND OR INUM

Michael Green, Senior Vice President - Travel, Transport & Hospitality at Salesforce on leveraging technology to meet the evolving expectations of today’s consumers

The Travel Corporation (TTC) has been a Salesforce customer since 2014. “TTC has been leveraging Salesforce technology to consolidate processes and systems to help accelerate sales cycles, ensure consistent communication across marketing and deliver seamless customer service,” says Michael Green, Senior Vice-President, Head of Retail & TTH (Travel, Transport & Hospitality) in the UK & Ireland.

“Salesforce solutions have been helping TTC go to market through their indirect model - via travel agencies and resellers.”

In recent times, TTC has evolved their business model from a B2B (business to business) to a B2C (business to consumer) facing organisation. “TTC had a clear vision, they wanted to get closer to their customers, and they came to Salesorce to understand how to achieve this. The travel industry has faced enormous challenges of late, and the need to find different ways to serve customers and build resilience into entire business models has accelerated many brand’s digital transformation journey. TTC were already on that path with a clear end goal in sight.

“Part of the work we’ve been involved in, is harnessing TTC’s vast amount of data, which has been accrued over the brand’s one-hundred year lifespan. We have been able to unify that data to provide a single source of truth.

“We know customers are demanding more from their online experiences, they crave more personalised, high-value and easy to use services. By leveraging Salesforce technology TTC is able to deliver personalised experiences at scale. When a customer chooses to interact with the brand, they want to be known and understood.”

After seven years of working together, Salesforce is laser focussed on continuing to be a trusted digital advisor to TTC. “It’s not just about supporting them as they run their business but helping them change their business,” says Green. “At Salesforce, trust is our number one value, and it is a key component to the success of any digital transformation project. This is built through being honest, demonstrating proven credibility and drawing on a vast array of expertise to inform decision making.”

THE TRAVEL CORPORATION

How We Tread Right

“ WE DON’T JUST SAY AN IMAGE ON OUR WEBSITE LOOKS MORE INSPIRATIONAL THAN ANOTHER WE LET DATA TELL US” GUNJAN VERMA

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, THE TRAVEL CORPORATION

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stress out of juggling travel documents by storing all relevant data for hotel check-ins or flight boarding.

Verma points out that just as important as the new technology is the culture supporting it, however, with a new emphasis on supporting decisions with data. “18 months ago, we embarked on an AB testing framework with everything we do. Now, we don’t just say an image on our website looks more inspirational than another - we let data tell us. We’re shifting the culture from inspiration to inspiration and data, instituting a culture of testing, learning and continuous improvement.” Alongside that is an emphasis on trusting teams to manage themselves. Verma sees this as not just a trend but a permanent evolution.

“It is actually well established now that self

THE TRAVEL CORPORATION

managing teams perform better.

Answering questions like: ‘What's the The question is how do you keep best way to unlock our data? What's business objectives in mind, give the best way to market our first-party them to your respective teams and data? What do we do with thirdThe Travel let them get on with it, promoting party data?’ All the issues that have Corporation was that culture of autonomy with a come up around adopting a multifirst founded in 1920. few guide rails.” channel strategy, they’ve helped Supporting TTC on its journey to answer.” have been a few key partners, among them The travel industry has been particularly Salesforce. “They’ve assisted as we’ve hard-hit by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, transformed our business from being a legacy leading TTC to adopt a number of proactive tour operator, to a omnichannel organisation. measures to ensure staff, customers and Salesforce of course has brought not just the partners all feel safe. “That is the single technology such as Einstein, but the thinking most important thing we have to do,” says which comes with being a digital-first business.”

Verma. “Of course we have a very robust One of the areas Salesforce has particularly hygiene and wellbeing protocol in place for focused upon is data. “The professional future travel. Governments will play their services arm of Salesforce has been moving part with vaccination, but we feel that as a things forwards with our approach to data. travel operator we also have to play our part

1920

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in making sure that people are looked after and taken care of.” One such example of that focus is the institution of wellbeing directors to ensure social distancing at hotels and restaurants, akin to existing travel directors.

As Verma explains, responding to the pandemic has allowed the company to learn a few lessons. “We’ve learnt that we can move fast if the organisation is focused on a single objective, and proved that legacy businesses can also be agile when it comes to it. The ways we were able to pivot and the nimbleness we were able to build into our operating model means that it’s served to accelerate existing efforts.”

“WE’VE LEARNT THAT WE CAN MOVE FAST IF THE ORGANISATION IS FOCUSED ON A SINGLE OBJECTIVE” GUNJAN VERMA

CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, THE TRAVEL CORPORATION

Going forwards, Verma sees his department as continuing to fulfill the measures upon which it judges itself, namely improving customer experience, providing productivity improvements, focusing on security and compliance, increasing distribution and building a culture of continuous improvement. “TTC’s technology department will continue using technology and digitalenabled tools and processes to make our brands more successful in their respective, competitive marketplaces.”

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Kimberly Bailey, CIO

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CITY OF MEMPHIS

THE CITY, THE CIO, COVID AND COLLABORATION The City of Memphis reeled under the impact of the pandemic, its newly appointed CIO Kimberly Bailey an unknown quantity: we asked her how her team responded.

WRITTEN BY: JOHN O'HANLON PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

Y

ou might have thought that Kimberly Bailey had a lot to prove after Memphis' Mayor Jim Strickland appointed her as the City's first female African American CIO in January 2020. A native Memphian, after university she shifted to Atlanta, Georgia in 1996, gaining experience with General Motors and IBM before returning to her home town in 2003 to work with the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team, helping them move into their new home, the $250m FedExForum. In 2018 she came back into the City government as IT lead in the HR department, getting to know the directors of every department and gaining intimate knowledge of what they do.

When the search for a new CIO started late in 2019 she was asked to assume the role of Deputy CIO to help in the search, so she drew up an outline of the qualities and experience she thought would be needed. By December the search was concluded – and she was informed by the Mayor's department that as she was clearly the best person to execute those plan, would she please accept the job. “It has been a fantastic journey. My first internship after graduation in 1995 was at the City of Memphis in the then CIO's department so it's an amazing feeling to now occupy this seat!”

Technology in partnership Between 1995 and now the perception of IT has changed, but she knew that much more change would be needed. “I wanted to change how the organization looked at the IT division - not just as a glorified emergency service but as a strategic partner. Just before the pandemic closed us down we did a roadshow, invited all the department directors and their deputies, and asked them what they needed, what challenges they'd faced in dealing with our division, and how they thought we should move forward.” This dialogue altered the relationship radically, and also made it easier for the CIO's department to implement its own programs. As an example, she identified a large corpus of shadow IT where departments technologymagazine.com

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Kimberly Bailey talks the City of Memphis' IT development

had accrued their own solutions. They were very amenable to her suggestion that these be replaced by enterprise solutions wherever possible. “Now they see us as the people to help them make the right choice, confident that we want what works best for them.”

Bailey's intimate exposure to HR work over many years helped shape her leadership style. The human element became critically important as Covid-19 struck. “I don't just check on what my teams are doing, but how they are doing: they are more than a resource for us: we are a resource for them and all 8,000 city employees too.” Kimberly Bailey's approach is best shown by her actions: her first action on becoming deputy leader in 2019 was to schedule a 15-minute one-to-one meeting with each of the 80 staffers in the IT division.

“I want to know what each person does, what they like about their work and what they would 248

March 2021

“ We immediately decided to send home our noncustomer-facing people, like programmers and developers and project managers” KIMBERLY BAILEY CIO, CITY OF MEMPHIS

CITY OF MEMPHIS

suggest to make it better. I know them and they know me. We have a portal where you can chat with the CIO any time. I schedule these meetings myself so they don't have to go through my EA” And since the lockdown she has continued to add members to her team – nobody lost their job, indeed there have been advantages as she is now able to onboard people who live in other cities.

Leading in an emergency

By March 2020 the IT Division found itself having to respond to unprecedented circumstances. “We immediately decided to

KIMBERLY BAILEY TITLE: CIO INDUSTRY: GOVERNMENT

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: MEMPHIS Kimberly Bailey is Director of Information Technology and the Chief Information Officer for the City of Memphis. She is the first African American female to hold the position. Bailey is an experienced leader with demonstrated skills in project management, team building, public speaking, and team facilitation. She enjoys finding new and innovative ways to address complex issues and obtain excellent outcomes.

The native Memphian began her career with the City of Memphis as a college intern in the Information Systems Division.

Since then, this ambitious woman has steadily progressed securing IT and project management positions with international and award-winning organizations such as the Memphis Grizzlies, Technicolor, AutoZone, Pinnacle Agriculture Holdings, and CBRE. She returned to the City of Memphis in 2017 as the

send home our non-customer-facing people, like programmers and developers and project managers. They could work from home easily and we needed more space for the people who did have to come into the office so they needn't work in proximity.” These guys probably had the right hardware, but not all the city's employees had. What to do, when 500 laptops and docking stations had to be sourced in short order? Very fortuitously Bailey and her deputy had recently paid a visit to a local IT recycling contractor, ER2. “I have to admit that I was not enthusiastic about going there initially, but the place was only five minutes

HRIS Solutions Manager and was instrumental in the upgrade of several vital operational components within the Human Resources Department.

Bailey received her BS in Management Information Systems from Christian Brothers University and MS in Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services from Bellevue University. She shares her knowledge and passion for technology with the IT professionals of tomorrow as an adjunct professor at Christian Brothers University.

In addition to technology, she serves as assistant secretary of the Shelby County Health, Education, and Housing Board. Bailey expresses her love of history as the publisher of the children’s coloring book series Color & Read which highlights the accomplishments of African Americans. It can be found online at www.colorandread.com.

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Mitel’s communications technology powers the City of Memphis As the pandemic swept across America, the solution installed by Mitel came at precisely the right time Mitel has supported thousands of cities around the world over the last 50 years. “It was exciting to have the opportunity to bring that experience to bear in helping the City of Memphis modernize its communications infrastructure and the way its staff communicates and serves area residents,” said Stephanie Ford, Vice-President of Vertical Sales at Mitel.

Discussions around the upgrade began in 2019 when stakeholders convened to gain a better understanding of the challenges they needed to address in overhauling the City’s disparate systems.

“We had a PBX system that was over 20 years old, and only one person in our organization really knew how to support it,” said Kimberly, Bailey, the City’s Chief Information Officer. “We were looking for a solution that could better meet our needs. That’s why we chose Mitel.”

Leveraging the MiVoice Business platform, Mitel designed a solution with an integrated contact center that lets employees and the wider community connect more easily via the device

and channel of their choice. Working together with its partner CRI, Mitel enabled the City to get the new contact center up and running in time to respond to higher call volumes associated with COVID-19 related inquiries.

“The contact center is the ‘storefront’ of any organization, so the impression created within that space sets the stage for the entire customer experience,” said Ford. “With a modern contact center, the City of Memphis can depend on this virtual storefront to ensure the impression it’s making is the best one possible.”

Just as importantly, the new communications platform can support the City’s employees even when they’re not working behind the traditional office walls. This feature proved especially valuable when the pandemic hit and organizations first felt its impact. While many were initially unprepared, the Mitel solution allowed the City of Memphis to power remote working and maintain operations.

“The initial implementation was very successful, so we’re continuing to deploy the Mitel infrastructure throughout the entire enterprise.

Everyone loves it because it’s so much easier to use and it’s moving us into the digital space we want to be in,” said Bailey.

CITY OF MEMPHIS

“ I want to know what each person does, what they like about their work and what they would suggest to make it better” KIMBERLY BAILEY CIO, CITY OF MEMPHIS

from our office so we went along anyway. We were blown away to find out that they not only recycled but also provided hardware and did imaging. We had found a very lean outfit, very well organized and a very good partner for us.

So, two weeks later when we needed these laptops we went to them rather a local retailer.

I reached out to them and they responded immediately and they were able to deliver.”

This was a great confidence builder for a division led by an untried CIO at a time when Memphis needed its IT team to deliver.

It also illustrated the value in the focus she gives to relationship-building. “Everything came together as if we had practiced it beforehand.” she said. As it happened, the way was smoothed by the fact that Microsoft Teams software had already been purchased by the City of Memphis though it had never been turned on. “We turned it on and we put together some quick reference guides and training materials. We simply sent everybody home and that worked and it has been phenomenal all the way through and everybody has responded and it has been a very good experience for us to see how we have been able to come together with partnership-building and relationship252

March 2021

building.” In fact, so successful has been the move to remote working that this arrangement will be made permanent for many.

The tools may have been in place but that's only half the story. We've seen how Kimberly Bailey leads by consensus, not wanting to impose solutions as it were, from above.

So right at the beginning of the process she surveyed her teams to see how they felt about working from home. “I wanted to be mindful of the fact that many of my team have young people studying and maybe elderly relatives who need attention from time to time. We have a hoteling arrangement: if someone needs to come in or a team needs to meet, they can schedule a space. We don't want anyone to feel excluded, we just want them

CITY OF MEMPHIS

to feel as safe as possible. I think the team appreciates the flexibility with the ability to work remotely and being able to come in and meet with colleagues and customers when they have to.”

GOVERNMENT Industry

8000

Number of employees

MEMPHIS Location

Fundamental fixes During this time, the work of the IT Division has had to continue uninterrupted, with some 50 different projects currently ongoing. The data center has been upgraded and relocated, and a number of transformational projects started. Outstanding among these has been the implementation of DocuSign. “We are a government entity so we deal with a lot of documents – these get drafted then they move up the authorization chain until they get to the Mayor's office, usually many days later. With people working remotely this process, always cumbersome, is near impossible so DocuSign has been invaluable in cutting the time it takes to get contracts and official documents through. Everyone really appreciates being able to still continue business at home, using any device, without waiting for the paper to come across their desk.” Now the IT team is looking to extend this facility to residents when they interact with the City.

The other big transforming upgrade came in the nick of time, being installed just as remote working came in April 2020. “We were operating with a 20-year-old PBX system, and only one person in the organization knew how to keep it going! Our telecom technology team was influential in selecting the most effective new system for the City, and that's when we chose Mitel as our provider.” The MiVoice system custom designed for Memphis allows call center managers to listen in and coach their teams, a function they had asked for. “We are rolling the system out across the entire enterprise – it is helping us get into that digital space where we want to be, and technologymagazine.com

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above all the users are all appreciating the benefits of a communications structure that is fit for purpose So, nothing had to stop because of Covid, though budgets were hit across all departments. “We had to save money,” Bailey admits, “but I think we have managed to find ways to scale back. I was glad not to let go of any of my staff as some departments may have had to: we just looked at how we were doing things and how we could do them differently. Remember that saving time always saves money.”

Her readiness to listen to her team’s suggestions was demonstrated when her security team suggested an upgrade of the security platform. They brought a convincing business case for introducing an endpoint security platform that would give better antiviral performance than the legacy Symantec software – they also wanted to start compliance training for the staff to minimize the vulnerability of the system with so many people working from home. “They found a great program in CrowdStrike: it is trackable and user-friendly, it's a lot better for our purpose and we get to push it out to more endpoints in different divisions.” At their instigation, they started a monthly security newsletter to keep employees aware of issues, and started compliance training with the help of Infotech.

Post-Covid, many efficiencies that have been introduced will continue to yield benefit.

Nevertheless she looks forward to the day she can return to normal levels of spending allowing her to bring on more transformational ideas, “Innovation is always in my sights. We have a three-pronged approach, infrastructure, implementation, and innovation. We had to do so much infrastructure and implementation work in that first year, but now we can start to look at ways we can bring in automation, 254

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CITY OF MEMPHIS

“I think the team appreciates the flexibility with the ability to work remotely and being able to come in and meet with colleagues and customers when they have to” KIMBERLY BAILEY

CIO, CITY OF MEMPHIS

machine learning, chatbots and IoT.” With competent leaders in her team to oversee the infrastructure and implementation piece she will take personal charge of innovation once the foundations on which it rests are where they need to be.

For now, though assessment, then rationalization, of the IT environment takes priority. “I am proud of the foundation work we are doing, which will ensure that whatever innovation we put in place will be sustainable.

So, we are carefully looking at what applications are aging and need replacing, or where we can save money by shrinking some of the complexity, or by phasing out some of the solutions that have accrued over time. We have more than 200 contracts in place with a host of different vendors, and we do need to cut that vendor base down to size.”

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MICROSOFT

How Microsoft is

Driving Defense Innovation at the Speed of Relevance Traditional acquisition and development techniques lack the agility required to deliver mission critical technology solutions in the defense and intelligence domain. Kate Maxwell explains how that’s changing.

WRITTEN BY: PADDY SMITH PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

D

efense and intelligence missions are moving increasingly into the information domain,” says Kate Maxwell, CTO, Defense & Intelligence for Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector. It’s a radical shift from what Maxwell calls “kinetics”, which remain a threat, but even traditional defense benefits from the advances in data science and connectivity.

“Information is helping our defense customers get ahead of their adversaries,” Maxwell explains. “Cloud computing enables secure information sharing across services, domains, and the allied community - all the way from headquarters to the tactical edge, to that soldier at a forwarddeployed location. And once that level of interoperability is achieved, we help our customers figure out how to turn raw data into insights. That's a big leap that is facilitated by capabilities like artificial intelligence, machine learning and high performance computing. Raw data is one thing, but how do we get to insights and technologymagazine.com

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1975

The year Microsoft was founded

1986

The year Microsoft stock shares first went public

$143bn Microsoft's revenue in USD, in 2020

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“As technologists, we often run after the amazing and shiny new technology.

But if we don’t get the culture right and really seek to understand how people and technology interact, that new technology is not going to take hold. Period” KATE MAXWELL

CTO, DEFENSE & INTELLIGENCE WORLDWIDE PUBLIC SECTOR, MICROSOFT

infer intent? When our customers can turn data into insights and get inside their adversary’s decision cycle, that's how they find competitive advantage in the digital battlespace.”

MISSION SPEED Despite Microsoft’s gigantic clout in the cloud computing arena, there’s more to the future of defense than spinning up a Microsoft Azure server or two. “Mission speed,” is one of Maxwell’s mantras, which means 5G and satellite communications are high on her list of priorities, not to mention virtualisation technologies – augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality (a significant upgrade to traditional training and mission planning activities that often include “drawing pictures in the sand”).

But fostering a culture of innovation is crucial to Maxwell’s own mission.

“As technologists, we often run after the amazing and shiny new technology. But if we don’t get the culture right and really seek to understand how people and technology interact, that new technology is not going to take hold. Period.” technologymagazine.com

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Microsoft for Defense and Intelligence

“ Our focus is on delivering world-class capability and digital transformation to the international defence allied community” KATE MAXWELL

CTO, DEFENSE & INTELLIGENCE WORLDWIDE PUBLIC SECTOR, MICROSOFT

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She talks about Will Roper’s ‘digital trinity’ as a philosophy and is also insistent that “antiquated, quite lengthy” government acquisition is a problem to be fixed. “It’s really hard to drive innovation at the speed of relevance when you have bureaucracy and red tape. But you also have to balance the need for speed with maintaining the integrity of the acquisitions process.

“And then there’s cultural transformation.

I mention all these digital models, but people are at the core of any transformation effort. We have to upskill the defense workforce, give them the right digital skills so they’re prepared to build and develop capabilities in new ways. We have to introduce design thinking into workplace processes so we can truly understand the customer and be a mission partner. I feel Microsoft is extremely well positioned to

MICROSOFT

do that. And this is an amazing time to be driving that digital transformation for the defence community.

“Microsoft is an iconic technology enterprise; we’ve been around for a long time, and we’ve been serving defence and intelligence customers for the better part of 40 years. In Worldwide Public Sector, our focus is on delivering world-class capability and digital transformation to the international public sector community.

And my team focuses specifically on the allied defense & intelligence community.

“Microsoft has the largest and most mature cloud partner ecosystem in the entire market, which is critical when it comes to driving innovation. Our job is to break down the barriers to entry so independent software vendors can bring their capabilities to bear for the defence and intelligence landscape. It’s a huge part of our value proposition.”

TITLE: CTO COMPANY/SECTOR: DEFENSE & INTELLIGENCE FOR MICROSOFT WORLDWIDE PUBLIC SECTOR INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY

EXECUTIVE BIO

THE DEFENCE LANDSCAPE When Maxwell discusses the defence landscape, she is talking about an array of threats. “This is not meant to be a doom and gloom story,” she says as she paints a picture of growing global disorder where established threats live alongside nonstate actors increasingly armed with sophisticated tools. Throw in geopolitical and civil unrest, terrorism, climate change and public health crises, and it looks decidedly doomy and gloomy.

“Technology is advancing at a really incredible pace, and that’s good for defense agencies, but it’s also good for their adversaries, because technology is increasingly capable, available, and in some cases becoming less expensive by the day.

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS), or drones, are a great example of this.

KATE MAXWELL

Kate Maxwell is the Chief Technology Officer for Defense & Intelligence in Microsoft’s Worldwide Public Sector. Maxwell is an accomplished technology leader and strategist with almost 20 years of experience supporting Defense & Intelligence customers around the globe.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Maxwell held various engineering leadership roles within Raytheon Technologies, including Technical Director and Chief Engineer of multiple product lines.

She was also the Founding Director of the Raytheon Innovation Center – a global corporate innovation engine that inspires and empowers employees to innovate.

Maxwell is a passionate advocate for STEM outreach and diversity, and she commits her time to making a difference through volunteerism.

MICROSOFT

“ We’re seeing this evolving defense landscape where there is a contest in every single domain: land, air, sea, space and cyberspace” KATE MAXWELL

CTO, DEFENSE & INTELLIGENCE WORLDWIDE PUBLIC SECTOR, MICROSOFT

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The US Air Force has maintained air superiority for decades, and all of sudden that air superiority is being threatened by $400 quadcopters that you can buy at any big-box store. The threat is asymmetric, and very real.

“We’re also seeing this evolving defense landscape, where there’s contest in every single domain: land, air, sea, space and cyberspace. The battlefield itself is changing. The landscape is moving increasingly to the digital domain. It’s all about who has information dominance.

It’s all about data. It’s about insights.

It’s about secure connectivity, especially at the tactical edge."

MICROSOFT

168,263

Current worldwide Employment Headcount at Microsoft

97,656 Current Employment Headcount at Microsoft in the US

CEO

Satya Nadella is the current chief executive officer of Microsoft

2030

Last year, Microsoft announced their plans to be carbon negative by 2030

THE DX JOURNEY “At Microsoft, we take a very customer-driven and mission-centric approach to everything we do. This is not a one-size-fits-all digital transformation journey. So, we see three horizons for defence and intelligence. First is the foundational transformation, where we are helping our customers modernise the defence workplace, facilities, and installations. Data is a critical asset, so we help our customers understand where all of their data lives and map out their data estates.

Migrating unclassified data and workloads to the cloud is a great first step. Then we help them work out how to harness and fuse that data and put it to work for them.

“The second horizon is about expanding on that transformation and helping our customers become even more datadriven and agile. We help our customers migrate qualified, sensitive data estates to the cloud. We help them take advantage of digital engineering tools and methods, ubiquitous computing, and AI to draw out insights, optimize their operations, and enable a common operational picture across domains, all the way to the tactical edge.

“And the third horizon is about unlocking all of the advanced capabilities that you can bring to bear once you have gone truly digital – enabling our customers technologymagazine.com

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MICROSOFT'S 4 PILLAR STRATEGY Four key pillars of Microsoft Worldwide Defense & Intelligence digital transformation strategy: Modernise the defence and intelligence workplace Deliver trusted and secure infrastructure and services Protect the information domain and help grow cyber force capabilities Optimise defence and intelligence operations and enhance datadriven decisions

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to disrupt and deliver innovative mission capabilities at the speed of relevance.

This includes a host of advanced capabilities including productivity tools for mannedunmanned teaming, cyber ops capabilities, synthetic environments for training and mission planning, and growing our customers’ network through avenues like space and 5G." SPEED IS EVERYTHING “Speed,” Maxwell insists, “is everything.”

One of her top priorities for the defense and intelligence community is enabling modern methodologies like DevSecOps, and improving the feedback cycle to constantly deliver improvements and high-value mission capabilities. “You don’t win a conflict by being the first to invent a capability,” she explains, “you win by being the first to field it.”

MICROSOFT

THE WORLD’S LARGEST PARTNER ECOSYSTEM Kate Maxwell explains Microsoft’s unique partnership position

“ Partnership is critically important, because we seek to drive innovation to the defence and intelligence missions we serve. Our technology partners are bringing these new mission capabilities forward. ” KATE MAXWELL

PARTNERSHIP

CTO, DEFENSE & INTELLIGENCE WORLDWIDE PUBLIC SECTOR, MICROSOFT

“We have more partners than all our top cloud competitors combined.

We’re partnering with many defence systems integrators as well as independent software vendors. As an example, we partner with Myriad Technologies for multi-domain, multi-level security collaboration. We partner with Semantic AI on artificial intelligence capability.

We’re collaborating with C3.ai to help us solve predictive maintenance issues for defense customers. And we’re partnering with companies like SES and Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) on the space side of the house. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“Partnership is critically important, because we seek to drive innovation to the defence and intelligence missions

we serve. Our technology partners are bringing these new mission capabilities forward. And we know a lot of small and commercially-facing independent software vendors have a hard time breaking into the defence community because they might not have the clearance, infrastructure, or domain knowledge needed to do it. They might not have the right license or accreditations to be able to sell to government acquisitions bodies. So enabling technologies – cloud platforms, containerisation, microservice architectures – unlock the door for those companies to come in and serve up their capabilities to defense customers. And that is one way to inject diversity and capability into the defense ecosystem, and drive innovation at the speed of relevance."

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“ Legacy platform procurement doesn’t work today, especially for software systems.

This demands agility.

We need innovation at the speed of relevance” KATE MAXWELL

CTO, DEFENSE & INTELLIGENCE WORLDWIDE PUBLIC SECTOR, MICROSOFT

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And that’s why she insists government acquisition models need to adapt. “Historically speaking, they have not been set up to accommodate that need for speed. Most government contracting vehicles are set up to support legacy platform procurement – a really lengthy bid, proposal, and development process. That doesn’t work today. And it certainly doesn’t work when you’re talking about building software systems. They demand agility. We have to modernise our acquisition methods to match the mission need, and that will help unlock innovation at the speed of relevance.”

Despite legacy acquisition processes (“antiquated”, “frustrating”), Maxwell notes

that they were installed for good reasons, and that change is not just at the service of technology. Those processes were, after all, “put there with good intent.” But the time for change has come.

“The key point is that digital transformation is not just about the technology. It’s also about people, process, and governance. And that, in many ways, is the hardest part.”

When asked why Microsoft is so passionate about the defense & intelligence domain?

“These efforts save lives. That’s why I come to work every day. I think it’s incredibly rewarding to see our customers realising the value of their own digital transformation, and hearing success stories from the field. This matters.”

So digital transformation is about cultural transformation? “This is very much a people story. This is about people and their interactions with the system. As Peter Drucker says, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. One of the things we do at Microsoft, and one of the things that brought me here, is that we put people and mission at the core of everything we do. We frame every digital transformation around the customer need, and their challenges and stakeholders.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty around digital transformation. People might not know what it means for them or for their job. They might be worried. ‘Is my role going to change? Do I have the right skills to do this?’ For every organization that is transforming, your number one objective has to be bringing your people along on that journey, and getting it right so that it works for them. And that is certainly true for defense and intelligence as well. Digital transformation is a people story, and Microsoft is a mission partner.”

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SECURITY IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION We hear how security and digital risk management have only become more necessary for digital transformation in 2020 WRITTEN BY: WILLIAM SMITH

I

n a fast-changing world, the imperative for digital transformation has never been clearer. Effecting that change while managing digital risk and prioritising security requires expert assistance. “Our intention is to be a strategic partner to our customers, an essential technology vendor and a one-stop shop for organisations as they undergo digital transformation,” says Arash Ghazanfari, CTO (UK), Dell Technologies.

“Events in 2020 have proven that every business has to become a technology business in order to survive the unique operating environment we find ourselves

PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

in. The need for digital transformation is stronger now than ever before. We’re finding that our customers have had to accelerate their digital transformation projects to take advantage of the emerging digital economy,” says Ghazanfari. “Our clients have recognised the need to leverage technology to create best-in-class experiences for their customers. Additionally, they need to empower a diverse, and in most cases distributed but connected workforce to collaborate on digital platforms with the ability to create value regardless of where they are. All of this means the amount of value you unlock from your data can

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Digital Transformation Index 2020

directly contribute to your competitive differentiation. It is now more important than ever before to consider your cyber resiliency and enterprise security as a matter of board level priority.”

One of the major transformational megatrends is the adoption of cloud, an area in which Dell Technologies specialises as an essential infrastructure provider. “As organisations think about adopting cloud operating models, it’s really important they understand the cost and operational implications of where they place their data,” says Liz Green, Cyber Security Specialist UK, Dell Technologies. “We help our clients to make sure they’re mitigating risks and costs and are able to understand what workloads fit best in the cloud.” The cloud landscape entails many choices, but that needn’t be an issue as Ghazanfari explains. “Businesses are increasingly adopting a multicloud strategy and we help our customers by delivering a consistent software defined enterprise 270

March 2021

architecture, so that workloads can be deployed in the empowered edge, or in existing on-premises and distributed private cloud environments, or in the public cloud ecosystem. Our multicloud strategy delivers a consistent software-defined architecture underpinned by a consistent and platformagnostic operating model helping IT departments deliver consistent value

DELL TECHNOLOGIES

“AS PART OF OUR WORK REDEFINED PROGRAMME, WE FOCUS ON THREE KEY AREAS: PRODUCTIVITY, TRUST, AND SAFETY” LIZ GREEN

CYBER SECURITY SPECIALIST UKI, DELL TECHNOLOGIES

ARASH GHAZANFARI TITLE: CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER (UK) COMPANY: DELL TECHNOLOGY (UK) INDUSTRY: I NFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND SERVICES Passionate about transforming great businesses in the digital age, experienced in start-ups and large corporations. Currently serving as a Chief Technology Officer, supporting the overall go to market strategy across the full breadth of the Dell Technologies Ecosystem in the United Kingdom.

EXECUTIVE BIO

added services to their lines of businesses and achieve unparalleled flexibility, control and choice. We believe this is the most optimum approach to maintain the security of and keeping control over application and data supply-chains.”

The number of subsectors experiencing digital transformation has led to a security landscape that is something of a headache for companies. “The security market is highly fragmented and there are many point solution providers out there.

Historically, businesses have also made tactical and reactive investments in cybersecurity,” says Ghazanfari. “The result is a proliferation of disjointed security controls that don’t necessarily talk to each other - adversely impacting the security posture of the enterprise. The approach that we take within the Dell Technologies ecosystem of capabilities, with VMware technology being at the heart of it all, is to focus on delivering more foundational and proactive security measures by delivering security by design intrinsically within our pre-validated solutions.

Building security controls intrinsically into our software defined capabilities reduces the need for bolt-on, threat centric and siloed approach to security.”

Among the trends in the transformation

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of security is virtualisation. “We’re seeing big transformations in network security, specifically in virtualising networks,” says Green. “Going from a physical to a software-defined network presents a lot of opportunities for greater levels of visibility and security. Micro-segmentation as an example, is a great way to prevent lateral progression of advanced threats,

LIZ GREEN TITLE: CYBER SECURITY SPECIALIST UK COMPANY: DELL TECHNOLOGY (UK) INDUSTRY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

ADVERT PAGE GOLD AND SERVICES

EXECUTIVE BIO

Data Protection and Cyber Recovery Strategist helping organizations to safeguard their most important asset, their data.

Passionate about helping drive human progress through technology.

Enthusiastic technical and financial sales leader that loves to work collaboratively towards common goals to drive positive outcomes for our clients.

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“GOING FROM A PHYSICAL TO A VIRTUAL NETWORK PRESENTS A LOT OF OPPORTUNITIES FOR GREATER LEVELS OF VISIBILITY AND SECURITY” LIZ GREEN

CYBER SECURITY SPECIALIST UKI, DELL TECHNOLOGIES

DELL TECHNOLOGIES

a common trait seen in modern destructive attack patterns.”

The fintech industry has kept up one of the fastest paces of transformation.

“Programmability, extensibility and visibility have played a major role in the success of open banking. What’s going to make organisations even more successful down the line is how they secure data and how they make sure that their customers understand how their data is being used and how the data is secured. We’re going to see a huge focus on security and

resilience for the fintech industry, but also as a huge catalyst for change across every sector.”

All of this has only been accelerated by the pandemic, which has served to catalyse new approaches and new understanding of security, with Dell Technologies offering a Work Redefined pathway for the new normal.

“We’re seeing fundamental shifts in operations, and how we talk to customers and clients in all industries. As part of our Work Redefined programme, we focus on three key areas: productivity, trust, and safety,” says Green. technologymagazine.com

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Trusted workplace solutions from Trustmarque and Dell Technologies Take your workplace beyond the limits and enable safe, secure, and user-friendly remote working across your whole organisation.

Learn Learnmore more

Trustmarque and Dell Technologies: delivering for customers

Andrew Downes, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Trustmarque, on the company’s digital transformation expertise and partnership with Dell Technologies IT solutions provider Trustmarque is laser-focused on customers, as Andrew Downes, Head of Strategic Partnerships, explains. “We provide customer-centric IT solutions which enable our customers to run their businesses more efficiently and give them a competitive edge in whatever marketplace that they happen to work in. We have six key go-to markets, namely cloud and data center, modern workplace, IT asset management, security, RPA and data and analytics.”

As a 20-year veteran of the industry, Downes has seen plenty of innovation. “The rate of change is phenomenal.

I think it’s actually one of the reasons that people get involved in the business in the first place. In my time, the biggest accelerant for that change that we’ve seen has been around the adoption of cloud technologies.”

He emphasises that it isn’t enough for IT solution providers to merely keep up with the rate of change.

“You need to stay ahead of it so that you’re best placed to advise your customers and guide them through new technologies as they come to market.”

Trustmarque is a trusted partner of Dell Technologies, holding Titanium partner status within Dell’s partner programme. “We’re one of the most accredited partners in the UK, with a specialism in unstructured data storage and next-gen elastic cloud storage,” says Downes. “We

were the first Dell partner in the UK to sell both Isilon and the object storage platform ECS - with us being the only partner accredited in the UK to deploy ECS.” As a key strategic partner, Downes emphasises that Dell is a keystone vendor with which Trustmarque collaborates closely.

Downes reiterates that the future heralds an acceleration in its customers’ digital transformation strategies, not least due to the events of 2020. “A great example of that has been in some of our healthcare customers, where we’ve seen cloud adoption like we’ve never seen before.” Also coming down the line are new and transformative technologies, such as the rollout of 5G. “We’re also going to have a more disparate workforce than we’ve ever seen, which throws up its own security challenges,” says Downes. “That’s why we’re working with Dell to facilitate this new working environment as part of their Workplace Redefined initiative.”

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Bearing those tenets in mind allows businesses to thrive, as Ghazanfari explains.

“It’s about assessing the risk of adoption of new digital technologies and providing a consumer-like, persona-driven experience

“OUR CUSTOMERS HAVE HAD TO ACCELERATE THEIR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PROJECTS TO BE ABLE TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE EMERGING DIGITAL ECONOMY” ARASH GHAZANFARI

CTO (UK), DELL TECHNOLOGIES

that effectively makes the complexities around delivering a digital workspace disappear and enables businesses to focus on delivering business value.” Having that increased awareness of risk can then lead to better outcomes. “Organisations didn’t always have a comprehensive digital strategy. Now, it’s essential that they do. With that comes a need to look at how risk is being mitigated and managed effectively, but this can actually be a really positive thing. The more that we assess and evaluate digital risks, the faster and better organisations can transform digitally.”

From this viewpoint, security acts as a catalyst for, rather than a barrier to, innovation.

“In order to achieve that outcome, you need to have visibility of your threat landscape and your risk profile,” says Ghazanfari. “We can help our customers understand every aspect of their business architecture so that they have the end-to-end visibility technologymagazine.com

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“ORGANISATIONS DIDN’T ALWAYS HAVE A COMPREHENSIVE DIGITAL STRATEGY. NOW, IT’S ESSENTIAL THAT THEY DO” ARASH GHAZANFARI CTO (UK), DELL TECHNOLOGIES

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that they need to maintain and manage risk, and then make calculated decisions around the steps that they need to take towards innovation. Fundamental to all of this is the recognition that we can’t secure the future in the same way we secured the past. Modern applications can have several cross platforms and complex lateral dependencies, a connected digital workspace can and will lead to the erosion

DELL TECHNOLOGIES

of traditional perimeters and a distributed data consumption model. This requires a context centric and unified approach to security transformation.”

Dell Technologies will continue to help companies make the most of technology in more flexible ways, as Ghazanfari explains. “We are seeing many businesses value and embrace consumption models.

We recognise our customers are looking

at consolidating, simplifying and de-risking their vendor relationships. Our broad ecosystem and open approach, as well as our diverse and inclusive consumption models, has put us in a position to serve the needs of our customers and the unique challenges they face in 2020.”

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Datorama: AI-powered marketing intelligence Salesforce Datorama enables marketers to optimise their marketing budget for maximum efficiency and business impact WRITTEN BY: JANET BRICE PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

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arketers are always looking at ways to improve the impact of their campaigns and drive business growth which is why they are turning to Salesforce Datorama.

Created a decade ago by marketing professionals for marketers seeking to gain a competitive edge - especially in today’s commercial landscape shaped by uncertainty and the Covid-19 pandemic - Datorama is the leading cloud-based, AI-powered marketing intelligence and analytics platform for enterprises, agencies and publishers.

Datorama is the only intelligence platform that helps marketers connect all of their data, uncover deep marketing insights and better understand campaign performance.

With Datorama, marketers can also create, distribute and access powerful marketing analytics apps with speed and ease.

“Our goal for the past 10 years is being able to help our customers automate their data and digital insights to transform their business,” said Boaz Ram, Head of Technology Partnerships at Datorama.

DATORAMA

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“ Our goal for the past 10 years is being able to help our customers automate their data and digital insights to transform their business” BOAZ RAM

HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS, DATORAMA

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Founded in 2012 in Tel Aviv, Datorama was acquired by Salesforce for a reported $800 million in 2018. The high-profile purchase promised marketers, ‘one unified view of data and insights… to optimise engagement at scale’.

Datorama enables more than 3,000 leading global agencies and brands including PepsiCo, Ticketmaster, Trivago, Unilever, Pernod Ricard and Foursquare - to optimise marketing campaigns, automate reporting and make data-driven decisions faster.

Datorama marketplace The Datorama marketplace extends the power of the Datorama’s marketing intelligence capabilities by enabling developers to create custom apps that marketers can discover and use on their platform.

The marketplace features prebuilt apps from partners, like Xandr, Brandwatch and Pinterest which helps

DATORAMA

BOAZ RAM TITLE: HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS COMPANY: DATORAMA INDUSTRY: SOFTWARE

EXECUTIVE BIO

to improve marketing analytics and democratising them.

Ram said that Datorama set out to simplify the process for marketers who have more than 3,0000 platforms to choose from when looking to reach the alldigital customer across every touchpoint.

“Every Platform has its own data set, usually they work in silos and then it becomes extremely hard for marketers to understand. There is too much data to choose from and understand how they impact on each other, what's the return on investment (ROI) or the efficacy of a specific campaign,” he said.

“So that's what Datorama is built for. The purpose is to help marketers ingest all these different data sources from all these faces, all these platforms into a single coherent data model. It then enables marketers to create reports and dashboards to drive cross channel real time insights which helps optimise their marketing.”

Boaz is currently the Head of Technology Partnerships at Salesforce Datorama, and is part of the Datorama Management team. In his current role he manages all types of technology partnerships, including building an ecosystem of partners around the Datorama Marketplace.

Prior to joining Datorama, Boaz served in different product leadership roles for the past 15 years, in Adobe, Yahoo, and Mediamind/Sizmek/Amazon.

Datorama is Boaz's third acquisition in his last four companies. Boaz specializes in Product Management, Product Strategy, Partnerships and Marketplaces, Marketing Technology, Advertising Technology and B2B in general, and has vast experience in building growth products and acquisitions.

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Salesforce acquired Datorama for a reported

$800mn Enables more than

3,000

global agencies and brands to optimise campaigns

Founded in Tel Aviv in

2012

“ We are built by marketers for marketers” BOAZ RAM

HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS, DATORAMA

Artificial Intelligence (AI) gives Datorama the power to drive the marketing platform giving it a competitive edge as it is able to map, model and harmonise data at speed. This enables it to make smarter decisions for clients.

“We are built by marketers for marketers, and we understand marketing - other platforms are more generic. That means we have a model that is structured for marketing,” commented Ram. He pointed out that AI-driven technology allows Datorama to look at data and highlights different aspects that can help customers optimise their data. “These insights can advise a marketer on the best regions or times to run their campaigns for a better ROI.” Value of ecosystems Ram emphasises the importance of ecosystems to Datorama comparing their technologymagazine.com

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“ These insights can advise a marketer on the best regions or times to run their campaigns for a better ROI” BOAZ RAM

HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS, DATORAMA

successful business model to how Apple evolved their iPhone.

“Ecosystem is my favorite subject. I like to use the iPhone analogy. When the iPhone was launched in 2007 it did not have an app store. When it came out, it was just a smarter phone,” he said.

“Although it introduced the internet to the palm of your hand, it couldn't extend its capability to do other things. The app store only came out in the third generation of the iPhone, which was in 2009.

“Think about how we use the smartphone today - very little for actual phone calls or texting and more for banking or shopping which comes from other vendors and partners that built apps for the iPhone.

“And that's really the concept of Datorama’s Marketplace ecosystem. It's basically to democratise the platform and help our partners and customers build solutions, using our technology and really expand the capabilities and the breadth of the solutions that we have beyond what we thought was possible.”

Ram said that although Datorama has an “awesome engineering and product team” 286

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Boaz Ram from Datorama talks about digital marketing from a data perspective

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“ And that's really the concept of Datorama’s Marketplace ecosystem. To democratise the platform and help our partners and customers build solutions, using our technology and really expand the capabilities and the breadth of the solutions that we have beyond what we thought was possible” BOAZ RAM

HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS, DATORAMA

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they're limited in resources. “Partners that can think beyond our spend and resources and expand the capabilities of the platform to help our customers leverage their solutions - so that's the power.”

Datorama has an app with Brandwatch which allows marketers to understand the reach of paid campaigns, not just organic, which is a major benefit for anyone on social media.

“We have an ecosystem of consulting partners and system integrators, like Accenture and Deloitte and smaller companies like Nabler, which help us sell Datorama as an extension of our sales and customer service teams which will help us scale. And that's something that we've expanded and learned a lot.

Solutions for ecommerce The restrictions imposed by the COVID19 pandemic from remote working and lockdowns has seen marketers turning to Datorama to focus their online sales.

“Everyone's turning to ecommerce and now there's a need for a lot of website analytics, a lot of ecommerce solutions and integrations with ecommerce sites like Shopify, Amazon and Walmart,” said Ram. “A lot of the things that we saw happening in small steps during the past eight years really accelerated in a way that no one thought was possible during the first eight months of the pandemic. I think ecommerce will stay and grow stronger.”

Salesforce acquisition When Salesforce acquired Datorama three years ago it opened up global markets and took it to the next level. “It brought in massive scale to roll into the Salesforce machine and that changes a lot of our processes,” commented Ram. technologymagazine.com

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POWER OF THE DATORAMA DEVELOPER PORTAL Datorama’s Marketplace includes Salesforce apps, as well as apps from customers and partners that have been built using the Datorama Developer Portal. These include: • Salesforce Marketing Cloud Cmail: Offers customers interactive analytics that help benchmark and measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns • Xandr Invest Essential Monitoring: Identifies ad server discrepancies and surfaces KPI performance trends for marketers to optimise campaigns and budgets more effectively • Workspace Health: Monitors data quality across every marketing source in one actionable view • Social intelligence: Compares brand presence for competitive insights across Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter • SmartLens Apps: The following apps deliver improved reporting for top marketing sources by displaying KPIs, trends and instant analytics

“ A really good leader needs to define a vision, have the ability to articulate it and finally the determination and conviction to go ahead with it” BOAZ RAM

HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY PARTNERSHIPS, DATORAMA

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“We've grown in size with the acquisition and in relation to the global resources open to us. Salesforce is an amazing company to work - as I think, it has the right heart in place - especially with its involvement in philanthropy.”

Looking ahead, Ram says the proliferation of marketing solutions is ever-changing.

“It's a very dynamic industry, Apple recently announced that, as part of the iOS 14 update, it will be giving users the choice to block the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) identifier at the app level.

“This is going to kill the option to track campaigns using their Apple phones. And that's a major change in the industry.”

According to reports, Apple has taken the strategic stance that privacy is a user right and is currently taking steps to grant users more ability to opt-out of any type of targeting or

tracking the change is expected to occur across Apple’s entire product portfolio.

IDFA is a unique identifier for mobile devices and is used to target and measure the effectiveness of advertising on a user level across mobile devices.

Looking ahead how technology will shape the industry in the near future, Ram predicts cryptocurrency will take off - not just as a speculative financial tool - but as an actual currency to be used in retail and marketing.

“I think it's, it's getting to the point where it's mature enough and safe enough for some of these currencies. I'm excited to see how the GameStop drama pans out.”

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Terry Greer-King, VP of SonicWall EMEA, explains the importance of implementing variable security and risk management solutions at an architectural level WRITTEN BY: WILL GIRLING PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

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eadquartered in Milpitas, California, SonicWall is a Silicon Valley firewall and cybersecurity solutions company originally founded in 1991. Acquired by Dell in 2012 and later sold as a subsidiary to Francisco Partners and Elliott Management in 2016, the company’s history is one punctuated by award-winning innovation, deft stakeholder management and prescient industry development. At a time when the rules for enterprise cybersecurity are being rewritten at an unprecedented rate by remote working and an ever-increasingly digital workplace, these qualities have proven to be invaluable. Fundamentally, SonicWall is a company that believes in embracing change and doesn’t shy away from investing time, money and energy into making it happen.

It was this attitude that first enticed Terry Greer-King, Vice President of SonicWall EMEA, to join. Beginning his career in the semiconductors industry during the late ‘70s, moving through the ‘PC boom’ of the ‘80s, and then finding himself in the cybersecurity arena, Greer-King emphasises that the power of technology to empower, enable and drive change in society is what motivates him. “Cybersecurity has been a growing phenomenon,” he says. “Nowadays, the threats are much more diverse. If you want to establish a security infrastructure and not touch it for five years, you’re going to expose technologymagazine.com

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“ FOR ME, THE ATTRACTION OF CYBERSECURITY IS THAT IT’S QUICK, DYNAMIC, INTERESTING AND CONSTANTLY CHALLENGING” TERRY GREER-KING, VP EMEA, SONICWALL

yourself to lots of risk. For me, the attraction of cybersecurity is that it’s quick, dynamic, interesting and constantly challenging.”

SonicWall is rapidly approaching its 30th year in operation. Despite this, GreerKing states, the temptation to become ‘set in its ways’ is furthest from its mind.

Evolving with the times isn’t easy, but it is eminently necessary. “Change is really difficult for a business, much more than you would be led to believe. It’s not just about technology; it’s how you approach the market and customers and how you deal with business partners.” To say that COVID19 has been one of the most significant harbingers of change in cybersecurity is an understatement. In the first months of the 294

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Spring 2020 lockdown, SonicWall noted an acceleration in digital awareness and a rapid increase in business. It seemed that enterprise digital transformation journeys that might have been completed over 10 years were instead driven through in weeks.

Ultimately, Greer-King reasons, this is because businesses have realised that the ‘new normal’ is here to stay, “Many people don’t think we’re going to ‘snap back’ to how things were beforehand. I believe the new challenges are going to be constant.”

Indeed, even for a cybersecurity expert like SonicWall, there is no denying that remote working poses some difficult questions requiring solutions on a previously unimagined scale. Less than a decade

SONICWALL

TERRY GREER-KING TITLE: VP EMEA COMPANY: SONICWALL INDUSTRY: CYBERSECURITY LOCATION: CALIFORNIA

ago, companies could easily protect their systems through robust firewalls in an office environment. Now, the same uniform protection cannot be guaranteed while employees work from home on potentially unsecured networks. Digital technology’s ubiquitous presence and devices that are connected 24/7 present even more targets for attack from cyber criminals.

“People are and should be part of the solution, as well as part of the problem.

What technology can do is mitigate risk and understand it,” says Greer-King. “Using machine learning, SonicWall can operate much quicker and learn at a code level what’s bad and what isn’t.” Technology’s role at SonicWall could be summarised

EXECUTIVE BIO

Terry Greer-King is currently Vice President of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Sales at SonicWall. Prior to joining the SonicWall team, Terry served as Akamai Technology’s Director of Security Sales for EMEA, Cisco’s Director of EMEA Cybersecurity Sales, as well as the UK Managing Director for Check Point. Terry brings extensive experience providing cybersecurity solutions to partners and customers across the EMEA region and works with EMEA sales leaders to increase direct touch results and grow the SonicWall business.

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1991

Year founded

1,400 Number of employees

“ MANY PEOPLE DON’T THINK WE’RE GOING TO ‘SNAP BACK’ TO HOW THINGS WERE BEFOREHAND. I BELIEVE THE NEW CHALLENGES ARE GOING TO BE CONSTANT” TERRY GREER-KING, VP EMEA, SONICWALL

as ‘pushing security beyond the limits of human ability’. In fact, with its Boundless Cybersecurity strategy, the company can collect data points across 215 countries and apply the aforementioned machine learning

or artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to detect and respond quickly to cyber threats.

Capable of actioning these processes in real-time, SonicWall claims to be able to resolve 80% of cyber attacks in less than two seconds.

Greer-King adds that although SonicWall’s investment in technology has been “huge,” there is another highly important aspect to its approach: understanding. The impact of culture on cybersecurity is arguably of a similar magnitude to the purely technical, and successfully communicating the philosophical divergence between previous iterations of security and the modern dynamic is essential.

“Previously we sold ‘padlocks’ against viruses, but you can’t stop bad guys from doing bad things. What you can do is understand the way your business operates and plan for the future.

If you can understand the threats inherent in the way that your business operates, then you can start to prioritise risk.” technologymagazine.com

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“ IF YOU CAN UNDERSTAND THE THREATS INHERENT IN THE WAY THAT YOUR BUSINESS OPERATES, THEN YOU CAN START TO PRIORITISE RISK” TERRY GREER-KING, VP EMEA, SONICWALL

The abundance of legacy infrastructure at many companies, even FTSE 100 entities, is unfortunately pervasive and forms a key obstacle for SonicWall to overcome. In purely operational terms, the pandemic has fortunately sent a clear signal that adapting to a new way of working is non-negotiable in modern business. True security, in GreerKing’s view, must be an architectural concern. However, companies often have 298

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disparate and inharmonious protection stitched together from multiple sources.

SonicWall’s Boundless Cybersecurity combats this problem by providing a suite of consonant solutions that protect every facet of the customer’s digital operations, including secure email, cloud app security, secure remote access, wireless security and more.

SonicWall has been the recipient of several accolades and industry citations for excellence in 2020 alone. Although unquestionably the result of visionary leadership and wise development of core

SONICWALL

Terry Greer-King from SonicWall talks about cyber security

technologies, Greer-King puts Greer-King outlines how this forward a different assessment managed service provider has for how the company been integral throughout the maintains its innovative two companies’ shared history SonicWall claims to output: “What we’re trying and why their relationship is be able to resolve to do is build empathy with special: “We’ve been involved customers. The idea is that in a couple of projects we don’t want to sit in an ivory together recently. Ignite’s of cyber attacks tower and muse upon what client base stretches from in less than the right product or solution small-medium businesses to could be. SonicWall listens to global enterprises. We’ve been real-world problems and realworking with Ignite and some world challenges, and therefore develops of the larger organisations on boundless technology with relevance to the market.” architecture, future-proofing security and Who a company partners with can new ways to support customers. Ignite’s be essential to the product development solution set is highly cost-effective and helps journey and one of SonicWall’s key them protect against contemporary cyber collaborators, UK-based tech company threats; I think the work we’ve done with Ignite, has distinguished itself from the rest.

Ignite is what we aspire to do everywhere.”

80%

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The potential for business disruption in 2021 is, according to Greer-King, almost impossible to comprehend. In addition to the ongoing challenge of COVID-19, Brexit, lifestyle changes, shifting markets and new working conditions are all conspiring to make predicting the future of cybersecurity nearly impossible. However, with uncertainty paradoxically the only certainty, SonicWall is embracing the inevitability of change and educating customers on risk’s 21st-century paradigm. The company’s approach acknowledges that no ‘catch-all’ solution could ever solve each client’s unique circumstances and instead embraces agility, variability and genuine leadership.

“PEOPLE CAN DO AMAZING THINGS IF ONLY YOU’D LET THEM” TERRY GREER-KING, VP EMEA, SONICWALL

“Leadership is about listening; we should be socially conscious enough to bring others with us. I think the sooner people get on board with cybersecurity, the sooner they’ll reap the benefits from it,” Greer-King concludes. “There is a requirement for clear leadership and a clear sense of direction, but it shouldn’t be done in an isolated way.

It should be done by listening to customers, partners and employees. People can do amazing things if only you’d let them.”

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GUIDING GOVERNMENTS THROUGH DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION SAP takes a leading role in guiding the public and private sectors through digital transformation in the burgeoning South East Europe region WRITTEN BY: RHYS THOMAS PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

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igital transformation in the private sector has taken on new urgency.

Amid COVID-19, businesses were quick to adopt new technology and automation systems to forge a path through economic downturn and place themselves on strong footing to compete in the postpandemic landscape - one that will look very different compared to just 18 months ago.

But in South East Europe, commercial organisations are now charting a near vertical trajectory in adapting to digital processes.

In the words of Josephin Galla, Managing Director for SAP South East Europe, the region has “grown up”. The notion that it is the “little brother or sister” in Europe is not only outdated, but misinformed. “We are very strong, particularly in the public sector and consumer products industries,” she says. “My heart is with South East Europe because I can see the dedication and open mindset of the people here. Serbia is set to be labelled the next Silicon Valley anytime now.”

SAP SEE has been guiding businesses through rapid change for many years.

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Josephin Galla and Predrag Cirkovic discuss SAP SEE's strategies and development

“We have a constant learning mindset about how do we react faster to what the market wants”

up because of the shut perspective. “South down,” and businesses East Europe is a very across the territory have diversified region,” he responded. This means explains. “In the West a more global approach Balkans, it is clear to procurement, companies are trying to rather than previously adopt to a new reality when domestic or by making efforts to local efforts were the digitize their businesses, priority. “We also see work remotely as much the human element as possible, and going JOSEPHIN GALLA of the entire business online with their sales MANAGING DIRECTOR, value chain has been and marketing. In this SOUTH EAST EUROPE given more weight, so it market environment, becomes more relevant to have an actual we act as an “economic enabler”, helping employee experience. We talk a lot about the commercial sector to go digital and to customer experience, and yes, that will go online through our products and our remain important. But the impact of this platforms for back office, online sales, web pandemic is so big that employers have to commerce and online marketing.” take responsibility, and therefore employee The fulcrum of this private sector shift experience has become equally important.” across the territory is the public sector, and it Predrag Cirkovic, Managing Director, SAP is here that SAP SEE is focusing its expertise.

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to help commercial companies adapt and grow while facing, let’s call it, a new reality with new challenges,” Cirkovic says. “The public sector is a key business focus for our investment in the West Balkans, and we have become a trusted advisor.”

Twelve months since the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, however, it is clear that governments are lagging behind. COVID-19 exposed weaknesses in their fundamental operations.

Fiscal consolidation, tax administration modernisation, and citizen engagement are all essential functions that are underdeveloped compared to their counterparts in Western Europe, Cirkovic points out: “The government sector is still using old systems which, though still functional, are sometimes 15 to 20 years old. But this is the opportunity.”

Diversity in the region throws up additional issues. Some countries such as Bulgaria, which “is all over digital transformation and smart cities,” are gaining pace. “We have very close cooperation with the municipalities,” Galla says. “Just to mention one example, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sofia Municipality and six other municipalities in the country introduced SAP SEE’s COVID-19 Pre-Screen & Routing Qualtrics Questionnaire. This is an intelligent online information platform for the citizens which gathers up-to-date information on

SAP partner companies globally

400,000+ SAP customers in more than 180 countries

TITLE: MANAGING DIRECTOR COMPANY: SAP AREA: SOUTH EAST EUROPE

EXECUTIVE BIO

21,000+

JOSEPHIN GALLA

Josephin Galla assumed the role of Managing Director of SAP South East Europe in July 2020, covering Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Croatia, and the seven countries of the West Balkans. Based in Bucharest, Romania she is responsible for driving SAP’s strategy, operations, revenue, and customer success in 12 countries focusing on People, Business and Brand across the region. Born in Berlin, her professional career has taken her from SAP Germany to SAP China, SAP Asia in various roles from sales executive to industry expert, with her previous role being the Managing Director of SAP Vietnam with a proven track record of business growth. She is a wellrespected speaker at international conferences bringing more than a decade of experience in technology, public services and sales leadership to the table. Her passion is to promote talents and education – bringing together industry, academia and governments around the globe.

Josephin has been with SAP since February 2008, heading for 13 years.

She holds a Diploma in International Economics from the International Business School Berlin and a Bachelor Degree in Business Administration from the University of Sunderland.

SAP SEE

the coronavirus and current developments, identifies high-risk groups with filter questions, and automatically redirects them to the appropriate channels. The system also sends summary reports to the municipalities, providing feedback on the trends of the disease, while helping authorities understand what information needs to be messaged more strongly to the public. I am also proud to mention that in all 264 municipalities of Bulgaria, our flagship ERP solution SAP S/4HANA will be the core digital platform to drive digital transformation.”

Other nations are a little slower to adapt, Galla says. Romania and Ukraine, which have also had to deal with other legacy infrastructure problems, have been slower to drive their digital initiatives and allocate funding, for instance. But this is part and

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“Not every organisation can do a big bang, wall-to-wall project; it's all about change management” JOSEPHIN GALLA

MANAGING DIRECTOR, SOUTH EAST EUROPE

PREDRAG CIRKOVIC TITLE: MANAGING DIRECTOR COMPANY: SAP WEST BALKANS INDUSTRY: ICT

EXECUTIVE BIO

parcel of working within the public sector.

Galla points to the many issues families have faced in simply connecting their children with their teachers. SAP cooperated with the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research last year, supporting remote learning of students through specific modern applications.

“Not every organisation can do a big bang, wall-to-wall project; it's all about change management, and we deliver all of the components to a successful project and are always there to stay,” Galla says. “With SAP’s experience, with more than 47 years in the market dealing with key players, we bring best practices to the table, as much as we bring technology, which can then help governments, private organisations, even healthcare organisations envision, ‘This is where I am now, and this is where I want to be’. We put a lot of effort into not only selling the products, but helping to develop roadmaps.

“Actually, this is exactly what our new cloud offering, the recently announced RISE with SAP, is focusing on,” Galla continues. “To deliver business transformation as a service, offering customers at all stages of digital transformation a completely new way to redesign processes to increase their resilience, operational efficiency, and their agility, and to enable them to innovate faster and more frequently.”

Predrag Cirkovic is an experi­ enced ICT and management professional, with more than 20 years’ industry experience. He joined SAP in 2013, initially as Senior Services Account Manager, a role he held for five years, before his promotion to Managing Director of SAP West Balkans.

In his current role, Cirkovic oversees operations throughout the region, covering the following countries: Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moldova and Macedonia. Prior to SAP, he served for seven years as Executive ICT Director of a regional system integration company called Comrade Solutions and Services, and has held roles at other major companies, including Coca Cola.

SAP SEE

“In the West Balkans, exactly as Josephin says, we are using SAP best practices to create roadmaps towards a potential future, and the most efficient route,” Cirkovic adds. “We are one of the rare companies providing everything for the back office, and the new way of doing business online through our customer experience portfolio, web commerce, customer experience measurement software and so on. So we are bringing technology, we are bringing best practices, all the while remaining very close to all these projects. Whether SAP or a partner is implementing the solution doesn’t matter; we are always present to offer quality assurance

“The public sector is a key business focus for our investment in the West Balkans, and we have become a trusted advisor” PREDRAG CIRKOVIC

MANAGING DIRECTOR, SAP WEST BALKANS

and be that trusted advisor for our customers.”

Infrastructure reform, which underpins the entire process of government digitalisation, is well underway and has already yielded positive, proactive steps towards more pressing concerns. “We are at the beginning of the project for tax modernisation based on a new back-office fiscalization platform which aims to simplify the process for citizens and business,” Cirkovic says. “We also have citizen engagement initiatives, which essentially bring greater transparency and ease the process for citizens to approach and access city services.”

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Subscribers in the SAP cloud user base

100+

Innovation and development centers

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“We are always present to offer quality assurance and be the trusted advisor for our customers” PREDRAG CIRKOVIC

MANAGING DIRECTOR, SAP WEST BALKANS

As governments gain pace under on mental health, and I think this is a really the stewardship of SAP SEE, Galla great thing. The paradigm shift that we're concedes that the “next few years will seeing right now will yield results in new be tough,” though now things are rolling, fields that we haven't even thought of yet.” governments can take swifter action As governments and businesses adapt to become leaner. “Similar to private in the region, Galla says that internally SAP corporations, they want to understands it also needs increase revenue, decrease to evolve. “We have a SAP CUSTOMERS costs, and increase constant learning mindset INCLUDE: cashflow, because this about how we must react cashflow enables them to 92 % of the Forbes Global faster to what the market reinvest into government.

2000 companies wants. How we provide There will be education 98% of the 100 most the right solutions to the and innovation, and we valued brands business challenges that foresee the trend to 97% of the greenest our customers have. The optimise business and companies (Newsweek) transition to a more agile, government processes SAP customers distribute millennial-style company continuing.”

78% of the world’s food is something we are all Already this has had a and 82% of the world’s constantly developing. positive impact on how medical devices "I'm very happy that governments consider 77% of the world’s I have leaders that are and interact with transaction revenue driving that. Predrag and citizens beyond the cold touches an SAP system all the other leaders of the mechanics of economic respective countries are governance, business relationships and working in areas that are highly innovative handling the strains in healthcare caused and forward-thinking. I love that because by the ever-present threat of COVID-19. that means we are in the right mindset “There has actually been quite a shift in and always one step ahead to boost our the empathetic part of governing,” Galla customers’ success. The pace of change says. “We’re seeing governments reaching in the market is picking up speed.” out to their citizens and saying, “It’s okay not to be okay’. They’re placing emphasis technologymagazine.com

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