But right now, we've got a new guest, Anubar Saxena, who is the CMO of HLC. Hi, welcome. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, my colleague John Furrier. Good to see you. Nice to meet you too. All right. Very fast growing company, service provider. Many of you may or may not know out there of your organization. So we're going to talk about cloud, we're going to talk about the service provider model, how that's changing. We're here at EMC World Live, 2010 in Las Vegas. So, first of all, thanks very much for being here. Well, thank you. Tell us a little bit about your organization. I was intrigued when I was reading the background on the 55% compound annual growth and just, you know, great EBIT growth. And tell us about your organization. What should we know? Absolutely, Dave. You know, so HCL is one of the longest standing IT organization in the world. We were founded in 1976. And we have 79,000 employees in 31 locations across the world. We're growing at 55%, you know, the point that you made. And we're into IT services. We do application development infrastructure services in BPO. And we service Fortune 1000 clients worldwide. Now, HCL, again, like I said, has centers all across the US, has centers in Northern Ireland, in Poland, in Belfast, et cetera, et cetera. And we have a lot of locals actually working out of HCL. So about a quarter of all the employees of HCL in the US are actually based in the US. And, you know, more than 66% of the employees in EMEA actually are based in the local offices out there. Yeah, so you touch all layers of the stack, I presume. You know, we were just talking EMC and Paul Moritz. They're a VMware talking about infrastructure, applications, talking about end user devices. You touch all of that, don't you? Yes, we do. We do. Right from the business process down to the application layer, the business, the data layer, the core infrastructure, and infrastructure inside the data center, outside the data center, and all the end users. Yep, absolutely, completely. Dave, we've been talking about services angle. And one of the things I want to ask you is, services is a big meat and potatoes part of this cloud proof points that we've been seeing. You know, the Sizzle has been the Hadoop big data. But a lot of the business model innovations that Dave and I were talking about is coming from this meat and potatoes service delivers integrated services, cloud has all these benefits. And it's not always that sexy of a conversation. But now it is because money's being made. Can you share with us some of your recent examples of that, where you've actually innovated around the integrating of the services?  I mean, you know, the value that the customer expects is actually the value that we can provide as a services organization to the customers. It's really about business value. So there were initial discussions around cost, IT agility, cheaper, faster, better, but now it's actually moved, the role of IT is changing. And we actually see that when we are able to integrate the service levels, right, from the business process to the application layer and the infrastructure layer, that's when we are able to provide more business value in terms of business service levels, business value being demonstrated. I mean, we operate across all kinds of industries across the world.  And the value is absolutely, you know, integrating all the service levels to sign up to a business SLA and we work very closely with the MC on that. So we were at dinner last night and we were talking with one of the executives and he asked us, well, you know, what's hot? What are you seeing at the show?  We've been talking about Hadoop all week. But John, I thought your answer was very interesting. You said, well, to me, the most significant thing that I've seen at this show is the whole service provider model and that ecosystem building. I want to, John, if you could elaborate on that and then we can have a little discussion about it. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that's come out, Dave, is this idea of a service provider is changing. So you're seeing the role of the solution provider and service provider kind of on a collision course. And I just find in connecting the dots, we heard from Accenture, we heard from CSC, we hear from these boutique consultancies that are emerging and flowering out from data science to integration. They all kind of have that common thread. They all want to make money around deploying and changing the value chains of how to integrate cloud. And it's not always that straightforward. So to me, that was the stake. That's the meat on the bone here at EMC is that that's where the money's being made, right? So whether it's a provider, Dave, or a solutions architect, Berm, or quite frankly, the business themselves harnessing the value. So that's the business model innovation that you touched upon. So to me, that is cool. And so we're trying to get, extract those points out and say, look, here's some specific examples of money being made, value being delivered, new value chains, new processes that are being generated. I mean, we heard from Lone Star. He saved $600,000, energizes staff, and got rid of all his old equipment, and everyone's really happy. Right, right. So that's a new process. So we're trying to find that example because that's a new breed of IT. And this is exactly what the dream has been in IT as Dave said. Can you share with us anything you're seeing, your angle on that, your services angle? Absolutely. And in fact, I'll share with you a couple of examples that we're seeing across the world and across industry sectors. It's kind of interesting.  So there is a way of reducing costs, increasing service levels, and actually kind of adding a lot of value to IT from that perspective. But that's only one part of Cloud. That's actually using Cloud to reduce costs and improve the agility in the IT. There's actually another part of Cloud which is actually how do you increase business value? I mean, we're going through a tremendous change in the industry. I mean, this is a change that we haven't seen for a while now. And the change is how do you leverage or how do you actually use IT to improve the revenues of customers, improve their top lines, improve their bottom lines, so on and so forth. So let me give you a few examples. If you go to the retailing industry, you know, their entire business model is moving from outside the stores to online. And they actually work, most of the retail organizations work for 300 days to actually perform in 65 days. So they actually try and get their IT up and running 300 days to actually do very well between Thanksgiving and the New Year. And they freeze it. And they go. They freeze it. And then they go. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a huge workload that happens. All their business, 85% of their business happens in those 65 days. Now, can they leverage the Cloud? Now, if they can leverage the Cloud, while Cloud has a good play when it comes to running the business and saving them costs, it's really leveraging Cloud to increase their business. So can they make it available online? Can they get the coupons online? Can they actually have the end user devices online with those smart coupons going into the stores and actually finding out the best possible deal? So that's one example. Take another example. Okay, the role of banking is actually changing, big time.  Now, again, cost of capital is at an all-time high. The return on assets is very, very crucial. Now, actually what they're doing is they're actually going back to the retail branches. And they're saying that can I leverage video conferencing, audio conferencing? Leverage all the latest devices that are available from Cisco, EMC, VMware and make that available on the Cloud. I mean, can I get into, can I expand my branches by reducing the amount of capital outlay in those branches? And they're actually leveraging the Cloud and we're playing big time into them. We're actually using- Are these conversations that, like, they're realizing they haven't had before? I mean, these are kind of new questions. I mean, it kind of, they wasn't, you couldn't do that a few years ago. Is that- Yeah, absolutely right. And you couldn't do that because of several reasons, right? I mean, there was no virtualization that was taking place. There was no abstracting of the bare metal. You know, you could not have dynamic workloads moving in. The application providers did not have licensing mechanisms that actually allowed those kind of workloads to move. You did not have, you know, all the Cloud elements, you did not have security available. Now those have changed, and those have changed significantly, right? Now, and you're absolutely right. Those kind of conversations would not have had, you know, a few months ago.  You know, it applies to all these disruptions we're seeing in the media business here with theCUBE, but in the consulting business on the solutions provider we had Tom roll off on earlier. From EMC, he runs the whole, you know, solution provider, chief operating officer, or new titleies. He's the big dog here, is changing. So there are folks that we see that kind of are sitting on their hands the old way. Are there new things that you can share on the consultant side that you can see and say, hey, these are things you've got to be paying attention to, and new mechanisms and new methodologies? Yeah, absolutely. And you know, that's a great question. Thank you for asking that. I think the days of advising or trying to do a pure job of going back to a consultant and saying, you know, this is what I think you should do, are over. I think, you know, customers want people who can do the advisory, the consulting, and also then work on the how, right? So the what days are over, the what and the how days are in, right? So most of our customers come back and say, you know what, please explain to me what I should do, what's the blueprint look like, what's, what does the future look like? And then, you know, please walk me down the path. Also, I don't want somebody who just paints the future and then walks away and then, you know, I go and try and search for someone else who can actually go and execute or implement it, right? So that's the key point. I think, you know, execution is key, right? What has changed? What has changed is that I think customers have realized the increasing role of IT. It's no longer a support organization or an enabling organization. They expect IT to actually improve revenues, improve bottom line, right? And- Right, we're just talking about that, right? Oh, absolutely. Oh, a totally different business model for IT. Exactly. And so, actually, here's what we did, you know? We said that EMC, VMware, Cisco, great technology companies will always create great technology to enable it. And what we'll have to do is that we'll have to empower our employees to make the right calls for our customers. So what we've done is that we have inverted our entire organization, 79,000 employees. We've got our CEO accountable to the organization because they're the ones who actually interact with the end customers every day. They use all the technologies created by, you know, EMC, VMware, Cisco, and they actually make the right calls for the customer in actually the journey to the cloud. Yeah, I think Dave, one of the things that we're observing at the high level with EMC and VMware and, you know, the ecosystem around them is, this is an operating system. So the data center operating system is a systems approach. So when Pat Gelsinger was on, he was essentially talking about, in so many words, operating system. So, you know, the systems view of the data center is very legitimate. Right. All the pumps working together, all the system working together. Can you comment on that vision? Do you think it's relevant? Do you think it's true? And what observations would you share? Oh, yeah. It's a very relevant view. It's a very relevant view point. Gone are the days when the role of the operating system was to abstract or actually take the application calls and look at the bare metal and operate back on actually a single system basis. The role of the operating system has evolved. It's actually moved from being an abstraction layer to actually the entire system as a whole. It has security built in, it has a management layer built in, it has the integration built in, it's got the interfaces built in. It's got, well, it's actually a data center in a box today. And I guess I think, you know, the service providers of the future will succeed. Are the ones who, you know, don't go and recreate the operating system up kind of an approach who actually take that entire system as one operating system and build business value on top of it. I think those are the system service providers that will actually succeed forward. I mean, companies like HCL have always done a good job of finding, you know, what's hot, you're close to the customers and you solve problems. That's right.  In the old days, it used to be, all right, well, everything revolved around IBM. And then, of course, you did a lot of very Microsoft specific stuff and certainly ERP and SAP and there was some Oracle and OLTP. And then, of course, you mentioned BPO before. This feels different. I mean, it's the whole cloud and we'll see about big data, but the cloud piece is sort of a combination of, you know, big trend like BPO, but also there's some vendor specificity as well, like VMware. So we're here at EMC World, which is astounding to me that EMC is memory company 30 years ago is in the heart of all this. What's happening there?  You know, it is actually very different. It's not similar to the older waves that we've seen in the past. I mean, a couple of things happen.  And you know, what happens is that the greatest innovation happens at the time when you actually come back to full economic recovery. Absolutely.  So what's happening is that recession, in my view, constrains growth. They constrain resources. They constrain capital. And at the time when you come back to recovery and everyone anticipates that we're all returning back to recovery, that's the time when everyone starts to invest. So it's a very interesting time that we are in. We are having an investment, well, we're having an over investment from IT going in. We're also having economic signs. We're moving towards the new normal, right? And the new normal will actually demand a lot more from IT. And IT is kind of getting geared to it, right? I mean, IT has always been an enablement support organization. Now with cloud coming in, big data coming in, you have the entire system in a box coming in. Everyone trying to get down full stack and trying to own, you know, or actually- Like Oracle. Like Oracle.  Is that their strategy? We talk about Oracle all the time. How do you? We love Oracle. We love Oracle. We like to beat up Oracle all the time. Well, they're easy to target, you know. They don't really innovate, and they want to own everything, and they're incredibly successful. And no one likes them. Yeah, right. Go ahead, sorry. No, absolutely. I think large organizations like Oracle, you know, should have a point of view, should try and increase, you know, the footprint in an account. I mean, that's the only way that they will survive. That's the only way that they'll earn their revenues. That's the only way that they will be able to get back in their business and then reinvest and actually make a lot more acquisitions. I mean, they're actually doing the right thing. I mean- Absolutely. I think the point that they're missing is that, you know, the business value will actually get created at the interface between the employees and the end customers. And I'm not sure how are they empowering their and employees to actually make a difference. I mean, I see the point. I totally agree with you about this new reinvention of IT combined with the intersection of this new capital markets where there's investment.  But the question is, is IT flat-footed? Did they get caught flat-footed in this investment cycle? Most of them are gearing up, yes, but where are they? Are they ready for this? I mean, we heard the guy on earlier, Alander, saying he's geared up. Can IT departments handle this, in your opinion? And the ones that can or can't, what do they look like? Well, absolutely, and that's a great question again. Now, is IT flat-footed? Yes, it is. And, you know, I think it's a wrong expectation to expect IT to do everything. You know, I guess, you know, business will have to take two steps forward and probably IT has to take four. The point is that there is technology that's available to be exploited, right? But I think business guys will have to actually go back to IT and actually say that, hey, this is the part that I'm going down to. They have to get IT on the same table. And they have to tell them that this is the, this is where, these are the new markets we're going after, these are my new customers. This is what I think I need. This is what I think I need to be successful. And IT then has to plan, you know, the entire roadmap. Now, are they going to fall behind? They will, because, you know, they haven't been treated, you know. It's been a tough 10 years. In that way. The past five have been brutal. But I guess, I guess a walk to success can't be made by IT alone. We had Howard Elias on earlier. We've talked to him a number of times. We had Joe Tucci on, you know, a couple times over the last year or so. And they make us a big point. You heard it in the keynotes about where we're clear. We're not going to compete with our service providers. We have a service organization. We've got a big services business. So as a service provider, I have two questions. Is that legit? Do you buy it? Do they put their money where their mouth is? And second is, what is it about EMC that attracts you? And what's the relationship like? Talk about that a little bit. Sure, absolutely, Dave. To answer the first question, I think it is the right way to do it.  And I mean, I'll give you a few data points that we are seeing, Dave. First data point is that we've got invited to about $15 billion worth of ITO deals in the last six quarters, 15 billion. That's approximately the same amount that IBM got invited and HP got invited, right? Now, one in every three deals that we fight, we actually win. Now, what we're seeing in the last six quarters is that the questions being asked are the same. The expectations from IT is more or less the same. I mean, the industries may vary. You know, the geographies may vary. Things may change, but you know, fundamentally, the expectation is IT will be a partner to our business. And as a service provider, it's our job to ensure that IT succeeds in the whole part. So we actually kind of sit back and we understand what's happening in the larger retail industry. We go back to the retail clients and actually try and add value. We actually do that in the banking industry. We actually go back and we try and add value. We actually look at corporate banking, retail banking, so on and so forth, right? So I think to answer your first question, it is a legitimate expectation from business to expect IT to actually kind of add value to what they're doing. So that's the first point. The second point is that, what's the role that EMC plays in this? Yeah, why EMC? Yeah, why EMC? So here is what's happening in the industry the way we see it. In the last six quarters, $15 billion worth of ITO transformation deals happening. What are they asking for? They're asking for transformation. They're asking for the service provider to stand up and tell them, can they be responsible for new revenue and new growth? Can they be responsible for increasing the bottom line? Can they be responsible for increasing customer sat? Can they step up and actually be responsible for customer retention? Increasing customer loyalty? Those are the questions that business is asking. And we're seeing that that will be a step change from what is really happening. It's not about saving costs anymore. Saving costs is a given. It's about how do you transform the way that they do business in the market? So that's the first thing that we're seeing. The second thing is that we're actually winning in one of those three deals, in every three deals, right? If we continue getting invited and winning the same way, we will actually create another HCL three or five years from now. So that's the size of growth. We'll add another 100,000 employees. We will grow to a very large market cap. Our stocks will increase, et cetera, et cetera. Now, the role that EMC will play is, it's kind of a very interesting play. You know what's happened is, EMC has been a dominant player in the storage market. VMware has abstracted the bare metal and again has been a dominant player when it comes to virtualization, right? And this is virtualization inside the data center and this is virtualization in the end user side, right? So if you really look at the stack, and then there is this piece about content management and sharing and again, and then there is this piece around security. So EMC has been, let me use the word, a fairly fragmented organization, here to date, but has established a leadership position in each of the areas that they have worked on, whether it's RSA, whether it's Symmetrics, whether it's the Clarion, whether it's virtualization, whether it's ESX, whether it's VDI, so on and so forth. The interesting thing that's happened is that EMC has decided to keep them separate so that they actually maintain a dominant position, but also bring them all together to form one stack that actually a client can buy. And I've noticed that a significant change that's happening in EMC is that they're not waiting for the integration to happen at the customer's end. They're actually prefabricating the integration at the factory level and actually shipping it out as one solution under one skew. What it's going to do for us. So why have we made the choice on EMC? So Dave, the reason we've made the choice is that we're actually taking all the dominant pieces that we've been managing and operating for the past 10 years. And we're making the integration happen so that that actually brings savings, it actually makes the environment more agile, it actually takes care of the run the business part of IT. The second thing is that in this move, now all the customers, we have about 355 customers in the Fortune 1000 segment. We're actually saying, Anubhav, we need to make the change. We need to now move to a private cloud, we need to look at the public cloud, we need to make the move to hybrid environments. And for us, since we've been managing and operating each of these pieces independently, it's easy to put them all together as one. Take EMC's vision, future roadmap of products and actually decide, hey, this is the movement of the workloads that'll happen. This is how your workloads will move from the existing environment to the newer environments, which could be hybrid, which could be public, which could be outside the data center and actually orchestrate those workloads. So, why EMC is because one, they've been a dominant player individually in their stacks. Two, they've kind of brought it all together. Three, we've been managing and operating it for the last 15, 20 years now. Four is that they have a very strong vision towards the cloud. And we believe that the company that will win in the future is the one that has a dominant market share inside, has a clear vision of what's going to happen outside and thinks they know how the orchestration will take place. Now, of course, the role of a service provider will be to make the orchestration happen and own the business service levels. And that's the role that we think that we can play. Well, I like that answer. So, Anubhav, I thought that perhaps right here, well, in fifth or sixth, they're not a direct competitor. Oh, absolutely. Now, that's a piece of it, right? It's very important for us.  So, that's a delicate balance, but as the industry starts to sort of coalesce around four or five big vendors, and most of those vendors have large service organizations, EMC starts to become an interesting play there, doesn't it? Because at this point anyway, it doesn't have that type of aspiration to be an IBM or an EDS or a Perot. And so, we've been hearing from the service providers that yes, we are technology agnostic, we have to be. We have to solve the problem, but the business models are very much aligned, and it's sort of an interesting new dynamic that we haven't seen before. It's a very interesting change, you're right, Dave. But having said that, here is my point of view. And the point of view is that the market buys $300 billion of hardware, $300 billion of software, and $400 billion of services every year. And we just $5.7 billion. Big sandbox. It's a big sandbox, right? So, you know, I mean, if I aspire for a market share, then I have that problem. Well, I do aspire for a market share, but I will not grow to about a $300 billion company overnight. It'll happen in shifts and phases. I think where the market will succeed very, very well, and we'll all do well with our clients is, if we identify which markets we want to be in, which geographies we want to be in, and what kind of value do we want to give back to our customers, and just decide to go back and select that target, and go after that target, and just do well in what we do. It could be the next $20, $25 billion of the market. Now, there's still a large part of the market that will still be serviced by the others, and that's fine. It's just about doing the right thing for your customers at that given point of time, get them to be your best references, make them lighthouse customers, let them get the next five clients for you, and that's where I think where the value is going to be. On above, Saxena, HCL, CML, very interesting story around HCL, extremely fast-growing company, a lot of great core competencies. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was great, haven't you? Absolutely, Dave. Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone. I appreciate it.