In the Venetian Expo Centre at AWS re:Invent, Lisa Martin and David Vellante from theCube speak with HCLTech’s Anand Birje and Prabhakar Appana, to discuss the power of the cloud, its potential to drive business transformation, the partnership with AWS and HCLTech’s brand transformation.

Q: What are some of the latest trends in digitalization, especially as it relates to cloud adoption?

Anand: Every enterprise in every industry is now realizing that they need to have composable systems and resilience at the core of their business.

As a result, digital transformation has become focused on the ability to change and pivot faster.

This is easier said than done and in larger enterprises, with more complex regulatory environments, the status quo is not easy to change. But, becoming adaptable is critical.

The cloud enables us to adapt and change value chains, so that businesses can better engage with their customers, partners and employees, while also building in composability – the inter-relationship between different systems and components in the enterprise, which can be assembled in various combinations to meet specific user requirements.

Organizations on this journey don’t have to make sweeping changes, but can make changes over time.

Adopting the cloud is essential for digital acceleration.

Q: How are customers dealing with more strategic transformation projects and building more business resilience?

Anand: Organizations don't have a choice, they need to be resilient and adaptable in order to succeed. The pandemic has taught them that the markets and macro dynamics are increasingly changing supply chains, customer behavior, as well as pricing and cost models. All this is driving the need to accelerate their digital journeys.

What’s changed is that they want to do more with less. They want to adapt faster and leverage clouds to operate more cost effectively, build resilience and improve composability.

Q: How are HCLTech and AWS working together and enabling customers to achieve transformation goals?

Prabhakar: Together we are helping clients drive modernization, consolidation, cost reduction, sustainability agendas and more.

By deepening our scale and skill sets with the services of AWS, this partnership is accelerating conversations by building tailored industry solutions.

In the cloud, these specific industry solutions can be used from anywhere with scalable options. This capability is igniting a lot of cloud conversations with our clients.

HCLTech is encompassing this cloud journey with CloudSMART. We have developed the CloudSMART strategy across all the HCLTech business segments.

CloudSMART positions AWS Cloud as a business platform and the CloudSMART offerings are designed to enable our clients to realize more value, without the risks of technical debt.

Our go-to-market offering is underpinned by app modernization and consolidation. It is a one stop shop, right from strategy, consulting and implementation.

Another point is that increasingly, a lot of new services are being added to AWS that not many clients are aware of. It is the responsibility of a system integrator, like HCLTech to give the client the ability to consume the service as a low cost, optimized option.

Anand: Cloud adoption needs to come with a curation framework, which we call FENIX 2.0. This defines what differentiates clients. Based on that, you can decide what architectural choices to make and AWS services to utilize at the applications, integration, infrastructure and data layer.

Q: Can you provide a customer example of a successful cloud adoption?

Anand: We work with a very large tools manufacturer and the pandemic dramatically shifted its business model in every way possible. Nobody was buying tools in-store and instead focused on purchasing products online. Their supply chains were also changing, with manufacturing shifting from China and Malaysia to Taiwan, Germany and Latin America.

The good thing was that the business was growing, but the needs were changing. They needed to rethink every value chain in the business and had to adopt the cloud. They leveraged AWS at the core to rethink every part of their business, rebuilding their supply chain applications, modernizing their warehouse management systems, modernizing their pricing systems, modernizing their sales and marketing platforms and every other aspect you can think of within 24 months.

Q: How can you avoid technical debt and shield customers?

Prabhakar: Every CIO or technology leader has ambitions to move to the cloud, embrace digital and operate sustainably.

To help them do this and minimize technical debt, we offer a complete financial analysis of the cloud adoption, which considers existing technical debt.

Anand: There’s been a generational shift in the last few years. Nobody is doing a lift and shift of traditional applications or traditional data systems to the cloud. In short, no one is taking their technical debt to the cloud, because there’s no business value.

The value is being cloud native, which means you want to continuously modernize your value chains by leveraging the cloud.

Q: Can you comment on HCLTech’s recent brand transformation?

We are now Supercharging Progress for our customers, partners and employees.

It's our new mantra that reflects our mission to bring the learnings of over 200,000 professionals that work at HCLTech to help clients adopt new technologies and modernize their business strategies to achieve aspirational business goals at velocity.