Overcoming the Cloud-Native Skills Shortage, with HCL’s Alan Flower

Episode 119 · 47:49 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Hi everyone, thanks for joining us on Pivotal Conversations. I'm Jeff Kelley. Most enterprises start their cloud-native journeys with lots of enthusiasm and big plans, but reality often sets in when they try to scale transformations by modernizing hundreds, sometimes thousands of legacy applications. The biggest digital transformation roadblock, "It's a lack of cloud-native skills," says HCL's Alan Flower. In this episode of Pivotal Conversations, Alan chats with Dormade and myself and shares some tips and strategies for overcoming the cloud-native skills gap. Enjoy. Okay, so Alan, you mentioned that you've yet to see a cloud-native transformation go faster than expected, and there's a common theme coming up again and again. Tell us about this. Well, the common theme, of course, is hopefully pretty straightforward, really, you know, Domain. It comes under skill. It's quite surprising, isn't it? I mean, we see so many large enterprises around the world today kind of try and accelerate their cloud journey. And for many of these organizations, of course, they've been on a cloud kind of path for quite a few years. There's an extreme level of comfort around cloud, but we need to appreciate that, you know, in many organizations, cloud initially meant something completely different. It was a replacement data center. It was infrastructure, you know, in particular. And now that clients are coming around for a second pass, a second go, that their aspiration is to become probably what we would call a cloud-native enterprise. They're looking to reinvent, you know, their key processes around the cloud. They want to enable kind of cloud technologies in their solutions. And clearly, they want to build new software that takes advantage of all of that too. And along with all of that, they need to figure out what to do with their existing

estate. They want to migrate to cloud. They want to modernize, you know, along the way. And clearly, you know, a lot of companies have got some very kind of extreme ambitions around cloud native, which is hugely reassuring. Of course, it's so good to see so many companies have this kind of level of kind of aspiration. Everyone starts this journey with huge intent. And we see everyone make initial, very rapid kind of progress. They all get out the door pretty quickly. They'll train up an initial cohort of people. The enthusiasm will spread. And then someone sort of decides to step on the gas and kind of just turn the volume up around this particular cloud journey. And that, of course, is when we see so much frustration. You know, everyone has, you know, quite typically hundreds, thousands of applications that they want to either re-platform or modernize the cloud. And it starts to get unstuck pretty quickly when they realize that they simply don't have the skill and the capability to kind of fulfill their ambition. And we see this absolutely everywhere. I don't think we have a single client anywhere on the planet who is going faster than expected. Everyone's going pretty quickly, but it gets very, very difficult indeed when you start to look at more than a handful of applications. And we've got clients with 10,000, 15,000 apps that they want to take on a cloud native journey. That is an incredible undertaking. What are some of the kind of the early signs that you're sort of, you're going from the smooth pavements to like the rockier pavement? I just, I have this very vivid memory of 17 years old driving in Costa Rica. And the road was beautifully paved. I was like, Oh, this is great. Cause it was not a super confident driver, especially to be in a foreign country. And then, and then I kind of noticed, it was like, Oh, suddenly I got bit gravelly. And then we're going along and we passed the paving truck. And sure enough, I start looking ahead. It's like, what's that on the road? It's like,

like dark spots on the road. And there were giant potholes, like basketball sized potholes that I was suddenly having to weave around. And of course you have to like massively decelerate. So this is my analogy that I've just come up with right now, which is that driving on that road in process of being repaved. So, but there was that moment when we, we hadn't gone straight from smooth paving to potholes. There was this kind of like, you know, they hadn't actually put the final layer on. So it was, it wasn't too bad, but it was kind of rough going. It was like a little loose. Yeah. So let me rephrase that. Let's just say, at what point did the wheels come off? Well, I would think that that's the pothole section of the road when you're actually like, Oh, we broke an axle. And I guess the, yeah, I guess the warning signs are that after some initial success on your cloud native journey, let's say you've, you know, you've implemented a pivotal cloud foundry, PS or maybe PKS, of course, and you're pretty excited by what you find. And then you decide that you might as well take the whole company on this year. And, you know, we, we, we, we do a lot of these, you know, clients will say, look, you know, we're very happy with the direction we're taking. Now, can you look at everything that we've got and take it on a cloud journey? And you might go from five applications to 500 or 5,000. And if you're not careful, if you jump in too deep too soon, and everyone thinks this is quite a straightforward process, all I've got to do is line my applications up and just work through them. That's when it gets a little bit tricky, because if you don't understand what treatments you might want to apply to applications, if you don't understand what the destination is for each application, if you haven't really thought through what you should be doing with your global portfolio, it can get quite interesting quite quickly, because people can very easily assume that let's say, well, we'll refactor and modernize

everything. Maybe we'll containerize everything and put it into coup, for example. It's very easy to completely underestimate the scale and the difficulty of the journey. And none of these tasks need be particularly difficult, of course, so long as you've got the people who understand how to do them. Ah, that's the key part at the end. You made it sound so simple, but is it that simple? So what, so what's that? What kind of strategies have you seen, I guess, both internally at HCL in terms of enabling your own people, as well as that some of your customers, maybe we, maybe we can start with HCL and then we can go into some customer examples as well. Well, you know, one of the challenges for HCL, of course, Jeff, is we have to service hundreds and hundreds of clients around the world. I can never predict what any one client will need from a, from a capability perspective. We have to ensure a bit like yourselves, we have to ensure that our people really are best of breed and can cover you know, all of the bases. So, you know, the journey for us is perhaps, you know, a lot more complex than it is for, you know, for many clients. But you, you have to make a number of predictions, don't you? You can look at sort of technology trends, you can look at your own strategy, you can see what you're consuming, you can see what clients will consume over time as well. You know, you know, you could water this down and quite simply say, look, it's pretty obvious. We need the ability to write cloud native code. We need the ability to modernize existing solutions so that they can, you know, to a certain extent become cloud native, you know, too. We need the ability to design and build and deploy cloud native environments. So that could be Pivotal Cloud Foundry, it could be Pivotal Container Services. You know, for example, we need the ability to operate those advanced environments because hopefully we all understand when you take a cloud native journey, you're going to change the way that you govern and operate your estate, of course, you know, along the way. So that entire spectrum of knowing how to design and build the environment, knowing what treatments you might need to apply to your applications, knowing what, you know,

the execution environment might be when you've built and deployed this new environment. You can look at that kind of spectrum of kind of capability and steps that you need to undertake and, you know, try and plan your kind of skills acquisition to support it. And certainly that's what we've been doing inside of HCL. We've got the best part of about 130,000 engineers in our particular company. So everything from developers to operators to architects and everything, you know, in between. So, you know, we realise, of course, as indeed many large organisations realise that you have to set up the sort of centre of competence. You have to have this sort of COE, which is trying to govern the journey. You have to have that ability to show your entire organisation what good looks like so that they can hopefully, you know, emulate it. You want to try and steer them along the journey too. So we've set up, you know, we've set ourselves on this journey inside of HCL. It's been quite an interesting one, really, because like any other organisation, you have plenty of people who are chomping at the bit. Maybe they've self-skilled themselves, they're ready to go. And then you have lots and lots of people who kind of need a bit of a push and you want to kind of help them sort of, you know, accelerate their, you know, their journey too. So we see, we probably see all extremes inside of our, you know, organisation. You know, what we're trying to do, of course, is ensure that when people start work on a cloud-native project, that they're paired up with someone who's done that before. You know, we want people to learn from kind of hands-on sharing of best-of-breed approaches. So we know that coaching and mentoring is a large part of, I think, anyone's kind of cloud-native, you know, journey. We also recognise as well, and this is hugely important, that you have to do far more than just train people. You know, you can give people as much education as you like, but if they can't deploy it hands-on, if you can't make that kind of learning habitual, then it becomes a major,

major challenge. And we see this more, as indeed I think a lot of organisations would see, is more of a cultural transformation. It's a combination of giving people, you know, the technical skill and ability. But you also want them to adopt what I would call the right cultural thinking. You want them to apply that training in the right way. You know, we've realised that one of the best approaches is to ensure that as you train people, you deploy them onto a project that's already working in this way. You know, we pair people up with engineers who've been working in this way for the last few years, for example. It then becomes habitual, you know, far, you know, far quicker. So now you mentioned kind of setting up a center of competence as an important step in this journey and, you know, a number of other practices like pairing and hands-on activities. You know, can you walk us through sort of, is there a winning recipe in terms of when and how much and who should be leading this type of kind of enablement transformation that you've seen, whether it's in customers or inside HCL? Well, our approach inside HCL was firstly, we decided to put ownership of the cultural transformation inside of our cloud native labs. So the cloud native labs inside of HCL, this is our kind of global center of excellence. All things to do with Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, for example, were to sit inside the labs. So we've got that hard core of skill. We've also got that hard core of kind of experience deploying these environments with with clients too. So that for us is where we've kind of put the the center of gravity around enabling the organization. And just to just to clarify what that means is there's some, of this like 130,000 engineering strong organization. There's a couple of locations, like specific locations,

where it's now set up to operate in a specialized environment called your cloud native labs. Well, absolutely. We did the first one in London, you know, last year. New York is just about to open as well. So we've got a brand new lab in Manhattan. And of course, there's India too. In our large sort of campus in Noida, just outside of Delhi, we've got our third cloud native lab as well. So we, from our perspective, we've got that kind of geocenter of gravity, center of competence available across across across the globe. So, you know, with our labs, we own our curriculum, if you like, we've created our own unique curriculum that suits the needs of HCL. We realize as well that as we build our own curriculum to enable our own large organization, that it actually met the needs of many of our clients as well. So we, we've had the added benefit of, as we've, as we've taught ourselves how to do cloud native, um, the right way. We, we've learned a lot of things that we can share with clients quite readily today. So we, we've had this added benefit that our center of excellence internally is now delivering this capability to, capability to our clients as well, uh, around the globe. So as we, as we build a curriculum that works for us, and you know, we, we can talk a little bit about that curriculum in terms of kind of the direction it takes. And of course, where the training comes from, you know, we, we realized that, you know, like in a perfect world, uh, business would stop for a few months and we packaged everyone up and we would send them away for, for training and enablement, you know, whether we send them to Pivot or to do PAL. And of course, a lot of us have done PAL, uh, in a perfect world, everyone would just stop what they're doing and go off and get themselves retrained. But clearly we live in imperfect world. Uh, no one can do this. So we, we've structured a curriculum that allows people to learn on the job. It allows people to go off and do formal education.

And really importantly for us, it allows people to do what we would call offline self-paced training as well, because we recognize in any large organization, people learn at different speeds, of course, and in different ways. So we, we have that combination of learning on the job. So you can be coached by someone who's been on this journey before, you can go off and do a formal class, or of course you can consume the material in your own time, uh, in a self-paced, uh, in a self-paced way. So we, we, we, we, we, we've created a curriculum that we can, I would describe it as modular. You know, we, we can customize and kind of reassemble the modules to suit the needs of, of any individual or indeed any, uh, any department within our organization. So we, we have these standard modules kind of ready to go. Um, and then, as I said, we can deploy them in different ways, whether it's on site or indeed, you know, delivered, um, you know, remotely. So we, we, we have a curriculum that has quite a, you know, quite an enormous range of modules, you know, within it. And just some examples, you know, for a lot of people, the journey might start at the, at what I would call the initial kind of cultural end of the spectrum. So a good example, of course, would be, you know, anyone who's been a pivotal customer for, for any period of time knows that extreme programming pairing in particular is one of the key kind of elements of a, kind of a pivotal, uh, you know, environment. So we, we start with some of the cultural basics, you know, sometimes we have to sort of provide, uh, an introduction maybe to agile and lean for, for some developers, but, but XP, you know, extreme programming pairing in particular is really at the heart of, I think anyone's cloud native, you know, journey, uh, within HCL, we, we decided quite some time ago that we would fully adopt the pivotal methodology when it came to software engineering, um, you know, in particular. So anyone, of course, familiar with, with XP pairing, balanced teams will find exactly the same kind of structure and capability, uh, inside of HCL.

Uh, not everyone knows how to do this, of course, you know, it's, it's quite a niche set of skills. So, you know, our curriculum starts with that kind of more elementary kind of cultural introduction around XP, uh, maybe an agile refresher too. And then of course we, you know, as, as the journey progresses, we want to take people through what we would call the formal technical training too. So this may mean, um, teaching developers how to write 12, 15, 16 factor code. So, you know, the cloud native developer pathway is a very common one, uh, inside of HCL. We also recognize that the needs of architects, of course, uh, are somewhat different. So we, we have a modified pathway for architects. Let's not forget the sys admins and the operators. They, they need a completely different set of education too. Uh, maybe like yourselves, we recognize that the, the approach to system reliability engineering that originated with Google, uh, has evolved to become a PRE, a platform reliability engineering, uh, based approach. We, we follow that too. So we, we have an element of our curriculum that sort of supports the needs of operations, uh, folks too. Then I would also add the needs of business leaders too. We, we have a separate approach for managers and leaders within our organization. We want to make sure that people can think in, in the correct way, even if they're not a technical, um, you know, hands-on, uh, engineer, we, we need the leadership too, to have this kind of cloud native and sort of digital understanding, you know, too. So long story cut very short, we, we have this very extensive curriculum that has a number of journeys across it, whether you're a developer, an architect, an operations person, or indeed a business, uh, leader. We have to have that ability to mix and match modules to suit the needs of each, um, you know, individual. And then of course, we, we need to find the content. We need to find the, the training material that is kind of best of breed. Uh, what we do inside AHCL today, uh, as you're probably aware, we, we've sent quite a large

number of people through, uh, platform acceleration lab power. So, um, that's an interesting journey, I think for, you know, more senior, uh, architects within any, uh, you know, organization. We, we consume a fair bit of, of pivotal training and, uh, you know, and content. We've also originated quite a lot of training material, uh, ourselves and a lot of companies do this. Of course, they, they, they see a unique gap that they need to fill themselves. So we have created, uh, our own material. And then of course we consume a lot of material from across, um, the industry. Uh, we use a lot of material from the Cloud Foundry Foundation. We, we, we quite like, uh, their approach. Uh, there's a lot of material out there from, from various providers and we, we simply weave it together into a, a journey that suits, um, the roles within, uh, our organization. And the interesting thing is, is as we've shared our journey with, with our clients around the world, how much kind of commonality exists there. I mean, everyone has the same challenge in terms of, I know exactly where I'm going, uh, but I've got 10, 15, 20, 35, 40, 50,000 people that, that, that I want to enable to take the journey. How do I create a kind of a training pathway for such a large number of people that suits so many different roles within my organization? And that for us is why the modular approach seems to work quite so well. Rather than having one monolithic, uh, slab of education, we would rather weave it together to suit the needs of, uh, of each individual. Yeah. And something that, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but you know, one thing that I'm trying to picture, like how this works, right? You, you mentioned that there's okay opportunities to pair, um, there's opportunities to, to sort of go take a formal class as well as sort of do something self-paced, but you have to think about how does that all fit in

with the, the day-to-day work that someone's doing. And, you know, HCL is a little bit different from a lot of other, what you would think of as kind of, um, systems integrators out there where it's not necessarily going from project to project. There's, there's long-term co-engineering work that you guys do. And so it's probably a lot more similar to in terms of like, you know, you're, you can't just wait for someone to be like between, you know, uh, assignments and say, oh, great. This is the time we'll slot you in for this kind of training. You're, you're going to have to figure out just like most people who have their regular full-time employees. Like there is no point when the work is stopped. It's your, you know, your, this is your, your, your product. Um, of course, they probably don't have the product mentality about it yet, but this is, you know, your day-to-day job. So when do you find the time? So I'm curious, how do you, how do you kind of figure out how to introduce, you know, those pairing opportunities as well as, you know, what, how do you give folks the permission, um, or empower their managers to give them the permission to take the time? Say like, go, go take a week off to go do a in-classroom training or, um, you know, go make sure that you, you take two hours a day to do your self-paced course or whatever it is. So how do you kind of weave that in when folks are on these long-term co-engineering projects that there's no gap in sight? Right. Cause that's, I think something that a lot of folks will find familiar. Yeah. Well, it needs a lot of careful management, of course. And I think one of the things in our favor is, is the fact that we, we are such a, I guess, focused product engineer and organization. So we, we, we, we appreciate that we have to have the latest skill. We have to be able to work in a certain way. And we certainly need a workforce that are, that are hugely competent, you know, in this space.

So from, from a, from a leadership perspective, you know, there's a, there's an acceptance. I think, I think from everyone that they want their teams to be fully enabled, uh, in this space, you know, that, that helps, uh, you know, enormously. If I just think as an example, we, we just wrapped up a course last week, actually domain. We, we did one in, uh, in India for a, for a team over there where you, you, you have a very, very solid, um, cloud engineering team that were just wrapping up one project, really just getting ready to start, to start the next. They, they wanted to build this project, uh, using pivotal technologies, of course, and, and they want to ensure that they can hit the ground running, uh, on day one. Now, what we had to do here, of course, was, it was two things, really. Firstly, craft a curriculum that suits the needs of, of the particular team. To do that, of course, we, we like to speak to the developers, understand what their strengths and weaknesses are, understand what they're going to be doing so that we can ensure that we, we just cover the things that they, uh, that they might need to focus on, you know, going forwards. The second thing, of course, we, we, we need to do is, is, is, is get them in a room, get, get them all together so that we can give them a kind of a, an accelerated journey. But, but we appreciate before we bring them together in the room, there's a lot of self-paced material that people would probably prefer to work through, uh, beforehand. Now we, we, we, we, we can run a very condensed cloud native developer class, uh, with an HCL. It typically leads to certification. So we, we put our developers through cloud foundry, uh, certification. So what we're trying to do is, is accelerate that kind of, um, makeover as quickly as possible, give people the opportunity to kind of bring themselves up to a certain level, you know, independently. Now, internally, depending on the kind of experience of, of, of an existing developer, we, we may give you up to approximately 80 hours of self-paced learning.

Hmm. Before we, we, we bring you together into a classroom. And when we bring you into that classroom, you know, boy, um, you're going to hit the ground running. It's not elementary stuff at all. We, we assume, I mean, we're somewhat lucky, of course. I mean, we, we've got a lot of hugely experienced engineers to start with. We're, we're not teaching them from scratch, but if we take an existing sort of cloud, uh, you know, developer, uh, and we want to ensure that they can work in the pivotal way, uh, we're going to give them a quite a large amount of pre reading to do, as I said, up to 80 hours, which is quite a large, uh, undertaking. Uh, we help an individual find the time of course, to, to work with, work their way through that. And when, when we get them in class, of course, um, we're going to have a very, very focused hands-on, uh, session. We want to ensure that people in particular can apply XP in the right way. If you've trained anyone on pairing techniques, for example, you realize you can't do that in a self-paced way. You have to get people ideally, uh, in a room. You can do it remotely, but, but quite frankly, if you're going to do it properly, do it, do it, do it in a room together. So when we do finally bring people together, uh, we really want to focus on XP, make sure that everyone can apply pairing techniques, um, you know, in the right way. Uh, and then of course, uh, we get everyone ready for, uh, certification. Um, I've mentioned already that our preference right now is to take people through the cloud foundry certified developer, um, approach. Uh, that's good for us because we, we, we, we engineer or we, we, we code in many different languages. Whilst we have a huge focus on, on, on Java, uh, .NET too, it's not the only language. So for us, a certification approach that supports multiple languages is, is, is hugely beneficial, uh, across HCL. So, um, as I said, we, we, we, we try and sort of combine a mixture of quite extensive self-paced material with a very, very intense classroom experience at the end of that,

uh, end of that journey. I hope you see it's probably within about two to three months. We want to get an experienced engineer fully up to speed on, on pivotal cloud foundry, uh, in particular, they probably already know how to write cloud native code, but we want to make sure they do it, you know, in, in, in, in a pivotal sort of themed way. Um, you know, in particular, make sure that they're hugely comfortable and competent on things like pivotal cloud services, um, um, spring boot, for example. So how, um, how far and wide across, uh, the HCL organization have you been able to sort of take this method and, and, you know, get folks either all the way through to certification or, um, you know, at least down, started down this path and, you know, at least engaged in some of this, the self-paced learning. Well, we, we, we, we, we've been lucky. Uh, we, we've been lucky because we, we tend to find that good engineers want to self-educate anyway, right? So we, we haven't needed to do much pushing, actually domain that there's been a ready sort of audience of thousands of developers who, who want to sign up and take this journey that, that helps enormously. And come on, you know, any of us who've been developers for any length of time, uh, we like to climb mountains, don't we? We, we, we like to build our skills. We like to ensure that we're, we're, we're hugely competent. So we're, um, we're, we're lucky. We're very fortunate that we have so many people who want to take the journey. Uh, we have leadership who are enthused and motivated to ensure that they can deploy best of breed teams. That's hugely important to us. And let's not forget that a large part of our business is developing world-class products for clients all over the world. We, we, we have to do, uh, an exceptional job. So clearly we want to make sure that our people have, have exceptional skills, you know, as, as well in, in terms of the journey that we're taking in Excel, we, we've been able to get this into every corner, every nook and cranny, uh, of, of the organization, which is, uh, you know, it, it, it's, it has its challenges. Of course, you know,

people need to find the time, uh, motivation, you know, for some might be an issue, but hopefully for many it's, it's not people want to do this. Uh, and we tend to find because of that, uh, simply the self paced, you know, approach seems to suit a large number of people, uh, inside HCL. You know, people want to get stuck in, they want to improve their skills. They, they want to be deployed onto cool and exciting projects as quickly as, as quickly as possible. So, um, it's been an interesting journey. I mean, we, we've certainly got a long way to go. We've got such a large community of engineers, you know, in the company to, uh, you know, to cover. I, I think one of the, you know, the important realizations for us as well is, is, is, is the sort of importance of certification, some way of, of people being able to sort of, uh, prove to themselves that they've met or they, they've achieved a certain level of, of, of training. Uh, we do put people to task when we, when we do project work, of course, you know, we'd like to think like, I like anyone else that, uh, you know, our peers are, are hugely competent. So there, there, there's a lot of peer pressure to perform, but we've also noticed recently an interest in certification from, from some individuals knowing that they've, that they've got that cloud foundry sort of ticking the box is, is important to a lot of these people too. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. That's interesting. And then, you know, as you are kind of talking to other organizations and clients who are going down this path, um, you know, what, what have you seen there in terms of starting to make headway on, you know, transforming the, the, the people side of things and enabling their, their engineers and their organization? Um, any success stories you can share, even if anonymized about folks that have started to take these, these steps well in terms of, you know, that interest in self-paced and that interest in, um, certification and whatnot. Yeah. It's interesting. Not, not everyone's interested in certification. I mean, I mentioned

that a lot of our people, you know, quite enjoy that option, but, um, you know, in clients, it's perhaps not quite so important, you know, with, with many clients, when, when they have their own community of engineers, uh, you know, to enable, they, they like control, uh, on the process, you know, there are common patterns that we've seen absolutely everywhere. And I can't really think of any exceptions, you know, to this. Most clients consider themselves very weak on what I would call the cultural kind of methodologies around XP and pairing, uh, in, in particular. Uh, I, I can't think of a single client that hasn't helped, hasn't asked us to enable that part of the journey in particular. You know, it is, it's, and again, if you're, if you're a new Pivotal customer, if you're adopting PCF for the first time, you're going to get this introduction from Pivotal in particular, aren't you? They'll be shown, uh, perhaps a completely new way to engineering your, your software development, you know, process. Uh, you've probably been given an introduction to, to XP and, and pairing, uh, along the way. Uh, the early signs are always very encouraging. So all of our clients have seen at a very early stage, the way that sort of XP pairing in particular, um, should be applied. And hence they're coming to us to say, look, we we've had an early sort of taste of this. Um, we now want to sort of take this a lot further and deeper, you know, into our organization. So everywhere we look, we see this interest in XP, uh, and pairing. Um, so that, that, that, that is a very common, you know, request where it then gets interesting, of course, is when, when clients kind of discuss what sort of hands on skill they feel they need in it from, from, from a technology and product perspective. Um, a lot of clients sometimes assume that every developer on the planet already knows how to build cloud native code, right? So it's almost table stakes in, in some organizations. The reality of course is, is, is, is completely different. Okay. Uh,

having written code on a cloud project is completely different to writing cloud native, you know, code, of course. So, uh, that, that's one area in particular where clients need quite a lot of guidance to understand what good might need to look like, you know, for, uh, you know, for them. Um, when we look at some of the other skills that are hugely useful, particularly when kind of migrating to cloud native domain driven design, you know, is, is another area where, you know, we, we have some clients who, who, who know absolutely nothing about these techniques and how to apply them. So they, they will come to us and ask those to be designed into a curriculum for them. Uh, I was with a client recently who said, no, that's, that's table stakes. We, we assume that everyone that we hire knows how to do DDD. So it, it does vary from, you know, from client to client, but the interesting thing is the, you know, the recognition that to be sort of, to take a successful cloud native journey, you've got to be able to apply these kind of cultural, you know, techniques. So, you know, master and expert, uh, knowing how to use DDD when it makes sense to, you know, to do so just broad kind of appetite for, for learning, uh, you know, in that, in that space. So what are some of the, some of the other challenges that customers should be aware of? So we mentioned, generally speaking, be aware that training is a big component. We've talked about the most recognized that the cultural component is where they are fairly weak. Are there any other common issues you come up, come up against, uh, when working with customers, things they should keep an eye out for? Well, here's a really obvious one that every client doesn't be considered. No one budgets for the training and cultural transformation. You know, we're also very focused on acquiring the technology, the product that we want to, um, embed within our organization. Sometimes we overlook the sheer enormity of the task to, to get, you know, to give our people the, the cultural skills to, to make use of that, that, that product. And we, we talk about enabling the cloud native journey, you know, both for ourselves and our clients and Jeff. And, you know,

look, if you've got a community of 10, 15, 20,000 developers, and that, that's not unusual, you know, in, in the world today, you know, often when, when a client takes a pivotal journey, they might only focus on a relatively small number of people to start with. It might be 10 or 20 people get the, the full kind of experience that, um, you know, is so important to, to support the pivotal journey. How do I fund the journey for the other 10,000 people? Okay. I've done the first 10. What about the other 10,000? And clearly it's not affordable to, to send everyone on a gold plated experience. We're not going to bust the whole company off for weeks at a time to, um, you know, to be, to be shown this. So we, you know, we, we have to be pragmatic, pragmatic. We, we have to weave, uh, a journey for organization that, that lets them invest in a certain way that, that suits them. Uh, and, you know, to, to answer the question in terms of what do many clients overlook, you know, many clients just simply overlook the cost and enormity of the challenge. You know, I, they, they all have this great vision, which we fully support. They want to become a cloud native enterprise. They want to ensure that everyone in their organization is writing code in the right way. They want to modernize their existing portfolios. They want to operate their estate in, in a completely different way. That is a huge undertaking, right? Retraining 10,000 people. It's not something that you're going to achieve, you know, overnight. You need to think about how long you're going to allow for this journey to be successful. Clearly you need to think about how you're going to budget for this journey as well. And there's, there's a lot that can be done there to make it more affordable. And just, just one observation that we've, we found ourselves, you know, the general quality of, uh, online material is, is, is getting exceptionally high now, right? And there's also a lot of very affordable, if not free, uh, material available as well. So it's possible for organizations to, you know, to get quite some way without this being too fearsome from a,

from a cost perspective, but, but in very general terms, I think a lot of people, when they take this cloud native journey, they, they see the early success, which we would expect, of course, their vision gets a lot more colorful that they have a huge amount of ambition for their organization. And it just needs a lot of preparation to align the organization with, with where you want this journey to take you. So, and that's brings up a good question around, you know, how to budget, like folks, I get it, like they're not budgeting for it. And that's part of the problem is, does it, is it something that makes sense where it's like, okay, well, you know, just, you look at the entire population and you assign a dollar amount to each person. And it's like, okay, well, that's, that's how we come up with their number. Or do you come at it from kind of a program's perspective and you fund a group that's then go out, like out there tasked with taking folks through some kind of education and enablement journey. And, you know, then you just measure that group based on, well, how many people did you get through the program? I mean, I can see it kind of going, one, one's a little bit more organic and one's a little bit more structured. You know, what do you see working for folks better? Yeah. I mean, ultimately for a large organization, it's going to come down to cost the head. Okay. Someone, somewhere in the organization needs to know how much it will cost to enable their team to, to take this journey. But you're, but you're correct. I mean, a cost effective approach for, for many larger organizations to take a course is, is build your own training capability. You know, let's enable a sort of a train the trainer type approach. Let's help you build your curriculum for, for your organization. Let's enable a team to then deliver that across your organization as, as cost effectively as possible. Well, it strikes me, there's the, I mean, there's budgeting challenges when you think about cloud native software to begin with, right? So, versus a more traditional waterfall type approach where you budget it all up front and you kind of

plan everything out in minute detail or, whereas with cloud native software and you're iterating over time, how do you, that's a, that's a challenge and how you budget that you need to think differently about that. And I guess it shouldn't be surprising that similarly, you have to think about how do you budget for training for these kinds of things as well. Yeah. It's all part of the journey, isn't it, Geoff, really? I mean, when, you know, ideally, you know, when, when clients, uh, adopt a platform like, like, like PCF, for example, you know, there is typically a strategic investment, isn't it? You know, you're doing it for all the right reasons. Um, you know, that it's going to, going to enable that particular set of outcomes that you, you aspire to. Okay. Whether it's in terms of efficiency, speed, agility, you know, whatever, you know, we, we, we all kind of buy into this vision. Um, and we want the journey clearly to be, to be a successful one. It's, it's very difficult, isn't it, to, you know, from the outset, understand how much effort is involved to make that journey, uh, a successful one. I mean, just as an example, you know, we've got a few clients who will say, you know, look, we've, we've, we've adopted pivotal cloud foundries, our strategic platform, you know, going forwards, uh, we've got 5,000 applications. Um, can you tell us how long is it going to take? And it's just not a straightforward, you know, question to answer, is it, in, in, in, in terms of the, you know, enormity, the magnitude of the journey. And, and in the same way, but when, when, when someone asks us to sort of take 5,000 applications on a cloud native journey, you, you have to do an awful lot of analysis and assessment to kind of work out the sort of, the particular treatment plan that, that any given application is going to take. The same approach also holds true when you look at sort of enabling your workforce to, to support this journey too. You'll, you'll spot certain key roles that have a certain amount of commonality, you know, behind them. It is possible, you know, to look at this on a role by role basis, and then try and put some numbers, uh, you know, behind it, behind it. But at the end of the day,

every individual is unique. And in the same way that anyone migrating a huge portfolio of apps to the PCF is going to dig inside each application to work out, you know, the effort, the costs, you know, the duration. We, we do the same thing with every individual, you know, we, we, inside of HCL, before anyone takes this cloud native journey, we're going to, we're going to interview them. We're going to understand what their strengths and weaknesses are. We'll understand what their role is. And we, you know, we, we've got pretty good, it kind of estimating the effort, you know, for each, for each individual to, you know, to take this journey. And it's, it is, it's clearly a challenge, you know, when you're trying to do that with tens of tens of thousands of engineers, it's, uh, it can be a little bit of an inexact science from, from time to time, but we, we do recognize, you know, a certain number of repeating patterns that kind of make it, uh, somewhat easier for our, uh, for ourselves. Well, that's kind of an interesting analogy to, to leave off then. And the, you know, talking to our app transformation team here internally, they use like snap analysis against a particular application. Right. Um, but then when you step back and look at the entire estate, um, and this is something we don't really do at Pivotal, but, but partners like HCL do, which is, you know, one of those is like the, the time analysis, right? Like, uh, you know, what do I tolerate versus invest? Um, and, and so you're, you're sort of suggesting you have to kind of do the same thing for the workforce. You've got to do the, the time analysis type of, you know, view the looking at everything and understand the big roles. Like, what are we, you know, what kind of roles are we going to create and invest in and which ones are we going to probably try and grow people out of? Um, but then you have to do the individual snap analysis with individual interviews. Is that a fair? Yeah. And you can't, you can't avoid that. I mean, you can automate it, you know, to a certain extent, but it, but there's, there's no substitute for speaking to

the individual to understand, you know, what are their aspirations? You know, what, what is their motivation for this journey? You know, how excited are they to be taking this journey? Because that, that, that, that counts for an awful lot. And, you know, during this, uh, initial sort of stage of the journey, you know, domain where we're, we're talking to an individual, understanding what their background is, their skills, we can very quickly map that to the journey that we're on, uh, as an organization. And, you know, as I said, you know, once we understand their role and their existing strengths, we can quickly swap them in to a certain sort of pathway, uh, within our sort of enablement, uh, you know, program. But we, we do make sort of dynamic course adjustments along the way, because you'll have plenty of individuals who are, they're so fired up to be taking this journey that you, you just can't hold them back. And sometimes, you know, you'll find that a particular training journey that we expect maybe to take two months for an individual, two or three weeks later, she or he has come back and said, look, I've done it, you know, and, you know, I'm ready for more. So we have to make those dynamic adjustments of course, um, which is good. I mean, it's always hugely reassuring when you see people so enthused to be working with this. Yeah. Well, it's, I mean, that kind of almost comes back to your, you know, your iteration plans, right? This week or this two week sprint, whatever we're doing. But from a people perspective, it's like, well, you know, it's instead of that story took less time than we expected that, that person's development took less time. So what are we going to do for them next? So as a, as a manager kind of doing those, those iteration plans is that that's what I'm taking away from it, at least maybe I'm going bonker balls here, but you know, I'm still adjusting to the, to the time zone change, uh, on an early call with the UK. Um, okay. Well, so if folks want to kind of learn more, follow you, uh, where can they, where can they kind of continue to hear about what you're up to,

um, what HCL is up to, what do you recommend is, is where folks find and follow? Well, I mean, a couple of immediate recommendations I'd make, of course, was just come and visit the HCL, you know, website, take a look at our cloud native pages. You'll see a lot of guidance, uh, you know, there, uh, we all tweet all of the time. Uh, of course you'll find us on social media, hopefully, uh, you know, in, in, in, in abundance. Um, and coming to visit the labs, is that something that folks can do? Um, and yeah, it's really interesting actually domain because, you know, quite, quite uniquely, we think in the industry, we've set our labs up for customer consumption. And in particular, we, we use our labs as a showcase. So customers can and do give us a call, come in and sort of experience an HCL labs, uh, environment if you would like to see. So what does a pivotal enabled kind of lab look like? You know, if I was to set one of these up myself, you know, if I wanted to sort of create the COE center of excellence inside my organ, uh, my own organization, uh, where can I see this working? You can come in, uh, to an HCL, you know, cloud native lab. The other thing that, you know, is hugely important to, to a lot of clients is, you know, you appreciate today that the, the environment that cloud, uh, the clients need to support is, is hugely complex and sophisticated, you know, hybrid multi-cloud environments. How do I train and enable my workforce to not just build, you know, good cloud native code, but deploy it. And of course, operate it in, in all of these environments too. That's the other reason why these labs exist, of course, to show clients the reality behind this. If clients would like to see, uh, pivotal cloud foundry, PAS, PKS, operating in a pivotal optimized hybrid environment, perhaps on Dell PRA equipment, uh, connected to a multi-cloud estate configured in a production way. Uh, of course, an HCL cloud native lab is the best place to, to get that exposure.

And we would, uh, love to share this with, uh, with all of our clients. And of course, um, any of your listeners too, and, uh, come in and we'll share with you how we enable our workforce too. Yeah. I think having the, uh, the physical space set up, um, when I was in London last fall, got to take a sneak peek at the, the London lab. And, and so, um, yeah, I think that's a great way for folks to, to sort of check it out. Um, so thank you. You're more than welcome. And we look forward to seeing you again in London, of course, to me. At least in November for the next RabbitMQ summit, of course. We will invite you to the opening. We will invite you to the opening of Manhattan in a few weeks. Well, that's an easier flight. So I think I'll take you up on that. Good. Um, great to talk to you as always, Alan. Um, thanks again. And this was a really interesting to way to think about transforming the workforce. Good. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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