Technology Magazine - March 2022 by Technology Magazine

March 2022 | technologymagazine.com

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AI search for the Enterprise

How AI is transforming sports fan engagement

Qualtrics: The Shift from Legacy to Modern CX Management Erik Vogel, Global Head of High Tech & Telco at Qualtrics discusses why now is the time to modernise customer experience management FEATURING:

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The Technology Team SENIOR EDITOR

ALEX TUCK EDITOR

PRODUCTION EDITOR

JANET BRICE CREATIVE TEAM

GEORGIA ALLEN DANIELA KIANICKOVÁ

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

PRODUCTION MANAGERS

VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER

CATHERINE GRAY EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

SCOTT BIRCH

PRODUCTION DIRECTORS

PHILLINE VICENTE JANE ARNETA ELLA CHADNEY

KIERAN WAITE SAM KEMP

DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

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

MARKETING MANAGER

SAJANA SAMARASINGHE MARKETING DIRECTOR

ROSS GARRIGAN

MEDIA SALES DIRECTOR

MOTION DESIGNER

TYLER LIVINGSTONE

JOE MARRITT JASON WESTGATE JAMES WHITE

PROJECT DIRECTORS

MANAGING DIRECTOR

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

LEWIS VAUGHAN

CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

STACY NORMAN CEO

GLEN WHITE

FOREWORD

You are your brand

“In my interviews this month, I’ve seen a great desire to improve culture”

TECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

ur cover star this month is Qualtrics, whose powerful manifesto defines its entire approach and translates measurably into brand equity — the perceived worth of a brand or product in the eyes of all those aware of its existence. The way your workforce writes, answers the phone, dresses, and the drive and purpose they bring to their role, permeates through to customers, clients, partners, colleagues, and even how your staff speak about the business to friends, family, or on social media. In my interviews this month, I’ve seen a great desire to improve culture. exemplified by profiles with Milestone Technologies, Tealbook, T-Mobile and Spark Compass. I’ll leave you with this nice snippet I found on the Qualtrics Twitter feed. It felt pertinent: ‘There will be two types of employers. 1. Employers that listen to employees, embrace change, and adapt 2. Employers that keep working the same way.’

ALEX TUCK

alex.tuck@bizclikmedia.com

technologymagazine.com

CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 14 Big Picture 16 The Brief 18 Timeline: How AWS became the largest cloud computing provider on the planet 20 Trailblazer: Sarah Friswell 22 Five Minutes With: Felix Eichler

Digital Transformation Digital strategies in aviation

Qualtrics

The Shift from Legacy to Modern CX Management

48 Yext

AI Search for the enterprise

Enterprise IT

Accelerating business growth through centralisation

Cloud & Cyber

The damaging impact of ageism in cyber security

Cundall

A sustainable roadmap to digital transformation

116

Bees gets a new buzz in the brewing revolution

How AI is transforming sports fan engagement

NTT Data

AI & Data Analytics

126

Delivery Hero

Making local food delivery sustainable

150

Boulder Community Health Transforming care with technology

136

Sheba Tel HaShomer City of Health The smart hospital leading the world

168

Danfoss Drives

Teamwork and resilience turn the wheels at Danfoss Drives

CONTENTS

182

SimCorp

Transforming to a technologyenabled service company

198

210

NTT's Global Data Centers helps to deliver NTT's digital backbone

How Wyoming Hyperscale formed the world's ideal data centre

NTT

Wyoming Hyperscale

000

224

248

Embracing technology in the energy sector

The quantum future of education

Centrica

Northern Arizona Universities

236

260

Shaping new era for data centre sustainability

Fast pharmacy service BioPlus grows with new technology

Schneider Electric

BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy

M ARCH 8 .COM

IS HERE Telling the stories of driven, ambitious women in business and society...

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BIG PICTURE

T-Mobile’s futuristic tech playground ellevue, Washington, B United States

Technology Magazine and BizClik Media had the pleasure of visiting T-Mobile’s offices in Washington and exploring its 5G&me immersive showcase. Here we were exposed to the transformative impact that 5G applications can have on the way we live, work and play. Avatars at the ready, the BizClik team made its way through the experience aboard spaceships and autonomous transports — just another day at the office! 14

March 2022

T-Mobile technologymagazine.com

THE BRIEF “As the industry transformed from typewriter to computers, to the internet, to cloud and then to hybrid cloud and AI, IBM has been transforming along with that” Pratik Gupta

Chief Technical Officer of Hybrid Cloud Management and AI-Powered Automation, IBM 

BY THE NUMBERS Out of the players working on and innovating in quantum computing

the majority are…

40%

33%

Start-ups

Universities

“Our business strategy and growth plan stems from Yext’s bold mission to transform enterprises through AI search” Deepika Rayala

Chief Information Officer, Yext 

The rest consisted of Big Tech leaders such as IBM, Google and Microsoft.

T-Mobile announce record-breaking Q4 2021 earnings T-Mobile US Inc. (TMUS) reported fourth-quarter net income of US$422mn, which topped Wall Street expectations Find out more about T-Mobile 

“Internally within Cundall, we’re making sure that we’ve got the best-ofbreed technology, making sure we’ve got the right ecosystem of technology” Lou Lwin

Chief Information Officer, Cundall  READ MORE

March 2022

Award-winning Kuato Studios blending edtech and gaming CEO Mark Horneff tells Technology Magazine about the Marvel partnership and his passion for edtech Find out more about Kuato Studios 

AI platform, o9 Solutions announces US$295mn funding Leading enterprise AI software platform provider for transforming decision making, o9 Solutions has announced a US$295mn round led by General Atlantic Find out more about Kuato Studios 

 DEEPMIND

How high performance computing is transforming enterprises High performance computing (HPC) is having a significant impact on a number of industries. With the ability to assist the resolution of a multitude of complex issues, the benefits of this technology, when properly implemented into business, is limitless. Originally available to universities and large businesses, this technology is now more widely available thanks to colocation centres and their ability to host the infrastructure needed. Many companies that wouldn’t have ordinarily had the capabilities to utilise supercomputers can now tap into their data centres and gain the benefits of high performance computing, such as a decrease in processing time, lower cost and improving safety. Encouragingly, new supercomputers are being launched all over the world as companies look for new ways to handle intensive data processing tasks. Notably, Hewlett Packard and AMD have announced their plans to set up El Captain, the world’s fastest supercomputer, in 2023. To put the power of this proposed computer into perspective, it claims it will be faster than today’s 200 fastest supercomputers combined.

DeepMind has created an AI system named AlphaCode, when testing the system against coding challenges used in human competitions and found that its programme achieved an estimated rank that placed it within the top 54% of human coders.

 AMAZON Amazon’s shares have jumped more than 10% to US$3,080 as Wall Street welcomed the Prime pricing announcement. Earnings have also been boosted by a strong performance in its cloud computing division and its stake in electric vehicle maker Rivian.

W I N N E R S MAR22

 TESLA After topping the tables last year, Tesla has dropped off the UK’s best-selling cars. This comes after entrepreneur and CEO Elon Musk explained his factories have been running below capacity due to supply chain problems.

 FACEBOOK Confounding market predictions, Facebook revealed it had lost users for the first time ever: contributing to shares plummeting by 20% — the company’s biggest loss. US$200bn fell off the value of parent firm Meta, after 500,000 fewer daily log-ins and declining profits.

L O S E R S

technologymagazine.com

TIMELINE HOW AWS BECAME THE LARGEST CLOUD COMPUTING PROVIDER ON THE PLANET As Amazon Web Services (AWS) annualised revenue run rate hits US$71bn, Technology Magazine looks back on how this leviathan of the enterprise IT world was born and how it evolved.

2003

2006

2008

Product launch Infrastructure changes approved Benjamin Black and Chris Pinkham write a short paper describing a vision for Amazon infrastructure that, in Black's words, "was completely standardised, completely automated, and relied extensively on web services for things like storage." Jeff Bezos approved the idea of experimenting with Amazon’s infrastructure in 2004, with the Amazon Web Services blog also launched the same year.

March 2022

March the 14th of 2006, AWS launched officially with the Simple Store Service. The Simple Queue Service would follow on July the 13th as the Infrastructure-as-a-service model began to take shape. The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) — which would form a core part of the Amazon cloud platform — followed on August 25, but the service is not available yet to the general public. In 2007, Amazon EC2 was available in unlimited public beta, so that anybody can sign up and start using it.

Rivals set out their stalls 2008 brought the launch of the Google App Engine, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud computing platform for developing and hosting web applications, which signals the dawn of Google Cloud. The same year, Amazon launched a content delivery network, Amazon CloudFront. 2010 saw Microsoft enter the fray with the Azure platform, as Amazon announced that Amazon.com has migrated its retail services to AWS.

2012 Changing the ecosystem AWS Marketplace launched in 2012 as a place for customers to find, buy, and quickly deploy software that runs on AWS. An early harbinger of ‘serverless architecture’ was seen with AWS Lambda in 2014, known as Functionsas-a-Service. 2015 saw Garnet place AWS at the top of it’s Magic Quadrant as Infrastructure as a Service ‘Leaders’.

2021 Market leaders According to Statista, in the third quarter of 2021, the most popular vendor in the cloud infrastructure services market was AWS with 32% of the entire market. Microsoft Azure took second place with 21% market share, followed by Google Cloud with 8% market share.

technologymagazine.com

TRAILBLAZER

Leading the way for women in tech

arah Friswell is CEO of Red Ant, a leading retail technology specialist that empowers organisations to respond to their business challenges and build new retail capabilities. Its retail solution RetailOS combines data, systems, process, and technical expertise for remarkable digital customer experiences. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in the UK, Red Ant’s team of technology experts is 59% women and has been dedicated to diversity and inclusion since the company’s inception. In May 2020, Red Ant became an employee-owned business and since then, employee motivation has soared. The ambitious company picked up a win at the National Technology Awards for best retail tech of the year in October 2021. After beginning her career in account management, Friswell followed the client relationship ladder all the way to the

emerging digital landscape in Dubai, where she led major projects for leading global brands including IBM and Volvo. On her return to the UK, Sarah joined Red Ant where she applied her extensive experience of networked and independent tech-based businesses to drive the company forward in its pioneering work with highprofile brands such as Charlotte Tilbury, Furniture Village and Chalhoub Group. As Red Ant’s CEO, she is responsible for driving and guiding the business, from ensuring the company is run in a sustainable and ethical way to heading up talent selection and overseeing project progress and delivery to clients. She is particularly passionate about diversity, equality and encouraging the progression of women in what can be a tough industry and has been instrumental in ensuring positive measures are part of Red Ant’s policies. Life hasn’t always been easy for Friswell, but she finds solace in knowing she is not alone: “Some mornings I wake up and think ‘I’ve got a lot to get done today’ or there’s a tricky call I need to make, but then I remind myself I’m not doing it on my own. The team carries you mentally in these times and if they don’t, you’re working with the wrong team!” Friswell feels there is much she can share with

“ Red Ant’s team of technology experts is 59% women and has been dedicated to diversity and inclusion since the company’s inception” 20

March 2022

other ambitious young women coming into the industry, which has always been so traditionally male-dominated. When quizzed on specific advice, she added: “There is so much more depth to our businesses than sales, engineering, and QA - seek out people who can help navigate you through all the different career paths by talking you through their first-hand experience, as well as traditional progress through the ranks,” she said. Inspiration can be found in understanding other role types around you, she continued: “Try to find experience in lots of different types of tech businesses and, if your interests align, different role types. Most people, however busy, have time for a coffee - don’t underestimate the power of a 30-minute chat as a source of inspiration,”

Since her studies at university, where she read History, Friswell has always considered it important to look outside of her immediate sphere of reference for some great examples of trailblazers. “Coco Chanel is not always recognised for her innovation in her industry. Taking a traditional male domain of suit design and tailoring, she created an offering for women that delivered a product of equal technical and aesthetic brilliance. The innovations in her clothing design led the move away from restrictive women’s designs such as corsets. With a clear parallel for the tech industry, we have a lot to learn from Coco [Chanel] about pushing the boundaries of norms that have existed for years around classification of what women contribute,” said Friswell. technologymagazine.com

FIVE MINUTES WITH...

FELIX EICHLER AT JUST 25, FELIX EICHLER IS CTO AND CO-FOUNDER OF DIGITAL ADOPTION PLATFORM START-UP, USERLANE. HIS COMPANY HELPS COMPANIES IMPROVE THEIR EMPLOYEES’ ADOPTION OF NEW SOFTWARE IMPLEMENTATION. NOTABLY, EICHLER WAS A MEMBER OF FORBES 30 UNDER 30 FOR TECHNOLOGY IN 2021.

Q. WHAT’S THE KEY CHALLENGE YOU SET OUT TO SOLVE?

» At Userlane, we believe technology

should be a boost, not a burden. My co-founders and I were inspired by the frustrations many people were having with using new software productively while at work, especially when that software was constantly changing or being updated. We set out to solve this by providing the right help at just the right moment. The Userlane platform, an example of what is known as a Digital Adoption Platform, is an overlay to any software, such as Salesforce or SAP, to help users find their way around, much like a GPS in a car. Can you imagine driving around a complex city without that? We’ve received a lot of interest in this approach from companies all around the world, including Allianz, B.Braun, Deutsche Bahn, and P&G. We did our initial seed round in 2016, followed by Series A in 2018 and Series B in 2020. To date, we have raised US$16.3mn. This has allowed us to grow to a team of 100 people in Europe in just a few years – but we’re just getting started.

“ EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE HAS RAPIDLY CLIMBED UP THE CORPORATE AGENDA IN RECENT YEARS” 22

March 2022

“ WE’RE FOCUSED ON DEVELOPING SOLUTIONS THAT ENABLE EVERYONE TO FEEL EMPOWERED BY TECHNOLOGY, NOT FRUSTRATED OR THREATENED” Q. WHY ARE GREAT TECHNOLOGY EXPERIENCES SO VITAL TO THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE?

» Employee experience has rapidly climbed up

the corporate agenda in recent years, and the link between a positive employee experience and productivity is increasingly clear. Of course, there are so many different factors that can affect employee satisfaction. At Userlane, we believe that the quality of workplace technology experience is a critical, but sometimes overlooked, factor.

When software is difficult to use, employees can feel frustrated and even threatened, and that certainly isn’t conducive to being engaged and productive. Conversely, when software is easy to use, it empowers employees to do more. I think digital upskilling and reskilling will also emerge as major trends in the next few years. It’s true to say that automation will eliminate jobs, but it will also create new opportunities. Self-driving cars are a classic example – when they become widely adopted, what will happen to all of the taxi drivers? They will need to find alternative work and for many, that will involve some degree of reskilling. The same can be said of many officebased jobs too. Businesses that are looking to fill critical skills gaps, or create entirely new roles, may find the most effective solution is to technologymagazine.com

FIVE MINUTES WITH...

upskill or reskill existing employees who have automated many aspects of their usual roles. We think that Digital Adoption Platforms like Userlane will play a key part in this process.

Q. WHAT SETS USERLANE APART FROM THE OTHER PLATFORMS AVAILABLE?

» Since the concept of the Digital

Adoption Platform is still a relatively new one, there are only a handful of significant players in our market. What sets Userlane apart is that we practice what we preach – and

that is a commitment to simplicity. Our ultimate goal is to make using software simpler, therefore it’s especially important that our adoption platform itself can be intuitively adopted. Userlane requires no technical skills or complex setup, allowing anyone to get started autonomously and see the value straight away. There is no complex implementation process or maintenance effort. The platform is very intuitive; users can build and maintain interactive training content without the need to constantly rely on customer support. At the same time, we work closely with every customer to ensure they meet their specific objectives.

Q. HOW DO YOU SEE THE MARKET AND YOUR PRODUCT DEVELOPING OVER THE NEXT FIVE YEARS?

» There is so much potential in this

space – especially as the category is still very new. Fundamentally, however, we’re focused on developing solutions that enable everyone to feel empowered by technology, not frustrated or threatened. Moreover, we want to give businesses and their employees the confidence to manage digital change as they continue to rapidly 24

March 2022

“Interactive performance support proved to be a valid solution to all the challenges Deutsche Bahn encountered connected to change management and software applications. Users felt confident using Jira and weren’t experiencing any frustration navigating the app.” - Deutsche Bahn on Userlane.

invest in new technologies. One of our big, long-term objectives is to grow to 1 billion users. Looking at our product specifically, we are developing exciting analytics capabilities that will enable our customers to understand how their users are interacting with software and provide insights on how to optimise training content. We are also focused on ensuring Userlane integrates seamlessly within our customers’ wider technology stacks and provides additional value by working well with complementary products while keeping the user ‘in the flow of work’. technologymagazine.com

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March 2022

QUALTRICS

AD FEATURE WRITTEN BY: GEORGIA WILSON PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

The Shift from Legacy to Modern CX Management technologymagazine.com

QUALTRICS

Erik Vogel, Global Head of High Tech & Telco at Qualtrics discusses why now is the time to modernise customer experience management ocusing on the vertical solutions that Qualtrics provides for the technology, media, and telecommunications industry, Erik Vogel, Global Head of High Tech & Telco, has been a part of the company since May 2021. Qualtrics is an experience management company, “in fact, we created the category for experience management. We are the leader in helping clients to design and improve the experiences they provide to employees and customers,” says Vogel. “At the heart of what Qualtrics does, is provide the platform,technology, and methodology to help drive improved human experiences and interactions for our client’s customers,” operating across multiple industries, including technology, telecommunications, healthcare, education, public sector, and financial services to name a few. Despite only being with Qualtrics for a short period, Vogel has seen some significant shifts in the industry. “There’s this old school thinking when it comes to experience management: ‘We’ll just send an email survey’. You can’t even buy a cup of coffee without getting an email survey. “Qualtrics has realised that the future will not consist of surveys alone, but data aggregated from multiple sources. Not just understanding the moment of: ‘How did we do on a scale of one to 10? But really 30

March 2022

technologymagazine.com

QUALTRICS

understanding the emotion and the intensity of the emotion of the customer. ‘Were they happy? Were they sad? Were they impressed? Were they angry? Were they frustrated?’ This approach is becoming more important as we think about experience management. It's about really understanding customers at a personal level - how they're feeling about you as a company and making sure you use that data to tailor experiences, especially if a customer has a negative or bad experience,” reflects Vogel. As a technology platform, Qualtrics’ solution aggregates structured and unstructured data from virtually any source. Qualtrics’ platform can bring together data from Adobe analytics, session replay analytics, and other operational platforms, and combine it with survey data, chatbot chats, call center transcripts and more, in order to gauge customer emotions and feelings at scale- allowing clients to immediately address experience issues.

GLOBAL HEAD OF HIGH TECH & TELCO, QUALTRICS

March 2022

Why is it important to modernise customer experience, ensuring that you do not get left behind? While many have been talking about rapid digital transformation for the last five to 10 years, the implementation has been slowmoving. “I think because of the pandemic, it has driven everybody to digitally transform very quickly. If you think about industries that have been very reluctant, a restaurant for example, where for years, they printed paper menus, and now all of a sudden there's a code you scan at every table to get a digital menu and contactless payment, and all within the last 18 months, that is rapid change says Vogel. “One of the effects of this digital transformation is, with everything now digital, there are virtually no switching costs for customers to switch brands. So for example, if you are selling sports merchanise on an online platform but don’t make it easy to find the products in the right sizes, it's very easy for people to go find a new place to shop online. Products and services are becoming easy commoditise and easy to replicate. What is hard to replicate is the experience. Anyone can build an amusement park but very few can provide an experience that Disney provides. There are coffee shops up and down the street where I live, but nobody is providing an experience where I can order my favorite latte on the app with a single click for pick-up like I can at Starbucks. So in tech and telecommunications, the experience becomes absolutely critical in order for companies to succeed and stay ahead of the competition. They have to continuously innovate and really build out the customer experience end-to-end because that is the new strategic differentiator. “So as we look into the future, the success of a company is going to depend on the experience they provide.”

EXECUTIVE BIO ERIK VOGEL TITLE: G LOBAL HEAD OF HIGH TECH & TELCO LOCATION: PROVO, UTAH, USA Erik Vogel joined Qualtrics in 2021. At the computer software company, Vogel is the Global Head of Hgh Tech and Telco where his accountable for shaping the vision for XM with its tech and telco customers. He also helps to shape product and marketing strategies to drive impact alongside Qualtrics' customers. Vogel describes himself as customer obsessed with an innate passion to not only fix customer problems but to delight them too. Vogel is a fearless leader edicated to changing the way things have always been down and the lens which business decisions are made. Being a progressive thinker, he drives business change even when faced with skeptics.

technologymagazine.com

QUALTRICS

The best approach to modernise customer experience and the role that digitalisation plays “Digitalisation has made customer experience more challenging,” says Vogel. “We have to think about emotions and how customers feel about a service, however, digital is inherently cold, it’s inherently emotionless compared to interacting with a real human. So digitisation has definitely made it more challenging as we think about providing great customer experiences. “With this in mind, our clients really need to start thinking about a customer’s journey. They have to think about every interaction a customer has, whether that's digital or non-digital. They have to start thinking about all the touchpoints and the context of the customer journey through a variety of channels. And for Qualtrics, this means really helping a customer think about the future: How are you going to have these digital interactions? How are you listening? How are you getting signals from these interactions? How are you interpreting and understanding emotions? And most importantly, how are you creating a culture of action to meet or exceed customer expectations?” adds Vogel. How can Qualtrics’ platform improve its clients’ customer experiences? “Customer experience is the competitive differentiator going forward in the postdigitally transformed world,” explains Vogel. “As more and more interactions become digital, the way to compete is through experience management. The broader view of experience management is it's not just about sending out an email survey anymore. In fact, we all get too many surveys, which results in low response rates. Nobody wants to see another survey. Experience management is really about engaging with 34

March 2022

“ Digitalisation has made customer experience more challenging” ERIK VOGEL

GLOBAL HEAD OF HIGH TECH & TELCO, QUALTRICS

2002

Year Founded

Computer Software Industry

5,000

Number of Employees

$1,075mn Revenue 2021 (USD)

the customer in a conversational manner that fits in the context of the experience. Not only will you have increased response rates, you will also understand your customers deeply and their behavioral signals across every touchpoint a customer may have with you.” The Qualtrics’ platform that allows companies to listen for these signals and capture them in real-time where they

come from. “Being able to gather that data, interpreting it and understanding it using AI enables us to understand how we make customers feel. With the adoption of analytics, we can get a real understanding of the customer's sentiment and the intensity of their emotions. Allowing these insights to be used in order to create personalised experiences in moment at scale,” says Vogel. technologymagazine.com

QUALTRICS

Qualtrics: The shift from legacy to modern CX management

“Customer experience is the competitive differentiator going forward in the post-digitally transformed world” ERIK VOGEL

GLOBAL HEAD OF HIGH TECH & TELCO, QUALTRICS

“Our platform allows a customer to ingest all of this data and even bring it in from other sources to generate these insights and then take automated actions to improve the experience in real-time. And that could be experience for groups of customers or segments of customers, but it could also be personalisation for individual customers. Our Qualtrics platform helps customers personalise at scale in the digital world.” 36

March 2022

The Qualtrics framework When it comes to experience management, there is a lot more to the process than simply buying a platform or piece of technology, therefore, Qualtrics is really focused on helping its customers transform, adopt, and make sure that their people are on board and engage. “It is as much a cultural shift, as it is a technology shift,” says Vogel.

“So what we have done is, we've built out an adoption framework that really helps customers move through this process, especially for those that are fairly new to this. We use what we call our ADEAMS framework, that is broken down into six stages. 1. Align: Making sure that whatever a customer does is aligned to the business objectives, is relevant to various levels of stakeholders within the organisation, and that the longer term vision has been agreed upon. This is absolutely critical. 2. Define: Building out the roadmap across the technology, as well as looking at the processes and the people, establishing the metrics that matter, and what has to be done to address that, to engage and enable an experience management programme. 3. Execute: Implementing the tools, implementing the platform, doing the integrations and setting up the programme for long term success. 4. Adopt: Driving enablement, knowledge sharing, and articulating value through pointed communications. This is really about change management and the organisation itself. We could put the best technology in place tomorrow, but it doesn't necessarily mean the customer is going to get the value out of it. 5. Measure: Understanding the results that are being obtained through tracking KPIs. Knowing what metrics matter to different stakeholders and leadership, all to build a strong ROI case while informing improvements to make sure they hit the KPIs and beat the baselines that they're looking for. 6. Scale: Expanding usage and innovation for additional use cases. This is really important. Once a company gets up and running, they start driving that adoption

and a lot of times they will find internally a lot of teams clamouring to use more and more, and so they'll want to scale. So it's really about scaling the platform and scaling the use of the platform to drive incremental value.

technologymagazine.com

Rolls-Royce plc flickr

March 2022

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

DIGITAL STRATEGIES IN AVIATION Airlines and engineers operate an ever-increasing amount of aircraft. How are digital strategies and platforms changing the way aviation performs? WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

nplanned downtime due to aircraft defects and spontaneous repair work is extremely costly for airlines. Before the pandemic, the costs most recently amounted to around USD$62bn annually. In addition to this, by 2025 it’s estimated that a further 38,000 planes will be in the sky and with their arrival, a vast new raft of data to learn from. As the aviation industry continues to power globalisation, how are airlines and engine manufacturers using digital strategy to ensure that data can transform their clients’ capabilities? Lufthansa has been providing technical aircraft services for over 65 years. More than

25 years ago, Lufthansa Technik became a division of its own within Lufthansa Group to strengthen and focus on its core competence: technical services for aircraft, its engines and components. Currently, it has more than 4,500 aircraft under exclusive contracts. With some 35 subsidiaries and affiliates, the Lufthansa Technik Group is one of the leading providers of technical aircraft services in the world. AVIATAR by Lufthansa Technik Jan Stoevesand is Senior Director of Digital Solutions and Analytics for the AVIATAR digital platform, with which the business technologymagazine.com

Enabling educators. Empowering students. Explore how we accelerate student discovery, learning and innovation with our Digital Education 3D Experience. EXPLORE THE 3D EXPERIENCE

“ GOOGLE ACCOMPANIED US CLOSELY AND IN PARTNERSHIP DURING THE MIGRATION AND THUS MADE THE SILENT MIGRATION POSSIBLE IN THE SHORTEST POSSIBLE TIME” JAN STOEVESAND

SENIOR DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL SOLUTIONS AND ANALYTICS, LUFTHANSA TECHNIK

uses to push Lufthansa’S core MRO (maintenance, repair and operations). “About 5 years ago our Executive Board started a digital initiative knowing that the future of the Lufthansa Technik depends on our digital capabilities, too. We identified three fields of action: Digitise the

core of our business, digitally enhancing our current portfolio and extending our product portfolio with standalone digital offerings. To be able to offer especially these standalone digital offerings, AVIATAR was born. An independent digital TechOps platform for the industry allowing us to offer open, modular, and neutral digital products,” said Stoevesand. His interdisciplinary team of aircraft engineers, software developers, product owners and managers, data engineers and data scientists are responsible for the development and operation of various applications to support the technical operations of their customers’ fleet. To operate its own artificial intelligence (AI) analytics platform within AVIATAR in a more secure, scalable, cost-efficient and technologymagazine.com

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

event-driven way, Lufthansa Technik relies on Google Cloud expertise and solutions. Late last year, experts from Google Cloud and Lufthansa Technik managed to migrate the system to the cloud without any downtime for customers. Lufthansa began the partnership with Google Cloud after realising that its analytics stack needed to be renewed. Technological development was rapid and new technologies would open up

new possibilities: “Furthermore, the selfmanaged technology stack we had until then meant a lot of administration and not enough scalability. We were looking for a technology stack that could grow with our needs, quickly adapt to new technical possibilities, and still offer scalability and cost transparency. And we found that stack in the Google Cloud. We can maximise the time our data scientists spend working on solving problems and not worrying about

AVIATAR: Condition Monitoring for SWISS

Lufthansa Technik Certified internationally as a maintenance, production and design organisation, the company has a workforce of more than 22,000 employees. Lufthansa Technik’s portfolio covers the entire range of services for commercial and VIP/special

March 2022

mission aircraft, engines, components and landing gear in the areas of digital fleet support, maintenance, repair, overhaul, modification, completion and conversion as well as the manufacture of innovative cabin products.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

infrastructure issues. That by itself leads to more fun at work and better and faster results. Google accompanied us closely and in partnership during the migration and thus made the silent migration possible in the shortest possible time. In the middle of the pandemic,” Stoevesand explained. Rolls-Royce Total Care Rolls-Royce are the leaders in the race to net-zero initiatives with a sharp focus on

electrification (and in some very fun ways) and hybrid initiatives. Rolls-Royce has also been a leader in Engine Health Monitoring (EHM) for over 30 years. Today, it provide an EHM service on 97% of all widebody aircraft powered by Rolls-Royce, including 100% of Trent-powered aircraft. Rachel Walker, SVP Services Systems at Rolls-Royce, discusses the premium TotalCare maintenance option and how it removes the burden of engine maintenance

“WE ENDED UP TRYING SEVERAL CLOUD CMS VENDORS AND CONTENTSTACK WON THE CONTRACT” HALLUR ÞÓR HALLDÓRSSON PRODUCT MANAGER, ICELANDAIR

technologymagazine.com

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

“ WE CAN ALSO MODEL FUTURE DETERIORATION TO GIVE ACCURATE PREDICTIONS OF WHEN MAINTENANCE WILL BE NECESSARY” RACHEL WALKER

SVP SERVICES SYSTEMS, ROLLS-ROYCE

from the customer, and transfers the management of associated risks to Rolls-Royce. “TotalCare covers predictive maintenance (off-wing) planning, work scope creation and management, and off-wing repair activities. The benefits include an aligned business model for Rolls-Royce and our customers, predictable cost of ownership for the customer, and a joint focus on minimising operational disruptions. Around 90 per cent of our widebody customers choose TotalCare when purchasing our Trent engines, which shows the widespread recognition for the service”, she said. Walker explains that the latest generation of engines can capture much more data than previously - shifting from tens of parameters scanned a few times per flight, to hundreds of parameters scanned every second. “We have the capability to detect abnormalities that were previously invisible, resulting in 10% less disruption and 30% more time to plan required maintenance compared with the earlier Trent engines. Our dispatch reliability rates are already very high, typically better than 99.7%. We have introduced Intelligent Lifting technology for the latest generation of Trent 44

March 2022

engines. Flight data, proprietary analytics, and digital twins model individual component performance, treating every engine as an individual rather than relying on one-size-fitsall inspection intervals and maintenance regimes. This technology has already been proven to extend some part lives by up to 60% and inspection intervals by 20%. We can also model future deterioration to give accurate predictions of when maintenance will be necessary”, Walker commented. By treating every engine as an individual, Rolls Royce knows how it is built, maintained, and operated and they tailor operating and maintenance recommendations specifically for every engine. This also allows them to advise on how to operate more efficiently and reduce emissions. Icelandair and CX Digitisation is not limited to maintenance of physical aircraft either. Sometimes it is the front end systems the customer uses that require overhaul, as Icelandair's Product Manager Hallur Þór Halldórsson realised with the potential improvements in customer experience (CX) by going to the cloud with Contentstack. “When I came on to the project in 2015 we had a very old-fashioned on-premises content management system (CMS) with a publishing front-end attached to it, which handled all the content for our booking site. Content managers had to go in and do a lot of cache-flushing and add code here, add code there to the site. Load tests during cloud containerising experiments on AWS in 2016 made people

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Rolls-Royce | Pioneering the electrification of flight

Rolls Royce TotalCare is charged on a fixed $ per flying hour basis, so they are only rewarded for engines that perform. This rewards reliability, a factor valued most highly by their airline customers. Put simply, TotalCare means:

• An aligned business model for Rolls-Royce and our customers • Predictable cost of ownership for the customer • A joint focus on minimising operational disruptions

technologymagazine.com

March 2022

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

scared the site would crash a lot; people weren't sure the CMS could handle what was coming in our digital transformation. We started looking for another CMS, using a different one for a year that wasn't headless - but had API functionality - but it wasn't quite doing what we expected. We ended up trying several cloud CMS vendors and Contentstack won the contract,” said Halldórsson. In the context of Icelandair’s digital transformation plan, the ability to adapt quickly and overall scalability were the primary reasons to go with a headless CMS. Headless became a requirement to decouple it from the publishing end of the old CMS. Icelandair needed this approach to personalise content for customers. The ability to adapt quickly and scale were the primary factors behind a headless CMS. Halldórsson was impressed with Contentstack and the way it handles localised content. Icelandair supports 11 languages online and 16 locales (four different versions of English, two French), and needed to be able to manage that: “Other vendors that impressed us otherwise didn't have mature localisation features,” said Halldórsson. In terms of its own digital transformation roadmap, the first thing the company did was to integrate the translation process into the CMS: “Before, we had to paste text into a Microsoft Word document, send it to the translation agency, wait for it to come back and paste it into the CMS. Now it gets sent to the agency via API and is delivered back automatically. Next for us is a Salesforce integration, to accelerate access to content for salespeople and customer service agents. Integrating a personalisation engine is the dream,” said Halldórsson. technologymagazine.com

YEXT

SEARCH FOR THE ENTERPRISE WRITTEN BY: SIMON HOWSON-GREEN

March 2022

PRODUCED BY: MIKE SADR

technologymagazine.com

YEXT

When it comes to a more sophisticated and accurate online search Yext’s AI engine has all the answers ouldn’t it be nice if every business website we visited could answer our questions easily, directly and correctly? That’s what the AI search company, Yext, is asking us to consider — and not just for websites, but for all business owned platforms, both internal and external facing. And it’s a question Deepika Rayala, Yext’s Chief Information Officer, can answer directly: “It can,” she says. “But you need Yext Search Platform to do it.” Today, using search on our laptops, mobile phones, and other devices is second nature to us. We often do it without even thinking about the complex process that takes place behind the scenes in order to deliver a direct answer to questions about topics ranging from the best winter shoes to Omicron variant symptoms. We’re accustomed to getting our results within seconds. “Our online day is punctuated by multiple visits to a search engine,” Rayala says. “Most of the time, that will be Google.” We all know on one level that a simple Google search will do the trick. That’s because, over the past few decades, the search giant has led the way on consumer search, introducing a satisfying AI-powered search experience that billions around the world have been accustomed to. 50

March 2022

Deepika Rayala Chief Information Example of Officer, Yext an image caption technologymagazine.com

YEXT

“ Our business strategy and growth plan stem from Yext’s a bold mission to transform enterprises through AI search” DEEPIKA RAYALA

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, YEXT

March 2022

At the same time, when we search for information about a specific business on Google, we are all at the mercy of its algorithms. Those algorithms can surface ads as results — including those for competitors — as well as third-party blogs and websites boosted by SEO that may contain spam or outdated information. For some of us, that experience might still be preferable to going to a business’s official website, which is also typically powered by an outdated technology called keyword search. Keyword search typically returns a list of irrelevant hyperlinks that people have to scroll through to find an answer to their query. Rayala says. “It’s an extremely frustrating experience that happens all the time, all around the world.”

YEXT

So, what if we could leave keyword search in the past, take only the best parts of Google’s AI-powered consumer search, and use it to transform the enterprise search experience? This is where Yext comes in. Founded in 2006, Yext (NYSE: YEXT) is a global enterprise search company that builds AI-powered search solutions for businesses to plug into their websites, customer support sites, apps, intranet, and more. While it might not be as much of a household name as Google, it’s a major fixture in the enterprise search space — one you’ve almost definitely used before while browsing sites. “Our business strategy and growth plans stem from Yext’s bold mission to transform every enterprise in the world through AI search,” says Rayala.

DEEPIKA RAYALA TITLE: EVP, CIO (INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS CENTRE)

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: NEW YORK Rayala has more than 20 years of experience building IT organisations. Prior to Yext, she was Vice President of Enterprise Applications and PMO at Apttus, where she doubled the size of her team and established a best-in-class enterprise applications team. She has also led large IT transformation programs at Broadcom and Genentech, executing strategies to modernise and align the IT application landscape with the companies' business goals. Rayala manages all aspects of IT from apps and Business Development operations to security and compliance. She also leads Yext’s ‘shared services centre’ out of India which was opened last year. She is responsible for leading the company's global IT organisation and driving the enterprise applications, data and analytics, infrastructure, and operations that enable Yext to deliver its platform to businesses around the world.

Business-led and cloud-forward transformation. It all adds up to The New Equation. Learn more at www.theNewEquation.com

© 2022 PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the US member firm, and may sometimes refer to the PwC network. Each member firm is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. This content is for general information purposes only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.

FROM QUOTE TO CASH - PWC AND YEXT CREATE THE PERFECT TRANSFORMATION BLUEPRINT PwC has been at the forefront of global business’s journey into the cloud. Its recent collaboration with AI search company Yext provides a powerful case study for how to get digital transformation right.

According to Yext’s CIO Deepika Rayala, working with PwC has helped to improve the efficiency of Yext’s business, saving many hours that sales staff would have otherwise spent producing detailed quotes to customers and providing contract support.

Starting in 2020, Yext turned to PwC to help overhaul its systems, specifically its ‘quote to cash’ (Q2C) operation, especially as the company had made a strategic shift to a consumption-based pricing model that its existing quoting tools could not support.

Samrat Sharma, US & Global Marketing Transformation Leader at PwC US, says that with such projects, there always should be an element of pragmatism and focusing on what really matters, from experience to outcomes.

‘Yext needed to build a solution that was more agile, automated and catered to their various business segments to unlock operational efficiencies, would automate their process overall, especially in configuring pricing and quoting,’ says Jen Yanoff, Cloud & Digital Principal at PwC US. ‘They also needed to increase productivity and efficiency, because of the high volume of transactions that they have. Finally, they wanted to improve the customer experience overall.’ The collaboration ultimately resulted in key innovations across three areas: productivity gains (reducing processing time by 50%), workflow improvement efficiencies, and support for the new pricing model.

At the same time, it’s important to leverage technology and data in order to be able to really focus, amplify, and simplify the company’s ability to deliver, tackling that with empathy and trust. ‘We need to be clear that we need to build infrastructure in a sustainable way with a clear intent to help drive the customer experience, drive growth, and drive profitability,’ he says.

Learn more

YEXT

“We often say, if you’ve ever searched for information about a company online, chances are you’ve interacted with Yext”. Yext currently works with more than 2,500 businesses and organizations around the world to transform their digital experiences with AI search.” AI is the key word here, since it’s the foundation of Yext’s search platform — and what differentiates it from typical keyword search experiences. It starts with Yext’s knowledge graph technology, which can consolidate a business’ facts from different sources into a brain-like database that can be mined. “Every company knows its own data the best, and they should be the source of truth for that data,” Rayala says. “By storing and structuring their data in a company-specific knowledge graph, they can power a Googlelike search experience that is powered by their own knowledge graph.” Once an Answers search bar is implemented on a website, AI also comes into play with the ever-evolving machine learning models and algorithms that continue to learn from the queries on your site. By understanding even the most complex natural language queries, the platform can deliver a direct answer. Sometimes, this answer can be accompanied by images, videos, or even action buttons like “get directions.” While the backend technology is impressive, Yext is most excited about the variety of ways that their platform can be used. AI search has broad applicability, so we’re setting our sights not just on horizontals like marketing, customer support, developers, and workplace but are also focused on verticals like financial services, healthcare, retail, the public sector, and more. 56

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“ One of the cornerstones of Yext’s success is strong partnerships” DEEPIKA RAYALA

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, YEXT

2006

Year Founded

AI/SEARCH ENGINE Industry

2000

Number of Employees

$354.7mn Revenue

Indeed, Yext recently expanded its AI solutions to new areas, enabling businesses to implement modern search experiences in key area such as customer support sites and support agent dashboards. These solutions are also optimized for their specific industry. For healthcare organizations during the pandemic, for example, Yext’s Find-a-Doc solution proved extremely helpful. “ One such example is our ‘Find-a-Doc’ AI search solution for healthcare organizations that is designed to improve the preappointment patient experience by enabling patients to identify the right provider quickly and easily on a healthcare organisation's website,” says Rayala. When a patient searches for a specific doctor speciality, location or other criteria, Find-a-Doc will rely on advanced NLP to actually understand the patient's query and return the doctors that match their criteria — complete with headshots, contact information, and helpful prompts like ‘make an appointment’ and ‘get directions.’” According to Rayala, Yext — as a global company — is committed to constantly expanding the number of languages its search platform caters for. Currently, its site search product exists in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. It’s easy to see how Yext’s solutions can offer a seamless, digital experience for end users. But for businesses, Rayala explains, there are even more benefits to reap: increased conversions, reduced support costs, expanded insights, greater productivity, and more. Samsung, for example, turned to Yext to transform its help centre. First, Yext helped them build a robust knowledge graph that consolidated all their help articles, FAQs, YouTube videos, and more, then implemented an AI search experience on the site. technologymagazine.com

YEXT

“Now, when a customer asks Samsung a complex question, the Yext algorithms powering the search experience understand the question and provide a direct answer,” says Rayala. “They surface dynamic content like photos, help articles, and calls-to-action — not a list of blue hyperlinks.” Ultimately, within eleven weeks of launching with Yext, Samsung experienced significant growth in every major customer satisfaction metric, increasing its Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 45%, Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) by 33%, number of resolved issues by 15%, and number of completed surveys by 8x. Tapping into Yext’s performance analytics, Samsung was also able to boost click-through rates (CTR) by 40%. All told, Samsung increased customer engagement with its help site by 19%, streamlining the path to resolution and delighting customers along the way. While it may seem like building this kind of search experience — knowledge graph and associated integrations — would take months, Rayala provides a real-life example of how quickly customers can be ready to go with Yext Answers. “We have the technology, integrations, algorithms, and expertise necessary to deliver a world-class search experience out of the box. We’re able to get businesses up and running with AI search relatively quickly so they can start enjoying its perks.” Another example she offers is Yext’s work in the public sector during the early phases of the pandemic. “Within the span of 60 days, when the world was scrambling for information, we were able to build custom information hubs to help the World Health Organization (WHO), the US State Department, and the states of New Jersey and Alabama deliver accurate, up-todate information about COVID-19,” she says.

“ Many businesses in every industry continue to use an outdated technology called keyword search” DEEPIKA RAYALA

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, YEXT

technologymagazine.com

YEXT

AI Search for the Enterprise

“We have the technology, integrations, algorithms, and expertise necessary to deliver a world-class search experience” DEEPIKA RAYALA

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, YEXT

It’s clear how proud Yext is of its customers and the incredible success it has facilitated for them. In order to realize that success, Yext had to enable more efficient business operations – and so, under Rayala’s IT leadership, the company implemented a comprehensive IT transformation program that required working with multiple IT partners. Take Yext’s relationship with professional services network and accounting firm PwC, for example, which Rayala says strengthened when Yext needed to implement updated product and pricing strategy to support an ever-increasing volume of transactions. 60

March 2022

“PwC helped us with complex challenges by integrating technology, business, and employee experience,” Rayala explains. “They brought strong technology expertise and the ability to affect global transformation at scale, ultimately helping us drive meaningful changes to our processes and ways of working.” In terms of meeting the challenges of managing a rapidly growing SaaS environment, Yext turned to the software-asa-service (SaaS) management platform, Zylo. “Implementing Zylo has also enabled us to have a more streamlined and decentralised management where certain SaaS apps can

be procured and managed by the lines of business,” she says. “However, all apps are still managed under the purview of the overall governance process when it comes to contract renewals, compliance, spend and usage tracking. This allows for quicker time to market and efficiency.” Yext is also working closely with San Francisco-based workflow management company, Pipefy. “By using a tool such as Pipefy, we’ve been able to automate complex workflows in one unified platform with an easy-to-use interface,” says Rayala. Alongside her duties as CIO, Rayala

serves as the executive sponsor of Yext’s Employee Resource Group (ERG), Embrace, which supports employees of colour and contributes to the broader inclusive culture behind Yext’s products — one that Rayala says she is very proud of. As an executive sponsor, Rayala advises a core team of employees on events and activities and joins safe-space meetings to understand how employees are doing on the ground, especially when external events impact them. Rayala says, “Leaders should step outside of their daily work and dedicate time to learn technologymagazine.com

YEXT

“ (Yext helps) businesses deliver truly exceptional search experiences to their end customers, partners, and employees”

from, work with, and support employees, especially in endeavours such as running ERGs. These forums help employees feel more connected and go a long way in building company culture.” Rayala believes that the most important leadership quality is being genuine. “When you’re leading a team, it is critical for people to trust you enough to come along with you on the journey — and authenticity is the key to building that trust.

DEEPIKA RAYALA

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, YEXT technologymagazine.com

CYBER AND CLOUD

The damaging impact of ageism in cyber security With ageist attitudes permeating society, we take a look at the damaging effect this can have on cyber and its growing skills shortage WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY

March 2022

onsidered a modern field, the cyber security industry faces challenges brought upon by a number of structural obstacles that comes with being a newer industry. Along with diversity issues, with cyber professionals being predominantly male, ageism is another challenge that is contributing to the large skills gap in the industry. In a study conducted by ISSA, 95% of respondents said the cyber security skills shortage and the impact of this gap have not improved over the past few years. Today’s workforce consists mainly of three generations: • Baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964 • Generation X, born between 1965 and 1976 • Millennials, people born between 1977 and 1996. The different experiences and different levels of exposure to technology these generations have lived through means not only do they respond differently to cyber issues, but they are treated differently by organisations as a result.

CYBER AND CLOUD

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“ The future as the World Economic Forum is saying is much more about human-centred capabilities, us thinking and talking” HENRY ROSE LEE

INTER-GENERATIONAL DIVERSITY EXPERT AND SPEAKER

Looking at ageism within businesses more broadly, Henry Rose Lee, InterGenerational Diversity Expert and Speaker, who conducted research with security company, Appgate, on generational differences and the impact it has on cybersecurity, said: “We have ageism at both ends. Ageism exists when people are young and then they can't get a job because

they haven't got the experience and need the experience to get a job.” “There's ageism at the other end. Statistically, if you are in your fifties to your seventies, the chances are that if you are in an industrialised, westernised, democratised society, you are probably seen as getting towards your sell-by date. You're often seen as becoming too old and therefore becoming less valuable when the truth of the matter is that nothing could be further from that,” she continued. Lee’s research looked into ageism in cyber and how to leverage multigenerational expertise to close the cybersecurity skills gap. With Appgate, Lee found that knowledge and experience make the real difference to effective cybersecurity resiliency, not the latest-generation technology and infrastructure. technologymagazine.com

CYBER AND CLOUD

Henry Rose Lee - Inter-Generational Diversity Expert at the National Sales Conference 2019

Henry Rose Lee is one of few experts in Inter-Generational Diversity. This is the emerging science and management skill of maximising the engagement, collaboration and productivity within and across the five distinct generations in today’s workplace. With over 20 years of IT security expertise, Gernot Hacker, Sales Engineering Manager EMEA/APAC of Appgate, specialises in systems integration, media liaisoning, product management and leadership.

Adding to this, the findings highlighted that businesses are at risk of creating their own cybersecurity abyss. As baby boomers look to retire, a significant amount of experience and knowledge can be lost including the ability to manage and integrate legacy platforms into secure Zero Trust security environments. Eradicating the ‘out with the old’ mentality Considering the cyber security industry with this issue, Lee explained that the older generation is often left behind in terms of training as there is a high chance they will leave soon to retire. This dismissal is particularly damaging when looking at research from the World 68

March 2022

Economic Forum that explains problemsolving, critical thinking and emotional intelligence are all skills that are key to thriving in the fourth industrial revolution. All of these skills are ones that develop with age and are found more within older generations. “If you don't need that in cybersecurity, I don’t know what you need,” said Lee. “Let's say you have a cyber threat, so it might be ransomware or it might be a virus that's introduced into the system. To overcome this, you really need a lot of cognitive thinking about what are the best steps going forward. So that is a powerful opportunity for infrastructure software, technology and people to get together. On the people side of it is really managing

CYBER AND CLOUD

“ Our critical thinking skills, our ability to think outside the box to use our experience to think about what we did and learn are all really powerful” HENRY ROSE LEE

INTER-GENERATIONAL DIVERSITY EXPERT AND SPEAKER

communications, learning from any fallouts and managing how people get together in teams to solve problems. The future according to the World Economic Forum is much more about human-centred capabilities, us thinking and talking. We might not even have the answer, but at least we're having the conversation. Our critical thinking skills, our ability to think outside the box to use our experience to think about what we did and learn are all really powerful. That's much more valuable than infrastructure and technology,” she continued. With these key skills needed within technology-focused industries, it is important for a diverse range of ages to be found within cyber security teams. Lee outlined, however, that many people aged 50-60 within the cyber industry are leaving or taking early retirement, and as a result heightening the already prevalent skills gap. Digital natives within cyber security Looking at the younger professionals in the industry, with their digital native mindset, they respond to challenges and threats a lot differently. Being digitally native means

this generation is a lot more technologically savvy and have skills in the field that would be second nature to them, but not to those older. However, with a lack of experience, paired with a heightened sense of confidence in technology, younger people tend to be more vulnerable to certain attacks as they are more trusting in the internet and other technologies compared to their older counterparts. This trust, and lack of experience, leaks into the cyber industry as Gernot Hacker, Sales Engineering Manager at Appgate explained: “We only learn by errors. And this ties into ageism. If you burn your fingers, eventually you won't touch the hot plate. 15 people can tell you don't do that. Eventually, because

Baby boomers bring a multitude of advantages to cybersecurity teams due to their higher emotional intelligence and maturity. Research by Verssimo, Verhaeghen, Goldman, Weinstein and Ullman (2021) demonstrates that many cognitive abilities improve due to life experience. Baby boomers have also learned key skills that are vital to maximise cybersecurity strategies, such as the ability to think deeply through a challenge, avoid distraction and fully focus when required. The advantages of having a multigenerational workforce have been recognised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) research. It revealed that the inclusion of more older workers boosts productivity by around 11%. They also discovered that 70% of employers are looking to implement or explore the benefits of multigenerational workforce policies to support greater collaboration between older and younger employees. technologymagazine.com

CYBER AND CLOUD

How generations colliding is great news for digital transformation Any organisation looking to transform should celebrate the fact that we have four generations in the workplace right now, all with different experiences and expectations that can help make projects both innovative and successful. One caveat: It’s important to recognise that skills and interests often transcend age barriers, but for this purpose we’ll make use of the generational model as it can be useful. The Gen-Zers now entering the workforce were 12 years old or younger at the launch of the iPhone, making them mobile first, with the expectation that technology will work seamlessly, change rapidly, and anticipate changing needs. By contrast, Boomers are less likely to look for purely technological solutions to problems, having decades of experience where tech solutions failed to deliver on promises. The one thing that makes a successful digital transformation – whether we’re talking about cybersecurity, the customer journey, or the employee journey – is proper understanding of the business processes that underlie any employee or customer interaction with your organisation. With different generations at the

March 2022

table, you’re gifted with an array of perspectives on how any process should be modelled, executed, and optimised. For example, look at the process changes forced upon supermarkets and other retailers due to COVID-19. Gen-Z and Millennials are the most likely to push for a 100% online experience, easily executable from a phone. That doesn’t work for everyone and it may be the Gen Xers and Boomers who remind you of that, forcing the adoption of ‘hybrid’ models like ordering online, pick up and return in-store. In addition, Gen X and Boomers understand the technology currently in place and the importance of integrating past data and applications into new processes, and their deep experience can help teams avoid unintended consequences when changes are made. When a diverse group has access to the necessary data, modelling, and collaboration tools needed, they can drive a deeper and more inclusive transformation that builds on the skills and experience of the entire team. Gero Decker, General Manager SAP Business Process Intelligence and Co-founder of Signavio.

CYBER AND CLOUD

“ We only learn by errors. And this ties into ageism. If you burn your fingers, eventually you won't touch the hot plate” GERNOT HACKER

SALES ENGINEERING MANAGER, APPGATE

you're curious, you try it out. Obviously, that’s different in larger entities because of the obligations that could cost you your job. But still, the premise remains, with age comes experience, probably bad experiences in cyber, and only then do you have more knowledge on how to tackle a problem.” “Younger people tend to take things for granted in terms of technology because they are digital natives. By taking things for granted, you literally don't think twice about it and this obviously has a real effect in terms of security,” he added.

On top of this, the digital native younger generation is more accustomed to having access to information faster, and without issue. Lee explains this makes them more likely to pay a ransom when they become victims of a cyber attack. “That sends a message to cybersecurity criminals that crime pays,” she commented. However, Hacker did note that it is not just the younger generations that experience vulnerabilities. Explaining that he has advised older people when facing this challenge Hacker urged them to learn how to “protect themselves from hard drive vulnerabilities better”. Paying a ransom is “a gamble” he said. But, sometimes by not taking the gamble, companies have “to start from scratch as they would lose everything if they didn’t.”

technologymagazine.com

CYBER AND CLOUD

March 2022

CYBER AND CLOUD

“By taking things for granted, you literally don't think twice about it and this obviously has a real effect in terms of security” GERNOT HACKER

SALES ENGINEERING MANAGER, APPGATE

Creating the right approach to tackle ageism Stressing there is no one size fits all approach when it comes to addressing this problem within cyber security, Lee believes by encouraging the baby boomer generation to return to their roles in a consultancy position could really help redress the skills gap brought about by ageism and create more of a dialogue between generations. Adding to this, she suggests: “At the top of the business, if you have a leadership team in cybersecurity, you can have a shadow leadership team who are a mix of different ages who perhaps could troubleshoot cases or situations for what might happen in a doomsday plan. So that helps the generations work with each other, mentoring and reverse mentoring from older and younger and younger and older.” Then, Lee concludes, looking at training the older generations to become more digitally savvy is crucial, along with the diversification of the hiring process, she noted: “A good way to do this is getting advice from universities, certain universities will specialise in certain areas and they often know interest groups that cyber professionals could contact.” technologymagazine.com

AD FEATURE WRITTEN BY: SIMON HOWSON-GREEN PRODUCED BY: GREG ST QUINTIN

March 2022

NTT DATA | AB - INBEV | MICROSOFT

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NTT DATA | AB - INBEV | MICROSOFT

Beer giant AB-InBev joined forces with NTT DATA and Microsoft to put even the most remote beer retailers in the picture

hen it comes to enjoying a beer,not all countries and palettes are the same. Managing the vast range of wants and needs of the beer drinkers across the globe presented almost insurmountable challenges to even the biggest brewing conglomerates. Not anymore. Beverage giant AB-InBev has joined forces with NTT Data and Microsoft to put even the most remote beer retailers in the picture Three generations ago the great English writer, George Orwell suggested the people of the world could be defined by the way they liked to drink their beer. Some things never change. Here in the allegedly sophisticated, technology driven 21st Century First World we are used to an almost inexhaustible range of hops, barley and yeast-based beverages — delivered in a mind-boggling variety of ways. Across Europe computerized Key Kegs can blast out fresh craft beer under pressure from plastic drums, through valves and tubes and into pristine, sparkling glasses, newly washed in digitally programmed machines. In the UK, beer drinkers are still partial to pumps and taps attached to wooden barrels. Ironically, in this modern age even beer in a can is making a comeback. But take a trip across the Caribbean, or to Latin America or South Africa and you are a world away from Orwell’s Moon Under Water public house. 76

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Example of an image caption technologymagazine.com

Bees gets a new buzz in the brewing revolution

March 2022

NTT DATA | AB - INBEV | MICROSOFT

“ We wanted to give our BDR’s the tools to help our retailers’ businesses grow; to sell more products, to sell more beer and effectively thrive” RICARDO PADULA PRODUCT LEAD, BEES FORCE

In this part of the world, they drink their beer out of bottles: Ice cold bottles, from ice cold coolers containing ice cold beer. It’s been this way forever. The hotter the region, the colder they like their beer. Brazilians alone glug their way through more than twelve billion litres of beer from coolers annually. But unlike most ‘Western leaning’ countries, the majority of this beer is bought from small retailers or in small bars which often double as the local — and only — shop. Keeping an accurate check on sales and stock and ensuring these small retailers are maximizing returns on their turnover presents a huge challenge. The market leader in these regions — the multinational drinks group AB-InBev — has found a way to revolutionize its sales and refresh its supply chain in these parts other beers find hard to reach. In Europe and the US, we recognize the company’s leading brands Budweiser, Corona and Stella Artois. In the Caribbean it’s Presidente and in Brazil: Skol, Brahma and Antarctica dominate. AB-InBev was formed following the acquisition of American brewer Anheuser-Busch by Belgian-Brazilian brewer InBev, which itself came into being after a merger between AmBev and Interbrew. So, put simply. This is a big global company. However, being big and dominant does not mean one approach to the market fits all. The Caribbean, South America and South Africa have unique challenges. This is where the workers at BEES come in. BEES is the e-commerce platform for Ab-InBev. Ricardo Padula, Product Lead BEES Force explains how the latest image recognition technology, supply chain analytics and algorithms are now being used to bring the beer maker’s more ‘out of the way’ retailers into the 21st Century technologymagazine.com

DANIELA SANTANA GRIECCO

EVANDRO LUIS ARMELIN

CARLOS PORTO FILHO

TITLE: D ATA & ANALYTICS DIRECTOR

TITLE: H EAD OF DATA & ANALYTICS

COMPANY: NTT DATA

COMPANY: N TT DATA AMERICAS

Carlos has been working at NTT Data for 4 years, where he works as a leader of machine learning projects in different areas such as banking, telecom, retail, industry as well as research projects. He has a background in Biomedical Informatics with a master's degree in Bioengineering, having over 10 years of using data to generate value.

Daniela works at NTT Data since August 2015 leading a team of over 130 employees, acting on several projects in consumer goods and retail companies, implementing data strategies, big data platforms, advanced analytics, and data visualization solutions. She has over 20 years of experience working with Data and Analytics solutions, performing complex projects especially for companies with significant expression in different areas, mainly in financial, telecom, consumer goods and retail sectors.

March 2022

Evandro is responsible for consulting services ranging from Data strategy, Artificial Intelligence, Data Platforms and Data Democratization. He is in charge of more than 600 people dedicated to implementation of Data products. Graduated in business administration, Evandro has been working for more than twenty years in the development of analytical solutions for large companies, adding the technical aspects and the business vision, to leverage the value of the data.

TITLE: DATA SCIENCE LEAD

NTT DATA | AB - INBEV | MICROSOFT

FREDERICO DE MARCHI

JEAN BRANT

RICARDO PADULA

TITLE: A B INBEV GLOBAL ACCOUNT LEAD

TITLE: D ATA & AI CLOUD SOLUTION ARCHITECT

TITLE: PRODUCT LEAD

COMPANY: MICROSOFT

Frederico has a rich and diverse expertise on global sales, marketing and tech industry in different countries and cultures over the last 25 years on companies like Infor, SAP, Startups launches in Latam and Microsoft Western Europe, combined with 10+ years as a professor on renown MBAs and Universities in Brazil. Frequently invited to speak in customer-facing conferences and/or with C-level executives about industry trends and how to translate innovation into business success. Proven track record working with C-level executives and corporate leaders, mainly blue chips companies on key industries, to push innovation and build success stories: Financial Services, Retail, Utilities, Telecom, Manufacturing and Retail.

Jean is a Cloud Solutions Architect who works with global customers, supporting their data journey. His expertise includes architecture design, data engineering, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other data-related fields. He enjoys working as a trusted advisor, helping people to understand how to handle data, how to find a solution to achieve their goals and how to improve their environment to better handle all sorts of data. In recent years he has focused on building data platforms for different industries/business areas such as Telecom, Marketing, B2B, among others.

COMPANY: BEES FORCE Ricardo Padula Jr has worked in Big Data projects for most of his professional career. He currently leads a team of 150 engineers, product managers and designers at the BEES division of AB-Inbev. He is responsible for the BEES Force development. Ricardo has been with AB-InBev in various roles since 2016 where he was responsible for a range of cloud-based initiatives which used ‘Advanced Analytics’ and Big Data. He has been in his current position — heading up BEES for the past two years.

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NTT DATA | AB - INBEV | MICROSOFT

— without upsetting their well-established beer drinking culture. This is all thanks to a new technology called BEES Force. “BEES is a B2B platform we have created to help our sales staff interact in the most efficient way possible with our small and medium sized retailers,” says Padula. But as Padula explains, once BEES got past the proof of concept for a new Image Recognition solution, it was clear it had the potential to totally change the way his company interacted with its retailers. This was not just a technological rethink. The potential of the technology meant Ab-InBev — through the BEES Force system — was able to completely overhaul the way it treated and incentivized its sales teams and its retailers. “BEES Force was designed to help our retailers buy beer from us, get it delivered and then sell it efficiently and effectively from the coolers in their premises,” he says. “But it also gave us an opportunity to re-purpose the sales model. “This technology has enabled us to turn our sales staff from order taking reps to consultants with a mine of data at their disposal to improve, streamline and enhance the sales process and maximize returns for the retailer. We now call our former salespeople Business development Representatives (BDRs).’ So, how is this concept groundbreaking and technologically advanced? Padua explains: “We had to ask what technology we needed to address the specific challenges we faced with retailers in these regions. We needed to re-invent the supply chain and the way we monitored it from a retailer and consumer (beer drinker) angle. “We wanted to give our BDR’s the tools to help our retailers’ businesses grow; to sell more products, to sell more beer and effectively thrive. Once we decided to do 82

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“ It may sound simple, but no one ever did this in the past….We even thought we’d have to employ the CIA or the FBI to achieve this” RICARDO PADULA PRODUCT LEAD, BEES FORCE

that it started a whole change management process. It was a huge transformation for the company and the future of the sales.” BEES had to ask itself what technology was needed to allow the new BDR to effectively run their own teams. BEES Force was born and would be with them all the way through the sales process. Padua is a Star Wars fan; in case you hadn’t guessed.

BEES Force technology uses image recognition via the retailer’s mobile phone. “We are able to use this to analyse the coolers, the way the shelves are arranged, and the pricing being used by our retailers,” says Padula. “We can then ensure everything is presented to the customer — in near real time — to make the products the most attractive in the market.” technologymagazine.com

Ironically, despite the digital intervention, the pricing is displayed on printed posters in these outlets. So, the cost to the consumer of a bottle of President or Skol is written by hand by the retailer after consultation with his or her BDR. This may sound incredibly simple but, as Padula explains, this image recognition mixed with remote consultancy for the retailer has solved one of the biggest problems Ab-InBev had with its sales process in these countries. “This was one of our biggest problems in the past which, until this technology came along, we were never able to solve. We never had a trustable way to audit our stock accurately — until now.” “In a nutshell, we take pictures, and they will recognize what's going on inside the 84

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cooler and on the shelves and in the local advertising and we can say ‘okay this Point of Consumption (retailer) is doing well’…or not.” Building this software, proving the concept, and getting it into the marketplace was not down to the efforts of BEES alone. This was a three-way project. Running in the background is Microsoft providing components of your solution architecture, and joining its software to the BEES front end is NTT Data, who is responsible for implementing the Data Engineering and AI solutions across the entire BEES Force technology environment. NTT Data is a consultancy, which provides technology services. It’s skill set includes working in a ‘Big Data’ environment, developing advanced analytics with AI services. For BEES NTT’s providing Image

NTT DATA | AB - INBEV | MICROSOFT

recognition and data visualization solutions was vital. NTT’s team working with BEES is its Data & Analytics Director, Daniela Santana Griecco and its Data Science Lead, Carlos Porto Filho. “We were responsible for defining and implementing the Proof of Concept for BEES and the big challenge was to propose an Image Recognition solution for the entire BEES Force platform”, says Daniela. “In just three weeks the results were incredible, because it not only matched but exceeded the initial acceptance criteria, surprising the executive board for its innovation and ability to scale the solution.” Daniela says the importance of keeping the operation running with quality and efficiency, increased user adoption to

BEES Force platform. “Nowadays, after performing this Proof of concept, we are also responsible for evolving the solution in other countries for BEES and establishing the entire operation to support those countries where the solution is already implemented. “BEES is a fantastic use case for us to become a reference, not only in Analytics, but also in Digital Transformation solutions.” One of the ways NTT helped BEES was by developing Planogram. “So, you have this cooler with products inside,” says Filho. “Then the retailers use a mobile phone to take pictures. Then our technology can validate or invalidate several things from posters, as we said, to the way the beers are arranged and displayed. This is the Planogram. technologymagazine.com

NTT DATA | AB - INBEV | MICROSOFT

March 2022

“ BEES is a fantastic use case for us to become a reference, not only in Analytics, but also in Digital Transformation solutions.” DANIELA SANTANA GRIECCO DATA & ANALYTICS DIRECTOR, NTT DATA

“Using image recognition, ensures the retailers are presenting the products in the correct way to maximize sales.” Jean Brant from Microsoft says "by using Azure Custom Vision, a cognitive service from our platform, it was possible to establish an image recognition solution adaptable to the different needs of any region of the world which greatly facilitates the process of scaling the solution to other countries.” Ricardo Padula says he cannot sing the praises of NTT and Microsoft enough in how they helped deliver this project. “I’m not a technical person but working with Carlos and the rest of the team enabled us to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to identify not only prices but a whole host of elements which need to be right to maximize sales,” he says. “It may sound simple, but no one ever did this in the past. We struggled in the past

for more than five years trying to recognise images, but we have never had success before. We even thought we’d have to employ the CIA or the FBI to achieve this.” “Now, with NTT and Microsoft we have a huge amount of data collected from the field to do thousands of pieces of analysis to really add value to the customer and retailer experience. “ “Projects like this are perfect for highlighting the real possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in transforming our customers' businesses. AI is not just a technological hype that one day will pass like many others, AI is an extremely powerful tool to deliver better experiences to our customers, be more efficient internally and consequently more competitive. ABInbev gives us an excellent example of how we should be disruptive, using the best that technology has to offer.“ says Evandro Armelin, Head of Data & Analytics Latam from NTT Data. The synergy between the three groups was key in ensuring the project was executed correctly and the culture of the Ab-InBev sales teams and its retailers was fully understood to ensure a successful implementation. Frederico De Marchi from Microsoft explains: “We immediately had a connection, a cultural match, when Ricardo introduced our team and gave us the Bees Force challenge. It is a good example of how we apply our mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. We say we don't want to be cool, we want to make our customers cool.’ An appropriate choice of words given cold beer served from a cooler is at the heart of this project.”

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IT VENDOR MANAGEMENT

ACCELERATING BUSINESS GROWTH THROUGH CENTRALISATION Centralised IT has become an appealing option for enterprise environments. But what conditions are necessary for success and are there alternatives? WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

March 2022

IT VENDOR MANAGEMENT

oftware-as-a-Service (SaaS) and public cloud platforms offer pay-asyou-go means to access computing power and storage capability, as well as taking some of the headaches around managing IT infrastructures in-house. But, while centralising how critical business data is managed can provide huge total cost of ownership efficiencies, does it come at the cost of the service availability and uptime the business depends on? Dave Russell, VP of Product Strategy at Veeam, a privately held US-based information technology company owned by Insight Partners, explains what the old

approach would entail: “When it came to backing up the data from SaaS applications like Office 365, for example, historically the approach has been to ‘set and forget’, relying on the built-in data protection capabilities offered by public cloud platforms. But when things like accidental deletion, ransomware and insider threats potentially wreak havoc, businesses need greater peace of mind that the entire array of data they’re producing and relying on every day is protected”. Russell suggests a disaster recovery tool is needed. One that works across all of the environments a business might use to store their data. According to Russell, even as technologymagazine.com

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functions have become more centralised, many organisations might make use of hybrid cloud infrastructures to manage their data and keep systems running. If not managed properly, he suggests, this can create blind spots in exactly where their data is being kept, creating opportunities for breaches or losses to occur. “This is why discussions around centralising IT should not only consider cost – the capability to respond to disasters, whether malicious or otherwise, must also be top priority. If a business makes a shift over to the public cloud as part of their centralisation, look carefully at where the data protection responsibility lies. Formulate a clear plan for an outage, data breach or even accidental deletion. Driving efficiencies within IT is a noble cause, but it’s all for nothing if it means availability takes a hit and the business can’t serve its customers,” he added. Centralisation by no means a straightforward process Ash Finnegan is an award-winning Digital Transformation Officer at Conga, who also joined BizClikMedia’s Tech, AI & Cyber Live event last year. Finnegan suggests that IT

“ CENTRALISED SOFTWAREBASED MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS ACT AS A SINGLE CONTROL POINT TO ALL WORKFLOWS ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE” GABRIEL KERNER VICE PRESIDENT, TELCO SYSTEMS

centralisation is complex and can make or break an organisation. “There are often many teams, processes and systems involved. If an IT leader rushes a transformation programme of this kind, it can have the opposite effect, stifling innovation, resulting in serious operational complexity and inefficiencies,” she said. “Technology does not need to be groundbreaking, integrating systems and streamlining processes should be the first priority – ensuring data management and workflows are properly structured and fully optimised,” said Finnegan. According to Finnegan, all data needs to be accounted for across the entire business cycle and properly structured before leaders consider adding any ‘radical’ technology or making serious structural changes to their organisations. Gabriel Kerner, Vice President at Telco Systems, a US-based telecommunications equipment company, agrees, suggesting that everything from edge and cloud to on-prem deployments all need to sync and communicate so they deliver true value. “Think of a central platform as the hub that holds all the processes. Without it, managing the network IT operation becomes too complex, involves multiple limbs and you technologymagazine.com

IT VENDOR MANAGEMENT

Ash Finnegan

“ LEADERS PICK A TECHNOLOGY AND IMPLEMENT IT AT SPEED, WITH NO REAL IDEA OF HOW IT WILL IMPROVE THEIR SERVICES OR OPERATIONS, OR UNIFY THEIR SYSTEMS” ASH FINNEGAN

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OFFICER, CONGA

may lose control of some, leading to rising costs and security and regulatory oversights.” Kerner suggests that the move to a centralised approach comes with a culture change. If organisations have multiple branches that are more used to siloed 92

March 2022

working, Kerner believes it's imperative that central resources understand the needs and nuances, so they can evolve processes in ways that continue to drive performance for the wider enterprise. “Centralised software-based management platforms act as a single control point to all workflows across the enterprise. They are a powerful tool that provide automation, transparency and greater control which optimises performance,” said Kerner. Improving cybersecurity and considering risk level George Waller is EVP and co-founder of StrikeForce Technologies, a next-gen cyber, privacy and data protection solutions provider for consumers, corporations and government agencies. According to Waller, when choosing a platform for your organisation, it is imperative that cyber security is your main priority.

IT VENDOR MANAGEMENT

“While almost every platform offers some level of security these days, the key is finding the right mix of features that will ensure the highest levels of protection. Some “must-have” cyber security features that your organisation should be looking for include encrypted audio and video, meeting and user authentication which includes one-time passcodes, biometrics, twofactor, multi-factor, and/or out-of-band authentication, as well as endpoint protection of the camera, microphone, speakers, keyboard and clipboard,” said Waller. As high-profile cyber attacks become the new norm, Waller insists it is imperative for all organisations to take a closer look at the virtual communications tools being used to ensure total organisational safety and security. Aaron Baillo, CISO at the University of Oklahoma, suggests that centralising reduces complexity, duplication, and the amount that has to be monitored: “If it was up to CISOs of the world, we'd lock everything down and there'd only be one option for everything! That would be our zen environment. But that doesn't help the business. That's where it starts to become an art form. How much risk is the organisation willing to carry? That's where you model your baselines,” he said. Ash Finnegan suggests that with any transformation programme, there is some level of risk involved, as most companies aspire to be disrupters. Leaders pick a

technology and implement it at speed, with no real idea of how it will improve their services or operations, or unify their systems. “Leaders need to identify clear business goals and review their current operational

“ MOST CLIENTS WE WORK WITH RARELY HAVE A COMPLETELY CENTRALISED OR DECENTRALISED MODEL” MARTIN MOLLOY

PARTNER, CIO ADVISORY, CONSULTANCY KPMG UK technologymagazine.com

IT VENDOR MANAGEMENT

“ BUSINESSES NEED GREATER PEACE OF MIND THAT THE ENTIRE ARRAY OF DATA THEY’RE PRODUCING AND RELYING ON EVERY DAY IS PROTECTED” DAVE RUSSELL

VP OF PRODUCT STRATEGY, VEEAM

March 2022

IT VENDOR MANAGEMENT

technologymagazine.com

IT VENDOR MANAGEMENT

“ AN ALTERNATIVE IS TO ADOPT A DECENTRALISED APPROACH — SUCH AS A DATA MESH — THAT INTERCONNECTS ALL INFORMATION” RYAN MOORE

HEAD OF DATA AND ANALYTICS, AIIMI

model to identify where a particular technology would be best suited and how IT centralisation will benefit their organisation,” she suggests. IT leaders must find out what the real business drivers are, given the complexity of integrating different systems and the sheer scale of such digital change programmes. These projects tend to be time-consuming and shouldn’t be rushed.

Finnegan suggests leaders take a step back: “By reviewing every stage of their operational cycle – from foundation (data transparency and business logic) to full system integration – leaders can take their business to a truly intelligent state, where they are actually using all of the data at their disposal to make strategic decisions to allow for further business growth. At this point, IT centralisation can begin to add real value on the digital transformation journey, providing greater operational visibility, business and data intelligence and the ability to be more agile and adaptable.”

KPMG Centralized Accounting and Business Intelligence Solution for Retail

March 2022

The decentralised approach For the past 20 years, data teams have typically focused on collecting data from across the enterprise and storing this information centrally in either a data warehouse, data lake, or repository, according to Ryan Moore, Head of Data and Analytics at Aiimi, a creative tech company that specialises in artificial intelligence (AI) and data: “While this centralised approach has its benefits, such as increased accessibility, as well as traditional data modelling and reporting capabilities, it also moves data away from its natural source and from the teams who need to quickly derive insights relevant to their bespoke requirements.” Moore suggests that rather than rearchitecting infrastructure to align with a centralised data strategy, an alternative is to adopt a decentralised approach — such as a data mesh — that interconnects all information, including structured and unstructured data, across the enterprise and enables the self-servicing of data and analytics capabilities for each business domain.

“By moving to a data mesh model, in which data is organised and owned by each business domain, bespoke data products that conform to standardised data principles can be delivered with ease. Teams can also scale their data requirements independently, delivering increased business agility and value,” says Moore. To centralise or decentralise? Martin Molloy, Partner, CIO Advisory at consultancy KPMG UK, says in recent times, decentralisation has also started to happen naturally. As technology has become more accessible through Cloud, there has been greater adoption of technology outside of IT than ever before. This used to be referred to as “shadow” IT but in reality, Molloy suggests it is just businesses using technology to solve problems. “The reality is, this is never a binary decision. Most clients we work with rarely have a completely centralised or decentralised model, there is almost always a hybrid somewhere along the spectrum,” he said. technologymagazine.com

CUNDALL

A SUST S U STA INAB L E ROADMAP TO DIGITAL TRA T R AN S F ORMA OR MAT ION 98

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CUNDALL

PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

WRITTEN BY: TOM SWALLOW

technologymagazine.com

CUNDALL

1976

Year Founded

Construction, Engineering, Business Consulting Industry

1000

Number of Employees

£67,841,073 Revenue

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CUNDALL

Lou Lwin, CIO of Cundall, divulges his successful appointment to the position and how he will drive the company’s sustainable digital transformation agenda

cross the globe, businesses are tweaking and fine-tuning their sustainability strategies to make sure they are working towards net-zero emissions and provoking positive climate change actions. Industries like construction — which contributes around 36% of global energy use and around 40% of emissions in the UK — and engineering are seeking more opportunities to mitigate greenhouse gases and waste. The emergence of new technologies plays a significant role in reducing industrial impacts, but how does Cundall enable technology implementation in these sectors? Particularly in construction, where the productivity gap equates to US$1.6tn in costs to the global economy. “The quality of our people is one of our biggest strengths. Our clients enjoy working with us and the fact that we consistently win repeat business with 70-80% of them is testament to this.” In conversation with Lou Lwin, the company’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), we discussed why the use of data and information technology (IT) is so crucial to the development of Cundall and its clients and how he hopes to use his extensive technology experience to drive the business towards a sustainable future through digital transformation. Lwin began by explaining how he came to understand the importance of technology within the industry that he works in. “I spent about 12 years with an architectural firm, but technologymagazine.com

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“ We use Revit to look at the embodied carbon content of any components that we might use in a building project or a construction design process” LOU LWIN

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CUNDALL

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it has probably been the 10 years prior to working for Cundall that have really helped me focus on the need to understand digital transformation for a business,” Lwin says. “During that time I was involved in a lot of mergers and acquisitions that were rapidly bringing businesses on board. When you’re in that position, you need to find ways to be the most efficient and create the least disruption to business processes.” “By doing that over time you build up a mindset that allows you to focus on the key aspects of what’s needed. So, coming to Cundall, where we’re engaging with a digital transformation journey, and bringing that experience of quickly identifying key areas on which to improve and knowing the steps

CUNDALL

LOU LWIN TITLE: CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER LOCATION: NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK

Leveraging a digital ecosystem with abundant technologies Lwin joined Cundall in July 2021, taking on a role that did not previously exist. As part of his role as CIO, he is responsible for overseeing the use and implementation of digital tools and solutions in line with the company's strategy of enabling sustainable operations for its clients. This starts in-house. “As a business, if we are taking the lead, in things like sustainability and the technology that helps us build sustainable designs, it always helps if you practice what you preach,” Lwin says.

EXECUTIVE BIO

to take thereafter, will quickly help bring the organisation up to speed.”

Having spent 30 years leading strategic digital transformation and innovation, Lou’s experience has spanned business & IT operations, business & enterprise architecture, security, cloud, software development and everything in between. Turning business challenges into business as usual, Lou has built a reputation for executing rapid change and achievable IT strategy. Currently focusing on data strategy and driving positive technology change by building on internal talent and expertise. As a thought leader and strategist, Lou is committed to driving out efficiency gains and productivity returns from technology by investing in the right people.

Consulting

Digital & Data

Cyber

Technical & Support Services

Waterstons: digital consultancy for leading organisations James Alderson, Client Experience Director at Waterstons, discusses the company’s development of its partners’ technology capabilities The ability to go digital has never been more critical for sustaining global operations. As businesses expand their use of technology, partners provide insight and application of new systems, while leveraging existing solutions for maximum gain. With more than 14 years at the company, James Alderson, Client Experience Director at Waterstons, explains how the company has worked with its clients to support their digital transformations — having delivered strategic and technical projects and driven the adoption of cloud, global collaboration tools and cybersecurity solutions to name but a few.

How does Waterstons support digital development? The company provides digital consultancy services and builds great working relationships with its clients, which can be seen through its partnership with Cundall — a multidisciplinary engineering and construction consultancy — as it celebrates 13 years of partnership with the business.

“Our key priority has been immersing ourselves within their business, seeing what challenges they’ve faced; what challenges the sector that they operate within has faced as well, to really help them evolve what they’re doing through the use of technology.” Waterstons’ ability to integrate itself into its clients’ operations adds value to its services. The company is often considered part of Cundall — and vice versa — with employees working across its partner’s global locations. “We also share our knowledge openly and often freely. During the pandemic, we created the Waterstons Academy Lite programme, taking our internal training materials and making them available externally as well,” Alderson explains. Waterstons is also committed to encouraging innovation within the company as it heads up its own research and development (R&D) fund. “We’ve got our own internal R&D innovation funds to encourage development. We set aside time and effort from people within the business for them to invest in innovation. We take those industry trends and insights that we gain from our clients and the broader marketplace, to really focus on how we can innovatively solve those problems.”

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CUNDALL

“ Our designs are innovative and we’re always looking to better ourselves and we use some of the latest technologies” LOU LWIN

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CUNDALL

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As a consultancy, Cundall’s aim is to provoke a cascading effect as it empowers its clients to operate more efficiently and leverage sustainable sourcing options, which in turn affects the performance of their projects and satisfies their clients’ needs. “We’re very much focused on making sure that we can create an efficient future and technology has come to a point that the things we’ve only discussed in the past can now become reality and we have quite a large division that focuses solely on those things.”

CUNDALL

Cundall: A sustainable roadmap to digital transformation

Lwin continues, explaining that great technology solutions aren’t effective enough for the company if they’re used inefficiently. “Internally within Cundall, we’re making sure that we’ve got the bestof-breed technology, making sure we’ve got the right ecosystem of technology. It’s not just about having the best, it’s about having the right mix and the right partners, which is really key for us to make sure that we can support all our engineers so they can focus on doing what they do best, which in turn has quite a positive impact on

not just the customers and clients, but on the planet as a whole.” “Because there is such an availability of tools, we’re actually spoiled for choice now. If you wind back a few years, and take big data, for example, that was a massive challenge: it required lots of computing power to do anything remotely like what we do today with a standard PC. Today, we’ve got an absolute proliferation of tools, meaning selecting the right things can actually be more of a challenge than finding the tools to do the job.” technologymagazine.com

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Applying digital solutions for emissions reduction Cundall has a clear focus on people. Whether it’s individuals within the organisation or the talent employed by its clients, the company is responsible for ensuring that digital tools are utilised effectively within their operations and by those that are responsible for monitoring those tools. Covering variable types of operations, the firm boasts a high-level talent of its own, with many PhD qualified individuals and chartered professionals

HOW HAS CUNDALL APPLIED DIGITAL TOOLS IN CONSTRUCTION? “Within tools such as Revit, we have built the capability to look at the embodied carbon content of any components that we might use in a building project or a construction design process. The New Royal Hospital in Adelaide for example, was designed in such a way that we were able to reduce greenhouse gases by 50%, by employing such technologies and techniques,” says Lwin. “By using the right technology and working to make the best use of the tools that are available to us, we can meet our net-zero objectives, and having that at the forefront of our minds all the time helps us move forward as an organisation. It helps us to support our ethos and support our customers’ requirements as well.”

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within the organisation. This has proven beneficial in managing a wide portfolio. “From an engineering perspective, we cover quite a broad range of services. Every one of those services, whether that’s acoustics or mechanical or electrical, whatever they might be, they all have their own toolsets,” Lwin explains. “Our job in IT is key in terms of supporting our staff, making sure they’ve got the right technology to hand and that it is well supported.” “We’ve always had a massive focus on people and that’s not just attracting and

CUNDALL

developing the right talent, but having that people-orientated approach, incorporating knowledge management and knowledge sharing, is incredibly important. It has been a huge driver for the business from the beginning and has really paid dividends.” Technology and talent drive Cundall’s positive contributions “We’re fortunate to have been founding signatories of a number of councils for netzero carbon,” says Lwin. “We really pioneered this in the engineering space.” Beyond its

“ How do we continue to develop on that? This comes back to the people; we’re massively focused on attracting and developing the right talent” LOU LWIN

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CUNDALL

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WE STOP BREACHES CrowdStrike has redefined security with the world’s most advanced cloud-native platform that protects and enables the people, processes and technologies that drive modern enterprise. Purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight-agent architecture, the Falcon platform delivers rapid and scalable deployment, superior protection and performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value.

SEEING INTO THE FUTURE: FALCON XDR FROM CROWDSTRIKE IS ALL ABOUT PREDICTING CYBER ATTACK In the post pandemic age, the threat from well organised Cyber Criminals is hotter than ever. CrowdStrike’s CTO explains how not all XDR solutions are the same and how its Falcon XDR product is doing the ‘heavy lifting’ for the data analysts.

This is where CrowdStrike Falcon XDR comes in. “The stakes are higher for organisations, especially on being targeted. The E-criminals. Are simply more sophisticated, Cybercrime is a lucrative business,” says Turedi.

There is XDR and then there is CrowdStrike’s Falcon XDR. That’s according to Zeki Turedi, CrowdStrike’s Chief Technical Officer. CrowdStrike is a security business which helps organisation stop cyber breaches. So why is CrowdStrike’s Extended Detection Response (XDR) offering the best on the market? Turedi Explains: “Extending Detection Response makes sure we have access to all this vital telemetry – that’s data collected from multiple sources across networks and are able to protect it from cyber-attack,” says Turedi.

Turedi says XDR is about future proofing a business from attack. “It’s not just about making sure what an attack does happen, we’re aware of it and we can respond to it. You need feedback immediately; you need to continuously make sure that you’re making life as hard as possible for the adversary. It’s about being able to look at all the telemetry and pick out the right pieces of data. Combating an attack is about an analyst trying to understand what this actually means, so the quicker we can get the right judgement for the analyst the quicker we can start making the response steps. It is all about harnessing what the analyst is identifying and using XDR to automate a response to a specific threat in the future so the analysts can move on to the next new threat and counter it”.

The seismic change in the speed of digital migration during the past two years of the pandemic has made organisations more agile and able to deliver products more effectively. But, from a security perspective this brings huge amounts of complexity. “Brand-new architectures, new environments and new cloud organisations now need protection from cyber-attack across the board,” says Turedi.

Learn more

CUNDALL

“ It has probably been the 10 years prior to working for Cundall that have really helped me focus on the need to understand digital transformation for a business” LOU LWIN

CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, CUNDALL

sustainability credentials, Lwin explains that Cundall is focused on more than just sustainability — without discrediting its importance — and is a leader in innovative design solutions. “For us, how do we build on that? How do we continue to develop on that? This comes back to the people; we’re massively focused on attracting and developing the right talent. The sustainability agenda is absolutely huge, as we all know. We have one planet. We have one opportunity to save it,” says Lwin. “By attracting and developing that talent, we get people who really understand the challenges and are passionate about doing something about them. However, it’s not just about having talent, it’s about sharing relevant knowledge and information. We also consult on business strategy for our clients and their clients, to be able to help people maintain their sustainability and their netzero footprint on an ongoing basis.” Over the next 12 months or more, Cundall will also be working on its use of data to compile information from previous projects and utilise it to develop a targeted approach to new projects. Data is somewhat untapped by the company and Lwin hopes that it will open up new capabilities for 112

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the firm. “One of the key things that we’re focusing on in the next 12 to 18 months is our use of data,” says Lwin. “We have so much information about the designs that we have built over the years and specifically the ones that are focused on that sustainability agenda. To be able to extract all that data is a really big challenge. None of the products, technologies or

CUNDALL

design tools that we use are built with data filtration in mind. The challenge is to pull out the relevant parts and do that in a sensible and structured way so that everybody can access the data that they need.” The ability to extract data from previous designs is likely to provide key insights for the sustainability team, which is currently growing within the organisation.

Collaborative partnerships enable better use of digital tools “Cundall is a very focused organisation. We don’t focus on the bottom line or ‘x’ amount of projects. We focus on quality, growing our business in such a way that we deliver the best for our clients. This isn’t just about sustainability, it’s above that,” says Lwin, before listing some of the digital tools that Cundall uses. technologymagazine.com

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“Our designs are innovative and we’re always looking to better ourselves. We use some of the latest techniques and technologies such as digital twins, fluid dynamics, energy modelling, all of those things to improve what we deliver back to our clients. Overall, the net result is that we end up with a much more sustainable future. It’s so core to what we do and is literally embodied in everything we do.” Cundall has a clear view of how partnerships can drive business performance and streamline the adoption and continued success of digital tools. The company prides itself on including its strategic partners in key business discussions and, as Lwin explains, it also selects those who have similar business interests or those that have values aligned with the business. “We like to share our roadmap, our technology stack and business agenda with our tech partners, including what we’re doing and where we’re going. By doing that you end up in a much better position than just buying a service, you end up working very closely with the company. In fact, for some of the companies we work closely with, you wouldn’t know whether they are Cundall staff or not. They’re embedded, they’re in our offices like everybody else and it means that when times are difficult, you’ve got somebody right there. A raft of people that can support you.” Incorporating partners to a similar extent that it would employees, can improve working relationships “because they know where your business is going and what your business agenda is, it offloads a lot of pressure from the internal team so they can focus on their core activities.”

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HOW AI IS TRANSFORMING SPORTS FAN ENGAGEMENT

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AI PLATFORMS

Physical locations and athletes themselves are still crucial to the sporting experience, but AI platforms and untapped data are changing the game

WRITTEN BY: ALEX TUCK

n the present and future of sports fan engagement, artificial intelligence (AI) continues to power new kinds of fan experiences in a range of ways. Catered to preference and persona; AI will be able to recommend options based on historical choices and interact through chatbots in real time. For the experience to truly take off, a collective effort is required from sports brands and sponsors, stadium real estate, cloud providers, nimble tech innovators and of course, buy-in from the fans themselves. According to Jan Kees Mons, Consultant and Sports Commentator at Eurosport, stadiums will be instrumental as they will become major content and data providers in order to deliver the ultimate customer journey inside a stadium, and hence satisfy the demands of the fans. In fact, stadiums and fan platforms will become ‘data temples’, thinks Mons. Equipped with this data, tailormade marketing campaigns, games and sales recommendations can be made, which should add to the fan experience. “The entire future customer journey of a fan will be hugely affected by AI. Imagine yourself wanting to go to a football match. Ordering your tickets will be determined by chatbot-assisted AI, your AI-assisted car will drive itself to the stadium, drop you off at the entrance and find itself a parking spot. You won’t have to queue as AI-powered crowd management systems technologymagazine.com

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Content Management and Process Automation Content Management and Process Automation

Making Communities Accessible, Making Communities Accessible, Transparent and Safe Transparent and Safe ICC Community Development Solutions works with local governments from Tucson, ICC Community Development Solutions works with local governments AZ to Bangor, ME to develop and implement enterprise-wide documentfrom and Tucson, records AZ to Bangor,solutions. ME to develop and implement enterprise-wide document and records management management solutions.

ICC Community Development Solutions is a subsidiary of the International Code Council, and provides software solutions for municipalities andisbuilding safety “Our solutions make easier ICC Community Development Solutions a subsidiary ofprofessionals. the International Code Council, anditprovides to get work done faster for local governments,” said Dan professionals. Foster, General“Our Manager, ICC Community software solutions for municipalities and building safety solutions make it easier Development Solutions, speaking from their headquarters in Rochester, New York. to get work done faster for local governments,” said Dan Foster, General Manager, ICC Community Development Solutions, speaking from their headquarters in Rochester, New York. With Laserfiche records management ICC Community Development Solutions is helping local jurisdictions digitize documents and records, giving you the ability toSolutions search, retrieve, andlocal share With Laserfiche records management ICC Community Development is helping files internally and with the public. And, you can automate paper-based processes to save time and jurisdictions digitize documents and records, giving you the ability to search, retrieve, and share increase efficiency. files internally and with the public. And, you can automate paper-based processes to save time and increase efficiency.

Learn how Learn how

municipal governments are using Laserfiche to transform government municipal governments are using Laserfiche to transform government

Learn how Learn how

you can use the American Rescue Plan funds to implement Laserfiche you can use the American Rescue Plan funds to implement Laserfiche

AI PLATFORMS

“ Even prior to Pokémon Go, we activated sponsor partner’s location with interactive geo-located AR games” ERIK BJONTEGARD FOUNDER, SPARK COMPASS

will take care of congestion assisted by facial recognition etc. Once in the stadium, AI will recognise who you are and what fan profile you have, so it can provide you with a tailormade experience instead of a one-for-all experience. AI-powered chatbots will give you a personal treatment like never before, making you feel like a VIP. Whether it is related to food, merchandise or social media, AI will come up with the right suggestions.

An AI-assited control centre with security personnel will oversee and monitor your safety so that you do not have to worry about terrorist threats or hooligans. Once at home, AI will take care of all your personal highlights during the game, so you have something great to remember,” said Mons. Data unlocks new levels of experience Sports science may now be widespread in most elite sports, but much ‘behind the scenes’ data isn’t immediately available to fans. It’s a realistic expectation that some will cash in on this rich vein of data and analytics, so it can migrate into the supporter’s experience and create a multitude of potential insights to be interpreted by fans and fed into areas like the betting industry. Highly-tailored experiences also bring with technologymagazine.com

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AI PLATFORMS

F1 Insights powered by AWS: Car Performance Scores

them more relevant content experiences for the customer and for advertisers, increased accuracy and locality of their messages. Substantial investments into directto-consumer platforms and enhanced streaming capabilities have already begun, powered by AI on the cloud from the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Back in 2020, Microsoft and the NBA announced a partnership that changed basketball. The NBA’s vast array of data sources and extensive historical video archive became available to fans through state-of-the-art machine learning, cognitive search and advanced data analytics solutions. Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft said at the time that: “We’re thrilled to serve as the official AI partner of the NBA. Together, we’ll bring fans closer to the game and players they love with new personalised experiences.” Richard Einstein is the Senior Global Product Manager for Sports at Vizrt, a 120

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global market leader in 3D graphics, studio automation, sports analysis and asset management tools for the media industry. Einstein suggests that another example of untapped data potential lies within Formula 1’s partnership with AWS, to leverage machine learning in analysing 65 years of historical race data, offering viewers analysis, insight, and predictions for the current in-race action. “The sole objective behind utilising this type of automated and Machine Learning (ML) technology is to make the sport more engaging, immersive, and impressive to fans at home. AI in sports also helps automate and speed up all processes that surround telling a more immersive story for fans, alongside driving efficiency by eliminating human caused errors. Increased interactions from viewers translate to better viewership numbers for broadcasters and thus business success. Establishing that connection with at-home audiences is even more critical

AI PLATFORMS

“ The entire future customer journey of a fan will be hugely affected by AI” JAN KEES MONS

CONSULTANT AND SPORTS COMMENTATOR, EUROSPORT

since the pandemic with a majority of fans experiencing their favourite sports through the screen instead of in person,” said Einstein. Immersive storytelling opportunities Einstein goes on to add: “Spectacular on-screen sports success is contingent on the availability of data and the ability of the

storyteller to turn that data into analysis and an exciting narrative. AI expedites this process and breaks down data better to enhance the story for audiences. AI can rapidly work with massive amounts of data to pull-out key stats, patterns, and real-time predictions of plays, matches, results, and more, in a sports context, to enhance the storytelling for audiences,” he said. Spark Compass, part of Total Communicator Solutions, is a communication platform that enables fan engagement and creates new levels of communication when engaging with a sport or team, both on premise and digitally. Spark Compass have been working on connecting the physical with the digital for years. Founder and tech entrepreneur, Erik Bjontegard remembers how it all started for them at the University of Mississippi.

The All England Lawn Tennis Club looked to IBM iX to invite millions of fans to be a part of the action

98%

More mobile visits

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Video views, a 25% annual increase

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“ AI in sports also helps automate and speed up all processes that surround telling a more immersive story for fans” RICHARD EINSTEIN

SENIOR GLOBAL PRODUCT MANAGER FOR SPORTS, VIZRT

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“We activated all the athletics facilities with our patented Spark Compass platform to integrate with fans through the Rebel Rewards app. Even prior to Pokémon Go, we activated the sponsor partner’s location with interactive, geo-located AR games; so if you found the Ole Miss receiver in AR using your phone and were fast enough to throw him a virtual ball that he could catch, you’d win a free lunch at the location you were at – and get 10 extra Bonus Rewards Points”. IBM Watson brings augmented reality to Wimbledon Spark Compass have also formed powerful partnerships with the likes of IBM Watson, during the Wimbledon tournament at the All England Lawn and Tennis Club (AELTC). Instead of activating virtual players, Spark

Compass activated plaques, sponsor partner’s pop-up stands and printed directories with engaging AR experiences. Over 69 million visitors were attracted to the digital experience. Speaking at the time, Alexandra Willis, Head of Communications, Content and Digital at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, was effervescent in her praise of the campaign, saying: “Whichever way fans want to experience the tournament, whether it’s online, on their phone, on TV, or live at the venue itself, we want to give them the best possible experience—direct, uninterrupted, and authentic. The new apps are a key part of that strategy.” Into the metaverse NFTs are Non-Fungible Tokens, which can be multiple types of assets including images,

video, social posts and much more. They’re completely unique, non-interchangeable digital collector items stored on a digital ledger called a blockchain. As these tokens can be transferred and sold by owners like virtual property, they can be bought, sold and shared without fear of duplication. NFTs are immutable, resistant to theft, impossible to forge and easily trackable - and easily purchasable with cryptocurrencies or with traditional currencies. NFTs give the NHL and other sports a truly unique ability to expand their brands and revenue streams into the digital space, as the Seattle Kraken, whose Climate Pledge Arena has recently undergone a US$1bn overhaul, just recently announced with their first series of NFTs in partnership with Orange Comet in December last year. According to NHL. technologymagazine.com

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“ Spectacular on-screen sports success is contingent on the availability of data and the ability of the storyteller to turn that data into analysis and an exciting narrative” RICHARD EINSTEIN

SENIOR GLOBAL PRODUCT MANAGER FOR SPORTS, VIZRT

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AI PLATFORMS

com, “the inaugural collection will comprise seven innovative, mysterious, and intense designs capturing the essence of the Kraken brand. The drop will include a mystery NFT that will reveal itself to the owner after purchase. There will also be unique realworld opportunities where fans can win tickets, behind the scenes experiences and autographed Kraken Jerseys. The NFTs will be available for purchase at a variety of price points starting at US$50.” Spark Compass is building NFT3.0 games and venues where fans can activate their own NFTs and use them to enter the digital Metaverse, where they can access global tournaments. “The venues and tournaments are controlled and owned via NFTs,” says Bjontegard. “We also enable simpler NFT2.0 gameplay based on fantasy league games, where fans can purchase NFT packs with player information. One such game is already in production and early adopters can join at PinMaster.io.” According to Bjontegard, the development of the metaverse venues will delve into the realms of pure fantasy, with imagination the only limitation. Most excitingly is the capability to activate a physical location with a Metaverse venue, entirely and accurately rendered. “We’re very excited about this and have created a new division to develop, activate and operate such venues for teams, leagues, tournaments as well as sponsors, merchants and those selling products. With our integration, an entry into the physical stadium can grant you access to the Metaverse stadium later, points earned in the physical realm can be redeemed in the SparkMetaVerse, and items purchased in the SparkMetaVerse can be activating the ownership transfer of a product or file in the physical world.” technologymagazine.com

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Making local food delivery sustainable AD FEATURE WRITTEN BY: TOM SWALLOW PRODUCED BY: GLEN WHITE

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DELIVERY HERO

Making local food delivery sustainable, Jeff Oatham explains how Delivery Hero is reducing plastic in its ecosystem by sourcing more responsible packaging

ver the past few years, local food delivery has been booming. It has become an integral part of city living and is responsible for a significant portion of restaurant deliveries. During the coronavirus pandemic — when food production and delivery was one of a few essential services to remain operational — restaurant-quality food deliveries have come a long way, and have increased as a result. According to McKinsey and Co., the food delivery sector is valued at over US$150bn; the figure has doubled since the onset of COVID-19 and tripled since 2017. Now that city-dwellers have access to multiple types of food, at the click of a button, without having to leave the house (or the office in many cases), what will determine which platform they decide to order from? With a global supply chain and client base, Delivery Hero has cemented its position as a leader in this space and is looking to provide more sustainable solutions for food delivery and create more options for consumers. Founded in 2011, the company was formed from an online food ordering service that was founded in Berlin by Niklas Östberg, the firm’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. Operating in around 50 countries across the world, Delivery Hero takes great responsibility for the impacts of its global operations on the environment, but also those hired by the company to carry out exceptional services.

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DELIVERY HERO

In conversation with the company’s Senior Director of Sustainability, CSR and Safety, Jeff Oatham, he explains the initiatives the company will implement and divulges the team’s crucial role in Delivery Hero’s success. Initiatives for a sustainable ecosystem As with many sustainability initiatives, innovation is critical both for meeting the needs of consumers — with generations becoming increasingly more conscious of their purchasing habits — and to reduce the environmental impact of the overall business and supply chain. Delivery Hero launched a Sustainable Packaging Programme that will benefit its restaurant partners for a few reasons; they will have access to biodegradable packaging, increase appeal to sustainability-conscious consumers, and its partners will be able to source the solution through their established 130

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partnership. This is just one of the many ways in which the company is reducing its negative global impact. “For us, it is about looking, understanding our climate footprint and impact, and then figuring out how we can make the biggest difference on that?” Oatham says. “Our longterm agenda is to build a company we can be proud of, and we believe we can do that by addressing and having a material impact on climate change.” “We've been rolling out carbon measurements on a regional basis over the course of the last three years. This spring we’ll have our first kind of global footprint and that's across Scope one, two, and three. It's our entire emissions footprint,” Oatham explains. “We know from our data measurement that the biggest drivers of our footprint are packaging and the vehicle emissions during delivery,” he says.

JEFFREY OATHAM TITLE: SENIOR DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, CSR AND SAFETY INDUSTRY: INTERNET

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: GERMANY Jeffrey Oatham is the Director of Sustainability at Delivery Hero, leading the business’s efforts on the environment, giving back to society. Jeff has over 15 years of experience in sustainable business, most of that working in FTSE100 firms in the United Kingdom. He brings insight to developing and implementing corporate responsibility programs in business across a range of sectors including tech, energy, finance, and logistics.

“ What we needed to do was to find a type of packaging that could compete against plastic in the eyes of restaurants and customers” JEFFREY OATHAM

SENIOR DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, CSR AND SAFETY, DELIVERY HERO

Packaging products for modern consumption During the conversation with Oatham, packaging was one of the main talking points, which is the company’s response to climate change and the changes in consumer mindset around environmental responsibility. Recognising the saturation in the market for restaurant-grade plastic packaging, Oatham says: “We needed to find a type of packaging that could compete against plastic in the eyes of restaurants and customers, but we also wanted to meet sustainability requirements.” Oatham continues: “Packaging needs to be food safe. We also wanted to make something that was plant-based, compostable and that would [withstand] the rigours of food deliveries. So, being moved around in the bags on the back of a bike or motorcycle.” 132

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Delivery Hero also explains that “a lot of the packaging out there will have certain additives in it,” which has repercussions for things like food safety. “It affects things like compostability and these are some things that we are able to overcome, by working with our packaging partners.” By launching its own global Sustainable Packaging Programme Delivery Hero aims to provide local restaurants with eco-friendly packaging solutions at a competitive cost. Piloting the concept in Austria, Chile, Hong Kong, Hungary, Qatar, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, the company plans to expand the program to more markets in 2022. “What we want to try to drive is sustainability across the ecosystem,and our restaurants are key to that.” “Understanding from them ‘what are their interests? What's their ability to tackle and challenge some of these issues?’ We've

DELIVERY HERO

“The biggest drivers of our footprint are packaging and the vehicle emissions from delivery” JEFFREY OATHAM

SENIOR DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, CSR AND SAFETY, DELIVERY HERO

worked with some of them to understand the feasibility of rolling out certain initiatives and what works in practice.” Technology insights drive sustainability initiatives As a technology company at heart, one of the most obvious ways to incorporate sustainability into the platform is by leveraging Delivery Hero’s current capabilities and the expertise within its technology and product team. With “thousands of really talented engineers and product specialists,” Oatham delves into the organisation's intentions to utilise the full extent of the team’s capabilities to continuously improve its consumer experience while also creating a more sustainable solution for delivering goods to them. “It was with the product teams, with whom my team and I worked, that we were

able to look together at how do we put in place a better system to get insights into what customers think around packaging or how they are approaching sustainability? How do we develop new features within the product to connect customers to causes they care about? How do we look at designing features that would enable restaurants and vendors to take sustainable actions?,” he says. “It's really [about] how we leverage those internal capabilities and systems.” Diversity, equity and inclusion have also played significant roles in developing the company as a whole. “One of the great milestones for the business overall last year was that we were among the first DAX40 companies to put in place a diversity and inclusion advisory board,” Oatham says. “So, we have that at the highest level of governance, supporting our management to understand the diversity and inclusion issues on a global basis.” technologymagazine.com

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Meeting the demands of the coronavirus pandemic “I led the coronavirus task force and the crisis response with some peers from March 2020, and that was an intense period, but also really gratifying to know that we are helping to keep our fellow employees safe.” During a period lacking knowledge and certainty, coronavirus and the issues it raises have been one of the main challenges for Delivery Hero. But, Oatham acknowledged that many companies faced struggles during that time. “It was challenging in that we were having to create things at the same time as learning something or not knowing anything. I don’t think that is an issue or a challenge that's unique to Delivery Hero,” Oatham says. 134

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Tackling future sustainability challenges As positivity looms around the corner in terms of the coronavirus pandemic and how it is affecting businesses and buying habits, one trend that will remain is the high demand for local delivery services. When asked about the challenges that await, Oatham says, “the next big challenge that we are looking at… is on the logistics and delivery side.” “When we look at our footprint we know that it's packaging and vehicle emissions” that must be addressed. He explains that Delivery Hero is considering how it will improve the sustainability of its vehicles through emissions reduction initiatives. “Tackling such major challenges such as reducing emissions from vehicles can only be done through multistakeholder partnerships.”

“Our long term agenda is to build a company we can be proud of”

Oatham elaborates on this. “When we look at the electrification of transport, that is a challenge because change must be driven within many different countries while working in partnership with a variety of organisations. Big issues must be addressed including infrastructure and encouraging use of electric vehicles.” “We will be looking for partners who are able to help in the context of reducing emissions from transport and who can do that at scale across a range of markets, in different parts of the world.” Aside from the company’s sustainability agenda, it will continue to expand its offerings across the globe through its quick commerce developments. “Last year we launched our logistics-as-a-service in 25 markets.”

JEFFREY OATHAM

SENIOR DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABILITY, CSR AND SAFETY, DELIVERY HERO technologymagazine.com

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THE SMART

HOSPITAL

leading the world WRITTEN BY: LEILA HAWKINS

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PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

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SHEBA

Eyal Zimlichman gives us an insight into one of the world's most digitally advanced hospitals, and its plans for the future

heba Medical Centre in Tel Aviv is the largest hospital in Israel. It's also widely regarded as one of the best smart hospitals in the world, and Newsweek magazine has ranked it among the top 10 hospitals in the world three years in a row. Israel's healthcare system operates via four health maintenance organisations (HMOs), all of which are non-profit and are funded through the government. Most hospital care is provided by hospitals that are either public, non-for-profit hospitals, or government hospitals, of which Sheba Medical Centre is one. Professor Eyal Zimlichman is the Chief Medical Officer as well as the Chief Innovation Officer at Sheba. He explains that Sheba's campus has four hospitals under the same management: for acute care, rehabilitation, children, and a woman's hospital, along with a cancer centre. "We see about 1.6 million patients every year, which is a large part of the Israeli population. We work with all four HMOs across the entire country, as well as people coming from foreign countries." Crucially, Sheba Medical Center is very much a digital hospital. Having been completely paperless for almost 20 years, its next ambition is to become a fully AI-based hospital by 2030. "We're working very hard towards that goal and have been for many years," Zimlichman says.

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Eyal Zimlichman Chief Medical Officer

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Sheba's electronic medical record (EMR) is well established, but the next step is to run AI-based decision support systems on top. "We've been using AI for many years at Sheba, while at most locations it's still considered a thing of the future. For us, it's been part of our care for at least five years now. " Zimlichman and his team are currently mapping all the processes in the hospital to make decisions about which ones can be automated. "The idea is to remove some of the excess work that teams have to do manually, which is a big contributor to staff burnout." "For example, many of the processes that need to be done through AI can be automated. Some don't need AI, but it could definitely come into play, such as on the clinical side, providing us with better insights into the patient's condition. A few years ago we implemented a decision support system that helps us avoid medication errors. This is something that is already being 140

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done in many hospitals, but our system is AI-based, so it learns with time and improves its decision capabilities. It's much more accurate than the traditional systems that are rule-based" Zimlichman explains. "We have a plan laid out all the way to 2030 to make sure that every process that can be automated, whether rule-based or through AI rules, will be" he adds. As a smart hospital, Sheba produce a huge amount of data. "I would probably say we're one of the most data rich hospitals in the world," Zimlichman says. "We've understood in the past couple of years that it's not just about having a lot of data, it's also about how the data is structured and how it is accessed, and how easy it is to create value from the data. Just sitting on top of piles of data doesn't create value by itself." To make the best use of this data, Sheba partnered with MDClone, an Israeli data analytics company. "The system allows

SHEBA

EYAL ZIMLICHMAN TITLE: CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE LOCATION: ISRAEL

EXECUTIVE BIO

almost anybody in the hospital, after about four hours of training, to be able to independently work with the data and gain insights, whether it's for research purposes, for better management, database management, quality improvement, patient safety, or efficiency improvement. "This system also creates what we call synthetic data, which is fake data basically, built on top of the original data and retaining all its properties. When you're working with synthetic data, it takes away all of the issues around data privacy and regulations, and you're able to work in real time, gaining insights and sharing the data with your partners." This has enabled Sheba to share data with other hospitals around the world that have also implemented MDClone, and build a global network for benchmarking and sharing data which Zimlichman calls "a game changer."

Professor Eyal Zimlichman is the Deputy Director General, Chief Medical Officer, and Chief Innovation Officer at Sheba Medical Center. Previously, he was involved in efforts to implement a strategic care redesign initiative at Partners HealthCare in Boston and served on advisory committees for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as well as Israel's Ministry of Health. Professor Zimlichman is the founder and director of ARC, a global ecosystem aiming to redesign healthcare through digital health solutions by 2030. He is board certified in internal medicine and completed a degree at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Janssen Israel is a strategic partner of Sheba ARC, an innovation hub set up by Sheba Medical Center to develop and promote digital health solutions.

“ Our strategy, as is Sheba's is to lead by innovation. We're a very patient-centric company with the goal to 'go beyond the pill' adding value to our customers and maximizing treatment results.”

As the pharmaceutical division of Johnson & Johnson, Janssen focuses on developing innovative molecules for patients in different therapeutic areas, to serve unmet medical needs. This aligns well with Sheba's position as one of the world's most digitally advanced hospitals. The Sheba ARC Center (Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate) brings together key players in digital medicine - physicians, researchers, start-ups, investors, and top-tier medical centers with the goal of redesigning healthcare. “Our innovation room at ARC physically connects us to the main players there and encourages us all to collaborate”, said Clive Kaye, Managing Director for Janssen Israel. "Our strategy - as is Sheba's - is to lead by innovation. We're a very patient-centric company with the goal to 'go beyond the pill' - adding value to our customers and maximizing treatment results”. Janssen is partnering with Sheba in three key areas:

1. Supporting promising Israeli digital medicare medicare solutions solutions

2. Getting valuable insights into the

patient's journey, using synthetic data

3. Being on-site at ARC to interact with the main ecosystem players

“Our partnership with Sheba consists in finding technological solutions, looking at the therapeutic areas where we wish to focus, plus working with researchers and technology partners-usually start-ups”, said Clive. He adds: “We currently focus on some digital health projects including areas such as Psychiatry, Gastroenterology and Oncology”. Janssen Conducts research using synthetic data provided by MDClone. Performing research while using such data makes it easier and simpler to locate any event along a patient's journey without having to worry about patients' privacy issues. Professor Eyal Zimlichman, the Chief Medical Officer as well as the Chief Innovation Officer at Sheba, added: “Janssen was the first industry partner who we signed. We learned very quickly that they share our audacity about where we want to be.” Advertisement Feature

SHEBA

“ We want to move beyond the pill, so we are building a whole digital solution around the condition” EYAL ZIMLICHMAN

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, SHEBA MEDICAL CENTER

Sheba also has an innovation hub called ARC (Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate) to enable startups to develop new technologies, many of which are based on Sheba's own intellectual property. Currently, there are almost 80 startups within Sheba's ecosystem, and Sheba itself spins out about five to seven companies every year. "They are anywhere between early stage to mature companies, and some of them are sold on the market which brings back capital to Sheba and allows us to further grow our innovation platform," Zimlichman says. Startups from outside Sheba are also brought in to work within ARC's ecosystem. "By doing this we allow them access to some of the other hospitals we work with around the world, and some of our strategic industry partners as well, providing them access to our data for example, which is critical for some companies, especially in the AI field. This allows them to work with us to implement the technology and do proof of concepts or pilots within Sheba and within some of our partner organisations around the world. "It's a 360-degree approach, we have everything that is needed to not just accelerate development and outreach into the market, but also provide them 144

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F O R I N N O VAT I O N & PA R T N E R S H I P S

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Discover how Sheba Medical Center Drives Innovation at their Organization A Big Boost for Innovation "Having solutions that will allow us to liberate the data in a way, to work on the data without having to mind all the regulations, I think would be a big boost for innovation. I really believe that synthetic data is going to create a revolution, how we handle data." DR . E YAL Z IM LICH M AN , DE P UT Y DIR ECTO R GE N E R AL, CM O ; CICO , S H E BA M E DICAL C E N T E R

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SHEBA

The smart hospital leading the world

“ We have a plan laid out to 2030 to make sure that every process that can be automated, will be” EYAL ZIMLICHMAN

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, SHEBA MEDICAL CENTER

a direction towards the market needs, because we understand better than anyone what is needed, what the pain points are, and where the startups can come in and help us." A key industry partner is the pharmaceutical company Janssen. "We look for partners that share the same mindset as us, that are looking to transform healthcare as a strategy. The first industry partner that we signed was Janssen, and we learned very

quickly that they matched us in terms of the audacity of where we want to be, that we're in it for the long run and these are not minor changes we want to create." Sheba's clinicians have been working with Janssen in various fields such as oncology and pulmonary hypertension, that Zimlichman says has the aim of transforming healthcare. "We want to move beyond the pill so it won't be just about the medication we're taking, but about building a whole digital solution around the condition. If the patient has diabetes, what would the digital environment be for that patient on top of the medication that he has to take? That is our strategy at ARC, pharma together with digital health will create a much more comprehensive solution." Sheba's forward-thinking approach meant it played a leadership role in COVID19 efforts, not just in Israel but around the world. Towards the start of the pandemic, Magazine Weblink in layers

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SHEBA

“ That is our strategy at ARC, pharma together with digital health will create a much more comprehensive solution” EYAL ZIMLICHMAN

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER, SHEBA MEDICAL CENTER

in March 2020, ARC re-focused all its solutions on the virus. "We put everything else on hold," Zimlichman says. "We declared ARC COVID-19 battle mode, to signify that we were in a state of emergency. We worked very hard for about four months, very long hours and weekends, to come up with a huge amount of innovation. "In the early days of COVID-19, we developed ventilators, and created a rapid diagnostic device that has just got approval from the European Union. It uses spectral imaging and takes a couple of seconds to make a diagnosis, at the cost of $1 per test, which is a game changer," he says. As well as pushing forward with AI, there are plans to build a control tower at the hospital, which will enable them to better manage the thousands of patients that come through their doors every day. They are also embarking on a hospital-at-home project, and are working in the field of precision medicine. In order to do this, building the right partnerships will be crucial, Zimlichman says. "as we look into the future this will be critical in reshaping healthcare."

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TRANSFORMING CARE WITH TECHNOLOGY WRITTEN BY: TILLY KENYON PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

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Boulder Community Health is a community owned-andoperated not-for-profit health system dedicated to providing local access to high-quality medical care to people and businesses in Boulder and surrounding areas.

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ntering its 100th year of providing care, Boulder Community Health (BCH) is on a mission to deliver the highest level of patientcentric healthcare with innovative technology, within its community. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been tremendous pressure on healthcare providers to adapt and continue through the worst health crisis in the 21st century. For many, this has meant moving to remote work, introducing new systems to

carry out daily tasks, and relying on a good team spirit to keep the company going. A community-owned-and-operated not-for-profit health system, BCH has one main campus with a hospital and mental health pavilion, and roughly 25 clinics in the region, primarily servicing Boulder County, Colorado. It is dedicated to providing local access to high-quality medical care to people and businesses in Boulder and surrounding areas, and during the pandemic, this did not change. technologymagazine.com

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Discussing some of the challenges facing the organisation during this time, Teresa Cole, Associate Vice President of Technology and Value Chain, said: “So much like other organisations, when the pandemic hit a lot of workforces went remote, we were just the same. In fact, almost all of our team went fully remote and they actually still remain that way today. But in doing so that really enabled our staff to do what they felt they needed to do best for their family. And they were able to feel like they were keeping themselves safe.” Implementing technology to deliver the best healthcare possible Technology can be used in multiple ways in the healthcare industry, from helping diagnose a problem, to collecting data and keeping patients connected with their provider. The pandemic really highlighted the importance of technology in delivering services that customers expect. When speaking about technology, Cole commented: “I would say it's been critical to the organisation, especially in light of the pandemic. Epic has been a significant and terrific partner to us. We actually went live on the Epic electronic health record in 2019. So shortly after going live, we were in the throes of the pandemic. Leveraging that tool during COVID helped the organisation immensely because we were able to provide a tool that enabled workflows that are efficient and effective in dealing with and responding to the challenges of the pandemic.” Founded in 1979, Epic develops software to help people get well, help people stay well, and help future generations be healthier. Its employees code, test, and implement healthcare software that hundreds of millions of patients and doctors rely on to improve care and ultimately save lives around the globe. 154

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MICHAEL JEFFERIES TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT & CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER INDUSTRY: HEALTHCARE LOCATION: BOULDER, COLORADO, USA

EXECUTIVE BIO

Michael Jefferies serves as Chief Information Officer at Boulder Community Health where he leads teams that evolve patient and clinician capabilities in pursuit of better wellbeing. Michael has led technology initiatives across all healthcare settings including right in patients’ homes. Michael is passionate about creating a just healthcare system that uses data and informatics to guide the deployment of effective health programs for all people regardless of their ability to pay.Michael received an MBA in Healthcare Administration and a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Colorado and is currently completing a doctorate in Public Health from UNC Chapel Hill. In his downtime Michael enjoys rebuilding classic motorcycles and enjoying life in Colorado with his wife and two daughters.

Ready to defend. We help busy and lean security operations teams save the day — day after day.

LogRhythm: Helping the healthcare industry fight cybercrime Andrew Hollister, Deputy CISO and Vice President of LogRhythm Labs, shares how the company is mitigating cyberattacks on healthcare organisations. Security intelligence company, LogRhythm, was founded with the ambition to save the world from cyber threats. The founders saw the importance of equipping network defenders with the tools they needed to quickly see what threat actors were doing and to be able to respond to those activities. LogRhythm supports small businesses through to multi-national enterprises, offering them a wide range of services. One of the main sectors it works with is healthcare. Andrew Hollister, Deputy CISO and Vice President of LogRhythm Labs said: “Healthcare organisations are in a unique position. They’re holding huge quantities of sensitive data making them prime targets for bad actors that are directly focused on compromising patient data and critical hospital technologies.” Hollister outlined ways in which LogRhythm assists healthcare in the fight against cybercrime. Its primary way of helping is with threat detection, explaining that they help detect threat actors in their customers’ environments early to mitigate risks, and provide support to meet compliance requirements.

“Typically, healthcare organisations don’t have massive cyber security budgets. Through our platform, we can help our healthcare customers get the most value from the resources that they have. We’ve also developed the Security Operations Maturity Model that helps organisations of all types develop their security operations and improve their resilience to cyberthreats. Security is not a step; it is a journey, and we want to provide guidance to organisations to help them.” Speaking on the importance of partnerships, Hollister noted that the company seeks to make it a bidirectional effort. “We’ve worked with many healthcare organisations over the years and as a result, we’ve gained insight into how those organisations work and where their priorities are. We’ve been able to develop specific content that helps healthcare organisations with the challenges they have in the cybersecurity space.” LogRhythm’s overall focus continues to be on reducing the time that it takes to detect and respond to cyberattacks and provide solutions that evolve with the ever-changing threat landscape.

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Transforming care with technology

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“ WE'VE REALLY HAD TO EXPAND INTO CONSUMER TECHNOLOGY, WHICH HEALTHCARE WAS NOT FOCUSED ON YEARS AGO” MICHAEL JEFFERIES

VICE PRESIDENT & CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, BOULDER COMMUNITY HEALTH

As the country shifted into a remote way of working and living, staying connected was important to Boulder Community Health in order to deliver the best healthcare. “Telehealth gave us yet another tool that we could still connect with our patients, even though when the pandemic began in 2020 there was the large shutdown and access was still really important so that we could care for our patients. Having telehealth as a tool really enabled us to stay connected to those patients and provide care, even though we couldn't physically be in contact with them,” added Cole. Telehealth allows organisations to provide appointments virtually. A benefit that Boulder Community Health experienced was that it enabled them to still provide a personal connection, and access to individuals that may not be in a position to come in person during a pandemic. Joining the company in 2016, Michael Jefferies, Chief Information Officer, is responsible for implementing technology solutions that advance provider capabilities and operational efficiency at BCH. “I'd say the biggest development within my career around technology has really been a focus on patient-facing technology where we've historically been focused on our internal tools for patient care,” commented Jefferies. The healthcare industry has seen an explosion of innovation in the adoption of patient-facing technology applied across research, routine care and personal wellness. Patient-facing tools give patients the opportunity to be more responsible for their care by providing them with the ability to access health information, choose providers, and manage their healthcare. In April 2020, just after the pandemic hit, overall telehealth utilisation for office visits technologymagazine.com

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Better clinical excellence, all around. Transform patient care with our AI-powered solutions. Learn more

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and outpatient care was 78 times higher than in February 2020, McKinsey found. Around 40% of surveyed consumers stated that they believe they will continue to use telehealth going forward, up from 11% of consumers using telehealth prior to COVID-19. Jefferies added: “We've had to retain all of the previous responsibilities, but we've really had to expand into consumer technology, which healthcare was not focused on years ago. But I think more recently we've made that shift and now we look at our technology and consider our patients the primary user of those technologies.” Using technology to help navigate the COVID-19 vaccine rollout An unforeseen challenge facing Boulder Community Health in the past year was the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. This relied on huge amounts of data, presenting a new technological hurdle to overcome.

“ I'D SAY THE BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT WITHIN MY CAREER AROUND TECHNOLOGY HAS REALLY BEEN A FOCUS ON PATIENT-FACING TECHNOLOGY” MICHAEL JEFFERIES

VICE PRESIDENT & CHIEF INFORMATION OFFICER, BOULDER COMMUNITY HEALTH

“Our key strategies have really been to move quickly and prioritise accordingly. The vaccine rollout came very quickly and then evolved as we added boosters. And logistically, if you think about the technology that is needed there are things that you have to build out in the systems such as pediatric dosing and matching the vaccine manufacturers correctly,” Jefferies said. Adding to these rapid changes, Cole noted: “During this time, it was critical to be able to have the agility to get a lot of these tools changed. This allowed us to respond quickly and by enabling our staff to be remote, our productivity increased in many ways.” technologymagazine.com

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With an IT team of 100 people, values are very important to BCH. The employees created a list of values which are commitments to each other and the management team’s commitment to the team. A key commitment is practising innovation, being creative problem solvers, ready to implement big picture strategic thinking to address organisational needs and challenges. “The secret to our great success has been hiring, developing, and keeping the most talented people. This isn’t easy as a non-profit organisation without all the

“I WOULD SAY TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN CRITICAL TO THE ORGANISATION, ESPECIALLY IN LIGHT OF THE PANDEMIC” TERESA COLE

ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY AND VALUE CHAIN BOULDER COMMUNITY HEALTH

perks of other industries, but we have been successful by leveraging our mission as a benefit to employees. The fulfillment that they get from helping our community is priceless in the quality of their professional life,” Jefferies commented. Utilising technology partners Boulder Community Health works with a number of partners within the technology sector, which helps them to innovate and transform services. Speaking on their partnership with Epic systems, an electronic health record company, Jefferies said: “When we have a problem to solve, they're right alongside us to solve that problem. During the pandemic, they waived any services that they provided related to the pandemic, like ramping up our technologymagazine.com

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“ SO MUCH LIKE OTHER ORGANISATIONS, WHEN THE PANDEMIC HIT A LOT OF WORKFORCES WENT REMOTE, WE WERE JUST THE SAME” TERESA COLE

ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY AND VALUE CHAIN BOULDER COMMUNITY HEALTH

online scheduling, utilising telehealth, they waived fees for all of that. So that's been really an outstanding, and true partnership where we really appreciate them.” Cisco, a leader in technology that powers the Internet, supports BCH’s networking and communication needs, which have been especially important over the past year with remote working and a lack of faceto-face meetings. Cisco aims to reimagine applications, secure data, and transform infrastructure. The company offers a wide 164

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range of networking products and services related to the communications and information technology industry. LogRhythm is a security partner, which helps the company identify and surface threats, in an ever-growing landscape, making sure personal data is secure is vital. The security partner reduces cyber and operational risk by rapidly detecting, responding to, and neutralising damaging cyberthreats. It offers a platform that combines advanced security analytics;

BOULDER COMMUNITY HEALTH

user and entity behaviour analytics (UEBA); network detection and response (NDR); and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) in a single end-toend solution. Nuance has been another key partner to BCH in improving patient care. With staffing challenges and cost pressures in the healthcare system, BCH has worked with Nuance to find solutions. BCH is implementing Nuance PowerScribe Follow-Up Manager technology that uses

natural language processing (NLP) to identify abnormalities that were detected in the patient’s diagnostic imaging reports and ensure they are monitored over the following years to return for treatment. Partnerships can allow companies to help each other with their strengths and weaknesses, and form a larger clientele. Jefferies added: “It’s important to identify the things that we're really good at and that we're going to keep doing because our community needs us to, and then the things that other technologymagazine.com

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people are doing well and we are able to refer out while maintaining high quality.” The pandemic has provided a silver lining Reflecting on the past year, the biggest advancement the healthcare company has made is adapting its remote workforce and keeping its employees engaged. The pandemic has caused major disruption to services but has also given way to new technology features or driven the adoption of existing tools. Jefferies noted that Telehealth and online scheduling are both something the company has had available for a while, but providers and patients did not always see the value to it. “Telehealth was a technology that was sitting there underutilised and the demand from both patients and providers alike has really increased during the pandemic. And I think that we're now ready to adopt it more in the mainstream across society. That's going to be great at reaching people that need specialty care that are further away, and more rural or hard to access communities will get access to better care,” added Jefferies. Looking at the next 12 months, BCH wants to make sure it avoids burnout and resignations among staff, as the pandemic has really taken its toll on people, especially in the healthcare sector. Observing that what it thought was going to be a sprint, has now turned into a marathon, the company wants to focus on exploring ways to take care of both the physical and mental health of its staff, even more than it has in previous years.

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WRITTEN BY: HELEN ADAMS PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

TEAMWORK AND RESILIENCE TURN THE WHEELS AT

Danfoss Drives

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DANFOSS DRIVES

From water systems via various industries to manufacturing, Danfoss Drives is lighting the way for a more efficient, sustainable and resilient world

anfoss Drives’ Senior Vice President of Product Management & Development, Janne Kuivalainen, is passionate about two things: delivering value-adding solutions to the electrical manufacturing industry and good quality lighting for his video calls. “I spent so long in my home office during the height of COVID that I actually purchased these LED panels, so that I had a good set-up,” explains Janne Kuivalainen. “It's dark in Finland in the winter.” Kuivalainen leads global product management and development at Danfoss Drives. “In my career, I have worked in two types of jobs: product roles and system integrator roles. In the past, I have been in the marine and ports system integrator business and in the power plant system integrator business.” Manufacturing company Danfoss Drives is part of the Danfoss Group, a family-owned business based in Denmark, with €5.8bn annual revenue in 2020. The Danfoss Drives business unit boasts over 4,000 employees, ten factories in seven countries across the world and €1.4bn annual sales. “Danfoss Drives is a global leader in AC-to-DC and DC-to-DC power conversion, as well as variable speed control of electric motors. “Our products, known as AC drives, are key to controlling the speed of electric motors,” said Kuivalainen. “These products

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enhance process control, reduce energy usage, decrease mechanical stress on the motor control applications, and much more.”

“ Companies cannot afford to take any actions without taking ESG into account” JANNE KUIVALAINEN

SVP, GLOBAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & DEVELOPMENT, DANFOSS DRIVES

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Embracing resilience in the manufacturing industry Besides the merits of LED lighting, working through the pandemic has taught Danfoss Drives a great deal about the company and the industry it works in. “We learned resilience,” said Kuivalainen. “In the industry, we tend to think a little bit in a linear way, in terms of forecasting, planning, and execution with reviews. “But now, more speed is needed, with better ability to respond to the new requirements and changes in the environment. These are some of the COVID learnings and we learned them fast. We also found new, innovative ways to work efficiently, but with the same quality. This is something we must take with us after the pandemic. Now, we can deliver the same result, in much less time.”

DANFOSS DRIVES

JANNE KUIVALAINEN TITLE: SVP, GLOBAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & DEVELOPMENT LOCATION: HELSINKI, UUSIMAA, FINLAND

EXECUTIVE BIO

In the future, Danfoss Drives anticipates several megatrends in the post-pandemic world. “If I want to be a little bit bold, we are driving the megatrends and transforming our world, because we are using those intelligent, electrified, and energy efficient solutions,” said Kuivalainen. “AC drives help to build a better future for all of us. We don't want to compromise on comfort when we implement sustainability policies in, for example, heating, ventilation, air conditioning systems, or refrigeration. By applying AC drives we can retain comfort and deliver better efficiency at the same time. “In the global food supply chain, we optimise equipment performance to help our customers optimise their food production - from irrigation of fields all the way to food retail. For many sectors, electrification is one of the key paths to decarbonization. That’s where we step in.”

Janne Kuivalainen is Head of Product Management and Development for the Drives business unit in Danfoss Group. Prior to joining Danfoss in early 2019, he was Head of Technology of the Global Marine and Ports Business Unit at ABB. He has also held various management positions with Danfoss, Vacon Plc. and ABB in the areas of Research and Development, Product Management, and System Integration Project Business. He holds a M.Sc. (Eng.) from the University of Tampere and has a special interest in the development of strategic business management.

DANFOSS DRIVES

“ When we develop new products, we look at the product’s sustainability and its impact on circular economy” JANNE KUIVALAINEN

SVP, GLOBAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & DEVELOPMENT, DANFOSS DRIVES

Danfoss Drives is using its technology to protect the world against climate change, particularly in urban areas. “Cities account for 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions,” explains Kuivalainen. “We address how we can make cooling systems, refrigeration systems, ventilation systems, and water systems more efficient.”

In urban areas, Danfoss Drives also provides sustained water and wastewater management. “Due to leaks, 20-50% of all water that is being pumped never reaches the end users,” says Kuivalainen. “At Danfoss Drives, we control the pipe pressure to avoid water hammering and so on, to operate the system at the optimum point in each location. Water is critical infrastructure. You need to be able to bring the right kind of reliability to the solutions. “We also work with some of our clients to reach an energy-neutral process. We’re converting the wastewater plant to actually produce energy. High wastewater temperatures can be used to generate heat and electricity, and inside the wastewater plant a bio refinery produces gas that can be burned in gas turbines.” technologymagazine.com

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Teamwork and resilience turn the wheels at danfoss Drives

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Year Founded

Manufacturing Industry

37,000

Number of Employees

€5.8bn

Revenue Euros (2020)

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But no matter what the business is, or the potential for green energy, Danfoss Drives focuses on its customers’ needs. “What helps your customer to make more money, what impacts their earnings negatively, and what are the safety and regulatory requirements?” asks Kuivalainen. “The second thing I'd like to mention is networking. Look at what's readily available, has somebody else run into a similar issue in some other context or in another industry? What's in it for our customers, and for us? “Then, thirdly: Keep the core strong and evolving, don't lose your focus on your own core. When you start to have these elements in place, integrate fast, test, learn, pilot. So, then it's about the learning curve. After that, from a business point of view, we need to recognise when a situation is about incubation or growth or maturity.” People are crucial in a technology journey Sustainable solutions require multiple engineering domains to come together, using diverse teams to work with problems and creating a better user experience. “People are our foundation,” says Kuivalainen. “Typically, there are people from all kinds of backgrounds, who work together to solve a customer’s problem. They approach it jointly with their different engineering disciplines, and they really need to look at it through the customer’s eyes. This is truly crucial in our journey,” said Kuivalainen. “We leaders are coaches to them. The real doers are our people, those engineers who are working to deliver the solutions.” When asked about where he sees Danfoss Drives’ place in the world, Kuivalainen quotes the CEO, Kim Fausing. “He has said that ‘Sustainability is not an add-on to our business, our business technologymagazine.com

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DANFOSS DRIVES

“ No one wants to compromise on comfort when we implement sustainability policies” JANNE KUIVALAINEN

SVP, GLOBAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & DEVELOPMENT, DANFOSS DRIVES

is sustainability’. I think that in Danfoss Drives, we see that really, we address the key megatrends in the world,” says Kuivalainen. “Our products and solutions are an elementary part of creating a better future. Like now in the green transition, our purpose is more relevant than ever, and this makes us a good partner for our customers, stakeholders, and a good workplace to be a part of.” Sustainable transformation at Danfoss Drives In 2020, Danfoss Drives announced its sustainability ambitions: • To reach carbon-neutrality in all global operations by 2030 • To have an electric car fleet by 2030 • To switch to 100% renewable electricity • To double energy productivity, compared to the 2007 levels Like many - hopefully most - businesses, the green transition is a central focus at Danfoss Drives.

“I think the green transformation is to make the world a better place. Companies cannot afford to take any actions without taking ESG into account. So, whatever you do, you need to think about what that means environmentally, socially and also from a governance point of view,” says Kuivalainen. “I think that this will really penetrate industry now, and this is part of any transformation plan. For example, at Danfoss Drives when we develop new products, we look at the product’s sustainability, product compliance and the impact on the circular economy. These are embedded into the product development initiatives.” Partnerships play an important role, from suppliers to customers To get to net zero emissions, a business must be aware of the behaviour of its suppliers and be aware of the challenges in being sustainable while growing the partner ecosystem. “When I talk about partner ecosystems, I consider our customers, our suppliers, academia and research partners, technology technologymagazine.com

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Cities account for providers and engineering when businesses look at the proof companies,” said Kuivalainen. of new emerging technologies. of global greenhouse “If I look at this from a product Kuivalainen says that Danfoss gas emissions. management and development Drives typically conducts applied Due to leaks point of view, each of them plays research with them. an important role. We collaborate “The engineering companies of all water that is with our customers to look at are key to the success in very being pumped never what is the next leading-edge many product areas, and we reaches end users. step we want to take, to excel in have invested in a few deep certain applications.” collaborations with these Academia and research partners, as well as engineering companies. These relationships technology providers, play an important role are typically of long duration. Those

70%

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“People are our foundation” JANNE KUIVALAINEN

SVP, GLOBAL PRODUCT MANAGEMENT & DEVELOPMENT, DANFOSS DRIVES

companies have their strongholds, and we have ours.” Danfoss Drives’ product development partner ecosystem is also helping the company to apply new technologies. “For us, it can be a small element, but a vital one. So actually, we learn and gain more by working with them because it's everyday life for them and like a core for them, but we can still excel in narrower more specialised fields,” said Kuivalainen. “They of course boost our deliveries, and we help them to really

understand the value proposition, what we are looking for, and what the customer is looking for. Our partners are a really integrated part of our development and work as efficiently as we do here internally.” From water systems via various industries, to manufacturing, Danfoss Drives is lighting the way for a more efficient, sustainable, and resilient world.

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TRANSFORMING TO A TECHNOLOGY-ENABLED SERVICE COMPANY WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY PRODUCED BY: BEN MALTBY

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SIMCORP

Jakob Højland, Commercial Director of Cloud Services at SimCorp discusses the company’s transformation to becoming a technology-enabled service provider

ounded in Denmark in 1971, SimCorp is a leading provider of investment management software solutions and services for the global financial industry. With its winning aspiration, SimCorp puts its clients at the centre of everything it does and aims to become the leading provider of integrated front-to-back, multi-asset, investment management solutions to the world’s largest institutional investors. Jakob Højland, Commercial Director of Cloud Services outlined the company’s customer base: “Our customers are the world's largest investment managers in what we call the buy-side industry – people who either have money or manage money on behalf of others, such as pension funds, insurance companies or asset managers.” The company has constantly evolved over the years to ensure its software is bestin-class. SimCorp’s core solution, SimCorp Dimension can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud, as Højland expanded: “SimCorp Dimension has evolved over decades to become a world-class, front-toback investment management solution. It gives a real-time overview of our customers' entire business on one platform.” Although the company’s core product has changed over the years, SimCorp is dedicated to continuous improvement in order to meet the needs of the market. Despite in already being a SaaS company,

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SIMCORP

SimCorp

“We strive to stay “on the edge” of all these technologies with our customers in mind”

SimCorp is now The company aims to do undergoing a companythis by delivering either wide transformation to tech-enabled services become a tech-enabled or complete business services company. process services. “There is no doubt With its technologythat the transformation enabled services, from being a software SimCorp will “take provider is huge,” full responsibility for JAKOB HØJLAND explained Højland. the entire technology COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, “For us, it’s all about platform including the CLOUD SERVICES, the value we bring to running, management SIMCORP the customers and the and operation,” said responsibility we can take to their success. Højland. It will also deliver continuous Two of our key strategic priorities, which innovation and optimisation as part of are highly interconnected, are about the service. taking leadership for customer experience Looking at its complete business process and delivering everything-as-a-service,” services, Højland said: “We deliver a he continued. complete business outcome, for example, This transformation means SimCorp clean data by combining our tech with our will now take co-responsibility for its market expertise and industry expertise. customers’ businesses and act as a tool to Essentially, we deliver a complete ‘Business help them solve key business challenges. Outcome as a Service’.” 186

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SIMCORP

JAKOB HØJLAND TITLE: COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY / SOFTWARE LOCATION: MIDDLE JUTLAND, DENMARK

EXECUTIVE BIO

Meeting the changing needs of the investment management industry SimCorp’s transformation is underpinned by the recognition that the investment management industry is going through a huge transformation itself at present. This change is necessary “to overcome the persistent challenges the operating environment brings, like costs and fees pressure, regulatory burden, and complexity of managing new asset classes,” Højland explained. As a leader in the industry, SimCorp has been able to identify new and emerging technologies that can help manage these challenges. Højland outlined that these can be innovations from “front-office augmented investment decisions with machine learning and natural language processing to back-office automation with robotic process automation.” This transformation to a technologyenabled services company is designed to make it easy and uncomplicated for investment managers to access new technologies. Højland said that this will allow companies to “focus on core business and innovation while providing them with a fast and hassle-free setup that allows them to consume these services at their pace and matches their preferences.” Its core service, SimCorp Dimension, supports the company as it looks to give its customers access to new technologies. As a front-to-back integrated investment management platform, it provides customers with a real-time overview of their entire investment cycle. “With solutions for data management, trading, risk management, operations, accounting, and communications and reporting, SimCorp supports the entire investment management value chain of its customers and covers all their asset classes,” Højland commented.

Jakob Højland is an executive with a commercial management background within the area of cloud in the financial services industry. He is currently leading SimCorp’s global commercial business within cloud and managed services and heads up all activities which relates to customers including sales, marketing, and go-to-market. Prior to joining SimCorp, he worked for Microsoft, where he drove cloud transformations in the Nordics. He has defined some of the strongest alliances and partnerships Microsoft has within this industry, which also includes the one between Microsoft and SimCorp. Before joining the technology industry, specializing within cloud in financial services, Jakob worked in consulting within the area of commercial management and excellence.

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Oracle and SimCorp’s aligned values and transformation Oracle Cloud Sales Executive, Majid Ittaouil, discusses how the company’s partnership with SimCorp aligns with the pairs business transformation Helping our customers and partners derive value and insight from data is the core of what Oracle is known for. Understanding and harnessing the power of data has created some of the most valuable companies on the planet, and I believe we have just scratched the surface of the opportunities that lies ahead. The main driver for the current rapid development, is easier and cheaper access to all the relevant services and technologies in OCI(Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) Commenting on the partnership Oracle has with SimCorp, Majid Ittaouil, ISV Ecosystem Executive at Oracle says: “The partnership between Oracle and SimCorp goes back several decades. As both companies have evolved over time from being a traditional license vendor to becoming a services provider in the Cloud, we are well aligned when it comes to how our companies are progressing. Within Oracle, we understand that this type of transformation is continuous and directly linked to the evolution of technology”.

With a mutual recognition around the challenges and best practices that come with undergoing a transformation to an ‘as-aservice’ model in the Cloud, “We understand the journey as we’ve been through it ourselves. We also understand the level of complexity linked to such a transformation exercise, especially from a communications perspective, as both new and existing markets will have to be educated in the new ways of working with us in the Cloud”. He comments how the strong partnership with SimCorp lets Oracle do this on a number of levels: “The really interesting part of working with strategic ISV partners like SimCorp, is that we get a chance to communicate jointly to the market and help customers transform their businesses via innovation”. “We appreciate the strategic ISV partnership we’ve had with SimCorp for the past couple of decades and we look forward to continuing and even strengthening that relationship even further in the time to come,” Ittaouil concludes. Discover our database solutions

SIMCORP

SimCorp software as a service

To ensure new and emerging technology is at the forefront of its product, SimCorp spends 20% of its revenue on research and development and ensures it has a clear roadmap in future investments. Adding to this, Højland said: “The objective of this is to deliver great technology, keeping up with innovation areas that are the most important to our customers in their specific industry: asset management, pensions, insurance, banks, etc.” Moving to the cloud: a basis for buy-side innovation To add to its cloud offering, the company built on its SimCorp Dimension product with SimCorp Dimension as a Service. This cloud-based version of SimCorp Dimension allows institutional investors to focus on their core business in the quest for growth and differentiation. 190

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SimCorp carries out tasks such as running, operating and managing the investment-management technology platform. “Most of our new customers choose this delivery model of SimCorp Dimension and we are currently helping our existing customers in their journey to the cloud,” explained Højland. SimCorp believes many customers are transitioning to the cloud as it brings many high-value benefits. This includes “unmatched delivery quality, access to ecosystem-enabled innovation, scalability, and best-in-class security and compliance - as well as improved cost-effectiveness,” Højland said. This year, there has been a huge predicted growth in public cloud end-user spending and Gartner predicted it would grow 23% in 2021. This is due to emerging technologies such as containerisation,

SIMCORP

“ Leveraging cloud and new technologies is a key enabler of sustainability” JAKOB HØJLAND

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, CLOUD SERVICES, SIMCORP

virtualisation and edge computing that are becoming more mainstream and as a result, are driving additional cloud spending. By responding to this growing demand in cloud technologies, SimCorp has shifted its strategic imperatives and embarked on this company-wide transformation. The Commercial Director of Cloud Services believes that the company’s cloud transformation is the foundation to realising the company’s strategic imperatives. He explained: “Becoming cloud-based is a multi-year endeavour and the license to operate and compete in the future, as it is

the basis for delivering software as a service, cost-effectively scaling our operations, and driving ecosystem-enabled innovation.” Højland added: “The public cloud is also putting us in a unique position to deliver speed, innovation, scale, security, costeffectiveness, automation, increased connectivity through API’s since we invest on behalf of all our customers.” Partnering with big technology players to push the boundaries of innovation To support the transition to the cloud within the industry and boost the company’s services, Højland outlined a new engagement platform: “We have also recently launched cloud-native services such as a SimCorp Digital Engagement Portal for self-service reporting, data access and gathering behavioural insights or SimCorp DataCare for clean, accurate, timely and technologymagazine.com

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SIMCORP

“We are currently helping our existing customers in their journey to the cloud” JAKOB HØJLAND

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, CLOUD SERVICES, SIMCORP

ready-to-use reference and market data.” The company’s focus on the cloud is part of its alignment with the Business as a Service initiative. To complement this, the company has developed its Investment Accounting as a Service. “Some investment firms are seeking to outsource more of their back-office functions to service providers and we are responding to this demand by taking more accountability for processes and outputs,” explained Højland. “Our ambition is to become the preferred partner for these types of services, based on our technology platform, our track record in delivering operational services and our ability to create standardisation and scale across clients,” he added. SimCorp, to ensure its offerings are as beneficial for its customers as possible, has partnered with Microsoft and its cloud services, which have formed part of the backbone for its technology-enabled services. Simcorp has also partnered with Oracle for its market leading database technologies. “We are working closely with both parties to push the boundaries for the innovation and efficiency we can deliver to our customers. The database technologies from Oracle have brought value to our business for decades and recently we decided to use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) 194

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in our SaaS architecture for backup solutions. OCI is also used as an internal provider for many of our internal software development environments. In the more recent years, we have experienced what the cloud can do for our own business growth as we have moved our internal production systems to Microsoft Azure and our DevOps environments to OCI, and we want to offer the same benefits of public cloud to our clients, with Azure as our main platform and OCI as our backup Cloud” said Højland.

SIMCORP “This includes solutions and services that are easier to consume, via a robust cloud offering, and open access to innovation that truly supports their success. In doing so, we take on increased accountability for solving our clients core business challenges and ultimately deliver a superior customer experience,” he continued. Along with Microsoft and Oracle, SimCorp has recently built a strategic partnership with Qontigo as part of its ecosystem-enabled innovation strategic imperative. Qontigo creates solutions that empower investment intelligence to drive targeted sustainable returns. With its STOXX and DAX indices and institutionally-proven Axioma analytics, the company delivers solutions at scale backed by modern technology, open architecture and client focus. “The goal is to offer optionality and strengthen our capacity to innovate and offer our clients optionality across their operations and the investment lifecycle,

SIMCORP SimCorp serves over 300 clients worldwide, has over 20k daily SimCorp Dimension users and invests over 20% of its revenue into R&D.

by leveraging an external ecosystem of partners,” Højland explained. Sustainable ambitions with a holistic approach As with many companies across the globe, SimCorp is also dedicated to ensuring its operations are sustainable. Discussing its sustainability ambitions, Højland said: “Creating a sustainable company is not only about taking climate action. At SimCorp, it’s about taking a holistic approach to how we can make the biggest impact as a company and as corporate citizens.” “Leveraging cloud and new technologies is a key enabler of sustainability. Reducing our CO2 emission, expanding support for our clients’ ESG investments, creating a truly diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace, and ensuring meaning in work constitute our current sustainability priorities,” he added. A key driver for reducing SimCorp’s CO2 emissions is intelligent resource optimisation, which is enabled by modern technology and behavioural change. To help reduce its own and its clients’ CO2 emissions, SimCorp is: • Gradually moving both SimCorp’s and clients’ operations from on-premises to cloud for improved data centre energy efficiency. technologymagazine.com

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“ Two of our key strategic priorities which are highly interconnected is about taking leadership for customer experience and delivering everythingas-a-service” JAKOB HØJLAND

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR, CLOUD SERVICES, SIMCORP

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• Applying modern computing to improve overall energy footprint and utilise digital resources in optimised ways. • Reducing air travel and increasing virtual meetings to reduce carbon emissions. To support the first point outlined, in 2019, SimCorp started decommissioning its own data centres as part of a cloud transition to Microsoft Azure and OCI. “Microsoft’s public cloud services have been operating 100% carbon neutral since 2012 by applying a global internal carbon fee model that charges Microsoft business units for carbon emissions from their operations. Microsoft has pledged to reduce its operational carbon emissions by 75% by 2030, against a 2013 baseline,

and to purchase 70% renewable energy for their data centres by 2023, on a path to 100% (60% in 2019). Additionally, all European Oracle Cloud regions currently runs on 100% renewable energy, whilst Oracle has pledged to power all of its global operations, both facilities and its cloud, with 100% renewable energy by 2025.” Højland outlined. Explaining how this aligns with SimCorp’s own sustainable targets he said: “Our goal is to reduce CO2 emissions from internal server installations by gradually moving these to Microsoft Azure and OCI. Also, we offer clients to move SimCorp operations to cloud computing. Our goal is to move 35% of our client business to the cloud by 2025.”

The road to becoming a technologyenabled services provider With its extensive company-wide transformation to become a technologyenabled services company, SimCorp’s winning aspiration is key to becoming the leading provider of natively integrated front to back, multi-asset, investment management solutions to the world’s largest institutional investment management companies. In doing so, Højland explained the company wants to “empower our customers’ strategies through unmatched operational efficiency and investment enablement.” He continued: “In practice, for all our investments and priorities we decide, we strive to keep our customers in the centre and think about which values and outcomes we can deliver to them. For us, new innovative technologies within machine learning (ML), blockchain, highperformance computing, and general cloud technologies are the core tools and building blocks we use to deliver brandnew solutions or enrich existing offerings. In short, we strive to stay “on the edge” of all these technologies with our customers in mind.” “We also want to take more responsibility in all the areas where we can deliver scale and differentiation to our customers, allowing them to focus on core business and financial innovation in their quest for alpha generating activities,” Højland concluded.

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DELIVERING

NTT'S GLOBAL

DIGITAL

BACKBONE AD FEATURE WRITTEN BY: BLAISE HOPE

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PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

NTT's GLOBAL DATA CENTERS

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NTT's GLOBAL DATA CENTERS

NTT provides a data centre platform and end-to-end solution from edge to core to cloud, for a future of speed, security, and sustainability in every region

igital transformation is driving the need for more bandwidth across the world and across every vertical, whether healthcare, scientific research, content streaming, education technology, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, as well as business continuity and resiliency services. Everything now demands greater data capacity, connectivity, flexibility, and ease of deployment. NTT Ltd. was formed to meet the needs of this digital world, providing end-to-end ICTmanaged services solutions across networks, data centres, security and collaboration. A series of strategic acquisitions has made NTT a global digital solutions provider. This expertise combined with its strong heritage as a communications provider makes NTT Ltd. well placed to serve the exponential growth in the market for data centre capacity, alongside the adoption of cloud infrastructure and services that will define this decade. Now, it is one of the world’s top three global data centre companies. Masaaki Moribayashi, the President and Board Director of NTT, has been with the wider NTT company for over 30 years and overseen much of its growth strategy. He has held leadership positions internationally for NTT in Hong Kong, US, Japan and UK and played a key role in the company’s data

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“ We are very excited to expand the business” MASAAKI MORIBAYASHI

PRESIDENT AND BOARD DIRECTOR, NTT LTD.

centre growth and investment strategy. He joined NTT Ltd. in London in 2019 and took up his current position as President in 2021. “I have spent much of my career in the data centre industry” says Moribayashi “and have worked in different regions for NTT, building and growing our data centre footprint and infrastructure to allow NTT to serve its clients and help deliver digital transformation across the globe.” 202

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Florian Winkler is the Chief Executive Officer of NTT Global Data Centers EMEA and has 25 years in the ICT sector and 10 years in data centres. “This is a very dynamic environment,” says Winkler. “I worked for global players like Siemens, and then 10 years at British Telecom. It is useful to have had that experience when developing the data centre division in a corporate setting: it has all the strengths and backing of NTT while preserving the entrepreneurial spirit that keeps us agile and eager for growth. I really enjoy working in a dynamic environment with lots of growth and expansion with the international cooperation we have under the NTT family. That is what excites me — that

FLORIAN WINKLER TITLE: CEO OF GLOBAL DATA CENTERS EMEA, NTT LTD. INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: GLOBAL Florian Winkler has over 20 years of experience in the ICT and data centre sectors. He has developed ICT solutions for major clients, as well as built and run client-oriented organisations and processes in various roles covering consultancy, business development and general management. In 2019, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of Global Data Centers EMEA, where he is responsible for the operational management and further expansion of the business in that region. Florian holds a master’s degree in Economics from the University of Augsburg (Germany) and an MBA from the University of Dayton (USA).

NTT’s history and the rapid creation of a global data centre giant NTT was a state monopoly founded in 1952, with roots tracing back to the beginning of modern communications. It privatised in 1985 and two years later made history with a stock offering of US$36.6bn. Today, it is a global telecommunications leader whose actions change our world and with huge strength in its digital backbone. It employs more than 300,000 people in 200 countries and has US$109bn in revenue across its divisions. NTT Ltd. was launched on July 1, 2019, and has become one of the

EXECUTIVE BIO

global presence and the solutions we can bring to help our client’s transform.”

NTT's GLOBAL DATA CENTERS

MASAAKI MORIBAYASHI TITLE: PRESIDENT AND BOARD DIRECTOR, NTT LTD. INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: GLOBAL

EXECUTIVE BIO

Masaaki Moribayashi was appointed President and Board Director in April 2021, and he is directly responsible for Global Data Center business, mobile and IoT business, submarine cable business, and Japanese multi-national clients. Prior to his current position, he was SEVP Services and Board Director at NTT Ltd. from July 2019 to March 2021. From June 2018 to June 2019, he was SEVP at NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) based in Japan, where he was responsible for technology, services, operation, information security, and global businesses. From 1984, he experienced a variety of positions in NTT Group including SVP and Board Director at NTT Com, responsible for Global Data Centers and Cloud businesses, Managing Director of NTT Europe Limited based in London, and President and CEO of NTT Com Asia Limited in Hong Kong.

“ We are the only one that is not just a pure data centre or colocation provider. The strengths of NTT as a company are unprecedented” FLORIAN WINKLER

CEO OF GLOBAL DATA CENTERS EMEA NTT LTD

world’s largest ICT providers and top three data centre providers. It was formed by bringing together 31 brands from a series of acquisitions, amalgamated into one NTT brand for the future of digital transformation. Major names were folded into NTT’s Global Data Centers division, including e-shelter, RagingWire, Gyron, Netmagic, and NTT Communications Nexcenter. These brands serve every continent and bring together decades of data centre experience and businesses that have allowed NTT to establish its market-leading position. While these acquisitions provided a nonorganic growth basis for NTT, its organic investment strategy is now growing its global footprint significantly. In September 2021, it announced a 20% footprint expansion over the following 18 months. Today, NTT Ltd. has a revenue of US$11bn, 40,000 employees, and NTT Group has invested an annual average of US$5bn in research and development for the next five years. Meeting diverse priorities of sustainability, speed and security in data centre demand NTT’s Global Data Centers is able to provide retail, wholesale and hyperscale solutions technologymagazine.com

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NTT's GLOBAL DATA CENTERS

that deliver on the priorities in each region. “What we call the digital backbone is our fabric between the edge and the cloud,” says Winkler. “Our proposition delivers hybrid IT solutions that include data centre infrastructure that is specific to our clients' security and vertical needs.” Winkler and Moribayashi have observed how the data centre evolves from region to region, for example, trends, like cloud computing, might emerge in the US for example and then transfer to EMEA and APAC, and today the focus is very much on sustainability. “Sustainability is a key focus,” says Moribayashi. “A good example is when we started using renewable energies and invested in a solar and wind power plant in India. Meanwhile, our data centres in London use 100% renewable energy and have a unique cooling system, which has significantly reduced the power consumption.” NTT’s Global Data Centers has committed to the Climate Neutral Data Center Pact, which commits the company to operating their data centres in the EU in a climateneutral way by 2030. Indeed, it is the first large data centre operator in the UK to achieve the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology certification (BREEAM) rating of Excellent for their London 1 site, certifying that it meets the high standards of the world’s longest established environmental assessment methods. What sets NTT’s Global Data Centers apart from the rest of the industry NTT’s Global Data Centers has a broad range of clients. However, the majority of their client base is made up of cloud providers and big enterprises, like banks – two industries experiencing worldwide innovation, investment, growth and the 206

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promotion and expansion of digital services. All of them plug neatly into the solution stack that the company has built. “We are special among the top data centre players in the world,” says Winkler. ”We are the only company that is not just a pure data centre or colocation provider. The strengths of NTT as a company are unprecedented.” Winkler says this allows NTT to fulfil the changing requirements of any industry. “This gives us the ability to serve multiple types of clients. We can provide exactly what's

good for hyperscalers, but also what’s good for the enterprise market. That's why this service portfolio — combining what we have in data centres with the strength of our network, security and managed services — is compelling because ICT is always transforming.” “NTT’s Global Data Center Interconnect (GDCI) — an integrated global network fabric service — delivers a cross regional data centre network and private secure connection to major cloud service providers and contributes to client’s digital transformation as a digital backbone. On the mobile side, with private

5G, NTT owns the major mobile company in Japan, so that means we can provide a secure managed network end-to-end from the device to the cloud,” says Moribayashi. “This is a differentiator for NTT across the data centre and telecoms industries. Telecom competitors don’t operate their own data centres as many spun those operations off some time ago. Data centre companies don’t have the network. We have both. We believe having the secure end-to-end infrastructure provides huge potential for us to serve our clients and communities.” technologymagazine.com

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“On the mobile side, with private 5G, NTT owns the major mobile company in Japan, so that means we can provide a secure managed network end-to-end from the device to the cloud” MASAAKI MORIBAYASHI PRESIDENT AND BOARD DIRECTOR, NTT LTD.

Building a total solution for our sustainable future through the IOWN initiative The company is also looking to build a world that transcends the typical constraints of physical connectivity operations, bridging all current infrastructure together. A powerful illustration of this offering is the IOWN (Innovative Optical and Wireless Network) initiative, which promises the “total mobilisation of city and mobility” with a roadmap through to 2030 to offer a sustainable and regenerative solution for businesses. NTT will maximise the benefits of its technologies by building out an all photonics network that will provide end-toend coordination of ICT resources. Included is a Super White Box that supports the next generation of computing platforms as well as quantum cryptographic communication and traffic flow management: systematically and methodically dealing firmly with issues of latency, security and bandwidth flow

that plague international communications. Through Digital Twin computing and a cognitive foundation, its network will allow for predictive action, analysis and optimisation, marking a complete departure from disaggregated computing, and the entrance of an era of low power consumption, large capacity with high quality, and low latency. The initiative promises 100x less power, 125x greater transmission capacity, and a latency reduction of 200*3. NTT believes this will deliver a sustainability-first. NTT is well placed, with its digital backbone, data centre footprint and expertise, to provide end-to-end solutions that are secure, sustainable and connected and help their clients across all sectors navigate their digital transformation.

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HOW WYOMING HYPERSCALE FORMED THE WORLD'S IDEAL DATA CENTRE

WRITTEN BY: BLAISE HOPE PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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WYOMING HYPERSCALE

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WYOMING HYPERSCALE

Wyoming Hyperscale is Trenton Thornock's vision of a liquid-cooled, renewable-fueled, minimal power, no-water, and carbon-negative data centre made real

yoming Hyperscale White Box, or just Wyoming Hyperscale, has a story behind it that is a modern version of an old corporate founding retelling. A forwardthinking, future-proof, family firm in the Old American West. Wyoming Hyperscale is the brainchild of siblings on a family ranch near Evanston, Wyoming. Bought from a bankruptcy in the 1990s, the 12,000-acre plot sits 2,316 metres (7,600 feet) above sea level, on the northern ridgetop of Aspen Mountain. The tagline “The End of Air Cooling” spells out neatly how innovative the project is. It is a fully sustainable, innovative and allinclusive data centre solution. The project offers: a 30MW critical IT load, 10MW vaults using under 1200 square metres, a dedicated on-site substation with 120MW design capacity, 8 0kW average rack density, 100+kW/rack high-density compute capacity at scale, less than half the per megawatt capital cost of comparable cold plate HPC [high-performance computing] expansions. It is also the first “geothermalcoupled” hyperscale data centre known. According to the company itself, it is “the hyperscale you should have been planning and permitting for immediate construction two years ago” with the “potential for infinite runtime with diverse natural gas storage and multiple high pressure gas transmission lines 212

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running through adjoining acreage owned by the family.” Trenton Thornock, the Founder and Managing Member of Wyoming Hyperscale White Box, says “one of the things we wanted to do was to create a situation where our tenants could find things that they can't find anywhere else in the world.” “My background as a CFO had me doing large scale industrial developments all over the world,” says Thornock. “I've built plants in China, started businesses in Russia and South America, and just everywhere else you can imagine.” Wyoming Hyperscale is Thornock’s purpose-driven mission and feels like a grand opus to a career of formidable industry and business relationships. Wyoming Hyperscale is a data centre project that uses negligible water and power by relying on Liquid Immersion Cooling (LIC). “In addition to the operating efficiency…is a connection to an indoor farming facility.” 214

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Farming is carbon negative and by growing produce that is sold locally on the same land as the data centre, obviating the need for haulage from elsewhere, social value impact is embedded here for the community, climate and customer. The project uses resources on site, taps into renewable sources and maximises the use of an ideal situation by, frankly, making sure it is ideal from the planning stage. Benefits of the set-up run deep and by building the concept from the ground-up, Thornock can maximise the benefits of using LIC to speed up construction. “One of the benefits we get from liquid cooling is we don't have to hang a lot of stuff overhead, so all that HVAC equipment goes away,” says Thornock. “We still have pipes where we have to move the heat, but those can be on the floor, which means we don't have a lot of suspended stuff overhead. “That has a knock on effect in the engineering, in that our data halls are clear

WYOMING HYPERSCALE

span, metal buildings. To build a clear span metal building on a concrete slab takes less than three months.” The core benefit, though, is that switching from air cooling to Liquid Cooling reduces cost of cooling by 95%. Thornock runs the business, his brother Brady the ranch, and the five other siblings are silent partners. It is Thornock’s career supervising major industrial builds that makes the project possible. Bringing in all the right partners and expertise has also allowed the project to come online in just a few years. Construction on Phase 1 is ongoing but the partnerships that brought it together mean progress has been rapid. Construction began on January 3, 2022. The current expectation is to install 10 megawatts in October 2022, ten megawatts in November 2022, and ten megawatts in December 2022. Full commissioning of the first ten megawatts is expected to complete by the end of 2022.

TITLE: FOUNDER AND MANAGING MEMBER INDUSTRY: DATA CENTRE LOCATION: HOUSTON, TEXAS, US

EXECUTIVE BIO

How partnerships and knowledge shaped a Hyperscale of the future Wyoming Hyperscale is the product of a lot of experience, a lot of expertise, a lot of interest from very large companies. Unsurprisingly, it is largely focused on providing for very large Content Delivery Networks, and while Thornock cannot name the clients lined up, they have been partners in the process, too. The will to set the solution up effectively comes in from all angles. That everybody involved knows what the market wants, could articulate it and then could make it happen actually owes less to the serendipity of the site itself and more to the people Wyoming Hyperscale has been able to draw on. Partnerships define this project’s success.

TRENTON THORNOCK

Trenton K. Thornock is Founder and Managing Member of Wyoming Hyperscale White Box, Chief Financial Officer of Wyoming Hyperscale Indoor Farms, and a Senior Consultant with the Boxley Group. He is also an owner of Hyperfuels, the first e-commerce racing fuels retailer and US distributor of TOTAL racing lubricants. Trenton was previously Chief Financial Officer for The Miller Group, a Trinity Hunt Partners portfolio company and Group Chief Financial Officer for WellDog, a high-growth energy technology company backed by Shell Ventures. He was previously Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Scientific Drilling International, the world’s largest private horizontal and directional drilling company. He has served in senior and board roles at the Breitling Energy Corporation, ACI Jet, Duratherm, and U.S. Zinc. Thornock began his career at Arthur Andersen after graduating from the University of Utah and later held finance positions at PPG Industries, working across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

OPERATIONS – FOCUSED MISSION CRITICAL ENGINEERING AND COMMISSIONING An MEP Engineering firm with roots in Mission Critical Commissioning and systems operation, we engineer systems focused on safe, reliable, maintainable and efficient operation of the facility. Our employees are: • OCP Advanced Cooling Facility Subproject Lead • Uptime Institute Accredited Tier Designers • ASHRAE Published Authors Discover Now

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WYOMING HYPERSCALE

“ One of the things we wanted to do was to create a situation where our tenants could find things that they can't find anywhere else in the world” TRENTON THORNOCK

FOUNDER AND MANAGING MEMBER, WYOMING HYPERSCALE

Just as he cherry-picked technologies, Thornock did the same with people. “If I were to build this from scratch and hire all of these people,” explains Thornock, “first of all, it probably wouldn't be possible. And even if I had all the money in the world and it was possible to get all of these people to leave their current organisations and join me at a startup, it would take years to put together this team.

Lumen Technologies, a Fortune 500 telecoms company, joins J.M. Gross Engineering (and its owner John Gross), engineering firm BCER and smart data centre solutions firm Submer as key partners in the project. Sustainable goals all meet in one at Wyoming Hyperscale Wyoming Hyperscale is special in that, in a region experiencing a megadrought, it uses no water and while it uses far less energy than other data centres, what it does use is renewable. “There are two reasons we selected this location for the data centre,” says Thornock. “On the power side, we are surrounded by more than 400MW of existing wind power and our procurement agreement with Rocky Mountain Power has a 138KV technologymagazine.com

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30MW Critical IT load 10MW vaults consuming less than 13,000 square feet of space each

120MW Design capacity at dedicated on-site substation

80kW Average rack density

100+kW Rack high-density compute capacity at scale, less than 1/2 the per megawatt capital cost of comparable cold plate HPC [high-performance computing] expansions

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power line coming out of the switch where this wind power converges on the grid. As a former commodities firm CFO. We see a lot of our competitors going out and buying swaps or entering into power purchase agreements, but the electrons that they're consuming are not actually green. They're probably coming from a gas fired or coalfired plant somewhere.” This would have been the case for Wyoming Hyperscale, until it wasn’t. “In November 2021, when Bill Gates and TerraPower announced they're building an advanced nuclear reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming, which happens to be where the base load power on our local grid comes from. By 2028, we'll be still plugged into the same wind switch, but the baseload power on that grid is going to be nuclear. We'll be on one of the first completely decarbonised, non-hydro grids in North America. So now you've got a situation where the entire power generation is decarbonised. You've got a data centre that's 50% more efficient from a power consumption standpoint than air-cooled data centres. And it consumes no water.” Thornock has also made sure the project is linked into key data centre clusters and is using fibre in the area that is lying unused. “I think that it's important to note for people who want to understand the project that even though we're still in the construction phase, through our partnership with Lumen, we've activated a lot of the dark fibre that was already terminated near the site,” says Thornock. Aspen Mountain itself has a history that made this possible. It is one of the highest points on the Union Pacific railway line. Fibre cannot be laid inside active rail tunnels, so telecoms companies instead had to run them over the mountain to rejoin the tracks technologymagazine.com

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WYOMING HYPERSCALE

right-of-way below. This meant all the work for splicing out from the fibre line and regenerating the signals was done - making it a far simpler proposition for network providers to get on board with. Wyoming Hyperscale is also fully plugged into strategic fibre exchanges. Thornock: “so the main Equinix exchange in Ashburn, we have private wavelength connection already, either ordered or being provisioned there. Same thing for downtown Manhattan and Wall Street, 32 Avenue of the Americas, a CoreSite LA 1, where we have the Asian cables landing and all the media connections, the Westin Exchange up in Seattle, the main exchange in Chicago, the

KEY PARTNERS: Lumen, J.M. Gross Engineering, BCER, Submer, Burns & McDonnell, FFKR Architects, Gensler, Forell | Elsesser structural engineers, Layton Construction, ZincFive, and many others

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DID YOU KNOW...

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• No water consumption exacerbating the megadrought • No CRAC units, refrigerants or compressors with obsolescence risk of phasedown of production and consumption of hydroflourocarbons • No water near the ITE in the data halls - biodegradable dielectric cooling fluid [Submer SmartCoolant] only in the data hall side of the cooling system • UI Tier III, upgradeable to Tier IV • The hyperscale that will be left standing in only a few short years when any level of CFM air cooling at any temperature simply will not do the job • Data Center PUE around 1.05 with credits for heat produced monetised and returned to tenants resulting an an economic tPUE less than 1 • Low-carbon footprint, safe Zinc|Nickel battery powered UPS from ZincFive • Agricultural CO2 capture offsets available to tenants from Wyoming • Hyperscale Indoor Farms affiliate 'waste' heat reuse • REVIT-linked Carbon Life Cycle Assessment tracking building construction • Live facility level energy and sustainability reporting portal accessible to the public • Live tenant level energy and sustainability reporting via secure, private portal for tenants

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WYOMING HYPERSCALE

“So now you've got a situation where the entire power generation is decarbonised. You've got a data centre that's 50% more efficient from a power consumption standpoint than air cold data centres. And it consumes no water” TRENTON THORNOCK

FOUNDER AND MANAGING MEMBER, WYOMING HYPERSCALE

main exchange in Atlanta, we're connected to all those already, or those are currently being [set up]. “So that means that the Cisco switches that will connect the wavelengths are either in those facilities or being provisioned right now.” Sustainability in the 2020s is becoming defined by the embrace and collaborative approach of agendas by major firms across sectors. The importance of data centres as an underpinning to a hyperconnected world and supply chain has come hand-in-hand with the desire to build the future out with sustainability, emissions, water conservation, social value and business sense in mind. Wyoming Hyperscale is a case study for all of them.

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CENTRICA: EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY IN THE ENERGY SECTOR WRITTEN BY: GEORGIA WILSON

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CENTRICA

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Centrica is a strong believer in digital transformation and embracing technology to ensure fieldworkers have the most up-to-date tech and software

roud to be founded on a heritage of 200 years, serving customers in homes and businesses, Centrica is driven by its purpose to help customers live sustainably, simply, and affordably. “As the pace of change continues to accelerate, we will respond by focusing colleagues and technology on helping businesses and households to use energy more efficiently and sustainably,” states Centrica. The History of Centrica Founded in 1997 following the demerger of British Gas, Centrica took on the gas sales, gas trading, services and retail business, and the gas production business of the North and South Morecambe gas field. Over the next 20 years since its founding, Centrica continued to grow its operations, making several company acquisitions, including Direct Energy, Dyno-Rod, Clockwork Home Services (Via Direct Energy), Home Warranty of America (Via Direct Energy), Bord Gáis Energy, NEAS energy and ENER-G Cogen International Limited. Today, Centrica is a FTSE 250 company, with 23,846 employees, 9.2 million residential customers, 17,700 electric vehicle charging points, and revenue of £20.8bn. “Our company is founded on a proud 200-year heritage of serving customers in technologymagazine.com

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homes and businesses. From our early days supplying gas and coal to being an energy and services company today, we have adapted and changed to meet the needs of our customers,” comments Centrica. The Centrica Business Model Designed to focus on meeting the changing energy supply, services, and solutions needs for its customers, Centrica provides its offerings to both consumers and businesses, helping them transition to a lower-carbon future. For its consumer customers, Centrica provides supply, and home services and solutions, ranging from protection, installation and smart heating to the supply of gas and electricity. “We want to make people’s lives simpler by providing seamless, time-saving services that are affordable and sustainable. Understanding and satisfying consumer needs is critical to our success,” says Centrica. Centrica is ‘a trusted energy partner’ of its business customers, providing energy and solutions to help businesses operate more efficiently and sustainably to achieve commercial success. Its services range from energy supply to energy trading and optimisation to business services and solutions.

“ Our company is founded on a proud 200-year heritage of serving customers in homes and businesses” CENTRICA 228

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At the heart of its success, Centrica places its values, culture and code. “Care, delivery, collaboration, agility and courage are values we developed through conversations with employees [...] By living our values, we will be better able to fulfil our purpose and satisfy the changing needs of our customers.” Centrica divides its code of conduct into six key areas: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Operating safely and securely Conducting its business with integrity Valuing people Treating customers fairly Protecting assets, information and interests Working responsibly with communities and government

Digitally transforming the energy industry “The world of energy is evolving rapidly, says Centrica. “It is becoming decentralised as distributed technology supports decarbonisation; choice and power are shifting to the customer, and technology and digitalisation are accelerating the pace of change. We are responding to these trends by focusing investment on our customer-facing businesses.” One way Centrica has driven its personal digital transformation has been through its collaboration with Microsoft, NetMotion, and Panasonic. Bringing these three leading organisaions together to optimise its operations, Centrica was the perfect customer to illustrate the impact of combining Panasonic's hardware, Microsoft’s advanced collaboration applications (OneDrive and Microsoft 365), and sustained connectivity from NetMotion. “Centrica has a large field team that ventures into both rural and metropolitan areas resolving issues and serving customers. technologymagazine.com

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CENTRICA

Microsoft Teams, Panasonic & NetMotion: take to the skies

“ A constant network connection is critical to the success of our field workers” CENTRICA

Commenting on the test, Stuart Carver, Mobile Device Specialist at Centrica said: “A constant network connection is critical to the success of our field workers. NetMotion, Panasonic and Microsoft deliver incredibly complementary solutions that ensure a stable connection in any situation. This acid test was a brilliant way to prove it.”

The company currently has approximately 12,000 workers using Panasonic TOUGHBOOKs in the field, with NetMotion Mobility deployed on each device. Centrica is also currently in the process of expanding the use of Microsoft Teams across its entire workforce to facilitate collaboration among employees,” says NetMotion. To stress-test the technology’s capabilities, the four organisations took a unique approach, by strapping a Panasonic TOUGHBOOK® tablet to a balloon, taking the tablet up into the stratosphere while running a Microsoft Teams call. technologymagazine.com

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“ From a user experience point of view, that Office 365 rollout has really transformed Centrica” JOANNE ROSE FORMER HEAD OF MOBILE USER COMPUTING AT CENTRICA IN 2019

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In today’s fast-paced environment, it is crucial to stay on top, if not, ahead of technological advancements to remain competitive and not get left behind. Over the last 20 years, Centrica has significantly transformed its field workforce digitally. Speaking to Joanne Rose, former Head of Mobile User Computing at Centrica in 2019, she explained that digital transformation for Centrica is about “continually making sure that our fieldworkers have got the most up-to-date technology and software. What we're doing is setting the scene for our field workforce to be on the latest products and for them to be kept up-to-date.”

Centrica and Panasonic: A Story of Successful Digital Transformation

Working with Microsoft, Centrica implemented Windows 10 across its entire organisation coupled with the Evergreen solution to ensure that it is never too far behind the latest operating system version. The escape from incremental and periodic upgrades extends to Centrica’s embrace of cloud technologies, such as Office 365, and OneDrive. “From a user experience point of view, that Office 365

rollout has really transformed Centrica. We have the full suite and we're constantly adding new applications and features,” said Rose in 2019. Keen to always embrace the latest technologies, Centrica’s partnership with Panasonic began more than 20 years ago when Centrica asked Panasonic to create a laptop with an integrated CD for its British Gas Engineers. technologymagazine.com

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Centrica and its partners today Nurturing its partnership with Microsoft, Centrica continues to harness Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365 across its European and North American markets. In the UK, Centrica is harnessing Dynamics 365 to manage customer engineer appointments and optimise in real-time. With this capability, Centrica can deliver fast and effective services to its retail and business customers. In Denmark, Dynamics 365 is being used to manage and action energy trading across its European energy markets, and, in the US, Centrica has adopted Dynamics 365 for its contract management in the utility market. In partnership with the leading UK telecommunications company BT, Centrica is harnessing its solutions for better Wi-Fi connectivity for its UK field operations engineers, boosting connection in areas with low cellular coverage.

“ Centrica has a large field team that ventures into both rural and metropolitan areas resolving issues and serving customers” NETMOTION The implementation is currently in its early stages, therefore, time will determine the effectiveness of BT Pinhole. However, it is said to provide the strongest connection at a third of the time, enabling an average of six engineer jobs in two weeks that otherwise would not have been completed. Centrica is currently conducting collaborative testing with multiple engineer groups to inform the effective use cases.

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SHAPING A NEW ERA OF DATA CENTRE SUSTAINABILIT Y AD FEATURE WRITTEN BY: BLAISE HOPE

PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

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Schneider Electric leads new era of data centre sustainability with industry-first framework for long-term, strategic commitments to fight climate change

chneider Electric has just ranked number one on Sustainability Magazine’s Top 100 Companies list, hot on the heels of being named ‘Fortunes World’s Most Sustainable Company’ by Canadian media research firm Corporate Knights in January 2021. In 2021, it also made the Financial Times ranking as a Top 50 Diversity leader for the second year running, the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index for a fourth year, FORTUNE’s ‘World’s Most Admired Companies’ and Forbes’ list of America’s ‘Best Employers for Diversity’. I asked Rob McKernan, Senior Vice President of its Secure Power Division for Europe, how Schneider had achieved this. His answer: “Sustainability has been at the core of our strategic decision-making for some time.” The secret is not complicated – early, decisive planning – but it is the grand strategy’s execution and results that are wildly impressive. McKernan, holding the same portfolio for North and South America before moving to Paris five years ago, has been leading the companies’ data centre sustainability efforts in Europe. A lesson in modern sustainable business strategy McKernan says the sustainability awards are “testament to what our ethos is. We want to help customers make the most of their energy, the most of their resources, so we’ve been talking to them about efficiency, reliability, and sustainability through digitisation and electrification.

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“ We want to be our customers' partner for efficiency and sustainability – helping them drive energy efficiency throughout all parts of the life cycle” ROB MCKERNAN

SENIOR VP OF SECURE POWER & DATA CENTRE DIVISION FOR EUROPE, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

It’s not something new to us in 2022, it’s been part of our culture for many, many years.” Schneider Electric has positioned itself as a world leader in sustainability and has solidified its position as a leader in sustainable technologies. It earns 76% of its revenue from sustainable, Green Premium solutions and 73% of its investments go right back into R&D. It is the leading name 240

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in global power management and its achievements to date are setting the stage for those to come. “We've been talking about metrics like PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) for many years, and we've been an early advocate of measuring how well your data centre performs from an efficiency standpoint,” says McKernan. Amalgamation and green management operations Schneider Electric has acquired greentech startups and is amalgamating them into a world-leading tech management offering. With its track record and the state of play in sustainability worldwide, it is building a primary application of greentech management solutions. Its January acquisition of climatetech platform Zeigo followed similarly headlinegrabbing news of the launch of its IoT management software EcoStruxure Resource

ROB MCKERNAN TITLE: SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF SECURE POWER AND DATA CENTRE DIVISION FOR EUROPE

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: PARIS Rob McKernan is Senior Vice President for Schneider Electric’s Secure Power Division in Europe. Across the region he empowers country leaders to support customer digital transformation through resilient, adaptive, sustainable and efficient data centres. Rob holds a bachelor's degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and is a strong advocate for embracing sustainable business practices. He believes that by integrating resilient digital infrastructure with renewables and the grid, and by selecting resource efficient technologies, the data centres of the future can support the needs of the digital and electrical world, helping to transform businesses sustainably.

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Advisor and the energy ‘buying’ portal NEO Network. All of it is building a comprehensive ecosystem for Schneider Electric to remain “the leader of the digital transformation of energy management and automation.” Its leading edge is a history of sustainable data centre management that solidified through the move from corporate data centres to cloud-based solutions. Much of this started in 2007 with the acquisition of American Power Conversion (APC™), a transaction that brought McKernan himself into Schneider Electric. In 2017, as part of a 10-year update on the deal, the company explained that “the idea was to take the leader in the IT room or white space of data centres – APC – and combine it with the company’s leadership position in the grey space or electrical rooms – Schneider Electric – to create a single data centre powerhouse.” Schneider Electric had, at the time, been building up its presence as an end-to-end powertrain solutions provider. This meant it had little customer competition with APC and the US$6 bn acquisition allowed data centres to quickly become a pillar in its global business. That acquisition allowed the French multinational to leverage its capabilities, sustainable practises, and market position to become a data centre powerhouse and then to move rapidly into the future by building the greenest possible solutions for the sector. A prescient move as the business world transitioned steadily into the cloud and climate change rose steadily up corporate agendas. “We see this, the data centre of the future, continuing to evolve with needs to be sustainable, efficient, resilient and adaptive,” says McKernan. “It's really interesting when we bring our partners into the fold, whether 242

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SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

it's inside a data centre or a building or [as] part of our ecosystem, there's a lot of additional value that we can provide.” “Looking at the data centre industry from a sustainability perspective has been quite a natural evolution,” says McKernan. “I think we were starting to do that even before we were using the word sustainability in many ways! In Europe we’re having conversations around carbon neutrality, around the removal of gas (SF6), and the issue of water usage. By focusing on what the industry's looking to do here, which is to reach net zero emissions by 2030, we can help operators plan and reach their aggressive CO2 reduction targets.”

“The journey continues, but I can tell you it’s a very effective conversation for clients that are looking for companies to help them drive sustainability across the data centre space” ROB MCKERNAN

SENIOR VP OF SECURE POWER DATA CENTRE DIVISION FOR EUROPE, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

“When I came to Europe five years ago, I had the experience of running the North American and South American business – those of a very mature market in the US, in Canada, and very much of a developing market throughout central and south America,” says McKernan. “So when you look at the diversity here in Europe, the countries that I'm responsible for and the Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Paris (FLAP regions), those have been the historical centres for the industry.” Schneider Electric has worked with numerous businesses across Europe, from end-users to owners and operators including cloud, colocation and hyperscale service technologymagazine.com

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providers. It has also supported the efforts of world leading businesses to expand their services across the region. Here customers include Interxion (a Digital Realty Company), Iron Mountain, SuperNAP and EcoDataCenter, the world’s first climate positive data centre. “The interesting part is that connectivity demands are growing across the entire region, and in southern and central Europe, new hubs are beginning to establish themselves to service this requirement. We’re seeing the build out of new data centres in Warsaw, Tel Aviv, Athens and Milan, nowhere near the FLAP countries. We’re more than prepared here, seeing this evolution once in North America and now experiencing it through a slightly different lens, there’s a lot of similarities between the two. Interestingly, the word sustainability was not used quite as frequently, five, six, seven years ago. Now it’s very much in the forefront of our discussions, if not the first thing we talk about with decision-makers.” The importance of standardised measurements Talking about what sustainability needs is one thing – providing a means to achieve it is another. One of the biggest issues in sustainability is figuring out and agreeing, cross-sector and cross-organisation, how to measure it. That is where Schneider Electric’s Data Centre Sustainability Metrics and Framework, launched in December 2021, comes in. “Last year I was on a panel with a couple of key industry leaders, and we were talking about each of our companies’ focus on sustainability. You quickly realise that everyone is going about this a little bit differently, everyone is trying to measure what it means,” says McKernan. “We felt that one of the key challenges is that we’ve never 244

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really had a standard set of environmental metrics that we can report on both here in Europe and throughout the globe.” Schneider Electric’s first-of-a-kind Sustainability Framework allows for the tracking and reporting of standardised sustainability metrics, helping drive internal collaboration to make it more effective in achieving company-wide targets, while increasing transparency for external stakeholders like customers and regulators. It was created by a team of ESG experts, sustainability consultants, data centre scientists and data centre solution architects to help operators who are at the

Beginning, Advanced or Leading stages of their sustainability journey, reduce their environmental impact. The comprehensive framework includes 23 key metrics for standardised reporting and identifies the 17 most relevant sustainability frameworks to guide operators in both setting measurable targets and reporting them. Further, Schneider Electric is recommending that data centre operators utilise holistic environmental strategies, which means being inclusive of five key areas of environmental impact such as Energy use, GHG emissions, Water, Waste, Land and biodiversity.

Using the framework removes the hassle of selecting impactful metrics for tracking, improves internal communication and empowers effective action on sustainability objectives. Moreover, it enables businesses to act on the data to improve operations, which, in turn, enables regular and consistent reporting for external stakeholders, and standardises benchmarking. “We realise a lot of companies are either not measuring their environmental footprint or really don’t know how to,” says McKernan. “So by empowering the industry, we can really help it to standardise the way it reports and reduce its environmental impact.” technologymagazine.com

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How culture breeds sustainable success An inclusive company culture has helped the firm to reach its highest sustainable ambitions. Its people join the business with the same vision and values, ensuring that sustainability remains central to its purpose. McKernan says these developments are a product of Schneider Electric’s sustainability-led company culture: “It’s driven from the top-down, it comes from our CEO, through his leadership team and then the top 100 leaders. We are really focused on this, not as the fifth KPI on a sheet, but really talking about how we drive sustainability within our organisation.”

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“ At Schneider, we realise a lot of companies are either not measuring their environmental footprint or really don’t know how to” ROB MCKERNAN

SENIOR VP OF SECURE POWER & DATA CENTRE DIVISION FOR EUROPE, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC

“We also have a real focus on measurement. In fact, we’ve been measuring our company’s sustainability for several years, measuring our improvement in each of our facilities, each of our manufacturing plants and very aggressively looking at our suppliers. It’s not just one or two things we can do ourselves. We realise we have to do it throughout our ecosystem. We take that mentality when we go talk to our customers, whether they’re building a new manufacturing facility or, in my case, a data centre.” Now that Schneider Electric’s ascent to a pinnacle of sustainability is getting recognised in the business mainstream, McKernan says it is the drive to continuously improve that

both led it there and will keep it there into the future: “There’s more to the equation of helping the customers, whether it’s through the design process, through the build process or through the operational process.” “We want to be our customers' partner for efficiency and sustainability – helping them drive energy efficiency throughout all parts of that life cycle. So, I would say that the journey continues, but I can tell you it’s a very effective conversation for clients that are looking for companies to help them drive sustainability in these spaces.”

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THE QUANTUM FUTURE OF EDUCATION 248

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WRITTEN BY: RHYS THOMAS PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

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CIO Steven Burrell explores the quantum leadership principles pioneering a purposeful new relationship between people and tech in higher education

orthern Arizona University (NAU) is home to 30,000 students, creative thinkers and exceptional minds. It is a higher educational institute that embraces difference and celebrates what makes it unique. The regional public university’s faculty is known for striving to create personalised educational experiences, and the institute is a leading organisation in supporting indigenous peoples with programmes and opportunities to gain undergraduate and graduate education. Though in many ways unique, NAU is not immune to the many challenges facing the higher education sector at large. At a surface level, it must remain modern, with digital capabilities in line with the expectations of its students and the world beyond its campus boundaries. In the summer of 2016, Steven Burrell joined NAU to tackle just that challenge. With the seemingly straightforward assignment of gathering a sprawling mass of IT services and centralising them across the institution, the new Chief Information Officer put his near 40 years of experience in higher education to work, accomplishing the task after a couple of “hard-fought” years. It was important work, Burrell reflects: “We’ve created some pretty fantastic efficiencies and effectiveness, as well as our agility in response to the rapidly changing higher education industry.

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The quantum future of education

But in 2022, NAU is facing what Burrell calls a “perfect storm” of new, present-day challenges: “I think it's fairly widely known that higher education is totally disrupted with a global pandemic, declining numbers of college-going students, the rapid pace of change in technology and this idea of the great resignation that's going on and has increased competition for talent.” These challenges are compounded by financial imbalance, important social conversations around racial inequality, and the maturity of identity politics that go beyond surface level ‘representation’. In the face of adversity, NAU sees opportunity. It has a new mission under the leadership of Dr. José Luis Cruz Rivera, the 17th president of NAU who began his tenure June 2021 and empowered the leadership team to do more. “The new president is bringing a fresh vision and a board who would like us to become more of an access institution,” Burell says. 252

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“So we're deep into the strategic road mapping process, looking to connect everything we do to provide greater opportunities for Arizona citizens to obtain the education they need to advance the prosperity of their families and adapt to rapidly changing 21st century workforce conditions.” Quantum thinking To reconcile NAU with its roots and beat a path for its new mission, the NAU leadership team knows change is necessary. “Rapidly evolving in this unpredictable and often chaotic climate that we're living in today suggests that deeper dimensions of leadership are required,” says Burrell. “We need to embrace a new paradigm of thoughts and I think we need to embrace the kinds of thinking brought forth by quantum leadership.” Distinct from ‘Newtonian leadership’, Burrell equates quantum leadership to the findings of Max Planck, the grandfather of quantum physics. They form the fundamentals of

STEVEN BURRELL TITLE: CIO & VP OF IT

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: ARIZONA Steven Burrell, EdD, is vice president and chief information officer (CIO) at Northern Arizona University. He has nearly 40 years of higher education technology leadership experience. Dr. Burrell began his career at Colorado State University then held the top IT leadership position at Hutchinson Community College (Kansas), Plymouth State University (New Hampshire), Saint Leo University (Florida), and Georgia Southern University before coming to Arizona. His research interests are in developing the humanizing aspects of technology and leadership development, and he serves as faculty for the EDUCAUSE institute. He is currently conducting research related to quantum leadership. As a board member of the Sun Corridor network he is active in developing networks that bridge the digital divide.

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“ We need to embrace a new paradigm of thoughts and I think we need to embrace the kinds of thinking brought forth by quantum leadership” STEVEN BURRELL

CIO & VP FOR IT NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

the observation of light as both wave and particle at the sub-atomic level, known as wave-particle duality. “Quantum leadership is the ability to view the world through many different facets and situations from all sides concurrently, and to see that with all these opposing thoughts there is a lot of duality. To stay with the quantum metaphor, I think to see beyond the visible light cast by today's complexity and chaos, quantum leadership draws upon three of our human intelligences.”

The first of these is cognitive intelligence (IQ), the familiar metric by which the efficacy of people and decision-making are often measured. The second is emotional intelligence (EQ), a better understood dimension of innate thinking which has become a key talking point for leaders in their pursuit to create people-first workplace cultures. The third is spiritual intelligence (SQ), distinct from theological thought and related to the understanding that profit, performance, attraction of skilled people and other organisational objectives must follow the fundamentals of doing good for people and wider society. It is a complex philosophy, Burrell admits, but breaking down the complex into the easily consumable is quantum leadership in motion. “Simplifying the vision in terms that everyone can understand is a practical type of thing technologymagazine.com

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that a quantum leader does,” he explains. “A very concrete example is driving leadership responsibilities to the front lines of the organisation. I've tried very, very hard to drive leadership as far down into the organisation as I can, past management, right to the front lines so that people feel empowered to lead from the front.” Putting this into practice, NAU has created fusion teams that draw experts from disciplines across the organisation to achieve a particular project outcome, both in terms of the human implication as well as the technological. It is a structural rethink that epitomises much of how Burrell applies quantum leadership’s core concepts with the broader purview as the university’s Vice President for IT and Chief Information Officer. “We're simply trying to connect what we know about technology in the world and empirical sense to what we know about people in the emotional sense, synthesising that with this kind of inner knowledge and spiritual sense,” he says. “That extends to creating shared governance to drive technology agendas, priorities and actions by drawing from a large range of people, and their voices; to enable different perspectives and inputs that ultimately help guide the decisions that we're bringing forth.” Holistic approach to digital transformation In terms of digital transformation, the backbone of any modern CIO’s responsibilities, it is a logical next step rather than a quantum leap. “There's a certain resistance to technological change, and particularly nowadays I think we've come throug a very intense period in response to the global pandemic,” Burrell says. “But digital transformation is very quantum in its 256

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approach, because that occurs at the multi-dimensional intersection of technology, people and culture. Given that quantum leadership in itself is holistic, multi-dimensional and its approach is relationship based and change orientated, it's an excellent leadership framework for digital transformation. It involves bringing people together from across the enterprise and having them work, not from the standpoint of the actual technological change, but more intrinsically on the good impact on people or what is it that we need to do to affect the mission.” Burrell extends this mindset to the university’s many key partners. HyeTech, a network and security services provider of

“We're simply trying to connect what we know about technology in the world and empirical sense to what we know about people in the emotional sense” STEVEN BURRELL

CIO & VP FOR IT, NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

technology giant Cisco, is a long-standing partner to NAU that Burrell believes already engages through the principles of quantum thinking. “HyeTech understands higher education, they understand the power of simplicity, our fiscal constraints and they understand the demands that are upon us. They pay attention to the climate that's going on around this – and not just from a technological lens,” he says. “They're always there to help us through the chaos, and they recognise – as do most quantum leaders – that there's great opportunity in chaos; it's not something to shy away from, but to embrace.” technologymagazine.com

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Microsoft is another key partner that engages at a level far beyond the transactional vendor-customer relationship. As well as products and services, Microsoft brings tremendous value to Burrell and his teams through knowledge transfer. “Microsoft has a tremendous ability to generate a lot of cutting edge research and thinking. Through their leadership channels they bring that to us in ways that match what we need to do in higher education, with digital transformation and other types of initiatives,” says Burrell. “And it's evident that they operate from a base of multidimensional thinking and transformational thought because they're concerned as much about the people aspect as they are about technology. They look through other lenses, bringing quantum capability and very strong EQ to the relationship, which I greatly appreciate.” With the fundamentals in place, NAU is embracing an ambitious future of extending and improving access to higher education. Plans are in place to reimagine policies and systems to remove the barriers for college goers who are the first in their family to take their education further. Burrell is also an advocate of simplifying technology and considering its impact from the students’ perspective. "From the students’ point of view, we spend a lot of time asking students and engaging them as a holistic approach,” he says. “We want to know what's most valuable to them. I’m of the opinion that perhaps not a lot of universities take the amount of time that we do to ask students those kinds of questions. “We're also actively driving collaboration and teaming across the institution and bringing together diverse points of view. 258

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Seeking new opportunities is so important to us,” he adds. Burrell’s statements are purposefully devoid of the buzzwords CIO’s often reach for - digital transformation, cloud technology, edge computing - he says. Instead he is committed to multidimensional, quantum thinking “that positions us to do good things with technology”.

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

“ Digital transformation is very quantum in its approach, because that occurs at the multi-dimensional intersection of technology, people and culture”

“I think if we're able to do that really, really well, we will not only help the institution achieve its evolving mission, but we will drive the institutions’ greater purpose to provide access to knowledge and education leading to the greater prosperity for all of Arizona.”

STEVEN BURRELL

CIO & VP FOR IT NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY technologymagazine.com

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FAST

PHARMACY SERVICE

BioPlus

GROWS

WITH NEW TECHNOLOGY WRITTEN BY: LEILA HAWKINS

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PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY

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BIOPLUS

Fred Gagle, VP of Technology & CSO, BioPlus, discusses the pharmacy’s growth and how technology supported their services even in the challenges of COVID-19

ioPlus Specialty Pharmacy knows that timely care is critical, especially in the treatment of cancer, multiple sclerosis, hepatitis C, and the other complex conditions served by this speciality pharmacy. Unlike a retail pharmacy, the speciality medications that BioPlus supplies are specialist medicines for chronic conditions. Founded in 1989, the company services patients nationwide and currently has brickand-mortar locations in six states. "We have a motto of ‘BioPlus, Where Healing Begins in 2 Hours’" Fred Gagle, the VP of Technology and CSO explains. "We are committed to being faster than other pharmacies and are proud to be the first and only independent, national speciality pharmacy to develop processes that quickly move through the steps from diagnosis to prescription fulfilment, within two hours, two days, and two Click operational processes.” As Gagle explains: "We call this the ‘Power of 2’ and it starts with our ‘2 Hour Patient Acceptance Guarantee’ that notifies physician offices in less than two hours whether a referred patient is accepted for treatment or not. Prescriptions then move through the ‘2 Day Ready 2 Ship’ process. In addition, patients with qualifying prescriptions can refill online with two simple clicks.”

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BIOPLUS

Fast pharmacy service Bioplus grows with new technology

More recently, BioPlus also announced its advanced operational processes that allow accelerated delivery of certain generic oncology medications, guaranteeing that they are ready to ship within 24 hours of the pharmacy receiving a complete referral. “Until now, no other pharmacy has ever eliminated the excess waiting period — the time from diagnosis to starting therapy — that cancer patients have historically experienced when prescribed treatment. We think of it as ‘hope delivered in 24 hours,’” notes Gagle. The organisation has experienced rapid growth over the past nine years, increasing its workforce of 80 to over 500 today, and generating US$1.5bn in revenue. "I think the growth has been a combination of many different factors," Gagle says. "It starts with our patient focus and our commitment to be the premier speciality pharmacy in the nation. 264

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"I also think BioPlus has valued the role of technology and how our technology investments have helped us maintain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Our speciality pharmacy has always focused on being ‘fast & easy’ for our doctors and patients, and technology is essential to meeting that goal." Gagle also explains that BioPlus has dedicated staff across every department, with a strong culture that has been built over the years, which includes giving back to the greater community. Playing off the ‘Power of 2’ theme at BioPlus, there’s a ‘2gether program’ that provides a lifesaving antibiotic through a partnership with OneWorld Health for every referral received at BioPlus. It’s part of BioPlus’ global vision to ‘heal the world 2gether’, helping to ensure patients across town and around the world have access to lifesaving and lifesustaining medications.

FREDERICK GAGLE TITLE: VP OF TECHNOLOGY AND CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER INDUSTRY: PHARMACEUTICAL LOCATION: UNITED STATES Fred Gagle, as the Executive Vice President of IT, ensures that the IT infrastructure at BioPlus is reliable, cost effective, secure, and easy to support. His department is responsible for making sure patient health information is secure and protected. Gagle deeply understands IT’s potential for making things easier for patients, doctors, pharmacists, business partners, and employees. Gagle earned a Master of Business Administration from the University of Central Florida, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration– Information Systems from the University of Florida.

500+ Number of employees

$1.5bn Revenue

1989

Year founded

“ Our pharmacy makes sure that the patient therapy and treatment plan are going well and this is managed through a very comprehensive clinical assessment system”

BIOPLUS

Like so many other organisations, this workforce was suddenly faced with the challenge of COVID-19, which necessitated a quick pivot to a new style of working. "Having almost 10 times more employees working from home was a real challenge," Gagle explains. "This introduced many variables like troubleshooting issues at employees’ homes with their internet connection and speed and all sorts of other issues that were previously in a well-controlled environment when people worked in the office. But it's also helped us become a better company," Gagle says. Pandemic restrictions meant BioPlus had to improve remote access to the network. "We implemented soft phones, introduced

“ Our speciality pharmacy has always focused on being ‘fast & easy’ for our doctors and patients, and technology is essential to meeting that goal” FREDERICK GAGLE

VP OF TECHNOLOGY AND CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, BIOPLUS SPECIALTY PHARMACY

COLLABORATE. CONNECT. CONVERGE.

Converge Technology Solutions Corp. is a Software-Enabled IT & Cloud Solutions Provider Focused on Delivering Industry-Leading Soutions and Services.

www.convergetp.com | info@convergetp.com

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Microsoft Teams, and had to quickly increase the capacity of our remote desktop servers. We changed all of our in-person meetings to virtual meetings, and even our sales team had to learn a different way of selling because many doctor’s offices only allowed patients and not visitors." By making these adaptations, Gagle says the company has experienced growth of 20% throughout the pandemic, which he calls "remarkable." In part, this is because BioPlus was already equipped to handle the pandemic challenges due to the nature of how a speciality pharmacy operates. "We've always been somewhat virtual. Speciality pharmacies manage very expensive drugs, and it takes a while for health plans to approve the treatment, so we store everything centrally, conduct patient consults over the phone and then ship the medication.

"From that standpoint, we haven't really changed our business model that much. Years ago we implemented Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology which made it easier to onboard new patients and fulfil medication refills for existing patients. We also added what we called the digital ‘Patient Journey’ which provides a comprehensive patient management system that includes a web-based patient portal, emails, text messaging, and educational videos that support patients by providing information about both the patient’s condition and their therapy, including potential side effects and how to manage that challenge. "Then we introduced our self-service ‘2 Click system’ for patients to refill qualifying medications in a much easier and faster way, and in 2021, we introduced multiple online forms of payments for patients." technologymagazine.com

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These digital experiences have led to accolades such as a spot among the Five Best Online Pharmacies from Money.com in 2020 and a 4.8 Google ranking from hundreds of patients. In the future, Gagle says virtual services will be essential. "I think that telepharmacy and telemedicine have always been the future of pharmacy and healthcare, but the pandemic has greatly accelerated the need for this. In most aspects, BioPlus has already been providing telepharmacy for patients since we do consultations, billing, and patient care all through telecommunications and other virtual technologies. "We may look into doing some kind of live video chat with our patients next, to give a more personal touch to patients. 268

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We have made large investments in online technology that can provide the best patient care and adherence to their medication and therapy. Our pharmacy makes sure that the patient therapy and treatment plan is going well and this is managed through a very comprehensive clinical assessment system. The assessment systems use the technology we developed and have refined to suit the unique needs of a speciality pharmacy." Over the years BioPlus has also shifted toward the cloud. "When we choose software and technology we always make sure that it is mobile-friendly and can be easily accessed from anywhere. Remote access is key for our current and future success and it is an area we spend a lot of time on. In fact, we are fully transitioning to

BIOPLUS

“ We made an impact and revolutionised the speciality pharmacy industry by becoming the fastest pharmacy with our ‘Power of 2’ promises”

the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS) along with using Citrix Cloud," Gagle says. BioPlus also uses a suite of Microsoft products, including Microsoft 365, Teams, SQL Servers, Power BI, and Great Plains. "Microsoft Teams has been an effective way to allow all our teams to communicate in this highly virtual world that we operate in today," he says. "We use Biscom which is a cloud-based fax system, and Salesforce CRM which is our cloud-based CRM system for sales. Our strategy is also to introduce virtual desktop infrastructure in 2022." Converge Technology Solutions is a key technology partner and has been supporting BioPlus' growth for over seven years. "They have always been there for us and provided technologies including load balancers, disaster recovery solutions, storage area networks, firewalls, Cisco switches, servers and other IT equipment. I can’t say enough about this company and I would highly recommend them as a technology solutions partner and vendor.” Gagle says that for the next two to three years, BioPlus' top goals will centre around connectivity. "This means that by using people, process and technology we will be deeply connected to the doctor’s offices and to our patients. "We set higher quality standards for the speciality pharmacy industry by becoming the fastest pharmacy with our ‘Power of 2’ promises. Moving to the cloud and being able to work virtually gives us flexibility as we expand and grow into other markets. We're licenced in all 50 states, and in the future, we aim to be the most connected speciality pharmacy in the US."

FREDERICK GAGLE

VP OF TECHNOLOGY AND CHIEF SECURITY OFFICER, BIOPLUS SPECIALTY PHARMACY technologymagazine.com

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