Welcome to Reimagining Higher Education, harnessing the power of the cloud. I want to thank each of you for joining us today in this virtual round table. We're going to have some interesting discussions today. And again, thanks for being here. I'm Kevin Benedict, your host. I'm a futurist and partner here at TCS. And over the last year, I've had the opportunity to meet over 20 higher education experts and leaders. And in the course of the conversations I had with these guys and ladies, I was able to take a lot of notes and learn a lot. And I want to just share some of the conversations and some of the visioning that I experienced this last year with leaders in higher education. One is the, in particular the need to take advantage of. The technology that's already been developed and use it for the purposes that universities have. For example, we all know about artificial intelligence. Students have a real need for artificial intelligence over the next 5 to 10 years. They need to be able to have digital assistance that will walk with them from the very first day of school to graduation. A digital assistant that based on assessments, knows what kind of learning style and. What kind of learning techniques are best for you? We see a time in the future when even the digit the content from courses can be altered and changed based upon your learning style. I look forward to that the ability to have that personalized experience. So both from even a mental capability, from financial capability to everything else, you have these digital assistants that are there to help. We also have learned that you know. One of the biggest reasons in many universities, nearly 40% of their students drop out between their freshmen and their senior year is that they remedial education wasn't provided at the time it was needed. So having that digital assistant be able to monitor the status of grades, courses, patterns of behavior with those students and be able to provide content at the time as most needed. That's another thing that we talk about a lot with the leaders out there. We see the need for analytics that once again recognize the patterns of behavior. So early on when a student most needs that inner somebody that jump in and intervene to just give them a give them some love, give them some additional help that can all be monitored in the patterns. We look forward to the day when students can have that. We also see a time when digital asset management platforms become hugely important for universities. Why? Because all that digital content that's coming out of the courses, out of the professors, out of everything, needs to be captured, often packaged. It needs to be stored, it needs to be licensed, it needs to be distributed. And we can see a day when that content is then put into marketplaces, higher education marketplaces where universities almost become studios of content, where they can create great film, great use. Cases, great lab experiments and that content can then be relicensed out for other smaller universities even to use out there. We see a time when some professors can become what they call rock star professors, right? Ones that have really invested in learning the digital technologies, the best of and know how to use media and be able to teach the courses. And those courses become so popular that universities see a real revenue opportunity of repackaging those and licensing that kind of content out there. So we see a time when licensing and versioning and digital content pricing and markets become hugely important. We see a time when there might just like Apple Music, there might be an educational higher education website, a marketplace for all these courses. And it's really about their marketplace, the ability to sell and promote and share this content out there, attract people and then licensed content from Rockstar professors. And we also see a time when traditional media companies think National Geographic providing the content for your biology courses. Think of these kinds of new relationships and ecosystems around higher education with media companies where you can dip into their. Archives of content to share with your classes. And we see a time when that's absolutely possible and business models start changing out there with that. One of the things that all of this has in common is it requires A comprehensive cloud infrastructure and an understanding of how to use that. And that's the topic of today, matter of fact. So we're going to jump in. We're going to really be talking about how can colleges and universities benefit. From a cloud first strategy and how should they go about their cloud modernization journey. So that's the topic of today. We have some distinguished guests here that will give us their best insight. And to do that, I'm going to ask each of them to introduce themselves and answer. We'll actually do two things. One, I'll introduce them if they can give a short bio and what do you like most about your job? That's the question I'm going to ask from you, Frank. Frank Figgins. We'll start with you. Frank Figgins is a vice president and CIO from the University of Texas at Dallas. Welcome, Frank. Thank you, Kevin. So I started out as a pure technologist. My education was computer and electrical engineering and computer science, and I spent about a decade doing that. Got moved into management to really be a force multiplier for this passion, to stay on the leading edge of technology. And I spent multiple decades in industry doing just that, moving up the leadership ranks. After a while, it just felt like quarterly earnings aren't enough. And I wanted to make a bigger difference. And I moved into higher Ed. I moved into higher Ed about just over a decade ago. And that's what I still love about my job today. It's the fact that what can we do for our children's, children's children, whether it's on the research side, it's on the instructional side, it's about the whole student success and the student lifecycle side. And you know, what value do they feel personally and monetarily down the roadway. So it's their education. That's me, Taj Patel. He's the Vice President and CIO and in responsible for IT from Stevens Institute of Technology tej. Thanks for joining us. Happy to be here. And Frank and Stan, it's a pleasure to be part of this panel. So what I know about my job, there's some fun facts, right? I never owned a laptop or a computer until 2004. However, I am an engineer by training. So it goes without saying I'm a geek. Right. But being in higher education for about 17 years and it brings joy when I see a new freshman class, when they come on campus and the energy that they bring. And it just motivates you to do bigger, better things and empower their journey, their experiences, their stay at any university for the next four to six years and make that journey so meaningful. That they carry on those experience while developing lifelong relationships that are so meaningful. And that is what something I love about my job. And on top of that at Stevens Institute of Technology technology is at our core and that's my passion and happy to be here. Thanks tej Stan. Stan Well Doll is the vice president and CIO of MIT from Carnegie Mellon. University, welcome Stan. Yes, hi, I'm Stan Waddell. I'm the CIO at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm so pleased to be here among this August group. I got into higher Ed and ultimately into the CIO role through technology as well. I'm an electrical engineering via undergraduate and training. I did software development in the telecom industry for a number of years. And then when the bottom fell out of the telecom industry, I ended up in higher red almost. On a whim and a chance and my intent was to work in higher Ed for a little while and then go back to industry. And funny thing happened along the way, I found out I loved it. Identify with the missions of education and research and outreach. I love being a part of the energy that comes from educating that next brightest group of individuals that are going to come out and take over the world and influence how we do things and how we live. And also take some personal. Responsibility and claim for the developments that come from our organizations. I have a profound sense that I'm curing cancer. I'm leading to developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning and even in silicon substrates. So, you know, as a geek, that really appeals to me. And I love being a part of this energy. Next Sushant, Tripathi Sushant. He's the vice president of Cloud Transformation. Or North America here at TCS. Thanks for joining us, Shishan. Thank you, Kevin. It's a real privilege and honor to be a part of this panel with so many esteemed panelists. And I'm delighted they could all make the time to join us this morning. My background, I'm also an engineer by training, so I can relate to the nerdiness and the geekiness that everybody talked about. And then somewhere along the way, I stumbled into an MBA and, you know, was able to balance out a little bit of my left brain with the right brain and get into the creativity dimension in terms of what I've been doing in the industry over the last 25 years or so. For a good part of my career with TCS, at least the last eight years or so, until a couple years ago, I was leading the healthcare business for TCS in North America. And being associated with healthcare, I think I got to witness a lot of elements of inequities, accessibility, which I also relate to education as an ecosystem, as a field. And I think I was extremely fortunate a couple years ago when I was given the chance to move into cloud as a service offering for TCS and take it across North America, across all the industries. I think one of the greatest delights of my joy is to engage with industry leaders. From different facets in the cloud journey and to be able to cross pollinate those learnings across industries and bring them to the leaders and also help them, you know, take their journey to fruition not by not just being a map room guy, but essentially playing it out in the battlefield with them and making it real. So that's extremely gratifying and I'm delighted to have this opportunity. Thank you, Susan. I want to thank each of you for the introductions there. Let's jump right into the questions here. What we're going to do is give each of you an opportunity to talk about these questions. If you have a follow-up comment, that's no problem. Let's just feel free to do that at any time. So question number one, Stan, let's start with you. How's that? What are the advantages universities might recognize by following a cloud first approach? That's a great question and. And I think that there are definitely some advantages to a cloud first approach. I think maybe principle among those is the ability to be flexible. So having the opportunity to be able to burst for temporal workloads or for special projects or where you just need a little bit more because the demand of specific process or piece of software is driving a need to have more infrastructure at your disposal. They also think that there's some financial benefits in the form of that shift from CapEx to OpEx, especially for organizations that. Or cash starved or cash strapped. It can be extremely beneficial to be able to move the amount of expenditure that one needs or an organization needs to do and spread that out over time versus coming up with the entire amount of investment available at day zero. That has been our traditional approach when we were buying things and implementing them and basically spending you know 80% of the projects. Lost in the first in the implementation phase and then spending about 15% percent supporting it overtime, Cloud gives you the opportunity to spread that cost out. I think that comes also with some risk. And that risk is that the cost can be more than what it would have been with the CapEx, CapEx approach because you never get to get out from under the subscription fees. But I think that you know those are a couple of a couple of advantages and maybe I'll pass it on to others and get them an opportunity to opine as well. tej. What are your thoughts? I think that stand pointed out a couple of really important benefits being nimble being Azure at the shift. And in our operating model, I think that's what it's done was referring, I think these are a really beneficial aspect of a cloud first strategy, right. But when I look at overall cloud first strategy, there are three or four pillars that I think about student success comes in mind right away, right. How are we driving student outcomes, how are we attracting students, how are we connecting these students in a much. Digital world today where the lines between physical and virtual or digital world has been blurred. Second one is around teaching and learning. How are we able to build environments for faculty and staff where they're able to come together in an environment where the outcome and the engagement can be measured, are scalable, are supported from anywhere, anytime? Off of the third pillar would be academic research. There is a significant importance if you are R1R2 university to have a cloud first strategy in place, particularly when you're dealing with DOD contracts and NIH grants and what have you which where allows you to operate in that hybrid environment. When a faculty comes with a significant amount of data storage or compute or GPU needs, you are able to quickly burst. Out and provide that support that researchers might be looking for. And the last one I would I would remiss if I didn't mention security right. I think a lot of times we look at our cloud first strategy and one of the gain that I have seen as we begin journey at Stevens was primarily getting ahead of some of the security challenges that we had maintaining on Prem. Environment and the technical debt that sort of came with it. So these are sort of like 4 pillars that we look at. Stevens, when we, when we talk about our cloud first strategy, having that say, obviously, there are a lot of challenges, right, and you have to have a strategy, but it's not a wish so much. You have to have certain ingredients to support that and one of the hardest one that I thought was. Culture shift, How do we talk about cloud technologies? And I'm not going to say cloud first anymore, right? We are not transforming our businesses, right. I mean we are trying to leverage technology as our strategy here. So how do you build a bridge for your IT folks, for your business stakeholders where they're able to walk and we are able to help them cross that bridge over whether it's risk killing, retooling and making? Opportunities available to our IT team members. So that's the way we look at cloud first strategy at Stevens that really empowers the learning, teaching and the research enterprise at Stevens Institute of Technology. Thanks tej. Frank. I love to talk about this. So it starts in no particular prioritized order with speed to market either. Being able to roll out stuff quickly that we need in order to meet and achieve our mission. But also from a research perspective for the researchers. So they can leverage this in order to fail fast and fail quickly and then redo things and understand what they really need in order to generate the research that need that, the seconds around that and. They talked to Stan and tej talked about this, but the fast provisioning and deep provisioning, so for example, during the first week or registration, these types of things, I don't have to purchase all this equipment that's ready for these big times. I can ramp it up and then I can ramp it down. And that works for the next point around business continuity as well. Sometimes as planned, sometimes things like COVID hit or you know your power grid goes out here in Texas and you need to be able to still run your business. Of IT and higher Ed, where this stuff sits or where it doesn't sit. And then finally another big thing to us is in higher Ed. I can't offer the compensation that folks at Amazon and folks at Microsoft and others can do. And even if I could attract those types of players that are 8 players around networking, 8 players around just keeping their environments up and running, excetera, excetera, how am I going to keep them? Excited all the time. And so by leveraging the cloud, I'm getting the pieces of these 8 players that I need and then the folks that I hire understand this thing, learn this. They can now go out and get jobs like that if they want to go that way. And then that opens the pipeline for others to come in. So I'm really a pipeline in order to grow more of those eight players out in the. Sushant, you have the perspective of being able to work with many different universities and kind of hear this and aggregate. What are your insights? Sure, Kevin, I echo the sentiments, you know from Page, Frank and Stan. I think all of those are extremely pertinent and valid. Reasons why university should be embracing cloud. But I want to take a step back to what you said at the very beginning of this discussion, Kevin. If I look at the core mission of an educational institution, a university, you know, it's three things. It's instruction, it's research and it's service. And that remains unchanged whether it's cloud or whatever the next new shiny object or technology may happen tomorrow. What's changing though, is that how do you reimagine these three dimensions of instruction, of research and of service for the next 5 to 10 years and beyond? And as the leader of the technology pillar who's doing this, as each of the CIO's on this panel has this opportunity to make that distinction or make the difference along the journey of the universities, how do you build that strong digital core on which? Reimagining of the business models can be done with agility, with scale, with speed at a lower cost, the democratization of that. So it's essentially an opportunity to put your effort or help your businesses, put your foot on the gas pedal and make it real for them. Because a lot of times, and I see this across multiple industries, a lot of times I find that it is the tail end of a transformation. Somebody wants to do that, but it. Says, hey, it's gonna take a year, year and a half to do that. And I think this is that inflection point in history where it with cloud, with the democratization of cloud and the accessibility of cloud, not just from an infrastructure standpoint but from an enterprise fabric standpoint. It puts the power in the hands of the technologists to truly set that core for the transformation and not be the tail, but be basically the tip of the sphere driving that transformation and then it comes back. If I peel the onion, it comes back to some very basic questions that I'm sure there should be asking to their business and their I'm sure they're asking to their business. What is so distinctive about us as a university? What do you want to stand for? Is this what we specialize in today? Is this what we want to specialize in tomorrow? Once we understand what makes us distinct, how do we make it real? You alluded to a data point and I saw some research as well, that only 60% of the students that enroll in universities graduate within six years and this probably 2017. I shudder to think of the pandemic. Has lowered those numbers. And if you further peel that data point, you know that's across the board in the United States. But in African American communities, that number is probably 40%. In Hispanic communities that number is 56%. So what I'm trying to say is we talked about AI, we talked about some of those things and we'll get an opportunity to go into that. But how do you bring in the information, the knowledge and not just my gut or intuition that hey, this is what I think we should do, but how do you do those? Early interventions, using the behavioral models, using the AI obviously takes a lot of work to build that foundation, to make sure that you can truly intervene with the right elements much before the student himself or herself knows whether they're going to graduate or not. Likewise, if a researcher wants to make something real for them, but you know if there's something that's slowing them down, or if they don't have the funds or the grants that they need at scale to realize that vision, how do you accelerate that? How do you bring speed? Agility and make it real for the researcher because if you look at the business models and the revenue streams, while student fees and all of those are revenue stream but some of the other intuition essentially. But the other revenue stream for the universities is also what they generate off of their IP intellectual property that they're generating from the athletic programs, what they're generating. And with the pandemic some of those revenue streams have been you know kind of slowed down. They're not probably as robust and as they used to be pre pandemic. So again. Long winded veil. What I'm trying to say is the ability to impact each one of those dimensions puts tremendous power in the hands and responsibility of course in the hands of all of us. And also it gives all close out by saying one final thing that it also gives us a chance to reduce inequities, the accessibility of education to students. I get it that the inertia of educational institutions is huge and it's difficult to make that change. I think the joke in the day was that it's easier to change the course of history than to change. History course in a university and I get that inertia, but still I think when it's rooted on these core mission of service, the core mission of instruction and know helping the students when you come from that place, it's possible to make that impact, to reduce inequities, to bring in greater inclusion across the student population, the faculty population and so on. So I believe there are multiple dimensions. Technologies can impact by embracing cloud first, and it makes it so real and puts the power in our hands. You hit on something that. That's very top of mind for me. And this is the concept of being nimble and agile and removing those blockers, that sort of support and nurse inertia in our organizations. And I think with COVID we really saw that you can knock down inertia and you can pivot on a dime, you can turn the Battleship 180 in a second. And I think what we saw was that you know, removing those blockers for decision making. And boiling decisions down to core principles and tenants that support the missions of education, research and outreach, you can make decisions very quickly and you can get buy in on those decisions very quickly and. I think that the cloud or having the capabilities of the cloud really enabled us to make that move. So being able to go to video conferencing, that's as a hosted solution. So we didn't have to, you know, string, you know MCU's and you know all the all those tech words that support video conferencing that we used to do, we didn't have to do that stuff. We relied on a vendor and that was their business, that was their core. Competency and they did it extremely well. For our Learning Management system, it was the same thing. We didn't have to go through and customize ways to embed digital assets into the Learning Management System. We relied on our vendor campus. That's their core competency. They do it well and they supported us phenomenally and that enabled the level of agility that did not exist 10 years ago. It didn't exist five years ago. But we were extremely fortunate that it existed 2 years ago. And I think that we've saw the value of that, we've seen the value of data, we've seen the value of leaning processes. There's no going back. So as consumers that pick up our phone every day, every day that we exist and we subscribe and use cloud services and it takes us a minute maybe to set up a cloud account and start taking advantage of all kinds of different solutions out there. We as consumers can be forgiven for thinking it's so very easy. But as leaders, there's work involved moving. Solutions in the enterprise on premise environment to the cloud, let's talk about that. How can senior leaders prepare themselves for this migration to the cloud? Let's start with you tej. Absolutely. I think I read somewhere and someone said if you don't know how to drive, buying a fast car may not be a good choice, right. And I think when we talk about cloud in general, I think a lot of time distance true, right, because we are trying to do a lift and shift we are we are always looking at moving our current existing. The workloads from our on Prem to cloud and just have a wish that it just works and then I don't have to monitor it, but we all know that's not true, right. I think some of the things that we have to consider when we look at cloud strategies overall, I think we have to keep business at our core like what Susanne pointed out earlier, right? What is the value add? I mean that's the bare bone question I ask myself, like moving VMS from on Prem to Azure, AWS, GCP, it's a piece of cake if you ask me, but reality, what is the value and why are we doing this? What we are doing this right? And that if we start peeling the onions one by one it really begins. How are we becoming financial, financially capable of making some of the decisions? Right. So for us I will give you a couple of high, high level information. Our points that we considered how are we going to adjust our procurement when we look at cloud systems, whether it's ERP or just the hosting providers Azure and or work day for our student registration or HCM. But that's the fundamental question we ask, are we ready to change our operating model, right, because clearly we are not changing our business. We are not trying to become Uber or Netflix which are. Digitally native business models, right. I think going back to Sushant and Stan, when you pointed out our business model remains same before pandemics, during pandemics and after where you have a faculty, you have a bunch of students and we deliver something so-called learning and teaching and they engage and they move on. That is going to be the core of what we do. But I think when what we have to really consider when we look at cloud is how. Technology is going to impact some of the journeys, starting from offboarding to onboarding. We talk about identity and access management, right? How can we make those journeys so meaningful that a student after four years will remember that? It was so much fun staying at Stevens Institute of Technology, right. And that's the mindset that we we're trying to instill at Stevens IT team where one of the things we talk about is student centricity and customer centricity at server code. That is our core. That is how we look at whether it's faculty, staff and student, anyone who crosses over campus. We're in a heart of Hoboken anyone who crosses the street retreat. Ms. potential customer or client, I know it's a non standard term for higher Ed, but that's the way we look at some of the digital transformations and cloud journey and how we are empowering our business stakeholders whether it's development and alumni, whether it's our student services, enrollment, research, enterprise, teaching enterprise and that is what becoming a very critical for us. I think that our business leaders, business leaders need to encapsulate a couple of things into their thinking and probably more than this, but these are the two principles that I think about. One is that we've got to shift our funding and finance models in order to be able to take advantage of a cloud first strategy or to take advantage of a heavy utilization of the cloud. And again this goes back to that concept of moving away from CapEx driven budgeting to a much more. Topics driven budgeting model and we're seeing this already, right. So you know Gardner says that today organizations spend about 15% of their technology budget on OpEx, OpEx type expenses. But they're saying we're getting ready to hit an exponential ramp on that and that by 2024 that 15% will be 60%. And I don't know about you all, but that really impacts the way I do budgeting. I operate on a budget that is much more CapEx centric and doing getting recurring dollars is a lot harder. But I think we've got to shift our thinking to be much more in that mindset of you know annuities instead of amortization and. So I think that's probably principle amongst our thinking, but I also think that we've got to start thinking much faster. In regards to how we impact the way we do business, I agree that we won't be changing our business model, at least not wholesale, not writ large. I think we're going to add some things to the way we do business that are going to encapsulate and incorporate remote and in court, incorporate digital presence and things of that nature. But we are largely going to be a. The higher education organization much to the same vein of Socrates. Someone sharing knowledge and people consuming it, but. There's going to be different ways that people want to engage and consume that knowledge. And we've got to look at, look to the cloud, I think for those applications that support it, just look at things, look at things that our students did on their own in Pandemic to support learning that are very, very functional and very impactful on the delivery of education, things like chat. Running their own Discord channels in their own Twitch channels and. Really magnifying the learning in real time texting to the class. Did you understand that? I don't really understand that. What do you think it by that And sharing links for videos in class resources. And I think we've got to capitalize on that. We've got to learn and recognize that has value and we've got to figure out how to magnify that value. So one of the things that was big at Carnegie Mellon and for all of us, I'm sure. During COVID was the inability to get to lab space. And one of the things that we did, we did, we moved very quickly on this in our melancholic of science. They engage with Emerald Cloud lab and actually got cloud lab services where they could do real time experimentation in physical labs through the cloud. And now we have a partnership with them that's going to be housed here in Pittsburgh that's going to allow us to do 100 simultaneous. Experiments running out of a building off not on campus, but on campus through a virtual interface. And we're going to spend about $250 million in building the nation's first cloud lab for physical experimentation and. It's that kind of thinking, that nimble thinking, that fast thinking that is going to enable us to keep the business model that we enjoy, that is effective, but enhance it so that we enhance those outcomes and so that our students do walk away going, wow, my undergraduate or my graduate education has enabled me to make a difference in the world and I'm going to do it. Brilliant. Brilliant. Frank. So there's a number of fronts. I inherited an IT organization that was extremely change averse and that was on everything didn't you threw in the cloud, which I'd had experienced very positively coming into the institution, you throw in the cloud, which now folks are thinking, Oh my gosh, there goes my job security or whatnot. If it was a situation that was that could have became toxic. And So what I did was I went the gentle approach here. I brought in a WS and Microsoft and had them look at the systems that I support, not all the ones that I support for campus, but just that run my internal systems and I had them do an analysis, you know what things that you've either lifted, shifted or re architected, what kind of savings would we get etcetera, etcetera. And so we picked a handful of those and I staffed the team who actually were interested or believed that this was the right way to go. So I didn't want it sabotaged and I and I put that in place and so that was the decision that we're going to go that route. The second was we needed a methodology and we looked at various methodologies and ended up going with a very close. Very closely aligned to what Amazon does, we took theirs and we put, we established a cloud center of excellence and the idea wasn't cloud first, but it was cloud strongly considered. So the center of excellence actually looked at should this be public, private, hybrid, local and it looked at each of the options. It did, you could call it a business case, but it was really more of a business proposal on each of those areas. And then we executed that. And so we got that going and that started to build the momentum and the understanding. Now the second thing then was we put this big training program in place, so we train anyone on campus, students, faculty, staff that wanted to learn about Amazon. And so we started offering training classes and we started offering opportunities to do various pilots like we had Alexa pilots that we brought in students to build these apps and we just had a variety of things like that to just start building awareness. Then we started encouraging and we put this in some of the performance plans too. Encouraging. Folks to look at these resources like we have with Gardner, even LinkedIn to in order to learn more about this and be able to at least get an idea of where this is important and where it isn't. And then and then finally. Luckily I have a future minded. PF finance. And so we were able to have the conversations around things that make sense to shift from CapEx to OpEx. And the future mining is important because I've worked with CFO's before who they take the capital approach because they believe this way you could just kind of run your system to dust, then you run the dust, right. I mean, they don't really replace it, but our CFO is not that way. So that's really it. It's still a journey. It's absolutely still a journey, but we've made the paradigm shift. To clouds, evil to cloud can be very useful and COVID was wonderful for us to show that because just Stan and Ed mentioned we needed these systems to all work and they did. We leveraged teams, we leveraged our Blackboard stuff. We used Amazon Connect, anything that one. Would think you needed to have to suddenly become an online institution and finally we took advantage of this to build a cloud strategic plan and it took a long time, but we have about a 30 page cloud strategic plan now and that is what we use and that is what we will refresh every year or two and keep moving forward. Thank you, Frank. You know on Frank's point about having a forward-looking CFO, I think that is so critical moving that operating model from CapEx to OpEx and also having a partner who understands it's not going to be cheaper or cost effective over the next three years and how do you align those savings and free up your team members who can contribute to other areas. I think that's the business. Yes, we had to build initially as part of our strategy. So that's a very good point, Frank. We all have a lot of similarities and I think we all beneficiaries to having strong CFO's that get the fact that technology costs money and has to be refreshed and changed periodically. My CFO loves to say I don't want to be in the pack, I want to be leading the pack from a technology standpoint and you can't imagine how ingratiating and satisfying that is. So sushant, now you have the opportunity to see this happen across thousands of organizations. So what's your insight? Sure, Kevin. I conquer with my panelists that the challenge of migrating to cloud is not about moving workloads or not about just making people comfortable with the concept of cloud or making the CFO comfortable with the CapEx versus OpEx. It's all of the above and some more if I were to take a step back even across the most progressive industries with a few exceptions where upon cloud native. Companies, I see only about 30 to 40% of workloads across the ecosystem has moved to cloud across industries. And there's a reason for that. You it's yes, touted as the next generation that will cure all ills or whatever it may be, but it's not that simple. Because I think when you're building your business case and I love the fact that each of the panelists mentioned that they've built a business case because that is really the key where I see organizations, whether it's a university, whether it's a retail, a CPG company or a healthcare company, struggle is. They're able to do some movement of cloud with some of the progressive business units if I could use that expression across support. And then they get stuck into what I call as a cloud purgatory because they did not conceive this grand design and they did not bring on board all the different stakeholders. So what I'm trying to say is you have to take a 3 dimensional view of this cloud journey, a holistic view. You have to take a technology view and technology has a lot of dimensions. You have to take an operating model view, which Frank also alluded to the culture that you need to change how the staff, the workforce will. I need you know. Violent of what Googles and Microsofts of the world employ kind of SRE, so that kind of engineer. So what's the talent I'm going to need and how am I going to evolve my operating model to bring about that cultural shift and change? And then the third is the business. In this case, it could be, you know, the faculty, the students or researchers, administrators, but what are they? What's the value creation for them? And it's very important early on that you align all of these personas together with the CFO persona. Where everybody comes to the congruence of what is the cloud journey going to look like, whether it's over the next two years or five years or whatever is appropriate timeline. But having that blueprint laid out early on with that initial 1215 weeks, whatever it takes to build out that business case before you truly take it to scale is very, very critical. Otherwise what ends up happening is you are able to do it in a Petri dish in a little, you know, Crucible if you will. Or at best you may be able to get one of the progressive quote UN quote business unit to align with that. But when you want to take it to scale, when you truly want to deliver the impact that you're trying to deliver, you're not able to scale it because you have not onboarded everyone and you don't have that grand vision. So it becomes a series of very small cloud specific initiatives that by themselves look good, but it's still not creating the grand value which is you know the whole is greater than the sum of its parts for the organization. So I think for senior leaders in. IT and technology again it's a joy and it's a burden at the same time to be able to help create that grand vision and then curate as to how slowly, how quickly do you want to turn that dial based on your organizational culture and what partners we hyper scaler or CSP like and Amazon or Google or the funding that they bring in or be it a service provider like TCS. But what partnerships do you want to bring into the table to make that real over time and. How do you have the agility and the flexibility to constantly iterate on making it real and making sure that there's value creation every step along the way that you can quantitatively articulate to all the stakeholders? So I think that early upfront work of creating that blueprint and getting the buy in of all the key stakeholders on that blueprint is very critical. And then the migration to workloads and all of that is the easy stuff. So that heavy lifting needs to happen early on. Got it. So let's move on to what are the financial incentives for moving to the cloud. We've talked about CapEx and we've talked about supportive CFO's that understand that there's an investment to be made and it you might not see those returns for three years. But when you do put that business case together as Sushant was talking about, what are some of those financial incentives or commercial incentives? That you're including into that business case. Let's start with you, Stan. Yeah, I think I'll stick with that theme you. I think that the CapEx, OpEx thing is a big benefit for organizations that don't necessarily have the financial wherewithal to start with big investments. And So what that does is that it allows you to spread that spend over time and it allows you to maximize your available funding. So we've talked a lot about you know, technology, but we've also talked a lot about the mission of the organization and it's not lost. On me as a CIO that every dollar that I get to spend on technology is a dollar that doesn't go to financial aid or doesn't go to building and ground management made upkeep and new buildings and things of that nature. And so when you're able to split that pie a bit more effectively by not having those big capital outlays, that's a big win for all of us. I do hope that I think you know as the way we see and expend money in the cloud today. It probably cost a little bit more money overtime than the traditional method of running things on campus. But I think that margin is shrinking every year and it gets smaller and smaller and at a certain point we probably will hit a break even where you know the annuity actually matches, you know the amortization. But right now I think that it's probably just a little bit more expensive but. The ability to spread that money in across the organization and across years probably outweighs the amount of spend that we end up spending a little bit extra on overtime at this point. Frank. It goes back to me to that resilience, agility and speed to market and some examples would be the human side, said I. The great resignation is certainly impacting us and DFW people are just throwing dollars. You wouldn't believe it at technologist. When I'm leveraging the cloud, not only are those technologists embedded in the product, but if I lose people that are supporting in a certain area, usually the cloud provider. Has some, although maybe expensive, but at least they have some way that I can tap into their support while I'm trying to get staff back up, and so I'm still providing the service to campus. The second are things like. When I need to scale the cloud or if I or a managed service, for example my edge network, I get a hold of my provider and it scales. Now when I have to build out AD servers in my data center or add new network boxes, whatever they are, routers or switches, I'm on a 6 to 12 month waiting time right now, which I know you all are too, and to being able to actually get stuff myself. And so that big bottleneck that has only gotten worse with the, you know, with the COVID situation and how some of the manufacturers have decided to react to it, I don't have to worry about that and the cloud because the people they're providing those services are doing that for me. So at the end of the day, those are the big ones. I would agree with Stan that from a near term perspective the if you look at the cloud solely as the dollars that you're writing checks for coming out that it is probably more expensive still at this time getting better. But if I look at that bigger picture, what's the cost to not have that service in place? What's the cost not to be able to quickly add new services that I need and those kind of things. I'm pretty confident that if you target the cloud to those areas that are most important to your institution that you'll find it is a cost savings. tej What are your thoughts? I agree with both Stan and Frank overall. But there's also when we talk about risk management, right, Overall for the entire institution, having this type of strategies in place goes a mile away, right, whether you're talking about audit and risk or what have you, what one of the examples I would love to share is. A lot of times we talk about cloud. It's essentially outsourcing XY and Z, right? I remember distinctly when I joined Stevens, we were about to make $2,000,000 investment in a sock center. Right, a security operation center and. We ended up deciding not to do that, not to make that investment, but use some of the funds from there to do other things, what Stan was saying. We built AR Lab to empower faculty and students to engage using HoloLens and HoloLens type technology. If you were to operate in a traditional model, we would not be able to do that. Otherwise a second one is and not only that, by having those kind of services it also improves your security posture throughout the university and hence the lowering the risk profile for your entire institution as well, right. So again I think that there are countless. Benefits to it. Again, I think in order to it's OK to go slow in order to go faster sometimes and I think that's the approach we'll pay the dividend in the long run for higher institution. So sushant, what would you like to add to that? So a couple of dimensions I want to bring to that and some of these elements kind of resonate with me, But also a surprising because as we do this initial cloud blueprinting for a lot of organizations, the going and thinking is that they're going to save a bunch of money. Then they come up thinking that we're not going to save any money. And I think one of the toughest place I've seen more in corporate enterprises and I'm sure in the university. The system would not be very different is selling it to the CFO that this is a plan that makes sense. I think the couple of things that need to be done right on that. What is I call as again in the whole blueprinting phase that early upfront investment in the planning is right sizing and projection for the future because the hyperscalers are driven of the CSP's are driven to get you committed to the largest consumption possible and they are done, you know they're responsibilities over. Sorry, I hate to put it so. Totally, and so blankly. But that's a harsh reality. What's important for you as a senior leader who's striving that charter is to make sure that your right size, what needs to be truly done because you have the ability to burst or to scale very easily. And what I've found, and this should not surprise all of you, even in the most progressive industries like CPG or retail, when we do a scan of the environment, we find the CPU utilization is somewhere between 20 and 30% because they've built. All that excess capacity, I'm working with a high tech customer today and they have committed again it's about $8 billion company. They have committed $43,000,000 in assets for hardware that they're struggling to sweat over the next three or four years. 4 or 5 million worth of that is just sitting untouched for the last one year because that's how much CapEx they want to absorb or soak up up front so that they're not delaying the six or 12 month process. And I think what I'm trying to get to is. That it's possible to right size it and to make sure that you're not overcommitting and you're fully consuming whatever you're doing with the CSP. And that's where I think you know a good business partner like TCS or anybody else, one of the top Gsis could help you do that right up front. Because when we look at the business case, I look at 4 quadrants in the business case, one is this truly cost savings, not huge, it's about 20%. If you're really do it right, it's of the order of 20 to 30%. Four or five year time horizon and good GSI will underwrite at risk for you make sure that you stay within that. The other is cost avoidance IE in future you have to go out and procure and buy and live through those cycles that cost avoidance. The third is the risk avoidance from the security from the IP and all of those things that we talked about. And then the 4th is what we're talking at the very beginning, the value creation for business. And if you're able to stitch all of these four components together with a level of detail and put it in and this has stood the scrutiny of. CFOs and ports of the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 corporations who are very tough about looking at every number and wanting you to defend every number, Mr. CIO. So building that whole detailed model up front. And then once you have that, you have also significant leverage with the CSP. You can get them to sit across the table with you and come up with a funding model where your initial bubble cost, your transformation costs, your training costs, all of that could be addressed. By way of investments, through them, through a partner, a combination of the two and so on. And you can spread that CapEx or OpEx the way that your organization desires over a three to five year time horizon in a way that makes the most sense for you. Now here is where it gets bad. This is not an exercise that most CIO's to day in and day out. It's you know once in every few years that you have to do that. It's highly complex. It requires a lot of specialization and that's where I think leaning on some external help, they call it outsourcing for that little business planning or whatever makes a huge difference. There are dimensions where help is needed, warranted and it will take your game to the very next level and that's where it's perfectly OK to lean on that help to create a much larger impact. For the ecosystem that you're serving and the mission that you're serving and if you're able to get all the key stakeholders to rally behind that cost, that mission by building that blueprint and getting the congruence upfront, the finance and all of those dimensions just become a matter of detail and it becomes very real. And that's a lot more productive and gratifying journey that you live as a CIO, making that real over the next three to five year time horizon as against fighting for every dollar of budget and trying to justify. Every little thing that you want to do through each step of the journey. The last question for the panelists today is one that I talked a lot about when I was with or I learned a lot about, I should say, at the beginning of COVID, when I was speaking to higher education leaders, they're saying our students are desperate for engagement with their professors. They don't want to just be an anonymous student in a digital world. They want. Yeah. Very close engagement so they can learn at the feet of the sage, if you would. So how can cloud infrastructure in this whole movement to the cloud, How can that be used to improve and enhance that engagement between faculty and students? Let's start with you, Stan. Awesome. So that's a wonderful question and I think that some of our comments sort of drive a way of thinking about that for the future. And for me it's a lot of this, the concept of purpose built. So again, relying on the knowledge base that is our vendors that exist within our vendor space to help us understand which feature sets are becoming more popular, which feature feature sets are driving adoption. Of technology and then not having to build that stuff ourselves. So Sushant mentions getting help and I think that that's a great concept, right? We don't have to have all of the knowledge ourselves about how technology can be leveraged effectively. We don't have to have all the knowledge ourselves about how the mission can be executed upon. So you know, having organizations like TCS that you can partner with to get a sense for what's happening. In the industry, what the trends are, you know, relying on your professional organizations to see what trends are developing your peer groups, what they can tell you, what trends are developing and. And to your point, directly, the students will tell you, they will tell you when they feel you're falling down in regards to engagement. Or they'll tell you when they found the technology said that works well for them and asked if the organization can go after that technology and implement it. And we've seen this with things like Slack. We've seen it with things like the side channels that they're using to communicate with and they're asking us to go out and. These things or similar technologies that they can utilize, but you're exactly right. A lot of the satisfactions that students are able to derive when interacting with their organizations is driven by engagement, whether that be faculty or that be mentors or that be the staff that build relationships with the students over the times that they are here with us, on campus and away from us over the summers are extremely impactful. And it does us well to think about how we can capitalize on that engagement and maximize. Frank. I constantly think of this situation because at the end of the day that's that is the key. Or even though we're in R1 and research is right up there too, it's 1B1A is this answer, it's the students decided and we're tackling it in a few different ways. Number one is we've built a very strong connection with the student government, both undergraduate and graduate, and with the students that we hire and the roles we put them in. I have 112 student. Voice, and almost every one of them are in roles where they're making a difference. They're not just there to get a paycheck, like they're running the technology bar, not, you know, not alcohol, but all the other things that they provide there. And we listen to them and we try to be their lobbyists with my fellow cabinet members on things that we're here. So that's one big piece. The 2nd is it's the rise of the introverts. So one of the things that was discovered. During COVID and we had to rapidly shift to five pedagogies and most of them were all of them had some online component or all was that the introverts now were able to contribute to the conversation. Somebody would moderate the chat, they could raise their hand right on the reactions component to it. And so suddenly the instructors got more information and more input. And we also heard that in other areas like advising and human resources and people were more comfortable to actually have a conversation. So they were striving for a connection. In that piece and in thirdly, it's critical that within IT that every hire that I can make, somebody has to be able to think the way that we've been talking about here. Your role is to advance research instruction and outreach. It's not to be the best DBA or the best sys admin. And so we want folks that think like a student that can empathize with the students and can also help look for those opportunities and it does help that most of it is introverted. Too. And so a lot of the things that we have learned from an instructional side has actually helped my organization and we've decided to be largely hybrid and remote. And part of it is because we're actually more productive and we're working Better Together in this model now than we were beforehand, which was a little bit of a surprise to someone like me who's extroverted and loves to be around lots of people. At the end of the day, you know, we all have to learn. Thanks tej. Frank well said few comments here. The way I look at students, right, I think. They have expectations. Right. And this expectations are set to their K through 12 education. When I went through to 12 we had paper and pencil and majority of the things happened there. We had to go to library to do some research. Right now my 7 year old is Siri. Do my homework or what is a Black Mamba right and the series spits it out or otherwise I would say I have outsourced reading to Alexa so I don't have to read to my children right? But joke aside, there are few specific things. That we did during the pandemic One is we put together a CIO student advisory. Where I am in front of them reporting out in terms of what new technology investments are being made, how it's impacting student experiences and what other benefits and challenges and opportunities, they are saying that they would like me to hear and implement it. And that has been a phenomenal way for us to get into that feedback that we were never exposed to before 2 like you, Frank, we employ about 30 to 50. A student colleagues and we put together a technology advocate program for those students and it's a four year journey. You start out with your first, second, third, 4th, and as you move on as you get close to sophomore and senior year. As you decide whether you want to study cybersecurity or analytics, they get to partner and work with individual team within our own department and then during their last year we offered them an internship program, right. So all of this is paying dividend for us. They have become the change agent for us, for my team, for the faculty and they drive some of the technology decisions on campus as well and we like to support it as much as we can to appoint 1. For a student worker, build a Atilla chatbot so that they could get 365 responses from IT team. And it's phenomenal work. I mean they learned, they grow, they provide feedback and the product, the outcome, it's superb where you see the engagement from IT and student. And the last thing that I want to mention is people, process, technology, vendor and data. It's a new game. Here and I feel like if you don't follow the synergy or model or framework, I think we'll miss out on a lot of great opportunity to do bigger, better things for faculty, staff and students. I think it's incredibly heartwarming to see how far the university ecosystem, and especially hearing from these leaders today have come in their thinking about cloud and embracing cloud. I heard some extremely encouraging comments, Frank said. Cloud is something that allows him to make a big difference. It's a force multiplier. Tech remarked about helping students, especially the freshman class, will be the future citizens of the nation, do bigger, better things and help them experience things differently as they go along the journey. And then Stan talked about the contribution that Cloud allows to make, including curing cancer and substrate research and using AI ML. So I'm truly delighted. See that the senior leaders in IT recognize the power of cloud and they also talked about some of the struggles in terms of getting the CFO to see, you know, OpEx, CapEx paradigm, getting the cultural shift in the organization to embrace cloud. So in closing, what I would say is there's a tremendous recognition of the power of cloud amongst the leaders in the university ecosystem and the places where they need a little bit of help. If they would lean on either the CSPS or the GSIS or any of their partners to help build that articulation, that business case that they can socialize and get a buy in from all the stakeholders, I think it would set them on the right trajectory to deliver the value of cloud and that would be an incredibly gratifying journey. So that's everything I have to say this morning and thank you very much for your time. I want to thank Tej, Frank, Stan and Sushant for joining us today and participating in our round table. Thank you very much.