Hello, I'm Emma Walden, broadcaster and correspondent in residence at several of the Globe's largest innovative industry events. Today I'll be joined by two experts to discuss how business transformation is now being driven by ERP systems on the cloud and how a spectrum of cloud based solutions and innovations still remain untapped by many businesses where some have completed a basic lift and shift cloud transition. There's so much more now on offer and this discussion will explore how ERP systems like SAP on Google Cloud. Will be the key to becoming a future ready enterprise. I'm delighted to be joined by two leaders in this field. I'd like to welcome Ramesh Ian Swami, Managing Director, Tata Consultancy Services. Hello Ramesh. Hello Emma. And also joining us is Nehanshi Shah, Managing Director, SAPS Solution Engineering at Google Cloud. Hi Emma, Hello, how are you? Great. Well, Ramesh, if I could begin by asking you to perhaps share your broad market perspective on what you're seeing at the moment in terms of the position of enterprises on ERP. Well If you look at it right, we see 80% of the enterprise, they believe ERP is the back end engine that will help them to go with a better top line, better bottom line and accelerate their business performance out there in the market. But even when we keep talking to these customers, the reality is only 15% of them, they believe they have a robust system in place. Right. So we actually did a survey with the Everest Group to find out more insights into this whole play. And what it came out is a lot of these customers are in their journey, but they are trying to figure out the road map and a strategy to take things to the next level. And we feel it's a right timing now with the acceleration that cloud can bring in for digital transformations for all of these customers. And what also becomes a little interesting in the last few years is how does cloud play a key role in all of this ERP transformation, right? So earlier it was more like ERP was the core that will just get deployed on Prime or on a cloud? But now cloud has taken centre stage in all these deployments and customers are slowly realising that the transformation cloud is not part of the transformation, cloud is the transformation. So that's sort of where enterprises are at. But Shah, why is this a key for building a sort of future proof cloud based ERP? Why is that going to be a model for key to for success for these enterprises? They're Emma. Great question. There are two things driving it. One is business ability and the other is really reducing or optimizing the IT debt that companies have. So you think about it, the velocity of business over the last couple of years has changed dramatically. Customers and companies are more interconnected. And if you look at ERP as the brains of any company, you really need something that's much more agile where you can reduce reaction time from days and hours. Into minutes and seconds. So that's one piece. The second thing is most companies have grown organically over time over the last 10,20 years. So they have an enormous amount of IT debt, very complex IT system. What the cloud offers is a way to massively simplify this. You know adopt A micro services architecture that makes it really simple that enables you to put new business processes in place and really Drive new innovation. So it sounds like enterprises are waking up to the need for this. And what you're talking about there, Shan, is the streamlining it will offer. So Ramesh, that's why it's needed. Could you tell us more now about what businesses need to be doing right now to build this? Yeah, I think so. From our analyst service that we did right. I think we would classify this whole process in three phases, right. The phase one is where you actually have to do a re architecture is in cloud native. So Shah spoke about how customers are trying to leverage a micro service. So that's no more a nice store. It's actually a must have thing in the whole deployment where customers need to look at their complex business process taken out of the year. We put it as a micro service on the cloud. So re architecting your overall business process using cloud native is the 1st way to go. The second thing is how do you leverage the entire ecosystem that cloud offers? It's not just about deploying saps for HANA for a customer or for business or line of business, but how do you bring that and tie it with the data that you have on the commercial side coming from YouTube and all different sources by that big query engine, right? And bring that whole ecosystem coming together where customers are not only running a back end ERP, but they are having an ERP that talks to their commercial systems, to the front end systems, to the customer experience. And that is where you start showing more value to the actual business stakeholders out there. And the third part is the more complex part, right, where we see 53% of these customers while they want to change, but there's a lot of resistance in the organization to change, right. So it's also about how you build a culture within the organization where they are ready to adopt that change, very incentivize the customers where they are ready to bring this new technologies and take up these new challenges for that will eventually give them more business value out of what they are doing today. I'm actually touching there on the mindset shift that that's perhaps needed. Charles, what would you say should be uppermost in the minds of people running these enterprises in terms of their implementation strategies? Do you have an insight on that? I think there are two things, right? One is take advantage of the capabilities that the cloud provides for you. So there are two big ones, right, that pop out. One is the analytical capability that the cloud provides. The 2nd is the AI ML capabilities. So as you start thinking about innovation, it's really taking how do you, how do you take, how do you innovate around analytics and how do you innovate around AI ML becomes very key. So it's things like how do I drive better customer experience using AIML? How do I make better recommendations, how do I take data that's outside of the ERP? So how do I? Do better planning or how do I optimize my supply chain by taking information from partners as well as things that you know, tying in things like weather as well as traffic patterns. The other piece of the puzzle for a lot of the customers really becomes, you know, when you when you start thinking about business, not only taking advantage of the cloud native capabilities, but as Ramesh pointed out is start thinking about what is your business going to look like, how does it need to evolve, what are the new business processes you need to put in place. So this is where. Taking advantage of cloud native capabilities to drive a micro architecture or micro services architecture really comes into play. A good example of this is how do you better communicate with your business partners and customers. So what can you do to drive better outcomes with both your partners by helping your business partners understand what your demand looks like and then communicating better with your customers and just drive a better customer experience. What Shah you're talking about there, it sounds like basically you. In a very basic sense, it's unlocking amazing business value. Is that something you would agree with, Ramesh? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a lot of business value that we can unlock using cloudification of the ERP, what we call right. And Google Cloud provides a lot of good opportunities to do that. And one of the things that I would call out is the Cortex platform. So Cortex is a big accelerator for a lot of these customers. So they don't have to go or wait for this whole 3 year, five year road map. So they can pick up their supply chain challenges, they can, they can pick up their inventory issues that they're having today, deploy a quick solution in the Cortex and Cortex accelerates. The entire processor of bringing all the data together in a much more streamlined manner and it gives you a lot of templatized processes that will allow you to deploy it in a really short time frame. So what we see in the market is a lot of these customers are looking at quick wins and Cortex is the game changer out there that allows these customers to go with a very quick win. And sure the capabilities of cloud based ERP systems are also of course going to be supercharged by AI and machine learning. Absolutely. And this is I think the huge, huge advantage that customers have right now is to leverage AI. So it's from simple things like leveraging AI to. Optimize their financial close processes. So we see customers right now looking at things like how do I take my historical accounts receivable patterns to predict what my future cash position looks like or looking at, you know, how do I sense and respond better to changes in the supply chain. The cool thing and you know the big, you know the key recommendation I would have is as Ramesh mentioned, take advantage of the accelerators. And the reference architectures that have been developed, you know one of the things that TCS has done, which is really great is developed the TCS Digital Garage, which consists of use cases they've brought, TCS and Google have brought to life that you can take advantage of. And these are the these become templates or accelerators that you can start with to solve business problems. And it cuts down the implementation time by almost up to 50 to 80% and gives you ideas that you can leverage. Sure, Ramesh. Thank you both so much for sharing your insights. A great discussion and I'm sure very thought provoking for our audience will now be looking at what they should be implementing in order to bring about effective business transformation and so discover new capabilities. We hope our conversation is the catalyst for many to begin or accelerate their cloud ERP journey. Thank you. Thank you for watching. And if you'd like any more information, please contact gbu.marketing@tcs.com.