3174: DXC and AI-Powered IT: Enhancing Performance, Security, and Efficiency

[00:00:04] What does it take to drive true digital transformation in today's AI-driven world? And how can enterprises leverage observability, automation, and AI, all those big buzzwords, to modernize IT applications and optimize their IT environments? Well, today I'm joined by Howard Beauville, Executive Vice President at DXC Technology.

[00:00:27] And he's someone that brings a wealth of experience in cloud, cybersecurity, and enterprise IT. But today we're sitting down together for a live conversation at Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, where both DXC and Dynatrace are showcasing their long-standing partnership and talk about the role of AI-driven observability in accelerating business outcomes. And for anyone that's not attending the event this week,

[00:00:54] that is one of the biggest themes that I'm seeing, both on the stage with the keynotes and the conversations around the show floor. So from digital twins and post-quantum security to the real-world impact of AI in IT operations, we've got a lot to unpack today. But enough for me. Let's get my guest onto the podcast now. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?

[00:01:21] My name's Howard Borville. I'm the president for our consulting and engineering services here at DXC. That's 50,000 world-class engineers distributed around the world, making the world's systems and the world's largest companies work and operate. Awesome. And also we were talking before we started recording today. DXC is a huge company. But can you tell me a little bit more about the origins of the partnership between DXC Technology and Dynatrace?

[00:01:47] Of course, yeah. I mean, so we have a number of long-standing relationships with most of the largest and best technology companies. And the relationship with Dynatrace has existed for 15 years, which is not long after actually it was founded. I think it was founded in 2008. And we just see a huge amount of value from the capabilities that they provide, because it gives you such deep insights in terms of business processes, applications, and then the independent infrastructure.

[00:02:11] And because of the nature of the mission critical work that customers trust us to do, Dynatrace is a perfect tool to allow us or platform to allow us to be successful in those endeavors. And I'm curious, what were the primary objectives and indeed mutual goals that led to that collaboration? I feel like there was a story there too. Yeah. So, kind of when you're dealing with very complex environments in terms of hundreds, if not thousands of applications, all the interconnected points, the infrastructure upon which it runs,

[00:02:38] and you're trying to assure the best quality service, so if there's any outages, you can hopefully predictively see those before they happen. But if they do, you can address them quickly. Without the capabilities of what Dynatrace provides, you're kind of staring into the abyss. You've got no real sense as to where problems can arise.

[00:02:56] So, Dynatrace is kind of a perfect partnership with DXC because they allow us to actually, through their observability tools, see a business process, deconstruct that business process into the constellation of their own applications, third-party applications, all the interconnected touchpoints. And we can then put in various monitoring tools and logging, as you'll have heard at the conference, to start to see points of standard deviation. So, when things are going off the rails, we can then prevent it before they go completely off the rails.

[00:03:24] So, it's a very key ingredient to the overall mix of services and capabilities that we provide to our customers. And I think if we were to look at any technology project, there's an increasing focus now on things like ROI, what tangible benefits does it bring, what value does it offer? What impact have you seen or will you see this partnership bringing to client digital transformation? And just to bring that to life, are there any specific examples of how the partnership has maybe accelerated a client's digital transformation?

[00:03:52] I love that question for a number of reasons. One of which is that conversation is increasingly coming through from customers and it's kind of that classic quote that's used in many different contexts. I think it was originally used in advertising, which is, half of my advertising spend I waste and the other half I don't. You could apply the same to IT, but the question is you don't know which half. Which one would you stop? What we do in partnership with the capabilities that the Dynatrace platform provides is we build a digital twin.

[00:04:19] And the genesis of this capability that we build came from work we do in the manufacturing space. So, when you take a production line offline, that's very expensive. So, what started to happen in the late 1990s and early 2000s was you create a digital twin that was a real-time representation of that actual production line. And then you can model what you could do to improve the productivity of that capability. We increasingly provide that to services companies in financial services, healthcare and so on.

[00:04:47] And with the capabilities that we get from Dynatrace, create a real-time digital twin. So, if you tweak a thing, how does that help another thing? Or how does it take cost out from a particular area? Or how does it improve a customer experience because you've improved the process? But the reason why that's becoming ever more prevalent is because of artificial intelligence. And every customer wants to do experimentation as they should with artificial intelligence. But they're unclear as to the benefit that it will provide.

[00:05:15] So, we can actually model with your current environment, you put this capability in from an artificial intelligence perspective, and you will derive this benefit. And these are the things that you have to change within your system to get there. And that's getting tremendous traction. There isn't a single customer or prospective customer that I talk to that isn't interested in having that level of insight. And the final point on your acceleration is the Dynatrace tool has come from a heritage of deep technology people.

[00:05:43] And the businesses now knew that this tool existed within their businesses. So, when we build these digital twins and ensure this modeling, it's like the dark arts. It's like, how have you made that happen? It's like incredible. And it's because of the capabilities that the platforms had, but it was solving for different problems as opposed to the business process transformation problem. And I think another big trend that we're seeing here is businesses are waking up to the fact that they can't do everything on their own, and they shouldn't do everything on their own. Collaboration is where it's at.

[00:06:09] So, in what ways has this combined expertise of DXC and Dynatrace, how's that improved things like application performance, customer experiences, all those things that enterprises are chasing? Yeah, so getting the insights of your environment is the first thing. So, know the inventory of the capabilities that you have. And there's these terms in IT which is physical and logical. So, the physical are the infrastructure, the physical boxes that it runs on, networks, and so on. The logical is the actual configuration items that connect applications, data sets, and so on and so forth.

[00:06:40] When you start to actually put that in, you've got lots of routes that things can go through in terms of applications can route in this particular way, data can come from a particular area. And unless you get that routing correctly, if you're going down side roads, you get application performance issues, you get latency. They run more slowly. By actually having this logical view of the environment, we can start to see, okay, we need to change the way that the application is routing.

[00:07:05] Or it's running on a box that doesn't have sufficient CPU capacity, compute capacity, for it to run effectively. Or this database is running hot. What's the independent infrastructure on that? Is there a problem in the network? And all of that happens all the time dynamically. There's always changes in the environment. There can be roadworks that carry the analogy on that then causes congestion in particular areas. So, that's how the tool and then the expertise that we bring with our certified engineers lends itself to actually improve the application performance management. Why is that important?

[00:07:35] How many times have you called a call center and the call center agent says, I'm sorry, the computers are running slow? Right? The computer's not running slow. The whole system has got an issue within it. And it affects user experience. My background is not just being a DXC. I was a user, a consumer of this service when I was the chief technology officer at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. And the chief executive there, Brian Monahan, had this notion that every digital interaction matters.

[00:08:01] It needs to be seamless and it needs to be frictionless. And any degree of latency actually affects the brand of the company. And if you think in those terms, you have to get everything instrumented. Otherwise, you're going to diminish the quality of the experience that customers have. We live in an age of instant gratification. And if we aren't getting things quickly, then we get dissatisfied. So, therefore, this instrumentation is essential for ensuring and assuring the customer experience of the customers that we serve. And there's a lot of excitement here at Dynatrace.

[00:08:31] Perform a lot of big announcements, a lot of conversation on the show floor. If we look beyond the event, how do you see DXC and Dynatrace further evolving your partnership to address these emerging IT challenges that we're seeing? Because the pace of technological change is moving faster than ever. It gets absolutely faster and faster. So, we have the most certified engineers in Dynatrace than any other company. And we'll continue to make those investments. We have a center of excellence as well to also help customers in terms of their training and development so they get familiar with these tools.

[00:09:00] The next phase of the relationship that we have with Dynatrace is pulling together the application groups that are typically in a different organizational grouping within a customer, the infrastructure groups and the cybersecurity groups. And using the broad capabilities that Dynatrace has to actually de-risk from a cybersecurity perspective, improve operational availability from an IT perspective, and within the application space, improve application performance management. And also, assure that the cybersecurity risks aren't inserted into that.

[00:09:30] But what we're starting to see an increasing amount of demand for is in kind of two other areas or maybe three other areas. The first is that digital twin, tying to business processes and then rebuilding the system and having the assurity that you'll get to a good destination when you've done so. The second is around laws, rules, and regulations. If you're in a regulated industry, how can you demonstrate that you have the controls in place to internal audits and regulators? And increasingly, we're using that tool.

[00:09:57] So talking to a different group of people and customers as to how they use the tool. And then the third element, which is huge, and it will initially be a trickle of demand, and then it will be a deluge, which is post-quantum security. And that's addressing the problem of quantum computers that will bring a huge amount of value, but every technology has a yang to its ying. And the yang on quantum computing is it will de-encrypt all of the encryption protocols that we currently use to protect data in the public sector and the private sector.

[00:10:27] And what the partnership that DXC has with Dynatraces allows us to actually discover the environments that actually have encryption techniques that will become vulnerable first, and then how you think about remediating them. And when I say that's a deluge, depending upon what vintage you are, if you remember Y2K, this will be as the same as Y2K, but it will be a deluge because there was a more measured approach to remediate the environment. Because Y2K had a date, which was December 31st, 1999.

[00:10:55] On quantum computing, nobody has called out yet when quantum computing will be at a production capability to de-encrypt, but this is the decade of quantum computing, so it will be in the next five years. Now we're in 2025. And the amount of time necessary to remediate all of the work for de-encryption has already passed. It will take more than five years for most enterprises to do it. So that's why we'll find a sudden deluge of work coming through.

[00:11:17] But we have a winning start here with the partnership of DXC and Dynatrace because we have the tools and the capabilities and the practice to actually see where the vulnerabilities are. It is, it can be quite daunting to think that so many people are counting down on when that date is going to be. And for many enterprises, they have hundreds, if not thousands of applications, a lot of legacy applications, some that businesses just won't let go on certain departments. And at DXC, I know you help your customers modernize some of those applications.

[00:11:44] So I'm curious, if we take all the conversations you've been having with your customers, maybe here at the event as well, are there any trends in what businesses and tech teams are focusing on this year? What's top of their agenda? Are they thinking about that quantum computing, breaking encryption, or is it something else? So the quantum is starting to have conversations, but I don't see that necessarily being a large body of work this year. But at some point it will be.

[00:12:09] The conversations are the conversations you have every year in terms of how do I ensure that my environment's run more effectively? How do I ensure I've got good performance? How do I ensure I'm protecting myself from cybersecurity? They're always constant. But the other conversations are as to, I'm under pressure from my chief executive or my CFO to do things with AI and the productivity gains that that will give. How do I even begin to think about that?

[00:12:32] And how do I also do it where I don't open Pandora's box and cause all sorts of subsequent downstream issues, which are unintended consequences because we've never truly understood what we're doing. The observability capabilities that we have, obviously in the application space, allow you to tag applications, understand how those applications are built, right down to who built them. It's called the software bill of materials. We can also help on an AI bill of materials so you understand how they've been built, how they're put together and so on and so forth.

[00:12:59] In that context, however, in certain cases, the things won't be built by a developer. They'll be built by an AI capability. So how do you factor that in as well? So there's a lot of conversations and consulting work we're providing to customers in that space as well, in terms of absolutely rush towards the opportunity that will exist with AI, but do so in a measured basis so that you don't actually cause problems. You can have the backtrack following a letter. Yes, completely with you.

[00:13:25] And two of the big trends I've noticed here is AI observability and ROI on tech projects. So we kind of talked about ROI at the very beginning of our conversation, but how are you leveraging the expertise at Dynatrace as technologies like AI to ultimately help DXC and indeed your customers revenues implement some of the improvements? Existential is used a lot in terms of different contexts, but in terms of the industry that DXC sits in, which is IT services, which has a lot of labor-based work in it.

[00:13:55] DXC is in the Goldilocks zone of what will be to be an AI IT services company. We have 50,000 engineers globally, and that is the right number for us to be very, very confidently leaning into all the productivity gains that will happen from AI. So let me unpack that a little bit in terms of what I mean by the existential moment and the Goldilocks zone. Many companies in the IT services space, their business model is to get you somebody as quickly as possible to do a body of work for you.

[00:14:22] And in that paradigm, there's a number of companies that are 600,000 big, 700,000 big. There's many companies that number of employees because the competitive advantage would be to just get you somebody that can do a body of work as quickly as possible. What happens with AI, particularly in knowledge-based work that we have in IT, is you'll get a lot more intelligent augmentation. So writing lines of code, more and more of that will be done through AI. There will always be a human in the loop, but not as much and as not as extensively by any measure than what it currently is.

[00:14:52] And if you're a company with 700,000 employees and your entire DNA has been to actually do that business model, to cross this chasm, as written by a famous author, Chloe Christensen, to the new space is terrifying. Because how do you reskill? How do you actually offer those levels of productivity gains when you've got so many employees from all various mergers and acquisitions you've done and people that you've recruited? We can lean into that very, very quickly.

[00:15:18] I mean, we can offer 20, 30, 40% benefits in ROI because we've been doing a lot of development in terms of how do we automate as much as we possibly can in how we actually modernize applications or rationalize applications and then how do we run them? And we can do so without terror because the market is going to be big for us, but we've got the right size of engineering pools to actually do so in such a way that we don't have to worry about doing large layoffs. And before you came on the podcast today, I was looking at your history throughout your career.

[00:15:46] And one of the things that I've found or a few things I've found, you've enjoyed leadership roles at IBM's cloud platform, technology lifecycle services and cybersecurity. So I'm curious, how have you seen the industry evolve throughout your career? And what excites you most about what you're seeing happening in the industry right now? Yeah, I mean, I regard purely through the date of birth and serendipity to have lived through moving from analog and chemical use of photography to digital, the internet, and then the adoption of those technologies.

[00:16:14] And then from internet into the iPhone being the most powerful piece of technology that you had up until that point. It was a technology that you were given by your company. What that's then meant for cloud, cloud in terms of the amount of innovation, in terms of startups could actually just come up with an idea, write some code and get running. And now we're into AI and quantum computing. And everything gets faster in terms of the rate and pace of adoption and what it means to us in our lives.

[00:16:41] AI absolutely needs to be managed with a responsible way. They have been involved actively since 2014, 15 in terms of responsible AI initiatives. They talked a lot on those topics over the years. Quantum computing, if we think classical computing, the ones and zeros computing that we use now has changed our lives. Quantum computing will unimaginably change our lives because that's going back to nature. Quantum computers use atoms to do calculations, not ones and zeros.

[00:17:07] And they can do calculations, mathematical calculations that are completely impossible to do on classical computers. What does that mean apart from a great geek fester if you're a mathematician? It means things in life sciences, so protein analysis, molecular analysis, space travel, materials management, all become far more realizable than what they were previously. So huge transformations about to come through. But every transformation has its patterns.

[00:17:34] So it may not be a pattern, but it may rhyme in the way that it comes through. So taking upon the experience that I have and helping guide the businesses that I run and the customers that I support on these various areas draws upon that kind of wealth of experience from all the fortunate positions I've had working for incredible companies and all the great mentors and people I work with where I've learned a lot from them. I think that's a powerful moment to end on. But before I let you go, for anyone listening wanting to find out more information about anything we talked about today, obviously DXC is a huge website.

[00:18:04] Any way in particular you'd like to point to everyone listening? So connect with me on LinkedIn. I post a lot of the content in terms of what we're doing, what we're thinking about, the innovations that I see, links to other companies and partners. So please connect Howard Bourville at LinkedIn. Well, I know how busy you are today. Back-to-back meetings, so many conversations on the show floor. Just thank you for sitting down with me. You're more than welcome. Thank you. I've really enjoyed the conversation. You're clearly deep in this area. So I really value the insights that you've provided by the questions that you've asked.

[00:18:29] So with AI, observability and automation both shaping the future of IT, how should businesses be preparing for what's next? And how do they ensure that they're not just keeping up with change but staying ahead of it? I think we covered everything today from DXC's partnership with Dynatrace to the impact of AI, digital twins and post-quantum security. But for everyone listening, what were your big takeaways of anything that you've heard today,

[00:18:56] anything that you've read about the event or things that you were seeing in your industry? Let me know your thoughts on how you see the AI-driven transformation heading next. As always, techblogwriteroutlook.com, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, just at Neil C. Hughes. But that is it for today. So thank you for listening as always. And until next time, don't be a stranger.