Tim Perkins, BMC | BMC Exchange VIP

This is texturong TV. Hey guys, we're at BMC exchange. And we're talking about how Walgreens is using the SAS edition of control-m to apply orchestration more widely across their entire organization.

How you doing? Welcome the show. Thank you very much.

You guys have been a customer of control and now you're moving to the SAS Edition. What kind of drives that what's the shift? And what do you guys trying to change or accomplish?

One of the areas that we're trying to modernize is around our batch processing currently. It runs on one of our mainframes, which you'll hear in the industry many people try to move away from the Mainframe, but you just seem to can't get over that hill but also we have a single point of failure with the Mainframe. So our objective is is to shift it to a Cloud solution to where we have a little bit more self-service and automation for our developers to be able to roll out more of the batch jobs on their timing as opposed to having to go through a mediator what that does.

It removes that single point of failure in the event that we do have an outage. It doesn't cost that impact of Revenue to be skyrocketing to the business, but allows us to also be able to control how we can deploy how we can make sure that we're meeting those future business demands coming down. Ultimately, will this be kind of a hybrid play because you still have the Mainframe for a while and you'll have the SAS Edition in the cloud.

So how long a transition is this or we'll both run together simultaneously for a period of time or maybe forever given them things been around for 50 years. Yeah, we we don't want it to be forever because that TCO is still there. We don't want the double run cost and so one of the things that we're trying to do is make sure that we have great communication with our business partners our pios and making sure that they're committed to have those applications.

First of all that they have in transformation programs that they do retire on time. And then in that parallel effort while we are shifting those jobs to the cloud we want to make sure that we meet the timeline so that we don't encourage additional licensing and expenses. So again within the next 18 months we feel that that's a reasonable time to be able to accomplish that but we want to quickly make sure we reduce that double run cost as much as possible.

So What attracted you to control m i mean you're already customer before there's a couple other options out there what made you land again on control end We have a division that's over in the UK that was already using control them. And so our objective was is to try to make it as a global solution. And so we did our own RFP given that we were a little bit behind schedule and make sure that it was the right solution and not have multiple tools or software across the organization but the Streamline and into one single-playing glass purpose and so once we chose control them out of all of the other products that we did our RFP we were very satisfied knowing that it wouldn't meet our demands all so it was a global they could fall into our Global solution model that we were looking into and it was it was very quickly and easily to the ploy and build the environment up and we think we're finding out that is very easy and working with our developers and the app owners to shift those jobs from the Legacy over to the new platform.

Are you using it to orchestrate technical processes or business processes as well as it kind of do and double duty I think is a combination of both because as you see the business models change, they never stay the same and so we want to be able to quickly adapt not only from a business model perspective but also as technology changes and that puts us in a better position to make sure that our front end customers at the store. We're making sure that we have those proper inventory items from a supply chain making sure that all those interdependencies are working together across the different business units so that we can deliver on time and meet those expectations. We hear a lot about application modernization these days technical debt reducing that is that a priority for you guys, and we're just driving that conversation.

Tech debt ah the challenge with tech debt is that you put an application on a specific platform. And the mentality is you never get off of it. You never modernize you never add enhancements you never do refresh and so over to period of time you have this high risk to the business, especially with your business critical applications.

And so that was one of the main reasons why we had to quickly move is because of those critical applications on a single point of failure infrastructure. Now you're using this also as a Leverage The Force those owners to say, are you willing to take the risk and when you state it like that you begin to get the response that we're individuals will say no, I don't want to have that risk any further. And so that's where more of the movement it's the modernize the applications to remove the technology that but also to make sure that we are setting the future for better faster to Market and and that has been a trend that we see going forward within our organization.

One of the aspects of moving to a SAS model. Is that the Onus for the upgrade cycle is on the vendor more so than you so is that part of the thinking that went into this is basically as new capabilities are at it you can pick and choose them as you still like but you don't have to do all the heavy lifting of the upgrade and install exactly and and it reduces our TCO. I know it shifts it from a capex model from two from capex to Opex and that was a new financial model which we were going with as the company as well.

But you're right taking that that budgeting aspect out of the picture of having to depreciate the assets and carrying those on your books for longer period of time and you put that expense on someone else to where you don't have to have the labor and the resources to schedule the maintenance the down times the upgrades and it allows it to be a lot more faster to making sure that you're compliant. Those are some those are some areas that you definitely don't want to have as a bottleneck to the things that you wanted to deploy you're not applying and you have end of support life environments and so putting that respons. Ability on someone else has tremendously helped us make sure that we have those streamlined alignments across compliance HIPAA socks and all those other areas.

Mm-hmm. You cannot walk down the street these days without somebody in it talking about digital business transformation. The issue, of course is that it means something different to just about everybody who looks at that phrase in the context of Walgreens.

What do you guys trying to accomplish or drive or what's the what are the goals and one of the primary objectives one of our primary objectivism making sure that we first of all hear our customers making sure that the things that they want to see in the stores making sure that we're meeting their needs making sure that we first of all we understand and see what their patterns are when they come to our stores and making sure that we can have those products making sure that we can help that user experience. They can go to any customer, you know, they can go excuse me. They can go to any.

Their competitor of ours, but we want to make sure that when they come to a Walgreens store that we are making sure that the needs are being met and the customers first. We're in the post covid eras. I mean, it has a completely gone away.

But some people are coming back to work. I know you like every other company had all the employees working from home for a while. You also dealt with the vaccine distribution.

What was the total impact of that event a Black Swan event as it were on it teams and it organizations. I mean, you know, what? Do you know now that you kind of wish you knew going in?

It's a different way of running it. I think we've over the years feel felt like if you didn't see the employee. Working you didn't know what they were doing.

And so it was more of that trust and we had already began a model to where we would allow individuals to work two days out of the week at home in three days in the office. So we were starting to build a scale to really understand that we had the proper infrastructure. We had the right tools put in place so that so that the engineers Architects and the support teams could support the business remotely so that when covid did occur It really was more of everything was in place already.

We had the infrastructure. We had the tools we hired the meeting rooms and those various things that continue to go on. We had the command center calls.

And so we had already begin that practice. It was more of the mentality from a leadership perspective. Can my team still deliver?

Can we still be proactive and be preventive and supporting the business even though we're not in the office and we see one another and it proved the fact that yes, you can be remote we can drive and support the business as if you were in the office. And so we see that becoming more of a pattern now is that there are less resources on on site and we're we're continuing to run the business and be sufficient and effective at it from a remote perspective and Congress of that is people who don't want to work. We'll find a way not to work no matter that's part of it bringing a full circle.

Control m is a Sasa Edition. What's your best advice to folks? We're thinking about making that transition.

One of the advantages that we find I think you alluded to a little bit earlier is that it? It causes us to shift away that we make our investments as opposed to making those heavily investments in your data centers, you know, you see data centers are trying to shrink as much as possible or individuals or getting out of the data center business. So that was one of the key solutions that that's our future goal is to is to reduce that footprint and the ownership.

So when we chose this as a product we wanted to make sure that it had that scalability not only from an on-prem perspective. But as we look in more future deployments ramping up more technology wrapping up more applications into the cloud. We wanted to make sure that this SAS solution was what we could use not only just for today we're going forward as vmc changes and bring those different initiatives and Technologies in the play.

We will find ourselves in a better position to to use those as well. All right folks. It's all about scalability flexibility and resiliency.

Hey, thanks for being on the show. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Thank you.