Intentional hybrid cloud and generative AI at USAA (sponsored by IBM) (IBM)

My name is Vun Bijani and I have the privilege of running IBM Consulting, our global Cloud Services. In that context, we partner with companies like AWS, SAP and others to help clients define and refine their cloud strategies and then to execute those cloud strategies to deliver and to realize value. Ecosystem partnerships is a critical portion of our hybrid cloud and AI strategy. And actually, we're very, very proud that we are one of the largest and fastest growing AWS Premier Partners.

We've invested in over 24,000 certifications. In fact, every member of my team has to be certified on the AWS cloud. We've also built competencies - over 24 competencies. And along that our strategic direction of all our acquisitions has also been to strengthen our capability and expertise in this space - cloud native development, managing on the cloud, on AWS and on the hybrid, on the hybrid cloud.

Today, I'm really excited and honored to invite on stage, Jeff Kalinski, the CTO of USAA. Jeff, come on up.

Well, Veron, thanks, I appreciate it. Thank you. Hey, everybody. Happy Tuesday! Yeah. Last time I checked, I know a lot of you probably have flown in from all over the place. Some of us are jet lagged and some of us just got up early to have conversations with our bosses.

I want to share with you a little bit about USAA. Many of you might not be familiar with who we are. Some of you might have actually seen some of our commercials.

USAA started 101 years ago - 25 Army officers could not get insurance. And so they decided to pull their assets together and insure themselves. And over 101 years later, we're going strong. We have over 13 million members that we serve worldwide. And our real focus here is about military members and their family. And our mission is to ensure that we are the financial services provider of choice for those military members.

One of the things you might not know is that we have 37,000 employees across the globe, not including just the US, but also three other countries. But what you also might not know is that we don't have brick and mortar. We're a fully digital, non brick and mortar environment. So what does that mean? Well, that means we actually have to be innovative in the way in which we serve our members because we have to be on all the time - 24/7, 365 days a year - because you never know if someone is in harm's way serving our country. And by the way, for those of you that have served, I thank you very much for your service. It's an honor for us at USAA to provide you with what you deserve, which is top quality financial services products.

And so we are a huge innovative sort of culture. As an example, I can guarantee that every one of you have used one of our patented innovations, remote deposit capture. If you ever used your phone to deposit a check, we invented that. Why did we invent it? Well, that was because our military members were all over the world and they got checks, they couldn't go to a bank, they needed to actually do it remote.

And so part of our value proposition, our core values are around service, loyalty, honesty and integrity. And it really drives the way that we think about how we service our members. So the number one question we always ask ourselves when we're going to make a decision is how does this affect the member? Is this in the best interest of the member? And it even starts with our key technology priorities.

So we want to, as we think about technology, because again, remember we don't have a brick and mortar. Like we, everything we do is either through the call center or on digital properties, mobile, VR and .com. So as we have to think about how do we modernize our environment? We have to do that in a way that delivers it in an innovative way, constantly enabling our members to interact with us at the speed that they need whenever they need it.

And as a financial services company, we don't create consumables or durables, we actually create data - that is our asset, the employee is our asset as well as the data. And so we have to figure out ways to harness that data in an effective way to scale, to ensure that we have the resiliency and the performance that's needed in order to support those members. But we have to do that in a way that we ensure that is consistent with what our obligations are both to the membership and to the regulators so that we do it in a safe and sound manner.

And so at a core of what we do as a part of our technology priorities is to ensure that we deliver these capabilities consistently and reliably for our membership. Along the way, like many other companies, we've accumulated technical debt. And so as we think about how is it that we evolve into a cloud environment, we have to also rationalize what, what role does technology play historically and then how do we evolve towards where we need to go? Because the whole idea is about driving innovation, innovation requires the adoption of newer technology and to learn from the technology that we've enabled over the last say 10, 15 or 20 years.

And as we do that, we have to ensure, and as we grow, we do that in a way that's cost-effective. So everything to the left affects ultimately the cost on the right. And as we grow, as an organization, we want to ensure that we do that in a safe and sound manner, but also not incur additional costs that we have to transition into our membership through pricing. So we're very, very maniacal on the way in which we leverage technology to innovate, but also how does that transfer or transcend into the member value?

So our hybrid cloud strategy is where we started five years ago. Part of my rockstar team is here supporting me that helped design and develop what we call our hybrid multi-cloud strategy and it has four basic principles that we started off with:

First and foremost, we were open. We were going to use open standards to drive interoperability across the environment.

Second, we were going to be fit for purpose or purpose-built based on the capabilities. So we weren't just arbitrarily going to decide to use cloud. We were going to be very specific about it. We were going to look at the quality service, non-functional requirements, what actually made sense, it wasn't cloud at all costs, it was cloud for the right reason.

Third, we were going to be hybrid by design. So we knew automatically because of the nature of our business that we had to ensure that everything that we did had some elements of on prem versus off prem hybrid in nature.

And then fourth, we would be multi-cloud because we knew the ecosystem that was going to transcend or be created either through providers or software as a service required us to be multi-cloud by nature.

And when we looked at this, we realized that we needed to have a sort of this unified fabric that enabled cloud governance that looked at it from a risk standpoint, but also from a capability in an operating model. And I'll talk a little bit more about that as we look at some of the best practices and how we evolved over time.

If you sort of think about it, if we're going to deliver capabilities to any cloud provider in support of either innovation or the membership, we had to also start to think about the problem a little differently and we've shifted our operating model to be more product-centric. So instead of capability-centric, we've shifted sort of this product idea as an IT provider.

And I'm very blessed and honored to be the Chief Technology Officer at USAA. We also have to think about like what are the things that we enable as an organization for the rest of the company to innovate? We don't innovate just for innovation's sake, we innovate in order to support the member, the touch point to the member is our business.

So we have to think about how does the technology, whether it's cloud or AI or generative AI for that matter, how is that going to manifest itself? And we shifted to this product taxonomy point of view.

So why was that really important for us? It allowed us to think about how to principles of or capabilities of agile and dev sec ops sre practices - how are they going to be infused into the operating model? And then secondly, it was about enabling common platform services so that people can innovate and accelerate quickly.

So we know cost is a big factor about how we evolve and how we innovate. And we used a couple sort of ideas around how we manage that. First and foremost, as I mentioned, we weren't going to be cloud first at all costs. We were going to be fit for purpose and we were going to drive towards cloud as a first order principle or delivery model.

Secondly, we weren't going to move without having business value because remember every dollar that we spend, we transition to members through the cost of the product. So we want to make sure that we have business cases that justify the investment that we're making. And so we want to make sure that we do that with the right set of guardrails.

The architecture team had to create what we call opinionated architectures. This is really, really critical and it winds up being one of the best practices when we think about an opinionated architecture. What we're talking about is this is the way in which you will deliver these capabilities.

So sort of think of a box, the box has a set of capabilities or set of products that we are going to deliver. If everything that you want to use is sitting in that box, you get to go as far and as fast as you want to go. If you want to live outside the box, you have to figure out how you rebuild the things that are in the box. So it becomes an accelerator, so opinionated architectures and we call them archetypes were the basis for us to help accelerate the adoption of cloud but do it in a compliant, consistent fashion and at speed and that really helped drive that delivery and acceleration across the organization.

Now, this took a while to get set up. I'm not going to tell you that it was overnight. I mean, it took us probably 2.5 to 3 years to get the environment in place. But now that it's in place, we're seeing rapid adoption and rapid acceleration and the benefit of that is in the business value is our ability to react to demands and business needs or member needs faster than we were before. I'll talk maybe a little bit about that a little bit later.

One of the other key things that we sort of focused on was how are we going to leverage the data in a more transparent and faster method? And so we have transitioned to move a vast majority of our data warehouse to the cloud. This helps enable things like analytics AI capabilities. It allowed us to leverage the scale elements of the cloud provider in a way that we couldn't do before, but we can't do that without understanding that the needs of our member are 24/7.

And even though cloud providers provide an immense amount of resiliency, we also have to make sure that our operating model supports that and that we can transition accordingly as events occur in a broader ecosystem.

And finally, we focused on what we call engineering excellence. So we wanted to make sure that it was dead simple for the engineer to be able to develop the applications in a way in a hybrid nature through a series of pipelines. And we only have three of them - you have three pipelines. This is the only way you can put something in production. Now, there's variations to those three pipelines. But in that efficiency, which is based on the opinionated architecture, which has the controls in place to prevent mistakes, allows us to accelerate quickly in the adoption of our archetypes.

So it's really sort of foundational as do we sort of bring these things together. So how did we start?

So first and foremost, the first thing we think about when we were thinking about modernizing our environment, either we were gonna retire an application or replace it with something we were going to refactor it or we were going to rewrite it. Those are sort of the, the models.

So we've been an OpenShift customer for six years, maybe even closer to 7. One of the first uh Red Hat users of, of OpenShift and we adopted it heavily for our private cloud environment. So when we looked at our existing hm I'm gonna say legacy like Websphere is like is our legacy environment for our web environment. 20 years, we've been around that platform.

And as we're starting to modernize, our first choice is to think about how do i refactor that application to run an OpenShift. But remember i said earlier that things are fit for purpose, there are times and many of those times we want to move directly instead of the OpenShift to AWS. So AWS is our preferred custom developed environment. All of that framework, all the governance that i talked about before is fully enabled for AWS today.

And we have this concept called safe landing. And what safe landing means is we put the governance and the controls and the archetypes in place so that you can safely land that plane in AWS and know that you're going to inherit all those value propositions that are important, but sometimes we're actually going to leverage a SaaS provider.

So as we created the framework, it was like, ok, if i'm going to refactor, i'm gonna go to OpenShift. If i'm gonna rewrite, i'm gonna go to AWS. And if i'm gonna replace, i'm gonna go to a SaaS offering that was sort of the high level principles.

And so we've embarked on the huge legacy modernization. We have over 1500 Websphere applications in the environment. And so now we're on this journey in a partnership with IBM and others to sort of modernize that environment in a relatively short period of time. And we're going to, we're going to replace refactor or rewrite across those three items on the top of the of the slide.

And what we have found is that the accelerators that IBM created and others have created allows us to do this as quickly as possible. We're not just taking VMs and putting an OpenShift, we're actually refactoring and we're separating um through a layered architecture in refactoring those applications to get good separation of concern and qualities of service across the different layers.

And at the same time, we've been moving our data to the cloud for those specific workloads that we know we get value propositions out of the data warehouse, our AI models just as an example, like what one of the things that by moving data to the cloud allowed us to be successful.

Um we know that climate change change has been occurring. And one of the things that we've observed as an insurance company is the number of wildfires and hurricanes have have actually increased recently. And so one of the innovative things the team was able to do is develop a product called aerial imagery. And what that allows us to do is use drones and images and those images, by the way, are stored in AWS. And we do analytics against those images to determine if the property is a total loss.

And in many, many cases before the fire is put out or before all the water moves away from the property, we've already given a member a check to say your house is at a total loss. And what does that mean that allows them to get their house repaired quicker, allows them to get back and restore their, their life faster than others. That's like what innovation allows us to do at USA and the cloud is a big part of how we're starting to think about enhancing those types of capabilities.

We've also been in this journey of re-platforming some of our core capabilities. So there's a couple up here Guidewire and AE those are our core claims and policy administration systems for our life insurance and for our property and casualty. And we're continuing to build and surround those core capabilities with services that we've been building on AWS ourselves, all aligned with that same sort of framework.

I mentioned a little bit earlier that the, the partnership with IBM and USA has been strong. We've had a long history with IBM, as I mentioned before, we started with OpenShift on the cloud journey. It was private cloud by nature. And then as we matured our pipelines and as we've matured our capabilities, we've shifted our workloads to AWS.

And the, the IBM consulting team has really helped to sort of think through some of the issues and how we do scale. Um as Barone mentioned earlier though, like they, he talked about how they have certifications for their teams. And what I would say is that um the quality of the engineer work from the IBM team has really helped us accelerate some of the, the capabilities that we're trying to bring to market that deep expertise coupled with our legacy environment, which was also IBM allowed us to transition and is allowing us to transition more quickly to leveraging more cloud capabilities as we refactor and rewrite those applications.

Um what was the surprise was how deep IBM understood AWS. It almost seemed like a a contrarian sort of thing that would occur. But um we wound up finding that their, their expertise really helped to drive that value proposition. It puts us in a position to better accelerate the adoption of our newer technology. It also improves our ability to ensure that we have compliance across our policies and standards because they understand the importance of what governance and compliance actually means.

So let me talk a little bit about a couple of the best practices that we learned over the last five years. First and foremost. And man, I tell you this one was not easy. We set up a center of excellence that where a governance board and decision rights were clearly defined. This was not organizational boundary driven, this was about capability and whether it was architecture, whether it was the data team, whether it was the core infrastructure team, none of them were all in the same organization. But we all realized we had to come together in unison through a cloud center of excellence to ensure that we had a common understanding. Because in reality, at the end of the day, you can't run a single cloud organization and scales the whole organization like you defeat the purpose. So though it was difficult in the beginning, it was probably one of the best decisions we ever made.

The second thing that we did because we are highly regulated. We came up with what we call, which i actually think might be might have been the industry first is a unified cloud risk framework. So we went in knowing day one that we wanted to understand the risks associated with moving things to the cloud. And we look at it across eight different dimensions. We calibrated against our compliance requirements from the regulators, but also our risk appetite as an organization. And we use that every capability that we want to put into the cloud has to go through the unified cloud risk framework. And that gives us a reference point on what is the inherent risk of doing something after we put the controls in place, what's the residual risk? And we use that as the basis to determine how we move forward.

I mentioned earlier about opinionated architectures. And this really allows us to ensure that we have the right consistency as we deliver the capabilities and drive innovation and value. And then we also want to make sure that when we put something in the cloud, it's safe landed. So what does that really mean? That means that we have used the opinionated architecture, it aligned with the unified cloud risk framework, it's approved by the governance board so that when we say yes and go, you can start running with those capabilities. If something isn't safe landed, you're not allowed to use it.

And then we designed around resiliency. And these last two points are really, I think they're important and we're maturing in this space. We're definitely not experts by any stretch of the imagination, but we have learned that when outages occurred, like they do also happen in the cloud, like how is it that we're setting up the architecture to support the resiliency that's actually really needed.

And then the the sort of the fin ops element um we did not do lift and shift there was in our operating model. It didn't, the uh the economics weren't there. So that's why we looked at rewrite refactor and replace as our, our options. Well, what we did learn is that as we've started to consume services across cloud providers that we and we've aligned with this product taxonomy. How do we understand our unit cost? And we've embarked on a whole journey to start to understand as we're delivering capabilities. How does that fit into the overall framework? And what does, what does costs look like? We probably would have learned a lot more on the financial management if we did lift and shift because we'd have been forced to do that. But um we are continuing to invest in that area.

I think it's pretty common for um organizations to look at some sort of framework. And I don't know if Arun if you want to come up and start to talk about what IBM is doing as a general framework related to uh hybrid cloud.

Thank you. First of all, thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you as you serve your members. I appreciate that. And I think the first thing that came to my mind was wow, your insights and your lessons learned, especially when we've seen so many clients start off with that lift and shift and not really recognize the value of cloud but not adequate amount of change in people in processes, you know, cloud sprawl unrealized use cases and slow adoption are just some of the challenges that a number of clients are facing.

One in three cloud transformation projects are on time and on budget, only one in four are where they really recognize and realize hard ROI on their programs. And those programs or those clients are who we call business cloud masters like yourself, Jeff, I'm not sure we masters, but we're getting there. Maybe you're getting good and in that context, you start seeing what is it that makes them successful? Those intentional choices, finding consistency aspects across that hybrid environment becomes very, very important.

And I think when you start looking at those business cloud masters, I think every large enterprise i've seen today is hybrid by default, but it's those business cloud masters who are hybrid by design like one of your four key principles.

So as I take that further, and we start thinking this through, we interviewed over 500 CXs to understand what was going through their process, what worked for them, what did not work for them. And we found a certain set of patterns around 18% of those clients actually had a clear articulation of their cloud value journey of being able to map their business to their IT blueprint.

And as they go through that there were certain patterns that we observed. Number one like you called out right at the beginning was product centric that used or that was the basis of prioritization and all the follow on technology decisions that came after that what we call an intentional architecture, you call an open architecture. And from there defining what sort of consistency do i need to have in my development execution and in my operations, how do i empower my teams?

But we also saw is those business cloud masters are also forward looking. 55% of them have already started embedding generative AI into the cloud transformation. And 38% of those have already started deploying quantum safe cloud architectures.

So as we looked at this, we looked at learnings from yourself, Jeff as well as from these other clients and said, how do we make this consumable? What sort of a framework can we create? So we defined a hybrid by design value framework, it's anchored on the top which is product native by design and that influences all the technology decisions that you make. Below.

What do we mean by product native by design, not just being product led, but also how does being product led influence your processes, your organization, your team, your culture, your day to day operations. We heard Jeff talk about safe landing the risk framework. Those are all aspects that he had to get the organization, the processes, the teams all following that behavior and then that defines the kind of choices you make. What sort of intentional decisions you make around your container strategy, your development platform strategy, your data and generative AI strategy and of course security and compliance.

So we took this framework further and then codified a lot of our lessons into what does a value framework look like. And the key message out here is this is not necessarily just a maturity model or a value framework. It's about choosing where you would like to be based on the business decisions you make.

Now let's take an example...

You heard one aspect from Jeff. Let me give you another example. And then I'll ask Jeff to comment on this.

So let me give an example of a US airline coming out of COVID. Key principle was we need to reduce technical debt and capex, we need to ensure resiliency. We'd like to accelerate developer productivity.

And as they started looking at this, they started off by doing this as a large technology program. Soon realized the interdependency between all the applications. By the time they started getting some, by the time their road map would start delivering value, it would be year three, year four, year five.

That's when they took a step back and said, we need to look at this from a business lens of being product centric and they defined very key business objectives. A one order strategy. And how do we get new products like wi-fi on the plane? How do we get that available to our consumers as soon as possible? Through that? They anchored on certain specific business domains like passenger movement, baggage handling and retail services that determined the rest of the execution in what comes under that technology by design.

So for example, for those areas, they defined product centric teams, full stack teams. Whereas for the other remaining domains, they chose to continue with their distributed delivery teams and shared service teams that also determined what they were going to do with infrastructure as code when they were going to focus on these work stream areas versus in other areas, they were not going to make an immediate change.

Jeff in your perspective, how does this apply to you? You know.

Jeff: So at USAA um remember the four principles, right, hybrid um open by design. Um so when we look at sort of the integration piece, like we have to be an orchestrator if I'm going to have a hybrid design, but also multi cloud, I'm now in the orchestration business. So it started with the network. So like regional access points, like we had to think differently about how our network was structured in order to support the integration.

So for us to be at a level five is like really important because it's not just on the cloud provider, it's also about how we operate our co o facilities, but also the ecosystem that exists across different platforms. So that interoperability becomes really, really important and that started with the network.

But on the integration standpoint, because we're going to be that orchestrator, we had to think sort of differently about like what role do our API s play, which had this sort of strong affinity to security.

Then if you sort of think about it, like the network is at the edge devices might be at the edge. We have compute all over the place, even though i have a network in place that's secure. I need to ensure that i have like the right controls.

This is where the unified cloud risk framework and our archetypes are really playing an important role because it's allowing us to um accelerate the adoption of these, of the technology. But know that we're inheriting these design points, you know, on level five in the case of security and, and um integration, but not everything needed to be there.

So i sort of think about um from a development standpoint, like i mentioned, we have three, we have three pipelines. I don't need to go to the nth degree for my pipelines because aws is where i'm doing my custom development openshift on premise, where i'm doing my custom development. After that, it's about integrating.

So i can ensure that my development pipelines are maybe a level three, but my integration and security is a level five. And so that allows us to have this, that for purpose. I'll use that phrase again. It was one of the principles to allow us to sort of think about how do we deploy and design our applications.

You: Excellent. Uh you know, you almost took this hybrid by design and you've added to this secure by design. And you've almost, you know, you've always said that there is a integration by design. Those are the intentional choices you made on this journey.

Jeff: Yeah, i mean, if, if i could, like we've been on like everybody else looking at gen a i. So the interesting thing for us, so you go back to sort of some of those elements, the security, the integration, the development and because of the design choices that we made our ability to experiment um was accelerated, we sort of have this concept, you experiment to understand, you understand, to develop critical thinking and you use critical thinking to make decisions.

And so the faster you can run through that continuum, the better business value and agility that you're gonna provide. In some cases, it could be first mover advantage. And so when we looked at our gen a i and our hybrid cloud strategy, it like they fit right, right next to one another.

And we rapidly were able to integrate because by the way, i'm using services from three different providers, not all in the same environment. So this allowed for us to do that integration and experiment quickly across different business use cases to come up with the idea. Hey, in some instances, we failed, it didn't prove out to be the way that we we wanted move on to the next one in other cases, like we're seeing like real value.

So it's like, ok, now how do i incorporate this into the operating model. And so that hybrid notion really has helped us to sort of accelerate the experimentation to get to that decision making process.

You: That's that's so true. And you know, when you start looking at it from models in different environments, prompts in different environments, end users consuming that from different environments. And you start realizing that yes, you know that intentionality in that architecture is so crucial on the other side, also hybrid cloud gets accelerated with the power of generative a i.

When we talk about refactoring and modernizing applications, generative a i helping in accelerating that application development, understanding legacy code extracting business logic and then also developing new programs developing new cloud native code observable in being able to accelerate the way you go down your devs pipeline. All of these are different aspects that generally a i accelerates hybrid cloud execution.

Jeff: Yeah, i mean, we had a certain set of use cases that we were willing to accept historically as sort of i'd say near real time or batch when ja i hit, it's like that has to be done in real time. So then you go back to the network like does my network support it going back to my immigration styles? Did they support it? Is it secure? How do i deliver that consistently? Like it the operating model just it starts to gain momentum and that momentum helps to drive sort of the adoption and new new capabilities this is going to be one space is going to be constant learning, isn't it exactly?

You: So as we look at the core concept of hybrid by design, we look at how that gets amplified with generative a i, how do we articulate value in this conversation? So by making those intentional choices, you actually influence value in a number of different levers. The most obvious or direct impact is around infrastructure cost optimization, developer productivity reduced cost of security and compliance.

But what it also releases is strategic optionality and that strategic optionality and the productivity levers start influencing how fast you get products out of market. How do you measure and drive greater adoption with a wider consumer base? How do you define velocity and it into agility in the business and all of those factors then start driving top line benefit and revenue growth. And that's what we're calling business acceleration.

Jeff how do you consume this?

Jeff: I mean for us tech that as i talked about earlier was a big issue. And so how do we start to address that? Well, if you look at refactor, rewrite or replace, like why do we replace? Well, because we were owning that capability or that responsibility. But if i move to a sass provider and i do the integration that we talked about earlier, i don't have to deal with the upgrades and all the other maintenance and the infrastructure associated with it because it's non differentiating.

But then there's scenarios where it's like, no, i've been maintaining this application, but i want to give myself agility. So as we refactor and put things in openshift or rewrite when we put it in aws, we're getting that agility because we're using modern technology that allows for better secure um interoperability across the environment, which actually manifests itself in business value because we're able to do things for the member we couldn't do before. And that's where we really see the acceleration playing a big part in the hybrid sort of strategy.

You: All those, you know, shackles of debt disappeared. And then you can really, you know, run as well as you get. I mean, what we found is that we had multiple applications doing the same thing when you replace you like consolidate into one. So i naturally lose things. I also get rid of some of the complexity in the environment. So it it, it's forcing us to think differently, especially as we shifted to that product mindset.

Excellent. So that value framework that we shared with you not only helps you choose what sort of road map you want to create for yourselves, but actually, as you make those choices on that value framework, what roi is expected to be delivered and that helps you shape your business case with your boards now as we move forward well, and from ibm, so there has to be one ibm sales light at least so, and i'm proud of that.

So how do we help clients on this journey? Well, jeff was very, very kind in sharing how we are working together with him in this journey. And jeff you called out and, and you called out our technical expertise there.

Jeff: Yeah, so one is helping clients like yourselves, refine their cloud strategies anchored on this product l hybrid by design framework and building a value case and a road map that you can then deliver upon. That's one aspect. The second is doing all of this in a co creation and a co innovation way. Like we've partnered with jeff in this joint team approach.

Now, not only shaping that road map but also helping in executing that road map with our own cloud accelerators, which are things like predefined reference architectures, predefined journeys with code snippets in place that really accelerate your move to cloud and your modernization of your application portfolio, including how do you then drive observable and operations across your hybrid estate?

And we can't do all of this without our partner ecosystem and the acquisitions that have helped us strengthen our expertise and our capabilities in this area to close generative a i is bringing a really shift of inflection point in a i. And we believe enterprises with hybrid by design will accelerate that impact as you work towards modernizing your now creating the new and managing for tomorrow.

We believe business cloud masters are hybrid by design.

Jeff, any other closing thoughts.

Jeff: Well, i want to thank you for the opportunity. I'm really proud of the work my team has done. We've been on a journey for five years. Hybrid was by design for first class. Um but i couldn't do it without sort of the support of aws and, and folks like uh ibm. So i really appreciate the, the partnership.

You: Wonderful. Thank you very, very much, Jeff.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, colleagues too.