Ericsson and HCLTech: Powering cloud transformation at speed and scale

Can you hear me? Ok. Yeah. Ok. So, uh you know, very, very warm welcome. Uh so today, what we are really going to talk about is a journey which HCL tech did for Erickson over two years, right?

Uh the way I always, uh, you know, think about the cloud and the enterprise adoption of cloud is go back to 2016, 2017, we had a customer called News International, large, you know, media company, you know, making newspapers and they had a crisis, their business was sort of going down quite rapidly in terms of traditional newspapers and the digital business was not going up and they reacted to the crisis by saying we needed to move to the cloud and Tech helped them in their journey to go to 70% you know, adoption of cloud in the enterprise, right?

Since then, I've seen lots, lots of customers attempting to sort of say what should we do with regards to the cloud now, you know, I always sort of thought about the cloud as a technology which can help you play a slightly more offensive game as far as, you know, how your business can adopt technology and what can it do for the business per se? And when I look at a lot of my customers, I always look for, you know, visioning, I look for leadership and I thought that the at the leadership which Erickson had is something which was just absolutely mind boggling. Right.

So I won't tell the story. I have Mats here to talk about, you know, why they took a decision to go 90% or 80% to cloud, right? And what was the journey like? And what does it really mean for Erickson as an enterprise? So, you know, Matt's overdue, you know, thank you.

Thanks, great to be here. I'm CIO at Erickson. So this is going to be a CIO version of a cloud journey, less technical, perhaps more about why we did it, how we did it and, and a bit of the obstacles as a CIO, I listen to a lot of technology strategies. There are a lot of good ones. Usually my issue is how do we execute and how do we bring business value? Uh how do we drive the outcome of all the great ideas?

So I'm going to start a bit by getting into what, what was the drivers of our cloud journey, how did we package our cloud journey uh at Erickson and I'm going to talk very much about the enterprise part of Ericson, but it's very much driven from our business needs.

Erickson delivers 5G solutions across the world. A lot of telco solutions, a lot more and more software, more cloud native. It was quite clear that our business needed much more innovative speed. They were needed to digitalize a lot of ways of working and also bring much more cloud native solutions to the market.

So we quickly decided that our cloud journey should be about supporting the business in those ambitions, ensuring that the backbone and the stack that we deliver to the business is really a state of the art when it comes to innovation from a business perspective. So that was the main driver.

But of course, that wasn't enough when the CIO comes and, and and tells the CEO that he want to spend quite quite some amount of money. Uh he needs to have a business case. So we discussed a lot. What, what is the business case? Do we believe that the cloud journey will heavily reduce our cost or are there things to debate about that? How much do we need to optimize the infrastructure around our applications and around our offerings?

So we had a lot of discussion and decided not to push so much on the savings part, much, much more on the speed of delivering innovation and capabilities. But we agreed that we should have a partner and we should have a partner set up and we should choose the partners who in a contractual perspective could show that they are willing to bet on the efficiency that we will gain after the journey.

And a TL and AWS really showed clearly that they were our partners in this journey and that they could sort of bet on this whole setup and, and everything we're going to do. So very much of the cost savings that we could bring into the to the was that we as a partner came together and bet on the efficiency that we will get and that we could sort of bet that over a five times period, a lot of the business arguments were speed to delivery of innovation and the agility of getting up. And I got to end with, with some clear evidence of what that means.

Then of course, a lot of how discussions in my team, leadership team, we discussed a lot, how should we do this so we can deliver these outcomes. So we decide 40 50% to cloud. No, we are not tipping over. We need to tip over. We need to change ways of working. We need to change culture. If we're going to deliver completely different to our business, we need to change the mindset totally.

So we decided at least 80% of all our workload should go to the cloud in this journey. We let all partners look into openly all our workloads and come with suggestions. How should we do this? When we had the partner system on board, we quickly came into, of course, how do we build insecurity? How do we ensure that every service that we now design is state of the art from all aspects including new processes, automation, wherever we can do it um policies, wherever we can do it, huge people transformation and also a rethinking of platforms.

We saw that we need to change our teams internally, how they operate. We were very siloed in sort of the typical stack infrastructure applications. We need to pull teams together in a more product operating model. We need to end up in a clearer def ops but different design. If we're talking foundational deliveries or what we call feasible deliveries, more front end loaded or process innovative business co creation teams in these journeys.

And when we talked about all of these areas and how to transform, we decided to do reorgs and changes as we grew on our cloud journey into cloud. So we defined move groups to cloud, we defined them in a way that we could form teams and change our ways of working and that our partners could be with us in doing that step by step over. You can say two years, the whole journey here that I'm talking about was sort of two years to do.

I think quite soon we got our policies, right. There was a lot of convincing legal security around our policies, how we did bring your own key solutions, all the technical stuff in how we consume cloud, how the fin knobs should be set up for business consumption. All of these things we sort of could design on a high level and from there, we could start the program when we come into the program.

Um we decided that we need to have a factory approach on the migration. I spend a lot of time with the business, with the stakeholders. Um some of them were quite worried and we need to engage them. And the one of the few things that i when i look back in, if we should have done differently is which we are discussing, did we engage our stakeholders too much because they were quite heavily involved? And i think if you ask our partners, they say, yeah, probably you did.

Um I'm not sure personally, i'm not sure at the same. it it took some time, but we were also quite clear we had the move groups. uh we had packaged them, these applications go this weekend, this go this weekend, this weekend and this weekend they had a chance of changing if there was good reasons, otherwise they had to go with it by engaging them a lot in the security set up and the consumption.

i think we got them with us. and now we are benefiting from that, but it was quite some turbulence around the engagement and, and we are talking about a project with several 1000 people involved. so the complexity was, was high.

The migration factory really came up with speed and you will see some of the complexity that it handled and it was a lot around the applications where we had most of the stakeholder engagement. At the same time, the digital components of the delivery started to increase in scale. So a lot of the infrastructure and how we can quickly build up c the pipelines for business came in parallel with the application moves.

So we had to sort of plan and replan and be a bit agile to the business needs across the way. uh I've talked about most of the things of the left hand side. um and post migration, we talked a lot about optimization and i'll mention something because that was a trade off.

We did as we prioritized speed business value, we discussed how much optimization of infrastructure should we do and will that be a driver or more something we do as we go, we decided not to be a driver and that we were glad of because we still have some optimization to do. But it's not an issue. We do that at the same time as we are delivering so much business value to our business.

If we had focused too much on infrastructure optimization, I think we were still on moving to cloud, we would have absolutely added a year or so to the time schedule and the business value had come later. So my own learning or, or as i said, reflection is that if you want to drive for business value, don't, don't worry about the infrastructure optimization.

We did some pieces here and there, we did some areas which we thought was necessary. Our partners were really good at supporting us in good judgments. But that was not the main driver, it was the business value and the digitalization backbone that was really pushing us.

So a bit into the complexity of the work loops. Erickson has one of the most complex sap um uh set ups, one instance, 180 countries um tailors over many years. Um this was the big fear when we move this. Uh and i'll tell you, we moved it over a weekend. It was 300 people globally engaged in that weekend.

Move with a minute planning across different time zones, but it worked out really good. Of course, there were much, much more. But if you look at the environment and you see the complexity with all the databases and, and more than 50 different sap systems uh with different uh integrations and, and, and connections to each other, this was planned.

So the, the planning of this specific move group, one of of 5060 move groups. Um it took us about six months to, to plan and prepare everything around this, but we did it over the weekend and i'll, i'll come to a bit of a story quite soon.

Then, of course, all the non sap migrations uh a lot of applications. I say that the where we struggled was the homegrown. The standard applications went quite straightforward. The home grown, heavily adop adopted, heavily customized some more work and we had to change some of these, put them in later move groups and replan. But overall the whole time schedule held, we had a burning platform.

We said that that day, we're going to be out of the data center and we were sweating a lot of our infrastructure. So it was really necessary to get out. Some stakeholders didn't want to move. They came to me and i was quite clear and told them, yeah, then you have the whole data center to take care of. We're not going to do it. You have had two years now, we have been planning this when they realized that it just took them a month to move.

That was our complex plm solution i'm talking about now. So, uh but we had some other complex loads as well. Um data lake hadoop uh challenge for aws. First time you did that complexity. Uh we have bastian from, from, from uh aws here. Um uh but again, a lot of new ground to cover. Uh and we did it together in a great way.

Uh we also had some of the ecosystem around aws supporting some of the complex workloads. Uh in a really good way today, we have moved more than 90% of our workloads. Uh we still have some legacy applications which which we gonna kill rather than than move to cloud. Um we have some in, in our private cloud set up. Uh the the rest is, is cloud native and serving us so, so much better huge difference.

It's not time for coffee yet. This is the story i promised you. It's around the sap landscape. Our finance teams were very nervous. So we had a coffee session with the leadership of finance team and they asked us, when was it again? You're gonna move sap to cloud. We did it last weekend.

Yeah, that's how it should be from a business perspective. Truly amazing and it builds so much trust in our capabilities and it caused a boom across the organization that it's something amazing has been done and we are prepared for the future in a way that we couldn't imagine.

So summarizing a bit of the experiences and then look what's, what's next. Now for us, in, in this context is having the right partnership, working as one team. i in this big team, no one knew. are you from erickson htl aws or some of the other partners? Uh it was really a true team work and, and the whole hl was driving and, and managing the project, but everyone was really engaging in different perspectives.

I think doing the set up as we did commercially as well where, where both aws and hl in a competitive bid had to show how they could, how they could do the journey and also commercially bet on that this journey would be successful, made everyone to have a good stake in the journey. And there was no sort of, there was no goals that were no different from each other. We all had the same goal and it was a win, win to, to make this delivery happen.

Very complex project. Uh probably a bit of a world record when it comes to complexity over that time period. And then of course, continuous automation and modernization and always discussion about how to do that and optimize every move group but within the given time frames.

And i must say, looking forward now and i give you some examples where we are now and as we now have moved to everything to the cloud, we have built up, we have worked with automation and data for many years. But of course, generative a i comes up now and then in some discussions. Uh so what, what we could do was was in a couple of weeks time, we could set up the whole generative a i uh coding, coding buddy system with the right hardware, with the help of aws and hl again because we built up that capability and business was truly amazed by how quickly uh the r and d department could get in and, and start working with, with the generative a i.

So if you look at the platform and what we are doing now, we are embracing automation. We are delivering digitalization in a scale we have never been able to do before. And the cloud, the cloud journey has been one of the most important enabler for that and even more a cultural journey for the whole it organization.

Today, we have teams left in a sort of old way of working. They, they want to shift. So we are looking at totally shifting to a agile set up and a product structure rather than a service uh uh uh set up and generative. A i will be a big bet for us as well.

Getting to those solutions time is flying. Do we have any questions?