KENDALL FISHER: Hi. I'm Kendall Fisher. Welcome to the Oracle
Customer Spotlight Series. On this episode, we're
shining a light on Xerox from their Palo Alto Research
Center, known as PARC. This is the heart of
scientific research and open innovation
for some of the most important technological
breakthroughs of our time. PARC brings leading scientists,
engineers, and designers together to form teams across
a series of focus areas that Xerox believes will shape
the future of technology, science,
and innovation. Please welcome Naresh Shanker,
Chief Technology Officer at Xerox and head of the
Palo Alto Research Center, along with Anasuya Strasner,
Vice President of Cloud Customer Experience at Oracle. ANASUYA STRASNER:
So Naresh, I am so happy and excited to
be able to be here at PARC and get a chance
to hear from you about what Xerox has been up to. So thanks for joining us today. NARESH SHANKER: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. And I'm looking
forward to the session. ANASUYA ST
RASNER: Perfect. So you came to Xerox
in May of 2019. Maybe we could just
start with share a little bit about what made you
excited about this opportunity and made you want to be a
part of this organization. NARESH SHANKER: So Xerox has got
a long heritage of innovation. It's over 100-year
company, and it's evolved. During this time, it
created industries that it monetized
very successfully, giving birth to the print and
office technology, graphics production, all of those
industries which actua
lly created billions of value for
the company and shareholders. So it's had a very successful
run in the print franchise, and it's continuing
to grow and scale. And what was really
interesting is that there's a huge untapped
side of the Xerox family and all of the PARC
innovation that exists. And if you think about
the last 50 years, PARC has created
companies that have-- spawned companies that have
created over a trillion market cap in terms of valuations. And all of these
companies are very su
ccessful today in the
industry and a lot of it is technology that was
born at Xerox and PARC. And so it was an
opportunity to actually fundamentally think
about how can we take this technology at Xerox
and actually monetize it. And so how do we develop
and create the value, go to market successfully,
and enjoy the benefits of a lot of the
intellectual property we've accumulated over
the last 50 years. So that in essence
is the opportunity and where this journey
started, and so that's what got me
really excited about
how do you incubate and launch new businesses beyond
the print franchise. And how do you create the
next wave and journey of Xerox in terms of creating
companies with both very strong valuations, and get into
new industries, new sciences, that is going to be the next
25 and 50 years of our journey. And so it just seemed a
way to line up the stars and have the opportunity
to actually make a run and see how this
is going to work. So that's what got me here,
and it's pretty ex
citing. ANASUYA STRASNER:
So I'd be shocked if there's anybody on this
planet that doesn't actually have hasn't actually
heard the word Xerox. But probably there
are certain things that come to mind when
you think of the word Xerox that maybe is something
different than what you're looking to evolve today
and have people understand. What are some of the things
that maybe people don't assume when they hear the word Xerox? What are things
people might not know? NARESH SHANKER: I think what
people
may not fundamentally understand is that Xerox has
actually created markets. It's created industries. So if you look at all of the
intellectual property we have developed over
the last 50 years, it's in very diverse sciences. We invented the Ethernet,
personal computing. You've got the graphical
user interface. You've got all these
initial technologies. And what people don't understand
is that we have gone well beyond all those spaces, and
what we are starting to do now is move into such high im
pact
industries in 3D additive, in Cleantech, and all of the
industrial commercial grade IoT technologies. These are huge
spaces and markets that we have substantial
amount of IP, and we have an amazing story
and journey ahead of us to invent these spaces. And that's what we're
doing right now. So people don't know that. People don't know where
we are fundamentally disrupting the industry
with disruptive technologies well beyond the print franchise. And that's what's exciting. ANASUYA STRASNER:
When you
look at some history from Xerox it's that you have that
foundation that you can leverage from, and
going back and saying, OK, what did we learn from
our entire rich history, and then how do we
innovate for the future and how do we create the future. What are some of the things--
can you possibly give us some examples of what are some
of the things that you think will transcend beyond
print that maybe you could give us an example of? NARESH SHANKER: OK. So let me walk you
through the jou
rney. If you look at Xerox
in its first 50 years and the birth of PARC. So PARC 1.0 was creating
the Office of the Future. And then you dial
that forward to 2002. We designed something called
the open innovation model, and basically we offered
research as a service to the entire world, both
public and private sector. And that foundationally
helped us create a very, very
intellectual property or patent-rich
portfolio of technology. So you've got tremendous
amount of intellectual property that we'
ve developed
over the last 50 years. More recently we
launched a company. It's Eloque, and
Eloque gave birth to industrial
commercial grade IoT for critical infrastructure. So that's an example of
one of the technologies that we gave birth to
here at Xerox and PARC, and we can now carry
that technology throughout the world. And it's going to have a huge
impact on society and safety, right? And more importantly, it
helps governments actually start prioritizing capital
spend and putting the energy
into focused areas in terms of
which areas are deteriorating rapidly and where should
they be putting their focus. And we know there's substantial
amount of investment going into
infrastructure globally, on critical infrastructure. So that's just one example. More recently, we've launched
a technology called CareAR, which is basically
augmented reality guidance technology for-- and it's contextual based-- to actually help, for
example, technicians that are in the field to be
remotely guided thr
ough AR in a way where they can actually
very directly and quickly address customer support
experiences and issues in the field by actually
tapping into a very wide network of very advanced
intelligence of technicians. But more importantly,
also content and data and solutions that
have been widely distributed and available across
industries as well. You bring it all together
in a very rapid fashion where you're able to actually
solve these problems very rapidly for customers. And you reduce thei
r down
time on equipment and things of that sort. And it's a real
breakthrough piece of art. I call it art. I mean it's-- ANASUYA STRASNER: It is. It's art and science. NARESH SHANKER: Yeah, it's a
combination of art and science. And it's going to really enhance
the whole customer service experience. So we've launched that company. It's a holding
company structure, and it's got a tremendous
amount of software assets. So yeah, so I can
go on and give you a tremendous number
of examples where we'r
e converting the science
to incubated companies. And then we're taking
these companies into product and
commercialization phases to the market. And it'll all be in the form
of either independent entities, joint ventures, spinouts,
potential M&A and acquisition kinds of instruments. And the goal is to basically
fundamentally launch all these new companies
beyond the print franchise. ANASUYA STRASNER: So you're
almost your own startup ecosystem as well. NARESH SHANKER: Exactly. And that's fundamen
tally what
our mission is right now. We are in the business of
actually deploying or creating and developing these
breakthrough businesses that are fundamentally powered
by breakthrough technology. And the goal is to solve
real world problems, right, at massive scale. And so all of our
portfolio is designed around massive business problems
or societal problems or climate problems. So that's in essence. ANASUYA STRASNER: So
now what about PARC? Maybe share a little
bit about what's happening with
PARC right now? NARESH SHANKER: Lots
going on at PARC. I mean, there's tremendous
amount of technology and capabilities here. And so what we've
done broadly right now is we have said that we're
going to start focusing. Because we've got
a very broad range of interdisciplinary sciences
that go across many domains. For now, what we've done is
developed a market thesis around three critical
areas that we think will give us actually
the greatest value proposition over the next 5 and 25 years. And t
he first one is around
disruptive supply chains and manufacturing,
that whole world. And so we've introduced our
first product and business around 3D additive
manufacturing. And it's all
products and science built at Xerox and PARC. So that's one of the
businesses around 3D additive. The second business is around
industrial and commercial grade IoT solutions. And the third one we recently
launched was Cleantech, and this is to improve
energy efficiency by upwards of 80% in cooling technologies.
It's one of the largest
contributors to the consumption of greenhouse gases. And it has a substantial impact
of somewhere around 2% to 3%, which is the equivalent of-- these greenhouse
gas implications are the equivalent of the
entire aircraft industry which is around 2% or 3%. ANASUYA STRASNER:
And it's so neat because, if you think about it,
what is happening with climate change and Cleantech,
it's incredible to see the application
of the technology that you're
inventing right here. NARESH SHA
NKER: So we we're
excited about that technology, and that business got
launched, and we're hoping to complete,
I'd say, a better version of the product
by the end of next year and then take it from there. So we've got some very
interesting technologies at PARC that we're pursuing
right now to get to market. ANASUYA STRASNER:
So then maybe you could help us understand
Xerox Financial Services. Where does that fit
in to the picture and how does that support
the other businesses as well. NARESH SHA
NKER: Yeah,
another great business. So Xerox Financial
Services is really all about providing a platform
of a bed of financial solutions to help both customers,
partners, actually not just sell hardware solutions
but the complete portfolio. And create the
avenue to actually cross-sell, right, in a
very effective way, not just enterprise, but more
importantly, the SMB market. And so it's a business
we've actually started to stand it up. It's called XFS. It's an independent
entity, and the goal is
for that business to go
to market effectively and be a provider for a
multitude of industries. KENDALL FISHER: In
this next segment, Naresh and Anasuya dive
into the principles of designing for time to value
and measurable experiences. ANASUYA STRASNER: Can
you share a little bit about what your perspective
is around Oracle and where Oracle fits into that
picture as a partner of yours? NARESH SHANKER: So when
we started this journey, I mean we looked at what would
an outside-in experience look
like for a customer, a partner. An inside-out experience,
what would that look like for an employee, right? I mean because when
we look at technology we bring to market,
we design everything from either a partner customer
or employee point of view. I mean, because
experience is everything. So it starts with that in mind. What is that experience we want
to design when we ultimately get to market? We then bring
together teams around interdisciplinary
sciences, which are people that design business
models, process models, go-to-market models. And then last but not least
is the online architectures, right. How do you enable
this whole experience? And so we kind of create
this three-legged stool around experience to design
from an outside-in perspective. And so what we ended
up having to do is actually design all
of these businesses to be simple, nimble, and agile. Because when you think about
a customer, what do they want? They want to make it-- they want you to
make it very easy for you t
o engage with them. When they engage
with your companies, they want it to be simple. They want it to be a really
enriching, simple experience. They also want it
to be easy for them to consume your technology. You want it to be
that way as well. So you want this
whole experience to be very simple for
a customer or partner. So what we had to
fundamentally do is look at all of the
technology and what we made the decision
was that we were going to go cloud native, mobile
native, and digital native,
because that would help us
actually create and stitch this simple, nimble,
agile experience that all constituents want,
whether it's a customer, partner, or employee. So we started with that premise. And so starting with
that premise, we said, OK, let's work with
a strategy that's going to support fundamentally
a multicloud, multimodal sort of set of experiences
and capabilities. So that's our
fundamental strategy. So we pursue a
multi-cloud strategy to create this multidimensional
digital exper
ience across partners,
customers, employees. And that's where
the journey started. And so after looking at
several different partners we actually-- one of the partners we
selected was the Oracle team. And what they helped
us actually do was to actually put
together a complete strategy around how do you stand up these
businesses very rapidly so we can achieve fundamentally
our goals, which is the time-to-market
in time-to-value goals. And more importantly,
at the end of the day, kind of deliver a
measurable experience for all these
constituents, right? For people on the outside
coming in or people on the inside out running
the operations to be able to deliver an experience. So we kind of had to
tether all this together. And so that's where Oracle
fit in and put together a strategy and
enabling architecture and the roadmaps and et
cetera, to help us accelerate and execute fairly rapidly. ANASUYA STRASNER: How
are you leveraging Oracle to look at
all these businesses and their performance
and
leverage that back end system in Xerox so that you can
have that unified view? NARESH SHANKER: Yeah,
so I think what's nice about the architecture
we put in place is that one, it's tightly integrated
and we pretty much implemented all of the
solutions out of the box. And more importantly,
we've created the standards-based
APIs or interfaces that can kind of
easily transport data to other entities. But at a very basic
fundamental level we wanted to make sure
that these entities had all of th
e transparency to
be able to operate and run independently. So that we started
with that foundation. And what we're able to
do is aggregate the data with all of the
different solution stacks that we have to be able to
provide full transparency on not just the revenue and
all of the different metrics that we typically track
around the business, but more importantly also
the user experience. You know, how simple is it
to support the environment? So you design for
supportability. You design for a c
ustomer
experience or you design for an employee experience. The whole idea is to make sure
that these experiences can coexist and, at the same
time, they can actually be holistic and complete in
terms of how the solution is architected out of the box. So the solutions
we picked actually gave us the opportunity to
actually put that in place. And that's really kind of
the whole value proposition around speed to market
and speed to value, to be able to achieve that. And then also to create
an envi
ronment which is supportable, an environment
that can be updated and evolved to the latest and greatest
where the market's going without putting too much, what I
call labor, into the ecosystem. So what we've done
is fundamentally move to an
automation-based ecosystem. So there's a lot of robotics
and process automation in place, a lot of very
powerful analytics in place. And then you have the
fundamental technology that operates and runs
the entire business, whether it's all of the procure
pay,
code to cash, recorded report, or planned
or ship processes. All of these. You name the process. ANASUYA STRASNER:
Yeah, all of it. NARESH SHANKER: You
know, we've got it all pretty much on steroids. And what it helped us do is
operate in a very simple, nimble, agile way. And we were able to spin up all
these businesses in literally 90 days, I mean, which
was very, very important. ANASUYA STRASNER: Are there
any benefits, specifically, that you can think of
already that you've realized? You shar
ed some just
in terms of time to value, the ability to
spin up these businesses and get them going and monetize
as quickly as possible, looking at the
performance holistically. Any other benefits
or things like that you can share
that just having that sort of experience-oriented
approach in mind you've realized already? NARESH SHANKER: I think some of
the metrics we were looking at is how rapidly can these
businesses transact and start interacting with customers. How quickly could we
turn around
quotes? How quickly can
we create orders? How quickly can we
actually configure products to the system and
recognize revenue? Things of that sort. And that was going
to be important, to be able to design
it so lean that-- so we've got a lot of
good metrics around lean. ANASUYA STRASNER: Do you
have any advice or feedback that you'd give to other
leaders that are potentially seeing an opportunity that
seems almost daunting at first? NARESH SHANKER: Yeah, so I think
what I learned very quickly on
the journey, and one of the
things I always do personally is I have my own personal
board of directors. And these are professionals
in the field, both either professional or
personal, and when they give me a lot of good insight. And living in the
valley, huge benefits because you have so much
of insight and opportunity to collaborate
with so many folks. So I think the most important
thing coming in I realized was that I had to really
be clear about what I know and what I don't know. And the sec
ond part of it was
also understanding with regards to what I do about
both these dimensions and make sure that I
appropriately build and/or bridge gaps, right? So starting there,
that's something that I put a lot of energy in
the beginning actually building and rebuilding the operating
models and the teams because I don't care what problem
they throw at me, but if I can get the right
team and the right leadership and the right culture,
I always find myself on the winning side, you
know, of probl
em solving. And so that's the first thing
I discovered was it can't be a one-size-fits-all because
there's too much diversity in the system. And so you start small
with one ecosystem and really shape it
and set it afloat, and then you get to
the next and the next. And so very quickly, you
know and the other thing was also anchoring around
sponsors, executive sponsors, and folks that were champions
of a specific mission or cause that could really help
you think it through and build it and really
accelerate,
also important. So I get a lot of help to help
me think about these things. KENDALL FISHER: For
widespread adoption, technology must be
universally accessible. Xerox CTO Naresh Shanker
shares his thoughts on how society can
accelerate technology into markets in the future. ANASUYA STRASNER:
What's on your mind in terms of the next innovation
or the next possibility for what you want to take
advantage of, whether it's around cloud or AI. What's next for you when
you think about that?
NARESH SHANKER: One of
the biggest challenges that we, at least
I see, us facing is designing a whole digital
monetised economy, you know. And that's going
to be interesting because you want to
be able to transact in currency which is going to
be pervasive and universal. And so how do you remove
the barriers to be able to transact universally? And from global to
region to country and how do we simplify
those interactions, whether it's the
impact business or even society or even climate? I mean i
t has massive
implications globally. But we don't have 10,
20, and 50 years to wait. We've got to solve
these problems now, which means we have to give,
be able to execute universally and allow access universally. That's I think going to be some
of the single biggest hurdles in terms of how we get this
technology to be ubiquitous. And then, how do you fund
it financially and globally, right? I mean it's public sector
funding, private sector funding, all these
different-- there's a lot of money i
n the system. But how do you gain
access to capital to actually help accelerate
these businesses to solve these problems
very, very rapidly? It's going to be
a huge challenge. And so most of what we do has
very significant implications in the public sector when
you look at these things universally. So it's a combination
of bringing the private sector
and the public sector together, getting
access to capital to be able to accelerate
these technologies, and patients and
speed is something we've go
t to solve for, and
we've got to figure out here and now. And then how do you get the
monetization to track to us, you know. I mean whether it's investing
or even the returns, how do you actually
be able to do this? Because it's all new. Getting into climate is new. 3D additive manufacturing,
it's a very nascent industry to disrupt supply chains
and manufacturing. You pick the industries
we are going into, right? It's very nascent,
so we're going to have to develop
the infrastructure to be able
to consume. ANASUYA STRASNER: So you've
shared so much with us, Naresh, in regards to just not
only some insight to you as a leader, you as a person,
the way that you approach. It's almost I think
of the evolution of artificial
intelligence and robots. It's like the show your work. What's happening in terms
of the approach or the way you construct these businesses? You know, we don't
always see that, right? We see the result
of the businesses. We see the result
of the technology. And that's what
's so
fascinating to spend time with you today is how do you
think about these businesses, how are you
approaching them, how are you thinking about
the experience in mind that you want to
create for customers and employees, and then the
customers of the customers that Xerox serves. So thanks for sharing a little
bit about what's in your head and spending some
time with us today, and we really look forward to
seeing what's next for Xerox and for you. NARESH SHANKER: Thanks so
much for the opportu
nity. And it's been quite a journey. And I want to actually
take the opportunity to thank the Oracle team. It's been a great
collaboration, and it's been probably two years
in the making since, or even three years in the
making, since we got here, and the Oracle team has
been an instrumental part of our journey. So I appreciate all the support
you guys give us, and thank you very much. ANASUYA STRASNER: We
feel it's an honor to be a partner with
you in the journey. KENDALL FISHER: From
industria
l grade IoT that senses the
health of society's physical infrastructure, to
reducing greenhouse gases with Cleantech, we at Oracle
are excited to support Xerox on their journey to the future. Thank you for joining
at this spotlight. It's been an
amazing conversation and we want to keep it going. To follow up and learn more,
visit our Customer Spotlight page and we can help you get
connected to the right team. And as always, be on the lookout for our next episode of the Oracle Customer Spotlight
Series. You never know which company
we'll shine a light on next. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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