Hitachi Digital & GlobalLogic: Combining Ecosystems and Marketing

Hitachi Digital & GlobalLogic: Combining Ecosystems and Marketing

TBR Talks Host Patrick Heffernan: Welcome to TBR Talks: Decoding Strategies and Ecosystems of the Globe’s Top Tech Firms. Where we talk business model disruption in the broad technology ecosystem from management consultancies to systems integrators, hyperscalers to independent software vendors, telecom operators to network and infrastructure vendors, and chip manufacturers to value-added resellers. We’ll be answering some of the key intelligence questions we’ve heard from executives and business unit leaders among the leading professional IT services and telecom vendors. 

I’m Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst, and today we’ll be talking about partner marketing, IT/OT, and the merging of GlobalLogic with Hitachi Digital Services, with Patrick Corcoran, Vice President, Global Head of Marketing and External Relations at Hitachi Digital Services, and Stephanie Long, Senior Analyst for TBR’s Telecom Practice. 

Full circle career point

Patrick, welcome to TBR Talks. We’re in season five. I’m really happy you’re here and we’re in person, which is great. As we have experienced over these five seasons, having these conversations in person opens up so much more. So, thank you for coming to the TBR studios and recording this. And maybe if you could just start off with giving us a little bit of your background and then we’ll jump into, we’re here, Stephanie’s with us too, I should say, and we’ll jump into all the questions we have for you.

Patrick Corcoran, Vice President, Global Head of Marketing and External Relations at Hitachi Digital Services: Well, it’s been great for you guys to host me here. I’m super impressed with the way that TBR has been evolving over the years, and not only from an awesome office space, but just the way that you’re so focused and grounded in the research that you do. It’s been great to finally get here in person and see everybody, which is always good. I appreciate the opportunity for the discussion today. I’ve been in Hitachi now for 4.7 years, according to my LinkedIn. So close to five, but we’ve been through a couple different rounds of what Hitachi actually means in the market. So, we started with Hitachi Vantara, which was a large SI that had both the storage business and the IT services business. And then in October of ‘23, we spun out a company called Hitachi Digital Services, which was the leading SI arm for all things Hitachi. And now as we approach this new fiscal year, April 1st, we are now merging with a five-year acquisition, GlobalLogic. And that name is still being decided, of course. But we are now making sure that the world is seeing all of the IT services capabilities of Hitachi under one umbrella, which is important. And personally, I’ve been in this industry now for 13 years. Prior, I was at DXC, which we all know, large old school provider. And then a company called Luxoft, which was an early engineering nearshore organization, which was larger than GL at that time when we were growing. And we ended up getting acquired by DXC because they wanted to add more strength to their application side of the business. So, it’s kind of a full circle for me when you think about everything that’s happening. End to end is coming back now, and I think that’s why things are starting to merge on our end as well.

Patrick: Excellent. And your role at Hitachi now, is it different than what you were doing with DXC?

Patrick C: Yeah, so right now, for the last two and a half quarters, I have taken on the role of head of marketing and comms. And at DXC, I looked after our advisor relations channel along with our partnership with PwC, which went back to the HPE CSC part of that business. 

Patrick: Right.

Patrick C: So, another long-standing relationship there. And then at Luxoft, very similar trail, starting on the AR front and ending up in the head of marketing at the end of that. So very fortunate to have sort of two different sets of the American Dream career at two organizations.

The importance of partner marketing for end-to-end organizations 

Patrick: Right. That’s fascinating, and I definitely want to talk about marketing as we go through this. One thing we can start off with, though, is I know you mentioned the big announcement with GlobalLogic. The other thing we talked about is your partnership, your growing partnership with ServiceNow. And so definitely want to hear a little bit about that, but I’d love to hear, because you’ve been around with companies like Luxoft and DXC, and you’ve had these roles in AR and marketing, you’ve seen the change in the way that companies partner across the ecosystem. I’d love to hear what you think about the way that Hitachi partners, ServiceNow specifically, sure, but also the broader picture of how you operate within the ecosystem and how much you’ve seen that change in the last 4.7 years.

Patrick C: So, I’ve been a big advocate of partner marketing for the longest time, because when you’re competing against, we’ll call it the top 10 providers that essentially own the advertising space, you need to leverage other brands to get your story out there. And most of the time when providers are claiming end-to-end, there’s always areas of depth that are anchored by a partner, whether it be in the hyperscaler world, the platform world, or the niche world like AI. So, for me, partner engagement, partner marketing, partner strategy, partner go-to-market, partner sell with, and so on and so forth, is incredibly important for organizations that are claiming end-to-end experience because they need depth, not just breadth. And that’s where the partners kick in. 

Now, from a branding perspective, anything that’s always co-branded, co-built, IP-related, go-to-market related, it makes an enterprise reader much more interested to see because it’s not a sole voice telling you what’s right, what’s wrong. 

Patrick: Right.

Patrick C: And it makes it a lot easier for the partners to really shore up their investments with the providers because they see real commitment. So, over the last 10 years, I would say that the partner ecosystem has become so important that any provider not doing partner marketing or partner engagement correctly is going to be way behind. And now with the world of AI, I’m sure you guys see it too, the number of boutiques out there or the number of firms that are branding themselves as AI, is really taking a front seat in how does your AI portfolio evolve. So, we have an MoU, Hitachi does, with OpenAI, which was signed with their CEO and our CEO, Tokunaga-san, back in, I think, a few months ago. So, we’re taking that- the next level with AI as well. But it’s the two in the box has never been more important than it is today.

The biggest challenges when navigating partner relationships 

Patrick: And what are some of the challenges that you still run into with a successful partnership and a successful alliance. And I’ll tell you, our own research shows that where you sit within the ecosystem determines what you’re not getting, what you’re looking for still from your alliance partners. That makes sense. But almost universally, alliance leaders tell us what they’re not getting from their partners in the ecosystem is more knowledge sharing, more knowledge management, more understanding of where they’re going. Like what’s coming in the next year or two from you, my partner, so that I can plan my own business around what you’re intending to do. Is that the biggest challenge you see or is there something else that’s even bigger?

Patrick C: So, the business planning part is always difficult because the partner has to manage multiple relationships and the business of each of the providers is more dictated by their own client engagements, whether it’s partner related or not. So, if somebody’s having a good year with bookings, it makes it always easier to manage and predict some of the investments’ future for that partner. If you’re having a bit of a tough year with bookings, then that always impacts where your OpEx is going to go with a partner all the way through to what are you replacing laptops internally. 

Patrick: Right.

Patrick C: So, it’s really important to have a successful partner engagement when your internal business is on the at least neutral to upright, or else it’s gonna impact your investments there. And that’s gonna create a problem. And what happens is, you know, everything is moving so fast now. If two companies have a great year and they do a huge amount of investment in partner X, and then three don’t have such a good year, and then they try to bounce back, there’s a whole year that the other companies are ahead of it now. So that’s where you guys come in, because you’re able to fill that gap of where are they? Because last year we missed out. Are we six months behind? Are we 18 months behind? So, it’s really important that the business is in tip-top shape in order to leverage the partners, because they’re not going to sit back and wait. 

Patrick: Yeah. Why should they? 

Patrick C: You know, I mean, regardless if there’s a quid pro quo or otherwise, you know, you have to be able to hold up your share of the bargain to it. 

Patrick: Yeah. Excellent. Stephanie.

The 360-degree approach to partnership  

Stephanie Long, TBR Senior Analyst: Yeah so, you mentioned the merging of GlobalLogic with Hitachi Digital Services, and you mentioned Tokunaga-san being at the helm and sort of his vision for the broader Hitachi. And I’m sort of curious to get your thoughts on how that unique position of Hitachi services within this broader Hitachi ecosystem from a partner perspective, what sort of advantages or competitive angles or edges does that provide to the business?

Patrick C: So, one of the cool things about Hitachi is IT and OT. So, there are businesses within the Hitachi Limited that build things. There are businesses that produce applications. There are businesses that do both. And so, you’re always having to touch a different partner in a different context. So, if you’re building something at a factory, you’re still going to have an ERP system up and running in order to do that. If you’re deploying at a client request an ERP system, you have to go through all the software licensing and all that other stuff. So obviously the connections between an internal use of a partner and the external implementation of a partner’s software need to be connected to maximize the value. So, there’s really been this push to have a 360-degree relationship across all these partners because that gives you the ability to get to the highest level that you want to be. It helps you reach certain certifications of X number of people engaged. It helps with having cross-company investments into what are we going to do with this type of partner. 

So, I think Tokunaga-san’s vision of a 360-degree approach to partnership at Hitachi is really going to give us a competitive edge because of the size of the organization, right? It’s all 60, 65 billion in terms of revenue across all these different areas. So that’s really important. And it also helps us because there’s a new concept that we’ve introduced called Customer Zero, which is we have factories that require systems like MES and so on. There’s also factories that our clients have that they want to make smart. Well, why not leverage our smart factories to show them how to make their factories smart? So, to bring that practitioner angle from shop floor to top floor, which means there’s several partners around that ability to make a factory smart, as an example, is truly a differentiator in the market. There’s no other provider that has this type of ecosystem. So, it’s a really cool story to tell now.

Hitachi’s pillar of sustainability 

Stephanie: I’m also curious to gain your perspective on one of the things that I find interesting about broader Hitachi’s perspective is its ongoing commitment to social innovation and sustainability. How would that play into this partner ecosystem and how maybe you may choose to partner or work together with these other companies?

Patrick C: So, sustainability for sure is a, you know, one of the key pillars of who Hitachi is. And that means not only selling sustainability services, but also being a sustainable company itself. So, we have a very rigorous sustainability mandate across all the organizations to ensure that everyone’s meeting certain criteria depending on the business that you’re in. So, we, you know, Hitachi Digital Services recently released our sustainability report, which we had a silver ranking from EcoVadis, which is one of the key, I would say, committees responsible for evaluating that type of sustainability. I think we’re in the top 6%. So that’s pretty good for a service provider, especially when everybody travels all the time, right? So, but having a mandate at a larger level, especially from an OT perspective, has really put a different spin on what we mean by being sustainable. It’s not just LED lights and not traveling as much and ensuring that the laptops are efficient on the electrical grid and so on. This gives you, like, factories have to be Amica work level type of organizations. So, learning from that and then helping use that in the market is, again, something that makes us real disciplined in everything we do about social motivation.

Patrick: So, a couple of things on sustainability. I’m really glad you brought that up. We have consistently been asked about sustainability and how companies are actually bringing sustainability services. But to your point, this sort of back to the customer zero, like actually doing it themselves. And while it may have faded off a little bit, it’s still there. And it’s still a high priority for a lot of companies that we work with. And we want to talk about IT-OT though for a second, because you mentioned your ability to show clients your, like, so Hitachi Rail, you guys build physical, actual rail cars, right? And so, you can take clients and say, here’s what it looks like to build this actual physical thing in a smart factory and here’s all that. But at the end of the day, there’s not so much IT-OT convergence because the people who are buying and using IT and the people who are buying and using OT are very different people, even if they’re in the same organization. So how does Hitachi make sure that they’re not bringing the wrong persona to the table from Hitachi to talk to IT, to talk to OT, because there isn’t actually that convergence.

Patrick C: So, I’ll give you an example from a partner perspective. One of the consultancies we work with is Eraneos, primarily EMEA-based. They have good footprint in the DACH region and the Nordics, and they’re also used by Hitachi Energy as a consultant. So, we have built a partnership with them, which we use to primarily push asset-heavy transformation projects, industries that is. So, one of the things that we do is we have a semiconductor factory in Lenzburg, Switzerland, which is top of the end in terms of smart factory, right? 4.75 out of five. And we host there enterprise leaders from manufacturing organizations and give them a tour of the factory and explain to them, hey, this was a X amount dollar investment five years ago, and here’s the transformation, and this is what you need to do to become a smart factory. So, Eraneos comes in and talks about the business side of how to make these investments, the OpEx, the CapEx, the governance, the program management. And then we come in and talk about the IT front and connecting that to the OT practitioners within there. So, the last time we did this, we had 15 different enterprises from, I would say, Fortune 500s within Switzerland come to the factory. And we have an awesome MD who is basically the product lead but he has a marketing background too. So, it gives him the ability to story tell around what this means, but answer every technical question under the sun. And so, we polled the audience and said, raise your hand if you think your factory, after you saw this tour, is at a five out of five, four out of five, three out of five? The highest we got was two out of five in terms of level of smartness, right? 

Patrick: Yeah.

Patrick C: And so, you know, that shows us that there is still a lot of shop floor OT maturation that needs to happen. So partnering with Eraneos has given us this opportunity to really help connect the disjointedness between the IT and the OT side, because we come in as a provider, they come in as the consultant, and then we obviously have the OT factory to show the connection between the two. So, it takes some time to get your head around that model, but we’ve done this now. I think we’ve done four different factory tours with names that you would all know in the market and have shown them what it’s like to become and how to run a shop floor and how to get to the board floor about how to make these investments. So that’s one example. 

Now, you mentioned rail. I was just in Hagerstown, Maryland, where we put together a Hitachi Rail factory. It’s more of a distribution center because the factory, the trains are built in Italy and shipped there. 

Patrick: Right.

Patrick C: And we are using that as a tour because it has the robotic dogs that do the assessment around the trains. It has an entire customer experience center that talks about the different technologies, things like sustainability platforms and the work around HMAX, which is a new platform that we’ve launched. And so being able to leverage that on site to bring clients to it, to bring partners to, the art of the possible is there. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Patrick C: And when you get IT and OT in the same room and you start to show them the connection between the two, it makes it a lot easier to deal with the disjointedness that certainly exists between the majority of those companies.

How the marketing job is different because of AI 

Patrick: Right, absolutely fascinating. I do want to ask you about, well, two more things. Because of your marketing background and your marketing position now, the work you’re doing now, two years ago, three years ago, when GenAI launched it was like coders, software coders, procurement, and marketing. Those were the three jobs that were going to be gone, you know, right away. Obviously, it hasn’t happened. But how much are you seeing your job as different because of AI now? Your marketing job as different.

Patrick C: So, I use it every day. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Patrick C: Now, I’m primarily using it, you know, a GenAI perspective. But we do have agents deployed in marketing that are doing everything from finding contact information and media contacts all the way through to writing white papers. So, we’ve embraced the AI environment for all of go-to-market as much as we can. So that’s been good. 

Now, our CTO, who was on stage once, and I’ll never forget what he said, he was, you know, a question came up very similar. Jobs, what’s going to happen? And his response was, we have to stop thinking about AI’s impact on losing jobs and killing jobs. We have to think about how do we leverage AI to restructure what the jobs actually do. And if you remember, I think The Economist came out with the article in the early days saying the biggest threat to a job is not AI, but it’s someone who uses AI.

Patrick: Right.

Patrick C: And so, I think that’s the mindset now that everyone, whether it’s marketing, HR, legal, any back office, front office, middle office function, needs to adopt. And I’ll be, I’m enrolled now in one of the Kellogg courses for sort of those accelerated certificate marketing courses. So, I’m very curious to see what my competitors or peers are doing with AI. And I know there’s a certain pillar that’s focused on that. So, and I know that discussion on AI has changed every, it’s almost like every six months now. So, we’re fully embraced in it, you know, and I will share with you when I get the information of what they’re talking about at Kellogg on AI. Our teams want to get certified in it, both internally and externally, whether it’s a LinkedIn cert or some of the training that we have internally mandated for us around AI. Everybody should be using it. They should be familiar with it, whether it’s helping design or helping it to write or helping it be creative and just be more efficient. I can only imagine the impact on an analyst role too. I mean, how much- this gives you time to actually think.

Patrick: Exactly.

Patrick C: Not just write and anyways.

Patrick: Not just cut and paste graphs into a slide deck. 

Patrick C: *laughs*

Where will we be in 15 years with AI?

Patrick: So, let’s take that and I want to look out, I want to talk about the longitudinal view of technology. We’ve been talking about that a lot in this season of the podcast. In a little bit of reaction to how much we talked about the hype around AI, but I kind of want to look both forwards and backwards. Like when you think about where we were with emerging technologies. And let’s call AI an emerging technology for the moment. Blockchain.

Patrick C: Mobile app dev.

Patrick: The Metaverse.

Patrick C: Metaverse, IoT.

Patrick: IoT, all that stuff. So smart cities, all that kind of stuff. So that’s where we were however many years ago. And now AI seems to be different. It seems to be more revolutionary than just an evolution of, you know, 5G plus blockchain plus IoT equals analytics. That’s much faster, much better. It’s more than that, or maybe it isn’t. And then, so start there and then go out another, let’s go out another 15 years with the other end of it, where AI is no longer emerging. What do you see as how much will have changed in the next 15 years?

Patrick C: So, I wonder if, and I’d be curious for both of your feedback on this, I wonder if because AI nowadays has a B2C impact. Like, so when IoT came out, the consumers weren’t- nothing was changed from a workforce perspective when IoT came out. When cloud came out, right, okay, nothing was really changed from a consumer perspective or a workplace perspective in terms of impact. I mean, so I’ve been, the way that I’ve been thinking about this is because there’s a- there’s such an end user element to AI now that the impact is different than any of those other trends that happened before. I mean, does that make sense?

Patrick: It does, and it reminds me that we have an Amazon Alexa in our kitchen that we use for the same things everybody else uses it for, lists and-

Patrick C: Turn the light on.

Patrick: Trivia of the day, question of the day. At times, when you ask Alexa a question, the answer is so bad that it sort of reinforces like, okay, AI is not going to take over the world because this thing that’s had its software updated just recently still can’t answer that very basic question. And then there are other times when it’s incredibly helpful and incredibly useful. And I just think that’s the sort of, you’re right, we’re getting exposed to AI very differently than we ever got exposed to the other technologies.

Stephanie: Well, to that point too, you also have sort of this grassroots adoption of a technology. And the users are deciding what they’re going to want to use it for, whereas when it rolls out in the other perspective, you’re sort of being informed what you’re about to use this new technology for.

Patrick C: Well said, and I think the democratization of it is going to have a much bigger impact, bottom up than top down, for sure. 

So, I’ll give you an example. We were running a workshop on one of our clients, and it was a, I don’t know, Gen. Z all the way through to baby boomer room of about 150 people. So, the keynote speaker was somebody from one of the well-known brands. And they talked about your, what you asked about the 15-year vision. So, everything all the way to physical AI and Metaverse and how all this stuff is going to change. And the feedback we got before we, as we were planning our contribution to the internal workshop, don’t scare the workforce with the future of AI. So that was, I don’t, so we let that presentation take care of that. So, I got on stage and, you know, I could look around and I could get this sense of people, there are users of AI, and then there were those who were still trying to figure it out. So, I started by saying, if I’m right, there’s still people in this room who don’t know which television remote to use when to turn on an app or lower the volume. And you see certain people laughing. Because if that’s still a problem, then the threat of AI coming in and ripping apart everything is not going to happen at the pace that some of these thought leaders are projecting. Because we still have basic issues around general technology. You know, it’s happening fast, there’s no doubt. It’s something that’s definitely in the workforce, like we talked about. But It’s not fundamentally there where things are very, very different.

Patrick: And to tie it back to what you said earlier about the factories in Switzerland, I mean, there’s so much that can happen on the IT digital AI front, but until it’s physically actually making a difference in how things are made and moved and constructed and all that, you’re still- we’re all still physically in this space, so we still have to move around in it.

Patrick C: And there’s still humans in that factory. It’s a hybrid environment. 

Patrick: Yeah.

Patrick C: The shop floor is still managed by human beings, you know, with technology as playing a bigger role in it. But again, I look at that as an efficiency piece. So, it allows the workers to focus on some of the bigger issues.

Patrick: Yeah. Stephanie, I have one last question. Do you have anything else you wanted to raise?

Hitachi Lumada 

Stephanie: I did want to sort of layer on to the conversation we were having earlier about the merge of GlobalLogic with Hitachi Digital Services and understanding how from a broader Hitachi perspective, the Lumada overlay is going to play in to this one Hitachi vision with this sort of modernized services arm.

Patrick C: So, they’ve introduced Lumada 3.0 now. And, you know, I think Lumada is, the way that I always think about it is that it’s a virtue or an ethos of who Hitachi is, right? It’s one of those things that connects all of the people together when they think about technology and they think about offerings, and they think about what they’re doing at a company, right? It’s not to be thought of as a sort of single piece of technology or a platform or a piece of infrastructure, but I look at it more of an ethos of who we are now. I mean, would you agree from your experience at Hitachi?

Stephanie: Yeah, Lumada seems to be sort of overarching through everything that you’re doing. And as the business units of the broader Hitachi evolve, so does Lumada along with it.

Patrick C: Well said. Well said. Better answer than mine, in fact.

Patrick: You’re not taking her back. She’s staying here. 

Patrick C: *laughs*

Reflecting on career goals from age 22

Patrick: All right, last question. So, this is something I’ve been asking everybody this season, and it stems from a conversation I had in Toronto earlier this year. We were talking about careers and life and where life takes you. And our daughter is 22. She’s going to be graduating from university in a month. She’ll be happy I stopped talking about her on this podcast. But so, at 22, you know, you think back to when you were 22, the whole world’s in front of you, right? And you have in your mind, this is what I would love to do, your 22-year-old self. I haven’t asked you this question yet on the podcast, have I? No, okay. So that’s the question. What did your 22-year-old self want to do. And the first time I had this conversation, the woman up in Canada said she got a degree in mechanical engineering and she wished she had just found a way to join a Formula One team. And just, it would have been, for her 20 years ago, 25 years ago, she would have joined it. And that’s her passion. That’s which she wished she could have done. And she wished she had done instead of being where she is now in a technology company. But anyway, so Patrick, when you were 22, what was the 22-year-old Patrick thinking, this is what I want to be in life?

Patrick C: Well, I went to undergrad for three of the four years studying to be a history teacher. And so, I was going to a local college, St. Joseph’s University, and I was also coaching football at high school. So, I thought these are, I’ll just get a job where I- right. Now I graduated in 2008, so we all know what happened then. But that aside, when I started to get into a lot more of the political science courses at St. Joe’s and learning about political economy, grand strategy, sort of the different theories around why states are doing what they’re doing, I got very much interested in international affairs. So, I stopped the teaching piece, and I went to get my MA in global affairs. And I think what I wanted to do was work at a think tank, be an analyst, sort of get involved in decision-making, advising on foreign policy, whether it’s an internship at the Council of Foreign Relations or trying to get a job at the State Department. That’s where my sort of head was. So, I moved to D.C. and I started my doctorate at Catholic U to further on this global affairs piece because I was noticing a lot of think tank leaderships had at a minimum a master’s degree or doctorate. And it was still hard to find an entry-level gig at that stage, 2009, 2010. And I needed to find a job while I was in DC. So, I was applying to everything. Now I think back and I go, I don’t even know how I applied to jobs that long ago, given the way LinkedIn’s evolved.

Patrick: Right.

Patrick C: But I think through Indeed.com, I get a call from the head of research at the Public Affairs Council. The Public Affairs Council was set up by Eisenhower to essentially be one of the associations for government relations professionals, i.e. lobbyists. 

Patrick: Right. 

Patrick C: So, this guy calls me and says, it sounds like you have a very interesting background. You know how to do research. You’re interested in global affairs. I’m looking for a contractor maybe 20 hours a week or a little bit more to help me do all the research we do. So, a lot of benchmarking, like very similar to what an analyst would do, right? So, I said, this sounds great. I’d love to do it. And I’ll never forget, it was probably my first real job interview, even though it was only a contracting role. And he says, do you have a dollar amount in mind? I’m like, well, you know, what, $12 an hour? He goes, how about 30? I said I’m in. 

Patrick: Sold.

Patrick C: Yeah. So fortunately, Adam, great guy, he brought me on and I stayed on there for about a year and a half and learned a whole lot about what it was like to have a real job. You know, like this was a fully structured association. And then I decided, all right, it was time to move back to New York. And you know, at that point I said, I don’t think the PhD route is something I want to do because I really loved working. And when you think about long-term of that, getting five years of writing and who knows where you’ll be. The last thing I want to do is have to move to the Midwest and teach at a local school. So anyway, and when I tell this story, I’m still amazed how I got into IT. So, I get back to New York and I’m going through sort of interview after interview. And I did some time with a mortgage broker. He had a private shop. And then I got a call from a company called the International Institute for Learning. Which, their target audience is chief learning officers. 

Patrick: Okay.

Patrick C: So, they sold project management training, search, Lean Six Sigma, and they have a gap. They said, oh, the new guy’s here. He can be the ITIL practice lead. So now I’m how to educate myself on all this stuff and what’s the go to market. And ultimately, at the end of the day, it was a sales job. I had to help the sales of ITIL training and V3, I think, had come out at that time. So, I was doing that for a year. And we went to a Gartner event because Gartner, they may or might still have this, but they had a project management section within the symposium. So, we had gotten a booth there to meet with the CLOs and to some extent IT leaders that wanted to train their teams. And I meet someone there who is in investor relations, but she’s looking for somebody to run analyst relations. And we just started to talk, and I said, analyst relations, I could do that. It sounds like something relating to what I’ve been trying to do for the last couple of years, but in the IT sector. And I never, ever thought I would be in this space. 

Patrick: Right.

Patrick C: So, as I’m trying to make this long story shorter, we basically, her and I had stayed in touch for about six months, and I wake up one day to a video, this company called Luxoft just went public. And she was the one who managed with the leadership team the whole IPO.

Patrick: Right, wow.

Patrick C: Because they were developing this role of AR, but it wasn’t ready yet because they wanted to get listed first. So come around, now we’re in August of 2013, and everyone says, oh, it sounds like, you know, we have a candidate here to run the Gartner relationship at that time and the Forrester relationship, right, back in 2013. And I took on the job. And I didn’t know at that point the difference between a briefing and an inquiry. 

Patrick: *laughs*

Patrick C: And it wasn’t until one of the sales reps at Forrester actually educated me on how I needed to do this job. So, I had to really BS my way through it, but then I eventually got a handle on it. And so, the rest was in history. I mean, I learned-

Patrick: Fascinating. Yeah. Wow.

Patrick C: I got really lucky. I mean, so my advice to a lot of graduates is, that it’s hard to know what you want to do until you actually start doing something. And I mean, I look at wanting, trying to teach students in 7th grade how to pass a Regents to where I am now, figuring out what’s our strategy going to be as a new organization.

Patrick: Right.

Patrick C: Two totally different pieces, but that all evolved because of where I had worked and who I had met. So, value the network and the people that you meet as much as you can, because everybody, anybody could have a potential opportunity that you want to get across. And I mean, just when you think about the steps, meet this person here and go to this event and this guy hires you and this happens, you just got to sell yourself and people will give you a chance. We just brought on somebody on our marketing team who just is out of school and has expressed interest in partner marketing. So, I don’t, I’m not going to, I look at the way I got into a company. So, if somebody doesn’t know the hard-core difference between what to do differently with Google versus Microsoft with AWS at 21 years old, I’m not going to hold that against them.

Patrick: Of course not.

Patrick C: So, you find the people that show the earnestness that they want to learn and the excitement that they want to join a company and figure out their career, and you can be a teacher and a leader.

Patrick: And it sounds like, you mentioned an Adam, and then it sounds like the woman that was at Luxoft, like good people too is part of it, too. People you want to work with.

Patrick C: 100%. Yeah.

Patrick: All right, Stephanie, you’re on the hook. What did 22-year-old Stephanie think she was going to do with her life?

Stephanie: So coincidentally, I went to school to be a history teacher as well. But when you peel the onion back of what my actual fundamental goal was, it was to make a difference. And I believed at the time, my 21, 22-year-old self believed that to do that, I had to work with children as a teacher to help make a difference at that age. But as I’ve aged, I realized that you get to make that difference at any age in life. You just have to change the lens that you’re looking at the world from to find the opportunity. But it exists in many different ways, in many different places, at many different ages to have that influence on making a difference.

Patrick: And a lot of us here at TBR are children, so you’re able to influence us. You’re still working with children, whether you think so or not.

All: *laugh*

Patrick C: That’s a good point, and I think I filled that gap by joining the Knights of Columbus.

Patrick: Oh, yeah, all right.

Patrick C: That’s given me the ability to make, you know, donations. Everywhere from Sloan Kettering to St. Jude’s to food banks and clothing drives. And I think to your point, everyone that’s interested in being a teacher wants to make a difference, right? That’s sort of one of the driving factors. But sometimes it’s not the career path you end up on and you still have this want to make a difference. And that’s been the way that we’ve been, you know, I’ve personally been able to do that.

Final thoughts

Patrick: Right. Excellent. Well, thank you, Stephanie. Thank you, Patrick. Enormous fun. This conversation went in a lot of different directions than I didn’t expect. So really appreciate it. Thanks for coming in. Now that I know you’re only down in New York, you’re close by, we’ll expect you to come back soon.

Patrick C: 100%. Thanks for having me. 

Patrick: Thanks. 

Tune in next week for another episode of TBR Talks. 

Don’t forget to send us your key intelligence questions on business strategy, ecosystems, and management consulting through the form in the show notes below. Visit tbri.com to learn how we help tech companies, large and small, answer these questions with the research, data, and analysis that my guests bring to this conversation every week. 

Once again, I’m your host, Patrick Heffernan, Principal Analyst at TBR. Thanks for joining us, and see you next week.

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