CDW | Technology Evolution: Navigating Five Market Shifts and CDW’s Market Transitions
(upbeat music) - I am delighted to bring to the stage our Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Sanjay Sood, as well as Conor Waddell, our Senior Vice President of Integrated Technology Solutions. They'll discuss five market shifts and discuss CDW's approach to those market transitions. I did get the opportunity to ask both of these leaders about their uses of AI. Sanjay actually uses an app or an AI application called Suno, which will create and generate music based on user prompt. So, as a music lover myself, you didn't ask, but I'm gonna share with you anyway, my favorite band is Pearl Jam, my favorite genre is country. I realize that's very strange, but I'm super excited to try this one out.
Conor, I'm convinced Conor uses AI to bolster his growing library of dad jokes. If you've not heard them, they're Olympic level. Wait and see. It is my great pleasure to welcome Sanjay and Conor.
(audience applauding) (upbeat music) - So I got music and you got dad jokes. - Yeah, exactly, tell me about Suno. What'd you most recently do with Suno? - Well, I used it to actually freak out my wife. So if you try this, suno.com, you can type in a prompt, any sort of genre. My wife is a computer science professor, so I prompted it to create a country song about a computer science professor with three kids, two dogs, and a cat.
And I played it for her and she freaked out 'cause she had no idea it was AI generated. But that was fun. How about you dad jokes? - Dad jokes.
Well, so audiences generally, or like when I do this internally, they generally give me either great remarks or it's their least favorite part of the entire session. So you'll tell me in the feedback. But I went on ChatGPT and asked for AI-based dad jokes. So I'm gonna let you be the judge here. What I got was, why did the neural network win an award? - Why, Conor? - Because it was well-trained. (audience laughing softly) - Grown, yeah.
- Okay, so at that point it fell apart, right? And it, oh yeah, we need this. There we go. Thanks, Jackie. So why did the AI assistant crash? - Why, Conor? - It was overloaded with tasks. So I'm like, wait a minute, that's not even really funny, it's actually probably true. So then I realized that I went back and I originally asked for dad jokes, but it didn't gimme AI-based dad jokes. So I'll give you this one. What is brown and sticky?
A stick. Okay, that one's pretty good, right? But then it made it AI, it said what is binary and sticky? A bit, right? So, eh, okay. - I don't know. - So I think that we can be rest assured of the things that might move to AI, the realm of dad jokes will still be human-powered for some time to come. All right.
But that's not why we're here, everybody. You may be wondering that, but again, I'm Conor Woodell, I'm the Senior Vice President of Integrated Tech. Happy to be on stage with Sanjay. Sanjay, do you wanna frame us up here? - Yeah, I'm Sanjay Sood, and I'm the Chief Technology Officer at CDW. You know, one of the things that I love about working at CDW is, you know, as Alitha said, on one side of the equation are 1,500 technology providers. On the other side, are hundreds of thousands of customers that work with CDW.
So we get to see a great vantage point of technology trends, market trends, the things that are on top of probably all of your minds. But in my role at CDW, I'm responsible for all our enterprise technology. So we thought it would be really interesting for us to walk through these market trends, but also reflect internally what is CDW doing about these. So if you think about CDW drinking its own champagne, I think it's important for us to give a little bit of a sneak peek behind the curtain in terms of how we think about some really important topics that are occurring within the technology industry, and with many businesses across the globe.
- Yeah, absolutely. So Alitha talked in the opening session about security, about AI and automation, and about data. So as we think about taking those concepts and bringing them down into actionable things that we can produce for our customers, we've had to develop frameworks, right? So I'll give you an analogy here.
I tend to speak and think almost exclusively in analogies. So I'll bring you along with me. By the way, this image is almost certainly AI generated. If you look really closely at it, these doors seem to lead to nowhere. There's a couch in the basement in what appears to be like some sort of cabling room.
And the attic is pretty creepy with a- - Crib? - What appears to be an empty crib, and that's it. So that's not why, again, didn't really help the analogy out, but the analogy is all of us here live in a house, have rented a house, and some of us have gone through building a house. And as you think about going through that, you are the subject matter expert on what outcomes you want. I want open areas that I can hang out with my friends and family. I want a pool.
I want X, Y, and Z, but you aren't a builder and you wouldn't really go about building a house on your own without the help of an architect, contractor, et cetera. So, as you think about CDW and these trends that are inherently, have almost infinite outcomes as you stitch together different technologies to produce what your business is asking you to do, CDW really plays the role of that architect and contractor. Another way to put it to context switch here to another analogy is, you know, thinking about F1 racing, if I have to go deeper in this and talk about how you do F1 racing quickly, you're gonna understand you gotta drive- - Yeah, drive fast. - You're gonna find out, I'm not necessarily deep into F1 racing, but the idea is that anytime you're doing a major tech transformation that's driven by like AI, right? We're figuring out how to respond to that, but everybody's doing that the first time and you really have one opportunity to think about how do we get back to work, right, after being forced to go remote after a pandemic. How do you think about your cloud and hybrid cloud environment and rationalizing that? These are all things that each individual customer in the room deals with and asks to address. But you see that really one or maybe two times as you think about affecting transformation as you go from either within your company or from within different companies.
And the idea here is that CDW is driving that track every single day. So as you think about what we're up to, Alitha talked about the transformation, which is all about taking the investments that we've made both organically and inorganically to create a full portfolio around the platforms our customers use, the security environments that they need to execute, the cloud environments that drive innovation, and driving that to the outcomes that you're all looking to produce and then codifying those, right? So as I use the house analogy, use the racetrack analogy, it's coming up saying, "Well, we've done this before, we have approaches that are standardized and templatized, and now we can bring the learnings from others in your industry of similar size, and say, this is how we recommend approaching those, knowing that every individual environment is bespoke and customized, we know how to produce an outcome that is repeatable that you can depend upon." So we do a lot of thinking about in these areas, where do we need to help our customers affect market transitions? In the areas on the side, you see five that we've landed on that we're gonna talk about what we're seeing in the market and what we're doing internally. These aren't the only five, right? But they're areas where we've seen customers needing to move from one paradigm to the next where CDW has consulting and an opinion on how to do that, and we have the right ecosystem of capabilities, partners and abilities to execute to help our clients through that transition. So with that, that's customer driven, so it's driven by everything that we hear from each of you, validated by analysts.
We're not shooting in the dark, we're making sure we're listening. And then it's really bounced across back to what we're seeing internally and validated by your own technology teams. So let's jump in. AI, Sanjay, a topic near and dear to your heart. - Yeah, no.
- Let's hear about what CDW's doing with AI. - Yeah, no, absolutely, near and dear to my heart. And you know, I've had the pleasure over my career of 20 plus years of working on really hard AI problems, previously coming to CDW, I worked on autonomous cars, and then I actually have a PhD in computer science where I focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning. So seeing kind of the hype over the last couple years, it's really interesting just to see that it's probably on top of everybody's mind. You've probably seen a million and one seminars. People talking about AI.
You know, I think when you think about AI at CDW, we're taking a very measured approach. AI wasn't something that just kind of dropped out of a tree a couple years ago, it's something that's been around for a while. You have statistical methods, expert systems that have existed for a while.
At CDW, we've invested in AI capabilities over the last several years. Technologies like RPA, which are fairly widespread of helping drive efficiency. We have systems that use machine learning models to develop statistical models to help us predict supply chain, help us predict order shipment tracking. So all the things kind of around our business, we've been thinking about AI for a long time, certainly with the advent and the widespread dissemination of generative AI, there's been a ton of opportunity to start looking at our portfolio of AI and figuring out how can we leapfrog those capabilities. But ultimately, it comes down to how do you identify business value? And ultimately, the question is, you know, from any CFO or somebody in finance, they're gonna say, "Well, this stuff costs a lot of money, right? Can you show me from a technology perspective how you're gonna drive the best ROI for this technology that you implement?" So at CDW, we're taking an execution approach that's really following kind of three main tactics. The first one is what we call take and deploy.
We invested in technology like Copilot. So actually my team has rolled out over 8,000 licenses of Copilot from Microsoft Office 365 to our coworkers. This costs money of course, but it puts the power of generative AI in the hands of a wide swath of our coworkers. So whether you're sales facing, whether you're sitting in finance or you're in comms, there are tools within Copilot that are incredibly powerful, whether it's summarizing Teams meetings, helping you write an email, doing first-person research.
All this capability helps. And as we've surveyed our coworkers, we're seeing really positive enthusiasm in terms of the value it's driving to the business. So, you know, on average, we're seeing our coworkers saying, "Hey, look, on a monthly basis, we're saving probably 10 hours of time that this technology's helping drive."
So in that take and deploy, these are technologies that are kind of available off the shelf. You know, it does cost money, but you buy the licenses, you deploy it, if you have a sales force or a ServiceNow, there's AI capability that's coming off the shelf. It's really, really easy to deploy to your organization.
So that's kind of one pillar in terms of how we think about execution. The second pillar is where it gets potentially a little bit more interesting and maybe a little bit more expensive, where this is about integrating and customizing AI technology, foundational building blocks, and creating what I would say functional specific capabilities for a specific department or a specific function. So one of the areas that we've innovated on is taking some of the building blocks from Microsoft.
So we have an Azure estate with OpenAI endpoints. We've built a set of systems that can do basic knowledge management. So any sort of collection of documents you have, we have a repeatable pattern using RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, many of you have probably heard of that, using a vector database, you can throw lots of knowledge, whether it's in PDFs, on websites, SharePoint, and then you can create an interface where you can converse with it and ask questions.
So that helps unlock knowledge that's sitting within your ecosystem, makes it more accessible. We've gone even further down by creating custom applications, using a lot of that technology building blocks. So the ones that we just recently deployed was a system that helps manage RFPs, so requests for proposals. CDW gets a lot of them, maybe your businesses has those as well. AI is a great tool for being able to get a really first good draft of an RFP.
So you take all the historical RFPs that you created, you train a model or put it in a RAG database, and then you can essentially create these first drafts that help accelerate throughput. - Yeah, not theirs though. Theirs we write by hand.
- Exactly, right. There's always a human in the loop on a lot of this technology. And so, there's been a lot of benefits of investing, kind of going deep on some of these use case specific and domain-specific areas. And then the final is really kind of what I call create an event, right? And you can go almost as far as to say training your own large language model, right? And we know that there's only a few companies that do that just given the cost of training, the infrastructure that that requires.
But we've been working with a lot of innovative startups in the ecosystem of bringing new capability within CDW. So we have kind of feelers out in Silicon Valley, on the East Coast, and the Midwest. And every so often we come along a company that has really interesting technology that we think can help CDW. And so we're partnering with them to help them develop their technology, prove it out within CDW, and eventually potentially helping them take that to market. So we're taking an approach where we're very methodical about where do we wanna place our bets? Understanding that, at least with a lot of this technology, it's fairly early in the cycle in terms of developing, it is certainly advancing pretty rapidly.
Taking opportunities of taking capability and deploying to organization, and then really focusing on what I think is probably the most important piece of it, which is kind of change management, and process redesign, process leaning out. Oftentimes people that are not in the technology space say, "Well, can AI solve this problem?" I mean, fundamentally, the the first question is, "Well, should AI solve this problem?" Maybe it can. But if you think about the process, the change management involved, that's a heavy lift. So it's something that I think about a lot is we think about where we wanna place the bets around AI, but I feel pretty good that we're following pace with the market.
We're taking advantage of innovations with our partners, learning from it, and then being able to actually take some of those learnings and help our customers along the journey, with things like Copilot, for example, where we have one of the largest installs probably, you know, in North America, in terms of the number of licenses we put out. We've learned a lot and we think it's powerful. It's certainly something that we can help many of you if you're interested in learning more about that.
- Yeah, absolutely. So just now overlaying that with our, kinda how we work with our customers or, again, thinking about templatizing, standardizing really follows the three buckets that you talked about, Sanjay. First is kind of, AI is a feature, right, where we think every company on the planet, right, is going to use, AI is a feature embedded in there, whether it's Copilot, whether it's embedded in like a stack like ServiceNow, helping our clients get maximum efficiency of the use cases tied to that. On the other end where you're just talking about custom LLMs, so that's AI as a factory. But again, now we're seeing that really on the kind on the uptake, a very select few clients are underway with that, whether it's specifically in financial services, in biotech, it'll go down market, right? But building your own, and getting value out of differentiation, out of kind of custom building your own model will apply to certainly some subset.
But where we're seeing kind of where we think the market will go is the middle bucket that you talked about, which is using kind of the models that are productized. So AI as a product where we're taking the, again, the custom models off the shelf and then we're sort of pulling those to referential architectures that our clients can get value out of. And the key there is identifying the use cases that will drive that by industry and helping get to value with that. So, all right, so that's on AI, more to, again, Sanjay will be available for discussions if you wanna grab him later. I'm offering you for that,
we didn't talk about that. Are you gonna be available? - Of course I will. - Okay, that's great. Okay, so next, to move into future of work, little audience participation, we'll see how this goes. How many people in here have a defined number of days that's the minimum amount of time that their coworkers need to be in the office? Okay, we're about 30% of the room.
Keep your hands up. With those people, how many or anybody, how many people have had a change in that policy in the last 12 months? Okay, so the point here, and where it'll end, right, is kind of up in the air, right? So the point here is that we're in a highly-variable environment where the math equation fundamentally has changed, right? So as we just think about this journey, right? You know, we were in the technology industry, we've had the like collaboration technology is available to us for high fidelity communication, leveraging video and multi-channel for quite some time, right? But it really took the pandemic forcing everybody when we went all remote to go from a reluctant user to a PhD super user and everybody, for really everybody in the company, right? And what that's done is create a new set of expectations for the technology that we have in our office locations. - Yep.
- But because we've been kind of, we've taken this meandering path back as we've tried to figure out meandering, we're just trying to figure out what the right mix is. When do you ask people to go back? It's really culturally something that's sensitive, that means the technology we put in place in our offices generally were put in place pre-pandemic. This Windows 10 to 11, right? Windows 10 was built before mobile became a requirement and a imperative. The video and collaboration technologies we have largely put in place pre-pandemic.
Now we go in and expect a high fidelity experience when we go back to office. So what we're seeing is really companies navigate that scenario and think about the end user experience, how to think about patterns of consumption around hybrid work and the technologies that enable that. And then, what that means for really all aspects of infrastructure. I was at a CDW office last week at Philadelphia.
We had 80 people in the room for that office. That's about 90% of those pretty, you know, close to the total population in that office. It was a Thursday. I said on Friday, "How many people are gonna be in the office?" Any guesses? They said eight. I mean, they might have been lying to me, right? But I'm like, it's Friday, and, like, the Phillies were playing.
So like there was a, but again, but that means just think about the, all right, 80 people in using kind of video, using the phone systems, think about bandwidth consumption, then the next day that dropping almost down to nothing and now they're all working remotely and have to be secured. So the patterns changed, right? And the patterns we put in place were largely put in place prior to us having to work with a mixed environment or a multimodal environment. - Yeah, no, I think you're right. I mean, hybrid is harder than having either everybody remote or everybody in the office. We face the same challenges at CDW. We had to invest significantly in our network infrastructure, SD WAN within offices because the nature of the traffic fundamentally changed.
And as Conor was saying, the office itself has changed in terms of everybody having assigned seating, having offices, we turn to hoteling. So you have to have software to enable that to be seamless and easy to use. One of the other things that happened is everybody went home during the pandemic, the expectations around enterprise software changed 'cause you're sitting on Facebook, using Netflix, you saw all the investment in terms of kind of customer and consumer experience, user experience. Those same now applied when people came back to work, whether they're at home or in the office, they're expecting better resiliency and uptime.
So we invested quite a bit in terms of just bulletproofing a lot of our core systems, getting to 99.9% uptime, really focusing on the performance of those systems so people aren't sitting there watching spinning icons. We also implemented some technology around our help desk. So we have a system or a bot called Harold that sits within Teams and essentially handles all tier one or many tier one IT needs. So if you need to reset your password, if you need to open a ServiceNow ticket, if you need to make an approval, it all comes fully, automatically through the spot. So whether you're in the office, on the road, mobile, in your home office, it makes it very seamless for you to interact with the technology department, which makes it a better customer experience.
And then certainly all the devices that we had to reissue, right, with people who were used to having a desk and a computer in the office and now are at home, you know, how do you make sure that you can deploy those devices to a global distributed workforce, making sure that we have the right infrastructure for capabilities like Citrix VDI for when there was workloads that had to be done through our own internal network, we're able to get there. So the story is not written fully in terms of how this is gonna play out, but, you know, certainly the future of work is gonna be way more complex than it was pre-pandemic. But it leaves a lot of opportunities for us to up our game from a technology perspective to create that experience that's gonna more match what our coworkers are now expecting as they interact with our systems and interact with fellow coworkers. So security, kind of shifting gears, certainly top of my mind and certainly if any of you are involved in cybersecurity, you know, top of your mind, going back to the first conversation about AI, we see generative AI just making the cybersecurity landscape more risky just in terms of the types of phishing attacks, spear phishing, all the ability to reverse engineer and to be a real tool for the bad guys.
So it's something that we've really focused on. I think later on during the Executive IT Summit, you're gonna actually hear from Marcos Christodonte II, who's the Global CISO at CDW, reports to me. But he's essentially rebooted our whole cybersecurity posture internally at CDW, has built a phenomenal team, and is focused on a couple areas.
One, certainly the tactics of a good cyber defense, cyber response. So whether that's network segmentation, making sure we have the right software running our clients, having the right logging infrastructure, having the right scanning capabilities to make sure that we're limiting or at least understand the surface area around our networks and our systems. There's been a lot of focus there.
The other thing that he's done really well is change the way that he communicates about cybersecurity to leadership as well as other coworkers. So instead of it being just a set of tools that we're deploying, he's focused a lot on compliance and training. So how do you make sure that people understand the rules of the road, when to be suspicious of potentially somebody being impersonated, putting the right controls in place when it comes to really important parts of our infrastructure, our accounting systems.
But he's also taken the approach of communicating cyber risk from a risk-based perspective. So instead of talking about a set of tools or capabilities, he's really focused on what are the biggest risks for CDW, right? And on top of those lists are certainly our customers, making sure that we're protecting all of you, protecting our partners, protecting our coworkers, and protecting our ability to operate. And so when you start with a risk-based approach where you say, "Hey, here are the top risks," all the work that falls out of that becomes so much more digestible, easy to rationalize, and significantly easier to fund, right? So he's done just a great job and I'm hoping you'll have time to listen to his conversation further in this program. - Yeah, if you were to encapsulate the kind of how we work with our clients around security, it's that quantifying risk that it's really the focus of what we're doing. And it's saying, we have a series of engagements and frameworks and methodologies and how we look at how we do that, right? So some of those, we have an engagement, we've called it the Spark Engagement, but that's where we take real-world insurance claims data based on industry and apply that to a framework to quantify the dollar amount of risk reduction you get by an IT investment.
And enable our customers to then plan out their investments to quantify not only kind of what the technical capabilities are of the systems we're employing, or the investments we're making, but then the corresponding reduction in dollar amount, potential dollar reduction of risk that you get on the other side of that investment. But it really, it's all about like how do you make IT security and reduction of risk something that's digestible both by the organization and by the board, and executive management. - And security doesn't always have to be a big stick that you're taking to the organization. You know, one of the things that we did was we just recently rolled out password-less login, right? And it's just a much better experience.
It essentially makes the notion of having to reset your password a thing of the past. It's significantly more secure and it takes just one more vector of attack away from the bad guys out there. So these are some of the small innovations of just making sure that we're balancing compliance risk, technology, with the coworker experience and making sure that you're always balancing those two and communicating. - Yeah, also functionally just inside baseball, so we're not only presenters, we're also business partners in the organization, but Marcos has embedded IT security experts within my organization who look at how we're just making sure, again, we're deploying to the proper standards for the entire organization for our cloud customers. So heavy focus on that, not just for us, but for all of you as you know, you expect us to, we maintain the highest standards.
- Keep everyone safe. - Okay, so let's talk one more audience participation here. Let's see, this is comments, "Too much audience participation." All right. How many people here since 2011 have had IT leadership changes in their organization? Hands up, hands up. How many of those changes have with it have come a differing opinion on how to implement cloud technologies? Okay, and rightly so, right? Going back, again, kind of the how do we get to where we are today, right? You know, you had the idea of like driving innovation through cloud adoption, right? And what we saw as an industry early days was heavier adoption of SaaS and adoption of IaaS, right, as a pattern, lift and shift into clouds.
And you know, as we've matured, we've gotten better at leveraging paths, looking at application modernization, better targeting applications that are fit for purpose, to be consumed in cloud or can use cloud capabilities. However, you know, we've grown up over time, I think actually when you get to Sanjay's story, CDW was I think conservative on the cloud journey. So actually, had a unique really opportunity to kind of attack cloud almost greenfield within our organization, but for most of our customers, right, it's really been a kind of building block on building block on building block that's really led to a lot of innovation and speed and kind of flexibility and consumption.
But it's also led to a really kind of broad-based, industry-wide inefficiency on some of the applications that live that were shifted early to an IaaS pattern would've benefited from being modernized and/or are running steady state in the cloud. Same, the applications that were difficult that you didn't want to take on early days, maybe were the best targets for modernization, right? So what we're seeing right now in the cloud space is really that equalizing or the kind of moving towards efficiency where we look at building a automated and automated orchestrated and self-service environment for our customers to be able to place workloads where they make the most sense. And that involves potentially leveraging private infrastructure, it involves potentially leveraging different patterns of cloud-based infrastructure, but really a evaluation of where we are today in building that environment for our clients and what we're calling a customer cloud or fourth cloud. So Sanjay, talk about, again, kind of that unique, well, you can talk about what you want, telling me what to do, but you're like, kinda get a little tense up here.
I don't know if you can sense it. You got a little- - Stealing my thunder, Conor. - Right, yeah, no, but I mean, talk about CDW's journey on hybrid club. - Yeah, so I think you said it well. So I started about four years ago, 2020.
And as Conor said, we didn't have a cloud strategy. We actually didn't do a lot of cloud at CDW. We had two data centers, one sitting in Vernon Hills, one in Vegas. Pretty much all our workloads ran on-prem. And so coming in, it was a bit of a green field and, you know, certainly as the new guy, I wasn't like, "Hey guys, we're gonna move everything to the cloud," right? It was, let's be very methodical about how we wanna approach the cloud, what does the cost profile look like, and what makes sense to move up and what makes sense to just keep in the data center? And so when I think about the cloud transformation, we really started with, let's start at the base, just the infrastructure.
So while we had these two beautiful data centers running, we didn't have a lot of the network connectivity up to a cloud provider to actually make any sort of cloud hybrid work. So we started with basic infrastructure. The second layer was really around the people. And so we had a lot of really skilled coworkers who really wanted to learn the cloud but didn't have that capability. And so we did a lot of training, we did a lot of hiring of bringing those skill sets out. And then, you know, on top of it, then you have how do you operationalize cloud? So we invested quite a bit in DevOps, SRE capabilities and built an entire team that's now focused on how do you not only build for the cloud but optimize it, monitor it.
And ultimately, when you go back to the uptime statistics that I showed, 99.9, a lot of the cloud infrastructure that we put was a big leg of actually getting to that type of resiliency 'cause it gave us failover capability, but it didn't mean that we just lifted and shifted everything out. So we're actually fairly proud of running a hybrid infrastructure where we have certain workloads that run in our data center, we did a lot of profiling of specific systems, specific processes, and said, "Does it make sense to migrate these up?" And so we've gotten to a position now where there's about half the workloads have been migrated up to the cloud and we're now in the optimization phase of trying to figure out, "Okay, how do you make these run more efficiently?" So last year we saved about one and a half million dollars off of our run rate from our cloud consumption. That's something that I get a high five from Al Miralles, our CFO, every time I see him because that's always the nightmare of anybody from the finance side saying, "Hey look, you've just doubled the cost of running your IT stack by moving it up." So we've been very kind of careful about this. We have also introduced, as you mentioned, a bunch of SaaS software.
So while our main estate sitting in Azure, we have connections to private clouds from a bunch of different SaaS providers. So I think the team is now kind of in full swing and we're still looking at, okay, what are the remaining workloads that we wanna move up? How do we continually optimize the cost profile? And then how do we continue to build the skills of our teams to be able to better operate and then modernize applications that can be moved up to the cloud for better resiliency, better efficiency, better performance. And so finally, you know, let's talk a little bit about operational efficiency. You know, I think technology can do amazing things. It can help drive better capabilities, better outcomes, but at the end of the day, there's also an operational efficiency piece of it, which is technology helps businesses scale to be more productive, to help serve their customers, their partners, their coworkers better. So at CDW, we focused a lot on operational efficiency, technology being not the means to the end, but a tool to help enable that.
So one of the big things that we actually did within CDW was we moved from what I would say a traditional waterfall way of planning our technology estate. And we moved to an agile way of working. And specifically in agile, we moved to SAFe, which is the Scaled Agile Framework for enterprises. It's a methodology, it's a framework that I've used at previous companies, but it helps us plan together, it helps us have better guardrails in terms of funding, but it really puts the power back in the hands of my team, right, and the product managers that work with me to make sure that we're always prioritizing the biggest value first, we're providing transparency to the organization and we're moving as fast as we can in terms of reacting to the business, the market needs, customer needs.
So with this, we've actually increased productivity and speed of delivery by 26%. We continue to make improvements and tweaking it, but we're very proud of that transformation. The other big piece that's really top of my mind, and I know, Conor, yours, is a program that we have within CDW called Project Fastlane. At the high level, it's essentially a re-platforming of our technology capability along with our business processes.
This started with bringing in Salesforce and bringing a CRM a couple years ago, earlier this summer, we released Workday HCM globally to all our coworkers, about 15,000 of them. We've also released a new order management system that helps power all our product delivery, and through that, we've been able to reduce transit times through our customers, reduce our carbon footprint by traveling less miles by optimizing our shipping routes, and then there's a whole bunch of other programs that we're working on. But this is really a partnership between the business and you've been a great partner in terms of just making sure that your coworkers understand the value.
But we're very much heavily focused on investing in our own capabilities 'cause ultimately it helps us serve our customers better, more effectively, and more efficiently. - Yeah, I think, again, really exciting set of transformation priorities there as we kind of we're moving to enterprise grade SaaS platforms to pull us to the future. But on the topic of operational efficiency, kinda two areas that we're looking at that I think the quote here from Gartner really, you know, hits it home that, "Cost management and efficiency and productivity are the fastest growing business priorities for IT executives and CIOs in 2024." As we think about that, we know that tying every large purchase we have back to the business rationale as well as the return on investment is evermore important, right? And that's a discipline that you see, again, within our organization, 'cause we believe it's really important to our customers to be able to provide that, it's a discipline we continually work on to make sure that we're taking our clients' point of view and translating that not to a calc that any ROI calculator will spit out something that produces the outcome that they want it to.
Really focused on using our customers' internal metrics to drive the right calculation for ROI so we can really help build a plan together. On the other side of that, you have how we actually drive efficiency within our client base, really two vectors for that. Our fastest growing area service right now is our Managed Services Platform. We believe we're going roughly four times what the market is right now. So 25% plus growth in that space.
It's a large business already. And the reason being is our clients are working with us to offload day-to-day management of technology infrastructure so they can focus on driving innovation and results within their organization. So that's one, it's not just a well, would you like to talk about that later? It's something we try and embed into every conversation. And second is fungible or flexible staffing.
We know talent is really one of the most difficult things to find today. We have a series of capabilities to augment our client's staff. So that really takes us here through our tour of a series of transitions we believe we are currently going through today, but our customers are faced with. Again, you have to think about how that each industry has a different priority. But generally we believe many of these are common tasks or common challenges our clients are faced with overcoming.
As we open with the analogies around the house, the AI generated house, and the lapse and the racetrack, what really CDW is working on within my organization, which again is the Pre-Sales Architecture and Delivery and Managed Services teams, are building the blueprints and capabilities so we can deploy, help you rationalize and work through these transitions to produce outcomes for your individual organizations. We're looking forward to you learning more about those capabilities throughout the coming days. It's been our pleasure to spend some time with you today. Thank you. And have a terrific great next step.
- Yeah, thank you. - All right, thanks, all. (upbeat music) (audience applauding)
2025-01-07 11:01
