859: LIVE From Ellucian Live 2024 - with Debarshi Mandal⁠, Head of Consulting, Strategy & Alliance, & ⁠Aditi Bhardwaj⁠, North America Education Head, Education Unit, ⁠Tata Consultancy Services⁠

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to ed up on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. Dr. Joe Sallustio podcasting live here at Ellucian Live 2024 in San Antonio, Texas. Everybody is literally running to go get lunch so they can go watch an eclipse. I have done neither of those things. I have no food and no glasses to watch the eclipse. So I might as well keep on podcasting right on by it. We'll see in another 20, 25 years. Hopefully, I'll be alive.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're live. We are live here at Ellucian Live. We're talking to amazing leaders in and across higher education. And I've got two more people with me that don't need any introduction. They work for like one of the biggest companies here, probably. I think they have like a million employees or some crazy number of 60,000, 600,000. I don't remember. I talked to one of these guests last year and I know it was a lot. I remember it being a lot of people that work at this company. And we're going to bring them in one at a time. The returning guest.

Her name is Aditi Bhardwaj. She is the head for the education unit at Tata Consultancy Services. How are you?

Aditi Bhardwaj: I'm very well and thank you for inviting us again, Joe. It's a privilege to be here two times. Last year and now this year.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And you're back on a microphone. How does it feel?

Aditi Bhardwaj: Wonderful.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, I got a lot of questions for you. As if I'm an expert now.

Aditi Bhardwaj: You are an expert.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You're an expert. I remember last year, super nervous. And then this year you're like, give me a mic, Joe. Give me a microphone.

All right, let's get your colleague in here. He is the one and only Debarshi Mandal. He is the head of consulting strategy and alliance for the education unit. Did I get it all right or close enough?

Debarshi Mandal: That's absolutely correct.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right. How are you Debarshi? What's going on?

Debarshi Mandal: I'm great.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right. Well, you guys, know what? Tell us how big Tata is again, just to set the scope for our listeners. You guys work for a massive organization.

Aditi Bhardwaj: Yeah, absolutely. So Tata Consultancy Services, TCS, is an IT services consulting and business solutions organization. And we have been partnering with many of the world's largest businesses, institutes, in their transformational journey for over 55 years. And we are part of India's largest conglomerate, Tata Group. And one thing that I'm really proud about here in TCS is the workforce diversity. So 36% of the workforce is women. We have, you were right, we have more than 600,000 employees.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Pretty good memory. 600,000, right?

Aditi Bhardwaj: Yes, 600,000.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You guys are everywhere. I mean, all across the world.

Aditi Bhardwaj: We are. We are in 153 countries we are serving. And in TCS, we do have a dedicated education practice, which both Debarshi and I are part of. And we are serving higher ed, K-12, EdTech, corporate, digital academies, and anything and everything in education. We are serving those segments.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. Debarshi, you guys are known throughout the world. You're working closely with Ellucian. Talk about the partnership that you have with Ellucian. What work do you do with them or around them or for them and how it works?

Debarshi Mandal: Well, it has been an exciting journey. As Aditi mentioned, we are a technology services organization. And we work with education. So working in education, being in the IT services, it's normal that we have to partner with Ellucian, which is one of the largest education services solution providers in the industry today. So this partnership started about more than two years back, we had all the agreements in place and then we started the services part of it and we are just a year old into it and the journey has been absolutely exciting. 

So what we are doing with Ellucian, we are partnering with Ellucian to solve the problems of our customers. So anything and everything related to Ellucian services, whether it's implementation, whether it's extension using the cards and the ethos platforms, whether it's maintenance, whether it's solving different problems of the customer. We are a single source of service provider for all Ellucian services and more.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So a school might come to you and say or go to Ellucian and say we have these problems and Ellucian says you know what Tata we're gonna bring you in to assist and provide that support. Is that typically so it's the school through Ellucian to get to TCS or do you work directly with the institution?

Debarshi Mandal: It's both.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Which one's more common?

Debarshi Mandal: Both. It's both right now, yes. So we are serving, introducing through Ellucian and also helping some of their customers directly.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What do schools need? What's the demand for your consultancy services? What's being asked for? Where's the confusion for higher education? What do you guys work on, you know, do you have some kind of like demand list where you go, you know what, we know this thing right here is where we're gonna put a lot of our time and services. And this one not so much, but we have it on the list. How do you think, how are institutions asking for support?

Debarshi Mandal: So I will, great question. I will respond to that in two sections, right? So what we see today, what the demand is, and what we see the demand in the future, where is it going to be? Obviously from an Ellucian point of view, and our services point of view.

Functionally, we see that student experience is at the top of the list. Always. Always at the top of the list. So the universities, the institutes are looking at various aspects to solve the experience problem. And as we heard in the keynote, as we heard in different sessions, experience is the key to success over there. There are other aspects as well, which the universities are looking into. They are looking, and these are related to the regulatory aspects also of the government. They are looking to increase the enrollment. They are looking to decrease the dropout rates.

So those are the key things, two key things which we think are impacting the institutes in a big way. From a digital point of view, the answer is a little bit different. Cybersecurity is a key aspect and analytics, the student analytics, and for which the data actually comes from systems like Ellucian. So these are the two key things that we are seeing right now on the digital side of it. 

Whereas into the future, you can tell me to stop if I'm speaking too much...

Dr. Joe Sallustio: No, it's important that we know this.

Debarshi Mandal: And if you look into the future, there's a buzzword of AI and GenAI.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, I thought that might be at the top of the list. That's why I asked, only because everybody's talking about it. But it's all... But you're student first still, right? Student first.

Debarshi Mandal: Well, to disappoint you, for me, it is not at the top of the list. While AI and GenAI are being talked about, but the application of those in the education sector I think is a bit far away. So we are working on that. There are a number of use cases, how to solve a student problem, how to personalize the courses, how to increase student success using AI. Those are being discussed. A lot of the AI things are already in use. Say for example, a student is enrolling. There are chatbots which are helping the students to get through the system. Those are applications of AI in real life which are live today. And we are seeing that. But there is a lot more to do once it goes ahead.

On the other side of artificial intelligence, somewhere, the technology is already here, but the institutes are not using it to the fullest extent. It's the AR VR and the metaverse side of it. We do think that we can do a lot more with this particular thing and it will change the face of the way the courses are imparted today. So I will request Aditi to talk about something that we have done with one of the institutes in the US.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Before you go there, I would note you brought up AR, VR and Metaverse, which if you go back like 18 months, those were the buzzwords. We were saying, what's going to happen with AR and VR? What's going to happen with AR VR? And all of a sudden, GenAI comes and nobody says AR, VR and Metaverse anymore. We just say Generative AI, right? It's just interesting that in a year, 18 months, the way we talk about technology has totally shifted.

Debarshi Mandal: Well, the technology might have shifted, but the implementation of a technology for a particular sector, this is going to continue for some time now.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Go ahead, Aditi, tell us the story.

Aditi Bhardwaj: Yeah, I just wanted to share this AR-VR simulation experience that we have implemented for one of our customers. So it's more of a virtual hospital. And the problem statement was there is a huge demand for nurses, right? And at the same time, a lot of nurses are also leaving jobs in the first year. So the dean and the president, they came up with the idea of, let's have a virtual hospital.

Ensure that the nurses, when they are learning through leveraging AR, VR and simulation, they are more job-ready, they are more prepared and have their critical thinking enabled. So we did create that with them, so various procedures are being created using VR and the simulation environment where nurses are exposed to these different scenarios where they can pick and choose which course patient to refer and what to do and triage and so it's...

It is helping. Technology is helping in a big way in solving these critical business problems. Like Debarshi mentions, while AI is a buzzword, lot of use cases we are exploring, like virtual assistant. Why can't we start leveraging AI to make an impact in the lives of learners? So that's precisely what. And at AR VR, we are seeing the application now. And probably next year when I'll sit with you, I'll talk about the examples of artificial intelligence.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Thank you for saying that. Now you guys are here. What makes this conference successful for you? Are schools coming to you guys? I know you have a setup over here. They saying, Tata, we need help. We need help now. Is it the networking? Is it the discussion? Is it just finding out what people are struggling with? And then you guys go back and you create solutions to solve them. What do you come here for other than the obvious and what makes this conference successful for both?

Aditi Bhardwaj: Yeah, so it's a combination of all so we are meeting a lot of customers. We are hearing their challenges, problems and trying to provide a consultative approach in resolving those and also, you know when you listen to a lot of people and you network also validate whether we are thinking in the right direction. We are having the right offerings or we need to evolve and be agile. So it's that exposure. Plus yesterday we won a Rising Star Partner Award.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I saw that. I was going to just bring that up. Thank you for saying that. Why is that important to you?

Aditi Bhardwaj: It is important because within a year we have cultivated this knowledge, skill and the various accelerators and experience we have in other industries, we are kind of augmenting what we are doing here. And you want to talk about the SaaS modernization, leveraging our accelerators. So it's kind of a wrapper we want to build for the customers, not just siloed one implementation.

We can enable end-to-end including organizational change management. So that whole aspect I want to bring onto the table. Right at the same time in this conference, we are also getting the opportunity to talk to Ellucian stakeholders over here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So you can hear what their challenges are, yeah?

Debarshi Mandal: Yeah. And we also come to know how we can work with them to solve the problems that our customers are having. Right. So like Aditi mentioned about the SaaS modernization. So for Ellucian, one of the key challenges at this point of time is how they can move all their existing customers to the SaaS environment. And we are talking to Ellucian about how we can solve that particular problem. So in TCS, we have years of experience in working with other leaders in the industry and moving their applications to SaaS. So we are sharing our experience with them, and then we are having a collaborative discussion and finding out the right way to do it. And very curious to know about the new product launches they are having, the major features that they are coming up with, how AI is shaping it up too. So, yes.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, it's interesting that you say that because, let's say, Ellucian launches some new product or innovation. You've got to then go back and say, OK, how can we support this too, right? I mean, you have to then go back and re-engineer. You look at it, re-engineer it, figure out how you can support it with consultancy services and technology services. So it's a never-ending loop, right?

Aditi Bhardwaj: It's a continuous loop. Yeah, like we say, continuous learning. So we keep learning what's coming up new and re-skill our teams and serve customers.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know what is a continuous loop or not a continuous loop? A lunch and going to watch the eclipse. I don't want to stop you guys from eating, but I do want to give you just anything else you want to say about Tata Consultancy Services before we go. Anything at all, where we find you, anything you want to say, anything that you want to take away from the conference. Open mic Aditi, go first.

Aditi Bhardwaj: Sure, so we are here to serve our customers and really looking forward to meeting a lot of you. Would love to hear your problems, your challenges. We are in the exhibit hall. We have a meeting room here and we do have a lounge here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Do you have any M&Ms in there?

Aditi Bhardwaj: Yes.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right, I'll come by and get some.

Aditi Bhardwaj: So yeah, we are looking forward to hearing and we would love to invite you.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: All right, colleague, do you know where to find Tata, how about you, Debarshi, any final words of wisdom?

Debarshi Mandal: So, well, we are having a great experience and what more that I can expect rather than meeting all the stakeholders at the same place. So, obviously, I'm learning a lot, talking to different people, networking and learning a lot. So, that's my biggest takeaway from here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, you know this, if you don't know Tata Consulting Services, then you haven't been watching what's going on in higher ed. It's a massive organization. They're helping so many schools through their partnership with Ellucian and directly. I've got two amazing people in front of me. Hopefully we'll see you both again next year at Ellucian Live. And we'll say, did you win another award in year three? Here's who I have with me. I have Debarshi and I have Aditi and they are with Tata Consultancy Services, consulting service. I can't talk. I need some coffee you guys and you need lunch. You know what you've done ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed-uped.