Ameren Corporation (AEE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Next up, we have Reimagining the Business - Leading and Innovating in Radical Times of Change, and I want to welcome to panelists up to the podium or the stage.

And why don't we start with Bhavani? Bhavani is with Ameren. She's a Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer. Great to see you, Bhavani.

Good to see you too, Hunter. How are you?

I am great. Now I'm going to try but it's really tough, your last name, and I don't want to -- will you enunciate it for us all?

Absolutely, Bhavani Amirthalingam.

Okay, Amirthalingam.

There you go. You got it.

Awesome. So talk to us about being a digital officer in Ameren, what does that look like? And how do they know they wanted a digital officer and not a CIO?

Great question. So I've been actually with Ameren since March of 2018, been an absolutely insane journey. Just for context for folks who don't know what Ameren does, we're in the energy space, electric gas operations, the utility industry. The energy space is going through significant change and transformation. The grid hasn't changed much in 100 years and has changed more in the last 5 and will change dramatically in the next 5 and 10. You think about renewables and what's happening to that 2-way flow of energy. If you think about the connected assets going on the grid, you think about evolving customer expectations, right, on how they want to engage from how they -- the energy choices they want and how they manage their energy consumption. So that whole space is changing significantly. And so part of the journey for Ameren was to look -- to kind of bring those pieces together, right? And every industry has a definition for digital. And when you think about our space, really, it's 2 key things. It's the aspect of customer, customer experience, and what we need to do to transform that. And the second is really around our grid. So think about the industrial IoT and the critical infrastructure that we run. We have nuclear power plants. We have transmission, distribution operations, energy centers. And so it's really just the number of connected devices that are going on there, the apps, the analytics, the cyber posture that comes with both customer data as well as grid operations. It's really why they kind of wanted to expand beyond the traditional thinking of IT and core CIO that supports your base, all the back-office functions and technology that you deploy from that standpoint. So that was just to give a little background on this energy industry itself and role.

Bhavani, it's hard for me to wrap my head around a CDO at essentially an energy company. What's different about the culture at Ameren that the CEO knew they wanted a dynamic Chief Digital Officer to help drive and innovate the customer experience?

No. I think it's what's happening with the industry in general, right? And our customer expectations continue to -- well, there's a lot of change going on with respect to -- if you think about the smart grid investments that are happening across the country, it's billions of dollars being invested in distribution automation and how power gets to stored today, very different from how it was even 5, 10 years ago. So if you think about the amount of technology that is what used to be this traditional operational technology had a digital component to all of it. And so I think the foresight to my CEO's perspective is really at Ameren, we put our customer at the center of our strategy. As we saw customer expectations evolving, customer behavior evolving -- really I was listening to the earlier conversation, when you think about these are -- these customers are the same that are interacting with the Amazons and -- on how they shop, how they order pizza, expecting similar experiences when they engage on how the experience evolves, how they manage their energy. And so it's really just understanding customers and keeping the customer at the heart of our transformation was a huge driver from that standpoint.

Stay with us, Bhavani. We'll circle back to you in just a minute. Next up, we have Coley Burke. Coley is the CRO at Zerto. Hey, Coley, a little bit about Zerto and a little bit about what you're seeing from your customers across the industry in this pandemic.

Yes. Hi, Hunter. Thanks for having me on the program. Always glad to be here. Hello, San Diego. So Zerto, I love that last conversation with Informatica and Kevin, data matters. So we live squarely in the data space. So we love data. And Zerto is an organization that delivers a platform that aims at providing DR, data protection and mobility. So we're all about your data. We know it is the currency, and our aim is to make sure you have continuous availability of your data and, more importantly, the business services it supplies. And we like to just kind of talk about how we are the best to help you protect, place and retain your data in such a way that helps you drive business value and innovation. So that's what does - Zerto does. What we've been seeing this year, Hunter, it's been pretty amazing. As you've heard me say before, I think the evolution of IT has just gone so rapid. It's grown so fast and so many new ideas and the innovation that's occurring. But some of the things that I've seen and we've heard a little bit on this call today is that the IT and the business coming together behind a digital strategy, aimed at digital transformation to meet the fast-changing requirements of the business, that's like really been the interesting thing for me, to see that come together of how does IT help the business accelerate, be more innovative, and what's IT's role in that. So sitting squarely in that data world, like we do and how we help protect and place it, that's a pretty unique thing to see that what we do around protection of data, placement of data has now -- it's kind of the new vogue. It's very important, and we're definitely seeing a lot of discussion, transformation and innovation around not only what you're doing with data but how do you make it accessible, protect it, and where do you place it to best kind of accelerate the speed of decision-making.

Coley, what does winning look like for you and your clients?

For us, this year, we've really focused in on listening to what the business is trying to do. So what winning looks like for us is really being a strategic partner to our customers, what are the challenges, what are the things that are being addressed because of the pandemic, how is the organization as a whole looking to transform. And we really want to be right there as a partner, helping get there faster through automation, through transformation or process and people specifically around data protection. And as we do that, we like to say that winning is watching our customers achieve that transformation. It was kind of discussed on this call. I think John mentioned it -- that if you're only now looking at transformation, you're probably behind the curve. So we take a little bit of what we've learned as we've helped customers through that transformation. And those that need to still get through it, we're definitely there as that partnership to help them succeed and frankly keep everything running the way it should.

Excellent, Coley. Hey, stay with us. I'll circle back to you in just a minute. Next up, we have Brian Shield. Brian is the VP of IT of the Boston Red Sox. Hey, Brian, great to see you, my friend. You're on mute.

Great to see you.

Hey, sorry, my condolences for the season.

It happens. It happens. You can't win them all.

Well, I mean it must be an unbelievable letdown. I mean you guys, 3 years ago, were unstoppable, right, 2 years ago were unstoppable. And then all of a sudden, it's like -- it's almost like in any given Sunday, anything can happen, right?

Yes. I mean I think sports in general, I think as most folks know, you go through cycles. You sign folks to contracts and they're guaranteed and other things and it gets -- it's challenging. It's a real complex process to try to feel that we're a successful team year after year.

Brian, I kind of joke, you and I, and our mutual friend, Mark Polansky, us being from New York, you being from New England/Atlanta. And I mean what can we learn from truly one of the most winningest clubs in the world, the Boston Red Sox, regarding the importance of winning. There'll be a culture of team, be culture of winning. What can we learn about that and apply it to being a better IT leader and leading up, out and down?

Yes. I was thinking something Coley just said a moment ago, which kind of resonated with me as well as some with other guests this morning, too, which is I think we try to have a multiyear plan. I think too often, companies, as I think John and I said earlier, have almost like a tactical, almost an organically growing plan. It's like every year is a modest refinement than the year before. And I think it -- and I think this is what else that fuels innovation. It's like -- I mean I tend to think of it as a series of these concentric circles where my current year is in the middle, and I'll go out 2 years after that and -- with a sense toward like where do I aspire to be, where do I think we as a company need to be. And because, as someone said it -- maybe Coley, a moment ago, said like, you can't just do these things overnight. You can't just wake up and say, "We're now digitally aware," or -- I think you know these things just don't kind of -- you can't turn things on a dime. You can't invest on a dime. And I think John said it earlier, which is really well, which is you have to have the infrastructure in place. When you have a successful ball club or organization, I think it starts with kind of what your core -- what your communities look like. And we basically try to staff a little bit like our ball club, like we've got to coordinate this of what we think are some all-stars and hopefully a couple of Hall of Famers. And we kind of build around that with team players and supplement with consultants or free agents and hopefully a referring system and things like that. So I think it's a combination of a staffing model and a -- I guess a vision toward the future that you're constantly revising as needs of business change.

I had a chance to meet Brian Cashman recently. I'm sure you guys study a little bit about what the Yankees are up to. I asked him one question. How do you lead? He said by data. So you had the question around data. How seriously do you take data at the Red Sox?

Yes, it's a great question. I mean in our world, we always have to break data into 2 to 3 parts. There are sort of data about players in baseball and statistics and analytics. There's kind of data about running a business and having 40,000 people in your stands every night during the summer months. And then also data about employees and how we're kind of running good business internally with our -- and make sure we're doing a good job. And I think on the business side of it, we've moved to Google GCP exclusively this year. I'd like to say that we had the forethought of knowing that this pandemic was coming, but we were pretty fortunate that by mid-July, we had transformed over to our new enterprise data environment kind of now on GCP. And we migrated all -- everything to Salesforce over this year as well and a host of other things. So I feel like -- I think John may have said it earlier, like I feel like we've got these building blocks that we now feel really, really good about because without those, everything is a challenge. And so I feel like we've got these blocks that will allow us to kind of now start to make much more dramatic steps in the right direction.

Excellent. Great. Stay with us. I'll circle back to you in just 1 minute. Next up, we have Maury Cupitt. Maury is the Vice President of Solutions Architect at Sonatype. Maury, welcome to the program.

Hi. Great to be here.

Great to see you. Hey, Maury, a little bit about Sonatype. People might not know exactly the space that you're in and how relevant and important it is relative to this current environment we're in.

Yes. It's interesting because for the past almost 10 to 12 years, we've been focused solely on accelerating application delivery, accelerating projects. So we're the creators and stewards of Maven Central, the largest open-source repository for components. And what we're helping companies do is take these open-source components, use the best of the best, and build on the infrastructure, right, build on data, build on automation. So all the innovation that's happening in companies is not being generated in the enterprise -- from within that enterprise, right? We're building the components. We're taking about 90% of the application that we build in the enterprise. It's made up of open-source components. So what we're doing is helping development teams and the enterprise pick the right components, develop fast, understand the risk that's involved in using these components and really putting the process in place so they can do it quickly, right? We can't wait for 6 to 8 weeks for an approval process on some component that we need to be innovative. We need to be able to get that right now. So that's what we follow.

Maury, within the enterprise architecture stack, can -- be a little bit more specific how do you help on that, the road map from current state to future state.

Yes. When we're looking at future state, we're looking at the way that we're building the application, right? How can I speed up for -- we've done a couple of these and are aware -- we've talked about speed. We've talked about accelerating delivery. I love that you guys are talking about metrics today because you're looking at metrics and data and value stream, right? I'm looking at these metrics and how do I deliver value and how do I deliver it quickly. So at the enterprise level, it's really about again accelerating that application delivery so I could focus on the value that I'm providing to my customers rather than just the people and the processes, right? Those are important, but are all of those actually contributing to more value at the customer end?

I mean when you think about this pandemic, if it did nothing else, it accelerated the digital importance by 10x, right?

Yes.

So if you're not dialing your customers, how do you help people -- how do you help enterprises really modernize their whole go-to-market on the front end in terms of being customer-focused, customer-centric and help the whole enterprise aligned accordingly?

Yes. It's building the products and delivering the products and the features when the customer needs it and where the customer needs it, right? For the foundation, for the fundamentals, that's another thing -- you and I have talked about before. It's like building on the fundamentals and building that foundation so that we can put those, the processes, in place and speed up. But it is about now I can focus on delivering software that matters to my customers, right? I love that notion of what does the customer need in the power company. What I don't actually need from my power company is a monthly e-mail telling me how much more I spend in electricity. Everyone's like -- I know that. I want to be able to check the box. So like every customer is a little bit different. So you're bringing this expertise around your customer and not having to focus on all the tools and all the components that you're using to build that. You can focus on what you need to focus on, which is the customer.

I'll circle back to you here in just a minute. Let's go back to Bhavani. Hey, Bhavani, when you think about leading and reimagining the business and leading and innovating in times of radical change, what's changed just in the last 7 months post-pandemic -- we're in it now -- we're entering the eighth or ninth month. What's changed in terms of your leadership style, your passion, your courageous leadership style, your authentic leadership style? What's changed or been accentuated in this whole pandemic environment?

Yes. Well, a good question. If I reflect on that, I think probably a few things, right? First of all, you can't rely on your walk-around, right? Like I'd love to like be able to walk through different teams, see how -- check on people. I mean something you really have to and you -- it's just the nature of -- when you're all physically around that you get to do every day. And it's something that you now need to be very deliberate about, right? Otherwise, you can catch yourself going from one video call to another, to another and others and you're just fully consumed and really haven't had the opportunity to connect with your people. And so I think it's being super deliberate about making time to check in on how your teams are doing, how you -- so I think there's an aspect of that, that you just have to be really deliberate about. I do think there is an aspect of your people. Most organizations -- for us, about 60% of our work was remote and about 40% in the field in energy centers working every day. And so it's really thinking of that hybrid setup and being able to lead with that mindset, I think, is really important in terms of how you enable, how you engage. And I also think there's just a lot going on. There's the pandemic and there's so much going on around us right now, but it just creates this environment of anxiety that probably a lot people are dealing with. And I think it's really important more than ever before that we show a sense of calm, right, for our people, bring a sense of calm for our team. So I think that really is very important for me from that standpoint. I do now allot more bite-size communication just compared to like 7 months ago. I do weekly virtual connects with the extended organization. And I think that's really just figuring out how your style of engagement needs to check and adjust, right? There's a lot of things around that. And then also the customer element. Our customers are going through a lot of -- some changes. And so how do we make sure we're thinking about those elements in terms of the products and services we're building out, the experiences we're building out is the other piece that -- when I think about just leadership, how you're thinking about it. It's not just internally how you think about your organization but externally how your customers are experiencing during this time.

It's really doing those check-ins with your whole team so vitally important and being a great storyteller. Has it been one of the most challenging but potentially the most interesting and exciting times to be a tech leader?

I absolutely think so because -- you said it earlier, right? The joke is like who accelerated the digital transformation, like the CEO, the Chief Digital Officer or really it's -- or the pandemic. Did COVID accelerate it? So there's just been a lot of, I'd say, adoption just as the necessity came in. And we've also seen a lot of creativity that from our field, for instance, that they've taken the technology very differently from that standpoint. So I do think there's been an extremely positive aspect. Same thing with customers. As I think either Maury or Brian indicated it, right, the customers that probably didn't want to engage previously in a certain way, right, are now engaging digitally. And so I think those are all key elements as well.

It's a different time, right, more than ever that people are really wanting and hoping for a different voice of leadership, one of authenticity, one of empathy, one of sincerity because we're all living -- most of us, living where we work, where can we live? Many -- and a realistic point of view, a person of a leadership style of caring and being nice.

I think it's really important, right, because people are really -- I'll tell you what my personal experience is. The -- on one hand, we've got this huge shift we have to make within days. And then we haven't taken our foot off the gas on the acceleration and the transformation level going on. And so you have teams executing with passion when they're also dealing with probably a lot of personal challenges. And so it's really important that you keep things in context and create safe spaces for your teams to be able to share what's going on because like you said, there is no start and end to your day and everything is kind of very comingled. It already was in a very digital world, and I think now it's just kind of taken it to a completely different level. So just being really genuine, authentic, I think, is extremely important -- care, right, I think extremely important.

Okay. Bhavani, thanks so much for coming on the summit, the program here today. Our friends from San Diego really wanted people from out of area across the country, and you really delivered. So thank you so much.

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Awesome. Coley, you're up next. When you think about like leadership style, your leadership style, you have a team around you, you have clients you're communicating with every day. Do you notice a different tone? People really want a different voice, right?

Yes. It's definitely interesting. And for me, I have the privilege of leading a global sales organization. And like Bhavani said, you definitely have to think a little differently, empathy certainly. And I think for us and for everybody, and Bhavani just mentioned it, burnout and fatigue becomes real. We're all working so hard and so aggressively pushing and you have not let up. And I think for all of us, even as leaders, we go through the burnout and the fatigue. And so for us, it's interesting to kind of see as we try to make sure that, again, we're helping our customers -- and I kind of spoke to this, we really are trying to listen a lot more. And you're right. Our customers are asking us for a different approach. Again, I'm very specific about being a strategic partner because we're right there in it with you, with our customers, with anybody, our partners, trying to all figure out not only how do we get through this together. We talk a lot about resilience at Zerto. Zerto kind of sells resilience, make it continuous but also what's your personal and professional resilience. And it's interesting for us as we engage with our customers. It has changed. It actually has slowed down a little bit. There's a little bit more thoughtfulness that goes into, okay, what are we doing? How are we going about it? How are we challenging what we've done. And Zerto, how can you help us? So that's actually been a really interesting thing after a long career in IT to see the way we are engaging with customers. It absolutely has changed, and you feel it more from the partnership standpoint. It's like let's -- if a vendor comes in with the right approach and was willing to partner and set aside what we are trying to do as the vendor but more to listen to what the customer is trying to do and what you all are trying to achieve, I find that engagement is more productive. It leads to a better outcome for everybody, and you really begin to push on what can we accomplish together. And that's where we sit. So my leadership style is all built around that not only within my team but more so how we push that out into our customer base and our partner base to make sure that we are doing the right things to be empathetic to what our customers are going through because that's the most important thing right now, to really care and be part of it, not just try to push one agenda. So we really go at the partnership side, and that's been the fun part, I think, the last 7 months. We're all in it together.

Coley, hey, thanks to your support, Zerto support, your support. Great job, really right on point, and I appreciate it. We'll follow up soon.

Thanks, Hunter.

Yes. Next up, Brian. Brian, you were early on -- we talked about this years ago about the customer, and you were so futuristic in your idea. You go, "Hunter, I really want to know my customer from the time they leave their home to the time they return home." And it was such a -- it seemed like such an out-there idea and it's back to the ecosystem or the platform system. How are you visiting the whole customer journey now, now that you've been digital? We've been digital now for 9 months.

Yes. We're probably digital longer than that, but I think it's taken on a whole new level of emphasis. And I think as Bhavani had said, sometimes you need a little kick in the ass to sort of help you sort of accelerate in certain areas because we all struggle with -- we have like too much work to get done with amount of budget and staffing and things like that. So it does come down to, as Coley said, priorities. And I do think priorities have shifted. We clearly have shifted toward a much more data-centric, information-rich and a very heavily consumer-focused sort of approach. And I think the other one they're like throwing there is employee productivity. Is a huge emphasis right now on how do we make our employees more productive. There's -- I think historically, employee productivity sort of took like a backseat to a lot of other things because it wasn't sexy and things like that. But in companies where more is expected from less in certain cases, I think it's pivotal. I think that the consumer one, as you pointed out, is sort of, first and foremost -- as I said before, we made some of these really key infrastructure investments. But a lot of it now is this whole journey. So I think what's interesting about these things -- my dad now orders food in -- on his phone, which I would have sworn would have been impossible for him to have done in the past, and watching these transformations. My daughter showed me how to use new features on my new iPhone release, and she's 11. And so I'm -- it's remarkable. So I think everyone is expecting things, especially in sports entertainment, a new world and kind of returning to that kind of environment. We want to make -- first and foremost, make sure it's a safe environment for everybody. We want to make sure it's as touchless, cashless as we can. And those are quite big changes. We were an organization that wasn't fully digital on ticketing. We will be from opening day next year. That wouldn't have happened without something like this. We're changing -- I was on the call this morning, a number of calls about mobile order, mobile food ordering and things. That never -- those were slow to evolve, especially in a stadium like ballpark of Fenway, which was built in 1912. Now those are -- space and social distancing in Fenway Park are not kind of -- a little bit mutually exclusive in some ways. So I kind of view 2021 as the great year of experimentation. I think we know that folks will kind of return in a bit of a kind of crawl, walk, run manner. I think we hope it will be a little bit quicker than that, but who knows the way things are evolving. And I think we're kind of using this as an opportunity to see how far we can sort of push the envelope a little bit here on sort of creating that transformational digital experience, where appropriate, for fans and maximizing -- we're overhauling all of our, what, 5G now. We're version 6 on our WiFi we're implementing over the winter type of thing yes. Installing in winter -- WiFi in the winter, it's a scoring point to your team but it does with fans when they come to the ballpark and a tremendous number of kind of digital initiatives, which I'm optimistic will really be a pretty kind of interesting experience for fans when they turn.

Hey, Brian, great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for coming on. Again, the San Diego friends wanted to hear from folks from out of area and thought leaders like yourself. So we need a prediction. Who's going to win the World Series?

Well, I've got -- I'm -- I guess -- I'm assuming it's going to be the Dodgers this time because my good friends tell me that the Dodgers tell me like this is the year and it won't be denied. So we'll see if that happens that way. But I have my fingers crossed a bit on Tampa, admittedly.

Very good to see you. Thanks again.

Take care, everyone.

Excellent. Hey, Maury, kind of final one. Best time ever to be in -- a tech professional to be in this industry and how you're helping your clients really reimagine, reinvent the future.

Yes, it really is, right, the best time. Having -- I have the ability now to slow down. You and I have talked about slowing down, speed up. We've been able to slow down and help our customers with, again, the fundamentals that they need to actually go faster and innovate. Bhavani mentioned just the leadership style. I've been able to slow down and spend more time with my team, right? My team is a high-speed enterprise field SE organization that now has to sit at home and not travel and has to learn fast, so how are we actually changing that environment, how we're doing enablement, then how are we forcing kind of end-of-day events, right? So we'll spend 2 days a week as a team. Anybody that can join can join in helping drive innovation that way. But again, for our customers, it's -- really, now is the time to innovate. Brian made -- actually made my day because 2021 is not back to normal. 2021 is back to something really cool. And I think we're in a position now to reimagine what that is and what everybody's experience is. So I'm really looking forward to it.

Maury, thanks so much for coming on the program. Thanks again for Sonatype supporting the HMG modeling format. Folks, what a great session. Bhavani, thank you. Brian, Coley and Maury, thank you. When the folks from Sonatype and Zerto do reach out to you, at least take the call and set up a 20-minute meeting, the least you can do to really pay them back for their support of the summit and the SIM Chapter.