Baxter International Inc. (BAX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

What keeps you up at night? What do you -- what keeps you up at night when your phone rings in the middle of the night?

Well, I'm sure I'll have the same concerns as Meredith, which really is a lot around the recent ransomware attacks. So you see a high vulnerability and a leverage point that bad guys are using in order to attack industries that will pay and have a requirement and need to pay to either protect patient lives or deliver products to people. So ransomware has been very, very prevalent over the last few months and has ramped up even more so in the last week with the FBI and [indiscernible] is now seeing a large awareness campaign around the attacks that are going on in the health care industry. So I think that's the most prevalent in the near-term space. So if you go out to the mid, longer-term space, the things you'll have are changes in privacy law, California just passed theirs. So there's a lot of privacy regulations, and that changes the game a little bit on how health care companies collect and handle and manage data, even though we're getting to more consistency with Europe, but there is nuances within each country. And then a corollary to that one also is now data localization, where you start seeing a lot more countries enacting and erecting barriers to say all data of my citizens need to stay in my country, which is almost the antithesis of the Internet. So we've spent lots of money going to the cloud and optimizing and having single services, now we're going to be kind of chopping those up into little pieces to serve little countries and different markets around the world, which will create a lot of inefficiencies in the way we've been building our services. So those are probably the near and a little bit more of the mid- to longer-term concerns that I've got.

Got you. Great. Thanks, JJ. Stay with us. Go on mute if you can. That would be great. We'll try Meredith one more time. Meredith are you there? Can you call in? Call in. Ok. [Technical Difficulty] Great. Laura.

I would like to congratulate Meredith on being elected to the [ HISAC ] board, even though she can’t respond. So that's a big honor. So you've got a very good panelist on this compared to the rest of us.

Thanks, JJ. And she is actually clapping and saying she's very happy and appreciative and smiling. Very good. Laura, when you think about securing the enterprise right now and -- what do you think about the whole idea of automating security in the DevOps cycle? You heard a little bit about that [indiscernible]

Yes. Sure. And my connection might be a little bit choppy as well here quickly. So if I break out, I'll join back to [indiscernible] Yes, I think it's pivotal. I think if we realize that developers and product managers, our internal customers from getting on the ground [indiscernible] meeting, the secure coding scan, automating the review. [Technical Difficulty] which is really going to, number one, reduce the number of vulnerabilities, but number two, truly going to help us prevent rework of having to go back and fix something that's already been rolled.

You're chopping up a little bit there.

Sorry. Can you hear me now?

Yes, right -- and you cut.

My power is going out 4 times a day at my house. So I don't know what's going on here in Pennsylvania. So Meredith has left again. Sorry. So yes, I think this partnership, especially nowadays, with [Technical Difficulty] or difficult to partner with the business and with the development team [Technical Difficulty] would it be if you're physically in the office and standing and [indiscernible] in the very beginning.

We're having a hard time making it out. Stay with us for 1 minute. We'll try again here in a minute. Monti, over to you. When you think about delivery value and looking at ROI on security initiatives to the Board and the C-suite, what comes to mind?

So -- and I want to say, I've heard Laura speak to this topic before, and she's got a great way ahead on this. I think that's been one of the -- one great thing about this time is that people are actually listening to a CISO and a CIO, maybe a little bit more companies are realizing just how much digital transformation matters to their business transformation. And so what you've got to do when you're up at that area, speaking ROI, you've definitely got to speak that language that the Board is wanting to hear. So often, security is viewed almost like a boat anchor or a compliance check box. And just some pain that somebody wants to make go away or hand to somebody else. And as security professionals, we've got to make that sale very clear to the C-suite on how security protects the enterprise, protects that business operation, let alone that company brand and reputation going forward. We've all seen some of the breaches happen and how that's absolutely destroyed credibility and customer base And that's something that security, hopefully we can convey in a more effective way to those partners at the top.

Excellent. Thanks, Monti. Appreciate it. Hey, Meredith, can we give it one more try? I can't hear you. Over to JJ. What's new within the pandemic for you?

I think the pandemic has been actually an opportunity for a lot of people. You've got both sides. You've got the pain and challenges. But I think it's also [ innovation ] a lot of creativity within companies to solve problems. I think you have had historical barriers that people may or may not have wanted to tear down, let's say, from a process flow. Digital signing is probably a good thing, electronic signatures. A lot of companies have been hesitant, a lot of companies in manufacturing spaces for a long time, like the wet signatures. This has kind of put that in stark contrast to say, okay, how much -- how many wet signatures do we really need? Because right now, they're really, really hard to get, and you're going to be shipping documents all over the place. So digital signatures has been one of those areas that has really said, okay, this is an opportunity to meet the need. Telemedicine is another one that says, okay, it's been a promised product for many years. Now it's actually taken off. So I think a lot of the timing you say, okay, what's new in COVID? There's a lot of innovation that's going in. And so there's a lot of new opportunities that are being created. The unfortunate side is a lot of the things or the way we have done things in the past are failing miserably. When you go into the hotel restaurant space and the entire leisure industry, it has been decimated. So you get a lot of unfortunate pain. At the same time, you're having a lot of opportunity for new advancement for people to say, okay, how do we collaborate? You mentioned a little bit about collaboration, better, different. And that's -- the e-mails are going away, as teams calls on the increased Webex calls, wherever you want to call. But the utilization of those tools has skyrocketed. So I think at the principle, people do want to collaborate, people do want to have interaction, and people do want to achieve the same goals as before. But it's really been your opportunity to do it differently. So I think the opportunities have been -- are there for people who have their eyes open and are willing to kind of step up and be aggressive and just say, okay, maybe we did something the same way for 20 years, and we no longer can do it that way. So let's look at a better or different way to do it.

Very thoughtful. Thanks, JJ. I appreciate the answer to that. And over to Chris. Chris, recently, Ivanti announced the acquisition of MobileIron and Pulse Secure. How will both these acquisitions help your customers?

Yes. So this goes back [Technical Difficulty] the strategy for Ivanti, which is how to help our customers to bring [Technical Difficulty] what's in our environment. To manage our environment, we need the right technologies to be able to [Technical Difficulty] what we're able to discover, identify what needs to be managed and manage it properly. We need good security technologies to not only prevent but also to control access throughout our environments. So MobileIron and Pulse Secure are really coming in to help us with 2 of those key strategies: MobileIron around the management. I need to be able to manage traditional clients. I need to be able to manage mobile devices in a more modern way. Most organizations haven't fully achieved that transition yet. So they need to straddle both the traditional and the modern management and they need a platform that can help them to achieve both. And that's the benefit of bringing Ivanti's client management and MobileIron's mobile management together. The security side. We've got some great preventative capabilities. Again, we've got industry-leading patch management. We've got a very robust app control and privilege management capability already. Pulse Secure really brings in a new layer of much needed security. So EDR came into the security space and [Technical Difficulty] large assertions as to what it would do. But it's hard to tune, takes a decent skill set to maintain. And if you haven't done those preventative things, it ends up with so many events to have to go through that you miss those critical items that come in there. Going to the topic of modern-day ransomware. These ransomware attacks are no longer just throwing ransomware malware into the environment and hoping it hits something. These threat actors are in your environment, they're behaving like a persistent threat actor, and they're able to get very stealthy very quickly. So the preventative capabilities will only hold them at bay until they find that chink in the armor to get in. At that point, if you're reliant on EDR to spot them, are they going to get lost in the noise of all of the events? Are they not going to get spotted because they've compromised the credential? And now they're masquerading as somebody you trust and tools you expect. So this is where Zero Trust from Pulse Secure really comes into play, providing access controls and a 360 visibility, premise to cloud, client to mobile device, getting that visibility and forcing threat actors to take more risks, which make it so technologies like EDR, are going to be successful in spotting those events as they happen instead of a threat actor being able to go stealthy on us and be able to go under the radar. So those are 2 very key pieces of the Ivanti strategy to help us strengthen our approach and help our customers to be successful.

Chris, thanks for coming on the program. And thanks for your support, and I believe you're in the marketplace as well. So great job. Guys, it's a wrap today. Monti final comment, final word. Monti?

We're in a great business, Hunter, glad to be a part of it.

Yes, you're right. Real exciting time, right. You agree, Chris. Laura, final comment.

Great to see you.

Guys, what a great summit. Sorry about the technical...

I was trying to say use this opportunity to [indiscernible]

One more time. Great time to be...

[indiscernible] for me, Hunter.

Thank you. Great time to be a tech leader, guys, another great summit from HMG Strategy. Apologies on the technical glitch there. We'll smooth it out next time for sure. A big shout out to our partners, BetterCloud, Darktrace, RingCentral, Ivanti as well as Rimini Street and Okta and the HMG Marketplace. A big shout out to the Philadelphia SIM Chapter. Appreciate a relationship going on some 8 years long and strong. And all of our presenters and the speakers, I'd like to invite August Pelliccio to the stage. August, are you there with us. And great to see you coming in from your studio office in New York. I see. That's great. August is our key -- in addition to social media here at HMG. August is -- leads the HMG recognition program, August takes this portion of the forum away. Let's go.

Thanks, Hunter, and thanks, everyone, for staying on the line, right till the very end. So we're recognizing Laura Whitt-Winyard today, a Global CISO for DLL. She was on our last panel, and we had a couple of technical glitches. But otherwise, some really great thought leadership that you were sharing today, Laura. Just want to give everybody a little bit of background on Laura. She's a visionary, cybersecurity, privacy, compliance, risk management leader with seasoned experience in creating and leading highly effective and successful risk management programs, products and services. She's a change agent. She has fostered extensive hands on enhancement of cybersecurity programs. Laura has taken on a diversity of roles in IT and security across an impressive career, including security management positions with Bloomberg and Comcast. Now as Global CISO with DLL. Laura has built a robust network and team of IT and cybersecurity specialists, leading DLL to a higher security maturity level in more than 30 countries. Part of Laura's special touch, she lives and breathes security, staying on top of global cybersecurity news from the moment she wakes up each morning. Laura, you're one of a kind leader, a passionate CISO. We commend all of the important strides you've made and congratulate you for winning this award.

Thank you so much. I'm so honored to receive the award. But in reality, I owe it all to the cybersecurity professionals that surround me and the cybersecurity community as a whole. I would be nowhere without them. And I just really love the security community, and I'm so grateful for them. But I absolutely adore my team at DLL, and they're just really top-notch security professionals.

Congratulations, Laura. Great reception speech. And we look forward to working with you in more summits going forward.

Thank you and I look forward it, too, Hunter.

Take care. Another great Summit, August, Bob, as always, folks, please reach out to your network. I'll refer folks into the HMG Summit model and others [indiscernible]. And we look forward to the next time we're together. Be safe, and lead on.