Everpure, Inc. (P) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Next up, our panel on top technology innovators. Welcome, Dr. Daniel Durand. Daniel, welcome to the program. Daniel, you're the Chief Innovation Officer of LifeBridge Health. Tell us -- give us an update. What are you seeing relative to the pandemic? And what's the way ahead, the road ahead?

Yes, there's a pretty broad runway in those questions. So when it comes to the pandemic, you'd have to really think about which geography you're talking about. Certainly, here in the United States, we had things under fairly good control about this time last week or so it seemed. Then we've had quite a resurgence, and it is differential by geography. Where I currently sit in Maryland, things are going fairly well, but that's not the case in all places. I think that just kind of reminds us of what this is likely to continue to feel like. We noticed all of the technological trends associated with changes in how people want to or need to work in the context of the pandemic. But I think what we'll also see is that different geographies will adopt public health measures and also working arrangements in different fashions. And what I expect to see here in the U.S. is until we get very different signals from the biomedical researchers and the pharmaceutical companies that are working on vaccines, we are going to be more or less where we are today for this foreseeable future. The only way that we know to really control things is to keep things locked down as economically and humanly possible. Certainly can't ask everybody to stay in their house forever and not work, and that would lead to other major issues like food shortages. But at the same time, if people conduct business without masks and go about their business, I think we've already proven to ourselves in several states that, that will result in a return of cases and then ultimately an overwhelming of the health system and many deaths that would be otherwise preventable. So I would say for at least 1 or 2 years, businesses should plan and be ready to be where we are today and know that there will be sort of coming and passing waves. However you label these surges in cases, whether we're at the end of the first wave or the beginning of the second wave, I don't think it really matters. What really matters is what's going on in your geography and how it impacts your business. And you have to be kind of ever ready to pivot from -- depending on the nature of your business, from bricks and mortar to virtual and back again. And certainly, that's one of the things we're thinking about as we reopen a lot of our health care locations. We're going from what had been many months of exclusively telemedicine visits to doing business a bit more in person and seeing a return to normal operations in certain areas where patients have deferred care, who have care that is urgent enough that it now needs to happen. It could wait 3 months perhaps from March until now but it can wait no longer. At the same time, if our state were to be hit with a major resurgence in the next 60 days, we would have to reassess that and recalibrate what comes in person and what's done virtually. So it's not just about the migration, but it's about the ability to potentially pivot back and forth. If you're a business like health care that sort of ultimately needs the in-person, that's a complex capability you sort of have to master. But if you're another type of business that can go indefinitely virtual, whether or not that had occurred to you before but now it occurs to you, then I think you'll see a lot of those folks stay very virtual for a much longer period of time. And as some of the other speakers have referenced, when things do truly normalize, there's a real question of does that then become -- does the 80% become virtual rather than the 20%. And maybe in the past, it was different. It was 80% in-person, 20% virtual.

Daniel, I need tell you, that was one of the most logical explanations that I've heard about what's going on out there right now in North America as it relates to business models and humanity about really this virus.

Thank you. And for health care, I think what it means is we've had success at doing a lot more than we thought we could virtually. We've really had a stress test and trust -- and tested that capability. And there's exponentially more trust amongst providers that they can manage patients that way when appropriate than there would have been this time last year. So ultimately, I think there will be tremendous benefits from the sort of creative thinking of the crisis, but we've also been very acutely reminded of the things that we can only deliver in person, whether that's a surgery or even whether it's just certain types of conversations and care that really need to happen in person. So it's been a great experiment that is a national experiment and not one we would have designed. And we're seeing a lot of very -- what's interesting to see in real time is both what we learn about the virus and by way of the medical journals and things like that, but also what we're learning about the technology lets us work this way while the virus is impacting us. And as someone mentioned before about COVID being a real catalyst and accelerant for digital transformations, to give you a sense for how true that is for health care because I think this isn't necessarily a health care audience, so just to throw some numbers in there, when I've met with other chief innovation officers within the health care sphere, whether it's on the insurance side or the provider side, and this is true of our system, we would have conferences and people would say, "Well, what have you noticed? Like a 50% growth or a 70% growth in televisits? Because you're telling us that you lost 70% of your in-office volume." And -- for -- at different times in the pandemic. And what it comes out to is, no, we've actually seen, in almost all cases, more than 1,000% growth in telehealth because it was -- it went from being a very small piece of the pie, almost always less than 5%, to being virtually the only types of visits that were going on through ambulatory doctors' offices, I mean just all kinds of conditions being managed by phone that would not have been managed that way in the past because there was more -- felt to be more risk if the patient came in. So that level of growth and I mean literally 1,000%, so for us, it meant going from 50 or so tele-encounters per week to like 12,000 a week, right? I mean for others that were a little deeper into their journey, there were still over 1,000% growth, 10x growth over baseline. So it's very hard to imagine, particularly with COVID still out and about pre-vaccine, that that's going to change. So that will be a permanent fixture of how medical carriers deliver differently. And hopefully, we make the most of that and use this as a time to divest ourselves in terms of health care systems of unnecessary bricks-and-mortar investments. So if you imagine that you're trying to keep 100,000 people in your catchment area or patient panels healthy, and previously you felt you needed -- I'm going to throw a number out there that isn't anchored to any reality, but let's say it's 1 million square feet of various different hospitals and doctors' offices, maybe after something like this, you can phase out half of that square footage. Who knows? It really depends on the amount of encounters and then the amount of bandwidth and capacity you still feel you physically need at the end of that. But between that and the emergence of things like artificial intelligence and remote monitoring, that should even further catalyze these types of remote patient-doctor interactions. I do think we're on the cusp of a remarkable digital transformation that's industry-wide, and we'll see far less reliance on bricks and mortar in health care in a much nearer future than we would have seen otherwise.

Daniel, great insights. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Loved it. Really appreciate it. Thank you.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Great. Next up, Jack Hogan, VP of Technology Strategy of -- and Cloud Go -- GTM for Pure Storage. Jack...

Hunter, how are you doing? Great to see you again.

Hey, good to see you. So tell us, digital transformation initiatives were already key to every core -- key and core to every company's strategies. What's going on now post-COVID?

Well, Ani mentioned earlier, everybody had a digital transformation plan, and a colleague of mine reminded me of a quote that Mike Tyson said back in his days that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And I think this kind of 100-year event with the pandemic has really been that punch in the face, and I think it's caused a lot of people to rethink what they need to do in their digital transformation strategies. And where Pure Storage fits into that is we've been an innovator in really the data storage world focusing on the data, which is the core asset that many companies are using to fuel this digital transformation and as Sandeep said earlier, that ability to really transform through speed and performance, and that's not speed and performance necessarily just at how you access but how you adapt to that punch in the face and how you adapt to what you need to do as a company. And so what we're seeing in this world and with the digital transformation post-COVID is that it's an evolution now. I mean I think we're seeing companies recognize that they really have to address how remote access to data, remote installations happen. We rapidly pivoted to -- well, for us, customer experience is paramount, making sure that the experience they have with Pure's platforms are second to none. We've achieved a pretty high result in that, in that 82 Net Promoter Score top 1% of all business to business. But we had to transform what we do in what used to be a very hands-on, quick and easy and simple installation of the data platforms. We now have a full remote, hands-off, remote install capability to allow that, the underpinnings of these solutions and these platforms to be able to be installed and set up. And we also have really seen an acceleration in the consumption of our cloud model, our cloud services and the ability to access data solutions through cloud economic and cloud experience model. So we're seeing that this kind of rapid evolution towards this kind of cloud model is really here to stay. We're seeing some great success in that, recognizing that as David just said, a lot of the medical and critical services have been an area we focused on quite a bit, have a number of large-scale partners there really helping with using the artificial intelligence, the machine learning to address the pandemic in a much faster fashion than we've ever seen companies come together. And so having data platforms like we provide has allowed an acceleration. I wouldn't -- I don't know if I can claim 100x like Sandeep was talking earlier but certainly substantial increases in business outcomes being able to access their data through platforms like what Pure provides and how that's really driving rapid innovation and that underpinning what -- really that experiencing their data solutions should be that modern data experience. And Pure's really rapidly evolved in this time frame and recognize that it's not just a new normal. It's an evolution of how everyone and everyone who manages data platforms, data systems have got to understand that it's a new world and they've got to rapidly adapt to that.

How do you -- how does Pure help with that work-from-home, distributed environment? How do you help on the infrastructure stack, lighten it up so there's better, faster compute?

Yes. Well, so one of the core tenets Pure's always had is that simplicity. I think it was mentioned earlier. Simplifying what used to be old spinning hardware, discs that sat in data centers, putting things onto a silicon media, in all-flash is really the first decade of the innovation Pure created, so the ability to now leverage the software that sits on top of that, to be able to extend into the public hyperscaler cloud. So Pure has solutions that take the same on-premise data centers and extend, so we're allowing that rapid evolution from the remote workers to be able to now extend without physical infrastructure into the cloud infrastructures but rely on the same enterprise features, enterprise capabilities, a lot of the things that we did in the first decade of business and now kind of moving into our second and so allowing that -- those applications. And what is really always a tech debt of what was developed decades ago to now be able to be consumed in the cloud models and to be able to be extended into the public clouds but at the same time take advantage of the services that exist, things like serverless and Kubernetes and the container models and to allow those to coexist with the same systems and allow remote access, simplifying the management. We have a Pure1 platform that allows you to see where all your data is at all times, see how your hosts are consuming that, see where performance bottlenecks are all in one central location. So Pure is really providing that simplicity of solution in how the new remote IT management workers and dev ops and even into the data scientists that can just consume data services now straight out of Pure platforms without having to go through what were months' worth of procuring in physical setup. Now that can all be done in a virtual sense.

Jack, thanks for coming on the program. Stay with us. We'll circle back to you.

Great, Hunter. Thanks.

Good to see you. Hey, next up, Lesley Ma, Chief Information and Continuous Improvement Officer of NSF International. Lesley, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Hunter. Glad to be here with everyone.

Great to see you. You're always so direct and switched on. The country's gone through such an amazing time over the past 3, 4 months, and early on, you were really dialed into the importance of diversity and inclusion in any management team. Just a couple of thoughts on that in technology, why it's important to have a diverse team.

Well, sure. I'm sure you've heard this. We're all in the people business, right? Whether it's with our teams directly or with our customers and our suppliers, it's all about relationships that you build, the trust that you are able to build. And those are the things that make people want to work with you, for you. And that is such an important thing, especially in these times. I'm sure many of you have had these discussions internally and how do you be a workplace of choice. And I don't need to tell you, in IT, it's very competitive, right, to attract the best talent. And these things resonate with the younger generations, and really they really feel a sense of mission. And if they have that purpose and that sense of mission, then they'll stick with you for the long run. And we all together collectively know how difficult it is to motivate and to challenge people in these days and times. So diversity more now than ever and we're all taking pledges and making pledges and taking action. And I hope that -- and I know that leadership of the people that are on this discussion are instrumental in that, in driving that within your own organizations for the benefit of all of us.

Lesson learned, key findings or learnings over the past 3 months with your new team?

Oh, my goodness. There's so many, and a lot of the speakers have touched upon those. We felt the same. In my new role, there's -- I work with a lot of scientists. And scientists are -- by nature, like to be very precise and methodical and think through -- things through, so it's very unnatural for them to pivot quickly, accelerate, move ahead even though you're not 100% sure and all the Is dotted, Ts crossed. So the things that I've been working on is of course building that balance of decision-making with the leadership team to say this is where we need to head. It's consistent with our north star and our vision. It's consistent with our mission. It's the right thing to do. We're just doing it perhaps a little quickly, and we need to understand that we need to pivot and instill that sense of -- or bias of -- for action. That's -- my personality anyways is that I'd rather do something. And even when you don't know, you're at least moving ahead. And sometimes it's sideways, but it's still in the right direction. So one of the things that I found that I've been doing a lot is channeling that to not only the leadership board but also my team.

Lesley, you came from GM and now you're in a nonprofit. What are the differences? What are you doing differently now?

Oh, there's -- it's a completely different industry. So I'm a person in transformation myself. So change is good. And I think that the difference -- the difference is that, like I said, we are in a very different industry and -- but yet, there's a lot of similarities. The mission at NSF International is to protect human health, and I think that, in a lot of ways, we can all relate to that. And that's our north star, and everything we do is geared towards that goal and that mission. So I don't think that from an IT perspective, much is different. Where I was in automotive, in -- as CIO of Cadillac, we focused a lot on customer experience and the importance of brand and that innovation and technical capability associated with that brand image. So whether it's dealing with our dealers or our direct consumers, that was my role, is to make sure that we transform the brand into one that was viewed as very innovative and consumer relevant. So in my new role, a lot of the customers are not direct consumers. It's more B2B. But I take with me that element of needing to really be clear that your brand is always moving and innovating, and the importance of that is always there. And in my new role, I stress internally and externally on that a lot.

Lesley, great to have you on the program. Stay with us. We'll circle back to you in a minute. Thank you.

Thank you.

Next up, Beni Lopez, Managing Director, Industrial and U.S. market at Softtek. Beni, welcome to the program. Great to see you. So Beni, where do you recommend companies to focus their efforts and investments as they are getting back to business, really getting ready to lead and innovate up in the next business cycle?

Right. Well, assuming all the safety and security basics have been taken care of, right, it's a high time to really focus on reassessing, I would say, the business canvo -- canvas model in general, the business model canvas and pivot according to this new reality. So it's time to, first of all, reassess what the value proposition is that you deliver. I mean, certainly, part of that value proposition now needs to address what all of us have been reflecting on what really matters, right? I mean companies need to really focus on their purpose tied to their value proposition, also focus on how they deliver that value and how to capture value as a company as an organization for profit or non because it has changed. And so everything is definitely going digital, and that's a good thing. It's going to accelerate implementation of it. So what we are recommending is, depending on your business models, whether you focus more on business model canvas or capabilities maps or your process value maps, depending on how you map your business, it's time to revisit them with all your senior leadership and redefine where the impact has been to reassess what I just mentioned before. Only once you have finished doing that exercise, which takes very little time relative to the impact it has, it's a matter of days or weeks to really focus, regroup in a more structured fashion and then begin to, in a very agile manner, start all those MVPs that Sandeep was referring to and work in a very agile model, which is another unintended consequence of COVID from the business perspective, is that all of a sudden, all the business was agile, right? All these COVID teams having meetings daily, taking decisions very quickly. We have a great opportunity to leverage that momentum to now implant how we're going to be transforming the business an MVP, MVP, MVP all the time once you've done the assessment on what the value is, how are you going to be delivering that value and how you're going to capture that value. And then that's where we play a role in technology. There's tremendous assets in -- around technology, whether you're going to be leveraging cognitive RPA for back-office operations, industrial IoT to make a leaner, more efficient and low-touch manufacturing operation and of course getting much better -- having insights of who your clients are, what your customers want and how you're going to be engaging them to not only get to know them better but to make sure that your product and your value proposition is now targeted differently to them. So it's those 3 steps: reassess what you do, take a step back and then pivot quickly to all those new programs.

Beni, I love it. What you think about Sandeep's idea of 100x or I would say somewhat differently, thinking big with a stretch vision and a stretch goal and having a sense of urgency?

Well, absolutely, absolutely. I think what we're seeing in the past 3 months is different stages of acceleration. I mean obviously Mars had been in a journey before, and this is accelerating that they have really done the canvas model, understanding where they're heading and what specific investments they would need to do. But what we're saying is some companies that you would be surprised they haven't paid that much attention to the pace of their transformation are now seeing for them maybe 4 or 10x -- between 4 and 10x acceleration in those transformations. So it's definitely happening. And again, I attribute that to all of a sudden, regardless of which industry you're in -- I mean as a company, we service 10 different vertical industries, and they have obviously been impacted differently, right, transportation, hospitality, financial services, et cetera. But depending on which industry and how you're being impacted, whether you're getting tailwinds or headwinds, it has impacted the speed. For those that are being "benefited" by -- from the business value position perspective, all of a sudden, they identified bottlenecks they didn't know they had or they suspected they had but they've been putting off projects to fix those bottlenecks around, I don't know, digital -- I mean around e-commerce or the last-mile delivery or whatever it was meant to fix. All of a sudden, they have the need to quickly, very quickly get back to that project and implement it as quickly as possible. So it's definitely happening.

Beni, thanks so much coming on the program. Stay with us. We'll circle back to you.

My pleasure.

Next up, Shola Oyewole, VP, Digital Innovation, United Therapeutics Corporation. Shola, welcome to the program.

Good. Good afternoon, everybody.

Good to see you. So where do you recommend companies focus their efforts and investments in this current environment at this point?

Well, I work in the life sciences industry, so my industry might be a little different from most. I would say the pandemic has made my industry rethink how they run R&D. I think the future of drug development, R&D and clinical trials will lie in silico. And what I mean by that is you apply computer models to rats to humans and molecules and then run your experiment in the computer itself without hurting an animal or hurting a person. You can run models, different scenarios, come up with doses, efficacies, things of that nature. So I'd say in my industry, that should be the future of R&D.

Interesting. And are you doing that now?

Yes. We have a computational analytics lab where we are developing mathematical models for our molecules and for rats. And in that way, we can run clinical trials -- not clinical trial. We can run trials electronically. Over time, we'll build human models and apply these same molecules mathematically on the human molecules. I mean understand that the goal of my company is to manufacture organs, and this kind of rapid testing helps us get to that goal faster.

So what's next? What have you -- how have you used the crisis to further an innovation agenda or accelerate an initiative that was in place?

Well, my company makes drugs for a very rare lung disease called pulmonary hypertension. We have a portfolio of drugs. The only real cure is a dual-lung transplant. Today, there are over 200,000 people waiting in line for a lung transplant. Of the 200,000, only 2,000 probably get a successful lung transplant. That's like a 1% success rate. My company will manufacture lung to remove [ alert ] from 1x to 100x over the next 10 to 15 years. And we're pursuing that using 3D printing, stem cell research and all kinds of technologies. The pandemic affects -- the novel COVID-19 affects the lung and destroys the lung. You can just imagine that if there are only 2,000 successful lung transplants per year, with this pandemic, there are certain much less because there are patients that need lungs and there are less available lungs. So this pandemic will help companies like mine accelerate the drug, the lung organ manufacturing process even much faster. So I'll say it is an opportunity.

What's the mission of your company?

Medicines for life. Our patients come first. We do everything to help our patients by providing them the best-in-class drug, best-in-class treatment. Today, our portfolio of drugs helps manage the diseases that our patients have. But our ultimate goal is to manufacture lungs for them, so they no longer need to rely on medicine.

Got you. What -- in terms of data and analytics and computer-aided analysis, what -- how are you using data to help you really understand exactly what you're treating?

So we operate in what we call an orphan drug market where there are less than 200,000 patients. And for that reason, the data that we have is very, very, very specific and unique to the disease state. But what we've done is this -- if you can remember, the way doctors are educated about any disease state is you have a sales rep visiting the doctor's office. Unfortunately, this pandemic has disallowed that. Sales reps no longer travel to doctor's offices. And by the way, the doctors are busy treating patients. So this opened up an opportunity to reach the doctors using alternative channel. Somebody mentioned earlier omni-channel marketing and targeting. So what we're doing is we're looking into an AI platform that will inform us on the best way to reach a health care practitioner.

Excellent.

Either through e-mail, their interests, the journals that they participate in, clinical trials they've participated in and things of that nature. So that way, we can meet the HCP, the health care practitioners' needs at the exact -- using their preferred model.

Got it. Shola, great to see you. Great to have you on the program. We're running a little tight on time here. I look forward to seeing you again soon.

All right.

Thank you. Great company. Hey, Jack Hogan, you want to come back just for one quick final comment from Pure?

Yes. Sure, Hunter. I don't know if you want a question or a comment.

Brief comment and then kind of how people can follow up with you all.

Yes. No, so I think comments are, listening to the other panelists here, Shola and what they're doing, we're seeing the need and the ever-increasing speed of the AI platforms that are consuming this data really need a completely transformed way of how you consume that data. Follow up with me. You can reach Pure Storage, obviously purestorage.com. You can reach me at [email protected], and I'd be happy to plug in those that are interested in understanding what we can do, specifically in the AI space, to put your data to use and put it to use in the systems and keep those data scientists working to find the cures and ultimately improve the outcomes for things like drug trials, like that.

Excellent. Perfect. Thanks, Jack. Thanks for coming on the program. Good to see you. Beni, you want to come back one more time? And any final comments?

Sure. First of all, thank you for the opportunity, and it's been a very insightful set of comments. Just one final comment, I mean regardless of -- I mean despite how harsh this hell pandemic is, we'd like to view it as an opportunity in many aspects. I mean our companies play a role in this new challenge, in this new, very challenging world. I'm very proud to be part of -- partnering with different companies that are trying to make a difference, trying to transform how they view the world and how they are assessing value and how they're delivering that. So it's really exciting on the one hand to see all this movement, all these trends. So I'd be happy to share several use cases that have been implemented in record time, leveraging very exciting technology for business transformation and digital acceleration. So thank you. Very exciting times, very challenging. Hope everybody remains safe. And you can reach me at obviously LinkedIn or [email protected].

Thanks, Beni. Great to see you. Bye now.