This episode features Lorraine Spadaro, Chief Information Officer at Global Partners. Lorraine discusses leading a major cloud migration across a diverse business spanning energy terminals and retail fuel and convenience locations. She shares how Global Partners is building an AI framework and governance model to guide adoption across the organization, and how agentic AI will reshape both customer experience and frontline operations.
This episode features Lorraine Spadaro, Chief Information Officer at Global Partners. Lorraine shares how Global Partners completed a cloud migration in seven waves, consolidating nearly 700 servers down to 238 after an extensive discovery process. She discusses the challenges of supporting two very different operational environments, the importance of referenced architecture and governance in managing change, and how she brought her team through the transition through upskilling and constant communication. Looking ahead, Lorraine shares how Global Partners is building out data pipelines, an integration engineering team, and a microservices and API strategy to enable AI and agentic applications across terminals, retail locations, and digital channels.
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Guest Bio:
Lorraine Spadaro is the Chief Information Officer at Global Partners, a role she has excelled in since joining the company in December 2021. In this strategic position, Lorraine has been instrumental in spearheading the company’s digital transformation, advancing cloudification, driving modernization, and optimization.
Before joining Global Partners, she was a key player in the technology landscape at Boston’s TD Garden and Boston Bruins, a premier venue under Delaware North. There, she managed the arena’s technology infrastructure and spearheaded numerous technological innovations. Her consulting work for Delaware North across major MLB, NFL, NHL, and NBA venues solidified her reputation as a leading national expert. She was also a trailblazer in sports technology, standing out as one of the few women working in the NHL. Now, she aims to make a significant impact in the energy and retail sectors, striving to deliver exceptional customer experiences through innovative solutions.
Lorraine’s distinguished career began with Delaware North Companies in 1992, where she started as Information Systems Manager for the original Boston Garden. Her visionary work in developing technology for the new Garden, later known as the FleetCenter, marked the beginning of her remarkable journey in the technology sector. Prior to her tenure with Delaware North, she gained valuable experience as a Programmer/Systems Analyst with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Lorraine holds a BA in Computer Science from Boston College and lives in the Boston area. She is a dedicated mother of three and enjoys golfing and tennis. She finds joy and relaxation at her coastal Maine home, where she cherishes her time away from the hectic professional sphere.
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Guest Quote
“It took every bit of my being to not wanna be like, ‘we've gotta be through this in six months because we’ve got a long way to go here.’ When I look back on it, just taking this in seven waves of migration, and then the network and infrastructure transition taking sort of the next six months, it was really the right way to do it, and it took a lot of the risk out."
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[00:00:00] Lorraine Spadaro: Take a store manager and the many tasks that we give them every day, you know, order. Intake inventory, make sure shelves are stocked, make sure you submit your paperwork on and on, and oh by the way, a pump is down and this and that. Just think about if you had a generative AI application right there that you could just prompt and say, do I have more Snickers bars in the that?
You know, do I need to order them versus half? To go in the back. Get on my computer, look it up. When's my next order coming in? If that stuff is available to you at a prompt, you are able to be in the front of the store meeting with your customers.
[00:00:39] Sunny Choudhry: Welcome to Hyperconnected Journeys, the podcast where we explore how enterprises are re-imagining their digital infrastructure to innovate and grow. I'm your host today, Sunny Choudhry, and I'm the head of the Americas region at Tata Communications. Today I'm joined by Chief Information Officer at Global Partners, Lorraine Spadaro, and Raj, who's a good friend of mine at Tata Communications and our solutioning leader, Lorraine Raj, it's great to have you both here.
[00:01:10] Lorraine Spadaro: Thanks for having me,
[00:01:11] Raj Purkayastha: Thank you, Sunny.
[00:01:12] Sunny Choudhry: So let's get started here. I wanna start off with our first topic, but now. Scaling with purpose. So, Lorraine, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go with Go to you first. Uh, global Partners operates across a diverse business from energy terminals to retail food locations. You've recently completed a major cloud migration.
In your opinion, what were the biggest priori priorities in modernizing? Your IT infrastructure for such a complex and asset heavy business?
[00:01:51] Lorraine Spadaro: Sure. Well, I will say, so I'm about to, um, I've been at Global about four and a half years now, and I would say, you know, it is a diverse and complex business. Um, when you just think about the diversity between sort of midstream, terminally to literally the customer.
You know, uh, at the, at a gas station in your retail locations. It's just the diversity of that is, is incredible. And so, sort of the, the time I took to sort of really learn the business, I, I came from the sports and hospitality industry, and so customer I understood, but the, the really big B2B side and sort of logistics and the um, sort of business optimization piece was, was where I really sort of spent a lot of time sort of learning the business.
Sort of getting to know my team and understanding our infrastructure. Um, you know what, I think what happens when you have a bit of legacy infrastructure is that it is just that, I mean, you know, I think we spent an entire year with the Amazon team doing discovery in our, in our data center. I think we did three rounds of discovery of what is in this data center.
Um, you know, at Legacy Data Center, you're not as worried about compute and storage. You're just like, oh, we, we can spin up a virtual machine anytime and build a sandbox and somebody forgets to, you know, to to, to take, to take it offline again, and it stays there. And as it turned out, this whole discovery process, we discovered, you know, close to 700, um, servers, and you high graded.
Only 238. So I was like, this is the ultimate spring cleaning, right? Like we said, what really matters to us? How do we define what our production environment looks like and what really matters to us? And that process that we took, the time we took to really identify that was really, really important. And uh, and that's where we landed.
Because what we were trying to do is really build a plan around, okay, this is what's critical to us. This is our, this is our production environment. We need to build scalability, resiliency. We need to be, you know, hyper security focused. We need to be able to enable innovation if we need to. And you know, doing that in physical data centers can be trickier, you know, so, um, and at the same time.
The commitment I made was to be sort of really cost conscious about what the real cost of delivering it for our organization was. And so all of those together really helped us build the business case for our migration to cloud. And, uh, we're, we're officially through that, uh, through that migration. I'm happy to say we've been operating in the cloud now.
Um, you know, uh, just about, um. Six to eight months and, you know, we did it in seven different waves. Um, and, you know, it's been, uh, it's been, it's been great and really, really grateful to the team who had to spend the time to sort of make the conversion. We brought in some new cloud resources, but just folks who, you know, were more sort of data center skill-based, who sort of upskilled to, to really sort of support this, uh, this cloud environment.
So it was, it was, it was a total team effort.
[00:05:18] Sunny Choudhry: Uh, that sounds, that sounds fantastic, and I know, Raj, you're gonna have some commentary on this, but before you provide that, I have a question for you, Raj. When you, when you look at industries like this, like energy retail that operate at this level of scale, what are some best practices from your perspective for building resilience into this type of infrastructure?
[00:05:47] Raj Purkayastha: Know, uh, I, I, I wouldn't, uh, envy the work Lorraine has is, is where I start because she is, uh, in a place where she has to manage complexity of two different industries. It's not one industry. That's the, that's the most interesting thing because retail works on a different playbook, uh, energy. Works on a different playbook and she has to put two, two of them together.
You know, think about the complexity of that. Uh, you know, if you think about a retail, you know, she, she talked about, uh, you know, the gas stations, uh, every gas station is a retail chain for you. Right. Which will have a similar IT architecture. Uh, like any other, you know, say for example, a DMARD or, uh, uh, you know, in a smaller scale, but it has an I product and the, the playbook for that needs to be very different.
Whereas if you think about the energy, right, energy will be extremely OT heavy, right? William, for you, OT, be very heavy. Uh, and uh, it is less heavy, right? So. So the playbook out there is, is very different. Now, when you think about, uh, resiliency, sorry. Uh, that's where the complexities come in because, you know, when we speak to a lot of our CIO friends, we speak, speak about one blueprint, uh, one playbook.
But for Laurie it needs to be two playbook with two different, uh, you know, re and two different ways of attacking business problems. Uh, for, for filler. Think about it like this, that the retail sector will be more agile. I'm not saying the energy sector will not be agile, but the retail sector will ask for more agility from it.
Then the energy sector where things will be, you know, more constant and, and you know, the resiliency would be a factor of that. Right. So for example, energy, you know, sunny, you remember one of our discussions which we had with one of the energy companies, uh, you know, in credit ticket, uh, is energy companies are not beating certain government policies.
They will have implications which go beyond reputation, beyond losses. There will be implication in terms of, uh, policy of the government than enforcing fines on them, right? Retail has nothing like that. So. You think about the impact of resiliency for both of them is very different and therefore the, the way it is implemented is also a bit different, right?
So as I said at the start, I don't envy Loren Bella's shoes at this point time. She has a very interesting job.
[00:08:47] Sunny Choudhry: Interesting. Uh, say, say it in one word, uh, of many. Uh, so Lorraine, just sticking with you now, um, as global partners starts to define and operationalize its AI strategy, whether it be for operational efficiency, safety, customer engagement, how are you thinking about the role, uh, you know, in regards to the core it infra and, uh, enabling that?
[00:09:12] Lorraine Spadaro: There's so much to think about in this space, and I, I, I think about, um, you know, infrastructure as code and, uh, and some of the automation capabilities, um, that are available now. I, you know, I always, I always use the analogy with my team of like, what, what we. What we have to do is work toward an environment where we think more like that technology flywheel, right?
Like, you know, it's so, you know, when we rearchitect our solutions because we'd still have a lot of legacy environment and we rearchitect those solutions in the way they communicate with each other and getting your data and leveraging AI to be able to help you do that more effectively. Do the discovery work, do a lot of the, um.
Heavy lifting around that. Uh, to be able to modernize that, I think is, is really important. Obviously there's embedded AI in, um, a lot of the ERP tools that we're using today. Um, you know, whether it's Salesforce or ServiceNow, um, you know, Workday, uh, Oracle. It's just choosing, um, where you're sort of leaning into ai.
Um, but I think first and foremost, we're building an AI framework. Whether it applies to our data team, whether it applies to our IT organization, um, and within our business units, and build that framework and identify sort of where and create a governance profile around it so that we're ensuring that we're adopting AI into the areas of the business that free the greatest opportunity, the greatest efficiency.
[00:10:46] Sunny Choudhry: And beyond that, right? I mean, I think we could all say that customer interaction and strengthening customer interactions are, are, are very important. So a global partners manages customer facing digital experiences, mobile payments, loyalty programs, digital engagements. What, what technology are you using to strengthen customer interaction and omnichannel engagements across your retail sites and digital channels?
[00:11:21] Lorraine Spadaro: Well, let me preface my answer first by saying that. The fuel and convenience industry probably lags a little bit. Some, some, the industry would tell you this too, there, it's, it's one of the industries a little bit anchored by the fact that that forecourt where you have fuel dispensers and all of the compliance, you know, um, you know, tank monitoring and all of the environmental aspects, that's the always been the priority and a lot of the technology investment has been around that.
Then really recognizing sort of the importance of retail and customer experience has been a little bit slower. Again, coming from hospitality and sports, right? And so, you know, mobile app, loyalty, payment orchestration across multiple platforms, all of that we look, I, you know, the way I look at it is certainly I look at adjacent industries and you know, whether it's q, it's QS, R.
Um, or retail and, and look to see what they, they're doing because we should be delivering those same experiences. And so when you come to one of our sites and whether we have car wash or, you know, fresh food ready, uh, uh, ready, you know, uh, made to order food, um, you know, traditional retail, um. We should be able to deliver an experience that's not fragmented in some cases, you know, you know, we have a little bit of a brand.
We might have a brand in the forecourt, like a, a branded partner, and they're driving a digital experience and we're trying to de to deliver a digital experience in the backport. And we're working really hard for that to look logical, uh, to a lot of our customers. And so really sort of leaning into not just that these systems stand alone.
But more sort of the integrated experience that they deliver. And that's, that piece has been sort of harder than I thought. We're starting to see some real progress. We see some AI driven point of sale platforms coming into the industry that will really sort of, um, you know, is that composable commerce concept, which I think is gonna be a game changer for us.
But we have some traditional. Legacy technologies that we, you need to work with. There's only three points of sale or maybe four, you know, if you look at it, that actually can activate a fuel controller. So we're, we're working with some partners that you, you know, you're bringing along this ride where you're trying to create this more modern.
Guest experience and you wanna be able to deliver it all. I want, I want somebody to be able to use that mobile payment to pay at the dispenser, to pay in store, and to get a car wash and have that experience be seamless, and for them to be able to redeem and earn loyal loyalty on that experience. And that's sort of the goal.
[00:14:04] Raj Purkayastha: I, I would love that. I would love that.
[00:14:07] Lorraine Spadaro: Harder than you realize, Raj.
[00:14:10] Sunny Choudhry: Yeah. Raj, we're actually going to you here. I mean, um. Are you seeing digital in digital customer experiences tying to infrastructure decisions?
[00:14:23] Raj Purkayastha: Oh, a hundred percent. Uh, and, uh, you know, see if you, if you think about it, many a times, uh, companies used to think in silos when it came to experience for time, experience for employee.
And the digital info. Right? Uh, and, and it's, uh, you, our, in our last impress, it was brilliant of a few voice that you mentioned. I still remember then, and even now, what you, what you said know, it's really, really, you know, talking about what's shared now rather than thinking about the past. Right. Uh, sunny, think about it like this, that, uh, when you have.
When you want to drive a unified experience, which is same everywhere that you go, it cannot be, uh, you know, segregated decision making when it comes to the digital inflow, right? You cannot have a client pick up a phone and talk to somebody, uh, say in, in New Jersey. Having a different experience from, say, having it in Texas and so on and so forth, or even in all localities per se.
And I'm just giving you a very high level example. You can go into each of the touchpoints that a client has, whether it is swiping the card, getting into a shop, you know, experiencing different digital touch points, the way I buy, the way, way I interact, the way I can solve my issues. Can I do it on chat?
Can I do it, you know, by calling, can I, you know, uh, go, you know, mail somebody and so on and so forth, right? The digital fra behind that is very, very critical because if you do not have integrated architecture, which, which talks about one program, which drives all those things, the client at the end of the day will have a very, very, you know, disjointed experience.
Uh, you know, somewhere the client may call in and, or, you know, send a mail and when they call in, there's no integration of that. They have to, you know, give the same information again. And somewhere you will see that, uh, you know, whether you've called you, you call a month back. All the information is there.
That's the digital infra that we are talking about, right? How is it digital infra to integrated? That will drive the experience of the client. And by the way, this is true for internal clients. Also, the employee experience of somebody walking to an office, a store, a full pump, you know, if the digital enterprise different, would be very different in different locations, right?
That is not what you want to drive, uh, specifically as an experience, uh, even for internal customers, which is your employees. So, uh, you know, I, I, I really love what Louis is doing and, you know, I, I love to go to one of the stores where it's an integrated experience, whether I wash my car or buy a hot roll or, and then fill my, my car per se, and pay from the, uh, and get loyalty points for that.
[00:17:49] Lorraine Spadaro: Yes, that's the goal, Raj. That's the goal we're working on it.
[00:17:54] Sunny Choudhry: Are great ideas. Um, I'm sure we'll, we'll, uh, take note of those ideas and, uh, you know, I wanna take a, take a step back now a little bit, Lorraine. So before global, you, you had a, you had a, a fascinating career and obviously you still do, but you have a fascinating, uh, career.
You know, you, you spent years shaping technology at TD Garden Consulting. Across Major League Baseball, national Football League, N-H-L-N-B-A venues. I mean, for, for me that sounds like a great time. Uh, but uh, hopefully it was. Um, but what I'd like to know is that, was there a defining moment, uh, for you that changed how you think about technology's role in delivering experiences?
[00:18:47] Lorraine Spadaro: Yeah. I, I can tell you sort of from the really interesting digital evolution that happened sort of in that space, but I'll tell you more about some from a fan's perspective. It was kind of in the early two thousands and think about being in Boston. In the early two thousands, the uh, red Sox had won, I think their first World Series.
After a hundred year drought, the Patriots were winning, starting to win Super Bowls. We had two teams, you
[00:19:19] Sunny Choudhry: know, by the way, I just wanna say I'm from New Jersey, so both of those times, I'm sorry they won. That did hurt us. Sorry to interrupt.
[00:19:27] Lorraine Spadaro: We, we were, Boston was quite a sports city in that, in those in for a while.
And it still is. It still is in that, think about the competition sort of, right? Like there's so much opportunity and there's only so many consumer dollars in the marketplace that you can tap into. And so how are you driving? Customer experience becomes critical. How good is your food? How fast can you get a beer?
What is the price of your beer? What's the quality of your beer? What's the quality of your food? You know? And then the sort of, when we talk about the digital evolution, it's now digital ticketing, you know, and mobile apps. And you know, now you get the, you know, you buy your parking and that's through, you know, that's on your mobile ticket as well.
And this whole experience becomes a very integrated experience. And, um, I think that evolution driven by. Just hardcore competition and wanting to drive the very best, you know, customer experience you can, as well as just the convergence of what all the leagues were driving and the ticketing companies were driving first into the digital experience.
And then ultimately what it is today. It has it really completely, uh, revolutionized sort of the, the customer experience to the point where you're just sort of. Remember used to be pulling tickets out, somebody would tear tickets, and now like you're literally just tapping and going, you know, so I always talk about, you know, we put a couple, um, there's a few, within Delaware North there's several, but at Titi Garden there's two autonomous checkout stores.
You know, you think about like, if I were gonna get a beer. I have to wait for the bartender to bore the beer, and I need to pull out my wallet, show my id. I have to go through this whole process. It could take three minutes to buy a beer, but in an autonomous, it was about, you know, somewhere between a minute, 20 to a minute 30.
And that matters in a sport where you only have certain length breaks, you know, so it can impacts business, it impacts customer experience. We looked at every sort of digital opportunity we could to take all of the friction out of what you were trying to do in that, remember, you only have three hours, three hours to, to make that money.
Um, and so you couldn't, you couldn't mess it up.
[00:21:36] Sunny Choudhry: Yeah. I think it's good for both customer and uh, and the business. Right? Yeah.
[00:21:40] Lorraine Spadaro: Good for the customer. Actually, when it comes to the business, especially, it comes to
[00:21:42] Sunny Choudhry: beverages.
[00:21:44] Lorraine Spadaro: That's right. We're always trying to figure out like. You know, how much more throughput can you get?
How much more beer can you sell? We never really reached that next s
[00:21:54] Raj Purkayastha: Yeah, really the message that I took is beginning half the time.
[00:21:58] Lorraine Spadaro: Yep, yep. That's right.
[00:22:01] Sunny Choudhry: That's,
[00:22:02] Lorraine Spadaro: that's an
[00:22:02] Sunny Choudhry: accurate message. Raj, um, RJ now to you, I mean, uh, enterprises modernize, uh, they juggle diverse IT environments. So what are your thoughts on.
Strategies that help bring consistency across, uh, such different operational contexts.
[00:22:24] Raj Purkayastha: Yeah, so excellent question, sunny. Uh, this is where, what, what I was talking about earlier comes the play, which is the playbook and the blueprint. You need to have playbook. You need to have a blueprint. Without that, you should not do any implementation.
Many a times what happens is I've seen the mistakes, uh, happening again and again that people will just go ahead and increment, right? There's a company which will be merged or acquired and you know, they wouldn't care. They would say, okay, I'll merge the IT systems also. It doesn't happen like that. It's calling for, you know, nightmares.
For a lot of people it's calling for secrets ride for a lot of people because. If you do not stick first, if you do not build a blueprint at a table and, and go with it, you know, you will not, uh, drive efficiencies. You will not drive, uh, you know, uh, good expectations from your clients, both internal like stern.
And the second is, uh, you know, if you just go about and doing things, uh, then there will be issues. And that issues will not only be from an efficiency perspective, but also from a security perspective, right? Lot of times, uh, you know, when, when you talk about, uh, IT policies not doing a few things, you know, do not go and buy a VM from, from anywhere else.
Do not go and. Just go and you start using say, you know, a Gemini or, or this AI tool and that AI tool, why people may not agree. The reason behind it is that it is working to a blueprint. It is working to a playbook, which is not only ensuring the experience, but also ensuring security of the entire operation.
Right. And there are a whole lot of other things which come and. Also when a new say, you roll out a new product to roll out the new product if you are not working towards the blueprint. 'cause here the example is somebody gets. In charge of rolling out a product in, you know, expedited timeline. And they would say, okay, you guys cannot give me, you know, this five VMs, this network for this, this policies, and so on and so forth.
I'm just gonna go and buy it from GCP. Uh, it's going to be a nightmare for everybody after that, right? So the way to drive efficiencies in an, uh, in any company is one, having a blue brand following through that. Then having a playbook and following through that. Right? Uh, and by the way, the playbooks and the blueprints are never static in nature.
That's also another myth that once you build something, it is static. More is not, you'll have to keep updating it. Think about it. This. So, uh, you know, two years back everybody talked about AI in terms of fundamental AI and the traditional ai. Nobody even thought about, uh, theis that there are genis and the agent AI that we are talking about right now.
So in a playbook and a blueprint, which talked about fundamental ai and now, you know, not really going and talking about say, agent or generative is not going to help the business, right? So that's, that's the difference that we are talking about where. How to look at playbook, how to look at a blueprint, how, how to ensure that that is, uh, you know, uh, kind of going, rolling with the times and keeping everything, you know, up to date.
Many companies who do not update the playbook and the blueprint are left behind, and that is also, uh, you know, a case in point per se. Dori, what do you think about that?
[00:26:33] Lorraine Spadaro: I, I think Raja, you're, you're making such good points. I mean, it becomes us unsustainable if you don't sort of, you know, create those blueprints and, you know, referenced architectures, whatever it is you're doing, um, and ultimately have those runbooks for it, it becomes us unsustainable the world.
It becomes you, you know, you're, you're going in front of your leadership team asking for more and more resources because you've got so much, uh. Sprawl, if you will, because you, you know, there's gotta be sort of some level of half, you know, what do we have, how are we operationalizing it, how are we supporting it, and what are we doing with, its, with its future.
And I feel like when you, when that grows out of control and it's not done in a really intentional way, it becomes very, very difficult to manage.
[00:27:24] Sunny Choudhry: So, Lorraine, uh, you know, leads me to my next question. So. Global Partners is in the midst of sunsetting its legacy data centers now that involves upskilling from traditional network and data center models to cloud native software defined networking. How, how are you guiding your teams through that, through that shift?
[00:27:52] Lorraine Spadaro: I mean, I think, I think we're using a little bit of what Raj was just talking about, sort of collectively creating sort of, you know, we have an architecture review board and creating referenced architecture. So there's the, it, I would say in that space, in our, in our network infrastructure space, we, they were sort of a follower to our data center migration.
We still had some core routing and switching cubs in those data centers for a, a while because. We didn't, you wanna kind of control how much change you have in your envi environment. And then we were still trying to figure out like what does the resiliency look like in that switching and routing environment?
The cloud, you can do a lot of things there a lot of different ways. And so what is our strategy going to be? And that allowed the time, the team some time to sort of, uh. Look at what that future, you know, infrastructure is gonna look like. And we've gradually been moving towards that. So the next step really is the design around our resiliency and DR strategy and how, um, you know, that sort of multi-region d dr strategy is going to work around, uh, the switching and routing design.
[00:29:04] Raj Purkayastha: So one of the things that you mentioned in one of our discussions was around. Uh, people. And, uh, taking forward to what you just mentioned, you talk about people, uh, you know, specifically from a technical perspective, what they learn, how you train them, and then you've talked about culture. I'd love that.
Would you like to, you know, talk about a bit more for the audience that, uh, that are sharing, uh, the hearing, uh, your views speaking and from your experience?
[00:29:33] Lorraine Spadaro: Sure. Um, I mean, I think, you know, the combination of. Building a team that, you know, you bring some that, that subject matter expertise in, but they become incorporated and the folks that also have some of that institutional knowledge blended together, I think make the best team right for a plan going forward.
But like, it, it's really sort of making sure that we create a vision that everybody's comfortable with because when we do that, it's that, you know, it's that. The infamous like locker room mentality. It's, you know, there's no I in team, we're all in this together. We, you know, we win together, we lose together, right.
And, um, you know, and making the commitment, and we did, I mean, we, because we took that year and we, you know, we put together, um, tons of education programs available and people were super excited about gaining these skills. They were, you know, I think everyone, anyone who had sort of. Being, working in a more legacy data center environment, knows, like everybody's talking about cloud, but are we ever going to be there?
And, and you know, here we were, we were, we were knocking on the door of this, of this, uh, transformation and we knew we had to bring the team along and we needed their commitment to learn and upskill. And they did. I mean, there were just thousands of hours spent. Um. On different training platforms and with the AWS team, quite honestly, who was, uh, who were great partners in our journey, understanding, you know, that we were making, you know, putting a lot of faith in them and, and, and making this, you know, huge leap and, and bringing the team along.
So it was, um, it, it was just, uh, it was a really, uh, getting, getting everyone to commit. To the change and really sort of hyper communicating what that change was gonna be and why it was important. Um, and getting the buy-in, I think from the team at every level really helped us be a success.
[00:31:39] Sunny Choudhry: I could imagine that the, um, the communication that, that you provided to your team was, was key.
[00:31:45] Lorraine Spadaro: It was, it was. And through, you know, through my leadership team too, I mean, they are an extension of. Division that we create together and sort of just continually, and they were on board too, continually emphasizing the importance of bringing every along along the journey. Not just us, but everyone along the journey was so important.
And in that period of time, we did a couple of major acquisitions too. So we had, uh, a lot going on. And it really, I would say, I, I, I just met with one of our team members who was saying that was probably one of the. Best and toughest years of my career here at Global hu And he had been here for a long time, so we did a lot in one year.
We didn't anticipate the collision of growth and this migration at the same time. But you, you take a step back and you reevaluate and you say, okay, we've gonna, something's gotta give here and we're gonna have to throttle the migration plan a little bit to get these assets onboarded and then sort of go back to it.
So it was. It was, you know, it just takes a lot of constant communication and attention to detail to make sure that you're making the right decisions and you're keeping the environment stable. I mean, don't forget, we all the, while we still have our legacy environment while we're doing these seven waves of migration over several months.
[00:32:59] Sunny Choudhry: Yeah, no, um, that's, uh, it seems like that took some time and you did the right way. Uh, Raj, I'm gonna go to you for one more question then I'll, and we'll then we will segue into our final segment here. Uh. Raj, this was a journey, right? That Lorraine and, and her team went on. Not all journeys are successful.
Uh, so Raj, from your lens, what, what, based on what you have seen, what separates companies that sustain momentum and those that do not?
[00:33:35] Raj Purkayastha: Alien question. Uh uh, sorry. You know, one of the thing. That I have seen is, uh, you know, when you go into execution, right? Uh, strategy is, is one that execution is other. Now, in execution, what is extremely important is the smaller goal.
Many times what happens is leaders, you know what? What l talked about, about the, uh, talks that she had with the team. I'm a hundred percent sure l talked about the small wins, the achievable goals, right? Because if you go and tell your team about the strategy, which is doing, say no, right now, they're doing 10, they have to do a hundred.
For example, for them a hundred is, they have not seen that. They will either you say, no, you're doing 10 and you have to do X. You know, either there is no context or it's too big a number for them to visualize and understand and be capable of seeing. That's where doing that small win and having clear directions in terms of what is the next step, how will you do it?
Uh, you know, where has this been done before? And by the way, I have done this before. Right? Is very important. I'll give you an example. When you think about the network itself, right? It starts from, uh, you know, how you are bringing everything together on one simple, uh, method, which is visible to everybody, uh, very easy to change, very easy to manage, and so on and so forth.
Now, that's where, you know, Lauren talked about the cloud networking, right? How's the cloud networking looking like? How's the WAN looking like and how's the WAN looking like? And there are three different. Parts of the network, which is the user mind, the middle mind, and the cloud mind. Have you defined it in a manner and define the changes in that in a, in a model manner, right?
Where you say this, the team needs to first say, do the user mind where they will shift from the existing, you know, wired ology to a wifi topology. And these are the different steps, which is going to look like. This will be finished in nine months. Right? And who's going what the point, sunny is that many times, one, the lofty goals are not defined by execution.
Once it is defined by execution, it is not defined in smaller steps, which can be achieved. Right? Once. As a leader, you define what needs to be achieved, how it will be achieved is very easy for the team to do once they're trained. And that's where l also talked about the thousand hours of training, right?
The what from small steps, very important, right? First is the blueprint, the playbook or the runbook as, as l mentioned. Uh, then the small goals, uh, the what and the how is through the trainings and through a partner ecosystem, right? We, and you have been partners for a lot of, lot of different, uh, enterprises, I'm sure.
That's what, uh, you know, Lauren would also vouch for. Pay the whole journey become very, very easy when enterprises do not look at it like that. Many enterprises say that, you know, I will not go for a partner and I'll do everything in house. Have a thousand people or 500 people, everything will be house.
That can also be a death na, you know, name on on them because, you know, people may not know everything. People will not know of it. Right. And that's where the gaps will be filled in with partners who will come and tell you that what needs to be done differently, how it can be done, and so on and so forth.
Right. So those are the, uh, the, the ones which segregate, you know, the winners for all the winners. Am I on the same page as you?
[00:37:41] Lorraine Spadaro: Yeah, definitely a hundred percent. And I would say the other thing that I found, you know, was we sort of wrapped this immediately, knew what. The importance of two things. One was building out a governance framework, right?
So what was this cloud governance gonna look like in every discipline of our IT area? And then two, what, um, how are we gonna manage change? 'cause it just became, it became such, such, so much more of a complex environment. Um, that we, you know, quickly realized, okay, so how we run, like we had to really step up and ramp up how we manage change in our environment.
And the visibility to those changes had to expand, uh, exponentially across the team because every little change has an impact somewhere in. And so that's why when you're talking about this, like not taking that boil the ocean, trust me, it was every, it took every bit of my. Being to not wanna be like, we've gotta be through this in six months and we've, 'cause we've, you know, we've got a long way to go here.
It was really, when I look back on it, just taking this in first in the seven waves of migration and then the network and infrastructure transition taking sort of the next six months, it was really the right way to do it and it took a lot of the risk out
[00:39:03] Sunny Choudhry: managing change. And as we think about change, we think about what future change is ahead. So we've talked about what has been done. Let's talk about what is up and coming, right? Innovation and future thinking. So Lorraine, I'm gonna stick with you here looking ahead. As AI becomes more embedded into operational decision making and customer en engagement at Global Partners.
How are you thinking about future readiness when it comes to cloud and network and data infrastructure, supporting AI at scale across your, your terminals, retail locations, digital channels, et cetera?
[00:39:55] Lorraine Spadaro: Yeah, I mean. I think we're looking at it right now. I think like everyone use case by use case. I we're, we're definitely creating vision and strategy around it.
We partner very closely with our data team and our data science team. You know, we're doing, they are working, doing all of the foundational work. Building out those data pipelines, making sure we've got the right data in the right places, uh, is something that's been a long time coming here that creates.
And enables you to be able to do that level of sort of optimization that you can see in the future that that AI is gonna deliver against. So whether it's in our terminals and, you know, using, um. You know, agent AI to help you monitor, you know, uh, alarms and triggers and, you know, instead of having to, you know, add more people to do that, you can really lean into AI operationally to help you do that.
And then they've got agent AI has playbooks and they're like, I'm seeing an alarm, and I can, you know, I understand what that alarm means and here's the playbook for what I do for that alarm. And so. The important thing is that we make sure we have the data available and our data science team is now building out sort of with that data, you know, the, the appropriate models for the appropriate use cases.
Um, so that it really sets us up for the future. We have a team of data engineers and in it we're building out our integration engineering team. We believe that there's that data mesh in between where we're modernizing how all systems are integrated in the future with our. More modern, uh, uh, microservices and API strategy, um, and leveraging AI there to help as well.
So it's, you know, when I look down the 24 to 36 months kind of, I think that's where we should start seeing some real, uh, enablement from those capabilities.
[00:41:53] Sunny Choudhry: Roger, any thoughts here?
[00:41:55] Raj Purkayastha: Uh. Let me, let me, uh, paint a picture of the cuff for re. So, Lauren, this is what I think, uh, the next 24 months it is going to look like for a consumer like me. Uh, I'll have an agent, which is my personal assistant, which everybody will have. The personal assistant will have a visibility into my calendar, in my card, everything right.
Uh, that agent will then go and speak to the agent. Of the car wash of a full bump, you know, and my, uh, my car itself to see when the full is low. Uh, some, some point if the car has not been cleaned for some time, and that that agent is going to do all the discussion. The other agent, the only thing that maybe I will do going forward is say, okay, they right.
Or maybe the agent is not, not even going to ask if the, it's within the limit, right? That's where agent to agent communication going forward would be the most critical thing. Right? And therefore, for a company like yours, uh, you know, uh, how that agent is, is really, really powerful, flexible, you know, uh, and breachable enough to agents of cloth, uh, it will become very, very interesting.
Right? Otherwise. My agent can go to any other agent and say, okay, this agent is not reachable, or it's, it's not very flexible, uh, not known enough, and therefore I'm not going to talk to that. Right? That's, that will be the agent chaos, which is going to happen going forward. Right. So the future from, in the next 24 months, you don't forget going forward, starting years is, is this will be the future, uh, as I see.
More and more autonomous driving is gonna come in. So you will not even know where your car is going going forward, right? The car may just go on the way to the office, go to a full pump of its choice, and when I say its choice, the, the agent will choose, tell the car where to go, uh, little clean and so on and so forth.
So agents is going to drive consumer behavior and also, uh, you know, enterprise behavior. In a very, very big manner, and therefore, uh, agentic in my mind is going to be extremely, extremely interesting and, and important. And from an enterprise perspective, therefore, the infra, uh, whether you're ready for the infra for the agents or not, or agentic enterprise ready or not, will be what differentiates an enterprise going forward, right?
Agent get, uh, you know, network or agentic and, uh, digital infra is very different from the human infra that we know of at this point of time. And that's the big change, which is going to come in sunny in the next, uh, you know, uh, 12 to 2 24 months.
[00:45:02] Sunny Choudhry: Sounds incredible. You know, especially, um, when you look at how physical assets and digital customer experiences are going to be, uh, operated and how they're gonna gain traction. So. Thank you for that, Raj. So Lorraine, I have one question for you. Um, one more question for you, and this is a big one. So if you had a blank canvas to, to design your organization's next gen digital backbone, and you're designing that based on your.
Vision for the next three to five years ahead, what would you prioritize first?
[00:45:45] Lorraine Spadaro: You always wish you could start fresh
[00:45:47] Raj Purkayastha: because we're all inheriting a little bit of,
[00:45:50] Lorraine Spadaro: um, you know, I always say legacy, right? Uh, and so, you know, like if I had a blank piece of paper, you, you would have, you know, similar to what Raj just explained, you would literally create that g flywheel of solutions that, and, and so.
Frictionless and seamless, the way that they can work together and the way they could work with the data that you have so that you can then layer on AI to be able to, you know, I'm trying to deliver great customer experience. I wanna be the loyalty offer that Raj's card chooses to come to my location to make sure that I've got the best offer on the table on that street corner.
So it's really just, um. You know, making sure. I think again, it's like you, none of, we can all sort of talk about. How we'd start with that blank sheet of paper. But at the end of the day, we're still working in some cases with, you've gotta work with certain ERP platforms and that ERP platform provides you with some core data that you have to do.
You know, so there's, you know, payment, payment needs to come along a little bit. So I would say it's really just how seamlessly we're able to deliver that experience. And it's looking at the solution architecture to deliver that, and then making sure AI is enabled on top of that.
[00:47:14] Sunny Choudhry: Excellent. Excellent. Raj, any, uh, final comments here?
[00:47:20] Raj Purkayastha: Uh, uh, sorry. The, the only thing that I'll say is that yeah, it won't change the world, right? And the agent, uh, is, is going to play the first big role. It's not going to be the funny thing. Agent tech is going to be the first, I know, major change in that. And going forward, there'll be a whole lot of other changes that we wanna see.
There are other technologies which are also coming along, you know, quantum being one of them, whether it's computing or network or security, which, which needs to be looked at, which we should all be, uh, you know, following through in terms of what is happening. And, uh, I'm sure there'll be, you know, human tremendous benefits to all of us, whether we are an enterprise user.
Or, uh, you know, consumer, uh, and, and that's what the world is going to look like. It'll be much, much, uh, know, faster, better, uh, more optimal and easily available from a solution perspective going forward is what I think.
[00:48:22] Lorraine Spadaro: And, and I think about it too. I mean, even, you know, there's the customer, but then there's the, the folks take a, take a store manager, and the many tasks that we give them every day, you know, order.
Intake inventory, you know, um, you know, make sure shelves are stocked, make sure you submit your paperwork, schedule your, you know, your p your, your payroll for the week or your, you know, coverage for the store for the week, and
[00:48:47] Sunny Choudhry: on and on. And oh, by the way, a pump is down and this and that. And, you know, just think about if you had just, you know.
[00:48:55] Lorraine Spadaro: You had a, a generative AI application right there that you could just prompt and say, do I have more sneakers, bars in the back? You know, do I need to order them versus have to go in the back, get on my computer, look it up, when's my next order coming in? If you, you know, if that stuff is available you to you at a prompt, you are able to be in the front of the store meeting with your customers and are.
In our small pro retail profiles, we have, you know, one or two store associates. And so, you know, you wanna deliver a hos hospitality experience, but you're asking people to do 10 things at one time. And so it's really like, how, how is AI and, and, uh, generative AI and agent AI helping them, uh, to, to really just be more of that sort of face of the retail experience, the customer at the human level.
By delivering these AI applications
[00:49:48] Sunny Choudhry: a hundred percent. It's better customer experience. Better employee experience.
[00:49:53] Lorraine Spadaro: A hundred percent. A hundred percent.
[00:49:55] Sunny Choudhry: Excellent. Excellent. So that brings us to the end of this episode of Hyperconnected Journeys. Lorraine, I wanna thank you so much. This has been an excellent conversation and, um, you know, I, I've really, uh, I'm looking forward to.
Seeing what you do next. Um, you know, this is, um, a, a really fantastic journey your company's on and, and what you're driving. So thank you for sharing how Global Partners is driving modernization across such a diverse business. And Raj, thank you as always for giving us the industry view. Uh, we hope this conversation gives everybody listening a glimpse on into how enterprises are building resilient networks, leveraging IOT, and empowering collaboration to meet the challenges.
Of today and tomorrow. Don't forget to subscribe and hope you can join us again. Thank you.