Organizations in sensitive industries, such as healthcare, have to ensure that their cloud transformations bring dividends in two areas: the financial side and saving lives.

Pharmaceutical company Merck & Co Inc. has seen its move to the cloud happen gradually at scale to ensure it fulfills both of the aforementioned areas.

“When we talk about moving things to the cloud, it’s much more than just moving servers or things like that,” said Ron Kim (pictured, right), chief technology officer and senior vide president at Merck. “It’s really contributing towards our business that saves and improves lives. So for our work, the stakes are high, but we think the opportunity’s great. And seizing that opportunity is what we’re doing now with our Blue Sky program and working with AWS and Accenture on it.”

Kim, as well as Fran Geatens (pictured, center), vice president of technology infrastructure, operations and experience at Merck, and Sean Finnerty (pictured, left), associate vice president of cloud and infrastructure technology at Merck, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Walls at the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Merck’s cloud transformation journey as a pharmaceutical industry player. (* Disclosure below.)

Starting small and scaling out

Merck’s digital transformation journey is only two years old. But even though it’s still in its fledgling stages, the company has doubled down on a strategy of gradually raising momentum, according to Kim.

“The early parts of the the two-year journey so far, we’re really starting small, primarily driven by a central team,” he stated. “And we did that consciously to get momentum, build the foundation, and prove again we could move things to the cloud with success and start to scale.”

Another dimension of that strategy is working to ensure that company employees maintain a positive experience while interacting with workplace solutions and technologies. And the company does this by fomenting an ardent curiosity within teams.

“The focus on experience — that my team’s accountable for — transcends our cloud journey,” Geatens explained. “We have held for the last three years within my organization a priority that’s focused on improving the experience that colleagues in our company have with workplace technology and services.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent. Neither Accenture PLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE