(mellow music) >> Oh, welcome back to theCUBE. We continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent 22. We're in the Venetian in Las Vegas, and this place is hopping. I'm tell you what. It is a nearly standing room only that exhibit floor is jam packed, and it's been great to be along for the ride here on Accenture's sponsorship at the Executive summit as well. We'll talk about Pfizer today, you know them quite well, one of the largest biopharmaceutical companies in the world but their tech footprint is impressive, to say the least. And to talk more about that is Wes Barnes, senior Director of Pfizer's Digital Hosting Solutions. Wes, good to see you, sir. >> Good to meet you, John. >> And Jon Harrison, the North American lead for Infrastructure and engineering at Accenture. Jon, good to see you as well. >> Good to see you as well. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Happy to be here. >> Alright, so let's jump in. Pfizer, we make drugs, right? >> Pharmaceuticals. >> Yes. >> Among the most preeminent, as I said biopharms in the world. But your tech capabilities and your tech focus as we were talking about earlier, has changed dramatically in the 18 years that you've been there. >> Yep. >> Now, talk about that evolution a little bit to where you were and what you have to be now. >> Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. When I started at Pfizer, IT was an enabling function. It was akin to HR or our facilities function. And over the past couple years, it's dramatically changed. Where Digital now is really at the center of everything we do across Pfizer. You know it really is a core strategic element of our business. >> Yeah. And those elements that you were talking about, just in terms of whether it's research, whether it's your patients, I don't want to go through the laundry lists the litany of things, but the touch points with data and what you need it to do for you in terms of you know, computations, what you, the list is long. It's pretty impressive. >> Yeah, yeah, for sure yeah. >> I mean, shed some light on that for us. >> We cannot release a medicine without the use of technology. And if you think about research now, a huge component of our research is computational chemistry. Manufacturing medicines now is a practice in using data and analytics and predictive machine learning and analytics capabilities to help us determine how to best you know, apply the capabilities to deliver the outcomes that we need. The way in which we connect with patients and payers now is wholly digital. So it's an entirely different way of operating than it was 10 years ago. >> And the past three years, pretty remarkable in many respects, to say the least, I would think, I mean, John, you've seen what Pfizer's been up to, talk about maybe just this, the recent past and all that has happened and what they've been able to do. >> Yeah, I mean, what is so exciting to me about working with a company like Pfizer and working in life sciences more broadly is the impact that they make on patients around the world world, right? I mean, think about those past three years and Pfizer stepped up and met the moment for all of us, right? And as we talk a little bit about the role that we played together with Pfizer with AWS in their journey to the cloud, it's so motivating for myself personally it's so motivating for every single person on the team that we ask to spend nights and weekends migrating things to the cloud, creating new capabilities, knowing that at the end of the day, the work that they're doing is making the world a healthier place. >> Yeah, we talk so much about modernization now, right? And it's, but it kind of means different things to different people depending on where you're coming into the game, right? If you've been smart and been planning all along then this is not a dramatic shift in some cases though, for others it is. Right? >> Yeah. >> Traumatic in some cases for some people. >> For sure. >> For Pfizer, I mean talk about how do you see modernization and what does it mean to your operations? >> Following our success of the COVID program of 2021, I mean it became evident to us that, you know we needed to maintain a new pace of innovation and in fact try to find ways to accelerate that pace of innovation. And as I said earlier everything we do at Pfizer is centered around digital. But despite that, and despite 10 years of consolidating infrastructure and moving towards modern technology, last year, only 10% of Pfizer's infrastructure was in the native public cloud. So we had a problem to solve. In fact, I remember, you know, we had to build up our clinical systems to support the volume of work that we were doing for COVID-19 vaccine. We were rolling things into our data center to build up the capacity to achieve what we needed to achieve. Moving to the public cloud became more imperative to try to achieve the scale and the modern capabilities that we need. >> And so where did you come into play here with this? Because obviously as a partner you're right alongside for the ride but you saw these inherent challenges that they had and how did Accenture answer the bell there? >> Well, so look, I mean we saw Pfizer react to the pandemic. We saw them seize the moment. We talked together about how IT needed to move quicker and quicker towards the cloud to unlock capabilities that would serve Pfizer's business well into the future. And together we laid out some pretty ambitious goals. I mean, really moving at a velocity in a pace that I think for both Accenture and AWS surpassed the velocity and pace that we've done anywhere else. >> Yeah, right, yeah. >> So we've set out on an ambitious plan together. You know, I was kind of reflecting about some of the successes, what went well what didn't in preparation for re:Invent. And you know, many of the folks that'll listen to this will remember the old days of moving data centers when you'd have a war room you'd have a conference bridge open the whole time. Someone would be running around the tile floor in the data center, do a task, call back up to the bridge and say, what do I do next, right? Then when I think about what we did together at Pfizer in moving towards the public cloud, I mean, we had weekends most weekends where we were running a wave with 10,000 plus discrete activities. >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> Right, so that old model doesn't scale. >> Right. >> And we really anchored, >> You have a very crowded data center with a lot of people running into each other. >> You'd have a whole lot of people running around. But we really anchored to an Accenture capability that we call myNav Migrate. I know you guys have talked about it here before so I won't go into that. But what we found is that we approached this problem of velocity not as a technical problem to solve for but as a loading and optimization problem of resources. Right, thought about it just a little bit different way and made sure that we could programmatically control command and control of the program in a way that people didn't have to wait around all Saturday afternoon to be notified that their next activity was ready, right? They could go out, they could live their day and they could get a notification from the platform that says, hey it's about your turn. Right, they could claim it they could do it, they could finish it, and that was really important to us. I mean, to be able to control the program in that type of way at scale. >> Yeah, by the way, the reason we went as fast it was a deliberate choice and you'll talk to plenty of folks who have a five year journey to the public cloud. And the reason we wanted to move as fast as we did and Jon talked about some of it, we wanted to get the capabilities to the business as quickly as we could. The pace of innovation was such that we had to offer native cloud capabilities we had to offer quickly. We also knew that by compressing the time it took to get to the cloud, we could focus the organization get it done as economically as possible but then lift all boats with the tide and move the organization forward in terms of the skills and the capabilities that we need to deliver modern outcomes. >> So, you know, we talk about impacts internally, obviously with your processes, but beyond that, not just scientists not just chemists, but to your, I mean, millions of customers, right? We're talking, you know, globally here. What kind of impacts can you see that directly relate to them, and benefits that they're receiving by this massive technical move you've made? >> Pfizer's mission is breakthroughs that change patient lives. I mean, the work that we do the work that everybody does within Pfizer is about delivering therapies that, you know provide health outcomes that make people live longer, live healthier lives. For us, modernizing our infrastructure means that we can enable the work of scientists to find novel therapies faster or find things that perhaps couldn't have been found any other way without some of the modern technologies that we're bringing to bear. Saving money within infrastructure and IT is treasure that we can pour back into the important areas of research or development or manufacturing. We're also able to, you know, offer an ecosystem and a capability in which we connect with patients differently through digital mechanisms. And modern cloud enables that, you know, using modern digital experiences and customer experience, and patient experience platforms means that we can use wearable devices and mobile technologies and connect to people in different ways and offer solutions that just didn't exist a couple years ago. >> And so, I mean, you're talking about IoT stuff too, right? >> 100%. >> It's way out on the edge and personal mobile, in a mobile environment. And so challenges in terms of you know, data governance and compliance and security, all these things, right? They come into play because it's personal health information. So how, as you've taken them, you know to this public cloud environment how much of a factor are those considerations? Because, you know, this is not just a product a service, it's a live human being. >> Yeah. I mean, you start with that, you think about it through the process and you think about it afterwards, right, I mean, that has to be a core factor in every stage of the program, and it was. >> So in, in terms of where you are now, then, okay, it's not over. >> It's never over. >> I mean, you know, as good as you are today and as fast as you are and as accurate and as efficient. >> Yeah. >> Got to get better, right? You got to stay competitive. >> Yeah. >> So where do you find that? Because, you know, with powers being what they are with speed and what it is how much more is there to squeeze out of this rock? >> There's a lot more to squeeze out of the rock. If you think about what we've done over the past year it's about creating sort of a new minimum viable product for infrastructure. So we've sort of raised the bar and created an environment upon which we can continue to innovate that innovation is going to continue sort of forever at this point. You know, the next focus for us is how to identify the business processes that deliver the greatest value ultimately to our patients. And use the modern platform that we've just built to improve those processes to deliver things faster, deliver new capabilities. Pfizer is making a huge investment in digital medicines therapies that are delivered through smart devices through wearables using, as I said technology that didn't exist before. That wouldn't be possible without the platform that we've built. So over the past year, we've come a long way but I think that we've effectively set the table for all of the things that are yet to come. >> So, Jon, how do you then, as you've learned a lot about life science or, and certainly Pfizer with what they're up to, how do you then apply, you know, what you know about their world to what you know about the tech world and make it actionable for growth to make it actionable for, for future expansion? >> Yeah, I mean, we start by doing it together, right? I think that's a really important part. Accenture brings a wealth of knowledge, both industry experience and expertise, technology experience and expertise. We work together with our clients like Pfizer with our partners like AWS to bring the best across that power of three to meet clients where they're at to understand where they want to go, and then create a bespoke approach that meets their business needs. And that's effectively what we're doing now, right? I mean, if you think about the phase that we've just went through, I mean, a couple of fast facts here no pun intended, right? 7,800 server instances across 11 operating system versions 7,500 databases across 20 database versions, right? 4,700 applications, 350,000 migration activities managed across an eight month period. >> In eight months. >> Yeah. But that's not the goal, right? The goal is now to take, to Wes' point that platform that's been developed and leverage that to the benefit of the business ultimately to the benefit of the patient. >> You know, why them, we have we've talked a lot about Pfizer, but why Accenture? What, what, what's, 'cause it's got to be a two way street, right? >> We've had a long partnership with Accenture. Accenture supports a huge component of our application environment at Pfizer and has for quite a long time. Look, we didn't make it easy on them. We put them up against a large number of world class SIs. But look, Accenture brought, you know, sort of what I think of as the trifecta here. They brought the technical capabilities and knowledge of the AWS environment. They brought the ability to really understand the business outcomes that we were trying to achieve and a program leadership capability that, you know I think is world class. And Jon talked about myNav, you know, we recognized that doing what we were trying to do in the time that we were doing it required new machinery, new analytics and data capabilities that just didn't exist. Automation didn't exist. Some people experience capabilities that would allow us to interface with application owners and users at a velocity and a pace and a scale that just hasn't been seen before at Pfizer. Accenture brought all three of those things together and I think they did a great job helping us get to where we need to be. >> When you hear Jon rattle through the stats like he just did, right? We talk about all, I mean, not that I'm going to ask you to pat yourself on the back but do you ever, >> He should. >> Does it blow your mind a little bit, honestly that you're talking about that magnitude of activity in that compressed period of time? That's extraordinary. >> It's 75% of our global IT footprint now in the public cloud, which is fantastic. I mean, look, I think the timing was right. I think Pfizer is in a little bit of a unique position coming off of COVID. We are incredibly motivated to keep the pace up, I mean across all lines of business. So, you know what we found is a really willing leadership team, executive leadership team, digital leadership team to endorse a change of this magnitude. >> Well, it's a great success story. It's beyond impressive. So congratulations to both you on that front and certainly you wish you continued success down the road as well. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Good job. >> Pfizer, and boy, you talk about a job well done. Just spectacular. All right, you are watching our coverage here on theCUBE, we're at the AWS re:Invent 22 show. This is Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture and you're watching theCUBE the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, we're at Reinvent 22, AWS's big show going on here at the Venetian. Several thousand, tens of thousands of folks packing that exhibit four and going to sessions and also learning a lot about what's going on in the cloud space. And today we're going to talk about speed, velocity, to be specific. And with me to do that is Chris Wegmann who's the global technology and business lead for the Accenture AWS business group. And Chris is with Accenture. And then Erik Farr immediately on my right, is the global technology leader again for the AWS business group, but at AWS. So very similar titles guys, you're making it tough on the host. But glad to have you with us here. Really appreciate the time. So let's talk about velocity, you know, what's that all about? And Erik, I'll let you jump in on that. And then Chris, you go from there. How about that? >> Yeah, so with velocity, it's really about innovation. It's really about trying to speed the way that we help our customers, not just innovate through the AWS services, but with Accenture. With their ability to come in and really just kind of bring their expertise in industries and in the technology underpinnings and kind of all of the aspects of what we do together as a partnership. >> Okay. Chris? >> Yeah, so when we came up with a concept around velocity, we worked backwards from the customers the traditional Amazon way, right? So, we looked across a lot of the programs we were doing with our customers as well as we were doing internally when we were building assets to take to the market on AWS. And we found we were spending way too much time, anywhere from six to eight months just getting all the foundation in place, all the integration in place, getting the services to the point where we could actually build on top of it or our customers could build on top of it. And we got challenged. We said, there's got to be a better way, right? And so we took a different look at it. We said, can we go build an application? Can we go build code versus accelerators or our blueprints or that type of stuff that really would allow us to walk into a customer or walk into one of our internal organizations that had a an idea around an application or solution to be built on AWS to take to our customers as a service. And said can we go through just a very simple set of checklist, predefined architectures, predefined solutions and that stuff, and can we just crank it out, right? Can we, and that's what we've built. We built this tool and platform based on that concept. So it's designed and it is helping us internally as well as our customers just go that much faster and get to that innovation that Erik talked about. >> So how did it happen between the two of you? >> Yeah. >> It's not easy, right? I mean, as good as your culture is there's still going to be some bumps along the way right? And so how did that evolve? What was that process like? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So I've been working with Accenture for over five years, working with Chris and other people at Accenture. And over those years we've spent countless discussions with our customers all around the world. And just like Chris said, we see all of the different scenarios that our customers are having to deal with. We see the pain points, we try to figure out how do we get better next time? How do we do this in such a way that allows them, those customers to really kind of innovate using AWS, which is what we're all trying to get to. And during that process we started to realize there's a few key themes that we're seeing, right? Not just the foundations, right, what you build off of at the base level, but the data aspects. Like how is a customer going and developing their data lake, so their data meshes, right? How is this happening? And what we've realized is that we are kind of doing that on a custom basis often and we realize we could actually speed that much faster, faster to value, faster to customer appreciation and additional usage and development of their solutions on AWS. >> So I look at it is, from the beginning we started the business group and the reason why we have very similar names is 'cause we represent each side of the organizations that are here. And when we started the business group seven years ago, the whole idea was better together, right? We should be able to come together and help our clients move that much faster, right? And that's what really was at the foundation of this, right? And how we built this, right? We came together, we both saw the problems, right? Obviously AWS has an immense set of services, has an immense set of capabilities. We had a lot of experience of implementing these. Came together, worked together to build this platform. And it's been a great journey, right? I mean, it's great to see the experiences from both sides come together. Some of the common problems, we each had different ways of addressing them and we had to go and debate, which was the best way. And we really are leveraging our joint customers here as well is to get inputs from them since we were working backwards for them. We've now taken this and pulled them into it and really gotten inputs from them on really what they're looking for above and beyond the services they have today. This is designed not just to be something we go use at the beginning of a journey, right? A cloud journey, it's to help customers continue through their journey as well. >> So, and I might have missed this, so I apologize if I did. But we always talk about speed, right? Everybody's about faster, quicker, more efficient and that. So what makes velocity a unique animal in that respect? What exactly is it delivering then for a customer that isn't just kind of baked into the services you'd be proposing to them anyhow? >> Yeah. So first off velocity is designed with automation at the core, right? So instead of having people going in and making changes or anything like that, it's all completely code backed and automated, right? So that alone allows for immense ability for us to go in and actually accelerate that journey for the customer. But in addition to that, because velocity was all developed to work together with this code, it actually allows these pieces and these components to be deployed together, to work together and to ultimately support that customer use case without actually having to go and recreate that every time. >> Okay. And can you gimme an idea, Chris, about somebody or at least how this has been put into practice then yeah? >> So I'll give you a couple examples. One, internally, right? So as part of our relationship, we're investing in these joint industry solutions, right? So industries, we're working with our different industry clients to solve industry specific problems, right? They're not thinking about, okay, let me go lay down a cloud foundation and go do that. They said, I've got a problem I want you to fix. Insurance is a great example, the underwriting processes and insurance, right? So our insurance teams really looked and said, okay, this is what we're going to go build. This is what we need to modernize that process. So instead of going back and going and building all the components they needed, building a data lake, right? Figuring out how data lake's going to work together, build the automation to create all the different EC2 instances and all the different services, security, all that stuff. You know, we were able to very quickly take velocity, go through a very short process with them, understand what they needed and use that code to create that entire environment. And it's not tied to that once it's created, right? So at that point you can still take the updates that we're giving on new services and things like that, but it's their environment, they're able to build on top of it. And it allowed them to rapidly create this insurance platform, right, that they're now taking out into clients. We're taking that same platform we use there and embedding it in every offering, every service that we give to our customers. So whether we're going out and build a cloud foundation, right? Whether we're rebuilding a cloud foundation because hey, it didn't stay up or keep up with the new services that came out from AWS, or we're going and building a data lake, right? Our customers want to take, they don't want to have to do all that heavy lifting in a lot of cases. They don't want it to go make a lot of those hard decisions, right? They want it kind of rebuilt. And what I love about velocity from the beginning, Erik talked about blocks, building blocks, right? And we also heard from our customers is, "I don't want to buy just one thing, right? And I have one size fits all. Hey, I'm really want something around data. Can you gimme that block? I really need something around compliance. Can you gimme that block?" Good example in Accenture, the compliance portion is an area that our internal organization really wanted. So we were able to give them that block. So we're hopeful that this just gives our clients that much more flexibility and move that much faster. >> So, go ahead EriK. >> Yeah, I was going to say I think to to the point too, the other aspect that we get with velocity is the idea and that the vision is that it's designed to be evergreen. And what that means is as AWS, as we release new services to the market, like we're doing this week right? We as the joint development group of velocity are taking those new services, those new features and updating them so that those functionalities are available to our customers that are already using velocity or that are going to use velocity into the future so that they're all taking advantage of it without having to go and do it into their own environments. >> That's what I was asking you about, about if there's a 2.0 down the road or I mean, how do you meet those growing needs and new capabilities that maybe don't exist now but they will a year from now, six months from now? Yeah so, what's on the drawing board right now? >> Yeah, so yeah, just I'll start. The one area that we're really looking at heavily, so the the velocity fabric is really just the underpinning technology that we've already been talking about. We've also got a set of activators, which is really the fact that we're kind of joint deploying this to our customers. But to answer your question, we have a concept of accelerators. So these accelerators are there to be developed over time and they're going to allow us to take those customer use cases that are typically kind of at a microservice level, right? Something smaller than an entire solution or an entire application. And use those to accelerate either the development of solutions into our customer environment or to accelerate our ability to create solutions to then take it out to our customers. So that's on the roadmap for '23 and beyond. >> So I'll build on what Erik was talking a little bit. A 2.0 is actually today, right? Multiple new services came out today, obviously through the site partnership, we had some insights on what's coming, right? And we could start building to those and start knowing customers are going to want to use those. And the idea of velocity is they don't have to go and figure that out themselves, right? So we'll be able to hand that off fairly shortly after those services are released to general availability. And the customers of Velocity will be able to start using 'em, right? And they don't have to go figure out how to integrate 'em and so on. So that's what's in the future. We'll continue to do that, right? We're committed to this. These industry solutions are going to grow, right? I mean that was one of the big reasons we built this. We knew we were going to be building a lot of these industry solutions. We already got several of 'em that are out in the market and we need this platform to do that. So you'll see a lot of velocity powered industry solutions coming out of Accenture. >> Who came up with the name? >> It's a great question. We wanted something around speed, right? 'Cause that's what it, further, faster. >> BLO did it, right? >> Exactly right. Everyone loves speed, right? And that's what we're talking about. So we really looked at lots of names, obviously, and Velocity is one of those ones that just stuck. It felt really right. It felt like it captured what we were trying to do in the market. You know, Accenture, we don't name a lot of things one off, right? They're really focused on what they do. And this was an exception to that because we thought, and we think that it's really going to drive the speed of our customers. And that was a challenge. And we're starting to see that. We're starting to see the improvement and speed that we can get our customers into the cloud. It's awesome. >> Yeah, it caught my attention right away. >> Yeah. >> So success on nicely done there. >> But I also think that velocity is not just about speed, it's speed in the right direction, right? >> Oh, sure. It's meant to design it in the way that our customers are leading and that we can then go along that journey with them. >> Right, yeah. The last thing you want is to go really fast in the wrong way. >> That's exactly right. That's exactly right. >> That's bad recipe. And you've had very few of those. You've had a lot of good recipes. Thanks for the time fellas, we appreciate. >> No, thanks for having us. >> All about Velocity and that offering going out to the marketplace in a, I guess a modernized version. Could you call it modernized now? By the way, it's only been around for couple years. It's all modernized. You are watching the executive summit sponsored by Accenture and also theCUBE, which is the leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

well you're watching the cube and I knew that you knew that I'm John Walls we're here in Las Vegas it's re invent 22. Big Show AWS putting it on the Big Show here late in 2022 that's going really well we're at the executive Summit right now sponsored by Accenture and we're going to talk about that relationship between Accenture and AWS um kind of where it is now and where it's going you know even bigger things down the road to help us do that two guests Andy Tay who's a senior managing director and the Accenture AWS business group lead at Accenture Andy thanks for being with us thanks for having me and Sarah whose last name was one of my all-time favorites all good because it is it's all good right okay it's all good Sarah all good worldwide leader of accenture's AWS business group for AWS and thank you both again for being here so let's talk about the relationship just in general high level here 30 000 feet a lot of great things have been happening we know a lot of great things are happening but how's this all you think evolved how did how has this come about that you two are just inextricably linked almost here in the cloud space Sarah why don't you jump on that yeah I'd love to um I think one of the the strongest factors that causes that Synergy for us is we both work backwards from our customer outcomes and so just by consistently doing that taking those customer signals um really obsessing over our customers success we know what we're marching towards and so then we kind of extract those themes and really work together to think about okay when we look at this holistically how do we go bigger better faster together and accomplish and solve those customer problems yeah Andy yeah John let me just maybe add and you know to amplify you know what Sarah just touched on um we both have common to our culture this notion of working from the client's perspective first so really delivering to the clients values or um you know in aws's parlance it's you know customer and so that's at the core and when we keep that at the core everything else becomes really easy where we invest what we build key clients we focus on what our team structure is et cetera Etc that's really easy so that sort of core core pillar number one in terms of our sort of you know success factors the second thing that I think really helps us is our sort of scale geographically you know certainly from an Accenture standpoint as you know John we're north of 800 000 people globally um couple that with aws's strength we really do have you know a field depth and breadth across the board that allows us to sort of see and feel what's happening in the market and allows us really to see around the corners as we like to think and say um and and that helps us be intentional on what we do um and then the third thing is really us we might know what we do but we sort of need to then play to our strengths and as you know we're two very different companies one focus on the technology side the other you know focus on the technology Services although we'll touch on you know some of the changes we're looking at as we go forward but that sort of playing to strength is key as well for us as a third pillar of success and so keeping those three things at the core really helps us move you know day to day and year by year and that's what you see in this continued partnership so what are you hearing from your customers these days we've talked a lot already today and it's kind of the buzzword you know modernization right everybody's talking about this transformation I don't care if you're in Mainframe or where you are everybody wants a modernized right now um you know what are you hearing from customers in that regard and I'm sure everybody's in a different state different yeah frame of mind you know some are embracing some are dragging uh what what's your take on the state of play right now well and I think it's like especially in these macroeconomic moments that we're in um time to value is critical for our customers um and then we have the talent shortage but even with those our customers still need us to solve for sustainability and still focus on inclusion diversity and equity and so we can't lower the bar in anything that we've already been doing we need to just keep doing more and building with them and so I think um for us really getting to the to the meat of what our customers need modernization is a big one but we're still seeing just so many of our customers look at basic transformation right how how do I dip in how do I start to move my environment move my people and get ready for what I need to do next for my business and so that that is a challenge and like we said with with the markets as volatile as they are right now I think a lot of customers are just trying to work with us to figure out how to do that in the most optimized and efficient way I just want to kind of rub people on the head and say it's going to be all right I mean it's so volatile as you pointed out Sarah right yeah I mean the market up and down and we're worried about a recession and companies and their plans they want to be Forward Thinking yeah but they've got to you know keep their powder dry too in some respects and get ready for that rainy day you know John it's funny um because you would think you know you've got the one hand you know rub that you know it's gonna be all right and and then on the other end you'll you know maybe clients should sort of hold temper and you know sort of just pause but I think clients get it they see it they feel it they understand the need to invest and I think you know there's a recent study back in 2008 those clients you know Sarah and I were reading the other day those clients who didn't invest ahead of those you know major if you remember those macroeconomic downturn times they came out really on the bad side um and so clients now are realizing that in these times these are the moments to invest and so they get it but they're faced with a couple of challenges one is time Sarah touched on you just don't have time and the second is Talent so we're working in a very intentional way on what we can do to help them there and and as you'll hear later on from Chris Wegman and Eric Farr um we're launching our velocity platform which really helps to compress that type and and get them faster you know time to Value we're also being very intentional on talent and how we help their talent so you know rotate so that we're not just taking the technology Journey but we're also having the people journey and then the third thing Sarah and I really focus on with our teams is figuring out new ways new sources of value for our clients and that's not just cost that's value the broader set and so we find that in moments like this it's actually an opportunity for us to really bring the best of AWS and Accenture to our clients well you hit value and I always find this one kind of tough because there is a big difference between cost and value my cost is X right whatever I write on my chat that's my cost so but but how do you help clients identify that value so that because it's you know it can be a little nebulous right can it not I mean it's uh but you have to validate you got to quantify at the end of the day because that's what the CEO wants to see it's what the CIO wants to see yeah you've got to identify values so how many how do you do that yeah yeah I mean we we have many different ways right velocity which Andy kind of touched on I think is is really um it's our foundational approach to help customers really kind of enter into their Cloud journey and focus on those key factors for Success right so we've got ISB Solutions built in there We've Got Talent and change built in we've got kind of what we're calling the fabric right that foundational technology layer and giving our customers all of that in a way that they can consume in a way that they can control and you know different modules essentially that they can leverage to move it's going to be tangible right they're going to be able to see I've now got access to all these things that I need I can move as I need to move and I'm not constantly you know looking around figuring out how to lock it all together we've given them that picture and that road map on how to really leverage this because we we need to be able to point to tangible outcomes and so that's critical yeah proof's got to be in the pudding and and you know to Sarah's point I think sort of we're entering into this sort of new dare I say new chapter of cloud and then you know sort of the first chapter was sort of those outcomes were around cost you know I've moved you into the cloud you can shut down your data center but now we've sort of got other sources of value now Beyond costs there's news new sources of revenue how do I become a platform company on top of the AWS cloud and then you know eke out new Revenue sources for myself how do I drive new experiences for my customers yeah um how do I maybe tap into the sustainability angle of things and how do I get greater Innovation from my talent how do I operate better in a Sarah said how do I become more Nimble more agile and more responsive to Market demands and so all those areas all those Dynamics all those outcomes are sources of value that were sort of really laser focused on and just ensuring that as a partnership we we help our clients on that Journey so what do you do about talent I mean you brought it up a couple of times UTP has um in terms of of training retaining recruiting all those key elements right now it's an ultra competitive environment right now yeah and there might be a little bit of a talent Gap in terms of what we're producing right so um you know how do you I guess make the most out of that and and make sure you keep the good people around yeah Talent is an interesting one John um and we were just touching on this uh before we got here um you know sort of from an Accenture standpoint um we're obviously focused on growing our AWS Talent um we've now got I think it's north of 27 000 people in Accenture with AWS certifications north of 34 000 certificates you know which is absolutely fantastic a small City it's just I mean it is very intentional in building that um as AWS rolls out new Services Adam touched on a whole bunch of them today we're at the core of that and ramping and building our talent so that we can drive and get our clients quicker to their value and then the second area of focus is what do we do to help our clients Talent how do we train them how do we enable them how do we you know get them to be more agile and you know being able to sort of operate in what we call that digital core operate in the cloud how do we do that and so we're focused um in in capabilities in fact our Accenture head of talent and people and change Christie Smith John is is here this week just for that and we're exploring ways in which we can get tighter and even more Innovative Around Talent and so I ultimately that that bleeds over to where the partnership goes right because if you can enhance that side of it then then everybody wins on that in terms of what you think you know where this is going yeah yeah it's already you know pretty good setup uh things are working pretty well but as the industry changes so rapidly and and you have to meet those needs how do you see the partnership evolving as well to meet those needs down the road we we have a very fortunate position in that our CEOs are both very engaged in this partnership and they push us think bigger go faster figure it out let's ride and there are definite pros and cons and some days I'm flying this close to the Sun but um it isn't a it's an absolute privilege to work with them the way that we get to and so we're always looking I mean Auntie said it earlier this is the relationship that helps us look around corners we've raised the bar and so we're constantly pushing each other pushing our teams just innovating together thinking it all through on where are we going and like I said reading those tea leaves reading those themes from our customers like hey we've just had five customers with the same similar feeling problem that we're trying to solve or we ran into the same issue in the field and how do we put that together and solve for it because we know it's not just five right we know they're more out there and so um I think you know it's it's leadership principles for us right at Amazon that guiding think big um you know insist on high standards that that'll always be core and Central to who we are and then you know fortunately Accenture has a really similar ethos yeah quick take on that Andy yeah I think as we look out you know I think um we're going to we've already seen but we're going to see this continued blurring of Industries um of um you know sort of clients moving into other Industries and yeah sort of this sort of agitation Market agitation um and so I think disruption you know disruption and and we're being you know focused on what do we need to be to do in order to help our clients on those Journeys and and to continue to you know get them you know faster Solutions is an area that we you know we are um really looking at and these are solutions that are either industry Solutions you'll hear a couple of them this week um you know we've got our insurance solution that we're we've developed as an intelligent underwriting capability leveraging AWS AIML to sort of be intelligent and cognitive um you know we've got other Solutions around the around Industries energy and Life Sciences but then also intelligent applications that might be touching you know areas I think earlier today Adam talked about AWS supply chain and that's an area that we are focused on and and proud to be a part of that and we're working very very closely with with Amazon on that uh to help you know our clients move ahead so I think we're going to see this continued blurring and we're going to obviously you know keep addressing that and just keep iterating well it looks like a relationship of trust and expertise right and it's worked out extremely well and uh if this is any indication where the interview went uh even better things are ahead for the partnership so thank you thank you for chiming in I appreciate your perspectives yeah thank you it's been great we continue our coverage here on thecube we're at re invent 22 we're in Las Vegas and you're watching thecube the leader in technical coverage foreign

>>Oh, welcome back to theCube coverage of AWS re:Invent Executive Summit presented by Accenture. I'm John,  your host of theCube. We're joined by two great guests, Leo Barella, Chief Technology Officer of Takeda and Don Heiliger Managing Director at Accenture. Gentlemen, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. Great to be here.  >>Last year, Karl Hick joined us to discuss Takeda's cloud journey. I know a lot's gone by the pandemic. Didn't go away as fast as we hoped, but we're starting to see visibility of the future with cloud at narrow and seeing cloud scale. Um, it's refactoring of business models, new opportunities. How's it gone? >>Well, I think it's a, it's going wonderful, as planned actually.  I can, I can share with you that there are definitely some lessons learned, uh, what the plan was quite structured. We definitely discovered that  maybe we should have actually had about 50% of our time, uh, in the planning for organizational change management and communication. And because we definitely, uh, want to, uh, be able to kind of explain why, uh, moving to cloud is actually important to, to our business. Uh, and so, so if you were to actually do it again, uh, I think we would have probably put a lot more time in communicating the value of the program and wild visibly. Now, uh, we're going to be able to move a lot faster than a, than a year ago. Uh, seeing that the community of the Qaeda is, uh, is already, you know, kind of come around, uh, to, to truly understand the value of, uh, of, uh, moving to cloud >>No last year, any Jessie gave up on stage the keys to success for the cloud journey, you guys were in the middle of it. Um, what was the big takeaway, um, on the, on, on your, your journey, because a lot of people are having real situational awareness and doubling down on successes, identifying what's not working and being real agile. This has been the big aha. What's the big aha moments you had, uh, this year? >>Well, I can tell you that. I say from the, the migration of our applications to cloud, which, which is basically table stakes for elimination of our data centers. So at the end of the program, we're likely gonna retain only few application in our data centers, but move more than 80% of our application workloads to cloud. What actually most excited about is, uh, is really our new strategy around data as a digital platform enabler. Uh, so from now on we're, we're really going to be focusing on the value stream of the Qaeda at the understanding of, of digital platforms that we actually want to able to, to, to further consolidate, um, and, um, uh, you know, and globally expand, uh, the, the, the technologies that we have, but old built on a data foundation, uh, that, that is actually governed across the community of the Qaeda. So data actually becomes the center of our strategy. Uh, and then digital is basically just a way for us to actually interact with data, uh, which includes applications, such as machine learning and AI, which we were heavily investing in. And, uh, and we definitely plan on now leveraging more and more. >>And just to real quick, before we go to a central for a second, I want you to double down on that journey dynamics because we're seeing and maybe reporting, and the theme here this year at reinvent is multiple workloads in the cloud changing workloads. You have evolution of workloads, data as the center of it. And then this cultural shifts where you got the, you know, these modern applications at the top of the stack. So you were AIS contributing. So you've got three major innovation theaters kind of exploding. I mean, this is pretty, I mean, one of those is, is mindblowing. Nevermind, all three. >>Yeah. And I can tell you that, uh, you know, um, I'd like to achieve further expand the circle, uh, beyond the Qaeda. We don't necessarily believe that the digital transformation is just about, I don't want enterprise. That is definitely a fundamental, uh, but the digital transformation is truly about, um, connecting the Qaeda as a digital, uh, pharmaceutical company to the overall healthcare ecosystem and be able to basically transact with our partners, uh, in real time, which is the reason why we actually put data at the center because at the end of the day, uh, when other partners wants to interact with our data, the should in real time be able to transact as if they were transacting on their own systems with our own data, especially DCPS and patients, >>Don your, your reaction, because a lot of learnings, new opportunities, you're at the center of essentially doing a lot of great work. We've been documented a lot of it as well. What's your reaction? >>I mean, I just to amplify a lot of Leo's comments already, I think if I, if I think back and on this journey with, with the Qaeda and AWS and Accenture as the power of three, I think, you know, leaning in to that has been a recipe for success. So as Leo said, we've definitely had some lessons learned, but you know, being there with this power of three, I think has been, uh, enabling us to, uh, attack those challenges that have, uh, that have come up and, and really gotten ahead of those. I think the other thing you talked about is this, um, you know, all these different things coming together, you know, before the pandemic, we had, uh, done done some research at Accenture that kind of had two groups of companies with the leader leaders and the laggards. And, uh, it showed, know the difference in revenue growth of the leaders that adopt technology and those that are falling behind and really, um, that gap has widened, but there's a new entrance of companies that have emerged, which is the, leapfroggers the ones that take advantage of all of the things that like AWS has to offer in terms of the AI capabilities, the data capabilities, the foundational elements that are enabling them to really do this compressed transformation journey in a much shorter timeline. >>I think that's been the element that, uh, you know, I think we know you and I have firsthand together with our AWS colleagues of us being able to really do this on a pace that I think has just been on, on the unseen or unmatched in the past. >>Well, we get to the innovation pilots you guys are doing. I want to just jump on that topic for a quick second time. If you don't mind, that's a really important point. I think the people who shifted to the cloud and replatformed, and then learned all the goodness and then refactored their businesses have done great. This notion of leapfrog is people who move and say, Hey, I don't need, I'm going to replatform and refactor at the same time, get the learnings from others. Okay. They get the best practice is so what's the scar tissue from all the pioneers who have been playing in the cloud, who got the benefits are also paving the path for others. This is actually a motivating, cultural and personal kind of impact motivation. People are happier. What's your guys' reaction to this culture of the cloud, this cloud reef, leapfrogging and refactoring. >>Yeah. I mean, uh, w what I'm saying, uh, and, and lovely, or your perspective on this too, but frankly, you know, I think, uh, you know, with, with the, uh, the war on talent right now, that's out there. I think, you know, companies are investing, whether they're leaders, whether they're leapfroggers in this digital, uh, you know, platform I think are attracting the best talent and actually making it a place where people can innovate. And I know we're going to talk about some of the innovations here in a second, but I think that is, um, you know, some, a way to differentiate, uh, right now in the marketplace, given everything that we're seeing around, uh, retention and attraction of talent. I mean, being able to be on the front edge of this is quite critical in any company's view, but, you know, especially when you're trying to attract the best talent in, in, uh, developing, uh, medicines that actually say lots, >>Leo jumping on this wave and moving leapfrogging, what's your perspective on this? >>Yeah. You know, I, I agree to, uh, you know, talent is that talent is key. Uh, and quite frankly, uh, you know, Takeda, we've been at, you know, pharmaceutical company for the past 240 years. Uh, and now what should you really, uh, you know, starting to become a digital, um, pharmaceutical, uh, power. Uh, and, and so, uh, part of the attractiveness of, uh, of joining Takeda for instance, is the fact that, uh, not only you actually get to, uh, you know, uh, be with a company that is investing heavily, uh, in, in, in digital re-skilling and actually training of people, but also you're connecting to the mission of, uh, of literally saving saving lives, right? So basically, uh, the, the, the connection of really this transformation to become a digital superpower, uh, and also, uh, the, the mission of, uh, of really finding new medicines were, uh, for people that actually experienced, you know, for instance, you know, order of disease, uh, it's quite exciting because it's, uh, it's the application of artificial intelligence machine learning, uh, where now you're actually really trying to find someone that is, that is struggling. Uh, and we're now actually connecting them to a cure that, that is drastically changing their lifestyle. >>It's interesting, the agile agility and the speed of innovation really kind of puts away the old analysis of like, what's the payback. I mean, if you, if you can't see the value right away, then you, then you don't know what you're doing. Basically people in the cloud that say I can contribute and leapfrog and get that value. This has been a big part of the business model. And one of the ways people are doing it is just getting involved, starting pilots, doing the projects. Um, so I'd like to have you guys share the project that you guys have got going on with nurse line. Can you share what you're trying to achieve and how has the cloud enabled you to, to innovate, but also capture the value and can, and can you see it, is there, is there a big analysis there's like a big payback it's like you're buying this 20 year project, or how do you guys look at this? >>I mean, the nimbleness of, uh, of cloud, uh, in our ability to come in and fail fast is what's extremely attractive to, uh, to, to the business, right? Because now all of a sudden we can quickly spin up a prototype. We can quickly actually put it out as a product and actually see how effective it is compared to traditional processes. Uh, so for instance, nurse line is actually what we, uh, it's one of the many, uh, innovation initiatives that we actually have going on, but specifically addressing, uh, one of our, um, uh, therapy areas, which is, uh, our plasma derived therapies, uh, plasma and other therapies is actually, uh, the supply chain actually really starts with, uh, the good wheel of a innovative individual like yourself, um, deciding to actually not donate plasma that eventually is being processed and fractionated to deliver medicines that are life savings in most cases is actually the, the literally life savings. >>Um, and, uh, so what we're trying to do is actually really make that experience as flawless as, uh, in, as seamless as possible. Uh, if you, if you, if you have ever experienced, you know, going into Amazon go, uh, where you kind of, you know, walk in, you get some groceries and walk out and don't pass through a register. And, uh, it's the same type of experience that we actually want to provide where, uh, in the past, um, when you're actually donating plasma, obviously it's a, it's a fairly invasive procedure because obviously you need to actually be in a, being a bad and your, your plasma is getting distracted, but there's a lot of paperwork that you need to actually fill in. And, uh, and what we actually did, uh, is now actually enabled that through a digital experience where a donor, uh, they do a short approaching the center can now actually initiate a chat with, uh, with Amazon connect the ILX. >>Uh, and then, uh, depending on the priority, uh, the donor is going to assign to a nurse that can actually be anywhere in the country. Uh, in all of a sudden the nurse can actually initiate, uh, through, through Amazon connect, um, a dialogue with the, you know, with, with the donor, uh, answering some of the questions in the, you know, in the regular questionnaire. So, so now all of a sudden the nurse is actually feeding up the people work for you. Uh, and, uh, and that is actually done through the initiation of a video call. Uh, and we're actually using chime, which is, again, a part of like, you know, the, the, you know, the, the Amazon AWS services. And then basically upon the, the completion of a, of the questionnaire that is action, analytic, Tronic signature, that has been applied to, um, you know, to the form. >>Uh, and so did, this is actually all happening while basically the person is actually walking through the center or walking into the center. Uh, and now all of a sudden, the only thing that they need to do is actually having a signed bat and, uh, and actually initiate the process of, uh, of plasma donation. So all of this is actually done through microservices. Uh, now everything that we do now is actually API enabled and, you know, obviously like many other companies right now, what I should really think about microservices and the usability of, of technology and, and reusable components. So we're extremely excited about the fact that now, uh, that experience can actually be carried on, uh, to, to other parts of the business and that, that, that can actually leverage these technologies. >>That's a great example of refactoring. What's next for you guys, a division Accenture, what's the plans? >>Well, again, uh, the Google got done. >>Well, I was going to say, I mean, I think, you know, we, we started touching on it, uh, experience, right. And, uh, how do we embed more technology experiences that we're all used to? I mean, you know, to get into some of the return to office, the easiest way for me to do some of the COVID testing has been using my, uh, my trusty iPhone. Right. And so, as, as Liam talked about that experience, uh, part of this beyond just the therapies and, and attracting donors is really key for any business to succeed and thrive. Um, yeah, I think it, you know, if you think about, um, you've got the natives that are really more technology-based, you've got the, the Peloton of the world that obviously have, you know, a platform, but also a product you're going to see product and specifically life sciences companies get more into platform enabled, uh, services that they can provide outside, uh, as a, uh, service to others. And I think, um, you know, the, the platform, uh, experience and the user experience, the donor experience, all that I'd say innovating in, in more use cases like, uh, some of the ones you just heard that's what's next, and being able to, uh, use those guys more even externally to, uh, to do even more good for society, >>Leah, your thoughts with that. >>Well, um, you know, what I should really just getting started, right? So it's not a, you know, this transformation is now cloud enabled, uh, but, but w we're systematically actually going through our value chain, uh, and trying to throw the, understand, uh, you know, our customers, you know, again, as a business, we don't actually sell directly to consumers. So we're, we're, we're basically brokering through, but primarily through CPS and hospitals, right, to basically be able to diagnose a disease that can actually be cured with our products. Uh, and we do feel that, uh, you know, there is actually a huge role that we can actually play because obviously we're are experts in the, of, uh, you know, of the disease that we actually cure with our products. So basically the interactions, like the one that I just described nurse line, uh, can actually be directed, uh, not only to the HCPs, but also to the patients, uh, and the access to communities. >>Uh, and so we want to actually continue to provide platforms by which, you know, people that experienced, you know, especially a rare disease can now actually already connect and, uh, and, and, and share, um, you know, th th the sense of community that, that the business is, is so, so very important, right? For someone that physically has, uh, you know, the diseases that we cure. Uh, so again, uh, I think that the systematic approach of API APIs, and actually making sure that the data is actually ready for say the FDA to actually consume, to accelerate the clinical trials or to an hospital to kind of already understand if there is maybe a clinical trial that can be applied to one of the patients that is, that is actually showing some, some side effects that, uh, you know, or, or symptoms that visibly can be cured with, you know, with our, with our products, I think is going to be, uh, you know, ultimately the, the value that we can provide to society. So >>You guys did a great work and a great example. And to me, and this really showcases the management philosophy of cloud and the culture of cloud, where you take something like connect, and you can refactor and reconfigure these existing resources in a way that creates value, that saves lives. And this is the new, this new playbook. Congratulations on an exceptional story. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the cube coverage rapist, reinvent executive summit presented by Accenture I'm John ferry, your host, thanks for watching.

(Music) >> Welcome to the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got two Cube alum here with me, please welcome Merim Becirovic, Managing Director of Global IT Enterprise Architecture at Accenture and Chris Wegmann, Accenture, AWS Business Group technology and practices, Senior Managing Director, gentlemen, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Great to be here. >> It is nice to be back in a way right here we are at this hybrid event, but we want to talk about what Accenture is doing with its, with AWS to serving its clients. And then we're going to get into your own internal use case, drinking your own champagne. Chris go ahead and start with you, talk to us about what Accenture is doing with AWS to serve its clients. >> Yeah, Lisa, it's exciting, as you said to be back in this hybrid event and you know, for me, this will be my 10th re-invent and for Accenture we're in year 14 of our partnership with AWS and actually year six of our partnership called Accenture AWS business group. And you know, the focus over the last year has been helping our clients come out of the pandemic stronger than, than where they started. Right? And a lot of that has been around focusing our customers, getting past cloud migration, past cloud modernization, and getting further into what we now call the cloud continuum, starting to truly leverage all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to, to truly speed their transformation. You know, we work with a lot of our customers who are needing to transform even faster today than they were before the pandemic. And, you know, we're focused on helping those customers do that with AWS services. >> So Merim, let's bring you into the conversation. Now Accenture's internal IT organization has been leveraging AWS and public cloud for a while. Talk to me about that you completed the journey a couple of years ago, 95% in the cloud. Talk to me about what you're doing there. >> Sure. Lisa, so our, our journey into the public cloud is complete. As you said, we put a bow on that project a couple of years ago. We started in 2015 and we went all in on public cloud. So we, the number 95%, 95% represents a true measure of everything it takes to run Accenture. Everything addressable is in the public cloud today. So the 95% just represents a small component of things that have to live outside of the cloud. But other than that, our journey to the cloud is complete, and we are very happy being in the cloud because it has opened tremendous doors for us as a business. I'm sure we'll talk about here as we go, but it's fundamentally a different place we live in today and where we were before we were in the cloud. >> Merim, you said something really powerful there a second ago. The Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. I don't think I'd ever heard anybody say that. Talk to me about the impact, especially during the last 18 months that that cloud journey is delivered. >> I mean, one of the things I am extremely proud of for our collective global teams around the world, when the, obviously the, you know, when COVID hit and the pandemic engulf the world, the only difference for us was that people just did not come into an office to work. Our capabilities in the cloud, our capabilities of having everything in the cloud really made it that much easier for our people to go to work. We weren't fighting over resources around infrastructure. People could just work from home directly. So I'm extremely proud of the collective global team that made all of that happen as part of that execution of all those things. So it was really a very proud moment, I would say for all of us running IT. >> As well, it should be. Chris, talk about that from your perspective of facilitating that massive pivot 18, 19 months ago, and what your group was responsible for doing to enable this cloud journey to be complete. >> Yeah. I always laughed at, you know, Merim and our internal CIO organizations, we call it was our first customer, right. You know, way back when I started working in this partnership, you know, we were already starting to leverage AWS, S3 and EC2, and that insight Accenture, and we took a lot of those best practices and started helping, our clients leverages best practices. So, you know, from an Accenture, we always kind of harvest from internally what we're doing, but, you know, over the last several years, we really are our focused with the CIO organization, Merim's organization has been, you know, expanding the usage of non, you know, I, as I call Maya services, right? So past EC2, you know, past S3. Obviously there's always storage. There's always compute, but you know, truly doing and building serverless applications, truly using, you know, services, fully managed services. So, you know, the CIO organization doesn't have to spend their time doing that. And, for our customers, that's while it's, they're still early on in a lot of their journeys, that's a novel idea is a truly try to sunset IS services or EC2 and things like that, you know, and whether that's, you know, fix some containerization or things like that, I think the other big part is, is the maturing security footprint, right? Obviously, as you use one or more of these AWS services, your security posture, your presence, how you think about security. We created an asset called secure cloud foundation, leveraging many of the AWS services in the security space that have come out like guard duty and others really to help make that security foundation stronger, make it easier for our customers, including CIO to leverage those services and truly enable that move further up the cloud or further down the continuum as we call it. >> Merim, I want to get your thoughts on security from in a, because we have seen such a dramatic change in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We've seen a huge spike in ransomware. It's getting much more personal. It's now a household word. We've got the executive order. We had this rapid pivot to and hundreds of thousands of Accenture employees working from home. Talk to me about, you feel very confident in the cloud during that you didn't word where's your competence from a security perspective. >> As you said, security is the fastest growth in our business. Collectively, like you said, the bad guys don't sleep. We don't sleep either when it comes to security. One of the things that we're constantly thinking about is how do we turn on a lot of our capabilities as an example. So even, I would say at an enterprise level, it's different when you're running a big multinational corporation, 650,000 people like we do. We can't just turn everything on and hope for the best. We are very scripted in terms of how we think about those services, how we think about the processes, how we work with our CSO organization, so that we're very meticulous and very thorough in terms of what services we turn on, how we turn them on, when we turn them on? How long we make them available, because this is, this is the new world, right? We have extended our corporate structure out into the cloud. That means we have to think of different ways for how we want to consume those capabilities and services. So like Chris said, you know, the, the journey to the cloud for us is complete. A lot of it was I, as I would tell you, a lot of it was lift and shift for less. And we can talk about that if we get time, but it was more about getting into the cloud and taking advantage of the cloud where we are today, because now that we're there, we get to take advantage of all those capabilities that are there. And I would say the best part of being with on, in, in the cloud is also having the, the providers like AWS they are with us, helping us with that security posture. So it's not just us doing this by ourselves. >> So Chris, I want to talk about that Merim just said, this was mostly lift and shift. Talk to us about that. Cause when we talk to organizations in every industry, the cloud transition, the cloud journey is extremely challenging. It's complex. How did you do this? How did you facilitate this and in a relatively short time period, Chris? >> Yeah. And, and you're right. Everyone has conversations I have with my clients. You know, there's a huge debate whether to lift and shift or modernize or build new build cloud native, right? So, you know, in Accenture's situation, you know, very early on, it was identified that we can, we can do a large savings by doing a lift and shift migration, right. We were not a big data center owner, right. That wasn't, we're not a big capital intense organization. So for us, that, that journey we had, you know, colos and that stuff coming up for renewal. And we knew that we could, you know, get some early savings there and really, you know, reduce our footprint and take that investment and then invest it into, you know, true modernization. So Merim and his organization worked very closely to build the factory, to do the migrations, get that done in a very short amount of time and then turn their attention on truly refactoring rebuilding the applications. I'm super proud of the number of applications that we've rebuilt. I'm super proud of the number of applications that, that now are cloud native. And we live in these applications every day. You know, they they're everything from our performance to how we do our payroll and do our time charging and things like that. But which, you know, it was a big reason why, you know, we can access our systems remotely and at home versus going into different systems to get to that stuff. So, you know, it was very much heavily lift and shift early, then really focusing on modernization. And as Merim said, getting, you know, now it's about living there and continuing, continuing to modernize, continuing to accelerate what we're doing in the cloud. >> Yeah. Lisa, its little bit like, so our journey lift and shift was a core component of it. But the minute we decided to go to the cloud, one of the things, the first things we did, as I said, no more vans. So any new capability that we were going to build, we were going to build a cloud native micro-services based, and that's been our standard for the last 3 or 4 years ago. So any new capability that comes along today that we must do custom, we build a cloud native microservices because one of the other things that I've got on my plate is I'm trying to reduce our overall technical debt. So all of these IS platforms, I still have to maintain them, patch them, support them, upgrade them. And I would rather be much more efficient at doing those things as, as I can and reinvest money into refactoring and modernizing the rest of the application, plead through containers through microservices, et cetera, which then gives me the agility right back to actually go even faster, to enable more services for the business. >> Speed is something that we've seen become even more critical in the last 18, 19 months where we needed to everybody pivot businesses multiple times over and over. But part of the challenge there Merim, I want to get your thoughts on this is they are something cultural shift. Talk to me about, you've been at Accenture for a long time. Talk to me about the cultural shift needed to facilitate this massive transformation to cloud and how Chris's team was a facilitator of that. >> So, you know, one of the things for us, I have probably in the last five years spoken to a thousand of our clients, around our cloud journey and this culture conversation always comes up and I will say, you know, the biggest thing for us was interesting. We had those same fears. We had some same in when we first talked about going to the cloud, you know, six years ago, it was very, not everything was there, that's there today. So the teams were extremely nervous and they were confident that we could never be as, as good in the cloud as we were on, on site. Yet here we are six years later and we're constantly finding ways to add value and take, bring value back. And though, it's so same teams. And one of the things is just, we gave them the challenge to say, Hey, this is the future. We're telling our clients, this is where we're going. We have an opportunity here to do something different and they took it and the team really took it on. And they said, okay, let's do it. And they act, and we looked at how we run into cloud the many different ways, whether we're using reserved instances, whether we're using containers, whether we're using, you know, different computer capabilities, we went through all of it and we're running such a highly efficient machine right now that it's like, we're still able to continue to eat out savings even five years after the program. Even two years after the program is complete, we're still able to get savings. >> That's outstanding. That's ROI that every business and every industry hopes to be able to achieve from this. I want to switch gears a little bit now because this is actually pretty cool. Accenture is really focused also on sustainability. You guys have signed onto the Amazon climate pledge, which if you don't know what the Amazon climate pledge, and this is back in 2019, Amazon, co-founded this a commitment to be net zero carbon across businesses by 2040, which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris agreement. You're in talk to us about that. And from Accenture's perspective, why it was important to sign on to that. >> So on a, on a personal level, I love obviously sustainability as a whole, that I think about the world park for my children that are growing up. So it's very important to me on a personal level as well. But I would say at a company level, what I love about the cloud is I am there right there with them as they make investments. All of our enterprise capabilities are there. We are able to very quickly shift and use those capabilities. So as Amazon, for example, in this scenario creates new capabilities, new compute offerings, new, new storage offerings, whatever it may be. They're doing it with a sustainability lens and me by being in the cloud already, I can then turn to start using those things too. So as much as I can, on that perspective, I'm in a great place with, as Amazon puts these sustainability capabilities out there, I'm right there consuming and making them more efficient. And then the other one is obviously as much of our workloads, as we can get to a cloud native perspective, microservices perspective, then we keep reducing that compute consumption and everything else that goes along with it. And lastly, I would say, you know, the, the other thing is we're very aggressive in managing all of our systems in terms of uptime. So for example, in a data center, most, most organizations don't think about turning off their development environments and everything else. But for us, we're very rigid in this process. And we have a, we have a target of all of our development environments being down 55% of the time. And primarily that's also a sustainability play in addition to a financial savings plan. >> Awesome. Great stuff, Chris, last question for you, as we wrap up here, what are some of the things that you were excited about that's coming in cloud in the next few years? Obviously here we are at, re-invent going to be hearing a lot of news, a lot of announcements about cloud in the coming days. What excites you most, Chris? >> Yeah. You know, obviously the machine learning and AI stuff is, is always the most exciting things right now in cloud. And, you know, we've put a lot of those to use here inside of Accenture as well. And, and our, you know, in our synopsis platform, which we use with our customers to run in a more intelligent operations, we use that internally as well. But you know, one of the things that excites me the most is the continued innovation at the core. Right. And you know, whether that be, you know, chip sets, you know, Merim talked a little bit about, you know, improvement and performance improvement and power consumption, you know, grabbing time, those types of stuff that, that excites me every year, I look forward to seeing what, what they come out with and, and then how we're going to put that to use. >> Well, I look forward to talking to you guys next year, you've done such a tremendous job. You should be proud of the massive transformation that you've done. I imagine this is, would be a great case study. If it's not already written up, it should be. It's really impressive. Merim and Chris, thank you for joining me at the summit. Talking to me about what's going on with Accenture and AWS and some of the things that you are looking forward to, we appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> You're welcome for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. This is the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. (Music)

(electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. This is the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture and our coverage of this great event continues. Lisa Martin here, I've got two guests with me here to talk about Amazon Connect. Please welcome from Hawaiian Airlines, Will Van Devender, Senior Director of IT Engineering. Will, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me here. >> And from Accenture, Erich Chen is here as well, the Hawaii Regional Lead at Accenture. Erich, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be here. >> I feel very overdressed. You can tell I'm on the mainland with my turtleneck and you guys are on Oahu, which is fantastic. And I'm excited that I have a seat on Hawaiian Airlines in just a few weeks. So you guys, let's talk about this technology solution that you put together. Will, I want to start with you. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Hawaiian Airlines was having prior to working with Accenture and Amazon. >> Well, nothing really unique to us. We had the challenges that everybody had with the pandemic and scaling out to work from home, as well as an old legacy stack that had been around for a long, long time. The specific ones that drove us to launch this particular project was we had been running into some talent acquisition issues. We're not of size where we have a huge telecom team that can specialize in IDRs and other things like that. So we need folks that can play a lot of different spaces. And in this particular case, we had a situation where we had really old technology and the people we were bringing in were a lot more savvy on Cloud and those kinds of things. And so AWS Connect was a way for us to take talent that traditionally wasn't inside the telephony space and use them and bring them to bear for that business need. So it kept us from having to scale up to do this. The other thing we had was a big issue with work from home that actually predated COVID. So we had been, we're in a hurricane zone, we had been doing hurricane preparedness exercises and we realized that we had a difficult time scaling our environment to large scale work from home. So even prior to COVID, we had been started looking at the technologies that we had, which ones worked well outside of an office for a distributed workforce. And we had been moving technology in that direction. And so telephony was one of the ones that we had to beef up. And so it was nice to have a good leg up on it when the pandemic hit us. >> Absolutely. I can't imagine how advantageous that was when it struck. And of course we all know how much the airlines were affected. Talk to me about an interesting catalyst for this solution in terms of challenge with talent acquisition and work from home. Interesting impetus for this solution. Talk to me about, are you long time partners, Hawaiian Airlines with Accenture? Talk to me about how you went about looking for the right solution with them as a partner. >> Ah, okay. So Hawaiian Airlines and Accenture had been partnering for many years, but in a much bigger way in 2019, when we solidified a new managed services deal. So Accenture came in to help us out with our day to day operations. And one of the big reasons for that was actually cloud adoption. So we needed a partner that was much more up to date technology wise. And as we started ramping up our engineering and architecture designs and releasing things on new stacks, we needed folks in the operation side that could keep up with that. And not only that, actually enable and push us in those directions. And so when we went out to RFP, Accenture kind of stood out in that area and that's been a good thing. We've had very little friction as we've been going out and acquiring new technology with being able to bring that out to our run and operation space. >> That's critical, especially given the tumultuous times in which we are still living. Erich, let's go ahead and bring you into the conversation. Now, talk to me about you guys at Accenture developed and deployed this solution quickly. We're talking an eight week timeframe. Talk to me about the solution that you architected, about that delivery, and what some of the challenges were along the way that you tackled and mitigated. >> Yeah. Thanks Lisa. I mean, it was, you know, eight weeks when you look back on it, it's hard to believe we did complete it in that timeframe, but, you know, we were able to do it with some strong experts from our side. Some of the challenges we ran into along the way were probably at the very beginning, just securing the right team for Hawaiian to deliver the kind of the proper designs and development upfront, and then helping to kind of manage through the delivery process itself. You know, they were great. They had some great people with some deep expertise, kind of from a business process side of things, kind of paired with our technical and then also industry knowledge of the airlines as well. It made for a really nice, you know, strong partnership where we could get it through in eight weeks. So it was pretty amazing. >> And then walk me through the actual, oh Will, sorry. Did you want to say something? >> Yeah, I was actually going to comment on that, that was exactly what we were looking for was that sort of wholesale partner. So when we went out to modernize our entire telephony stack, it wasn't just call centers. It was the conference rooms, it was the telephony, we went to new phone providers and circuit providers, we moved everyone off of Skype over on to Teams, all the desk phones. And so there was this scope of work that was simply larger than our team. And so what we were looking for from a partner was one, who's done this before, and then two, could you manage the whole piece of work? And so what was nice for Accenture, because they owned our existing operation space, they not only did the AWS Connect piece, they got on the old systems and they brought up all the specs of how the call queues worked, how the call flows worked, they found the old voice talent, they brought those, imported them without us having to do anything over onto the new stack, and then brought it over for testing. So it was just a very minimal lift from the Hawaiian Airlines side. And since they ran our operations, they then moved it over to the run space. And it was just very few man hours on the Hawaiian Airlines side expended for that outcome. >> Wow. It sounds fairly seamless. Erich, how did you guys accomplish that? >> I mean, that's a type of experience and partnership we like to have with our clients, more of an all-inclusive type service. But we're sometimes accused of not having the cheapest prices on the block, but you know, you do get a great, you know, a pretty holistic experience with us and we do try to make it as easy as possible for our clients and bring kind of the full breadth of Accenture to fill in a lot of gaps. >> Well, one of the things, Will, that you mentioned is we were looking for a partner that had done this before, where there's actual proof in the pudding, especially given the, like I mentioned before, the tumultuous market. Erich talk to me about, if we look at Hawaiian Airlines as an example, as a template here, how common or how often are you seeing these same challenges with respect to talent acquisition and work from home? Is that something that really skyrocketed in the last year and a half? >> Sure. I mean, it's maybe a blessing in the type of business that we're in, right. But whenever there are, you know, big, you know, kind of market issues and kind of pandemics as an example, right. Our clients do turn to us for, you know, support to help them through, you know, smaller times of need. And, you know, maybe very compressed issues. So we're very happy to, you know, reach into our larger organization to make sure that we can bring the best of Accenture to them and help them get through these tough times. >> Will, let's talk about how this solution is helping employees, agents get through these tough times. As we know, Hawaii had some really strict travel restrictions on COVID. And of course, one of the things that a lot of people lost during this time, was patience. Talk to me about how the workforce is improving, the employees, the agents, now that you have this solution implemented and a leg up probably on your competitors. >> Yeah, the whole pandemic hit us in a hard way. So we found ourselves, you know, all of a sudden one day waking up and finding that our customer facing support desks couldn't be staffed. People couldn't get into the office and actually get there. At the same time, as you and everyone else knows, flights were getting canceled and customers were calling at a level we'd never seen before trying to reschedule their flights or get credit back or get money back. And so AWS Connect was interesting in that it was one of the things we could ramp up new call centers very quickly. And so we knew we wanted something that was consumption-based because we didn't know how long it was going to last. And we wanted to be able to spin it up, get new agents going, respond to our customers, scale up to the volume, and then be able to decrease it out. So it was a good win there. What wasn't talked about much was the reliability aspect of it. Being on a really old system, our telephony was pretty stable, but our call center internal business facing ones were not. We had a series of outages out there and those outages directly impact our ability to get planes out in the air. There's the sort of customers calling about tickets and about help with flights, but there's also things like cruise, trying to get cruise scheduling done, trying to get staffing to a plane, trying to get things moved around in an airport. And there's a lot of internal desks that deal with those kinds of things. And having that on an incredibly stable technology and stack is key for us. And so we were able to get Connect deployed, and we were also able to front that with a number of other technologies that allowed us to have DR plans. So even if we lost that desk, how can we quickly move that over to manual calls and desk phones and those kinds of things. And so that's been, that part has been very well received. That has helped us out a lot. Our confidence, knowing that if anything should happen, our ability to recover and get back into full operations now is just night and day from where it was 12 months ago. And so thank you all very much for your assistance in getting us to this point. >> Getting that stability and that reliability during a time of chaos that's, and also in a time that can really affect brand reputation, it sounds to me like IT is really helping drive the business forward. This is something that you did in partnership with the business side, because of course during the last year and a half, so many brands have had challenges with reputation and the ability to not do things. Talk to me about that business IT relationship. And was this a facilitator of making that even better? >> Well, it's certainly better. Yeah, we have far better conversations internally than I can ever remember in my time here in Hawaiian Airlines. But you know, when these kinds of emergencies hit, I don't think about it as IT or business. I mean, there's a problem and you got to go fix it. And so we're all in there and IT is one piece of that. How do we get a solution stood up almost overnight in this, you know, very, very difficult pandemic business time? But you know, the business is trying to get talent together and trying to get agents trained and being able to do things like handle these customer calls is very, very skill intensive. So there's a lot of partnership coming in and getting solutions, demoing with the business, dialing them in back and forth, and a lot of collaboration there. And so that builds stronger teams. And that's one of the outcomes I like more than anything else, is we're working together and dialing in the IT and the business needs very much in unison. >> That's probably one of the best outcomes you can hope for. Erich, talk to me about, are you seeing similar things with customers in other industries? Are you seeing that business IT coming together, especially during these challenging times we've been living through? >> Yeah, to varying degrees, you know, that's always the crux of, you know, a successful IT department, right. You know, you're there to serve and support the business side of things, right. We don't do technology for technology sake. But yeah, I think the better ones are getting better, better at, you know, being more fully integrated and it's not a business or IT decision, right, it's a collective kind of team decision. And I think as long as you have people who respect and understand the other side of the coin sometimes, easier the conversation will go. And I think that's what our team was able to do is express, you know, very clearly and concisely kind of what the decisions they had to make were and they could make a decision a little bit easier that way. >> And talk to me, Erich, about the solution, what impressed you? What are you most excited about in terms of what Accenture has helped to accomplish for Hawaiian Airlines? >> Yeah, I was really happy that even, you know, within a short eight week period itself, you know, things always come up as you go throughout a project. And I think the business team was getting excited about the possibilities once they saw kind of the potential of the platform. And so some, you know, requests came up in the middle of the way, you know, in flight. And, you know, our team was able to accommodate a number of the kind of minor enhancements or tweaks to the system to make it even better and serve the business in a better fashion there. >> Gotcha. Will, what is next for Hawaiian Airlines, besides my flight on it in a few weeks? Talk to me about where you guys are going from an IT perspective. >> Well we've rolled out a solution quickly 'cause we needed to, but there's a lot still to be done to dial it in for the business. Where reliability and speed were key, we got those done, but there was some aspects of the old system that were still a little easier. For those call centers where people needed to dial in, get ahold of an agent, and then pass it onto an internal employee, there's still a disconnect between our call center technology, AWS Connect, and the internal collaboration, Microsoft Teams. And that's because Teams really wasn't up to all of the call center technology needs at the time we started this. Things like call recording and things like that just weren't there at the time. So we've got some of our internal desks that still need to be tweaked and integrated more seamlessly between the two platforms or maybe as Teams gets ready, moved back over onto that. So that's, again, the part of it, being able to have this deep conversation with the business, understand their needs, having a partner where you can quickly go respond and go dial it in. And so we don't look at it as our telephony migration is complete. We look at it as we got our first big hurdle done, moving off decades old tech onto our modern stack. And now we're looking at refining it with our partners over the future. >> Right. Phase one, it's always that journey that we talk about. Erich, last question for you. What are some of the things that are coming up next as you help Hawaiian Airlines to continue on this modernization journey? >> Yeah, so more broadly we're really excited because this effort was one of the first or probably more platform centric system integration type projects we've done for Hawaiian. We've been on the operation side, we've done some business consulting worked with them for various business functions already, but this was really more on the application modernization side of things. And, you know, we see that Hawaiian has a number of areas that they're looking to kind of modernize and improve along the way. And we're very excited about, you know, being a strong partner for them in that journey coming up. >> Awesome guys, great work. Congratulations on a huge transformation accomplished during a very chaotic world time period and done so quickly. We appreciate your comments, your feedback, and look forward to seeing what you dial in next. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> For Will Van Devender and Erich Chen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture. (soft music)

welcome back to the cube's presentation of the aws executive summit at re invent 2021 made possible by accenture my name is dave vellante we're going to look at how digital infrastructure is helping to transform consumer experiences specifically how an insurance company is changing its industry by incentivizing and rewarding consumers who change their behavior to live healthier lives a real passion of of mine and getting to the really root cause of health with me now are simon guest who's the chief executive officer of generality vitality gmbh and niels mueller who's the managing director at the cloud first application engineering lead for the european market at accenture gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks for having us you're very welcome simon generally vitality it's a really interesting concept that you guys have envisioned and now put into practice tell us how does it all work sure no problem and thanks for for having us on dave it's a pleasure to be here so look uh generally vitality is in its uh it's core pretty simple concepts so it's uh it's a program that you have on your phone and the idea of this program is that it's a it's a wellness coach for you as an individual and it's going to help you to understand your health and where you are in terms of the state of your health at the moment and it's going to take you on a journey to improve your your lifestyle and your wellness and hopefully help you to lead a healthier and a more sort of mindful life i guess is is the best way of summarizing it from um from our point of view with insurance company of course you know our historical role has always been to uh be the company that's there if something goes wrong you know so if unfortunately you pass away or you have sickness in your in your life or in your family's life that's that's historically been our role but what we see with generality vitality is something a little bit different so it's a program that really is uh supposed to be with you every day of your life to help you to live a healthier life it's something that we already have in in four european markets in fact in five from this week i'm a little bit behind the time so we're live already in in germany in france in austria and italy and in spain and fundamentally what we what we do dave is too is to say to customers look if you want to understand your health if you want to improve it by moving a little bit more by visiting the doctor more by eating healthier by healthy choices on a daily basis we're going to help you to do that and we're going to incentivize you for going on this journey and making healthy choices and we're going to reward you for for doing the same so you know we partner up with with great companies like garmin like adidas like big brands that are let's say invested in this health and wellness space so that we can produce really an ecosystem for customers that's all about live well make good choices be healthy have an insurance company that partners you along that journey and if you do that we're going to reward you for for that so you know we're here not just in the difficult times which of course is one of our main roles but we're here as a partner as a lifetime partner to you too to help you feel better and live a better life i love it i mean it sounds so simple but but it's i'm sure it's very complicated to to make the technology simple for the user you've got mobile involved you've got the back end and we're going to get into some of the tech but first i want to understand the member engagement and some of the lifestyle changes simon that you've analyzed what's the feedback that you're getting from your customers what does the data tell you how do the incentives work as well what what is the incentive for the the member to actually do the right thing sure look i think actually the the covered uh situation that we've had in the last sort of two years has really crystallized the fact that this is something that we really ought to be doing and something that our customers really value so i mean look just to give you a bit of a sort of information about how it works for for customers so what we try to do with them is is to get customers to understand uh their current health situation you know using their phone so uh you know we ask our customers to go through a sort of health assessment around how they live what they eat how they sleep you know and to go through that sort of process uh and to give them what a vitality age which is a sort of uh you know sort of actuarial comparison with their real age so i'm i'm 45 but unfortunately my my vitality age is 49 and it means i have some work to do to bring that back together uh and what we see is that you know two-thirds of our customers take this test every year because they want to see how they are progressing on an annual basis in terms of living a healthier life and if what if what they are doing is having an impact on their life expectancy and their lifespan and their health span so how long are they going to live healthier for so you see them really engaging in this in this approach of understanding their current situation then what we know actually because the program is built around this model that uh really activity and moving and exercise is the biggest contributor to living a healthier life we know that the majority of deaths are caused by lifestyle illness is like you know poor nutrition and smoking and drinking alcohol and not exercising and so a lot of the program is really built around getting people to move more and it's not about being an athlete it's about you know getting off the the underground one station earlier walking home or making sure you do your 10 000 steps a day and what we see is that that sort of 40 of our customers are on a regularly basis linking either their phone or their their exercise device to our program and downloading that data so that they can see how how much they are exercising and at the same time what we do is we set we set our customers weekly challenges to say look if you can move a little bit more than last week we are going to to reward you for that and we see that you know almost half of our customers are achieving this weekly goal every week and it's really a fantastic level of engagement that normally is an insurer uh we don't see the way the rewards work is is pretty simple it's similar in a way to an airline program so every good choice you make every activity you do every piece of good food that you eat when you check your on your health situation we'll give you points and the more points you get you go through through a sort of status approach of starting off at the bottom status and ending up at a gold and then a platinum status and the the higher up you get in the status that the higher the value of the rewards that we give you so almost a quarter of our customers now and this is accelerated through provide they've reached that platinum status so they are the most engaged customers that we we have and those ones who are really engaging in the in the program and what we really try to create is this sort of virtuous circle that says if you live well you make good choices you improve your health you you progress through the program and we give you better and stronger and more uh valuable rewards for for doing that and some of those rewards are are around health and wellness so it might be that you get you get a discount on on gym gear from adidas it might be that you get a discount on a uh on a device from garmin or it might be actually on other things so we also give people amazon vouchers we also give people uh discounts on holidays and another thing that we we did actually in the last year which we found really powerful is that we've given the opportunity for our customers to convert those rewards into charitable donations because we we work in generality with a with a sort of um campaign called the human safety net which is helping out the poorest people in society and some what our customers do a lot of the time is instead of taking those financial rewards for themselves they convert it into a charitable donation so we're actually also thinking wellness and feeling good and insurance and some societal good so we're really trying to create a virtuous circle of uh of engagement with our customers i mean that's a powerful cocktail i love it you got the the data because if i see the data then i can change my behavior you got the gamification piece you actually have you know hard dollar rewards you could give those to charities and and you've got the the most important which is priceless can't put a value on good health i got one more question for simon and niels i'd love you to chime in as well on this question how did you guys decide simon to engage with accenture and aws and the cloud to build out this platform what's the story behind that collaboration was there unique value that you saw that that you wanted to tap that you feel like they bring to the table what was your experience yeah look i mean we worked at accenture as well because the the the sort of construct of this vitality proposition is a pretty a pretty complex one so you mentioned that the idea is simple but the the build is not so uh is not so simple and that that's the case so accenture's been part of that journey uh from the beginning they're one of the partners that we work with but specifically around the topic of rewards uh you know we're we're a primarily european focused organization but when you take those countries that i mentioned even though we're next to each other geographically we're quite diverse and what we wanted to create was really a sustainable and reusable and consistent customer experience that allowed us to go and get to market with an increasing amount of efficiency and and to do that we needed to work with somebody who understood our business has this historical let's say investment in in the vitality concept so so knows how to bring it to life but that what then could really support us in making uh what can be a complex piece of work as simple and as as replicable as possible across multiple markets because we don't want to go reinventing the wheel every time we do we move to a new market so we need to find a balance between having a consistent product a consistent technology offer a consistent customer experience with the fact that we we operate in quite diverse markets so this was let's say the the reason for more deeply engaging with accenture on this journey thank you very much niels why don't you comment on on that as well i'd love to to get your thoughts and and really really it's kind of your role here i mean accenture global si deep expertise in industry but also technology what are your thoughts on this topic yeah i'd love to love to comment so when we started the journey it was pretty clear from the outset that we would need to build this on cloud in order to get this scalability and this ability to roll out to different markets have a central solution that can act as a template for the different markets but then also have the opportunity to localize different languages different partners for the rewards there's different reward partners in the different markets so we needed to build in an asset basically that could work as a tempos centrally standardizing things but also leaving enough flexibility to to then localize in the individual markets and if we talk about some of the more specific requirements so one one thing that gave us headaches in the beginning was the authentication of the users because each of the markets has their own systems of record where the basically the authentication needs to happen and we somehow needed to still find a holistic solution that comes through the central platform and we were able to do that at the end through the aws cognito service sort of wrapping the individual markets uh local idp systems and by now we've even extended that solution to have a standalone cloud native kind of idp solution in place for markets that do not have a local idp solution in place or don't want to use it for for this purpose yeah so you had you had data you have you had the integration you've got local laws you mentioned the flexibility you're building ecosystems that are unique to the to the local uh both language and and cultures uh please you had another comment i interrupted you yeah i know i just wanted to expand basically on the on the requirements so that was the central one being able to roll this out in a standardized way across the markets but then there were further requirements for example like being able to operate that platform with very low operations overhead there is no large i.t team behind generally vitality that you know works to serve us or can can act as this itis backbone support so we needed to have basically a solution that runs itself that runs on autopilot and that was another big big driver for first of all going to cloud but second of all making specific choices within cloud so we specifically chose to build this as a cloud native solution using for example manage database services you know with automatic backup with automatic ability to restore data that scales automatically that you know has all this built in which usually maybe a database administrator would take care of and we applied that concept basically to every component to everything we looked at we we applied this requirement of how can this run on autopilot how can we make this as much managed by itself within the cloud as possible and then land it on these services and for example we also used the the api gateway from from aws for our api services that also came in handy when for example we had some response time issues with the third party we needed to call and then we could just with a flick of a button basically introduce caching on the level of the api gateway and really improve the user experience because the data you know wasn't updated so much so it was easier to cache so these are all experiences i think that that proved in the end that we made the right choices here and the requirements that that drove that to to have a good user experience niels would you say that the architecture is is a sort of a data architecture specifically is it a decentralized data architecture with sort of federated you know centralized governance or is it more of a centralized view what if you could talk about that yeah it's it's actually a centralized platform basically so the core product is the same for all the markets and we run them as different tenants basically on top of that infrastructure so the data is separated in a way obviously by the different tenants but it's in a central place and we can analyze it in a central fashion if if the need arises from from the business and the reason i ask that simon is because essentially i look at this as a as largely a data offering for your customers and so niels you were talking about the local language and simon as well i would imagine that that the local business lines have specific requirements and specific data requirements and so you've got to build an architecture that is flexible enough to meet those needs yet at the same time can ensure data quality and governance and security that's not a trivial challenge i wonder if you both could comment on that yeah maybe maybe i'll give a start and then simon can chime in so um what we're specifically doing is managing the rewards experience right so so our solution will take care of tracking what rewards have been earned for what customer what rewards have been redeemed what rewards can be unlocked on the next level and we we foreshadow a little bit to to motivate to incentivize the customer and as that data sits in an aws database in a tenant by tenant fashion and you can run analysis on top of that maybe what you're getting into is also the let's say the exercise data the fitness device tracking data that is not specifically part of what my team has built but i'm sure simon can comment a little bit on that angle as well yeah please yeah sure sure yeah sure so look i think them the topic of data and how we use it uh in our business is a very is very interesting one because it's um it's not historically being seen let's say as the remit of insurers to go beyond the you know the the data that you need to underwrite policies or process claims or whatever it might be but actually we see that this is a whole point around being able to create some shared value in in this kind of product and and what i mean by that is uh look if you are a customer and you're buying an insurance policy it might be a life insurance or health insurance policy from from generali and we are giving you access to this uh to this program and through that program you are living a healthier life and that might have a you know a positive impact on generali in terms of you know maybe we're going to increase our market share or maybe we're going to lower claims or we're going to generate value out of that then one of the points of this program is that we then share that value back with customers through the rewards on the platform that we that we've built here and of course being able to understand that data and to quantify it and to value that data is an important part of the of the the different stages of how you of how much value you are creating and it's also interesting to know that you know in a couple of our markets we we operate in the corporate space so not with retail customers but with with organizations and one of the reasons that those companies give vitality to their employees is that they want to see things like the improved health of a workforce they want to see higher presenteeism lower absenteeism of employees and of course being able to demonstrate that there's a sort of correlation between participation in the vitality program and things like that is also is also important and as we've said the markets are very different so we need to be able to to take the data uh that we have out of the vitality program uh and be able in in the company that that i'm managing to to interpret that data so that in our insurance businesses we are able to make good decisions about the kind of insurance products we i think what's interesting to uh to make clear is that actually that the kind of health data that we generate stays purely within the vitality business itself and what we do inside the vitality business is to analyze that data and say okay is this is this also helping our insurance businesses to to drive uh yeah you know better top line and bottom line in the in the relevant business lines and this is different per company and per mark so yeah being able to interrogate that data understand it apply it in different markets and different uh distribution systems and different kinds of approaches to insurance is an is an important one yes it's an excellent example of a digital business in in you know we talk about digital transformation what does that mean this is what it means i i'd love i mean it must be really interesting board discussions because you're transforming an industry you're lowering overall cost i mean if people are getting less sick that's more profit for your company and you can choose to invest that in new products you can give back some to your corporate clients you can play that balancing act you can gain market share and and you've got some knobs to turn some levers uh for your stakeholders which is which is awesome neil something that i'm interested in i mean it must have been really important for you to figure out how to determine and measure success i mean you're obviously removed it's up it's up to generality vitality to get adoption for for their customers but at the same time the efficacy of your solution is going to determine you know the ease of of of delivery and consumption so so how did you map to the specific goals what were some of the key kpis in terms of mapping to their you know aggressive goals besides the things we already touched on i think one thing i would mention is the timeline right so we we started the team ramping in january or february and then within six months basically we had the solution built and then we went through a extensive test phase and within the next six months we had the product rolled out to three markets so this speed to value speed to market that we were able to achieve i think is one of the key um key criteria that also simon and team gave to us right there was a timeline and that timeline was not going to move so we needed to make a plan adjust to that timeline and i think it's both a testament to to the team's work that they did that we made this timeline but it also is enabled by technologies like cloud i have to say if i go back five years ten years if if you had to build in a solution like this on a corporate data center across so many different markets and each managed locally there would have been no way to do this in 12 months right that's for sure yeah i mean simon you're a technology company i mean insurance has always been a tech heavy company but but as niels just mentioned if you had to do that with it departments in each region so my question is is now you've got this it's almost like non-recurring engineering costs you've got that it took one year to actually get the first one done how fast are you able to launch into new markets just from a technology perspective not withstanding any you know local regulations and figuring out to go to market is that compressed yeah so if you are specifically technology-wise i think we would be able to set up a new market including localizations that often involves translation of because in europe you have all the different languages and so on at i would say four to six weeks we probably could stand up a localized solution in reality it takes more like six to nine months to get it rolled out because there's many other things involved obviously but just our piece of the solution we can pretty quickly localize it to a new market but but simon that means that you can spend time on those other factors you don't have to really worry so much about the technology and so you've launched in multiple european markets what do you see for the future of this program come to america you know you can fight you can find that this program in america dave but with one of our competitors we're not we're not operating so much in uh but you can find it if you want to become a customer for sure but yes you're right so look i think from from our perspective uh you know to put this kind of business into a new market it's not it's not an easy thing because what we're doing is not offering it just as a as a service on a standalone basis to customers we want to link it with with insurance business in the end we are an insurance business and we want to to see the value that comes from that so there's you know there's a lot of effort that has to go into making sure that we land it in the right way also from a customer publishing point of view with our distribution and they are they are quite different so so yeah look coming to the question of what's next i mean it comes in three stages for me so as i mentioned we are uh in five markets already uh in next in the first half of 2022 we'll also come to to the czech republic and poland uh which we're excited to to do and that will that will basically mean that we we have this business in in the seven main uh general markets in europe related to life and health business which is the most natural uh let's say fit for something like vitality then you know the next the sort of second part of that is to say okay look we have a program that's very heavily focused around uh activity and rewards and that that's a good place to start but you know wellness these days is not just about you know can you move a bit more than you did historically it's also about mental well-being it's about sleeping good it's about mindfulness it's about being able to have a more holistic approach to well-being and and covert has taught us and customer feedback has taught us actually that this is something where we need to to go and here we need to have the technology to move there as well so to be able to work with partners that are not just based on on on physical activity but also also on mindfulness so this is how one other way we'll develop the proposition and i think the third one which is more strategic and and we are you know really looking into is there's clearly something in the whole uh perception of incentives and rewards which drives a level of engagement between an insurer like generali and its customers that it hasn't had historically so i think we need to learn you know forget you know forgetting about the specific one of vitality being a wellness program but if there's an insurer there's a role for us to play where we offer incentives to customers to do something in a specific way and reward them for doing that and it creates value for us as an insurer then then this is probably you know a place we want to investigate more and to be able to do that in in other areas means we need to have the technology available that is as i said before replicable faster market can adapt quickly to to other ideas that we have so we can go and test those in in different markets so yes we have to we have to complete our scope on vitality we have to get that to scale and be able to manage all of this data at scale all of those rewards at real scale and uh to have the technology that allows us to do that without without thinking about it too much and then to say okay how do we widen the proposition and how do we take the concept of vitality that sits behind vitality to see if we can apply it to other areas of our business and that's really what the future is is going to look like for us you know the the isolation era really taught us that if you're not a digital business you're out of business and pre-kov a lot of these stories were kind of buried uh but the companies that have invested in digital are now thriving and this is an awesome example jeff another point is that jeff amebacher one of the founders of cloudera early facebook employee famously said about 10 12 years ago the best and greatest engineering minds of our my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads and this is a wonderful example of how to use data to change people's lives so guys congratulations best of luck really awesome example of applying technology to create an important societal outcome really appreciate you your time on the cube thank you thanks bye-bye all right and thanks for watching this segment of thecube's presentation of the aws executive summit at reinvent 2021 made possible by accenture keep it right there for more deep dives [Music] you

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome everyone to the cubes coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we're welcoming back to Cuba alum. We have Kishor Dirk. He is the Accenture senior managing director first global services lead. Welcome back to the show Kishore. >>Thank you very much. If I go through it again, >>Do it again. And, uh, Tristin moral horse set. He is the managing director, Accenture cloud first North American crows. Welcome back to you to trust in >>Rebecca. >>Exactly. Even in this virtual format, it is good to see your faces. Um, today we're going to be talking about my nav and green cloud advisor capability. Kishor I want to start with you. So my nav is a platform that is really celebrating its first year in existence. Uh, November, 2019 is when Accenture introduced it. Uh, but it's, it has new relevance in light of this global pandemic that we are all enduring and suffering through. Tell us a little bit about the miner platform, what it is. >>Sure, Rebecca, you know, he lost it and now we're 2019 and, uh, you know, he does that cloud platform to help our clients navigate the complexity of cloud and cloud decisions and to make it faster and obviously innovate in the cloud, uh, you know, with the increased relevance and all the, especially over the last few months with the impact of COVID crisis and exhibition of digital transformation, you know, we are seeing the transformation or the acceleration to cloud much faster. This platform that you're talking about has enabled hundred and 40 clients globally across different industries to identify the right cloud solution, navigate the complexity, provide a boat specific solution simulate for our clients to meet the strategy business needs. And the plants are loving it. >>I want to go to you now trust and tell us a little bit about how my nav works and how it helps companies make good cloud choices. >>Yeah, so Rebecca, we, and we've talked about cloud is, is more than just infrastructure and that's what mine app tries to solve for it. It really looks at a variety of variables, including infrastructure operating model and fundamentally what clients' business outcomes. Um, uh, our clients are, are looking for and identify as the optimal solution for what they need. And we assign this to accelerate. We mentioned, uh, the pandemic, one of the big focus now is to accelerate. And so we worked through a three-step process. The first is scanning and assessing our client's infrastructure, their data landscape, their application. Second, we use our automated, um, artificial intelligence engine to interact with. We have a wide variety and library of, uh, collective plant expertise. >>And we look to recommend what is the enterprise architecture and solution. And then third, before we aligned with our clients, we look to simulate and test this scaled up model. And this simulation gives our clients a way to see what cloud is going to look like, feel like and how it's going to transform their business before they go there. >>So tell us a little bit about that in real life. Now as a company, so many of people are working remotely having to collaborate, uh, not in real life. How is that helping them right now, Justin? >>So, um, the, the pandemic has put a tremendous strain on systems, uh, because of the demand on those systems. And so we talk about resiliency. We also now need to collaborate across data across people. Um, I think all of us are calling from a variety of different places where our last year we were all at the cube itself. Um, and, and cloud technologies such as teams, zoom that we're we're leveraging now has fundamentally accelerated and clients are looking to onboard this for their capabilities. They're trying to accelerate their journey. They realized that now the cloud is what is going to become important for them to differentiate. Once we come out of the pandemic and the ability to collaborate with their employees, their partners, and their clients through these systems is becoming a true business differentiator for our clients. >>Sure. I want to talk with you now about my NABS multiple capabilities, um, and helping clients design and navigate their cloud journeys. Tell us a little bit about the green cloud advisor capability and its significance, particularly as so many companies are thinking more deeply and thoughtfully about sustainability. >>Yes. So since the launch of my NAB, we continue to enhance capabilities for our clients. One of the significant, uh, capabilities that we have enabled is the being our advisor today. You know, Rebecca, a lot of the businesses are more environmentally aware and are expanding efforts to decrease power consumption, uh, and obviously carbon emissions and, uh, and run a sustainable operations across every aspect of the enterprise. Uh, as a result, you're seeing an increasing trend in adoption of energy, efficient infrastructure in the global market. And one of the things that we did, a lot of research we found out is that there's an ability to influence our client's carbon footprint through a better cloud solution. And that's what being entered by that brings to us, uh, in, in terms of a lot of the client connotation that you're seeing in Europe, North America and others. Lot of our clients are accelerating to a green cloud strategy to unlock beta financial, societal and environmental benefit, uh, through obviously cloud-based circular, operational, sustainable products and services. That is something that we are enhancing my now. And we are having active planning discussions at this point of time. >>So Tristan, tell us a little bit about how this capability helps clients make greener decisions. >>Yeah. Um, well, let's start about the investments from the cloud providers in renewable and sustainable energy. Um, they have most of the hyperscalers today, um, have been investing significantly on data centers that are run or renewable energy, some incredibly creative constructs on the, how, how to do that. And sustainability is there for a key, um, key item of importance for the hyperscalers and also for our clients who now are looking for sustainable energy. And it turns out this marriage is now possible. I can, we marry the, the green capabilities of the cloud providers with a sustainability agenda of our clients. And so what we look in the way the mind works is it looks at industry benchmarks and evaluates our current clients, um, capabilities and carpet footprint leveraging their existing data centers. We then look to model from an end-to-end perspective, how the, their journey to the cloud leveraging sustainable and, um, and data centers with renewable energy. We look at how their solution will look like and, and quantify carbon tax credits, um, improve a green index score and provide quantifiable, um, green cloud capabilities and measurable outcomes to our clients, shareholders, stakeholders, clients, and customers. Um, and our green plot advisers sustainability solutions already been implemented at three clients. And in many cases in two cases has helped them reduce the carbon footprint by up to 400% to migration from their existing data center to green cloud. Very, very important. Right. >>That is remarkable. Now tell us a little bit about the kinds of clients. Is this, is this more interesting to clients in Europe? Would you say that it's catching on in the United States? Where, what is the breakdown that you're seeing right now? >>Uh, sustainability is becoming such a global agenda and we're seeing our clients, um, uh, tie this and put this at board level, um, uh, agenda and requirements across the globe. Um, Europe has specific constraints around data sovereignty, right where they need their data in country, but from a green, a sustainability agenda, we see clients across all our markets, North America, Europe, and our growth markets adopt this. And we have seen case studies in all three markets. >>Kishor I want to bring you back into the conversation. Talk a little bit about how up ties into Accenture's cloud first strategy, your Accenture's CEO, Julie Sweet has talked about post COVID leadership requiring every business to become a cloud first business. Tell us a little bit about how this ethos is in Accenture and how you're sort of looking outward with it too. >>So Rebecca mine is the launch pad, uh, to a cloud first transformation for our clients. Uh, Accenture see you or Julie Sweet, uh, shared the Accenture cloud first and our substantial investment demonstrate our commitment and is delivering greater value for our clients when they need it the most. And with the digital transformation requiring cloud at scale, you know, we're seeing that in the post COVID leadership, it requires that every business should become a cloud business. And my nap helps them get there by evaluating the cloud landscape, navigating the complexity, modeling architecting and simulating an optimal cloud solution for our clients. And as Justin was sharing a greener cloud. >>So Tristan, talk a little bit more about some of the real life use cases in terms of what are we, what are clients seeing? What are the results that they're having? >>Yes. Thank you, Rebecca. I would say two key things right around my neck. The first is the iterative process. Clients don't want to wait, um, until they get started, they want to get started and see what their journey is going to look like. And the second is fundamental acceleration, dependent make, as we talked about, has accelerated the need to move to cloud very quickly. And my nav is there to do that. So how do we do that? First is generating the business cases. Clients need to know in many cases that they have a business case by business case, we talk about the financial benefits, as well as the business outcomes, the green, green clot impact sustainability impacts with minus we can build initial recommendations using a basic understanding of her environment and benchmarks in weeks versus months with indicative value savings in the millions of dollars arranges. >>So for example, very recently, we worked with a global oil and gas company, and in only two weeks, we're able to provide an indicative savings for $27 million over five years. This enabled the client to get started, knowing that there is a business case benefit and then iterate on it. And this iteration is, I would say the second point that is particularly important with my nav that we've seen in bank, the clients, which is, um, any journey starts with an understanding of what is the application landscape and what are we trying to do with those, these initial assessments that used to take six to eight weeks are now taking anywhere from two to four weeks. So we're seeing a 40 to 50% reduction in the initial assessment, which gets clients started in their journey. And then finally we've had discussions with all of the hyperscalers to help partner with Accenture and leverage mine after prepared their detailed business case module as they're going clients. And as they're accelerating the client's journey, so real results, real acceleration. And is there a journey? Do I have a business case and furthermore accelerating the journey once we are by giving the ability to work in iterative approach. >>I mean, it sounds as though that the company that clients and and employees are sort of saying, this is an amazing time savings look at what I can do here in, in so much in a condensed amount of time, but in terms of getting everyone on board, one of the things we talked about last time we met, uh, Tristan was just how much, uh, how one of the obstacles is getting people to sign on and the new technologies and new platforms. Those are often the obstacles and struggles that companies face. Have you found that at all? Or what is sort of the feedback that you're getting from people? >>Yeah. Sorry. Yes. We clearly, there are always obstacles to a cloud journey. If there weren't obstacles, all our clients would be, uh, already fully in the cloud. What man I gives the ability is to navigate through those, to start quickly. And then as we identify obstacles, we can simulate what things are going to look like. We can continue with certain parts of the journey while we deal with that obstacle. And it's a fundamental accelerator. Whereas in the past one obstacle would prevent a class from starting. We can now start to address the obstacles one at a time while continuing and accelerating the classroom. That is the fundamental difference. >>Uh Kishor I want to give you the final word here. Tell us a little bit about what is next for Accenture might have and what we'll be discussing next year at the Accenture executive summit >>Sort of echo, we are continuously evolving with our client needs and reinventing, reinventing for the future. For my advisor, our plan is to help our clients reduce carbon footprint and again, migrate to a greener cloud. Uh, and additionally, we're looking at, you know, two capabilities, uh, which includes sovereign cloud advisor, uh, with clients, especially in, in Europe and others are under pressure to meet stringent data norms that Chris was talking about and the sovereignty advisor health organization to create an architecture cloud architecture that complies with the green. Uh, I would say the data sound-bitey norms that is out there. The other element is around data to cloud. We are seeing massive migration, uh, for, uh, for a lot of the data to cloud. And there's a lot of migration hurdles that come within that. Uh, we have expanded mine app to support assessment capabilities, uh, for, uh, assessing applications, infrastructure, but also covering the entire state, including data and the code level to determine the right cloud solution. So we are, we are pushing the boundaries on what mine app can do with mine. And we have created the ability to take the guesswork out of cloud, navigate the complexity. We are rolling risk costs, and we are, you know, achieving client's strategic business objectives while building a sustainable alerts with being cloud. Any >>Platform that can take some of the guesswork out of the future. I am I'm on board with thank you so much, Kristin and Kishore. This has been a great conversation. Thank you, Rebecca, stay tuned for more of the cubes coverage of the Accenture executive summit. I'm Rebecca Knight.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent Executive Summit 2020. Sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Welcome to CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, part of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by a CUBE alum, Karthik Narain. He is Accenture's senior managing director and lead Accenture Cloud First, welcome back to the show Karthik. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >> Always a pleasure. So I want to talk to you. You are an industry veteran, you've been in Silicon Valley for decades. I want to hear from your perspective what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, what are you hearing from clients? What are they struggling with? What are their challenges that they're facing day to day? >> I think COVID-19 has been a eye-opener from various facets, first and foremost, it's a health situation that everybody's facing, which not just has economic bearings to it. It has enterprise and organizational bearing to it, and most importantly, it's very personal to people because they themselves and their friends, family, near and dear ones are going through this challenge from various different dimension. But putting that aside, when you come to it from an organizational enterprise standpoint, it has changed everything, the behavior of organizations coming together, working in their campuses, working with each other as friends, family, and near and dear colleagues, all of them are operating differently. So that's one big change to get things done in a completely different way from how they used to get things done. Number two, a lot of things that were planned for normal scenarios, like their global supply chain, how they interact with their client, customers, how they co-innovate with their partners, and how their employees contribute to the success of an organization, they're all changed. And there are no data models that give them a hint of something like this for them to be prepared for this. So we are seeing organizations that have adapted to this reasonably okay, and are launching to innovate faster in this, and there are organizations that have started with struggling, but are continuing to struggle. And the gap between the leaders and laggards are widening. So this is creating opportunities in a different way for the leaders with a lot of pivot in their business, but it's also creating significant challenge for the laggards, as we defined in our future systems research that we did a year ago, and those organizations are struggling further. So the gap is actually widening. >> So you just talked about the widening gap. You've talked about the tremendous uncertainty that so many companies, even the ones who have adapted reasonably well in this time. Talk a little bit about Accenture Cloud First and why now? >> I think it's a great question. We believe that for many of our clients COVID-19 has turned cloud from an experimentation aspiration to an urgent mandate. What I mean by that is everybody has been doing something on the other end cloud. There's no company that says "We don't believe in cloud," or "We don't want to do cloud." It was how much they did in cloud. And they were experimenting, they were doing the new things in cloud, but they were operating a lot of their core business outside the cloud or not in the cloud. Those organizations have struggled to operate in this new normal, in a remote fashion, as well as their ability to pivot to all the changes the pandemic has brought to them. But on the other hand, the organizations that had a solid foundation in cloud were able to pivot faster and are actually gone into the stage of innovating faster and driving a new behavior in the market, new behavior within their organization. So we are seeing that this pandemic has actually fast forwarded something that we always believed was going to happen, this movement to cloud over the next decade, it has fast forwarded it to happen in the next three to five years. And it's created this moment where it's a once in an era, really replatforming of businesses in the cloud that we are going to see. And we see this moment as a cloud-first moment where organizations will use cloud as the canvas, as the foundation with which they're going to reimagine their business after they were born in the cloud. And this requires a whole new strategy. And at Accenture, we are doing a lot in cloud, but we thought that this is the moment where we bring all of that capabilities together because we need a strategy for addressing movement to cloud or embracing cloud in a holistic fashion. And that's what Accenture Cloud First brings together, a holistic strategy, a team that's 70,000 plus people that's coming together with rich cloud skills, but investing to tie in all the various capabilities of cloud to deliver that holistic strategy to our clients. >> So I want you to delve into a little bit more about what this strategy actually entails. I mean, it's clearly about embracing change and being willing to experiment, and having capabilities to innovate. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this strategy entails? >> Yeah. The reason why we say there is a need for strategy is like I said, cloud is not new. There's almost every customer client is doing something with the cloud, but all of them have taken different approaches to cloud and different boundaries to cloud. Some organizations say, "I just need to consolidate my multiple data centers to a small data center footprint and move the rest to cloud." Certain other organizations say that "Oh, I'm going to move certain workloads to cloud." Certain other organizations said, "Oh, I'm going to build this greenfield application or workload in cloud." Certain others said, "I'm going to use the power of AI/ML in the cloud to analyze my data and derive insights." But a cloud-first strategy is all of this tied with the corporate strategy of the organization with an industry specific cloud journey. To say, if in this current industry, if I were to be reborn in the cloud, would I do it in the exact same fashion that I did it in the past, which means that the products and services that they offer need to be reimagined, how they interact with their customers and partners need to be revisited, how they build and operate their IT systems need to be reimagined, how they unearth the data from all the systems under which they are trapped need to be liberated so that you could derive insights. A cloud-first strategy hence is a corporate-wide strategy, and it's a C-suite responsibility. It doesn't take the ownership away from the CIO or CDIO, but the CIOs and CDIOs felt that it was just their problem and they were to solve it, and everyone else being a customer. Now the center of gravity is elevated to it becoming a C-suite agenda on everybody's agenda, where probably the CDIO is the instrument to execute that. That's a holistic cloud-first strategy. >> And it's a strategy, but the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's also a mindset and an approach, as you were saying, this idea of being reborn in the cloud. So now how do I think about things? How do I communicate? How do I collaborate? How do I get done what I need to get done? Talk a little bit about how this has changed the way you support your clients and how Accenture Cloud First is changing your approach to cloud services. >> Wonderful. You know, I did not cover one very important aspect in my previous question, but that's exactly what you just asked me now, which is, to do all of this, I talked about all the variables an organization or an enterprise is going to go through, but the good part is they have one constant. And what is that? That is their employees, because if those employees are able to embrace this change, if they are able to change themselves, pivot themselves, retool and train themselves, to be able to operate in this new cloud-first world, the ability to reimagine every function of the business would be happening at speed. And cloud-first approach is to do all of this at speed, because innovation is directly proportional to the rate of probability on experimentation. You need to experiment a lot, for any kind of experimentation, there's a probability of success, and organizations need to have an ability and a mechanism for them to be able to innovate faster, for which they need to experiment a lot. The more they experiment and the lower cost at which they experiment is going to help them experiment a lot, and experiment them at speed, fail fast, succeed more. And hence, they're going to be able to operate this at speed. So the cloud-first mindset is all about speed. I'm helping the clients fast track their innovation journey, and this is going to happen, like I said, across the enterprise in every function, across every department, and the agent of this change is going to be the employees who have to embrace this change through new skills and new tooling, and new mindset that they need to adapt to. >> So Karthik, what you're describing, it sounds so exciting. And yet for a pandemic-weary workforce that's been working remotely, that may be dealing with uncertainty for their kid's school and for so many other aspects of their life, it sounds hard. So how are you helping your clients, employees get onboard with this? And because the change management is often the hardest part. >> Yeah, I think it's, again, a great question. A bottle has only so much capacity. Something got to come out for something else to go in. That's what you're saying, it's absolutely right. And that is again, the power of cloud. The reason why cloud is such a fundamental breakthrough technology and capability for us to succeed in this era, because it helps in various forms. What we talked so far is the power of innovation that we could create, but cloud can also simplify the life of the employees in an enterprise. There are several activities and tasks that people do in managing their complex infrastructure, complex IT landscape. They used to do certain jobs and activities in a very difficult and a roundabout way, cloud has simplified and democratized a lot of these activities, so that things which had to be done in the past, like managing the complexity of the infrastructure, keeping them up all the time, managing the obsolescence of the capabilities and technologies and infrastructure, all of that could be offloaded to the cloud, so that the time that is available for all of these employees can be used to further innovate. Every organization is going to spend almost the same amount of money, but rather than spending activities, by looking at the rear view mirror, on keeping the lights on, they're going to spend more money, more time, more energy, and spend their skills on things that are going to add value to their organization. Because every innovation that an enterprise can give to their end customer need not come from that enterprise. The world of platform economy is about democratizing innovation. And the power of cloud is to get all of these capabilities from outside the four walls of the enterprise. >> It will add value to the organization, but I would imagine also add value to that employee's life because the employee will be more engaged in his or her job and therefore bring more excitement and energy into his or her day-to-day activities too. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is a normal evolution we would have seen, everybody would have seen in their lives, that they keep moving up the value chain of what activities that gets performed by those individuals. And this is, you know, no more true than how the United States, as an economy has operated where this is a powerhouse of innovation, where the work that's done inside the country keeps moving up the value chain and US leverages the global economy for a lot of things that is required to power the United States. And that global economic phenomenon is very true for an enterprise as well. There are things that an enterprise needs to do themselves, there are things an employee needs to do themselves, but there are things that they could leverage from the external innovation and the power of innovation that is coming from technologies like cloud. >> So at Accenture, you have long, deep stand, sorry, you have deep and long standing relationships with many cloud service providers, including AWS. How does the Accenture Cloud First strategy, how does it affect your relationships with those providers? >> Yeah. We have great relationships with cloud providers like AWS. And in fact, in the cloud world, it was one of the first capability that we started about 13 years ago, when we started developing these capabilities. But five years ago, we hit a very important milestone where the two organizations came together and said that we are forging a formal partnership with joint investments to build this partnership, and we named that as Accenture AWS Business Group, AABG, where we co-invested, brought skills together and developed solutions. And we will continue to do that, and through that investment, we've also made several acquisitions that you would have seen in the recent times, like Enimbos and Gekko that we made acquisitions in Europe. But now we're taking this to the next level. What we are saying is through cloud-first and the $3 billion investment that we are bringing in through cloud-first, we are going to make specific investment to create unique joint solution and landing zones, foundation cloud packs, with which clients can accelerate their innovation or their journey to cloud-first. And one great example is what we are doing with Takeda, a global pharmaceutical giant, with whom we've signed a five-year partnership. And it was out in the media just a month ago or so, where the two organizations are coming together, we have created a partnership as a power of three partnership where the three organizations are jointly holding hands and taking responsibility for the innovation and the leadership position that Takeda wants to get to. With this, we are going to simplify their operating model and organization by providing it flexibility. We're going to provide a lot more insights. Takeda is a 230 year old organization. Imagine the amount of trapped data and intelligence that is there. How about bringing all of that together with the power of AWS and Accenture and Takeda to drive more customer insights, come up with breakthrough R and D, accelerate clinical trials, and improve the patient experience using AI, ML, and edge technologies. So all of these things that we will do through this partnership with joint investment from Accenture Cloud First, as well as partner like AWS, so that Takeda can realize their gain. And their CEO actually made a statement that five years from now, every Takeda employee will have an AI assistant that's going to make that Takeda employee move up the value chain on how they contribute and add value to the future of Takeda, with the AI assistant making them even more equipped and smarter than what they could be otherwise. >> So, one last question to close this out here. What is your future vision for Accenture Cloud First? What are we going to be talking about at next year's Accenture Executive Summit? >> Yeah, the future is going to be evolving, but the part that is exciting to me, and this is a fundamental belief that we are entering a new era of industrial revolution, from industrial first, second, and third industrial, the third happened probably 20 years ago with the advent of silicon and computers and all of that stuff that happened in the Silicon Valley. I think the fourth industrial revolution is going to be in the cross section of physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And there's a great article in World Economic Forum that your audience can Google and read about it. But the reason why this is very, very important is we are seeing a disturbing phenomenon that over the last 10 years, we are seeing a plateauing of the labor productivity and innovation, which has dropped to about 2.1%. And when you see that kind of phenomenon over that long a period of time, there has to be breakthrough innovation that needs to happen to come out of this barrier and get to the next base camp, as I would call it, to further this productivity lag that we are seeing, and that is going to happen in the intersection of the physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And I think cloud is going to be the connective tissue between all of these three, to be able to provide that, where it's the edge, especially is going to come closer to the human lives. It's going to come from cloud. Pictorally in your mind, you can think about cloud as central, either in a private cloud, in a data center, or in a public cloud, everywhere. But when you think about edge, it's going to be far-reaching and coming close to where we live and where we work and where we get entertained and so on and so forth. And there's going to be intervention in a positive way in the field of medicine, in the field of entertainment, in the field of manufacturing, in the field of mobility, when I say mobility, human mobility, people, transportation, and so on and so forth, with all of this stuff, cloud is going to be the connective tissue and the vision of cloud-first is going to be plowing through this big change that is going to happen. And the evolution that is going to happen where, you know, the human race of mankind, or personkind, being very gender neutral in today's world, cloud-first needs to be that beacon of creating the next generation vision for enterprises to take advantage of that kind of an exciting future. And that's why in Accenture we say "Let there be change" as our purpose. And I genuinely believe that cloud-first is going to be in the forefront of that change agenda, both for Accenture as well as for the rest of the world. >> Excellent. Let there be change indeed. Thank you so much for joining us Karthik. A pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you so much, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS reInvent Executive Summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Welcome everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS reInvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. For this segment we have two guests. First we have Helen Davis. She is the Senior Director of Cloud Platform Services, Assistant Director for IT and Digital for the West Midlands Police. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Helen. >> Welcome. >> And we also have Matthew Pound. He is Accenture Health and Public Service Associate Director and West Midlands Police Account Lead. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Matthew. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we are going to be talking about delivering data-driven insights to the West Midlands Police force. Helen, I want to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about the West Midlands Police force? How big is the force and also what were some of the challenges that you were grappling with prior to this initiative? >> Yes, certainly. So West Midlands Police is the second largest police force in the UK, outside of the Metropolitan Police in London. We have an excessive 11,000 people work at West Midlands Police serving communities through and across the Midlands region. So geographically we're quite a big area as well as being population density having that at a high level. So the reason we sort of embarked on the data-driven insights platform and which was a huge change for us was for a number of reasons. Namely we had a lot of disparate data which was spread across a range of legacy systems that were many, many years old with some duplication of what was being captured and no single view for offices or support staff. Some of the access was limited. You have to be in an actual police building on a desktop computer to access it. Other information could only reach offices on the front line through a telephone call back to one of our enabling services where they would do a manual checkup look at the information, then call the offices back and tell them what they needed to know. So it was a very long laborious process not very efficient. And we certainly weren't exploiting the data that we had in a very productive way. >> So it sounds like as you're describing an old clunky system that needed a technological reimagination, so what was the main motivation for making this shift? >> It was really about making us more efficient and more effective in how we do business. So certainly as an IT leader and some of my operational colleagues, we recognize the benefits that data analytics could bring in a policing environment, not something that was really done in the UK at the time. We have a lot of data, so we're very data rich in the information that we have, but we needed to turn it into information that was actionable. So that's where we started looking for technology partners and suppliers to help us and sort of help us really with what's the art of the possible, this hasn't been done before so what could we do in this space that's appropriate for policing. >> Helen I love that idea. What is the art of the possible, can you tell us a little bit about why you chose AWS? >> I think really as with all things, when we're procuring apartment in the public sector, there are many rules and regulations quite rightly because you would expect that to be because we're spending public money so we have to be very, very careful and it's a long process and we have to be open to public scrutiny. So we sort of look to everything, everything that was available as part of that process, but we recognize the benefits that Cloud would provide in this space because we like moving to a Cloud environment. We would literally be replacing something that was legacy with something that was a bit more modern. That's not what we wanted to do. Our ambition was far greater than that. So I think in terms of AWS, really, it was around the scalability, interoperability, just things like the disaster recovery service, the fact that we can scale up and down quickly, we call it dialing up and dialing back. It's page go. So it just sort of ticked all the boxes for us. And then we went through the full procurement process, fortunately it came out on top for us. So we were able to move forward, but it just sort of had everything that we were looking for in that space. >> Matthew, I want to bring you into the conversation a little bit here. How are you working with the West Midlands Police, sorry, and helping them implement this Cloud-first journey? >> I guess by January the West Midlands Police started paver five years ago now. So we set up a partnership with the force I wanted to operate in a way that was very different to a traditional supplier relationship. Security that the data difference insights program is one of many that we've been working with West Midlands over the last five years. As having said already Cloud gave a number of advantages certainly from big data perspective and the things that that enabled us today from an Accenture to that allowed us to bring in a number of the different teams that we have say Cloud teams, security teams, interacted from a design perspective, as well as more traditional services that people would associate with the country. >> I mean, so much of this is about embracing comprehensive change to experiment, and innovate, and try different things. Matthew, how do you help an entity like West Midlands Police think differently when there are these ways of doing things that people are used to, how do you help them think about what is the art of the possible, as Helen said? >> There's a few things to that, what is critical is trying to co-create solutions together. Yeah, there's no point just turning up with what we think is the right answer, trying to collectively work through the issues that the force are saying and the outcomes they're looking to achieve rather than simply focusing on a long list of requirements I think was critical and then being really open to working together to create the right solution rather than just trying to pick something off the shelf that maybe doesn't fit the full set of requirements in the way that it should do. >> Right, it's not always a one size fits all. >> Absolutely not. What we believe is critical is making sure that we're creating something that met the forces needs in terms of the outcomes they're looking to achieve the financial envelopes that were available and how we can deliver those in a iterative agile way rather than spending years and years working towards an outcome that is going outdate before you even get that. >> So Helen, how are things different? What kinds of business functions and processes have been re-imagined in light of this change and this shift? >> It's actually unrecognizable now in certain areas of the business as it was before. So to give you a little bit of context, when we started working with Accenture and AWS on need data driven insights program, it was very much around providing what was called locally, a wizzy tool for our intelligence analyst to interrogate data, look at data, decide whether they could do anything predictive with it. And it was very much sort of a back office function to sort of tidy things up for us and make us a bit better in that area or a lot better in that area. And it was rolled out to a number of offices, a small number on the front line. Really it was in line with the mobility strategy that we had where officers were getting new smartphones for the first time to do sort of a lot of things on policing apps and things like that to again, to avoid them having to keep driving back to police stations, et cetera. And the pilot was so successful. Every officer now has access to this data on their mobile devices. So it literally went from a handful of people in an office somewhere using it to do sort of clever whizzbang things to every officer in the force being able to access that level of data at their fingertips literally. So what they would touch we've done before is if they needed to check an address or check details of an individual just as one example, they would either have to, in many cases, go back to a police station to look it up themselves on a desktop computer while they would have to make a call back to a centralized function and speak to an operator, relay the questions either wait for the answer or wait for a call back with the answer when those people are doing the data interrogation manually. So the biggest change for us is the self-service nature of the data we now have available. So officers can do it themselves on their phone, wherever they might be. So the efficiency savings from that point of view are immense. And I think just parallel to that is the quality of our data because we had a lot of data, but just because you've got a lot of data and a lot of information doesn't mean it's big data and it's valuable necessarily. So again, it was having the single source of truth as we call it. So you know that when you are completing those safe searches and getting the responses back, that it is the most accurate information we hold. And also you get an it back within minutes as opposed to half an hour, an hour or a drive back to a station. So it's making officers more efficient and it's also making them safer. The more efficient they are, the more time they have to spend out with the public doing what we all should be doing. >> Have you seen that kind of return on investment because what you were just describing with all the steps that we'd needed to be taken in prior to this to verify and address say, and those are precious seconds when someone's life is on the line in sort of in the course of everyday police work. >> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's difficult to put a price on it. It's difficult to quantify. But all the minutes here and that certainly add up to a significant amount of efficiency savings, and we've certainly been able to demonstrate the officers are spending less time at police stations as a result and more time out on the frontline. Also they're safer because they can get information about what may or may not be and address what may or may not have occurred in an area before very, very quickly without having to wait. >> Matthew, I want to hear your observations of working so closely with this West Midlands Police. Have you noticed anything about changes in its culture? In its operating model in how police officers interact with one another? Have you seen any changes since this technology change? >> What's unique about the West Midlands Police is the buy-in from the top and the chief and his exact team and Helen is the leader from an IT perspective. The entire force is bought in so what is a significant change break ground. And that trickles through everyone in the organization change is difficult and there's a lot of time effort. There's been person to bake the technical delivery and the business change and adoption aspects around each of the projects. But you can see the step change that is making in each aspect to the organization and where that's putting West Midlands Police as a leader in by technology on policing in the UK and I think globally. >> And this is a question for both of you because Matthew, as you said, change is difficult and there is always a certain intransigence in workplaces about this is just the way we've always done things and we're used to this and don't try to get us to do anything new here, it works. How do you get the buy-in that you need to do this kind of digital transformation? >> I think it would be wrong to say it was easy. We also have to bear in mind that this was one program in a five-year program. So there was a lot of change going on both internally for some of our back office functions, as well as frontline officers. So with DDI in particular, I think that the step change occurred when people could see what it could do for them. We had lots of workshops and seminars where we all talk about big data and it's going to be great and it's data analytics and it's transformational, and quite rightly people that are very busy doing a day job that not necessarily technologists in the main and I'm particularly interested quite rightly so in what we are not dealing with the Cloud, and it was like, yeah, okay it's one more thing. And then when they started to see on their phones and what teams could do, that's when it started to sell itself. And I think that's when we started to see the stack change, and if we have any issues now it's literally our help desks in meltdown 'cause everyone's like, we can't manage without this anymore. And I think that speaks for itself. So it doesn't happen overnight. It sort of incremental changes and then that's a step change in attitude. And when they see it working and they see the benefits, they want to use it more. And that's how it's become fundamental to our policing by itself really without much selling. >> Matthew, Helen just made a compelling case for how to get buy-in. Have you discovered any other best practices when you are trying to get everyone on board for this kind of thing? >> We've used a lot of the traditional techniques, things around comms and engagement. We've also used things like 30-day challenge and nudge theory around how can we gradually encourage people to use things. I think there's a point with all of this around, how do we just keep it simple and keep it user centric from an end user perspective? I think DDI is a great example of where the technology is incredibly complex. The solution itself is extremely large and it's been very difficult to get to live it, but at the heart of it is a very simple front end for the user to encourage it and take that complexity away from them. I think that's been critical through the whole piece of DDI. >> One final word from Helen. I want to hear where do you go from here? What is the longterm vision? I know that this has made productivity savings equivalent to 154 full-time officers. What's next? >> I think really it's around exploiting what we've got. And I use the phrase quite a lot, dialing it up, which drives my technical architects crazy, but because it's apparently not that simple, but we've been through significant change in the last five years and we are still continuing to batch all of those changes into day operational policing. But what we need to see now is we need to exploit and build on the investments that we've made in terms of data and claims specifically, the next step really is about expanding our pool of data and all functions. So that we keep getting better and better at this. The more we do, the more data we have, the more refined we can be, the more precise we are with all of our actions. We're always being expected to, again, look after the public purse and do more for flavs. And I think this is certainly an applied journey and cloud-first by design, which is where we are now is helping us to be future-proofed. So for us, it's very much an investment. And I see now that we have good at embedded in operational policing for me, this is the start of our journey, not the end. So it's really exciting to see where we can go from here. >> Exciting times indeed. Thank you so much Helen and Matthew for joining us. I really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> And you are watching theCUBE stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of the AWS reInvent Accenture Executive Summit. I'm Rebecca Knight. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment. We have Brian Bohan, he is the Director of the Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group Global Lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, Managing Director Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group. Oh my word (all laugh) how big are your business cards? >> Exactly >> Well welcome for both of you Thanks for coming on the show. So the relationship between AWS and Accenture is now in its 13th year. I want to hear from both of you, what's new what's exciting about the relationship and I'm going to start with you Chris. >> Yeah, so it's been 13 great years. Four years since we used the AABG, we use the acronym to make it easier to say >> Rebecca: Okay, thank you, and now you tell me. >> The Accenture AWS Business Group. So the partnership continues to get stronger, continues to grow, we've doubled down on the partnership this last year, really increasing our investment and our focus. We've done in the last year really a lot of focus around industries. So we continue to build our teams we continue to grow on the number of certified resources we have. And our clients are just eatin' that stuff up. So it just gives us more opportunity to grow. >> Ryan? >> Yeah, I mean I think you can see, it's consistent with what you see here at the event and also with Andy's keynote. The emphasis on enterprise and as we see large enterprises really accelerating to AWS, I think that's what we're seeing as well. At any given time we have hundreds of projects going on around the world, but when we formed the business group in 2015 it was really around driving really large transformations with customers and what we're seeing now is customers at the place of maturity and willing to take, embark on those journeys and I think we're really well set up to make that happen together as a partnership. >> So as you kind of enter into this new phase now of kind of working with companies, are you seeing any kind of increasing specialization in the types of companies you're working with? >> Yeah, no absolutely. So I think that's why the answer's really exciting. So I think if you look across this is fairly typical. We started out in a lot of horizontal capability areas and they're still incredibly important to us around data and SAP, mass migrations and these are areas we continue to invest in and we tend to get even more specialized as we do so, but we're also seeing this last year is getting more industry focused. So as we move up the stack and we start talking about cloud native development, we start talking about machine learning and analytics, customer care has become a really interesting thing. So you see a lot of companies, whether it be tire companies, CPG companies, moving from products companies extending into services, it completely changes how they think about customer care and how they need to understand their data and understand their customers. So necessarily as you move up that stack, you have to have that deep domain expertise and so what's fantastic is we have great technology, we're building out some teams with domain expertise, but Accenture has got thousands of people with this expertise. So it's again this kind of combining of strengths that we're able to bring to the table for our customers. >> Yeah we saw when we started the group, we knew Accenture's strong position in industries, right. Our deep industry knowledge, knowing those industries really well we knew they would come together at some point, the technology and industry. And we've seen that over the last 12 months really start to take effect. Companies are now specifically thinking about how they leverage Amazon for their specifically industry solutions and capabilities, and we're just going after that. >> So Andy Jassy in his fireside chat this morning talked about innovation at AWS and he said, we're a big company but we need to think of ourselves as a big startup. So here are two big companies, how do you innovate together what is your relationship like? I mean you said it's 13 great years, but what's your creative process? >> So I'll take a stab. So first of all, I'll say that in recognition of that we actually on our team, and this year into some light of and Chris mentioned a doubling down the partnership, we're growing the team we have on the AWS side to support the partnership. And with some of the things we're doing in addition to adding industry folks, is I've added a full time team to focus on innovation. And it's innovation with customers but it's also all the mechanisms we use. So if you think about with AWS, a lot of customers come to us and want to understand how does Amazon innovate, what is our culture of innovation? So at Amazon we have a program that we've rolled out around that. Accenture also has many mechanisms around innovation. Small teams driving very agile projects, and it's our job, that team's job and my team to go around and pull the best of breed across the world and make sure that we're delivering that to clients every single day. And so more and more clients want to see not just the outputs, but they want us to imbed in their teams and also show them by doing. So yes, give us the deliverable but we want to build the muscle around what Accenture and AWS can do together around innovation. So that's more and more what we see. >> Yeah and we follow the Amazon principles, right. The principles that Andy talks about that are core to innovation there, we follow them. From the beginning when we started this partnership we started working backwards, what we wanted it to be in five, ten years and we follow those. So our teams act that way, they work that way, they follow those day to day out and it makes us, it allows us to integrate well into AWS into the AWS people around the world. For Accenture it gives us, our people a insight into how AWS does it, and then we can share that with our customers as well. >> Interesting, so Chris you've been doing this a long time. Right, okay and so, and you guys have been collaborating for a long time, when Amazon first started there was a whole new breed of companies they were coming out, we'd call kind of born in the cloud. Companies that were agile and fast moving, taking advantage of a lot of the technology stack to do things that a lot of legacy companies couldn't do. Now we're starting to see what has been termed kind of companies being reborn in the cloud, right. Older, leg--, you know older companies now that are transforming moving their workloads to the cloud and then getting new types of capabilities. I'm wondering in your work, are you seeing some examples of companies that are kind of undergoing that kind of transformation? >> Yeah absolutely. I think we see what we would call an epic disruption of these companies right. It's happening, it's been happening for awhile. I think they've gotten, they've looked at Amazon now more as not just a cloud, and not just infrastructure, going up the stack and doing that. So they're going through these transformations and we see them balancing between moving their workloads to AWS versus innovating. And also changing, they've realized they have to change the organization to go along with that. It's just not moving and acting in the same old way so we're seeing agile and cloud come together to drive that transformation. So I would say almost every customer we're seeing today is going through that transformation in some form or fashion >> Yeah, I would say that's also a really interesting change Again, years ago we were, if you were focused on a mass migration today, the conversation is if you're a pharmaceutical company how do you get your pipeline of therapeutics out to market faster, right? How do you start thinking about patients differently or patient services, the data you have on those patients how do you integrate further into the value chain and to providers and payers and get that information. So, and what happens, what you find is to be able to deliver say precision medicine and pharmaceutical you need to rethink about your data, then you have to look at your application portfolio and say, okay what does that need to look like to support this completely new paradigm serving our patients? And that's what ends up pulling the workloads through to support these new business initiatives. So I think that's a bit of a difference that we've been seeing as well in the last couple years. >> One of the messages we're hearing is that journeys of the cloud really represents the fourth industrial revolution. I'm wondering, in terms of the pace of innovation are there any new technologies that maybe even just from a couple of years ago that are just table stakes today? >> Yeah no, I think the table stakes, AI and ML are quickly becoming table stakes, right. And that's what I love about AWS, they make the stuff easy to consume. Right, SageMaker and that stuff. Last year I was able to go in through DeepRacer and going through that I was able to do a model in 30 minutes. I don't do a lot of coding anymore these days, but on a plane I was able to create my first model. And so that stuff is becoming table stakes. They're making it very easy, so there is no excuse to not do ML or AI in your application. I don't need a separate set of data scientists sitting off to the side. So that to me, and data in the cloud, right. So the data being there so I can consume it in AI and ML that's table stakes, there is no more hey, I'm just only going to put what I don't care about, or what I want to low cost data store, it's table stakes to have that data there, accessible to your people 24-7. >> And what does that mean for your workforce? Because as you said, these are now basics. You need to know how to use these tools and be willing to experiment with these technologies. How do you make sure your workforce has the right skills and the right mentality and approach? >> So one of the things I talked a little bit about DeepRacer last year when DeepRacer came out, I was sitting there kind of scratching my head and saying, what is this, right? It's a glorified RC car. And one of my team members was texting me and saying, we've got to do this. And what that, we've run a private league, and what that's done is it's taken well over 1400 people who never knew what machine learning, R-reinforcement learning was and got them engaged in doing it. So now they've got that experience, they're now hungry for more knowledge through a fun activity, a competition. You know we're all very competitive people at Accenture, so that was just, it caught on amazing, it was amazing just around the world at how these people took onto it and why our employees took onto it. >> Yeah, the person who won that league, so it was across 30 different innovation centers at Accenture, plus hundreds of people virtually building cars, and the guy who won it out of Kronsberg, Germany had never touched AWS the day before. And I dunno if this is true, the story's great, he supposedly wrote his model on the train to the innovation center that day, he ran the model and came up like four one hundredths of a second off the world record. So great example, yeah, of somebody who wasn't in the AWS kind ecosystem at Accenture, got turned on my this new technology, this new capability, dove in and now he's enabled, right. And we talk about innovation, so innovation is also like I said, not just what you're delivering for the client but how you're doing it. So that same team actually who started the DeepRacer league down in Australia, they've been creating what they call a hackathon as a service. So working with customers, not just doing slideware and going through courseware, but getting folks in a room like this and you've seen it here at the event, have a business problem that you want to solve, get a bunch of people in a room, business people, technology people, and hack away. In a low risk environment that's collaborative where you can share and you're learning by doing. So we're seeing a lot of that, and so you've got to really, like think of new ways that you're going to enable the workforce especially if you hope to scale this. >> So one of the things obviously that Accenture brings to the table, AWS got a global platform but you're a consulting firm with global reach. And everybody wants to use data in new ways but how you use data in different regions and different localities can vary. So how are you working with customers to be able to kind of enable that? >> Yeah, so obviously a lot of different regulations, country by country, and they're changing very rapidly so we have to stay on top of it. One of the things we've done is through our we formed a state of business group last year. We've completely focused on data. Includes AABG folks, Amazon folks, but they're very regionally based. So we stood up a lighthouse here in North America, in New Jersey, and the experts sitting in that are very well versed in what North America or the US is doing around data privacy and security and things like that. So they're taking what they learned, the same thing, we opened it in London last, a few weeks ago in Canada, other places. So we're definitely taking a regional focus but we're making sure through the partnership that the techniques, the tooling, the capabilities are being pushed down into those groups. So they're taking all that experience and that knowledge but putting a local slant to it and making sure it's locally compatible. >> Yeah, I mean what's interesting too is you talk about, I mean data we're seeing this take off in every industry and it's so critical, but two of the areas that the data business group is seeing the most traction actually are financial services and life sciences pharmaceutical health care. So you would think, those are two of the most regulated industries in the world, extremely sensitive data, you wouldn't think those would be the ones out in front but they are, and because there's so much value to be had. So even in Europe, working with pharmaceutical companies there together, and their R and D process around patient services and being able to use native data lakes on AWS, use machine learning to gain new insights in terms of how therapeutics are working on patient populations, right. And so this is again, very sensitive information but hugely valuable, and Accenture through this business group has all the capabilities so that we can have the best of both worlds, right. And have it accessible, analyze it in AWS but have it secure as well. >> And a lot of research show, actually the constraints can power innovation. The fact that it, because it is so sensitive and there are these regulatory concerns around it that that in fact enables people to be more, they're forced to be more creative. >> Yeah, and it's the old, you know cars didn't go fast until they put brakes on them, kind of a thing, right. And we see that, absolutely. And I think that sort to thing is, big enterprise customers, they want to move fast but they're public companies, they have to ensure that they're mitigating risk. So again we're investing a lot in moving fast but doing it in a way that controls risk and is able to kind of give them the assurances that they need. >> And definitely the platformed has helped, right. Amazon investing in that platform, bringing the tools like you saw on Andy's keynote, some things around the S3 bucket, you know those type of things. Those are enabling, and those regulations, us to deal with those regulations much faster and less work on our side to build the things that are need to meet those regulations. So definitely the platform growing and expanding is definitely helping us go faster. >> That's a great point, right. I mean because also if you have, you know whether your data, your applications in your on-premises environment chances are you don't have the granular visibility that you would like into that environment, whereas you move it into AWS, you have all these tools to really get as granular as you want and really understand your environment and make sure that you have control over it. So it really creates a new paradigm for that. >> One of the things that really struck me during Andy's keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy's keynote, was the fact when we was announcing all these, this dizzying number of new products and services >> Brian: I'm not sure how he does that (all laugh) >> I know, just how many of them rely on the technology ecosystem to be successful. So can you just riff on that a little bit about how really the landscape for technology has changed so dramatically in the sense that all these companies need to cooperate and collaborate, and here we are. You two, you're a living and breathing example. >> Absolutely, you know I think you'll hear Andy say it, is the right tool for the right job. AWS, we're very much about giving customers choice. So there's a lot of options and you know we went through all the different database options that we have. So they're very specific to specific use cases. Now that also implies that you have to know which tools to use for the right job and you have to have very skilled craftsmen. So that's where we rely on partners like Accenture who have those skilled craftsmen, in addition to our own to really extend that. And then you look at the ISV ecosystem, right and some of those ISVs and our technology partners who've done an amazing job of taking our capabilities but then extending them further into whatever domain that they're very expert in, and there's a very specific IP delivers extra value to their customers. And so that's what, we want to give all this choice, whether it's a customer, or a technology partner, a consultancy like Accenture can really thrive. >> And I think if you walk through the show floor you see what these companies are doing. And they're not afraid to innovate and they're not afraid to take on some of the bigger challenges out there because they don't have to invest in the platform underneath. They're able to start with something that's solid, known, recognized by the market, right. No one is going to get in trouble for building something on AWS. So they're taking that and taking the next level and you're right, the partnerships between 'em we see if you just walk down there, you see them talking, you see them collaborating and saying, oh well I'm doing this, if we integrate this, can we do this differently? So you know I think we're only going to see more of that. And we're going to see it more industry focused, coming back to what we were talking about earlier. We're going to see more things stand up in the industries. We've seen this with FinServ, we've seen this you know but I think across all the industries we're going to see more of this collaboration. >> Yeah, I agree, in fact I have someone on my team now that's new this year to focus exclusively on we'll call the power of three. So it's AWS, Accenture, and plus a technology partner. And so if you go in the Executive Summit, Salesforce being a really obviously example, right. Accenture's got very large successful Salesforce practice very important partner of AWS's, how can we come together and drive more value for our customers by figuring out solutions. You know we announced at Dreamforce, the connect integration with Salesforce that's a perfect example, right. So the end-to-end customer care I talked about earlier, even more powerful, we can bring that power of three together. >> So going into the 13th year, lucky 13 (laughs) what are some of the things we're going to be talking about at next year's Executive Summit? What are some of the things you're most looking forward to in the coming year? >> I have to say machine learning and AI. And I have to say Outposts is probably the third of my, I think I live the quantum computing stuff, and Accenture has been doing a lot of research and a lot of work in quantum computing. We were super excited to see what was announced, I guess Monday, and so we're super excited about that but I think that's a little farther out. I think the ML, the AI, the new things in SageMaker are super exciting and I think are only going to make that stuff go faster. So I think that's all we're going to be talking about next year I think we're going to be talking about all the new models that have been created, all the new problems that have been solved, and just a new paradigm in computing off of that stuff 'cause it's getting simpler to use, faster to use, and cheaper to use so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's just, these announcements yesterday just continue to remove barriers, and so you think about the announcement with Verizon around 5G, so now the possibilities that opens up in terms of the applications and the analysis and the machine learning that can get pushed down to the edge is really amazing. And I think what's going to be fun is, we work with customers to figure out what these services should look like, but even at launch we're not sure how they're going to be used. So now it's going to be really exciting turning all these developers, all the Accenture developers, loose on this and just let's see what we create together. >> In 2020 all the developers are loose, I love it. (all laugh) Brian, Chris thank you so much for coming on theCUBE again. That was a really great conversation. >> Well, thanks for having us >> Thanks for having us >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, we are wrapping up two days of wall to wall coverage at the Accenture Executive Summit. You are watching theCUBE. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, and co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment, we have Zafar Razzacki, he is the managing director Digital Industry X at AWS, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> Rebecca: And Jon Allen, global automotive professional services leader at AWS, thank you both for coming on the show! >> Thank you so much, thanks for having us. >> So, first, I'm going to start with you, Zafar, I want to hear both, what you do, what is Digital Industry X? It's so mysterious! (laughter) >> So, Industry X.0 is a fairly new practice inside of Accenture, we focus on all things smart and connected. There's a product segment that focuses on smart and connected products specifically, and then certainly we have to think about engineering, so how do you build those products and how do you automate and make the processes for developing those products smarter, and then processes and operations, how do you actually run those types of businesses? So, I'm new to the practice, I actually joined from a number of years at General Motors, where I worked on mobility and innovation there, and prior to that, spent a number of years at Google, working on innovation and new products there, so happy to be at the firm and excited to think about how we bring these types of skills to the mobility industry and change automotive. >> So, Jon, paint a picture for our viewers. The entire industry is being disrupted, we're changing the way we move around from city to city, we have Uber and Lyft, electric scooters, connected cars, just paint the picture for our viewers about the disruption taking place. >> Sure, I mean, I'll use a line from one of our CEOs in the auto industry, Mara Barra, said we'll see more disruption in the next five years than we've seen in the last twenty-five years, in the automotive industry, and it's really fascinating, seeing what's happening. I think the big disruption is that, automotive industry and automotive makers are no longer traditional metal benders. They see themselves as mobility companies. And they see that they need to integrate with this ecosystem, it's just not about driving your car to one spot to another, but it's a full customer experience, from the moment you get into your car, you get to your location, and then how do you actually get further, maybe, take a Lyft, a scooter, maybe you're not using your car, you're using Uber, so it's fascinating to see how the ecosystem is all integrated in. The auto industry also has shifted that, no longer do they think they should just do it alone. I think we're seeing a lot of partnerships, and they're bringing a lot of small businesses and they're bringing in more innovation, they realize that innovation isn't just happening within their four walls, but they're using a much larger ecosystem to really change and transform mobility across the world. >> So, maybe talk a little bit about how broad this ecosystem is, right, 'cause maybe, you know, in the old time, we had maybe sort of car manufacturers, right, and we had cities. You know, cities made the roads, car manufacturers built the vehicles, right? But now we've got a complicated ecosystem, right? We've got data companies that are playing a role in this, that are driving sort of ride hailing, et cetera, we've also got cities thinking about how they offer traffic services differently. Maybe just talk about some of the things you're seeing around the ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, certainly, OEMs are re-imagining their role in the ecosystem, suppliers are also thinking about how they can start to add new value and leverage the data off of their systems. We have to talk about startups in this space as well, I mean, the ecosystem with startups is just growing rapidly, we've talked about Uber and Lyft, they've been a great model for the way a startup can come in and disrupt and grow, but across all aspects, from supply chain, to retail, to in-vehicle technologies, you know, there are so many new entrants, and it's exciting. And it's leading to these types of partnerships where, traditionally, an OEM might have said, I'm going to do it all, now there's this comfort with, I'm going to partner with a startup, I might invest in them, I might put some project dollars into that relationship, and work on co-developing a solution together. >> Yeah, what's amazing, I think, is the customer has a lot more power, maybe than in the past, and so, automotive makers, this unique partnership that's happening, is they're really putting the customer in the center. Customers want a seamless experience, they want to be jumping between different apps or different capabilities, that's what's beautiful about what we're doing in AWS, is we're trying to help these OEMs take that full experience end-to-end. Think of your car as a personal assistant. Think of it as, it can help you get to your job, but it can also help with your personal life as well, and so I think it's fascinating that they're really starting to put the customer at the center to have a better customer experience, and it's no longer just horsepower, and how your car works, but it's really the connected ecosystem that extends, theoretically, beyond your car. So you can connect to your home, you can connect with the rest of your life through your vehicle these days, and I think that's the change. >> So, how will that work? Describe the connected car, what are we really talking about here? >> Wow, you want to take that one first? >> Sure, well, let's contrast it to the non-connected car. >> All right, fair enough! >> I mean, you know, literally, getting in, turning the engine on, and the car was a standalone part of your daily life. But to Jon's point, now, with it being really software-driven and having data able to flow from your vehicle to your home, and be able to automate, you know, turning on your thermostat as you're approaching the home, automatically opening the garage just based on proximity, those types of things. Being able to have the convenience of your favorite playlists and your phone book, bringing that digital life into the car, those weren't possible before the connected car and that technology architecture that we see now. But now, you know, that experience becomes much richer and much more personalized. >> Yeah, and I think, look at it latency, look at an IoT, looking at Edge, fascinating, especially with the introduction of 5G coming out, it's going to completely be a game changer for the rest of this. >> So let's build on that. So the roles of the players in the ecosystem are changing, right, so the role of the car manufacturer's changing, the role of the city is changing, the role of the startup's changing, but it seems like the kind of common theme among all of these is that they're leveraging data in different kinds of ways, I was just wondering, how does AWS help these stakeholders be able to leverage that kind of data? >> That's great. So, my role on professional services for AWS is we help our customers use the AWS services to make it real, whether it's from a proof of concepts all the way to operations. So we use our wonderful partner community like Accenture, and we come in together, and so, for example, say a customer wants to create a personal assistant through the vehicle, using Alexa, using other services, we would go in, maybe with a partner, and a lot of times we love to do it with the customer, with the auto maker, and together build. And again, it might be a concept. There is still a long lead time to create devices to be included in the vehicle, but the great thing about now, Cloud, and some other technologies, seven years was generally the design cycle for a vehicle, you can't do that anymore with new technologies. So we as AWS come in and really help, A, let's envision, let's work backwards from the customer, let's think about what we need to have, help them build, and then later on, actually implement and make it operational. >> Maybe I could just add to that real quick. One of the beauties of this partnership is that we see some of the new technologies that AWS is developing and what's in the pipeline, and our teams are actually working on building demos on top of this, so you know, one example of that is a trip planner that we actually have on display here at the show floor, where we can help a family plan a trip, what are all the things they need to take on that trip, because Alexa knows your shopping preferences, you know, we can recommend the snacks and things that you want to take, we can recommend stops along the way. In the future, when we're all driving electric vehicles, you know, how do you plan out your charging, and take the family to a restaurant while you're waiting thirty minutes for the vehicle to charge, so a lot of those things are realities that we can actually build today based on the technologies that AWS has to offer. >> What are some of the best in class auto makers in the sense of who are really at the cutting edge in terms of working with you both Accenture and AWS in terms of really thinking innovatively and creatively? >> Sure, well, I think everyone across the ecosystem is at that point in time where they recognize, it's time for that transformation to happen. So, you can pick any one of the major brands, and look at great examples of the way they're changing the experience inside of the vehicle. From the integration of different types of personalization offerings, to even, you know, some of the newer entrants, like at Tesla, that's really building vehicles from the ground up focused on software and that customer experience. So I think it's an exciting time across the industry, everyone's really making those changes and you guys are probably a seat at the table in all of those conversations. >> Yeah, I hate to point out one specific, but what I think I've seen a theme is that they recognize to draw talent, they can't do the old way of doing business, right, so they're creating these joint innovation centers with AWS, they have innovation centers kind of off campus of the main campus, they kind of have that Silicon feel, because it's a draw of talent, and they got to make it as exciting to get these new coders and developers in to want to join an automaker. They weren't really necessarily seen as that, the joint automaker, and that's completely transforming especially the rise of the digital, the CTO and the CDO, the chief digital officer, we're seeing that completely change and data science, these are themes maybe ten years ago that really weren't talked about in OEMs, and now they have a seat not only at the table, but they're at the board level. These are conversations at the board level now. >> Absolutely. >> So, one of the things we've all experienced, we all spend a lot of time sitting in traffic, right? Maybe talk a little bit about how are cities getting smarter about kind of using mobility in order to move people across cities and avoid traffic, some of the other problems we all experience. >> Well, I think there's cities as consumers of data, so cities are now having conversations with many of the automakers about leveraging vehicle data to make better decisions about the use of their roadways or how they manage traffic light phasing, so there's a lot of interesting things happening there, where manufacturers are able to share their data to cities, and you know, their city planner teams, the way they're building new roadways, are including a lot of that infrastructure now, where you see technologies like DSRC, that's able to talk to vehicles and help those traffic lights phase accordingly. I think cities are playing a really important role in making those new technologies come to bear. >> And I think it's amazing to see some of the investments in some of the smaller cities. So a few years ago, the Department of Transportation put out a challenge, a smart city challenge, and selected a city to actually be the incubator. But that created all these other cities, from Austin to Columbus to Ohio to you name it, to almost have these PMOs or these centers of excellence to create smart cities, and we talked about the ecosystem at the beginning of the conversation, and it's really enabling these cities to bring in maybe big ideas that weren't able to be brought in before. You know, the Cloud and the technologies we have are really leveling the playing field and giving access to maybe companies that didn't have that kind of compute power before, and that's what we're seeing with the smart cities initiatives, is it's not so expensive anymore, and you can bring in some really brilliant ideas of a small business that is maybe a three person shop that could actually transform. But I think we do need to fix the infrastructure, and we've talked about this as a nation for a while, and we continue to invest in our infrastructure to really enable smart cities. >> We've been talking about these smart cars and how they are going to serve as our personal assistants of the future, but what about safety, too? As an innovative USP? In the sense of, here we are using data to make these cars smarter, more connected, and also safer. >> Right, yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of debates right now on safe the autonomous vehicle and we're learning more as we go along that, I think as a couple use cases that I've seen is, you can sign up for apps to become a smarter driver, right? You see, you get your score, right, with my vehicle I get a report card every month to say how I've actually been doing, and as a parent, I can see how my kids are driving and all that, but I think at the end of the year, and it's kind of, I'll be bold here a little bit, we really don't remember the last time there was a major commercial airline crash in the United States. It makes the six o'clock news. By the time I retire, I make a bold prediction, I can be bold here, that a major car accident in the country, now I might be in a nursing home, could make the evening news. 'Cause we could get to that level of safety in the future, okay? >> Meaning, car accidents are so infrequent-- >> So rare. >> Could be so infrequent, rare, right. Now, I'm not saying it's going to happen near turn, I do have a prediction that if, what we're trying to design today, enables that for the future, I think it's pretty proud to be a part of that, right? Again, I think it's, years down the road, I might be at Shady Pines retirement community at that point, but I really, I mean, you think about how we've been able to do the aviation industry and make it safer, even with the challenges around that, I think in the future we could have that for safety in vehicles in my lifetime. >> I totally agree, and I think that's a big promise of autonomous vehicles, that's what so many people are excited about, you know, traffic accidents are one of the leading causes of death in our country, so to be able to address that through technology, I think, is an exciting promise. We see some of that even today, with all the technology that's being built into the vehicle, there are high standards for minimizing driver distraction, and just imagine that future where, you no longer have to worry about driver distraction. And now our relationship with the vehicle is one where we sit back, we live our lives, you know, there's a statistic that we estimate people will get back 4.5 years of their life that they're not spending behind the wheel locked on the road. You know, those types of things are really exciting to think about. >> Somebody out there will probably correct me on the numbers, but I think 39,000 fatality deaths in the United States was reported by Nets, I think that's the number, but I know that the number of distracted driving is going up, and that's a problem. I mean, people are using their phone, and it's not only phone, it's drinking, it's distracted driving, so anyway-- >> And distracted pedestrians, that's the thing, walking around Boston, everyone's just-- >> That's right, walking around here, you see people on their phone, absolutely. And I think that we are on a, it's amazing to see the changes that have happened around this the last couple years, and I think it's just opened new opportunities for companies that could never have really played in this space, are making a change for us. >> So one of the stories I love to hear about is how these kind of connected car and data capabilities are enabling us to use the infrastructure we've got today better. I mean, we'd all love to jump in a flying taxi and zoom over traffic, et cetera, but there's some concepts like smart carpool lanes, things like that, maybe you can talk a little bit about those and kind of how new business models are being allowed by that. >> Sure, yeah. So metering is one way, where it becomes a smart infrastructure, where you understand the traffic patterns, and it'd be HOV or you pay for it, so you can make the decision if you want to spend $30 to try to get into the city, or be stuck in traffic and take you an hour. And so it's interesting, with the smart infrastructure that's actually occurring, within cities right now that changes on how people will use metered lanes, and that's one thing we're seeing today. But there's also integrations with apps that we use every day to help us give us better insights, obviously, that we all use, to be able to have traffic, but it's the integration with that, imagine being able to have an application integrated with emergency management. So, you know, today people are hitting an app cause waves as a cop on the side of the road, well, we have customers, one customer particular, that wants to make sure that's integrated in a smart way, you know, that if a police car is on the side of the road, how is that really feeding the larger infrastructure? So, yes, there's a whole piece on metering and smart infrastructure, but I think that some of these other businesses are finding ways to integrate things like emergency management and some other pieces to really help reduce traffic flow and make it easier. >> Parking is another great example. >> Parking. >> There are a number of startups out there that have created technologies to help map open parking spaces, so how do you feed that data to the end user to help them make smarter decisions. I think there's another data point, we spend about 30% of our time in our vehicle, is spent just looking for parking. Right, so, how can we help to drive those things down, how can we help make it more efficient to find a parking spot, to even transact for that parking spot, and you might come to a situation where, again, when there's peak traffic, are we bidding for a parking spot? And will a parking spot go to the highest bidder? So these are all opportunities that technology really enables, when we connect the vehicle and are able to feed in that type of data around parking, infrastructure, roadway usage, et cetera. >> Well, Zafar and Jon, this has been a really cool conversation, you have great jobs. It's really neat, re-imagining mobility, yes. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein, that wraps up our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit for theCUBE, thank you so much, and we'll catch you next time.

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering AWS executive. Something brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of the ex Censure Executive Summit here at AWS. Reinvent I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Satya Adric, Carl Adder Gala. Sorry, He is the VP single family technology at Fannie Mae. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Satya >>glad to be here. >>And we have Dave Baldwin, VP Architecture, Cloud Engineering at Fannie Mae. Thank you so much for coming on the show D thanks >>for having us. >>So we're talking today about transforming the mortgage industry through through the cloud. Fannie Mae is obviously a foundational part of the US home mortgage industry, and it's been around for a long time. But at a time right now, where there is just so much tremendous change going on in the industry, particularly with the emergence of fintech and other push button mortgage providers, talk a little bit about the last 3 to 5 years. In terms of the changes, you've seen two to the business. You want to start? >>Yeah, I will. So So when we look at the industry changes. What Fannie Mae does is mostly in the secondary market, so our core business hasn't changed from the point of taking the lone synchronizing and selling. However, in the mortgage industry, when we talk about the bar or experience and then the lenders how they have improved the experience across the board, I think is it has been a huge shift right three years ago. The discussion has bean always about Hey, can we do more reliably? Can we do more faster? Right? Those were the conversations, but now the expectations off our lenders and bottles have significantly increased. Right now, they're talking about user experience. How can we meet our bar or where they are, Right. So the lenders have got a lot of expectations on us in terms of how do you feel? Feel that that is the first biggest change in the realm off several of these, right? The 2nd 1 ese, the data has become the currency now, right? It has significantly improved our posture around finding about, um, their assets that income, their employment. Right. So you guys may have seen a lot off David surgeon. It is a product that we have launched in that well, so data revolution has been a big change. And then how we're utilizing that to serve Margaret's industry, our lenders and borrowers, thereby we also reduce the risk within the industry. Right? So those two have bean huge changes. Then there is a technology revolution in terms off AP eyes, Microsurgery says. How do I plug and play? How do we reduce my cost when I'm locking a bottle or two alone? Right. And these are the things that are lenders have bean pushing us on right? Reduced the cycle from somebody coming to the application to taking a loan, closing alone and delivering to Fannie Mae. Shrink the timeline and in doing it, reduce our costs. Right? So these are being like more and more expectations Have bean really set from the border for a few from the lender point of view on Fanny me and all our innovation. Our transformation is all about meeting them and also setting standard for them. What is great in this industry and that's that's what has been going on in the last 3 to 5 years. >>Yes, and that you just laid out a tremendous number of trends and all this disruptive change when you were trying to meet these new expectations from your lenders and your borrowers. Dave. What? What are the in making this journey to, from to to say, I'm sorry from to the Cloud, How are you thinking about these challenges ahead at a time where the user experience is so important? Data is currency and this technology revolution, >>well, it's a big change and, you know, and it's a change across people, process and technology. So if you think about it, what we've done is we've started to trade a new operating model, which really is a lot more engaging, and and it requires an uptick, a scale and really ah, a new way of working right. We've even gone as far as to introduce lean management in a tools and processes. But if you think about it, the people definitely have to change. If you think about it from a process point of view, you're you're really looking at reimagining the way some of the mortgage industry works right, because there's a lot of demand for it. At the end of the day, the customer expectations and especially If you go all the way to the borrower, the customer expectations is very different. You know, they're very they they don't understand unnecessarily why they would have to fill out all this paperwork, right? When don't you already have the information? And to sati is point about data. That's why it's so important to get that data together. Because if we can harness it right, then we can truly start to re imagine these processes and make it so much easier for a borrower nor a lender to work together and eventually work with us. So and then finally, you know, from a tech point of view with the introduction of the cloud, you know, that new foundational sort of technology that really gives you something to pivot off, you can really you can really start to take advantage of the micro service architectures and the new technical capabilities that can help make this really right. And so that's That's generally how we look at our digital transformation and and as you start to think about prioritization, how do I move those? How do I think about the applications that are going to change and how they're gonna neither either Transformer moved to the cloud. You really start to think of you know what business value and I'm trying to achieve 1st 2nd 3rd right? And then what applications won't make it, You know, they're gonna be completely redone. And what applications? Frankly, we're gonna have to move along with it to manage some of the dependencies we're going. >>So I think one more point I wanted and Rebecca is that when we look at this B to B businesses, they're very tightly integrated, right? Our companies have been integrated when we are extending out information explained, extending the responses in the past. Anybody talks about experience, right? It is about Hey, there will be there are technological glitches, but you don't want to impact big. That's used to be the norm. Not anymore. I think when we look at now one of the top customer slate, if you blink from the infrastructure layer point of view, there is business loss. People are not just looking for resiliency anymore. People are looking for fault tolerance, especially when it comes to the top to your customers. Right. So I think we can see the underpinning off cloud and also how we architect our applications to meet that kind of need. It's not just about being resilient anymore. Gotta be. You cannot lose a transaction. But I think those things have bean more and more that we're hearing from our customer base, and we feel like the cloud journey is going to be underpinning for these types of expectations from our customers. >>So how do you work with partners like Accenture in AWS? When you embark on this journey and think through the your business imperatives and think through your strategy, >>I think when when we think about our partnership's. First of all, there are a lot of partners that we have and that we've had for years, as we as we really not only do digital transformation, but you got to run the business, too, while you're doing this transformation. And so you know, when you think about it, the way the wake centers worked with us is you know they number one have helped us with a cloud strategy. So that's a very hard thing to Dio because you think about all the different personalities in your organization and all the people that you have to bring together. You know what Accenture helped us with. It is to really level, said everyone and get everybody on the same page in terms of, you know, where we want to go on how we wanna head on this journey. The second thing that they helped us with was really the program management. So that's a huge undertaking to write and given the fact that it's very different and these are new things that we're doing in our firm. It's good to have that external expertise that that sort of done it with other companies and they can bring that to bear with eight of us. You know, eight of us is is one of one of the major providers that we're using. Thio post a lot of our business applications, and if you think about that there, you know we're taking advantage of their technology. We're leveraging some of their pro serve professional service is thio, help us get it right and help us sort of not only with the implementation, but in some cases the governance and control frameworks that are highly regulated. Organization like ours needs So >>and I think if you think about this from the scale point of view, right? Everybody knows there is war for talent, right? We use our partners in terms of how can we scale these things that are new operating models? New technological? Because there is a change curl in bringing up the entire employees based without extent, These guys can be catalyst. In addition to that, they can be scaled provided us, right. I think that's how we can I use these, But it is action generator B s. >>This morning during Andy Jassy fireside chat, he talked a lot about the importance of innovation and experimentation and trying different things. How What's the experience of innovation at Fannie Mae? How do you innovate with partners or just thinking about all of the changed expectations? How do you make sure you are trying to solve the right problems? Describe your process creative process >>again, I think, um, when we I think about this innovation process and how we do water in Fannie Mae right three years ago, it is about Hey, how do we get our employee base to think about the possibilities right on Veran bunch of hackathons innovation days so that you get excitement from the teams, but in the last one and 1/2 year. It's more about innovation that can reap benefits, right? So we call it as focused innovation. We have, ah, clear cut Enterprise Innovation team. And they're on some of these innovation days and whatever have you within the within the firm so that you get the ideas and we have a process called pitch. So all these ideas feeding to lack of a better time a funnel where we have this enterprise innovation groups actually scan through the I. D. S and then can identify what things we can use and where we want to put our innovation investments. Right. So there is, ah, set off funnel requirements and gates we go through to identify Hey, this is where we want to do. And how we do is that Fanny Me is a lot more design thinking shop, right? So customer is at the center of everything. So anything we do, we will have some sort of research first, right with the customers and then how that might push the needle such that it can reach different boundaries through innovation. Right? So our processes cultivated ideas from inside. Also, look at what is happening with the trends. We have a strong strategy group. They're gonna look at this and our innovation team is always on the hunt for Hey, what is happening in industry in the cutting edge, How do you bring these three dimensions and then come up with a bunch of ideas? And then we have a funnel process where we identified what moves? What's this? What stays? Because there are other things that are at play. Is this innovation ready for the market? Now? Does it have to wait that sort of There are so many dimensions that going to that. But we have a structure process, and we have AH, dedicated team who can manage is that yet uses the creativity of the employees to be able to participate in animation. I mean, that's how we have a wall this process from. Think of the possibilities, too focused innovation. >>I think there's one extra point as well, like when it comes to technology side of that, it's it's creating a safe place for people to experiment, right, So we have a sandbox, the environment that we've created, an Amazon there in eight of us, and what we're doing is we're actually releasing some of the controls. I mean, obviously there's security and compliance, but released some of the controls and and just put a few guard rails in place so that people can experiment safely and not impact our firm, you know, in a very negative way. So >>talk about your employees and how they received this, this major transformation, and how are you receiving feedback in terms of their productivity in their engagement with the process? Dave. >>So you know, I would say this. There are lots of different types of employees, right? And like I said earlier, we also have as we're building the new, we also have to continue to support what we're running. So So what we've done is we've actually rolled out on South. We'll talk about it more detail because his team rolled it out. But, you know, but we have rolled out some training. You know, we've created a change management process, an organization right. Working with our human resource is so that we can up left, you know, sort of skills. And that's what I think. What's important is you're not going to be able to find the people out there to do everything that you need to do right. What's really important is creating those opportunities to carry the people that you have in your organization along with you for the journey as they learn you benefit right as an organization. So but salty should talk about some >>of the training. Yeah, so I take your question in two parts one. Is that how the employee base is taking the message of this district transformation or don't have right again? We have a compelling vision and mission like people that fanny man, they what? They take pride in fulfilling the mission. That's that's the 1st 1 along the way, when we crafted our message around why we're doing this. That is a lot more compelling. It is meaningful for our customers, our employees, right? So I think the messaging has been very important. Then, when you look at the things that we're trying to do, our cutting edge right from the employee point, if you it is a lot of excitement, because that keeps them at the cutting edge of what is happening in the world that makes them more marketable, right? Naturally, people are excited about it, but like any transformation, right? There will be camps off who will come across the change car up front like they're catalyst. Right? And then there are some in the middle and summer can a lagging right? But when we look at the entire gambit off the employee base, majority off them are. Hey, we are on board with this. We want to do it. We want to learn, How do we get there? And the company has done several different things to help the employees through this kind of knowledge cover I would call rather than the change career. We have a whole bunch of training plans that we have laid out. People have been wall until early taking. I mean, maybe a classroom training, maybe a self, sir. Uh, type off, download this particular module and then kind of read upon it and then also provide them to practice them with the sandbox. Right? So all these things have been done. I think one challenge we had actually facing now is that we can train them up pretty easily if we haven't put them in a place to practice it. Then it kind of fades away. So we're now kind of trying to see. Okay, let's identify groups off people. Give them a tool where they can assess for them their own self. What I wanted to learn such that I can become that and then be eligible for doing that right so that now they learn. And then they're put in a role on a project that they can actually practice on. So we are in that posture of that right now. So I think, but employee base is really excited about this, >>So I want to. I want to end where we started where Sati described the myriad changes that are taking place in your industry and getting back to your your cause, which is helping the customer buy a home, get it, get it, get it more easily, qualify for a loan. Can you think about the customer experience of the home buying process 3 to 5 10 years from now? And how it will be different as Fannie Mae embarks on this on this cloud journey. Do you want to start David? Just think. Look into your crystal ball >>and it's great. I wish I had a crystal ball. That would be great, but but you know. Look, we're making significant advancements, you know, working, working with our customers, taking that customer first mentality. And, ah, and and, you know, the mortgage industry itself is right for a change. I mean, you know, and and we're in a good position to really help and drive a lot of that. So my expectation, if I were to look out, I would expect to see a world where you know that borrower experience gets a lot better. I mean, one of the things we've learned to our research is that you know what is it? 40% of people actually cry as they're going through the mortgage experience, >>and they're not tears of joy. No, it's actually, you >>know, tougher to get into a tougher to think through the mortgage process, you know, and really take that big leap than it is to, you know, our Cielo tells us all the time than it is to actually apply for college. It z, it's often on bigger life event our goal. How do we make that simpler? How do we make people have a much more pleasant experience? Right? Waken do that with our data. We can make sure that they don't have to fill out those amazing forms. Heck, find the information. Sometimes they don't have it. You know, we're in a better position, right? You know, really? Get Teoh. You know, I can't promise a single click experience, but we're all gonna try to aspire to that, because that's what the customers out there with their cell phones and their technology or used to right. So we've got to get at least somewhere close to being there. >>So in the bottle, it expedient sight. I think we can even now see one tap market. How do we get them right? I think that's probably not too far. It's probably within two or three years. That's if I were to think about that. But if you want to think about 5 to 6 years, 10 years, if I am an individual driving by a home and then take your phone and say, Hey, can I buy this home? That should be able to tell you this is your lender and then go. That's right. And again from Fannie Mae, a point if you re help the lenders and they helped the borrowers threat. So through this transformation, what we're doing is that set up an engine that can be nimble, that can move fast. That runs with the low investment so that if we were to pivot, do things testing, learn and then change your game. We are fully in the position to be able to do that, right So and however fast, fast, you can experiment, those many different ideas will come out, and then some of them will reap fruit. And all of these for two things, like for our customers. How do we benefit our company, Fannie Mae? And how do we move the needle in industry? I think these are the three things that we want to achieve through this transformation. And we're building an engine to be able to do those types of things. I wish I could say this is one thing we would do. That's not what we're trying to do. Being a position where we can move quickly, we can lead industry. We can set the standard and then make good for the good for the American house. So that's all stories. >>Exciting times. Thank you so much. Both for coming on the Cube. Satti on Dave. Thank you. I'm Rebecca night. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Live coverage of the Ex Censure Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.

>>Bach from Las Vegas. It's the Q covered AWS executive summit brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of the Excenture executive summit here at AWS. Reinvent from Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by two guests for this segment. We have Greg sly, he is the SVP platform and infrastructure at Verizon. Thank you so much for coming on Greg. Thank you. Happy to be here and almost sad. K he is the managing director, Accenture global network services. Thank you so much. I'm all so Greg, I want to start with you wanting, everyone knows Verizon, it's a household brand. Tell our viewers a little bit just about how big you are, what countries you're in your reach. >>Okay. Well we're a global company. There's about 135 ish thousand employees in the company. The brands and they're, you know, they include Yahoo and AOL and HuffPost and riot and others. So we have a much more global reach with some of those brands overseas for is obviously very well known in the U S and overseas as well. And that's really where our big plays are. Now. We're big in Asia as well with our eCommerce sites and stuff. So it's, it's, it's global and it's everywhere. So, >>so give our viewers an overview of this current state of where you are in your journey to the cloud, the cloud effication of Verizon. >>Sure. So the last probably two years we've really put a lot of focus into moving out of our data centers and into the cloud. We focused primarily on workloads that are right for the cloud because we as during this journey we went, there's obviously huge data lakes and huge amounts of data equipped over two exabytes of data. And trying to move that to the cloud is obviously takes some time. But a lot of our front end apps from anything from, you know, where your order, your phone or where you order services to, whether you're on Yahoo fantasy sports or on finance page, those, those things tend to work well in the cloud and they're built for the cloud for very bursty type workflows. So we spend a lot of time moving a lot of our applications plus all the new Greenfield applications up into the cloud. So we're, we're considerable way down the path now on that. We're now getting to the tail end with these kind of massive data sets on what's our next step for those. And that's what we're working on now. >>Um, well I want to bring you into this conversation a little. What, what are you seeing right now across cross industry, the current state of deployments? >>Yeah, so I mean, just building on what Greg said it's almost a third wave of cloudification that we see now. So you know that we had the desegregation of hardware and software and most operators started to go globally towards cloud and then they sort of had the second way, which was really the own private cloud infrastructures. And now because we are here, you can see clearly the amount of public cloud infrastructure that's starting to come in and become relevant to this deployment. So it's almost a third wave where I see a lot of our clients globally looking at hybrid cloud type models for. And >>that really accelerates that cloudification journey because now you see a lot of workloads moving to a hybrid cloud environment. Just by the size of the ecosystem of suppliers and partners that are involved. We give you a sense of how accelerated this has become. I mean, the last three years I've seen in this event doubling of the number of partners who are just moving their workloads, whether it's compute, storage network to a hybrid cloud in one. So that acceleration has started and we expect in the next two to three years this will become mainstream. That I'm always right. We're been down that exact same journey where we've, we've done a lot of things up into the cloud like in AWS now, but we've also done a private cloud which enabled us as more like a development or a on-prem tool that allowed us to build, learn, and take applications that were not really ready for the cloud, are native for the cloud, build them on prem, wherever, a little bit more freedom to do some things and then learn and then move them up to the public cloud. So we've been down that exact same journey. >>So I also want to ask about a buzzword here, five G five G the arrival of five G. what it means to your industry and whether or not being in the cloud is ness is a necessary prerequisite to really capture all the benefits. >>I'm going to start on me. Sure, go ahead. No, I was just saying if you look at 5g, the reason it's so fundamentally different from previous generations is because 5g opens up a bunch of use cases that traditional TG for genetics did not and the size and skin of those use cases including like billions of devices and having really cool use cases like gaming and health and automotive and robotics in 10 places a huge burden on an infrastructure, which means cloudification does become a massive requisite. The level of skill size devices, latency profiles is something you only get when you are on a cloud infrastructure. So Greg, I agree 100% and this is going to drive new innovation that we've never seen before as we obviously being Verizon. 5g is one of our big, big bats. Obviously. That's one of the things that Andy and Hans talked about yesterday at the announcement here at reinvent and where we're seeing now with clarification, it's, it's literally I think one of the cornerstones of how it's going to work because we're going to have to put so much out to the far edge and out into as close to the customers as we can. >>The only way you're going to do that is through the cloud and using the cloud services like outpost and other services to push that out close to the, to our customers. So 5g and cloud are synonymous. They're going to go hand in hand. It's the only way it's going to work. And when, if I just save one last thing on what Greg said, cloudification was happening anyways and it was a great efficiency driver for all organizations. Five G's almost come in and lit a match and said, here's a lot of revenue opportunities that you can get on top and that has just accelerated >>the whole thing with distribution of five G and cloud. So that that's going to happen. >>Yeah, I think we're really only seeing the beginning. It's so early on in 5g and the journey to the cloud that I think next year's reinvent and the year after that I think we're going to look back and say this was really just the very beginning of what we're learning, what this technology can do for the world. >>I want to ask about innovation and this is something that Andy Jassy talked about in his fireside chat this morning is how AWS maintains its startup mentality even though it is of course a enormous company. How does, how do you think about innovation and approach innovation at Verizon? How do you make sure you are continuing to experiment and push boundaries even though you are a large and complex organization yourself? >>It's a good question. That's something we are always pushing. I think it starts from the top with Hans, he's, he's made one of his key pillars of innovation, of what we have to drive, listening to our customers and building on what they need, but we've spent a lot of time on redefining how we work to adapt to the cloud. So the days of in the past of, you know, we'll do one release every quarter, it's now how many releases a day can you do? And the only way you can do that innovation through bucket testing, through AB testing is literally embracing the cloud and doing small tests here and there on stuff. So it's really now learning from the internet startups, trying to keep that startup mentality in a company the size that's 137,000 employees. But it's building that culture and I think Hans has been a great leader to really drive that, that different way of working. So, >>um, well we've seen a dizzying number of announcements from AWS, new products and new services that are coming out. What are, what is most caught your attention and how are you thinking about how to help clients capture the benefits of what AWS is offering? >>You know, the thing that struck me yesterday when I was looking at the keynote was this is probably the first time there is a recognition in the industry that it's an ecosystem play. And what I mean by that is a lot of the challenges that were seen in the last couple of years around getting 5g mainstream, getting all these things in the market was who does it, who supports them and this whole ecosystem and yesterday's announcement where you know Andy enhance and other carriers like water, phone and so on are coming in and saying, you know what? Let's do this together. Let's collaborate. To me that really hit the Mark because as you start building specific use cases to make this real for a consumer like us, you will see that an ecosystem plays the only way to make this a reality. And that's what really struck me. If you look at Waveland, if you look at local zones, all the announcements that were done yesterday, all of them require app development communities, escalates session partnerships. It requires hardware partnerships, services firms. It requires of omic Accenture to come in and do this secret sauce. So there's lot of things that have to >>be done there. And I believe that's what really caught my eye, that it's an ecosystem. Now you have the amount of collaboration going forward. Is going to be unprecedented because no one company is going to be able to do all of it. >>So how do we, you're both technology veterans. I mean you're just babes. You're, you're just teenagers of course. But thinking about how different it is today versus when you were just beginning your careers in terms of, I mean we have this idea of this cutthroat competitive world of technology, but as you said, there is, these companies need each other. I mean they're there, they're competing of course, but they also desperately need each other to make sure their business models are successful. So can you just describe this landscape for, for our viewers in terms of what you've seen as changes and whether or not these changes are for the good? >>Well, starting in the mainframe days, which is where I started and then kind of went wound, don't, you know, windows NT and the distributed compute, you're right, it was very do it ourselves. We're the only ones that could do it. You have to hide everything from all your competitors because we're providing a solution and nobody sees anybody else a secret sauce. And obviously protecting IP was key. Now we've seen open source take a much broader stroke across the canvas and we've also now everyone's got what are we best at and how do we use that rather than trying to be all things to everybody and building partnerships. So you're right, we have partnerships with company that we compete with, but we also have relationships. We need to work together to make this happen. So it is completely different from what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago on how you're collaborating on one part of a company who should come. >>Competing is one area, but you're actually collaborating to build a product to go to market together at another one. So it's really interesting. I mean the market forces have changed dramatically. I mean, I remember when I was in my telecom operator days with BT, we used to as great selling or love technology, we used to start in the labs and in the labs we use engineering was a sort of bread and butter. And then this focus on customer centricity in the last couple of years around so much choice, so much availability of solutions in the market. And as Greg said, the collaboration is a must do now. And that's why that focus changed for us. And I see now this customer centricity becoming so important that what does the end user really want? And then that comes with it and realization that says, okay, I am not able to provide this by myself, but I do know how to solve for it. >>And that's when you have to bring in others who can create a solution. You're absolutely right because you know, 10 years ago, 1520 years ago, technology was still so new. Most people weren't comfortable yet and really knew what it could do or what they wanted. And it was a room full of architects designing what it was going to be. Now it's a room full of customers telling you what they want and going out. So it's completely changed now where we'll build what the customer, what we think the customer needs. Now we're building what the customer tells us they want. So it's been a one 80 >>so Greg, I know before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about how you'd been to this conference years ago and now just the growth that it has experienced has really shocked your, your sphere system. Um, what kinds of conversations are you having? What are the messages that you're hearing, a particular letter that are particularly resonant to you right now? This idea of the fourth industrial revolution. Do you buy it? >>I absolutely buy it and it's not just drinking the Koolaid because I work at Verizon. It's actually seeing what's possible in health. What's possible in gaming, automotive industry. Like you were saying at the beginning, it's one thing that struck me in Pedder was through the conversation we were having of how many people I've met here and when I was walking through the expo downstairs I was like, Oh, we have a relationship with them now. We have relationship with them. There's like half the floor down there that we have some sort of relationship with that were other customer or a partner or providing services to that. It's, it's, it's changed where before you'd have a booth and you're like, how many people can we get over there? Now it's like how do we get a booth with our partners that we can talk about a common solution that we're providing back? >>So it's, it's been amazing from like it reinvent four or five years ago it was like one hotel was still pretty full up to like four or five hotels now with with 65,000 people or something. It's, it's amazing. But, but the conversations before too used to be, we can only talk if we go into a private room over here. It's now that there's so many people and so many conversations and they're like, Oh let me pull them all in. Let me pull Rebecca cause we're all talking about the same thing now. So it's become more open. There's still sure there's IP and things we have to protect and we all have our company strategies, but there's now there's so much collaboration, there's a lot more conversations going on now. I mean the focus will now move to how do we operationalize this industrial revolution because that's where a lot of engineering horsepower, a lot of scaling would have to happen in terms of, it would be great to launch health as a service or gaming as a service and all of these things. >>But you know when things go wrong, which Deville in the early years of adoption, somebody is going to have to take the call, somebody is going to have to manage the customers. Somebody who's going to have to, because that's where the test would happen in terms of okay this is going to stick and this is going to work. So to me the next two to three years of this event will be around how do I operationalize and scale what we've now started? Cause I think that's where the rubber is going to hit the road. And I think even at Accenture we see this with all our work. It's moving more and more towards how do I monetize the use cases, how do I now build on it? How do I implement at scale? So that's, that's really what I see happening >>coming up. We were, we're on, we're on the cusp of 2020 there's so many new emerging technologies and of course the old technologies which are still pretty new machine learning, AI, IOT. What are some of the exciting trends that you're looking at coming in next year and the next three to five years in terms of your business and an industry wide? Two ML? >>Well for me there's obviously the stuff that we're talking about with five G and waving, but one that really struck me at this conference was how we're going to be treating data differently or I should say storage of data differently. Where before it was like buy huge storage devices and you'd have petabytes and petabytes or exabytes of data in a data somewhere, data centers somewhere. It's now distributed out to the far edge. It's, it's going to be much more in the cloud, much more dispersed. Obviously that's going to bring challenges around, you know, with, with GDPR, with, with, you know, the, the California protection act, all of those that are coming as well of how we're going to deal with that. So absolutely the 5g and the announcements went on yesterday. But in my slice of the world, looking at how are we going to manage, transform, handle, distribute data and how we're going to protect user's privacy through all of that is really interesting. And I think a new field that we're, it's just changing so rapidly day to day >>and one that's really part of our national conversation too in terms of privacy and security. >>Well I think to me the key trend would be adjacencies. And what I mean by that is we've always been a little bit siloed traditionally in terms of, you know, there is a telco industry solution and then there is a mining solution and then there is a automotive solution, right? And the technology is blurring these lines. Now, you know, like as Greg said, I can have a intelligent 5g conversation with a gentleman, car manufacturing company that I wouldn't have dreamed of having a couple of years ago. So that trend is set to accelerate because 5g edge compute, all of these things are going to be more and more applicable to adjacent industries. And this is why I always believe the telecom sector has a pivotal role, almost a orchestrator role that says as these industries look for solutions we have those, we just haven't adapted and customized are social. That I think would be a big trend. I see other industries are going to cash in on what we've done. >>I'm all, Greg, thank you so much for coming on the cube. A really fascinating conversation. Oh, pleasure. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Coming up in just a little bit.

>>Bach from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering KWS executive sub brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executives summit here in Las Vegas, part of AWS reinvent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by two guests for this segment. We have Mamadou BA. He is the senior director of cloud technology at Anthem. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Mamadou and Sean mulch and Donnie, he is AWS security lead at Accenture. Thank you so much Sean. Thank you for having us. Rebecca, glad to be with you. So let's start with you mama. Do tell our viewers a little bit about Anthem, the business. >>Sure. So Anthem is a healthcare company. We're serving around 40 million members and we're committed to simplifying healthcare and make it more accessible and affordable for people. >>So committed to simplifying healthcare, which is, I'm imagining the driving force for your cloud journey, but, but what were some of the other factors that led you to the cloud? It's >>really, we want to make healthcare more accessible for people and more affordable. We want to meet our consumers where they are and meet them using mediums that they want us to use. So it's going through all the data we have. We have 40 million members who serving today looking at the data and find the ways to build customized and personalized experiences to meet them where they are and how they want to be met and also improve to health care for them. >>So what kinds of personalized customized experiences are you talking about and what does the cloud enable? >>So really when you look at, we have a variety of members, young children to adults and people who are Medicare and Medicaid, they have various needs. When you look at people's medical needs, you look at their financial needs, their social needs. What works for me might not work for your, might not work for him. So it's understanding the person as a whole and meeting them where they want to be a mentor really. >>So Sean, how does does, does Accenture, what does Accenture bring to this partnership? How are you helping Anthem realize its goals? >>Sure. So, I mean, I would say this happens under the guise of cloud and at Anthem broadly as well. Right? So Accenture, Anthem is, has Accenture is one of its largest partners. We're proud to be one of, have Anthem is one of our largest clients of course, and all the way from a lot of the outsourcing operations from the business operations side providing cost-effective business operations for addressing all those millions of subscribers that they have to of course helping them innovate both within cloud, within a lot of their other technology needs on premise from a lot of, they're from a lot of like transformations in technology. That's, I would say that covers the gamut specifically within, I'd say where we're helping both strategically and operationally on a strategic front. This includes mapping some of the business needs to um, how to various cloud technologies, uh, where it's a multicloud and a hybrid cloud approach, but also specifically on AWS and, and also about how we can help empower Anthem to realize its cloud journey and potential there with their workforce. >>We, their cloud technology organization and how we empower that movement going forward. Uh, there are a number of other drivers on the operational side and that includes of course, minimizing any future technical debt. Um, and that's, that's a big journey of course, or a big pattern. I would say that that is prevalent across multiple clients, but also realizing comprehensive monitoring, save preventive guardrails for services that then allows developers to have the freedom to experiment, to enable rapid prototyping. And also of course, uh, transparent, uh, operations from a cost perspective. So these would be a couple of ways. >>So mama, do you talk about the ways in which you are innovating in this cloud space? What are, what are some of the most exciting projects that you're working on? Right. So >>we have a, a large number of projects, but NTM as a whole, since we're serving 40 plus million members, we have thousands of applications, petabytes of data. So some of the projects we're working on today, we have a landing zone on AWS and we have some applications in AWS. What we need to meet our application teams. Also internally, we need to help them focus on the business drivers focused on healthcare. So we're working on providing them a nimble platform so they're not worried about day to day it and providing them a self service catalog. And we understand that there's a lot of complexity in healthcare or when you have all this data you need to make sure it's secure. There's a lot of regulatory challenges, so we don't want our application teams to have to deal with all those things. So it's really putting together, identifying the services, AI services, machine learning services, container and serverless, and building a framework for them to have access to all those services that are preapproved and make those self-service for the application teams. >>So that's our service catalog project and allowed them to use all that in an AWS account where they're self sufficient. So we were working closely with Accenture on their end. What we found was while the technology is very valuable, the people and process aspect of it, it's we have to get alignment across all the internal divisions, working closely and bringing our security teams on the table, our data teams, our operation teams, and working together to say how can we empower our developers internally to focus on business deliverables? So building that catalog, provide them a reference, a provider for reference architecture or reference implementation, identifying skills gaps and recognizing them, working with HR to hire new talent and reskill our existing talent, but also leveraging our partners to bring in that talent and give us various ways of looking at the same problem. >>So I saw you Shawn, nodding along with what a lot of mama do was talking about in terms of the alignment. Can you talk about that challenge and how you work with clients to make sure that you are bringing people along? Because the people and the processes are the most important part, but they're often the hardest part too. >>They're are definitely the hardest part. And of course we, I mean behind every grade success story, there's so many challenges, right? And, and one of the things we do of course is not just try to bring our best people that are technically sharp for Anthem, but that understand the client that understand the business needs. For example, it's not just about technology, but it's also about how it's applied to support certain business operations like mergers and acquisitions or as a strategy grows from one cloud to multi-cloud. So it's about bringing those folks that help align or understand those goals organizationally and how they're realized technically. In addition to that, I would say it's also bonding very, very, very closely with leadership, with architects, with operations personnel and the developers and engineers at Anthem to work side by side and realizing many of these goals or many of our shared goals and Anthem's overall vision. And >>the good thing there is really the cloud is aligned with the corporate strategy. So there's a lot of leadership alignment. And what we found is really trying to find that balance between autonomy and alignment. One, the teams to be autonomous. We're providing them with self-service, want them to innovate and get to market quickly, but we also want them to be aligned with the company and enterprise best practices and regulatory standards, so it's a fine balance, but I think we're making great progress with our partners. The processes are being reevaluated. Every process we were saying because we've done it this way for all these years and we were successful at doing it, doesn't mean that that's the way forward. We want to bring everyone together and think of a process holistically, not this is my team, I'm doing this and passing it to the next team. It's bring your best people and let's solve the problem together. >>Right. At the same time, I would say it's not siloed again between say architecture, operations and security either before or after. It's about bringing, I would say these, these three legs of that stool together or are together throughout the process and I think that's something we've done as well. One of the things we've done is establish a tiger team essentially right for to, to power through some of our challenges as we build out a new landing zone. As we move towards implementing some of these self capabilities and plan for migration of I would say a hundreds or potentially thousands of applications to the cloud. It's about getting security to shape policy, getting buy in from there as well. Ensuring that when design decisions are made from an architecture perspective, we take into consideration not just the operational side of Anthem but the operational arm of Accenture that supports and enables some of that work as well and how we can make that their lives easier and how we can make a, minimize any risks of the business, any disruptions, outages, et cetera, by way of good design and by getting their buy in and making sure that every internal stakeholders are, >>yeah. Yeah. Really our um, our emphasis is on quality by design, by bringing the right stakeholders, help architect it properly, and then have some process control and monitoring in place and having some key metrics that we look at. How long is it taking a developer to get an AWS account? How long does it take them to get access to a service that they need to meet? That business function letter is an AI service or a server less the application that they're trying to build. Evaluating those and then trying to improve our process >>and by keeping everyone in the loop, I mean it's this dynamic process that is that I'm sure is very complicated, but by with everyone on the same page, they then feel more engaged in the process and that they matter more, which, which also I'm sure drives productivity. Yes. >>Times w whenever you have a lot of people, sometimes there's no agreement on the decision, but you have to be at a point where when you come to an agreement, you might not have a hundred percent consensus all the time, but if 70 or 80% agree, the other people still feel included, their needs have been heard, their concerns will be addressed one way or the other, and they're willing to move forward with the group. It's not because I didn't get my way. I'm not supporting the business. They understand that and there's some trade offs. >>So I wanted to, I want to switch gears here and talk a little bit about security because health health care data represents some of the biggest security breaches of industry data. So how, how biz cloud infrastructure and your security processes and practices help help counteract that. >>Sure. So before you even get in the account do account is designed to meet all our Hampton security best practices and are based on our AWS agreement. Those best practices listed on there and working with our partners to make sure that by the time you get in an account, it's secure, you only have access to services we gave you. And for each of those services we do a full analysis on it, look at the various attack patterns. For instance, I do encryption and just ensure that the developers have a safe environment to experiment and develop. That's why we're building the self service catalog. It's a self service, but we put the services in there after we evaluated them, we feel comfortable with them. Some services, let's say some HIPAA eligible services. We want to ensure if your application is a HIPAA applicate eligible application, you, you're using those services, so having to control them process in place before you even get to account once you get it. And we have detective and preventive controls in place to alert us in case of any, anyone trying to use a service they're not supposed to use. >>Sean, I want to ask you about some research that Accenture did in 2017 the healthcare industry will be one of the top two industries to face the most digital disruption and the next three years. This was part of the technology vision survey. What, how, how do you even begin to to talk to clients through this, hold their hands through this enormously disruptive period in the healthcare industry. What's your advice and what do you think about the role of big data and analytics going forward? >>Right, absolutely. I think so. There's definitely a tremendous amount of disruption and then it's where a number of large, some of our large clients enterprises really have to go through their own transformational process, their own disruption process for the better, right. As you have a number of different start ups as you have a number of different new entrance into the field and one of the things they cloud technologies do is oftentimes it's not necessarily a first mover advantage, but it's, it's actually the lowest common denominator that if you're not using some of these services, whether it's the predictive capabilities for example, or some of the other analytics capabilities that are offered. So whether it's predict, whether it's Sage maker, et cetera, within AWS and other capabilities, these are really the new foundation and so many companies either no matter of size are actually leveraging these to build for a better experience. And one of the things we are looking at is how we can work with our clients to actually get them there as soon as possible and or use that again as the lowest common denominator and build their own differentiators bill bring to bear some of their experience throughout. Uh, I would say a years potentially decades been valuable experience products of services and actually turbocharge them for lack of a better word, >>mamma do large scale cloud transformation, innovation. This is a monumental challenge. How do you, but it's also a balancing act. How do you make sure that you are balancing the needs in adjacent areas like applications and onboarding and dev ops? How do you, >>so it's, it's really having that alignment and everyone understanding that this is a part of our corporate mission. We're trying to improve health care and reduce the cost, make it more affordable, improve people's lives. So all the teams that are leaders are coming together. Like you mentioned, we have a cloud tiger team and saying for my business unit or my application teams, these are the capabilities I need to support on AWS can do enterprise build up platform for me so I can focus on my business. So it's bringing people together, understanding where they are. Some application teams are more mature than others. Finding really ways to understand our internal customers. Also because we have many application teams and business divisions and having a process while working with, you can have application migration, we can help you migrate to the cloud, but that's not the goal. >>We want to help you understand the services you're using. It's enabling the application teams and providing them with a reference architecture or sometimes reference implementation team. We have a cloud enablement team for instance, where it's an internal consulting group where you go in and say, this is my application, helped me find the best way to move this application to cloud and the best way to improve it over time. So it's bringing everyone together and working closely with HR, the training teams, the vendor management teams, there's, it's almost everyone has to come together to scale this. If it's one team, it's easy to do it, but when you want to make it enterprise wide you have to really scale it and have the leaders aligned. Everyone contributing to it. It is all about alignment. >>It is. It is. It definitely is. Great. Yeah. Just wanted to comment earlier about the piece on security as well. Right, so we talked about, of course he talked about mama was talked about the service catalog, service introduction, so one of the things we do is as part of that alignment, getting everybody's thoughts in terms of how we see this working. Looking at that picture holistically, also looking at what is the, what is the consumer experience? Was the desired experience, is that how do we secure that? How do we make sure that it's frictionless and internally, how does that translate into all of the giving the developers freedom and having those guard but still having some guardrails in place as well as some comprehensive visibility and monitoring. There are about a good dozen services if not more, that provide different points of data metrics, alarms within AWS, but how do we do all of this at scale, at Anthem scale, and then back to the self service perspective. Not just enable security and as part of the organization to monitor, but how every part of the organization is accountable for ensuring security, be it an application team, be it part of the dev sec ops process, be at the networking teams, infrastructure teams, et cetera. So how is everybody informed and how do we bring that level of self service, not just from an application onboarding or migration perspective, but also from a security perspective. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's all about really enabling the application teams also because we can tell you you need to do these five things before you go to production, but if you don't know how to do them, you will not get to production. Instead of doing that, providing you some references, providing you have people you can talk to that can help you go through that. And everyone collaborating as let's help this application team get to production instead of we need to do these things before we approve you. Great. And they're from an alignment perspective. Again, we've gotten folks from cloud strategy, operating model and governance, architecture, um, operations, the actual network team, uh, in different parts of security. Yeah. Database of course, database, data, warehouses, et cetera. And then different parts of security, be it all the way from encryption, key management, the preventive side of things to more of the operational side as well. >>And how all of these folks come together with, if I may add some fantastic executive support on the end in front, um, across, across our board, um, to make things a reality. And I think it's been, we didn't, we didn't start with that model. We did that model out of necessity because when we started our cloud journey, we did have multiple teams taking care of their area. They did their job properly, but then there were some tickets waiting in queues. And it was when you look at the end to end process, it was slowing down the application teams. So we said, how do we help accelerate this stuff? Let's bring everyone together. Not, I did my work and I'm giving it to the next year, but let's collaborate and make sure we're doing the work as one team. >>Well, mama do. Sean, thank you so much. I've really fascinating conversation about re-imagining healthcare and how the cloud helps us do that. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit coming up in just a little bit.