>> Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE! Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Akhtar Saeed, VP Solution Delivery, Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits, and Michael Noel, Managing Director Applied Intelligence at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> I think this is going to be a fun one. We're talking about wine and spirits. >> Absolutely. (laughs) >> Akhtar, tell our viewers a little bit about Southern Glazer. >> Yeah, so Southern Glazer Wine and Spirits is a privately held company. We are in about 44 states, and we are the largest distributor of wine and spirits. >> Okay, in 44 states. What was the business problem you were trying to solve in terms of the partnership that you formed with Accenture? >> Yeah, so we started this initiative before Southern and Glazer merged. >> And that was in? >> It was 2016. So southern was already looking at how to enhance our technology, how to provide better data analytics, and how to create one source of truth. So that's what drove this and we were looking to partner with appropriate system integrator and right technology to be able to help deliver well if the company to be able to do analytics and data analysis. >> So you had two separate companies merging together and I like this idea, one source of truth. What does that mean, what did that mean for you? >> Well what it means to us is that since you have quite a few data marts out there and everybody is looking at the numbers a little differently, we spend a lot of time trying to say, hey is this right or is this right? So we want to bring all the data together saying this is what the data is and this is how we're going to standardize it, that's what we're trying to do. >> Okay, so this one source, now, Michael, in terms of that, is that a common, common issue particularly among companies that are merging would you say? >> No absolutely you have businesses that might be in the same industry but they might have different processes to try to get to the same answer, right, and the answer's never really the same. So having this concept of a clean room that allows you to take your various aspects of a business and combine that from a data point of view, a business metrics point of view and a business process point of view, this one source, helps you consolidate and streamline that so you can see that integrated view across your new business model really. >> So where do you begin? So you bring in Accenture and AWS and where do you start? >> So like you've mentioned, in 2016, Glazer and Southern Wine Spirits came together and merged, it actually accelerated process because we needed what Mike mentioned as a clean room where we could put this data and won't have to merge at data centers on day one and have the reporting, common reporting platform being available for the new SGWS and that's what we started so we said, okay what is the key performance indicators, the key metrics that we need going into day one? and that's what we want to populate the data with to begin with to make sure that information is available when the day one for merger comes through. >> Okay and so what were those indicators? >> There were several indicators, there were several business reports, people needed the supply chain, they needed to understand the data, what the inventory looks like they needed to know how we were doing across the markets. So all those indicators, that's what we put together. >> Okay, okay, and so how do you work with the client in this respect, how do you and AWS sort of help the client look at what the core business challenges are and then say okay, this is how we're going to attack this problem? >> Right, no that's a good question. I think the main thing is understanding, what does the business need? and how is the technology going to support what the business needs, right? that's first and foremost, right, and then getting alignment and understanding that is really what drives a roadmap to say here's what we're going to do, here's the order we're going to do it in and here's the value that we expect to get out of following these steps one by one and I think one thing we learned is you have to be directionally correct, you may not be exact but as long as we're making progress in the right direction, you course correct as you need to, right, based upon as the business learns new things and as the market changes and what not and that's really how we accomplish this. >> And is it a co-creative process or, how closely are you working with Accenture and AWS? >> Oh, very closely with Accenture and AWS, it's very co-creative, I mean we are really working hand-in-hand. I mean, as Mike alluded, you start certain ways a journey and you realize, gee, this may work but I have to change a little bit here and there's several time we had to change team's direction how to get there and how to approach it and to deliver value. >> Well let's talk, let's get into the nitty gritty with the architecture and components. So what did this entail, coming to this clean room, this one source of truth? >> Yeah, AWR architecture is based on AWS' platform or Accenture's AIP, Accenture Insights platform which runs on AWS and we have, what we did right from the beginning we said we're going to have a data link, we're going to have a hadoop environment where we're going to all our data there And then for analytics research we're going to use Redshift, on top of that for reporting we use Tableau, and we have a homegrown tool called Compass for reporting also that we use. So that's how we initially started, initially we were feeding data directly into it, because we needed to stand the system up relatively quickly. The advantage to us, we didn't have to deal with infrastructure, that was all set up at AWS, we just to need to make sure we load our data and make sure we make the reports available. >> Were you going to add something to that? >> Yeah I know that the concept around, because the merger is expediting this clean room which allows you to stand up an analytics as a service model, to start bringing your data, to start building out your reporting analytics quickly right, which should really speak to market to understanding their position, as an integrated company was so important. So building the Accenture Insights platform on the AWS platform, was a huge success in order to allow them to start going down that path.. >> Yeah I want to hear about some of the innovative stuff you're doing around data analytics and really let's bring it back down to earth too and say actually so this is what we could learn and see, in terms of what was selling what was not selling, what were you finding out? >> So at this point we have about 6000 users on the platform approximately. Initially we had some challenges, I'll be very frank upfront, that everything does not go smooth. That's where we then say "Okay what do I do differently?" We started with dense storage, nodes and we soon found it's not meeting our needs. Then we enhanced Tougaloo dense cluster, and they helped us by about by 70%, that it drove the speed, but the queue length was still long, with Redshift we were still not getting the performance we needed. Then we went to second generation of dense computers and clusters and we got some more leverage, but really the breakthrough came when we said "we need to really reevaluate "how we've been doing our workload management." Some of our queries were very short term report queries real quick, others were loading data that took a while. And that's the challenge we had to overcome, with the workload management we were able to create, where we were able to bump queries and send them to different directions and create that capacity. And that's what really had a breakthrough in terms of technology for us, till that time we were struggling, I'll be honest, but once we got that breakthrough, we were able to comfortably deliver what business needed from data perspective and from businesses perspective. Mike would you like to add... >> Yeah, in addition to AWS, using Redshift has really been a really important, I guess decision and solution in place here, because not only are we using it for loading massive amounts of data, but it's also being used for power users, to generate very adhoc and large queries, to be able to support other analytic type needs right? And I think Redshift has allowed us to scale quickly as we needed to based upon certain times of year, certain market conditions or whatever, Redshift has really allowed us to do that. In order to support where the business demands have really grown exponentially since we've been putting this in place. And it all starts with architecting, and we said, and delivering all around the data. And then how do you enable the capabilities, not just data as a foundation but you know real time analytics, and looking at what looking at what could be, you know, forecasting and predicting what's happening in the future, using artificial intelligence, machine learning and that's really where the platform is taking us next. >> I want to talk about that, but I want to ask you quickly about the skills challenge, because introducing a new technology, there's going to be maybe some resistance and maybe simply your workers aren't quite up to speed. So can you talk a little bit about what you experienced, and then also how you overcame it? >> Yeah, I mean we had several challenges, I mean I'll put it in two big buckets, one is just change management. Anytime you're changing technology on this many users, they're comfortable with something they know, a known commodity, here's something new, that's a challenge. And one should not ignore, we need to pay a lot of attention on how to manage change. That's one, second challenge was within the technical group itself, because we were changing technology on them also right, and we had to overcome the skill sets, we were not the company, who were using open source a lot. So we had to overcome that and say how do we train our folks, how do we get knowledge? And in that case Accenture was great partner with us, they helped us tremendously and AWS professional services, they were able to help us and we had a couple of folks from professional services, they had really helped us with our technology to help drive that change. So you have to tackle from both sides, but we're doing pretty well at this point, we have found our own place, where we can drive through this together. >> In terms of what you were talking about earlier, in terms of what is next with predictive analytics and machine learning, can you talk a little bit about the most exciting things that are coming down the pipeline in terms of Southern Glazer? >> I think that's a great question, I think there's multiple way to look at it. From a business point of view right it's, how do they gain further insights by looking at as much different data sets as possible, right, whether it be internal data, external data, how do we combine that to really understand the customers better? And looking at how they approach things from a future point of view, we've been able to predict what's going to happen in the marketplace so I think it's about looking at all the different possible datasets out there and combining that to really understand what they can do from an art of the possible point of view. >> Can you give us some examples of terms of combining data sets so you're looking at, I mean, drinking patterns or what do we have here? >> I mean you have third party data, right, and TD links and those kind of things, you pull that data in and then you have our own data, then we have data from suppliers right, so that where we combine it and say okay what is this telling me, what story is this putting together telling me? I don't think we are there all the way, we have started on the journey, right now we are at what I call the, this one source of truth and we still have some more sub-editors loading to it, but that's the vision that, how do we pull in all that information and create predictive analysis down the road and be able to see what that means and how we'll be driving? >> And so you're really in the infancy of this? >> Yes, I mean it's a journey right, some may say that you're not in infancy, you're in the middle somewhere, somebody said, if they were ahead of us, it's all depending where you want to put this on that chart but we at least have taken first steps and we have one place where the data's available to us now, we're just going to keep adding to it and now it's a matter of how should we start to use it? >> In terms of lessons that you've learned along the way and you've been very candid in talking about some of the challenges that you've had to overcome but what would you say are some of the biggest takeaways that you have from this process? >> Yeah the biggest takeaway for me would be, as I've already mentioned, change management, don't ignore that, pay attention to that because that's what really drives it, second one that I'll say is probably, have a broader vision but when you execute make sure you look at the smaller things that you can measure, you can deliver against because you would have to take some steps to adjust to that so those are the two things, the third have the right partners with you because you can't go alone on this, you need to make sure you understand who you're going to work with and create a relation with them and saying "hey it's okay to have tough conversations", we have plenty of challenging conversations when we were having issues but it's as a team how you overcome those and deliver value, that's what matters. >> High praise for you Michael (laughs) at Accenture here, but what would you say in terms of being a partner with Southern Glazer and having helped and observed this company, what would you say are some of the biggest learnings from your perspective? >> Oddly enough I think the technology's the easier part of all this, right, I think that's fair to say without a doubt but really I think, really focusing on making the business successful, right, if everything you do is tied around making the business successful, then the rest will just kind of, you know, go along the way right because that's really the guiding principles right and then you saw that with technology right and that's really I think what we've learned most and foremost is, bring the business along, right, educating them and understanding what they really need and focusing on listening, alright, and trying to answer those specific questions, right, I think that's really the biggest factor we've learned over the past journey, yeah. >> And finally so we're here at AWS re:Invent, 60,000 people descending here on Sin City, what most excites you about, why do you come first of all and most excites you about the many announcements and innovations that we're seeing here this week? >> Yeah, so I'll be honest, this is the first time I've come to this conference but it's been really exciting, what excites me about these things is the new innovation, you learn new things, you say "hey, how can I go back "and apply this and do something different "and add more value back?" That's what excites me. >> Now, no I think you're absolutely right, I think, AWS is obviously a massive disruptor across any industry and their commitment to new technology, new innovation and the practicality of how we can start using some of that quickly I think is really exciting, right, because we've been working on this journey for a while and now there's some things that they've announced today, I think that we can go back and apply it pretty quickly, right, to really even further accelerate Southern Glazer's, you know, pivot to being a fully digital company. >> So a fully digital company, this is my last question (laughs) sorry, your advice for a company that is like yours, about to embark on this huge transformation, as you said, don't ignore the change management, the technology can sometimes be the easy part but do you have any other words of wisdom for a company that's in your shoes? >> All the words of wisdom I'll have is just I think I've already mentioned, three things they'll probably need to focus on, just take the first step, right, that's the hardest part, I think Anne even said this morning that some companies just never take the first step, take that first step and you have to, this is where the industry is going and data is going to be very important so you have to take the first step saying how do I get better, handle on the data. >> Excellent, great. Well Michael, Akhtar, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE this has been a real pleasure, thinking about Southern Glazer, next time bring some alchohol. >> Absolutely. (laughs) It's Vegas! >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Great. I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS executive summit coming up in just a few moments, stay with us. (light music)

>> Life from Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. And I'm joined by Kathleen Natriello. She is the vice president and the head of IT, digital design at Bristol Myers Squibb. And Shalu Chadha, senior technology services lead at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming on theCube. >> Sure. >> Thank you for having us. >> So we're going to talk about Bristol Myers Squibb's journey to the cloud today, but I want. Bristol Myers Squibb is a household name, but I would love you to just start out, Kathleen, by telling our viewers a little bit about Bristol Myers Squibb. Just how big a global pharma company you are. >> Sure. We're a global company, as you said. We have about 23,000 employees all over the world. And we're very focused on our immuno oncology therapies. And the way that they work is that they boost the immune system to fight cancer. So it's a really exciting development that we've had over the years. >> And so what was it, sort of, in the trajectory of Bristol Myers Squibb, that made you realize, as an organization, we need to do things differently? What challenges were you facing? >> So, we're very science focused in terms of developing treatments for our patients. And so our highest priority was our scientists' productivity. And so we started our cloud journey about 10 years ago. And our initial focus was on leveraging burst computing in AWS, which enabled us to spin up enough capacity for our scientists to do research with very large volumes of data. That's one of the things about biopharma. We use very large volumes for genomics research. >> And also, with this partnership, using AWS, you also partner with Accenture. So, can you describe a little bit, Shalu, how the partnership evolved? >> Right. And so that journey that Kathy mentioned, We've been part of that journey for the last two years now. And I think it's this nice partnership between AWS, BMS, and Accenture. And the teams have gone on with a lot of quick successes and early successes. And I think, going forward, the focus is really now businesses is going to look for a lot more demand and agility. Clouded adoption is going to be key in how we actually expand on that. And I know we're talking amongst us to say, how do we get there faster now? >> A little less conversation, a little more action please. >> Yes. (inaudible speech and laughter) >> Exactly. So, let's talk about this journey. So you're not only migrating existing applications, you're also building your own applications. >> Yes. >> What's the, sort of the wisdom behind that strategy? >> A couple of things. So I mentioned earlier that we started our journey with our scientists and we've continued because that's where AWS really delivers significant value for Bristol Myers Squibb. So, what we have done is implemented several AWS cloud services that enable our scientists to use machine learning, artificial intelligence, a lot of computational approaches and simulations that significantly reduce the amount of time it takes them to do an experiment, as well as the cost. Because they no longer have to use actual physical material, or patients, or investigators. They can do it all through simulation and modeling, which is exciting. >> So, I mean, we all know that the drug discovery process takes a long time, and it's tedious, um, cumbersome. So can you actually bring it back down to earth a little bit and say, what have you seen? What are your scientists? In terms of how the drug discovery process is going. >> Yeah. Our scientists are our biggest advocates of the cloud and the capabilities it delivers. And they will report back to us that they are doing things with machine learning and artificial intelligence with these simulations, that they're doing in a few hours, that used to take them weeks and months. And so that's how it's really shortening that cycle. >> And are the patients feeling the benefits yet, too? >> The patients will feel the benefits with our focus on clinical trials. And so, being able to speed up a clinical trial is very helpful. And both from the patient experience, as well as the investigators. >> Shalu, can you talk about some of the other innovation and automation capabilities? >> Yeah. So, BMS is really on this really exciting journey, and now that they've, like Kathy said, extended some of those capabilities and actually building and enabling for the scientists, of the commercial, the brand sites. It's now about, really, what do you do next and how you bring that next wave of innovation. And so, what's been nice at Bristol Myers Squibb and the partnership we have with Accenture here, is really looking at taking some of the learnings we had in the back office, in the finance and the procurement. Where we've actually brought a lot of process efficiency through our bots taking some of that learnings and bringing that across in many other different ways. And now we have bots across legal, compliance, and moving into the clinical area that adverse events. And we're looking at really that part which is how do you actually get quicker with how the patients are going to see both responses to the adverse events, as well as how do you actually accelerate the clinical trial process. And all of those innovations are really possible with what Kathy has set up in her organization. And actually having that digital acceleration competency and be able to take this span enterprise. >> One of the things that's so interesting about these partnerships is how you work together. >> (in unison) Yes. >> And is it that you're focusing on the science and Accenture is thinking about the technology? I mean, are you, sort of, two different groups? Or how are you coming together to collaborate and build a relationship? >> I really see it as three groups. So it's Bristol Myers Squibb that's focused on science as well as the technology. And if I take an example of how that partnership works, when we were doing our migration to the cloud, the more aggressive plan that we have in place right now, Amazon partnered with us on a migration readiness program. And that enabled us to move as much as 400 plus workloads into the cloud and to other locations. And then Accenture partnered with us, as well, to actually move the applications and migrate them to the cloud and the two other locations. So, I really see it as a three way partnership. And part of the way, one of the reasons it's so successful is it's not just BMS partnering with Accenture, and BMS partnering with Amazon, But it's Amazon and Accenture partnering together. And they would come up with ideas on here's what we think will make BMS even more successful. >> And how, and how is that? Is it because you were really grasping their business challenges? Or, I mean, how are you able to come up with? You're not a life science person. >> Right. >> It's, how are you doing that? >> It's a good question, and I think when I reflect on what I experience with other clients, I think what's so tremendously making us successful here is everything is about interest based. And it's about how we start the conversation. The patient in the center. And then it's about who's interests are we serving. Let's be clear. And let's try and try trigress into what's the solution that actually needs that. So, I think, whether, Kathy mentioned it in the cloud cumulus work, or even with the SAPS four journey right now. It's the combination of AWS, BMS, and Accenture in that journey of how we going to solve this together. Those critical and complex programs. >> Kathy, you said that scientists were some of your biggest advocates for going cloud native. I'm curious about the rest of the work force. I mean, has it been, sometimes introducing new technologies and new ways of doing things can cause consternation among your employees. >> Yeah., but in my organization, we bring a lot of change to the rest of the company. And your right. Sometimes it's well received. But I think when it is well received, is when across the company they can see the productivity gain with our robotics process automation. At a digital workforce, people are able to have, they are able to get a lot more done. And so there is acceptance of that. And very often, the business functions are the ones that introduce the new technologies because they're really interested in it and curious. So it works out well. >> So they're getting more done so >> Yes >> So then they're more satisfied with their work and life >> Yes >> And, exactly. So tell our viewers a little bit more about what's next for this partnership, for this relationship, in terms of new technologies. In terms of what you hope to be able to accomplish in the years to come. >> So, I can start. I really think that's what is next for us is to move a little faster. So, in our cloud journey, as I mentioned, we started 10 years ago and then, we've build on what we've learned. So, as an example, we put our commercial data warehouse into a Amazon Redshift. And then that laid the foundation for us to do, for example, rapid data labs. We started by building some data lakes in HR and R and D. And then, by the time we got to doing that for manufacturing, we did it serverless. And so we've had a nice progression based on learning and going the next step. But I think, we're to the point where the technology's evolving so quickly we can move a lot faster and get the benefits faster. So for me, that's what I view as what's next. >> Shalu, anything? >> Yeah. I would just add that I think analytics set the core. I think there is such a strong foundation set here that now it's about how are we going to extrapolate from there. And really look at bot machine learning and what that could do for us. And that, and we will take a lot from what we've learned here today about actually evolving that journey. And I think the best part is the foundation is set strong. And now it's about accelerating into those specific business areas as well. So I would say analytics and really extending our machine learning capabilities. >> So move faster, analytics machine learning. Great. So we're going to be talking about it next year's summit. Well, Kathy and Shalu, thank you so much for coming on theCube. This was a lot of fun. >> Yes. It was. >> (in unison) Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have today, Mahmoud El Assir, he is the CTO and Senior Vice President of Global Technology Services at Verizon. And Annette Rippert, Senior Managing Director, Accenture Technology, North America. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we are talking today about Verizon's migration to the cloud, but Verizon is a company that many people have familiarity with, Mahmoud. Just lay out a few facts and figures for our viewers here. >> Sure, I'll say Verizon is Fortune 16 company. Last year we made $126 billion dollars from our, kind of, loyal customers. We are, today we deployed, we were the first people to deploy 5G. And we have 98% coverage in U.S., so we are America's fastest and most reliable wireless service. >> So it's a company that touches so many of our lives. >> Yup. >> Earlier this year, Verizon selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. What was, one, what was the impetus for moving to the cloud? And two why AWS? >> Yeah, that's a great question. But I'd like to zoom out a little but more and talk about what is Verizon? What's our mission and how kind of tackling it? So when you think about Verizon, our mission is to deliver the promise of the digital world, right? Enable, deploy 5G and enable the 4th Industrial Revolution. And as part of this, it's all about empowering humans to do more, right? And in global technology solutions our winning aspiration is to develop products and services that our customers and employees love. And then we, and also to be the destination for world class technology talent. And be the investment innovation center for the company. So when it comes to digital transformation we look at the enables and where we want to invest our energy and how do you want to leverage the right partners. So the heart of our technology transformation is the public cloud. When you think about what the public cloud, it's like where you want us. It will allow us to spend more of our energy building solutions and for our customers. And creating value for our customers. Also public cloud will allow us, and or business, to experiment faster, better and cheaper. In technology our focus is to always save on efficiency, speed and innovation. So that is our kind of model and at the heart of this, public cloud is a key kind of element for our journey. >> Well I want to get into that journey a little bit more, but Annette, I want to bring you into the conversation here. So, Verizon is one of the leading communications companies that is migrating to the cloud at this scale. >> Yes. >> What are some of the lessons, as you have helped and observed and also helped this partnership grow, what are some of the key takeaways that you would say? >> Well, I think there is a couple you know, if you take a look at some of the lessons that our clients learn. You know when at Accenture we go into the market really helping our clients think about how do we leverage technology for achieving business outcomes. You just talked about some extraordinary business outcomes that you're looking to achieve and you'll do that through a variety of things, including leveraging technology. And so, just like that we encourage our clients to be thinking about what is the business innovation? What is the outcome? The disruption that we're looking to achieve through leveraging technologies like AWS, right? I think secondly, if you think a little bit about the importance in that journey of communicating that vision. Of what will it mean to be able to leverage that kind of technology? You just communicated a very strong vision. And that's so important to the change journey that many of these organizations go on. You know there is the importance of the investment strategy, but ultimately, the innovation that the organization itself the engineers within the organization are a part of delivering, you know, the kind of innovation that you'll be delivering is really, it will not only make such a big impact on those in your enterprise, delivering that. But, you know, to all of us who are consumers of your business strategy which will be fabulous. And I think, in the end, you know, one of the most exciting things, and it's really sitting Alexis, as we were talking a little bit about some of what Verizon is doing earlier in the day, one of the most important things is really thinking about how this provides an opportunity for the enterprise to change. So, you know, moving to be a much more agile enterprise, being able to respond to market changes, and certainly in the business that you're in, the market is changing everyday. And so by leveraging innovative products like AWS' platform, you know it really provides the opportunity to constantly leverage new technology in that environment. >> And that, as you said, the market is changing everyday and customers, they're demanding things and companies are providing customers with things they don't even know that they want until they have them in their hands. How, at a time when customer differentiation is such a key competitive advantage, how are you staying ahead of the game and making sure that you know you're sort of getting inside the heads of your customers? And then you're also delivering what they want and expect. >> Customers comes first at Verizon, right? So it's at the heart of our technology is also leveraging emerging technology. So cloud is one, scaling AIML is another one. One of the big programs we're doing is, how do you move personalization to one-on-one personalization? How do you make every customer feel they have their own network, our network. Like their own network that's personalized for their needs. There own experience, their own plans. Their own recognition. So that's key. So today when you think about most companies do segmentation or personalization at the cluster level. So one of the biggest things is we're shifting now from systems of engagement, and systems of records. We're inserting systems of insights. A system of insight allows to build the DNA for every customer and will allow us to personalize the customer experience for every customer at the customer level based on all the data, kind of, we know about them, from the data they use with us, and will allow us to personalize their experience at every touch point. >> So what, how would that look like? What will a personalized customer experience at Verizon look like in the future going forward? What are some of your goals and aspirations? >> Imagine you're like a, you've bought every iPhone, since iPhone one through like iPhone ten, right? >> I can imagine that. >> So you're an iPhone enthusiast, right? So, when you come up on our website recommend, like the iPhone, the next iPhone say, the next iPhone is up, the next iPhone red is up or so. So we know more about you and your history and we recommend right accessories, we recommend and so we tell you, hey this stuff is coming. So you feel we're watching out for you. You're like we know, we know you. We know you better than anybody. So at any touch point when you come to us we kind of tell you what's the next thing for you. And then even when you don't know we, like from a network kind of performance from everything we proactively, kind of cater for you. That's a big one. The other one, how do you, when you want to talk to us, how do you get leverage technology like Chatbots and conversationally AVRs and stuff. And make sure you feel you're like, we know you. If you have a different accent, we recognize the accent, then you say, hey do you want to speak in that language? >> (laughs) >> So imagine the power of doing that. Versus today you have to do, like you have Spanish AVR, you have to have a, or have a Spanish kind of call center. Imagine through a IML and Chatbots and stuff, you can recognize all the stuff and personalize the experience. Today at Verizon, we are known of our network superiority. And we have great customer experience but we want to be known also for our experience the same way we are known for our network. And we believe that at Verizon, there is always a higher gear. So we all aspire for the higher gear and aspire our customers to feel they have a Verizon for every customer. >> So this, that's from the customer experience. And as you said, the goal is to have the customer feel that the company empathizes with them and really gets them. What about the workforce changes? I mean Annette was talking about the importance of change management and the cultural shift that these kinds of transformations entail. Have you come up against any challenges at Verizon in terms of this migration? >> Sure I would say, at the heart of our kind of transformation, there are four main pillars. The first pillar is, enabling all these modern technologies. This is like cloud, Cloud Native, API, AI, ML. And especially go back to cloud, the time of enabling cloud was very important to get everybody on board at beginning of the journey. So one of our biggest thing is to get like the security team on board, as early in the process as possible, and make sure security team is a development team, not just a kind of a controls team. So having an engineering team on the security side is a big one to kind of automate all this kind of, all the security controls we need in the cloud so we have the right guardrails and have everything automated. Another thing, same thing like with the other teams. Get them on board in the journey have an advisory kind of board with the other team and security team and legal teams and everybody is onboarding on the journey. So that's I'd say key and pay lots of dividends investment upfront but pays lots of dividends so you can move faster. It's like more of a slow down to speed up. So that's a big one. The second one is, technology is one thing, but you need the culture. So you need to have sustainable momentum in this kind of movement. So the proxy we wanted to have is like have AWS certifications. Because you need 10% believers to have momentum. So our proxy to believers is AWS certifications. So we put a program in place we call it: Verizon Cloud Train. And that train basically is like a 12-week, six sprints, and we help our teams prepare for their certification. So last year we did more than a thousand, we have more than 1800 people probably right now certified with AWS. >> That is incredible. >> At the same time, we set up a dojo's, which are like emergent centers. So we have like 40, 50 seats in different cities and with like five six coaches. So if you are a team who wants to come in and move your application to the cloud, we help you do it. If you want to decompartmentalize your application to microservices we help you. If you want to do ABI's, we help you. So we helped you build deep expertise into these technologies we are doing. So that is like, transforming the teams, and up scaling, I would call it up scaling the talent, is key. Hiring great talent in key rolls is also key. The third pillar is changing the way we work from, what you call a project based, to outcome based. And this beyond agile. Agile is an enabler for this, but how do you change the model where everything is outcome based? Where you have the business and the technology team working together to move an outcome. If I want to increase my kind of video-on-demand revenue per customer, everybody making all the changes, experimenting, and making sure that's a need, is moving. It's not like I did my code, I delivered my, I did my testing, I deployed my app. It's what's a business and what's a customer kind of expectation. And fourth one is, how do you establish internal kind of communities and get out of a like the thiefdoms and stuff. And get a culture of kind of sharing and cheering for others. So we have like Dev Ops days internally within the company, bring in external, internal speakers. We have internal kind of intersourcing for some piece of code. So you have to fire on all cylinders I would say. And get as many kind of parties included as early in the process. And have also an objective to have everything as code. And it's a journey, so you have to always keep on exercising new muscles and more muscles and the more muscles you exercise, the faster you can go. >> So Mahmoud, Annette already shared with us her key learnings from your experience and your journey. What would you say, I mean you're hear at AWS reInvent, it's not your first rodeo, you've been to this conference many times before. When you're talking with other CTO's, CIO's and they're saying, hey, so how's it going for you? What's your advice for a company that is really just starting this, this process? >> Sure, I would say the movement to the public cloud is not just a cost play. I mean, cost needs to be, efficiency needs to be there, but that shouldn't be the primary kind of objective. The primary objective should be speed and innovation. At the same time, deliver a cost. Lots of people say, oh do I, is the same, you can't compare it same-for-same. Because it's different. On prem you can do like A, B testing. In the cloud you can do A to Z testing for much cheaper. You don't need everything you have on prem. You can experiment, so think about it as accelerating the speed of innovation. That's the key one. And I said it before, but I'll say it again. It's like all about having the right kind of, from like a security perspective, people will argue, oh public cloud is insecure? I would argue, public cloud can be more secure than on prem because you have all the tools to kind of automatically, kind of protect and detect and recover. And you have more tooling to allow you to be more secure. It's having the right kind of guardrails and the right controls, right automation and right teams. So it's, you have to build muscle across all these fronts. And have them as a front as possible. >> Great, and great note to end on. Thank you so much Mahmoud and Annette. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. >> Very good. >> Been really fun having you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> We will have more >> Thanks, Ann. >> from theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Joe Donahue, managing director at Accenture. Hal Stern, AVP, IT Engineering Merck Research Labs. And Derek Seymour, Global Partner Leader Industry Verticals at AWS. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you! >> So, we're talking today about a new informatics research platform in the pharmaceutical/medical research industry. Will you paint a picture for us right now, Joe, of what it's like today. Sort of what medical research the time frame we're thinking about, the clunkiness of it all. >> Yeah, so it's a great question Rebecca. Drug discovery today generally takes more than a decade, it costs billions of dollars and has a lot of failures in excess of 90%. So it's not an exact science, we're generating more and more data. And at the same time, just our understanding of human disease biology continues to increase. These metrics haven't really changed. If you look back at the last coupe of decades, it's a 10 year plus process and that much money. So we're looking for ways that we can apply technology to really improve the odds of discovering a new drug that could help patients sooner and faster. >> And that will ultimately save lives. So it's a real social problem, a real problem. Why a platform for this? >> I think if you look at basic research, and you talk about basic blood sciences research, the lingua franca there is chemistry and biology. And we still don't really understand all the aspects, all the mechanisms of action that lead to chronic disease or lead to specific disease that we're interested in. So very, very much research is driven by the scientific method. You formulate a hypothesis based on some data, you run an experiment, you collect the data, you analyze it, and you start over again. So your ability to essentially cycle your data through that discovery process is absolutely critical. The problem is that we buy a lot of applications. And the applications were not designed to be able to interchange data freely. There is no platform to the sense of you have one on your phone, or you have one on your server operating system, where things were designed with a fairly small set of standards that say this is how you share data, this is how you represent it, this is how you access it. Instead we have these very top to bottom integrated applications that, quite honestly, they work together through a variety of copy and paste. Sometimes quite literal copy and paste mechanisms. And our goal in producing a platform is we would like to be able to first separate data from the applications to allow it to flow more freely around the cycle, that basic scientific method. Number two, to now start to allow component substitution. So we'll actually start to encourage more innovation in the space, bring in some of the new players. Make it easier to bring in new ideas is there better ways of analyzing the data or better ways of helping shape and formulate and curate those hypothesis. And finally, there's just a lot of parts of this that are fairly common. They're what we call pre competitive. Everybody has to do them. Everybody has to store data, everybody has to get lab instrument information. Everybody has to be able to go capture assay information. It's very hard to do it better than one of your competitors. So we should just all do it the same way. You see this happen in the cable industry, you see this happen at a variety of other industries where there are industry standards for how you accomplish basic commoditized things, and we haven't really had that. So one of the goals is, let's just sit down and find the first things to commoditize and go drive that economic advantage of being able to buy them as opposed to having to go build them bespoke each time. >> So this pre competitive element is really important. Derek, can you talk a little bit about how this platform in particular operates? >> Certainly. Our goal collectively as partners is to help pharma companies and researchers improve their efficiency and effectiveness in the drug discovery process. So the platform that we built brings together content and service and data from the pharma companies in a way that allows them, the researchers, a greater access to share that information. To do analysis, and to spend their time on researching the data and using their science and less on the work of managing an IT environment. So in that way we can both elevate their work and also take away, what we at AWS, call the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing an IT environment. >> So you're doing the heavy lifting behind the scenes so that the researchers themselves can do what they do, which is focus on the science. So what have we seen so far? What kind of outcomes are we seeing? Particularly because it is in this pre competitive time. >> Well we've just really started, but we're getting a lot of excitement. Merck obviously is our first client, but our intent is that we'll have other pharmaceutical and biotech companies coming on board. And right now we've effectively started to create this two sided marketplace of pharma and biotech companies on one side and the key technology providers and content providers on the other side. We've effectively created that environment where the technology companies can plug in their secret sauce, you know via standardized APIs and micro services, and then the pharmaceutical and biotech companies can leverage those capabilities as part of this industry standard open platform that we're co creating. And so far we've started that process. The results are really encouraging. And the key thing is, you know really two fold. Get the word out there, we're doing that today here. Talking to other pharmaceutical and biotech companies. As well as not only the established technology providers in this space, but also the new comers. 'Cause this type of infrastructure, this type of platform, will enable the new innovative companies, the startup companies, to enter a market that traditionally has been very challenging to get into. Because there's so much data, there's so much legacy infrastructure. We're creating a mechanism that pharmaceutical researchers can take advantage of new technologies faster. For example, the latest algorithms on artificial intelligence and machine learning analyze all of this diverse data that's being generated. >> So that's for the startups, and that's sort of the promise of this kind of platform approach. But what about for a Merck, a established player in this. What kinds of things are you feeling and seeing inside the company? >> You think about this efficient frontier of what does is cost us to run the underlying technology systems that are foundational to our science? And you think about it, there are some things we do which are highly commoditized, we want them to be very efficient. And some things we do, which are very highly specialized, they're highly competitive, and it's okay if they're less efficient. You want to invest your money there. And you really want to invest more in things that are going to drive you a unique competitive advantage. And less in the things that are highly commoditized. The example I use frequently is you could go out and buy a barrel of oil, bring it home, refine it in your backyard, make your own gasoline. It's not recommended. It's messy, it really annoys the neighbors. Especially when it goes wrong. And it's not nearly as cost effective or as convenient as driving over to Exxon Mobil and filling up at the pump. If you're in New Jersey, having someone else even pump it for you. That's kind of the environment we're in right now today where we're refining that barrel of oil for every single application we have. So in doing this, we start to establish the base line of really thinking about refactoring our core applications into those things which can be driven by the economics of the commodity platform and those things which are going to give us unique advantage. We will see things I think, like improved adoption of data standards. We're going to see a lower barrier to entry for new applications, for new ideas. We're also going to see a lower barrier to exit. It'll be easier for us to adopt new ideas. Or to change or to substitute components because they really are built as part of a platform. And you see this, you look at, I would say over time things that have sedimented into AWS. It's been a remarkable story of starting with things that were basically resting our faces on a pausics file system and turned all the sudden into a seamless data base. By sedimenting well defined open source projects, we would like to see some of the same thing happen, where some of the core things we have to go do, entity registration, assay data captured, data management. They should be part of the platform. It's really hard to register an entity better than your competitor. What you do with it, how you describe what you're registering, how you capture intellectual property, how it drives your next invention. Completely bespoke, completely highly competitive. I'm going to keep that. But the underlying mechanics of it, to me it's file system stuff, it's data base stuff. We should leverage the economics of our industry. And again, leverage it as technologist ingredient. It's not the top level brand, chemistry and biology are the top level brand, technology's an ingredient brand we should really use the best ingredients we can. >> When you're hearing this conversation so related to life sciences, medical, bio/pharma research, what are sort of the best practices that have emerged, in terms of the way life sciences approaches its platform, and how it can be applied to other industries? >> What we've seen through the early collaboration with Merck and with Accenture is that bringing together these items in a secure environment, multi talent environment, managed by Accenture, run by AWS. We can put those tools in the hands of the researchers. We can provide them with work flow data analytics capabilities, reporting capabilities, to cover the areas that Hal is talking about so that they can elevate the work that they are doing. Over time, we expect to bring in more components. The application, the platform, will become more feature rich as we add additional third parties. And that's a key element in life science is that the science itself, while it may take place in (mumbles), it's a considerable collaboration across a number of research institutes. Both within the pharma and biotech community. Having this infrastructure in place where those companies and the researchers can come together in a secure manner, we're very proud to be supporting of that. >> So Joe, we started this conversation with you describing the state of medical research today, can you describe what you think it will be in 10 years from now as more pharmaceutical companies adopt this platform approach. And we're talking about the Mercks of the world, but then also those hungry start ups that are also. >> Sure, I think we're starting to see that transition actually happen now. And I think it's the recognition and you start to hear it as you hear some of the pharmaceutical CEO's talking about their business and the transformation. They've always talked about the science. They've always talked about the research. Now they're talking about data and informatics and they're realizing being a pharmaceutical company is not just about the science, it's about the data and you have to be as good and as efficient on the informatics and the IT side as you are on the science side. And that's the transition that we're going through right now. In 10 years, where we all hope we should be, is leveraging modern computing architectures. Existing platform technology to let the organizations focus on what's really important. And that's the science and the data that they generate for the benefit potentially of saving patient's lives in the future. >> So not only focusing on their core competencies, but then also that means that drug discovery will be quicker, that failure rates will go down. >> Even a 10 or 20% improvement in failure rates would be incredibly dramatic to the industry. >> And could save millions of lives. And improve lives and outcomes. Great, well thank you all so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a really fun and interesting conversation. >> Same here, thank you Rebecca. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of the AWS Executive Summit and theCUBE's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas; it's the Cube. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of the AWS executive summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas Nevada. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Hitoshi Ienaka the CEO of ARISE Analytics and Takuya Kudo the Chief Sciences Officer at ARISE. Thank you both so much for coming on the program. >> Thank you. >> So I want to start by having you tell our viewers a little bit more about ARISE analytics. >> Well ARISE analytics is a joint venture between KDDI and Accenture. Well last, well last year we established a company yeah. That's family. >> Right and that's you know kind of we provide like tying the capabilities and the KDDI is kind of number two mobile network operator in Japan, has 50 million subscribers, massive data. So that's there a lot of room to cook but they don't have enough capability to support that. So that's why we kind of married together. >> And it helps companies leverage a wealth of knowledge resources and data between firms to bring about digital transformation. >> Right. >> That's what you're doing. So talk a little bit about what you've seen so far. >> Well so we have two assets, KDDI has, well big data and well Accenture has, well a lot of analytic skills. So using this well these assets, we built our integrated analytics platform hosted on a eda-brais. And what our first challenge was to deduce, channel out to the other operators and were which caused a challenge risk to well more than 40 million subscribers and by digging into that data and using machine learning origin and our data includes (mumbles) and life style service usage. And well, we optimize customer channels and contact timing and well to target customers efficiently. And well we well we tried art of well, other event well art of >> (mumbles) >> Yeah yeah. >> Yeah (mumbles) marketing. >> Okay. >> Yeah and we can get a good result and well it was not only due to our activities but only last year, only KDDI well could increase the market share among three network operators in Japan. That is our our achievements yeah. >> That's very impressive! So can you talk a little bit about the initial pilot in particular what you saw. Taku, do want to? >> Right so like as he mentioned like we have two work stream gigantic work stream. One is for consumer facing right. So customer chai and the you know out of on three marketing's or like recommendation engines based upon this stream data because we have massive like this is a consumption data too. Not just about like you know one handset data. In another work stream is a B2B, a business domain which is sounds like not related to mobile network operators but they have massive network to sell to B2B customer. So we utilize those gigantic data, combine those maybe I can mention but data but combine those data creating new service model. So that's quite a new IOT initiatives for B2B layers and consumer initiatives you know to support ongoing current business. >> And you're using this in a variety of sectors in particular I wanted you to ask you about one that you're doing with Toyota and a taxi service. >> Right so (mumbles) so yeah that that one is like five years like example because a, unless otherwise, I don't think that new business model to compete with Uber never happened right? So KDDI provide like Maura Handu said like location data over like you indigenous subscribers creating some, you know demand side riders for (mumbles) right? Over there, on top of that Toyota's transact log, which is technically like kinematics data provide like supply side which is cause, right? Focusing model and taxi also provide like meters, where customer riders get in and get off and combine those three completely different cable and data sets. >> But also with things like weather and those kinds of other >> Exactly yeah. >> outside. >> Open data too. And combine those data sets. We in, we provide, Accenture provides like talents and creating completely new forecasting model it's called AI taxi dispatch model. So now if you go to Tokyo, majority of taxi has our algorithm like Arizona takes in, you know KDDI and Accenture provide it. >> So that's very cool! Can you talk a little bit about what you've learned, about, in terms of when the weather is like this, taxis happen this >> Yeah, so it's of course weather has massive impact over, like if it's mornings specifically lane, it boosts like demands and also events. We have also events data. Maybe I don't know concerts, some famous singer, celebrities came and it's you know boost like riders demands. So that's actually significant impact of our demand focused model. Rather than using pushing like Uber, you strike you know app, mobile app. we actually treated as (mumbles) like taxi actually go because taxi driver and I can see where is a hot spot to pick up riders. And that's what we try to do. So based up on those, you know people don't even have like maybe like my father's age right, that don't have a smartphone they can get the benefit universality right. So that's the base concepts to provide Universal model to those you know without these >> So even people lacking technology >> Right exactly. >> Can still reap the benefits of this kind of approach. >> (mumbles) is universality so that's also our business strategy. Yeah. >> So you're also using this approach in a manufacturing environment. >> Yeah that's right. We are also working with some manufacturing factory. On the factory field were experienced workers can detect machine breakdown before they occur. But well how can that not be passed on to less experienced employees? So we created a live predictive maintenance which alerts companies ahead of time to pre potential breakdowns. Sensors (mumbles) about things like vibrations, temperature and electrical current. The collected data is analyzed by the AI system. So in this way the prediction of machine (mumbles) can be performed by almost anyone. Well it used to be others by only experienced employees before, yeah. >> So it not only helps the company know when a machine is going to fail, it also empowers the employee to fix it him or herself. >> Right it's a preventive way and so it's up and running over the ad-abreis. We use kinesis in late shift you know, learn the functions and over EC2. So that's completely free stock over ad-abreis capability too. >> So what you're describing sounds like it requires a lot of collaboration, a lot of deep relationship building between not only Accenture and KDDI but also the clients that you're working with. Can you describe how you all work together? >> Right. So maybe I'm going to provide that information. So like of course like KDDI's employee has specific domain knowledge and we provide like you know like data science capabilities and also like maybe through the interview right, found workers or like taxi, they have specific domain knowledge So combine those collaboration. It's called two in the box and we collaboratively paired each employees and you know supply the knowledge each other so that's it. Just one is not enough but as a team integrated over database and created a very strong team and that's a you know we try to cherish and that's culture. And the two boost the data science, data driven companies decision-making process. >> So i think our viewers are pretty amazed and impressed with what's going on. But in this era of 5G and IOT, what's next, what are you working at? It's a relatively new partnership. What are what are some of the most exciting things in the pipeline? >> So the (laughs) the very strategic so we strategizing right now in terms of 5G in IOT. But definitely one of the pieces could be like deep learning right? And also about your realities which nobody has done before. So that's where we try to collaborate with other sectors, industries, to create a new. And to do so we need a massive like computation power like GPU servers and we have to rely on the ad-abreis because otherwise we cannot achieve those goals and specifically 5G maybe changing in the game. Maybe like you know low latency and you know wireless connectivity, you know we don't need connections so maybe the factory lining assembly lines. You know completely change the way crispy like edge computing no more. Maybe like for computing, right, in between like Saba and edge because of the 5G. I don't know but we are strategizing now in a very exciting moment. We are doing right now. >> Indeed it is. >> Yeah. >> Well Hitoshi, Taku, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. This was a lot of fun. >> Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up just after this. (Uptempo music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. Doctor Justin Marley, he is a consultant psychiatrist for the NHS in the U.K., Chris Ashley, Technology Delivery Lead Associate Manager, and Gayle Sirard, Applied Intelligence Lead North America for Accenture, thank you so much the three of you for coming on the show. >> Thanks. >> Well, thanks for having us. >> Very much, yeah. >> I'm really excited about the topic that we're going to have today. which is a home healthcare system for the elderly. I'm going to start with you, Doctor Marley. In terms, can you just provide the context of what, of sort what this problem is with an elderly person living at home, experiencing loneliness, experiencing isolation, can you paint the portrait for our viewers? >> Yes certainly, so the older adult population is heterogeneous, but what happens is as people get older they retire from work, they lose part of their purpose in life, sadly they lose loved ones in their lives, and can often find themselves at home by themselves. As people get older, they start to develop cognitive impairment, it may not be at the level of dementia or it may be at the level of dementia. And so, they become increasingly isolated. And there's something called a digital divide, which is basically, we're living in a connected world which is permeated with digital technology to help connect people. The older adult population haven't grown up with this technology, so they're a little bit disconnected from all of this, which just adds to everything else. >> So what is the idea here, so he just described older people who are lonely, who are experiencing forgetfulness, they've lost a lot of their friends and social connections. So what's the answer, what's the solution here? >> Our mission is to help people feel socially connected in this, it's always changing, this digital world and stay independent in their own home for a bit longer. So, what we've done is we've made an Alexa Skill and web portal. So, an Alexa Skill is just like an app on your iPhone. And it's really about day to day help. Everyday, little things, so medicine reminders or finding things that are happening in their area. And just a bit more independence, a bit more joy day to day. >> So Gayle, so what did this look in practice? So we have this Alexa who is in a person's home and reminding the person to take his or her pills and just providing a little connection. So, just describe to me what it looks like. >> Yeah, so I mean, well if you kind of take a step back a minute and you think about this, as Doctor described right, the impact of an individual sitting at home alone and you think about their daily lives and what they're doing, this solution starts by really thinking about what are they doing on a daily basis and what's going to motivate them to get up and get engaged? So, fundamentally this solution thinks about the process that they do and it's constantly learning the behaviors that they're doing on a daily basis and as you know there's constant reminders. You start to get forgetful, so there's activities that you have to do and if you don't do, you become stagnant, lonely. And so, getting a system that allows them to learn their behaviors, understand what those behaviors are, and what's going to motivate them to wake up, get excited everyday, feel engaged. Fundamentally, this system is about learning that and nudging them to get engaged and move forward. The thing I really love about this is, if you think about sort of what we're doing here, fundamentally we're taking really sophisticated technologies, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition and applying it to an everyday process. Which is like so exciting to see the application of the elderly adopting a solution like this. And being able to reach out and engage through this new technology channel. >> And it is, as you said, learning the behaviors, it's learning their proclivities, but it's also providing a bit of social interaction for these people who are incredibly lonely. What have you seen, Doctor Marley? >> So, what we've seen is from the Hanover Project, which the Liquid Studio team in London have been working on. Which is some of the work in sheltered accommodation with older adults and Chris can talk a little bit about that, we've also been trialing it in a young onset dementia group, as well. So, we're looking at people with dementia across the lifespan, both young and old. And we've had some very promising feedback from the younger group, as well. >> So yes, how are you using this for people who are experiencing the onset of dementia? >> So, the idea is that, well first of all what we've had to do is to start a trial, a pilot study. So, we're currently going through the ethics committee process, which is very important for vulnerable adults, we can't just trial a new technology in this group, but we've had a design session with the Liquid Studio team, they've come in and they've showcased the technology within the group. And this is a group of people with young onset dementia and their carers, and we've had some very interesting feedback about how they can communicate with it and how easy it is to understand, and some of the features that we've been developing, such as the information about the condition that they can access from the home care solution. >> Chris, I wanted to ask you about the role of empathy in technology, so here's artificial intelligence which is it's not human intelligence. >> Absolutely. >> It's not our human social intelligence, but yet empathy is so important. Particularly in a technology like this. Can you, can you talk about how you approach this question? >> So, I take your point completely. It is AI, it's not a real human. And ultimately, we would love it if every single old person had human contact everyday, but it's just not the case. And I have sat with people, one of whom is my nan, and genuinely she was just like, it's really nice to have a voice in the house, my grandad's been dead for 15 years, she's been alone for 15 years in that same house and she loves it, when Alexa sang her Happy Birthday because it was configured with the birth, I put her birthday in and she was just like, I love it. She says goodnight to it's like, oh sleep well, I do call her regularly, but knowing that she has that is amazing. >> So it's giving peace of mind to the loved ones, too. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Exactly, so talk a little bit more about what, so we've already seen great success, adoption is on the rise, what are some of things that you hope to add to this application going forward? >> So, we see it at the moment as a companion. So, it might be for people with dementia. It might just be for people who are alone and they feel a bit socially isolated. So, the Alexa platform is very powerful. It offers a very simple way to do things, like radio, if you want to mess around with an iPad, unlock it, make sure it's charged, find your contacts, call it, it's much easier to say, Alexa call my daughter. So, that's the things that we have and that's a great service, what we can add very quickly is IoT sensors, so if you put a sensor on the fridge, on the bathroom door, in the bed, you work out whether people are sleeping enough, whether they're eating enough food, whether they're drinking enough. And you're augmenting that role of the caregiver that comes along and sees, hang on, this person hasn't been sleeping very well at all for the last few days. One of the things we get people to do when they interact with home care, is just say, how are you feeling today? And they say, good or bad, and over time you build up a picture of that person's mental health. >> Because Alexa has built a rapport with her roommate. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, what you're describing it sounds like a very user-friendly, a straightforward interface that is perfect for people on the other side of the digital divide, as you just described. So, how do you work with technologists, Doctor Marley, in terms of helping the technologists understand where these customers are, I mean so many, I had a member of my family who had Alzheimer's and the idea was meet the person where they are. So, if they come to you and tell you that it's Christmas Day and you say, it is, Merry Christmas, but how do you help the technologists sort of get that? I mean it comes back to the empathy. >> So, in terms of where the person is, there are many different barriers to the use of technology, the sensor impairment, there's for example if someone has a moderate to severe level of dementia, then it would be very difficult for them to interact with the device. So, we have to kind of work with carers to work with them. So, there's all sorts of kind of complications about taking this out into the real world. And what we're also looking to do is develop a service with the AI at the front end, backed up by healthcare professionals at the back end. So, that we can quickly escalate if there's problems because the last thing that you want is someone to run into problems, for the technology to be able to detect that there's something is amiss, and not being able to do anything about it. So, I think combining the AI with all of the warning signs flagged up by the algorithms with healthcare professionals in the background ready to escalate in-house services is the best of both worlds. And gets the right services to the person at the right time, and I think that's only possible through this combination. >> Yeah, it's an extraordinary story. >> It is. >> It's really been a great conversation. Thank you all so much for coming on theCube and sharing it with our viewers. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's a pleasure, thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, that wraps up our coverage of today's AWS Executive Summit. Join us tomorrow for more from AWS re:Invent. (quirky upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment, we have Merim Becirovic he is the Managing Director of Accenture's Global Cloud Initiative. Matt Lancaster, Associate Director of Technology, Architecture, Science, and Miha Kralj, Managing Director of Cloud Strategy at Accenture, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for returning, I should say, Miha, you're a veteran. We're talking today about event-driven architecture. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of it, I need a definition, so what is event-driven architecture? >> Sure, so event-driven architecture, I think the simplest way to think about it is when we're doing complex series of transactions it's actually breaking it down into its constituent pieces and treating all of the segments of a transaction as separate events that can be reacted to as they happen. So if you're shopping and you're putting something in the cart, that's an event. If you're going to the next page, that's another event, if you're checking out, that's another event, right? And as opposed to treating those all as one step follows the other, right, a lot of times there are sequences and things that can happen in between there. If there's a next best offer or a product marketing interstitial that needs to be put in those things can be reacted to and composed much more simply than actually writing all the logic to put them in a big sequence. >> So on a high level I would say it's an architectural style, right, it's a style of putting systems together, which is an evolution of the most common styles that we used so far, and we went through several evolutions, about every decade we get a new and better architectural style, so a reactive event-driven style is just the one that is currently shaping to be the one that is going to replace the older architectural style called microservices. >> So why would an organization implement this event-driven architecture what kind of business challenges would the organization be looking to solve? >> Well if you want I'll start there, I mean just think so, you have a world where today I believe we're in the slowest time we're ever going to be from a technology perspective. >> Which is mind boggling. >> And what we saw this morning, right gentlemen, the amount of innovation that everyone is doing including AWS is going to be mind-numbing, so the question is going to be, how can we and what tools can we use to help us adapt for those capabilities in the future? So I think that's really one of the things is, Matt'll say I think it's easier than ever now, it was harder before but it's getting easier as the providers and everyone else is making their services more readily available for consumption. >> I think in a lot of ways as an industry, we're almost forced to move to this paradigm, whether we like it or not because I think everyone understands that every company has now become a software company once again, whether they like it or not and that means major changes to the organization model, the way people deliver. We need to be much more product-focused, and teams need to own their product and things like that, right, which is becoming the common business model that successful companies are operating around. If the architecture is still a traditional command and control architecture, two years later they're going to be back to that old work style, and frankly the market is going to punish them out of existence. So we need something where all of these wonderful, complex components that we saw in the sessions today can be decomposed into one team doing one thing with one set of components and they don't necessarily need to be aware of what all the other teams are doing because they just need to react to one another's events when they're interested in them. >> So the system, business systems always grow to the largest possible extent of what is still manageable and controllable, and using traditional architectures on top of this modern technology that allows us now to make way more complex systems, we already having clients that we see that the governance control and transparency is at its limit. So if we want to go beyond that barrier of complexity and not fear that suddenly systems will become chaotic, we need a new architectural style and we see already those limits happening, and that's why we already have an answer, we have an answer that is after microservice architecture which is reactive event-driven. >> Would you say that moving to this kind of architecture is difficult? >> It's a great question and I think it's gotten a bit easier. There's definitely some magic to actually taking a step back and decomposing the business systems and saying this component or this piece of the transaction or this piece of the organization fundamentally does this, these business events are what they really need to focus on and then make the components, functions, and systems actually emit and perform the business logic of those events and do more demand-driven design, then get into picking and choosing which, whether it's serverless functions or micro-nano-service some Kubernetes, the components allow us to cleanly separate and stream out events and react to each other but if we don't do that initial stuff on the business side, then it becomes really difficult to know who gets value where. >> I think the art of the possible in this space is very much anything can happen, and I think about things like we run a lot of our Cloud footprint, we're already 93% of the public Cloud for Accenture's IT, and I think about how we consume those things, what can we optimize, how can we do things differently, even on the concept of running infrastructure, if I have better event-driven capabilities, I can react more efficiently, I can really make a consumable service more utility service than I've ever had before, so I think that's one of the draws for me. >> When you say difficult, here is if developers that are writing code today and they already went through a couple of waves of reinventing themselves, if they already know that they need to do that again, then it's not difficult. For the developers that feel that they arrived and they already can code for the Cloud and that's it it's a difficult reinvention when they realize that although yes, their existing knowledge of procedural programming of traditional way of coding systems in the Cloud, they need to throw lots of that knowledge away and relearn how the systems are properly composed so they use Cloud the way that Cloud was intended to be used. >> And just to add to that a little bit, there's a lot of folks that will take a very traditional imperative programming paradigm and try to jam it into things like AWS Lambda and Kinesis streaming and what they end up with the end is sort of a tortured circus freak of an architecture. It doesn't help anyone and ultimately people spend six months and then get super discouraged on doing this stuff when they could have taken a step back and done it right the first time which I think is why it's important to understand that's only a few code composable components, the more layers you put in, the more complexity you're adding, the more you horizontally grow the better off you are. And if you're streaming events, you have functions that react to those events, microservices that react to those events and then gateways that can actually stream those out to interfaces, that's all you need. We don't need to overcomplicate this like we have every other generation of architecture. >> I'm trying to picture that tortured circus freak of an architecture, it's ugh, in terms of Accenture's own experience in this area I know that your company is already leveraging event-driven architecture. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about your own experience? >> So let's start with our clients first. We serve a very broad spectrum of clients. And luckily not everybody is at the forefront and also not everybody is at the tail-end, right. We have lots of clients in the high tech industry in communications and media where the needs for the leading edge is very clear, and we are focusing particularly when it comes to that latest innovation, event-driven included, particularly on those industries. We kind of belong in the front part of there, and that's why Merim and his organization is extremely versed in those modern styles. >> I think just to add to that a little bit, since I play in a slightly different space than you most of the time, I work with a lot of banks, insurance companies, capital markets, and the adoption that I see in those industries of this stuff is massive. The problem with most banks is that they've tried to change core banking systems now two or three times, they're still sitting on mainframe stuff that they built in the 70's and 80's and most of what they with payments and with different financial services and stuff they can't actually add that stuff to the speed and convenience that their customers are determining and so there's a lot of fintech startups that are disrupting that market. And if they don't change those core systems and they don't become more event-driven and we don't decouple, decompose and then eventually rebuild we're going to find folks really fall behind in the marketplace, and I think they realize that. The real magic of this is that we can, it's not a big bang three year transformation anymore, right we can build the core and then realize value within the first six months and then continually iterate and evolve and hollow out those legacy systems and eventually turn them off which is very opposed to the old way of saying we're going to do this three to five year transformation, after five years, you probably maybe kind of will realize some technology value. And to Merim's point earlier, no CEO is going to go in front of his board or her board and pitch a five year transformation, that's a really good way to get fired. >> Yeah even in our own internal environments one of the things we always think about is what are we trying first, what are we failing fast at, 'cause that's one of the key things for us and all of these capabilities and the other thing, what's happening with this space, Cloud, microservices, event-driven architectures, everything is enabling this powerful change of making for the first time I would say in a long time the network engineer, the app architect, the technical architect, the infrastructure engineer, every one of them working together to start to think about this, all of these things are happening in my environment, these events are happening, what should I do differently? How does this help me automate my capabilities? How do I react to things differently? How do I make sure that I'm catching my infrastructure before it fails, my application before it fails, there's many many levers that you could use in this space, and we're frankly trying all of them because I think the goal to me that helps is I want an automated IT experience that has less people managing it but more people reacting to the events and we're creating the world where this event-driven architecture you could say eventually is going to evolve into all this AI stuff, we're going to be the managers of AI in the future. The AI's going to run our infrastructure and I think that's the most fun part part about this. >> I think two additional points to that, I think it was very well said, one of the things the really excites me about this space is that it becomes very understand... The technology piece, the software piece becomes very understandable to the folks who understand the business side and the marketing side, et cetera. If what you're doing is just sending out events which are a piece of business functionality or marketing functionality or whatever it becomes explicable in plain English, you're reacting to one another's simple business events, and then all of those composed together can create the same value chain that before had to take six months and only a math PhD could understand. (laughing) >> It's approachable to much broader businesspeople, not just to arcane, unique eyes. >> Yeah and to the AI point I think one of the most disappointing things to me in our industry is that most of the AI projects have boiled down to a shitty chat bot that nobody actually likes to interact with. >> I know and this is the part we're missing, right. >> Because they can't actually do anything, when you finally get to a person they have none of the same knowledge, so if we democratize that information, it all gets streamed out to all interfaces all at once, and they can say okay, if you didn't get your room in time the system will go ahead and rectify that and it creates a great customer service experience instead of an IVR in text, which nobody likes. >> And I like the point, I think you hit on the point that's very near and dear for me is, as IT practitioners we've dealt a long time with the siloed ownership of data, this democratization of data is a very powerful tool I think that helps gets enabled by some of this event-driven capability because so many times people feel that oh, I own the data, I can't share this with you or I need to understand what you're doing with it, expose your data, give your teams a chance, give them the events, let them react because you don't know what you're going to create coming from it. >> Set your data free, we heard that this morning from Andy Jassy. >> There's very relatable examples of this, right, I mean how many of us have gotten off a flight, the gate has changed, it shows that on your mobile app, you walk up to the gate agent, you're in an unfamiliar airport, where do I go? And they say oh your gate hasn't changed, it's not updated on my screen. You go to the board in the airport, oh it's not updated here either, right. Then you go to the original gate, they say what are you doing here, you have five minutes to get over to the new gate, right? And then you book it all the way over there, you look at the defibrillators on the wall, you're thinking I'm really glad those are here. You get to the gate and they haven't even started boarding yet and you finally get the late boarding announcement, right? It's three bad customer services experience in one, and if all that data goes to all those interfaces all at once you have none of those bad experiences. >> Well if event-driven architecture can solve that problem, I'm all for it. >> You're in? >> Merim, Matt and Miha thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. - Absolutely, pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (digital music)

>> Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Mike Moore, Senior Principal at Accenture Research, and Andrew Wilson, Chief Information Officer at Accenture. Thank you both so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Good to see you as ever, Rebecca, and to be back in Las Vegas as well. >> Exactly, back in Sin City, right, here we are. So our topic is innovation. A buzzword that is so buzzy it's almost boring. Let's start the conversation with just defining innovation. What does innovation mean? >> An objective, a behavior, a way of working. To me, innovation is what we need to do with modern technology to enable the enterprise and the business world and be creative humans and to use disciplines which we didn't typically bring to work before. >> And is it creativity, or is there sort of logic and rationale too? >> I think there's logic and rationale. But there's also entertainment, fun, modern consumer-like experimentation, risk-taking, things of that nature. >> I think that a big key is actually striking a balance between creativity and logic and rationale and that's the really tricky bit, because you need to give your employees the license to be creative but within a certain set of boundaries as well. >> The rules of work have definitely changed, and behaviors that we encourage, even the clothes we wear, how we work, when we work, those are all characteristic of a more innovative, accepting diverse world, and a world that can keep up with the modern technology and the advancements and the announcements like we're hearing about here at re:Invent. >> It's the ultimate right brain, left brain behavior and activity. So Mike, you've done some research recently about the hallmarks of innovative companies, what they do differently from the ones that are not innovative, that are failing here, so tell our viewers a little bit about what you've found in your research. >> We surveyed 840 executives from a variety of different companies, different industries, different geographies, to understand their approach to innovation, and those who were doing it particularly well, and those maybe not so well. And around about 14 percent of our respondents were turning their investments in innovation into accelerated growth, and there were lots of different reasons for their success but three things really stood out. So first of all their outcome lacked in terms of the way they approach innovation, so they put a clear set of processes around their innovation activities, and then linked those to operational and financial performance metrics. They're also disruption minded, so they're not just pursuing incremental tweaks to their products and services, but their investing in disruptive technologies that could actually create entirely new markets. And then finally they're change orientated. They're not just using innovation to change their products and services, but also to fundamentally change the nature of their own organizations as a whole. >> So 14 percent are knocking it out of the park. Does that mean the rest of them are all laggards or are sort of some in the middle? What is the state of innovation in industry today, would you say, Andrew? >> I would say it's hugely variable by industry, geography, type of company, and individual instance of leader and culture, but I am sure that the most successful companies, those that are pivoting to the new, those that are imaginative, those that have recently arrived, all have that DNA that we're describing, all have that way of working, all have that ability to operate cleverly, intelligently, humorously, and at speed. I think innovation is very much characterized by something that can be fast-failed, do, step, move sideways, do again. The way of working has changed in modern enterprises. We as CIO's have to accept that. We have to speed up. We have to create the environment in where that productivity, where that creation can occur, and I think all of that's key. >> You keep mentioning this, the way of working has changed, and I think we all sort of know what you mean but explain a little bit what you're seeing. >> Experimentation, the ability to get more done with the resources that you have. So here we are at AWS re:Invent, cloud-based operations. Cloud gives you, gives me as a CIO the means to do more, more quickly, more rapidly, on a greater scale, in more places that I ever could have imagined in my old old-fashioned data senses. So the services we can consume, the data we can connect together, the artificial intelligence we can bring to it, the consumer-like experience. All of those things, which by the way, are drawing on innovative behaviors in their own right, are absolutely what the game is about now. >> How does AWS figure into your cloud transformation? >> Well for our cloud transformation at Accenture, AWS is one of the core cloud platform providers who power Accenture. We are nearly 95 percent in cloud. So as an organization that's very pronounced, and typically ahead of most organizations. But we sort of have to be, don't we? I mean, we have to be our own North Star. I can't sit here and explain the virtues of what Accenture can bring to a client's cloud transformation if we haven't already done it to ourselves. And by the way, that drew on innovative approaches, risk-taking approaches because over the last three years we've moved Accenture to the cloud. >> So I love how you said it, we are our own North Star, and other people would say we eat our own dog food, I mean that's just kind of more gross, but in terms of having experienced this transformation yourselves, how do you use what you've learned to help your companies transform as well? And make these moves, take these risks, what would you say to that? >> Well I think we keep an eye on the research with our colleagues there, they're our own North Star. I think we look at the ecosystem, we assess readiness for enterprise, security compliance, scale, availability, and then we also look and say, and what's ready for prime time in terms of Accenture scale, half a million people nearly. You bring all of those things together and it's a recipe, and that's why we consult our business, that's why we guide and educate and experiment and innovate together. And that's very much how we adopted cloud, it's very much how we do a number of other things, and the creative services we have. >> In terms of, let's get back to the research. So how do you, I mean as you said, the research is, as Andrew said, it's something that executive leaders are looking at to figure out what's actually happening in the market as well as what's happening within the organization itself. So how do you set your research agenda in terms of figuring out where you want to focus your time and energy and resources. >> Well I think we do it in a very similar way to in which we consult with clients, we speak to them. We talk to them about some of the key issues that they're facing and we always interview a series of executives and also academics to get their perspective at the start of their project. And that's something that we did in this particular instance and what we heard from many executives was that, to the point that Andrew was making before, the speed and scale of innovation today is happening at a completely different pace than in the past. So product cycle times are just diminishing in every single industry and as a consequence, executives now need to build new innovation units to make sure that they can respond to that changing market. So that's we wanted to explore through the research. >> So in this research, with the 14 percent doing it well, the 86 percent sort of either, somewhere on the spectrum of doing terribly or figuring things out, getting better, what are their pain points, and what's your advice to those companies? >> Well I think, and we take the positive spin on it in terms of what the companies are doing well, one of the points that Andrew was making before was how Accenture works with other partners to become more innovative itself. And that's something that we saw many of the high performing companies doing. So many of them were what we call networks powers. Not just innovating using their own resources, their own people, but their drawing on a broader ecosystem of partners to bring the very best products and services to their customers, and their spending not just on R and D internally but also on accelerators, incubators, technology based M and A, and actually their spending as much on inorganic innovation as they are on organic innovation. >> At Accenture we actually help our clients look for trap value, and what we mean by that is if an organization with a history, with a set of business processes, a set of technologies, and a set of disciplines and employees that have been successful and worked possibly for decades in that model, then they're going to be in some pretty tight guide rails. How do you innovate out of that, to deal with all of the destruction that's now available, good healthy disruption, that actually reveals the next level of efficiency, customer satisfaction, product creativity, and innovation in it's own right, so that's innovation in action, if you like. >> I want to ask, here we are at AWS re:Invent, Andy Jassy on the main stage this morning announcing a dizzying number of new products, services, and AWS, this is Amazon, this is a huge company that really seems to know how to innovate, and do it constantly, but is that is that, can every company be Amazon? You know what I'm saying? I mean, is this really possible and attainable? >> Is such a thing as innovation fatigue perhaps? >> Well, exactly, right! >> My view is that you have to find a way to make innovation a constant and a norm. It doesn't mean that you always will have to operate with the same ridiculous pace, but creativity and pace do go hand in hand to a point, but to be ahead, to stay ahead, and to lead an organization of technologists, who can comprehend all of these announcements, so you have to innovate in both how you lead and operate as well. It's not just your product, it's your behaviors, because there's just so much coming all the time. >> Right, and we've seen a number of large companies, not necessarily technology companies, but I'm thinking of Sears and Toys-R-Us, that have really, you've seen what can happen, the cautionary tales. >> Look at the attrition in the Fortune 500, and you can see how companies have a, a half life now, which perhaps is very different to 20 or 30 years ago. >> Right, right, exactly. Well, Mike and Andrew, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was a really fascinating discussion. >> Thanks. >> Thank you, good to see you again. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (techno music)

>> Live (lively music) from Las Vegas it's the Cube covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment we have Chad Duncan, Managing Director of Financial Services Technology Advisory Cloud Lead North America at Accenture, it's quite a long title. (laughs) And Jim Good, Senior Director Product and Portfolio Delivery at Capital One. Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So we're talking today about Capital One's migration to the Cloud, but Jim, let's start out with Capital One the bank and why moving to the Cloud was a business imperative for you. >> Essentially, as we look at Capital One, we have national reach and in credit cards, people are very familiar with that, but we also wanted national reach in banking services too. And the approach we're using is not to go the old fashioned way, bricks and mortar, but it's to actually go more into the way people like to interact with their financial services partners and that's through mobile devices. And the only way to really get the kind of innovation you need, and to get the features to customers that they want on a regular basis is to be a very nimble, and use strategies like DevOps, et cetera. And the Cloud really puts us in the position to do that. By the dynamic provisioning of infrastructure, all the different things that our Agile practices can take advantage of so that we can regularly deliver new features to customers that they want. >> So, Agile delivery, you mentioned Agile. What is it about Capital One's culture in terms of it's approach to innovation that sort of enables that? >> Well we've adopted Agile a number of years ago and this is something where we'd like to really empower teams to work with the business to deliver these features on a recurring basis, regular releases. That's ingrained in our culture. I don't think we'd be able to actually do this Cloud migration without that structure because the teams themselves are doing the work. The teams themselves now have control over the infrastructure. No more centralized group doing all the work for them. It's really distributed to the teams. And so that's really become what's expected of our teams that they can actually deploy when they need to and actually build as needed. Again, without the Cloud, without the AWS services that we're using, we simply would not be able to realize that and the teams could not innovate the way that they are. >> Chad, in terms of you, you've been working with Capital One for a few years now on this migration. What would you say about this company and about how it's migration has gone? >> Their innovation strategy right? They want to be innovative, you heard Jim talk a little bit about that just now, and how they go to market for their customers. How they create new service offerings for their customers. Be their new cafes. Right? They don't have typical branches. You walk into a cafe, you can get a cup of coffee, yes there's financial advisors in there, but that's not the main focus it's not walking into a traditional branch bank. So taking that, if you think about that theme across all of their different product sets, and being able to very quickly and iteratively roll out new products to the market, and services that customers are desiring and really kind of being a disruptor in the industry. Frankly, is the approach that they're taking. >> And is Accenture says, we are living in this age of epic disruption so >> Epic disruption. >> (laughing) Exactly. So Jim, one of the challenges in the migrating legacy platforms is this lack of megadata metadata, I'm sorry. (laughs) Megadata. >> There's megadata. >> There is megadata. >> (laughing) I think we need the aid of the U.S. house bans to talk about that. >> The mega needs meta. (all laughing) >> But this lack of metadata, so how do you overcome that obstacle? >> Well it's been one of the more challenging things that we face. We have a lot of legacy systems that we're kind of unwinding and migrating to the cloud. We're building new platforms for those new services of those. There's been a lot of rolling up the sleeves work just to understand what all this is the old fashioned way. But, what we're really able to do now because as we move things to the Cloud as we move new applications to the Cloud, we're able to use information that's now available to us that was not available to us before. VPC Flow Logs for example, from Amazon, allow us to know what are the connections between all these different services, and we've been able to use some of their tools and other tools that we've developed internally to start to visualize this in a much better way. Would not have been able to do that in our legacy setup. And so this is something that now we're actually using to aid the migrations, to understand how things connect in a much better way. And really, looking forward, we're in a much better place and we now know what we have, and we're able to track it very well. >> So Chad, Capital One is making it sound like it is pretty easy, (laughing) but we know that moving to the Cloud is actually really hard for so many financial institutions. Why has Capital One been able to succeed at a time when so many other banks are really struggling to do this? >> Yeah, I think about it in a couple of ways. They're not afraid to lead and innovate and fail fast, right? So you get out there, you talked about an MVP, and how you would stand up a new surface offering, or one of the applications in the cloud, right? Go ahead and do that, get some momentum, get people excited about the progress that's being made. That's one thing. And really understanding that security shouldn't be an issue, right? There's ways to secure your data in the Cloud. You can run core banking in the Cloud, Capital One's doing that, right? So, there's things like that that some other institutions sort of have analysis paralysis and they're like, "Well I don't know if I can secure my data, "I don't know if I can get the throughput that I need." The data latency may be an issue for banking and really bring the right architects to the table and do that. Capital one did a great job from the beginning of getting their people trained and certified in the Cloud technologies. A lot, mostly with AWS, right? Frankly. And really making that a culture of their organization. They don't consider themselves a financial services institution really. They consider themselves a technology company. >> Yep. >> And that's the culture. When you walk into a Capital One building, not a bank ... >> A Pete's cafe. (laughs) Right? Yeah. >> People center. >> The center, yes right, and headquarters building. You feel like you're walking through a technology company. You don't feel like you're in a bank. And setting that culture and that expectation with all of the Capital One associates I think is a huge key to your success and how you guys were able to get everybody on board. >> Yes. >> You had your CEO your CIO all talking about we're moving to Cloud. We're going to close our data centers. We're going to be all-in in public Cloud and that's the marching orders. And that's the drum beat, right? And you kind of feel that when you're there. >> And also from our inception, we've been a test and learn company and culture. That is what we have built Capital One on is finding out what customers really want, responding to that and iterating, and iterating, and iterating in different offerings. And it's no different with how we've approached our migration to the Cloud. We're going to set the minimum viable product as far as outcomes are concerned. We're going to test and learn, test and learn, test and learn. We learn from those, it's the fail fast kind of mentality, and we learn from some of those failures and adjust. And it's been, again, it really does fit our culture very well historically. >> And that's how, because there are so many trade-offs involved when you're thinking about these things. And is that how you sort of stick with the minimum viable product? This test and learn ethos? >> Well the test and learn is a way to get there. The minimum viable product is like this is our goal let's kind of be focused there so we can get to that. It takes some discipline to be able to say no there's shiny objects over here and over here, but if we go that way it's going to take us a little bit off track. So we spend a lot of time discussing what is MVP for the migration, for an application, whatever it might be, and sticking to that and making sure we stay true to that. So we have regular reviews at a team level, at a program level, to make sure we're staying the course and driving toward that. >> And that's critical. So many of our customers think they have to have it all thought out, all planned out, the entire strategy, all of the different dependencies mapped out, how we're going to develop this in the Cloud and they never get anywhere. Because you can't absorb all of that at once. So you start small, you gain, you iterate, and you go from there. >> When you're talking about getting inside the brains of customers and figuring out what they want and then delivering that, when we think about the bank of the future Capital One has this digital first strategy, what do you envision? For how people will interact with their financial services institution? >> Well I have four kids and they're all in their 20s and so I observe them a lot and I learn from them a lot and I can see what people want to do. They want to use their mobile devices. That's what they want to be able to do. They want to have access to their information at their fingertips, when they want it. The cafes Chad mentioned are kind of our big step toward, it's an educational offering more than anything else. Like here's how you can do that, here's the things you can do with this. It's not a sales oriented thing, it's an educational oriented thing so people can understand what tools they have available, understand what products we have available to help them, and then go about their lives the way they want. >> Great. What are some of the most exciting applications coming down the pipeline in terms of this new way of banking that Capital One is showing us? >> Do you want to take this one? >> We've actually built our primary customer servicing application that our customers use every day native in the Cloud. And we're continuing to iterate on that so I think you don't have to look much further than our mobile app to see what we're super excited about and what we already offer to folks. And again, that's been enabled by our migration to the Cloud so it's going to continue to iterate, we continue to learn from our customers what they want, what new features they want, we continue to build those out. >> Great. >> And even from a call center perspective you guys are using Amazon connect, right? >> Yes we are. >> To man your call centers and that has enabled a different way to interact with the customer. You have more data at your fingertips. You're learning some of the patterns from your customer calls in a way that you've not been able to do that in the past. So enabling some of that data is also been effective and kind of servicing those accounts and having that very good interaction with your customer. >> Great. Chad, Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show it was really fun. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of the Cube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (lively music)

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Jim Phillips, Cloud Architect, Mutual of Omaha. Roy Bacharach, Senior Principle Technology, Accenture. And Brian Bohan, Global Business Lead, AWS. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're talking about the transformation of the Contact Center but before we get started there, let's tell our viewers a little bit about Mutual of Omaha, your business, your target demographic and what you do. >> So Mutual of Omaha's a 109 year old insurance company. We have, our biggest market segments are in the senior health space and then, in the life space. So we service customers with a wide variety of needs, everything from Medicare supplement policies so we have like seasonal surges in business and things like that to people who are concerned about like, how do they, how do they prepare for their family for their life insurance needs and things like that. So, we've been around for quite a while. Predominantly, we'd been servicing our customer base through agents and as that shift occurs, right, we've been looking at how do we provide a much more finely focused view of the customer and emphasizing that within our contact centers with the recent creation of our service practice. >> So it was really just this idea of let's think about how to touch the customer in a different way. That that was really the business imperative toward this move. >> Right, so previously, we had, this all started in 2016 when we decided to take a focus on the customers, specifically from the service practice. So instead of service kind of being like an overhead associated with a product line, what we decided to do is we decided to really have something where the focus was on the end to end customer experience and how do we make that consistent across your interaction with Mutual of Omaha. That then lead us to reevaluate how we were doing our contacts centers and that's when we became involved with Roy and Accenture to look at what are our options to really kind of improve that experience for the customer. >> So when a customer like Mutual of Omaha comes to you Roy, with this business problem, what, how do you walk them through it and have them think about it? >> Okay, so we typically start at the top, you know, and understanding not only the business strategy but their current state of their technology architecture. And then, you try to work through the specific gaps, you know, gap analysis. What are they missing to get them there? With Mutual of Omaha, it was really they were being held back by their legacy on premise solution. You know, high levels of technical dept, huge complexity to support maintain and to make the changes. You know, so it was in that analysis we -- It was easy to see that the cloud was probably the best option for them. >> And did Amazon Connect immediately stand out? >> So even initially, when we were looking at options for this, Amazon Connect wasn't actually even on our list, so that was something that was brought to our attention during the sort of short-listing of candidates process. And then, you know, when we really looked at it, it just kind of blew our minds. So, you know, Roy had mentioned about taking a look at the gap analysis. So, as sort of as embarrassing or sad as this may seem, right, the decision to do something is a lot easier when there are a lot of gaps. We had a lot of gaps between what we could deliver with our current technology solution and then, what really the business strategy outcomes were wanting us to do. So, it did make a decision to look at completely sort of reinventing how we do the contact centers a lot easier position to consider. >> Bryan, in terms of the nuts and bolts of making Amazon Connect, can you give our viewers a little sense about really what is the infrastructure we're talking about here? >> So the interesting thing with Amazon Connect is it's really the call center platform capability that Amazon.com has been using for a number of years and that we decided to commercialize and externalize to customers like Mutual of Omaha. And so, like a lot things with AWS, what's nice about it is that it's you can start small. You can layer it in and it can integrate into some of the existing technologies and investments that you've made. It's not a rip and replace and then you can scale it as you see success and you can scale it up and down. So it's very economical as well. And so, it's an area we're really excited to see Mutual of Omaha really on the cutting edge there but we're seeing, with Accenture, a lot of momentum with this platform in insurance, financial services, even as CPG companies become more focused on delivering services, it's changing how they have to interact with customers so it's a great platform for that, a great starting place. >> So Amazon, a famously customer centric company. So what are the kinds of. You think, oh customers will love this but in fact, we were talking before the cameras were rolling, there was a little bit of resistance. >> So you have to think about like, how do you introduce this type of sort of radical change from what was traditionally just an exclusively a hands on service process that was, you know, agents and contact centers with an audience demographic that is not what you would think of as being like cutting edge in terms of technology adoption. But what we found through things like paying a lot of attention to our call flow development with Accenture. Paying lot of attention actually to our voice tuning and getting the voice of the customer to understand like what that voice tuning and how well that worked. We were able to actually get a more positive reception for the Connect solution that we even over like professionally recorded voice talent on it. So, you do have to address like all of the, all of the like customer touch points within the contact center and think about how do you manage the change within your audience demographic and how do you manage that adoption. But, you know, it's your customers, it's your agents. How do you make them comfortable with the solution? Right, because the, you know, customer can detect it, an agents uncomfortable with the solution that they're using. Right, how do you make this kind of like really seamless? So we took a, put a lot of emphasis on customer experience development as part of this. We didn't, we did not take any of our existing call flows and just put them in Connect. So all of our call flows were re-architected. >> What are some of the best practices that have emerged because he has just pointed out so many of the kind of challenges of implementing this new kind of approach and system with both clients and also the workforce itself. I mean, what would you say, what is sort of your advice in best practices that have emerged in terms of Mutual of Omaha's experience? >> You know, I think it's really start with the desired customer experience that you want. You know, so start with that customer experience and then with Amazon Connect, you know, likes Amazon Web Services, you can deliver that experience. So start there, throw out the legacy call flows, the legacy IVR scripts and start from scratch with the customer experience at the top of mind. And then you can get there. >> Yeah, I would second that. The, 'cause managing change internally organization, like if your focus is exclusively on what the customer experience is, that shortcuts a lot of arguments within the organization about what's the right thing to do because you know, everybody tends to kind of sub optimize for whatever their stakeholder perspective is. >> If your clearly focused on what the customer is looking for, that actually clarifies a lot what your internal conversations are. >> How do you three work together in terms of this tri-partnership? Accenture, AWS and Mutual of Omaha. How do you collaborate? >> Yeah, so I guess first from the partnership perspective, like I talked about, Connect and modernizing customer care, is a really big focus area for us as a partnership and a big investment area. So, we worked with Accenture and gotten their teams very much skilled up on the new platform and they have done a great job of integrating it into their existing practice. So now, when we come to a customer like Mutual of Omaha, we, you know, Accenture's got a very strong point of view, they've got technology skills behind it and they know how the solution can solve customer problems. So that's my job is to make sure that foundation is there and then, the team takes it from there really with the client. >> Yeah, I would say our experience with Amazon around this, is they're really very interested in the experience that we're having and how we can provide feedback around our particular use cases and understanding like what are the types of, what are the types of things that would make our stuff more successful. So because we work with a combination of health and life insurance products, things like HIPAA eligibility for services are a big deal for us and when you look at how the ecosystem is all tied together with Connect, that has really kind of, we've got a lot of attention and help from Amazon with regards to dealing with like HIPAA incompliance issues associated with how we put the solutions together and it's been really helpful for us. >> I want to talk about the role of empathy in this kind of technology, because as we know, we are dealing with really difficult times in peoples' lives. That they are in need of these kinds of products and services. So how do you make sure that the technology is taking that into account? >> Yeah, that's an excellent point. So we tend to think of financial services products as kind of sort of emotionally neutral or cold even, right? But when you're dealing with insurance, and a lot of times you're dealing with people who are calling and they're in a very emotional sort of situation. The, one of the things that is really good for that, that we hope to leverage much more in the future is being able to get the transcripts of the conversations out, so we can understand as part using that data that's coming from the interactions with the Lex bots and understanding that data as the customer works through the call flows to be able to look at how do we continue to improve these around how that customers responding to it, so that we can get to better customer experiences. Like, in often times, it's a very highly emotional situation. If you're dealing with like a life claims contact center, you're dealing with someone who's just recently experienced a loss of a loved one and as a result, peoples' patience is really low, they're really stressed, they're facing -- You know, our demographic is selling final expense policies and that means that people are facing a lot of financial uncertainty in addition to emotional distress. >> Right. >> Being able to take that information and use that to continually tune things for delightful customer outcomes is really important to us. >> So, what's next for Mutual of Omaha? >> So really, what's next for us is we're in the process of major migration of our contact center agents onto it. Once that is completed, that allows us to kind of get rid of some existing technology debt with our on premise telephony solution. And then we really start to get into kind of the good stuff. Right, so that's like integration with our customer portal, taking more advantage of what we want to do from a machine learning and AI perspective with regards to what we can get from the call data and the customer, the customer interaction. And really starting to kind of like make a huge jump in terms of what that customer experience can be. >> Great, I look forward to hearing more about it at next years Executive Summit. (laughing) >> Yeah, it would be great to be back. >> Great. >> Jim, Roy, Brian. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more from the AWS Executive Summit and theCUBE's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. (echoing percussive music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests this segment, we have Brian Bohan, the AABG global business lead at AWS, and Chris Wegmann, welcome back to theCUBE, managing director Accenture AWS Business Group. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us, yeah. >> So I want to start with you, Chris. It's been three years since Accenture and AWS announced this relationship, bring us up to speed on what's happened in those three years. >> Yeah, it's been a fast-paced three years. We've seen AWS continue to mature the platform, grow their number of services, we've seen our customers go from looking at just lift and shifting workloads at AWS, to now doing full cloud native services, machine learning, containerization, all the really cool stuff they can do on the platform. So for the business group, we've gone through that journey and that maturity as well. We started very focused on things like lift and shift migrations, and cloud management, and investing in assets and capabilities, now to really focus on innovation, and helping our customers drive the innovation on top of that platform. >> I want to get into that, but you've also recently said you're going to continue to expand this partnership, Brian-- >> Mhmm. >> And so what does this mean? >> Yeah, I mean just kind of keying off some of the things Chris talked about, right, is that, and I think we've talked about innovation specifically, really where we're going to focus, and we're also going to talk about vertical and industry solutions, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later. But, even if we looked at where we've had a lot of success in the mass migrations, moving enterprise applications like SAP to AWS, what we're seeing now, customers are in their maturity curve, where they're there in the cloud, and now they're asking what can I do? Right, so I have SAP, I have my core systems in the cloud, and so we're investing heavily, as Chris mentioned, in some of the modern technologies, so application modernization, cloud native development. Andy in his keynote today talked a lot about database freedom, so now that you're in the cloud, how can we start looking at your database portfolios, start using some RDS or Aurora, some other native AWS services. So, these are way that we can innovate with our customers that you maybe typically don't think about, but are critically important, and I would say on the other side, and what Chris mentioned as well, is the investments we're making in machine learning, and in AI, and in analytics, and edge computing. And then really at the core of that is data, right. And what we find, with these kinds of projects, is you need to move very, very quickly, and you also need to prove out the concepts. So these are two important things, and so what we're doing is a big investment in the partnership, is investing something we call Launchpad. So this a mechanism in Amazon parlance, we can think about it as two pizza teams, so several nodes of two pizza teams around the world, and these folks are 100% focused on driving innovation, and driving POCs, and pilots, and prototyping, and asset development, in the innovation areas around AWS machine learning, analytics, connect, so new modern customers care capabilities. So that's really important, and then, kind of related to that, very closely, is our innovation studios. So these team will be located across the world, some of them in or around liquid studios that Accenture has. So the innovation studio is a place where we can bring clients to get together, and we can execute on working backward, and ideation, and design thinking sections, so we can take it from an idea to actually a concrete, implementable set of requirements, and then use that Launchpad team to execute very quickly. So this is something we're really excited about. >> So interested, you bring clients into the studio. Now, why is that so important, to get everyone in the room together? >> Now I think what we've seen is it gets them out of their day-to-day environment, right? And in an innovative environment, where they can go through that innovation process, come up with those ideas, and then very quickly see them in reality, versus sitting and writing a bunch of requirements down and things like that. So the whole design thinking process and going through that, we find works very well, in a very innovative studio type format. >> So how does it work, I mean a client comes-- >> Yep. >> You're together, Accenture, AWS, together, with the clients-- >> Yep. >> saying what are your problems, and so how do you help them learn to think expansively about what their biggest challenges are? >> So we start with some design thinking workshops. So thinking about what they're trying to achieve, not the technology, right, we get the technology, but what they're trying to do, how they want to think about the problem differently, and we do the working backwards. So, idea is, where do you want to end up, either press release, or something like that, that documents where they want to be. Then we work backwards, at leverage the design thinking, and then going to the idea-zation phase, look at what will work, what might not work, and then how technology, we can use the AWS technology. So the technologists are there, they say, "Oh if we can go use these three services "off the platform, we can actually deliver this," and take advantage of this data that you may not have had before to help to answer that problem. >> And the technologists are also saying, "If we can leverage these three existing technologies, "we can also build some more stuff." >> Yeah, and I think Andy was again hitting home, the right tool for the right job, and as Chris mentioned, we don't start with the technology, we really start with the problem. And what's really cool about this is that Accenture's gotten very mature and developed and deep capabilities through their digital practice, around design thinking, working backward. And when folks come visit Amazon, one of our most popular EBC or executive briefing sessions, is around Amazon culture, and how does Amazon innovate. So we programatize that, as well, into our working backward methodology, that we work with clients, and what we've done is we've married these two things together. So, we're able now to bring the best of both worlds, and help our customers through that journey, getting from idea to actual realization. And then, as you saw, we now have I don't know how many services, 130 plus services, there's plenty of things in the bag that our technologists can then start working together with the clients to solve those problems. So it's really exciting. >> How do we innovate, that's sort of the question of the hour, the question of the era. At a company like Amazon that is now so big, but still is famous for it's start up mentality, and it's ability to innovate and deliver products that customers don't know they need, until they until they (Rebecca laughs) have them in their little hands, how do you do it? I mean, what is the secret sauce? >> So, I mean, there's a few things, and I don't have time to talk about all of them, but I think culture, we've talked about it a little bit, is hugely important, and you just can't graft on or import culture. You saw Guardian's CIO talk today how important it was. They didn't start with technology to cloud, they started with actually redesigning their work spaces and how their teams work together, that's super important. So at Amazon, we work in what we call two pizza teams. So every team is fairly autonomic, fairly small. They interact with other teams, but they can make decisions autonomously, and move fast. And then the other thing that we reward moving fast, is if you're going to move fast, you're also going to make some mistakes, you're going to take risks, you're going to experiment, and you're going to fail. So Jeff Bezos always likes to say, if you're not failing, then you're really not innovating. Right, so we want to controlled failures, and we want to make sure that when we are failing, it's what we call a two-way door, meaning that if we fail, we can come back through the door, and do it again. We haven't committed ourselves down a path that we can't retreat. So, you know, again, small teams, our culture, a culture that also rewards risk-taking, controlled risk-taking and failure, and that's also I think why getting us in the cloud is so important because now we have a platform where you can spin up nodes to run your analytics and your machine learning. If it's wrong, it doesn't work, you just tear it down, and that's it, you start over. So, it's a great platform for that as well. >> Chris, what have been some of the most exciting new business ideas, models, approaches, that you've come up with; we're having a number of really fascinating guests theCUBE, what personally excites you most? >> Yeah, I think one of the things is the research life science cloud and then some of the work we've done with AWS and marketed around that. To bring the research all together to make the researchers jobs much easier, bring all that data together and get the value out of the data. I was amazed when I first got involved in that and didn't realize how much time was spent just duplicating data across different systems during the research process, and I thought that's a lot of waste of time by very, very smart people, just coding data, and by us being able to do that, it just opens up the possibilities of what research can do. And it's all about saying how can we help lives to be better, and that's something that's really doing it. Other thing is just, customer interaction. So, one of the things I've talked about and have been very excited over the last couple of years, was you know Amazon Connect, future next generation call center capabilities, again, like Brian said, as a service, you can step up it up very quickly. You don't have to go and buy PBXs and install them and go through that whole, and the the 360 relationship that you can build with those services, that customers are demanding and asking for, right? You can go into organizations that have not been known for great customer care, and now within a few days, and do 360 type customer and omni-channel, and pass off chats, and stuff like that. You know, all the things that Amazon themselves, as dot com business, are famous for, right? And they can, they can get there. So you know, those things just excite me, and I see the clients get really excited when we go and sit down and talk about that stuff. >> And how are they measuring the ROI because I mean, as you said, at a company like Merck that is doing life-saving medicine every day, it's kind of obvious, but at a company that maybe is not good with customers, and then to suddenly have this more customer-centric call center, it really can change things. So how are they measuring what they're getting out of this? >> So they're measuring the sentiment of the customers, right, which Amazon can help you do too, right? You know, so really understanding how satisfied the customers are, they can tell by the way they're talking to the reps, and listening to the recordings, and stuff like that. And see how angry they get, and how much that reduces over time, and really get there, right. They're looking at customer satisfaction, of course. >> Yeah. >> Right, and almost every call center finishes up with some type of survey, right? So looking to see how those surveys have improved. They look at call volumes, they look at how many they're able to answer via chatbot, or via text, and things like that, and how many of those a customer care rep can do at the same time. When you're on the phone, usually you can only talk to one person, but a customer care rep might be able to take four or five calls at the same time, via chat, and be able to help customers which reduces the time waiting on the phone, and the less time you wait on the phone, the happier the customer is. >> Brian, last word, what do you think we're going to be talking about at AWS 2019. >> So I think if you look at the trend that we're seeing, so as we move more into the innovation services, what also is true is that we're getting increasingly focused on industry problems, right, and Chris already mentioned one with life sciences and the research life science cloud because it's sort of a migration across industries, with some variances, but when you're talking about deep applied learning and analytics, it's going to be very specific. So I think what we're going to see next year, is a lot more things like the research life science cloud across industries, right, so we're diving deep in financial services and capital markets, and banking around things like money-laundering, and anti-fraud platforms, right? We're working across over into PNC, and insurance, on kind of completely new ways to have customers think about how they engage with their PNC insurance companies. So, as we dive deeper into this, and as we apply a lot of these up the stack innovation services, I think we're going to see a lot more really compelling, exciting business solutions specific to industry problems, and I'm just super excited about that. >> Great, well we're looking forward to seeing you >> Yeah, yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> here again. >> I'm sure we will. >> I'm looking forward to it. (Chris laughs) >> We'll be here. >> Chris, Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage at the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (bouncy percussive music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Michael Liebow. He is the Global Managing Director Accenture Cloud platform, and Chris Milkosky, Enterprise Architect at ETS. Thank you both for coming on theCube. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> So, Chris, I'm going to start with you. ETS, the world's largest non-profit education testing service. Give our viewers a little history. >> Sure, we're the guerrilla in the test assessment industry. So, ETS, Educational Testing Services, been around since the 1940s. We do... our mission is to advance the quality and equity in education through test assessments, through research, and related services. Big thing of what we do is just try to find out more about the state of education in the world, in the United States, and then do what we can to improve that. ETS has grown up with-- to relate this to Accenture and everything-- ETS has grown up with IT. We've been around since the 40s and so we've used traditional IT for quite a long time. Over time, we realized obviously that there's constraints and stuff like that on some of the traditional IT. We understood that we needed to figure out ways to become more competitive, to stay a leader in the industry, to innovate, innovate faster. That's how we ended up engaging Accenture, and working on an effort to migrate to the Cloud, and give ourselves capabilities to become more innovative. >> So, you're talking about this need to innovate, this need to stay competitive and ahead of the crowd. So why, so tell me, you announced a big partnership with Accenture this morning. A large transformation project. Do you want, tell us a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, no, absolutely, this has been the-- Chris has been the principal architect, driving that whole agenda for some time, so why, why Accenture, why look to the outside in order to partner with somebody in order to realize that innovation? >> Yeah, so, I'll give you a little bit of history on that. Back in we've been for years actually messing around with things in the Cloud, trying out Amazon and everything. We quickly realized after doing some POCs and pilots that there's a lot to this. It's not just going to be a trend and it's not just a fad that's out there and everything. It's hard, it's tough. What we needed is we needed somebody who had the capabilities, the experience, the knowledge, the history of doing this already before. In around 2017, we engaged Accenture already early on. They helped give us some foundational understanding about movement to the Cloud. Then over time we decided, yeah, you know what, we really need a lot more help with this. We need a managed service provider in the mix. We need capabilities to migrate to the Cloud. We need help with security, that kind of thing. Ultimately though, the big goal here is to be more agile, to be more innovative and we have to do it fast and we have to do it at scale. Yeah, so we did our due diligence. We looked around and after talking to Accenture, it was clear to us that they had that capability. >> So that's why Accenture. Tell me a little bit about what Accenture-- what does partnership entail? >> What do we bring into it. >> Exactly, what are you bringing to the >> It's a great question. >> Table in helping ETS achieve it's goals? >> Yeah, oh no, absolutely. We've been partnered for a while, as Chris indicates, and what you realize is there's a journey. You know where, since 1940, right, you have this IT organization, you're delivering whatever set of value and capability to the business, but the business is hungry, right? The leadership wants to innovate, they want to do new things, but they can't. They realize that and if you move on your own, you move slowly, and if speed is of the essence, which for most organizations it is, then what do you need? Well, you need the tools, the capabilities, the skills. You have to trust somebody to enable that vision. And it's kind of like if you're a surgeon, right, you know, do surgery. We'll do everything else in order to enable you to spend time innovating. What we bring is the whole strategy, the business case development as part of the journey. We show what we can do, kind of where you are today, and where you will be quickly. We can migrate and transform the workload. When we talk about this relationship, it's the whole end to end but it doesn't stop there. It's not just what we should build, how we should build it, the architecture, it's not just moving the workload into the Cloud, it's then running it securely, as Chris pointed out and to optimize it, so that it's not just this whole notion of devops and agility, those terms are tied together. We want to enable the agility, but we want them to be able to then leverage it. Don't go direct to Amazon, go direct to any other provider. Enjoy the innovation that we're hearing about this week and leverage all that. This is the key thing. This partnership creates the ETS Cloud platform. It's their basis, their foundation to now innovate and enable their broader business, so they can bring new capabilities to education. I'm so excited. This is such a great partnership, and the outcome is going to be so important, I think, to ourselves, to our communities. It's great stuff. The last thing though is we want to de-risk this. The point here is how do package all that? We have something Accenture Prime. Not to offend my friends. (laughs) >> I've heard of another Prime. >> Right, so this is about how Accenture's priming the capacity, the services, and being on point for ETS. So, one throat to choke, kind of, right? You can, you know, that's my throat. I'm here to make sure he's successful. And the organization is successful. That's really the point. Everything from the tooling of the Cloud management capabilities, to set the policies, the security, cross manage the Cloud management services, the cost in Cloud optimization and the contracting is all through Accenture. One stop shop. That's what we're here for. >> That's really important to us because ETS, our goal isn't to be out there and be the best at creating the Cloud, building a Cloud environment, migrating to the Cloud, managing the service of the Cloud, and secure. We want to do what our core competencies are in furthering education and advancing the quality of it. Accenture allows us to do that. They are the enabler. We can now, we don't have to worry about that part. >> I love this that Accenture is really allowing you to do surgery, or really to actually focus on the testing. With Accenture taking care of you, enabling you, how are you now innovating? What are the goals and aspirations on the table now that Accenture, because they're in the background helping you. >> Sure, so yeah, we're going to be able to do more in the mobile space. We're going to work in furthering our capabilities in doing data analytics. We want to, oh my goodness, the conference it's all about artificial intelligence. There's a whole lot of stuff on that. We need to figure out, how are we going to do that? And how are we going to use that to get better information to, again, accomplish that mission, to further quality of and equity in education. The capabilities and the speed at which we're going to be able to things is just very exciting. What's really cool is that you see it in people, they see the change in ETS already, and they know what's coming. It's already fostered this new and renewed feeling of creativity and it's becoming pervasive, and so you feel it. Everybody's coming up with new ideas and we're trying out new things. With the help of Accenture, we're going to be able to do that a lot faster and in volume and another thing I didn't mention is, and I think you might have said this earlier, what's really nice, too, is we know that in the Cloud you can do cost optimization. Cost optimization, it takes a lot of paying attention to, and a lot of attention. The folks at Accenture, they explained to us what they would do. It's great how your service provider is telling you how to save money. I just love that, you know. (laughing) It's awesome. You know that, right? >> You can do that for everyone, right? >> But it's great, you know, there's so much you can do in the Cloud and to be able to leverage that, so, again, we can focus on our core competencies. It's just an excellent story. It's a good thing. >> Excellent, excellent. And Michael, is that really what you're always bringing to the table? You focus on your core competencies, we can take care of the rest. >> Yeah, you think about a managed service and how do you allow you to do what you do, but also do you de-risk the whole value prop? Because a lot of organizations honestly struggle with how to move to the Cloud. One of the things that Accenture's done, I'm not sure if you know, is we've moved our entire business to the public Cloud. We're 95% in the public Cloud today, and so I've made a lot of mistakes, all right. But we've taken all those lessons learned, and we've built that into our platform, our skills, our competencies. Now we can apply that so Chris doesn't have to make the same mistakes. >> You were your own guinea pig. >> Right, we ate our own dog food, right? Because we figured early on a number of years ago, that you can't really sell this stuff if you don't use this stuff. That was an aha moment, I would say, at one of the Reinvents four years ago. We really have to go all in. We have to move our business so that we can learn how to help others do it. It's thrilling, it really is, because you see that with organizations that are just starting today. They really don't know what they don't know. All right, call me. We will help you understand that and we've structured this under this notion of joining the Cloud where you can apply that to your business and you want to get there in a year, two years, we've done this with various organizations. Let's just move, let's get there. Stop the analysis paralysis and let's go. That's the message. >> What will we be talking about at next year's Accenture, AWS Executive Summit? When you think about ETS and the things that you're going to be able to accomplish faster this year and in the years to come, what's most exciting to you about this? >> Well I know from my side, I'm hoping that you guys are going to be saying, "Oh my goodness, ETS has become "a lean, mean, innovation machine." >> All right. (laughs) Okay, yeah. >> That's what I want. That's what I want to see. I think with Accenture's help we're going to be there, so that's what I think you'll see. We're going to be one to watch along with Accenture. Absolutely. >> Yeah. No, that's great. We love the fact that ETS wanted to come out at this event and say, "This is what we're doing. "We're going to climb that mountain, we're going." I love that. And to help others realize, yes, you can. Let's go do this. Here's an organization, 70 odd years old, right, saying, no, we wa-- this guy sounds like a startup guy from the Valley. >> That's what we want. We want to become like a startup again. We got to have that attitude again. >> Enthusiasm. >> Yeah, no, it's true. >> The energy. >> Right, right. >> That's what we want to do. >> And he was talking about the cultural differences. Everyone's feeling more creative and get the juices flowing and sharing ideas and insights. >> And the ability to fail. >> A hundred percent, yes. You need to be able to fail faster and be okay with that. It's a whole cultural change, too, you know. There was a lot in the traditional IT, everything back then, it's like, oh no, you know, failure is failure, it's bad. But no, we're going to learn from it and everything, but we need to be able to do that faster and learn from it. Startup mentality, lean, being lean, being more innovative, yeah. >> I want to go work there. (laughs) >> Yeah, right? It's an exciting time. >> This is great. >> Well, Chris and Michael, thank you so much for coming on theCube, a really fun conversation. >> Well, good, good. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> These are great questions, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by folks from MONETA Money Bank. We have Martin Berdych, who is the senior manager IT infrastructure, and Martin Trcka, Cloud Technical Architect Manager at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, we're talking today about MONETA Money Bank's journey to the cloud, but first I want to start with you, Martin, talk a little bit, tell our viewers a little bit about MONETA Money Bank. >> So, MONETA Money Bank, it's the fourth largest bank in Czech Republic, which is not big, because basically the country's small, but the bank is far big. We are serving something around one million customers, and we're providing all the services that you can imagine, so, bank accounts, loans, mortgages, credit cards, whatever you find out, and there's one special thing I'd like to point out, we have a brilliant mobile application, which is consistently getting the awards every year for the best mobile banking app on the market, so this is MONETA. >> So, you're already a pioneer in technology, really on the vanguard, and recently made the decision to move twelve of your, or two dozen of your existing apps, to the public cloud. What was the impetus for that decision? >> I think there's a wider strategy, which is around being digital, being agile, all those buzz words you hear around everywhere, you know. >> No, actually go into that a little bit. >> It's an automation, all the other stuff, I think one of the big ones, as well, was the legacy infrastructure, because the banks got a huge legacy staff, which is causing a lot of issues, if you want to go fast on the market, you want to be quick, you want to respond to your customers, this is slowing us down. So, I think apart from all the other strategy, or at least in my area, the infrastructure part, definitely the big one was the legacy asset we are actually trying to remove by moving to cloud, which is, that's the thing. >> So, they needed a partner to help them move to the public cloud, in this case, AWS, of course, and, so, when Accenture comes into this, first of all, is this a standard client sort of someone who is a company that is already technologically minded, and trying to do this, would you say that this is the kind of organization that gravitates? >> So, MONETA, as a pioneer, in terms of federal public cloud on the checking market, for them, it was a huge step to adopt public cloud, so we are very happy that they ask us for help, the first thing that we did, is we helped them design their IT strategy, what the steps should be in terms of adopting public cloud, actually, we helped them also to define that cloud production would be one of the pillars of their future growth along with other initiatives. So, we helped them with the IT strategy, and then we basically went through that whole journey together with one of the infrastructure teams, one of the security teams, and with our team who helped the client to migrate, eventually, those two dozens workloads into the cloud. >> So, is it a co-creative process, in the sense of are you together, figuring out, the steps on the journey, or is it Accenture in the background, and- >> I think, one of my goal was to make my team part of that as much as possible, so, obviously, Accenture help is appreciated, and they were needed, because the knowledge of public cloud, not only the company, I think, even on the market itself, is very limited, the experience with that is very limited, so Accenture played a strong role in that, but what I make sure from the beginning, or I was trying to make sure from the beginning, is that the team will be part of that from, really, end to end. So they, whatever Accenture was helping, the team was contributing, and they were able to actually do it together, so the knowledge has been increased in the wider theme, so now, we are definitely much more capable than we have been before, and when we started. >> So, how did you help? As you said, figuring out the business challenges, and then actually finding solutions. >> So, it all started with what we call preparation for forging into cloud. This means that we helped the client to assess their risk, because we are speaking about their banks, there's a regulation, which needs to be met, those requirements are regulatory. So, we help the client to assess the risk associated with going to cloud, we help them design their exit strategy when they need to actually exit the cloud, and after we complete those, let's say, preparation tasks, we focus on what we call blueprints. This is basically designing concept of how the target environment will look like in terms of the architecture, in terms of security, in terms of government, so we have, jointly, you know, with Mark Markstein, designed those blueprints, and after that, it was basically ready to take the journey to cloud, actually, itself. >> You mentioned governments, you mentioned security, privacy, GDPR was recently enforced in Europe, did you come up on any challenges with- >> There have been many, obviously, the regulation itself, if it's GDPR, if it's the banking regulation, all the other elements have to be considered, and I think this is a constant task, it's not over, because obviously as we are opening on the market we are learning, and we are showing the other competitors that this is actually possible, and what needs to be done to make it possible, so, obviously, the regulator Czech National Bank had a lot of steps, they gave us a lot of next steps we have to fulfill, so we can actually proceed, and this is an ongoing journey and we have to, kind of, work on this, still work on it, it's not over, there have been a significant risk analysis done, obviously, so do I think it's more than hundred risk has been identified, around the cloud. Now, this has been much reduced, and, obviously, there are still next steps we need to fulfill to get this done. >> So, you have fully migrated to the public cloud? >> Those twenty applications. >> The twenty applications, yes, exactly. What have you seen so far, both from your clients and both from your colleagues? Have you seen changes? >> I think a couple of things. One of things is that the team, not only IT team, but internal people in the bank see that it's actually working, there have been some skepticism in the beginning, obviously, people are looking for reasons why we shouldn't be doing it, because of this and that, I think this is now a bit clearer, and people are kind of getting the feeling that this is actually working. So, this is one of the outcome of the thing. Obviously, the other walls that we've quickly find out and essentially help them that we need to optimize. So, we move it as it is, we lift and shift, and then we find out we're actually wasting resources, therefore we're wasting a lot of money, so we had to start looking, so by moving it, it didn't stop, it's not over, we have to now work on that and we need to find out how do we actually optimize the whole workload and what we can do to actually make it better, apart from the fact we are looking at the other phases of the project and we want to move more, we have to work on the older beta as well, so we need to make sure we get the most from the cloud. >> And what other learnings throughout this process did you come up with, sort of best practices that have emerged, as you said, you are showing your competitors that it is possible, the other top three banks in the Czech Republic, are, sort of, learning from MONETA Money Bank's experience, what would you say are the best practices? >> So, it really depends, you know, from which perspective you look on those lessons learned, from the regulation perspective, the answer is yes, it's possible to edit public cloud, even with, in higher FS Market, however, you need to meet money requirements. From the technology perspective, I believe that MONETA was really surprised how easy it was to adopt the technology itself. The migration happened, basically, in just four and a half months, so this is something you normally are not able to accomplish in traditional, like I said, data center and data center environment. So, this is from a technology perspective. As you said, journey to cloud is how you migrate to cloud, but then journey in cloud begins. So, another lesson learned is once you are in the cloud, you need to change your operating model, you need to start optimizing not only your span, but also, I would say, optical performance, so basically, the job is not done when you migrate to cloud, it just begins. >> So, you're now at the beginning of this journey, now that you're there, what is the future work? What does the future look like? >> Obviously, we have big plans. I think our aim is to migrate 50% of the workload until the end of 2019. It's a challenging task, because, I mean, we obviously created the base line because we have the environment, we have some obligations, so now we just build on top of that and we still have to work on it, but it's a challenging task, and this is what we're looking at in the future. >> And, do clients feel it, would a banking customer sense any difference, this is the thing, you win awards for your mobile apps, so you're- >> Absolutely, absolutely. I think, the plans for the 2019 will be really, that's going to be the shift for the clients, we have clients to move that are really, like, a strong production workloads, which are affecting the clients, on the end of the day, and I think that's going to be the visible element for them, when we do that. >> And finally, what's your word of advice for other banks that are considering, pondering, this move to the public cloud, what would you say, what is, sort of, the strategy, the strategic advice. >> So, when we are speaking to clients about public cloud adoption, they usually think about public cloud adoption, in terms of technology, like, that you are basically pricing data center technologies, on premise technologies, with some other technology in the cloud. This is not the case. That part of the whole journey, is just a small part, it's about changing how the organization works, it changes the operating model, it touches almost every function in the organization, you know, the business, HR, finance, security, risk things, all those things and functions are affected by cloud adoption. So, my recommendation would be think of cloud adoption from that perspective, it's not just a technology change, you're not just changing a platform for another platform. >> I would have one recommendation, and that is, don't be afraid. >> Don't be afraid, I like it, it's a good word of advice to end on. Martin and Martin, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a really great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, that wraps up day one of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, we will be back here tomorrow with more. Signing off, thank you so much for joining us. (funky outro music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back the theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Gene Reznik, the Chief Strategy Officer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Gene. >> My pleasure, Rebecca. >> So, Accenture is calling this period of time that we are all living through a period of epic disruption. Define what that means for us. >> Sure, sure. So, well, I think we're living in a very disruptive age right now. But again, I think we believe over the next 10 years it's going to become even more epic. And I think what's driving that, some things are geopolitical in nature. Alright, uh. Sort of, everything between U.S. and China relations, what's happening in Europe, all of that. Of course, there's technological. Dynamics around artificial intelligence. Of course, there's data, there's privacy, there's security. And all that really compounding on each other. We believe it's creating an environment where it's just going to be very challenging for people, but also for companies to navigate. And I think leadership and big organizations and their teams have to be very thoughtful of how they navigate this time. And I think there's going to be some big winners and I think there's going to be some big losers. And I think we see companies today that have been around for hundreds of years challenged to really adapt, adjust, and transform to really be prepared for this next wave of change. >> So, as you said, it's a very restive time politically, technologically, business wise. How are companies approaching this? I mean, as you said, you have to be very thoughtful. You have to have a real strategy in terms of how you're going to approach this, an approach innovation. How would you say companies are doing? Give them a report card right now in terms of how industry is responding. >> Yeah, well I think the first thing we would sort of say, and we've done quite a bit of analysis, and study through Accenture research, and as you'd expect, different industries are under different amounts of pressure and disruption. Some, like music industry and book publishing and currently retail, are under tremendous pressure. And, many have not responded well. They were too slow. They saw the digital natives just really take away their businesses. Others are better protected. So we have really gone through and analyzed industry by industry how they are prepared for today and really what they need to do going forward. And I guess our assessment is it's very, very difficult, as you would expect, to take a big organization and transform it. And the issue is again, while a lot of it is technology, the people side, the culture side, the organizational side, the incumbency dimension, the shareholders, all those things that make change very difficult are at the core of the transformation agenda. >> And innovation is really sort of the answer to it all because once you're move innovative, then you are going to ride this wave of epic disruption. So, first of all, how would you, so many companies are saying we want to be more innovative. What's the answer to that? I mean, what does that mean to be more innovative? >> Yeah, it's a good point. So we have, Accenture has looked at this. We sort of codified something that we call the wise pivot. Which is how should an organization really pivot to transform their business. And it's got elements, we believe strongly that you have to transform the core. Innovation can't be on the edge. At some point, you have to transform the core which usually gets at cost reduction, using automation to transform the business, transform the core economics. Then you have to grow the core and that's really I think the hard part, which is gaining market share in the core business we believe, whether it's in automotive business, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in even retail, you have to grow the core, cause ultimately that gives you the investment capacity to scale the new. So, how to orchestrate that journey in a methodical way, again, keeping in mind the organization and what it delivers today and not leaving different parts of the organization behind is what we work with our clients on. >> And, what separates the winners from the losers? So the companies that are doing this well, how are they focusing on their core? And the core competencies? >> Right. We believe investing is a very big thing. Right, so the hardest part of all of this, in terms of economically, I mean there's a lot of difficult dimensions, but economically, as the pressure mounts, the ability to invest diminishes for most companies. And they don't have the room to invest in the business that their future depends on. And really freeing up that room and making the difficult decisions, you may have seen there were some announcements of mass lay offs, even today right? It's some of the biggest companies in the world. They're trying to create the room to invest in their next generation business that will take them into the future. And I think that's really the hardest part. How do you ultimately create the capacity to invest? And how do you make those investments? Again, cause there's also a lot of other examples of companies that have invested in the wrong way or in the wrong thing, that ultimately didn't lead them to the future So those two elements, creating the room to invest, then investing it in the right things and the right ways is what we find is key. >> So you're talking of course about GM which announced today that it was laying off about 15 thousand white collar and blue collar jobs. And the reason they're doing this is because they're saying there's no longer any room for six passenger cars in this market. We want to focus on self-driving vehicles. Is that a good move? I mean, I know you're not a GM analyst here but at the same time, it sounds as though that is smart, as you said. It's making room for investing in the future. >> Yeah, and I think that GM is clearly seeing autonomous cars coming, sort of form factors, everything that they're doing. And again, I don't think particular it's that in GM's case but again you read it that way. You'll look at General Electric. They're restructuring their entire company to better compete in the new. You'll look at IBM. IBM is acquiring Red Hat to have the kind of assets to compete in the new. So I think the biggest companies in the world are really trying to sort of say what the next ten years, what is their business going to to be? And then how to they take what got them here which for many of them have been 50 to 100 year journeys. And really figure out how to restructure that, to give them the room to invest into building a new business. And really, that takes tremendous leadership by the entire, you know, by the CEO, the board, the entire executive team and the people. The people have to commit to go along for that ride, and endure some of the pain for the greater good. >> So it's really a change management issue here, but in terms of, you talked about leadership, it also takes the foresight to actually know what your business is in the future. So GM is saying autonomous vehicles, which an average layman can say, yeah, that looks as though that's where the car industry is going. But how does a company even begin to imagine it's future at this time where there are new technologies being invented everyday, which are disruptive as we started talking about in the earlier conversation. >> Yeah, I think that's a very good question. Cause also if you look at where's the money going. The money is going to the disrupters. Right, if you look at the top five, the Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, let's put Microsoft in there. Combined last year they invested over 70 billion dollars, and that's about 15 percent of all of the fortune of the global one thousand. So the capital, as measured by what companies are expending, what the start-up, the VCs are at an all time high. 155 billion dollars invested last year, double what it was in 2001. The IPO market is at an all time high. Right, then you have these things like division fund, which is a whole other investment vehicle to fuel technology. So the reality is, there's never been more money going in to create the next wave of disruption, which is why we believe many of the existing companies really need to create those partnerships where they benefit from that. They can't compete with it. They can't outguess it, right? They need to be making equal systems that ultimately enable them to leverage those investments, to really help power their next generation business. >> So as an ecosystem driven world, where is Accenture doing this kind of work? >> Yeah, so the good news for Accenture is we built our business, built services in an ecosystem kind of model. Initially with SAP, with Oracle, with Salesforce and now it's with companies like Amazon and the AWS. And I think our view, and what we try to work with our clients on, is really to create the construct. And by the way, a lot of these constructs are just now being formed. What does partnering with an AWS to create your next generation digital business, what does that look like? And there's some models emerging in terms of co-innovation. And I would tell you what Amazon has done, what Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan Chase is an example of partnering to transform healthcare. Interesting way to do that. You look at something, another Seattle company Starbucks partnering with Alibaba to basically power their entire business in China. So you're starting to see different constructs where big companies are really coming together in different ways. And then again, those partnership constructs, incentives, business models around that, I think that's really where the innovation is going to take place. How do you do that? How do you align your incentives? And how do you jointly benefit from that partnership? >> So you announced something today with your Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle, Washington. Tell our viewers a bit little more about that. >> Well, first of all we look at AWS and we say, clearly this is a company that is really important. >> It's doing something right. >> It's doing a lot of things right, it's doing a lot of things right. And I think a lot of our clients are looking at them, are leveraging them. So, it's our responsibility then as a services organization to build up capabilities and skills, and make their, and enable our clients to really tap in to this tremendous innovation. So, yeah, we did announce at Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle. It'll be one of many centers across the United States and globally with a simple premise of building skills, building proof of concepts, building use cases, building MVPs to really around different industries and different solutions sets so again, reimagine business processes, catalyze transformation, and really make it something that our clients can tap into. >> You are the Chief Strategy Officer, what is your piece of advice for companies out there, at AWS, at reInvent here, what's sort of your one piece of strategy advice in this period of epic disruption and this cloud world. >> Yeah, I would say that unburdening ourselves from the day to day, and really immersing ourselves in this amazing environment. Learning, really understanding what makes one of these, one of the greatest companies in the world tick. Understanding how they do things. Not only, and as you know, there's more to Amazon than just technology. Right? There's a very strong culture. There's a very strong customer centricity. And really sort of understanding that, and really trying to apply it to our respective businesses. And seeing how it could really be, make the pivot to the digital more effective. And that's what I would sort of say. Come with an open mind. Learn a lot, and take it forward. >> Great, well Gene Reznik thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> This is a lot of fun. >> My pleasure. Thank you, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit in just a little bit. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture executive summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS executive summit, I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, we're here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. We have two guests for this segment, we have Mike Moore, Senior Principal Accenture Research, and Chris Wegmann, Managing Director Accenture AWS business group, thank both you so much for coming on theCUBE, and you for returning to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me back, it's good to be back. >> So Mike I want to start with you and talk about your recent research which is entitled Discover Where the Value's Hiding: How to Unlock the Value of Your Innovation Investments. I like it, 'cause it just makes me think that innovation's just hiding somewhere in the corner, maybe underneath this desk. So talk a little bit about why companies can't find the innovation, and how they're failing at this. We'll get to the rays of hope later, but talk a little bit about what the problem is as you see it. >> Well, it certainly seems to be hiding for a lot of companies. Based on the research that we did, we found that over the course of the past five years large income companies like our own, and then also start-ups, have spent a combined 3.2 trillion dollars on innovation, which is obviously a huge sum. But when we looked at the rate of return on that investment, incumbent companies, we found it was actually declining by 27% over the course of that five year period. So there's a clear disconnect there in terms of what companies are doing. >> So, why are companies, why are so many companies not good at this? >> Well, we asked 840 executives from around the world exactly that question. And what we found is that for the vast majority of them who have been increasing their investments in innovation, they weren't seeing a great return, and what we found is that many of them were focused on incremental innovation, just small tweaks and adjustments to their products and services. But that's really not enough to get new customers in this day and age. But there was some reason for optimism, around about 14% of our respondents said that actually they were translating their investments in innovation into accelerated growth, they were outperforming their peers in terms of profitability, in terms of their market growth and they actually expected to continue to do that over the course of the next four to five years. >> So, I want to talk about that 14%, that rarefied group, but I want to bring you into the conversation Chris and just talk a little bit about the relationship between Accenture and AWS, and how you approach innovation, and how you help clients think about their innovation and driving ingenuity and creativity in their businesses. >> So Accenture and AWS have been partners for over twelve years, even before the first AWS service hit the market, Accenture was starting to use it in our labs at that point, and looking at how we could leverage S3 to really innovate on, and we've carried that tradition on for a while now. A couple years ago we sat down and really looked at what our enterprise customers were struggling with as they moved to the Cloud, and at that point innovation wasn't quite the topic yet, it was really how do we use Cloud to get better returns on our investment, better TCOs, things like that, and now we've seen that turn, as AWS has created more and more capabilities and solutions and offerings, our customers are really wanting to figure out how they innovate. They go and ask AWS "How do you innovate?" And that's their number one, one of their biggest EBCs is how do they innovate. So, we looked at it and said, that's great, how do we take that to the next level? How do we fix these failures that're happening and what we've seen is most customers are in this stop and go innovation traffic, I like to call it. There's people that're whizzing by them, the 14% are whizzing by them in the fast lane, so the question is how do you get them out of that stop and go traffic, into that fast lane, and, There's no lack of ideas, they have tons of ideas on how they can innovate, how they can use drones, how they can use all this. The ideas are out there, but taking those and turning those into operationalized assets that're continuously working, continuously growing, continuously maturing is where they struggle. >> And the question, when companies would ask you how do you innovate, I mean it is this question, but as you're implying it sounds as though it's a very, you have to have some discipline around it, there has to be real processes around the innovation, it's not just throw a bunch of creative people in a room together. >> No, that's great, you can do the creative people and they come up with the great ideas and there's no lack of those, but then you've got to operationalize those and go through the disciplining to take those, pick which ones are going to drive value, invest in those, operationalize those, and take them from a proof of concept or a pilot or whatever you want to call it and actually turn it into something that gets used every day, and what we've been focusing on with AWS is how do you get out of that, take what's out of that ideation stage, operationalize it using the full set of AWS services, and then how do you continue to run that and prove it going forward. >> So Mike, the 14%, what are they doing? What makes them different? >> Well I think there's lots of things that stand out, but there are really three things that came of the research, so firstly that group of companies is outcome led, as you were just saying, they're not just relying on the method, the genius in the garage tinkering away, but they're putting a real set of processes around the innovation activities that they're pursuing. Then they're linking those activities to clear operational and financial metrics. And then secondly they're disruption minded, so unlike the other companies that aren't performing well, they're really focused on investing in disruptive technologies that have the potential to create entirely new markets. And then finally, they're change orientated, so they're not just using innovation to develop new products and services, but they're also using it to drive more fundamental change across their organizations. And one of the principle changes that they're making is that they're becoming what we call network powered, so they're not just relying on their own internal innovation but they're drawing on a wide ecosystem of partners, like AWS, to really supercharge the rate at which they innovate. >> So those are the characteristics, what are you seeing on their ground, can you give us some specific examples of how they're taking those characteristics and what they're actually doing? >> I think you see companies set up and grow these innovation pods, so what we see customers doing is expanding those beyond just one pod. So, not just focusing on one part of their organization to do this, bringing that into a central location, creating a hub of pods and capabilities using everything, AWS services, using DevOps, doing all the cool stuff that's out there, but operationalizing that and getting to that center of excellence where they're actually seeing it end to end and they're not just jumping from one problem to then next. And once that graduates out, they have an organization waiting to take that on and continuing that journey while the next set comes in. So it's this process, it's this ongoing kind of chain of different problems coming in, being solved, and graduating out the other end. >> Is this a technology issue or is it a culture issue? >> The technology is there, I don't see it as a technology issue, I see it as a cultural issue, a change issue, a organizational issue, a resource issue, you got to find the talent that does that, you got to have the operational discipline to lead this stuff, and you have to go through that change. And we're seeing I think a lot of our customers struggle with that, and they want to learn how Accenture's done it, they want to learn how AWS has done it because obviously they've been very successful at it. >> And in terms of the cultural, the change management challenges that you're talking about, those are harder to overcome. So, do you have any best practices from your own experiences with it? >> We've obviously, Accenture's been in this game for a long time, whether it's innovation or whether we called it solution integration, whatever we called it, change was always a big part of that. So, a lot of those same change principles that we've used for twenty, thirty years still apply here. We see, you need very top down ownership and sponsorship, so from the very top down, whether that's the CEO, the CDO, the CIO, whoever it is they have to be 100% behind this, and have to be the cheerleaders. They have to be the people that're going to go get on stage, at re:Invent or other conferences and be that, this is how we're going, so you need that lead, and then you need very strong leadership underneath it that have gone through the journey before, this isn't the first time they've done it, they know where the potholes are in that road, they know what the signs are when they're going down the wrong way and how to get out of that. So you got to have those two key levels of experience. >> And to bring the others on-board. >> Absolutely, and they have to be the visionaries, they have to be the people guiding them through that, and you know, if you've got those people, if they're very strong-willed, very luminaries, those people will follow, and they'll follow them through that journey. And then they also got to go sell that to the rest of the organization, 'cause it's a change for the rest of the organization, the business is now much more engaged in that process, they're not just sending the requirements over the fence, they're very much engaged, they've got to understand and go through that agile transformation and understand when they're getting capabilities, what those capabilities are, so they need to go through that new operational paradigm that we're running in. >> So, finally, we're talking about innovation and then in particular AWS and Accenture, almost as the use cases here, how would you describe the innovation engine at AWS, Accenture in terms of the report that you've just published? It's obviously, I mean AWS is the biggest part of Amazon, I mean the high-growth engine of Amazon, and obviously a huge growth engine for Accenture too, so how would you characterize it Mike? >> Well, I think if we look at the three factors I was talking about before, being outcome led, being disruption minded, and being change orientated, then the relationship between Accenture and AWS really exhibits all of those three things, so in terms of being outcome led, Accenture has always been an organization that's laser focused on delivering results, delivering high performance, delivering value for our clients, and so is AWS. In terms of being disruption minded, we're innovating on the Cloud, using AWS to bring genuinely new and groundbreaking products and services to our clients. One of my favorite ones of those that we worked on in the UK, is our partnership with AWS and Age UK, which is a charity that helps the elderly and we're developing products and services for the elderly that helps them feel more connected to their family, and that's really opening up a brand new market. And then finally in terms of being change orientated, well, it's a relationship that really personifies being network powered and bringing the power there to multiple organizations that we can develop great products and services for our clients. >> Great, well Mike, Chris, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a really fun conversation. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS executive summit coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment, we have Adam Burden, Chief Software Engineer at Accenture and Chris Scott, AWS North America Lead. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE for returning. >> Sure, thanks for having us. >> Awesome, thanks. >> So we're talking today about future systems. So, in the past, when Accenture has talked about this, it's talked about the future of applications, future applications, now it's future systems. What are we talking about first of all? >> Sure. >> And why the switch? >> Look, it's actually a key question for us, and I think that we aspire to be to our clients thought leaders about where we believe that the technology landscape of tomorrow is heading. To help give them guidance about the path that they should chart their own systems on today. And we wrote kind of a seminal paper several years ago, called The Future of Applications, and it laid out different strategies that our clients, we recommended to our clients that they follow in order to build the technology systems of tomorrow. And in it, we have three characteristics, liquid, intelligent, and connected. And the outcome from that was great. It was an inspiration for many of them to build their future technology landscape and that language of liquid, intelligent, connected from a white paper was written five years ago has really entered the lexicon of many of our clients in industry. Now, however, they've seen the success, but they want to be able to do that truly at scale. They want to be able to take advantage of applications and the way that they're built and designed for tomorrow, but do that at an enterprise wide scale. And we felt like it was a time for us to go back and reflect upon what we had wrote about as the future of applications, and said, let's think about how systems, three years on, four years on, are going to be built for tomorrow. And that's exactly what we did in future systems. So future systems, you can look at it as a compass for how they'll continue to chart their path to be able to scale the new and close something that we call the innovation achievement gap. And this innovation achievement gap is really kind of the diagnosis that we put on there of where, they've seen success in pockets of innovation across their enterprise, but they want to be able to have that occurring across all of their businesses simultaneously. And we believe that following some of the prescriptive advice that we provide in future systems, that clients, our clients, would be able to do exactly that. >> So I want to dig into that research a little bit and you said, liquid, intelligent, connected. Those really became part of the vernacular. This year, it's three new-- >> Three new ones that's right! >> Three new ones, boundaryless, adaptable, and radically human. These are the characteristics that you say are the secret sauce for a successful system. >> That's right. >> So, let's get into these a little bit, let's start with boundaryless. >> Sure, boundaryless is great to talk here about, reinvent, because it really is all about cloud and how you use cloud. But before I get ahead of myself, and really define about what boundaryless is. Naturally, it's about breaking down barriers between systems, between businesses, and between humans and machines. And the successful companies that do this can really quickly respond to the market 'cause their systems are very agile and can react. There are really two really important elements to boundaryless, first is cloud. Being able to leverage cloud not just as a data center, but as an innovation platform to be able to do more, leveraging the great services from AWS, like Lambda and API Gateway and across the entire stack of AWS services and leveraging automation and really getting beyond infrastructure, to treating it infrastructure as code with an environment is an important component of that. The second is decoupling. It's decoupling applications and data. For years, we designed systems and the data that's part of that system would remain within that system. But you didn't get the value out of it by linking that across various parts of the organization. So it's important to decouple that data and application and give that access to other parts of the organization. The other important part is decoupling applications from legacy infrastructure. I talked a little bit about infrastructure as code. That's an important component of it. And lastly, it's decoupling integrated systems into loosely coupled applications and systems. And that's important because you develop components that you can share across the organization. You do really well for one system, you want to share that component across other systems in the organization. So Adam and I were talking a little bit about boundaryless and different examples that we've seen in working with our clients. Adam had a really good one that he was talking about before. >> Yeah, so this, I think this characteristic kind of sets the foundation for how future systems are going to be constructed and when you think about the restrictions that you perhaps even falsely place on applications today by sort of limiting how they can actually expand or grow or scale over time, you're limiting the potential growth of your business, and that's why we think it's so important that as you're designing and building systems of tomorrow and we're working with a client right now who is rethinking their loyalty program, it's Cathay Pacific, a big airline. >> We're going to be speaking with them later on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and it's a remarkable story and you're going to get a lot of details of this later, but what I really love about this is they've embraced this concept of boundaryless by introducing blockchain technologies in cloud into how their loyalty points program is going to work in the future. So whether they have 10 partners, 1,000 partners, or 10,000 partners in there, the way that they've constructed their system is it is going to elastically scale to be able to support all that, and it's going to make it faster and better with higher quality than ever before for them to onboard new partners and even more importantly, serve their mile point program customers better. So great example of boundaryless and how the systems of tomorrow are going to be built. >> And particularly because you said that that was a big challenge, that it's not only not communicating with your partners, but it's also not communicating within the business, the different units not talking to each other. >> Exactly. >> So let's move onto adaptable, and adapt, you think every system's got to be adaptable, duh! But what do we need, let's break it down. >> It's actually, you know, this is a really interesting challenge for us and you're starting to see the early stages now of systems and technologies that can embrace these characteristics. Basically what we mean by adaptable is that these are systems that autonomously change. They anticipate, for example, new loads or performance expectations or they anticipate certain changes in user patterns or behavior and actually reorganize themselves without you telling them to do it. So they're taking advantage of trusted data and artificial intelligence and other elements so that they can perform better and that you can focus more attention on the business value that's delivered on top of them. A great analogy that I've used for this is imagine you've got kind of two gears that are turning towards each other, right? And one gear has like a really big tooth on it and you can kind of see it coming and it's going to wreck the other gear when it gets there. Well, imagine that gear sort of sees that coming and adapts, and says, oh, okay, I can make this area wider, and that tooth will fit right in there. That's what adaptable is all about, is it's looking at what's happening around it and it's adjusting itself so it can perform better in the enterprise instead of falling over. And that makes your systems more reliable, it makes your customer experiences better and allows you to have systems that will make you one of these high performers of tomorrow. >> Anticipating and adapting? >> Anticipating and adapting, exactly right. >> Finally, the final characteristic, radically human, I love this. Define what it is, and then I want to talk about the kinds of companies that you've seen do this best. >> Yeah, radically human, I love the term too. I think it's great, and it's really about creating systems that are simple, they're elegant, but they're also immersive to our customers. Natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning are all important components and it's really about how these systems listen, they see, they can adapt, they understand what's going on just like people do. And it's interesting that technology's become so invasive in our lives, but it's also become invisible and it's woven into the fabric of what we do, with digital assistants and all the things that are out there today. It's such an important part of what we do. So it's important to create systems that are aligned to the users, and this is created an interesting inversion. We would design systems in the past that would gather requirements and then eventually, when the system went live, you'd have to train all of the users how to use that system and you would have to adapt the user to the system. Now what we're talking about is developing systems that can adapt, to the adaptable point that Adam mentioned, but really change to work better for the users. We were talking a little bit before as well about Amazon Connect, and a great example of this is leveraging Connect and omnichannel capabilities to allow customers to interact with customer service and businesses the way they want to interact. Whether that's via phone or through online or text message, find the right medium to get them the right answers as fast as possible. A great example of this is a client we're working with, Mutual of Omaha, who's going to be here on theCUBE and we've done a breakout session with them. They've been through this whole journey and they've really gotten much better customer engagement through this. >> So it's not necessarily feeling that your technology is mimicking a human, it's really just the technology is what you, the human, want it to be, in whatever format, I mean, is that right? >> That's a really interesting way of putting it. It's about so many times, and there's examples all around us, where people have kind of adapted to technology rather than us adapting to, or rather than that, technology adapting to us. I mean, even the keyboard, I have right here, right, the keyboard? This keyboard and the layout was invented in 1870, okay? And it was invented in a way to actually slow down typists so that the arms wouldn't get stuck on it. I mean, why are we still suffering with a keyboard that limits how fast we can type this many years later. And that's the point we're trying to make with radically human, is that we should be thinking about how technology is designed around people rather than the other way around. >> So that's a real cultural shift that has to take place within companies, so what are some of the best practices that sort of how companies can become more radically human and their systems become more radically human? >> Well, look, there's human-centered design, is a really important aspect of it, and then a lot of great emerging thought in that space. We think that design thinking contributes a lot to kind of really thinking from the very beginning about how do we build applications or technology systems in the future that are going to work with people so it's human plus machine, not human versus machine. And we think the outcomes that you get from embracing some of those approaches allow you to build solutions and design them that are much more radically human in the future. And this is really important. You're going to be more productive, more effective, your workforce is going to be happier, your customers are going to be happier, and they're going to be more engaged. And there's a paradox here too. Is it the more we do this, actually the less you'll see of the technology, because it'll become embedded in the things around us. So maybe, I've actually written some things in the past that says AI is the new UI, and the end of screens, right? So maybe it doesn't really mean the end of screens, but we're going to see a lot less screens because it's easier for people to hear information, sometimes, than it is to actually see it. >> Right, this is really fascinating stuff. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE for these great conversation. >> Oh, we're happy to, thank you, Rebecca. >> Adam and Chris, thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, here at The Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. We have Lawrence Fong, general manager, information technology at Cathay Pacific; Peter Yen, managing director, Hong Kong Accenture; and Massimo Morin, head world wide business development travel at AWS. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So we're going to be talking about applying blockchain to a travel rewards program at Cathay Pacific, but I want to start with you, Lawrence. Let's describe the business problem that you were trying to solve. The Asia Miles program is already, sort of a world-class program, very competitive. But it still had it's kinks. So, what were you trying to do to make it better? >> Okay, first of all, Asia Miles is a lifestyle, you know, frequent flyer loyalty program, and almost every year they're running over 460 marketing campaign a year. So, you can imagine how much work they have to do. So, from the customer point of view, they have a pin point of whatever activities of redemption or for award, all these kind of thing. It's going to take a long time for them to get their miles. So, from the customer point of view, this is not really ideal. And on the other hand, at the back office, because we're running so many marketing campaign. So, there's a lot of back office operation and lot of, where people work and all this kind of thing. So, it's also not, I think, a very good operation efficiency. So, from the customer point of view, from the back office point of view, so that's the key pinpoint we want to be solved. >> Right. So, it was tedious to operate for both the customer and for the business itself. So, why was blockchain the technology? That could solve it? >> Well, we study one of the key features, or component of blockchain, it's called 'smart contract'. And we could see the smart contract would be able to help bringing our customer and Asia Miles, and also our merchant together. So, by using blockchain, the miles, the redemption, all this will happen almost in a second. >> So, how did this work, Lawrence? I mean, in terms of getting, working together with Cathay Pacific, how did you work together to create this new program? >> Okay. Effectively, it's a very co-create process. It started with a conversation with Lawrence. We had the idea, so Lawrence was courageous enough to let us try. We did a very short, quick pilot. We proved the concept. Then we went into a very rapid development cycle, as well. And then, within weeks, we get the product done, and then we launch and go to the market. >> So, Peter, is that generally the way it goes, in terms of this co-creative process? I mean, we're hearing so much, that Accenture and AWS have these solutions that they can bring to clients, and then, is it sort of happening in the background or are you on the ground together, sort of dreaming up ways to make this better and make the technology work? >> Well, we used to call this the new way of doing things, but I think now this is the way of doing things, right? Because it is the perfect combination. The client has perfect knowledge about the business, we understand the technology, and we have enablement partners like Amazon. So, we just work together and make it happen. >> So, from Amazon, so we hear blockchain you automatically think Bitcoin. You just do. But this is actually a very different kind of use case for blockchain, and it's one that really is so pertinent. Can you talk a little, Massimo, about other uses cases that you're seeing? >> So, indeed that you are right. Blockchain has been very nebulous, and always associated to Bitcoins, but there are actually some uses cases that are much more relevant, especially in the travel industry where you complex transaction, multi-party, where you are actually going to do transparency and data integrity. For example, we had a proof of concept to to read IATA about a one ID project that allows a travel agency to register themselves with this authority and get the key, and then seamlessly doing transaction with travel providers by identifying themselves through blockchain. That allows them to actually be recognized, and you have a seamless process with the new NDC, new distribution capabilities coming along. That is going to be extremely important. This is one type. Another type is when you wanted the immutability of the data. For example, when you have planes an you want to see you getting leases, on and off lease, and you want to see all the maintenance that occur there, and you want that that doesn't change. You want to use a trusted system that is transparent, and that is not changeable. And that provide a lot of value. And the third use case that I personally like, is automatic contract. So, when, for example, you have corporate buyers, that buy travel products from a travel provider, like Cathay Pacific, and you wanted that, you buy the ticket. But when is the airline going to get the money? That reconciliation is like, with the frequent flyer miles, you want to be done as soon as possible. Other cases is, is the passengers flying around? If it doesn't fly, well, what happened to the taxes? Taxes should be actually returning back to the customer. So, with automatic contracts, you would be able actually to reconcile that behind the scene. These are use cases that are very valuable in travel industry. >> So, does this immediate reconciliation and this trust, I mean , trust is such an important, thick concept right now. What are you hearing? From both the clients' side and the provider's side. I mean, where are we? >> Yeah, that's true. I think trust is one of the key elements of, you know, doing reconciliation. So, what we are doing now is still within our legal system. So, we trust each other. But, looking forward, I think one of the key areas that blockchain will help a lot, is the entire supply chain. But, when we talk about the supply chain, there's so many stakeholder. So, building a trust, of course, of domestic holder will be a challenge. I think that's something, you know, of course the industry has to put more thought onto it. >> What are we seeing so far? So, this was implemented in April of this year. What has been the return on investments so far? >> It's phenomenal. For those marketing campaign, we're using blockchain. These new capabilities, we had a triple digit growth, in terms of our sales, and also, because we also use kind of a game to gamify the whole thing. So, we create a lot of traction in there, you know? A lot of excitement. So, the number of people and the number of customer engaged in those marketing campaigns also have more than, you know, more than double, you know, growth. >> Peter, what's most exciting to you about this process? >> The most exciting thing is that, as you heard from Lawrence, is indeed generating performance and results. And the process of co-creating a successful solution is a very rewarding experience. >> So, I mean, and then AWS is, in terms of the co-creative process, where does AWS fit into this? >> So, we are their neighbor, and I'm glad that you're able, Cathay Pacific and Accenture, as using AWS for this. So, we have standard templates, blockchain templates that actually take away all the heavy lifting of putting place to platform to found the blockchain. So, actually, the customer and the partner can focus on the business need that they have attend. And this is all open-source, so you can see how it works. And it's so transparent, that we are very glad to enable our customer to do transformative things like this. >> So, the word is out that blockchain is not just for Bitcoin anymore. So, where do we go from here? We're talking about the travel industry, but are the learnings that Cathay Pacific has had and Accenture, in terms of how applicable are they to other industries? And how are you sharing what you've learned in a collaborate, co-creative process? >> Well, all of that, in Asia Miles, now we are taking what we learned from the blockchain, we are going to apply to the cargo industry, and also apply to the airport operation. Particular, the baggage, the consideration baggage between different people, of course they're all the blockchain. >> Great. >> Actually, many clients are now talking about this Cathay Pacific case, and they have very creative ideas, how to borrow the concept and apply to their own business. So, we should see more and more application of this solution. >> And we are seeing acceleration of adoption of cloud technology throughout the travel industry, with airline, and technology providers out there. And I'm very glad that there are taught leadership, for example, from Cathay Pacific, to take this hypothetical use cases and taking the lead on showing how it is done and sharing with the industry. We are looking for those travel leaders that will help the industry to move forward. >> That's true. >> Because it's very challenging industry with very low margin, and any improvement in customer service is going to go a long way. And we are glad to be part of that. >> And is that what it is? I mean, as you said, it sort of seen, even the incremental improvement and how that can be, just, so transformational for a company's bottom line. >> Yep. >> Yes. >> Yep. Absolutely. >> Well, Massimo, Peter, Massimo, Peter, Lawrence, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. It's been a really fun conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (thrilling music)