(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Accenture San Francisco Innovation Hub on the 33rd floor of the Sales Force Tower in downtown San Francisco. It's 2020, the year we know everything with the benefit of hindsight. And what better way to kick off the year than to have the Accenture Tech Vision reveal, which is happening later tonight, so we're really happy to have one of the authors who's really driving the whole thing. He's Michael Blitz, the managing director of the Accenture Tech Vision 2020, a very special edition. Michael, great to see you. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so you've been doing this for a while. I think we heard earlier, this thing's been going on for 20 years? >> It is. >> You've been involved for at least the last eight. >> Michael: I think a little bit more than that. >> More than that, so what's kind of the big theme before we get into some of the individual items? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think right now, what we're really talking about is that our real big theme is this: We the digital people. And it's that recognition that says that we've fundamentally changed. When you start looking at yourself and your lives, it's that you've gotten to a point where you're letting your cell phone track you. Your car knows where you are probably better than your spouse does. You're handing your key to Amazon and Walmart so they can deliver packages in your house. And more than that is that actually, we're trying to start to revolve our lives around this technology. I look at my own life, and we just sold our second car, specifically because we know that Uber and Lyft exist to fill that void. >> Right, well you don't have to look much further than phone numbers. How many people remember anybody's phone number anymore, right, 'cause you don't really have to. I think it's the 15th anniversary of Google Maps. >> Michael: Yep. >> This year, and to think of a world without Google Maps, without that kind of instant access to knowledge, is really hard to even fathom. But as you said, we're making trade-offs when we use all these services, and now, some of the costs of those things are being maybe more exposed? Maybe more cute or in your face? I don't know, what would you say? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's happening now is that what we're realizing is that it's changed our relationship with companies. Is that suddenly we've actually brought them into our lives. And, on one hand, they're offering and have the ability to offer services that you could never really do before. But on the other hand is that, if I'm going to let somebody in my life, suddenly they don't have to just provide me value and this is useful, is that they actually, people are expecting them to retain their values, too. So, how they protect your data, what they're good for the community, for the environment, for society, whether it's sustainable or not. Is that suddenly, whereas people used to only care about what the product you're getting, now how it's built and how your company's being run is starting, it's just starting to become important, too. >> Right, well it's funny, 'cause you used to talk about kind of triple bottom line, shareholders, customers and your employees. And you talked about, really, this kind of fourth line, which is community and really being involved in the community. People care, suddenly you go to conferences where we spend a lot of time all the utensils are now compostable and the forks are compostable. And a lot of the individual packaging stuff is going away. So people do care. >> They do, and there's a fourth and a fifth. It says that your community cares, but your partners do, too. Is that you can't, I'm going to say, downgrade the idea that your B2B folks care is that suddenly, we're finding ourselves tied to these other companies, and not just in a supply chain, but from everything. And so, you're not in this alone in terms of how you're delivering these things. But now it's becoming a matter that says, Well, man, if my partners are going to get pummeled because they're not doing the right thing or they don't have that broad scope, that's going to reflect on me, too. And so, now you're suddenly in this interesting position where all of the things that we suspected were going to happen around digital connecting everybody is just starting to, and I think that's going to have a lot of positive effects. >> Yeah, so one of the things you talked about earlier today, in an earlier presentation was kind of the shift from kind of buyer and seller, seller and consumer, to provider and collaborator. Really kind of reflecting a very different kind of a relationship between the parties as opposed to this one-shot transactional relationship. >> No, and that's right, and it doesn't matter who you're talking about, is that, if you're hiring folks for skills that you're assuming that they're going to learn, that's going to be different in three years, in five years, you're essentially partnering with them in order to take all of you on a journey. When you start talking about governments, is that you're now partnering with regulators. You look at companies like Tesla, who are working on regulations for electric cars, they're working on regulations around battery technology. And you see that this go-it-alone approach isn't what you're doing. Rather, it's becoming much more holistic. >> Right, so we're in the innovation hub, and I think number five of the five is really about innovation today. >> Michael: It is. >> And you guys are driving innovation. And, rest in peace, Clayton Christensen passed away, Innovator's Dilemma, my all-time favorite book. But the thing I love about that book is that smart people making sound decisions based on business logic and taking care of existing customers will always miss discontinuous change. But you guys are really trying to help big companies be innovative. What are some of the things that they should be thinking about, besides, obviously, engaging with Mary and the team here at Innovation Hub? >> Yeah, no, and that's the really interesting thing is that when we talked about innovation, you know, five or even 10 years ago, you were talking about, just: How do I find a new product or a new service to bring to market? And now, that's the minimum stakes. Like, that's what everybody's doing. And I think what we're realizing as we're seeing tech become such a big part is that we all see how it's affecting the world. And a lot of times that things are good is that there's no reason why you wouldn't look at somebody like a Lyft or Uber and say that it's had a lot of positive effects. But from the same standpoint is that, you ask questions of: Is it good for public transit? It is good for city infrastructure? And those are hard questions to ask. And I think where we're really pushing now is that question that says: We've got an entire generation of not-tech companies, but every company that's about to get into this innovation game, and what we want them to do is to look at this not the way that the tech folks did, that says, here's one service or one technology, but rather, look at it holistically that says: How am I actually going to implement this, and what is the real effects that it's going to have on all of these different aspects? >> Right, Law of Unintended Consequences is always a good one. >> Michael: It is. >> And I remember hearing years ago of this concept of curb management. I'm like, Curb management, who ever thought of that? Well, drive up and down in Manhattan when they're delivering groceries or delivering Amazon packages and FedEx packages and UberEats and delivery dog food now. Where is that stuff being staged now that the warehouse has kind of shifted out into the public space? So, you never kind of really know where these things are going to end up. >> No, and I'm not saying that we're going to be able to predict all of it. I think, rather, it's that starting point that says that we're starting to see a big push that says that these things need to be factored and considered. And then, similarly, it's the, if you're working with them up-front, it becomes less of a fault, on a fight of whose fault it is at the end, and it becomes more of a collaboration that says, How much more can we do if we're working with our cities, if we're working with our employees, if we're working with our customers? >> Right, now another follow up, you guys've been talking about this for years, is every company is a tech company or a digital company, depending on how you want to spin that. But as you were talking about it earlier today, in doing so and in converting from products to service, and converting from an ongoing relationship to a one-time transaction, it's not only at that point of touch with a customer, but you've got to make a bunch of fundamental changes back in your own systems to support kind of this changing business model. >> Now, and that's right, and I think this is going to become the big challenge of the generation, is that we've gotten to a point where just using their existing models for how you interact with your customers or how you protect their data or who owns the data, all of these types of things, is that they were designed back when we were doing single applications, and they were loading up on your Windows PC. And where we're at now is that we're starting to ask questions that says, All right, in this new world, what do I have to fundamentally do differently? And sometimes that can be as simple as asking a question that says, you know, there's a consortium of pharma folks who have created a joint way for them to develop all of their search algorithms for new drugs. But they're using block chain, and so they're not actually sharing the data. So they do all the good things, but they're pushing that up. But fundamentally, that's a different way to think about it. You're now creating an entirely new infrastructure because what you're used to is just handing somebody the data, and what they do with the data afterwards is kind of their issue and not yours. And so now we're asking big, new questions to do it. >> Right, another big thing that keeps coming up over and over is trust. And again, we talked a little earlier. But I find this really ironic situation where people don't necessarily trust the companies in terms of the people running the companies and what they're going to do with their data, but they fundamentally trust the technology coming out of the gate and this expectation of: Of course it works, everything works on my mobile phone. But the two are related, but not equal. >> Michael: No, I mean, they're not, I mean, and it's really pushing this idea that says we've been looking at all these, I'm going to say scary headlines, of people not trusting companies for the last number of years, while at the same time, the adoption for the technology has been huge. So there's this dichotomy that's going on in people, where at one point, they like the tech. You know, I think the last stat I saw is that everybody spends up to six-and-a-half hours a day involved on the internet, in their technology. But from the same standpoint is that they worry about who's using it and how and what is going to be done. And I think where we're at is that interesting piece that says we're not worried about a tech lash. We don't think that people are going to stop using technology. Rather, we think it's really this tech clash that says they're not getting the value that they thought out of it, or they're seeing companies that may be using this technologies that don't share the same values that they do, and really, what we think this becomes, is the next opportunity for the next generations of service providers in order to fill that gap. >> Right, yeah, don't forget there was a Friendster and a MySpace before there was a Facebook. >> Yeah, there was. >> So, nothing lasts forever. So, last question before I let you go, it's a busy night. The first one was the I in experience, and I think kind of the user experience doesn't get enough light as to such a defining thing that does move the market if, again, I love to pick on Uber, but the Uber experience compared to walking outside on a rainy day in Manhattan and hoping to hail down a cab is fundamentally different, and I would argue, that it's that technology put together in this user experience that defined this kind of game-changing event, as opposed to it's a bunch of APIs stitching stuff together in the back. >> No, that's right, and I think where we're at right now is that we're about to see the next leap beyond that. Is that, most of the time when we look at the experiences that we're doing today, they're one way. Is that people assume that, Yeah, I have your data, I'm trying to customize. And whether it's an ad or a buying experience or whatever, but they're pushing it as this one-way street, and when we talk about putting the I back in experience, it's that question of the next step to really get people both more engaged as well as to, I'm going to say improve the experience itself, means that it's going to become a partnership. So you're actually going to start looking for input back and forth, and it's sometimes going to be as simple as saying that that ad that they're pushing out is for a product that I've already bought. Or, you know, maybe even just tell me how you knew that that's what I was looking for. But it's sometimes that little things, the back and forth, is how you take something from, what can be a mediocre experience, even potentially a negative one, and really turn it into something that people like. >> Yeah, well, Michael, I'll let you go. I know you got a busy night, we're going to present this. And really thankful to you and the team, and congratulations for coming up with something that's a little bit more provocative than, Cloud's going to be big, or Mobile's going to be big, or Edge is going to be big. So this is great material, and thanks for having us back. Look forward to tonight. >> No, happy to do it, and next year we'll probably do it again. >> [Jeff\ I don't know, we already know everything, it's 2020, what else is unknown? >> Everything's going to change. >> All right, thanks again. (upbeat music)

>>from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Accenture Tech Vision 20 twenties Brought to you by >>Accenture. >>Hey, welcome back here. Ready? Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Accenture San Francisco Innovation Hub in the 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco. It's 2020 the year we know everything with the benefit of hindsight. It what better way to kick off the year than they have the Accenture Tech vision reveal, which is happening later tonight. So we're really happy to have one of the authors who's really driving the whole thing. He's Michael Built the managing director of the Accenture Tech Vision. 2020. A very special edition. Michael, great to see you. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So you've been doing this for a while? I think we heard earlier. This thing's been going on for 20 years, but you've been involved with at least the last eight a little bit more and more than that. So what's the, uh, what's kind of the big theme before we get into some of the individual? Yeah, So I >>mean, I think right now what we're really talking about is that our real big theme is this ui the digital people? And it's that recognition that says that we fundamentally changed. I mean, when you start looking at yourself in your lives, is that you've gotten to a point where you're letting your cellphone track you. You know your car knows where you are, probably better than your spouse does. You know you're handing your key to all go to Amazon and Wal Marts. They deliver packages. Your help, and more than that, is that actually, we're trying to start to revolve our lives around this technology. You know, I look at my own life and we just sold our second car specifically because we know that uber and lift exists to fill that void, >>right? Well, you don't look much further >>than than phone numbers. How many people remember anybody's phone number anymore? Right, cause you don't really have to. I >>think it's 1/15 anniversary of Google maps this year, and to think of a world without Google Maps without that kind of instant access to knowledge is is really hard to even fathom. But as you said, we're making trade offs when we use all these services and and Now, some of the costs of those things are being maybe more exposed, maybe more cuter in your face. I don't know. What would you say? >>I mean, I think what's happening now is that what we're realizing is that it's changed our relationship with is that suddenly we've actually brought them into our lives. And on one hand they're offering and have the ability to offer services that you could never really do before, you know. But on the other hand is that if I'm gonna let somebody in my life suddenly they don't have to provide. Just provide me value. And this is useful is that they actually irks people expecting them to retained their values to, you know, so how they protect your data. What they're good for the community, for the environment, for society, whether it's sustainable or not, is that suddenly whereas people used to only care about what the products are getting now, how it's built, how your company is being run, it's starting like it's just starting, you know, to become important too, >>right? Well, it's funny cause you used to talk about, you know, kind of triple bottom line shareholders, customers and your employees and you talked about really kind of this fourth line, which is the community and really being involved in the community. People care suddenly go to conferences that we spend >>a lot of time and you know, all the utensils air now compostable and the forks air compostable. And you know, a >>lot of the individual packaging stuff is going away, so people do care. >>They do. And then there's 1/4 and 1/5 that says, the your community cares, you know? But it's also your partners. Do, too, is that you can't you know, I'm going to say downgrade. You know, the idea that you're B two b folks care is that suddenly we're finding ourselves tied to these other companies, and not just in a supply chain, you know, but from everything. And so you're not in this alone in terms of how you're delivering these things. But now it's becoming a data that says the man, if my partners are going to get pummeled because they're not doing the right thing or they don't have that broad scope, is the that's going to reflect on me, too, And so now you're suddenly in this interesting position Where all of the things that we suspected we're gonna happen around digital connecting everybody is just starting to. And I think that's gonna have a lot of positive effects. >>Yep. So one of the things you talked about earlier today, earlier presentation was kind of the shift from kind of buyer and seller seller, consumer to provider and collaborator, Really kind of reflecting a very different kind of a relationship between the parties as opposed to kind of this 11 shot transactional relationship >>now And that's right. And it doesn't matter who you're talking about. This is that, You know, if you're hiring folks, you know, for skills that you're assuming that they're going to learn, you know, that's going to be different in three years and five years. You're essentially partnering with them in order to take all of you on a journey. You know, when you start talking about governments, is that you're now partnering with regulators. You know, you look at companies like Tesla who are working on, you know, regulations for electric cars. They're working on regulations around battery technology. And you see that this go it alone approaches and what you're doing? You know, Rather, it's becoming much more holistic, >>right? So we're in the innovation hub, and I think Number five of the five is really about innovation today. And you guys are driving >>innovation and you know the rest of peace. Clayton Christensen passed away. Innovator's Dilemma. My all Time favorite book The Thing I love about that book is it's smart people. Making sound decisions based on business logic and taking care of existing customers will always miss this continuous change. But you guys are really trying to help companies be innovative. What are some of the things that they that they should be thinking about besides obviously engaging with marrying the team here? And >>that's the really interesting thing is that you know, when we talk about innovation, you know, five or even 10 years ago, you were talking about just how do I find a new product or new service to bring to market? And now that's the minimum stakes like that's what everybody's doing. And I think what we're realizing as we're seeing tech become such a big part is that we all see how it's affecting the world. And a lot of times the things they're good is that there's no reason why you wouldn't look at somebody like a lifter uber and say that it's had a lot of positive effects. But from the same standpoint is that you ask questions of Is it good for public transit? It's good for city infrastructure, and those are hard questions to ask. And I think where we're really pushing now is that question that says We've got an entire generation of not tech companies. But every company that's about to get into this innovation game and what we want them to do is to look at this, not the way that the tech folks did. That says, Here's one service or one technology but rather look at it holistically. That says, How am I actually going to implement this? And what is the real effects that it's gonna have on all of these Different >>lot of unintended consequences is always >>a good, and I remember hearing years ago >>this concept of of curb management, curb management you ever thought of that will drive up and down in Manhattan when they're delivering groceries or delivering Amazon packages and FedEx packages and uber eats and delivery dog food. Now where's that stuff being staged? Now? The warehouses kind of shifted. You got into the public space, so you never kind of really know where these things they're going to end up? >>No. And I'm not saying that we're gonna be able to predict all of it. I think rather it's that starting point that says that, you know, we're starting to see a big push, you know, that says that these things need to be factored in and considered. And then similarly, it's the If you're working with them up front, it becomes less of a fault in a fight of who's fault. It is at the end, and it becomes more of a collaboration that says, How much more can we do if we're working with our cities that we're working with our employees? We're working with >>another follow up. You guys been talking about this for years? Is every company is a tech company or a digital company, depending on how you want to spin that. But as you were talking about earlier today in doing so and then converting from products to services and converting from an ongoing relationship 21 time transaction, it's not only at that point of view touch with a customer, but you've got to make a bunch of fundamental changes back in your own systems to support kind of this changing business >>models. And that's right. And I think this is going >>to become The big challenge of the generation is that we've gotten to a point where just using their existing models for you know how you interact with your customers or how you protect their data or who owns the data. All of these types of things is that they were designed back when we were doing single applications and they were loading up on your windows PC. And where we're at now is that we're starting ask questions that says Alright in this New World order why it's a fundamentally do differently, you know, And, you know, sometimes that could be You know, a simple is asking a question that says, You know, there's a consortium of pharma folks who have created a joint way for them to develop all of their search algorithms for new drugs, but they're using Blockchain, and so they're not actually sharing the data, so they do all the good things but they're pushing that. But fundamentally, that's a different way to think about it. You're not creating an entirely new infrastructure because what you're used to is just handing somebody the data on what they do with the data afterwards. It's kind of their issue and not yours. And so now we're asking big new questions to do it >>right. Another big thing that keeps coming up over and over is trust. And again, we talked little. Really? I find this really ironic situation where people don't necessarily trust the companies in terms of the people running the companies and what they're gonna do with their data. But they fundamentally trust the technology coming out of the gate and this expectation of, of course it works. Everything works on my on my mobile phone, but the two are inter related, but not equal. >>No, I mean, they're >>not. I mean, it's really pushing this idea that says the we've been looking at all of these. I'm going to say scary headlines. People are not trusting companies for the last number of years, while at the same time the adoption for the technology has been huge. But there's this dichotomy that's going on and people were at one point is the they like the tech. I think the last stat I stall is that everybody spends up to six and 1/2 hours a day involved on the Internet in their technology. But from the same standpoint is that they worry about who's using it, how and what it's done. And I think where we're at is that interesting piece that says the we're not worried about a backlash. We don't think that people are going to stop using technology. Rather, we think it's really this tech backlash that says they're not getting the value that they thought out of it, you know? Or they're seeing companies that may be using this, technologies that don't share the same values that they do. And really, what we think this becomes is the next opportunity for the next generations of service providers in order to fill that >>right. Don't forget, there was a Friendster and MySpace before there was a Facebook. Nothing lasts forever. So last question finally goes busy night. The 1st 1 was the eye and experience, and I think you know the kind of the user experience doesn't get enough light as to such a such a defining thing that doesn't move the market again. I lived in an uber right, but the uber experience compared to walking outside on a rainy day in Manhattan and hoping to nail down a cab is fundamentally different. And I would argue that it's that technology put together in this user experience that defined this kind of game changing event as opposed to, You know, it's a bunch of AP I stitch and stuff together in the back. >>That's right. And I think where we're at right now is that we're about to see the next leap. Beyond that is that you know, most of the time when we look at the experiences that we're doing today, they're one way is that people assume that, Yeah, I have your data trying to customize and whether it's a ad or buying experience or whatever. But they're pushing it as this one way street. And when we talk about putting the I back experience, it's that question of the next step to really get people both more engaged as well as to I'm going to say improve the experience. Self means that it's going to become a partnership. So you're actually going to start looking for input back and forth, you know? And it's sometimes it's going to be a simple is saying that that ad that they're pushing out is for a product that I've already bought or, you know, maybe even just tell me how you knew, You know, that that's what I was looking for. But it's sometimes that little things that back and forth is how you take something from, you know, which could be a mediocre experiences, even potentially a negative one and really turned it into something that people like. >>Yeah, well, Michael, I let you go. I know you got a busy night, and we're going to present this and ah, I really think to you and the team And congratulations for coming up with something that's a little bit more provocative than Cloud's Going to be big or mobile is going to be big or edge is going to be big. So this is a great material. And thanks for having us back. Look forward to tonight happening. >>Happy to do it. And, you know, next year will probably do it again. >>So we already know everything is 20. >>20. What else is No, A All right. Thanks again. >>Yeah,

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020, brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Francisco, at the Accenture Innovation Hub, 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower at the Accenture Technology Vision 2020 party. The party's getting started. Paul, and Mike, and the team are going to present the findings, and we're excited to have, actually, the hostess of this great facility. She's Ashley Miller, managing director of the San Francisco Innovation Hub. Ashley, great to see you. >> Great to see you again. >> So, congratulations once again. We were here last year. It was the grand opening of this facility. >> Ashley: Yes, sure was. >> You've had it open for a year now. >> We sure have. It's been a year. We also have a soft launch in September, so a little more than a year under our belt, and as you can see, the place is busy. >> Right, so you had the hard job, right? So Mike, and Paul, and all the big brains, they put together pretty pictures, and great statements. You're the one that actually has to help customers implement this stuff, so tell us a little bit about how you use the Tech Vision because it's pretty insightful. It's a lot deeper than cloud's going to be big, or mobile's going to be big, but to take some of these things to help you with your customers drive this innovation. >> Yeah, well, I don't know about having the hard job against theirs. They certainly have the hard job understanding what these technology trends are that are going to have an impact on business three to five years out, but I certainly do have the fun job, and the exciting job. I get to work with our clients every day here in the hub, and work with our 250 dedicated innovation teammates here in the hub to think about the impact of these trends to their business, so clients come in for a day, two days, a week, and we'll sit with technologists. We'll get our hands on some of these emerging technologies, on quantum computing, on artificial intelligence, machine vision, machine learning, natural language processing. You name it, we have it here. We have a smart materials showcase going on upstairs that a lot of these clients have checked out, so they can come here, they can get their hands on these technologies that are driving these trends, and then, they can sit and work with strategists, and others who can think about, what are the application of these technologies to their business? And then, what's really exciting is we have engineers here who can then help build prototypes to actually test these technologies to see what their impacts are for the business, and then, finally, support the rollout of pilots that prove successful, so it's, again, it's a fun job. I love it. >> And how does it actually work in terms of best practices? Is it starting out as some strategy conversation with the top-level people about trying to integrate say, more AI into their products, or is it maybe more of within a product group, where they're trying to be a little bit more innovative, and it really challenges on the product development path? You talked about the material science that they want to go down, what are some of the ways that people actually work with you, and work with your teams, and leverage this asset here at the hub? >> Yeah, so ultimately, it's both, and it's at all ends of the spectrum. We are here in the Silicon Valley, where clients are coming from all over the globe to understand what the trends are that are going to shape their business operations in the future, so we have clients that are coming through. Some people call them digital safaris, or innovation safaris. Some people may say that's not valuable. I think it is valuable to come and get firsthand experience, knowledge, touch and feel these things, and really dedicate time to think about the application to your business. On the other end of the spectrum, we'll have clients who are here for days, weeks, and months, and we have ongoing partnerships with clients. We've been open for about a year and a half, for that and longer to actually embed this innovation capabilities into their business, so I think maybe an answer is, what is the most successful model I see? I really get to dig into these clients who are using our services as an innovation engine to help them drive their business, and to help augment their innovation capabilities, and it's those clients I see who are continuously testing, continuously learning, understanding the impact of these technologies, driving proofs of concepts to test them who are able to make progress. >> Can it happen without top down support? I mean, we talked, unfortunately Clayton Christensen just passed away. Innovator's Dilemma, my favorite business book of all time because he said smart people making sound business decisions based on customers, profitability, and business, logical business priorities, will always miss discontinuous change. Jeff Bezos talks about AWS had a seven-year head start on their public cloud because no one down in Redwood Shores, or Waldorf was paying attention to the bookseller in Seattle, so it's hard for big companies to innovate, so is it really necessary for that top down, that, hey, we are going to invest, and we are going to saddle up, and get our hands dirty with some of these technologies for them to be successful, and drive innovation because it's not easy for big enterprises. >> You're exactly right. Innovation is hard. Change is difficult. I was a student of Clayton Christensen, and like you and many others, are mourning his passing. He made a significant impact, this area of research. Change is hard. It's difficult, so we see a lot of clients who are coming in, and are doing interesting things to overcome that inertia to stay put, and I think tops down leadership is a significant piece of that. You need to have leaders who are supporting movement, who are enabling decision making quickly, so they are supporting small decisions they're making frequently so that there's not a massive decision that happens at the end of a pilot, but rather, micro-decisions that help ensure things are being moved along, building pilots and proof of concepts, of course, helped in that movement to get buy-in, to get leaders to see the value, and to also pivot if something isn't working, so innovation is hard. Accenture's Innovation Hub helps to fill some of those gaps because really, we are a sandbox, where you can come in, build the proof of concepts, test these ideas, and then, in an ongoing, continuous way, help understand their impacts to your business. >> Right, and I'm just curious how often, as order of magnitude, this innovation around a particular, existing business, maybe it's the new materials, the new way of thinking about it, versus maybe, is this a way for them to really explore wild ideas, or go out a little bit beyond the edge of what they're going to execute in their normal, day to day, say, product development because which of those do you find is best use of your resources? >> Yeah, so again, it runs the spectrum. I mean, I think the companies who are innovating around the edges, they're spending a lot of money to run pilots, and tests, proof of concepts that may not have significant value to the core of their business, so of course, it's the companies who are really thinking about how they're going to innovate new business models, how they're going to build on these trends to figure out where their company is going in the future, and be ready, and be ahead of the curve, but in order to get there, maybe you do need to get your hands dirty, and run some tests, run some proof of concepts to understand the technology. The key is, in order to ensure that the investment in those activities is actually helping you move the needle. >> Right, so how should people, if somebody's watching this, and they want to get involved, or I'm busting my head. We're not moving as fast as we need to. I'm nervous. I have an imperative. I need to accelerate this stuff. How do they get involved, and how do they end up here getting their hands dirty with some of your team? >> Yeah, thanks for that, appreciate that. Accenture works with the largest organizations around the globe, and there's typically a client account leader, partner, from Accenture embedded into the biggest organizations, and so, for those who are existing clients, they can reach out to their client account lead, and we would be delighted to welcome them in, and do some, either, exploratory research into these technologies, or actually, do some longer-term innovation engine work, where we're helping to augment their capabilities. For those who, maybe, aren't an Accenture client, then, we do have open houses. We do quarterly open events, not only for potential new clients, but also, for people in the community for partners, for schools. We're really committed to helping to be an asset for San Francisco, for this community, so keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to come in. >> Yeah, that's great because last time when we were here when we opened there was a lot of conversation about being a very active participant in the community. You guys are sponsors with the Warriors at the Chase Center, but no, I think we had a number of people from the city and county of San Francisco in talking about the opportunities, and being an active, engaged member of the community beyond just a for-profit company. >> Absolutely, and the undercurrent of this year's Tech Vision, which is about to launch is all about thinking beyond the edges of your organization, and understanding the choices that you make, how they impact the communities you serve, so it's really important to us to be a good steward of that here at Accenture, and we have teammates accessible within the hub. For example, data enthesis, who can help you understand the decisions you're making around artificial intelligence. Are you using data securely? Are you using it in a way that makes people feel comfortable? So we have teammates here who can help clients consider the impact of these decisions that goes beyond the four walls, to really be a good steward for the next generation. >> Okay, well, next time I come, I'm wearing a white coat, so we can go get our hands dirty. >> I like it. >> All right, Ashley, well, again, congratulations to you and the team, and have a great evening. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, she's Ashley, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub for the Technology Vision 2020. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. (funky electronic music)

>> Hey, welcome back. Your body, Jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the century innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. There were about security and all kinds of other things, so centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but yeah, absolutely. Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to reach. All of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in >> everyone's, you know, everyone's got a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember we used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service now. I mean, we've went through on premise collaboration, email thio 3 65 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really started. See some scale around it. >> And I think and tell me if you agree, I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and and the service now is of the world office 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial beers, which are all really about security and security, security, security, Always to hear where now security is actually probably an attributes and loud can brink. >> Absolutely. In fact, I mean, those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service Now to put, you know, instances on prime and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when Europe into sales force, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems have certainly gone away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it sold by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the in the public domain, right? Not public. >> And I think it also helped them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So let's back up 1/2 a step, because then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into public cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be, Um, but then we ran into a whole new host of issues, right, which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds. There's certain attributes is that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How should they think about what to deploy where I think >> I'll start in? The military has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspective. You go to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications, or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues, or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment. Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will. Then Dr where these applications need to recite and then what we think in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy. But you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know how clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications? And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms, guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications gonna evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some, like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And, you know, I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi and, you know, every cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, etcetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we gonna modernize that >> it had. And how do you segment? That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size where they should be focusing on us? >> So typically what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications he moved to sass certain other applications you move to pass. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization and then certain others you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have to initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, um, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old. And where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. If >> you could go back through four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings, I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get getting your capabilities to market faster, to change my customer experience. So So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. We're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how'd I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get their upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress. So So Obviously, cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more for, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on, given the right service levels of right experience to the user, little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds, easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define him? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talked more clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to, you know, come to ah, you know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific look >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera. So that's the innovations there obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly, which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption, economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it, um, performance if you think the public world, you know, Although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business. Critical workloads like that article, article rack, the Duke clusters, everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana database you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, you know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of code still living in, You know, whether it's you, nick system, just IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right? And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take their reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now, when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or everything three or four days for my mobile application. And it's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, But we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're seeing is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles. The land is that, you know, the red shifts the functions of the public world, but then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip, a data that I need to worry about GDP are there, you know, the whole set of regular two requirements. Now, over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from my client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him, runs that AWS public sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this in this hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of breaking the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move. Works fine, be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where? But finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it the business value of replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and in a micro service's architecture now D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> and percent you raided, jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single planet glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications in the and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass. Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you will Yeah, >> I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers go to private cloud. And so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, cantinas and Cuba needs. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients, >> right? Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promises, cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started in. They've got some, actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at surveillance. So you're gonna even a single application can span that. And one of things we've seen is is first, you know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM, where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talk to it. It's a very well. Despite the power, it's a very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, Application Service's teams that do that Application manager, an optimization cloud infrastructure. How do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to security service is bringing those together. And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive with cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public? But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale, er's and how they hit Incredible degrees of automation. We really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys we're doing that We came up with this concept. We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy, environment, and start a look and say, OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl >> and my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that way. So >> we started make you know how to be standardized like center hybrid cloud solution important with hp envy And where we how do we that was an example of so we can get to you because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing our service catalog. Standardizing that, um you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now. But truly putting the security and and operations into Deb said cops are bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re Skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're riding the automation script to take work, you know, test work out right. And over time they'll be tuning the aye aye engines to really optimize environment. And then finally, has Prasad alluded to Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know what we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms, and then the application teams with it with my wizard framework, and we started to bring that together you know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide. You know, it's automation. Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a I ops, right? I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops. That's what we you A ups. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control? Aye, aye. Reporting et cetera. Right? >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools to do straight functions. >> I'm just I'm just curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app, something we're coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds that just with the wrong. It was just the wrong application. The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options like an tars and out pulls an actor stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that, then you see many more options around around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed. That left >> E. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were a big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption, you know, consumption model. And they went, really, they didn't have a function to go and look at be thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement Exactly. I think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on Do you know e? I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application led, you know, modernization, that really that will dictate that. And I think In many cases, people didn't. May not have thought Through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. And if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana and that's the core, my crown jewels that data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that? >> Right? But if Andy was here, though, and he would say we'll send down the stove, the snow came from which virgin snow plows? Snowball Snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But I have seen the whole truck killer that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they, you know, they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source. Of course. Then to move it, change it. You know, you run into all these micro lines of billing statement, take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe, so if they anyone need to expose it, Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out, You know, particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue because no matter how much you know, while Moore's Law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better. The network becomes more of a bottleneck. And that's a It's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith. Oh, all right. Or, you know, highlight and see type. Also, egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know, that's being a big issue, >> you know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally from building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it and they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, Turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But it kind of close on our conversation. I won't talk about a I and applied a Iot because he has a lot of talk in the market place. But, hey, I'm machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. Yeah, yeah, >> absolutely. Completely agree with you. In fact, attack sensual. We actually refer to this whole area as applied intelligence on That's our guy, right? And it is absolutely to add more and more automation move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environments comported right. What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken rounding et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space, less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, And then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate one too. Then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement. You know, between >> when the best thing to you, then you have dynamic optimization. Could you might be optimizing eggs at us right now. But you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending when you got me. They got to see them >> together with you and multi dimension. Optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the tables. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you, Grace. Besides Larry, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We are high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Theis Center, Innovation hub in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Cube, we are high top San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower in the newest center offices. It's really beautiful and is part of that. They have their San Francisco innovation hubs, so it's five floors of maker's labs and three D printing and all kinds of test facilities and best practices Innovation theater and in this studio, which is really fun to be at. So we're talking about hybrid cloud in the development of cloud and multi cloud. And, you know, we're, you know, continuing on this path. Not only your customers on this path, but everyone's kind of on this path is the same kind of evolved and transformed. We're excited. Have a couple experts in the field. We got Larry Soccer. He's the global managing director of Intelligent Cloud Infrastructure Service's growth and strategy at a center. Very good to see you again. Great to be here. And the Jay Patel. He's the senior vice president and general manager, cloud provider, software business unit, being where enemies of the people are nice. Well, so, uh so first off, how you like the digs appear >> beautiful place and the fact we're part of the innovation team. Thank you for that. It's so let's just >> dive into it. So a lot of crazy stuff happening in the market place a lot of conversations about hybrid cloud, multi cloud, different cloud, public cloud movement of Back and forth from Cloud. Just wanted. Get your perspective a day. You guys have been in the Middle East for a while. Where are we in this kind of evolution? It still kind of feeling themselves out. Is it? We're kind of past the first inning, so now things are settling down. How do you kind of you. Evolution is a great >> question, and I think that was a really nice job of defining the two definitions. What's hybrid worse is multi and simply put hybrid. We look at hybrid as when you have consistent infrastructure. It's the same infrastructure, regardless of location. Multi is when you have disparate infrastructure. We're using them in a collective. So just from a level setting perspective, the taxonomy starting to get standardized industry starting to recognize hybrid is a reality. It's not a step in the long journey. It is an operating model that's gonna be exists for a long time, so it's no longer about location. It's a lot harder. You operate in a multi cloud and a hybrid cloud world and together, right extension BM would have a unique opportunity. Also, the technology provider Accenture, as a top leader in helping customers figure out where best to land their workload in this hybrid multicolored world, because workloads are driving decisions right and one of the year in this hybrid medical world for many years to come. But >> do I need another layer of abstraction? Cause I probably have some stuff that's in hybrid. I probably have some stuff in multi, right, because those were probably not much in >> the way we talked a lot about this, and Larry and I were >> chatting as well about this. And the reality is, the reason you choose a specific cloud is for those native different share capability. Abstraction should be just enough so you can make were close portable, really use the caper berry natively as possible right, and by fact, that we now with being where have a native VM we're running on every major hyper scaler, right? And on. Prem gives you that flexibility. You want off not having to abstract away the goodness off the cloud while having a common and consistent infrastructure. What tapping into the innovations that the public cloud brings. So it is a evolution of what we've been doing together from a private cloud perspective to extend that beyond the data center to really make it operating model. That's independent location, right? >> Solarium cures your perspective. When you work with customers, how do you help them frame this? I mean, I always feel so sorry for corporate CEOs. I mean, they got >> complexities on the doors are already going on >> like crazy that GDP are now, I think, right, The California regs. That'll probably go national. They have so many things to be worried about. They got to keep up on the latest technology. What's happening in containers away. I thought it was Dr Knight. Tell me it's kubernetes. I mean, it's really tough. So how >> do you help them? Kind of. It's got a shot with the foundation. >> I mean, you look at cloud, you look at infrastructure more broadly. I mean, it's there to serve the applications, and it's the applications that really drive business value. So I think the starting point has to be application lead. So we start off. We have are intelligent. Engineering guys are platform guys. You really come in and look And do you know an application modernisation strategy? So they'll do an assessment. You know, most of our clients, given their scale and complexity, usually have from 520,000 applications, very large estates, and they got to start to freak out. Okay, what's my current application's? You know, you're a lot of times I use the six R's methodology, and they say, OK, what is it that I I'm gonna retire. This I'm no longer needed no longer is business value, or I'm gonna, you know, replace this with sass. Well, you know, Yeah, if I move it to sales force, for example, or service now mattress. Ah, and then they're gonna start to look at their their workloads and say OK, you know, I don't need to re factor reform at this, you know, re hosted. You know, when one and things obviously be Emily has done a fantastic job is allowing you to re hosted using their softer to find a data center in the hyper scale er's environments >> that we called it just, you know, my great and then modernized. But >> the modern eyes can't be missed. I think that's where a lot of times you see clients kind of getting the trap Hammer's gonna migrate and then figure it out. You need to start tohave a modernisation strategy and then because that's ultimately going to dictate your multi and your hybrid cloud approaches, is how they're zaps evolve and, you know, they know the dispositions of those abs to figure out How do they get replaced? What data sets need to be adjacent to each other? So >> right, so a j you know, we were there when when Pat was with Andy and talking about, you know, Veum, Where on AWS. And then, you know, Sanjay has shown up, but everybody else's conferences a Google cloud talking about you know, Veum. Where? On Google Cloud. I'm sure there was a Microsoft show I probably missed. You guys were probably there to know it. It's kind of interesting, right from the outside looking in You guys are not a public cloud per se. And yet you've come up with this great strategy to give customers the options to adopt being We're in a public hot. And then now we're seeing where even the public cloud providers are saying here, stick this box in your data center and Frank, this little it's like a little piece of our cloud of floating around in your data center. So talk about the evolution of the strategy is kind of what you guys are thinking about because you know, you're cleared in a leadership position, making a lot of interesting acquisitions. How are you guys see this evolving? And how are you placing your bets? >> You know, that has been always consistent about this. Annie. Any strategy, whether it's any cloud, was any device, you know, any workload if you will, or application. And as we started to think about it, right, one of the big things be focused on was meeting the customer where he's out on its journey. Depending on the customer, let me simply be trying to figure out looking at the data center all the way to how the drive in digital transformation effort in a partner like Accenture, who has the breadth and depth and something, the vertical expertise and the insight. That's what customers looking for. Help me figure out in my journey. First tell me where, Matt, Where am I going and how I make that happen? And what we've done in a clever way, in many ways is we've created the market. We've demonstrated that VM where's the omen? Consistent infrastructure that you can bet on and leverage the benefits of the private or public cloud. And I You know, I often say hybrids a two way street. Now, which is you're bringing Maur more hybrid Cloud service is on Prem. And where is he? On Premise now the edge. I was talking to the centering folks and they were saying the mitral edge. So you're starting to see the workloads, And I think you said almost 40 plus percent off future workers that are gonna be in the central cloud. >> Yeah, actually, is an interesting stat out there. 20 years 2020 to 70% of data will be produced and processed outside the cloud. So I mean, the the edges about, you know, as we were on the tipping point of, you know, I ot finally taking off beyond, you know, smart meters. You know, we're gonna see a huge amount of data proliferate out there. So, I mean, the lines between public and private income literary output you look at, you know, Anthony, you know, as your staff for ages. So you know, And that's where you know, I think I am where strategy is coming to fruition >> sometime. It's great, >> you know, when you have a point of view and you stick with it >> against a conventional wisdom, suddenly end up together and then all of a sudden everyone's falling to hurt and you're like, This is great, but I >> hit on the point about the vertical ization. Every one of our client wth e different industries have very different has there and to the meeting that you know the customer, you know, where they're on their journey. I mean, if you talk to a pharmaceutical, you know, geekspeak compliance. Big private cloud started to dip their toes into public. You know, you go to minds and they're being very aggressive public. So >> every manufacturing with EJ boat back in >> the back, coming to it really varies by industry. >> And that's, you know, that's a very interesting here. Like if you look at all the ot environment. So the manufacturing we started see a lot of end of life of environment. So what's that? Next generation, you know, of control system's gonna run on >> interesting on the edge >> because and you've brought of networking a couple times where we've been talking it, you know, and as as, ah, potential gate right when I was still in the gates. But we're seeing Maura where we're at a cool event Churchill Club, when they had Xilinx micron and arm talking about, you know, shifting Maur that compute and store on these edge devices ti to accommodate, which you said, you know, how much of that stuff can you do at the adverse is putting in. But what I think is interesting is how are you going to manage that? There is a whole different level of management complexity when now you've got this different level of you're looting and security times many, many thousands of these devices all over the place. >> You might have heard >> recent announcements from being where around the carbon black acquisition right that combined with our work space one and the pulse I ot well, >> I'm now >> giving you a management framework with It's what people for things or devices and that consistency. Security on the client tied with the network security with NSX all the way to the data center, security were signed. A look at what we call intrinsic security. How do we bake and securing the platform and start solving these end to end and have a park. My rec center helped design these next generation application architectures are distributed by design. Where >> do you put a fence? You're you could put a fence around your data center, >> but your APP is using service now. Another SAS service is so hard to talk to an application boundary in the sea security model around that. It's a very interesting time. >> You hear a lot of you hear a >> lot about a partnership around softer to find data center on networking with Bello and NSX. But we're actually been spending a lot of time with the i o. T. Team and really looking at and a lot of our vision, the lines. I mean, you actually looked that they've been work similarly, agent technology with Leo where you know, ultimately the edge computing for io ti is gonna have to be containerized because you can need multiple middleware stacks supporting different vertical applications, right? We're actually you know what we're working with with one mind where we started off doing video analytics for predictive, you know, maintenance on tires for tractors, which are really expensive. The shovels, It's after we started pushing the data stream up it with a video stream up into azure. But the network became a bottleneck looking into fidelity. So we gotta process there. They're not looking autonomous vehicles which need eight megabits low laden C band with, you know, sitting at the the edge. Those two applications will need to co exist. And you know why we may have as your edge running, you know, in a container down, you know, doing the video analytics. If Caterpillar chooses, you know, Green Grass or Jasper that's going to co exist. So you see how the whole container ization that were started seeing the data center push out there on the other side of the pulse of the management of the edge is gonna be very difficult. I >> need a whole new frontier, absolutely >> moving forward. And with five g and telco. And they're trying to provide evaluated service is So what does that mean from an infrastructure perspective. Right? Right, Right. When do you stay on the five g radio network? Worse is jumping on the back line. And when do you move data? Where's his process? On the edge. Those all business decisions that need to be doing to some framework. >> You guys were going, >> we could go on. Go on, go. But I want to Don't fall upon your Segway from containers because containers were such an important part of this story and an enabler to the story. And, you know, you guys been aggressive. Move with hefty Oh, we've had Craig McCloskey, honor. He was still at Google and Dan great guys, but it's kind of funny, right? Cause three years ago, everyone's going to Dr Khan, right? I was like that were about shows that was hot show. Now doctors kind of faded and and kubernetes has really taken off. Why, for people that aren't familiar with kubernetes, they probably here to cocktail parties. If they live in the Bay Area, why's containers such an important enabler? And what's so special about Coburn? 80 specifically. >> Do you wanna go >> on the way? Don't talk about my products. I mean, if you >> look at the world is getting much more dynamics on the, you know, particularly you start to get more digitally to couple applications you started. You know, we've gone from a world where a virtual machine might have been up for months or years. Toe, You know, obviously you have containers that are much more dynamic, allowed to scale quickly, and then they need to be orchestrated. That's essential. Kubernetes does is just really starts to orchestrate that. And as we get more distributed workloads, you need to coordinate them. You need to be able to scale up as you need it for performance, etcetera. So kubernetes an incredible technology that allows you really to optimize, you know, the placement of that. So just like the virtual machine changed, how we compute containers now gives us a much more flexible portable. You know that, you know you can run on anything infrastructure, any location, you know, closer to the data, et cetera. To do that. And I >> think the bold movie >> made is, you know, we finally, after working with customers and partners like century, we have a very comprehensive strategy. We announced Project Enzo, a philosophy in world and Project tansy really focused on three aspects of containers. How do you build applications, which is pivotal in that mansion? People's driven around. How do we run these arm? A robust enterprise class run time. And what if you could take every V sphere SX out there and make it a container platform? Now we have half a million customers. 70 million be EMS, all of sudden that run time. We're continue enabling with the Project Pacific Soviets. Year seven becomes a commonplace for running containers, and I am so that debate of'em czar containers done gone well, one place or just spin up containers and resource is. And then the more important part is How do I manage this? You said, becoming more of a platform not just an orchestration technology, but a platform for how do I manage applications where I deploy them where it makes most sense, right? Have decoupled. My application needs from the resource is, and Coburn is becoming the platform that allows me to port of Lee. I'm the old job Web logic guy, right? >> So this is like distributed Rabb logic job on steroids, running across clouds. Pretty exciting for a middle where guy This is the next generation and the way you just said, >> And two, that's the enabling infrastructure that will allow it to roll into future things like devices. Because now you've got that connection >> with the fabric, and that's working. Becomes a key part of one of the key >> things, and this is gonna be the hard part is optimization. So how do we optimize across particularly performance, but even costs? >> You're rewiring secure, exact unavailability, >> Right? So still, I think my all time favorite business book is Clayton Christians. An innovator's dilemma. And in one of the most important lessons in that book is What are you optimizing four. And by rule, you can't optimize for everything equally you have to you have to rank order. But what I find really interesting in this conversation in where we're going in the complexity of the throughput, the complexity of the size of the data sets the complexity of what am I optimizing for now? Just begs for applied a I or this is not This is not a people problem to solve. This is this >> is gonna be all right. So you look at >> that, you know, kind of opportunity to now apply A I over the top of this thing opens up tremendous opportunity. >> Standardize infrastructural auditory allows you to >> get more metrics that allows you to build models to optimize infrastructure over time. >> And humans >> just can't get their head around me because you do have to optimize across multiple mentions. His performances cost, but then that performances gets compute. It's the network, I mean. In fact, the network's always gonna be the bottlenecks. You look at it even with five G, which is an order of magnitude, more bandwidth from throughput, the network will still lag. I mean, you go back to Moore's Law, right? It's Ah, even though it's extended to 24 months, price performance doubles. The amount of data potentially can kick in and you know exponentially grow on. Networks don't keep pays, so that optimization is constantly going to be tuned. And as we get even with increases in network, we have to keep balancing that right. >> But it's also the business >> optimization beyond the infrastructure optimization. For instance, if you're running a big power generation field of a bunch of turbines, right, you may wanna optimize for maintenance because things were running at some steady state. But maybe there's oil crisis or this or that. Suddenly the price, right? You're like, forget the maintenance. Right now we've got you know, we >> got a radio controlled you start about other >> than a dynamic industry. How do I really time change the behavior, right? Right. And more and more policy driven. Where the infrastructure smart enough to react based on the policy change you made. >> That's the world we >> want to get to. And we're far away from that, right? >> Yeah. I mean, I think so. Ultimately, I think the Cuban honeys controller gets an A I overlay and the operators of the future of tuning the Aye aye engines that optimizing, >> right? Right. And then we run into the whole thing, which we've talked about many times in this building with Dr Room, A child re from a center. Then you got the whole ethics overlay on top of the thing. That's a whole different conversation from their day. So before we wrap kind of just want to give you kind of last thoughts. Um, as you know, customers Aaron, all different stages of their journey. Hopefully, most of them are at least at least off the first square, I would imagine on the monopoly board What does you know, kind of just top level things that you would tell people that they really need just to keep always at the top is they're starting to make these considerations, starting to make these investments starting to move workloads around that they should always have kind of top >> of mind. For me, it's very simple. It's really about focused on the business outcome. Leverage the best resource for the right need and design. Architectures are flexible that give you a choice. You're not locked in and look for strategic partners with this technology partners or service's partners that alive you to guide because the complexities too high the number of choices that too high. You need someone with the breath in depth to give you that platform in which you can operate on. So we want to be the digital kind of the ubiquitous platform. From a software perspective, Neck Centuries wants to be that single partner who can help them guide on the journey. So I think that would be my ask. It's not thinking about who are your strategic partners. What is your architecture and the choices you're making that gave you that flexibility to evolve. Because this is a dynamic market. What should make decisions today? I mean, I'll be the one you need >> six months even. Yeah. And And it's And that that dynamic that dynamics is, um is accelerating if you look at it. I mean, we've all seen change in the industry of decades in the industry, but the rate of change now the pace, you know, things are moving so quickly. >> I mean, little >> respond competitive or business or in our industry regulations, right. You have to be prepared for >> Yeah. Well, gentlemen, thanks for taking a few minutes and ah, great conversation. Clearly, you're in a very good space because it's not getting any less complicated in >> Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Larry. Ajay, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. >> We are top of San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower at the center Innovation hub. Thanks for watching. We'll see next time. Quick

>> Hey, welcome back. Your body, Jefe Rick here from the Cube were high atop San Francisco in the century innovation hub. It's in the middle of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful facility. They think you had it. The grand opening about six months ago. We're here for the grand opening. Very cool space. I got maker studios. They've got all kinds of crazy stuff going on. But we're here today to talk about Cloud in this continuing evolution about cloud in the enterprise and hybrid cloud and multi cloud in Public Cloud and Private Cloud. And we're really excited to have a couple of guys who really helping customers make this journey, cause it's really tough to do by yourself. CEOs are super busy. There were about security and all kinds of other things, so centers, often a trusted partner. We got two of the leaders from center joining us today's Prasad Sankaran. He's the senior managing director of Intelligent Cloud infrastructure for Center Welcome and Larry Soccer, the global managing director. Intelligent cloud infrastructure offering from central gentlemen. Welcome. I love it. It intelligent cloud. What is an intelligent cloud all about? Got it in your title. It must mean something pretty significant. >> Yeah, I think First of all, thank you for having us, but yeah, absolutely. Everything's around becoming more intelligent around using more automation. And the work that, you know we delivered to our clients and cloud, as you know, is the platform to reach. All of our clients are moving. So it's all about bringing the intelligence not only into infrastructure, but also into cloud generally. And it's all driven by software, >> right? It's just funny to think where we are in this journey. We talked a little bit before we turn the cameras on and there you made an interesting comment when I said, You know, when did this cloud for the Enterprise start? And you took it back to sass based applications, which, >> you know you were sitting in the sales force builder. >> That's true. It isn't just the tallest building in >> everyone's, you know, everyone's got a lot of focus on AWS is rise, etcetera. But the real start was really getting into sass. I mean, I remember we used to do a lot of Siebel deployments for CR M, and we started to pivot to sales, for some were moving from remedy into service now. I mean, we've went through on premise collaboration, email thio 3 65 So So we've actually been at it for quite a while in the particularly the SAS world. And it's only more recently that we started to see that kind of push to the, you know, the public pass, and it's starting to cloud native development. But But this journey started, you know, it was that 78 years ago that we really started. See some scale around it. >> And I think and tell me if you agree, I think really, what? The sales forces of the world and and the service now is of the world office 3 65 kind of broke down some of those initial beers, which are all really about security and security, security, security, Always to hear where now security is actually probably an attributes and loud can brink. >> Absolutely. In fact, I mean, those barriers took years to bring down. I still saw clients where they were forcing salesforce tor service Now to put, you know, instances on prime and I think I think they finally woke up toe. You know, these guys invested ton in their security organizations. You know there's a little of that needle in the haystack. You know, if you breach a data set, you know what you're getting after. But when Europe into sales force, it's a lot harder. And so you know. So I think that security problems have certainly gone away. We still have some compliance, regulatory things, data sovereignty. But I think security and not not that it sold by any means that you know, it's always giving an ongoing problem. But I think they're getting more comfortable with their data being up in the in the public domain, right? Not public. >> And I think it also helped them with their progress towards getting cloud native. So, you know, you pick certain applications which were obviously hosted by sales force and other companies, and you did some level of custom development around it. And now I think that's paved the way for more complex applications and different workloads now going into, you know, the public cloud and the private cloud. But that's the next part of the journey, >> right? So let's back up 1/2 a step, because then, as you said, a bunch of stuff then went into public cloud, right? Everyone's putting in AWS and Google. Um, IBM has got a public how there was a lot more. They're not quite so many as there used to be, Um, but then we ran into a whole new host of issues, right, which is kind of opened up this hybrid cloud. This multi cloud world, which is you just can't put everything into a public clouds. There's certain attributes is that you need to think about and yet from the application point of view before you decide where you deploy that. So I'm just curious. If you can share now, would you guys do with clients? How should they think about applications? How should they think about what to deploy where I >> think I'll start in? The military has a lot of expertise in this area. I think you know, we have to obviously start from an application centric perspective. You go to take a look at you know where your applications have to live water. What are some of the data implications on the applications, or do you have by way of regulatory and compliance issues, or do you have to do as faras performance because certain applications have to be in a high performance environment. Certain other applications don't think a lot of these factors will. Then Dr where these applications need to recite and then what we think in today's world is really accomplish. Complex, um, situation where you have a lot of legacy. But you also have private as well as public cloud. So you approach it from an application perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you really take a look at Army, you look at it centers clients, and we were totally focused on up into the market Global 2000 savory. You know how clients typically have application portfolios ranging from 520,000 applications? And really, I mean, if you think about the purpose of cloud or even infrastructure for that, they're there to serve the applications. No one cares if your cloud infrastructure is not performing the absolute. So we start off with an application monetization approach and ultimately looking, you know, you know, with our tech advisory guys coming in, there are intelligent engineering service is to do the cloud native and at mod work our platforms, guys, who do you know everything from sales forward through ASAP. They should drive a strategy on how those applications gonna evolve with its 520,000 and determined hey, and usually using some, like the six orders methodology. And I'm I am I going to retire this Am I going to retain it? And, you know, I'm gonna replace it with sass. Am I gonna re factor in format? And it's ultimately that strategy that's really gonna dictate a multi and, you know, every cloud story. So it's based on the applications data, gravity issues where they gonna reside on their requirements around regulatory, the requirements for performance, etcetera. That will then dictate the cloud strategies. I'm you know, not a big fan of going in there and just doing a multi hybrid cloud strategy without a really good up front application portfolio approach, right? How we gonna modernize that >> it had. And how do you segment? That's a lot of applications. And you know, how do you know the old thing? How do you know that one by that time, how do you help them pray or size where they should be focusing on us? >> So typically what we do is work with our clients to do a full application portfolio analysis, and then we're able to then segment the applications based on, you know, important to the business and some of the factors that both of us mentioned. And once we have that, then we come up with an approach where certain sets of applications he moved to sass certain other applications you move to pass. So you know, you're basically doing the re factoring and the modernization and then certain others you know, you can just, you know, lift and shift. So it's really a combination off both modernization as well as migration. It's a combination off that, but to do that, you have to initially look at the entire set of applications and come up with that approach. >> I'm just curious where within that application assessment, um, where is cost savings? Where is, uh, this is just old. And where is opportunities to innovate faster? Because we know a lot of lot of talk really. Days has cost savings, but what the real advantages is execution speed if you can get it. If >> you could go back through four years and we had there was a lot of CEO discussions around cost savings, I'm not really have seen our clients shift. It costs never goes away, obviously right. But there's a lot greater emphasis now on business agility. You know, howto innovate faster, get getting your capabilities to market faster, to change my customer experience. So So it's really I t is really trying to step up and, you know, enabled the business toe to compete in the marketplace. We're seeing a huge shift in emphasis or focus at least starting with, you know, how'd I get better business agility outta leverage to cloud and cloud native development to get their upper service levels? Actually, we started seeing increase on Hey, you know, these applications need to work. It's actress. So So Obviously, cost still remains a factor, but we seem much more for, you know, much more emphasis on agility, you know, enabling the business on, given the right service levels of right experience to the user, little customers. Big pivot there, >> Okay. And let's get the definitions out because you know a lot of lot of conversation about public clouds, easy private clouds, easy but hybrid cloud and multi cloud and confusion about what those are. How do you guys define him? How do you help your customers think about the definition? Yes, >> I think it's a really good point. So what we're starting to see is there were a lot of different definitions out there. But I think as I talked more clients and our partners, I think we're all starting to, you know, come to ah, you know, the same kind of definition on multi cloud. It's really about using more than one cloud. But hybrid, I think, is a very important concept because hybrid is really all about the placement off the workload or where your application is going to run on. And then again, it goes to all of these points that we talked about data, gravity and performance and other things. Other factors. But it's really all about where do you place the specific look >> if you look at that, so if you think about public, I mean obviously gives us the innovation of the public providers. You look at how fast Amazon comes out with new versions of Lambda etcetera. So that's the innovations there obviously agility. You could spend up environments very quickly, which is, you know, one of the big benefits of it. The consumption, economic models. So that is the number of drivers that are pushing in the direction of public. You know, on the private side, they're still it's quite a few benefits that don't get talked about as much. Um, so you know, if you look at it, um, performance if you think the public world, you know, Although they're scaling up larger T shirts, et cetera, they're still trying to do that for a large array of applications on the private side, you can really Taylor somethingto very high performance characteristics. Whether it's you know, 30 to 64 terabyte Hana, you can get a much more focused precision environment for business. Critical workloads like that article, article rack, the Duke clusters, everything about fraud analysis. So that's a big part of it. Related to that is the data gravity that Prasad just mentioned. You know, if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana database you know, sitting in my private cloud, it may not be that convenient to go and put get that data shared up in red shift or in Google's tensorflow. So So there's some data gravity out. Networks just aren't there. The laden sea of moving that stuff around is a big issue. And then a lot of people of investments in their data centers. I mean, the other piece, that's interesting. His legacy, you know, you know, as we start to look at the world a lot, there's a ton of code still living in, You know, whether it's you, nick system, just IBM mainframes. There's a lot of business value there, and sometimes the business cases aren't aren't necessarily there toe to replace them. Right? And in world of digital, the decoupling where I can start to use micro service is we're seeing a lot of trends. We worked with one hotel to take their reservation system. You know, Rapid and Micro Service is, um, we then didn't you know, open shift couch base, front end. And now, when you go against, you know, when you go and browsing properties, you're looking at rates you actually going into distributed database cash on, you know, in using the latest cloud native technologies that could be dropped every two weeks or everything three or four days for my mobile application. And it's only when it goes, you know, when the transaction goes back, to reserve the room that it goes back there. So we're seeing a lot of power with digital decoupling, But we still need to take advantage of, you know, we've got these legacy applications. So So the data centers air really were trying to evolve them. And really, just, you know, how do we learn everything from the world of public and struck to bring those saints similar type efficiencies to the to the world of private? And really, what we're seeing is this emerging approach where I can start to take advantage of the innovation cycles. The land is that, you know, the red shifts the functions of the public world, but then maybe keep some of my more business critical regulated workloads. You know, that's the other side of the private side, right? I've got G X p compliance. If I've got hip, a data that I need to worry about GDP are there, you know, the whole set of regular two requirements. Now, over time, we do anticipate the public guys will get much better and more compliant. In fact, they made great headway already, but they're still not a number of clients are still, you know, not 100% comfortable from my client's perspective. >> Gotta meet Teresa Carlson. She'll change him, runs that AWS public sector is doing amazing things, obviously with big government contracts. But but you raise real inching point later. You almost described what I would say is really a hybrid application in this in this hotel example that you use because it's is, you know, kind of breaking the application and leveraging micro service is to do things around the core that allowed to take advantage of some this agility and hyper fast development, yet still maintain that core stuff that either doesn't need to move. Works fine, be too expensive. Drea Factor. It's a real different weight. Even think about workloads and applications into breaking those things into bits. >> And we see that pattern all over the place. I'm gonna give you the hotel Example Where? But finance, you know, look at financial service. Is retail banking so open banking a lot. All those rito applications are on the mainframe. I'm insurance claims and and you look at it the business value of replicating a lot of like the regulatory stuff, the locality stuff. It doesn't make sense to write it. There's no rule inherent business values of I can wrap it, expose it and in a micro service's architecture now D'oh cloud native front end. That's gonna give me a 360 view a customer, Change the customer experience. You know, I've got a much you know, I can still get that agility. The innovation cycles by public. Bye bye. Wrapping my legacy environment >> and percent you raided, jump in and I'll give you something to react to, Which is which is the single planet glass right now? How do I How did I manage all this stuff now? Not only do I have distributed infrastructure now, I've got distributed applications in the and the thing that you just described and everyone wants to be that single pane of glass. Everybody wants to be the app that's upon everybody. Screen. How are you seeing people deal with the management complexity of these kind of distributed infrastructures? If you >> will Yeah, I think that that's that's an area that's, ah, actually very topical these days because, you know, you're starting to see more and more workers go to private cloud. And so you've got a hybrid infrastructure you're starting to see move movement from just using the EMS to, you know, cantinas and Cuba needs. And, you know, we talked about Serval s and so on. So all of our clients are looking for a way, and you have different types of users as well. Yeah, developers. You have data scientists. You have, you know, operators and so on. So they're all looking for that control plane that allows them access and a view toe everything that is out there that is being used in the enterprise. And that's where I think you know, a company like Accenture were able to use the best of breed toe provide that visibility to our clients, >> right? Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. It's becoming, you know, with all the promises, cloud and all the power. And these new architectures is becoming much more dynamic, ephemeral, with containers and kubernetes with service computing that that that one application for the hotel, they're actually started in. They've got some, actually, now running a native us of their containers and looking at surveillance. So you're gonna even a single application can span that. And one of things we've seen is is first, you know, a lot of our clients used to look at, you know, application management, you know, different from their their infrastructure. And the lines are now getting very blurry. You need to have very tight alignment. You take that single application, if any my public side goes down or my mid tier with my you know, you know, open shipped on VM, where it goes down on my back and mainframe goes down. Or the networks that connected to go down the devices that talk to it. It's a very well. Despite the power, it's a very complex environment. So what we've been doing is first we've been looking at, you know, how do we get better synergy across what we you know, Application Service's teams that do that Application manager, an optimization cloud infrastructure. How do we get better alignment that are embedded security, You know, how do you know what are managed to security service is bringing those together. And then what we did was we looked at, you know, we got very aggressive with cloud for a strategy and, you know, how do we manage the world of public? But when looking at the public providers of hyper scale, er's and how they hit Incredible degrees of automation. We really looked at, said and said, Hey, look, you gotta operate differently in this new world. What can we learn from how the public guys we're doing that We came up with this concept. We call it running different. You know, how do you operate differently in this new multi speed? You know, you know, hot, very hybrid world across public, private demon, legacy, environment, and start a look and say, OK, what is it that they do? You know, first they standardize, and that's one of the big challenges you know, going to almost all of our clients in this a sprawl. And you know, whether it's application sprawl, its infrastructure, sprawl >> and my business is so unique. The Larry no business out there has the same process that way. So >> we started make you know how to be standardized like center hybrid cloud solution important with hp envy And where we how do we that was an example of so we can get to you because you can't automate unless you standardise. So that was the first thing you know, standardizing our service catalog. Standardizing that, um you know, the next thing is the operating model. They obviously operate differently. So we've been putting a lot of time and energy and what I call a cloud and agile operating model. And also a big part of that is truly you hear a lot about Dev ops right now. But truly putting the security and and operations into Deb said cops are bringing, you know, the development in the operations much tied together. So spending a lot of time looking at that and transforming operations re Skilling the people you know, the operators of the future aren't eyes on glass there. Developers, they're writing the data ingestion, the analytic algorithms, you know, to do predictive operations. They're riding the automation script to take work, you know, test work out right. And over time they'll be tuning the aye aye engines to really optimize environment. And then finally, has Prasad alluded to Is that the platforms that control planes? That doing that? So, you know what we've been doing is we've had a significant investments in the eccentric cloud platform, our infrastructure automation platforms, and then the application teams with it with my wizard framework, and we started to bring that together you know, it's an integrated control plane that can plug into our clients environments to really manage seamlessly, you know, and provide. You know, it's automation. Analytics. Aye, aye. Across APS, cloud infrastructure and even security. Right. And that, you know, that really is a I ops, right? I mean, that's delivering on, you know, as the industry starts toe define and really coalesce around, eh? I ops. That's what we you A ups. >> So just so I'm clear that so it's really your layer your software layer kind of management layer that that integrates all these different systems and provides kind of a unified view. Control? Aye, aye. Reporting et cetera. Right? >> Exactly. Then can plug in and integrate, you know, third party tools to do straight functions. >> I'm just I'm just curious is one of the themes that we here out in the press right now is this is this kind of pull back of public cloud app, something we're coming back. Or maybe it was, you know, kind of a rush. Maybe a little bit too aggressively. What are some of the reasons why people are pulling stuff back out of public clouds that just with the wrong. It was just the wrong application. The costs were not what we anticipated to be. We find it, you know, what are some of the reasons that you see after coming back in house? Yeah, I think it's >> a variety of factors. I mean, it's certainly cost, I think is one. So as there are multiple private options and you know, we don't talk about this, but the hyper skills themselves are coming out with their own different private options like an tars and out pulls an actor stack and on. And Ali Baba has obsessed I and so on. So you see a proliferation of that, then you see many more options around around private cloud. So I think the cost is certainly a factor. The second is I think data gravity is, I think, a very important point because as you're starting to see how different applications have to work together, then that becomes a very important point. The third is just about compliance, and, you know, the regulatory environment. As we look across the globe, even outside the U. S. We look at Europe and other parts of Asia as clients and moving more to the cloud. You know that becomes an important factor. So as you start to balance these things, I think you have to take a very application centric view. You see some of those some some maps moving back, and and I think that's the part of the hybrid world is that you know, you can have a nap running on the private cloud and then tomorrow you can move this. Since it's been containerized to run on public and it's, you know, it's all managed. That >> left E. I mean, cost is a big factor if you actually look at it. Most of our clients, you know, they typically you were a big cap ex businesses, and all of a sudden they're using this consumption, you know, consumption model. And they went, really, they didn't have a function to go and look at be thousands or millions of lines of it, right? You know, as your statement Exactly. I think they misjudged, you know, some of the scale on Do you know e? I mean, that's one of the reasons we started. It's got to be an application led, you know, modernization, that really that will dictate that. And I think In many cases, people didn't. May not have thought Through which application. What data? There The data, gravity data. Gravity's a conversation I'm having just by with every client right now. And if I've got a 64 terabyte Hana and that's the core, my crown jewels that data, you know, how do I get that to tensorflow? How'd I get that? >> Right? But if Andy was here, though, and he would say we'll send down the stove, the snow came from which virgin snow plows? Snowball Snowball. Well, they're snowballs. But I have seen the whole truck killer that comes out and he'd say, Take that and stick it in the cloud. Because if you've got that data in a single source right now, you can apply multitude of applications across that thing. So they, you know, they're pushing. Get that date end in this single source. Of course. Then to move it, change it. You know, you run into all these micro lines of billing statement, take >> the hotel. I mean, their data stolen the mainframe, so if they anyone need to expose it, Yeah, they have a database cash, and they move it out, You know, particulars of data sets get larger, it becomes, you know, the data. Gravity becomes a big issue because no matter how much you know, while Moore's Law might be might have elongated from 18 to 24 months, the network will always be the bottle Mac. So ultimately, we're seeing, you know, a CZ. We proliferate more and more data, all data sets get bigger and better. The network becomes more of a bottleneck. And that's a It's a lot of times you gotta look at your applications. They have. I've got some legacy database I need to get Thio. I need this to be approximately somewhere where I don't have, you know, high bandwith. Oh, all right. Or, you know, highlight and see type. Also, egress costs a pretty big deals. My date is up in the cloud, and I'm gonna get charged for pulling it off. You know, that's being a big issue, >> you know, it's funny, I think, and I think a lot of the the issue, obviously complexity building. It's a totally from building model, but I think to a lot of people will put stuff in a public cloud and then operated as if they bought it and they're running in the data center in this kind of this. Turn it on, Turn it off when you need it. Everyone turns. Everyone loves to talk about the example turning it on when you need it. But nobody ever talks about turning it off when you don't. But it kind of close on our conversation. I won't talk about a I and applied a Iot because he has a lot of talk in the market place. But, hey, I'm machine learning. But as you guys know pride better than anybody, it's the application of a I and specific applications, which really on unlocks the value. And as we're sitting here talking about this complexity, I can't help but think that, you know, applied a I in a management layer like your run differently, set up to actually know when to turn things on, when to turn things off when you moved in but not moved, it's gonna have to be machines running that right cause the data sets and the complexity of these systems is going to be just overwhelming. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Completely agree with you. In fact, attack sensual. We actually refer to this whole area as applied intelligence on That's our guy, right? And it is absolutely to add more and more automation move everything Maur toe where it's being run by the machine rather than you know, having people really working on these things >> yet, e I mean, if you think you hit the nail on the head, we're gonna a eyes e. I mean, given how things getting complex, more ephemeral, you think about kubernetes et cetera. We're gonna have to leverage a humans or not to be able to get, you know, manage this. The environments comported right. What's interesting way we've used quite effectively for quite some time. But it's good at some stuff, not good at others. So we find it's very good at, like, ticket triage, like ticket triage, chicken rounding et cetera. You know, any time we take over account, we tune our AI ai engines. We have ticket advisers, etcetera. That's what probably got the most, you know, most bang for the buck. We tried in the network space, less success to start even with, you know, commercial products that were out there. I think where a I ultimately bails us out of this is if you look at the problem. You know, a lot of times we talked about optimizing around cost, but then performance. I mean, and it's they they're somewhat, you know, you gotta weigh him off each other. So you've got a very multi dimensional problem on howto I optimize my workloads, particularly. I gotta kubernetes cluster and something on Amazon, you know, sums running on my private cloud, etcetera. So we're gonna get some very complex environment. And the only way you're gonna be ableto optimize across multi dimensions that cost performance service levels, you know, And then multiple options don't do it public private, You know, what's my network costs etcetera. Isn't a I engine tuning that ai ai engines? So ultimately, I mean, you heard me earlier on the operators. I think you know, they write the analytic albums, they do the automation scripts, but they're the ultimate one too. Then tune the aye aye engines that will manage our environment. And I think it kubernetes will be interesting because it becomes a link to the control plane optimize workload placement. You know, between >> when the best thing to you, then you have dynamic optimization. Could you might be optimizing eggs at us right now. But you might be optimizing for output the next day. So exists really a you know, kind of Ah, never ending when you got me. They got to see them >> together with you and multi dimension. Optimization is very difficult. So I mean, you know, humans can't get their head around. Machines can, but they need to be trained. >> Well, Prasad, Larry, Lots of great opportunities for for centuries bring that expertise to the tables. So thanks for taking a few minutes to walk through some of these things. Our pleasure. Thank you, Grace. Besides Larry, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We are high above San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower, Theis Center, Innovation hub in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From the Salesforce tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019 brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in an exciting new location. Last year we covered the Accenture technology vision release 2018. It was at Minna Gallery, cool event. But this year the venue is off the hook and 33 stories high and we're really excited to be in the brand-new Accenture Innovation Hub and joining me here our first guest, John Del Santo, he is the senior managing director for the West region for Accenture and he is responsible for this beautiful five-story. So John, first off congratulations to you and the team. >> Thanks, it's been a big project opening up this place over the last year, but it's come together great. >> Yeah and this morning they had a nice ribbon cutting, all kinds of dignitaries so, you know, what does this mean in terms of kind of, you've been with the center a long time. Your presence in the Bay Area specifically, but also as part of more of this global innovation effort. >> Well I think it's this, this is bringing together all the best of Accenture that we already had in the Bay Area. We're putting it all under one roof. We're relocating everybody and we're expanding the team. So we announced 500 new technology jobs here in this location over the next year and expanding our apprentice program. But basically, it's all about bringing more talent to this location in San Francisco to do more projects with clients in this space. >> Right. So we'll get into it with some of the other folks that we have scheduled, but it's both a coworking space for the Accenture people in town and three solid floors of all kinds of labs and innovation, kind of hands-on spaces, if you will, to do this work with your clients. >> Absolutely, that co-creation, we think, is what is really differentiating us from our competitors and it's really allowing our clients to work with us and our experts, our technology experts, and the ecosystem partners that we do a ton of work with, real time to solve a problem. Brainstorm a problem, prototype it, solve it over a very short period of time. >> Yeah, I think it's a pretty unique approach that you guys have, which is imagine the future and then create the future. >> Yeah >> As opposed to just reacting to the future. And you made an interesting comment this morning about, you know, be the disrupter, not the disruptee. And my question is really, as you see the leadership at these traditional companies that are afraid of being disrupted, how are they kind of changing the way that they do things, knowing that the digital natives and the threats that they don't even see coming from a completely different direction are now bearing down, and they have to get with the program. >> Well they do have to. And then it's really our job, our purpose, you know, the talent that we have in this company's purpose is to make our clients succeed and be disrupters. Because if they're not, they will be disrupted. And so it's in our best interest to make sure we're bringin' in the best talent, pushing their thinking on ideas, and actually getting to a solution that can actually allow them to differentiate and serve their customers better. >> Right. >> So that's what we're all about, is making sure our clients are successful. >> And draggin' 'em kicking and screaming? Or are they, are they seeing-- >> Absolutely not. >> Are they seeing it in their competition? I mean, in terms of kind of that board-level discussion, where, you know, it's passe that everybody's a technology company, and everybody's doing digital disruption, but you're down in the weeds helping these people actually execute the detail. >> Yeah, well it's funny, you say everyone's a digital company, that was our big theme a few years ago at this exact event. >> Right, right. >> Absolutely, not kicking and screaming. Most executive teams, most business teams that we work with understand that they need to change. The pace of change at their business is rapid, it's faster and faster, and every year it gets faster, and so they need to actually be a lot more agile in that >> Right. >> And move quickly. >> So one of the big things in like the singularity and accelerating pace of change. And some of these big kind of macro trends that we're experiencing is that there's no single person that sees all the innovation change across this broad front, by industry, by role, etc. You guys are in a pretty unique position 'cause you actually get to see the technology innovation and the disruption and the digitization across a number of industries as well as a number of roles. So you can kind of see this big huge glacier that's moving down the valley. >> That's one of the really cool things about this particular geography and location is that literally steps from our door here on Mission Street in San Francisco, we've got clients from ten, fifteen different industries that we serve, and we can bring talent from ten or fifteen plus different industries plus the technology skills to make sure they're looking at the problem from all angles. So if it's a retailer, are they really thinking about financial services, 'cause we've got both skills here. If it's a retailer, are they thinking about platform-based selling? Do they have an omnichannel strategy? We've got the skills in this location cross-industry to help serve banks, retailers, products companies, software platform companies, etc. And I don't think you can find that anywhere else, at least in the Continental United States, given kind of where we are in our geography. >> Right. So you had a couple of special guests this morning at the ribbon cutting. You had a customer, which is great, but you also had a representative from City of San Francisco and I just want to shift gears and talk about, you know, what it is to be kind of an active member of the community. You know, the responsibility of companies we're seeing, with kind of this backlash, if you will, against some of the mega-companies out there. It's more than just taking care of your customers. It's more than just taking care of your employees and even your stockholders. But now companies are being asked to be more kind of responsible and active participants in their local community. That's always been sort of part of our ethos. It's always been part of our vision to help our clients succeed, but also to change the way the world works and lives. And therefore, we have to be really active in our communities. We're being a little bit more explicit about it lately. But it's our view that we need to be able to improve where we're working and living, 'cause our people are active and it's important that we help serve 'em. We have a very strong public service business. We serve the State of California, we serve the City and County of San Francisco as well as well as other entities in California. And it's critical for us to help improve California as we improve the businesses in California. And so it's clearly part of our mission. >> Right. The other thing I think it's interesting is kind of companies' roles with higher education. We've seen a lot of work that Accenture's doing with community colleges and, you know, it's more than just helping so that you get good talent to feed your own system, >> Right. >> But it's really, as the pace of change just continues to accelerate, you know, historical institutions aren't necessarily best-equipped to move that fast. So again, you guys are taking a much more active, you probably done it before, but more active vocal role in the local academic institutions as well. >> Absolutely, I mean, our university relationships are really, really strong, always have been. But it's always been a little selfish on our end. We're always trying to get the best talent out of the universities locally here and there's obviously great schools in the Bay Area. We want to be more engaged with those universities on projects together as well. We want more of a 360-degree relationship. We've got great examples of where we've done research with some of the universities here locally, where we've co-innovated with some of them and we want to do more of that so that there's more of a solid relationship. It's not just about us, you know, helping them find the best students to work here, >> Right. >> Which we want, (laughs) and we do every year, but making sure that we're actually involvin' them from a research perspective and any other kind of, you know, philanthropic idea that we might have together. >> Right. So big event tonight, big event this morning, >> Yeah. >> So before I let you go, it's a brand-new space, I wonder if you could share a couple fun facts for the people who haven't come to visit yet, but hopefully will come as part of a project and a co-creation about some of the cool unique features that you guys have-- >> Well some >> Built in this thing. >> Unique features in the building. First of all, there's unique features with the talent. So we have researchers here, labbers, we call 'em, from our labs, that have, you know, Accenture has thousands of patents. More than 10% of them have been actually invented here. So our inventors are a secret that we've had in Northern California for a long time and they're all based here now. We've got some really cool spaces. We've got an augmented reality room, which is basically a 360-degree room where you can, rather than having to wear virtual-reality goggles, you can actually go inside of a computer, go inside of a lab, go inside of a hospital, and get an experience that's much more hands-on and a lot more immersive, if you will, than you could any other way. We've got a maker lab where we actually are makin' stuff. So we've got a design business here where we've helped physically make not only software, we make a lot of software, everyone knows that, but we've actually made products that have embedded software in them and so there's that fabrication capability we actually have in this building as well, which is pretty unique for a high-rise. (laughs) so >> Right. No, we saw all the machines back there, >> Yup. >> Had a good tour earlier today so-- >> Oh lots of robots and toys and all that good stuff, too. >> Yeah, that's right, it's all the robot room. All right, well, John, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. Really exciting day for you and the team, >> Yeah. >> And nothing but congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. >> Thank you, thanks for coming. >> He's John, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the brand-new Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce tower. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco with a brand newly open Salesforce Tower, the 33rd floor, the middle of the brand new Accenture Innovation Hub. We're excited to have our next guest, who's been part of the Innovation Labs and the Innovation Hubs and a lot of innovation in the center for years and years and years. You've seen him before, we're at the 30th anniversary, I think last year. All the way from Paris, is Marc Carrel-Billiard. He is the Senior Managing Director for Accenture Labs. Marc, great to see you again. >> Great to see you Jeff again as well, I'm so happy. >> So, what do you think of the new space here? >> I love it, I just love it. I saw it building and everything and now it's ready, and we open it today, I mean it's just amazing. The stairs, did you see the stairs? >> I saw the stairs, yes. >> Really amazing, everything's good there. I think it's not an office, like Paul already said, it's really something better and I think it's a tool for explaining what is innovation at Accenture at play, I mean, how we use it, how we connect the labs, we use the liquid studio, all the ventures and everything, that's great. >> Great. But now it's all brought together, right? You had a couple satellite locations in the Bay Area-- >> Yeah and I think that with the story of putting all this stuff in what we call the Innovation Center, the Innovation Hub, and so putting everything in the same building and have different floors where we can address different talking with our clients. Are we talking about research? Are we talking about more polythiophene? Are we talking about, I mean ideally, it's all about driving innovation at scale. >> Right, right. >> At scale. >> So, we're here for the technology vision-- >> We are. >> Which will be in, in a little bit and then, Paul and they team will present-- >> Yep, they will. >> Five new transfer for 2018. One of the ones they called is DARQ, D-A-R-Q, >> I know. >> Which is distributed ledger technologies, formerly known as blockchain, but we don't want to call it blockchain. AI, extended reality, which is every kind of form, extended, augmented-- >> Mix relating everything, that's right. >> And quantum computer. >> You bet. >> So, from the labs point of view, from an Accenture kind of innovation looking forward, inventing the future, as you like to say, which I think is a great tagline, what are some of your priorities going forward, now that you got this great new space? Which is one of what I think 11 in the United States, right? >> So, my priorities are all of them, I mean, all of the above! Because I was like, do you remember at the time we were talking about SMAC? Like Social Mobility, there was analytics and cloud. I would say that DARQ is the new SMAC. So, we saw that basically, that technology has evolved and, from analytics, we'd like more AI work and everything, but it's still being combined and everything. You can still think about social media, collaborative stuff, we going to go through immersive reality where we going to continue collaborating. Think about cloud. I mean, just like cloud will bring you height, throughput computing power through the cloud. Well, I mean, also quantum computing can give you like amazing capability in terms of computing power. So I would say probably, like, DARQ is a new SMAC and so the lab has been working on it since, I would say, not since day one, but at the very beginning. And so, well obviously distributed ledger, you know that we have a lab in Sophia Antipolis, they're really spending a lot of time in the blockchains. So there's a couple of things that we're doing. I give you a couple of ideas. One is, maybe people talk about blockchains, and there's bunch of blockchains all over, there's like blockchains for manufacturing, there's blockchains for trade finance, there's blockchains for this and that. Problem is there's no very good interoperability between those blockchains. One thing that the lab is going to be working is how we can interoperate between those different blockchains. So you are basically a supply chain, you want to connect to a financial organization, how their blockchain will connect to your blockchain. Number one. The second thing we're going to be working on is the SMAC contract. The lab believes the SMAC contract is not smart enough. So we going to add more artificial intelligence in the SMAC contract to see what we could do better. Think about this SMAC contract as a stock procedure in database. How we make those stock procedure a little bit better. I mean, it's just analogy type of thing. >> Obviously, the blockchain conversation, any kind of demo, talking about DHL-- >> Yeah, DHL, exactly. >> But is that logistics, that merchandise move through their system, as you said, there's a lot of different touch points with a lot of different systems. So it's not an aggregated system, it's a problem, and the other thing is you don't necessarily need all the data for each person, >> You don't. >> Or transaction all along the line, right? >> You're absolutely right. And I talk about interoperability between blockchains, but there's going to be also interoperability between the blockchain that you're implementing and the legacy environment that you have. And this needs to be addressed as well. So lot of thinking about blockchains, I've always said for me that blockchain is the digital right management of your future. That kind of protocol, and we're working with companies that are basically creating movies and stuff like that, and how we leverage blockchain to change those movies between different parties. I mean, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff that we're going to be able to do. So that's blockchain. The D for distributed ledger. A for artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence obviously is something very beginner labs. We have three labs that are delegated to artificial intelligence. >> Three? >> Yup, out of seven. One here, San Francisco. The other one in Bangalore, and the third one in Dublin, Ireland. And each of them are covering a little part of the things that we want to do with artificial intelligence. It's all about accelerating the artificial intelligence, so how we're going to think about new infrastructure, a new way of doing machine learning, using weak labeling, it's all about explainable AI, how you're going to connect the knowledge graph with machine learning, so that's the probabilistic model will give you an explanation of why they've decided to select this picture, or this information and so forth. And basically the other things we're going to be working on, artificial intelligence, is that human-machine interaction, and one thing that we want to address is what we call the conversational aspect of virtual agents. If you look at virtual agents today, voice comment type of things. >> Right, right. >> You can't really engage in a conversation. I want to look at that. How they're going to understand context, and how you're going to be exchanging better, and how you're going to flow a better conversation with that. One thing that's going to be very important in everything that we're doing is going back to semantic network, knowledge management, knowledge graph. How we combine knowledge graph with all these machine learning capabilities. That's artificial intelligence in the lab. >> Then you get, we'll just work down the list, right, then you've got the extended reality. >> Extended reality. >> So whatever kind of reality it is. >> So we're going to continue doing a lot of stuff for extended reality, immersive learning, we're going to use that, I think what's going to be important for us is that not to look at extended reality just from a vision standpoint, but try to use the combinatorial effect of every immersive sense that you have. So like, basically, hearing, also, smelling, touching the aptic, and how you combine all those senses to change completely, not the vision, but the experience. What you really feel. In fact, if you go to this Innovation Hub, I don't know if you've seen that we have an igloo-- >> We did, I saw the 360. >> That's right the 360, to try to immerse you already in some quantum computing experience, I think it's a good segue way also for quantum. So quantum, is that we've been doing a lot of progress with quantum too, you know, two years ago we started already to work with D-wave and then we have work with this company called 1QBit, so we build a software, so we use their software development kit, to program the quantum computer, and then we work with Biogen to do drug discovery, and changing the way you do that, by accelerating that through quantum computing. But we've continued, we've announced basically some partnership with IBM to look at their platform, we're continuing working with other interesting platform like Fujitsu, their Digital Annealer, and so forth, and what we want to do is that Accenture is very, very agnostic related to all those vendors. What we want to do is that we want to understand more about how you program those different architecture, how you see what type of problems they can solve, and how based you can program them. And so if we use the Abstraction Layer on top of all the others, and we can program on top of that, this is really cool, this is exactly what we want to do. >> So how close is it? How close is it to getting the production ready? I mean, you got it in the new vision for 2019, I mean, what are people just playing with it or is it ready for prime-time. >> No, no, no. >> Where is it these days? >> So first of all, DARQ stuff, all the people, all of our clients-- >> I mean quantum specifically. >> Okay quantum-specific. I think we're talking about three to five years to start to have real solutions. Right now, we have prototype, but we're moving to more pilot, and I think the solution will come soon. Probably in five years time, we're starting to ascend soon. Let me give you another idea. >> So the order of magnitude difference in the way that you can compute, the AI. >> Exactly, and I think that's going to change the game. It's going to change the game on everything. Let me give you maybe a last example that I'm sure you're going to love. And it's all about optimization matchmaking. Our tech vision this year is all about hyper-personalization, plus on-demand delivery, and so that's how at the moment, you know, you're going to change the game. The momentary moment. How you're going to change the reality of people. What you're going to be able to do. I'm going to tell you that, where we're going to use quantum computing. We're going to use quantum computing to do a better matchmaking between a person who is waiting for an organ and an organ that you can transplant to this person. And the moment is the accident that happens on the street. There's going to be someone basically dying on the street, so someone dead and then you need, basically, to get this organ, it could be a kidney, for example, every organs have a time-lapse that you can use basically to transport that to someone else. Now the question is that you have the organ, it's in basically an ice-cubed environment-like box, and then you transplant that to someone, you have like few hours to figure out who are the best receiver. And this is hyper-personalization, because you need to understand the variable of all the body that is going to receive that but all the variables of the organ, until now is all main front to do the matchmaking. We're rethinking that using quantum computing. >> It's just wild, you know, what the cloud really enabled to concept. If you had infinite compute, infinite store, and infinite networking, at basically free, asymptotically approaching free, what would you build? And that's a very different way to think about problems. >> Not only will we build some amazing things, but I think we would change the reality of every people. Every people will have their own reality that they could use product and service the way they want it, and this will be a completely different, not a world, but a game set, that would be completely different. >> Marc, we're almost out of time, but I just want to ask you about Pierre, former CEO of Accenture passed away recently, and I was really struck by the linked investors. So many people, you know, I follow you, I follow Paul, a lot of people posted, what a special man, and what an impact he had, sounds really personally with most of the leadership here in Accenture. I was wondering if you could share a few thoughts. >> Well obviously, I mean, everyone's been very sad that we lost Pierre. I mean, he was just an amazing person. He was really a role model, not only in business, but in life. And he was so fun about fun of innovations, he loved the labs, he loved what we could do in it, I think he was really thinking about better future for the people, better future for the world, and everything, and it was really amazing for that. Everyone was struck really to see that. But I think there was so many testimonials pouring from our people, but what I was even more amazed was our clients. He really moved clients. And his visions is an amazing legacy for Accenture, and we're going to, I mean, this is so precious what he left us and I think that I really want the lab, every day that we're inventing something, I'm always thinking about Pierre and what he would have thought about these things. He was always enthusiastic reading our research paper and everything, so definitely the lab's going to continue to innovate, and I hope that Pierre, wherever he is, will be watching. >> I'm sure he's smiling down. >> And will be happy with that. >> Alright, well Marc, thanks a lot for taking a few minutes and congratulations on this continual evolution of what you guys are doing with labs and Innovation Centers, and now the Innovation Hub here in downtown San Francisco. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Alright. He's Marc, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at downtown San Francisco at the Accenture Innovation Hub as part of the Accenture Technology Vision 2019 presentation. Thanks for watching. See you next time. (light electro music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in downtown San Francisco, the Salesforce office in the brand new Accenture Innovation Hub. It's the grand opening, like I say the soft opening, but we had the ribbon cutting, we're presenting the Accenture Technology Vision 2019 and we're excited to have somebody who's not a technologist who's very important to technology, she's Doctor Rumman Chowdhury, she's the Global Lead For Responsible AI at Accenture. >> I am. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you for having me on your program. >> Absolutely. So I was doing some background research on you and I love you introduce a lot of your talks about the fact that you're not a technologist, you come at this from a very, very different point of view. >> I do. So I am a social scientist by background. I've been working as a data scientist in artificial intelligence for some years but I'm not a computer scientist by trade. I come more from a stats background, which gives me a different perspective. So when I think of AI or data science, I literally think of it as information about people meant to understand trends in human behavior. >> So there's so many issues around responsible AI. We can talk, probably, to all these people, go on above, you know. >> Yeah. >> We don't have too much... And the first one is really a lot in the news right now, about AI is simply a codification of existing biases often, unless you really take a very proactive stance to make sure you're not just codifying biases in software. What are you seeing? >> Absolutely. So we really have to think about two kinds of bias. There's one that comes from our data, from our models. This can mean incomplete data, poorly trained models. But the second one to think about is you can have great data and a perfect model but we come from an imperfect world. We know that the world is not a fair place, some people just get a poor lot in life. We don't want to codify that into our systems and processes, so as we think about ethics and AI it's not just about improving the technology, it's about improving the society behind the technology. >> Right. >> Yeah. Another big topic I think that's really important is if you're doing a project and you want to think through some of the ethical issues, should we be collecting this data, why are we collecting this data, why are we running these algorithms and you make a decision it's for a particular person, purpose and the value outweighs the cost. But I think where the challenge really comes into is the next people that use that data or the next use that you don't necessarily have in mind and I think we hear that a lot in terms of kind of the complaints about the current state of big tech, where everyone is doing their little piece. >> Right. >> But what happens over time as those get rolled into maybe bigger pieces that weren't necessarily what they were starting with in the first place. >> Right. >> Absolutely, it's something I called moral outsourcing. Because what we build is often, we feel like a cog in a machine, we feel sometimes as technologists people aren't willing to take the responsibility for their actions, even though we should be. If we build something that is fundamentally unethical, we need to stop and ask ourselves, just because we can doesn't mean we should. >> Right. >> And think about the implications on society. Right now there's often not enough accountability because everybody feels like they're contributing to this larger machine, who am I to question it and the system will crush me anyway. So we need to empower people to be able to speak their minds and have an ethical conscience. >> So I'm curious in term of the reception of your message when you're talking to clients because clearly there's a lot of pressure to innovate fast. Everyone is telling everybody that data's the new oil and we've got to leverage these micro-experiences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they don't necessarily take a minute to step back and reflect >> Right. >> Is this the right thing, is this the right way? Are we collecting more data than we really need to achieve the objective? So how receptive are companies to your message? Do they get it? Do they have >> Yeah. >> To get hit upside the head with some problem before they really understand the value? >> So I'll give you a phrase that everybody understands and then they get the point of ethics in AI. Brakes help a car go faster. If we have the right kinds of guard rails, warning mechanisms, systems, to tell us if something is going to derail or get out of control, we feel more comfortable taking risks. So think about driving on the freeway. Because you know you can stop your car if the car in front of you stops abruptly, you feel comfortable driving 90 miles an hour. If you could not stop your car, nobody would go faster than 15. So I actually think of ethics and AI are an ethical implementation of technology as a way of helping companies be more innovative. It sounds contradictory but it actually works very well. If I know where my safe space is, I'm more capable of making true innovations. >> Right. So I want to get your take on another kind of topic, which is really kind of STEM education versus not STEM, or ethics. >> Right. >> And it's interesting, huge push on STEM, it's very, very important thing that's going on now. But as you look not that far down the road, and this events all about looking down the future, reinventing the future. As more and more of those kind of engineering functions are taken over by the machines >> Right. >> It seems like where the void is is really more talking about what are the implications, what are the deeper questions we should be asking, what are the ethics and the moral questions before just building a better mousetrap. >> Right. So you're raising a very hot button issue in the ethics and AI space. Is it simply enough to say all technologists should take an ethics course? I think it is very important to have an interdisciplinary education but, no, I don't think one ethics course, taken out of context in college will help you. So I think that there's a few things to think about. One is that corporations need to have an ethical culture. It needs to be a good thing to be ethical, number one. Number two, we need interdisciplinary teams. Often technologists will say, and rightfully so, "How was I supposed to know thing X would happen?" It's something very specific to a neighborhood or a country or a socio-economic group. And that's absolutely true. So what you should do is bring in a local community, the ACLU, some sort of a regional expert. So we do also need to move towards creating interdisciplinary teams. >> Right. So you brought up another really cool thing I think in one of your talks, FAITH. Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Explainability >> Yes. >> Which is a, you know nobody likes black box algorithms. >> Yep. >> But fairness, specifically, is such an interesting concept. We all feel very slighted if we perceive things not to be fair. >> Yes. >> The reality is life is not fair, a lot of things are not fair. So as people try to incorporate some of these things into the way they do business, how can they do a better job, what are some of the things they should be thinking about >> Yeah. >> So they can have the faith? >> Fairness is a very complicated, complex thing and I invite you, or whenever someone asks, "What does it mean to be fair?" I point them towards this really great talk from this conference called Fat Star and it's called, 21 Definitions of Fairness. And it's all these different ways in which we can quantify and measure the concept of fairness. Well at Accenture, we took that talk and some other papers and created something called the Fairness Tool. So it's a tool to help guide discussion and show solutions on algorithmic bias and fairness. Now, the way we think about it is not as a decision maker but a decision enabler. So how can you communicate as a data scientist to a non-technical person to explain the potential flaws and problems and then take collective action? So the algorithm can help you make that decision but it's not automating the decision for you. So what it does is it helps smooth conversation and helps pinpoint where there might be bias or unfairness in your algorithm. >> Right. Well we don't have time tonight but another time we're going to >> Sure. >> Dig deeper into this and all the biomechanics and bioengineering >> Yes. >> And a lot of great topics that you've covered in a number of your talks. So I really enjoy getting to meet you and you do terrific work, really enjoy it. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> Alright, thank you. She's Rumman, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're in downtown San Francisco with the Salesforce Tower. We're in the 33rd floor with the grand opening of the Accenture Innovation hub. It's five stories inside of the Salesforce Tower. It's pretty amazing, couple of work floors and then all kinds of labs and cool things. Tonight they introduce the technology vision. We've been coming for a couple of years. Paul Daugherty and team. Introduce that later, but we're excited to have a couple of the core team from the innovation hub. And we're joined by Mary Hamilton She's a managing director of Accenture Labs. Great to see you Mary. >> Nice to see you too. >> And Teresa Tung also managing director of Accenture Labs. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So it's been quite a day. Starting with the ribbon cutting and the tours. This is quite a facility. So, what does it mean having this type of an asset at your disposal in your client engagements, training your own people, it's a pretty cool spot. >> Yeah, I think it's actually something that's, these innovation hubs are something that we're growing in the U.S. and around the world, but I think here in San Francisco, we have a really unique space and really unique team and opportunity where we're actually bringing together all of our innovation capabilities. We have all of them centered here and with the staircase that connects everyone, we can now serve clients by bringing the best of the best to put together the best solutions that have open innovation and research and co-creation and innovation all in one. >> Right and you had a soft opening how many months ago? So you've actually been running clients through here for a number of months, right? >> We have. So, we've been working here probably about six months in the workspaces. We've been bringing clients through, kind of breaking in the space, but just over the holidays we opened sort of all of the specialty spaces. So, the Igloo, the Immersive Experience, we've got a Makeshop, and those all started to open up so our employees can take advantage and our clients can come in. >> Right, right. >> Yeah. >> So one of the things that comes up over and over I think in every other interview that we've had today is the rock stars that are available here to help your clients. And Teresa I got to brag on you. >> Got one here. >> You're one of the rock stars, all you hear about is most patents of any services for most patents from this office of all the other offices in Accenture. >> All of Accenture >> You're probably the person. (laughs) So congratulations. Talk about your work. It's funny, doing some research, you have an interview from a long time ago, you didn't even think you wanted to get in tech. >> Yeah. >> Now you're kicking out more patents than anybody in Accenture which has like 600,000 people. Pretty great accomplishment. >> I think it's a great story how a lot about people think about technology as a geek sort of thing and they don't actually picture themselves in that role but really, technology is about imagining the future and then being able to make it happen. You can imagine an idea, and you think Cloud, and AI, VR, it's all so accessible today. You could buy a 3D printer and just print your own idea. >> Right. >> And that's so much different than I think it was even ten, twenty years ago. And so when you think about tech, it's much more about making something happen instead of, just again, coding and math. Those are enablers but that's not the outcome. >> Right, right. So what type is your specialty in terms of the type of patent work that you've done? >> I've done them all. So I start with cloud computing, doing a lot of APIs and AI. Most recently doing a lot of work on robotics and that's the next generation. >> Right. so one of the cool things here is, software is obvious, right? You get to do software development, but there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of tangible stuff. You talked about robotics, there's a robotics lab. Fancy 3D printing lab. >> There's like this, >> Yep. >> I don't know, the maker lab, I guess you call it? >> That's right. >> So, I don't know that most people would think of Accenture maybe as being so engaged in co-creation of physical things beyond software innovation. So, has that been going on for a long time? Is that relatively new? And how is it playing in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so, there's a few things we've been doing. Some of it is the acquisitions we've made, so Mindtribe, Pillar, Matter, that really have that expertise in industrial design and physical products. So we're getting to that space. And then, I'm also, as a researcher's standpoint, I'm really excited about some of the area that you'd never think Accenture would play in around material science. So if you start to combine material science plus artificial intelligence, you start to have smart materials for smart products and that's where we see the future going is what are all the kinds of products and services that we might provide with new material? And new ways to use those materials And, >> Right. >> My original background, my degree is in material science so I feel like I've kind of come full circle and exactly what Teresa was saying is how can you design things and come up with new things? But now we're bringing it from a technology perspective. >> Right, got to get that graphene water filtration system so we can solve the water problem in California. That's another topic for another day. But I think one of the cool things is really the integration of the physical and the software. I think a really kind of underreported impact of what we're seeing today are connected devices. Not that they're just connected to do things, but they phone home at the end of the day and really enable the people that developed the products, to actually know how they're being used. And then the other thing I think is so powerful is you can get shared learning. I think that's one of the cool thing about autonomous cars and Waymo, right? If there's an accident, it's not just the people involved in the accident and the insurance adjuster that learn what not to do but you can actually integrate that learning now into the broader system. Everyone learns from one incident and that is so, so-- >> Right. >> different than what it was before. >> Yeah I mean, it really points to type of shared pursuits of larger business outcomes. By yourself, a company might see their customer and impact their business and their product, but if you think about the outcome for the customer, it's around taking an ecosystem approach. It might be your car, your insurance company, you as an individual, and maybe you might be a hobbyist with the car, you're mechanic. Like this ecosystem that I just described here. It's the same across all of the different types of verticals. People need to come together to share data to pursue these bigger outcomes. >> Right, you need to say? >> I was just going to say, and along those lines, if you're sharing data, those insights go across the legal system. But then they can get plugged back in to thinking about the design, and we're looking at something called generative design where if you have that data, you can start to actually give the designer new creative solutions that they may not have thought about. >> Right. >> So you can kind of say, hey based on these parameters of the data we've received back about this product, here are all the permutations of design that you might want to consider, and here's all the levers you can pull and then the designer can go in and then say, okay, this makes sense, this doesn't. But it gives them the set of here are all of the options based on the data. >> Right. >> And I think that's incredibly brilliant. It's kind of the human plus machine coming together to be more intelligent. >> So, human plus machine, great Segway, right? What we just got out of the presentation and one of the guys said there's three shortages coming up. There's food, water and people. And that the whole kind of automation and machines taking jobs is not the right conversation at all, that we desperately need machines and technology to take many of the tasks away because there aren't enough people to do all the tasks that are required. >> I mean think about it as a good thing. As a human, the human plus workers really enabling your job to be easier, more efficient, more effective, safer. So any task that's dull dirty, dangerous, those are things that we don't want to do as humans. We shouldn't be doing those as humans. That's a great place for the robotics and the machines to really pair with us. Or AI, AI can do a lot of those jobs at scale that again, as a human we shouldn't be doing. It's boring. Now you could have human plus machine whether it's robotics or AI to actually make the human a higher level worker. >> Right, I love the three Ds there. You got to add the fourth D, drudgery. Talking about automation, right, it's like drudgery. Nobody wants to do drudgery work. But unfortunately we still do. I mean, I'm ready for some more automation in my daily tasks for sure. Okay, so before we wrap up. What are you looking forward to? We got through the ribbon cutting. Are there some things coming in the short term that people should know about, that you're excited that you're either doing here, or some of your, kind of research directives now that we got the big five from Paul and team. What are you doing in the next little while that you can share? >> Well, I'm excited to have clients coming in, so >> Yeah. >> Al lot of the innovations that we have like Quantum Computing. This is a big bet for Accenture. At the moment, at the time we started Quantum Computing, our clients weren't begging for it yet. We made that market. We went out and took a bet. We saw how the technology was changing. We saw the investments in Quantum. We made the relationships with 1QBit, with IBM and through that, now we're able to find this client opportunity with Biogen and that's the story that we published a drug discovery method that is actually much better than what would happen before. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Mary? >> For me it's about, it's also the clients and it's thinking about it from a co-research and co-innovation standpoint. So, how do we establish strategic, multiyear, long-term relationships with our clients where we're doing joint research together and we're leveraging everything that's in this amazing center, to bring the best and to kind of have this ongoing cycle of what's the next thing. How are we going to innovate together, and how are we going to transform them, talk about approximately from building physical products to building a set of services. >> Right, right. >> And I think that's just taking advantage of this to make that transformation with our clients is so exciting to me. >> Well, what a great space with great energy and clearly you guys look like you're ready to go. >> Hey, we are. >> So congrats again on the event, and thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing this terrific space with us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right. She's Teresa, she's Mary, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube, from San Francisco the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (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 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. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Annette Rippert. She is the Senior Managing Director Accenture Technology, North America. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Well, I'm happy to be here today. >> So, let's talk a little bit about Accenture's innovation for society initiative. Give our viewers a little background on it. >> Sure. Well, you know, for quite a while we've been known as a company around innovation. But I think one thing that doesn't always come forward is the fact that you know, since our very early days we've had this very tight coupling with corporate citizenship, with philanthropy. In fact we invest 1% of our pre-taxed dollars in philanthropic related initiatives. And you know, for a number of years we've had initiatives like Tech4Good that are part of the DNA of our organization. So, when you think about the innovation side of the organization, and then you think about our philanthropic desires and couple that now with all of the digital technologies, really the possibilities are almost endless when you think about ways that, really, we strive to be able to conquer, not only business problems but societal problems with technology. >> So how do you decide where you're going to focus your energy, your time, your resources. How do you choose the biggest most pressing problems? >> Yes. Well I think one of the things that's really important is we always start with the business process or the societal issue itself as opposed to thinking about how can we use a particular technology to instantiate something we start with really, what's the social problem. And one of the ways that we do this, we have a global innovation contest. Our people get so excited to be apart of this as you could imagine. And one of the tracks is really around Tech4Good and so, teams from around the world think of ways that they can use technology to solve a particular societal issue. And it's really exciting to see the kind of innovations that come out of that. In the end the winners globally are funded to be able to take that idea and actually develop it and put it out in to use. >> So talk about some of the winners and the most exciting entrants from your perspective. >> Well, there's one that I think is maybe a good place to start and that's really around the area of home care, elder care, you know striving to keep a connection together with somebody who's in that circumstance. And being able to provide sort of a real world interaction. So, one of the teams took, with that in mind, concepts around natural language processing, around AI, and really IoT as well. Connecting in sensors in the home, whether that be to doors or to beds or to stoves which can represent safety concerns. And this innovation was built around an Amazon Echo show and around the Amazon platform. And really enables a lot of freedom and a opportunity for the person who's home bound like that to be able to interface with family, with caregivers and really better enable an independent living situation that extends that home care environment. >> So particularly, as the world's population is aging, that's something that we're experiencing here in the US, you can see how that really would help to solve a social challenge. >> Yes, pretty exciting. >> Yeah, so. Talk to me a little bit more about how this contest works in terms of teams within Accenture working together, collaborating and do the self-form the teams? Does Accenture tell them how to ... >> We announce the competition and people self-form it can be an individual, it can be a team. They do this on their own time. They spend time really thinking about how they can apply new concepts. So for us, it's a opportunity for people to learn but then they also think about wanting to address something that's another part of them, you know doing social good. So, it's also an opportunity to contribute and give back through the process of this competition. >> I know that one of the parts of the innovation for social good is the skills to succeed initiative. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that? >> Sure, well this is a program really that has taken off like wildfire and we've been doing it for many, many years and it's targeted with extending technology skills to individuals who come from lesser than means. It's a way of extending skills and capability and coaching to provide them the ability to really re-enter the work force. Re-enter the work force with skills and get on their feet. It's been something, it is pervasive across our business. Most of our people have participated in some way whether through coaching or other initiatives and it's been very successful. >> So you go in to these communities and coach marginalized communities? >> Yes, and then it provides an opportunity for them to be able to re-enter, whether re-enter the work force whether with us or any other organization. We look most to provide them with skills. We also provide them with other things that you don't think about when somebody is trying to re-enter the work force, whether that happens to be clothing or other capability to be able to get back on your feet. >> So let's talk about this moment in time in the technology industry. So we have this explosion of digital technologies, as you were saying, AI and machine learning and big data, data analytics and we have companies sort of coming together saying hey, there are a lot of pressing global challenge, societal challenges. We need to harness these technologies to solve them. I mean, do you think that, can you describe, since you are really on the ground, your boots on the ground in the middle of this, what it's like to be in this environment. Do you think that other companies are sort of following Accenture's lead? How would you describe what's going on? >> Well, I think that for a very long time, as I was mentioning, part of our mission statement as a company is to help the way the world works and lives. And so it's been kind of core to the way that we operate the business in our core values. But I think what's happening now is there's a lot more awareness of social good. And instead of supporting a charity or being a partner together with a charity, now we find ways we can really amplify our ability to make a difference. And that is by leveraging our capability around technology to help take that devotion of time, that interest, and really step it up in a pretty significant way. To bring that technology in a way that really's disruptive to changing the societal issue. >> But at the same time you don't want to necessarily start with the technology itself. You want to make sure you're starting with the problem. >> Well that really comes back to the way that we address business problems and the way we address the societal problems, is all of our people are taught concepts around designed thinking. Around human centered design. And so that concept of starting with what is the human problem, is a very natural course because that's the way that we solve all of our business problems. And so, I think that that's a, in thinking about how we solve those issues or collaborate in order to do that I think really drives a lot more complete answers in fact, to the kind of problems that we look to solve. And that's why starting with the societal issue and really what's at risk. What are we trying to address? And then thinking of creative ways to be disruptive around that. Some cases it's not even around the technology. It's about, you know, thinking in a new way about how to address those issues. >> And a cultural shift and getting people to, yeah exactly, collaborate differently. So I know you've just came from a hackathon and you were helping charities think different, think about a problem they wanted to solve and then think about how we could use technology to solve it. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the hackathon here. >> Sure, well you know, our interest in this area is, you can tell I'm very passionate about it. We invest a lot of time from a corporate standpoint and we're helping to sponsor this hackathon here at AWS re:Invent and we're doing that together with several organizations. For example, Girls Who Code, let me see, GameChanger, Compassion, and Goodwill are all other organizations that are participating in the hackathon. And had really interesting problems that they brought to the table. In fact, one of the problems that we talked about today, that the teams are over hacking away thinking about, is there are many organizations that sponsor very under privileged children and create, in this organization situation, they create a one to one relationship between a sponsor and a child and they were looking for ways to be able to connect those two parties by using natural language processing, they wanted to facilitate a near real time kind of dialogue across the boundaries of language in a way that ensures protection of the child and that there's nothing malicious that could happen through that direct connection. Of course we expect everyone to be well-meaning in that but part of the innovation is also protecting the children too. So the teams are over hacking away looking at this and several other kind of problems, social problems, Tech4Good type of initiatives throughout the day today. >> So at next year's, let's look in to our crystal balls here and think about what we're going to be talking about at next year's AWS Executive Summit. What is on the table for this year and what kinds of things are most exciting you that you're ... >> Well I think all the innovation, just further enables it, the way that we think about how we're using today, artificial intelligence, and you couple that together with so many other things around, whether, the example I just gave, around natural language processing and you couple that together with the societal and business problems that are here. I mean, it's really quite explosive. So you think about all of the new innovation that's being announced this week. I think the opportunity to be able to drive that even deeper into, whether it happens to business or societal problem, will be even more interesting next year. >> We'll end that, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Thank you. >> A really fun conversation. >> Enjoyed it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more from the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Hello everyone welcome back, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage at Informatica World 2018 here live, in Las Vegas at The Venetian Ballroom. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Peter Burris, my co-host this week, Analyist at Wikibon, Chief Analyst at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. Our next guest is Sanjeev Vohra, Group Technology Officer at Accenture, in charge of incubating new businesses, growing new businesses, handling the talent. Great to have you on thanks for spending the time coming on. >> Pleasure, it's my pleasure to be here. >> So we have a lot of Accenture interviews, go to thecube.net, type in Accenture, you'll see all the experts. And one of the things we love about talking with Accenture, is you guys are in the front lines of all the action. You have all the customer deployments, global system integrator, but you've got to be on top of the new technology, you've got really smart people, so thanks for spending the time. So I got to ask you, looking at the landscape, of the timing of Informatica's opportunity, you've got data, which is not a surprise for some people, but you've got GDPR happening on, this Friday, you've got cloud scale on the horizon, a lot of interesting things are going on right now around data and the impact of customers, which is now pretty much front and center. What're you guys doing with Informatica, what are some of the things that you guys are engaging with them on, and what's important to you? >> We have a very deep relationship with Informatica for many years and, we have many, many, joint clients in the market, and we are helping them sustain their businesses, and also grow their businesses future. Right? In future. And I think, I think there's a lot going on, there's a lot going on sustaining the core of the business, and improving it on a continuous basis, by using new technologies, and, you know, like today's keynote went on a little, talked about the new stuff and it's, there's a lot of things, actually, clients require, or our customers require for, just sustaining their core. But then I caught something in the middle, which is basically: how are you building your new business models, how are you disrupting the market your industry, what's new around that? And, in that piece, I think that's where, we are now starting working with Informatica to see what other pieces we need to bring together to the market, so we can generate, so we can help clients or customers to really leverage the power of technology. And I'll tell you, there are four areas of discussion priorities, that are, you know, you get a sense, and we get a deep dive depending on what you want to see. The first one is, I think the customers now have data warehouses, which are Data 2.0, as is what's told in the morning, so these are still 15 years old data warehouses, they are not in the new. So a lot of customers, and a lot of organizations, large organizations, including some organizations like ours, they're investing right now to make sure that they get to Data 3.0, which is what Anil was saying in the morning, which is around the new data supply chain, because without that, you cannot actually get real data analytics. Right? So you can't generate insight on analytics unless you actually work on your data's infrastructure layer below, so that's one area where we are working with them, that's where the cloud comes in, that's where the flexibility of cloud comes in. The second piece is around, around data compliance and governance because, guess what, there're regulations which are coming up now, which are towards data privacy and data protection. And the data infrastructures which were built 15 years back, actually do not handle that so effectively. >> In being polite, yeah. I mean, it wasn't built for it, they didn't have to think about it. >> Sanjeev: It was not built for that, exactly. So now, now, the point there is that, now there is a regulation coming in, one of them is GDPR, Global Data Protection Regulation, it impacts all the global companies who deal with your EU residents. And now they are looking at how they can address that regulation, and be compliant with that regulation. And we believe that's a great opportunity for them to actually invest. And see how, not only comply with regulation, but actually make this a benefit for them. And make the next leap towards building a next level of infrastructure for them, their data, right? >> And that is doing a lot of the data engineering, actually getting data right. >> And that's the third piece. So the first two are this: one is infrastructure, second is compliance, and the third reason, they're all interrelated finally, but I'm just saying, it depends on, from where do you want to begin your journey, right? And the third piece is around, I think you got it right, is about quality of data, but actually it is not quality, we call it data voracity, it's much beyond quality. We talk about more completeness, and also things like provenance, integrity, and security along with it, so if we, and it's very much business contextual element, because what's happening is, you may have heard the story is that, clients have invested in data lakes, for years now, it's been there for like, eight, nine years, data lake concepts, and everybody talks about it-- >> John: Throw everything into the lake. >> And everybody says throw everything into the lake, and then they become a data swamp. (John laughing) - That was last years theme. >> That was last years theme, and the reason is because, because it's not IT's failure, IT is actually pretty advanced, the technology is very advanced. If the business is not as involved as it should be, and is not able to trust the data, and that's where your point comes in, whether you have the right data, and trusted data with you. >> Though, well we had Toyota on earlier and they said, one of the customers said, we had this 2008 post crisis thing and then, they had all this stuff channeled, they had product in channel, and they had the data! They actually had the data, they didn't have access to it! So again, this is like the new data center, data first, get it right, and so with GDPR we're seeing people saying okay, we've got to get this right. So that's, investing engineering involved, governance, application integration, this is all, now, a new thing. How do you guys advise you clients? 'Cause this is super important and you guys are, again, on the front edge. As a CTO group, you got to look at the new tech and say, okay, that's baked, that's not baked, that's new, that's old, throw a container around it, you know. (laughing) How are you sorting through the tools, the platforms? 'Cause there's a lot of, there's a lot of stuff out there. >> Oh yes, absolutely, and there's a lot of stuff, and there's a lot of unproven things as well, in the market. So, the first and foremost thing is that, we should understand what the context in the market right now is. The first question is, mine is, is everybody ready for GDPR? The answer is no. (John laughs) Are they, have they started into the journey, have they started getting on the racetrack, right, on the road? >> Yes? Yeah? It depends on a majority of that organization, some people have just started building a small strategy around GDPR, some people have actually started doing assessments to understand how complex is this beast, and regulation, and some people have just moved further in the journey of doing assessment, but they're now putting up changes in their infrastructure to handle remediation, right? Things like, for example, consent management, thinks about things like dilation, like, it's going to be a very big deal to do, right? And so they are making advantageous changes to the infrastructure that they have, or the IT systems to manage it effectively. But I don't think there's any company which properly can claim that have got it right fully, from end-to-end, right? So I think that's happening. Now, how are we addressing? I think the first and foremost thing, first of all we need to assess the majority of the customers, or the organization. Like BHD, because we talk to them first and understand, we understand, right? Usually we have various ways of doing it, we can have a chit-chat, and meet the person responsible in that company, it could be a Chief Data Officer of a company, it could be a CIO of a company, it could Chief Operating Officer of a company, it could be a CSO of a company, depending on who has a baton in the sea of suites, to kind of handle this problem. >> So it's different per company, right, so every company has their own hierarchy or need, or entry point? >> Data companies have different entry points, but we are seeing more of the CSOs and CIOs playing a role in many of the large organizations, and our, you know our clientele is very large companies, as you know. But we see most of these players playing that role, and asking for help, and asking for having a meeting, and starting with that. In some cases, they have not invested initially, we talked to them, we assess them very quickly, very easy, quick as it's in, you know, probably in a couple of days or day, and tell them that, let's get into a, what we call is, assessment as step one, and that takes four to six weeks, or eight weeks, depending on the size of their application suite, and the organization. And we do it quite fast, I mean initially, we were also learning. If you were to have asked me this question 12 months back, we had an approach. We've changed that approach and evolved that approach now. We invested hugely in that approach itself, by using a lot of machine learning to do assessment itself. So we have now a concept called data discovery, another concept called knowledge graph. >> And that's software driven, both with, it's all machine learning or? >> Sanjeev: It's largely computer driven. But obviously human and computer work together, but it's not only human. A traditional approach would happen to do only with humans. >> John: Yeah, and that've been takin' a long time. >> And that has changed, that has changed with the new era, and technology advancement, that even for, things which are like assessment, could now be done by machines as well, machines are smart enough to do that work, so we are using that right now. But that's a step one, and after that, once we get there, we build a roadmap for them, we ensure that they're stakeholders are agreeing with the roadmap, they actually embrace the roadmap! (laughing) And once that's done, then we talk about remediation to their systems. >> So, you mention voracity, one of the, and you also mentioned, for example, the idea of the, because of GDPR, deletion, which is in itself a voracity thing, so you, it's also having a verifiable actions on data. So, the challenge that you face, I think, when you talk to large customers, John mentioned Toyota, is, the data's there, but sometimes it's not organized for new classes of problems, so, and that's an executive issue 'cause, a lot of executives don't think in terms of new problem, new data, new organization. You guys are speaking to the top executives, CSOs, CIOs often but, how are you encouraging your clients, your customers, to think differently, so that they become data-first? Which is, kind of a predicate for digital business transformation anyway. >> So I think it's a great question. I think it depends again on, who you're talking to in the organization. I have a very strong perspective, my personal view is that data is an intersection of business and technology, it is not a technology, it's not a business, right? It's an intersection of both, especially this topic, it has to be done in collaboration within business and technology. Very closely in terms of how, what is the, how you can drive metadata out of your data, how can you drive advantage out of your data? And, having said that, I think the important thing to note down is that: for every, when you talk about data voracity, the single comment I will make that it is very, very, very contextual to business. Data voracity is very, very contextual to the business that you're running. >> Well, but problems, right? Because, for example, going to Toyota, so, when the Toyota gentleman came on, and this is really important, >> Absolutely. >> the manufacturing people are doing a great job of using data, lean is very data-driven. The marketing people were doing a great job of using data, the sales people were making a great job of using data, the problem was, the problems that Toyota faced in 2008, when the credit crunch hit, were not limited. They were not manufacturing problems, or marketing problems, or sales problems, they were a wholistic set of problems. And he discovered, Toyota discovered, they needed to say, what's the problem, recast the problem, and what can we do to get the data necessary to answer some of these crucial questions that we have? >> So, I think you hit the nail, I can tell, I mean, I think you're spot on, and the one way we are doing right now, addressing that is through, what we call our liquid studios, >> John: I'm just going to-- >> Peter: I'm sorry what? >> Liquid studios. >> Peter: Liquid studios. >> We have this concept called liquid studios. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And actually, this concept we started, I don't know if you heard about this from Accenture before? we started this thing couple of years back-- >> John: Well take a minute to explain that, that's important, explain liquid studios. >> Okay, so liquid studios, so what, when we were thinking about these things where, we talked to multiple clients, they called us, exactly the point, they may be working in silence, and they may be doing a great job in their department, or their function, but they are talking across enterprise. As to how they can, if you are doing great work, can I use your work for my advantage, and vice versa, right, because it's all sharing data, even inside enterprise, forget outside enterprise, and you will be amazed to know how much sharing happens today, within enterprise, right? And you're smiling, right, so? So what we did was, we came to this concept, and the technologies are very new and very advanced, and many of the technologies we are not using beyond experimentation, we are still in the COE concept, well that's different than enterprise ready deployment. Like, if we talk about ERP today, that's not a COE, that's an enterprise ready deployment, in most of the companies, it's all there, like, you run your finance on ERPs right, most of the companies, big companies. So we felt that, technology's advancing, the business and technology IOs, they all have to still agree on a concept, and define a problem together. And that's where the studio comes in, so what we do is, it's actually a central facility, very innovative and creative space, it's unlike an office, it's very much like, new, new thing, it's like very, differently organized structure to generate creativity and good discussion. And we bring in core customers there, we have a workshop with them, we talk about the problem for one or two days, we use design thinking for that, a very effective way. Because one thing we've learned, the one thing that brings our table to agreement on a problem. (laughing) (John and Peter laugh) In a very nice manner, without confronting, in a very subtle manner. So we, through this timeframe, we get to a good problem situation, a good problem definition and then, the studio can actually help you do the POC itself. Because many times people say, well I understand the problem, I think I kind of get your solution, or what your proposing, my people also tell me something else, they have a different option to propose. Can we do it together? Can I get the confidence that, I don't want to go in enterprise ready deployment and put my money, unless I see some proof of pudding, but proof of pudding is not a power point. It's the actual working mark. >> Peter: It's not?! >> It's not! (all laughing) and that's where the studio comes in picture because, you wouldn't believe that we do these two days of workshop without any Powerpoint, like we aren't on a single slide. >> So it's creative, it's very agile, very? >> It's more white boarding, come and talk, it's more visitation, more visitation now, more human interaction, and that's where you open up everybody saying: what is your view, what is your view? We use a lot of post-it stickies to kind of get the-- >> I think the business angle's super important, I want to get your thoughts. 'Cause there's a lot of problems that can be solved once you identify them. But we're hearing terms like competitive advantage, 'cause when you solve some of these problems, these wholistic problems, that have a lot of interplay, where data's shared, or where there's internal, and or external with APIs and cloud-native, you start thinking about competitive advantages, being the data-first company, we've heard these terms. What does that mean to you guys? When you walk into an executive briefing, and they say look, you know, we've done all this work, we've done this engineering, here's where we're at, we need help, but ultimately we want to drive top-line results, be more competitive, really kind of move with the shift. This is a, this is more of a business discussion, what do you guys talk about when you have those conversations? >> I think we, so first of all, data was always a technical topic, do you agree? Like if you just go back, 10 years back, data was always a CIO discussion. >> Well, >> Unless you're in a regulated industry like financial services or, >> Or I guess I'd say this, that the, that the notion of getting data out of a system, or getting data into a system, was a technical discussion. But there was, you know, we've always used data, from market share growth, etc. But that was relatively simple, straight-forward data, and what you're talking about, I think, is, getting into considerably greater detail about how the business is really operating, how the business is really working. Am I right? >> You're right, considering data as an asset, in a discussion in terms of, how can you leverage it effectively, that's what I was saying and, so it is, it's definitely gone up one more level upstaged or into the discussion that is, into the companies and organizations. And what we're saying is, that's where the business comes in effectively and say that, helping them understand, and by the way, the reason I was making that comment is because, if you have ever seen people expending data 10 years back, it is very complex explanation. >> Schemas, this, that, and the other thing. >> You got it, yeah. And it's very hard for a business guy to understand that, like if I'm a supply action lead, I don't get it, it's too complex for me. So what we did, I'm just letting you know how we started the discussion. The first and foremost thing is, we tell them, we're going to solve the business problem, to your point, that's what we think, right? And, every company now-a-days, they want to lead in their industry, and the leadership position is to be more intelligent. >> Yeah, and it's got to hit the mark, I mean, we had Graeme Thompson on, who's the CIO, here at Informatica, and he was saying that if you go to a CFO and ask them hey where's the money, they'll go oh, it's over here, they get your stuff, they know where it's stored, at risk management, they say, where's they data? You mentioned asset, this is now becoming a conversation, where it's like, certainly GDPR is one shot across the bow that people are standing up, taking notice, it's happening now. This data as a asset is a very interesting concept. When I'm a customer of yours, say, and I say hey Sanjeer, I have a need, I got to move my organization to be data-first but, I got to do some more work. What's my journey? I know it's different per customer, depending on whether it's top-down, or bottom-up, we see that a lot but. How do you guys take them through the journey? Is it the workshop, as you mentioned, the assessment, take us through the journey of how you help customers, because I'm sure a lot of them are sittin' out there goin' now, they're going to be exposed with GDPR, saying wow, were we really setup for this? >> Yeah, so I think in the journey, it's a very good question that you asked. The journey can start depending on the real, the biggest pain they have, and the pains could be different on the majority of that particular organization, right? But I can tell you what client position we are having, in a very simplified manner, so that you understand the journey, but yes, when we engage with them, there's a process we follow, we have a discovery process, we have a studio process, together have a workshop, get into a POC, get into a large-scale deployment solution en route. That's a simple thing, that's more sequential in nature, but the condition is around four areas. The first and foremost area is, many companies actually don't have any particular data strategy. They have a very well articulated IT strategy, and when you go to a section of IT strategy, there's a data component in that, but that's all technology. About how do you load, how do you extract those things. It talks about data architectures, and talks about data integration, but it doesn't talk about data as a business, right? That's where it's not there, right? In some companies they do have, to your point, yes, some companies were always there in data, because of regulatory concerns and requirements, so they always had a data organization, a function, which thought of data as different from other industries. And those industries have more better strategy documents or, or they're more organized in that space. But, guess what, now companies are actually investing. They're actually asking for doing help in data strategies, that's one entry point which happens, which means, hey, I understand this, I understand governance is required, I understand privacy's required, and I understand this is required, I also understand that I need to move to new infrastructure, but I can't just make an investment in one or two areas, can you help my build my strategy and road map as to what should be my journey from now til next three years, right, how does it look like? How much money is required, how much investment is required, how do I save from something and invest here, help me save internal wealth, right? That's a new concept. Right, because I don't have so much that you're asking for, so help me gain some savings somewhere else. That's where cloud comes in. (laughs) So, that's one entry point, the second entry point is totally on, where the customers are very clear, they actually have thought through the process, in terms of where they want to go, they actually are asking, very specifically saying, I do have a problem in our infrastructure, help me move to cloud. Help me, that's a big decision right, help me move to cloud, right? But that's one, which I call is, new data supply chain, that's my language. Which means that-- >> John: I like that word actually. >> Yeah? I'm making your supply chain and my supply chain in business terms, if I have to explain business, it's different, technically it's different. Technology, I can explain all the things that you just mentioned, in business I explain that there are three Cs to a supply chain, capture it, curate it, consume it, and they so, oh I get it now, that's easy! >> Well, the data supply chain is interesting too, when you think about new data coming in, the system has to be reactive and handle new data, so you have to have this catalog thing. And that was something that we saw a lot of buzz here at the show, this enterprise catalog. What's your take on that, what's your assessment of the catalog, impact to customers, purpose at this point in time? >> I think it's very important, especially with the customers and large companies, who actually have data all over the place. I can share, as an example, we were talking to one of the customers who had 2600 applications, and they want to go for GDPR, we had a chat with them, and we said look, they were more comfortable saying, no, no, let's no use any machine. Because when you talk about machine, then you have to expose yourself a bit, right? And I said look, the machine is not going to be in my place, it's going to be in yours, your boundaries of firewall. But they were a little more concerned, they said let's go with a manual approach, let's do that, I said fair enough, it's your call, we can do that as well. But guess what? 2600 applications, you can't discover manually, it's just not possible. >> John: Yeah, you need help. A lot of data streaming and-- >> I guess I'm just letting you know it's very, I'm just answering your question. The data catalog is extremely important, if you really want to get a sense of where the data is residing, because data is not in one or two applications, it's all over the place. >> Well I'm impressed by the data catalog positioning, but then also, when you look at the Azure announcement they had, that Informatica had. You're essentially seeing hybrid cloud playing out as a real product. So that's an easy migration, of bringing in some of those BI tools, bringing some democratization into the data discovery. Rajeev, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, love the work you do, and I just want you to take a minute, just to end the segment out. Explain the work that you do, you have two roles, real quick, explain your two primary roles. You've got the, you incubate new stuff, which is hard to do, but, I'm an entrepreneur, I love the hard problems, but also you're doing talent. Take a minute to kind of explain, real quickly, those two roles, for, super important. >> well, the first one is basically that I, my role, I look at any ideas that are, that we can incubate as a business, and we can work within Accenture, different entities within Accenture to make sure that we go to clients in a much more quiescent manner, and see how we can have an impact to our top line. And that's a big thing, because our, we are a service as a business and, we have to be very innovative to come to know how do we increase our business. >> Any examples that you can share, of that stuff that you worked on? >> So, one is, right now, I'm spending a lot of my time in, on fueling our data business itself. We just recently launched our data business group, right? We have our market way in this position, is called applied intendance, which you may be aware, which includes data, analytics, advanced analytics, and then artificial intelligence, all put together, then we can solve these problems. >> And you guys got a zillion data scientists, I know that, you guys have been hiring really, really strong people. >> It's a very strong team. But on that, what I feel is that, the data is a critical foundation, really critical foundation for an intelligent enterprise. You can become and intelligent enterprise unless you have right data, to your point. And right data means curated data, in the set, in the fashion that can help you become, draw more insights from your enterprise. And that's possible if you invest in data strongly, and selection of data so strongly, but that's why we are fueling that, so I'm just letting you know that I'm spending most of my time right now to enhance our capability, you know, enhance our power in on that, and go to market with that. The second thing which I am investing right now, which is, there is a few more ideas, but one more, which could be very useful for you to know, is, while companies are moving to the new, they have to also, they have to rely on their people. Ultimately the companies are made of people. Like us, right? And if you can, if you are not retooling yourself, you cannot reimagine the future of your organization as well. >> You're talking about the peoples, their own skills, their job functions, okay-- >> So I'm working on a concept called workforce of the future right, how can 44 companies, large companies, how can they transform their talent, and their, even leadership as well, so that they are ready for the future and they can be more relevant. >> Yeah, and this is the argument we always see on theCUBE, oh, automation's going to take jobs away, well, I mean certainly automating repetitive tasks, no one wants to do those, (laughing) but the value is going to shift, that's where the opportunities are, is that how you see that future workforce? >> Absolutely, it's one of the complimentary, we have Paul Daugherty, whom you know, who's the Chief Technology Officer of Accenture Technology. Accenture, Accenture as a firm, he, he's a Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Accenture He has recently written a book called Human + Machine, exactly talked about the same concept that, we actually all believe, very, very strongly that, the future is all about augmenting humans together. So there are tasks which machines should be doing, and there are tasks where humans should be doing, and there are tasks which both of them do collaboratively, and that's what we are trying to boast. >> Cloud world, we're doing it here in theCUBE, here at Informatica World. Rajeev, thanks so much for spending time-- >> Sajeev. (laughing) Sajeev, I mean, thanks for coming on. Sorry my bad, a little late in the day. But we're bringing it out here at Informatica World, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, here with Accenture inside theCUBE, here at Informatica World in Las Vegas. Be right back with more coverage, after this short break. Thank you. (bubbly music)

(click) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube we're at the Accenture Technology Vision event 2018. The actual report comes out in a couple of days. We're here at the preview event. A couple hundred people in downtown San Francisco. A lot of demos of AR and VR downstairs. It's really a center kind of highlighting the top trends that they've surveyed their community and we're excited to be here to be joined by one of the experts. He's Tony Parisi, on the Cube a long time ago we looked at 2013 amazing. He's the global head of AR and VR for Unity technology. Tony great to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> So uh, so you've been on this AR VR virtual reality thing for a while. Amazing development in this space. >> I've been working in the field for a couple decades now in one form or another and it's just been great to see with the resurgence of virtual reality. And we had experiments 20 years ago trying to turn this into a consumer ready technology. Really wasn't ready yet. With the advent of oculus and some of these other technologies, we've seen something that a consumer could afford that enterprises can afford in large numbers. You know, some thousand dollar piece of hardware connected to a personal computer that's a few thousand dollars that can drive amazing VR experiences. These same kind of immersion techniques brought into a phone where you can take a smartphone and just look through it like a magic window into this extended reality where you're seeing 3D graphics that persist in the environment around you. And these are all working toward the future where we're going to have all this 3D amazingness. Digital magic in front of us. And it's just incredible to see how far we've come in all these years and how it's just about to be both consumer ready and be deployed into businesses for all kinds of different productivity opportunities. >> Yeah it's interesting >> Amazing - that a center role them all up into one. They went with the extended reality. Cause there's a lot of confusion, is it augmented reality, virtual reality you know, how much of it is virtual stuff overlayed to reality, how much reality is brought back into the virtual space. But at the end of the day it's a lot of blending. It's going to depend on the application. >> Definitely depends on the application. If you just take marketing terms and put them aside because everyone's got their own talking about this and agreed there's a little bit of confusion right now. If you just look at the common element, it is 3D graphics. It is graphics that represent objects, environments, places, people in a way that's much more realistic. It's much more intuitive for an enuser to grasp that touches us in our brains, in a place that a flat screen doesn't so that we remember it better, or learn it more effectively. That's what all of these different techniques have in common. So, you know, call it what you want. Accenture's rolling forward with all of that. My company Unity's supplying the core technology to power all of that across 30 platforms and you look at the whole industry. Game platforms, which is where we were born. And now in the VR and AR it's you know, a dozen platforms at least that look like they could be viable. The common element for anybody who's developing is that it's 3D graphics and they're going to make investments in certain kinds of software, certain kinds of application design and techniques and knowledge that's going to transfer among all of these different kinds of hardware platforms. Because we know at the end of the day there'll be a handful there will be 3 or 4 that end up dominating just like in any other part of the computer industry with any other digital technology. So, you know we're moment because it's so early where the technology um, we don't know how to talk about it yet. But I think if you look back, probably the same thing was true of mobile and the PC at the time if you were in the middle of it. - Right >> People call it the PC, or they called it the internet, or they called it the web, or then they called it mobile or a smartphone. You know, there's just all these terms for it but that, you know, that'll be in the the rear view mirror in a couple years. And we'll just all take this for granted as, oh there's 3D stuff now in front of us. Or there's a 3D place I go into in a VR headset. >> Yeah even we were at Baobab Studios last week and, you know, even in entertainment right? Early early television replicated just a stage right? And early movies replicated just a stage before they figured out what they could do with the medium. Same thing here and it's interestingly common, how much is interactive kind of game-like. How much of it's narrative storytelling like a movie. And he's like, don't think of it that way. It's a completely different medium with a completely different opportunity to tell stories, to do things in a completely different way. >> One hundred percent. That team at Baobab is amazing. They use Unity a lot to create their experiences. And they're the first to tell you, we don't quite know what it's going to look like in a few years. We're trying lot's of things, we are going to start from some, you know touchstones, some places we already know. Game design, linear storytelling. But this is a different beast and we don't know what we're going to get. Baobab is a great example of a company that's not afraid to experiment. They're going to try and put you, I mean, what they do is they make Pixar kind of quality, high production value animated content like a Pixar movie but you're in it in VR. You can look all around, you can see the entire action unfolding around you. And more than that, they've made you a part of the story. They make you a character. Usually a secondary character. So the whole burden is not on you as the viewer to have to figure this story out. But someone who can help the story along so you feel fully involved. And if you play that forward, if you think about where that's going to go in a few years, we may be the folks who are making the stories up. I mean, it starts with just kind of being a secondary character, but as we learn this as users, as we learn how to do this, we may start making the stories up and being a much more active part of it. But, somehow still having that sweet spot where we're giving the director and the content creator the final say in sort of how this world is being created. Uh, Brett Letter the famous director did Lawnmower Man if you know his work in a 90s work in a movie about VR. He's back in the world here also doing VR again. And he likens this to world building. He thinks VR creation for entertainment is much more like creating a Disney theme park. A world that you can inhabit and be part of and have fun for hours, days at a time versus telling one story from start to finish. So I mean, think about it what's going to happen in the next couple years. It's mind blowing where this could go. And we really don't know, none of us could predict. >> So you're deep into it Tony. I wonder if you could share a story of maybe some applications that you're seeing in production or kind of in development. Where people are not thinking, you know, men like me obviously we know entertainment, we know games, we know some of the industrial stuff like walking a shop floor and seeing the RPMs of a machine. But what are some of the applications that we don't know that you see coming down the pipe. >> Well if you just think about take one industry, like the auto industry. Right? I think you can imagine like you said if you're somewhat versed in this. The idea that you could use virtual reality to design a car instead of what they do today which is they use some 3D design packages but they still build a physical prototype of the car out of clay and, you know, companywide a Ford, or a Volkswagon, or a company like that will spend millions for every new car building these physical prototypes. They want to replace that with purely digital and virtual processes at some point which is going to save them a heck of a lot of time and money and materials cost. Right? But now you just take that one example and you take that car design and do the entire life cycle of that car to when it's assembled, manufactured, you can train people in VR how to do that. When it's getting rolled out onto a show floor, to people who are selling it. All the way to when that car is a self driving car that you put somebody into and they get in the cabin of that thing and the cabin because there's no driver in there, you now have a lot of room in there. Right? It's an entertainment center. So these kind of augmented and virtual reality technologies could potentially touch every phase in the lifecycle of not just the development, but the deployment, and the ongoing operation of a motor vehicle as we know it. So that's going to radically transform things sometime in the next 5 to 10 years. >> Alright Tony I'm going to let you go, the party's underway. We got the autonomous robots are playing in the band. In 5 years from now we can't wait 5 years because I don't even know what's going to be here. >> I hope we do this again. >> It'll be crazy different. - Well in advance of 5 years from now. >> So thanks for talking with me a few minutes. Tony Parisi, Jeff Rick, you're watching the Cube from the Accenture Technology Vision 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here, with theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Technology Vision 2018, it's actually the preview event, a couple of days before the report comes out. We came last year, it's really Accenture querying all their customers and partners, as to what are the hot topics for 2018? We're excited to have a return, from Accenture Labs, he's Marc Carrel-Billiard, the Global Lead for Accenture Labs. Last we saw you at the 30th anniversary. So, Marc, great to see you. >> Great to see you too, very happy to be here. >> Absolutely, and we saw you a year ago at this event as well. So, as you look at this Vision compared to last year's Vision, what really jumps out at you as being so different? >> I think what really jumps is just the fact that what we say here is that, you remember last year, it was all about technology for people, technology by people. What we see is that we move forward into, not just technology for people, by people, but how technology basically is shaping the society. And what people, basically I mean, like technology is changing their life, the way they work and everything. What we say to all this technology is that they're going to be a major impact in the society itself, and then companies need to work with people, need to work with society basically to change, basically, the new models. What we say also is that, something which is very important is that there's a transparency that needs to be brought out by this technology. I mean, it's like if you look at companies and everything they will have to build a social contract with these people. Bring in the technology. It's a two-way street now. >> Right, right. >> Like, you build a lot of technology, and people adopt this technology, and then need to bring back feedback. So what are you going to do about it? And it's not going to be about selling products, selling services, but building partnership. Partnership with the people, partnership to the society that you're going to build around them. That's very important. >> But it's kind of weird, because it's kind of bifurcated. On one hand, there's a personal level of connection that you've never had before. On the other hand, we're trying to automate, with software and data, as many processes as we can, which we've seen in Martek, probably on the cutting edge of that. And that sometimes can cause issues. So we're kind of bifurcating. Automate as much as you can, on the other hand, there's a personal touch and trust and a relationship that I never had before. >> I love this discussion, because I'll tell you this, I completely agree. But I think that people need to recognize that artificial intelligence, we've made tons of progress there. And you remember, we had so many winters along the way and everything. I think there will still be winters for artificial intelligence. Machines can do things very very well. >> Jeff: Right. >> But they still can't do what people can do. You know, for example, common sense learning. It's very difficult to explain to a machine what is common sense learning. You know what is common sense. For example, if I would like to build a robot that comes in your office, and picks, for example, a cup of coffee, and decide whether they want to throw it in the bin or basically reserve it for you, it's very difficult. You need to weigh the cup of coffee. You need to understand if it's warm or not warm. I mean, there's so many things that come to play. A robot would not be able to do that. You can do that, even your kids could do that. >> Pretty interesting. >> I know! >> So there's like five big things, I want to jump into a couple with you. One is, and you guys have twisted kind of common phrases-- >> We did, yeah >> A little bit of Accenture branding, of course, right? So one of them is the Internet of Thinking. So rather than the Internet of Things, which is very popular, and then, of course, we hear about the industrial Internet of Things. You talked about the Internet of Thinking. What do you mean by that? >> Okay, so Internet of Thinking is all about to recognize that every product in the world today will be very intelligent. We talk about artificial intelligence. We're baking the intelligence into systems. They all have matched learning, they all learn about what you're doing. So what we need to do is that, when we're going to build a new environment and everything, we need to understand exactly where all the processing power for this intelligence going to be sitting. Is it going to be, for example, if you have to reinvent the car of the future, where it's going to be driverless. You need to re-think about the cockpit of the future and the experience. There needs to be a lot of matched learning, intelligence, to understand exactly how they want to interact with you. Should sudoers sudo-vise? To recognizing your face when you're frowning, and stuff like that. I mean there's going to be so many things, so there's lot of processing power to put. Where do you put all this processing power? In the chip in the car? >> Right. >> Do you want to split it between the chip in the car and some other chip in the cloud? Where do you put all the data related to what you're going to be doing in this car? You want to look at all these data only in the platform in the car or you want to put a little bit in the cloud so you're going to be able to crunch all the data? You going to be sitting in a seat. American people spend on average, 500 hours per year in the car. Can you imagine what we can do there? Imagine we have sensors in the seats. We're going to be able to collect a lot of data about your wellness your well-being and everything. We want to make you more healthy. What are we going to do with all this data? Are we going to crunch the data basically in the car? Or in the cloud? So, what we want to say is that the Internet of Things is going to evolve to Internet of Thinking because we're going to have to be smarter. Not only to implement smart product in the car or something else, but to decide about our fixture. Where are we going to put all that stuff? Which process are we going to use? CPU, FPGA, GPU, even quantum computing? People need to think about where they're going to put the architecture. What type of flavor of architecture they want to have. All these things need to come into play. >> I know, I know! >> Marc we could go and go and go, unfortunately we're getting the hook, they're going to start their program so maybe we'll get you back after the program. >> Sure. >> Thanks for taking a few minutes, they're going to start the program behind us. I'm Jeff Frick, he's Marc, you're watching theCUBE at the Accenture Technology Vision 2018. We'll be right back after the presentation. >> Alright, sure. >> Thanks Marc. Alright, welcome back everybody! We are still the Accenture Tech Vision 2018 free event, the autonomous band is playing, very loudly. But it's good. So we've got Marc back, Marc Carrel-Billiard, and again he is Accenture Labs' Global Lead and he is also all on top of Extended Reality. >> Extended Reality. >> So Marc, we could talk about OR, VR, AR. >> Optics, olfactives, everything. >> Now it's ER? >> That's right. >> Extended reality. >> Extended reality's VR, I mean it's like, I think it takes every type of sensors or immersion, feeling and everything you can have because it's all about combinatory effect. If I combine the augmented reality with the audio, as well with the smell, as well as with the touch then you feel that something is happening. In fact-- >> How long until you just pass all the sensors and just go right to the wires? That's what I'm waiting for. (laughing) These things are not built to look at googles, right? >> I know, I know, I know. But it's coming. >> It's coming but what's interesting though, you guys put a play on it about distance. >> Marc: That's right. >> You guys are, you're positioning this as really a way to break down distance. >> Absolutely, I mean-- >> Jeff: How does that work? >> Well, we call that the end of distance because I think the feeling that we have is that what you're going to be doing is that, you know what I mean it's always the same stuff that you're looking for talent. You're looking for skill. You're looking for people. You're looking for information. Here. Where it's out there. How how are you going to bridge that? How are you going to reduce the distance? To bring people to you, to bring the skills you need, to build the information you need. Extended reality, virtual reality, that can help you out to do that. I'll give you an example, Komatsu, it's a Japanese company. >> Big tractors and things. >> That's right, big tractors and everything. Sometimes, I mean it's a lot of investment and everything, you want to try them out, you want to test them, but it's snowing, it's pouring, it's raining. You're not going to do it. What are you going to do? Why, you're going to use the vehicle a bit in virtual >> They're all autonomous though, and they all drive themselves around. >> But not now, there's some not there. But eventually you can use that in your office. You're going to be training in your office and when it stops raining, basically you're going to be there and you're going to be able to drive that and you're going to be able to use them. We see that in the oil and gas industry. We are building very complex platforms. It takes 10 years to build them, maybe less. The question is that, do you want to wait for five years, 10 years until the platform is delivered, to start training your people? No. I'm going to bring basically that to them directly. It's not only end of distance, it's end of time. I can reduce the time that this stuff is delivered, virtually, to train the people onboard and when they're going to be there. So they're going to be using virtual reality, to be trained on the platform, and then when they're going to be on the platform, they know how it works. But even more, then you go to augmented reality, When they can do maintenance on equipment by augmenting information, to make them more efficient. >> So what's the killer app going to be? Is it a killer app problem? Is it a hardware problem, right, we're still wearing the clunky goggles. What's the breakthrough? >> So the breakthrough is really new devices because right now, if you look at the market today in AR, VR, we're talking about $14 billion, one-four. The billion dollars-- >> Today? >> Yeah, today. Which is a lot. >> Yeah, it's a real number. >> But most of it is on the devices. Most of it is on gaming devices. You know, the stuff that you find on Xbox, the stuff that you find on the PlayStation, very consumer-driven. The big business is really enterprise business which is how you're going to use these devices in oil and gas industry, in automotive industry, in very toxic environments. Where the device needs to be lightweight, with long battery-life, it needs to be intrinsically safe as well. Safe in the-- >> Jeff: Environment, right. >> The devices are coming, and then by 2020 the estimate is that, that whole business is going to shift from $14 billion to $143, one forty three. >> By 2020? >> Yeah. >> Two years from now? That's right, two-three years, because the devices are there. And then, right now 70% of this business is consumer-driven, and 30% is enterprise. We're going to flip that. 70% is going to be enterprise, and 30% will be consumer. >> In 2020? >> Yes. >> Just right around the corner. >> Right around the corner. I mean, I met with a couple of companies, this company called RealWear, they doing amazing device. It's a device you wear, you can put that on the helmet, very very light. You can drop it from 10 meters, it bounce back. It works. And then basically you have bots with cognition in the very noisy environment, like this one, you can speak, you recognize everything. It can provide you with augmented reality information about what you need to do and everything. That's the typical device that we need. You can use it in toxic environments. It has other certification. I mean it's IPv6 and everything, you can run on it and it doesn't do anything, and that's exactly what we need to develop the new use case, that's going to drive these further. >> Yeah, cause we're still a long way from there but two years is not very long, >> It's not long. >> for the devices. >> I mean, it's acceleration. >> Right, right. Alright Marc, well we're excited. What's your favorite AR-VR-ER application? >> You and I, we go to Venice tomorrow, always virtual reality, and so with the combination of the olfactive, the sound, the sun and everything. You can be sitting there on the terrace, you can hear the Vaporetto passing by, you eat the bread, and I fake your brain with the olfactive stuff, you believe it's a pizza, and you drink the water and it's Chianti. That's what it's going to be. >> See I think the device is going to be when it plugs into your head. Again, avoid all these things and go straight in. And then it begs the question, did you really do it? >> I know, I know. Or not? That's way deep, we don't have time Marc. >> It was great to see you. >> Thanks for stopping by. He's Marc, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube, Accenture Technology Vision preview party, thanks for watching. (bright music)