>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at the Venetian part of the AWS re:Invent show, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Adam Burden, he is the chief software engineer at Accenture, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE, Adam. >> It's great to be here again, Rebecca, thanks a lot for inviting me. >> So I want to talk to you about some research that you conducted about the future, about future systems. We're going to get into what future systems are in a little bit, but I first want to hear about this research itself, what was the genesis of it, what were you trying to understand? >> It was really interesting. First of all, we actually followed the scientific method for this, starting with a real hypothesis, and then conducted a really big research study to find out, was that hypothesis true? And what we were trying to understand is, we see this thing called an innovation achievement gap at many of our clients, where they're investing heavily in new disruptive technologies, but they're not seeing the benefit out of it that they expect, and others, their peers often are. And why is that? And we thought that was really important to understand for our clients who are trying to compete in the digital era. >> So you had this hypothesis, so what did you go in thinking? >> First of all, we went in and we said, we believe that there's a number of barriers out there that people have to really preventing them from embracing and adapting in the digital age in the right way. A lot of it has to do with what I call the inertia of legacy, or the handicap of legacy. So the things that, the way that they used to build systems, like the methods can be a really serious drawback, like if they're using waterfall techniques. Maybe their legacy systems, for example, that they are not really open, they don't provide the ability to interface with them properly. Another great example of the challenges of legacy systems can really be that they're built in a more monolithic nature, and because they're built in that fashion, it's really hard to maintain them in an Agile way, with lots of different teams working on components, because they need them all to be assembled together at once. So it forces you into this release schedule which can be months long or even years long to do things, and that type of speed, that just doesn't work in the digital age, so it's holding them back, and that's some of the diagnostic that we went into this research study with, saying these are the challenges that are out there. >> So before we get talking about the results, I want you to just define for us what these future systems are. >> Great, and this is where we really were trying to say that we think it's time for a hard reset around a lot of the way that business systems and applications are built today. And the reason that we believe that is that, companies who are very large enterprises that really should be dominating in their industry, that there are so many examples of where small startups have come in and disrupted them, things that you think should never have happened. So the democratization of technology, the introduction of cloud, et cetera, the capabilities that AWS is talking to us here at this conference about, that's what's enabling them to do it. But enterprises have so many advantages, the wealth of data that they've got, the enormous investment capacity in others, how is that possible? And we really believe a lot of it comes down to the way that they're using, and the way they're embracing these future systems. And there's three characteristics of these things that we look at, first we say that they're boundaryless, and they really break down the traditional stack of IT, so that it's more open and it's able to connect with services outside of their enterprise, and they embrace the way that that works, so the traditional layers of application and data, and compute and storage, those are really going away, and everything's becoming code and much more components. Another one is adaptable, I'm a really big believer in this space, because I've seen so many things come in, that just makes you really kind of rethink the way that you may have built some things in the past, so that might be like blockchain, or it could be DevOps or other things, and are there ways to build systems that are much more flexible and evolutionary in nature, so they don't have to be completely disrupted and changed, in order to embrace some new technology, so adaptable is another one. And the third one is radically human, this is my favorite one, I think if I had one, it's about building systems for people, rather than building the people around the technology that you're using, in fact I'll give you an example, that keyboard right in front of you today, that keyboard, you know when that keyboard was designed? >> Rebecca: Oh my god, when? >> 1887, or 1880s, about. And basically, that keyboard was designed to slow you down, to keep you from typing too fast. And that was because people were typesetting newspapers, and they were crossing the little bars in their typewriter. Yet, today, what's the date today, 2019, we're still using that, right? Isn't it time for us to have more of a radically human approach to technology, and instead of having people design themselves around how technology works, having the technology best designed for them, so taking better advantage of artificial intelligence, maybe making AI the new UI, those types of things are really going to change it, and we think that future systems will exhibit this key characteristic of radically human in the way that they're built and organized. >> Okay, so I like it. Adaptable, and boundaryless, and radically human. What did you find, so how did you go about this survey, and then what did you find? >> Okay, so first, this was the single biggest survey of enterprise systems that Accenture's ever conducted. And we surveyed more than 8300 companies, c-level, across 20 industries and 20 different geographies. And the survey was looking at more than 100 data points from each one of them, as well as other demographic data, we collected 1.6 million pieces of data about this. We ran machine learning on the data to find patterns that surprised us, we looked at the data in terms of our hypothesis to say, what is it about these future systems, are there some companies that are starting to do things like this boundaryless, adaptable, and radically human space that we could learn something from? And we found some really interesting things. So when I dug into the data, maybe the biggest headline out of it was, the companies that have begun to adapt or to use these future systems type of approaches for things, we'll call them the top 10% of this group. Their revenues are growing at twice the speed of anyone else in their peer group. So think about that, if their revenues are growing faster, and everything else about their peers is the same, they're competitors, they're in the same geography, even the same industry, but the revenues of this group is changing faster, isn't that great evidence that adapting these characteristics of future systems is super important to the business performance that you've got there? It's a huge difference. >> Right, so that's compelling me, so what are they doing differently, what is this 10% of companies, how are they leading the pack? >> Yeah, so it boils down to a couple of key things that they're really doing differently, and I'll start by saying that they look at, instead of just looking at things as applications, they look at them more as systems of interconnected solutions, and they are treating components in a way that allows them to reassemble things in different and unique ways much faster than others can do. Sometimes they're using API solutions, a lot of times they're using outside functions outside of their enterprise to do that, and it's giving them remarkable flexibility. Another thing is the methods, the way that they build systems and what they're embracing, but it goes beyond just using Agile, it's almost like a different culture altogether. I think about some clients that I visited that really are getting this right, and the way that they look at failure, for example, is success, and the conservative nature of a lot of enterprises as it pertains to technology, to carefully study it before they invest, before they move forward, it's holding them back, and maybe that paid dividends for a long time when things were done in a much more waterfall nature, but in the digital age, you can't afford to take that kind of time to embrace or to try and leverage new technologies. I think another one that really stands out for me too, is the breadth of disruptive technologies that they tried, and so it wasn't just that they experimented with everything that worked, they've experimented with a lot of things that maybe haven't produced the kind of results or outcomes that conventional wisdom said that they were going to. Augmented reality is a good example, right, I think it's taken time for augmented reality to really start producing value in the enterprise, but it's been around for a while now. We found that the leaders had all experimented with augmented reality, it didn't necessarily mean that they'd adopted it and begun to use it, but that was actually something that separated them from the laggards, what a surprise, right? Because you had thought, "Okay, well maybe the leaders "are just smarter, they only choose the things "that are really going to make a difference." But it's the fact that they were trying lots of different things, and they weren't afraid to experiment, that really made a difference for them. >> And not afraid to fail, too, as you said. >> Or maybe shelve it and say, "Not quite ready yet. "Maybe in a few years we'll get there." So I thought that was fascinating, and it really helped us sort of confirm that there are definitely things different that these leaders are doing than laggards, and it goes beyond just their adoption of future systems, it's the way that they were building them too, and the culture that they've embraced as a result. >> So we had a dizzying number of announcements on the main stage this morning from Andy Jassy, so many different mainframe legacy migrations, so many different areas that AWS is moving into, and starting new services, how does what you heard today from Andy Jassy translate to the research that you're doing? >> Well it's actually great, and I think it's a great microcosm of what is truly different about these leaders, and laggards. All of them, in some ways, have said, "We're adopting cloud." Okay, great, everybody's doing cloud, all 8300 companies, I can't think of one that said they were doing nothing with cloud. They were doing something with SaaS, or maybe they've got public cloud or others. But here's the difference, here's the difference. When the leaders do cloud, they think about it differently. The laggards look at cloud as a cheaper data center. They say "Okay, we can just move our compute and storage "into cloud, great, awesome." The leaders look at cloud as an innovation catalyst, they're taking advantage of the cloud native services, the things Andy was talking about today, fraud detect, private VPNs, all of the things that he was introducing and describing today, they can't wait to get their hands on that capability. And it's more than that, though, because you could do this on-premise, but it's too expensive, and it takes too long to do that. When you've got a cloud service provider that's making things like Rekognition or SageMaker available at your fingertips, to do amazing things with artificial intelligence, that is what an innovation catalyst is all about, and the leaders are taking advantage of that at every turn, and that's why, that's why they can do things so fast. >> So for the 90% that are not in this leading category, it sounds as though it will require a real change in mindset. Are there any other, what's your advice to help these laggards improve? >> Yeah, so I would say it really boils down to two things, I would give them, if you're in that laggard category, first of all, you can definitely move out of it, and the other thing is, is that you're in strange company. There's digital natives, like the most successful born-in-the-cloud kind of companies, that have this problem too, so it's kind of surprising, right, that you wouldn't expect that, but that's definitely the case, and we see lots of examples of that. The good news is, though, is that you can move from A to B, and I would say it starts with doing two things. The first is, is embracing more fast and flexible technologies, so the things that I really like to see companies embrace, or the things that we observed in this research that they're doing is, looking at Agile at scale, embracing product-based operating models, doing things that allow them, like DevOps, to increase automation and the way that they're building and deploying systems, that type of change is a significant adjustment to the way that you think about technology, and how quickly it can be deployed for use, and if you look at the difference between these digital born-in-the-cloud, digital companies that are the succeeding companies in this space, that's the way that they do it, and they really, it is really kind of part of the secret sauce, so that's one thing, embracing these solutions that make them fast and flexible. And the other one gets back to what I was describing earlier about cloud, recognize that cloud is an innovation catalyst. It is not going to be successful for you to think about cloud as just a cheaper data center. It might very well be lower cost for you to do that, but if you're not taking advantage of the cloud native services, whether that's AWS databases like Aurora, it's the new features that they introduced around the low latency application development, those are the things that will really allow you to do stuff much faster than you could've ever imagined on-premise, so I'd start there, if I was a company that's one of those laggards, and then I'd look at, what is my blueprint for future systems, and how do I embrace those characteristics of boundaryless, adaptable, and radically human. >> Cloud as an innovation engine, I love it. Adam, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE, it was a pleasure. >> It's great to be here, Rebecca, thank you again for inviting me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage from the Accenture Executive Summit. (techno music)

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

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Tauni Crefeld. She is the Managing Director, communications, media and high-tech at Accenture. And Adam Burden, Chief Software Engineer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> So we are talking today about the future of platforms and Adam, I'm going to start with you to just sort of give our viewers a lay of the land here. It's been a few years since platform development really hit the scene. >> Sure. So it's been an interesting space for us as well. When I talk about what's happening in this area, I like to break it up into the how, the now and the wow. And the how is really what is created or enabled by these platforms. It really is extracting away the complexity. This plumbing and difficult parts of building software bespoke and systems. And it's making that complexity sort of disappear so that the real effort is expended upon building systems and enabling business value. And when we talk about how that has changed the way that we look at systems integration and development, it's actually enabling this thing that we call the renaissance of custom to a degree. And that is really kind of the how. And in the now side of this, it's interesting. When we first started tracking this space, these platform areas, I want to say it was close to eight years ago, we actually called it the Helen of Troy effect. Right? So we had the face that launched 1,000 ships. There literally were 1,000 platforms out there floating around in the ocean and some of them had a lot of sailors on it. And a few of them were just dinghies but. Now what we're seeing happen is this consolidation of platforms and it's taken a couple of different forms. Sometimes you got something like one of these really popular open source platforms like Cloud Foundry. And it's actually becoming sort of an OEM product inside of a lot of other platforms. So you see Cloud Foundry now inside of things like SAP Cloud Platform, for example. So it's popping up in surprising places. Plus you can also use the community version. But that consolidation is now sort of channeling down the number of platform options, environments that are available to build things on top of. So that's a very interesting development that's happening right now. And the wow is what's happening, you know, tomorrow. And I tell you, I see some remarkable things on the horizon. Working with our ecosystem partners, that really will change the way that clients, business, the enterprises, especially the ones that have ambitions to be the high performers of tomorrow, how they're going to enable business applications and systems for their customers. And when you talk about things like low-code and no-code platforms, imagine a scenario where you can talk to an intelligent agent and describe the system that you want to build and the scaffolding for that is created for you. So really remarkable advances and leaps forward coming ahead in the platform space and when I think about the how and how we've gotten here. The now and the wow. It's just an exciting time to be working in this area. >> So what are some of the primary benefits? As you said, you're talking to clients who want to become the high performers of tomorrow. What kind of successes are you seeing? >> So I would really group that into probably two things, Rebecca. I think the first one is around agility. One of the things I like to say is that the pace of technology change will never be as slow again as it is today. And it's sort of a daunting thing. >> Which is mind boggling in itself. >> It is. It's kind of daunting. And being here at AWS re:Invent, we're about to be bombarded with an unprecedented number of new product and capability announcements over the next couple of days. It's hard to absorb all of these things. And hard to be able to take advantage of them and for our businesses and our clients who we work with, they are looking for agility. And that's one of the key benefits that you get out of being on one of these or a part of one of these platforms. It allows them to be more responsive to the market and they can do it in a way which is really enabling them to deliver solutions faster and better than ever before. And think about the competitive threats that they're facing, right? With cloud technologies, like AWS, we really, we've democratized a lot of compute like never before. So because of that, it's a lot easier for a start up or even a company in an adjacent industry to come in and say, I'm going to start doing things in this space. I'm going to sell roofing products and I'm a car manufacturer, for example. And when you have things like that happening and it's so easy for competitors to get in and be disruptive, it's really important to business that you can move quickly. And these platforms enable just that. So agility is clearly one of them. And then the other one is around innovation. If you think about how hard it would be for my colleague here, Tauni and I if we were going to build a new customer service system that had natural language processing and a virtual agent technology in it and we were going to try and build this in our own data center, right? Stand up the infrastructure. Set up all the services. Be able to do this. Train the models ourselves. We're talking about something that could takes months or years even, just to get to the point where we're ready to start building. Yet, today, with a lot of these platforms you don't have to do any of that. You can start tomorrow and it's all as a service. It's on tap, it's on demand. And if you're going to be one of these high performers of tomorrow, using it as an innovation platform is absolutely a key component of the success of the future for that business, no doubt. >> Tauni, I want to bring you in here a little bit to the conversation. So talk to me about a specific example of a platform that Accenture has been working on. >> So I'd like to highlight OpenAP. It's just a great example of what Adam was talking about where it was a consortium of media giants that came together to build a new platform really to disrupt the broadcast TV industry and find a way of doing targeted advertising more effectively. So broadcast TV is usually done based on gender and age demographics, that's it. They wanted to find a way of really being more specific. Targeting veterans or people who want to buy trucks or whatever. And they did this by wanting to create a cloud platform that would become the marketplace between agencies and the broadcasters. You know, but because it's a consortium, there's no infrastructure, there's no starting point. It was from thin air, from scratch and they, because of the broadcast industry timelines, they wanted to do the entire, from idea to launch, in five months. And we couldn't have done that if, to Adam's point, we had to create, you know, put in servers and all that stuff. We were able to do all of that because we were able to leverage AWS as a baseline and get started with the development almost immediately. >> So talk a little bit more about this OpenAP. So it's a consortium of media companies and sort of looking at their digital competitors, with a little bit of envy here of wow, you can slice and dice your target customers so finely and you know exactly who they are, what they want to buy, what their consumer proclivities are. And they wanted to be able to do the same. >> Right. Yeah, so there's a lot of analytics that they wanted to leverage and do it in a way that there was a standard across the different media companies cause they realized that the biggest threat was coming from digital not from each other. So they kind of got together and said, hey let's find a way of doing this more frictionless. Make it more seamless. We can have a lot of the data and analytics behind it so that you could target, like I said, you know veterans or whatever. And by doing so, they're able to create that marketplace. But to do that, we had to really make it easy to use. We had to build custom UI's. Back to exactly, the Renaissance of custom. There's nothing out there in the marketplace that would do this. They were the first ones in there to really disrupt the marketplace. So it was custom UI's. API's. The whole set of capabilities that needed to be done for the consortium. >> So Adam, in terms of these platform services, talk a little bit about what you have learned so far and sort of the best practices that have emerged. The nuggets of wisdom. >> Well, thanks Rebecca. I love it when people ask me that question because then-- (Rebecca laughs) I have two things that I think are really important to keep in mind with that. One of them is that if you're building green field applications, right? It's actually time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it's a bit hard sometimes cause there's a lot of inertia in enterprises about how you do things and how things have been done. And a lot of times they can be quite conservative too, about their approaches. So for example, if you're going to use a platform but what you're going to do on that platform is you're going to stay using waterfall development techniques you're going to have releases every three or six months or something. That's just not going to meet your businesses expectations anymore. It goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about the speed of change in technology. It's just not going to keep up with what potentially competitors are going to do. So, you have to throw of a lot of that baggage that you've carried with you for a long time. A great example I like to talk about in this space is actually site reliability engineering. This is a pattern for solving architecture problems that it really has become quite popular in the last couple of years and what it allows you to do is to release software a lot faster, but you have more circuit breakers inside of your applications that allow it to gracefully degrade if there's some sort of defect or problem that happens so that your customer's, your business partners, your employees, they don't see an outage. What they see is a slightly degraded service. They don't get something where it say's "404: site not available" they get a slightly degraded service. And if you follow those patterns well, you can deliver software a lot faster with higher degrees of quality but you have the comfort and assurance that it's going to do that. That actually helps you get over some of the cultural barriers as well. >> Well those cultural barriers, and I'm interested in your experience at OpenAP, too. What you just described is exactly right. Is that there is this inertia. There is this, enterprises, we've been doing things our way for a long time and they're not broke. So, can you talk about the challenges of having to overcome that? >> Yeah You know, with the consortium, we had a little bit of an advantage in that it was pure green field and the consortium was very specific about the first pain points they wanted to focus on and really wanted to build it as an MVP, you know minimum viable product, not trying to do everything at once and that was really key to us. So once we really knew what they wanted to do we put in all of the DevSecOps, agile practices so that we could move fast. We did automated testing and test harnesses and built in the security, the scalability, the performance from the beginning so that we weren't halfway down the road and then had to try to bolt that stuff in later. And we really all had a vision of what we needed to get to and we were able to leverage all of the modern technology practices to get there. I'm not going to say it wasn't hard. Five months was kind of crazy especially because it had to be ready to launch and go live. And in fact we had a beta day which was industry experts coming to test it hands on demo at Paramount Studies in California. Like no pressure, 4 months after we started. And it was awesome. But it was because we had the vision and then we had all the new tooling and the technologies and the ability to build in some of that stuff from the beginning. Which I think in a green field scenario really helped us. >> Adam, final word in terms of next years AWS Executive Summit, what are we going to talk about? We're already talking about the future platforms, what is going to be next years buzz? >> So the thing, next years buzz. I really think that there's going to be this momentum towards something called go native. And this is going to be, so there's a lot of enterprises that are taking advantage of clouds today but they're using it as compute storage and power and the real value for them is going to be unlocked by taking advantage of the native services that are there. And when we think about things that AWS re:Invent has announced in the last couple of years and I'm sure it's going to come up this year. Think about things like Lambda and Aurora and others. These are native cloud services that taking advantage of those and not just sort of bringing the other components of your older architecture with you. That will really unleash a new era of innovation for your company. You'll be able to do things faster and better. And you'll have even better outcomes for your clients, your customers and business partners than you would otherwise. So, go native. >> Go native, okay! You heard it here first folks. Adam, Tauni, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on day three of our continuing coverage AWS re:Invent 2017. We've had an amazing three days, lots of great guests, lots of great conversations. I am Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend, and we're very excited to be joined by two guests new to theCUBE, please help us welcome Adam Burden, the Senior Managing Director of Advanced Technology and Architecture at Accenture, welcome to theCUBE Adam. >> Thank you so much. >> Lisa: And Sandra Stonham, one of the Managing Directors of Technology and Operations at DBS Bank, welcome-- >> Thank you. >> All the way from Singapore. >> Thank you, yes. >> Great to have you guys here. So we hear great things about there is a remarkable story that DBS has, that started last year when you guys attended the AWS re:Invent 2016. Talk to us about what you discovered last year and how this has facilitated your journey to cloud, your transition. >> So if I may, maybe I'll start just a little bit before that, because actually we had been playing with AWS before that. We actually have a huge transformation, transformation strategy that takes us towards cloud. So we've actually been using AWS for infrastructure as a service just scaling. We were putting our trading system grid on to that, so, that was our initial exposure, and then what happened to AWS last year is that I came to re:Invent and I saw all these rich, rich services that AWS were providing and I thought, we actually can't afford not to be building on this. So, from then, I went back, and with my organization I basically said, look, we need to be building natively on AWS, and so that's what we've been doing. We invited Accenture to come and help us because they actually have more experience of building natively on AWS, taking advantages of those services, and we invited them in, they've been working together with us, and we've got now native AWS applications using serverless. >> So Sandra, talk to a little bit more about that process, because, politically it's tough to move something as very consistent, very stable, as a bank, to digital transformation, and then even select not just a partner to help that transition, but AWS. How was that first set of conversations when you got back from re:Invent 2016, excited about the transformation opportunities, what were some of the internal discussions? >> Well as I said, we actually had a whole technology transformation strategy underway at that point, so we'd actually really looked deeply at ourselves and we looked also at the tech giants that are out there, and we'd created this whole technology transformation strategy that basically meant that we needed to go completely cloud native. Cloud native infrastructure, cloud native applications, complete automation on everything, and a very agile, agile and fast moving business environment as well to work with us. So we actually had that whole strategy in place and that was all underway, and we starting to work with AWS, so this was actually just an extension of that strategy. >> Tell me a little bit about this digital transformation strategy, I'm sure a lot of others would love to learn from what you guys are doing. What were the top three business goals that this transformation strategy needs to drive? >> What we did, actually maybe I'll tell you a bit about it. We call it Gandalf, and the reason we call it Gandalf is we actually took a look at our, all the tech giants, and we said, how can we DBS be standing tall among the tech giants. So the tech giants that we looked at were Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn, Facebook. And we said, how can we be the D in Gandalf. That kinda became our sort of code name and our galvanizing strategy. To help people understand what that really meant internally, we actually came up with five key themes, and we put them in a wheel, and we've got kinda five cheeses in the wheel if you like. Three of them are really about the organization and the culture, so one of them is organize for success, one of them is to change from project to platform, one of them is high performing agile team. So those are kinda the three organization and culture focus. Then we have two that are very specific to technology. One of them is design for modern systems, and the second one is automate everything. On each of these five themes we then have a whole load of sub-themes and that give people a little bit more idea of what they can do, and that strategy we've found has been very galvanizing for the whole organization so that everybody in the organization, they know if they are aligning to the strategy because they're doing one or more of these themes or sub-themes. >> So Adam, this is kind of the perfect customer. They already gone through a transformation, you don't have to have the conversation, cloud isn't a technology, it's more of a business process. What was it like engaging DBS for the first time in their transformation? >> Well the good news is, I was actually with Sandra at the re:Invent Conference last year, so I saw some of the light bulbs go on during that process. We engaged with DBS, they've been a client of Accenture for many many years, and we're delighted to have an opportunity obviously to work with them. Going in and having these discussions though, and helping them identify the right workloads to move to serverless technology, is something that we've done a lot for other clients. We move workloads all the time to AWS, and there's lots of different techniques to do that. You can just lift and shift, you can move things into containers and move them, but for the right workloads, you can get truly break through results, benefits and value release, by moving them to serverless. That's what we're able to identify for them and we worked through a process to do exactly that with that experience. It was actually very pleasant because we'd had an opportunity to see that process from the very beginning and I think that the inspiration at the end of that, that we've created about the value that can be generated is going to help to really drive even further adoption of cloud and other serverless technologies at DBS as a result. >> One of the things that I love that you were talking about is the cultural transformation. How long has DBS been in business? >> Sandra: Since the 1960's. >> Quite a long time, so the strategy that you laid out, I love also, not just the cultural transformation, those are hard and so challenging, but also the fact that as a bank, you want to be like one of those big tech leaders, and I think that's gonna be incredibly inspirational for people to hear your story that even in terms of adapting the culture, but even attracting talent that you have such big aspirations. How did you establish the strategy? What were some of the cultural elements that you have successfully changed and how quickly were people able to get on board with this? >> It's a very long journey and there are many different facets to that journey. We have a CEO who's very driven to be digital to the core. He's very visionary and has really sorta set targets for us as an organization. Embracing digital, embedding ourselves in customer journeys, driving for joyful customer journeys, making banking joyful is one of our missions. So he really set some of these strategies even challenging us as well to be a data driven company because we feel that's very much the future. We have a CEO who's really set many of these strategies out there, but even so, to make it happen in the organization is difficult. The agile teams is one aspect, where we've really been looking at what does it mean to be agile and sometimes you can be tech agile but not business agile, and so what does it really mean to be business led agile? So that's a long learning journey we're still on it. But we're getting some successes and so now that helps to start get other people on board. We also look at innovation, so we have an innovation officer and he feels that his job, his job of himself and his team is not to produce product, but to actually change the culture of the organization so that we look like a 22,000 person start up. He tries to, on many many different things, whether he's bringing in speakers, or whether he's out working with us to align to start ups and work with start ups so that we can really get exposure to how start ups work. Many many different aspects of what he does to just encourage innovation among everybody, right from the senior leadership down. So many different aspects of the cultural transformation. Another area is one we're grappling with at the moment, is how we do funding. When we want to move from projects to platforms, how do you take away that big cumbersome way of working where you fund these big initiatives and you have to wait for a long time to get any output and how do you move that more to a sort of iterative evolution of a platform that the business really owns and champions. All of these things, it actually crosses all aspects of the organization and I think you have to do all of them. You have to take every facet and work on it, and move it forward. >> So Adam, large company like DBS comes to you with these big aspirational goals, become a platform, from a technologist perspective, architect, that's exciting to hear. However, baby steps and chunks. >> Right. >> What were some of the first steps that you guys took after identifying opportunity and workload, what was some of the first technologies you engage AWS with? >> Well, Accenture, well first of all, I should probably explain that I'm a customer of DBS as well, they're my bank in Singapore, so I care very deeply about making sure that the work we are doing, even more so than Accenture would normally. (laughing) The things that we do to help a client get started on a journey like this, first of all, helping to identify the applications. A lot of times, one of the very first things that we do is we look at different patterns. Almost like a sewing pattern that you would follow and be able to repeat over and over again, different patterns for how workloads should actually move. We use those as ways that developers can kind of follow a recipe book almost, so that in the future as they're moving new workloads or they're building new services, that they do it in a very similar style and technique. Those initial steps, those processes, kinda set the tone for how the migration process will go, and you can really expand from there. If you try to do too much at once, without really getting a nucleus of it right, you'll have a lot of varying standards and it'll be much harder for you to be able to make the kind of progress that you want. So we typically try to start with a really good marquee, couple of projects, get those going really really well, save those patterns and then expand upon them as more and more workloads actually move. That's one of the key elements of success we find early on. >> Well Adam, as you engage with customers, and you're coming to a show like this, it's great that a customer gets really excited about the business opportunity, but working internal IT for long time, exposing just a little bit of the capability of AWS is both good and bad, because now you've exposed AWS and developers want the whole thing. They'll look at something like Sage, SAS Master I think it is, is the AI solution from yesterday. >> Or Recognition. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> I want that today. But you have to be able to roll it out in a controlled fashion. How do you guys handle governance once you've embraced a opportunity and the relationship with a company like AWS? >> Well I can speak about, why don't Sandra, why don't you talk about that from DBS's perspective and then I'm gonna give you Accenture's as well. >> So no doubt about it, it's challenging. But governance is changing, regardless of whether you're looking at cloud internally or cloud externally, governance is changing. Now the whole focus is to give developers self-service access to everything they wanted. Everything they want to be able to do, so they can deploy, they can run tests, they can do all of things themselves. So that applies whether you're looking at private cloud or whether you're looking at public cloud. Now obviously in public cloud, all of those controls that you have internally, not only they need to change for the new world, but they also now need to translate, if you like, into public cloud. So things don't just necessarily, you can't just necessarily move them and apply the same things to public cloud as you do to private cloud. You have to go and reinvent them in public cloud. AWS is good in that they give you all the tools to do it, but the tools are not already set up, so you do have to learn about it and you do have to build slowly over time. That's why we started with simple things like infrastructure as a service which we can just scale up and down and now are moving to the more complex which is using the native services, which obviously need more governance around them and contain more data. So it's a learning process, but basically if you've got a great organization internally that really understands what it is you're trying to control, then you need to be able to translate that and see how that applies to AWS. >> One of the things that interests me Adam, is what you talked about with the recipes. Recipes, the consistency, how important was that for DBS Sandra, in terms of, alright they've got some prescriptions here on how we can be successful, talked about governance, the steps to take, so that like Keith was saying, you get exposed to all these things, you gotta kind of control everybody. But talk to us about the recipes and this kinda playbook for success, and what that means to DBS to be able to do things in a streamlined fashion and be successful. >> That was the real reason that we brought Accenture on board is because they've actually looked at applications before, in house applications that we've, that the people have built, and then they've looked at what would that look like if you were to rebuild that from scratch on AWS using native services. So they were able to work with us and work through difficulties with us to actually transpose those applications onto an AWS native format. That was actually very helpful, and that's been our learning. So the team that's been working together with Accenture has now learned, we've taken other applications from there and we're now looking at just starting directly building natively on AWS based on what we've learned. It's very valuable and I would say expedited our journey. >> Excellent. >> So let's talk about some of those newer services. Infrastructure as a Service, we can do what we do in our data center today in AWS much faster, there's instant value there, but as we start to expand out and look at something like serverless, how is DBS and Accenture in general looked at something like serverless and taken advantage of lamda? >> I'll tackle that one first maybe. Serverless technology for Accenture has been something that has really allowed our clients to move from looking at cloud as a data center to looking at cloud as a platform. It's an epiphany actually for many of our customers where they look at, well, absolutely, we can move our workloads into cloud, well maybe we'll get a lower operating cost, maybe we'll get some other benefits of being there, but now I can begin to actually, in serverless and other techniques, I can take advantage of the native services there to actually operate at a far lower cost and enrich it with new capabilities. Think about adding text to speech capabilities from Polly, think about adding image recognition facilities. Think about the other capabilities that you can now have because you're on a cloud platform that you wouldn't have if all you were looking at it was as simply another data center. That is the light bulb that goes on, and why I think serverless from a breakthrough standpoint, about the cost structure, the granularity of how things are metered and actually priced. But then the richness of features that are available, you're inventing your future there. It's available at your fingertips. You do have to control the governance, you do have to make sure that you're, you've got some guardrails around that, but the developers will be incredibly creative with those services and you will have new features that'll delight your business users and your clients much faster than you'd ever been able to in the past. >> I love that, ignite your future. I wish we had more time, because I wanted to ask you both about what you're excited about that was released and Adam got this great grin on his face, but unfortunately we are out of time. We wanna thank you both Adam and Sandra for joining us and sharing what you guys are doing. Sounds like the light bulbs are going off, continuously burning, and we look forward to hearing more of your great successes. >> Great. >> My pleasure. Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And for my co-host Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from AWS re:Invent 2017. Stick around, day three of coverage, we've got more great stories coming back.