(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent! 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host for the theCUBE, a lot of great action here. A lot of great solutions. Great keynote. The future of cloud's going to be all about purpose-built software platforms, enabling more and more SaaS, faster performance with custom chips, all enabling great stuff. I have two great guests here. Who are going to talk about it from Accenture. We've got Karthik Narain, global lead of Accenture's Cloud First. Welcome to the program. Good to see you and Chris Wegmann, AABG Accenture Amazon Business Group. Technology leads senior manager. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> I was commenting before we came on about Accenture's work you guys been doing with the clouds in my article, I posted before re:Invent!. Dave Vellante coined the term superclouds, which we kind of just put out there, but the idea that people can build really strong platforms that enable a new kind of Saas has been the big wave. Connect has been a great example. We heard on stage from Adam, the CEO. Chris, this has been something that's been a real change where it's not just lift and shift and refactor, it's build value in a platform and new SaaS capabilities. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I would absolutely agree. We've seen this change over time. We've seen the lift and shift and modernize and it's definitely moved into the Superclouds. I like the term, but you know, we call them cloud continuums, which we'll talk a little bit about, it's about building these purpose-built solutions. I think if you look at the keynote today, you look at, everybody that was on stage. United and everyone talking about what they're building, their technology companies now, they're not just the business. >> You guys did some new research, coining new terms and Cloud First. What is this all about? What is this new wave you guys are talking about? >> Yeah, so John, you know, few years ago, when people talked about cloud, they generally meant public cloud. I think the definition of cloud is changing and expanding. And from now on, whenever people talk about cloud, it's actually a cloud continuum. It's a continuum of capability from public to Edge and everything in between all seamlessly connected by Cloud First networks, which means all the capabilities that customers used to get from one public cloud destination. They can actually access that across the continuum, whether that be in their own private data center, using the capability of cloud with AWS's Outpost and other capabilities. Or they could use the capability in their Edge location, whether it's their retail centers, their warehouse locations, manufacturing and so on and so forth. So organizations are using the power of cloud beyond one purpose and one destination, but more as an operating system going forward. >> Chris, what's your take on this redefinition of cloud what's your take on it? >> I think it's much needed. I think Andy kicked it off last year when he recognized the term hybrid. We all, who've has been around a while kind of chuckled because they finally said the word. But if you look at the keynote today, they just continued it. Adam picked it up and ran with it. If you look at all the services, Wavelength and all the different services, there's not a single customer that I have, that's just using EC2 or S3 right. They're using all these different services you saw today. You saw all the different services that United put up on the screen. That DISH put up on the screen. So yeah, it's how people and companies, if they're truly going to transform and truly use cloud to transform, you have to use the whole continuum. >> Yeah. And I think the continuum message is a good one because if you look at what the evolution is, that was interesting to. Adam went on and did kind of a history lesson in the beginning, it felt like I was in the Star Wars movie, like back in the old days. And then you kind of progressed. You had to be really elite to roll your own cloud. And the hyperscalers did that, you saw that. Now you still have elite technical people, but now it's general purpose, or purpose built. It's like having prefabricated platforms and open source. We've learned that why do you want to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to? So if I want a call center I get Connect, if I want to have a big plugin platform, I can still build on top of and have that SaaS unique application. This seems logical. This is new. (laughter) This is the continuum. I mean, it seems obvious now looking at it, but how far along in are people getting this. Karthik, what's your take on this? >> I think customers are getting it. They are looking at cloud more as an operating system for their future innovation. They liked the concept that they got from the public cloud, which is easy configurability, consumability and automatability of their infrastructure assets. And when you can get that capability as an operating system for your entire enterprise, and you could innovate across the spectrum, that's extremely powerful. We see companies accelerating their adoption to cloud, but we are also seeing over the last three years, a lot of that adoption was using cloud as a migration destination. But now with the power of the cloud continuum, where innovation is available, that so many new services that Adam launched today, you could use truly cloud as an innovation engine. And we're actually seeing that the clients who are using the cloud continuum for innovation are doing much better than the ones that are using cloud as a migration destination. In fact, they're doing two X to three X use of cloud for innovation and uplifting knowlEdge where they are actually using three X more cloud for sustainability purposes. So huge, huge value. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a great point. Great insight, because what you're saying is essentially you can't hide anymore. The projects are either going to be successful or not. You can see whether it's useful or not, and now you're tying cloud adoption and outcomes together. Where you can look it and saying, we need to make this outcome work. Not for building, for building sake. Those projects were discovered during the pandemic. Why are we doing that? So you can't hide that ball anymore. >> Right and everybody's got to do it now, right? I mean, you don't have a choice. The pandemic is now forcing companies to change. They've changed. And that the research shows that the companies that have truly adopted the whole continuum are doing much better than the companies that didn't. >> What's pattern in this continuum research you guys, what's the big takeaway that you guys have found in that study, in that customer experience that you're having. What's the big, Aha moment. >> I think there are a few things. Number one surprising aspect is that the companies that use cloud for a broader innovation objective, actually, were saving more than the ones that use cloud just as a cost saving initiative. That was a big, Aha moment. Number two, when you talk about all of this innovation that AWS provides, sometimes it's easy for organizations to shrug it off saying, this looks like this is only for the elite companies, or this is only for the digitally native companies to follow. But our research showed that the companies that were successful adopting cloud continuum, the ones that we call less continuum competitors, 60% of them are pre-digitally born organizations. And they were reaping the benefits and they were growing faster, saving more, being more innovative than all others. So this is truly usable across the spectrum of the G 2000 enterprise. >> Yeah, and I think it's a no brainer, but now that you have, customers are transforming, they have multiple clouds. You have AWS, Azure, Google cloud, people were trying to find their swim lane. We heard about skill gap shortage. We did some reporting on that, that this idea of multi-cloud maybe not, I can't hire enough people. I'm going to bet on this cloud, maybe use that cloud. How are people looking at that? How do you guys see that the cloud competitive continuum, or how is the cloud competition affecting the cloud continuum from a customer standpoint? >> Yeah. I mean, you got to look at it, do you use the whole continuum? You've got a lot of cases, you got to be on the same cloud, right. You can use the whole, you got to use all the different components, all the different services. So I think we are seeing customers that are picking one and starting with one and then adding others. I see a lot of my customers who are using multiple clouds, but they're using them in different business units, right? So they may pick one business unit to go deep with AWS on, they may go use another business unit to go deep on another cloud, right? So yeah, I mean, everyone is getting multiple, but a lot of they're starting with one and then adding a second one or a third along the way. >> Karthik, this is what I was trying to get out of my story. It's a hard, very nuanced point. But if you look at the success of say Snowflake and Databricks, all bet on Amazon and their superclouds, they are on Amazon, but they're now working with Azure as well, because why wouldn't you want to open up your market? >> Exactly. And even the industry companies that want to monetize their capabilities using the digital ecosystems are doing that. For example, Siemens wanted to bring all their capabilities in manufacturing and machine operating system into a platform called MindSphere. And they knew that their end goal was going to be multi-cloud, but they want to practice, leveraging the power of cloud with one platform. And when they created MindSphere, they started with AWS and they created that solution in the public cloud and private cloud also at the Edge by leveraging the power of cloud from public to Edge and proved it out. And once it started working and they were able to roll it out for customers. Now they are giving customers the choice to be able to use it in other clouds as well. >> Yeah Karthik, you mentioned earlier at the top of our interview about the platform of the cloud and Dave and I were talking on our keynote review. We did a little history lesson of when Microsoft owned the monopoly of windows, the system software, and they had the application suite with office, but they still wanted developers to build on top of windows. Okay. But now with cloud that's one big windows platform like thing. So the developers ecosystem is evolving. And so one of the things we're watching, I want to get your reaction to this. Is in every major inflection point in the computer industry, when new ways to build and write code rolled out, the application owners always wanted their software to run on the fastest platform. Speeds and feeds matter in these shifts, because why would I want to have my software run slower? >> Yeah. >> What is your reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. And again, there's a lot of things that the industry is going through and we are pushing the envelope on digitization. And today's keynote. When you saw the CEO of NASDAQ talking about the technology bottlenecks that were preventing the matching algorithm to be finally taken to cloud. Now that capability that's available at with AWS is what is enabling that matching algorithm to be taken to cloud through the power of Edge. So there's so much technology innovation, that's happening. That's constantly expanding the boundaries of posibilities. >> I mean, that's exactly the point. And I wrote this in my story and it came out on the keynote today, which was Adam saying, the clouds expanding that's the continuum. If it's running cloud operations, does it matter what it is? I mean, it's, if you're at the Edge and you're running cloud, maybe cause you want latency, of course you want to have low latency. Why wouldn't you want outposts. Again, this is all cloud operations. DevSecOps data is now kind of cloud operationalized. That seems to be what's happening. >> Yeah, I think the developers love the fact that they can write for one and put it anywhere, right? And whether it's a EKS on Inside, I don't even know what you call anymore, the public cloud, right? Or all the way out at the Edge, right? You write it once, you can deploy it there and it makes their lives a lot easier. And you know, as you said, it's all about performance. So they get the best option. >> Well, We love having you guys on the theCUBE, Accenture. You guys have really smart, talented people, always great commentary. Dave and I were looking at reviewing the tape so to speak. It's not really tape anymore. It's it's digitally stored on a S3, but we were looking back at 2016 when we first started talking about horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized applications. If you look at the keynote today and squint through the announcements, Amazon's going to offer full horizontal scalability and vertical specialization at the app level with machine learning capabilities. This means that you need data to be horizontally addressable, which is kind of counterintuitive, but you're seeing all the success on data lakes and lakes. This is the new architecture. It's kind of proven now, what do you guys think? >> Yeah, again, the aspect of cloud is about democratised innovation. The first element is, even though there's so much infrastructure build-out and infrastructural elements where there's continuous innovation going on, the enterprises and developers are moving from Bivives built decisions to assembling and consuming options. And when they assemble and consume, they want newer and newer services to be available. That is very specific to their industry and specific to functions, whether it is supply chain function or manufacturing function or so on and so forth. For this, there are going to be specific data that is going to be required, or operational for that particular use-case. But the whole idea of predictive analytics and AI and machine learning and data science is about how do you find correlations between operational data for a particular capability, with things that in the previous world was unrelated. For that you need to bring all of this data together. Time will tell whether all the data is going to move to one location or is there going to be distributed computing of that data with more technology, but that's the role that data is going to play in these verticalized solutions. >> Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. I want to get you guys while I got one, a couple of minutes left. Advice to people that look into go this next level. They know the continuum is coming, you guys been providing great solutions and advice to your customers. For the folks watching, what advice can you give where they're just putting their toe in the water or want to go full in? >> Yeah, so, we found in that research that there were some common patterns that were followed by these continuum competitors, the ones that were succeeding or winning in the cloud. And there was namely four of them, the first one, and these four can be adopted by others for them to also win in the continuum. The first one was looking at the power of the continuum, how the technology is evolving and creating a strategy to take advantage of the evolution of the continuum. That's number one. Number two, this is about organizational change. So don't go about this change in a soft manner. There are elements that you need to change within your organization to imbibe this wholeheartedly. That's the second thing. Third thing is one common aspect that all the continuum competitors followed was they put experience at the forefront for everything. For their end customers. Last but not the least. This is a holistic journey and an enterprise wide journey. And this would require CSO level, CEO level commitment on a longer term to achieve this. So with these four things, most companies can achieve the successes that the continuum competitors are seeing. >> Awesome insight, Chris, real quick, 30 seconds. What's your advice. >> Chris: Don't be afraid. (laughter) It's pretty simple. >> The water's warm, come on in >> Yeah, come on in. A lot of gone before you, right? It can be scary. It can be daunting, right? A lot of services. Don't be scared to get in and go at it. >> Yeah, one of the jobs I love about being theCUBE host is, you talk to people many years earlier, you guys got it right at Accenture. Congratulations. You were deploying, you saw this wave of purpose-built before anyone else and congratulations. Great success. >> Thanks, thanks for having us on theCUBE. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier. You're watching us here live in Las Vegas, for AWS re:Invent 2021 coverage. TheCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS reInvent Executive Summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS reInvent 2020. This is special programming for the Accenture Executive Summit where all the thought leaders are going to extract the signal from those share with you their perspective of this year's reInvent conference as it respects the customers' digital transformation. Brian Bohan is the director and head of Accenture, AWS Business Group at Amazon web services. Brian, great to see you. And Chris Wegmann is the Accenture Amazon Business Group technology lead at Accenture. Guys this is about technology vision this conversation. Chris, I want to start with you because you're Andy Jackson's keynote. You heard about the strategy of digital transformation, how you got to lean into it. You got to have the guts to go for it and you got to decompose. He went everywhere.(chuckles) So what did you hear? What was striking about the keynote? Because he covered a lot of topics. >> Yeah. It was epic as always from Andy. Lot of topics, a lot to cover in the three hours. There was a couple of things that stood out for me. First of all, hybrid. The concept, the new concept of hybrid and how Andy talked about it, bringing the compute and the power to all parts of an enterprise, whether it be at the edge or are in the big public cloud, whether it be in an Outpost or wherever it'd be, right with containerization now. Being able to do Amazon containerization in my data center and that's awesome. I think that's going to make a big difference. All that being underneath the Amazon console and billing and things like that, which is great. I'll also say the chips, right? I know computer is always something that we always kind of take for granted but I think again, this year, Amazon and Andy really focused on what they're doing with the chips and compute and the compute is still at the heart of everything in cloud. And that continued advancement is making an impact and will make and continue to make a big impact. >> Yeah, I would agree. I think one of the things that really... I mean the container thing was I think really kind of a nuance point. When you've got Deepak Singh on the opening day with Andy Jassy and he runs a container group over there. When we need a small little team, he's on the front stage. That really is the key to the hybrid. I think this showcases this new layer. We're taking advantage of the Graviton2 chips, which I thought was huge. Brian, this is really a key part of the platform change, not change, but the continuation of AWS. Higher level servers, >> Yep. building blocks that provide more capabilities, heavy lifting as they say but the new services that are coming on top really speaks to hybrid and speaks to the edge. >> It does. Yeah. I think like Andy talks about and we talked about we really want to provide choice to our customers, first and foremost. And you can see that in the array of services we have, we can see it in the the hybrid options that Chris talked about. Being able to run your containers through ECS or EKS anywhere. It just get to the customers choice. And one of the things that I'm excited about as you talk about going up the stack and on the edge are things, most certainly Outpost, right? So now Outpost was launched last year but then with the new form factors and then you look at services like Panorama, right? Being able to take computer vision and embed machine learning and computer vision, and do that as a managed capability at the edge for customers. And so we see this across a number of industries. And so what we're really thinking about is customers no longer have to make trade-offs and have to think about those choices, that they can really deploy natively in the cloud and then they can take those capabilities, train those models, and then deploy them where they need to whether that's on premises or at the edge, whether it be in a factory or retail environment. I think we're really well positioned when hopefully next year we start seeing the travel industry rebound and the need more than ever really to kind of rethink about how we kind of monitor and make those environments safe. Having this kind of capability at the edge is really going to help our customers as we come out of this year and hopefully rebound next year. >> Chris, I want to go back to you for a second. It's hard to pick your favorite innovation from the keynote because, Brian, just reminded me of some things I forgot happened. It was like a buffet of innovation. Some keynotes have one or two, there was like 20. You got the industrial piece that was huge. Computer vision, machine learning, that's just a game changer. The connect thing came out of nowhere in my opinion. I mean, it's a call center technology so it's boring as hell, what are you going to do with that?(Brian and Chris chuckle) It turns out it's a game changer. It's not about the calls but the contact and that's distant intermediating in the stack as well. So again, a feature that looks old is actually new and relevant. What was your favorite innovation announcement? >> It's hard to say. I will say my personal favorite was the Mac OS. I think that is a phenomenal just addition, right? And the fact that AWS has worked with Apple to integrate the Nitro chip into the iMac and offer that out. A lot of people are doing development for IOS and that stuff and that's just been a huge benefit for the development teams. But I will say, I'll come back to Connect. You mentioned it but you're right. It's a boring area but it's an area that we've seen huge success with since Connect was launched and the additional features that Amazon continues to bring, obviously with the pandemic and now that customer engagement through the phone, through omni-channel has just been critical for companies, right? And to be able to have those agents at home, working from home versus being in the office, it was a huge advantage for several customers that are using Connect. We did some great stuff with some different customers but the continue technology like you said, the call translation and during a call to be able to pop up those keywords and have a supervisor listen is awesome. And some of that was already being done but we are stitching multiple services together. Now that's right out of the box. And that Google's location is only going to make that go faster and make us to be able to innovate faster for that piece of the business. >> It's interesting not to get all nerdy and business school like but you've got systems of records, systems of engagement. If you look at the call center and the Connect thing, what got my attention was not only the model of disintermediating that part of the engagement in the stack but what actually cloud does to something that's a feature or something that could be an element like say call center, the old days of calling the 800 number and getting some support. You got infra chip, you have machine learning, you actually have stuff in the in the stack that actually makes that different now. The thing that impressed me was Andy was saying, you could have machine learning detect pauses, voice inflections. So now you have technology making that more relevant and better and different. So a lot going on. This is just one example of many things that are happening from a disruption innovation standpoint. What do you guys think about that? Am I getting it right? Can you share other examples? >> I think you are right and I think what's implied there and what you're saying and even in the other Mac OS example is the ability... We're talking about features, right? Which by themselves you're saying, Oh, wow! What's so unique about that? But because it's on AWS and now because whether you're a developer working with Mac iOS and you have access to the 175 plus services that you can then weave into your new application. Talk about the Connect scenario. Now we're embedding that kind of inference and machine learning to do what you say, but then your data Lake is also most likely running in AWS, right? And then the other channels whether they be mobile channels or web channels or in-store physical channels, that data can be captured and that same machine learning could be applied there to get that full picture across the spectrum, right? So that's the power of bringing you together on AWS, the access to all those different capabilities and services and then also where the data is and pulling all that together for that end to end view. >> Can you guys give some examples of work you've done together? I know there's stuff we've reported on, in the last session we talked about some of the connect stuff but that kind of encapsulates where this is all going with respect to the tech. >> Yeah. I think one of them, it was called out on Doug's Partner Summit is a SAP Data Lake Accelerator, right? Almost every enterprise has SAP, right? And getting data out of SAP has always been a challenge, right? Whether it be through data warehouses and AWS, or sorry, SAP BW. What we've focused on is getting that data when you have SAP on AWS, getting that data into the Data Lake, right? Getting it into a model that you can pull the value out and the customers can pull the value out, use those AI models. So that's one thing we worked on in the last 12 months. Super excited about seeing great success with customers. A lot of customers had ideas. They want to do this, they had different models. What we've done is made it very simplified. Framework which allows customers to do it very quickly, get the data out there and start getting value out of it and iterating on that data. We saw customers are spending way too much time trying to stitch it all together and trying to get it to work technically. And we've now cut all of that out and they can immediately start getting down to the data and taking advantage of those different services that are out there by AWS. >> Brian, you want to weigh in as things you see as relevant builds that you guys done together that kind of tease out the future and connect the dots to what's coming? >> I'm going to use a customer example. We worked with, it just came out, with Unilever around their blue air, connected, smart air purifier. And what I think is interesting about that, I think it touches on some of the themes we're talking about as well as some of the themes we talked about in the last session, which is we started that program before the pandemic, but Unilever recognized that they needed to differentiate their product in the marketplace, move to more of a services oriented business which we're seeing as a trend. We enabled this capability. So now it's a smart air purifier that can be remote managed. And now when the pandemic hit, they are in a really good position, obviously, with a very relevant product and capability to be used. And so, that data then as we were talking about is going to reside on the cloud. And so the learning that can now happen about usage and about filter changes, et cetera can find its way back into future iterations of that picked out that product. And I think that's keeping with what Chris is talking about where we might be systems of record like in SAP, how do we bring those in and then start learning from that data so that we can get better on our future iterations? >> Hey, Chris, on the last segment we did on the business mission session, Andy Tay from your team talked about partnerships within a century and working with other folks. I want to take that now on the technical side because one of the things that we heard from Doug's keynote and during the partner day was integrations and data were two big themes. When you're in the cloud technically, the integrations are different. You're going to get unique things in the public cloud that you're just not going to get on-premise access to other cloud native technologies and companies. How do you see the partnering of Accenture with people within your ecosystem and how the data and the integration play together? What's your vision? >> Yeah. I think there's two parts of it. One there's from a commercial standpoint, right? Some marketplace, you heard Dave talk about that in the partner summit, right? That marketplace is now bringing together this ecosystem in a very easy way to consume by the customers and by the users and bringing multiple partners together. And we're working with our ecosystem to put more products out in the marketplace that are integrated together already. I think one from a technical perspective though. If you look at Salesforce, I talked a little earlier about Connect. Another good example technically underneath the covers, how we've integrated Connect and Salesforce, some of it being pre-built by AWS and Salesforce, other things that we've added on top of it, I think are good examples. And I think as these ecosystems these ISVs put their products out there and start exposing more and more APIs on the Amazon platform may opening it up, having those pre-built network connections there between the different VPCs of the different areas within within a customer's network and having them all opened up and connected and having all that networking done underneath the covers. It's one thing to call the APIs, it's one thing to have access to those and that's not a big focus of a lot of ISVs and customers who build those APIs and expose them but having that network infrastructure underneath and being able to stay within the cloud, within AWS to make those connections that pass that data. We always talk about scale, right? It's one thing if I just need to pass like a simple user ID back and forth, right? That's fine. We're not talking massive data sets, whether it be seismic data or whatever it be, passing those large data sets between customers across the Amazon network is going to open up the world. >> Yeah, I see huge possibilities there and love to keep on this story. I think it's going to be important and something to keep track of. I'm sure you guys will be on top of it. One of the things I want to dig into with you guys now is Andy had kind of this philosophical thing in his keynote talk about societal change and how tough the pandemic is. Everything's on full display and this kind of brings out kind of like where we are and the truth. If you look at the truth it's a virtual event. I mean, it's a website and you got some sessions out there, we're doing remote best we can and you've got software and you've got technology and the other concept of a mechanism, it's software, it does something It does a purpose. Accenture, you guys have a concept called Living Systems where growth strategy powered by technology. How do you take the concept of a living organism or a system and replace the mechanism staleness of computing and software? And this is kind of interesting because we're on the cusp of a major inflection point post COVID. I get the digital transformation being slow. That's yes, that's happening. There's other things going on in society. What do you guys think about this Living Systems concept? Yeah. I'll start. I think the living system concept, it started out very much thinking about how do you rapidly change your system, right? And because of cloud, because of DevOps, because of all these software technologies and processes that we've created, that's where it started making it much easier, make it a much faster being able to change rapidly. But you're right. I think if you now bring in more technologies, the AI technology, self-healing technologies. Again, you heard Andy in his keynote talk about the systems and services they're building to detect problems and resolve those problems, right? Obviously automation is a big part of that. Living Systems, being able to bring that all together and to be able to react in real time to either when a customer asks, either through the AI models that have been generated and turning those AI models around much faster and being able to get all the information that came in the last 20 minutes, right? Society is moving fast and changing fast and even in one part of the world, if something in 10 minutes can change. And being able to have systems to react to that, learn from that and be able to pass that on to the next country especially in this world of COVID and things changing very quickly and diagnosis and medical response all that so quickly to be able to react to that and have systems pass that information, learn from that information is going to be critical. >> That's awesome. Brian, one of the things that comes up every year is, oh, the cloud's scalable. This year I think we've talked on theCUBE before, years ago certainly with the Accenture and Amazon. I think it was like three or four years ago. Yeah. The clouds horizontally scalable but vertically specialized at the application layer. But if you look at the Data Lake stuff that you guys have been doing where you have machine learning, the data is horizontally scalable and then you got the specialization in the app changes the whole vertical thing. You don't need to have a whole vertical solution or do you? So, how has this year's cloud news impacted vertical industries? Because it used to be, oh, oil and gas, financial services. They've got a team for that. We got a stack for that. Not anymore. Is it going away? What's changing? >> Well. It's a really good question. I think what we're seeing, and I was just on a call this morning talking about banking and capital markets and I do think the challenges are still pretty sector specific. But what we do see is the kind of commonality when we start looking at the, and we talked about this, the industry solutions that we're building as a partnership, most of them follow the pattern of ingesting data, analyzing that data and then being able to provide insights and then actions, right? So if you think about creating that kind of common chassis of that in just the Data Lake and then the machine learning, and you talk about the nuances around SageMaker and being able to manage these models, what changes then really are the very specific industries' algorithms that you're writing, right, within that framework. And so, we're doing a lot and Connect is a good example of this too, where you look at it and yeah, customer service is a horizontal capability that we're building out, but then when you stamp it into insurance or retail banking, or utilities, there are nuances then that we then extend and build so that we meet the unique needs of those industries and that's usually around those models. >> Yeah. I think this year was the first reInvent that I saw real products coming out that actually solved that problem. I mean, it was there last year SageMaker was kind of moving up the stack, but now you have apps embedding machine learning directly in and users don't even know it's in there. I mean, cause this is kind of where it's going, right? I mean-- >> You saw that was in announcements, right? How many announcements where machine learning is just embedded in? I mean, CodeGuru, DevOps Guru, the Panorama we talked about, it's just there. >> Yeah. I mean having that knowledge about the linguistics and the metadata, knowing the business logic, those are important specific use cases for the vertical and you can get to it faster. Chris, how is this changing on the tech side, your perspective? >> Yeah. I keep coming back to AWS and cloud makes it easier, right? All this stuff can be done and some of it has been done, but what Amazon continues to do is make it easier to consume by the developer, by the customer and to actually embed it into applications much easier than it would be if I had to go set up the stack and build it all on them and embed it, right? So it's shortcoming that process and again, as these products continue to mature, right, and some of this stuff is embedded, it makes that process so much faster. It reduces the amount of work required by the developers the engineers to get there. So, I'm expecting you're going to see more of this, right. I think you're going to see more and more of these multi connected services by AWS, that has a lot of the AI ML pre-configured Data Lakes, all that kind of stuff embedded in those services. So you don't have to do it yourself and continue to go up the stack. And we always talk about Amazon's built for builders, right? But, builders have been super specialized and are becoming, as engineers were being asked to be bigger and bigger and to be be able to do more stuff and I think these kind of integrated services are going to help us do that >> And certainly needed more now when you have hybrid edge that they're going to be operating with microservices on a cloud model and with all those advantages that are going to come around the corner for being in the cloud. I mean, I think there's going to be a whole clarity around benefits in the cloud with all these capabilities and benefits. Cloud Guru I think it's my favorite this year because it just points to why that could happen. I mean that happens because of the cloud data.(laughs) If you're on-premise, you may not have a little Cloud Guru. you are going to get more data but they're all different. Edge certainly will come in too. Your vision on the edge, Chris, how you see that evolving for customers because that could be complex, new stuff. How is it going to get easier? >> Yeah. It's super complex now, right? I mean, you got to design for all the different edge 5G protocols are out there and solutions, right? Amazon's simplifying that. Again, I come back to simplification, right? I can build an app that works on any 5G network that's been integrated with AWS, right. I don't have to set up all the different layers to get back to my cloud or back to my my bigger data set. And that's kind of choking. I don't even know where to call the cloud anymore. I got big cloud which is a central and I go down then you've got a cloud at the edge. Right? So what do I call that? >> Brian: It's just really computing.(laughing) Exactly. So, again, I think is this next generation of technology with the edge comes right and we put more and more data at the edge. We're asking for more and more compute at the edge, right? Whether it be industrial or for personal use or consumer use, that processing is going to get more and more intense to be able to maintain under a single console, under a single platform and be able to move the code that I developed across that entire platform, whether I have to go all the way down to the very edge at the 5G level, right, or all the way back into the bigger cloud and how that processing in there, being able to do that seamlessly is going to allow the speed of development that's needed. >> Wow. You guys done a great job and no better time to be a techie or interested in technology or computer science or social science for that matter. This is a really perfect store. A lot of problems to solve, a lot of change happening, positive change opportunities, a lot of great stuff. Final question guys. Five years working together now on this partnership with AWS and Accenture. Congratulations, you guys are in pole position for the next wave coming. What's exciting you guys? Chris, what's on your mind? Brian, what's getting you guys pumped up? >> Well, again, I come back to Andy mentioned it in his keynote, right? We're seeing customers move now, right. Five years ago we knew customers were going to do this. We built a partnership to enable these enterprise customers to make that journey, right? But now, even more we're seeing them move at such great speed, right? Which is super excites me, right? Because I can see... Being in this for a long time now, I can see the value on the other end. We've been wanting to push our customers as fast as they can through the journey and now they're moving. Now they're getting the religion, they're getting there. They see they need to do it to change your business so that's what excites me. It just the excites me, it's just the speed at which we're going to to see the movement. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I'd agree with that. I mean, I just think getting customers to the cloud is super important work and we're obviously doing that and helping accelerate that. It's what we've been talking about when we're there all the possibilities that become available, right? Through the common data capabilities, the access to the 175 somewhat AWS services. I also think and this is kind of permeated through this week at Re:invent is the opportunity, especially in those industries that do have an industrial aspect, a manufacturing aspect, or a really strong physical aspect of bringing together IT and operational technology and the business with all these capabilities and I think edge and pushing machine learning down to the edge and analytics at the edge is really going to help us do that. And so I'm super excited by all that possibility because I feel like we're just scratching the surface there. >> It's a great time to be building out. and this is the time for reconstruction, reinvention. Big theme, so many storylines in the keynote and the events . It's going to keep us busy here at SiliconANGLE on theCUBE for the next year. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks. >> Thank you. All right. Great conversation. We're getting technical. We're going to go another 30 minutes A lot to talk about. A lot of storylines here at AWS Re:Invent 2020 at the Accenture Executive Summit. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Washington, DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The District everybody. We're here covering the AWS Public Sector Summit, #AWSPSSummit. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Stuart Miniman. Gus Hunt is here, he's the Managing Director of Accenture. Great to see you. >> Great, thanks. Dave, Stu, appreciate being here. >> Thanks for coming on. Last night we were at the Accenture Event, it was hosted by Teresa Carlson and Accenture, a jam packed high-level audience. It was really, really fabulous. You couldn't make it, cause you got stuck in-- >> Weather-wise, got trapped in Atlanta. >> Unfortunately, Gus, you missed a lot, it was very good. But bring us up to speed on just sort of the state of where we're at with Accenture. You guys are heavily involved with the CIA implementation. We can talk about that a little bit. But start with Accenture, what you guys got going on in the Government. >> So Accenture Federal Services, which is the part I'm within, supports all of our federal agencies across the board. And we do enormous amount of work in the Cloud Services. In fact, Accenture itself is the largest partner of AWS in the world, right, providing cloud services directly engaged with Amazon. We have our Accenture Amazon Business Group, for example, that we leverage across the board. So we are really heavily steep, both in what it takes to help companies and our federal clients move to the cloud, but also how to take real advantage of it, how to gain the efficiencies that they need, and how to do this very securely. Because so much of I think the concerns that get expressed by people are a misunderstanding about whether or not the cloud is secure, versus how to do it securely in the cloud, if you understand the nuance difference there. >> Right, right. So, well, explain that. Let's double-click on that nuance there. A lot of people so early on it was concerns about the cloud, and then it kind of flipped and said, well, obviously the cloud's going to be more secure than what I could do as an organization. We heard what the CIA said today. They said, "On the worst day in the public cloud, "security's far better than in it is "in my client service systems." So help us unpack that a little. >> So, I'll take you back a few years. I spent 20 years in Federal Government working for CIA. I retired from there as their Chief Technology Officer. And I led basically the C2S deal that we put together in order to bring cloud services into the agency. And we did that fundamentally for four reasons. One was velocity. We had to get our speed of abilities, delivery capabilities up to match that what was happening in the private sector, in the cloud. The second was efficiencies. We had to find a way to really tap into the extraordinary efficiencies being driven by the cloud world and the cloud environment, with this continuous drop in price and storage, and computing, and things like that. How do we leverage that to our advantage and enable us now instead of to keep pace in the world when we knew that data was doing like this, and that the ability to exploit data is what the business is all about, right? >> And that was going like that at the time. >> With the cost, what we didn't want was the cost to do this, right? This is where the cloud was going to play a critical role to enable us to really keep pace with the explosion of data big data, and yet through storage and compute in the cloud, be able to do this at a fairly level cost curve, that was the objective. The third was to drive innovation, right? So we had to be able to innovate as fast as the private sector was able to innovate, to deliver new capabilities continuously all the time, and do those things. And the final reason really was about security, right? To your point, we're getting back to, the question that was originally asked was that the cloud, when we investigated the cloud, it turned out that the cloud was much more secure as a basic platform than almost anything that anybody could deliver inside their own data center across the board. And if you leverage the cloud in a particular way, security, it becomes a much more secure environment for people to operate in and do work in, then you could possibly achieve inside of your own data centers, your own data center environments. >> Gus, I'm hearing things like speed, innovation and security. I'm thinking, can you tell us a little bit about developers inside the agency? Do they have a DevOps initiative, as part of achieving those goals? >> Absolutely. So we actually got started doing Agile Development back in 2005. And what happened was, curiously enough with Agile development using scrum techniques is what we applied. We were able to build software capabilities much faster than we could actually get them hosted. So we had an impedance mismatch, a velocity mismatch, between the ability to build capabilities with Agile Development and to go. Now, when we got started in the cloud world here, DevOps was a relatively new term, but now of course DevOps just permeates everything that gets done. Accenture Federal Services, we teach DevOps for the intelligence community across the board, we teach Agile Development, we're heavily engaged. But our big move now is into DevSecOps, right? So the new impedance mismatch is the fact that I can deliver and build software very quickly. I can host it very quickly in the cloud, but my problem is that my security people who have to credit and approve the ability to run these things, are not working in sync very well with what happens in the space there. It's not that they're not great people, it's just that the methodologies that have been applied, now are causing a delay. So this is where DevSecOps comes into play and this is our big push in Accenture Federal Services. all of our clients in the cloud is to adopt DevSecOps so that we can have security tied directly into the entire development cycle all the way through, so that there are no surprises, right? We know exactly what the status is all along, and if you know anything about cyber security, in particular, both things, security on at the end is the worst possible thing you can do. And fixing cyber security holes at the end is 30 times more expensive than having just done it up front in the beginning across the board. So we are heavily invested in driving both Agile Development and DevSecOps now, in support of our cloud customers. >> Can you talk, Gus, about just as an observer, you're obviously deep into federal, but just the delta between commercial and federal? Certainly within federal you see pockets of highly advanced, whether it's security or analytics, et cetera, but across the board the Federal Government systems are obviously a lot of money is spent on maintenance, a lot of time and effort. Is Federal still learning, the public sector still learning from the commercial sector? Is it flipping? What's your take on that? >> So it's interesting. So when I retired and went out to work, from the public sector into the private sector, there's this really interesting point of view that's out there. When I was in the Federal Government, we really thought that the private sector was way ahead of us. And so we spent lot of time working with the financial service people who were brilliant, and working with Amazon and all of the people and all of the things that they were doing, because they were brilliant. So it was a really interesting engagement. But when I got to the other side, it's looked at the other way, right? They want to know what's going on because, particularly from a cyber-security optic, from a security optic, the Federal Government is viewed in many ways and particularly the intelligence community itself, is viewed as being far ahead of what goes on in the rest of the world. And in terms of analytics and things, the federal government has terrific capabilities, and has built terrific systems to do these things. So it's an interesting optic. Each one looking at the other from the outside in, is observing things and the reality is, is that like anything in life, you have this distribution. There are those that are terrific on one end of the spectrum and those that are nascent on the other end of the spectrum. This is true in the public sector, it's true in the private sector across the board. And it's just getting people together. I think the most important thing is to find a way to get us together so we share information really effectively, so that we understand what's going on, we can educate and we can all elevate ourselves up the chain, to deliver better capabilities, both for our clients and our customers, and to the citizens of our country. >> Yeah, and that public private partnership really isn't formalized. Frankly, it's companies like Accenture that are the glue there, don't you think? >> Yes, exactly. I think that that's a key point. It's companies like Accenture, companies like Amazon, who have engagements across the spectrum and on a global basis, that are able to see and experience things that most companies can't do 'cause they don't have that global perspective. One of the biggest issues we see is that most companies view the world through their narrow optic of their local sets of problems and issues, and this is what catches up with them, particularly in the cyber realm, for example. Which is they're looking at the world through the their own little narrow soda straw. And the global view of an AWS and the global view of an Accenture can be brought to bear to help us with our federal clients, for example, to see the issues more broadly and engage more effectively in a public private sector discourse. >> So there are threats everywhere, obviously. Increasingly people are talking about the weaponization of social media. Obviously, there's critical infrastructure, which we've talked about for years. Where do you see the priorities going? Where is the focus, the spending? Is it on response? Is it on keeping the bad guys out? What do you sense? >> I would say that most of the spending today is focused on trying to keep bad guys out. And that model, while critically important, has got to change, right? Because as you notice while important to do and absolutely essential, it has been wholly insufficient in actually dealing with the problem. We have to move ourselves into a completely different posture in the world today. We have to adopt very much proactive capabilities, hunt for things, do critical reviews and pen testing, discover your vulnerabilities before the adversary does. Adopt cloud services because they can change the security game. If we write cloud native code and distribute it in multiple availability zones and fully leverage elasticity and software to find networking, we can turn it into a shell game where the adversary has to find me, not the other way around. We can become what I call the polymorphic attack surface, as opposed to us having to do with polymorphic viruses, and things like that, that we have to find that are constantly trying to hide themselves from us. And so, it's adopting those things that then drive us to a state of resilience, which have to get to. Resilience is the ability to have an event and keep on operating. As opposed to what happens today, where you have an event and everything gets shut down, and all hands on deck and panic ensues. >> So, Gus, we've talked a little bit about some of the constraints and why some people might be concerned. Wondering if we could talk about some of the opportunities. What kind of innovation are you seeing from partners and customers that you're working with, that they're driving when they do adopt cloud? >> Innovation just across the board, or? >> Yeah, any cool things they're doing, there's edge technologies, you got IOT. >> I would say that the big drivers of innovation, of course, are the ones that everybody else talks about. Which is really what's happening in the machine learning and AI space. And that is really critical because those are the things that will enable us to both deal and act with issues, particularly in my realm, the cyber realm at machine speed across the board, and stop things before they can actually become problematic. But it's also going to be the mechanism by which we can enable the human population across the board to better themselves. So you take that and you combine it with the Internet of Things, which is growing explosively across the board, to begin to automate and drive efficiencies and enable remote health care and all those things like that. We're really at the cusp, I believe, of a true renaissance, if you will, of enabling society in ways that we can't possibly begin to imagine, just looking at it from where we are today. >> A lot of talk, you know, about machine intelligence. I didn't say AI, so I don't have to do a shot. Where do you see that fitting in, generally, and then maybe specifically in cyber? And the second part of that question is you're seeing this DevOps and SecOps worlds coming together? >> Yeah, right. So we talked previously about DevSecOps. Just to go back to that real quickly. That's an absolute essential. We have to get the business, the beauty of Agile Development and DevOps was it got the business and the infrastructure people who had to run things successfully all the time, and the developers who needed to do things very quickly, all at the table to engage and ensuring that they could do that. The gap in there was the security people. So with DevSecOps, you've got the security people brought in right up front across the board there. That move into DevSecOps is more than just essential, it's a must-do, I believe, for all organizations here as they move themselves into the future, and to find a way to adopt it. How did you phrase it? You didn't use the word AI, you said? >> Machine intelligence. >> Machine intelligence directive. I think that those capabilities are maturing very, very rapidly, and I think that what you're going to see is a rapid shift in two ways. One is that while machine intelligence is great, the machine is only as smart as the data and the information that are fed to it, right? If you feed a machine a bunch of information that's highly biased, you're going to get highly biased information out. So there's two things you have to have. One, the intelligence is going to grow inside the machines, but two, there's going to be and must be a parallel thread where you have to have some form of social consciousness and social awareness that ensures that the machines themselves don't develop unconscious biases that are then leveraged, and used to the disadvantage of citizens in society, or other people and things like that. And so machine intelligence is going to grow, but that same ability is emerging, and in fact it's something we talk about at Accenture and have written papers on, about the fact that we have to have this social conscience or social awareness around Artificial Intelligence, the machine learning, to ensure that it is most effectively used to the benefit of the citizens of the country. >> Right, well, in this notion of polymorphic attack surface, presumably it just can't be humans moving stuff around. >> No, that's where machinery and automation come into play, they have to act at machine speed. It's the only thing that can act at machine speed. Humans will always be involved. Okay, you're never going to get away from the human factor. What these things do is they do the heavy lifting, and then enable humans to focus on what their brains are really, really good at, which is making hard decisions about what's actually going on, and what they actually need to do in many cases. We can automate some things, but a lot of it is still going to require really smart people to engage. >> So when you look back at your original four objectives with respect to the cloud velocity, efficiencies, trying to keep the costs where they are or lower them, driving innovation and security, how would you grade, maybe the agency, the industry, whatever you feel comfortable attaching? >> Great question. I'm going to avoid giving you a specific answer like this. >> Fair enough. >> Again there's a spectrum of engagement, across the board. Some agencies are doing really well and have been leaders in the space, and I would argue that my old agency is one of those, really. There are others that are also leaders in the space and are engaging and adopting cloud services, they're pushing very heavily down these pathways we talked about. They're embracing these technologies because they realize what they can do. And then there are others that are lagging behind, but they are lagging behind for any number of several reasons that are out there. So first and foremost is the fact that there's a massive legacy set of workloads and capabilities out there, and it's very hard to figure out what are those that I want to engage in to move to the cloud and do things. So IT modernization dollars were put into play by the federal government in order to help federal agencies do this, modernize their IT with the goal of moving themselves to the cloud, so that they could drive the efficiencies and adopt the things that are going to be there. There's also the concerns we mentioned about security. There's too much fear, uncertainty and doubt, and I think misunderstanding about the cloud, and that was great. I missed the talk today from my old agency, but I'm glad to hear them talk about the fact that I've said this for the longest time, the basic cloud is much more secure than almost everything new. And if I apply and build and develop cloud native capabilities, I can actually leverage the cloud to my advantage to dramatically change the game and deliver cyber resilience into my customers set. So this is the messaging that we want to be able to do. The only way that people are going to do this in the end, because of this big backlog of capabilities, is they have to remember that they got into where their current state is one application, one system at a time. And the only way they're going to get out of it is one application, one system at a time. They just have to begin to think about what are the ones that matter and how they want to go about that. >> No quick fixes there, but a lot of hard work and thoughtfulness. Gus, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really great to have you, appreciate you sharing your insight and your knowledge. >> Delighted, Dave. >> Pleasure. >> Stu, thanks so much. >> Okay, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back, John Furrier is here as well with our next guest. We're live at the AWS Public Sector Summit. You're watching theCUBE. >> Thanks, guys.