Shruthi Murthy, St. Louis University & Venkat Krishnamachari, MontyCloud | AWS Startup Showcase
(gentle music) >> Hello and welcome today's session theCUBE presentation of AWS Startup Showcase powered by theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, for your host of theCUBE. This is a session on breaking through with DevOps data analytics tools, cloud management tools with MontyCloud and cloud management migration, I'm your host. Thanks for joining me, I've got two great guests. Venkat Krishnamachari who's the co-founder and CEO of MontyCloud and Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy, solution architect research computing group St. Louis University. Thanks for coming on to talk about transforming IT, day one day two operations. Venkat, great to see you. >> Great to see you again, John. So in this session, I really want to get into this cloud powerhouse theme you guys were talking about before on our previous Cube Conversations and what it means for customers, because there is a real market shift happening here. And I want to get your thoughts on what solution to the problem is basically, that you guys are targeting. >> Yeah, John, cloud migration is happening rapidly. Not an option. It is the current and the immediate future of many IT departments and any type of computing workloads. And applications and services these days are better served by cloud adoption. This rapid acceleration is where we are seeing a lot of challenges and we've been helping customers with our platform so they can go focus on their business. So happy to talk more about this. >> Yeah and Shruthi if you can just explain your relationship with these guys, because you're a cloud architect, you can try to put this together. MontyCloud is your customer, talk about your solution. >> Yeah I work at the St. Louis University as the solutions architect for the office of Vice President of Research. We can address St. Louis University as SLU, just to keep it easy. SLU is a 200-year-old university with more focus on research. And our goal at the Research Computing Group is to help researchers by providing the right infrastructure and computing capabilities that help them to advance their research. So here in SLU research portfolio, it's quite diverse, right? So we do research on vaccines, economics, geospatial intelligence, and many other really interesting areas, and you know, it involves really large data sets. So one of the research computing groups' ambitious plan is to move as many high-end computation applications from on-prem to the AWS. And I lead all the cloud initiatives for the St. Louis university. >> Yeah Venkat and I, we've been talking, many times on theCUBE, previous interviews about, you know, the rapid agility that's happening with serverless and functions, and, you know, microservices start to see massive acceleration of how fast cloud apps are being built. It's put a lot of pressure on companies to hang on and manage all this. And whether you're a security group was trying to lock down something, or it's just, it's so fast, the cloud development scene is really fun and you're implementing it at a large scale. What's it like these days from a development standpoint? You've got all this greatness in the cloud. What's the DevOps mindset right now? >> SLU is slowly evolving itself as the AWS Center of Excellence here in St. Louis. And most of the workflows that we are trying to implement on AWS and DevOps and, you know, CICD Pipelines. And basically we want it ready and updated for the researchers where they can use it and not have to wait on any of the resources. So it has a lot of importance. >> Research as code, it's like the internet, infrastructure as code is DevOps' ethos. Venkat, let's get into where this all leads to because you're seeing a culture shift in companies as they start to realize if they don't move fast, and the blockers that get in the way of the innovation, you really can't get your arms around this growth as an opportunity to operationalize all the new technology, could you talk about the transformation goals that are going on with your customer base. What's going on in the market? Can you explain and unpack the high level market around what you guys are doing? >> Sure thing, John. Let's bring up the slide one. So they have some content that Act-On tabs. John, every legal application, commercial application, even internal IT departments, they're all transforming fast. Speed has never been more important in the era we are today. For example, COVID research, you know, analyzing massive data sets to come up with some recommendations. They don't demand a lot from the IT departments so that researchers and developers can move fast. And I need departments that are not only moving current workloads to the cloud they're also ensuring the cloud is being consumed the right way. So researchers can focus on what they do best, what we win, learning and working closely with customers and gathering is that there are three steps or three major, you know, milestone that we like to achieve. I would start the outcome, right? That the important milestone IT departments are trying to get to is transforming such that they're directly tied to the key business objectives. Everything they do has to be connected to the business objective, which means the time and you know, budget and everything's aligned towards what they want to deliver. IT departments we talk with have one common goal. They want to be experts in cloud operations. They want to deliver cloud operations excellence so that researchers and developers can move fast. But they're almost always under the, you know, they're time poor, right? And there is budget gaps and that is talent and tooling gap. A lot of that is what's causing the, you know, challenges on their path to journey. And we have taken a methodical and deliberate position in helping them get there. >> Shruthi hows your reaction to that? Because, I mean, you want it faster, cheaper, better than before. You don't want to have all the operational management hassles. You mentioned that you guys want to do this turnkey. Is that the use case that you're going after? Just research kind of being researchers having the access at their fingertips, all these resources? What's the mindset there, what's your expectation? >> Well, one of the main expectations is to be able to deliver it to the researchers as demand and need and, you know, moving from a traditional on-prem HBC to cloud would definitely help because, you know, we are able to give the right resources to the researchers and able to deliver projects in a timely manner, and, you know, with some additional help from MontyCloud data platform, we are able to do it even better. >> Yeah I like the onboarding thing and to get an easy and you get value quickly, that's the cloud business model. Let's unpack the platform, let's go into the hood. Venkat let's, if you can take us through the, some of the moving parts under the platform, then as you guys have it's up at the high level, the market's obvious for everyone out there watching Cloud ops, speed, stablism. But let's go look at the platform. Let's unpack that, do you mind pick up on slide two and let's go look at the what's going on in the platform. >> Sure. Let's talk about what comes out of the platform, right? They are directly tied to what the customers would like to have, right? Customers would like to fast track their day one activities. Solution architects, such as Shruthi, their role is to try and help get out of the way of the researchers, but we ubiquitous around delegating cloud solutions, right? Our platform acts like a seasoned cloud architect. It's as if you've instantly turned on a cloud solution architect that should, they can bring online and say, Hey, I want help here to go faster. Our lab then has capabilities that help customers provision a set of governance contracts, drive consumption in the right way. One of the key things about driving consumption the right way is to ensure that we prevent a security cost or compliance issues from happening in the first place, which means you're shifting a lot of the operational burden to left and make sure that when provisioning happens, you have a guard rails in place, we help with that, the platform solves a problem without writing code. And an important takeaway here, John is that a was built for architects and administrators who want to move fast without having to write a ton of code. And it is also a platform that they can bring online, autonomous bots that can solve problems. For example, when it comes to post provisioning, everybody is in the business of ensuring security because it's a shared model. Everybody has to keep an eye on compliance, that is also a shared responsibility, so is cost optimization. So we thought wouldn't it be awesome to have architects such as Shruthi turn on a compliance bot on the platform that gives them the peace of mind that somebody else and an autonomous bot is watching our 24 by 7 and make sure that these day two operations don't throw curve balls at them, right? That's important for agility. So platform solves that problem with an automation approach. Going forward on an ongoing basis, right, the operation burden is what gets IT departments. We've seen that happen repeatedly. Like IT department, you know, you know this, John, maybe you have some thoughts on this. You know, you know, if you have some comments on how IT can face this, then maybe that's better to hear from you. >> No, well first I want to unpack that platform because I think one of the advantages I see here and that people are talking about in the industry is not only is the technology's collision colliding between the security postures and rapid cloud development, because DevOps and cloud, folks, are moving super fast. They want things done at the point of coding and CICB pipeline, as well as any kind of changes, they want it fast, not weeks. They don't want to have someone blocking it like a security team, so automation with the compliance is beautiful because now the security teams can provide policies. Those policies can then go right into your platform. And then everyone's got the rules of the road and then anything that comes up gets managed through the policy. So I think this is a big trend that nobody's talking about because this allows the cloud to go faster. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? >> No, precisely right. I'll let Shurthi jump on that, yeah. >> Yeah, you know, I just wanted to bring up one of the case studies that we read on cloud and use their compliance bot. So REDCap, the Research Electronic Data Capture also known as REDCap is a web application. It's a HIPAA web application. And while the flagship projects for the research group at SLU. REDCap was running on traditional on-prem infrastructure, so maintaining the servers and updating the application to its latest version was definitely a challenge. And also granting access to the researchers had long lead times because of the rules and security protocols in place. So we wanted to be able to build a secure and reliable enrollment on the cloud where we could just provision on demand and in turn ease the job of updating the application to its latest version without disturbing the production environment. Because this is a really important application, most of the doctors and researchers at St. Louis University and the School of Medicine and St. Louis University Hospital users. So given this challenge, we wanted to bring in MontyCloud's cloud ops and, you know, security expertise to simplify the provisioning. And that's when we implemented this compliance bot. Once it is implemented, it's pretty easy to understand, you know, what is compliant, what is noncompliant with the HIPAA standards and where it needs an remediation efforts and what we need to do. And again, that can also be automated. It's nice and simple, and you don't need a lot of cloud expertise to go through the compliance bot and come up with your remediation plan. >> What's the change in the outcome in terms of the speed turnaround time, the before and after? So before you're dealing with obviously provisioning stuff and lead time, but just a compliance closed loop, just to ask a question, do we have, you know, just, I mean, there's a lot of manual and also some, maybe some workflows in there, but not as not as cool as an instant bot that solve yes or no decision. And after MontyCloud, what are some of the times, can you share any data there just doing an order of magnitude. >> Yeah, definitely. So the provisioning was never simpler, I mean, we are able to provision with just one or two clicks, and then we have a better governance guardrail, like Venkat says, and I think, you know, to give you a specific data, it, the compliance bot does about more than 160 checks and it's all automated, so when it comes to security, definitely we have been able to save a lot of effort on that. And I can tell you that our researchers are able to be 40% more productive with the infrastructure. And our research computing group is able to kind of save the time and, you know, the security measures and the remediation efforts, because we get customized alerts and notifications and you just need to go in and, you know. >> So people are happier, right? People are getting along at the office or virtually, you know, no one is yelling at each other on Slack, hey, where's? Cause that's really the harmony here then, okay. This is like a, I'm joking aside. This is a real cultural issue between speed of innovation and the, what could be viewed as a block, or just the time that say security teams or other teams might want to get back to you, make sure things are compliant. So that could slow things down, that tension is real and there's some disconnects within companies. >> Yeah John, that's spot on, and that means we have to do a better job, not only solving the traditional problems and make them simple, but for the modern work culture of integrations. You know, it's not uncommon like you cut out for researchers and architects to talk in a Slack channel often. You say, Hey, I need this resource, or I want to reconfigure this. How do we make that collaboration better? How do you make the platform intelligent so that the platform can take off some of the burden off of people so that the platform can monitor, react, notify in a Slack channel, or if you should, the administrator say, Hey, next time, this happens automatically go create a ticket for me. If it happens next time in this environment automatically go run a playbook, that remediates it. That gives a lot of time back that puts a peace of mind and the process that an operating model that you have inherited and you're trying to deliver excellence and has more help, particularly because it is very dynamic footprint. >> Yeah, I think this whole guard rail thing is a really big deal, I think it's like a feature, but it's a super important outcome because if you can have policies that map into these bots that can check rules really fast, then developers will have the freedom to drive as fast as they want, and literally go hard and then shift left and do the coding and do all their stuff on the hygiene side from the day, one on security is really a big deal. Can we go back to this slide again for the other project? There's another project on that slide. You talked about RED, was it REDCap, was that one? >> Yeah. Yeah, so REDCap, what's the other project. >> So SCAER, the Sinfield Center for Applied Economic Research at SLU is also known as SCAER. They're pretty data intensive, and they're into some really sophisticated research. The Center gets daily dumps of sensitive geo data sensitive de-identified geo data from various sources, and it's a terabyte so every day, becomes petabytes. So you know, we don't get the data in workable formats for the researchers to analyze. So the first process is to convert this data into a workable format and keep an analysis ready and doing this at a large scale has many challenges. So we had to make this data available to a group of users too, and some external collaborators with ads, you know, more challenges again, because we also have to do this without compromising on the security. So to handle these large size data, we had to deploy compute heavy instances, such as, you know, R5, 12xLarge, multiple 12xLarge instances, and optimizing the cost and the resources deployed on the cloud again was a huge challenge. So that's when we had to take MontyCloud help in automating the whole process of ingesting the data into the infrastructure and then converting them into a workable format. And this was all automated. And after automating most of the efforts, we were able to bring down the data processing time from two weeks or more to three days, which really helped the researchers. So MontyCloud's data platform also helped us with automating the risk, you know, the resource optimization process and that in turn helped bring the costs down, so it's been pretty helpful then. >> That's impressive weeks to days, I mean, this is the theme Venkat speed, speed, speed, hybrid, hybrid. A lot of stuff happening. I mean, this is the new normal, this is going to make companies more productive if they can get the apps built faster. What do you see as the CEO and founder of the company you're out there, you know, you're forging new ground with this great product. What do you see as the blockers from customers? Is it cultural, is it lack of awareness? Why aren't people jumping all over this? >> Only people aren't, right. They go at it in so many different ways that, you know, ultimately be the one person IT team or massively well-funded IT team. Everybody wants to Excel at what they're delivering in cloud operations, the path to that as what, the challenging part, right? What are you seeing as customers are trying to build their own operating model and they're writing custom code, then that's a lot of need for provisioning, governance, security, compliance, and monitoring. So they start integrating point tools, then suddenly IT department is now having a, what they call a tax, right? They have to maintain the technical debt while cloud service moving fast. It's not uncommon for one of the developers or one of the projects to suddenly consume a brand new resource. And as you know, AWS throws up a lot more services every month, right? So suddenly you're not keeping up with that service. So what we've been able to look at this from a point of view of how do we get customers to focus on what they want to do and automate things that we can help them with? >> Let me, let me rephrase the question if you don't mind. Cause I I didn't want to give the impression that you guys aren't, you guys have a great solution, but I think when I see enterprises, you know, they're transforming, right? So it's not so much the cloud innovators, like you guys, it's really that it's like the mainstream enterprise, so I have to ask you from a customer standpoint, what's some of the cultural things are technical reasons why they're not going faster? Cause everyone's, maybe it's the pandemic's forcing projects to be double down on, or some are going to be cut, this common theme of making things available faster, cheaper, stronger, more secure is what cloud does. What are some of the enterprise challenges that they have? >> Yeah, you know, it might be money for right, there's some cultural challenges like Andy Jassy or sometimes it's leadership, right? You want top down leadership that takes a deterministic step towards transformation, then adequately funding the team with the right skills and the tools, a lot of that plays into it. And there's inertia typically in an existing process. And when you go to cloud, you can do 10X better, people see that it doesn't always percolate down to how you get there. So those challenges are compounded and digital transformation leaders have to, you know, make that deliberate back there, be more KPI-driven. One of the things we are seeing in companies that do well is that the leadership decides that here are our top business objectives and KPIs. Now if we want the software and the services and the cloud division to support those objectives when they take that approach, transformation happens. But that is a lot more easier said than done. >> Well you're making it really easy with your solution. And we've done multiple interviews. I've got to say you're really onto something really with this provisioning and the compliance bots. That's really strong, that the only goes stronger from there, with the trends with security being built in. Shruthi, got to ask you since you're the customer, what's it like working with MontyCloud? It sounds so awesome, you're customer, you're using it. What's your review, what's your- What's your, what's your take on them? >> Yeah they are doing a pretty good job in helping us automate most of our workflows. And when it comes to keeping a tab on the resources, the utilization of the resources, so we can keep a tab on the cost in turn, you know, their compliance bots, their cost optimization tab. It's pretty helpful. >> Yeah well you're knocking projects down from three weeks to days, looking good, I mean, looking real strong. Venkat this is the track record you want to see with successful projects. Take a minute to explain what else is going on with MontyCloud. Other use cases that you see that are really primed for MontyCloud's platform. >> Yeah, John, quick minute there. Autonomous cloud operations is the goal. It's never done, right? It there's always some work that you hands-on do. But if you set a goal such that customers need to have a solution that automates most of the routine operations, then they can focus on the business. So we are going to relentlessly focused on the fact that autonomous operations will have the digital transformation happen faster, and we can create a lot more value for customers if they deliver to their KPIs and objectives. So our investments in the platform are going more towards that. Today we already have a fully automated compliance bot, a security bot, a cost optimization recommendation engine, a provisioning and governance engine, where we're going is we are enhancing all of this and providing customers lot more fluidity in how they can use our platform Click to perform your routine operations, Click to set up rules based automatic escalation or remediation. Cut down the number of hops a particular process will take and foster collaboration. All of this is what our platform is going and enhancing more and more. We intend to learn more from our customers and deliver better for them as we move forward. >> That's a good business model, make things easier, reduce the steps it takes to do something, and save money. And you're doing all those things with the cloud and awesome stuff. It's really great to hear your success stories and the work you're doing over there. Great to see resources getting and doing their job faster. And it's good and tons of data. You've got petabytes of that's coming in. It's it's pretty impressive, thanks for sharing your story. >> Sounds good, and you know, one quick call out is customers can go to MontyCloud.com today. Within 10 minutes, they can get an account. They get a very actionable and valuable recommendations on where they can save costs, what is the security compliance issues they can fix. There's a ton of out-of-the-box reports. One click to find out whether you are having some data that is not encrypted, or if any of your servers are open to the world. A lot of value that customers can get in under 10 minutes. And we believe in that model, give the value to customers. They know what to do with that, right? So customers can go sign up for a free trial at MontyCloud.com today and get the value. >> Congratulations on your success and great innovation. A startup showcase here with theCUBE coverage of AWS Startup Showcase breakthrough in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management with MontyCloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (gentle music)
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the co-founder and CEO Great to see you again, John. It is the current and the immediate future you can just explain And I lead all the cloud initiatives greatness in the cloud. And most of the workflows that and the blockers that get in important in the era we are today. Is that the use case and need and, you know, and to get an easy and you get of the researchers, but we ubiquitous the cloud to go faster. I'll let Shurthi jump on that, yeah. and reliable enrollment on the cloud of the speed turnaround to kind of save the time and, you know, as a block, or just the off of people so that the and do the coding and do all Yeah, so REDCap, what's the other project. the researchers to analyze. of the company you're out there, of the projects to suddenly So it's not so much the cloud innovators, and the cloud division to and the compliance bots. the cost in turn, you know, to see with successful projects. So our investments in the platform reduce the steps it takes to give the value to customers. Data Analytics and Cloud
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Gene Reznik, Accenture | AWS Executive Summit 2018
>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back the theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Gene Reznik, the Chief Strategy Officer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Gene. >> My pleasure, Rebecca. >> So, Accenture is calling this period of time that we are all living through a period of epic disruption. Define what that means for us. >> Sure, sure. So, well, I think we're living in a very disruptive age right now. But again, I think we believe over the next 10 years it's going to become even more epic. And I think what's driving that, some things are geopolitical in nature. Alright, uh. Sort of, everything between U.S. and China relations, what's happening in Europe, all of that. Of course, there's technological. Dynamics around artificial intelligence. Of course, there's data, there's privacy, there's security. And all that really compounding on each other. We believe it's creating an environment where it's just going to be very challenging for people, but also for companies to navigate. And I think leadership and big organizations and their teams have to be very thoughtful of how they navigate this time. And I think there's going to be some big winners and I think there's going to be some big losers. And I think we see companies today that have been around for hundreds of years challenged to really adapt, adjust, and transform to really be prepared for this next wave of change. >> So, as you said, it's a very restive time politically, technologically, business wise. How are companies approaching this? I mean, as you said, you have to be very thoughtful. You have to have a real strategy in terms of how you're going to approach this, an approach innovation. How would you say companies are doing? Give them a report card right now in terms of how industry is responding. >> Yeah, well I think the first thing we would sort of say, and we've done quite a bit of analysis, and study through Accenture research, and as you'd expect, different industries are under different amounts of pressure and disruption. Some, like music industry and book publishing and currently retail, are under tremendous pressure. And, many have not responded well. They were too slow. They saw the digital natives just really take away their businesses. Others are better protected. So we have really gone through and analyzed industry by industry how they are prepared for today and really what they need to do going forward. And I guess our assessment is it's very, very difficult, as you would expect, to take a big organization and transform it. And the issue is again, while a lot of it is technology, the people side, the culture side, the organizational side, the incumbency dimension, the shareholders, all those things that make change very difficult are at the core of the transformation agenda. >> And innovation is really sort of the answer to it all because once you're move innovative, then you are going to ride this wave of epic disruption. So, first of all, how would you, so many companies are saying we want to be more innovative. What's the answer to that? I mean, what does that mean to be more innovative? >> Yeah, it's a good point. So we have, Accenture has looked at this. We sort of codified something that we call the wise pivot. Which is how should an organization really pivot to transform their business. And it's got elements, we believe strongly that you have to transform the core. Innovation can't be on the edge. At some point, you have to transform the core which usually gets at cost reduction, using automation to transform the business, transform the core economics. Then you have to grow the core and that's really I think the hard part, which is gaining market share in the core business we believe, whether it's in automotive business, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in even retail, you have to grow the core, cause ultimately that gives you the investment capacity to scale the new. So, how to orchestrate that journey in a methodical way, again, keeping in mind the organization and what it delivers today and not leaving different parts of the organization behind is what we work with our clients on. >> And, what separates the winners from the losers? So the companies that are doing this well, how are they focusing on their core? And the core competencies? >> Right. We believe investing is a very big thing. Right, so the hardest part of all of this, in terms of economically, I mean there's a lot of difficult dimensions, but economically, as the pressure mounts, the ability to invest diminishes for most companies. And they don't have the room to invest in the business that their future depends on. And really freeing up that room and making the difficult decisions, you may have seen there were some announcements of mass lay offs, even today right? It's some of the biggest companies in the world. They're trying to create the room to invest in their next generation business that will take them into the future. And I think that's really the hardest part. How do you ultimately create the capacity to invest? And how do you make those investments? Again, cause there's also a lot of other examples of companies that have invested in the wrong way or in the wrong thing, that ultimately didn't lead them to the future So those two elements, creating the room to invest, then investing it in the right things and the right ways is what we find is key. >> So you're talking of course about GM which announced today that it was laying off about 15 thousand white collar and blue collar jobs. And the reason they're doing this is because they're saying there's no longer any room for six passenger cars in this market. We want to focus on self-driving vehicles. Is that a good move? I mean, I know you're not a GM analyst here but at the same time, it sounds as though that is smart, as you said. It's making room for investing in the future. >> Yeah, and I think that GM is clearly seeing autonomous cars coming, sort of form factors, everything that they're doing. And again, I don't think particular it's that in GM's case but again you read it that way. You'll look at General Electric. They're restructuring their entire company to better compete in the new. You'll look at IBM. IBM is acquiring Red Hat to have the kind of assets to compete in the new. So I think the biggest companies in the world are really trying to sort of say what the next ten years, what is their business going to to be? And then how to they take what got them here which for many of them have been 50 to 100 year journeys. And really figure out how to restructure that, to give them the room to invest into building a new business. And really, that takes tremendous leadership by the entire, you know, by the CEO, the board, the entire executive team and the people. The people have to commit to go along for that ride, and endure some of the pain for the greater good. >> So it's really a change management issue here, but in terms of, you talked about leadership, it also takes the foresight to actually know what your business is in the future. So GM is saying autonomous vehicles, which an average layman can say, yeah, that looks as though that's where the car industry is going. But how does a company even begin to imagine it's future at this time where there are new technologies being invented everyday, which are disruptive as we started talking about in the earlier conversation. >> Yeah, I think that's a very good question. Cause also if you look at where's the money going. The money is going to the disrupters. Right, if you look at the top five, the Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, let's put Microsoft in there. Combined last year they invested over 70 billion dollars, and that's about 15 percent of all of the fortune of the global one thousand. So the capital, as measured by what companies are expending, what the start-up, the VCs are at an all time high. 155 billion dollars invested last year, double what it was in 2001. The IPO market is at an all time high. Right, then you have these things like division fund, which is a whole other investment vehicle to fuel technology. So the reality is, there's never been more money going in to create the next wave of disruption, which is why we believe many of the existing companies really need to create those partnerships where they benefit from that. They can't compete with it. They can't outguess it, right? They need to be making equal systems that ultimately enable them to leverage those investments, to really help power their next generation business. >> So as an ecosystem driven world, where is Accenture doing this kind of work? >> Yeah, so the good news for Accenture is we built our business, built services in an ecosystem kind of model. Initially with SAP, with Oracle, with Salesforce and now it's with companies like Amazon and the AWS. And I think our view, and what we try to work with our clients on, is really to create the construct. And by the way, a lot of these constructs are just now being formed. What does partnering with an AWS to create your next generation digital business, what does that look like? And there's some models emerging in terms of co-innovation. And I would tell you what Amazon has done, what Berkshire Hathaway and J.P. Morgan Chase is an example of partnering to transform healthcare. Interesting way to do that. You look at something, another Seattle company Starbucks partnering with Alibaba to basically power their entire business in China. So you're starting to see different constructs where big companies are really coming together in different ways. And then again, those partnership constructs, incentives, business models around that, I think that's really where the innovation is going to take place. How do you do that? How do you align your incentives? And how do you jointly benefit from that partnership? >> So you announced something today with your Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle, Washington. Tell our viewers a bit little more about that. >> Well, first of all we look at AWS and we say, clearly this is a company that is really important. >> It's doing something right. >> It's doing a lot of things right, it's doing a lot of things right. And I think a lot of our clients are looking at them, are leveraging them. So, it's our responsibility then as a services organization to build up capabilities and skills, and make their, and enable our clients to really tap in to this tremendous innovation. So, yeah, we did announce at Applied Intelligence Center of Excellence in Seattle. It'll be one of many centers across the United States and globally with a simple premise of building skills, building proof of concepts, building use cases, building MVPs to really around different industries and different solutions sets so again, reimagine business processes, catalyze transformation, and really make it something that our clients can tap into. >> You are the Chief Strategy Officer, what is your piece of advice for companies out there, at AWS, at reInvent here, what's sort of your one piece of strategy advice in this period of epic disruption and this cloud world. >> Yeah, I would say that unburdening ourselves from the day to day, and really immersing ourselves in this amazing environment. Learning, really understanding what makes one of these, one of the greatest companies in the world tick. Understanding how they do things. Not only, and as you know, there's more to Amazon than just technology. Right? There's a very strong culture. There's a very strong customer centricity. And really sort of understanding that, and really trying to apply it to our respective businesses. And seeing how it could really be, make the pivot to the digital more effective. And that's what I would sort of say. Come with an open mind. Learn a lot, and take it forward. >> Great, well Gene Reznik thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> This is a lot of fun. >> My pleasure. Thank you, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit in just a little bit. (techno music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by Accenture. of the AWS Executive Summit that we are all living through And I think there's going to be some big winners You have to have a real strategy And the issue is again, while a lot of it is technology, And innovation is really sort of the answer to it all and not leaving different parts of the organization behind the ability to invest diminishes for most companies. And the reason they're doing this And then how to they take what got them here it also takes the foresight to actually know So the capital, as measured by what companies are expending, And I think our view, and what we try to work So you announced something today and we say, clearly this is a company And I think a lot of our clients You are the Chief Strategy Officer, make the pivot to the digital more effective. thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. My pleasure. of the AWS Executive Summit in just a little bit.
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