live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering Adobe summit 2019 brought to you by Accenture Interactive okay welcome back everyone so cubes live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe summit 2019 I'm John ferry with Jeff Frick our next guest is Jim LaLanne CX orchestration practice lead at Accenture customer experience engine welcome to the cube Thank You Forex for joining us customer experience engine CX e CX a yes that's your product I should we work on what's the importance of that what's the big deal so the big deal is there's a proliferation of technology in the world and and one of the main challenges is everything's silent everybody has a different lens when you talk to the sales folks they have a view of the customer when you talk to marketing day of you nobody ever talks and the problem is when these organizations they think technology is the answer so and one of the things that we're always asked inside of the Accenture interactive is well how do you bring all this stuff together and we kept getting asked the same question over and over and over again and so finally we decided you know what let's do something about it let's make this so that you move the discussion away from technology and how can you accelerate your transformation and use something like CX e to bring that to life Jim you've been a pro in this business know digital back we're gonna you're mister you've seen many ways of the hype and the reality you know the titles of customer success man and your orchestration practice manager you know we're relevant but now more than ever those actually means something look at orchestration that's a big term used in cloud computing around orchestrating workloads customer success that's the theme of the show sure experiences so now more than every we're starting to see some visibility into tech implementations to hard problems that were being tackled by pioneers on the bass now in front and center here how do you summarize that that market right now because do you believe that to be true and what is that visibility what are people looking at right now and then what's behind it well for far too long it was always about the technology providers themselves or the in the cusp who are our customers the organizations that hire Accenture to help them transform but what we've seen is just a complete seismic shift it's all about what is the customer or the consumer one it's not about what we as organizations want it's about what the consumers want so we do very much see that as a trend that's moving and in in order to do that you really need to decouple your systems of engagement from your systems of record and by doing that it allows organizations to experiment so there's new technology coming in everyday probably while we're sitting here at least a hundred others have come to life yeah but it becomes hard because when you're always having that technology come into play how can you plug it into your own ecosystem to let the consumer get done what they want to get done on their terms because that's their expectation they don't really care what your internal problems are they just want to be able to get done what they want to get done and if they can't with you it'll go somewhere else so the practice what you're seeing is the practices have an environment that allows you to try stuff yes without a lot of hurdles and you know integration yeah so the standard thing would be any time an organization wanted to try a new product it could take anywhere from 6 12 18 months just before they could even figure out does it work what we're trying to do with cxe is turn that into a matter of weeks in some cases in a matter of days so by having a platform or a capability set up so as a new application comes in great I already know about the customer information because I'm making that transparent to everything I can plug it in I can experiment I spend a month I measured does this actually work if it doesn't great get it out let me try the next thing so it gives that flexibility to organizations which marketers love because the last thing you want to do is tell us CMO is like that idea you have that's great that's what really agility exactly come talk to me in nine months different now in terms of the people process and technically been talking about 360 view of the customer is short for donkey years right so what's now is different is it just a perfect storm of some of these things finally coming together is there some particular process or kind of secret sauce to get us over this you know finally we're here you know we can finally get that view of the customer one of the things that that started to happen was you started moving the I the idea and the concept of a single view of a customer out of back-end master data management legacy hard really complex applications and with the poll earlier for Asian what they call customer data platform CDP's there are applications that are built natively in the cloud that are exposed through api's it makes it easier to stand up those capabilities so it really starts becoming a question of well why wouldn't you do this so in the past it would be well I gotta go get capital expenditure money and I gotta go through this whole business justification now it's I can have something stood up literally in a matter of Miss villains which is purpose-built and it gives you that capability to then plug in place so that gives especially for us as system integrators it makes it exciting for us because we can say you know what I can stand up a single view of your customer I can be couple that from the sales force the Adobe's the Marketo we are the world up that would never built for that right that's not their expertise take a minute to explain what is the customer experience engine the CSE what is it so in essence it's the plumbing it's all the stuff that nobody ever wants to do that always destroys transformations so again this was one of these things where every single transformation you had ever seen I don't care pick your vendor Adobe s AP Microsoft where they always fall down is in integration it's just it's just the nature of the business so what we did with CX II was we said you know what what I want to be able to do is I want to have a micro services based architecture that allows me to if I have a client telling app one week I can plug that in three weeks later I want to use something like tulip I'm going to unplug what I have I'm going to plug tulip in but the experience that the consumer sees on the glass it doesn't change so when I'm writing a mobile application I'm going to use the experience API what sits underneath it and this is what CXC provides is that system API layer to then say you know what I'm going to unplug tulip I'm going to plug in something else the consumer is done to what it's like it's like a Tesla versus a car there's all the software updates going on behind the scenes changing the configuration of the automobile yeah similar experience you're gonna automate creating mechanisms so that the application the workload for the user is not disrupted by you're making modifications under the hood so to speak well think of it this way so and we'll go with the car analogy which was probably why with the engine engine mechanism but I was explaining it to another another gentleman and he said he's like you guys are like to pimp my ride of ID I'm not changing my engine what I'm doing is I'm adding a spoiler here I'm adding new tires and rims here I'm you know putting on you know flames I'm doing all these things but the underlying engine or the heartbeat of the engagement that stays the same what you're enabling me to do as a business is tailor and adjust based on consumer expectations so if today they really want to engage with us with email next week it's through a RvR I they have that ability and I don't have to completely retrofit my entire IT architect and this is the modern approach that we see people that are winning take a take a certain formula and that is build software abstractions in their areas of expertise so here if I get this right the the CXC the customer experience engine is essentially your domain knowledge of the center interactive extract it away to make it easier for the vendors to work through your system yeah so you solve your own problems but unstop being a customer benefit right because what we firmly believe the hard part in a digital transformation is not the tech which is easy for me to say because I'm the propellerhead in the room but to me it's it's a much more fascinating conversation to say how do we transform your people and your process to be customer centric that's actually the hard part it's not the tech so by taking the tech difficulty off the table then that allows them to jumpstart and get to the actual meet of changing how they operate and the other piece of that which i think is ensuring you didn't touch on that specifically but I'm I'm sure it's got to be there is it democratizes the access apps and the ability to do things with that data to the people that aren't necessarily tied into the ERP and tied into these other systems so you can now have other people running out algorithms doing tests doing experimentation so really that democratization is so important well it's amazing the empowerment that you give people when you just provide transparency of the data so when when the sales staff if the retail rep in the store all of a sudden has transparency of what have been the engagements that have been going on with the consumer they can have a meaningful conversation and they're focused on how can they help that consumer in that moment so we look at it as you know the last moment that you engage with a consumer is usually the most telling because typically you are 20% more likely to maintain loyalty if it's a positive you're only four percent likely if it's negative yeah and if anything you will lose 32 percent of your population on one bad experience so you look at your thoughts on the vendor relationship and that's so much locking because I think lock-in is really about value you do a good job you get value because we will use you but with cloud tick tools and api's are becoming a very key part of the tool chest if you will for the users and your customer base and so we're seeing that the skills gap and the retraining that's trying to happen tends to focus on api's and tools so Amazon's got a cloud everybody's no one wants to learn ten different tool sets right how do you view that because I think we hear from practitioners all the time and they always say you know I just want it to work I want infrastructure as code I love DevOps I love agility but I don't want to learn all these new tool sets all right but I'm comfortable with this cloud I'm comfortable with this these kinds of tooling tool chains or api's how do you see that evolving is that going to be automated away will it be innovation there what's your thoughts there so my general feeling is I think you're going to continue to see more and more consolidation of adoptions in the rest based API space just because one it's easier on developers and developers win so if you make a developer's life difficult they're just going to move to something else so for the organizations that embrace that they're gonna continue to see that you will you will start to see more and more automation but I mean ultimately at the end of the day the economy that we work in runs off of api's and it's really the more you embrace it the more you share information are willing to share information within reason I mean there's you know legal and all sorts of things that have to have to be looked after but you know that's what that's what drives things so we as Accenture we look at application partners that embrace that methodology embrace that belief system of let's make it easy to share data that's one of the things that you know Adobe Microsoft and sa P are doing what the open data initiative is also trying to make it easier to share information amongst different stacks so it's a it's a variation of that and I I do believe that you're gonna continue to see more of that just because again the consumer that's what they expect and also the cloud native trend also that's a tailwind for that movement as well because they expect it to short standards I mean to a certain extent if you think about what's even cloud native it anymore cuz a lot of times people say well I'm on Fram well where are you I'm from ma well I've got my virtual cloud sitting over here or my privacy it's just distributed computing all right what's getting you excited here at Adobe summit I mean I'm impressed with the platform play I think they got that right I think they didn't over reach its laid out nice single view the customer got the data pipelining and semantic engine on the on the other side of it and a variety of app integrations looks solid to me what's your thoughts on Adobe I think it's a good first step to be fair I think it's a good first step I actually applaud them for for going down that path I'm excited about the possibilities it gives to our customers who are embracing the Adobe stack I'd like to see them go further especially with in terms of extending it out to other partners as well because it's one of those things of there's no one platform that solves everything that's a large reason why we established cxe is the days where you could just have all Adobe and that's going to solve everything across they'll service marketing and commerce that's there's no one provider that has that so you need to have that ability to transfer data and to drive that experience so I'm excited about where Adobe's going with the experience platform because I think it's a good first step especially on their side to try and make it easier again it's about how do you make it easier to deploy applications so that you can serve the purpose for the consumer so I think it I think it's a good first I would you describe the makeup of the ecosystem community breaking down from developers to integrators and partners because as you start to see this kind of enabling platforms as you said it's a first step is foundational you'll see how it kind of evolves sure ultimately developers will to me will be a canary in a coal mine on this one but how does has the makeup of the community on the development side what did what it's the personas are the developers the hardcore cloud guys are they mostly app developers is there some segmentation what's your view of this I think so what I'm seeing is developers turning more into cross utilization of skills if there's there's less and less of I'm just this type of developer it's usually more of I'm gonna experiment and do a little bit of everything what I've actually been finding interesting is a lot of developers are turning into people that sit in marketing or sit in sales operations or you know some people have turned it citizen integrators but it's people who do not come from a technical background but the tools that are being created today are enabling them to do more of the integration work on their own and that's one of the benefits when you have open API is recipes api's is you can put more of that power in the hands of less technical users there's that's not to say you're not going to ever need hard for developers but what I'm seeing is more and more non-technical people are getting into the developers of time cycles are changing they want to be closer to those customers that the closer to the front line is not in the back office kind of coding away right you just you don't with with consumer expectations shifting on a dime you can't wait and that's one of the things that we spend a lot of time trying to help our IT side of the house customers is how to be flexible how to be nimble so that when marketing where any business leader comes to you and says hey I want to try this out you don't say I'll get back to you in nine months it should be I'll get back to you next week yeah and that's really the goal of what we're trying to do with new titles we had a guest on the queue we've been doing the queue for 10 years first time we've ever had a guest with a title marketing CIO which was kind of business saying look I got I got to sit in the marketing team and be a CIO over here and translate and put projects together and make things happen to your point about it's an integrator kind of like putting it all together well I mean it's no different than you see more and more CIOs become much more business focused business savvy they're not just hey I'm going to keep the lights on from a technology perspective the the more successful CIOs have that business lens no different than the CMO the CMO czar having to get smarter on technology and a lot of times what we're saying is the CMOS are driving the tech agenda not the CIOs so as a result I'm not surprised to see I'm the would you say was a marketing CIO Marketing CIO thanks for the insights great to have you on yeah I think get the talk tech and under the hood marketing text great final question for you what's next for CXC customer experience engine what's going on what's the next leg of the journey for you so the next leg of a journey is we've already got the integration layer laid out so we can pretty much plug-and-play any application that is out there we're really diving into real time analytics real time segmentation taking some of the power of the capabilities that are in the CDP space to drive those engagements so it's really it's it's an expansion and then that data space and making it that much more accessible to our customers that's great you guys bring some abstraction some automation to the table for customers it's a cube bringing you all the data here and insights I'm chef Fred chef Rick stay with us more day 2 coverage after this short break