>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's the Cube, covering KubeCon andCloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you buy Red Hat, the CloudNative computing foundation and it's ecosystem partners. (background crowd chatter) >> Okay welcome back everyone, live here in Seattle forKubeCon and CloudNativeCon. This is the Cube's coverage, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We've got two great guests, Chris Wright CTO of Red Hat, Scott Sneddon who's the senior director ofcloud at Juniper Networks, breaking down, windingdown day one of three days of coverage here. Rise of kubernetes, rise of cloudnatives, certainly impacting IT,open source communities, and developers. Guys, thanks for coming on the Cube. Appreciate it. It's good to see you. >> Yeah, good to see you. >> Welcome to the Cube. Okay, so, talk aboutthe relationship between Red Hat and Juniper. Why we're here, what are we talking about? >> Well, we're here to talkabout a combined solution. So, Red Hat's bringingkind of the software platform infrastructure piece and Juniper's bringinga networking component that ties it together.>> Yeah. >> So, we do have a fairly, well, in tech terms arelatively long history of working together. We've had a partnership for a little more than two years on sometelco Cloud initiatives around OpenStack, using the right OpenStackplatform with Contrail Juniper's contrail solutionas an SDN layer for these telco Cloud deployments. And have had a lot of successwith that partnership. A lot of large and smallto medium telco's around the world have deployed that. Earlier this year at theOpenStack summit in Vancouver, we announced an expandedpartnership to start to address some enterprise use cases. And, you know, naturallyopen shift is the lead technology that we wanted to tie in with around enterpriseadoption of cloud and some alternatives to someof the legacy platforms that are out there. >> And we were talkingearlier in the Cube here, we always get kind ofthe feel of the show, kubernetes maturing? But it kind of two worlds colliding and working together. A systems kind of view,almost like operating systems. The network systems, allkind of systems thinking. And then just apps. Okay, the old app thing. So these old legacy worldthat we all lived in kind of happening in really dynamic ways with the apps aren't thinkingabout what's below it. This is really kind of whereyou guys have a tailwind with Juniper.>> Yeah. Because you still gotto make things dynamic, you still got latency, onpremises not going away. You got IOT, so networkingplays a really big thing as software starts figuringthings out as kubernetes. Let's talk about that. Where is that value? How's it expanding? Cause clearly you stillneed to move packets from A to B.>> Yeah. Be more efficient with it. Apps going to have policy. >> The, well, I mean you've still got to, the network is always been the foundation of technology or at least for the last 20 plus years. And as cloud has been adopted, really we've seen network scale drive in different ways. The mega scalers thathave built infrastructure that we've been enabling for quite a while and have been working withthose customers as well. We've been developing a lot of simplified architecture just forthe physical plumbing to connect these things together. But what we've seen andis more and more important is, you know, it's all about the app, the app is the thing that'sgoing to consume these things. And the app developerdoesn't necessarily want to worry about IP addresses and port numbers and firewall rules and things like that, so how could we justmore simply extract that? And so, you know, we'vebeen developing automation and aimed at the networkfor quite a while, but I think more andmore it's becoming more important that theapplication can just consume that without having to directthe automation at the app. And so, you know, groupslike CloudNative foundation and a lot of the workwith kubernetes are on network policy, let's us use CloudNativeprivatives and then we can translate into the network primitives that we need to deploy to move packets, you know, IP addresses and subnets. >> And Chris, talk aboutthe multi cloud dynamic here because again, the dayof things are moving around the standardizationaround those core value propositions, youmentioned about networking and software networks, all kinds of software, you know, venations under the covers. I'm a customer, I havemultiple clouds now. This is going to be a core requirement. So you got to have a a clean integration between it. >> There's really two things. If you look at a modern application, you got your traditionalmonolithic application and as you tease itapart and into components and services, there's only one thingthat reconnects them and that's the network and so insuring that that's as easy to use as an applicationdevelopers focus is around the app and not aroundnetwork engineering is fundamental to a single cluster. And then if you have multiple clusters and you're trying to take advantage of different specialtiesin different clouds or geo replication or things like this that also require thenetwork to reconstitute those applications across thedifferent multiple clouds. If you expect your applicationengineers to become experts in networking, you're just sort ofsetting everybody up with misset expectations. >> It slows things down,requires all these other tasks you got to do. I mean it's like a rock fetch. You don't want to do it. Okay, stack a bunch of rocks, move them from there to there. I mean, this is whatthe holy grail of this infrastructure's code really is. >> Yeah.>> Yeah. I mean, that's the goal. >> Help connect the dots for us. When you look at multicloud networking obviously is a very critical component, what're your customers looking for? How does this solution goto market for your company? >> Absolute ease ofuse is top of the list. So, it can't be overly complicated. Because we're alreadybuilding complex systems, these are big distributive systems and you're adding multipleclusters and trying to connect them together. So ease of use is important. And then something that'sdynamic and reflects the current application requirements, I think is also really important. So that you don't over utilize resources in a cloud to maintainsort of a static connection that isn't actually needed at that moment. I'm sure you probably havea different perspective. >> Yeah, I mean, this isthe whole concept of SDN and network virtualization, a lot of the buzzwordsthat have been around for a few years now, is the ability to deliveron demand network services that are turned on whenthe application asks for it and are turned off when the application's done with it. We can create dynamic connectionsas applications scale. And then with a lot of thenewer things we've been doing around contrailand with Red Hat are the ability to extend thoseapplications environments with networking andsecurity into various cloud platforms. So, you know, if it's runningon top of an openstack environment or in a public cloud or, some other bare metal infrastructure, we're going to make surethat the network and security primitives are inplace when the application needs it and then get deepervisioned or pulled out when they go away. >> Being at a show like this, I don't think we need to talktoo much about open source, because that's reallycore and fundamental, but what we're doing here, but I guess, how doesthat play into customers? We've been watching the slow change in the networking world, you know, I'm a networking guy by background, used to measure changesin networks in decades and now it feels like we'removing a tiny bit faster, >> Little bit. >> What're we seeing is--? >> Well, I mean the historyof openness in networking was the ITF>> Standards. >> and IEEE and standards bodies, right? How do we interact? We're going to have ourlittle private playground and then we'll makesure to protocol layer, we can interact with each otherand we call that openness. But the new openness is open source and transparency into the platform and the ability tocontribute and participate. And so Juniper shifted a lot of our focus, I mean we still haveour own silicone and the operating system we built on our routers and switches, but we'vealso taken the contrail platform, open sourced it a few years ago, it's now called thetungsten fabric project under the Linux foundation. And we're activeparticipants in a community. And our customers really demand that. The telco's are drivingtowards an open source model, more and more enterpriseswant to be able to consume open source software with support, which is where we come in, but also be able to have an understanding of what's going on under the covers to participate if that's a possibility. But really drivinginteroperability through a different way then justa protocol interaction and a standards body. >> I can see how kubernetescan be a great fit for you guys at Juniper, clearly out of the boxyou have this kind of inter cloud, inter networking, paradigm that you're used to, right? How does the relationshipof Red Hat take it to the next level? What specifically areyou guys partnering on, where's that, what'sthat impact on customers? Can you just give a quick explanation, take a minute to explainthe Juniper Red Hat-- >> Well a lot of itcomes down to usability and ease of use, right? I mean what Red Hat's done with open shift is developed a platformleveraging kubernetes heavily, to make kubernetes easierto use with the great support model and a lot of tooling built on top of that to make thatmore easily deployable, more easily developersto develop on top of. What we're doing withcontrail is providing a supported version ofour open source project and then by tying thesethings together with some installation tools and packaging and most importantly a support model, that let's a customer have the proverbial single throat to choke. >> Have you ever hadcustomers that can run beautifully on your platform? >> Yeah yeah, and theinstallation process is seamless, it's a nob that installtime to consume contrail or some other networking stack and they can call Red Hat for support and they'll escalate toJuniper when appropriate and vice versa. And we've got all those things in place. >> I think one of the things that we have like shared vision on is, the ease of use andthen if you think about two separate systems with a plug in, there's going to be someintegration that needs to happen and we're lookingat how much automation can we do to keep thoseintegrations always functional so that ifwe need to do upgrades, we can do those together instead of abandoning one side or the other. And I think another areawhere we have shared vision is the multi cloud space where we really see the importance for our customer base toget applications deployed to the right locations. And that could be takingadvantage of different pricing structures in different clouds or it could be hardwarefeatures of functionality. Especially as we getinto edge computing and really creating a differentview of computing fabric, which isn't quite so, you know, client serveror cloud centralized, but much more distributed. >> I like how you said that Chris, earlier about how when you decomposethat monolithic app it connects with the network. That's also the other way around. Little pieces can cometogether and work with the network and then form in real time, whether it's an IOT datacoming into the data center, or pushing computdata to the edge, you got to have that network interaction. This is a real CloudNative evolution, this is the core. >> Yeah, and I think anotherpiece that we haven't touched on as much, Scott mentioned it, was the security component. >> Yeah, explain that. >> Again, with as youdecompose that application into components, you surface those components with APIs, those were internal APIswhen they're now exposed externally security really matters. And having simple policythat describes not just the connectivity topologybut who can speak to whom is pretty fundamentally important. So that you maintainsecurity posture and a risk profile that's acceptable. >> And then I think it'sreally important is, your traditionalenterprise starts to adopt these CloudNative models. You've got a securityteam there that might not necessarily be up to speed or on board. So you've got to havetooling and visualization and analytics to beable to present to them that policies are being enforced correctly and are compliant and all those things so. >> Yeah and they're tough customers too. They're not going to, they expectreally rock solid capability. >> They don't let youjust deploy a big flat network with no policy-- >> Hey what about the APIs? Service areas exposed in the IOT space. >> Yeah.>> Right. >> You got to nail it down. >> Yeah absolutely, sothat's a lot of what we're bringing to the table here, is a lot of Juniper'shistory around developing security products. >> Take a minute to explain,I want to give you some time to get a plug in for Juniper. I've been following youguys for a long time. Junos back on the old days, contrail. Juniper's has had a software, big time software view. >> Yeah. >> Explain the DNA of software at Juniper. >> You know the earlydays of Juniper were, we weren't the first networkvendor on the market. There was already somebodyon the market in the mid 90s that had a pretty solid stronghold on carrier and enterprise networking. We had to come in with a better model. Let's make the box easierto use and simpler. Let's make the interfacea little more structured and understandable. Let's make it programmable, right? I mean the first feature request for Junos was to have a CLI becausethe first interaction to it was just an API call. And that was out of the box from day one. We had to write a user interface to it just to fit in to theexisting network world in the mid 90s. And so we've alwaysbeen really proud of the Junos operating systemthat runs on our boxes. We've really been proudthat we've had this one Junos concept of a commonoperating system on every network device that we deliver. As we've started tovirtualize those network devices for NFE and things like that, it's again that same operatingsystem that we deliver. Contrail came to us through acquisition, so it's not Junos in and of itself, but still leveraging a lot of those same fundamentals around,model driven configuration management, understandableAPIs, and openness that we've always had. >> Cloud operating modelthat everyone's going to, the common operating modelfits in that unification vision that you guys have had. >> Yeah absolutely. >> And really early, by the way, was before SDN was SDN, I think that was SDN's kind of like-- >> I like to dry, I-- >> Should have called it SDN. >> Right, I described SDN as just a big distributed router andreally we've had big distributed routers for a long time. >> John, we are in Seattle, everything we're talkingabout in tech is hipster. >> Chris, great stuff. Great to have you on, Scott. Great smart commentary. CTO Red Hat, you guys are winning. Congratulations on the betsyou made at kubernetes early, >> Yeah. >> CoreOS great acquisition,great team there, and some news there aboutsome dealings out back into the C and CF, soI mean, you've got it-- >> A lot going on. >> A lot going on. And yeah, big news with that other things, I can't remember what it was, it was some big-->> Something in there. >> Something for a million dollars. >> Great news out there. Thanks for coming out, appreciate it. Good to see you.>> Good to see you. >> Alright, breakingdown day one coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. Day two starts tomorrow. Three days of wall towall coverage of KubeCon. And they're shutting down the hall. Be right back and see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching. (techy music)

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

(techno music) [Narrator]- Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to the CUBE live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian, in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Chris Scott, Managing Director, Accenture AWS Business Group and J.C. Novoa, Senior Manager, Accenture AWS Business Group. Chris, J.C., thank you much for coming on the show. >> No problem. Thank you Rebecca for having us here. >> So we're talking today about the call center transformation. And I'm excited about it as a customer who loathes call centers. So Chris, why don't you paint the picture for us right now of what a call center looks like, the customer experience, and then also the business experience too? >> Absolutely. Thanks again for having us here. We're really excited to talk about Amazon Connect. I think it's one of the services in Amazon that everyone, as you were saying, can really identify with 'cause they've all been through that kind of customer experience before. So I think what's really interesting about contact center is that it really hasn't dramatically changed last ten or fifteen years. It's all kind of the same, kind of phone tree type conversations. So I think there's a few companies that do it a little bit better but still it hasn't really radically changed over the last ten or fifteen years. And I think Amazon's really playing in that space of disruption, in really thinking how can we do something different in the contact center. So I think there's a lot of challenges that we see with contact centers today. They're not scalable, right? And a lot of representatives spend 90% of their day handling inbound calls. And that's just not scalable. You can't train people up to address that. Also there's an issue with reporting. You don't get as much data about the customer experience. When they call you you don't understand their intent and what happened and how you improve in the process for the next round. And then, I think another big challenge they have is the solutions for contact centers are very complex. And it takes a lot of time to address and change those solutions. So you amass a lot of technical debt over the years of operating this 'cause you can't make those changes that you really want to. So I think Amazon is really playing in the space, like I said, in disruption, in really creating the better customer experience. >> Not only creating that but making it easier making it more human, to some extent Enabling customers to kind of peer behind the green veil and say you know what? This is not that difficult. You should be able to implement something like Amazon connect, which is a contact center as a service. And not have to worry about infrastructure, not have to worry about all the details and the minutiae that goes into actually making that happen and then be able to innovate immediately. Being able to introduce additional artificial intelligence to make that contact center experience more human. Again, to be able to introduce natural language processing and understanding, and then all these capabilities out of the box are able to be integrated with Amazon Connect in a way that improves that, and then additionally increase containment from their perspective of dedicating live agent interactions for things that matter. And then automating some of the activities that are more Q&A, FAQ type of things that can be addressed by a machine in a manner that makes it more understandable by the person that is calling. So that's kind of where we're going here with Amazon Connect. >> I want to dig into some of those features and capabilities because what you're describing is making me excited about the next time I need to call a contact center. So explain exactly how this will work for a customer who calls up. What will happen and then what's sort of happening behind the scenes with the technology? >> So when a customer calls, the idea will be to try to first identify the intent, as Chris was mentioning. What are they calling for? And then be able to identify who they are. Maybe there were interactions that were happening in different channels. These are some of the things that Amazon Connect provides, which is a mechanism for our clients to experience Omni channel and kind of graduate across experiences for their client. Being able to leverage that is important. >> Yeah, Omni channel. I don't think I can underscore the importance of that enough. Because it's all about interacting with a system and a business the way you want to interact with them. Some folks want to be able to call up and have a conversation with an agent, but others want more rapid response. Maybe using a chatbot, or even moving between all of those different channels within the same conversations. When we work with a client, for instance Utility, in order to pick a date to schedule service, it's a lot easier to get a text message, go to a web site, pull up the little calendar and choose your date rather than the representative giving you ten options and you're thinking which one works best for you. And then you're also feeling I've got to rush because this person needs to move on to the next customer. So this Omni channel thing really creates a much, much better experience for the user. >> And Amazon Connect kind of enables that, in a sense. It's our entry point for that Omni channel experience. >> So describe for me how Accenture works with clients implementing Amazon Connect. >> Yes, normally we want to be able to understand what the client's needs is, and understand their customer base. So we go through the process of identifying what that use case looks like. How do we then determine what are the different channels that they want to leverage initially? How do we help them graduate to the full Omni channel experience, one channel at a time? We conduct these workshops, we identify what is the current need. How do we ramp up, and how do we introduce Amazon Connect? Chris will tell us a little bit about the... >> Yeah, great example, and I believe you're speaking with them a little bit, Rebecca, is Mutual of Omaha. Great client that we've worked with, and actually doing a break out session here at re:Invent to talk about their journey out to Amazon Connect. They really started with, you know the problem statement is they wanted to improve their customer engagement. They wanted to retain customers, they wanted to establish new customers and sell new services to their existing customers. And they said the best way for us to do this is to improve our customer engagement through our contact center. So they went about in the market, looked at all the different solutions, looked at their existing solution and they said Amazon is the platform we want to use. We want to innovate on Amazon. It provides us a lot better features, that Omni channel experience. And that's let to better customer engagement, it's led to better tools for the agents, and world leading computer response and machine learning through Amazon. And an overall better experience. Because now they can also get more metrics about what's going on, and they can tailor that and continue to improve their solution and respond to customers, and improve customer engagement. >> So I'm curious though, starting with the business problem, which is Mutual of Omaha, they said we want to do better by our current customers and then also attract new ones. Retract and retain. So is that where you like, is that the starting point in terms of how you start to work with clients? >> That was their starting point. And they said "We found a solution, and that's Amazon. "Now we need to find a partner "that's going to help us with that transformation." And that's when they selected Accenture to help them with the journey. >> But starting with the question... >> Correct, absolutely. They want to understand, a couple of things; they want to be able to innovate, but they also want to be able to provide this excellent customer experience. And what has happened thus far is the current offerings that they have in place are on premise, they're not reliable. They're not scalable and they're costly. At the end of the day, a lot of this actually hits their bottom line. But the reality is that they want to be able to delight their customers. And be able to provide channels that eventually are going to grow with their customer base. Because if you think about it today, that customer is going to expect more of these interactions to follow them through their day. In the morning they might be able to talk to a device. While in the car they might want to talk to a live agent, but when they're at the office they might want to be able to chat with someone. And that kind of day in the life of a customer is what we're actually trying to help our clients solution. >> Also to your point, the folks that are interested in Connect are no longer just I.T. and AWS. It's now the business wanting to engage with AWS in really understanding this new solution. So I think this is a game changer in how Amazon interacts with businesses. 'Cause now it's the business users that are buying, not just I.T. >> And it's those decision makers who are ultimately... talk a little bit about who you go to in terms of... is it the CIO, is it the CTO, about the business decision, and what kind of ROI these folks want to see. >> I think it's a little bit of both, and there's a client that you've been working with, J.C., that's kind of been on this journey. We've started with them, they're looking to expand their business and for that new business expansion, they were looking to have a new solution for their contact center. So we started selling to I.T., because that was the main buyer. But after I.T. heard about, wow, these are all the cool things that we can do, here's how we can improve our customer engagement. We went to the head of customer service for this company, and they were blown away by the capabilities. They said wow, this is really a platform that we can innovate on. It changes. >> And the beauty about that is that those synergies actually is something that we brought together. They themselves were not talking to each other, within the company. So how they can help each other. But the reality is the customer experience relies on data and all these workloads that were helping I.T. move to the cloud actually going to power Amazon Connect and create this more human and natural experience to their customers. So that's kind of the end game here. >> So when you are bringing this new technology to these companies, how hard is it, how big of a challenge is it to get the workforce onboard. (laughter) In some ways the technology's the easy part. >> It is, but I don't think it's all that difficult because people are really excited about doing something different. As I said, this space in contact center hasn't really radically changed in ten to fifteen years, so now folks are saying wait, I can do that? And it doesn't take me three months to do it? I can have what I want next week? That's a game changer, I think that that's what's really getting people excited. And that's why the folks in the business want to work with us to implement Connect. Yes, of course there is change management, which I understand. There's folks that are going to push back, and we understand that. But the reality is at the end of the day, we have the buy in from the executive team in these companies that we're working with and they understand the value. And at the end of the day they help us drive change. Operationally is very much something that we're doing with them, together as a journey, but at the end of the day we're also working with the individual stakeholders within the company, actually to deliver. So we're taking them there. >> Final question. What is the most exciting thing that you're seeing, you're thinking about innovating on for the contact center of the future? What will it be like? >> Artificial Intelligence. >> Yeah, absolutely. If you think about how that conversation is going to happen in the future, you're not going to know whether you're talking to a human or you're talking to a machine, and if we can achieve that, then I think we are getting there. So that's what I see. >> Absolutely. It's understanding customer intent, and being able to intelligently route someone to the right place, without even knowing necessarily why they're calling, or having to tell the agent what they're trying to do. We know why they're calling. Maybe they had a billing issue in the past. So we know that ahead of time, and we can address that proactively in a conversation. >> Great. Well Chris and J.C., thank you both so much for coming on the CUBE. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll have more from the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin and I have with me a cube alumni back, please. Welcome Scott Mullins, the worldwide financial services business development leader at AWS. Scott. Welcome back. Great to have you joining us, >>Lisa. It's great to be back on the cube and to be visiting with you today from virtual re-invent 2020. >>Yes. Reinventing reinvent. The last show that I got to host in-person for the cube was reinvent last year. And here we have this three week virtual event that started last week. So lots more even going on. I think I even saw a hundred thousand or so registered, so massive event, lots of news. So walk us through some of the highlights that have been announced at reinvent this year and some of the things that you're seeing the most interest from customers in. >>Well, I think one of the big highlights is 500,000 registrants that are reinvented 50,000 attendees last year to reinvent or 50,000 or so to 500,000 re registered for the event. So that's, that's, that's worth talking about in its own. Right. But I think, you know, one of the things, and you mentioned this, you know, more re-invent three weeks, uh, this year, as opposed to the four days that we normally spend in Las Vegas together, physically, when you do, when you do it digitally, you have the ability to actually include more things and more leaders talking about things. And so when we think about the announcements that are having impacts, uh, with financial services customers specifically I'd point to a couple of things and, you know, they're obviously gonna mention Andy's keynote, but there's going to be some things that you might go wait a minute. >>I didn't even see that announcement. Uh, and then maybe I could point you and the viewers to some other, other, um, keynotes or some other sessions that were announced. So obviously I think, uh, first and foremost in Andy's keynote, uh, hybrid, uh, was something that was a very, uh, big focus for him and I for a very long time, we've had the messaging of the right tool for the right job when it comes to any of your services. I think you could alter that today to say it's the right tool for the right job at the right time and in the right place. That makes sense for you and especially for financial institutions. Um, you could look at the announcements around containers, the announcements around Amazon EKS, distro, Amazon EKS, anywhere, and then also Amazon ECS anywhere, which allows our customers to actually, uh, put AWS container technology anywhere they would like to put it. >>You could look also at the additions of the one you and two you form factors to outposts. So no longer do you have to do the, the, the large for you, uh, foreign factor for outposts, smaller outposts for smaller spaces, uh, that particular will play well in the financial service industry. You may not have necessarily as much room for a full cabinet. You could also look from the hybrid perspective in the announcement we made, um, around red hat OpenShift on AWS, all of are giving customers the ability to choose how they actually want to deploy, um, and pursue a hybrid. I'd also point to some announcements we made around management and governance in the financial services, industry governance, uh, is a very important topic. Uh, we announced the management and government lens for the AWS well architected, um, uh, program, uh, that is focused on breath practices for evolving governance for the cloud. >>It has recommended combination of AWS services integrations with our partner network and vetted reference architectures and guidance for addressing regulatory obligations as well. I'd also point to some things we made around audits. I was specifically in Steve Smith's, um, session today, he talked about AWS audit manager. That's a new tool for continually assessing areas and environments for controls or risk compliance. That includes prebuilt compliance frameworks for things like PCI DSS and GDPR, uh, two things that are very important in the financial services industry and last, but certainly not least I'd point to the announcement around the AWS audit Academy. This is training for auditors to actually be able to audit clouds from an agnostic perspective. Any cloud, not specifically AWS that's tree, uh, digital training to do that. And then also an instructor led course specifically on how to audit AWS. So some very key announcements, both from the standpoint of services, uh, as well as additional layers of helping customers in the financial services industry in regulated industries actually use our services. >>So typical, re-invent typical in a lot of news, a lot of announcements, the 500,000 Mark in terms of registering. I hadn't heard that. That's amazing. Let's talk that this has been an Andy. Jassy had an exclusive with John furrier just a couple of weeks ago before. I think it was last week, actually. And we've been talking about this acceleration of digital business transformation because of COVID we've been talking about it, the entire pandemic on the virtual cube, talking about how companies it's really about right now, surviving and thriving to be able to go forward and companies that haven't accelerated are probably in some trouble. Talk to me about how AWS has been working with your financial services customers to help them pivot and move to the cloud faster, really to not just help them survive now, but thrive in the long-term. >>Yeah. Immediately when COVID hit and it hit at different times in different, in different parts of the world. Immediately when COVID hit, we saw the conversation that we were having turning from, Hey, what's my digital strategy to immediately, what are my digital capabilities? And what that really means is what do I have the ability to do tomorrow? Because tomorrow is going to really matter. I don't have necessarily the time to plan for the next several quarters or the next several years, what can I do tomorrow to, um, really, uh, support my, my own workforce and support my own customers and the obligations I have as a financial institution. The first thing we saw people do was to try and make sure that those who financial services work can work. You can look at the adoption of Amazon workspaces, as well as our, uh, Amazon connect, uh, call centers as a service. >>As two examples there at the RBL bank in India was able to move to Amazon workspaces in just 10 days to enable its teams to actually work remotely from home. When they couldn't come into the office, you can look at Barclays. Barclays is actually a presenter at re-invent this year. They'll have a session on how they use Amazon connect, which again is our call center as a service offering to enable 25,000 contacts and our agents to work from home when they can no longer work out of the, out of their traditional contact center. The second thing we saw a financial institutions joining was making sure that customer engagements could still be meaningful when digital was the only option, um, specifically here in the U S you could look at the work that each of us did with FinTech companies like biz two X or fins Zack, or BlueVine Stripe and cabbage in support of the care act in the U S you might remember that the cares act, um, hasn't provisions for funding for small businesses. >>This small business administration had a program called the paycheck protection program, and those organizations were active in providing funding, uh, to small businesses. Uh, through that program. I'll give you an example of cabbage cabbage had previously not been an SBA lender, um, but they were able to, in two weeks build a fully automated system for small businesses to access PPP funding using Amazon text track, to extract information from documentation that those folks submitted to get alone. That reduced approval times from multiple days to about a median of four hours to actually get approval, to get funding through the PPP program. And then just four months cabbage became the second largest PPP lender. They lent over $7 billion in funding, which was twice the amount of funding that they went last year in 2019 loans. So we were happy to support organizations like cabbage and those other FinTech companies, as they help small businesses in the U S get access to funding, uh, during this critical time. >>And as we know, as you said, critical time, but really life or death for a lot of businesses. And as we continue to go through these ways, but it's interesting that you talked about that the speed of facilitation that during such unprecedented times, AWS and this massive machine was able to continue moving at full speed ahead and helping those customers to pivot. You talked about the cloud connect. I had a conversation with a guest on the queue last week about that. And, and I now think about if I have to call in a contact center and that person might be from home. So, you know, we're fortunate that the cloud computing technology and people like you and AWS, or are able to power that because it's, it's literally essential, which is probably one of the words of the year, but being able to keep the machinery going and innovate at the same time has been, make or break for a lot of businesses. >>Absolutely. And you, you look at, you know, kind of one of the last year is that I'll point to is, um, financial institutions. Uh, anti-virus, we're were very much focused on making sure that that cannot fail, that they scaled. And so you can look at the work we did with, uh, with the, with FINRA FINRA is the primary capital markets regulator here in the U S and on a daily basis frame or processes about 400 billion market events on every night to do surveillance on our markets, that when COVID hit, we had unprecedented volume and volatility in the market. And FINRA was, was, um, looking at processing, uh, anywhere from two to three times, their normal daily market volumes that's anywhere from 800 billion market events to 1.2 trillion a night. And if you look at how they were able to scale, they're actually able to scale up compute resources in AWS. We're on a nightly basis. They're able to automatically turn on and off up to a hundred thousand compute nodes in a single day. That automatic ability to scale is, is the power you're talking about. Being able to actually turn things up when you needed it and turn things down when you, when you don't need it based on the volumes. >>Well, and that's going to be something key going forward. As we know that there will be one thing I think that I always say we can count on right now is uncertainty and continued uncertainty, but we've also seen I'm calling them COVID catalysts. You know, the, what you talked about with cabbage, for example, and how that business pivoted quickly, because of the power of cloud computing and emerging technologies, what are some of the things that you think as we go into 2021 in the financial services arena, what are some of the big tech trends that you think were maybe born during COVID that are going to be critical going forward? >>Well, you know, you, you, you had Melanie Frank from capital one on cube a couple of days ago, and she was talking about, you know, their shift to cloud and what that's really enabled, and it, and she kind of sums it up nicely. She says, look, we want to give our customers experience that are real time, and that are intelligent. And you just can't do that with legacy technology. That's sitting in, you know, kind of a legacy data center. And so I think that's going to be kind of the, the, the all encompassing statement for what's happening in the financial services industry. As I mentioned, you know, organizations overnight said, okay, wait a minute, let's take that strategy. And then let's put it aside. Let's talk about capabilities. What can we do? And I think, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. Um, and when you're faced with limitations and challenges, like we all have been faced with around the world and not just in the financial services industry, it, it breeds, um, invention and the, and the desire and the need to actually meet those challenges head on, in very engineered of ways. >>And I think you're going to see more invention and specifically more invention from the established players in the financial services industry. Cloud use is not just experimental on the edges anymore. You're going to see more organizations coming out of COVID. Um, having had those experiences where they actually stood up a context center and scaled it. And, and just a matter of a few days to, to thousands of agents, you're going to find, um, organizations saying, wait a minute, we, we can do remote work. We could, we have access to things like Amazon workspaces. So I think you're, you're gonna, you're going to see that, uh, be a, be a trend. I think you're also gonna see, um, w what Lori beer said in the keynote with Andy, you know, she, she made a very, very astute statement, and I don't know if people caught it, cause it's kind of neat in the middle of her conversation. >>She said, look, we're trying to infuse analytics into everything that we do at JP Morgan. I think you're going to see more and more financial institutions looking to do that, to actually leverage the power of analytics, to power everything we do as a financial institution. So I think those, those are a couple of things that you're going to see. Um, and then, you know, looking, uh, you know, kind of around the corner, I think you're going to continue to see more re-invention within the industry. And what I mean by that is you've seen many financial institutions over the last week, uh, with, uh, re-invent making announcements, you saw bank and we towel saying, Hey, look, we are completely transforming ourselves with AWS. Uh, just a few weeks before we even saw standard charter, the same thing HSBC said, the same thing, global payments earlier in the year said the same thing. And you're going to see more and more organizations coming out and talking about these strategic decisions to reinvent everything that they do to make the financial systems of the world work. And so we're really pleased to be partnering with those organizations to make those transformations possible. We're seeing a lot of invention within the industry, and we're very pleased to be a part of the reinvention of the financial systems around the world. >>It's interesting to hear that you, you see, even the JP Morgan, some of those legacy, big houses are going to be really pivoting. They have to, to be competitive and to be able to utilize analytics, to deliver those real-time services. Because as we all know, as consumers, our patients is wearing thin these days, but I agree with you. I think there's a lot of opportunity there that innovation is exciting and there will have to be reinvention of entire industries, but I think there's a lot of silver linings there. Scott. I wish we had more time, cause I know we could keep talking, but thank you for sharing your insights on this reinvented reinvent this year. >>I appreciate it. Thank you, Lisa. It's always a pleasure to be on the cube. >>Chris Scott Mullins, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.