>> Woman: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector awards for the award of best migration solution. I'm your host Natalie Erlich and now we're joined by very special guests. We have Omer Enaam, application modernization leader at Deloitte Consulting and Bart Mason, technology lead for the Office of Recovery Services at the Utah Department of Human Services. Welcome, gentlemen. Good to have you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Well, terrific. I'd love to hear more about your migration from mainframe to AWS. Bart. Let's start with you. >> The state of Utah has a mainframe system and we have our child support application that was first developed in 1996 on the mainframe written in COBOL. The application served us well through the 24 years that we had it running on the mainframe. The issue was that the mainframe, it was getting difficult to find people who knew how to program in COBOL. But the biggest problems were any type of modernization. We were pretty much stuck to using what are called green screens, and there was no real easy way to do any type of modernization. And a lot of our applications that were public-facing or employee-facing, a lot of those web applications had to be written in a separate system and set up to connect and talk to the mainframe system. So it was a system that served us well but it was time to try and figure out what are we going to do about this? Because the mainframe was expensive and it was old technology that didn't let us advance to where we wanted to go in the future. So roughly about 2016, we started to investigate what are the possible ways that we can migrate our child support application off the mainframe. And we went through discussion such as a complete rewrite where we would start from the very beginning and rewrite our child support application. The child support application is a case management and an accounting system. And if we would have done a total rewrite we were told it would be upwards of $200 million to do a complete rewrite. We started looking at other possibilities and came across one possibility, and that is to do a migration off of the mainframe into the cloud. It would be a pre-session where we could do a lift and shift and basically take the code, change it into Java, and put it into the cloud running in EC2 instances. So it was an, we called it an intermediate step to modernization because it would get us one step to where we need to do, or where we need to go. And for modernization, it helps us to, since the program that it was, or the language it was migrated to was Java it made it so that we could do modernization. And we decided that if we did a lift and shift from the mainframe to AWS, that we could modernize at our own pace, we could modernize screen by screen or function by function. So it gave us the ability to control roll-outs and getting our application to where we needed to be. >> Terrific. And Omer, I'd love it if you could weigh in as well. What were, what was the support that you provided towards this migration? >> Yeah, of course. So as Bart pointed out, the state was looking for a approach that had high chance of success, high probability of user adoption with minimal impact to the organization. At the same time, have the ability to for the state to maintain and modernize at their own pace. So we work with Bart and explain to him a few options. And one of the options was using a automated coding data conversion approach where we take legacy programming languages like COBOL and convert them into Java. Just like translating the code from one language to another. And in the process, we guarantee that your your new system will work exactly. It will be functionally equal of what you do currently. And at the same time, it minimizes the risk. And it also allows the state to have no issues with their business continuity and additional training for their staff. So in a nutshell, we brought in a solution demonstrated to Bart and team and they bought into that, the idea that this is exactly what they want to do as a first step. And as we speak, we are working with the state to help them take that system in the cloud to the next level. Now we have unlocked the potential of digital transformation. Bart can build mobile apps in front of that application. That the state can. There are new analytics capabilities for that their employees can be more productive in providing services to the citizen. They can implement native capabilities from AWS to implement a process automation, implement some artificial intelligence-based tools to optimize the processes and make life easy and better for the employees, at the same time more importantly, serve the citizens in a better way. >> Mhm. And Bart I'd love it If you could share some further details on some of the considerations that you had such as risk and whether it could be used later in the future. >> The biggest thing, the biggest risk to us was that if we, as we migrated off the mainframe, there's a risk that we have to recertify our system with the Office of Child Support Enforcement in Washington, DC. When we build a system, the child support system, we're required to have them come in and do a assessment of our application and certify that it is an application that can be used for child support. If we would have done a rebuild from scratch, the risk would be that first a rebuild, from what we've seen can take anywhere from five to 10 years. I've already touched on how expensive it is, but it takes up to five or what we've seen, up to 10 years to do a complete rewrite. And the risk for us was that if we did a complete rewrite, we would still be on the mainframe for quite a long time. And we would have to have our system recertified with OCSE. And that can take anywhere from five to 10 years for a recertification too, so the risk was that if we did anything with the complete rewrites it would be several, several years going through rewrites and recertifications to get our system up and running in AWS. And the other problem would be that taking that amount of time would also, it would bring us probably not up to date with the current technologies as we did our rewrite because we'd be focused on rewriting that application and not taking advantages of services and applications that come up and can help us with our rewrites. So one of the biggest risks was that we'd have to do recertification with OCSE, With the migration, coming off the migration because it is a one for one migration where it went from COBOL to Java, we did not have to do a recertification. This allowed us to move the application as is and it functioned the exact same way that recertification was not a problem for us. OCSE said that, told us that it was not a risk or an issue that we'd have to take on. So the biggest risk was recertification for us but with the migration and moving into the cloud we went through their security processes and we came out without any big issues coming out of that. >> Fantastic. Thank you. Omer. I'd love to go to you now. What are some of the unique benefits of working with AWS? >> Sure. I think the biggest benefit is there, the extensive services that are available and having the the proven platform where you cut down your operational costs drastically. So comparing the mainframe costs with the Amazon cloud costs. Clearly the state has benefited a lot from the from a savings standpoint, infrastructure savings standpoint, and at the same time now, as I said, the the system is in the cloud, running on open architecture in the Java programming language, The AWS cloud provides us several capabilities natively which allows the state to use, to digitally transform the experience for the citizens and employees by implementing modern DevOps practices for for managing the, operating the system providing new capabilities to workers and supervisors for analytics to business process automation, having better call center integration capabilities and so forth. So there are endless opportunities. And the state is in the process of executing on a prioritized list Just before the pandemic hit, we worked with the state to lay out the future for their system and for their organization in the form of a one day innovation lab, where major stakeholders from the state gathered with Deloitte and we worked through a prioritization process and determined how we can take this system to the next level and really digitally transform the system and in the process, provide new services and better services to state employees and the citizens. >> Yeah. Terrific insight there. Now Bart, I'd like to shift it to you, asking the same question. What are your thoughts on working with AWS? Why choose them for this? >> We always have been looking at moving a lot of our applications into the cloud. We've been looking at that for several years. The advantages of moving to AWS is, from my point of view, and state's point of view, is that AWS provides a lot of services and it provides the capability for us to do a lot more for our applications. So for example, when we were on the mainframe, one of the biggest problems that we had was disaster recovery. We had a disaster recovery site in the Southern end of our states with another mainframe that we would sync up with our application. The problem was that we have over a hundred data connections. We connect to banks, external entities, internal entities. We have different types of connections. We have to do printing. We have to print checks and several things. Disaster recovery on the mainframe was something that we were never really capable of doing. We could get our application up and running but it just sat on the mainframe. We had no data connections, all that was extremely difficult and extremely expensive to do for disaster recovery on a mainframe and on alternate sites. Moving to AWS, one of the biggest things for us was that disaster recovery requirement. Because now that we're in AWS, it makes it more easier for us to spin up servers once servers go down, restore servers when they go down. We have all of our data connections in one location, and as systems become unrecoverable or have issues, it's easy for us to spin up another one or several in their place, or even our data connection, because they're all located in one place and we're using them all of the time. So disaster recovery was one of the big key components for us. The other component was that, as we modernize our application, we're looking at what AWS services are out there to help us with modernization. We're looking at services such as AWS Batch to replace our batch system. We're looking at databases to replace the current database that we're using. We're looking at using containers to containerize our applications and our ORSIS application, and also microservices. So moving off the mainframe was the first step and putting it all into servers on an EC2 instance. But then we look and say, okay, how can we do this and make this more modern and run better and more efficient? And then we started looking at all the AWS services that are out there, that run outside of an EC2 instance, for example. And we see that there's an endless possibility, and endless capabilities that we have at our fingertips to say, okay, we're off the mainframe less modernize by moving to Batch or let's start looking at containers and things like that to help us with our applications. So disaster recovery and the available services that we can move to to help us with our applications, what we look at. >> Well, thank you both so much for your insights, Bart Mason, Utah Department of Human Services as well as Omer Enaam, Deloitte Consulting and LLP. I'm your host for theCUBE. Thanks so much for watching. (outro music)

>>from around the globe. It's >>The Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM Well hi everybody john Wallace here on the cube. Thanks for joining us here. As we continue our initiative of IBM think a chance to look at what IBM thinks in terms of infrastructure, we're talking to you about a hybrid cloud kind of the new trend. The thought that's going to the hybrid cloud, what's the future look like and help us cover that waterfront. A couple of experts from Deloitte Terry Cobb, the IBM Alliance lead at Deloitte Terry. Thank you for joining us. We look forward to this time together. >>Thank you so much for having me. You >>bet. And also introduced Dave Knight quickly, your colleague who is a senior solution architect and IBM Alliance cloud leader at Deloitte. Dave good to see you as well. Thanks for being with us. >>Thanks for having me. >>Alright, so maybe it's just for the two of you set the table for our viewers here in terms of your specific roles of delight. I talked about IBM and your connections there, but in terms of what you're doing there, how you work together and ultimately what kind of service you're trying to provide your clients terry? Why don't you jump on that first? >>Sure. So I've been with Deloitte for 16 years, I believe, maybe a little longer and focusing on the IBM like our strategic partnership. Um and so what that means is I work day in day out with our practitioners to identify and understand where our clients what are some of the critical business needs. And so I work with are leaders and and collaborate with IBM and we we look for ways to solve really unique critical business issues. Um and so part of my my background, so I've come from, you know, at my 30 year background and strategy management consulting. So it's really exciting. I get to use my uh consulting skills, my strategy skills to, you know, look at where we are in the market, what's what's happening in the market because that's a great example. There was a huge impact on how businesses, you know, work, how they work differently and how they handle their workforce. So it was a very interesting time. And and so bringing these two great firms together to solve some of these critical business issues. As for me, it's, you know, it's it's critical and it has a positive impact on, you know, for our clients. >>All right, dave from your side of the fence. >>Yeah. So um I sit in a similar place within the firm. I actually joined the last century. I've been with the firm for 21 years, so uh in a variety of roles, but all with with sort of a technical last solution architecture um, slant. Right, So, so just like Terry mentioned in the alliance function, we try to find opportunities to work together specifically between IBM and the Deloitte, you know, go to market services, uh my role as a solution architect and then as the cloud lead is to make sure that we've got the right mix of technology that we solve the client's problems uh efficiently and cost effectively. Uh and then, you know, sort of translate those, those business problems into technical solutions and then those technical solutions back into business solutions. So the business sees the value and its valuable not only for Deloitte from the services perspective, but also for IBM. >>He just almost just blew me away when you said you've been there since the last century. I haven't heard it quite put that way. And it's really that was really good, uh >>1999, to be fair, but still, it >>certainly implies a lot of experience. That's for sure. That's it. But that was really, that was a unique twist. So, kudos to you, let's talk about your client's first a little bit. So you talk about problems and we're talking about obviously technology and deployments and what capabilities are. So today, right. You've got on primary got off Premier, you've got private cloud, you've got public cloud, you've got edge technologies, you've got this really just this maelstrom basically of opportunity, but also confusion a little bit right? Um with different kinds of capabilities, different kinds of challenges. So Dave if you would, you know, let's look at it from the macro level then, in terms of how you start dissecting these kinds of decisions that the, the C T O. S and with your within your client list have to make and and how you help them chart their course in terms of determining priorities and what the right steps are for them to take. >>Okay. So I mean you sort of summarized my points actually quite nicely. We we help customers find their path, what's there, right approach to their digital transformation journey. Um We do have assets that help them, you know identify workloads where they might might run the best. Um We certainly have approaches and experience in the market having done this for for years. Uh you know it's the number one cloud professional services firm globally. We we we've garnered a lot of experience working with customers again helping among this journey. Um What we've learned is that one size does not fit all. Um Clearly cloud and more specifically public cloud is a game changer. It's here to stay, but it's not necessarily the right answer for every workload for every customer even. Um And so what we're starting to see is is a shift towards hybrid discussions and hybrid architecture discussions. Um and just as a quick, very simple example, um you wouldn't go purchase a mainframe to be a web server, right, That's that's significant overkill. And similarly, um the cloud is great for its, you know, capacity and and all the things that come with an economics, that sort of thing, but it's not necessarily the best platform for a credit card clearing house. Right. The transactional volume is simply too great. Right? So, um and that sort of very simplified example. Hybrid we think is the answer. And we're seeing lots of customers now that they've shifted a lot of their workloads to cloud that our cloud suitable. Um starting to ask us the more difficult questions, right, the core of my business, it's a high risk move. Can you help me sort this out? And in many cases the answer is don't move it, it's too extended at the edge. It's to augment it with cloud technologies such as AI and and enhance your service rather than replace it or move it to a different location. >>So you recently published a report that you did the mainframe market poll survey where you're looking at really, I guess migration plans or an appetite right to make these evolutions to, to to explore this hybrid cloud model that you've already detailed for us. Um, give me an idea if you would and our our viewers an idea a little bit about some of the key summaries of that in terms of what the appetite is for that, what the desires are, you know, are we ready to cut the court on the mainframe and let it go? Is there too much involved? We want to hang on. Um, you know, what's kind of, what's the mood out there right now? >>Yes, so we, we commissioned the double blind survey, we had a belief that we really wanted to explore it further, um, and that belief was, you know, a little tongue in cheek. The death of the mainframe is greatly over exaggerated. Um, and so again, this double blind survey, we commissioned it and, and we, we found a lot of interesting results. First and foremost, um, the mainframe for many customers is not going away. The vast majority of our survey respondents uh, indicated that was the case. Um, there was a couple of other interesting to, that's that, that we, we found in the results as well. Um uh, the first one is this isn't just a technology issue um It's a human capital um issue as well with the aging workforce. Um You know, mainframe not being quite as sexy in the age of java but coming back to IBM investments in the platform. Um And then another key point that we we found was security continues to be a key concern of business I. T. Uh and business, you know, owners. Um and that mainframe is seen as is the pillar of security sort of, they hold it up as sort of the example of security in the industry. Um Another interesting too that we found was that Um you know, one specific question asked about future growth plans and um over just under 60%. So over half answered three questions um that most people would think are at odds with each other and that is you know, are you expanding your mainframe? Over 60 said Yes. Um, are you advancing into cloud? Just under 60 said yes. And then there was a hybrid question which over half said they were going to look at hybrid. So that sort of marriage of mainframe and cloud in a hybrid way was an interesting thing that we weren't exactly expecting, but still quite interesting to explore. >>So >>when >>you hear this right about these, I mean not conflicting, but certainly, you know, interesting of uh survey findings, um, what do you make of that? What what are you, how are you reading those tea leaves a little bit about what people are saying about not ready to leave, but yet they're interested. And and so the concerns that they've brought up about security, about the asian workforce, I mean, you know, a lot of challenging uh, positions here, they have to be considered for your clients. >>You know, for me it was very interesting and and I believe, you know, one of the reasons we launched the survey was really to find out what is really going on with our clients because we're hearing a lot of, you know, there's a lot of news around clients migrating all their all their applications, >>I say all >>to the cloud and but yet we were spending a lot of time with clients that had mainframes and we were solving some of their mainframe issues and so we we were a little confused, so that was part of the impetus from really getting out and enjoying market sensing and figure out what our clients really doing. And we didn't target, you know, the mainframe, you know, clients, we targeted main from clients but we didn't target mainframe users. We were looking at really the business users of the mainframe and the executives that have mainframes. And so we were, it was surprising to to get the information back and hear how important the mainframe, so us. Uh and and then when you start digging a bit deeper into, you know, what does cloud really mean? Your hybrid cloud comes to the surface and then you have people that have different meanings of hybrid cloud. So, really understanding what is hybrid cloud really mean and what does it mean for your business? And that's what we're solving today. It's like how do we how do we go to market around hybrid cloud and what benefits does it have work for our clients? >>Yeah, so, Dave yeah, to touch up on that, to follow up, I mean, so, how are you a Deloitte then taking these results and and kind of ingesting them and distilling them and deciding. All right, this is how we're going to define hybrid cloud perhaps. I mean, I don't know if that if that's a bold assumption, but I think you're probably trying to draw some parameters around it, Right? This is how our clients see it. So this is how we're gonna talk about it and then this is how we're going to take them on that journey. How instructive was this survey for that and actually what are you doing with it in terms of shaping your practice? >>Yeah, so it's a great question and it is driving um you know, not the survey by itself, but a lot of the market trends and including the surveys is driving um some reevaluation and refocusing quite frankly on on hybrid cloud um as an offering within the firm. Right? We we define hybrid cloud generally is, you know, seamless integration of data and applications across on and off premise. And with with the wave of five G that's coming at us, increasingly we're looking at architecture is that include edge uh into that that hybrid definition? Um you know, I've said this to a lot of folks uh for me, mainframe was the original cloud. So it's only natural that it should be part of solutions now. And what I mean by that is when it was released it was virtualized, it was virtually unlimited. Somebody else managed it for you. You you you you only paid for what you use. Those are all characteristics of the cloud as we know it today, but those were implemented in the 70s, the mainframe um and so, capturing those characteristics and newer technologies and then integrating those into architectures. I think it's going to be sort of the next wave of what we see in the industry and, and Deloitte is certainly positioning to help our customers on that journey. And >>before we sign off, I do want to touch on security issue again because you did bring it up a little bit earlier, but let's just talk about it holistically here, depending upon where you are, doesn't matter right edge on off private public. I mean security's gonna be first and foremost. And so what are you suggesting or what are you saying to your clients? You know, terry and dave on this. In terms of their security concerns, the awareness they have to have in that and the allocation of resources to make sure that, you know, whatever solutions they deploy, their their credible, they have integrity and and they're sustainable. So let's hit on security before we head out terry. If you don't mind jumping >>first, I'd like to address security. But even stepping back a little bit. So as clients for looking at moving applications to the cloud for hybrid cloud, it's really about, you know, making sure you have a strategy unless you address some of the underlying data infrastructure, you're gonna end up with you disparate data everywhere and you're not going to be able to, you're gonna have data silo issues, you're gonna have security issues. You also have complex architectural issues. So, you know, some of the work that we're doing with IBM and internally with our firm is trying to help clients understand like you take a step back and really evaluate their business requirements and making sure that they and your dave can you found on this. But it's really making sure they have the right strategy in place to address, you know, their data, where the data sets, how to innovate some of these applications and of course security, security is a huge concern. We see that from all of our clients and needs to be on prem and secure. Mhm. >>Just a final word. >>Yeah. Thanks. Just to add on to that. Right. So security is absolutely critical. As terry mentioned. Having a strategy is absolutely critical and having security be integral to that strategy is equally critical. Um As you said, it's everywhere, cloud on prem on the edge. I would even go so far as to say, you know, in your personal life and your professional life, it should be as pervasive as we like to think it is. I think the reality is that maybe isn't but that's part of the job of architects like me, is to make sure that it gets built in at its core. It's not an afterthought, it's integral. I've got some fantastic technologies around that, specifically in the Z space. Um you don't wanna get too too wonky here, but you know, Phipps 1 40 dash to level four encryption, which is unique in the market. Um, you know, data privacy, passports, pervasive encryption, all these things. Um, interestingly enough live in the mainframe but extended ideas cloud and um from my perspective, I think it's one of the unique uh, connections intersections where mainframe could actually help drive the growth of cloud um, in that hybrid model and even getting into future looking things like home, um, or fixed encryption, there's a raft of technologies coming out of IBM um, that help us ensure we have, you know, secure transactions, secure hybrid architectures as you put our security everywhere. >>Well, you can get a little wonky. That's okay. David terry, thank you for the time today. We certainly appreciate it. And thanks for shining light on your work at Deloitte and of course, that partnership you have. It's working so well with IBM. Thank you both. >>Thanks for having us. >>All right. We've been talking about hybrid cloud, the future of a hybrid cloud and the mainframe and it ain't dead yet. All right. John Wallace. Thanks for joining us here on the cube.

(Upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE got two great guests from Deloitte Consulting Dave Knight who manages the Red Hat Relationship, Lee he's the lead there, and Mike Bourgeois who's the Public Sector Managing Director both from Deloitte Consulting LLP official name. Guys, great to come on, and we were just talking before camera about all the stories. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Like I said we were just talking about all the stories from the transition from pre-COVID, COVID. Now we've got a view into post-COVID. I want to dig into that 'cause there's a lot of things happening. You guys have been in the trenches, front lines bringing solutions, but before we get into that, can you guys just introduce yourself share your roles at Deloitte and give us a quick overview of what you work on. >> Yeah, so again, thanks for having us John Dave Knight I'm a solution architect and Global Red Hat Alliance Manager for Deloitte. I've got responsibility for making sure that play nicely in the sandbox together or we've got a joint customer and solutions to deliver to those customers. >> Hi everyone, thanks for having us John, I'm a Managing Director Mike Bushwa out of Boston Texas. I am coming up on year 20 and Public Sector Consulting. My area of expertise is large state government systems that serve the needs of millions of citizens and thousands of state workers, good to be here. >> Yeah. Great to have you. And I wanted to chime in with you right away because Mike you are living in probably one of the hottest markets Public Sector. I've been following that for many, many years, generations actually from the early computer industry GSA contracts, all these contracts you've got all the Public Sector, they move very slowly but now the pandemic, there was no place to hide. Everything got pulled back, disruption, you can't just shut down critical infrastructure and critical services. People had to move fast. What was your experience and how is it now give us a taste of some of the challenges and the landscape. >> You bet John, so we talked a little bit before we started this, but my 20 year consulting career, I can't think of anything really in close to this, other than maybe Y2K and as Dave mentioned the Affordable Care Act Legislation in 2009, though that was a much smaller scale as it turned out to be. So I would be remiss not to share examples of extraordinary challenges our clients have had related to the pandemic. Department of Labor and Health and Human Service Agencies for example, responded to the pandemic in rapid timeframe that were rarely seen in government. Citizens that were used to coming in appealed offices, We're now required to do most things virtually. Deloitte has been privileged to assist clients with digital solutions across the country in response to this unprecedented event. And so I'd like to share just a couple of examples. The first is for Department of Labor, the pandemic contributed to millions of layoffs throughout the country Department of Labor workers found called volumes increasing by a 1000% in some cases, the amount of increased volume required agencies across the country hire temporary workers to help out. Millions of new unemployment claims needed to be filed in benefits rapidly provided to citizens of name. So the big challenge was the agency had to figure out how to rapidly file claims into the unemployment system, rather than requiring new citizens to use an external web application they were really unfamiliar, the agency needed more efficient approach. The approach we used was to create an internal web application that enabled workers to file unemployment insurance claims on behalf of citizens. Workers collected the necessary data from citizens and claims were filed into the system. The application enabled workers to focus on filing claims rather than sort of a technical support role showing how to people use an external web application. More citizen were served in much less time, claims are filed efficiently by train workers which resulted in benefits being received in a much more timely fashion. And so a second example is, with Department of Human Services. So one stay as mentioned Citizens were used to going into field offices but suddenly they were told you can't come into the field office. So once they provided a 100% virtual application and the important part here is certification solution for the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or DSNAP for short. this application was stood up in two weeks, families who needed food assistance can now apply and be certified for benefits remotely. Today over 50,000 cases have certified and citizens receiving food nutrition assistance. Back to you John. >> So, I mean obviously there's some great use cases you got, basically I got to work at home, new architecture there you got to have a new workflows. I mean, this poses some real challenges. How did you guys put it together? I mean, Dave take us through where this all fits in with the Red Hat, because obviously now it's new deployment new capabilities have to be deployed for the pandemic. How does this bring together the partnership with Red Hat? >> Yeah, so great question and it really plays to the strength of both Deloitte and Red Hat, right? The success stories that Mike has illustrated show how we can quickly pivot as a firm to delivering these types of solutions and help our customers think through innovative ways to solve the problems. So, I mean the prime example that Mike just gave, everything used to be done in offices. Now it's all done remotely cause you can't go to the office even if you want to. And that is very much aligned with the innovation we get with our partnership with Red Hat, right? They've led the way in open source and some of the technologies that we've leveraged that our solutions include, answerable for automation, some of the middleware products, and I would say one of the cornerstones is the OpenShift Platform. Now that allows us to greatly accelerate the development and delivery of those solutions to our customers. Sort of again, aligning our innovative thinking with Red Hats Innovative Technologies. >> What would you say if someone said, "what's the partnership strengths and what needs specifically are you addressing with customers and customer needs?" >> So I, again, I think our lean towards innovation is a common thread across both firms and where we have our greatest strength. We like to take our customers on a journey but it's not our journey, it's their journey, right? So we help them figure out where they want to go and how they want to get there in a way that aligns with their business goals, their budgets all the sort of factors that drive those things and Red Hat is very open to that approach. They sort of invented the crowdsourcing of open source they made it into a business model. They've developed that from literally nothing. And that aligns very nicely with us. That's one of the key strengths. We also are firm believers in open source again to the degree that our customers like the leverage that to drive their journeys. And we're seeing that, especially in the Public Sector Space as being a key driver of the technologies they employ. >> Mike, I want to come back to you on this open ma component open question, open source, open to technology open innovation out in the open as Red Hat calls it. How does Red Hat open source software, address the needs for your customers for security and on-premise considerations. >> I'll talk a little bit about open source principles in general still the open source principles of transparency meritocracy community problem solving and collaboration. These are on its of both software innovation as well as organizational transformation. One of the highest demand transformation needs that I'm seeing in the market is the desire to adopt innovative technology, and most importantly, moving workloads to the cloud. It's no longer a thought, it is an imperative moving workloads to the cloud, on new deals hosted in the cloud, on an existing, is it large systems let Deloitte help us get to the cloud. So I believe the key to success embracing the cloud is recognizing first the need for change in people, processes and technology. The vehicle for this transformation is DevSecOps and innovative open source platforms, such as the OpenShift platform that Dave mentioned. OpenShift focuses on people, processes and technology and the security conversation becomes even easier. I mean, I see Linux was around for years, and we've always used Linux on our Java based workloads now we can have the conversation about saying, Hey, well that se Linux operating system we've been using for years now, there's this really cool Container Management Platform that we can solve real problems like auto scaling, in my Health and Human Services career, I can remember every year when open enrollment comes around systems engineers are teed up, and ready to manually add those to a BMR cluster or something like that. Well, now we don't have to do these things. We can rely on Kubernetes so auto scale, and then and get rid of those instances when workload demands seven resolved. So it's a really cool technology kind of behind the scenes. It's not the dog and pony show sometimes but in the end it helps the clients and Deloitte remain consistent with those service level agreements. >> That's a great example about the open enrollment illustrates the fact that, you got to provision more stuff to take that load on it. It's always hard in Public Sector you might not have the speed. So I got to follow up and ask you, you guys have had wins in the Public Sector lately with Red Hat, you guys Deloitte and Red Hat working together and get some wins under your belt, on around cloud and cloud and technology obviously with the pandemic has needs there. Are you guys seeing any particular sector challenges specifically around Public Sector as it goes this next level a lot of modernization happening we're seeing that, but any challenges that you're seeing, can you give some examples of how these challenges are being addressed? First talk about the challenges and then give some examples of how they're overcoming them. >> So I can jump in here with this one then, and Mike I think you probably have some maybe Public Sector specific examples, but one of the things that I think is common across all industries is resource constraints, right? And particularly as we look for human resources and not in the HR sense, but developers, CIS admins those types of resources as Mike said, the cloud is here to stay, right? And it's not something that people are thinking about it's de facto part of the conversation. And that's great, but it leads to silos of skills which puts further sort of strain on a limited pool of resources within most sites IT organization. So something like an OpenShift, something like an Ansible solves problems related to resource constraints, because they're skills that are portable across cloud environments, right? If you can manage OpenShift you can manage OpenShift on-prem, you can manage it recently released AWS version of that ROSA on the Azure version of that. So it's no matter where you're running it you've got a common set of skills and access sort of a force multiplier, same thing with Ansible automation, right? If you can write scripts, with an Ansible you can do those repeatable tasks in a much more efficient fashion. And again sort of multiplying the capacity of your existing workforce. >> So you've got an operating leverage there. I mean, this is what you're getting at is that, Public Sector and other commercial areas they kind of got to get used to this fact that, you get some leverage here, you get some operating leverage. >> More or less has always been a thing in IT. And it's not relenting that's for sure. >> It's been more at the more, with less has always been kind of a tagline for budget cuts, right? You can squeeze more out of the investment. Here it's kind of like do more with less than the sense of there's more net new things happening with leverage. So, I mean, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's more with less from a resource perspective, right? Typically it was budget, but no money is just another resource. Now we're getting into the personnel side of it. The other thing I would say is, something like an OpenShift Platform allows the Mike's point around DevOps, it allows the developers to develop, right? I have an article in wired.com about this, where developers are saddled with meetings and they have to become concerned with infrastructure and they have traditionally and security. And I am I doing all these things that aren't related to development. If you have a good DevOps Platform in place the security folks can build guard rails into the platform and the developers can just go develop which is what they want to do in the first place. Yeah exactly, that's another riff on the more, with less, again in a resource, the human resource way versus the budget way. >> Yeah, and that really is where OpenShift ties in. Mike what's your take on this? Because with this kind of program ability infrastructure as code DevSecOps kind of modern developers, Public Sector loves that, because they just want to build the new apps. They got to modernize. So change the infrastructure once. And then a lot of ma many benefits on top of it. It's almost like, it sounds like an operating system to me. >> Yeah, lots of thoughts going around my head right now but I'll say the more with less to me when I'm having client conversations is imagine a world of higher innovation, more technology at lower costs, right? I mean, so CIO is light up when I explained to them the orders of magnitude cost savings on top of the innovation introduced to their environment. So when moving workloads to the cloud is not as easy as just packaging up a binary and dropping in on a name, your cloud provider, right? There's an entire, a blueprinting strategy. There's a Cloud Native Architecture, modernization discussion, so we do those sorts of things, at Deloitte and we work with clients very closely to do that. I want to say teaming with Red Hat allows us to be proactive with our design and reference architecture validation. The Collaborative Partnership in Relationship allows us to connect senior engineers from Deloitte and Red Hat. So we have low level strategic discussions, we validate our assumptions and optimize to use a Red Hat technology. What we're doing in Public Sector is separating the monolithic application into layers. And whenever it comes to technologies like Ansible, like OpenShift, like Jenkins, all of these things that any application needs and Public Sector, we're saying out to the account teams across the country, look this is a slower layer DevOps Platform. And by the way, you can run any .Net or Java based workload on it. So we're trying to make opinionated reference architecture so that regardless of the solution, we can just go to market with that platform that tried and true production application. So I'll give a quick example John, if now's a convenient time regarding, well, one of the things that we've done for particular state client. >> Definitely yeah, give the use cases we love those. >> Yes so one of the impactful modernization that struck my mind was the State of Washington. They've mentioned the affordable care act earlier, there are two major things that came out of that. One was the eligibility and enrollment systems had to be modified across all 50 states. But the second thing and the primary driver behind the affordable care act was health insurance exchange. A way for millions of citizens to have access to healthcare using Subsidized Health Insurance Plans. So in Washington and health benefits exchange is that health insurance exchange, State of Washington has been a client of Deloitte since 2012. The solution was originally designed using closed source proprietary products. There are three drivers for change. The first is the API gateway was end of life and needed to be replaced. Number two was the client wanted it to move health benefit exchange to the cloud from an on-premise hosting arrangement. And third is reducing cost of those solution with innovative products. So the agency was looking for a platform that provided flexibility, auto-scaling and performance and lower cost of ownership. So we worked with the agency and we evaluated a variety of API Management and Integration Platforms after reviewing the outcomes for each proof of concept the agency decided to move forward with Red Hats, three skill API Management Platform, Red Hat Fuse for Integration and OpenShift Container Platform that offered the auto-scaling continuous integration tools and out of the box monitoring and reporting capabilities proactively monitor the health of the solution. I often describe a little bit of OpenShift as a data center or DevSecOps in the box. It just is all there. You don't need to add layers on top of OpenShift install and configure it, tune it and just you're off and running in a short amount of time. So three outcomes I'll mention, go ahead, John. >> NO continue, I thought you were finished. So on the outcomes side, the first outcome the agency substantially lower the cost of ownership using commercially supported open source while increasing access to innovative emerging technology. So the agency wanted a solution not only to meet their current needs, but extend the solution going forward. The beautiful thing about OpenShift is you can drop a container images into the platform without installing an operating system. It's all just there and it's spreading to be extended. The number two outcome cloud migration. Deloitte work collaboratively with the agencies and infrastructure and managed services team to successfully migrate the health benefit exchange to the cloud. And the last thing a bit obvious, but that's successful release, working collaboratively with our client. We were able to migrate the solution within 100 days from making the products decision. The cut over to the new solution was seamless with minimal downtime and zero production issues or exceptionally proud of that. >> Great stuff, great use case. And again, those are great business examples. Dave, I want to get this last question to you and Mike can chime in too. As Red Hat Summit evolves, and we're hearing the theme here at the event about transformation is the innovation, Innovation is about scale. When you hear the words like in a box or Hybrid Cloud you hear about an operating environment. So it's an opportunity to set the table for the next generation, this is what I see. What do you guys see as people talk about Hybrid Cloud and soon to be Multiple Cloud? Because you guys you said have tough relationships. You deal with IBM and Red Hat and you probably deal with other people. Clients want, from what we hear they want back to the Multi Vendor Open Connection Distributed Environment. That's what they want. So how does your relationship evolve, given all this is happening? How do you see the future, please chime in. >> Thanks, that's a fantastic question. I actually think the market is coming catching up to where I've been thinking for quite a while. And that is the Hybrid is kind of where it's at. A lot of customers have been in some sort of Hybrid mode as part of the step or a journey to the cloud, getting all the way to the cloud. But I think we're seeing some transition. I know customers are starting to ask me more and more about Hybrid solutions for a variety of reasons, right? The easy workloads for the most part have either been moved or be are being moved, or at least there's a strategy and a plan to get them moved. And now we're starting to be asked about some of the more difficult architecture type questions, right? The workloads that are a little bit more sticky to the on-premise model. And so Hybrid becoming more of the endpoint as opposed to a step along the journey. The other big thing is some repatriation, right? Workloads coming off of cloud. Maybe they seem like good candidates but for whatever reason, the cost drivers or other things weren't realized, let's get them back on premise. Maybe it's a regulatory thing and new regulations are making folks uncomfortable. So I see Hybrid as a pretty interesting next wave of cloud, Deloitte as a far or we're skilling up or tooling up in order to address the needs of our customers, again are starting to ask us these really challenging questions about Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures. >> Yeah and just the key point there is that you think about it like with the way you're discussing it, it's a platform, not a tool, right? So if you think about it like a platform then you can move things around and look at architectures and changes of how resources and workloads are deployed and then what data you're getting from it. Whether you bring it to a factory, for instance you say, Hey, okay, we're going to put it on prem because it's a factory or whatever, and you need more data. What was the changeover? This is like a day to operations kind of mindset. What's your comment on that? >> Well I mean I have actually going back three years now, one of the marketing lines that we developed internally, was moved to a platform, not a provider. But because you get that flexibility, now, the reality is what works stay where they're put for a variety of reasons. But I think one of those reasons could be, because they're put in places where they tend to not want to move, right? So if we could put them into a platform where, there is some portability built into the platform, I think we might have a different sort of outcomes for customers. And I think architecture is absolutely the key, right? That to me is the secret sauce here. >> Mike set up for you to close us out here, platform, Public Sector, Hybrid, that's what they want. It's an ideal scenario for anyone in Public Sector and in general, and why wouldn't you want to have a great platform that's it can be programmed, and rearchitected at will for the benefit of the business powered by software. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, all good points and I will agree with Dave that Hybrid is certainly evolving. Eight years ago, Hybrid was consuming and address validation API in the cloud and not custom coding that, but today I do agree that Hybrid Cloud is all about a vehicle a way of moving workloads across data centers. It's an architecture that is encapsulated by something like an OpenShift so that you can federate your workloads across data centers. You can put them in one or easily moved them to the other. Maybe that's for a variety of reasons. It could be compute and storage is being reduced by one provider versus the other. So the solutions were we're designing today, they are data center agnostic, we're not being tied to data centers anymore. The best design solutions, you can just let them move in their easy manner. So that that's my take on Hybrid Cloud. And I would say the and Red Hat are making investments to help us advance that thinking help us advance those solutions. We had Deloitte have created a Red Hat OpenShift lab environment, and we've done this purposely to validate reference architectures to show account teams the way we have delivered the very very large accounts to show them what DevSecOps to means from a product perspective and to give them opinionated processes to be successful in delivering these large type solutions. >> Dave, Mike, thanks for coming on, and I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE and sharing the perspective on the Red Hat Relationship with Deloitte Consulting. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> This is CUBE Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021, am John for your host, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCube with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hi, and welcome to theCube Virtual in our coverage of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Shawn Snyder. She is the managing director at Deloitte and Cloud Migration market leader. Thanks for coming on the show Shawn. >> Thank you, Rebecca. I'm glad to be here. >> So we're talking today about cloud migration in the public sector in the COVID era, but I want to start by having you introduce yourself to our viewers tell them a little bit about what you do at Deloitte. >> Sure, I'm Shawn Snyder. I'm a managing director based out of Atlanta. I lead our cloud migration offering for our government and public sector clients. So that really means that I serve clients in the government, both public sector local government agencies, as well as federal agencies and helping them move to the cloud, and I'm also responsible for building out our capabilities, our tools, our resources, and people to help clients do that in a very fast and accelerated way. >> So even putting aside the pandemic for a second, shifting to the cloud is such a big and daunting undertaking for so many organizations, including federal agencies. How do you help CIOs and clients think through the processes and what they need to do and how they need to do it? >> Yeah, I mean, it all starts with where are they at on this journey, right? We actually have a show our clients like a typical journey to the cloud and, you know, we have a method and set of tools that we can work with them depending on where they are but if they're just in the initial stages of exploring, moving to cloud, it typically starts with a strategy and really understanding what, you know, how engaged is the mission and the agencies in supporting this. Are they really looking to continue to build their own talent? What is the end state look like? Do they want to build cloud skills and cloud engineering skills within their organization, or are they looking to do more of a managed service model? So a lot of these conversations happen and also around what platforms they want to use and then we typically look at their portfolio of applications. So it could be, you know, they're looking to move out of a data center and go more to a cloud virtual environment. It could be that they're looking to move a couple of mission critical applications that are highly complex with lots of data and sensitive information, so. It really kind of depends on what they're trying to achieve and what is the business result that they're looking to gain. >> And how do you help them think through the business case for this? Because I know that that is definitely an imperative. >> So we take a couple of, I can give you an example. So when we were working with a state in local agency, looking at a big mission critical integrated eligibility system, they wanted to be able to move because they were, the technology was getting a little dated. It was eating inflexible to maintain and when they were looking at the maintenance costs that they were spending on both the infrastructure and the application, it was starting to, you know, take up to 90% of the budget and so the lack of ability to be able to do new capabilities and new innovation when you're talking about especially post COVID, which I know we haven't gotten into, but when they're looking, there's actually more and more products and aid that's being made available. So they need more flexibility, and so what we did was we actually did a bunch of analysis around what does that technology stack look like? What's the cost drivers and then we built out what the future would look like on the, in this particular case was the AWS platform. How could they take advantage of some native services and reduce some of their licensing costs? How could they upgrade through our products? We have a seamless way to upgrade to cloud suitable operating systems. So in this case, they were on an outdated Windows and Linux platforms. We were able to update that to cloud suitable, which allowed them to, you know, save a lot of money in terms of their infrastructure costs to maintain some of that outdated infrastructure and then we get them on end state tools around security monitoring, around infrastructure monitoring and so they can really streamline some of those infrastructure costs as they are spending tremendous amount of money just on the tools when they're managing all of that on-prem, on a complex system. >> So thinking about now we are in this pandemic, which has changed everything about the way we live and the way we work, moving to the cloud was a business goal. Something that a lot of organizations sort of had, in they're two and three year, two and five-year plan. Now it is an absolute mandate. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are organizations saying to you now? >> There's just such a, there's such a demand for speed and doing it at scale very fast. So prior to COVID, like you said, it was a multi-year journey. We'll get to it when we can, but there were other priorities that automatic, always got in the way of that and also just the cost justification, right? When you're talking about migration and a lot of times these systems that's portfolio systems are outdated, they're not cloud suitable. So how do you have to refactor them? That can get pretty costly pretty quickly. Now our clients want to move fast and they have a virtual work workforce, they need more scale. They need more storage for some of the data. They need to be able to integrate with other partners, especially in the healthcare space, whether it's at the state and local agency level or in the federal space, that ability to create that ecosystem of being able to transmit and share data in a very secure way at a very large volume is becoming, you know, mission critical with combating COVID with being able to protect our citizens. >> Speed is the name of the game, as you're saying. So what, how is Deloitte investing in automation and what kinds of migration accelerators are you bringing to clients now? >> So a few different things. One, we are partnering with AWS, both on a professional services perspective, as well as with some programs. So we've integrated our methodologies and we've been certified by AWS for our methodology around migration acceleration program. So that's the map because of our qualifications of the amount of migrations we do globally, as well as our methodology and tool set, we're able to offer this joint map program, which allows us to team with AWS. Go on site in quickly use our tools to diagnose what applications are actually at cloud ready to move, how fast can they move? And it gives a lot of information around technical configurations, what servers they reside on, and all of basically the affinities, all of the information you would need to be able to move those applications and if it's not cloud suitable, we can detect if it, how quickly we could get it cloud suitable. What would need to be done is an application code, or is it database, or is it operating system? What are those things that need to get upgraded to move it to the cloud? And is it worth moving to the cloud? So we actually look at the business value that each of these applications are providing and saying, you know, this might be more suited to stay on-prem for now. So we work with them through this map program to really come up with that detailed migration schedule and plan and we then use that information that we collected during that diagnostic phase feeds into our migration tools. So the migration is actually automated with the information that was collected during the diagnostics and the landing zones, and all of the sizing of the infrastructures able to be sized appropriately based on the information that was collected. >> I want to ask you about innovation. In a lot of these Cube Virtual conversations that we're having, we're hearing from a lot of executives that the pandemic has been a forcing mechanism in sort of forcing people to think more resourcefully, more ingenuitively about how they solve these pressing problems. What have you experienced, and have you seen in particular examples of innovation that have been inspiring and exciting for you? >> Yes, absolutely. So I actually work in the federal health space most, and our ability to be able to stand up an application or a service, whether it's a Salesforce service, the AWS platform, but we've been able to stand up contact tracing for local agencies, for state agencies. We've been able to set up cloud native services that allow the data that's getting collected across these different organizations to be able to make meaningful information using machine learning and some of the other native services that are available within cloud and they can be stood up very quickly and very cost-effectively and I think that's the other value that cloud is unlocking for organizations and really now starting to realize that they can move towards innovation and start to spend much more money on innovation than what they were doing previously on spending most of the budget on maintenance. >> When you're talking to clients now about the future, what are they thinking? What's on their minds in this sort of this 12 to 24 month plan? Are they just thinking we just need to get through this next period and cope with this uncertainty? Or are they thinking about the future. >> Moving to cloud isn't just an infrastructure move. I think that's getting your head around what does it mean? What does your workforce have to look like? What does, how do you collaborate with the business? What are the, what is the future innovation use cases? What is going to, how do you actually start to use those use cases to demonstrate early value and start to do things much more in an agile and iterative way instead of, you know, delivering something in a, you know, several months or years. So it, it really is shifting, it's a transformation for how the office of the CIO or how they actually operate. It's creating integrated teams within the CIO organization. We're actually embedding different disciplines like engineering, infrastructure, IT operations, security operations, risk management, financial management, these disciplines as part of these, what we call DevOps DevSecOps type teams, and be able to deliver an end-to-end product on a particular platform in a very agile way. >> In thinking about the future of the workforce and how the pandemic is changing people's careers. I know that you serve as the technology campus champion at Georgia Tech, and you're very active in recruiting bright young business talent. Can you talk to our viewers a little bit about the changes that you foresee in terms of how people plan their careers and their professional development and anything in particular that Deloitte is doing to make sure that the pandemic does not have such a damaging effect, you know, from a lot of statistics that women are dropping out of the workforce in large numbers. >> Yes, so let me unpack your question a couple of ways. So, you know, first of all, you know, I'm really passionate about talent development and recruiting, and I've learned recruiting efforts at the undergrad for many, many years, and I've always been a technologist. So now, like just seeing how technology is embedded in all of the business that we do and it's so mission critical, you now, I'm very focused on making sure there's more women and more minorities going into technology oriented degrees. There's so much you can do with a technology degree and the of career careers that are available, you know, are unlimited. We can't hire enough people that have the right skills. There's just a war on talent for people that have the right security and cybersecurity skills, cloud engineering skills, and just the analytical skills. I mean, this is very complex stuff that you're trying to, you know, build stuff and create stuff that hasn't been created before. So I find it extremely fascinating and I hope that people can see the creative side of things and the scientific it's really bringing it both together and that's what I try to mentor a lot of the recruits on campus. In addition to that, so I think that there's tremendous amount of opportunity for folks going into those types of degrees, as well as for women I, you know, it's been a challenge because people are, you know, some schools aren't closed are not open. If you have a dual working family, it can be a big challenge if you're taking care of children or elderly parents, for example. So at Deloitte, we actually recently implemented a dependent care policy for folks that could take advantage of additional stipend to subsidize, you know, childcare or dependent care. So that's helped a little bit, we're also really focused on diversity inclusion. So, you know, really having candid conversations, individual conversations around what are your boundaries at work right now? Can, do you have to be off right now from, you know, dinner time till bedtime? What does that look like? And we're trying to really help people have the tools and feel comfortable about having those conversations, 'cause it's not just women, it's men, too. I mean, this, these are difficult situations that we're all, you know, co living with our spouses and our significant others and our children, and potentially, you know, extended family members and trying to work in the same environment and is very challenging, and so we're trying to create space for people to be able to have those conversations and make it work for them. >> Don't I know it's Shawn. So just in terms of thinking about the future and what is next for Deloitte, and you've just talked about how you are a technologist at heart, and you see so much excitement about bringing in different disciplines, different functions to solve these urgent and pressing problems. What do you foresee for yourself and for Deloitte over these next couple of years, as we emerge hopefully out of this crisis situation. >> I think Deloitte, you know, one reason I've stayed at Deloitte for so long is that we've always been really focused on how does the technology solve the business problem, the mission problem? And so we have a real opportunity to continue to be able to bring the IT and the technology enablement and make sure it aligns to the business strategy and so the business use cases, you know, we've invested a lot in our labs Capabilities where we're able to bring different disciplines, whether it's, you know, HR and talent thinking about workforce of the future, you know, that technology stack and the architects together, as well as the thinking about across the ecosystem, what are some of the future use cases that you're not even thinking about? So we're able to bring a lot of these different disciplines or subject matter experts together. Now I'll be in a very virtual way, but we've been able to take these lab concepts and it really helps kind of get that out of the possible defined and really strong alignment across these different constituents across the enterprise. So that is really exciting to me. I also think the investment that we're making in our cloud engineering practice, in our alliances with companies like AWS, it really gives us insight into where the technology is going and making sure our staff and our tools and our resources available to us are aligned to that more than investments are being made in the technology. >> So well Shawn thank you so much for coming on theCube Virtual. It's a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned for more of theCube Virtual's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today with our ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. It's a virtual event, like all the events in 2020, but we've been going there since 2013. We're happy to be back this year and we're excited to have for the first time on theCUBE, our next guest, she's Kelly Herod the US SAP Offering Leader for Deloitte Consulting. Kelly, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Jeff, thanks so much for having me. >> Absolutely, so first time on, on theCUBE, you guys have a really interesting concept at Deloitte, you call it the Kinetic Enterprise. What is the Kinetic Enterprise all about? >> Yes. So if you think about the past, organizations built their technology infrastructures to be what we would call built to last, the future though is all about built to evolve. And that's exactly what the Kinetic Enterprise is. It's really how we're helping our clients create the right technology infrastructures that evolve with their business. And Kinetic Enterprise is focused on four key pillars. The first, that we're building a technology solution that's clean. That means we want to have reduced amount of custom code or things that we may have built that really rack up your technical debt. The second pillar is that it's intelligent. So we're leveraging all of the technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, to really automate and change the way in which an organization runs their business. The third pillar is that it's responsive, and that means it's on the cloud and this is where AWS comes in. And then the last pillar is that it's inclusive. So it uses all of the technologies and microservices available to really optimize and achieve a company's business value objectives. >> So that is a great summary, and I've got the list of the four pillars. It's just interesting you lead with clean. You know, there's a lot of conversation about digital transformation and move fast and be dynamic, you know, would be kind of an opposite to static. But clean, interesting choice of words. It runs with core... Core clean ERP with minimum technical debt. Why clean is such an important thing? I get kind of intelligent and responsive, but clean is an interesting attribute to pick. >> Absolutely, so if you take a step back and think... (Kelly hangs) when comes to ERPs, when ERPs came out, there was... (Kelly hangs) how you're going to run your entire organization on this one solution. What we've found is that as companies have put ERPs, they've gone through and created so much customization, that it's that which makes it very difficult to be able to keep up with technology changes or actually migrate to the next versions. So the concept here is if you're going to go in and put in brand new ERP, such as an SAP S/4HANA, this time around in order to achieve the promise of ERPs, let's make it clean. Let's stick to as much standard functionality as possible within the core, and then we innovate on the edges. And so that will allow us in the future to maintain that flexibility or dynamicism of a Kinetic Enterprise. >> Right. So I have to tease you Kelly 'cause SAP R/3 and ERP is not necessarily synonymous with digital transformation, speed, agility, and embracing change. So you've been involved in Deloitte's SAP practice for a long time. Why should people start to rethink about SAP in terms of being responsive, in terms of being able to change quickly and to your vocabulary, more kinetic? >> And you're right. You know, I've been doing SAP for 20 years. So I actually did start back in the R/3 days. And, you know, I would just say that things are changing, is evolving. You know, SAP themselves has been going through a transformation, a revolution. You look at the ERP landscape as a whole, all of the ERP players are moving to the cloud. The technology is the backbones are changing. Now the reality is, you know, going in and actually changing out your ERP, no matter what solution you're using, it's a big endeavor or undertaking. The goal here, and why we're partnering with SAP, partnering with AWS is really focused on how can we make this more efficient for our clients? More importantly, I like to think about it as how can we make this less of a one and done, and more of a let's keep transforming the technologies and the business as things are changing in the market, along the way. And using technologies to even change how we implement, allows us to do that. >> So, Kelly, another thing a lot of people probably don't think of is SAP and AWS, together in the same sentence. So I'm sure there's a lot of people that are much more intelligent about this, but for those that aren't as familiar, tell us a little bit about the relationship with SAP and AWS and then how you guys are leveraging that at Deloitte. >> Absolutely. So when you... There's a couple of things that I would bring up. One is SAP S/4HANA solutions, in particular, but any SAP environment that you're running on, one of the objectives most of our clients are focused on is how to move to the cloud, and that's where AWS comes in. You can absolutely run any of your SAP solutions on AWS. And what that brings you with is more flexibility, so that you can actually scale or contract your infrastructure that you're running SAP on based on your business needs. The second thing that we've been partnering with AWS to do is a little bit of what I just mentioned, which was a teaser around, how do you change the way you even go about implementing an SAP solution or start to migrate your business? So one of the things we asked ourselves was, could we radically change how you jumpstart an S/4 implementation? And what we decided to do is team up with AWS and leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence, most importantly, standing up an environment on AWS. We actually created what we call Kinetic Finance Startup. Many of our clients are choosing to start with finance and specifically SAP central finance to begin their journey to the new S/4HANA environment. And what we've been able to do is create a touchless build solution, so over a weekend, we can actually connect to your existing ERP solution. Majority of those is starting with an ECC environment. We can extract the data, we can use harmonization rules to actually change and modify your data and optimize it for the future. And then we actually through completely touchless built-in automation, stand up a brand new AWS environment with S/4HANA on it and actually automate the configuration and testing of the basic financial transactions. So when you come in the next week and we start the conversation with the client, we're actually looking at a real life S/4HANA system on AWS with their mas... >> Oh, that's... >> So the whole concept is to change how we engage. >> Right. So again, I don't know that I were to think of finance as kind of a lead application, to start this journey. I mean, I can see on one hand, it is the system of record and it, you know, it has a lot of very important information that's got to eventually get into finance. On the other hand, it seems like there's less critical, maybe lower hanging fruit that's less risky. Is it because you can run it kind of in a parallel path for some period of time, but it strikes me that finance might not be the first place you go to look for some early wins. >> It's actually what you just said about the parallelism. So the reason we've seen that finance actually was one of the starting points is even if you look at the history of SAP's S/4HANA solution, way back before we got to that, it started with a concept called smart accounting or simple finance. And the theory here is, you could actually... If a company has, let's say multiple ERPs, as most do, you can actually grab the financial information, bring it into a new S/4 or central finance environment, and actually combine or merge the accounting information to get improved reporting, optimize a shared service organization. So it's actually a lower risk way to start the journey before going and touching the heart of the business or core operations, or manufacturing, for example, >> That's pretty interesting. So you run it in parallel for a while and then eventually does, is the plan that it takes over, from the old. So it is effectively kind of, I guess, a slightly delayed lift and shift, or maybe it's a reassemble and then a flip. I don't know how you would describe it because it's not really lift and shift. >> It's not really lift and shift actually, you have two options. You can either over time pull all of your business processes out of the underlying ERP solutions and bring them into the S/4HANA environment or multiple S/4HANA environments. Or some companies may choose to continue to... (Kelly hangs) Especially if you're in an industry where you do a lot of acquisitions or divestitures, you may not have an intention of ever combining all of your ERPs, but you may want to change each of them to S/4HANA underneath, and then have one environment in which you're pulling your data together to really consolidate your financial reporting. >> That's great. I want to follow up on something that you mentioned, which is the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And we talk a lot about, right? Those are hot buzzwords all over the place, but, you know, I'm pretty vehement in that, you know, general purpose AI and ML is kind of interesting, but where the real interesting stuff ends is where the rubber hits the road, is in applied. And it sounds like you've got a pretty interesting application where you're applying this technology to help make this move to cloud go a little bit smoother. >> Yes. One of the areas, you know, since we've been talking a bit about finance then I'll use it as an example. Is if you think about it, whenever we go in and we're typically working with... (Kelly hangs) especially in finance, you know, one of the topics is, how to optimize a chart of accounts? So over time we've done this hundreds of times, if we can look at different sectors, different industries, we can use benchmark chart of accounts. So instead of making this a paper-based exercise that individuals are doing, why not take that and actually use artificial intelligence machine learning to create data harmonization rules, so that technologies can actually do that same work. And so that's been one of the things we've been working on that I personally find very interesting just in my finance background. >> Right. And is this a relatively new thing, or have you guys been doing this for a while? >> Actually, it's something that over the last 12 months, we've been focused on building out in partnership with AWS. So it's fairly new. >> That's great. I want... I'd love to shift gears a little bit, and talk about COVID, and the impact of COVID on your business. Clearly in March, right? It was the light switch moment and everybody had to work from home and it was a quick rush to make sure that everybody was safe and we could support our remote workers, that said, can't help with the ba... All the bad stuff that's happening in hospitality and travel, and a whole lot of other industries. So that aside and that's bad stuff. In the tech industry, we were able to make the move, but now we know we're six, seven, eight months into this thing, and it's clear that, you know, we're going to have many elements of this going forward for a while. So I'm curious just from your business and your customer point of view, if you can share, you know, kind of the contrast of what happened in March and April to what you're seeing now and how this new reality, whatever this new reality is going to be, as we, you know, continue to evolve is impacting this digital transformation conversations? >> It is interesting. So if I pivot back to March, when this all occurred, you know, it truly did feel an instant going from in-person. And as consultants we travel and typically have a Monday through Thursday, or Monday through Friday type of travel schedule to an instant working from home overnight. And, you know, I'm really proud of our teams and how they seamlessly made that transition. Many, including myself, were actually leading clients through final cut overs in parallel to this happening. And we were able to really pivot and make those shifts, and I was reflecting with one of the executives I worked with, you know, she and I, you know, six months later, we're looking back at how we did that and how impressed we were with what the team pulled off. And since then, they've been able to do several other go lives, which is great. But I think that it was something we had to do quickly. I think many would have said it couldn't have been done that you would see the whole world move to a working from home environment, but we did. What it tells me is it gives me a lot of hope for a lot of the things that businesses can do in the future. In the past we used to constrain ourselves of, Oh, there's no way we could ever get XYZ done, or we can't make this type of change in the world, but we can. If I flash forward to now, I think we're very settled in kind of this new way of working, but I'm also hopeful for what the future is going to look like. I don't believe it will be a pivot all the way back to... Especially for consultants traveling on a regular basis of Monday through Friday. Instead, I think we're going to create models that give people and organizations the flexibility they need to really balance some of their personal responsibilities along with their work responsibilities. My hope and expectations is that also opens up options so that all organizations have access to more talent that they may not have had before. And I think that also means global talent. I think we're showing we can work as global teams, which means, you know, I could now have members from Japan joining, you know, my permanent leadership team in ways that I maybe never have thought of before. Those are just some examples of what I expect and hope for all of us that we'll see coming out of this. >> Hopefully and I know... Like you said, you've been a consultant for years and years and years, and you guys spend lots of time on airplanes, and hopefully you don't have to spend quite so much time on airplanes because you don't necessarily have to be there all the time. But you talked about an interesting thing and that's talent and opening up the opportunity to get more talent that maybe you wouldn't have ever considered. And along those same lines, right? Is the move in diversity and inclusion. And I just watched a show that you did a few months ago, called the... "A Chance for Change: Accelerating Business Recovery, Through Gender Diversity," on a Facebook interview, very cool panel, really enjoyed it. And I want to follow up on some of those things, 'cause you've made some really simple and poignant points. And one of the things that you said definitively, go back to the wide diverse talent and perspective equals winning in business, period. I love that. You know, we hear this all the time that, you know, not only is it the right thing to do, but it's also good for business. And isn't it nice when those two things can actually line up. And you just talked about, you know, in more of a generic sense, the ability to open up your talent window when there's a worldwide talent shortage, both for geography, but also the work in diversity and inclusion and to continue to hold the momentum that continues to build in this area. I wonder if you could, you know, kind of share your thoughts on that, and your position and what's going on with Deloitte. >> Absolutely. You know, I do think this is one of those key pivotal moments for all of us, and I believe we have, coming out of this an option to really move the needle on our diversity and inclusion, and equality efforts. You know, one example I think about women, women in leadership positions. You know, being in consulting, you know, one of the challenges has always been that we do travel a lot, and it can be difficult to balance all the responsibilities, professional and personally. I think with a move to more flexible work arrangements, less travel, or travel for purpose is what I would highlight for the future. I think it opens the door to many more women being able to have careers in consulting, if that's what they, you know, had desired. I also think it allows them to have... You know, spend their entire careers in consulting and in ways we never saw before. And that means you'll see as significant movement and women in leadership positions. I also think this applies to underrepresented minorities. I hope that from all of this, instead of there may be companies that focus on recruiting from, you know, schools that are local to them or within their surrounding areas. I think this gives us an opportunity to really open that aperture up and look at talent from any school or university, or geography, and being able to get the right skill sets in the door and the right talent. Therefore you can actually see movement and diversity within teams, as well as at the leadership levels for URMs. >> Right. Right. And really managing to the right things too. I think that's the other thing that's coming out of this, and we've had a lot of conversations on work from home or work from anywhere. You guys are a little bit different than the consultant 'cause your team is there, usually local at the client site for some period of time. But for a lot of people, it's the first time they are not sitting across from a desk or, you know, within close proximity. Now you too, in your teams. And so, the shift changes that now you have to judge output, (Jeff chuckles) and not activity. And you would think that that would be a great and easy thing to execute, but we're hearing more and more that it's not necessarily. And you really highlighted, I think, three leadership traits that are always important, but more important now than ever before in that other interview. And I just want to call them out 'cause I thought it was worth calling out. You know, empathy has never been more important. Resilience, and my favorite one you said at the end, calm in the storm. I just wonder again, if you could share, you know, kind of, as you've gone through it, both, you know, as somebody at Deloitte within the greater Deloitte group, but then also in managing your own teams, to maintain that calm in the storm and to maintain, you know, empathetic leadership, because I think you've said it before, right? This is a personal challenge that we're all going through. We all have different things going on at home, whether it's the spouses working, the kids are doing homeschool. People are taking care of older parents, this and that. It's a real personal thing, and so these leadership characteristics, these softer leadership characteristics have never been more important >> That's so true. And, you know, when I think about the empathy part, right now what we're going through is also about how is each of us as leaders also sharing a bit more about how we're experiencing this? I think the sharing of stories is what also helps many on the teams adapt, adjust. The reality is when you're working on camera all day and, you know, in the past, imagine that you maybe were having a tough day or you weren't feeling that great, you weren't on camera all day with every one of your coworkers. You we're actually, you know, sitting in an office, you may have to go to the conference room to do some meetings, but you didn't look... (Kelly hangs) like someone was kind of staring at you all day long. Now, when we're working from home virtually and we're on Zoom or Skype or WebEx, et cetera, all day, it does feel like you're under the lights when you're on camera. And there's a lot of pressure and people are trying to figure out how to manage their own emotions while doing that. And, you know, my message would say as an empathetic leader, it's okay for you to also share when you might be having a tough go that day. Maybe one of your children has been kind of acting out and they didn't really want to do the virtual school. It's okay to share in that because everyone's going through it, and it makes us all more human. >> Right. >> And it makes us all more connected. >> Right. Well, I will share with you a pro tip, we've done a few of these interviews and it is okay to let people turn off the camera. And I think as a manager, I think it's actually an okay thing to say, okay, everyone, let's just turn off our cameras and get a break from that camera that's got that eye on you all the time, because it is just another, you know, kind of a factor that we have to deal with. Well, go ahead. >> And I was going to ask, what do you actually, you know, I don't know what one of your techniques is, but I know mine is some of the meetings, it's actually just go back to traditional telephone calls (Jeff chuckles) and actually even just being on your cell, put on your air, you know, your earbuds, or your headphones and even walk. >> Right. >> So I think the other thing we're all missing is actually that movement, the steps to go to the coffee maker and back, or to lunch and back, we don't have them anymore. So you've got to work extra hard, actually getting those extra steps in calories and just mental breaks at times. >> Yeah, well then there's a whole another tranche on walking during meetings. And I used have a boss that I would only do one-on-ones while we took a walk. He always says, I get in there... 'Cause then there's, you know, you're not necessarily looking at each other. And if there's some sensitive things or tough conversations, sometimes it's easier if you're not just looking across the table at one another with all the silence. So there's a lot to be said for that as well. Well, Kelly, I really enjoyed this conversation and getting to meet you for the first time. It sounds like you're doing a lot of cool and exciting things and, you know, exciting speed and innovation with SAP, that's noble work and I'm sure a lot of people are really happy to have you help them out there. So thank you very much for your time and to have a great AWS re:Invent. >> Thanks, Jeff. It was great to discuss this with you. >> Absolutely. All right. She's Kelly, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE's ongoing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, it's the Cube, covering empowering the autonomous enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Everybody. Welcome back to this special digital presentation where we are tracking the transformation of Oracle Consulting. Aaron millstone is back, he's the senior vice president of Oracle Consulting. He's joined by Jeff Davis, who's the principal at Deloitte. He's the chief Commercial Officer for Oracle at Deloitte. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. We see a lot of these deals. Sometimes we call them Barney deals, you know, I love you, you love me, there's a press release and that's it. But so one of the things we look for okay, is their teeth behind this? So you guys have come up with with what you call elevate. What is elevate? How did it get started? And I have some follow up questions. >> Well, elevate, really got started when Aaron and I started to look at the assets that each of the firms possessed. On the Deloitte side as Aaron suggested, we have deep capabilities and a broad range of technologies, some of them competing technologies with Oracle. At the same time, we didn't have a great deal of depth in Oracle's technical products, Oracle Cloud infrastructure, and Oracle autonomous. Our bench was not as big as Aaron's. And Aaron also had access to Oracle development at a level that we didn't have access to. So we really found ourselves in a situation where we could put those two capabilities together, and we could offer something to our clients and the broad range of Oracle customers in the field. They had access to all of the Deloitte's capabilities which include great project management, great change management, real skill around the strategic aspects of cloud migration. And Aaron had tools and had resources trained and developed around the latest Oracle Technology, they'd always be a step ahead of any SI. So together, we felt this was really a differentiation for marketplace. >> One of the things we look forward there, is there any other integration? Are you doing co-engineering? In this case maybe not co-engineering, but are there tools that you're developing that you're taking to market that you're actually leveraging? Aaron, can you talk about that a little bit and convince us that's not just the sales play? >> Yeah, sure. And Jeff alluded to some of this earlier too, right. So we definitely each had our respective tooling, right on Deloitte investments and tools. One was called ATADATA that we've seen use quite a few times now. We've invested in something we called Oracle Soar. You know, our tools are, as you'd imagine, heavily Oracle focused it's about moving Oracle technology to Oracle Cloud, ATADATA and some of the tools that Deloitte invested in are focused more comprehensively on holistically it looking at everything in a data center and everything that's across data centers and starts to develop a set of facts around this stuff. But in both cases, we actually looked at these things. And we said, "You know what if you combine these together, "we get a very comprehensive view of what exactly "it is that we're looking at with a customer". So we can tell everything from the types of traffic we see in the network to the specific versions of stuff, we can start to identify whether there's risk associated with having things not past or out of supporter, but get a very comprehensive view that's based on facts. And so you know, we took those tools and we've combined them together so that we can go into a customer and give a complete end to end view from both an Oracle and Deloitte perspective and quite frankly, it doesn't matter whether Deloitte leads or whether Oracle leads we've developed these tools together we're going to market together and we've even got you know, the templates you'd expect consultancies to have, right? So when you look at business cases, we've got joined business case templates that we've created together and that we're using actively with customers, and therefore then we're refining them and improving them each time we do it. But you know, we're at a point now where our tools are combined, our templates are combined. And we even at this you know, we were even Jeff and I were on a call earlier, yesterday actually we even got a joint, a war room that's constantly engaging with different account teams making sure that we structurally approach things in a consistent way so that we're driving business value and using the tools appropriately. >> Aaron you and I have talked about you know, data centers and building data centers and investing. It's not just it's just not a good use of capital today. There's so many other things that organizations can do. You guys have identified data center consolidation as a call it a, you know, an initiative that you're seeing customers. I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. Is that kind of a starting point for conversations? >> Yeah, it's well it's definitely starting point right. So we call it a referred to as infrastructure lead transformation. And appetite, the appetite for that is certainly high. We were seeing an increased focus on you know, what do customers need to do to take not just a workload here and there but how do they get out of the data center business holes? So it's sort of it's a foregone conclusion, right? Like you just said, it's not really a question of should we invest in another data center? Or should we invest in up to in our data centers? The question has changed to let's move to cloud, how do we get there? And let's move in a big way. And that's, we're seeing that dialogue across all of our customers. And quit frankly, even for Oracle, it's been a learning curve for us, right? We started with an Oracle workload conversation, which is you want to move this Oracle workloads to Oracle's cloud, you want to move that Oracle workload over to cloud. And really what we're finding is it's a wholesale transformation of everything in a data center to one or more clouds right again, often, it's a multi cloud strategy and that's okay. And we you know, we were having more bigger conversations. The thing that has been really interesting as these conversations have evolved, and especially as we work with our partners at Deloitte, has been that, you know, we think that the combination of our cloud technology, the consulting services that Oracle consulting and Deloitte can bring to bear. And then Oracle's ability to finance the whole deal makes some very compelling conversations for customers, because you can walk in to a CIO to a CFO and say, Look on day one, you can actually have a lower spend than what you have today in your data center, and get a cloud transformation underway at the same time. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that business case. Is that generally what you're seeing where it starts is let's take some costs right out and then Aaron, you and I talked about maybe investing that in the future but is that really the starting point for the vast majority of customers? Let's cut some costs right away and get a payback immediately? >> So I'd like to share our perspective. Which is, you know, nobody spends money for the sake of spending money on technology, it's got to have meaningful business value. So the conversation starts with really renewable and a path to the cloud. But there's a natural opportunity for savings in consolidation that we take advantage. We're not simply shifting from your hardware to the cloud. We're actually modernizing, which will result in significant savings. But it also gives the business something that they don't have today had at a level of security and scalability and ability to run modern technology. Much faster, much better, and much more scalable. >> Jeff, can you give us a sense as to how far you're into this elevate journey, maybe thinking about a couple of customer sizer specifically or generically, kind of where you're at with them? How far along maybe even some examples that you feel are representative. >> Sure, you know, the relationship has been probably about six, close to seven months of maturity. In that time, we've had an opportunity to work on several key clients at scale. We've worked together in collaboration on one of the nation's largest retailers in the grocery business. We've worked collaboratively in aerospace and defense, and also in the hospitality industry. In these cases, what we're finding and one is each one is in a various stage of maturity. One is done, one is in midstream, and one is at the early stages. And current economic conditions we're driving a huge pipeline right now. I think our challenge right now is making sure that we identify those clients that can best take value, take advantage of our services and our joint offering to deal with that pipeline right now. What we're finding is that the savings are at least as we projected. In some cases, we're finding even more what people say they have and what people say they do isn't necessarily what you find when you get in there. And but almost every case, we're finding that there's unused equipment, unused capacity, that they currently have redundancy, low utilization of their current assets. We can go a long way in streamlining that. Plus, I can't emphasize enough that these days security is a major concern. And we're adding a layer of security that they could never achieve themselves with soft. >> How do you guys and how to customers want to approach the transaction is it a fixed fee? Is that a TNM? Is it a situation where you participate in some of the savings or the gain? How does the pricing work? >> I'll start off by saying, each deal is really custom built around what a customer really needs. What they're trying to get out of it. Right now as an example, Op-X is very important. So we're engineering deals in a way that helps customers deal with their financial challenges, especially around Op-X. There are other structures that we can put in place. We have the backing of Oracle finance, so we can be very innovative on deals. They can be when value is attained, they can be milestone based. There's just I think, a wide variety. I don't want to say unlimited, but a wide variety of different options that we can offer our clients in order to be able to deal with whatever financial challenge or opportunity they may be looking at. >> What does success look like? You know, when you sort of you know, just less than a year in, when you're two, three, four let's say five years in and you look back, what does success look like Aaron? >> So to me successful, success is going to look like we've gotten a number of these big transformation deals in play. It's in motion naturally between our organizations not necessarily driven entirely by Jeff and I going out and driving organizational behavior right away. It's more in our DNA. But more importantly, I think we've gone into, we've gone beyond the conversation of let's move workloads we've gone into conversations of let's really talk about how to reimagine your business on top of Oracle's cloud, and have an ongoing dialogue that looks at that transformation. Once we hit that point three, four or five years from now, right, that'll be a wild success Michael. >> Jeff final comment. Deloitte has been around for 175 years. This is our birthday this year and in that time, What we've learned is there's no substitute for impact and value added to our clients. In our perspective, what success looks like is client success. Find success means improved scalability of their operations. Securing their technology and their data at a substantially lower cost, so that they can focus on what their core business is, and focus less on technology, that success to Deloitte. >> Great, guys, thanks so much. Great session, we're not only witnessing the rebirth of Oracle consulting, but there's clearly a transformation going on. And it's cultural. Gentlemen, congratulations on your partnership. And thanks so much for coming in the cube. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for having us.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, The Virtual Experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me, Stephen Laaper principal at Deloitte consulting and Brenna Sniderman the Executive Director for the Center of Integrated Research at Deloitte Services, Stephen and Brenna, nice to have you on the program today. >> Thank you, >> (mumbles) >> So we're going to be talking about The Smart Factory. I'd love for you to start Brenna, we'll start with you. Give our audience an overview of Deloitte's definition of The Smart Factory then we can dig into some of the very interesting research that Deloitte has been doing the last few years. >> Sure, absolutely. So the way we think about The Smart Factory is it is a system that's quite flexible that uses data and information from throughout, physical assets to optimized performance, to enable the facility to be more agile, to be proactive, to optimize its assets and to react and change as quickly as possible to shifts going on. It overall enables organizations to just be more intelligent about the way they use their assets to use data, to make more informed decisions and to drive a more optimized process. >> And Stephen for you, one of the things that I found interesting looking at some of Deloitte's research is that the last few years or so, there's been net zero growth in manufacturing labor productivity and labor productivity being an indicator of economic impact. Why in Deloitte's perspective, has that manufacturing labor productivity growth been flat? >> Yeah, it's a really interesting observation. And what we've seen is really decades and decades of management principles, companies using things like Lean, like Six Sigma, taking advantage of labor arbitrage in many cases. And the reality is that a lot of that low hanging fruit is gone. Those projects have been executed well and we're now seeing what we would consider to be diminishing returns as it relates to the investments in those same types of tools. And that is really what's leading many organizations now towards things like the capabilities that you'd find in a Smart Factory. Adding additional technologies to the capability set to really bring companies to that new productivity frontier. >> One of the things that I saw too, is that Smart Factory adoption in one of your studies, can result in a threefold productivity increase. So talk to me about in the last few years, some of the early adopters, Brenna we'll start with you, what are some of the trends that you've seen with those early adopters? any industries in particular that are leading in that respect? >> Well, that's a good question. I think when we recently published a study on lessons from early adopters in the Smart Factory and what we found was that a lot of the organizations that have adopted the Smart Factory have learned lessons that are not necessarily new but some that are new as well. Really I think the biggest challenge has been to figure out how to gather data from a lot of assets that maybe haven't had to produce data before to find out where all the information is from throughout the facility to bring together different groups and different cultures within the organization, whether it's IT and OT and have them figure out how to share information and data and really just to figure out what to do with that information once we've gotten it. Some of the organizations that we spoke with for our research really ran the gamut from aerospace to automotive, to consumer products, to industrial manufacturing. It really has been an interesting spread that we've looked at. >> Stephen walk us through the last three years or so of research that Deloitte has been doing into the Smart Factory from the 2017 study to the 2019 study, to the one that was just released, what's some of the progress that you've seen over the last three years? Is it what you anticipated it would be? >> Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, three years ago, I think a lot of people were talking about Industry 4.0, they were talking about the industrial internet of things, they were talking about The Smart Factory, but we saw relatively few very concentrated efforts to advance those. Now as we fast forward three years, we're seeing that the specific capabilities that each one of those topic areas can enable for organizations, has become much clearer. So correspondingly companies have been planning for these types of investments and they're taking action on much of the capability build and quite frankly, starting to see the value. One of the underlying kind of architectural elements that I think are critical as part of the modern Smart Factory is exactly what Brenna touched on. And that was as it relates to the data. Many assets out there even if they're several decades old likely have a wealth of data associated with them. The challenge is that data is either not readily accessible or it's not well understood. And much of the effort that organizations have now undertaken is not only how do they connect, extract and use that information many times on a real time or near real time basis, but now also combining that information with other assets, other parts of the manufacturing facility, or even their manufacturing network to generate that value. >> So Stephen follow on question, how does an organization, a company start that process, if as you said, there's myriad assets of varying age, some really advanced, some really old as well as even from, I guess, a generational perspective in the workforce, you've got multiple generations, for organizations that know we've got data that's hidden, where do they start? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think a really important element of your question is how do you determine where to start? And the reality is that not all of these solutions are created equal. Not all of the assets have data that's interesting enough to be equal. And so really going through a very concerted effort to understand what are the capabilities we're trying to build And what value does it create for our organization? Aligning that to the objectives and the goals of the organization is critical right from the outset. And we see companies that are being most successful in their implementation of the Smart Factory, following that value orientation. And that might not mean that that value comes tomorrow, It might not come next month, but there's a very clear guidance in terms of how the particular capabilities that are being built will lead to value. Organizations that are not doing that, we tend to see random X visual. We see a lot of different efforts underway with very little tied value and correspondingly many of those efforts don't continue because the executive team, the shareholders aren't going to continue those investments in that space without showing them (mumbles). >> So Brenna walk us through, along what Stephen was just saying. I was reading in your 2020 study that positioning a Smart Factory initiative for value starts with human-centered design and I thought this was really interesting that Deloitte research demonstrated successful teams generally focus on the user first, not the technology. >> Well, yeah. And I think to follow on a little bit to what Stephen said about understanding the value and the goal of what you're trying to do before thinking about the technology you need to rush out and implement goes along with this as well. You want to think about what the user is actually going to be using that data for, what is their job, what information are they going to need and think about from their perspective, what is going to be most helpful and effective for them. And I think the value of this is twofold. One is if talent within your organization and folks on the shop floor, see the value of this data and information, they're going to be more inclined to adopt it because it makes their job easier. But also if you have a tremendous amount of data and information from all the different assets and parts of your facility, if an individual has to sift through all of that, to find what's going to be valuable to them, it's not really going to make their job easier. So human-centered design is really thinking about what that individual needs to do their role, and in a lot of the work that we've done, we've almost thought about it as personas where this particular persona or job needs this information, needs to go through these steps and here's the data information we need to show them to enable them to do that. It's just a way for people to leverage information, to make smarter decisions more quickly. >> How does a manufacturing company do that, Brenna, excuse me, without being siloed, like in business units, so I'm thinking, getting cross-functional support all the way up to the top level. >> Mhhh, that's something that we saw quite a bit in our research that many of the groups or organizations that have successfully enacted a Smart Factory have done so because it's not just coming down from the top, it's also coming up from the bottom. You know, although that may sound like a pejorative term, but coming from all angles of the organization. So we see from the strategic level, this is what we need to do to change the way our organization operates in a more effective way. But from the line of business individuals that are using this information and data every day, we need to think about sort of having a groundswell of support work there as well, so that our team members are using this information. So I think it has to be something that comes from throughout the organization. What we've also found your point about silos is bringing in diverse teams and individuals from throughout the organization who have different types of expertise, different perspectives, different things that they're looking at in different ways that they need to use this technology to do their job, will enable us to make sure that, what we're producing is something that's going to be of value to them. >> And along those lines, Stephen question for you, this must need to be looked at, not as what can we do today or the next six months, but over the long-term. So that ongoing enablement and education is going to be critical. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right. And you know, the reality is that some of these investments that organizations are making into Smart Factory, do take quite a bit of thought, research and assessment and those aren't investments that they're making for the short-term, many of them are long-term. The important part about those investments that organizations are making is that they're creating platforms by which teams can continue to evolve the persona-based type solutions that Brenna referred to, so critical. And so, the flexibility, the adaptability, the agility of those platforms and the investments that are being made, really is one of their critical factors. I did want to just revisit the user adoption of these types of solutions. And, I'm a engineer by education. And I could look up back to early in my career and say, "Hey, look, I built solutions, "using data for manufacturing shop floor equipment. "And I created those solutions for others." But the reality was that I created it in a way that an engineer would you consume that data. And the reality is the persona-based approach really lets us focus on how is a particular individual in their job going to consume that data in a way that enables them to make the best next decision which ultimately has a positive outcome for the company. And in some cases that might mean not exposing them to all the complexities that happen underneath the surface. The modern smartphone, for example, enormously complex device, yet intuitive to use, easy to pick up, easy to interact with. The modern Smart Factory is also very similar in that frame. >> Along those lines of agility, but also designing with certain mindset, culturally IT and OT are different. Brenna, one of the things that I found interesting in the research was the marriage of IT and OT, how do you advise or let's go to clients that were part of that 2020 study, what lessons can the next wave of adopters learn where it comes to bridging those two IT OT mentalities and different cultures? >> Yeah, that's a good question. And I think the different cultures is sort of, key insight that is helpful. With respect to IT, they work on different timeframes, they think about investments in a different way, they think about technology in a different way than individuals who are in OT, who are on the shop floor, who are using these tools every day. and what we found was that bridging that divide and bringing them together, is a challenge that many overlook and something that really the importance of it, can't be overstated. I think to get back to Stephen's point about adoption, if those within the OT space have an understanding of what IT is doing and why, they're just likelier to adopt and to use. And conversely, if those in IT have a deeper understanding of what those in OT are doing and what types of tools they need, they're likelier to come up with solutions that are going to be effective. I think the cultural divide is something that's practically important to understand, to address and not to overlook because I think the last thing that anyone implementing any sort of Smart Factory solution wants is to roll out a solution that was sort of baked in one area, but not taking into account the other as well. >> Great point. Stephen, I want to go back to you for a second. Just understanding along the lines of the cultural differences and the design principles that need to be factored in. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March of 2020, for clients that you were talking to that were in whatever stage process of rolling out Smart Factory initiatives, where are they now? And what are some of the advantages that you see that organizations that aren't yet adopting Smart Factory initiatives should be doing to prepare to thrive in this new normal? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me start with some of those advantages right at the outset. So many organizations now have been looking at advanced solutions, perhaps, to enforce social distancing within the manufacturing environment or perhaps contact tracing within the manufacturing environment and the advantages organizations are seeing that are already on that Smart Factory journey is they're finding they have largely a lot of the infrastructure required to be able to do that already in place. So that has been an enormous accelerant for companies that are already on the journey. The reality is that many organizations, are unable to have their experts, their engineers, their vendors, many of the people that are supporting the equipment and the people in their manufacturing plants around the world, they're not able to get them there. And companies that have been on the Smart Factory journey, specifically as it relates to creating what we would call the digital twin of many of their assets, where they can now see not only visual representations of those assets, but can also see that the data flowing off those assets and in the most advanced solutions, being able to see those together, they'd be able to unlock remote support, in a way that organizations that have not been on this journey simply can't. And we're starting to see some very distinct results, as it relates to those who are able to continue running at scale, and those who are struggling in the COVID environment. >> And Stephen, last question for you. I know you've got a session or a demo on Smart Factory an AI that you're doing at Discover 2020. Tell us a little bit about that and what the participants can anticipate. >> Yeah. So we're really excited to be able to bring Factory AI as we call it, in a live virtualized session. That session is going to cover what we have built around we'll call it a mini manufacturing line. And usually we'd have that with you at the conference, or we take that around the country, to many of our manufacturing clients to really show them, the power of adopting many of these different types of capabilities in the manufacturing environment. So what we're going to be showing and what viewers can expect to see is a demonstration of edge capabilities, of computer vision, of advanced internet of things, all wrapped into several high-impact use cases. So we're looking forward to you're doing that. >> Excellent. Well, Stephen, Brenna, thank you so much for your time discussing The Smart Factor. This is such an interesting provocative topic. I wish we had more time, but appreciate you speaking with me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> You're watching the cube, Lisa Martin for HPE Discover 2020, The Virtual Experience. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's the Cube, covering empowering the autonomous enterprise, brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to this special digital presentation where we are tracking the transformation of Oracle Consulting. Aaron Millstone is back, he's the Senior Vice President of Oracle Consulting and he's joined by Jeff Davis whose Principal at Deloitte, he's the Chief Commercial Officer for Oracle at Deloitte. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. We see a lot of these deals, sometimes we call them Barney deals, you know, I love you, you love me, there's a press release and that's it. But, so one of the things we look for, okay, is there teeth behind this? Now, you guys have come up with what you call Elevate. What is Elevate, how did it get started? Then I have some follow up questions. >> Well, Elevate really got started when Aaron and I started to look at the assets that each of the firms possessed. On the Deloitte side as Aaron suggested, we have deep capabilities and a broad range of technologies. Some of them could be technologies with Oracle. At the same time, we didn't have a great deal of depth in Oracle's technical products, Oracle Cloud infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous. Our bench was not as big as Aaron's. And Aaron also had access to Oracle development at a level that we didn't have access to. So we really found ourselves in a situation where we could put those two capabilities together and we could offer something to our clients. And the broad rage of Oracle customers in the field, they had access to all of Deloitte's capabilities, which include great project management, great change management, real skill around the strategic aspects of cloud migration and Aaron had tools and had resources trained and developed around the latest Oracle technology. They'd always be a step ahead of any SI. So together we felt this was really a differentiation for the market place. >> One of the things we look for, is there any other integration? Are you doing co-engineering? In this case maybe not co-engineering, but are there tools that you're developing that you're taking to market that you're actually leveraging? Aaron, can you talk about that a little bit and convince us it's not just a sales play? >> Yeah, sure, and Jeff eluded to some of this earlier too, right. So, we definitely each had our respective tool line, right? Deloitte's investments and tools, one of them's called ATADATA, that we've seen used quite a few times now. We've invested in something we called Oracle Soar. You know, our tools are, as you'd imagine, heavily Oracle focused. It's about moving Oracle technology to Oracle cloud. ATADATA and some of the tools that Deloitte's invested in are focused more comprehensively on wholistically at looking at everything in a data center and everything that's across data centers and start to develop a set of facts around this stuff. But in both cases we actually looked at these things and we said, you know what if you combine these together, we get a very comprehensive view of what exactly it is that we're looking at with a customer. So we can tell everything from the types of traffic we see on the network, to the specific versions of stuff. We can start to identify whether there's risk associated with having things not patched or out of support, but again a very comprehensive view that's based on facts. And so, you know, we took those tools and we combined them together so that we can go in to a customer and give a complete end to end view from both an Oracle and Deloitte perspective. And quite frankly it doesn't matter whether Deloitte leads or whether Oracle leads, we've developed these tools together, we're going to market together, and we've even got, you know, the templates you'd expect consultancies to have right? So when you look at business cases, we've got joint business case templates that we've created together and that we're using actively with customers and then we're refining them and improving them each time we do it. But, you know, we're at a point now where our tools are combined, our templates are combined and we even at this, you know, we were even- Jeff and I were on a call earlier, yesterday actually, we even got a joint war room that's constantly engaging with different account teams and making sure that we structurally approach things in a consistent way so that we're driving business value and using the tools appropriately. >> Aaron you and I have talked about, you know, data centers and building data centers and investing; it's just not a good use of capital today. There are so many other things that organizations can do. You guys have identified data center consolidation as, I'll call it a you know, an initiative that you're seeing customers. I wondered if you could talk about that a little bit, is that kind of a starting point for conversations? >> Yeah, well it's definitely a starting point. So we call it and refer to it as infrastructure lead transformation and the appetite for that is certainly high. We're seeing an increased focus on you know, what do customers need to do to take not just a workload here and there, but how to they get out of the data center business hole? So it's sort of, it's a forgone conclusion. Like you just said, it's not really a question of should we invest in another data center, or should we invest in up-tooling our data centers? The question has changed to, let's move to cloud, how do we get there? And let's move in a big way. And that's, we're seeing that dialogue across all of our customers. And quite frankly, even for Oracle, it's been a learning curve for us, right? We started with an Oracle workload conversation, which is: do you want to move this Oracle workload to Oracle's cloud? Do you want to move that Oracle workload to Oracle's cloud? And really what we're finding is it's a wholesale transformation of everything in a data center to one or more clouds right? Again, often it's a multicloud strategy and that's okay. And we, you know, we're having more-bigger conversations. The thing that has been really interesting is these conversations have evolved and especially as we work with our partners at Deloitte, has been that, you know, we think that the combination of our cloud technology, the consulting services that Oracle consulting and Deloitte can bring to bear and then Oracle's ability to finance the whole deal, makes some very compelling conversations for customers cause you can walk in to a CIO, to a CFO and say look on day one, you can actually have a lower spend than what you have today in your data center, and get a cloud transformation on Deloitte at the same time. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that business case. Is that generally what you're seeing where it starts as let's take some costs right out? And then, Aaron, you and I talked about maybe investing that in the future, but is that really the starting point for the vast majority of customers? Let's cut some costs right away and get a payback immediately? >> So I'd like to share our perspective which is, you know, nobody spends money for the sake of spending money on technology. It's got to have meaningful business value. So the conversation starts with really renewal and a path to the cloud, but there's a natural opportunity for savings and consolidation that we take advantage. We're not simply shifting from your hardware to the cloud. We're actually modernizing, which will result in significant savings. But it also gives the business something that they don't have today at a level of security and scalability. An ability to run modern technology much faster, much better, and much more scalable. >> Jeff could you give us a sense as to how far you're into this elevate journey maybe thinking about a couple of customers either specifically or generically, you know, where you're at with them, how far along, maybe even some examples that you feel are representative. >> Sure, you know, the, the relationship has been probably about six, close to seven months of maturity. In that time we've had an opportunity to work on several key clients at scale. We've worked together in collaboration on one of the nation's largest retailers in the grocery business. We've worked collaboratively in aerospace and defense, And also in the hospitality industry. In these cases, what we're finding, and one is, each one is in a various stage of maturity. One is done, one is in midstream, and one is at the early stages. And current economic conditions are driving a huge pipeline right now. I think our challenge right now is making sure that we identify those clients that can best take advantage of our services and our joint offering to deal with that pipeline right now. What we're finding is that the savings are at least as we've projected, in some cases we're finding even more. What people say they have and what people say they do isn't necessarily what you find when you get in there. But almost every case, we're finding that there's unused equipment, unused capacity that they currently have, redundancy, low utilization of their current assets. We can go a long way in streamlining that, plus, I can't emphasize enough that, these days, security is a major concern. And we're adding a layer of security that they could never achieve themselves. I'll start off by saying each deal is really custom built around what a customer really needs, what they're trying to get out of it. Right now, as an example, OPEX is very important. So we're engineering deals in a way that helps customers deal with their financial challenges, especially around OPEX. There are other structures that we can put in place. We have the backing of Oracle finance, so we can be very innovative on deals. They can be when value is attained, they can be milestone based. There's just, I think, a wide variety, I don't want to say unlimited, but a wide variety of different options that we can offer our clients in order to be able to deal with whatever financial challenge or opportunity they may be looking at. >> What does success look like, you know, when you were, you know, just less than a year in. When you're two, three, four, let's say five years in and you look back, what does success look like, Aaron? >> So to me success will, success is going to look like we've gotten a number of these big transformation deals in play, it's in motion naturally between our organizations, not necessarily driven entirely by Jeff and I going out and driving the organizations to behave the right way, it's more in our DNA. But more importantly, I think we've gone into, we've gone beyond the conversation of let's move workloads and we've gone into conversations of let's really talk about how to reimagine your business on top of Oracle's cloud and have an ongoing dialogue that looks at that transformation. Once we hit that point, three, four, five years from now, that'll be a wild success in my book. >> Jeff? Final thoughts. >> Deloitte's been around for 175 years, this is our birthday, this year. And in that time what we've learned is there's no substitute for impact and value added to our clients. In our perspective, what success looks like is client's success, client's success means improved scalability of their operations, securing their technology and their data at a substantially lower cost, so that they can focus on what their core business is and focus less on technology. That's success to Deloitte. >> Great Guys thanks so much, great session. We're not only witnessing the rebirth of Oracle consulting, but there's clearly a transformation going on and it's cultural. Gentlemen, congratulations on your partnership and thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for having us.

>> Narrator: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's the Cube, covering empowering the autonomous enterprise, brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to this special digital presentation where we are tracking the transformation of Oracle Consulting. Aaron Millstone is back, he's the Senior Vice President of Oracle Consulting and he's joined by Jeff Davis whose Principal at Deloitte, he's the Chief Commercial Officer for Oracle at Deloitte. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. We see a lot of these deals, sometimes we call them Barney deals, you know, I love you, you love me, there's a press release and that's it. But, so one of the things we look for, okay, is there teeth behind this? Now, you guys have come up with what you call Elevate. What is Elevate, how did it get started? Then I have some follow up questions. >> Well, Elevate really got started when Aaron and I started to look at the assets that each of the firms possessed. On the Deloitte side as Aaron suggested, we have deep capabilities and a broad range of technologies. Some of them could be technologies with Oracle. At the same time, we didn't have a great deal of depth in Oracle's technical products, Oracle Cloud infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous. Our bench was not as big as Aaron's. And Aaron also had access to Oracle development at a level that we didn't have access to. So we really found ourselves in a situation where we could put those two capabilities together and we could offer something to our clients. And the broad rage of Oracle customers in the field, they had access to all of Deloitte's capabilities, which include great project management, great change management, real skill around the strategic aspects of cloud migration and Aaron had tools and had resources trained and developed around the latest Oracle technology. They'd always be a step ahead of any SI. So together we felt this was really a differentiation for the market place. >> One of the things we look for, is there any other integration? Are you doing co-engineering? In this case maybe not co-engineering, but are there tools that you're developing that you're taking to market that you're actually leveraging? Aaron, can you talk about that a little bit and convince us it's not just a sales play? >> Yeah, sure, and Jeff eluded to some of this earlier too, right. So, we definitely each had our respective tool line, right? Deloitte's investments and tools, one of them's called ATADATA, that we've seen used quite a few times now. We've invested in something we called Oracle Soar. You know, our tools are, as you'd imagine, heavily Oracle focused. It's about moving Oracle technology to Oracle cloud. ATADATA and some of the tools that Deloitte's invested in are focused more comprehensively on wholistically at looking at everything in a data center and everything that's across data centers and start to develop a set of facts around this stuff. But in both cases we actually looked at these things and we said, you know what if you combine these together, we get a very comprehensive view of what exactly it is that we're looking at with a customer. So we can tell everything from the types of traffic we see on the network, to the specific versions of stuff. We can start to identify whether there's risk associated with having things not patched or out of support, but again a very comprehensive view that's based on facts. And so, you know, we took those tools and we combined them together so that we can go in to a customer and give a complete end to end view from both an Oracle and Deloitte perspective. And quite frankly it doesn't matter whether Deloitte leads or whether Oracle leads, we've developed these tools together, we're going to market together, and we've even got, you know, the templates you'd expect consultancies to have right? So when you look at business cases, we've got joint business case templates that we've created together and that we're using actively with customers and then we're refining them and improving them each time we do it. But, you know, we're at a point now where our tools are combined, our templates are combined and we even at this, you know, we were even- Jeff and I were on a call earlier, yesterday actually, we even got a joint war room that's constantly engaging with different account teams and making sure that we structurally approach things in a consistent way so that we're driving business value and using the tools appropriately. >> Aaron you and I have talked about, you know, data centers and building data centers and investing; it's just not a good use of capital today. There are so many other things that organizations can do. You guys have identified data center consolidation as, I'll call it a you know, an initiative that you're seeing customers. I wondered if you could talk about that a little bit, is that kind of a starting point for conversations? >> Yeah, well it's definitely a starting point. So we call it and refer to it as infrastructure lead transformation and the appetite for that is certainly high. We're seeing an increased focus on you know, what do customers need to do to take not just a workload here and there, but how to they get out of the data center business hole? So it's sort of, it's a forgone conclusion. Like you just said, it's not really a question of should we invest in another data center, or should we invest in up-tooling our data centers? The question has changed to, let's move to cloud, how do we get there? And let's move in a big way. And that's, we're seeing that dialogue across all of our customers. And quite frankly, even for Oracle, it's been a learning curve for us, right? We started with an Oracle workload conversation, which is: do you want to move this Oracle workload to Oracle's cloud? Do you want to move that Oracle workload to Oracle's cloud? And really what we're finding is it's a wholesale transformation of everything in a data center to one or more clouds right? Again, often it's a multicloud strategy and that's okay. And we, you know, we're having more-bigger conversations. The thing that has been really interesting is these conversations have evolved and especially as we work with our partners at Deloitte, has been that, you know, we think that the combination of our cloud technology, the consulting services that Oracle consulting and Deloitte can bring to bear and then Oracle's ability to finance the whole deal, makes some very compelling conversations for customers cause you can walk in to a CIO, to a CFO and say look on day one, you can actually have a lower spend than what you have today in your data center, and get a cloud transformation on Deloitte at the same time. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that business case. Is that generally what you're seeing where it starts as let's take some costs right out? And then, Aaron, you and I talked about maybe investing that in the future, but is that really the starting point for the vast majority of customers? Let's cut some costs right away and get a payback immediately? >> So I'd like to share our perspective which is, you know, nobody spends money for the sake of spending money on technology. It's got to have meaningful business value. So the conversation starts with really renewal and a path to the cloud, but there's a natural opportunity for savings and consolidation that we take advantage. We're not simply shifting from your hardware to the cloud. We're actually modernizing, which will result in significant savings. But it also gives the business something that they don't have today at a level of security and scalability. An ability to run modern technology much faster, much better, and much more scalable. >> Jeff could you give us a sense as to how far you're into this elevate journey maybe thinking about a couple of customers either specifically or generically, you know, where you're at with them, how far along, maybe even some examples that you feel are representative. >> Sure, you know, the, the relationship has been probably about six, close to seven months of maturity. In that time we've had an opportunity to work on several key clients at scale. We've worked together in collaboration on one of the nation's largest retailers in the grocery business. We've worked collaboratively in aerospace and defense, And also in the hospitality industry. In these cases, what we're finding, and one is, each one is in a various stage of maturity. One is done, one is in midstream, and one is at the early stages. And current economic conditions are driving a huge pipeline right now. I think our challenge right now is making sure that we identify those clients that can best take advantage of our services and our joint offering to deal with that pipeline right now. What we're finding is that the savings are at least as we've projected, in some cases we're finding even more. What people say they have and what people say they do isn't necessarily what you find when you get in there. But almost every case, we're finding that there's unused equipment, unused capacity that they currently have, redundancy, low utilization of their current assets. We can go a long way in streamlining that, plus, I can't emphasize enough that, these days, security is a major concern. And we're adding a layer of security that they could never achieve themselves. I'll start off by saying each deal is really custom built around what a customer really needs, what they're trying to get out of it. Right now, as an example, OPEX is very important. So we're engineering deals in a way that helps customers deal with their financial challenges, especially around OPEX. There are other structures that we can put in place. We have the backing of Oracle finance, so we can be very innovative on deals. They can be when value is attained, they can be milestone based. There's just, I think, a wide variety, I don't want to say unlimited, but a wide variety of different options that we can offer our clients in order to be able to deal with whatever financial challenge or opportunity they may be looking at. >> What does success look like, you know, when you were, you know, just less than a year in. When you're two, three, four, let's say five years in and you look back, what does success look like, Aaron? >> So to me success will, success is going to look like we've gotten a number of these big transformation deals in play, it's in motion naturally between our organizations, not necessarily driven entirely by Jeff and I going out and driving the organizations to behave the right way, it's more in our DNA. But more importantly, I think we've gone into, we've gone beyond the conversation of let's move workloads and we've gone into conversations of let's really talk about how to reimagine your business on top of Oracle's cloud and have an ongoing dialogue that looks at that transformation. Once we hit that point, three, four, five years from now, that'll be a wild success in my book. >> Jeff? Final thoughts. >> Deloitte's been around for 175 years, this is our birthday, this year. And in that time what we've learned is there's no substitute for impact and value added to our clients. In our perspective, what success looks like is client's success, client's success means improved scalability of their operations, securing their technology and their data at a substantially lower cost, so that they can focus on what their core business is and focus less on technology. That's success to Deloitte. >> Great Guys thanks so much, great session. We're not only witnessing the rebirth of Oracle consulting, but there's clearly a transformation going on and it's cultural. Gentlemen, congratulations on your partnership and thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for having us.

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering you. I pat Forward America's 2019. Brought to you by you, I path Welcome >>back to Las Vegas. Everybody's is Day two of the Cubes coverage of you AI Path forward. Three. This is the third year of North American Conference, and second year the Cube is covered. This Anthony at Batista's here, Cuba. Lami was on last year from from Deloitte. He's a principal there, Anthony. Good to see again. >>Great to be here. Great. >>Yes. So it is. I mean, we've seen the growth of our P A. Generally you AI path, the whole automation were starting to talk about intelligent automation. A. I has its wings, and it's starting toe sore. But give us the update from a year ago. We talked about, you know, accelerating last year. I think it was you had a really good statements around looking, Yes, go on Fast is good, but you wanna accelerate the right things, you know, speeding up for bad processes. Paving the cow path, as I sometimes call it, is really not the way to go. But what's new? >>So I do think there's still some issues around getting programs t to scale and thinking about automation at scale, which has been a major theme here. The conference is still in front of us. People are still figuring out how the climate that curve well, I think is new is way Thought about automation before it was, it was a whore statement was that humans or automation is about going to replace the human on. I really think we've no lights. Always had a campaign about I t a. I that that we kicked off a couple of years ago and said, How do we have automation and humans interact with each other? And I don't just mean attended, attended bots, But how do we actually start to use automation as sort of the glue that hang together a much more rich experience to start to put the components there? So that leads us to the age of with, which is how we how we use technology along with humans, to change their role in there been some great talks. One of my partners earlier they was here with Walmart's, his client on. They talked about how they're redefining the HR processes at Wal Mart on that was That was a really good presentation because they changed the workers work. They didn't replace workers. >>So how was this concept of the age of with how is that different than attended? Boss, can you maybe talk about a possible use case or example? >>So if you think about a call center way, know who's coming in? We used to just look them up and say, Hey, do we know who's calling? Now we can say that we know is calling. Do they have a history with us? Way can use data, and that's another part of the width. Is Dave plus analytics with automation? And we could say, Well, what else do we know about this person to have a history of calling us? They have an open ticket. Have they had some issues or complaints in the past that we can deal with or get in front of on and basically start to put the intelligence in the front end? And that could be unattended, right? That could just be some screen pops around automation way start to introduce natural language. We start to introduce some advanced analytics, and that would be a simple, simple way of enhancing that process. >>So let me double click on that so normally what you would get this year in the other end of the line of the call center. And it's like, Hold on, I'm just reading the notes and you know, they're scanning these notes. It's like an eye test, you know, and they can't. They can't ever get to see. It's a faster for you to just explain. Let me tell you what what I'm imagining is in a different experience where this is happening in near real time, getting pop ups or some other messaging. Is that absolutely experience on how real is this today? >>This Israel. And you know, I I always like to say all them anything. All the main thing is easy if you just take the process, repave the cow path. But it's very real because the natural language components they work up front. Now you can ask some questions you could start to do pre searches on which materials might might help with that type of question. You also can train the process over time. So daily overtime. What's the call satisfaction? Did you actually complete what it was? The call got started about on how quickly you do that so you could train these models and start to use machine learning to actually improve that experience even further. So I think that's left again, back to the whip. It's adding these components. >>I like talking to folks with a consulting background because you know, when you're talking to the vendor community, they get very excited about our why and how you know, lack of disruption to install some software, right? And so that's one of the advantages, I guess, of our P A. As you can pop it into an existing process, good or bad, and get going right away. We've seen this time and time again in the industry. When you have when you have a big force people to change, you know it's slow When you can show Immediate Roo. I start to see these rocket ships at the same time as a consultant, you really want to have a bigger impact on business you don't want to just repeat in automate Bad process is. So how do you work with clients to sort of manage that that insatiable desire for quick R A y, and then the transformative components that. You know, I could maybe defend you from disruption or allow you to be an incumbent disruptor. >>So I think what's interesting is transformation. Use the word we were really good transformation program. So starting to say how that we think of automation first as we do a traditional transformation program is is very near and dear to us now. And instead of saying, Hey, we're gonna bolt the ear piece system and then figure out if we can get some improvement by automating later. We're saying, you know what? Let's sort of double go backwards. Maybe it's a little fashion, but what is this whole process look like? And can we put automation and launch not is a process improvement after lunch? So I think we think of these transformation programmes, But AARP programs for ready and they're doing at automation is now on the tip of the front end of the program rather than afterthought. Reporting used to be >>right, so I mean, >>you guys >>have to be technology agnostic in your business. I mean, we happen to be a U IE path conference, but there, you know, if our p a generally you iPad specifically, it's not a panacea for all problems. I mean, we've talked about a I we talked about other automation process automation capabilities. You've got existing systems. All this stuff has to work together. So so and people always say technology last people process first. You guys lived that, Um So how are you seeing automation evolved in in terms of adoption of the how people are dealing with existing systems and some of the other technologies that you're having to bring together. >>So I think the first thing is, the technology has to work. It has to be bulletproof, resilient. If you're going to put it in these processes and make it make it part of your work life reserving clients or that sort of thing. So first it needs to be bulletproof. That's becoming a given second. I'd like to think that's, well, architected more. Maura's. You bring in a I or other advanced components. You need thio. Be ready to have a changing ecosystem. You know, the best document processing right now might not be the best in six months. So starting to think of your automation solution is that the technical glue and this is allow you to swap out the trade components as you as you refined processes going forward or something new hits the market. So now we're working ecosystem, I think, for the r p a. Vendors that are having great success in a market like you have have they sort of give you that platform, and they give you the off ramps and the on ramps to integrate the other technologies. And like I said, I think that's table stakes in addition, being bulletproof. But the next piece of that is how we get various people involved in the value proposition of creating automation. So various tools and studios, some for the business user that might not be as technical, maybe self designed about it, eh? Process description level on, then maybe a more technical work bench for the technical body builder. So I'm starting to see that in the product suite and somebody announcements here this week. Hallie, we tailor the tools to different users and engage them in that process from one into the other. >>So you mentioned scaling before what the blockers, what's the challenges of scaling? Why's it seemed to be so hard? It's clearly an area of focus here at this event. >>So I think first of all, the technology is is still new to some areas. They're still back and forth with the business or I t led initiative. I think there are some scars and wounds over the last few years of automation where people might have gotten started on the wrong foot. There's even some reduced to learn from. So I think people are looking for the business case. They're getting more comfortable with it. So the job sizes, deal sizes, air getting bigger for the FDA vendors and for us. But I think it's just an evolution. And, like I said, there a lot of stubbed toes early on a nomination. >>What are >>some of the big mistakes that you've seen? People make >>people thinking that it's only a business tool, or only a technology tool or technology to the point that they get started on something that becomes either a real technology problem, a real business problem? Maybe you told the body out in the business, and you attach it to your ear piece system and you cause performance problems or you have security problems on. Then it becomes a real I t problem also seeing the reverse where you know, when I t group will start and say Let's do some automation And they pushed into some departments it might have a fully big business case, might now have good support, and it becomes a technology science project rather than delivery in the real value. >>I was tryingto a week sort of Think about analogies. Analogous ascendance sees in software. I use service now a little bit, but that was kind of a heavy lift. It started an I t. It was very clear. You know, I t You're seeing this massive rapid growth of you ai path fastest growing probably the fastest growing software segment in history and striking to me that we're just now starting to see Cloud come into the play here. If we just you iPad that big announced this week. It's got this new SAS capability, which you would think you would, you know, be born in the cloud. But people have explained why that is. Do you have concerns about the pace of growth and a company like you I path and its competitors their ability to sort of keep up and continue to deliver quality. I mean, a big part of what you guys do is sort of risk management. Well, so how do you manage that risk? >>So I think what you look for if you're going to be in the lion's partner, if you're going the work together and pursue things together first you have to have the basics. It has to be bulletproof. It has to work. When you hit bumps in the road, you have to have escalation pass. That makes sense. And there's growing pains in any firm, or any company that grows grows as quickly as you tap. On the other hand, the question is, your culture is the line. Do you know the fix problems? Do you put your customers first? I think that's what we look like. Look at in the lions, which is how we have a partner with. People have similar DNA about customers first, and you put everything else aside, roll your sleeves up and do the right thing. So that's what we look for in lines like This >>Way. Always talked about the buzzwords of digital transformation, which conferences like this, it is kind of buzzy, but when you talk to customers, they're actually going through digital transformations. And then a couple years ago, they started experimenting. They bought one of everything and they'd run things in parallel with, you know, legacy systems. But now they're starting to place their bets, saying, actually, we've got some use cases that are working. We're gonna double down on the stuff that, you know, we think works. Our p a in some cases fits there. We're gonna unplug some of the legacy stuff and try to deal with our technical debt. But I guess my question is, where do you see our P? A fitting in to that whole digital transformation? Major, I like to think of a matrix where you've got different sets of service is and you've got different industries that are tapping, you know, all data centric that that are tapping these new capabilities and formulating new businesses. News industries. That's how you see this disruption happening. And then the incumbent saying, Hey, we've got assets to we're gonna tap that same matrix and whether it's open source software or cloud or new security paradigms or data and analytics. So where do you see our P? A fitting into that matrix? >>So I think at the glue level. At the architectural level, it can be the orchestrator of the experience of taking a variety technologies integrating them, providing again on ramps and off ramps, doing with a human canoe, looking at screens, analyzing content so it could be the glue that orchestrates those processes orchestrates. Maybe some of the so it was used to be a void between legacy systems and new systems on darky A helps take all that away or level the playing field on. That s So that's has another set of eyes and ears for process integration, our technology integration. And I think that's what it's probably it's best place now. Are there good process tools there? Can we get, you know, community developments? A big discussion right now. I think some people have been successful at it, but it requires a lot of care and feeding and planning to have your community hand the rails or stay between the curbs and do useful things. So I think we're in the beginning of how far can we go with community development? I think the technology is really the glue. >>So community of elven terms of best practice sharing >>and users have developing their own bots. You know, what are the guardrails? Does the process? They're automating matter. Does it introduced a risk? Eyes going to perform. How do you make sure your bots are an evil that people are creating? It's a pretty powerful technology. >>Is their I p in there that you don't want it? We talked about this last year that you don't want to necessarily share with others. So, um, now your role used to have focused specifically in financial service is now you're more horizontal. But how does the light look at this opportunity? Is there is it an automation practice? Is it you cut across all industries with automation, or is it sort of broader than that? >>So my colleague here runs the offering, which is Do we have the people, the training, the tools that delivery centers in the know how to go out and do this kind of work? And we've scaled tremendously in the automation space. The second part is, how do we look to the Jason sees? So we work very closely with our colleagues in a I and ML when we say how we go do the next generation of this out of the gate, How we experiment, how we say, Do you want fries with that as we as we do some of this work. But then we look for the industry in the intersection, and that's where a firm like Lloyd we've got deep, deep industry expertise, way say, well, those intersections where we can go make something happen way come work with our partners are lions you know, partners in making making something happen at an industry specific level, or can we go solve a specific problem? So I think that's what we bring that unique. But we do it both ways. >>It's kind of off off the topic here, but I was talking about that matrix before and again. I'm envisioning technology, horizontal technologies and then vertical industries, and it used to be for decades if you were in it. And if you're in financial service is, you are pretty much stuck in financial service is you had a value chain that was specific to financialservices, and you knew it inside and out, whether it was product development or marketing or sales distribution, whatever it was. That same thing for automobiles on manufacturing, an education on and on and on, and you develop these industry areas of expertise and domain experts with in there. And you guys have built up a global powerhouse doing, But you're seeing a CZ digital. It's cos. Become digital. What's the difference in the business in a digital business? That's how they use data. Data is at the core, and you're now seeing organizations Company's tech company specifically traverse different industries. You're seeing Amazon, you know, in content you're seeing Apple and financialservices other companies getting into health care. >>How is >>that? First of all, you see that and what do you think it was driving that? And how does that affect your business? Or your clients asking youto help you traverse new new industries, get into new industries or defend against others? You know, these big tech companies tryingto with a duel, disruption agenda, trying to take him >>over, and the center of all that you mentioned a little. But the center of that is who the ultimate customers, and we'll experience that they want how they want that experience integrated, so it's not channel by channel anymore. It's which pieces fit together and how I want to buy things and how I want to be serviced. You're getting whole crossed economies around what the consumer wants, unable by technology. I think the other thing that plays into that is you start thinking of the Internet of things and how connected people are. And how do you use monetize and integrate data about particular people and how they want to be served to make that a better experience? I think the consumer ultimately is driving. A lot of that technology is in the billions. >>Yeah, is you think about that picture again. You'd like to use a metaphor of a matrix. I mean, I see our p a is just, you know, one piece of that. You know, there's so many others you mentioned. I o t We talk about a I all the time we talk about Blockchain. It's how you put those different capabilities together and apply them to your business. That really makes the difference. Not that RPG right now feels very tactical, but it's part of a much more strategic agenda. >>Absolutely on again. It could be the glue in an ecosystem of emerging technologies. I do see there's the eyes and ears. The fact that what you get out of the box from regular p. A vendor. Really? Integrate some really, really painful things. Looking at spreadsheets and thinking the guys with green visors column numbers. It's really good at that stuff as, ah, base task. >>Yeah, nothing wrong with tactical and quick. Roo, I So, Anthony, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Great to be here >>to welcome. All right, Keep right, everybody. We're back with our next guest. Day two from you. I path forward in Las Vegas. You watching the cue?

>> from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering Cooper inspired 2019. Brought to You by Cooper. >> Welcome to the Q. But Lisa Martin on the ground in Las Vegas for Cooper Inspire. 19 Hot Vegas. Fresh Insight. I'm pleased to welcome Max Ground, the managing director from Deloitte to the program. Hey, Max. >> Good morning. Good afternoon. >> Good afternoon. Whatever time it is, Vegas Right here is this. It's a time warp. They don't like you see outside It's >> only place the world. The 25th hour. >> Right? So here we are. It inspired 19 kick Everything kicked off this morning with the general session. I was teasing Rob Bernstein a couple hours ago and I had him on that. I learned three things in the general session. He likes pizza, he likes kittens. And Cuba's platform now has 1.2 trillion dollars of spending data going through it. And I thought, man procurement is not what I thought. It wa ce and you have a really >> interesting story about procurement. I'd love for you to share with our audience >> because you said in your session earlier today you said people in this standing your morning session. How many of you wanted to be on procurement? Anybody that raises their hands of line tell me about the procurement of yesterday, the >> opportunities that it's given you and what it is now. >> So I think >> in the past, >> security has been something that had to happen. It was a must have not a place that people saw value. But was the rule enforcers right? So trying to do that and really adding value by discipline, where today, if you think about it, the value that they can add by driving savings authorization drops right to the bomb line. So all the savings that are out there, all >> the negotiations that are doing, it's really unique skill set >> and something that people really should move into finance folks when they're looking for a new opportunity. It's a great skill set to have. Lately I've come across a former attorneys are practicing law but now doing strategic sourcing, doing procurement, work, people from finance because the talent that you have to have is field work with people within their companies, understand their needs, negotiate with suppliers, do hard core analytics and, oh, by the way, we're talking about Cooper has helped in change and implemented technology like that. It's really fascinating. >> It's so much more than >> being a buyer or being somebody that's controlling a particular business unit's ability to buy and spend. >> One of the interesting things about Cooper is this platform that allows what started, I >> think, initially as more procurement corner invoicing is now expanded to also include payments and expenses and travel management and contingent workhorse management. So what the CPO now has the opportunity to do is get this visibility right across an entire business of all of the spending, to your point, make massive impacts to the bottom line. >> Yeah, I >> mean, data is so important, right? In the past, the vendors had all the information. Why? Because the sales people how to get commissions. They knew exactly what was being bought of that company. Today, you can reverse engineer saying, selling cells. I say it's reverse sales. I can't go in there and I tell them now I have the full picture. So if it's divided up that category by three or four different vendors, they're making assumptions about how much market share they have. I know it all. I can create a model, a pricing model on the reverse. Engineer it. It's really for sales. I'm telling them now why they should give me a great discount for the organization and >> I >> have the ability to actually enforce that and drive the savings that we have for the organization. It also helped them drive their numbers on sales. So it's a mutually beneficial relationship. They have more market share. I drive better value for the organization. It really works well, >> Well, one of the destructor is that you're kind of alluded to Is this consumer ization? You know, when you go to buy >> a car these days, you just walk in there. You have as a as a buyer of the consumer oven automobile. You have access to every piece of information possible, the whole transaction process. The sales process is different. So as consumers in our regular lives, we have so much expectation that weaken, find anything good Amazon, find anything that we want, get it delivered tomorrow and have all these information on what? Where's the best place I could get it? Who's selling it for what? How is this person that you know, more trustworthy supplier So this consumer ization element and how it's changing the role of the CPO in the CFO is >> really revolutionary. >> It really isn't so you think about it. Most of us go out to Amazon by something, and really the only control there for me, for example, is my wife has to approve it, right, so that's the only veto authority. So that's really the only difference between the two platforms. If you think about it is, there's controls in place, so you're doing the right thing. But from an end user perspective, if I go out there and find the right item and again in Amazon, I don't to go find the supplier. I don't know if that be on contract. Why don't you do that work? We shouldn't have to. I should just go out there and say, I need this And in the background, Cooper is working all those things, presenting the right products on the right contracts, driving right value and almost is important, minimizing the risk. So across all those different lenses, you see why the value of Cooper is for the end user. They're getting what they need for the organization, for the company we're reducing risk and we're increasing value, and then you have rich reporting on the back end. So it's just it's a great way of doing business. It really is taking what you used to do or what you do. It's Sunday afternoon like Rob, you say Monday at work, and I think that's really powerful thing of perspective. >> It is. And it can be so impactful if applied in the right way with an organization, whether it's a manufacturer or hospital or retailer that has a culture that is willing to embrace change, right? I mean, there's that right, Especially >> get him to get your >> perspective on when you're implementing Cooper at a large organization. Maybe have been around for many, many years versus maybe a more modern that we think might be more nimble organization. Culturally, Do you see massive differences in how they're leading procurement, and are you able to sort of level the playing field and show them doesn't matter what your culture is? Here's how your business, your body. >> So from a change perspective, I think there's a different perception. The newer, nimbler organization believes that they changed easy, but it still may have people the older organisation again still made people most people don't like to change. What I have learned is if you help them understand the value of it, how they're doing it, how their jobs are going to change and give them the tools to do it. Some people are gonna be early adopters. But finding that one person, the organization, no matter what level they are in that business unit or in that department that has that informal voice that people look to naturally, that the Nazi leader who's in a leadership position with leader from a personality perspective get them on board. And sometimes that's the hardest thing to do. They might be the most changed resistant, but was that person flips, They become your greatest greatest advocate out there. So it's a personal thing. This is hard work. That's why I talk about in our sessions, is going through. This requires a lot of work, but it's worth it. You can measure the value on the end that you got help. People understand why you're going on this journey and have have resource is there for help. >> So what were some of that? You said you did good Q and a session during your break out this afternoon. >> Tell me some of >> the things that that some of the audience said that you thought was really like they're getting it, >> Yes. So the whole point of our session was going live is not really the goal, right? That's just >> a guess, the exact right. >> And so most people focus on going live, and the answer is congratulations. You purchased the product, Kuba, and now it's working. So what? You don't have any real data? What do you do in the future? Some questions were as they're going through Supplier Neighborhood. The shift between procurement now taking a larger role in the relationships with the vendors. Well, that's great. It should be a balanced relationship. You know, there's a procurement role in that. And then there's the end. Users are the people in the organization from the business. You have to relate with those suppliers, so work together. If you were together in the past now it's a great time to do that. There's some other questions about if something is not working correctly. Post go live how quick It's not broken, but it could be optimized or you're getting complaints about. How quick should you change it? The answer is, I don't know, measuring yourself. I mean, obviously it's broken. Fix it. But it might be something around change. And maybe you have to help people understand why they're doing this new process. If people are giving feedback positive, negative, mostly native, was positive. We just go off our way. Welcome to Yelp. But if it's negative feedback, listen, don't get offended, understand that perspective and then measure it. Say, Is this something that we did is saying the platform, or is it just changed and work with it? What I tell our clients to is in Cooper, Just cause you can doesn't mean you should. I mean, that's really easy to build a field custom field, really easy to build, custom approval chance, really hard to maintain that stuff. So try to do it out of the not out of the box, but configured without as much customization as possible, and they can always improve it, understand it better. >> I think the key to adoption is the more customization that you have. I imagine the adoption funnel gets narrower and narrower. It's got >> interesting, so you customize because you think that's the way the process should go, because that's how we do it today. So if your goal is to take how you do your process today and put into Cooper, also tell clients congratulations. If you had a bad process now you're bad process that works faster. So take the time to say, Let's step back. Companies evolve, right? And so as they're evolving, if you haven't taken a really a view purposeful of you backwards and measure organization, where you're out from a charity model assessment, then you probably don't know where your gaps are. Take the opportunity when you're implying Cooper to use kind of leading practice that Cooper has start with that and said, Going back to what you're doing today, you know what a great example. That's improvers, right? So people like to have 10 approve er's because they think it reduces risk. So if I go back and look and I asked the audience, say, how many purchase order requests rejected? Very few. And how long do people actually have it open when they re prove it? So that's three seconds when they open it up and looked at it, do they really assess it from a risk perspective? Probably not. But if four people ahead of them approved it, that person's just gotta prove it, because I think it's okay because they're assuming someone else is looking at it, as opposed to in Cooper. Now I have the rich data to understand it. I could minimize risk that way instead of trying to do it. And what is a false sense of security? >> So getting people on board with bringing in automation and leveraging like I was saying in the beginning, the 1.2 trillion of spend that's going through the Cooper platform toe leverage that intelligence to not only have Cooper create the prescriptions for companies to be able to go. Okay, we don't we shouldn't your point. We shouldn't take a process that was clunky before and just do it faster. Still clunky, being able to have the automation thing. Analytics. Really, Those core enabling technologies can also be quite revolutionary. >> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So the coop insights now, and you're seeing that measured against others and its mass, but you see how you're doing it, So this is really powerful sitting your goals out there and seeing how you're doing. Adjusting those really question yourself is, if we're not getting is approved in the speed that we thought, How do we do it differently? Right, So and that's nice about Cuba. It is really sounds right, and they really do come out with three releases a year, which is powerful. And so it's always changing, which means you have to be nimble. Understand your organization, adopting the new technologies to come out. They're also looking at their acquisitions and seeing that fits into what you're doing. >> Exactly. Last question for you is the announcement of the expansion of their in the AWS marketplace today and thinking, Wow, the I t person is probably gonna finally all these Shadow I T units that are popping up in finance and marketing and engineering and whatnot. They now have the ability to see and manage the entire software from search to deployment and management through AWS. What advantage is that going to give Deloitte when you're working with Cooper customers on implementation? >> That's probably too soon to say on that one. All the expansions they're having really help us with another tool. Tell clients I would say that there's always measuring the benefit for that client in the risk. So even if you take Amazon, for example, just opened by for Cooper is managing that So Amazon. When they first came out with Amazon for business open by, you couldn't control the categories that were exposed to the client. Now you can, but you can't control the items. So having a process in place, having a category strategy and then maximizing it if Amazon works that client fantastic, AWS is gonna get them or visibility across their platforms to manage those better. Fantastic. I think it just gives another opportunity to bring clients back into Cooper. Have a look at the value for Cooper from an end and solution, and all these wraparound acquisitions are making our expansions with their clients, people pay and all those other pieces out there. It's just another thing for them to have a goal and understand make a decision from their business, whether they're going to use it or not. But there's there's value across the board. Every every client is different, >> Absolutely. But it's also that that consumer ization approach that if you can take a process that somebody does on their own time, whether they're buying soccer balls or pool and bring that to their business life, that consumer ization following them. You think with potential there to transform every industry, every function, every line of business. It's just infinite. So >> truly dot, >> dot dot to me. Continue. Absolutely Wish we had more time. But Max, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube today and talk doing talking to me about what's going on at Deloitte and congrats on having us standing. You're only sessions. That's good, right? Take for Max Ground like I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cooper Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We are here with Nitin Mittal, he is the Principal Analytics and Cognitive Offering at Deloitte. Thank you so much for coming direct from Boston. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. >> So first of all, tell us a little bit about your role at Deloitte. >> Yeah so, as the Analytics and Cognitive Offering leader at Deloitte Consulting, the practice that I run in Deloitte Consulting, we help a lot of our clients with basically their data management needs, their data modernization needs and also basically how to capitalize on the data they have. Particularly as it relates to the analytics and the insights that they could generate and more so using AI approaches and machine learning techniques. And that's a lot of the work that we do and the business that I lead in Deloitte Consulting. >> So what you just described I think in technology world parlance is now digital transformation and that is using data to transform business models and approaches. I want to hear, where you think most companies are in terms of this journey? I mean are they still in the planning stage? Are they in the execution stage? Where do you see things? >> Frankly I would say depending on the industry that you work in, they are in different states of maturity. Frankly I would say financial services companies and life sciences pharmaceutical companies, they are a bit ahead in terms of their level of understanding along that digital transformation spectrum, as well as the effort and the investments that they are making versus if you take many of the consumer companies, unless you happen to be an e-commerce company like Amazon, many of them are basically still kind of catching up and trying to understand how do they cross what is called the digital divide which is customers coming into their retail stores versus customers actually going to their web properties and expressing an intent or trying to basically buy a particular kind of product. How do they actually sort of correlate that? So depending on the industry, depending on frankly the market that you're in, you will absolutely see a variance and you'll have companies along that entire spectrum, from companies who are just starting and trying to understand what do they do with their data to companies who are a lot more progressive, who inherently understand and comprehend the data that they have but are more focused on how do we capitalize on that data for the purposes of insights. >> The digital transformation data is a big part of it. People want to be like a SAS company where they've got all this legacy on premises, they get Cloud-native activity kind of coming together. Where should customers store their data? This becomes a big question we hear a lot. What are you guys doing at the edge of the network, you know the cutting edge with customers. What are they looking at doing? Are they architecting it? Where are they in figuring out where data sits, how data feeds the machine learning, how machine learning feeds the AI, all this requires data. And it's not addressable. You can't get it to the app, there's a problem. What are you seeing on where the data should be stored? >> A very very big debate in companies right now and frankly a lot of the architectural discussions that take place are all with respect to basically exactly the nature and the intent and the spirit of the question that you just kind of asked. More and more frankly what we see is a discussion along the lines of a hybrid cloud architecture. Where is some data is assumed it's going to keep continue residing on premise, particularly where there are significant privacy considerations, where there is basically kind of a risk or a heightened risk of cyber security et cetera. That type of data still is resident on premise. But more and more if you take like customer data, sales data, supply chain data, a lot of that is moving to a cloud based environment. But what we also see in that mix is that many companies at least at this point of time, have not necessarily gone down the path of choosing a singular cloud platform. They still have basically a multitude of cloud platforms, whether they are public cloud or frankly a private cloud and you see kind of data moving to those cloud environments too. So in a sense we are going from a world where data has been fragmented and siloed, in many of the back end transactional systems, data warehouses and data basis, to well a lot more consolidated in a cloud environment but not necessarily a singular, unified view of that data because data is still, to some degree, getting fragmented in a multitude of cloud environments. >> Is the regulations create more constraints then, because what you're saying is is that privacy and compliance and risk which we've all known about, it's been a part of the plan, but now you got more regulations. Just saw Microsoft had an announcement this morning around having more privacy so then you got Internash, you've got clouds, you have geography, so the complexity seems to increase. Its almost the N times N problem. What's your thoughts on that? >> I would say that, I won't necessarily state the constraints but it's certainly a very prominent consideration and I kind of talked about this yesterday at the conference as well. It actually goes beyond privacy. It actually includes three different things. Privacy is a big consideration, but then there's also basically the topic of ethics, particularly in the age of AI, in terms of what constitute ethics because we as humans we are given basically the macro environment that we live in, our upbringing, our morals, and kind of our general know-how, essentially have a ethical code and a set of principles that we follow. The same needs to be embraced by intelligent machines. Ethics is becoming another topic. And a third topic around algorithmic bias. Frankly all, whether it's privacy, whether it's ethics, whether it's algorithmic bias, those are becoming prominent topics for consideration and something which consciously have to looked in, or looked upon in the context of data management, in the context of basically analytics, in the context of the processes that are being applied, and in the context of the systems that are being architected. >> It's not just software level abstractions it's societal level, human input-- >> Exactly. >> kind of blends it in, we'll get to that in the skills question later. But okay real quick, how does Informatica address this because their software guys, building abstraction layers, they got now Compute in the cloud. As the world changes so fast, how do customers implement a solution to solve these complexities? What's your take on the Informatica story? >> As one of probably the most significant systems integration partner for Informatica, the way that we have always kind of viewed Informatica and why frankly I view our partnership has excelled in the marketplace and at many clients, is because we actually see Informatica as an entire ecosystem around the topic and domain of data. Whether it comes around basically data extraction, data integration, data management, master data management, data governance, data privacy as well as basically intelligent insight generation, we literally see Informatica as having the platform, having the products, having the solutions that address a multitude of needs across the entire ecosystem and frankly, they're not just a tools company focused around one aspect of that value chain. They are basically a platform company that has the ability to traverse across that entire value chain so that you could essentially access data, capitalize on that data, generate insights of that data and use advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to actually get a better competitive edge in the marketplace against your competitors and in the market that you're working in. >> So you've just painted this portrait of this exceedingly complex landscape, where companies are wrestling with all these really hard questions. Do we have the right people in place who are trying to answer these questions? I mean the skills gap is well documented. What do you think the best companies are doing to combat it? >> So absolutely right that there is a significant skills gap and it's not necessarily something that's kind of getting really better. Frankly that gap is increasing and we see kind of, I'll narrate this from a consulting and a systems integration standpoint. One of the areas that we're looking at to start closing some of this skills gap, is the development and usage of what we call digital FDE's which is we know we've got a limited pool of essentially highly talented practitioners and team members and human beings as part of our practice but we need to have them focus on some of the higher value added task. So we're taking a lot of the cookie cutter, repeatable kind of tasks as part of that value chain and we're automating it, building basically software bots that we in our language call digital FDE's so that a lot of that work can be taken upon by these digital FDE's versus we can take the limited pool of talented practitioners that we have, retrain, reskill, recertify them, and taking some of the more complex activities that we have to undertake for our clients. >> Love that strategy but I got to ask you, for all the graduates that are graduating college, in high school, the other question to follow up on that is what specific skills, what do I need to know to solve the data, be in the data business. Is there a certain playbook you see? A certain success formula from a skills specific skills standpoint? >> So without necessarily kind of getting into the hard skills sets because frankly, technologies evolve, skills sets kind of develop, new platforms are basically kind of out there, the one area that I would absolutely highlight is understanding the age of AI that we are living in and as part of your eduction, paying attention to and focusing on how do I deal with data? How should it be architected? How should it be classified? How should it be categorized? What are the appropriate algorithms to use? When do I apply those algorithms and what is meaningful in terms of the application of the right data set, or the selection of the right data set, and marry it with the algorithm to generate the meaningful insights. Understanding basically the age of AI, and what that entails and how does the role of data change, how does the role of algorithms comes into being, and what is important from a privacy, ethics and biased standpoint. If you develop those skill sets and that understanding, it will actually serve you well in any circumstance. And it will serve you well irrespective the technology, irrespective of the vendor, irrespective of the underlying hard skill sets. >> That's terrific advice for all the budding technologists out there. Nimin thank you so much for coming on the program. >> Thank you. Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE at Informatica World 2019. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. Okay, welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE, live here in Las Vegas at The Venetian, this is Informatica Worlds exclusive coverage with theCUBE, Informatica World 2018, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Jim Kobielus, analyst at Wikibon, SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE, our next guest is Tracy Ring, Vice President at Deloitte Consulting, great to see you again. >> You as well! >> So, love havin' you on, last year, you know, we go through all the interviews and, you know it always comes up, and this is important, you know we are passionate about women in tech, inclusion and diversity, huge topic, the job's never done, in fact, I was in New York last week for a blockchain event, and I wore a shirt that said: Satoshi's Female. (Tracy laughing) And I literally was getting so many high fives and, but it's not just women in tech, there's a role that men play, this is, sort of an ongoing conversation so. What's the state of the industry, from your perspective, how do you see it? Obviously the data world is, indiscriminate data is data, >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> It should be 50/50. >> Yeah, you know I think that the, the opportunity is multi-faceted, right? So we're in a place where technology is changing unbelievably fast, we're graduating nearly as many men as women in, fields of science, data analytics, computer engineering, etc. But what we're not seeing, a combination of women in leadership roles as much as we would expect, we're not seeing the retention of women in those roles. And for me, I'm really passionate about the fact that supporting, attracting, and keeping women in those roles, is really critical, right? There's an interesting facet to how this all really, really plays together, Deloitte for 20 years has a women initiative, right? 20 years of supporting women, embracing them, helping them support leadership roles and, and I think that the time is now. If not, it's long overdue, to really support them within this field. I also think that women in data, an initiative that we're launching this year, and having our launch event today, is sort of super timely because women in data is not women who only become CIOs, or will only become CDOs, these are women that will be the Chief Marketing Officers, the CHROs, and using data to tell their stories. >> You know, we had a guest on earlier, who was a man, but he was the head of the CDO for the Ireland Bank, and Peter Burris asked the question, said hey, where did you come from technical? No, he came from the business side, who knows technology, this is what you're getting at, and I think this is something that we've been seeing as a pattern that you don't rise up through the ranks and be super nerdy, although that's cool too, and there's a lot more STEM action but there's also multiple vectors into the field. You can come from business, and know tech, and a lot more tech is consumable, and learnable, either online, or through some sort of other proficiency so, this is a big story and so, how do you guys, looking at that, at Deloitte, I know Deloitte's got the track record, but this all scales beyond Deloitte, right? It's an industry thing. >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> How are you guys seeing this? How are you looking at helping people, either connect the dots, or support each other? What's some of the latest and greatest? >> Yeah, I mean I think Informatica is part of what has created the case for change, right? We've democratized data integration, we have, you know, made self-service analytics, we've put data in the cloud in everyone's hands, right? So technology is out there more, every single day, and I think the unique part is, is that, when we think about diversity wholistically, and I think of diversity from ages, and geographic, and gender, etc. I think really being able to take all of that diverse experience, and be able to listen to business user's requirements in a way that they can hear it! And listen for something different, right? And brings skills to bare, that aren't necessarily there. I think if we can build better technology, that's more future-proofed, based on having a diverse crowd listening, and trying to build something that's far more compelling than, you know, I asked for X, build me X. I think when we really do our clients, and the world of justice is when we, you know, someone asks for X, and you ask them 10 more questions, and heavy--what about this? And what, and what, and what? And I think really being much more inquisitive, giving people the ability to be inquisitive, and bringing more opinions to the table to be inquisitive. >> And bringing more diversity of practice, makes the applications better, so that's clear. We see that in some of the conversations we have, but I got to ask about the question of roles, what are you seeing, kind of, you look at the trends, are there certain roles that are, that are being adopted with women in tech more than others? Less, trending down, up? What are some of the trend lines on, either roles in tech, for women? >> Yeah, you know, I think that over all, when I had the opportunity, so when we decided, we're going to launch a program within Informatica. We want the women who are going to be the Chief Data Officers of tomorrow. And it was a great question because, actually what we ended up saying is, the Chief Data Officers of tomorrow could be so many different current roles right now, right? And how do we really, kind of, attract the right women into this cohort, support them for a long year and, provide them the forum to network, connect with others, understand different career paths. You know, looking at what we're seeing, you know, with GDPR, and regulations, and all these other things happening, you know, the concepts and roles that didn't even exist years ago, right, so data governance leads and, Chief Analytic Officers, and all of these-- >> James: Or Chief AI Officers! >> Exac--(laughing) >> How do we bring women into the hottest fields like AI, deep learning? If you look at the research literature, out of, both the commercial and the academic world, many of the authors of the papers are men, I mean, more than the standard ratio of men to women in the corporate space, near as I can tell, from my deep reading. How do you break women into AI, for example, when they haven't been part of that overall research community? That's just a, almost like a rhetorical question. >> Yeah, how do you not, you know, it's just impossible to not bring them to bear, the skills, the talent, the ingenuity, I think it's absolutely mandatory, and someone said to me, they said well, why are the men not invited to this event? Why are they not in the cohort? And I said, you know, because there's a component of all this, that we want to grow and foster and support, and create opportunities. You know, one of the women that sat on our board today said, you know, I'm not somebody who's going to golf, I'm not someone who's going to go to a sports game, I'm going to meet you in the board room, and we're going to talk about compelling topics there. And so I think it's about, encouraging and fostering a new way of networking that's more aligned with what women are interested in, and what, you know, sometimes we do best and, I think creating an opportunity for a different type of everything, in the way that we operate is important. >> I think self-awareness, for men, and this also, creating a good vibe, right? Having a good vibe is critical, in my opinion, and also, you know, not judging people right, you know, based upon, you have some women say, hey I like to get dressed up and that's what I am, some people who don't want to go to sports and, some guys want this, so I think generally, there needs to be, kind of a reset, like hey, let's just have an open mind and a good vibe. >> It's like lunch and learns, you know, lunch and learns are, are a great enabler for centers of confidence, to get together on a regular basis, to talk about business and technical-related things, but also it's a social environment. How can you build more of those kinds of opportunities into the corporate culture, where, they're not skewing, the actual socializing, to traditionally male-dominated hobbies or interests, or traditionally female-dominated hobbies or interests? How can you have, sort of a balance, of those kinds of socialization opportunities in a professionally appropriate environment that also involve a fair amount of shop talk? 'cause that's what gets people bonding, promoted in their careers is that they do deep shop talk in the appropriate settings. >> Yeah, it's interesting, one of the women that I personally consider a mentor, she said if it wasn't for data, I wouldn't be where I am today. And she said, you know, I grew up in and industry where, unfortunately, I really didn't have a voice at the table, and my voice at the table came from data, it came from my ability to see connections, patterns, and detect things, and also for my ability to create networks of people, and make connections and pull things together in a way that my colleagues weren't doing. And, you know, when she tells that story I think that's, that's the template, right? >> John: That's the empowerment. >> We want to say, use everything at your bevy to bring the best value to your business end-users, and she's connecting the dots in a way that no one else had, and is using data as really, the impetis to really, solidify everything that she's saying, it's inarguable. >> That's a great story, it's a phenomenal story. >> It's just amazing. >> Once she got into power she really drove that hard, that's awesome. Well, let's take that to the next level, so, you know, I have a daughter as a junior at UCAL Berkeley, and she's a STEM girl, and so she's got a good vibe in there >> James: STEM girl, I have a stem girl too, mines 28 now. >> You know, and so, kind of aside, but she, turned away from computer science because, at, you know, in middle school the vibe wasn't there, right? And it was kind of a social thing, we mentioned social. You're advice to young women now? Because we're seeing people with the democratization, you see YouTube, you see all these tools, you got robots, you got makers, of course, you got data, you've seen a lot more touch points where people can, you know, ingratiate in unthreatened, un, you know, just, getting immersed in tech. So you have, you're starting to get people the taste of not being tracked into it. So, what's the advice for young folks trying to navigate? And is it networking groups, is it mentoring? What's the playbook in your mind? >> Yeah, I think it's a combination of everything that you've mentioned, right? I absolutely think that your network, and what one of my mentors calls your sleeper network, right? The network that's out there, the people that I worked with five years ago, and we worked, and were in a war room til two a.m. and you know, then I, I just got busy, right? And reactivating your sleeper networks, you know, having the courage to kind of, keep people apprised, using social media, in a way that people, you know, the number of people that say, oh I didn't know you were up to this, that, or the other, thank goodness you posted. And so, I think using all of the technology to your advantage. And I also think there's a component of someone, I mean, I had an MIS degree for undergrad, and I started out as a developer. >> You might have to explain what this is for the younger generation. (laughing) >> Oh, I know, how crazy is that! Oh my gosh, >> Is that in the DP department, was that in the DP department? >> Can you imagine. But I wasn't interested in technology that much, it was what was going to get me a job and, and I thought I would become a business analyst, I've stayed with it, and now really passionate about tech, but, I think there's a component of all this that, every job, you know, the CHROs, the CAOs, all of the roles that roll up, you know, every finance person I know that's exceptional, is phenomenal with data! Right? And so, I think, not only creating a network of people that are in the industry, but I think it's about telling the stories outside the industry, and telling the oh my gosh, you'll never believed what we learned today. And I think that's the magic of the stories, and being transparent. >> Well Tracy, you're an inspiration, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really love the story. I got to ask, what are you up to now? Tell us what's up with you, obviously you've moved on from MIS, Management Information Systems, part of the DP, Data Processing department, that's many computer days. >> Tracy: Oh my. >> Oh my God, we're goin' throwback there. >> Tracy: Absolutely. >> What're you up to now? What are you havin' fun with? >> Yeah, so my day job, I have the luxury of working across our cognitive analytic, and our PA alliances, which is an insane mouthful, but it means I get to work with some of our most exciting alliance partners that Deloitte is building solutions, and going to market, and getting really great customer stories under our belt. And I think really kind of blowing the doors off of, of what we did three years ago, five years ago, and 20 years ago, when MIS degrees were still being handed out, so. >> A lot more exciting now, isn't it. >> (laughing) It's way better now! So. >> I wish I was 23 again, you know, havin' a good time. (Tracy laughing) >> Yeah, so, really wholistically, seeing what we consider ecosystems and alliances, is, that's my day job. >> Tracy Ring, Vice President at Deloitte, great story, fun to have on theCUBE, also doing some great work, super exciting time, you got cloud, you got data, it really is probably one of the most creative times in the tech industry, it's super fun to get involved. This is theCUBE, here out in the open, at Informatica World in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier with Jim Kobielus, be back with more, stay with us! From Vegas, we'll be right back. >> Tracy: Thank you. (bubbly music)

>>live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's the cues covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015. Brought to you by Oracle. How your hosts, John Courier and Jeff Rick Wait, >>We are here. Live in Howard's treated oracle. OpenWorld for Silicon Angles, The Cube Exclusive coverage Star flagship program. We go out to the events extract the cinnamon noise. I'm John Kerry, the founder of Silicon, and Brian gracefully lead analyst on all the cloud and all the infrastructure stuff going on here. Next guess is Jeffrey Davis, Principal Gore, Oracle, global leader for Deloitte and Touche. Legend in the industry. I've been covering Oracle for a long time. Good to see you, John Bryan allegedly knew she had to get that in there. Love that. You know you guys are. The service's angle has been something that the service's business is. It's been changing radically. Now more than ever with clouds. I really want to get your take because you are an executive looking at this transformation of cloud. But the Lloyd across all the Oracle customer base, your party with customers. So you're the front lines. I gotta ask you straight up. What is the number one thing customers are looking at right now that you partner with four Cloud to figure it out. Is it a migration? All the above, And what do you think about that? So when customers are evaluating the cloud or our clients are looking at the club, you really focus on three things. One is agility. Thea other one is time and the other one is valued. So how quickly can we adopt to the changing environment? How quickly can we leverage technologies like clouds in order to be able to respond to our customers, to adapt to the changing needs of our employees, to embrace our business strategy in a new and innovative way? So I said legend, you know, talk about the eighties for women on camera. That's important point I want to bring up. Is that Is that the old way? Big growth of client server was around software middleware right year BC around you name it that created huge consultancies like Lloyd, you participated in that create a lot of wealth creation for the customers, create value, right, but their cycles were long in the deal. That'll be about 12 13 years now, months and almost a year or two, there were all these big deployments. Now the cloud is accelerating when you compare and contrast time of then share. And now with the cloud Just how much the deployments change the software, the organizations, How you guys operate a new way to do that job well, and we're all responding to the market, right? While responding to customers needs Cloud didn't come about because of technology in it of itself. But we're really all in this ecosystem responding to our customers must customers a really demanding from us is there demanding agility and speed. As I said before, if you take a look at the way we used to do things, basically you had a a large capital investment on the part of the customers. They went, they bought the software, they bought the hardware, they had to hire the expertise of an advantage, mail the eggs, and you're looking at a transformation for them that could take anywhere from 12 to 24 months or longer before they would get time to value. And, you know, these projects didn't go as planned. No, that's this is Yeah, I know the change orders came in paid more cash on DSO. We all got a really bad reputation because of the high costs in a long time to value and even if value was ever realized in some cases, now we take a look at the environment and what the cloud enables us to do is move in a much faster pace. Way used to have what we call a waterfall approach to design and implementation went into a big room and you talked about the world and I never ran that way. And then you put it into the system and then people never really embraced it, because when it came out, it didn't look like anything they thought they were gonna get. This is completely different with cloud. Now you can take an agile approach. Now you can sit and listen to the customer demands very quickly respond to what they think they need, where they really generate value. And then you can focus on those things and very quickly there, in a design session with you And at the end of the day, >>changed management is much easier because they've been a part of the process and also, you know, looking at 90 days sprints. You're looking at things that are done. You know, in >>six months, six months, time to value that can give you compress a competitive advantage. You know, that could help you retain Maur employees or customers. So it's really some timetable. Met Lavery s V p of the Cloud Gru. Gru Integration was saying they were doing provisioning on in 24 minutes. Multiple deployments like like nobody's business. What has them in the timetable that you're seeing for some of these times of value, horizons means hurdles. These milestones said days, weeks, months, hours, minutes. I mean, when you go to a customer base where their expectations of what you guys deliver, there's some insight there. Some of it depends on the environment. So remember they're still clients. We have local customers that are in a highly regulated industry or have a very complex prisons process. Those are gonna take a longer there is they're gonna take in. Technology is not necessarily on the critical path. But when you look at those other areas that frankly, you don't differentiate yourself very much or speed with a solution concave you a competitive advantage. You know, you're looking at a client expectations of anywhere from 90 days, you know, to six months, you know, manager here, very manager, but aggressive. Visa VI the old way. Well, certainly, And the other piece that we're not really talking about is, you know, it's not enough for us to put the technology out there. It's also got to be used and adopted. You know, when you had those large transformations. It's very hard for an organization to absorb all of that change. Now we're looking at the fine entry point that you could get with clouds with that fine entry point. Now we can sub select areas with greatest impact, but we're not changing the entire organization. >>Mark Hurd has the C I. O. G. On this morning and one of the comments that he made. I've heard this a number of times over the last 12 18 months. He essentially said, I have a ton of undifferentiated applications now. They're things that that Oracle thinks are fantastic. HCM and C. R. M and Air P. But in essence, everybody has those. Every business has those very undifferentiated, but they're complicated. What? You Seymour, you see more people saying you know what take those. Help me migrate those into SAS applications, you know, save costs. Where do you see more saying, You know what? Give me the other 20%. The ones that drive business differentiation, ones that are new cloud native applications. What do you see in your mix? What's pushing your customers >>to push you? You know, it depends on the geography, and it depends on the industry and some other things. If you want to talk about North America, which tends to be one of the largest markets in the world, if not the largest market in the world, when you're looking in North America, really people have gone through a lot of the major ear piece. Remember the earlier conversation? You know, they have suffered through tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, and their boards were not satisfied that they got the results of the expected. Now, when you take a look at what's happening, you know, people are now being much more strategic in their investments, much more prescriptive there. Look how they spent exactly, because now the boards have different expectations. They've already gone and spent all that money on technology. They can't go back to the board. Can't say we need to redo this. What they do are willing to fund is you want to get into a new business. If you want to spin something off, you need to stand it up right away. If a customer you know, provide you a new opportunity, you want to shift to that new opportunity. Really? Well, technology is the basis of a lot of this transformation. So Cloud provides that opportunity and it's modest investment with really quick, high value. It's a great point >>you look at I t In the past decades prior to this evolution, we're seeing the cloud consolidate, consolidate, consolidate, right? I don't know the well again. I just went to the well, apparently running, you know, whatever the model was there. But now they're under a lot of pressure to drive top line revenue. Absolute. Now, the top line revenue equations, a completely different mindset. You have to go out and oh, cut the market. You gotta use a shadow I t or your authorized go out. Do legitimate stand up new platforms are Can you give me an example of that? We're seeing more of that now. A clear Mandate. Cee Io's Go take a New Hill or let's consolidate these apt and reposition for this new use case, which is not. That's experiment, but it's certainly a new market opportunity, and they gotta do their due diligence, so it's almost unparalleled. Due diligence kills your waterfall. That's one doesn't talk about that dynamic. Where examples you give go. Take that new top line revenue driver. So you know that there are customers that are looking at new partnerships in the marketplace, and those new partnerships have dynamic new business models. You know, it's not like opening up another hamburger stand. You know, they're not necessarily expanding into our core business. They're really looking at ways to amplify growth. If you're gonna take that as a strategic position, then you know customer or client of ours would focus on, you know, let's take this innovation the market. We don't want to invest a lot in it, waste a lot of time and lose the competitive advantage. Let's >>get to market first. Let's provide a new product or service to the market where we can move very quickly, and then the >>net result is we can see the benefits right away. And if it isn't way, haven't sunk a lot of time and money and something that's not necessarily gonna have the same values. We just had Shawn Price on. And I'm gonna ask this because it's a lemon that you're in because you're part of the customer right here, the strategic partner of the customer. So that idea top line revenue growth could come from a partner. When I see How do you work in that? Quick, You're cool to work with my Aunt VI's. Bring that into the table. You're absolutely so this market is changing. You know, Cloud clearly changes everything and much more so than some of the things we've seen in the past. And so now we need to position ourselves differently now for the Deloitte Business Model way. We're really in a specialized business of focusing highly on value and value creation. We weren't necessarily in other areas and we have different partnerships now. Those partnerships are shifting. Oracle provides us a complete platform. You know, we don't >>have to really get involved in a lot of the aspects of the platform that, frankly, we're in our core competency and frankly, weren't our clients what >>you talked about that customer interaction? What do you have to do to change what we've seen? Different size, trying different approaches? We've seen some that are partnering with cloud Provider, but they want to be their own flat for acquiring them. What changes in terms of the skills you have to hire the way you expect that interaction toe happen between you and customer. Because to a certain extent, like for developers, developers love self service. They do. You know, they they are shadow I because they're driving What changes in your world for that? >>So this is really kind of an interesting question. Very early on, when Oracle made cloud product available >>in HCM, we saw an opportunity. Our clients had the demand because they wanted to create a more sticky environment from customers. What better >>way than providing them better products in the HCM space? We made major investments there. Now we're a leader in HCM, and if I look back over that experience, what do we do differently? First of all, we had to change our mindset. You know, it's not enough just to say the cloud, but you gotta live the cloud because it truly is more agile. It truly is faster. You can take your old methods and tools and approaches all the things that worked for you before. A lot of them don't work anymore. There's some but some really good winds here, especially in the change management side. Also, you know, we'd have clients that had to kind of do it yourself brain surgery that have to order their own hardware that have provisional themselves. You know, that became a real mess. Now we're looking at something that's a lot different. We're not in that business anymore. You know, we do support on Prem where our clients think it's important and strategic course. But now we've got a new, agile methodology. Now we've trained our workforce. We've got 14,500 professionals around the world. We've had to move that group, and Oracle really helped us do that. They've been very collaborative in sharing I p and sharing methods and tools with us so we can make that adjustment. Not only have we had to change that when you think about our other methodologies, all of our other methodology to create value to change management, they were all thoroughly integrated. We've had to rethink those, but it's been a great story because we could go to the client. We can say we can get you there faster because where technology was a barrier world, >>it was on the critical path. We're now changing that. And by the way, this technology is not your old technology. It's much better. It's much more robust. How >>do you you know, obviously we're here It at an oracle OpenWorld. It could be called Oracle Cloud >>World if we really wanted to. I mean, >>it's a lot of it is the red stack. A lot of it is one cloud. How do you manage that against customers saying, Well, look, there's other options as well. I wanna have the ability to leverage this cloud for something. Oracles cloud for certain things. How do you do? You find your customers want multiple clouds or one cloud is good enough? >>Well, we're all teaching right? We're all teaching the world about God because you know there's still people that look at it in a variety of different ways. I think it's an excellent question, so let's think about this. >>Do you want to be your own systems integrator for your smartphone. You want to go by an operating system? Do you want to go buy a separate peace of heart? Where do you >>want to decide what APS fit? What don't. And do you want to actually try to get those abs together? I don't think we want to do that anymore. And I try to use that as an example for my clients. Tell them. Look, let's not be your own systems integrator. You is a iittie executive. You could be an officer toe, help the organization get to their business goals. You know, you're not in another yourself a business objective, but you could be an agent for change. I try to educate them so they can help their colleagues explain cloud, take the fear out and then show the art of the possible. What about the security model? I mean, I wouldn't get your take on you little bit biased because your manager Oracle really? But what would be global, critical or complementary events? How you feel about it? But the intense security message is really a game changer in my mind. Follows on incredible theory. Incredible application. Certainly the product's gonna be ready soon. If it works, it's like a car that does the key turnover. It's like it's all good on paper. Certainly a game changer. Security outside number One thing you're hearing Get some color to that because, you know, if that plays out, if you believe that end N security on the chips and software Silicon plays out the way they say it would, that's gonna change the game. For sure. It is. So none of us and you can go through a week without hearing about a major security breach. When you think about this, you step back and think about the potential here. Our stuff is starting to talkto our stuff. But our stuff isn't unless it's based on. Oracle isn't all thoroughly integrated, so somebody can break into our stuff and they can get access to our lives and they can change our lives. That's hugely powerful. So we are very concerned about security, and Lloyd is one of the largest organizations. In fact, we have a cyber practice that looks at both Proactiv reactive aspects of security. Here's the big concern we have as all this stuff starts, get interconnected. The Internet of things, security becomes a major issue. We need more breakthroughs and security. And I think oracles on the vanguard certainly as we get into what we call a hyper hybrid cloud on Prem on Cloud. Some of that's gonna be a great emotion is no. Perimeter is nothing either. Protect is the Wild West total while and, you know, despite what you believe, boards and people are not reacting fast enough to security threats. And that's why you're seeing these breaches into my knowledge. I don't think anybody has been breached with Orgel security in place. But that said, you have to be really, But still, they probably would get out. There's not that they're hiding it, but the point is, you need to be united engine system. It's hard to do that in a open source world, right? So you have a horizontally scaled open source phenomenon, and it's growing our market and a vertically integrated product requirement. You believe I want Indian security, then you gonna go vertically integrated. You do purpose built. But if you want scale a 1,000,000,000 large scale a k a cloud, you want horizontally scalable. How do you reconcile that with your customers? Well, you know so again. It's difficult for them because unless you've had a security threat, it's very difficult to really get them to take the initiative. You know, the more that we can build security in, the more that it's covered in the Red Sea. More that we get a comprehensive end to end product. I think it allows us to help the client realize you know the risk and help them. The old Fowler said. In The Cube they had they had this done in 2005. Finally took a bunch of security breaches to get people's attention to your point. It's on everyone's agenda. Number one right it is. And yet you know how much is enough? Well, we find the people are too reactive and not not proactive enough. >>What's the What's the temperature of your customers right now? I mean, you know, Tesla's out, they're disrupting Uber's out. Their Airbnb are they? Are they sort of defensive and paranoid? You know that Andy Grove, always trying to be aggressive with a saying No, no, no, no. I'm not letting these little guys into my market. I'm gonna go be aggressive and try and push back what a general feeling. There's a lot of interesting startup disruption going on really changing industry. >>There is, and you know, there's so many sort of partnerships and alliances, mergers and new innovations. You know, right now, clients are very uncomfortable. Just the transition from on Prem to Cloud is a major change in our clients have been the expert for technology for decades for their organization. They are having trouble keeping up with all of it. It can be disruptive. They're looking at what's unique in their industry. You know what is regulation driving? You know what is innovation driving in their industry? But, you know, they're always on the learning curve. They're always trying to figure out if we want to get your final thought wrapping up here to get your take for the folks that are watching here on camera that couldn't make it here were beloved world. What is this show about it? We've been here six years. You've seen that transformation. About four years ago, Larry looked like a deer in the headlights, almost stuck in his tracks and smoke coming out of his ears like he felt that the scene felt like a pivotal moment couple years ago. And then since then, just been every year. Oracle just gets more and more energy, just like dominated that march of the crowd. Almost like four years ago. Like we're gonna win that. What's your vibe? You see that same thing here and shared some color on the take is over the years, and we've been doing this a lot in various forms Over the years. There's been the promise of riel innovation. There's been the promise, real change in the industry. We saw sort of incremental change. We really see increments. Exponential change now and now. The promises fulfilled. We have real product. We're taking the market. We're doing interesting product, right? Israel product. It's very riel, and we have work to be done. But yeah, really studies and customers? Well, it's an evolution. But this is really sort of an epiphany at the moment, because we've never had, >>you know, full sweets of product in the marketplace. Not right now. I don't know that there are any other large you know. Air Pia options in the clouds away there is for Oracle and look at the host of service is that have been announced over the last year. >>This this particular show for us, you know, really isn't accelerating. All these products and service is in the cloud that are now available. They give us a lot of different options that we never had. A great quote. Put that on a cube. Jim. Thanks for joining Us. Way are here live in San Francisco's Howard Street for the Cube Special. Exclusive coverage of Oracle OpenWorld Q. Be right back with more of this short break. Thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> "Supermetafragilisticexpialadotious." What's in a name? In an homage to the inimitable Charles Fitzgerald, we've chosen this title for today's session because of all the buzz surrounding "supercloud," a term that we introduced last year to signify a major architectural trend and shift that's occurring in the technology industry. Since that time, we've published numerous videos and articles on the topic, and on August 9th, kicked off "Supercloud22," an open industry event designed to advance the supercloud conversation, gathering input from more than 30 experienced technologists and business leaders in "The Cube" and broader technology community. We're talking about individuals like Benoit Dageville, Kit Colbert, Ali Ghodsi, Mohit Aron, David McJannet, and dozens of other experts. And today, we're pleased to welcome David Linthicum, who's a Chief Strategy Officer of Cloud Services at Deloitte Consulting. David is a technology visionary, a technical CTO. He's an author and a frequently sought after keynote speaker at high profile conferences like "VMware Explore" next week. David Linthicum, welcome back to "The Cube." Good to see you again. >> Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. Okay, so this topic of supercloud, what you call metacloud, has created a lot of interest. VMware calls it cross-cloud services, Snowflake calls it their data cloud, there's a lot of different names, but recently, you published a piece in "InfoWorld" where you said the following. "I really don't care what we call it, "and I really don't care if I put "my own buzzword into the mix. "However, this does not change the fact "that metacloud is perhaps the most important "architectural evolution occurring right now, "and we need to get this right out of the gate. "If we do that, who cares what it's named?" So very cool. And you also mentioned in a recent article that you don't like to put out new terms out in the wild without defining them. So what is a metacloud, or what we call supercloud? What's your definition? >> Yeah, and again, I don't care what people call it. The reality is it's the ability to have a layer of cross-cloud services. It sits above existing public cloud providers. So the idea here is that instead of building different security systems, different governance systems, different operational systems in each specific cloud provider, using whatever native features they provide, we're trying to do that in a cross-cloud way. So in other words, we're pushing out data integration, security, all these other things that we have to take care of as part of deploying a particular cloud provider. And in a multicloud scenario, we're building those in and between the clouds. And so we've been tracking this for about five years. We understood that multicloud is not necessarily about the particular public cloud providers, it's about things that you build in and between the clouds. >> Got it, okay. So I want to come back to that, to the definition, but I want to tie us to the so-called multicloud. You guys did a survey recently. We've said that multicloud was mostly a symptom of multi-vendor, Shadow Cloud, M&A, and only recently has become a strategic imperative. Now, Deloitte published a survey recently entitled "Closing the Cloud Strategy, Technology, Innovation Gap," and I'd like to explore that a little bit. And so in that survey, you showed data. What I liked about it is you went beyond what we all know, right? The old, "Our research shows that on average, "X number of clouds are used at an individual company." I mean, you had that too, but you really went deeper. You identified why companies are using multiple clouds, and you developed different categories of practitioners across 500 survey respondents. But the reasons were very clear for "why multicloud," as this becomes more strategic. Service choice scale, negotiating leverage, improved business resiliency, minimizing lock-in, interoperability of data, et cetera. So my question to you, David, is what's the problem supercloud or metacloud solves, and what's different from multicloud? >> That's a great question. The reality is that if we're... Well, supercloud or metacloud, whatever, is really something that exists above a multicloud, but I kind of view them as the same thing. It's an architectural pattern. We can name it anything. But the reality is that if we're moving to these multicloud environments, we're doing so to leverage best of breed things. In other words, best of breed technology to provide the innovators within the company to take the business to the next level, and we determine that in the survey. And so if we're looking at what a multicloud provides, it's the ability to provide different choices of different services or piece parts that allows us to build anything that we need to do. And so what we found in the survey and what we found in just practice in dealing with our clients is that ultimately, the value of cloud computing is going to be the innovation aspects. In other words, the ability to take the company to the next level from being more innovative and more disruptive in the marketplace that they're in. And the only way to do that, instead of basically leveraging the services of a particular walled garden of a single public cloud provider, is to cast a wider net and get out and leverage all kinds of services to make these happen. So if you think about that, that's basically how multicloud has evolved. In other words, it wasn't planned. They didn't say, "We're going to go do a multicloud." It was different developers and innovators in the company that went off and leveraged these cloud services, sometimes with the consent of IT leadership, sometimes not. And now we have these multitudes of different services that we're leveraging. And so many of these enterprises are going from 1000 to, say, 3000 services under management. That creates a complexity problem. We have a problem of heterogeneity, different platforms, different tools, different services, different AI technology, database technology, things like that. So the metacloud, or the supercloud, or whatever you want to call it, is the ability to deal with that complexity on the complexity's terms. And so instead of building all these various things that we have to do individually in each of the cloud providers, we're trying to do so within a cross-cloud service layer. We're trying to create this layer of technology, which removes us from dealing with the complexity of the underlying multicloud services and makes it manageable. Because right now, I think we're getting to a point of complexity we just can't operate it at the budgetary limits that we are right now. We can't keep the number of skills around, the number of operators around, to keep these things going. We're going to have to get creative in terms of how we manage these things, how we manage a multicloud. And that's where the supercloud, metacloud, whatever they want to call it, comes that. >> Yeah, and as John Furrier likes to say, in IT, we tend to solve complexity with more complexity, and that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about simplifying, and you talked about the abstraction layer, and then it sounds like I'm inferring more. There's value that's added on top of that. And then you also said the hyperscalers are in a walled garden. So I've been asked, why aren't the hyperscalers superclouds? And I've said, essentially, they want to put your data into their cloud and keep it there. Now, that doesn't mean they won't eventually get into that. We've seen examples a little bit, Outposts, Anthos, Azure Arc, but the hyperscalers really aren't building superclouds or metaclouds, at least today, are they? >> No, they're not. And I always have the predictions for every major cloud conference that this is the conference that the hyperscaler is going to figure out some sort of a multicloud across-cloud strategy. In other words, building services that are able to operate across clouds. That really has never happened. It has happened in dribs and drabs, and you just mentioned a few examples of that, but the ability to own the space, to understand that we're not going to be the center of the universe in how people are going to leverage it, is going to be multiple things, including legacy systems and other cloud providers, and even industry clouds that are emerging these days, and SaaS providers, and all these things. So we're going to assist you in dealing with complexity, and we're going to provide the core services of being there. That hasn't happened yet. And they may be worried about conflicting their market, and the messaging is a bit different, even actively pushing back on the concept of multicloud, but the reality is the market's going to take them there. So in other words, if enough of their customers are asking for this and asking that they take the lead in building these cross-cloud technologies, even if they're participating in the stack and not being the stack, it's too compelling of a market that it's not going to drag a lot of the existing public cloud providers there. >> Well, it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out, David, because I never say never when it comes to a company like AWS, and we've seen how fast they move. And at the same time, they don't want to be commoditized. There's the layer underneath all this infrastructure, and they got this ecosystem that's adding all this tremendous value. But I want to ask you, what are the essential elements of supercloud, coming back to the definition, if you will, and what's different about metacloud, as you call it, from plain old SaaS or PaaS? What are the key elements there? >> Well, the key elements would be holistic management of all of the IT infrastructure. So even though it's sitting above a multicloud, I view metacloud, supercloud as the ability to also manage your existing legacy systems, your existing security stack, your existing network operations, basically everything that exists under the purview of IT. If you think about it, we're moving our infrastructure into the clouds, and we're probably going to hit a saturation point of about 70%. And really, if the supercloud, metacloud, which is going to be expensive to build for most of the enterprises, it needs to support these things holistically. So it needs to have all the services, that is going to be shareable across the different providers, and also existing legacy systems, and also edge computing, and IoT, and all these very diverse systems that we're building there right now. So if complexity is a core challenge to operate these things at scale and the ability to secure these things at scale, we have to have commonality in terms of security architecture and technology, commonality in terms of our directory services, commonality in terms of network operations, commonality in term of cloud operations, commonality in terms of FinOps. All these things should exist in some holistic cross-cloud layer that sits above all this complexity. And you pointed out something very profound. In other words, that is going to mean that we're hiding a lot of the existing cloud providers in terms of their interfaces and dashboards and things like that that we're dealing with today, their APIs. But the reality is that if we're able to manage these things at scale, the public cloud providers are going to benefit greatly from that. They're going to sell more services because people are going to find they're able to leverage them easier. And so in other words, if we're removing the complexity wall, which many in the industry are calling it right now, then suddenly we're moving from, say, the 25 to 30% migrated in the cloud, which most enterprises are today, to 50, 60, 70%. And we're able to do this at scale, and we're doing it at scale because we're providing some architectural optimization through the supercloud, metacloud layer. >> Okay, thanks for that. David, I just want to tap your CTO brain for a minute. At "Supercloud22," we came up with these three deployment models. Kit Colbert put forth the idea that one model would be your control planes running in one cloud, let's say AWS, but it interacts with and can manage and deploy on other clouds, the Kubernetes Cluster Management System. The second one, Mohit Aron from Cohesity laid out, where you instantiate the stack on different clouds and different cloud regions, and then you create a layer, a common interface across those. And then Snowflake was the third deployment model where it's a single global instance, it's one instantiation, and basically building out their own cloud across these regions. Help us parse through that. Do those seem like reasonable deployment models to you? Do you have any thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a distributed computing trick we've been doing, which is, in essence, an agent of the supercloud that's carrying out some of the cloud native functions on that particular cloud, but is, in essence, a slave to the metacloud, or the supercloud, whatever, that's able to run across the various cloud providers. In other words, when it wants to access a service, it may not go directly to that service. It goes directly to the control plane, and that control plane is responsible... Very much like Kubernetes and Docker works, that control plane is responsible for reaching out and leveraging those native services. I think that that's thinking that's a step in the right direction. I think these things unto themselves, at least initially, are going to be a very complex array of technology. Even though we're trying to remove complexity, the supercloud unto itself, in terms of the ability to build this thing that's able to operate at scale across-cloud, is going to be a collection of many different technologies that are interfacing with the public cloud providers in different ways. And so we can start putting these meta architectures together, and I certainly have written and spoke about this for years, but initially, this is going to be something that may escape the detail or the holistic nature of these meta architectures that people are floating around right now. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on this, because anytime I get a CTO brain, I like to... I'm not an engineer, but I've been around a long time, so I know a lot of buzzwords and have absorbed a lot over the years, but so you take those, the second two models, the Mohit instantiate on each cloud and each cloud region versus the Snowflake approach. I asked Benoit Dageville, "Does that mean if I'm in "an AWS east region and I want to do a query on Azure West, "I can do that without moving data?" And he said, "Yes and no." And the answer was really, "No, we actually take a subset of that data," so there's the latency problem. From those deployment model standpoints, what are the trade-offs that you see in terms of instantiating the stack on each individual cloud versus that single instance? Is there a benefit of the single instance for governance and security and simplicity, but a trade-off on latency, or am I overthinking this? >> Yeah, you hit it on the nose. The reality is that the trade-off is going to be latency and performance. If we get wiggy with the distributed nature, like the distributed data example you just provided, we have to basically separate the queries and communicate with the databases on each instance, and then reassemble the result set that goes back to the people who are recording it. And so we can do caching systems and things like that. But the reality is, if it's distributed system, we're going to have latency and bandwidth issues that are going to be limiting us. And also security issues, because if we're removing lots of information over the open internet, or even private circuits, that those are going to be attack vectors that hackers can leverage. You have to keep that in mind. We're trying to reduce those attack vectors. So it would be, in many instances, and I think we have to think about this, that we're going to keep the data in the same physical region for just that. So in other words, it's going to provide the best performance and also the most simplistic access to dealing with security. And so we're not, in essence, thinking about where the data's going, how it's moving across things, things like that. So the challenge is going to be is when you're dealing with a supercloud or metacloud is, when do you make those decisions? And I think, in many instances, even though we're leveraging multiple databases across multiple regions and multiple public cloud providers, and that's the idea of it, we're still going to localize the data for performance reasons. I mean, I just wrote a blog in "InfoWorld" a couple of months ago and talked about, people who are trying to distribute data across different public cloud providers for different reasons, distribute an application development system, things like that, you can do it. With enough time and money, you can do anything. I think the challenge is going to be operating that thing, and also providing a viable business return based on the application. And so why it may look like a good science experiment, and it's cool unto itself as an architect, the reality is the more pragmatic approach is going to be a leavitt in a single region on a single cloud. >> Very interesting. The other reason I like to talk to companies like Deloitte and experienced people like you is 'cause I can get... You're agnostic, right? I mean, you're technology agnostic, vendor agnostic. So I want to come back with another question, which is, how do you deal with what I call the lowest common denominator problem? What I mean by that is if one cloud has, let's say, a superior service... Let's take an example of Nitro and Graviton. AWS seems to be ahead on that, but let's say some other cloud isn't quite quite there yet, and you're building a supercloud or a metacloud. How do you rationalize that? Does it have to be like a caravan in the army where you slow down so all the slowest trucks can keep up, or are the ways to adjudicate that that are advantageous to hide that deficiency? >> Yeah, and that's a great thing about leveraging a supercloud or a metacloud is we're putting that management in a single layer. So as far as a user or even a developer on those systems, they shouldn't worry about the performance that may come back, because we're dealing with the... You hit the nail on the head with that one. The slowest component is the one that dictates performance. And so we have to have some sort of a performance management layer. We're also making dynamic decisions to move data, to move processing, from one server to the other to try to minimize the amount of latency that's coming from a single component. So the great thing about that is we're putting that volatility into a single domain, and it's making architectural decisions in terms of where something will run and where it's getting its data from, things are stored, things like that, based on the performance feedback that's coming back from the various cloud services that are under management. And so if you're running across clouds, it becomes even more interesting, because ultimately, you're going to make some architectural choices on the fly in terms of where that stuff runs based on the active dynamic performance that that public cloud provider is providing. So in other words, we may find that it automatically shut down a database service, say MySQL, on one cloud instance, and moved it to a MySQL instance on another public cloud provider because there was some sort of a performance issue that it couldn't work around. And by the way, it does so dynamically. Away from you making that decision, it's making that decision on your behalf. Again, this is a matter of abstraction, removing complexity, and dealing with complexity through abstraction and automation, and this is... That would be an example of fixing something with automation, self-healing. >> When you meet with some of the public cloud providers and they talk about on-prem private cloud, the general narrative from the hyperscalers is, "Well, that's not a cloud." Should on-prem be inclusive of supercloud, metacloud? >> Absolutely, I mean, and they're selling private cloud instances with the edge cloud that they're selling. The reality is that we're going to have to keep a certain amount of our infrastructure, including private clouds, on premise. It's something that's shrinking as a market share, and it's going to be tougher and tougher to justify as the public cloud providers become better and better at what they do, but we certainly have edge clouds now, and hyperscalers have examples of that where they run a instance of their public cloud infrastructure on premise on physical hardware and software. And the reality is, too, we have data centers and we have systems that just won't go away for another 20 or 30 years. They're just too sticky. They're uneconomically viable to move into the cloud. That's the core thing. It's not that we can't do it. The fact of the matter is we shouldn't do it, because there's not going to be an economic... There's not going to be an economic incentive of making that happen. So if we're going to create this meta layer or this infrastructure which is going to run across clouds, and everybody agrees on, that's what the supercloud is, we have to include the on-premise systems, including private clouds, including legacy systems. And by the way, include the rising number of IoT systems that are out there, and edge-based systems out there. So we're managing it using the same infrastructure into cloud services. So they have metadata systems and they have specialized services, and service finance and retail and things like doing risk analytics. So it gets them further down that path, but not necessarily giving them a SaaS application where they're forced into all of the business processes. We're giving you piece parts. So we'll give you 1000 different parts that are related to the finance industry. You can assemble anything you need, but the thing is, it's not going to be like building it from scratch. We're going to give you risk analytics, we're giving you the financial analytics, all these things that you can leverage within your applications how you want to leverage them. We'll maintain them. So in other words, you don't have to maintain 'em just like a cloud service. And suddenly, we can build applications in a couple of weeks that used to take a couple of months, in some cases, a couple of years. So that seems to be a large take of it moving forward. So get it up in the supercloud. Those become just other services that are under managed... That are under management on the supercloud, the metacloud. So we're able to take those services, abstract them, assemble them, use them in different applications. And the ability to manage where those services are originated versus where they're consumed is going to be managed by the supercloud layer, which, you're dealing with the governance, the service governance, the security systems, the directory systems, identity access management, things like that. They're going to get you further along down the pike, and that comes back as real value. If I'm able to build something in two weeks that used to take me two months, and I'm able to give my creators in the organization the ability to move faster, that's a real advantage. And suddenly, we are going to be valued by our digital footprint, our ability to do things in a creative and innovative way. And so organizations are able to move that fast, leveraging cloud computing for what it should be leveraged, as a true force multiplier for the business. They're going to win the game. They're going to get the most value. They're going to be around in 20 years, the others won't. >> David Linthicum, always love talking. You have a dangerous combination of business and technology expertise. Let's tease. "VMware Explore" next week, you're giving a keynote, if they're going to be there. Which day are you? >> Tuesday. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. >> All right, that's a big day. Tuesday, 11 o'clock. And David, please do stop by "The Cube." We're in Moscone West. Love to get you on and continue this conversation. I got 100 more questions for you. Really appreciate your time. >> I always love talking to people at "The Cube." Thank you very much. >> All right, and thanks for watching our ongoing coverage of "Supercloud22" on "The Cube," your leader in enterprise tech and emerging tech coverage. (bright music)

>>from >>the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering empowering the autonomous enterprise brought to you by Oracle >>Consulting. Welcome back, everybody, to this special presentation of the Cube. We're covering the rebirth of Oracle Consulting. It's a digital event. We're going out. We're extracting the signal from the noise we happened today to be in Chicago, which is obviously the center of the country. A lot of customers here, a lot of consultants and consulting organizations here. A lot of expertise. Mike Evans is here. He's the VP for cloud advisory and general manager of Oracle. Elevate, Mike. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >>Appreciate it. Good to be here. >>So you elevate in your title. What is Oracle Elevate it or >>elevate was actually announced or cold from world last year. It's the partnership that we really had to actually take our scale of the next levels who actually did it with Deloitte Consulting. So the goal is to actually take the capabilities of both organizations. Deloitte really has functional capabilities and expertise within Oracle practice, and obviously Oracle has Oracle technical expertise. That combination that to really allows us to scale provide sort of call. The one plus one equals three effort for customers. >>You've got a decent timeline or observation. Over the past several years you joined three years ago, you were brand name companies. First of all, what attracted you to come to Oracle Consultant? >>Absolutely. So Oracle was in the point where they were doing a lot of stuff around on prim on premise software, the old RP type stuff they were doing cloud. They sort of had to have this sort of transformational moment. I was asked to come in and consulting in the early days and say, Hey, look, we're trying to transform the organization for mantra consulting over to Cloud Consulting, coming to help us with this stuff that you've worked with prior to cloud companies and help us really move the organization forward and look at things differently. So it's definitely been a journey over the last three years have taken it from early 85% of the 90% of our revenue around on Prem type of engagements to now actually splitting the organization being dedicated 100% in cloud, which is a huge transformation last >>three years. What really, what's the underpinning of Gen two Cloud. Can you give us the bumper sticker on that? >>Yeah, Well, the underpinning agenda to cloud is really if you look at the Gen One cloud was purely just infrastructure layer. Gen two is really based on a segmenting security, which is a huge problem out in the marketplace, right? So we actually have a sort of a world class way. We take segments security outside of the actual environment itself. It's completely segment, which is awesome, right? But then they also when you actually moving forward. The capability of the entire thing is built on sort of the autonomous enterprise, autonomous capabilities. Everything is sort of self healing. Self funding are not sorry, self healing and self aware that continually moves it forward. So the goal with that is, is if you have something that takes mundane tasks back to that, you have people that are no longer doing those capabilities today. So the underpinning of that, and without allows you to do is actually take that business case, and you reduce that because you're no longer having a bunch of people do things that no value add. Those people can actually move on to do back to the innovation and doing those higher level. >>So the business case is really about primarily, I would imagine about labor costs, right? I t labor costs were very labor intensive. We're doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add differentiation and value to the business. You're shifting that other tasks, right? >>Yeah, So the big components are really the overall cost of the infrastructure, what it takes to maintain the infrastructure, and that's broken up into kind of two components. One of it is typical power, physical location of building all those kinds of things and then the people to do the automation that take care of that right at the lower level. The third level is, as you continue to sort of process and automation going forward, that people capability that actually maintains the applications becomes easier because you can actually extend those capabilities out into the application, then require fewer people actually do the typical day to day things. Whether it's DB is like that, so it kind of becomes a continuous stream. There's various elements of the business case. You could sort of start with just the pure infrastructure cost and then get some of the process and automation is going forward and then actually go that even further, right? And then as organizations, a c i 01 of the questions I always have is where do you want to end on this? And they say, What are you talking about, right? It's really never done. You're on. If you're on a journey on a transformation, I go. This is the big boy Big girl conversation, right? Do you want to have an organization that actually, it stays the same from a head count standpoint? Are you trying to look to a partner to do that? Were you trying to get their operating model? What is your company trying to get you to look at, right? Because all those inflection points takes a different steps in the cloud journey. So as an advisor, as a trusted advisor, I asked those there was 1/2 a dozen or so questions. I would kind of walk through the organization through on sort of a cloud strategy, and I'll pick the path that kind of work with them. If they want to go to a manage service provider at the end, we would actually prepare someone, either bring the partner in or have associated partner. We've heard it off to, but we put the right pieces in place to make sure that that business case, >>that's interest. That's a really important point because a lot of customers would say, I don't want to reduce headcount. I want O. I'm starving for people. I want to train people Some companies may want to say Okay, I got to reduce headcount. It's a mandate, but most least in these boom times are saying I want to shift. So my point to the business cases, If you're not gonna cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. And the example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive is relevant. And I won't explain this. Is that, for example, very simple example. You're I'm inferring you're gonna be able to compress the time to value, reduce lower your break, even accelerate the time to positive cash flow, if you will. That's an example of a value component to the business and part of the business case that people look at that and >>really, that's what it is. Definitely the business case and when he called. You know, when you get your rate of return, right? Um, the more that we can compress that. And I would say back to the conversation we had earlier about elevate and some of the partnerships we have with Deloitte around that a lot of that is to actually come up with enough capabilities that we can actually take the business case and actually reduce that have special, other things we can do for our customers around financing and things like that to make it easier for them, Right? We have options to make customers and actually help that business case. Some of the business cases we've seen are entire i t organizations saving 30 plus percent. Well, if you multiply that on a, you know, a large fortune 100 that may have a $1,000,000,000 budget, that's real money. >>Yeah, and okay, yes, no doubt. But then when you translate that into the business impact like you talked about the i t impact. But if you look at the business impact now, it becomes telephone numbers and actually see if it was often times just don't even believe it. But it's true, because if you can make the entire organization just, you know, 1/2 a percentage point more productive and 100,000 employees. I mean, that is that overwhelms. Actually, the i t business case. >>Yeah, and that's where that back to the sort of the steps in the business case is on the business and application side is making those folks actually more productive in the business case in saving them and adding, you know, whether it's a financial services, you're getting a new application out to market that actually generates revenue. Right? So that's sort of the trickle effect. When I look at it, I definitely look at it from a I see all the way through business. I'm a technically a business architect. That does. I t pretty damn good, >>Yeah, enables that sort of. Absolutely. How do you let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement? How are people thinking about that? Because you're talking a lot about just sort of self funding and and self progressing in a sort of organic entity that you're describing. How are people thinking about that? >>Yeah, I would say there's a little bit older map, right? But I would say that the goals what we're trying to embed back to the operating model we want to really embed is sort of a concept of a cloud center of excellence, and as part of that at the end, you have to have a set of functionality of folks that's constantly looking at the applications and or services of the different cloud providers that capability we have across the board. Everyone's got a multi cloud environment, right? How do they take those services They're probably already paying for anyways. And as the components get released, how can you continually put little pieces in there and do little micro releases? Quarterly aren't started weekly every month versus a big bang twice a year, right? Those little automation piece is continually add innovation in smaller chunks, and that's really the goal of cloud computing. And, you know, as you can actually break it up. It's no longer the big bang theory, right? I love that concept in vetting that whether you actually have a partner with some of the stuff that we're doing that actually in bed, what we call like a date to services, that that's what it is, is to support them but constantly look for different ways to include capabilities that were just released to add value on an ongoing basis. You don't have to go. Hey, great. That capability came out. It will be a next year's release. No, it could be next week, next month. >>So the outcome should be should be dramatically lowering costs, really accelerating your time to value. It really is what you're describing and we've been talking about in terms of the autonomous enterprise. It's really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? >>It is. Absolutely >>thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. Good stuff. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you for watching. Be right back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube? We're here in Chicago covering the reverse of Oracle Consulting. I'm Dave Volante. Right back.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE covering, empowering the Autonomous Enterprise brought to you by Oracle Consulting. >> Welcome back everybody to this special presentation of theCUBE where we're covering The Rebirth of Oracle Consulting. It's a digital event where we're going out, we're extracting the signal from the nose. We happen today to be in Chicago which is obviously, the center of the country, a lot of big customers here, a lot of consultants and consulting organizations here, a lot of expertise. Mike Owens is here, he's a group V.P. for cloud advisory and a general manager of Oracle Elevate. Mike, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hi, I appreciate it, I'm glad to be here. >> So I got to ask you, Elevate in your title, what is Oracle Elevate? >> Yeah, Oracle Elevate was actually announced Oracle Open World last year, and it's the partnership that we really had to actually take our scale the next level. So it's actually did it with Deloitte Consulting. So the goal is to actually take the capabilities of both organizations, Deloitte really has functional capabilities and expertise with an oracle practice, and obviously, Oracle has Oracle technical expertise. The combination of the two really allows us to scale, provide, what I call the one plus one equals three effort for customers. >> Now, you've got a decent timeline or observation over the past several years. I think you joined three years ago? >> Yeah. >> You were at some brand name companies. First of all, what attracted you to come to Oracle Consulting? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Oracle was in the point where they were doing a lot of stuff around on-prem, on-premise software. The old ERP type stuff, they were doing cloud, they sort of had to had this sort of transformational moment. I was asked to come in on Oracle Consulting in the early days and say, hey look, we're trying to transform the organization from on-prem consulting over to cloud consulting, come in and help us with the stuff that you've worked from your prior two cloud companies and help us really move the organization forward and look at things differently. So it's definitely been a journey over the last three years. I've taken it from really 85 percent of, the 90 percent of our revenue around on-prem type of engagements to now actually split in the organization being dedicated 100 percent on Cloud, which is a huge transformation in the last three years. >> What really, what's the underpinning of Gen 2 cloud? Can you give us sort of the bumper sticker on that? >> Yeah, all about the underpinning the Gen 2 cloud is really, if you look at the gen 1 cloud was purely just an infrastructure layer. Gen 2 is really based on a segmenting security which is a huge problem out in the marketplace. >> Mm-hmm. >> So we actually have a sort of a world-class where we take segment security outside of the actual environment itself, it's completely segment which is awesome, right? But then they also, when you actually move it forward, the capability of the entire thing is built on sort of the Autonomous Enterprise or autonomous capabilities, everything is sort of self-healing, self-funding, or not, sorry, self-healing and self-aware, that continually moves it forward. So, the goal with that is, is if you have something that takes mundane tasks back to that you have people that are no longer doing those capabilities today. So the underpinning of that, and what that allows you to do, is actually take that business case and you reduce that because you're no longer having a bunch of people do things that are no value add. Those people can actually move on to do it back to that innovation and doing those higher level components. >> So the business case is really about, I mean, primarily, I would imagine about labor cost, right? I.T., labor costs that we're very labor intensive, we're doing stuff that doesn't necessarily add differentiation of value to the business, you're shifting that to other tasks, right? >> Yeah, so the big components are really the overall cost of the infrastructure, what it takes to maintain the infrastructure and that's broken up into kind of two components. One of it is typical power, physical location, a building, all those kinds of things, and then the people that do the automations that take care of that at the lower level. The third level is, as you continue to sort of process and automation going forward, the people capability that actually maintains the applications becomes easier because you can actually extend those capabilities out into the application, then require fewer people to actually do the typical day-to-day things whether it's DBAs, et cetera, like that. So it kind of becomes a continuous stream. There's various elements of the business case, you could sort of start with just the pure infrastructure cost and then get some of the process and automations going forward and then actually go that even further. And then as organizations as a CIO, one of the questions I always have is, where do you want to end on this? And they say, well what are you talking about? It is really-- >> Dave: We're never done! >> You're on a journey, you're on a transformation, I go, this is the big-boy, big-girl conversation. Do you want to have an organization that actually, it stays the same from a headcount standpoint? Are you trying to look to a partner to do the... Were you trying to get in your operating model? What is your company trying to get you to look at, right? Because all those inflection points takes a different step in the cloud journey. So as the advisor, as the trusted advisor, I ask those half a dozen or so questions, I would kind of walk your organization through on sort of a cloud strategy and I'll pick the path, to kind of works with them and if they want to go to a managed service provider at the end, we would actually prepare someone either bring the partner in or have associated partner we put it off to. But we put the right pieces in place to make sure that that business cake works. >> Well that's interesting, that's a really important point because a lot of customers would say, I don't want to reduce head count, I'm starving for people, I want to retrain people. You know, some companies may want to say, hey, okay, I got to reduced headcount, it's a mandate. But most, at least in these boom times are saying, I want to shift. So my point to the business case is, if you're not going to, you know, cut people, then you have to have those people be more productive. >> Correct. >> The example that you gave in terms of making the application developers more productive is relevant. And I want to explain this, is that, for example, very simple example, I'm inferring you're going to be able to compress the time to value, you're going to reduce, lower your break even, you know, accelerate the time to positive cash flow, if you will. >> Absolutely. That's an example of a value component to the business, and part of the business case. Do people look at that and is that real? >> Absolutely, that's what it is. Definitely, the business case and when you call the... You know, when you get your rate of return, right? >> Mm-hmm. >> The more that we can compress that, and I would say back to the conversation we had earlier about Elevate and some of the partnerships we have with Deloitte around that, a lot of that is to actually come up with enough capabilities that we can actually take the business case and actually reduce that and have special other things we can do for our customers around financing and things like that to make it easier for them. We have options to make customers and actually help that business case. Some of the business cases we've seen are entire I.T. organization saving 30 plus percent. Well, if you multiply that on a, you know, a large Fortune 100 that may have a billion dollar budget, that's real money. >> Okay, yes, no doubt. But then, when you translate that into the business impact, like you talked about the I.T. impact, but if you look at the business impact now it becomes telephone numbers. And actually the CFOs often times just don't even believe it, but it's true. >> Yes. >> Because if you can make the entire organization just you know, a half a percentage point more productive and you got 100,000 employees, I mean, that is, that overwhelms, actually, the I.T. business case. >> Yeah, and that's where back to sort of the steps in the business case is on the business and application side is making those folks actually more productive in the business case and saving them, and adding, you know, whether it's a financial services getting an application out to market that actually generates revenue. So that's, it's sort of the trickle effect. So when I look at it, I definitely look at it from a I.T. all the way through business. I am technically a business architect that does I.T. pretty damn good. >> Yeah, and I.T enables that sort of business transformation. >> Absolutely. >> How do you... Let's talk about this notion of continuous improvement. How are people thinking about that, 'cause you're talking a lot about just sort of self-funding, and self-progressing, sort of an organic entity that you're describing. How are people thinking about that? >> Yeah, I would say they're kind of a little bit all over the map. But I would say that the goal is what we're trying to embed back to the operating model, what we want to really embed is sort of a concept of the cloud set of excellence in as part of that at the end, you have to have a set of functionality of folks that's constantly looking at the applications and or services of the different cloud providers, their capabilities you have across the board, everyone's got to multicloud environment. How do they take those services they're probably already paying for anyways, and as the components get released, how can you continually put little pieces in there and do little micro-releases quarterly? I'm sorry, weekly? You know, every month versus a big bang twice a year. Those little automation pieces continually add innovation in smaller chunks and that's really the goal of cloud computing, you know, is you can actually break it up, it's no longer the big bang theory. And I love that concept, embedding that, whether you actually have a partner with some of the stuff that we're doing that actually embed, what we call, like a day two services that that's what it is, it's to support them but us constantly, look for different ways to include capabilities that were just released, to add value on an ongoing basis. You don't have to go, hey, they're great, that capability came out, it'll be on next year's release. No, it could be next week, it could be next month. >> Well, so the outcome should be dramatically lowering costs, really accelerating your time to value. It really is, what you're describing and we've been talking about in terms of the Autonomous, you know, Enterprise. Is really a prerequisite for scale, isn't it? >> It is, absolutely. And so, when we use the term Autonomous Enterprise too, I love that because that's actually the term I've been using for a few years even before Larry started talking about the autonomous database, I talk about that environment of constantly looking at a cloud capability and everything that you can put from the machine earlier into A.I., under to basically let it run itself. The more that you can do that, the higher the value, and you can put those people off into higher level tasks. That's been going on every provider for a while. Oracle just has the capability now within the database that takes it to the next level. So we still are the only organization with that, put that on top of our Gen 2 cloud where all that is built in, as part of it going forward. That's where we have the upper level really at the enterprise computing level. We can work on all types of workload but where we are niches, is really those big enterprise workloads 'cause that's where we started from data enterprise. >> I don't want to make it a technology discussion. We said they're the only organization, you mean the only technology company with that autonomous database capabilities, is that correct? >> Yes, sir, yes. >> Okay, so I know others sort of talk about it, but, you know, Oracle I think talks about it more forcefully? >> Yes. >> We'll dig into that and report back. Mike, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Really, I appreciate it, good stuff. >> Anytime, thank you very much. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We're right back with our next guest, you're watching theCUBE. We're here in Chicago covering, The Rebirth of Oracle Consulting. I'm Dave Vellante, we'll be right back.