>> From the Salesforce tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019 brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in an exciting new location. Last year we covered the Accenture technology vision release 2018. It was at Minna Gallery, cool event. But this year the venue is off the hook and 33 stories high and we're really excited to be in the brand-new Accenture Innovation Hub and joining me here our first guest, John Del Santo, he is the senior managing director for the West region for Accenture and he is responsible for this beautiful five-story. So John, first off congratulations to you and the team. >> Thanks, it's been a big project opening up this place over the last year, but it's come together great. >> Yeah and this morning they had a nice ribbon cutting, all kinds of dignitaries so, you know, what does this mean in terms of kind of, you've been with the center a long time. Your presence in the Bay Area specifically, but also as part of more of this global innovation effort. >> Well I think it's this, this is bringing together all the best of Accenture that we already had in the Bay Area. We're putting it all under one roof. We're relocating everybody and we're expanding the team. So we announced 500 new technology jobs here in this location over the next year and expanding our apprentice program. But basically, it's all about bringing more talent to this location in San Francisco to do more projects with clients in this space. >> Right. So we'll get into it with some of the other folks that we have scheduled, but it's both a coworking space for the Accenture people in town and three solid floors of all kinds of labs and innovation, kind of hands-on spaces, if you will, to do this work with your clients. >> Absolutely, that co-creation, we think, is what is really differentiating us from our competitors and it's really allowing our clients to work with us and our experts, our technology experts, and the ecosystem partners that we do a ton of work with, real time to solve a problem. Brainstorm a problem, prototype it, solve it over a very short period of time. >> Yeah, I think it's a pretty unique approach that you guys have, which is imagine the future and then create the future. >> Yeah >> As opposed to just reacting to the future. And you made an interesting comment this morning about, you know, be the disrupter, not the disruptee. And my question is really, as you see the leadership at these traditional companies that are afraid of being disrupted, how are they kind of changing the way that they do things, knowing that the digital natives and the threats that they don't even see coming from a completely different direction are now bearing down, and they have to get with the program. >> Well they do have to. And then it's really our job, our purpose, you know, the talent that we have in this company's purpose is to make our clients succeed and be disrupters. Because if they're not, they will be disrupted. And so it's in our best interest to make sure we're bringin' in the best talent, pushing their thinking on ideas, and actually getting to a solution that can actually allow them to differentiate and serve their customers better. >> Right. >> So that's what we're all about, is making sure our clients are successful. >> And draggin' 'em kicking and screaming? Or are they, are they seeing-- >> Absolutely not. >> Are they seeing it in their competition? I mean, in terms of kind of that board-level discussion, where, you know, it's passe that everybody's a technology company, and everybody's doing digital disruption, but you're down in the weeds helping these people actually execute the detail. >> Yeah, well it's funny, you say everyone's a digital company, that was our big theme a few years ago at this exact event. >> Right, right. >> Absolutely, not kicking and screaming. Most executive teams, most business teams that we work with understand that they need to change. The pace of change at their business is rapid, it's faster and faster, and every year it gets faster, and so they need to actually be a lot more agile in that >> Right. >> And move quickly. >> So one of the big things in like the singularity and accelerating pace of change. And some of these big kind of macro trends that we're experiencing is that there's no single person that sees all the innovation change across this broad front, by industry, by role, etc. You guys are in a pretty unique position 'cause you actually get to see the technology innovation and the disruption and the digitization across a number of industries as well as a number of roles. So you can kind of see this big huge glacier that's moving down the valley. >> That's one of the really cool things about this particular geography and location is that literally steps from our door here on Mission Street in San Francisco, we've got clients from ten, fifteen different industries that we serve, and we can bring talent from ten or fifteen plus different industries plus the technology skills to make sure they're looking at the problem from all angles. So if it's a retailer, are they really thinking about financial services, 'cause we've got both skills here. If it's a retailer, are they thinking about platform-based selling? Do they have an omnichannel strategy? We've got the skills in this location cross-industry to help serve banks, retailers, products companies, software platform companies, etc. And I don't think you can find that anywhere else, at least in the Continental United States, given kind of where we are in our geography. >> Right. So you had a couple of special guests this morning at the ribbon cutting. You had a customer, which is great, but you also had a representative from City of San Francisco and I just want to shift gears and talk about, you know, what it is to be kind of an active member of the community. You know, the responsibility of companies we're seeing, with kind of this backlash, if you will, against some of the mega-companies out there. It's more than just taking care of your customers. It's more than just taking care of your employees and even your stockholders. But now companies are being asked to be more kind of responsible and active participants in their local community. That's always been sort of part of our ethos. It's always been part of our vision to help our clients succeed, but also to change the way the world works and lives. And therefore, we have to be really active in our communities. We're being a little bit more explicit about it lately. But it's our view that we need to be able to improve where we're working and living, 'cause our people are active and it's important that we help serve 'em. We have a very strong public service business. We serve the State of California, we serve the City and County of San Francisco as well as well as other entities in California. And it's critical for us to help improve California as we improve the businesses in California. And so it's clearly part of our mission. >> Right. The other thing I think it's interesting is kind of companies' roles with higher education. We've seen a lot of work that Accenture's doing with community colleges and, you know, it's more than just helping so that you get good talent to feed your own system, >> Right. >> But it's really, as the pace of change just continues to accelerate, you know, historical institutions aren't necessarily best-equipped to move that fast. So again, you guys are taking a much more active, you probably done it before, but more active vocal role in the local academic institutions as well. >> Absolutely, I mean, our university relationships are really, really strong, always have been. But it's always been a little selfish on our end. We're always trying to get the best talent out of the universities locally here and there's obviously great schools in the Bay Area. We want to be more engaged with those universities on projects together as well. We want more of a 360-degree relationship. We've got great examples of where we've done research with some of the universities here locally, where we've co-innovated with some of them and we want to do more of that so that there's more of a solid relationship. It's not just about us, you know, helping them find the best students to work here, >> Right. >> Which we want, (laughs) and we do every year, but making sure that we're actually involvin' them from a research perspective and any other kind of, you know, philanthropic idea that we might have together. >> Right. So big event tonight, big event this morning, >> Yeah. >> So before I let you go, it's a brand-new space, I wonder if you could share a couple fun facts for the people who haven't come to visit yet, but hopefully will come as part of a project and a co-creation about some of the cool unique features that you guys have-- >> Well some >> Built in this thing. >> Unique features in the building. First of all, there's unique features with the talent. So we have researchers here, labbers, we call 'em, from our labs, that have, you know, Accenture has thousands of patents. More than 10% of them have been actually invented here. So our inventors are a secret that we've had in Northern California for a long time and they're all based here now. We've got some really cool spaces. We've got an augmented reality room, which is basically a 360-degree room where you can, rather than having to wear virtual-reality goggles, you can actually go inside of a computer, go inside of a lab, go inside of a hospital, and get an experience that's much more hands-on and a lot more immersive, if you will, than you could any other way. We've got a maker lab where we actually are makin' stuff. So we've got a design business here where we've helped physically make not only software, we make a lot of software, everyone knows that, but we've actually made products that have embedded software in them and so there's that fabrication capability we actually have in this building as well, which is pretty unique for a high-rise. (laughs) so >> Right. No, we saw all the machines back there, >> Yup. >> Had a good tour earlier today so-- >> Oh lots of robots and toys and all that good stuff, too. >> Yeah, that's right, it's all the robot room. All right, well, John, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. Really exciting day for you and the team, >> Yeah. >> And nothing but congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. >> Thank you, thanks for coming. >> He's John, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the brand-new Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce tower. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto at our CUBE headquarters. We're here with John Del Santo, Senior Managing Director at Accenture for a Cube Conversation. John, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thanks, John. Great to be here. >> So we just talked before we came on camera about Accenture and all the stuff you guys are doing. You guys are in the cloud heavily. We've been following, you guys have probably one of the most comprehensive analytics teams out there. And global SI market and just, the world's changing. So it's pretty fun. I'm looking forward to this conversation. So I got to ask you first, before we get started. I want to jump in with a ton of questions. What is your role at Accenture? You're in the Bay Area. Take a minute to explain what you do for Accenture and what's your territory. >> I've got the best job at Accenture. So, Accenture's got close to half a million people right now and my job is, I'm responsible for our business on the West Coast, across all of our industries, et cetera. I've been here 32 years, so I've seen a lot of things happen in the Bay Area. And I now have the responsibility of making sure that we're doing great work for our clients. And we're doing great work in the community. And then we're providing great opportunities to the thousands of people that work for us here in the Bay Area and across the West Coast. So it's a lot of fun. >> Obviously, West Coast is booming. And for tech it's been a hotbed. And obviously the industry's across the board now is global. I got to ask you because, you know, you've been around multiple waves of innovation. And Accenture's been, had their hands in enabling a lot of value creation for clients. You guys have a great reputation. There's a lot of smart people. But the waves are always kind of different in their own way, but sometimes it's the same. What's different about the way we're living now? Because you can almost look back and see the major inflection points. Obviously the PC revolution, client server, interoperability, networking stacks went standard. Then you saw the Internet come. Now you've got Web 2.0. And now you got the whole global, you got things like cryptocurrency and blockchain. You have multiple clouds. You have a whole new game-changing dynamic going on with IT infrastructure combined with opensource at a whole 'nother level. So how is this wave different? Is it like the, how would you compare? >> Well, I think all the technologies that have waved through my career, at least, have been real enablers for the business model that the companies had at the time, and that they evolved. What we see now is epic disruption, right? So, the waves now are, we have digital native companies that are just disrupting the heck out of the industry or the company that we're trying to help. And so it's now about pulling all of those technologies together, and really figuring out a new business model for a client. Figuring out a new distribution channel, a new product that's maybe natively digital. And so it's very, very different, I feel, then it was five, 10, 15, 20 years ago, through some of the other waves. >> Talk about the things going on in the Bay Area before we get more in the global themes, because I think the Bay Area is always kind of a leading indicator. I call it a bellwether. Some cool things happened. You've got things like the Golden State Warriors got a stadium that's being built. I'm watching the World Series with the Red Sox, and you see Amazon stat cast, you're seeing overlays, you're seeing rosserial. All these things are changing the work and play. The Bay Area's got a lot of leading indicators. What are some of the projects that you've been involved in? What's happening now that you think is worth noting, that's exciting, that piques your interest? >> Yeah, I mean, we work across every industry, and we do a ton of work in tech, but I actually find some of the more interesting projects are the ones we're doing for healthcare companies in the Bay Area, some of the utilities in the Bay Area, some of the big resource companies, some of the financial services institutions, 'cause, like I said before, all of those industries have disruption coming or have been disrupted, and so we're doing some work right now around patient services in healthcare and in pharma that is really interesting. It's meant to change the experience that a patient has, that you and I have when we interact with our healthcare providers or, you know, the whole industry. And so those kinds of projects are real interesting cause a lot of these industries are old and sort of have a big legacy estate and model that they need to transform from. So they need to move fast, and we kind of describe it as a wise pivot. They sort of need to move, but they need to make sure they're moving at the right time. They can't hurt their existing business, but they got to pivot to the next business model, and that's happening in lots of places. And you're right, I think it is happening a lot in the Bay Area and the West Coast as sort of a bellwether. >> I want to get your thoughts on some of the moments that are going on in tech. You mentioned prior, before we came on camera, you worked for Apple in the old days. Tim Cook was just recently tweeting yesterday, and that tweet's going around, privacy. He was at this big GDPR conference. The role of regulatory now is changing some of the West Coast dynamics. Used to be kind of fast and loose West Coast, innovate, and then it gets operationalized globally with tech, tech trends. What's the tech enablers now that you see that are involved that actually have to deal with regulatory, and is regulatory an opportunity? You're mentioning utilities, finance, those are two areas you can jump out and say okay, we see something there. Privacy is another one. So you have a perfect storm with tech and regulatory frameworks. How has that impacted your job in the West Coast? >> Well, I mean, GDBR, we live with everyday. And clearly we're doing a ton of work in Europe. And I think that's one of the advantages Accenture has of being a big global company, and being able to take lessons learned from other parts of the world that are likely to come to the United States, et cetera, so, but I think the combination of tech and regulatory are going to be merging together here pretty quickly, especially when you talk about AI and data privacy, and that sort of thing. But it's definitely been an evolution. Great to hear Tim's point of view on what Apple thinks. And it's been really fun in my life to see Apple in the 80s when I worked there. They were a client of mine in the 80s. I worked with NEXT Computing in the 90s. And then obviously they're a big partner of ours now, so it's been a really interesting evolution. >> What are some of the growth accomplishments you guys have in the Bay Area? Obviously there's been growth here for you guys. Obviously, we've been seeing it. >> Well, I think the amount of tech-driven disruption, or digital transformation, we call it, is growing like crazy. So, you know, 20 years ago we were doing a lot of eCommerce work. We kind of shied away from doing Y2K work and a lot of our competitors saw that as a big opportunity. We didn't think it was a lot of value for our clients, fixing the old systems. And so we pivoted to eCommerce in a very aggressive way. And I would say now that's evolved even further, where more than close to 2/3 of our business here on the West Coast is what we call the new, which is clouds, security, digital analytics. And I really think it gets down to, we were talking a little bit earlier, about the data. And so we have more data scientists than we've ever had. We're probably hiring one or two every day out here on the West Coast. And it's about the data. Data is driving our consulting business. It's driving our technology business. It's driving what we're doing with AI, obviously, and things like that, so. The transformation's been pretty tremendous. >> So take a minute to explain the difference (mumbles), data, you mentioned a lot of things, you got data in there, you got cloud, and you mentioned earlier you got kind of cloud first companies, got born in the cloud, born in AI, AI first, data first, these new companies that are essentially disrupting incumbents, also your clients, that are kind of born before the cloud. And they got to transform. Is digital transformation one of those things or both of those things? How does digital transformation translate to the clients that you guys work with? >> Well, every client has a unique set of needs depending on where they came from. We do a lot of work with the digital natives. We do a lot of work with the unicorns out here on the West Coast. And their needs are different. You know, they need to learn how to scale globally. They need help in the back office. They need help sort of maturing their business model. We do a lot of work with legacy financial services companies, healthcare companies, that sort of thing. They need to figure out how to sort of, you know, pivot to digital products or digital interactions with their customers. We have a very large business now in Accenture Interactive around helping to find customer experiences for clients. And we think our mission is sort of help our clients really redefine that relationship with their customer, their supplier, their supply chain, and the experience is a key part of that. Given expectations means a lot. >> We have a lot of CUBE Conversations around IT transformation as well. And I had a CIO, big time firm, we won't say the name cause it'll out em, but he said, "We've been outsourcing IT for so many years, but now we got to build the core competency internally because now it's a competitive advantage." And they have to ramp up pretty quickly. Cloud helps them there, and they need partners that can help them move the needle on the top line. That this is not just cost control and operational scale or whether it's horizontally scalable scale-out or whatnot. Top line revenue. This is where the bread and butter of the companies are. >> Right. >> So how are you guys engaging with the clients? Give some examples of how you're helping them with the digital transition to drive their business, how do you engage them? Do you do the standard sales calls engagements? You bring them to a technology center? As the world starts to change, how do you guys help those clients meet those top lines? >> Well, a perfect client for us, you know, we're really good at helping clients cut costs and get really efficient and be good with their peers on cost structure. We love a client where they want us to help em with that and they want to pivot the savings to the new part. The way, one of the things that triggered a thought when you mentioned that was we like to bring our clients into our innovation hubs, so we've had labs here on the West Coast for a long time. We now have 10 innovation hubs in the U.S. We have a very large one in San Francisco now, and so we'll bring a client into our innovation hub and really roll up our sleeves with the client and over a week or two weeks or three period of time, we really brainstorm on envisioning their future for their company, build a minimal viable product if we have to out of our rapid prototyping capability and really envision what the target and state of their business could be, of their product could be or their customer interaction and we'll model it. Rather than sort of do a study, do another study, do a PowerPoint presentation, it's let's roll up our sleeves and figure out how to really pivot your business to the new and then take it from there. >> And they come to your location Absolutely. >> For an extended period of time? >> Yeah, so we'll have, any given day we'll have at least two different clients in our location doing either a couple a day workshop, a multi-week workshop, and it's co-creation. It's us collaborating with our client to figure out a solution. A good example is we had one of our large clients from the West Coast in there recently and we were trying to figure out how to use drone technology to drive analytics in, you know, over a geography to provide better data for them to minimize risk. And we've got a number of co-creation projects now going on with them to figure out how do we take that into a solution that not only helps their business but maybe it is a commercially available system. >> Yeah, our Wikibon research team brings us all the time with IOT and security you're starting to see companies leverage their existing assets, which is physical as well as digital and then figure out a model that makes them work together because these new use cases are springing up. So what if some of those use cases that you guys see happening, because you mentioned drones, cause that's an IOT device, right, essentially. There's all these new scenarios that are emerging and the speed is critical. It's not like, you can't do a study. There's no time to do a study. There's no time to do these things. You got to get some feet on the ground. You got to have product in market, you got to iterate. This is devops culture. >> Right. >> What is an example? >> So we did a project for a big ag company and not actually a West Coast based company but they came to our labs to look at it. And basically what we did was, we covered an area that's basically the size of Delaware in terms of drone video and we were able to drive analytics from that and ten times faster figure out for them where the forest was weak and where it wasn't. where they ought to worry about vegetation, where they might have disease issues or other risks that were facing them. And those analytics we were able to drive a lot faster and so rather than manually going around this huge square mile set of geography, they were able to sort of do it through technology a lot faster. >> Yeah, just a side note. I was talking to Paul Daugherty and interviewed him. We were celebrating, covering the celebration, your 30th anniversary of your labs. And one of the interviews I did was a wacky idea which made total sense, was during like a car accident or scene where there's been a car accident, they send drones in first and they map out the forensics- >> Sure. >> First. And you think, okay, who would have thought of that? I mean, these are new things that are happening that are changing the game on the road because they'll open up faster. They get the data that they need. They don't have to spend all that physical time laying things out. This is not just a one-off, this is like in every industry. Is there an industry that's hotter than another for you guys? (mumbles) oil and gas, utilities, financial services is kind of the big ones. What are some of the hot areas that you guys see the most activity on, on this kind of new way of taking existing industries and transforming them? >> I don't know if I could pinpoint an industry, I really don't. I mean, because I see what we're trying to do with anti-money laundering and banking is really moving the ball forward. What we're doing with patient services and pharma in health care is pretty aggressive. Even some of the things that we're doing for some of the states and governments around citizen services to make sure that ... Cause all of us have expectations now on how we want to interact with government and our expectations are not being met in just about every department, right? So we're doing a lot of work with states around how to provide a better experience to citizens. So I don't know if I could pinpoint an actual industry. One of the fun ones that we just, that we're involved with our here in our patch is one of the big gaming companies in Vegas. We are doing a lot of video analytics and technology and again, it's something like 20 times faster being able to detect fraud, being able to figure out what's going on on a gaming table and how to provide rewards quicker to their customers, keep em at the table faster or longer- >> He's got to nice stack of chips. Oh, he's going down. (laughs) Give him a comp through, he's feeling down. Look at his facial expression. I can (mumbles) imagine, I mean, this is the thing. I would agree. I think this every vertical we see is being disrupted. Just mentioned public sectors. Interesting. We were riffing at an Amazon event one time around who decides with the self-driving cars? These towns and cities don't have the budget or the bandwidth to figure out and reimagine the public services that they have, they're offering the citizens. The consumerization of IT hits the public sector. >> For sure. >> And they need help. So again every industry is going on. Okay, well I want to step back and get some time in for analytics because you guys have been investing as a company heavily in analytics in the past 10 years. Past, I think, seven years, you guys have been really, really ramping up the investment on data science, analytics. Give us an update on that. How is that going? How's that changed? And what's the update today? >> Yeah, and it's a good point. I mean, and again, you mentioned those labs being here for 30 years. A lot of our data scientists and big machine learning and big data folks frankly started at the labs here years and years ago and so, we've now got one of the largest analytics capabilities, I think, of any services company globally. We called it applied intelligence. It's a combination of our analytics capability and artificial intelligence, and we basically have an analytics capability that's built into all the different services that we provide. So we think it's, everything's about analytics just about. I mean, clearly you can't do a consulting project unless you've really got a unique analytical point of view and unique data around assessing a client's problem. You really can't really do a project or implement a system without a heavy data influence. So we are adding, frankly, I think every day I'm approving more analytics head count into our team on the West Coast in lots of different practices. And so it disbands industries, it spans all the platform sets, that sort of thing, but we're the largest of most of the big data players. >> I think one of the consistent trends with AI, which is now being the word artificial intelligence, AI, is kind of encapsulated the whole big data world because big data's now AI is the implementation of it. You're seeing everything from fraud. You mentioned anti-money laundering, know your customer, these kind of dynamics. But you get the whole dark web phenomenon going out there with fraud. All kinds of underground economies going on. So AI is a real value driver across all industries around one, understanding what's happening, >> Sure. >> And then how to figure out how to applications development could be smarter. >> Right. >> This is kind of relatively new concept for these scale out applications, which is what businesses do. So how is that going? Any color commentary on the impact of AI specifically around how companies are operationally changing and re-imagining their businesses? >> Well, I think it's very early days for most of our clients, most big companies. I think, we've done some recent surveys that say something like 78% of our clients believe that AI's really, really important and they're not at all prepared to deal with or apply it to their business. So I think it's relatively early days. There's a huge fight for skills, so we're building our team and that sort of thing. We're also classic Accenture. We grow skills pretty well too through both on-the-job training and real training. And so I think we're seeing sort of baby steps with AI. There's a lot of great vended solutions out there that we're able to apply to business problems as well. But I think we're in relatively early days. >> It's almost as if, you know, the old black-box garbage in, garbage out. You have good data, >> Exactly. >> and you got to understand data differently, and I think what I'm seeing is a lot of data architects going on, figuring out how do we take the role of data and put it in a position to be successful. It's kind of like, cause then you use AI and you go, that's great, but what about, oh, we missed this data set. >> Right. >> You'll have fully exposed data sets, so this is all new dynamics. >> So you have to iterate through it and you'll have to (mumble) solutions that'll start and restart. >> All right, so final question for you. Talk about this technology hubs again. So you have the labs, get that. So how many hubs do you have, technology hubs? >> Well, in the U.S., there's 10. But I would say in the West Coast it's really San Francisco and Seattle right now, with San Francisco being our flagship and frankly it's a flagship in the U.S. We've had the 30 year presence of our labs here on the West Coast and we've had design studios on the West Coast. We've had our what we call liquid studios, which is a big rapid prototyping sort of capability. We've had our research, et cetera. We've pulled all of those locations, so our lab started in Palo Alto, went to San Jose and is now in San Francisco. We've pulled all those locations together into what we're calling the innovation hub for the West Coast and it's a five-story marquee building in San Francisco and it's where we bring our clients and we expect to have literally, I think last year we had 200 and something client workshops and co-creation sessions there. This year we think the number's going to go to 400 and so it's really becoming a fabric of all our practices. >> How important is the co-creation, because you have a physical presence here and it's the flagship for the innovation hub and it's an accumulation of a lot of work you guys have done across multiple things you've done. Labs, liquid labs, all that stuff coming together. How important is the co-creation part as a mechanism for fostering collaboration with your clients? Co-creation's certainly hot. Your thoughts on co-creation. >> Great question, and I would tell you Accenture's kind of gone through waves as technology's gone through waves and so we were always an enabler for a client's projects and we did a lot of project work. I think we're in a wave now where we're going to be the innovation partner. We continue to sort of be named the innovation partner or the digital partner for certain clients. And we're going to do that through co-creating with them, and it's not just at their site, et cetera. It's going to be co-creation in our labs where we're taking advantage of the hundreds of data scientists and computer researchers and technical architects that we have in our labs to create something that's new and fresh and purpose-built for their particular business model. So we think co-creation is a huge part of the formula for us being successful with our clients over the next 10 years. And so that's why we've put this infrastructure in place, expect it to expand and to be sold out and that sort of thing. But it's a good way for us to build capability and really, really viable solutions for our clients going forward. >> So it's not just a sales development initiative. It's an operationalized engagement and delivery mechanism for you guys. >> Exactly, exactly. It's not, I mean it has, it self markets but it's not about marketing. It's about, we'll have tours and we'll have a little tourism through our center and so clients'll say, Wait, look at that maker lab. Look what you're doing with that client. I want one of those, right? I need to do that in my business, even though I'm in a different industry. So it's not really a marketing tool per se, it's a way for us to interact and engage with our clients. >> Well, it's a showcase in the sense of where you can showcase what you have and if clients see value, they can go to the next step. It's an accelerated path to outcomes re-imagining businesses. Okay, final question. What have you learned from all this? Because now you guys have a state of the art engagement model, delivery model, around cloud, all these things coming together, perfect storm for what you guys do. As you guys look back and see what you've built and where it's going to go, what are the key learnings that you guys came out of the West Coast team around pulling it all together over the years? What's the key learnings? >> Well, I think that our clientele is just thirsty for innovation and innovation now. It's now about sort of let's envision the future and we'll get to it some other day. It's what can we do right now and what journey, what glide path are we on to change our business? So the pace is just radically different than it used to be. And so it's about changing, rapidly changing, putting real innovation on it, and collaborating with clients in a pace that we've never seen before. I mean, I've been here 32 years and I've just never the pace of change. >> That's great, John. So (mumbles), really appreciate it. We'll get a quick plug in. What's coming up for you guys? What's going on in the West Coast? What's happening? >> Well, we're in event season right now, so we just finished all the ... We're wrapping up Oracle Open World. We just won five awards at Oracle Open World. We just did an acquisition on the West Coast to beef up our Oracle capabilities. We've got ReInvent and we have all kinds of events coming up but it's a, it's been a pretty busy season. >> So cloud and data have certainly helped rise the tide for your business. >> 100%. I mean, cloud is taking Accenture from kind of in the back of the office and put us into the front office over the last 10 years. >> Well, certainly it's awesome, (mumbles), leveling the playing field, allowing companies to scale out very rapidly, bringing a devops culture, new kinds of modern application developments, real value being created, super exciting time. Thanks for coming in and sharing your time. John Del Santo here in theCube for Cube Conversation, senior managing director at Accenture. I'm John Furrier here in theCube studios for Cube Conversation. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with though leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back all ready, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios we're still getting through the COVID crisis. I think we're in week 12. I don't know, I can't even keep track anymore. But again, as part of this process, we're reaching out to our community, going out to the leaders of the community to really get some best practices, get some insight, and I hear from people that are out in the community and helping other companies as well as their own company, kind of get through these crazy times. So we're really excited to have in a brand new role, never been on the key before, Saleem Janmohamed. He is the senior managing director and market unit lead of the U.S West he just took over from John Del Santo, who we met when you guys opened the new salesforce location. So Saleem, great to meet you. >> Hi, Jeff, great to meet you. Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. >> Glad to be here. Excited for being in this new role. >> So, it's a new role for you, but you've been at a center for, I think for 30 some odd years so, give us a little bit of history. How did, where did you get started? And obviously you must like the culture. You must like the opportunity to stick with it this long. >> Yeah, I am, 30 years in one company is definitely an anomaly here in the Bay area. I started actually in Toronto in financial services, I have an undergraduate degree in business and computer science and then an MBA. I was attracted to Accenture or Anderson Consulting at the time because it was a combination of business and technology. And frankly, the ability to travel the world, just from a personal perspective, I was born in Kenya of Indian parents. I grew up in the UK, I went to school in Canada and now I'm a U.S citizen. So, when someone asks me, where are you from? My usual answer is, how much time do you have? (laughs) But I've got the opportunity through Accenture to work all around the world with some amazing clients, doing incredible things. So, I'm excited about this opportunity to work with some of the leading clients in the world. >> Right? And for people that are familiar with this Accenture, you guys are kind of a matrix organization. So, in terms of the vertical specialty, you've been in the called the CMT, the Communications Media and Technology. So what's been kind of your focus from that point of view? >> Absolutely, so I spent about, as I said, 30 years with Accenture, about 20 of those years were with a wireline wireless and satellite communications companies where I was helping to essentially build out the network infrastructure, the billing and customer care infrastructure. For both large existing telcos, as well as emerging telcos or next-gen telcos, for example, in the wireless space. In markets like India and the middle East, which were emerging markets for us, and for the wireless business. The last 10 years I've spent in the software and platforms part of our business. which is really serving our high-tech client base, as well as our internet and social plant based mostly here on the West Coast. And so it's been, CMT is one of our five industry verticals. The others are products, resources, health and public sector, and financial services. So, we have gone to market traditionally, as those industry led PNS just in the last few months, we actually, right before the Pandemic, I shifted to a new operating model, which is very geography focused. We still preserved our core industry argument. But we're now concentrating in specific markets with a real focus to get all of our services, deployed into those markets and focused on the unique needs of each market. So, it's nothing like moving to a new operating model and having to deal with a pandemic, two weeks into it. It certainly tests your leadership argument as well as your leadership team. >> Right, well, at least you're not in it by yourself. And, it's interesting from your mobile background, you got to see some significant transformation driven by the mobile, especially as you said in more rural markets that were underserved by traditional wire, telephones, but wireless completely changed the game. COVID is this new kind of digital transformation opportunity. We've talked about it a lot over the last several weeks, and it was kind of this light switch moment. You didn't really have a lot of time to plan or, any plans you had were probably laid out very organized, Gantt chart way over a long, long period of time. Then suddenly it was like, boom, you can't go to work. Everybody needs to work from home. So, I'm just curious to get your perspective as you look at, say, the telco transformation and some of these other transformations that didn't have the, either the benefit or the liability, I guess, depending on how you want to define it, of kind of this forcing function that's ready, set go now, you don't really get to think about it or have a choice anymore. >> No, absolutely, look, I'll tell you the COVID crisis, never been a time in  human history, when 2 billion people virtually overnight had to change their behavior And I think that's what we've seen here from an enterprise perspective. The transformation required or the capability required to actually work, have tens of thousands sometimes hundreds of thousands of employees working from home is an arduous task. If you think about Accenture, I mean, we've been a virtual organization throughout our history, We don't really have a headquarters. Our leadership team is distributed all over the world, and a lot of our workforce is actually mobile. So, early on we invested in remote infrastructure, Cloud technologies, really allowing our people to work on client sites at home, in our offices around the world, and to be able to collaborate and communicate, in that fashion. But for those organizations that haven't invested in that kind of infrastructure, COVID has really actually created a greater separation of between the leaders and the laggards. The top 10% of digital transformers have actually expanded that gap and they've created lasting value for their shareholders through that infrastructure investment that they've made. And I think about sort of today's clients that we have here, whether it's on the West Coast or around the world, at this point we've seen more digital transformation happened in the last three months, than we have seen in the last 10 years. It is on the agenda for our key clients and their boards with respect to how they create resiliency, both in their infrastructure and their business operations. So we're particularly focused on helping clients through that transformation, and closing that gap between the leaders and laggards. >> That's terrific, and I'm wondering what you could share, cause we always talk about kind of the three headed monster, right? It's it's technology, which is certainly part of it, but it's also people and process. And clearly to be able to efficiently manage a workforce of 500,000+ people I think are at essentially these days distributed all over the world, many languages, many times zones, many kind of expertises, what are some of those things along those three paths that you share in terms of best practices between the technology and the people and the process? >> Absolutely, so from it, I think, technology is the underlying foundation at this point, if you don't have the remote working infrastructure and the Cloud capability, your data and your systems accessible, to a remote workforce you're already behind. So, step one is getting the basic foundation of the fundamentals in place through that remote infrastructure as well as Cloud technologies. From a process standpoint, what we're seeing clients do today is actually rethink all their processes. If COVID has taught us one thing. I mean, three months ago, if you had asked most of the executives that we talked to, can you actually run your company remotely, most would have answered no. (Jeff laughs) Today, what we've proven over the last three months is in fact that's possible. But you really now need to create lasting change in the process, to be able to sort of sustain the value. We're finding that people are more efficient, quality's better, engagement is better, with remote working, but in order to be able to create enduring change, you're going to need to actually change and rationalize processes across the organization from selling to customer care, to marketing and to operations, and even some cases manufacturing. And that requires a cultural change as well. For organizations that haven't, aren't used to sort of virtual working, it requires an engagement model change, and really sort of bringing together a hybrid between, physical interaction and digital interaction. One of the things we're doing actually along those lines, our team is Zurich cause that pioneered this technology we're calling synapse, which allows you to go from sort of, this kind of interaction to actually augmented reality and virtual reality environments where you connect collaborate with each other in an entirely virtual world that actually replicates the real world. So, we've taken our San Francisco Hub and various other Hub locations around the world, replicated them instead of 3D space, and how people do interact with each other, in a more human way in a virtual space. So, I think what you're going to see is more of those kinds of technologies, creeping into the way people actually interact with each other as the new normal. >> Right, so, for the people that weren't prepared, right? That hadn't already kind of moved down the road in terms of SaaS applications and distributed workforce and security and all those things to bake in, did they just have to go now or are they still stuck, kind of holding their head in the sand, waiting for this thing to end. I mean, is there a way for someone to, how do they quickly make that transformation with no planning? It's one thing if you're already kind of on your way, and you just, you give it a little bit more gas, but for the people that really weren't thinking that way, do they even have a chance or it's like, sorry, you better, (laughs) you're late to the party. >> I think today, even with a standing start today, if you look at the technologies available from Microsoft, from Google, from Amazon, a lot of the big public Cloud providers, you can really get up to speed very quickly. For example, we took the National Health Service in the UK, using teams we put them online almost within a week to get them activated in a virtual environment, interacting and operating their service without having interest invested in that technology in the past so, even as an organization that hasn't done, that you can move quickly leveraging the investments in infrastructure that service providers have made over the years. >> Jeff: Right. >> I think that it requires though a leadership change. The c-suite and the board of our clients really need to see that strategic imperative of making that change in order to be able to facilitate the change through the organization. And I can tell you that, our clients are absolutely committed to that journey at this point, and are actively looking for opportunities to implement digital technology throughout every function in their organization, so that they can actually, handle these kinds of extraneous shocks to their business. >> Right. >> And if you think about sort of the three areas of focus these days, it's about, getting people to work or getting back to the office wherever possible, and doing that with a focus on keeping their people safe, and within sort of the regulatory environment that they operate. But secondly, it's about putting in place these kinds of digital technologies that allow sort of ongoing hybrid digital and physical workspaces, and also creating a different type of customer experience from selling to operations for their customer base. And then the last is actually thinking about a dramatic change in cost infrastructure through outsourcing that also creates the ability to variabilize your cost in the event of further extraneous shocks, because we don't know how long this is going to last. We don't know what the next wave might look like. So you really need to think about putting in place the infrastructure and the changes that allows you to endure both from a cost as well as a process and technology perspective, these changes in the future. >> Yeah, I want to dig into a little bit about kind of what comes next because we're into this for a while. I think it's going to keep going for a while. There's indications that we might be hitting into a second wave and in my mind, short of a vaccine we're going to be an in kind of an uncomfortable state for awhile. But I'm just curious as to how you're hearing people thinking about what going back means. Cause I, you know, I have a hard time thinking that if people have been working from home for months, right, and behaviors become habits and, people learn how to be productive and, they like to be able to eat dinner with the family. I just don't know, or what do you think in terms of kind of rushing back to jumping on the 101 every day at 7:00 to sit in traffic for two hours. I just, it seems like hopefully we're past that in a need to have knowledge workers be at an office all together at the same time every day, especially now that they've learned to be productive, kind of outside of that routine. What are some of the things that people are thinking about? How should they be thinking about it? And of course there's the whole liability issue where, you invite people back somebody gets sick. I mean, we've barely kind of begun to hear the whole lawyer piece of the story, which we don't necessarily >> No. >> need to get into. >> I mean, I think the first thing is absolutely making sure that people are safe. And I think most organizations are thinking through, how to put in place the controls and the processes to ensure that their people are safe and most are thinking about this in a very phased way. You're hearing a lot of our Bay area clients announcing that they're not returning back to work this year. And, several are saying, perhaps even never. And so I think that, there is a fundamental change happening here with respect to going back to the office. Our sense is that there's going to be a much more hybrid environment where, it's going to be perfectly fine for folks to be working from home two or three days a week, and then going to the office where it's necessary to collaborate in a physical way. And also a human way, I think that, we do need as humans that interaction, a physical interaction. And so I think, we may be physically apart, but we need to be socially interactive. And I think organizations are trying to figure out sort of the right blend there. But I don't think we go back to a normal, if you will the old normal, which was five days a week in the office, I do think that we're going to be in a much more virtual environment. And frankly, there are some benefits of that in that, if you look at our organization because we're so global, we're able to tap into talent all around the world that can help our clients here in the Bay area, because they're more comfortable now, with the use of virtual technology. So I do think that the new normal will be a hybrid environment, much more so than it has in the past. >> Yeah, we talked to, I don't know if you know, Darren Murph, GitLab, they're really interesting company. They've been 100% remote from forever. So they've got a lot of really defined practices and processes in place in terms of like, which communication channel is for what types of communication and Darren's point was because they are mobile and they are in different time zones, you have to be much more defined and thoughtful in the way that you organize your communications so that people can be more self serve. And that those things will also work great in a physical world you just didn't have to have in the physical world. And his point is, we can just throw people in a room and hope that they get together, that doesn't necessarily always happen. And so by using some of these remote management techniques and processes you're actually going to be much more effective whether you're together in a room and can go out to lunch together, or you're still distributed team. And really kind of, as we've seen this transition from kind of do we want to put it in Cloud, to why don't we want to put it in the Cloud, to kind of a Cloud first and then on kind of a mobile, where your history is, should it be a mobile app, or should it be mobile first? It almost feels like now it's going to be remote first. And then if there's a reason to come to the office, it's an important meeting we need to get together. People are coming from out of town, but it almost feels like it's going to shift that remote's going to be the primary form. And then the physical getting together really be secondary. I don't know if you are hearing anything along those lines. >> No, absloutely, we've seen that in our own environment. I think the level of engagement between our leadership teams here in the West and all around the world and in the market units is actually significantly greater. It's not that you run into someone in the hallway with especially in a very large organization like ours, you are now actually connecting face to face with people. The days of the conference call are gone, and you're actually interacting and you're peering into the lives and the homes of the colleagues that you've worked with for many years. I think that's actually a pretty fundamental social change, and actually creates a level of proximity that perhaps you didn't even see when you were together in an office somewhere, and you're appearing into the lives, if you will, of your counterparts. I think that's a pretty fundamental change. And, if I look at the forms of engagement, I mean, we have, most of our population is under 30 around the world. And so they're used to a digital channels of communication, both on the mobile handset, as well as on their laptops and desktops, through online channels. And so, we're actually leveraging that to be much more connected, even in this virtual world than we were in our physical world. >> Jeff: Right. >> And I think most organizations see that as an avenue to really get a pulse on what's happening with their workforce and in their business, especially in a global setting. >> Right, and I wonder if you could share some best practices on kind of from a leadership perspective, cause you're part of Julie's executive team. I'm sure you guys are distributed all over the world and I assume your direct reports, maybe a little bit less distributed now that you're running the U.S. West but, one thing we keep hearing is that the frequency and the variety of the communications has got to go up a lot both in terms of, what you're talking about and how often you're talking to. And as you said, kind of getting into this, kind of human side, because you are getting invited into people's homes. What can you share that you guys have been doing best practices at a center forever because you've been managing distributed teams, since the very beginning? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, if you look at just this week, I spent eight hours with Julie and the entire Global Management Committee, the top 40 people, or so within Accenture. Every morning through video conferences, we interacted with Julie, highly interactive sessions, where we went through our strategy or financial results, some of the key initiatives we're trying to drive, and instead of what we would have done historically is fly 40 people to some part of the world, and how's them in a hotel room for two or three days to have the same session, we were incredibly more productive. We had three blocked hours per day over the last three days, again using digital media to engage with each other converse share our rich media content much more productive use of technology and frankly, a lot less wear and tear on people flying around the world, and as substantially lower cost. So, I think that that's something that is here to stay. I can't see us going back to the model where we, fly people around for internal meetings, certainly. From a West perspective, I meet with my management team, we scheduled calls now three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, typically, we get together for an hour. We conduct sort of what's going on with the business, where are the issues, what do we need to solve? And we do that entirely virtually, if you think about it, I'm getting, an hour or three hours a week with my entire leadership team, connected and collaborating around the same issues, in a much more kind of organized and concentrated way than if I ran into them at the coffee machine or at the water cooler. I am actually getting more engagement, more organization and more focus through my leadership team, in this new world than perhaps I would have had, in new. >> Right. >> So, I think that there's a lot of benefit, to this model. I still think that there's an opportunity to get, when we have large meetings and we need to sort of convey a particular message. It is nice to be able to get together with people physically. But I think that that's going to be less often now than in the past. >> Right, I just think people it's just different, right? It's not better or worse, it's just different. We had an interview earlier today. I think we had somebody on from Singapore, somebody on, from India, somebody on from Germany, our host was in Boston and the production was here in Palo Alto. You couldn't do that to get all those people together in a physical space is a lot bigger investment and a lot more difficult. So, it's just, it's different. It's not the same as being together. We can't go out and get a beer after this is over, but at the same time, it's a lot easier to grab an hour and get together with people. So, I think there is, it's different, it's not a substitute is different. >> Yeah, I mean, to that point, if you think about our clients they are global, their executives are global. The ability to actually connect with clients have a conversation regardles of where they are on the globe You know, it's, we are actually much more able to do that now because it doesn't require flying. It doesn't require sort of scheduling months ahead to make sure everyone can be in a particular location. You can literally just schedule a meeting and have it the next day. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that makes us much more responsive to our client's needs and much more accessible as they have questions for us. So I think there's definite advantages to this mode of working. >> Right. So Saleem, before I let you go, it's a great conversation and we could go all day, but we'll let you (laughs) get back to work. But I've just, especially since you come from a communications background and a 30 year veteran in this space I mean for as bad as this pandemic has been and it's bad, right? A lot of people are dead, a lot of businesses like restaurants and airlines, speaking of airlines and hotels, couldn't go digital right away. Right, we're fortunate to be in the knowledge business that we could. But what I really want to get your perspective is the fact that we have so many of these tools in place today that actually enabled it to happen kind of easily, right? We've got fast internet and we've got a high power mobile devices. And we have a huge suite of mobile applications from Salesforce to Slack, to Acuity. That's the software we use for scheduling. I mean, there's so many tools that, you look at had this happened 10 years ago, of five years ago, 15 years ago, a really different level of pain. And I'm sure, as you look back to the old days, put again application of that service providers and laying all this fiber and a lot of that stuff in 2000 looked like it wasn't necessarily going to pay off. And in fact, a lot of that infrastructure that was put in in those early days has really, kind of shined in this moment where it had to. And it's, I just love to get kind of your perspective with a little bit of a history of how these systems have developed and are in place and really enabled, kind of this work from anywhere, communicate from anywhere, almost do anything as long as you've got access to some type of a device and an internet connection. >> Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you that the broadband infrastructure investments that our telco clients have made over the last, two decades or so have really come into their own through this crisis. I think if you look at the level of investment, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have made in Cloud infrastructure has enabled, our organization, as well as many others, to be able to turn on a dime with respect to this crisis. I actually think that emerging economies that are implementing for example, 5G technologies, and adopting those technologies sometimes faster than their Western counterparts are actually, will leap frog, with respect to using those technologies, and allow if you will, their economies, their businesses, to sustain these kinds of impacts in a much more ready way in the future than perhaps in the past. And I think that, digital and digital transformation is sort of a element to the  business in the future and frankly, to sustaining, economies. So, I think mobile technology, Cloud technology, and the ability to sort of digitize your business and your economy are critical success factors for the future. >> Yeah, if not, you're in trouble because everybody else is doing it. >> Exactly. (Jeff laughs) >> All right, Saleem. Well, thank you for spending a few minutes, sharing your insight, really appreciate it. And congratulations on the new position. I'll look forward to seeing you in that beautiful, innovation Hub, one of these days, as soon as we can get back outside. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Jeff, I look forward to having you at the San Francisco Hub and showing you the virtual implementation of that Hub on our CMS platform. >> Awesome, look forward to it, thanks a lot. >> All right, you take care. >> All right, he's Saleem, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)