(relaxing intro music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage here live at reinvent 2022. We're here at the Executive Summit upstairs with the Accenture Set three sets broadcasting live four days with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier your host, with two great guests, cube alumnis, back Tanuja Randery, managing director Amazon web service for Europe middle East and Africa, known as EMEA. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Great to see you. And Karthik Narain, who's the Accenture first cloud lead. Great to see you back again. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming back on. All right, so business transformation is all about digital transformation taken to its conclusion. When companies transform, they are now a digital business. Technologies powering value proposition, data security all in the keynotes higher level service at industry specific solutions. The dynamics of the industry are changing radically in front of our eyes for for the better. Karthik, what's your position on this as Accenture looks at this, we've covered all your successes during the pandemic with AWS. What, what do you guys see out there now as this next layer of power dynamics in the industry take place? >> I think cloud is getting interesting and I think there's a general trend towards specialization that's happening in the world of cloud. And cloud is also moving from a general purpose technology backbone to providing specific industry capabilities for every customer within various industries. But the industry cloud is not a new term. It has been used in the past and it's been used in the past in various degrees, whether that's building horizontal solutions, certain specialized SaaS software or providing capabilities that are horizontal for certain industries. But we see the evolution of industry cloud a little differently and a lot more dynamic, which is we see this as a marketplace where ecosystem of capabilities are going to come together to interact with a common data platform data backbone, data model with workflows that'll come together and integrate all of this stuff and help clients reinvent their industry with newer capabilities, but at the same time use the power of democratized innovation that's already there within that industry. So that's the kind of change we are seeing where customers in their strategy are going to implement industry cloud as one of the tenants as they go through their strategy. >> Yeah, and I see in my notes, fit for purposes is a buzzword people are talking about right size in the cloud and then just building on that. And what's interesting, Tanuja I want to get your thoughts because in the US we're one country, so yeah, integrating is kind of within services. You have purview over countries and these regions it's global impact. This is now a global environment. So it's not just the US North America, it's Latin America it's EMEA, this is another variable in the cross connecting of these fit for purpose. What's your view of the these industry specific solutions? >> Yeah, no and thanks Karthik 'cause I'm a hundred percent aligned. You know, I mean, you know this better than me, John, but 90% of workloads have not yet moved to the cloud. And the only way that we think that's going to happen is by bringing together business and IT. So what does that mean? It means starting with business use cases whether that's digital banking or smart connected factories or frankly if it's predictive maintenance or connected beds. But how do we take those use cases leverage them to really drive outcomes with the technology behind them? I think that's the key unlock that we have to get to. And very specifically, and Adam talked about this a lot today, but data, data is the single unifier for all of business and IT coming together to drive value, right? However, the issue is there's a ton of it, (John Furrier chuckling) right? In fact, fun fact if you put all the data that's going to be created over the next five years, which is more than the last 30 years, on a one terabyte little floppy, disk drive, remember those? Well that's going to be 15 round trips to the moon (John Furrier chuckling) and back. That's how much data it is. So our perspective is you got to unify, single data lake, you got to modernize with AI and ML, and then you're going to have to drive innovation on that. Now, I'll give you one tiny example if I may which I love Ryanair, big airline, 150 million passengers. They are also the largest supplier of ham and cheese sandwiches in the air. And catering at that scale is really difficult, right? If you have too much food wastage, sustainability issues, too little customers are really unhappy. So we work with them leveraging AWS cloud and AI ML to build a panini predictor. And in essence, it's taking the data they've got, data we've got, and actually giving them the opportunity to have just the right number of paninis. >> I love the lock and and the key is data to unlock the value. We heard that in the keynote. Karthik, you guys have been working together with AWS and a lot of successes. We've covered some of those on the cube. As you look at these industry solutions they're not the obvious big problems. They're like businesses, you know it could be the pizza shop it could be the dentist office, it could be any business any industry specific carries over. What is the key to unlock it? Is it the data? Is it the solution? What's that key? >> I think, you know the easier answer is all of the about, but like Tanuja said it all starts by bringing the data together and this is a funny thing. It's not creating new data. This data is there within enterprises. Our clients have these data the industries have the data, but for ages these data has been trapped in functional silos and organizations have been doing analytics within those functions. It's about bringing the data together whether that's a single data warehouse or a data mesh. Those are architectural considerations. But it's about bringing cross-functional data together as step one. Step two, is about utilizing the power of cloud for democratized innovation. It's no longer about one company trying to reinvent the wheel, or create a a new wheel within their enterprise. It's about looking around through the power of cloud marketplace to see if there's a solution that is already existing can we use that? Or if I've created something within my company can I use that as a service for others to use? So, the number one thing is using the power of democratized innovation. Second thing is how do you standardize and digitize functions that does not need to be reinvented every single time so that, you know, your organization can do it or you could use that or take that from elsewhere. And the third element is using the power of the platform economy or platforms to find new avenues of revenue opportunity, customer engagement and experiences. So these are all the things that differentiates organization, but all of this is underpinned by a unified data model that helps, you know, use all the (indistinct) there. >> Tanuja, you have mentioned earlier that not everyone has their journey of the cloud looks the same and certainly in the US and EMEA you have different countries and different areas. >> Yep. >> Their journeys are different. Some want speed and fees, some will roll their own. I mean data brick CEO, when I interviewed them that last week, they started database on a credit card swiped it and they didn't want any support. Amazon's knocking on their door saying, "you want support?" "No, we got it covered." Obviously they're from Berkeley and they're nerds, and they're cool. They can roll their own, but not everyone can. >> Yeah. >> And so you have a mix of customer profiles. How do you view that and what's your strategy? How do you get them over productive seeing that business value? What's that transformation look like? >> Yeah, John, you're absolutely right. So you've got those who are born in cloud, they're very savvy, they know exactly what they need. However, what I do find increasingly, even with these digital native customers, is they're also starting to talk business use cases. So they're talking about, "okay how do I take my platform and build a whole bunch of new services on top of that platform?" So, we still have to work with them on this business use case dimension for the next curve of growth that they want to drive. Currently with the global macroeconomic factors obviously they're also very concerned about profitability and costs. So that's one model. In the enterprise space, you have differences. >> Yeah. >> Right, You have the sort of very, very, very savvy enterprises, right? Who know exactly what they're looking for. But for them then it's about how do I lean into sustainability? In fact, we did a survey, and 77% of users that we surveyed said that they could accelerate their sustainably goals by using cloud. So in many cases they haven't cracked that and we can help them do that. So it's really about horses for courses there. And then, then with some other companies, they've done a lot of the basic infrastructure modernization. However, what they haven't been able to yet do is figure out how they're going to actually become a tech company. So I keep getting asked, can I become a tech company? How do I do that? Right? And then finally there are companies which don't have the skills. So if I go to the SMB segment, they don't always have the skills or the resources. And there using scalable market platforms like AWS marketplace, >> Yeah. >> Allows them to get access to solutions without having to have all the capabilities. So it really is- >> This is where partner network really kind of comes in. >> Absolutely. >> Huge value. Having that channel of solution providers I use that term specifically 'cause you're providing the solution for those folks. >> Yeah. Exact- >> And then the folks at the enterprise, we had a quote on the analyst segment earlier on our Cube, "spend more, save more." >> Yeah. >> That's the cloud equations, >> Yeah. because you're going to get it on sustainability you're going to save it on, you're going to save on cost recovery for revenue, time to revenue. So the cloud is the answer for a lot of enterprises out of the recession. >> Absolutely, and in fact, we need to lean in now you heard Adam say this, right? I mean the cost savings potential alone from on-prem to cloud is between 40 and 60 percent. Just that. But I don't think that's it John. >> The bell tightening he said is reigning some right size. Okay, but then also do more, he didn't say that, but analysts are generally saying, if you spend right on the cloud, you'll save more. That's a general thesis. >> Yeah. >> Do you agree with that? >> I absolutely think so. And by the way, usage is, people use it differently as they get smarter. We're constantly working with our customers by the way though, to continuously cost optimize. So you heard about our Graviton3 instances for example. We're using that to constantly optimize, but at the same time, what are the workloads that you haven't yet brought over to the cloud? (John Furrier chuckling) And so supply chain is a great idea. Our health cloud initiative. So we worked with Accenture on the Accenture Health Insights platform, which runs on AWS as an example or the Goldman Sachs one last year, if you remember. >> I do >> The financial cloud. So those, those are some of the things that I think make it easier for people to consume cloud and reimagine their businesses. >> It's funny, I was talking with Adam and we had a little debate about what an ISV is and I talked to the CEO of Mongo. They don't see themselves on the ISV. As they grew up on the cloud, they become platforms, they have their own ISVs and data bricks and Snowflake and others are developing that dynamic. But there's still ISVs out there. So there's a dynamic of growth going on and the need for partners and our belief is that the ecosystem is going to start doubling in size we believe, because of the demand for purpose built or so out of the box. I hate to use that word "out of the box", but you know turnkey solutions that you can buy another one if it breaks. But use the building blocks if you want to build the foundation. That is more durable, more customizable. Do that if you can. >> Well, >> but- >> we've got a phenomenal, >> shall we talk about this? >> Yeah, go get into- >> So, we've built a five year vision together, Accenture and us. which is called Velocity and you'll be much better in describing it, but I'll give you the simple version of Velocity which is taking AWS powered industry solutions and bringing it to market faster, more repeatable and at lower cost. And so think about vertical solutions sitting on a horizontal accelerator platform able to be deployed making transformation less complex. >> Yeah. >> Karthik, weight in on this, because I've talked to you about this before. We've said years ago the horizontal scalability of the cloud's a beautiful thing but verticals where the ML works great too. Now you got ML in all aspects of it. Horizontal verticals here now. >> Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. Again, the power of this kind of platform that we are launching, by the way we're launching tomorrow we are very excited about it, is, create a platform- >> What are you launching tomorrow? Hold on, I got news out there. What's launching? >> We are going to launch a giant platform, which will help clients accelerate their journey to industry cloud. So that's going to happen tomorrow. So what this platform would provide is that this is going to provide the horizontal capabilities that will help clients bootstrap their launch into cloud. And once they get into cloud, they would be able to build industry solutions on this. The way I imagine this is create the chassis that you need for your industry and then add the cartridges, industry cartridges, which are going to be solutions that are going to be built on top of it. And we are going to do this across various industries starting from, you know, healthcare, life sciences to energy to, you know, public services and so on and so forth >> You're going to create a channel machine. A channel creation machine, you're going to allow people to build their own solutions on top of that platform. And that's launching tomorrow. Make sure we get the news on that. >> Exactly. And- >> Ah, No, >> Sorry, and we genuinely believe the power of industry cloud, if you think about it in the past to create a solution one had to be an ISV to create a solution. What cloud is providing for industry today in the concept of industry clouds, this, industry companies are creating industry solution. The best example is, along with, you know, AWS and Accenture, Ecopetrol, which is a leader in the energy industry, has created a platform, you know called Water Intelligence and Management platform. And through this platform, they are attacking the audacious goal of water sustainability, which is going to be a huge problem for humanity that everybody needs to solve. As part of this platform, the goal is to reduce, you know, fresh water usage by 66% or zero, you know, you know, impact to, you know, groundwater is going to be the goal or ambition of Ecopetrol. So all of this is possible because industry players want to jump to the bandwagon because they have all the toolkit of of the cloud that's available with which they could build a software platform with which they can power their entire industry. >> And make money and have a good business. You guys are doing great. Final word, partnership. Where's it go next? You're doing great. Put a plugin for the Accenture AWS partnership. >> Well, I mean we have a phenomenal relationship and partnership, which is amazing. We really believe in the power of three which is the GSI, the ISV, and us together. And I have to go back to the thing I keep focused on 90% of workloads not in cloud. I think together we can enable those companies to come into the cloud. Very importantly, start to innovate launch new products and refuel the economy. So I think- >> We'll have to check on that >> Very, very optimistic. >> We'll have to check on that number. >> That seems a little- >> You got to check on that number. >> 90 seems a little bit amazing. >> 90% of workloads. >> That sounds, maybe, I'd be surprised. Maybe a little bit lower than that. Maybe. We'll see. >> We got to start turning it. >> It's still a lot. >> (laughs) It's still a lot. >> A lot more. Still first, still early days. Thanks so much for the conversation Karthik great to see you again Tanuja, thanks for your time. >> Thank you, John. >> Congratulations, on your success. Okay, this is theCube up here in the executive summit. You're watching theCube, the leader in high tech coverage, we'll be right back with more coverage here, and the Accenture set after the short break. (calm outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent! 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host for the theCUBE, a lot of great action here. A lot of great solutions. Great keynote. The future of cloud's going to be all about purpose-built software platforms, enabling more and more SaaS, faster performance with custom chips, all enabling great stuff. I have two great guests here. Who are going to talk about it from Accenture. We've got Karthik Narain, global lead of Accenture's Cloud First. Welcome to the program. Good to see you and Chris Wegmann, AABG Accenture Amazon Business Group. Technology leads senior manager. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> I was commenting before we came on about Accenture's work you guys been doing with the clouds in my article, I posted before re:Invent!. Dave Vellante coined the term superclouds, which we kind of just put out there, but the idea that people can build really strong platforms that enable a new kind of Saas has been the big wave. Connect has been a great example. We heard on stage from Adam, the CEO. Chris, this has been something that's been a real change where it's not just lift and shift and refactor, it's build value in a platform and new SaaS capabilities. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I would absolutely agree. We've seen this change over time. We've seen the lift and shift and modernize and it's definitely moved into the Superclouds. I like the term, but you know, we call them cloud continuums, which we'll talk a little bit about, it's about building these purpose-built solutions. I think if you look at the keynote today, you look at, everybody that was on stage. United and everyone talking about what they're building, their technology companies now, they're not just the business. >> You guys did some new research, coining new terms and Cloud First. What is this all about? What is this new wave you guys are talking about? >> Yeah, so John, you know, few years ago, when people talked about cloud, they generally meant public cloud. I think the definition of cloud is changing and expanding. And from now on, whenever people talk about cloud, it's actually a cloud continuum. It's a continuum of capability from public to Edge and everything in between all seamlessly connected by Cloud First networks, which means all the capabilities that customers used to get from one public cloud destination. They can actually access that across the continuum, whether that be in their own private data center, using the capability of cloud with AWS's Outpost and other capabilities. Or they could use the capability in their Edge location, whether it's their retail centers, their warehouse locations, manufacturing and so on and so forth. So organizations are using the power of cloud beyond one purpose and one destination, but more as an operating system going forward. >> Chris, what's your take on this redefinition of cloud what's your take on it? >> I think it's much needed. I think Andy kicked it off last year when he recognized the term hybrid. We all, who've has been around a while kind of chuckled because they finally said the word. But if you look at the keynote today, they just continued it. Adam picked it up and ran with it. If you look at all the services, Wavelength and all the different services, there's not a single customer that I have, that's just using EC2 or S3 right. They're using all these different services you saw today. You saw all the different services that United put up on the screen. That DISH put up on the screen. So yeah, it's how people and companies, if they're truly going to transform and truly use cloud to transform, you have to use the whole continuum. >> Yeah. And I think the continuum message is a good one because if you look at what the evolution is, that was interesting to. Adam went on and did kind of a history lesson in the beginning, it felt like I was in the Star Wars movie, like back in the old days. And then you kind of progressed. You had to be really elite to roll your own cloud. And the hyperscalers did that, you saw that. Now you still have elite technical people, but now it's general purpose, or purpose built. It's like having prefabricated platforms and open source. We've learned that why do you want to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to? So if I want a call center I get Connect, if I want to have a big plugin platform, I can still build on top of and have that SaaS unique application. This seems logical. This is new. (laughter) This is the continuum. I mean, it seems obvious now looking at it, but how far along in are people getting this. Karthik, what's your take on this? >> I think customers are getting it. They are looking at cloud more as an operating system for their future innovation. They liked the concept that they got from the public cloud, which is easy configurability, consumability and automatability of their infrastructure assets. And when you can get that capability as an operating system for your entire enterprise, and you could innovate across the spectrum, that's extremely powerful. We see companies accelerating their adoption to cloud, but we are also seeing over the last three years, a lot of that adoption was using cloud as a migration destination. But now with the power of the cloud continuum, where innovation is available, that so many new services that Adam launched today, you could use truly cloud as an innovation engine. And we're actually seeing that the clients who are using the cloud continuum for innovation are doing much better than the ones that are using cloud as a migration destination. In fact, they're doing two X to three X use of cloud for innovation and uplifting knowlEdge where they are actually using three X more cloud for sustainability purposes. So huge, huge value. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a great point. Great insight, because what you're saying is essentially you can't hide anymore. The projects are either going to be successful or not. You can see whether it's useful or not, and now you're tying cloud adoption and outcomes together. Where you can look it and saying, we need to make this outcome work. Not for building, for building sake. Those projects were discovered during the pandemic. Why are we doing that? So you can't hide that ball anymore. >> Right and everybody's got to do it now, right? I mean, you don't have a choice. The pandemic is now forcing companies to change. They've changed. And that the research shows that the companies that have truly adopted the whole continuum are doing much better than the companies that didn't. >> What's pattern in this continuum research you guys, what's the big takeaway that you guys have found in that study, in that customer experience that you're having. What's the big, Aha moment. >> I think there are a few things. Number one surprising aspect is that the companies that use cloud for a broader innovation objective, actually, were saving more than the ones that use cloud just as a cost saving initiative. That was a big, Aha moment. Number two, when you talk about all of this innovation that AWS provides, sometimes it's easy for organizations to shrug it off saying, this looks like this is only for the elite companies, or this is only for the digitally native companies to follow. But our research showed that the companies that were successful adopting cloud continuum, the ones that we call less continuum competitors, 60% of them are pre-digitally born organizations. And they were reaping the benefits and they were growing faster, saving more, being more innovative than all others. So this is truly usable across the spectrum of the G 2000 enterprise. >> Yeah, and I think it's a no brainer, but now that you have, customers are transforming, they have multiple clouds. You have AWS, Azure, Google cloud, people were trying to find their swim lane. We heard about skill gap shortage. We did some reporting on that, that this idea of multi-cloud maybe not, I can't hire enough people. I'm going to bet on this cloud, maybe use that cloud. How are people looking at that? How do you guys see that the cloud competitive continuum, or how is the cloud competition affecting the cloud continuum from a customer standpoint? >> Yeah. I mean, you got to look at it, do you use the whole continuum? You've got a lot of cases, you got to be on the same cloud, right. You can use the whole, you got to use all the different components, all the different services. So I think we are seeing customers that are picking one and starting with one and then adding others. I see a lot of my customers who are using multiple clouds, but they're using them in different business units, right? So they may pick one business unit to go deep with AWS on, they may go use another business unit to go deep on another cloud, right? So yeah, I mean, everyone is getting multiple, but a lot of they're starting with one and then adding a second one or a third along the way. >> Karthik, this is what I was trying to get out of my story. It's a hard, very nuanced point. But if you look at the success of say Snowflake and Databricks, all bet on Amazon and their superclouds, they are on Amazon, but they're now working with Azure as well, because why wouldn't you want to open up your market? >> Exactly. And even the industry companies that want to monetize their capabilities using the digital ecosystems are doing that. For example, Siemens wanted to bring all their capabilities in manufacturing and machine operating system into a platform called MindSphere. And they knew that their end goal was going to be multi-cloud, but they want to practice, leveraging the power of cloud with one platform. And when they created MindSphere, they started with AWS and they created that solution in the public cloud and private cloud also at the Edge by leveraging the power of cloud from public to Edge and proved it out. And once it started working and they were able to roll it out for customers. Now they are giving customers the choice to be able to use it in other clouds as well. >> Yeah Karthik, you mentioned earlier at the top of our interview about the platform of the cloud and Dave and I were talking on our keynote review. We did a little history lesson of when Microsoft owned the monopoly of windows, the system software, and they had the application suite with office, but they still wanted developers to build on top of windows. Okay. But now with cloud that's one big windows platform like thing. So the developers ecosystem is evolving. And so one of the things we're watching, I want to get your reaction to this. Is in every major inflection point in the computer industry, when new ways to build and write code rolled out, the application owners always wanted their software to run on the fastest platform. Speeds and feeds matter in these shifts, because why would I want to have my software run slower? >> Yeah. >> What is your reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. And again, there's a lot of things that the industry is going through and we are pushing the envelope on digitization. And today's keynote. When you saw the CEO of NASDAQ talking about the technology bottlenecks that were preventing the matching algorithm to be finally taken to cloud. Now that capability that's available at with AWS is what is enabling that matching algorithm to be taken to cloud through the power of Edge. So there's so much technology innovation, that's happening. That's constantly expanding the boundaries of posibilities. >> I mean, that's exactly the point. And I wrote this in my story and it came out on the keynote today, which was Adam saying, the clouds expanding that's the continuum. If it's running cloud operations, does it matter what it is? I mean, it's, if you're at the Edge and you're running cloud, maybe cause you want latency, of course you want to have low latency. Why wouldn't you want outposts. Again, this is all cloud operations. DevSecOps data is now kind of cloud operationalized. That seems to be what's happening. >> Yeah, I think the developers love the fact that they can write for one and put it anywhere, right? And whether it's a EKS on Inside, I don't even know what you call anymore, the public cloud, right? Or all the way out at the Edge, right? You write it once, you can deploy it there and it makes their lives a lot easier. And you know, as you said, it's all about performance. So they get the best option. >> Well, We love having you guys on the theCUBE, Accenture. You guys have really smart, talented people, always great commentary. Dave and I were looking at reviewing the tape so to speak. It's not really tape anymore. It's it's digitally stored on a S3, but we were looking back at 2016 when we first started talking about horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized applications. If you look at the keynote today and squint through the announcements, Amazon's going to offer full horizontal scalability and vertical specialization at the app level with machine learning capabilities. This means that you need data to be horizontally addressable, which is kind of counterintuitive, but you're seeing all the success on data lakes and lakes. This is the new architecture. It's kind of proven now, what do you guys think? >> Yeah, again, the aspect of cloud is about democratised innovation. The first element is, even though there's so much infrastructure build-out and infrastructural elements where there's continuous innovation going on, the enterprises and developers are moving from Bivives built decisions to assembling and consuming options. And when they assemble and consume, they want newer and newer services to be available. That is very specific to their industry and specific to functions, whether it is supply chain function or manufacturing function or so on and so forth. For this, there are going to be specific data that is going to be required, or operational for that particular use-case. But the whole idea of predictive analytics and AI and machine learning and data science is about how do you find correlations between operational data for a particular capability, with things that in the previous world was unrelated. For that you need to bring all of this data together. Time will tell whether all the data is going to move to one location or is there going to be distributed computing of that data with more technology, but that's the role that data is going to play in these verticalized solutions. >> Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. I want to get you guys while I got one, a couple of minutes left. Advice to people that look into go this next level. They know the continuum is coming, you guys been providing great solutions and advice to your customers. For the folks watching, what advice can you give where they're just putting their toe in the water or want to go full in? >> Yeah, so, we found in that research that there were some common patterns that were followed by these continuum competitors, the ones that were succeeding or winning in the cloud. And there was namely four of them, the first one, and these four can be adopted by others for them to also win in the continuum. The first one was looking at the power of the continuum, how the technology is evolving and creating a strategy to take advantage of the evolution of the continuum. That's number one. Number two, this is about organizational change. So don't go about this change in a soft manner. There are elements that you need to change within your organization to imbibe this wholeheartedly. That's the second thing. Third thing is one common aspect that all the continuum competitors followed was they put experience at the forefront for everything. For their end customers. Last but not the least. This is a holistic journey and an enterprise wide journey. And this would require CSO level, CEO level commitment on a longer term to achieve this. So with these four things, most companies can achieve the successes that the continuum competitors are seeing. >> Awesome insight, Chris, real quick, 30 seconds. What's your advice. >> Chris: Don't be afraid. (laughter) It's pretty simple. >> The water's warm, come on in >> Yeah, come on in. A lot of gone before you, right? It can be scary. It can be daunting, right? A lot of services. Don't be scared to get in and go at it. >> Yeah, one of the jobs I love about being theCUBE host is, you talk to people many years earlier, you guys got it right at Accenture. Congratulations. You were deploying, you saw this wave of purpose-built before anyone else and congratulations. Great success. >> Thanks, thanks for having us on theCUBE. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier. You're watching us here live in Las Vegas, for AWS re:Invent 2021 coverage. TheCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent Executive Summit 2020. Sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >> Welcome to CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, part of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by a CUBE alum, Karthik Narain. He is Accenture's senior managing director and lead Accenture Cloud First, welcome back to the show Karthik. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >> Always a pleasure. So I want to talk to you. You are an industry veteran, you've been in Silicon Valley for decades. I want to hear from your perspective what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, what are you hearing from clients? What are they struggling with? What are their challenges that they're facing day to day? >> I think COVID-19 has been a eye-opener from various facets, first and foremost, it's a health situation that everybody's facing, which not just has economic bearings to it. It has enterprise and organizational bearing to it, and most importantly, it's very personal to people because they themselves and their friends, family, near and dear ones are going through this challenge from various different dimension. But putting that aside, when you come to it from an organizational enterprise standpoint, it has changed everything, the behavior of organizations coming together, working in their campuses, working with each other as friends, family, and near and dear colleagues, all of them are operating differently. So that's one big change to get things done in a completely different way from how they used to get things done. Number two, a lot of things that were planned for normal scenarios, like their global supply chain, how they interact with their client, customers, how they co-innovate with their partners, and how their employees contribute to the success of an organization, they're all changed. And there are no data models that give them a hint of something like this for them to be prepared for this. So we are seeing organizations that have adapted to this reasonably okay, and are launching to innovate faster in this, and there are organizations that have started with struggling, but are continuing to struggle. And the gap between the leaders and laggards are widening. So this is creating opportunities in a different way for the leaders with a lot of pivot in their business, but it's also creating significant challenge for the laggards, as we defined in our future systems research that we did a year ago, and those organizations are struggling further. So the gap is actually widening. >> So you just talked about the widening gap. You've talked about the tremendous uncertainty that so many companies, even the ones who have adapted reasonably well in this time. Talk a little bit about Accenture Cloud First and why now? >> I think it's a great question. We believe that for many of our clients COVID-19 has turned cloud from an experimentation aspiration to an urgent mandate. What I mean by that is everybody has been doing something on the other end cloud. There's no company that says "We don't believe in cloud," or "We don't want to do cloud." It was how much they did in cloud. And they were experimenting, they were doing the new things in cloud, but they were operating a lot of their core business outside the cloud or not in the cloud. Those organizations have struggled to operate in this new normal, in a remote fashion, as well as their ability to pivot to all the changes the pandemic has brought to them. But on the other hand, the organizations that had a solid foundation in cloud were able to pivot faster and are actually gone into the stage of innovating faster and driving a new behavior in the market, new behavior within their organization. So we are seeing that this pandemic has actually fast forwarded something that we always believed was going to happen, this movement to cloud over the next decade, it has fast forwarded it to happen in the next three to five years. And it's created this moment where it's a once in an era, really replatforming of businesses in the cloud that we are going to see. And we see this moment as a cloud-first moment where organizations will use cloud as the canvas, as the foundation with which they're going to reimagine their business after they were born in the cloud. And this requires a whole new strategy. And at Accenture, we are doing a lot in cloud, but we thought that this is the moment where we bring all of that capabilities together because we need a strategy for addressing movement to cloud or embracing cloud in a holistic fashion. And that's what Accenture Cloud First brings together, a holistic strategy, a team that's 70,000 plus people that's coming together with rich cloud skills, but investing to tie in all the various capabilities of cloud to deliver that holistic strategy to our clients. >> So I want you to delve into a little bit more about what this strategy actually entails. I mean, it's clearly about embracing change and being willing to experiment, and having capabilities to innovate. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this strategy entails? >> Yeah. The reason why we say there is a need for strategy is like I said, cloud is not new. There's almost every customer client is doing something with the cloud, but all of them have taken different approaches to cloud and different boundaries to cloud. Some organizations say, "I just need to consolidate my multiple data centers to a small data center footprint and move the rest to cloud." Certain other organizations say that "Oh, I'm going to move certain workloads to cloud." Certain other organizations said, "Oh, I'm going to build this greenfield application or workload in cloud." Certain others said, "I'm going to use the power of AI/ML in the cloud to analyze my data and derive insights." But a cloud-first strategy is all of this tied with the corporate strategy of the organization with an industry specific cloud journey. To say, if in this current industry, if I were to be reborn in the cloud, would I do it in the exact same fashion that I did it in the past, which means that the products and services that they offer need to be reimagined, how they interact with their customers and partners need to be revisited, how they build and operate their IT systems need to be reimagined, how they unearth the data from all the systems under which they are trapped need to be liberated so that you could derive insights. A cloud-first strategy hence is a corporate-wide strategy, and it's a C-suite responsibility. It doesn't take the ownership away from the CIO or CDIO, but the CIOs and CDIOs felt that it was just their problem and they were to solve it, and everyone else being a customer. Now the center of gravity is elevated to it becoming a C-suite agenda on everybody's agenda, where probably the CDIO is the instrument to execute that. That's a holistic cloud-first strategy. >> And it's a strategy, but the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's also a mindset and an approach, as you were saying, this idea of being reborn in the cloud. So now how do I think about things? How do I communicate? How do I collaborate? How do I get done what I need to get done? Talk a little bit about how this has changed the way you support your clients and how Accenture Cloud First is changing your approach to cloud services. >> Wonderful. You know, I did not cover one very important aspect in my previous question, but that's exactly what you just asked me now, which is, to do all of this, I talked about all the variables an organization or an enterprise is going to go through, but the good part is they have one constant. And what is that? That is their employees, because if those employees are able to embrace this change, if they are able to change themselves, pivot themselves, retool and train themselves, to be able to operate in this new cloud-first world, the ability to reimagine every function of the business would be happening at speed. And cloud-first approach is to do all of this at speed, because innovation is directly proportional to the rate of probability on experimentation. You need to experiment a lot, for any kind of experimentation, there's a probability of success, and organizations need to have an ability and a mechanism for them to be able to innovate faster, for which they need to experiment a lot. The more they experiment and the lower cost at which they experiment is going to help them experiment a lot, and experiment them at speed, fail fast, succeed more. And hence, they're going to be able to operate this at speed. So the cloud-first mindset is all about speed. I'm helping the clients fast track their innovation journey, and this is going to happen, like I said, across the enterprise in every function, across every department, and the agent of this change is going to be the employees who have to embrace this change through new skills and new tooling, and new mindset that they need to adapt to. >> So Karthik, what you're describing, it sounds so exciting. And yet for a pandemic-weary workforce that's been working remotely, that may be dealing with uncertainty for their kid's school and for so many other aspects of their life, it sounds hard. So how are you helping your clients, employees get onboard with this? And because the change management is often the hardest part. >> Yeah, I think it's, again, a great question. A bottle has only so much capacity. Something got to come out for something else to go in. That's what you're saying, it's absolutely right. And that is again, the power of cloud. The reason why cloud is such a fundamental breakthrough technology and capability for us to succeed in this era, because it helps in various forms. What we talked so far is the power of innovation that we could create, but cloud can also simplify the life of the employees in an enterprise. There are several activities and tasks that people do in managing their complex infrastructure, complex IT landscape. They used to do certain jobs and activities in a very difficult and a roundabout way, cloud has simplified and democratized a lot of these activities, so that things which had to be done in the past, like managing the complexity of the infrastructure, keeping them up all the time, managing the obsolescence of the capabilities and technologies and infrastructure, all of that could be offloaded to the cloud, so that the time that is available for all of these employees can be used to further innovate. Every organization is going to spend almost the same amount of money, but rather than spending activities, by looking at the rear view mirror, on keeping the lights on, they're going to spend more money, more time, more energy, and spend their skills on things that are going to add value to their organization. Because every innovation that an enterprise can give to their end customer need not come from that enterprise. The world of platform economy is about democratizing innovation. And the power of cloud is to get all of these capabilities from outside the four walls of the enterprise. >> It will add value to the organization, but I would imagine also add value to that employee's life because the employee will be more engaged in his or her job and therefore bring more excitement and energy into his or her day-to-day activities too. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is a normal evolution we would have seen, everybody would have seen in their lives, that they keep moving up the value chain of what activities that gets performed by those individuals. And this is, you know, no more true than how the United States, as an economy has operated where this is a powerhouse of innovation, where the work that's done inside the country keeps moving up the value chain and US leverages the global economy for a lot of things that is required to power the United States. And that global economic phenomenon is very true for an enterprise as well. There are things that an enterprise needs to do themselves, there are things an employee needs to do themselves, but there are things that they could leverage from the external innovation and the power of innovation that is coming from technologies like cloud. >> So at Accenture, you have long, deep stand, sorry, you have deep and long standing relationships with many cloud service providers, including AWS. How does the Accenture Cloud First strategy, how does it affect your relationships with those providers? >> Yeah. We have great relationships with cloud providers like AWS. And in fact, in the cloud world, it was one of the first capability that we started about 13 years ago, when we started developing these capabilities. But five years ago, we hit a very important milestone where the two organizations came together and said that we are forging a formal partnership with joint investments to build this partnership, and we named that as Accenture AWS Business Group, AABG, where we co-invested, brought skills together and developed solutions. And we will continue to do that, and through that investment, we've also made several acquisitions that you would have seen in the recent times, like Enimbos and Gekko that we made acquisitions in Europe. But now we're taking this to the next level. What we are saying is through cloud-first and the $3 billion investment that we are bringing in through cloud-first, we are going to make specific investment to create unique joint solution and landing zones, foundation cloud packs, with which clients can accelerate their innovation or their journey to cloud-first. And one great example is what we are doing with Takeda, a global pharmaceutical giant, with whom we've signed a five-year partnership. And it was out in the media just a month ago or so, where the two organizations are coming together, we have created a partnership as a power of three partnership where the three organizations are jointly holding hands and taking responsibility for the innovation and the leadership position that Takeda wants to get to. With this, we are going to simplify their operating model and organization by providing it flexibility. We're going to provide a lot more insights. Takeda is a 230 year old organization. Imagine the amount of trapped data and intelligence that is there. How about bringing all of that together with the power of AWS and Accenture and Takeda to drive more customer insights, come up with breakthrough R and D, accelerate clinical trials, and improve the patient experience using AI, ML, and edge technologies. So all of these things that we will do through this partnership with joint investment from Accenture Cloud First, as well as partner like AWS, so that Takeda can realize their gain. And their CEO actually made a statement that five years from now, every Takeda employee will have an AI assistant that's going to make that Takeda employee move up the value chain on how they contribute and add value to the future of Takeda, with the AI assistant making them even more equipped and smarter than what they could be otherwise. >> So, one last question to close this out here. What is your future vision for Accenture Cloud First? What are we going to be talking about at next year's Accenture Executive Summit? >> Yeah, the future is going to be evolving, but the part that is exciting to me, and this is a fundamental belief that we are entering a new era of industrial revolution, from industrial first, second, and third industrial, the third happened probably 20 years ago with the advent of silicon and computers and all of that stuff that happened in the Silicon Valley. I think the fourth industrial revolution is going to be in the cross section of physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And there's a great article in World Economic Forum that your audience can Google and read about it. But the reason why this is very, very important is we are seeing a disturbing phenomenon that over the last 10 years, we are seeing a plateauing of the labor productivity and innovation, which has dropped to about 2.1%. And when you see that kind of phenomenon over that long a period of time, there has to be breakthrough innovation that needs to happen to come out of this barrier and get to the next base camp, as I would call it, to further this productivity lag that we are seeing, and that is going to happen in the intersection of the physical, digital, and biological boundaries. And I think cloud is going to be the connective tissue between all of these three, to be able to provide that, where it's the edge, especially is going to come closer to the human lives. It's going to come from cloud. Pictorally in your mind, you can think about cloud as central, either in a private cloud, in a data center, or in a public cloud, everywhere. But when you think about edge, it's going to be far-reaching and coming close to where we live and where we work and where we get entertained and so on and so forth. And there's going to be intervention in a positive way in the field of medicine, in the field of entertainment, in the field of manufacturing, in the field of mobility, when I say mobility, human mobility, people, transportation, and so on and so forth, with all of this stuff, cloud is going to be the connective tissue and the vision of cloud-first is going to be plowing through this big change that is going to happen. And the evolution that is going to happen where, you know, the human race of mankind, or personkind, being very gender neutral in today's world, cloud-first needs to be that beacon of creating the next generation vision for enterprises to take advantage of that kind of an exciting future. And that's why in Accenture we say "Let there be change" as our purpose. And I genuinely believe that cloud-first is going to be in the forefront of that change agenda, both for Accenture as well as for the rest of the world. >> Excellent. Let there be change indeed. Thank you so much for joining us Karthik. A pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you so much, Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of CUBE 365's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.