>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have today, Mahmoud El Assir, he is the CTO and Senior Vice President of Global Technology Services at Verizon. And Annette Rippert, Senior Managing Director, Accenture Technology, North America. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we are talking today about Verizon's migration to the cloud, but Verizon is a company that many people have familiarity with, Mahmoud. Just lay out a few facts and figures for our viewers here. >> Sure, I'll say Verizon is Fortune 16 company. Last year we made $126 billion dollars from our, kind of, loyal customers. We are, today we deployed, we were the first people to deploy 5G. And we have 98% coverage in U.S., so we are America's fastest and most reliable wireless service. >> So it's a company that touches so many of our lives. >> Yup. >> Earlier this year, Verizon selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. What was, one, what was the impetus for moving to the cloud? And two why AWS? >> Yeah, that's a great question. But I'd like to zoom out a little but more and talk about what is Verizon? What's our mission and how kind of tackling it? So when you think about Verizon, our mission is to deliver the promise of the digital world, right? Enable, deploy 5G and enable the 4th Industrial Revolution. And as part of this, it's all about empowering humans to do more, right? And in global technology solutions our winning aspiration is to develop products and services that our customers and employees love. And then we, and also to be the destination for world class technology talent. And be the investment innovation center for the company. So when it comes to digital transformation we look at the enables and where we want to invest our energy and how do you want to leverage the right partners. So the heart of our technology transformation is the public cloud. When you think about what the public cloud, it's like where you want us. It will allow us to spend more of our energy building solutions and for our customers. And creating value for our customers. Also public cloud will allow us, and or business, to experiment faster, better and cheaper. In technology our focus is to always save on efficiency, speed and innovation. So that is our kind of model and at the heart of this, public cloud is a key kind of element for our journey. >> Well I want to get into that journey a little bit more, but Annette, I want to bring you into the conversation here. So, Verizon is one of the leading communications companies that is migrating to the cloud at this scale. >> Yes. >> What are some of the lessons, as you have helped and observed and also helped this partnership grow, what are some of the key takeaways that you would say? >> Well, I think there is a couple you know, if you take a look at some of the lessons that our clients learn. You know when at Accenture we go into the market really helping our clients think about how do we leverage technology for achieving business outcomes. You just talked about some extraordinary business outcomes that you're looking to achieve and you'll do that through a variety of things, including leveraging technology. And so, just like that we encourage our clients to be thinking about what is the business innovation? What is the outcome? The disruption that we're looking to achieve through leveraging technologies like AWS, right? I think secondly, if you think a little bit about the importance in that journey of communicating that vision. Of what will it mean to be able to leverage that kind of technology? You just communicated a very strong vision. And that's so important to the change journey that many of these organizations go on. You know there is the importance of the investment strategy, but ultimately, the innovation that the organization itself the engineers within the organization are a part of delivering, you know, the kind of innovation that you'll be delivering is really, it will not only make such a big impact on those in your enterprise, delivering that. But, you know, to all of us who are consumers of your business strategy which will be fabulous. And I think, in the end, you know, one of the most exciting things, and it's really sitting Alexis, as we were talking a little bit about some of what Verizon is doing earlier in the day, one of the most important things is really thinking about how this provides an opportunity for the enterprise to change. So, you know, moving to be a much more agile enterprise, being able to respond to market changes, and certainly in the business that you're in, the market is changing everyday. And so by leveraging innovative products like AWS' platform, you know it really provides the opportunity to constantly leverage new technology in that environment. >> And that, as you said, the market is changing everyday and customers, they're demanding things and companies are providing customers with things they don't even know that they want until they have them in their hands. How, at a time when customer differentiation is such a key competitive advantage, how are you staying ahead of the game and making sure that you know you're sort of getting inside the heads of your customers? And then you're also delivering what they want and expect. >> Customers comes first at Verizon, right? So it's at the heart of our technology is also leveraging emerging technology. So cloud is one, scaling AIML is another one. One of the big programs we're doing is, how do you move personalization to one-on-one personalization? How do you make every customer feel they have their own network, our network. Like their own network that's personalized for their needs. There own experience, their own plans. Their own recognition. So that's key. So today when you think about most companies do segmentation or personalization at the cluster level. So one of the biggest things is we're shifting now from systems of engagement, and systems of records. We're inserting systems of insights. A system of insight allows to build the DNA for every customer and will allow us to personalize the customer experience for every customer at the customer level based on all the data, kind of, we know about them, from the data they use with us, and will allow us to personalize their experience at every touch point. >> So what, how would that look like? What will a personalized customer experience at Verizon look like in the future going forward? What are some of your goals and aspirations? >> Imagine you're like a, you've bought every iPhone, since iPhone one through like iPhone ten, right? >> I can imagine that. >> So you're an iPhone enthusiast, right? So, when you come up on our website recommend, like the iPhone, the next iPhone say, the next iPhone is up, the next iPhone red is up or so. So we know more about you and your history and we recommend right accessories, we recommend and so we tell you, hey this stuff is coming. So you feel we're watching out for you. You're like we know, we know you. We know you better than anybody. So at any touch point when you come to us we kind of tell you what's the next thing for you. And then even when you don't know we, like from a network kind of performance from everything we proactively, kind of cater for you. That's a big one. The other one, how do you, when you want to talk to us, how do you get leverage technology like Chatbots and conversationally AVRs and stuff. And make sure you feel you're like, we know you. If you have a different accent, we recognize the accent, then you say, hey do you want to speak in that language? >> (laughs) >> So imagine the power of doing that. Versus today you have to do, like you have Spanish AVR, you have to have a, or have a Spanish kind of call center. Imagine through a IML and Chatbots and stuff, you can recognize all the stuff and personalize the experience. Today at Verizon, we are known of our network superiority. And we have great customer experience but we want to be known also for our experience the same way we are known for our network. And we believe that at Verizon, there is always a higher gear. So we all aspire for the higher gear and aspire our customers to feel they have a Verizon for every customer. >> So this, that's from the customer experience. And as you said, the goal is to have the customer feel that the company empathizes with them and really gets them. What about the workforce changes? I mean Annette was talking about the importance of change management and the cultural shift that these kinds of transformations entail. Have you come up against any challenges at Verizon in terms of this migration? >> Sure I would say, at the heart of our kind of transformation, there are four main pillars. The first pillar is, enabling all these modern technologies. This is like cloud, Cloud Native, API, AI, ML. And especially go back to cloud, the time of enabling cloud was very important to get everybody on board at beginning of the journey. So one of our biggest thing is to get like the security team on board, as early in the process as possible, and make sure security team is a development team, not just a kind of a controls team. So having an engineering team on the security side is a big one to kind of automate all this kind of, all the security controls we need in the cloud so we have the right guardrails and have everything automated. Another thing, same thing like with the other teams. Get them on board in the journey have an advisory kind of board with the other team and security team and legal teams and everybody is onboarding on the journey. So that's I'd say key and pay lots of dividends investment upfront but pays lots of dividends so you can move faster. It's like more of a slow down to speed up. So that's a big one. The second one is, technology is one thing, but you need the culture. So you need to have sustainable momentum in this kind of movement. So the proxy we wanted to have is like have AWS certifications. Because you need 10% believers to have momentum. So our proxy to believers is AWS certifications. So we put a program in place we call it: Verizon Cloud Train. And that train basically is like a 12-week, six sprints, and we help our teams prepare for their certification. So last year we did more than a thousand, we have more than 1800 people probably right now certified with AWS. >> That is incredible. >> At the same time, we set up a dojo's, which are like emergent centers. So we have like 40, 50 seats in different cities and with like five six coaches. So if you are a team who wants to come in and move your application to the cloud, we help you do it. If you want to decompartmentalize your application to microservices we help you. If you want to do ABI's, we help you. So we helped you build deep expertise into these technologies we are doing. So that is like, transforming the teams, and up scaling, I would call it up scaling the talent, is key. Hiring great talent in key rolls is also key. The third pillar is changing the way we work from, what you call a project based, to outcome based. And this beyond agile. Agile is an enabler for this, but how do you change the model where everything is outcome based? Where you have the business and the technology team working together to move an outcome. If I want to increase my kind of video-on-demand revenue per customer, everybody making all the changes, experimenting, and making sure that's a need, is moving. It's not like I did my code, I delivered my, I did my testing, I deployed my app. It's what's a business and what's a customer kind of expectation. And fourth one is, how do you establish internal kind of communities and get out of a like the thiefdoms and stuff. And get a culture of kind of sharing and cheering for others. So we have like Dev Ops days internally within the company, bring in external, internal speakers. We have internal kind of intersourcing for some piece of code. So you have to fire on all cylinders I would say. And get as many kind of parties included as early in the process. And have also an objective to have everything as code. And it's a journey, so you have to always keep on exercising new muscles and more muscles and the more muscles you exercise, the faster you can go. >> So Mahmoud, Annette already shared with us her key learnings from your experience and your journey. What would you say, I mean you're hear at AWS reInvent, it's not your first rodeo, you've been to this conference many times before. When you're talking with other CTO's, CIO's and they're saying, hey, so how's it going for you? What's your advice for a company that is really just starting this, this process? >> Sure, I would say the movement to the public cloud is not just a cost play. I mean, cost needs to be, efficiency needs to be there, but that shouldn't be the primary kind of objective. The primary objective should be speed and innovation. At the same time, deliver a cost. Lots of people say, oh do I, is the same, you can't compare it same-for-same. Because it's different. On prem you can do like A, B testing. In the cloud you can do A to Z testing for much cheaper. You don't need everything you have on prem. You can experiment, so think about it as accelerating the speed of innovation. That's the key one. And I said it before, but I'll say it again. It's like all about having the right kind of, from like a security perspective, people will argue, oh public cloud is insecure? I would argue, public cloud can be more secure than on prem because you have all the tools to kind of automatically, kind of protect and detect and recover. And you have more tooling to allow you to be more secure. It's having the right kind of guardrails and the right controls, right automation and right teams. So it's, you have to build muscle across all these fronts. And have them as a front as possible. >> Great, and great note to end on. Thank you so much Mahmoud and Annette. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. >> Very good. >> Been really fun having you on the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> We will have more >> Thanks, Ann. >> from theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit, coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, it's theCube. Covering VeeamOn 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, Mahmoud Yassin is here, he's the Data Center Manager of the National Bank of Abu Dhabi. >> Good to see you. >> Nice to meet you. >> I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman, this is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. So, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. >> Tell us about VeeamOn, what's your experience been like so far? >> Actually it is not the first time for me, I was here in the last few years. It's a very nice experience, mix it up with all IT companies, listening to people, leaders like Cisco, VMWare, Amazon, understanding what is the technology, how the market is moving, this is a great experience, great experience. >> Tell us about what's going on in the banking industry in your world in terms of the challenges and in particular, what's happening with the need for availability and uptime. >> I think you heard about what's happening last two days about Crayon, all the mobiles of all the IT people never stopped about the people and the need for restoring and restoring the machine cause of the people hit by crime virus or malware that encrypted the whole machine and you need to restore the data. This is happening all the time, there's not only banks in there, across different sections, three four days back, UK, the whole healthcare sector was stopped due to cyber attacks so availability and security has become so tight and of course banking means money, money is a big target for cyber-criminals. So we are caring about availability much much much more than before, it's not a matter of just fulfilling the checkbox and like what we have done in many years in IT, backup was a checkbox, just a checkbox, it's not anymore , no luxury to have the backup as a checkbox anymore. >> Checkbox meaning, okay I have-- >> I'm compliant, I have backup. >> We did it, we don't know if it failed or not but we did the backup. >> We did the backup, we tick it, we have the backup, we have the backup process, everything is okay. But have you never restored, restore in time, ensure the data availability is okay. How much data for how long? Regulation became as well very tough for the financial sector so you look at countries now that are asking for 15 to 20 years of data retention. So imagine your backups you need to maintain, multimedia, media is not sufficient anymore. Which tape drives will be sufficient for 15 to 20 years? After ten years, the tape will be rotten, it will not work, it will not be readable in the machine. And the data side as well is becoming a challenge so you need to offload the data to a desk, you need to offload the data to somewhere else that you ensure your availability and you need to ensure all that you can restore this data back. >> It's interesting you know, in IT we've known ransomware as something that's been discussed for a while, but now all of your customers know what it is. >> All of the customers, every one of them. >> So does that change the role? >> It's hitting the kids in the school, it's hitting everyone. >> You know, Dave's been talking for the last year that security has been like a board level discussion. Now it's your users, how much do your end users start coming and wanting to understand how secure money is. >> A lot, a lot. >> And how does that impact your role in IT? >> A lot, actually National Bank for Abu Dhabi security is one of our label, one of the safest banks, one of the 50 safest banks, this is one of our label. And we take security, we are the first customer in the Middle East to implement the RSA talking for login for online banking. This was eight years back. >> What about, I got to ask you, I follow a little bit of the banking executives and see what they're talking about and blockchain comes up a lot. This notion of trust between two parties and so forth. Do you see that as a mega-trend, is it something that's sort of an interesting trend? I mean what're your thoughts on that? >> It is the future, this is the future. >> It's the future? >> This is the future of the money. Money will be part to part with encryption and with the mechanism to get keys. And this is, people who don't want, this is where the money is moving in. >> So what happens to-- >> Actually what blocks this from happening on a wider scale is it's still, the regulation is not enough around this area, there is not enough regulation, so good money can mix with bad money and to be untraceables, he says this is one of the things. So people are starting putting a certain regulation across to start regulating, it will take time but it will be there. >> So blockchain is interesting, banking executives saying it's the future because everybody says oh blockchain's going to disrupt the banks but what I'm hearing from you is it's both, maybe it's a threat but it's also an opportunity because right now it's all done in secret, and so there needs to be. >> It's not in secret, it's done in Swift, the only platform for exchanging money worldwide is Swift. And sooner or later this will be changing, though some people are blockers, some people are, but it will be changing and the banks will realize this, adapt to blockchain technology. There's some legal services for blockchain and sooner you'll find central banks across the whole worldwide are starting regulating the blockchain. >> Yeah, okay it's very interesting because everybody says it's such a disruptive force which it is. >> It is a disruptive force. >> But it's also an, as you say, an opportunity. Where does Veeam fit with your availability strategy? >> It is in the center of our availability strategy, >> Really? >> Veeam is, I'm running my data centers and 90% of my data center is virtualized. So Veeam is running the whole virtual world in my data center, the 10% is running on traditional backup solution, which is, still we can't get rid of because you know in banking you have a critical system that measures 20 to 80 so you have running 80% of your system in virtual but actually the core system is the 20% so this is still not virtualized. Your core banking legacy application and some other stuff, so you have still to take the back up in traditional ways. And we mix both together, we mix back up data backing up the information, back up the virtual environment, this is very important for me. >> Dave: And you have a service catalog essentially? >> Mahmoud: We have service catalog for restore. >> For your data protection services right? >> For data protection of course. >> And what, like bronze, silver, gold levels or is it more granular than that or less granular? >> We have more, actually, in discussion with business we all were trying to meet the business requirements. So the most important for business in the banking section is the availability of the communication, mailboxes, availability of the critical detail in the databases. This is the things that we are taking care of. And Veeam has done a lot of development over the time, I'm first customer for Veeam from the Middle East by the way. >> Really? >> Yes. (laughter) >> Pioneer. (laughter) >> We are pioneer, and we've done it after trying them extensively in our environment and we decided that this is the best solution this time to go for virtual environment. It was extensive evaluation done across multiple vendor and we select them. >> And did that give you a competitive advantage? >> Of course, of course. >> How so? >> The ability to restore faster, the ability to do uptime faster, the ability to recover and ensure your back up is secure. This is something very valuable. >> Some of the other customers we've spoken to today have said that the announcements were meeting some of the wishlist that they have. Anything jump out at you with the announcements made so far? Things on your list that they-- >> Actually the continuous application is a very good feature. >> In the CDP, yeah. >> Yeah. It is one of the most important features we used as a traditional application of Vim backup. Last year, to move my data center from place to place, we were hosted somewhere and we moved the data center, the whole data center. It is good, but it was taking time, so continuous application will give you the availability of all those, just divert your backup somewhere and you'll be up and running. This is a very important feature. >> Anything that is on your wishlist that they haven't gotten to yet or things that you're looking for? >> I see, I see, Veeam should more personal devices, we are talking about IoT, internet of things, bring your own devices to work, so we should go more backing up the usual details on mobiles on at least the corporate one on the corporate bubble like Citrix, like whatever good solution, whatever solution is used. You can backing up design, backup solution for this, for end users this will be a huge thing. This will be, and part of the security of the organization cause you need all those to ensure if you add device of one employee you can restore this data back and ensure this data is restorable. >> This is the pain point for you today. >> It is. >> And it's going to get worse. I'll give you the last word, things have been exciting you at the show or conversations that you've had. >> No actually the keynote speech today was amazing, especially when you're understanding the direction of big companies like Cisco, VMWare, this is what's very valuable, very valuable. >> Excellent, well listen, thanks very much for coming we really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back rapid fire from VeeamOn 2017, be right back. (funky music) (tense music)