from London England it's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 emia taught to you by Koopa hey welcome to the cube Lisa Martin coming to you from London I'm at Koopa inspire 19 pleased to be joined by one of Koopas spent setters hit me here is alla Williams the managing director and chief procurement officer at Barclays al welcome to the cube Thank You Lisa thanks for having me so Barclays is a three hundred plus year old Bank three hundred and thirty five years I think I also was was headquartered in London I didn't know this until he did some research Barclays is the pioneer of the ATM yes and a credit card in the UK credit card why first credit card in the UK and the pioneer in inventor of the ATM correct yes so when we think of an organization that is three hundred and thirty five years old we think how agile is that organization how transformative can it be talk to me about what it's like at Barclays from a digital perspective before we get into some of the procurement stuff which or not but tight and culture like that's a great question right could you think about a three hundred thirty-five year old Bank how innovative could it can it be right how agile can it be and the market in the the sector we work in requires us to be very agile because banking is a disrupted sector especially on the retail and consumer side expectations around technology and mobile capabilities and digital transformation are the most significant they've ever been in this sector and so for Barclays it's it's absolutely key that we deliver on those capabilities both in terms of our front office for our consumers and our corporate clients as well as for our own employees within the bank how influential is the consumer side because as consumers we are so used to being able to get anything that we want we can buy products and services we can pay bills with a click or swipe on the on the business side it's harder for businesses to transform and innovate it's a lot of other risks and security issues how influential is Barclays Barclays is your retail your consumer business in terms of your b2b work and that's a great question because I think the the experiences that shape people's expectations come from their interactions in retail and consumer when it comes to b2b and traditionally business-to-business commerce and financial transactions haven't been nearly as sophisticated streamlined or frictionless you know as you would in a consumer model so the expectations are built on the consumer side in consumer to business type models and then the business and business models been playing catch-up for the last several years as a result talk to me about now the role of finance leaders I was reading surgery that Kupa did recently have 253 uk-based financial decision makers and a big number of them I think it was 96 percent said we don't have complete visibility of all of our spent there's a big opportunity there to work with a company like Cooper but talk to me about how the role of the chief procurement officer is changing you've been doing it for quite a while you're a veteran right some of the trends that you have seen that you've really jumped on and said this is the direction we need to be going in right so I've been the chief procurement officer of Barclays for two and half years and the CEO of a large global technology company for nine years before that so I think the the the role of the chief procurement officer has changed significantly over the course of the last say 10 years five years two years we're at a point now where the chief procurement officer is seen as a source of and the organization of procurement is seen as a source of innovation it's seen as a source of capacity creation for the the the organization for the company and it's also seen as sort of a steward of the portfolio of spins for that particular organization to ensure we're maximizing the utility and value of that spend and of that supply chain so the expectations for procurement have tripled quadrupled or more fold in the last you know four or five years some of the interesting things that we're hearing from Koopa and from their customers and partners today is beyond simply initiative to simply but beyond you know dramatically improving procurement and invoicing and dispensing and leveraging the platform as one source for visibility of all that spent but it's being transformative to completely other areas like I was hearing a story of a customer who redefined procurement and is actually positively impacting corporate sustainability yes Wow so talk to me a little bit about I know one of the things that you really thrive on is competition how are you leveraging that and maybe your old American football days to build and maybe foster a sense of collaborative competition within your team to transform procurement at Barclays yes so I think that whether it's in sport or whether it's in business I think the concept of teams is key and effective teams are built on trust they're built on empowerment they they're built on collaboration open communication limited asymmetry and information as it's passed and that's all about kind of driving agility for whether you're on this on the football field American footballer or other football or on or in a business environment of business context so you know it's really and as a CEO and for all of the leaders on my team it's also about being a player coach and knowing when you need to be a player when you need to sort of roll up sleeves contribute in a particular area or particular solving a particular problem but more importantly when you need to be coached and and help those players sort of and those team members in on the team sort of step up to the challenge and coach them to be more success see Bennet Berkeley's a couple years now talk to me about your use case the purpose has with Koopa what are you guys doing together and what are some of the transformations that both internally and externally you've been able to achieve yeah so the relationship with coop has been great again I joined to make a couple of years ago one of the sort of first pillars associated with our overall transformation journey of centralizing procurement from five different procurement or six different procurement organizations really to moving to strategic locations to building out a new organization structure and operating model for for procurement I won't go into all that but one of the key pillars was around technology and we didn't have a common procure-to-pay or source to pay capability that extended or threaded throughout the bank for managing and supply chain so early on when I joined Barclays partnered partnering with Koopa working both of our teams working very effectively together to deploy sort of country by country and region by region we're now in 11 countries with the Koopa source to pay platform we're going to point to six more by the end of this calendar year and over 95% of our spend is flowing through Koopa as a multinational banks so it's been a significant component of our overall transformation journey for for Barclays and part of that transformation journey the technology piece is important that all a lot of its cultural we talked about a history of a three hundred and thirty-five year old organization but also going from five different procurement organizations down to one using a central platform that's challenging to get folks on board right being comfortable with change is your spirit of competitiveness was that a facilitator of getting adoption so that you could get them well I think so I mean I think to get the most out of teams and the most out of any organization large or small you need to galvanize around a common set of goals and objectives the the adage we ought to be pulling on the rope together to achieve achieve the end result and I think in the case of the sort of our Koopa journey both in terms of its strategy and overall deployment it was something more or less our entire procurement organization was able able to galvanize around and in feel like they were a part of and it it created an identity for us within Barclays as a procurement organization as well and kind of put his front and center with our business units and our stakeholders in a way we had we'd never been before so in terms of procurement having a seat at the board table is that something now that you have the ability to do with Barclays and be much more of a strategic driver of business yeah and look at Barclays compared to some of my other experiences it's not an it's not an issue of not having a seat at the table we might have a seat at too many tables sometimes there's a lot of attention on procurement within Barclays to help it deliver on its strategic objectives so with that seat comes a lot of responsibility so I often will coach my teams to ensure that they understand kind of that that that component of it's not just about having a seat at the table it's about what we're going to contribute what are we going to do differently when we're at that table when we're helping shape the decisions for the organization and what are the accountabilities and responsibilities that will pick up as a result and deliver on those promises that's absolutely critical one of the things that was talked about this morning is to trust Rob Bernstein talked about it they also had a guest speaker Rachel Botsman who's a trusted expert it was such an interesting conversation you know we talked about any chuck event that the cube goes to you always talk about trust got to have trust in the data you gotta have trust in your suppliers but what they were talking about here was really being an enabler of trust but cooper really working to earn the trust of its customers tell me about how has earned your trust and also allowed you to have those better discussions at the board table so that you have marked trusted relationships with your executive and your peer team yeah I mean it all starts for Barclays at the very top of the house in front office because we're in the business of trust I mean Bank a bank is in the business of trust that's what we deliver and promise to our consumers and our corporate clients and I think you know within procurement we need to make sure we're sort of delivering on that same promise around around trust and building trust with our teams and with our suppliers in the case of Kupa frankly it was about asking them to ensure they appropriately set expectations with me with my team in terms of what we could or couldn't do with the capability right don't over promise and under deliver but actually be very prudent and practical about what we're gonna be able to get done and then deliver on those promises to the best of your ability but if something and I always do if something goes so not according to plan right it's be open communicative and direct with the issue and how we're going to address it that to me is how we build trust in any team and that's how we built trust with Kupa through our transformation over the last two years that's critical mister your point no deployment probably ever goes perfectly according to plan there are always things that happen whatever it is software hardware is that we're talking about and I think for companies to address that confront it help the customer through those challenges to me that's more valuable I'm saying everything went beautifully was flawless that's not reality right I completely agree and I think that's that's what separates good from great companies to write is their ability to build that trust whether it be within their supply chain with their clients with their employees and look it's it's a journey it's not something you're one and done and you can say okay we've got the trust you can lose it as easy as you can obtain it and you have to keep a focus on on those trusting relationships should think about that we've earned this trust but we have to focus on it so we don't lose it so we grow X having the focus on that because you're right whether it's a deployment of software it's not one and it's the same thing with any sort of trusted relationship right it's maintaining that it's ensuring that there's value right being delivered on both sides that's right tell me a little bit about your ability Barclays ability as a spend setter in this program that Cooper has to influence technology directions like they talk a lot about the community all the insights that they're able to deliver to the community because of the community as Burton is able to be a strategic her gir with Cooper rather than just a customer yeah Phil we are I mean Rob and his team Raja Ravi the entire crew are very receptive and they're very collaborative in hearing from an organization like Barclays now look I'll be the first to admit Barclays and in banking and banking specifically in the UK it's a different animal than many other companies and sectors that kupo would work in so what might work for other companies doesn't always work for us and kind of flipping that around there's certain things that we need from Koopa that that we've been able to partner with them to deliver over the course of the last two years and the relationship of coop has been fantastic they hear us they listen to us they help us understand what the solution can do what it can't do or won't be able to do in the near term and then how do we augment that in the right way so we don't create cottage industries of activity with Impa cure med when we could be leveraging the capability of ghupat to deliver on those services right so you mentioned a little bit about what's next for you guys in terms of rolling out the deployment a little bit more broadly last question for you is some of the news that came out today with the expansion of Koopa pay with American Express for example and just some of the other innovations that Koopa is making what are some of your thoughts what are some of the things that excite you about the direction are going in well yes so on the Koopa pay front I'm actually going to be on stage with Ravi tomorrow talking about Koopa pay because Mark Lee card is also a key component of that capability for the first virtual card that they integrated probably I believe it was yeah and and so so I think about payments is sort of the one not the only but one of the next frontiers from a source to pay or a procurement perspective and it's about how do we innovate in the payment space to get away from having that through the old traditional methods of adding suppliers you know detailed information to our vendor masters so that we can then eventually get an invoice and then reconcile payment remittance to invoices and sort of work through there's a lot of cost in that a lot of time and very little speed we want to move the dial on speed the value we want to move the dial on efficiencies and eventually get to a point where we can offer things like early payment discounts so by having control over our our payment process and that's where Koopa pay and the Barclaycard partnership with Koopa pay is really played a key role in making that happen so in q1 we made our commitment to deploy Koopa pay in q1 after we're through some of our deployments through the rest of this year on the base of the platform and look forward to continuing that journey next year on the payment side one last thing that just popped up I was doing some research and the b2c side is transformed much faster a lot of demand from the consumers we talked about that a moment ago do you see what the direction could the pay is going in with Barclays card for example as bringing in some of the consumer implements to start facilitating the acceleration that's needed there and I think yes I think that's exactly right because again when you think about the consumer side of payments or use it we're all using our phones we're using other digital means we're using wearables we're using different ways of buying and paying especially in retail and the first question we have to ask ourselves why can't those innovations be applied in a b2b space now kupah pay is I think a start of sort of that journey and certainly not the end you know destination but certainly I think it sets us off in the right direction yeah we as consumers are quite demanding yes I'll thank you for doing you on the cube ensuring the Barclays spends that our success rate good luck tomorrow in your keynote thank you for having me thank you pleasure I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from cuca inspire London 19 thanks for watching

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

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>with digital >>coverage of IBM >>Think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube ricardo for lenses here with me is the global managing director for IBM at Citigroup recorded. Great to see you. Thank you for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me. >>You're the team leader for Citigroup Managing Director um, a lot going on in the world of finance, Fintech technology, scale transformation, all this is happening. Always leading edge indicator. Give us your perspective on the market right now on the, on that vertical and in general because um there's so much scale is so much machine learning, so much going on, so much competitive advantages. Give us an overview of the industry, how you see them. >>So john about the fortune of working essentially around the world of work in europe in asia in Australia, back here in north America. And I'll tell you what, there are some, some uh, dynamics are specific to a market. There are also a lot of common threads, right? You know, a lot of common threats, right? As you know, my industry, financial services in the middle of uh great disruption right from payments to a global wealth to understand exactly. Not to reposition yourself is a, is a startup. Oftentimes looking time to be dis intimidated by many in the context. I have found many financial institutions are very adept, a change in the way they operate, a lot more nimble than they have been in the past. And they found ways to incorporate a lot of techniques that some of the Frontex operate with. So they all have shark tanks, they all find a way to uh, progress investments that they get to a point of uh, failing fast, right, more are some more adept than others. But for the most part, I'd say that everyone in the market is looking to beef up their their core competences. >>And, you know, the financial, um, industry has never been shy of using technology ever. They've always poured it on. They always want to get more edge. Um, what's your, what is the edge now in the industry for, um, financial and, and in general, businesses who were learning how to be agile? What's the edge? >>I think the edges really finding a way to be ambidextrous, right? Because in many respects, you do want to hold on to a franchise to what got you to a level of success. It's oftentimes it's in the case of my client is in good stead for more than 100 years, Right? So you don't want to let that go. But you also want to grow a new set of skills and grow competences that they need to take into the future. I have found that in many respects that many of my clients are remind me of what lugers and one said maybe 2025 years ago. Our former Ceo and chairman who said the last thing that IBM needs is a strategy. In fact, I think that many of our financial institutions that don't need a strategy, they just need the competences to innovate and executed scale and it's a lot easier said than that >>card. I want to get your perspective before we move on to some of the initiatives and work at city, which is probably compelling. But I want to get your expert opinion on a question that comes up all the time with customers and that are going post pandemic and looking at growth strategies. The idea of the unit economics of their business models tend to change with more data, more digital acceleration. Is there any observations that you could share for leaders who are looking to get that financial mindset or of of how the business is changing with whether it's KPI S or business models. Because at the end of the day, the financial upside of what we're seeing with digital is pretty significant. The economics are seem to be a real game changer on these, these conversations are about acceleration, but also the results are business results are money. >>Absolutely john as a matter of fact, that I'd argue that while it's true that the common theme so many and that several of our financial institutions are growing a skill in, in a, in a uh, approaching problems in a different fashion is also true that there's been a lot of redistribution of wealth across financial enterprises, right? So it's not lost on all of us. Right. The security look at market globalization of the financial institutions, on the work. They've really done a little place with the clear winners in several sectors, right? In Asia and europe, as well as here in North America. So what I argue is that while I think we're all tired of hearing the data is the new oil, right? It's also true that we need to find a way to finally harness the power of it. Right? And that's what I think IBM is more more adept at, right, argue that many of the common threads that we've seen across the financial institutions and back to the to the measures of success you would indicate in a minute ago, really around cloud, right around data and around digital transformation. Right? So our approach to cloud, for instance, is unique, right? While there are a number of uh very competent hyper Steelers, we've taken a different approach to it, right? We've taken our approach is more than after other highly specialized regulated workloads, right. Organ after the layer that allows you to port application seamlessly based on regulation costs and competition across multiple platforms. Right? So this hybrid concept has only been at the center of our strategy and that's the one that mama is is delivering our clients. Greatest father tell you what. I think one client told me once after hearing our hybrid story that while there were many cloud providers, there wasn't anyone that could help them quite as much as I B. M. Dealing with their legacy and in all candor, I think it's fair to say that legacy is here to say well past our investment horizon. Right? So that level of self awareness, I think ended up believing forming our collaborations for years to come. >>You know, I'm a big believer and I've reported this and certainly talked to Arvin when um he was on the cube about this microservices, containers, kubernetes, these kinds of new technologies really allow for legacy to integrate well into the new modern era of computer, what's going on at city and IBM tell us take us through some things that you're working on, some of the exciting projects that you're driving. >>So the disclaimer is that I started this well three months ago, so I'll try to do my my team proud here. But what I'll tell you is that the teams you talk about are alive and well, that's sitting right. So on the cloudfront we are doing exactly that we're focusing on, on on being uh cities partner on the heavy cloud deployment, acknowledging that uh fabric odyssey is an ecosystem of participants, right. Technology that IBM uh dominance in on prem computing will go through a very different face going forward. We not only a comfortable with it, but we're trying to accelerate its deployment. Right? So you mentioned communities, you mentioned containers, hence a redhead acquisition, right? Which has been central to the collaboration that we've uh we've established the city and we look at the growth. I'm also gonna go back to data and I will tell you that uh you know, uh, cities in the midst of a transformation journey of their own right. It's also the middle of a regulatory challenge. That's second to none. Right. With with the zero cc. Findings that then led to a final remediation plan that the bank has put in place over the past two months. With that in mind, we are looking to help the bank make a make a good crisis make the most of the crisis right. And so helping for instance, Mark Sabino, the head of innovation City, find ways to infuse Ai into their internal audit practices doing that. It's just smart business, the results in much better outcome at a lower cost and it's something that can scale because it's all seen before. Oftentimes our solutions have lacked the ability to scale to really keep up with them in >>ricardo. The relationship between IBM and City has been long standing. I believe. I read somewhere you're celebrating 100 year partnership. Is that true? If so. I mean it's a huge milestone. What's the take us through the history and where this is going as a partnership? >>I've heard as a matter of fact is that as I first came on board that in fact our companies have been added for more than 100 years and someone showed me an actual document 100 years old, there was proof positive of that. So I'll tell you, I know that our firms would be added again 100 years from now. I will probably not be here to toast to it, but I'm certain they will continue to collaborate and for the strong is this is my responsibility or do whatever I can to help you continue to grow. We're only going to focus on three things I spoke about every cloud, but you also want to be the partner is the bank transforms its operations right and infuse in it. Our AI and process information, skills and capabilities. I think if we do that we'll continue to collaborate and will continue to have our partnership fully rests on two pillars that is always independent, which are really innovation and trust >>great commentary. Great. An account that you're leading probably great team behind how many people are on this team must be pretty massive. And I'd love to see that document by the way. Was it a memo? Was that type written was a handwritten? You know, it was a P. O. Okay. >>It was an Akron document that I get your copy. >>Uh so historic. I love those history. I love the IBM culture longstanding relationships. Final question for you. You've been in the industry for a while, you've seen many waves of innovation. If you're talking to a customer, your friend or colleague and they had asked you ricardo, why is this wave so big and so important? What would you tell them? >>John I think at the heart of this transformation, the evolution, the way they should call it is not the introduction of new products, the international processes, but entire no value chains that are being established by players that in many cases need need each other to coexist. This is hardly ever been the case in the past. I think IBM will form a great example of it, right? And so I do think that this is far more disruptive than what we have witnessed in years past and I can't wait to get get in it and my part to lead us through it >>ricardo. Great insight, totally agree. This is a time of open collaboration and ecosystem you're seeing in the ecosystem and network effect where people are integrating together in this new connected distributed economy. Global economy, thank you for coming on the cube, appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much for having me. >>Okay ricardo for Relenza, Global Managing Director for IBM at Citigroup, This is the Cube coverage of IBM think 2021 I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We're here, virtual again, in real life soon. It's right around the corner, but we've got a great guests here. Cameron Art Managing Director at AT&T for IBM. Cameron manages the AT&T Global Account for IBM. Cameron, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. It's great to be here. >> I can almost imagine how complicated and big and large AT&T is with respect to IBM and the history and AT&T is a very large company. What's the relationship with IBM and AT&T over the years? How has that evolved and how do you approach that role as the Managing Director? >> Well, it's been fascinating. As you said, we've got two large complex companies, but also two brand names that are synonymous for innovation, whether it be in compute or technology or communications. But the most fascinating thing is, if you look back at our relationship, and this is two brands that have been around for well over a hundred years, our relationship actually has some fascinating backdrop to it. My favorite is in 1924, AT&T sent a picture of Thomas Watson Sr, over a telephone wire to IBM. And Thomas Watson said, "they sent this over the telephone?" We are United in a community of interest. They want to make it easier for businesses to transact as do I, we need to work together. And since then, there has been a number of advances, that both of us have driven collectively and individually. And it's been a long running and treasured relationship in the IBM company. >> It's such a storied relationship on both sides. I mean, the history is just amazing. They could do a whole history channel segment on both AT&T and IBM. But together it's kind of the better together story. As you pointed out from that example, going back to sending a picture with a phone line, it's like, "Oh, my God, that's Instagram on the internet happening!" But how are they responding to the relationship, now? Obviously with Cloud native exploding with the ability to get more access, and you're seeing a lot more things evolve, more complexities emerging that needs to be abstracted away. You're seeing businesses saying, "Hey, I can do more with less, I can connect more. There's more access." But then also services more potential opportunities and challenges. How are you responding with AT&T? How are they responding to that dynamic with you guys? >> Yeah, I think it's fascinating because, when I originally approached this relationship and I've been doing this for 12 months now, little over 12 months, and when I originally approached it as with anything else, many times you're trying to enter something that is quite special and make it even better. And my approach at least initially with AT&T was very much one of. We're going to provide even better service. We're going to jointly grow together in the market and strengthen each of our businesses. And we're going to work for something broader than ourselves. And I'll get into, a little more, the last point later. But those first two things, from an AT&T response perspective. And I think this is a common perspective among many clients is, "we'll see if your actions follow your words". And so it's been a process we've gone through to understand that I'm a champion for AT&T, inside of IBM. And those interests, that we share individually and collectively, will be represented at the highest levels. And we will mature this relationship into one of, not just kind of supply chain partners, because we're very complimentary to each other, but more ecosystem partners. And my belief in my core, and you see this much with many of the business strategies that are out there, the ecosystem strategy, this sum is greater than the parts. It's not a zero sum game. Is something that's absolutely blooming in the market. >> Yeah, that ecosystem message is one of the things that's resonating and coming clearly out of the IBM Think 2021 this year and in the industry your seeing the success of network effects, ecosystem changes. That is the constant that's happening. Certainly with the pandemic and now coming out of it, people want to have a growth strategy. That's going to be relevant current and impactful. And you, you pointed that out, growth with each other, it's interesting. And you shared some perspective on this just recently with an example of what is underway there. Where are you heading with that? I mean, talk more about this growth with each other, 'cause that really is an ecosystem dynamic. What is underway and where are you heading? >> It's a fascinating ecosystem dynamic and it's something that we've adopted wholeheartedly within AT&T in terms of not only how we work. So, there are very basic examples, examples like, we rather than answering RFPs and responding to requirements, we're co-creating with our clients. We have multiple Cloud Garages going with AT&T where we identify outcomes that we believe could be possible. And then we show and allow the client to experience the outcome of that rather, than a PowerPoint slide. So, there's this kind of base of how do you work with each other, but then much more broadly in the market. It didn't take long for us to realize that, you know, the addressable market, if I were selling AT&T, everything I could ever sell them. And AT&T was selling IBM everything they could ever sell us. The addressable market is, let's say, $10 billion. But the moment at which we pointed ourselves outside to the external market, we realized that that market opportunity expands by a factor of 20 or by a factor of 50. We have the opportunity to create unique value together. And I think that kind of comes from the core of how we work together. >> I'm also intrigued by your comments about working together for a greater purpose. You said you'd address that later. What do you mean by that? I mean, that's little. Is there higher purpose, North star and obviously you mentioned working together in the ecosystem. That kind of seems tactical and strategic as well, but what's this greater purpose? What does that mean? >> Well, my belief, and it's something I learned actually, is I got indoctrinated into the work that AT&T does, the work that IBM does, and how we do it, but we share many common purposes in terms of what we believe on the whole, in terms of progress in society. So for example, equality in the workplace. We hosted a women's day luncheon, actually multiple Women's days luncheons across the United States. Where we had hundreds of female leaders from both IBM and AT&T collaborating together, talking about how tips and tricks, for how they continue to advance in the workplace. Another example is inequality in diversity and inclusion. Both AT&T and IBM have a strong commitment. And if you'll see, IBM just published their diversity data inclusion study where we actually demonstrate, here are the numbers, here's our targets, here's where we want to get. AT&T has exactly that same belief. Finally, in STEM education for educating our future leaders. In science and technology, engineering and math. Both, AT&T and IBM, for our future need those skills showing up in the marketplace. And Corey Anthony, just a quick spot, for any of you at Think, Corey Anthony, who's the Diversity and Development Officer at AT&T is going to give a great presentation on AT&Ts work in STEM for younger generations. So, there are many things that are, I would say, societal on a broader purpose statement, that we share a belief in together. >> That's awesome. And also people want to work on a team that's mission driven, has impact beyond just the profit and loss. I mean, I love capitalism, personally myself. I'm an entrepreneur, but been there done that but we're living in a cultural shift now. We're starting to see remote work. We're starting to see virtual teams, new use cases that have different expectations and experiences in the work place and also at home. So, you know, with mobile, I could be on the side of the soccer fields or, you know, skiing or running or jogging and take a message, pull over, do a chat, jump into an audio chat, listen to a podcast, engage. So we're all tethered now. This is exchanging experiences, and this is going to change the game for how you work together. >> A hundred percent. And by the way, we're all tethered hopefully through AT&T mobile connectivity devices. It was kind of amusing how much that has become a part of our lives and the core value. One of the core value propositions of AT&T is obviously connecting businesses to each other but also consumers through their mobile brand. But also then to entertainment I will say when I was in Augusta at the masters, you know people that have been there know that, you're not allowed to have cell phones. It was amazing just in conversations how often whoever it was I was having a conversation with and myself would say, well, I'd like to look that up, hold on, can I get that statistic? And we realized we're missing a big part of our lives in terms of the communication but those requirements of connecting people in new ways and in their homes or remotely actually only reinforce this shared value proposition of when you have the technology and you have it securely between our company IBM and AT&T we play a massive part in that. And it's something I'm quite proud of. >> Yeah, and you guys have a really interesting position there with the history of, with the relationship. And as you pointed out AT&T has to be on the forefront of cutting edge user experience technology they're bringing, I mean, they are the edge. I mean, they ultimately from base station down to the device, to the person, to the account, you're talking about a real edge. There that's a person's consumer. They got to provide these new services. So I got to ask you, you mentioned at the top of this interview, that your goal is to provide even better service to AT&T pretty big pressure point for IBM. You know, you got to deliver step up and their expectations must be high. Can you take us through perspectives on that kind of even better service when you've got a client that's on the cutting edge of having to deliver new kinds of things like better notifications, smarter devices smarter software, more fault-tolerant highly available services. These are things that, you know there's a lot of pressure take us through that. What's, what's it like? >> There is a lot of pressure but there's a lot of consistency in terms of expectations. And it's something that both of us understand very well. And I would argue that it's probably the reason we work so well together. Both AT&T and IBM for years, namely 50, 100's of years have understood that if we're transacting for business, we're transacting on something that has to get done. So on both sides of the equation not only do we push the edge of what can be done technically or for business, but we also understand the expectations of the business clients that are, it works every time and it works in every way I need it to. So for us, when we work together, I think that healthy balance of part musician, part engineer comes out very, very strongly in both teams. >> Cameron, great insight and great to talk to you. I love to get the perspective on, you know, the kind of challenges and opportunities that you're seizing at IBM with AT&T. Again, the history is amazing. The impact to the industry at both levels. You mentioned Tom Watson Senior, then you got Junior that in that generation just carries forward. You got that vibe back now with hybrid cloud Irvin loves cloud. So, you know, you got a lot of things happening that's really strong over at IBM and the theme this year generally is better together. So, awesome, awesome work. Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. I will tell you, I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk a bit about the future, because from an AT&T and IBM perspective we're doing a load of work around private 5G or 5G in general. This is something that provides an absolutely low latency huge bandwidth with a lot of actually characteristics from a business perspective that are manageable. And it will enable what I believe is a another big wave in the technology and business industry which is new business models. Very similar to that, of the internet originally, it allows with IBM technology and AT&T technology they have something called Multi-Access Edge Computing. These are absolutely blazing, fast 5G boxes that will be in, not only businesses, but universities, sports stadiums, you name it, changing the experience of how people consume technology or the benefits of technology, which I couldn't be more excited about. >> Awesome future ahead, great. Its a big wave certainly a wave we'd never seen before. Cameron, our managing director AT&T at IBM. Great insight, thanks for sharing, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, CUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. We've been covering Think since the beginning and this is the first year that they've gone to the virtual conference, obviously with the COVID situation. We're excited to have our next guest. She's Sarah Diamond, the Global Managing Director for Banking and Financial Markets for IBM. Sarah, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Great, so, let's just jump into it. You've been dealing with financial services and financial markets for a long time. In getting ready for this interview, I stumbled across some old stuff you did in 2016, kind of talking about cloud adoption in financial services. But we all know financial services has special restrictions in terms of privacy and regulations, and making sure that stuff stays stable and fulfills the obligations, reporting obligations. But, there's so many great things that come from cloud in terms of speed of innovation, cost, and all these other things. You've been working in this space for a long time. There's some exciting work that you've been doing. How are you helping financial institutions leverage cloud in a better way? >> Yeah, it's a great place to start. As you say, financial services clients have been looking at the cloud for several years. But actually, it's interesting that notwithstanding the great focus on the opportunity presented by cloud, in terms of the agility of the architecture, speed, resiliency, and cost savings, are less than 10% of their workload has actually moved to the cloud. And that's because, as you say, there are very, very strict requirements over what workload can move to the cloud, as it relates to data privacy, security, et cetera. And so, as we looked at how much our clients were struggling to be able to move their workloads over to the cloud, we realized the need to come up with a financial services specific cloud. And we've been very fortunate to do that in conjunction with one of our main clients, Bank of America. And we will be launching the first Financial Services Cloud for the industry. >> Wow, that is wow. First, I'm shocked that you say only 10% of the workloads have made the conversion to the cloud in the current situation, which seems very, very low. >> Actually, I said less than 10%. >> Less than 10% not even 10%. >> Even less than that. >> So what are some of the specific attributes of the Financial Services Cloud that IBM's rolling out, that will enable them to move that number, hopefully well north of 10% in the not too distant future? >> Yeah, well I think the first place to start is secure and really at a enterprise grade level for financial services so that, the financial services can provide the level of security and resiliency that's needed as they run mission-critical systems for the world. Wrapped around that then, is being absolutely sure that the way the cloud is built meets all of the regulatory requirements as it relates to both risk analysis, and again, security. And we acquired, three years ago, Promontory, which is the preeminent regulatory advisory company for financial services. And one of the huge benefits of having Promontory in our portfolio is to be able to leverage their expertise to do this. And then there's things like making sure that the cloud will support a rich catalog of the ISVs and the SaaS providers that our clients want to be able to work with and that it dovetails seamlessly into other infrastructure services, whether it's VMware, Cloud native, Red Hat OpenShift, et cetera. >> I'm just curious there, to get your take on kind of the complexity of the regulatory environment, 'cause clearly just knowing the US regulations per se, very, very complicated in financial services. But you guys are dealing with global, multinationals, as well as banks established all around the world. >> Yeah. >> Just for the laymen, how much delta is there between the various regulations that either apply to a bank within a particular country, as well as when banks do business across a lot of countries, do they have to comply with every single regulatory infrastructure in the markets in which they serve? That's got to be a crazy mess >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely, they do. So they both have to comply with the regulator of their home country and they have to comply with the regulations in any other country that they do business. And whilst there's definitely a level of consistency across the regulations, they're not a single set of regulations. So it requires a great deal of knowledge, insight and preparation to make sure that they're going to remain compliant in every country in which they do business. >> A lot of boxes to check. >> Exactly. >> And again, that interview that I saw, it was 2016, we're now in 2020, right? So it's been four or five years. And what's interesting is, on kind of the pace on digital transformation is not super, super fast. But here we are with COVID-19. And COVID-19 has just been this light switch moment that nobody had time to prepare for. So whether it's working from home or we're participating here in a digital conference, Think is not a physical event like it's been in the past. So it's been this kind of light switch forcing function on a lot of things. As you look at your client base, within the financial services industry, what are some of the impacts that maybe people aren't thinking about, of COVID, on their ability to deliver their services? >> Yes, and I think there's two parts to your question, as I think of it. One is, which of the financial services clients were able to adapt most quickly to the requirements of being able to operate in essentially, the lockdown work from home environment imposed by COVID-19? And then the second part is, what are the waves that we see going forward for the industry? It's really interesting because clearly those clients that had moved already to a much more agile, hybrid environment were much more digital in their capabilities, had much better security around their data assets, were ones that were able to make the shift quickest. And those that were somewhat behind, lagged in those areas, are the ones that struggled, or took longer to make the shift. I think the shift has come, initially, all around how to move the predominant workforce to work from home. Most clients now, 70 or 80% or more of their workforce are working from home. And that's a huge shift for most of the banks, where notwithstanding the offshore work they were doing, still virtually all of their staff are onshore. So that was a huge effort. And with that, they needed both extra security, to make sure that there was not going to open up any security risks in doing it, capacity, because obviously capacity peaked. And then obviously just the tools and the knowhow to know how to work from home. So that was a huge piece. Those clients that had significant trading operations saw huge peaks and troughs in the trading, so you got this huge volatility around trading, as well as, of course, the huge volatility around the results. And then I think a third category of this, is just how to continue to service their clients, their customers, in a remote way. And when you look at banks, for example in Italy, some of the Italian banks have closed down up to 70% of their branches, again, to create the security that was needed to withstand the epidemic. In the U.S., you hear numbers more in the 50% range. But that's a huge shift in terms of how to support your customers in a continuous way. And just with that, as you might imagine, huge peaks in call center volumes, and challenges in terms of how to deal with that. And these are all things, as you pointed out earlier, that bring intense focus on the ability to leverage digital technology and be able to support both the employees and the customers in a seamless, secure way, online. >> There's so many, kind of facets to this, if you will, and the one that strikes me, as you're talking about the work from home, we've had a lot of work from home conversations over the last several weeks, right? A big piece of this is enabling your workforce to do that. What strikes me, the difference about banks and financial institutions is, not only do they have digital security, but they have a lot of physical security. And physical security of assets that is not so easily digitized. So, where are some of those kind of physical operations, literally like moving cash around and taking deposits and some of those things? Are they just trying to consolidate those operations to fewer points of presence? How are they kind of managing that piece of it? >> Yeah, and you bring to mind a great story that one of our managing directors who supports a client in Brazil just shared with us, because this client is a huge retail bank in Brazil, and supports the Brazilian population throughout the country. And as you say, a lot of the movement of assets, cash, is still physical. So indeed, they had to put together teams that would continue to be able to take cash to different sites, up and down the Amazon River, not withstanding all the concerns about moving around in the COVID environment. So, what you've seen is that mission-critical needs are still obviously having to be done by teams, physically onsite or moving around. And typically the way the banks have bene able to do that is they've created two or three teams that basically mirror or parallel each other, so that if one team got infected, then the second or the third team could fill in. So they've created this redundancy, or this contingency, in their team structures. >> Yeah, it's really, yeah, a unique challenge 'cause that money's got to move, right? It's got to go. Again, back to the digital transformation, one of the themes that we've seen happen over the course of time is kind of going to your point, kind of from a, where can we use cloud, to kind of a cloud first. And I guess financial services is lagging that a little bit. We saw it kind of in mobile applications too, where mobile was an afterthought, and now for a lot of people, it's mobile first. And I think in a lot of underdeveloped countries, the phone, a mobile phone, is the primary conduit to a lot of services like banking and those things. So I wonder now, as you look forward and as we get used to this behavior, and as systems and infrastructure get put in place over time to support the work from home, the lockdown, and just less people moving around, how do you see that changing? Will it get to, from a workload point of view, kind of a work from home first, versus work from home is kind of this adjunct. Do you see that taking hold over the course of several months of being in this new normal? How do you think it's going to reshape the financial services industry, as we get out of this over some period of months, or maybe many, many months? >> Yes, and I think again, you're pointing to two aspects of this. So first is, how banks will continue to support their customers. And as we've just said, many customers have started to use much more online, digital banking than they had before. And so what we expect to see is now an acceleration of the banks moving to digital online services for their clients. Because there's been a breakthrough here, which has been forced by the circumstances, and suddenly, the opportunities are opened up and they'll become even more competitive advantages to be able to do that. Both because of the client experience, but also because of the cost implications and the speed and agility to market around that. And then the other part is always the employees. So it's the clients and it's the employees. And we're already hearing our clients are engaged in conversations with our client, where they're saying, "Look, even when this epidemic passes and we'll feel confident about asking our employees to return to the office, we no longer want to just go back to where we were." And there's a lot of work already being done to look at different job categories to decide which ones can be done remotely, just as effectively as onsite, and which ones will need to be onsite or in front of the client. So to your point, I think this is going to really, really, accelerate the digitization of the industry on all fronts. >> Yeah, it is kind of this new way to think of it, not can it go remote, but why can't it not? >> Exactly. >> And I can't help but think of the infrastructure for someone in financial services in terms of the VPNs and the security on those systems, and I'm sure there's all kinds of crazy firewalls and stuff within a bank's physical four walls that is just not that easy to pick that up and go stick it in somebody's house, especially with no real opportunity for planning, or resourcing, or rolling out. And then we've seen the same thing, as you mentioned, in the call centers, which are another huge piece of the customer service experience, which again, all those people are now moved out. And we're hearing those same things, how much of them can stay moved out and stay remote, and what will it take to support them to give that same level of service. >> Well, and also, how much can move to actual automation, right? So one of the things we've seen, given not just the move of the call center employees to work remotely but even more importantly, I think given the volume of call center inquiries that have been occurring, is much more eagerness to start to use automation in that. So for example, our Watson capabilities that have been used in call centers. For some years now, there's been a big uptick in the demand of using those in the call centers so that you're agents can focus on the truly complex questions and the routing questions can get answered digitally. >> Right. >> I think the other point that we should bring out in this conversation is just the financial impact on the industry, right? We've already seen huge degradation in terms of the likelihood of huge credit exposure and what's that going to mean for the financial services industry. Loss of revenue today, given the market challenges. And so, we are seeing right now, huge focus on how to take cost out of the industry dramatically. And you're hearing banks talk about needing to take up to 40% of their cost structure down, which is going to require, yet again, a massive shift in terms of how the banks operate. >> Wow, 40%, that is a huge number. But it also just begs the question for those who got ahead of the curve a little bit. They're the ones that are going to come out of this. I would assume, in a much better position because banks, we think of them as the old state institution with the fancy building down on the corner, downtown, with the columns. But in fact, they've been at the cutting edge of technology for a really long time. It's such a hyper-competitive market, the margins are so thin, the benefits, the speed and better customer experience are so huge when you're basically trading in the commodity of cash and trying to build all those services around it. So do you expect it'll really kind of a shake out between those that were already kind of on the bandwagon a little bit and really driving forward on their digital transformation, versus the laggers that just were kind of slow to the party and now suddenly, the door to the party is closing? >> Yeah, I think you'll see some of that. I also think you're going to see more, if you like, model shift. So, one of the things that has been a constant topic of conversation is, what are core competencies that banks should be in, and what are capabilities that the banks no longer need to provide? They may have provided in the past, but they no longer need to provide in the future. And, how can they leverage a broader ecosystem, right, to be able to tap into expertise that is maybe better elsewhere and doesn't need to be a core expertise of the bank? So, I think you'll see, yes, those banks that have been moved faster, have had bigger technology investment and have been able to move faster on the digital journey doing better coming out of this. I think, very importantly for the industry as a whole, you'll start to see even more of those shifts in terms of what are core competencies that the banks need to provide, versus where do they leverage an ecosystem to provide those capabilities or services for them. And again, some of the most innovative banks are quite far down, thinking in that road. And that's again, where the role of Vintex come in, right? Because banks don't need to build and develop all of their own technology assets. They create the platform, they create the access to their customer base and then other technology firms provide products onto those platforms. >> Right. Well, rough seas for financial services as it is for everybody, as we navigate these uncharted waters. We're five or six weeks into it, things seem to be settling a little bit down. And at least in terms of the daily shocks that we were going through, through the course of March. And I think we are helping to define a new normal. I don't think, and I would imagine you would agree, that coming out of this is not going to be the same as going into it. January 2021 is not going to look like January 2020 did, at all. So just give you the final word as you look forward with some hope and enthusiasm and a smile. For your clients, what do you see as some of the positive benefits that we're going to realize in the post-COVID world? >> Well, I think when you go through huge shocks like this, which have obviously had huge, huge personal impact, but they've also had huge system impact, there's always a flight to quality, and there's a flight to those players that really represent the trust and the core of a industry. And so, I think the same will be for the financial services industry. There's been a lot of discussion about non-traditional entrants into financial services. At the end of the day, I think this is also an opportunity for banks to stand up and uphold the fact that they're trusted sources of service to their customer base, they do understand how to navigate through, as you've said, these unprecedented times, securely, protecting their customers' data and their assets. So I think you will see a resurgence of the role of a trusted industry in the path forward. >> Well Sarah, thank you for coming on. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and perspectives, and your ongoing expertise in the field. Really enjoyed the conversation, and stay safe out there. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> All right. She's Sarah Diamond. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE's continuing coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital experience. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Washington, D.C. It's theCube! Covering Boomi World 19. Brought to you by Boomi. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Boomi World 2019, from D.C. I'm Lisa Martin. John Furrier is my cohost, and we're pleased to be welcome a couple of guests from Accenture, Boomi partner. To my right, we've got Pete Yao, Global Managing Director of Integration, and Laetitia Cailleteau, Accenture's Global Lead for Conversational AI. Welcome, both of you. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> Thank you so much. So, big news. You can't go anywhere these days without talking about AI. I mean, there's even commercials on TV, that, you know, any generation knows something about AI. But, Laetitia, let's start with you. Some big news coming out this morning, with what Boomi and Accenture are doing for conversational AI. Give our audience, kind of an overview of what you guys announced this morning. >> So, thank you very much. So, conversational AI is booming in the market. It's at the top of the agenda for a number of our C-Suites. It's a new way to make system more human. So, instead of having to learn the system you can actually speak. Ask them direct question. Have a conversation. And actually, what we are doing, what we announced this morning, is Accenture and Boomi are going to partner together to deliver that kind of services for our client. Much faster. Cause we have the expertise and the know how, of designing those conversational experience, and Boomi, obviously, integrates really fast with Beacon system. And the two, together, can really be accelerating, you know, the value delivered to our client. >> And the technology piece, I just want to sure of something. Cause, you guys are providing a front end, so, real technology, with Boomi. So, it's a together story? >> Yeah, it's definitely a together story. And as you say, we are quite expert in designing those experience on the front end. And Boomi, obviously, kind of powers up the integration in the background. >> So, this is going to be enabler of, something you said a minute ago, is, instead of us humans having to learn the tech the tech's going to learn us. Is that fair to say? >> Very fair to say. That's exactly how we want to see it. And I think we call that trend, radically human systems. So, systems are going to become more radically human as we go on. And conversational AI is one enabler of that. >> Is it going to be empathetic? Like, when, you were saying this morning something I loved, on stage. We've all had these interactions with AI, with bots, whether we're on a dot com site, trying to fix something for our cable provider. Or we're calling into a call center. You're starting to get, your voice changes, your agent! And you want that. Is it going to be able to understand, oh, all right, this person, maybe we need to escalate this. There's anger coming through the voice. Is it going to be able to detect that? >> On voice, you can definitely start detecting tone much better than on text. Cause on texts it's very small snippets. And it's quite difficult to define somebody's mood by one small interaction. Typically, you need a number of interactions to kind of see the build up of the person's emotion. But, on voice, definitely. You know, your intonation definitely defines your state of communication. >> You can tell someone's happy, sad, and then use the text meta data to add to it. This is fascinating, cause we all see Apple with Siri front end. That's a different system. They have a back end to Apple. This is a similar thing. You guys have a solution at Accenture. Can you explain how people engage with Accenture? Cause, the Boomi story is a great announcement, congratulations on that. But still, you can deploy this technology to any back end. Is that right? >> Yeah, to any back end. We have a number of live deployment running at the moment. I think the key thing is, you know, especially in the call center. Call center is an area that has not been invested in for, like decades, yeah. And, very often, the scripts are very inward driven. So they would describe the company's processes rather than think about the end user. So, what we do in Accenture, is we try to reinvent the experience, be much more user driven. And then we have a low code, no code, kind of interface, to be able to craft some of those conversation on all the variation. But, more importantly, we actually store all those conversation and can learn. And so we have assisted learning module to make a natural language processor cleverer and cleverer. And as you were saying, before we started to be on air, the user is contributing training data. Yeah, I was just sharing one of recent stories, of an ISP that I was trying to interact with, and frustrated that I couldn't just solve this problem on my own. And then after I was doing some work for theCube, a few months ago I realized, oh, actually I have to be calm here. I have an opportunity, as does everybody, to help train the models. Because that's what they need, right? It takes a tremendous amount of training data before our voices can become like fingerprints. So, I think, if more of us just kind of flip that, maybe our tone will get better, and obviously the machines will detect that, right? >> Yeah, no definitely. I think they key with conversational AI is not to see it as just plain tech, but really an opportunity to be more human centered. And, you know, obviously knowing who peoples are and how they interact in different kind of problems and scenario is absolutely critical. >> Pete, I want to get your thoughts on digital transformation, because we've done, I've done thousands of interviews on theCube, and many, many shows. Digital transformation has been around for awhile It all stops in one area. Okay, process technology, great areas, we've got visibility on that. Automation's excellent for processes. Technology, a plethora of activity. The people equations always broken down. Culture, has stopped dev ops. Maybe not enough data scientists or linguistic engineers to do conversational AI. You guys fill that void. Great technology. The people equation changes when there's successes. It all comes down to integration. Because that's where, either I don't believe in it, I don't want to do it, the culture doesn't want it. Time to value. The integration piece is critical. Can you guys explain how the Boomi Accenture integration works? And what should enterprises take away from this? >> Well, yeah, one of the key things when we started our relationship with Boomi more than five years ago now, really, Boomi was the leader, kind of the ones who invented iPad, right, the integration platform as a service. So, in the small and medium business, a lot of those companies had already moved a lot of the critical apps to the cloud. But, in the enterprise we see that it's taken a lot longer, right, so, certain departments may move certain pieces, but it's still very much a hybrid, right, between a cloud and on-prem based. So, taking a platform like Boomi, and being able to use that with the atomsphere platform has really allowed us to move forward. We've done quite a bit of work in Europe. And, now, in the last year, we've been focusing on North America, along with Europe. So, really, the platform has allowed us to focus on the integration. >> It's interesting, you bring up, you guys have been at Accenture for a long time, you've seen the waves. Oh, big 18 month deployment, eight years. Sometimes years, going back to the 80s and 90s. But now, the large enterprise kind of looks like SMB's because the projects all look, they're different now. You could have a plethora of projects out there, hundreds of projects, not one monolith. So, this seems to be a trend. Do you guys see it that away? Do you agree? Could you, like, share some insight as to what's going on in these large companies. Is it still the same game of a lot of big projects? Or, are things being broken down into smaller chunks with cloud platform? Can you guys just share your insights on this? >> Do you want to take that one first? >> You can do first, yeah. >> Okay. So the days of the big bang, big transformation, multi year programs, we don't see very many of those. A lot of our clients have moved away, towards lean, agile delivery. So, it's really being able to deliver value in shorter periods of time. And in that sense, you do see these big companies acting more like SMBs. Cause you really have to deliver that value. And, with Boomi's platform it's not just the integration aspect, and though our relationship started there, it's with some of the other pieces of technology, like flow and low code or no code as well, which has allowed Boomi customers and our clients and our teams to be able to get those applications out to production much quicker. >> Lisa: A big enabler, sorry, of the citizen developer. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> John: Thoughts on this trend. >> Yeah, so I guess my thought I will come with the innovation angle. So, obviously, we are in a very turbulent time, where company, you know, like a number of the Fortune 500 of 20 years ago, they're not there any longer. And there's quite a heavy rotation on some of the big corporation. And, what's really important is to size the market, and innovate all the time. And I think that's one of the reason why we have much smaller project. Because if you want to innovate you need to go to market really fast, try things up, and pivot ideas really fast, to try to see if people like it and want it. And, I think, that's also one of the key driver of smaller, kind of projects, that would just go much faster to like... >> We had a guy on theCube say, data is the new software. Kind of provocative, bringing a provocative statement around data's now part of the programatic element. And integration speaks volumes. I want to get your reaction to the idea of glue layers. I mean, people kick that term around. That's a glue layer. Basically integration layer with data. Control plane. This isn't really a big part of the integration story for Boomi but for other customers. What's your guys thoughts on this data layer, glue layer, that software and data come together? You're showing it with the conversational AI. It's voice, in terms of software, connects to another system. There's glue. >> Yeah, so, that's a very interesting angle. Cause I think, you know, in the old integration world people would just build an interface, and then it would go live, and they wouldn't necessarily know exactly what's going on the bonnet. And I think, adding that insight, of what you flow, or how often they use, when they're kicked off, is something that becomes quite important when you have a lot of integration to manage. I would remember, I was working for a bank, a major bank in the UK, where we trying to make a mainframe system go real time. But we had all those batch schedule, kind of running, and nobody really knew when, what, and the dependency in between each other. So, I think it definitely helps a lot. You know, bubbling up that level of visibility you need to transform truly. >> Yeah, and you're seeing lot of companies now have Chief Data Officers. Right, but data really is important. And with big data data links, unstructured data, structured data, tradional RDMS databases, being able to access that information. Is it just read only? Is it read and write? You're really seeing, kind of, how all of it has to come together. >> So, if we look at the go-to-market for Boomi and Accenture. Pete, talk to us about how that go-to-market strategy has evolved during the partnership. And where you see it going with respect to emerging technologies like conversational AI. >> Oh, yeah, we've got great opportunities. So, we've started off, really just, hey, there was integration opportunity. Are we doing much work with Boomi and the enterprise. Five years ago, we hadn't. And we started doing more work, kind of in AsiaPac, and then in Europe. Three years ago we entered a formal relationship to accelerate the growth. It was accelerated growth platform which started at Amia. And this last year we formally signed one in North America as well. And in the last three years we've done four times the amount of work. The number of customers, we've got more than 40 joint customers together. The number of trained professionals within Accenture. We have more than 400 people certified, with more than 600 certifications. Some of them may be a developer as well as an architect. And so, a lot of that is really that awareness and the education, training and enablement, as well as some joint go-to-market activities. >> Any of those in a specific, I was reading some US cases in healthcare and utilities? >> Yeah, we're definitely, we've seen quite a bit in utilities and our energy practice. We've seen it in transportation. Because Accenture covers all the different industry groups we're really seeing it in all of them. >> You know, I'm fascinated by the announcement you guys had with Boomi. The big news. Conversational AI. Because it just makes so much sense. But I worry people will pigeon hole this into, you know, voice, like telephone call centers only. Cause the US cases you guys were showing on stage was essentially like, almost like a query engine, and using voices. Versus like an agent call center work flow, which is an actual work flow. Big market there, I have no doubt about it. But, there's other US cases. I mean, this is a big, wide topic. Can you just share the vision of conversational AI a little further? >> So, meaning, I think the capability we have is to kind of go on any channel. Voice is an interesting one, cause it's, I think, it's very common still, you know, to have a call center, when you dip into challenges. And this is kind of the most emerging and challenging from a technology perspective. So, that's the one that was showcased. But there's a number of chat channels that are also very important. On the web, or a synchronous channel, like Whatsapp and Facebook and all of that kind of thing. So, it's really kind of, really offering a broad choice to the end consumer. So they can pick and choose what they want at the moment they want. I think what we see in the market is a big shift from synchronous kind of interaction, like on the web. You go on the web, you chat with something, and you just need to be there to finish it. To actually text. Because you can just send a text, get a response, go to a meeting, and on the back of the meeting, when you have five minutes, you just kind of do the reply. And you actually solve your problem on your own terms. But really when you have the time. So, there is a lot coming there. And, you know, with Apple Business Chat, you know, there's a number of mechanisms that are coming up, and new channels. Before company tended to be, you know, we do digital, we do call center, and maybe we have chat, but actually all of that is broadening up. You know, people want multi channel experts. >> So, synchronous is key. Synchronous and synchronous communication. So, is there a tell sign for a client that says I'm ready for conversational AI? Would I have to have a certain data set? I mean, is it interface? What are some of the requirements, someone says, hey, I really want this. I want to do this. >> Yeah, so, the way we deal with all of that, very often, is if you have call center recording or chat recording, we have a set of routines that we pass through. So, we transcribe everything and we do what we'd call intend discovery. And from that we can know, you know, what are the most, kind of critical, kind of processes kicked off. And from that, we know if it's transactional, or if it's an interaction, or an attendant's emotionally loaded, like people not happy with their bill. And then we have different techniques to address all of those different, kind of processes, if you want, and transform them into new experiences. And we can very easily, kind of look at the potential value we can get out of it. So, for instance, with one of our client, we identify, you know, if you do that kind of transformation you can get 25 million off your call center. You know, like, which is very sizeable. And it's very precise cause it's data driven. So, it's based on kind of, real calls, recordings and data. >> Can't hide from data. I mean, it's either successful or not. You can't hide anymore. >> Yeah, and I think one of the extra value add is very often call center agent or chat agent, they're not really paid to classify properly, so they would just pick up the most easy one all time. So, they will misclassify some of those recordings. Choose what's easiest for them. But when you actually go into what was said it's a very different story. >> John: Well, great insight. >> So, AI becoming, not just IQ, but EQ, in the future? >> Yes, definitely. That's the whole idea. That why we need our users to emrace it. (laughing) >> Exactly. And turn those frustrating experiences into I have the opportunity to influence the model. >> Last question, Pete, for you. In terms of conversational AI, and the business opportunities that this partnership with Boomi is going to give to you guys, at Accenture. >> Oh, definitely looking forward to joint go-to-market, taking this globally. We were named, earlier this week, yesterday, the worldwide partner of the year. Second time that Accenture's been awarded that. Which we appreciate. And that we look forward to working with Boomi and taking conversational AI to our joint clients. >> Awesome. Laetitia, Pete, thank you so much for joining John and me. Really interesting conversation. Can't wait to see where it goes. >> Great. Thank you very much. >> Our pleasure. >> Great conversational. >> Very conversational. >> Got some AI here, come on. >> Next time we give you a bot to sit in our seat. (all laughing) >> Cube conversations. >> Exactly. For our guests, and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube, from Boomi World 19. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We are at Oracle Park, formerly AT&T Park, recently named Oracle Park. Right on the shores of McCovey Cove, in downtown San Francisco. We haven't been here since Sport's Data, I think 2014. I can't believe it's been five years. So maybe now the Giants' situation will turn as we make a run for the pennant. We're here at a really interesting event, it's called Sports Tech Tokyo World Demo Day. And we're here with kind of the master of ceremonies, if you will, he's Mike Proman, the Managing Director of Scrum Ventures. Mike, great to see you. >> Great to be here. Thanks again for the time. >> Absolutely. So what is this day all about? Give us the low down. >> Yeah so, start up frenzy, right? Sports tech community's just in it's infancy right now. There's a lot of fragmentation though, in this world. And how do we best connect start ups to best-in-class companies, right? Japanese companies, there's a lot of excitement in Japan right now. We have Rugby World Cup coming up next month, we have the Olympics next year. How do we enable the start up community to realize those opportunities from a partnership perspective? So, we set out on this journey about a year ago. Bringing together companies of all different stages, all different geographic regions, and all different areas of focus within sports tech. And our job was to connect them to opportunities in Japan. What we kind of uncovered along the journey right, is that this is a community. And that we're building a platform here that transcends Asia, right. We want to help this community, and whether it's connecting them with the venture audience, or otherwise, we feel this is a great reflection of innovation coming in to this industry. >> Now you took kind of an interesting tact. You've called them, before we turned the cameras on, kind of a cohort, kind of an incubator, not really an incubator. So how is this thing structured, how do people get involved? What are some of the benefits of being part of this group versus out there slogging it on your own? >> Well, absolutely, and I think everyone's first reaction is, oh, this is just another accelerator, right? And we've really made a point of not identifying ourselves as an accelerator, for a variety of reasons. Number one, it's a stage-agnostic cohorts, right. So a lot of the companies that are representative here today, the 159 in our cohort, they've raised 10, 20, 30, $40 million. In many respects, they're all grows up, right. They don't need a quote unquote, a traditional accelerator. But our reality is, everybody needs acceleration. And particularly in Asia, Japan in particular, right? You need allies, you need advocates, you need facilitators. And people who are going to help revenue optimization, as well as just breaking the door in some cases. There's a lot of high profile content coming to that region, and if we can help people, it all comes back to us, long term. >> Right, right. And then the other piece, obviously, is the investment piece. 'Cause you work with a number of Japanese investment firms, so that's really kind of part of the, you know, we're sitting in San Franscisco, the event's called Tokyo, the Olympics are a year way, and you're from the Mid-West. So, you're kind of bringing it all together here in San Franscisco. >> You know, sport is the great unifier, right. So this is a great opportunity for us to speak to other industries, and bring the venture community into this conversation. Because, as you know, it's about top-line growth for a lot of these startups, but in many cases, they need capital to be able to accelerate into that growth. And so, you know, it's a very exciting time, and we're here to help support everybody. Our DNA, we're investors, right. We're a venture capital firm. But at the end of the day, what ends up happening is, these companies needs advocacy and connections, and that's what we're here to provide. >> Right, so, you said 100 plus companies in cohort. So, there's a lot of things going on in sports tech, but what are some of the really oddball ones that you're seeing a little further out than maybe most people aren't thinking about. >> Yeah, you know, the trends to me that I'm really excited about personally, are those opportunities that transcend the industry, right. Where is there opportunity for us to democratize things, from just a lead athletes, right, into things that you and I both need. So look at athlete performance. Look at recovery health, as an industry focus, right. Hydration, you look at mental health, sleep health, dietary health, you know. Players of the Giants, they need that, right? But you and I need that too. So where are those technologies that are innovators or thought leaders and leading the way in those spaces? The nice thing about Sports Tech Tokyo is we focus in athlete performance, stadium experience, and fan engagement, right. And there are 13 sub-categories, so it's a very broad based cohort, a lot of different areas of expertise. But bringing them all together is what's most rewarding. >> What's your favorite piece of it? I mean, it's hard to pick your favorite kid, but a couple of interesting companies in the portfolio that you'd like to highlight. >> Everyone's always saying, oh, you put me on the spot. No, absolutely not, Jeff. But in reality, my background is, I've been an entrepreneur for 10 plus years before this. And I've worked with brands like Coca Cola, and the NBA. What excites me most-- >> So we framed you up with a Coke bottle, by the way. >> Thank you very much. That was a nice product placement there. The nice thing is, I'm seeing technology today that didn't fundamentally exist a year or two ago. So I could tell you my favorite right now, in 2 weeks that might be entirely different, right. You're going to meet somebody from Misapplied Sciences, and they are doing some of the most breakthrough, cutting edge tech that, it's mind boggling, in terms of what they can do. And what's great about a company like Misapplied, is that they're doing it in sports, but they're also doing it in retail, and other high-dense environments. And so to me, those are the winners in this cohort. The ones that can transcend sport, and add value to so many other places. >> Right, so, before I let you go, you got a busy day ahead. What's the run of the day, what should people expect who are coming through the gates here at Oracle today? >> Well I said this is not your traditional accelerator. Well, this is not your traditional demo day, by any means, right. Traditionally, demo day is a bunch of company pitches, and then there's maybe some conversation afterwards. To us, this is a celebration of a broader cohort, right. Our 100 plus mentors that make up the Sports Tech Tokyo community. And we wanted to celebrate those individuals, right. The 100 mentors, the 400 plus attendees we have here today. So, think of it as an extended cocktail party, right. We want people to connect, and connect at scale. And so that's the back half of the day. The front half of the day is more content oriented. We have a lot of industry experts, again, common theme is transcending the vertical. Looking at opportunities to bring the venture community into the conversation. >> All right, well Mike, good luck and have a great and very busy day. >> Yeah, thank you so much. Appreciate it Jeff. >> He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCube. We're at Oracle Park in San Francisco on the shores of McCovey Cove, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat digital music)

>> Live from Washington, DC. It's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The District everybody. We're here covering the AWS Public Sector Summit, #AWSPSSummit. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host Stuart Miniman. Gus Hunt is here, he's the Managing Director of Accenture. Great to see you. >> Great, thanks. Dave, Stu, appreciate being here. >> Thanks for coming on. Last night we were at the Accenture Event, it was hosted by Teresa Carlson and Accenture, a jam packed high-level audience. It was really, really fabulous. You couldn't make it, cause you got stuck in-- >> Weather-wise, got trapped in Atlanta. >> Unfortunately, Gus, you missed a lot, it was very good. But bring us up to speed on just sort of the state of where we're at with Accenture. You guys are heavily involved with the CIA implementation. We can talk about that a little bit. But start with Accenture, what you guys got going on in the Government. >> So Accenture Federal Services, which is the part I'm within, supports all of our federal agencies across the board. And we do enormous amount of work in the Cloud Services. In fact, Accenture itself is the largest partner of AWS in the world, right, providing cloud services directly engaged with Amazon. We have our Accenture Amazon Business Group, for example, that we leverage across the board. So we are really heavily steep, both in what it takes to help companies and our federal clients move to the cloud, but also how to take real advantage of it, how to gain the efficiencies that they need, and how to do this very securely. Because so much of I think the concerns that get expressed by people are a misunderstanding about whether or not the cloud is secure, versus how to do it securely in the cloud, if you understand the nuance difference there. >> Right, right. So, well, explain that. Let's double-click on that nuance there. A lot of people so early on it was concerns about the cloud, and then it kind of flipped and said, well, obviously the cloud's going to be more secure than what I could do as an organization. We heard what the CIA said today. They said, "On the worst day in the public cloud, "security's far better than in it is "in my client service systems." So help us unpack that a little. >> So, I'll take you back a few years. I spent 20 years in Federal Government working for CIA. I retired from there as their Chief Technology Officer. And I led basically the C2S deal that we put together in order to bring cloud services into the agency. And we did that fundamentally for four reasons. One was velocity. We had to get our speed of abilities, delivery capabilities up to match that what was happening in the private sector, in the cloud. The second was efficiencies. We had to find a way to really tap into the extraordinary efficiencies being driven by the cloud world and the cloud environment, with this continuous drop in price and storage, and computing, and things like that. How do we leverage that to our advantage and enable us now instead of to keep pace in the world when we knew that data was doing like this, and that the ability to exploit data is what the business is all about, right? >> And that was going like that at the time. >> With the cost, what we didn't want was the cost to do this, right? This is where the cloud was going to play a critical role to enable us to really keep pace with the explosion of data big data, and yet through storage and compute in the cloud, be able to do this at a fairly level cost curve, that was the objective. The third was to drive innovation, right? So we had to be able to innovate as fast as the private sector was able to innovate, to deliver new capabilities continuously all the time, and do those things. And the final reason really was about security, right? To your point, we're getting back to, the question that was originally asked was that the cloud, when we investigated the cloud, it turned out that the cloud was much more secure as a basic platform than almost anything that anybody could deliver inside their own data center across the board. And if you leverage the cloud in a particular way, security, it becomes a much more secure environment for people to operate in and do work in, then you could possibly achieve inside of your own data centers, your own data center environments. >> Gus, I'm hearing things like speed, innovation and security. I'm thinking, can you tell us a little bit about developers inside the agency? Do they have a DevOps initiative, as part of achieving those goals? >> Absolutely. So we actually got started doing Agile Development back in 2005. And what happened was, curiously enough with Agile development using scrum techniques is what we applied. We were able to build software capabilities much faster than we could actually get them hosted. So we had an impedance mismatch, a velocity mismatch, between the ability to build capabilities with Agile Development and to go. Now, when we got started in the cloud world here, DevOps was a relatively new term, but now of course DevOps just permeates everything that gets done. Accenture Federal Services, we teach DevOps for the intelligence community across the board, we teach Agile Development, we're heavily engaged. But our big move now is into DevSecOps, right? So the new impedance mismatch is the fact that I can deliver and build software very quickly. I can host it very quickly in the cloud, but my problem is that my security people who have to credit and approve the ability to run these things, are not working in sync very well with what happens in the space there. It's not that they're not great people, it's just that the methodologies that have been applied, now are causing a delay. So this is where DevSecOps comes into play and this is our big push in Accenture Federal Services. all of our clients in the cloud is to adopt DevSecOps so that we can have security tied directly into the entire development cycle all the way through, so that there are no surprises, right? We know exactly what the status is all along, and if you know anything about cyber security, in particular, both things, security on at the end is the worst possible thing you can do. And fixing cyber security holes at the end is 30 times more expensive than having just done it up front in the beginning across the board. So we are heavily invested in driving both Agile Development and DevSecOps now, in support of our cloud customers. >> Can you talk, Gus, about just as an observer, you're obviously deep into federal, but just the delta between commercial and federal? Certainly within federal you see pockets of highly advanced, whether it's security or analytics, et cetera, but across the board the Federal Government systems are obviously a lot of money is spent on maintenance, a lot of time and effort. Is Federal still learning, the public sector still learning from the commercial sector? Is it flipping? What's your take on that? >> So it's interesting. So when I retired and went out to work, from the public sector into the private sector, there's this really interesting point of view that's out there. When I was in the Federal Government, we really thought that the private sector was way ahead of us. And so we spent lot of time working with the financial service people who were brilliant, and working with Amazon and all of the people and all of the things that they were doing, because they were brilliant. So it was a really interesting engagement. But when I got to the other side, it's looked at the other way, right? They want to know what's going on because, particularly from a cyber-security optic, from a security optic, the Federal Government is viewed in many ways and particularly the intelligence community itself, is viewed as being far ahead of what goes on in the rest of the world. And in terms of analytics and things, the federal government has terrific capabilities, and has built terrific systems to do these things. So it's an interesting optic. Each one looking at the other from the outside in, is observing things and the reality is, is that like anything in life, you have this distribution. There are those that are terrific on one end of the spectrum and those that are nascent on the other end of the spectrum. This is true in the public sector, it's true in the private sector across the board. And it's just getting people together. I think the most important thing is to find a way to get us together so we share information really effectively, so that we understand what's going on, we can educate and we can all elevate ourselves up the chain, to deliver better capabilities, both for our clients and our customers, and to the citizens of our country. >> Yeah, and that public private partnership really isn't formalized. Frankly, it's companies like Accenture that are the glue there, don't you think? >> Yes, exactly. I think that that's a key point. It's companies like Accenture, companies like Amazon, who have engagements across the spectrum and on a global basis, that are able to see and experience things that most companies can't do 'cause they don't have that global perspective. One of the biggest issues we see is that most companies view the world through their narrow optic of their local sets of problems and issues, and this is what catches up with them, particularly in the cyber realm, for example. Which is they're looking at the world through the their own little narrow soda straw. And the global view of an AWS and the global view of an Accenture can be brought to bear to help us with our federal clients, for example, to see the issues more broadly and engage more effectively in a public private sector discourse. >> So there are threats everywhere, obviously. Increasingly people are talking about the weaponization of social media. Obviously, there's critical infrastructure, which we've talked about for years. Where do you see the priorities going? Where is the focus, the spending? Is it on response? Is it on keeping the bad guys out? What do you sense? >> I would say that most of the spending today is focused on trying to keep bad guys out. And that model, while critically important, has got to change, right? Because as you notice while important to do and absolutely essential, it has been wholly insufficient in actually dealing with the problem. We have to move ourselves into a completely different posture in the world today. We have to adopt very much proactive capabilities, hunt for things, do critical reviews and pen testing, discover your vulnerabilities before the adversary does. Adopt cloud services because they can change the security game. If we write cloud native code and distribute it in multiple availability zones and fully leverage elasticity and software to find networking, we can turn it into a shell game where the adversary has to find me, not the other way around. We can become what I call the polymorphic attack surface, as opposed to us having to do with polymorphic viruses, and things like that, that we have to find that are constantly trying to hide themselves from us. And so, it's adopting those things that then drive us to a state of resilience, which have to get to. Resilience is the ability to have an event and keep on operating. As opposed to what happens today, where you have an event and everything gets shut down, and all hands on deck and panic ensues. >> So, Gus, we've talked a little bit about some of the constraints and why some people might be concerned. Wondering if we could talk about some of the opportunities. What kind of innovation are you seeing from partners and customers that you're working with, that they're driving when they do adopt cloud? >> Innovation just across the board, or? >> Yeah, any cool things they're doing, there's edge technologies, you got IOT. >> I would say that the big drivers of innovation, of course, are the ones that everybody else talks about. Which is really what's happening in the machine learning and AI space. And that is really critical because those are the things that will enable us to both deal and act with issues, particularly in my realm, the cyber realm at machine speed across the board, and stop things before they can actually become problematic. But it's also going to be the mechanism by which we can enable the human population across the board to better themselves. So you take that and you combine it with the Internet of Things, which is growing explosively across the board, to begin to automate and drive efficiencies and enable remote health care and all those things like that. We're really at the cusp, I believe, of a true renaissance, if you will, of enabling society in ways that we can't possibly begin to imagine, just looking at it from where we are today. >> A lot of talk, you know, about machine intelligence. I didn't say AI, so I don't have to do a shot. Where do you see that fitting in, generally, and then maybe specifically in cyber? And the second part of that question is you're seeing this DevOps and SecOps worlds coming together? >> Yeah, right. So we talked previously about DevSecOps. Just to go back to that real quickly. That's an absolute essential. We have to get the business, the beauty of Agile Development and DevOps was it got the business and the infrastructure people who had to run things successfully all the time, and the developers who needed to do things very quickly, all at the table to engage and ensuring that they could do that. The gap in there was the security people. So with DevSecOps, you've got the security people brought in right up front across the board there. That move into DevSecOps is more than just essential, it's a must-do, I believe, for all organizations here as they move themselves into the future, and to find a way to adopt it. How did you phrase it? You didn't use the word AI, you said? >> Machine intelligence. >> Machine intelligence directive. I think that those capabilities are maturing very, very rapidly, and I think that what you're going to see is a rapid shift in two ways. One is that while machine intelligence is great, the machine is only as smart as the data and the information that are fed to it, right? If you feed a machine a bunch of information that's highly biased, you're going to get highly biased information out. So there's two things you have to have. One, the intelligence is going to grow inside the machines, but two, there's going to be and must be a parallel thread where you have to have some form of social consciousness and social awareness that ensures that the machines themselves don't develop unconscious biases that are then leveraged, and used to the disadvantage of citizens in society, or other people and things like that. And so machine intelligence is going to grow, but that same ability is emerging, and in fact it's something we talk about at Accenture and have written papers on, about the fact that we have to have this social conscience or social awareness around Artificial Intelligence, the machine learning, to ensure that it is most effectively used to the benefit of the citizens of the country. >> Right, well, in this notion of polymorphic attack surface, presumably it just can't be humans moving stuff around. >> No, that's where machinery and automation come into play, they have to act at machine speed. It's the only thing that can act at machine speed. Humans will always be involved. Okay, you're never going to get away from the human factor. What these things do is they do the heavy lifting, and then enable humans to focus on what their brains are really, really good at, which is making hard decisions about what's actually going on, and what they actually need to do in many cases. We can automate some things, but a lot of it is still going to require really smart people to engage. >> So when you look back at your original four objectives with respect to the cloud velocity, efficiencies, trying to keep the costs where they are or lower them, driving innovation and security, how would you grade, maybe the agency, the industry, whatever you feel comfortable attaching? >> Great question. I'm going to avoid giving you a specific answer like this. >> Fair enough. >> Again there's a spectrum of engagement, across the board. Some agencies are doing really well and have been leaders in the space, and I would argue that my old agency is one of those, really. There are others that are also leaders in the space and are engaging and adopting cloud services, they're pushing very heavily down these pathways we talked about. They're embracing these technologies because they realize what they can do. And then there are others that are lagging behind, but they are lagging behind for any number of several reasons that are out there. So first and foremost is the fact that there's a massive legacy set of workloads and capabilities out there, and it's very hard to figure out what are those that I want to engage in to move to the cloud and do things. So IT modernization dollars were put into play by the federal government in order to help federal agencies do this, modernize their IT with the goal of moving themselves to the cloud, so that they could drive the efficiencies and adopt the things that are going to be there. There's also the concerns we mentioned about security. There's too much fear, uncertainty and doubt, and I think misunderstanding about the cloud, and that was great. I missed the talk today from my old agency, but I'm glad to hear them talk about the fact that I've said this for the longest time, the basic cloud is much more secure than almost everything new. And if I apply and build and develop cloud native capabilities, I can actually leverage the cloud to my advantage to dramatically change the game and deliver cyber resilience into my customers set. So this is the messaging that we want to be able to do. The only way that people are going to do this in the end, because of this big backlog of capabilities, is they have to remember that they got into where their current state is one application, one system at a time. And the only way they're going to get out of it is one application, one system at a time. They just have to begin to think about what are the ones that matter and how they want to go about that. >> No quick fixes there, but a lot of hard work and thoughtfulness. Gus, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really great to have you, appreciate you sharing your insight and your knowledge. >> Delighted, Dave. >> Pleasure. >> Stu, thanks so much. >> Okay, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back, John Furrier is here as well with our next guest. We're live at the AWS Public Sector Summit. You're watching theCUBE. >> Thanks, guys.

>> Narrator: From the Fairmont Hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering When IoT met AI: The Intelligence of Things. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey welcome back here everybody Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Jose at the Fairmont Hotel. At a little event it's When IoT Met AI: The Intelligence of Things. As we hear about the Internet of Things all the time this is really about the data elements behind AI, and machine learning, and IoT. And we're going to get into it with some of the special guests here. We're excited to get the guy that's going to kick off this whole program shortly is Tom Stuermer. He is the I got to get the new title, the Global Managing Director, Ecosystem and Partnership, from Accenture. Tom, welcome-- >> Thank you, Jeff. >> And congrats on the promotion. >> Thank you. >> So IoT, AI, buzz words, a lot of stuff going on but we're really starting to see stuff begin to happen. I mean there's lots of little subtle ways that we're seeing AI work its way in to our lives, and machine learning work our way into its life, but obviously there's a much bigger wave that's about to crest here, shortly. So as you kind of look at the landscape from your point of view, you get to work with a lot of customers, you get to see this stuff implemented in industry, what's kind of your take on where we are? >> Well, I would say that we're actually very early. There are certain spaces with very well-defined parameters where AI's been implemented successfully, industrial controls on a micro level where there's a lot of well-known parameters that the systems need to operate in. And it's been very easy to be able to set those parameters up. There's been a lot of historical heuristic systems to kind of define how those work, and they're really replacing them with AI. So in the industrial spaces a lot of take up and we'll even talk a little bit later about Siemens who's really created a sort of a self-managed factory. Who's been able to take that out from a tool level, to a system level, to a factory level, to enable that to happen at those broader capabilities. I think that's one of the inflection points we're going to see in other areas where there's a lot more predictability and a lot of other IoT systems. To be able to take that kind of system level and larger scale factors of AI and enable prediction around that, like supply chains for example. So we're really not seeing a lot of that yet, but we're seeing some of the micro pieces being injected in where the danger of it going wrong is lower, because the training for those systems is very difficult. >> It's interesting, there's so much talk about the sensors, and the edge, and edge computing, and that's interesting. But as you said it's really much more of a system approach is what you need. And it's really kind of the economic boundaries of the logical system by which you're trying to make a decision in. We talk all the time, we optimizing for one wind turbine? Are you optimizing for one field that contains so many wind turbines? Are you optimizing for the entire plant? Or are you optimizing for a much bigger larger system that may or may not impact what you did on that original single turbine? So a systems approach is a really critical importance. >> It is and what we've seen is that IoT investments have trailed a lot of expectations as to when they were going to really jump in the enterprise. And what we're finding is that when we talk to our customers a lot of them are saying, look I've already got data. I've got some data. Let's say I'm a mining company and I've got equipment down in mines, I've got sensors around oxygen levels, I just don't get that much value from it. And part of the challenge is that they're looking at it from a historical data perspective. And they're saying well I can see the trajectory over time of what's happening inside of my mind. But I haven't really been able to put in prediction. I haven't been able to sort of assess when equipment might fail. And so we're seeing that when we're able to show them the ability to affect an eventual failure that might shut down revenue for a day or two when some significant equipment fails, we're able to get them to start making those investments and they're starting to see the value in those micro pockets. And so I think we're going to see it start to propagate itself through in a smaller scale, and prove itself, because there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of work that's got to be done to stitch them together, and IoT infrastructure itself is already a pretty big investment as it is. >> Short that mine company, because we had Caterpillar on a couple weeks ago and you know their driving fleets of autonomous vehicles, they're talking about some of those giant mining trucks who any unscheduled downtime the economic impact is immense well beyond worrying about a driver being sick, or had a fight with his wife, or whatever reason is bringing down the productivity of those vehicles. So it's actually amazing the little pockets where people are doing it. I'm curious to get your point of view too on kind of you managed to comment the guy's like I'm not sure what the value is because the other kind of big topic that we see is when will the data and the intelligence around the data actually start to impact the balance sheet? Because data used to be kind of a pain, right? You had to store it, and keep it, and it cost money, and you had to provision servers, and storage, but really now and the future the data that you have, the algorithms you apply to it will probably be an increasing percentage of your asset value if not the primary part of you asset value, you seeing some people start to figure that out? >> Well they are. So if you look, if step back away from IoT for a minute and you look at how AI is being applied more broadly, we're finding some transformational value propositions that are delivering a lot of impacts to the bottom line. And it's anywhere from where people inside of a company interact with their customers, being able to anticipate their next move, being able to predict given these parameters of this customer what kind of customer care agent should I put on the phone with them before you even pick up the phone to anticipate some of those expectations. And we're seeing a lot of value in things like that. And so, excuse me, and so when you zoom it back in to IoT some of the challenges are that the infrastructure to implement IoT is very fragmented. There's 360 some IoT platform providers out in the world and the places where we're seeing a lot of traction in using predictive analytics and AI for IoT is really coming in the verticals like industrial equipment manufacturers where they've kind of owned the stack and they can define everything from the bottom up. And what they're actually being able to do is to start to sell product heavy equipment by the hour, by the use, because they're able to get telemeter off of that product, see what's happening, be able to see when a failure is about to come, and actually sell it as a service back to a customer and be able to predictably analyze when something fails and get spares there in time. And so those are some of the pockets where it's really far ahead because they've got a lot of vertical integration of what's happening. And I think the challenge on adoption of broader scale for companies that don't sell very expensive assets into the market is how do I as a company start to stitch my own assets that are for all kinds of different providers, and all kinds of the different companies, into a single platform? And what the focus has really been in IoT lately for the past couple of years is what infrastructure should I place to get the data? How do I provision equipment? How do I track it? How do I manage it? How do I get the data back? And I think that's necessary but completely insufficient to really get a lot of value IoT, because really all your able to do then is get data. What do you do with it? All the value is really in the data itself. And so the alternative approach a lot of companies are taking is starting to attack some of these smaller problems. And each one of them tends to have a lot of value on its own, and so they're really deploying that way. And some of them are looking for ways to let the battles of the platforms, let's at least get from 360 down to 200 so that I can make some bets. And it's actually proving to be a value, but I think that is one of the obstacles that we have to adoption. >> The other thing you mentioned interesting before we turned on the cameras is really thinking about AI as a way to adjust the way that we interact with the machines. There's two views of the machines taking over the world, is it the beautiful view, or we can freeze this up to do other things? Or certainly nobody has a job, right? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. But clearly AI is going to change the way, and we're starting to see just the barely the beginnings with Alexa, and Siri, and Google Home, with voice interfacing and the way that we interact with these machines which is going to change dramatically with the power of, as you said, prescriptive analytics, presumptive activity, and just change that interaction from what's been a very rote, fixed, hard to change to putting as you said, some of these lighter weight, faster to move, more agile layers on the top stack which can still integrate with some of those core SAP systems, and systems of record in a completely different way. >> Exactly, you know I often use the metaphor of autonomous driving and people seem to think that that's kind of way far out there. But if you look at how driving an autonomous vehicle's so much different from driving a regular car, right? You have to worry about at the minutia of executing the driving process. You don't have to worry about throttle, break. You'd have to worry about taking a right turn on red. You'd have to worry about speeding. What you have to worry about is the more abstract concepts of source, destination, route that I might want to take. You can offload that as well. And so it changes what the person interacting with the AI system is actually able to do, and the level of cognitive capability that they're able to exercise. We're seeing similar things in medical treatment. We're using AI to do predictive analytics around injury coming off of medical equipment. It's not only starting to improve diagnoses in certain scenarios, but it's also enabling the techs and the doctors involved in the scans to think on a more abstract level about what the broader medical issues are. And so it's really changing sort of the dialogue that's happening around what's going on. And I think this is a good metaphor for us to look at when we talk about societal impacts of AI as well. Because there are some people who embrace moving forward to those higher cognitive activities and some who resist it. But I think if you look at it from a customer standpoint as well, no matter what business you're in if you're a services business, if you're a product business, the way you interact with your employees and the way you interact with your customers can fundamentally be changed with AI, because AI can enable the technology to bend it to your intentions. Someone at the call center that we talked about. I mean those are subtle activities. It's not just AI for voice recognition, but it's also using AI to alter what options are given to you, and what scenarios are going to be most beneficial. And more often than not you get it right. >> Well the other great thing about autonomous vehicles, it's just a fun topic because it's something that people can understand, and they can see, and they can touch in terms of a concept to talk about, some of these higher level concepts. But the second order impacts which most people don't even begin to think, they're like I want to drive my car is, you don't need parking lots anymore because the cars can all park off site. Just Like they do at airports today at the rental car agency. You don't need to build a crash cage anymore, because the things are not going to crash that often compared to human drivers. So how does the interior experience of a car change when you don't have to build basically a crash cage? I mean there's just so many second order impacts that people don't even really begin to think about. And we see this time and time again, we saw it with cloud innovation where it's not just is it cheaper to rent a server from Amazon than to buy one from somebody else? It's does the opportunity for innovation enable more of your people to make more contributions than they could before because they were too impatient to wait to order the server from the IT guy? So that's where I think too people so underestimate kind of the big Moore's Law my favorite, we overestimate in the short term and completely underestimate in the long term, the impacts of these things. >> It's the doubling function, exactly. >> Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. >> I mean it's hard for people, human kind is geared towards linear thinking, and so when something like Moore's Law continues to double every 18 months price performance continues to increase. Storage, compute, visualization, display. >> Networking, 5G. >> You know the sensors in MEMS, all of these things have gotten so much cheaper. It's hard for human of any intelligence to really comprehend what happens when that doubling occurs for the next 20 years. Which we're now getting on the tail end of that fact. And so those manifest themselves in ways that are a little bit unpredictable, and I think that's going to be one of our most exciting challenges over the next five years is what does an enterprise look like? What does a product look like? One of the lessons that, I spent a lot of time in race car engineering in my younger days and actually did quants and analytics, what we learned from that point is as you learned about the data you started to fundamentally change the architecture of the product. And I think that's going to be a whole new series of activities that are going to have to happen in the marketplace. Is people rethinking fundamental product. There's a great example of a company that's completely disrupted an industry. On the surface of it it's been disrupted because of the fact that they essentially disassociated the consumption from the provision of the product. And didn't have to own those assets so they could grow rapidly. But what they fundamentally did was to use AI to be able to broker when should I get more cars, where should the cars go? And because they're also we're on the forefront of being able to drive, this whole notion of consumption of cars, and getting people's conceptual mindset shifted to having owned a car to I know an Uber's going to be there. It becomes like a power outlet. I can just rely on it. And now people are actually starting to double think about should I even own a car? >> Whole different impact of the autonomous vehicles. And if I do own a car why should it be sitting in the driveway when I'm not driving it? Or I send it out to go work for me make it a performing asset. Well great conversation. You guys Accenture's in a great spot. You're always at the cutting edge. I used to tease a guy I used to work with at Accenture you've got to squeeze out all the fat in the supply chain (laughs) your RP days and again a lot of these things are people changing the lens and seeing fat and inefficiency and then attacking it in a different way whether it's Uber, Airbnb, with empty rooms in people's houses. We had Paul Doherty on at the GE Industrial Internet launch a few years back, so you guys are in a great position because you get to sit right at the forefront and help these people make those digital transformations. >> I appreciate that. >> I will tell you I mean supply chains is another one of those high level systems opportunities for AI where being able to optimize, think about it a completely automated distribution chain from factory all the way to the drone landing at your front doorstep as a consumer. That's a whole nother level of efficiency that we can't even contemplate right now. >> Don't bet against Bezos that's what I always say. All right, Tom Stuermer thanks for spending a few minutes and good luck with the keynote. >> I appreciate it Jeff. >> All right, I'm Jeff Frick you're watching theCUBE. We are at The Intelligence of Things, When IoT met AI. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCube, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back, Rachel Mushahwar is here, from Intel. She's the general manager and head of America's Industry Sales, and she's joined by Jason Kimrey, who's Managing Director of America's Sales at Intel. Folks, welcome to theCube, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright so Rachel, let's start with you. First of all, this event, you guys are partners with Nutanix, we'll get into that in a minute, but what's Intel doing here, what's the vibe of the event, what are you talking about? >> So there's a variety of things that we're talking about, first of all, Nutanix is a fabulous partner of ours, but it's not just about the technology that Intel is supplying to Nutanix, and that's what's great about this event, is you see so many different business folks that are focused on what are the right outcomes for their businesses, and how do you start to use technology to solve business problems, and that's a big part of what Intel is helping companies do, it's all about the digital transformation, and how to keep pace with your competitors, so that you don't fall behind, or worse, fall off the Fortune 500 list, like most companies have done. >> So Jason, how's that conversation translate into the discussions you're having with customers? >> You know I think digital transformation, that topic is everywhere, and there isn't a company on the planet that isn't trying to figure out how to transform their business through digital, and at Intel there's pretty much two ways the company can transform their business, either through culture, or through technology, and we see Intel playing a key role in being that technology enabler to a digital transformation strategy, and that's a big part of our conversations and our strategy with Nutanix, is how to enable companies to be more data driven, move towards a more on demand infrastructure, be more secure, and really look at how we can help companies adopt those technologies faster. >> And frankly, how do we help them move more quickly, right? The average age of a company used to be about 60 years. The average age of a company today is less than 12 years old. Think about what that means from a digital transformation perspective, and how fast companies have to move to adapt to what consumers are expecting, and that's a big part of what we do. >> So Jason, I'm glad you mentioned data, so Rachel, you were talking about digital transformation, it's kind of a buzz word that's thrown around, but when we unpack it, it seems like it's all about the data. Becoming data driven, digital means data. We just saw Amazon buy Whole Foods, and you would never think that a retailer would get into the grocery business like that, but data allows you to sort of jump these industry value chains. So I wonder if you could talk about digital disruption and the data relevance. >> So there's a variety of digital disruptions that are happening across every industry, whether you're, you know, retail, or you're a transportation company, or you're a health and life sciences company. Data is at the heart of all of that, and figuring out how do I address what my consumers are looking for, in as close to real time as possible. How do you make those decisions just like that so that you can provide those answers back to you consumers? Amazon, is it a retailer, is it a supply chain company, it's all of... >> Content company. >> It's all of those things, and a lot of companies are taking a step back saying "Holy moly, how do we start "to transform everything all at once, "and how do we use technology "to leapfrog where are competitors are?" They don't want to be knocked off that Fortune 500 list. Who's saw >> Yeah, that... >> Yeah, go ahead. That's what's... There's just so many cool examples of where traditional mainstay companies are integrating digital, and becoming data companies almost overnight. We looked at John Deere, which is one of these old line agriculture companies that's really now a data company, they're applying analytics to help do more crop forensics and determine what the optimal time to plant. They're using IOT with the use of drones to survey fields. They're even using autonomous driving capabilities, inputting sensors in directly into the equipment to make sure that they're planting within, you know, driving large 120 foot wide pieces of equipment to one inch of accuracy. Just seeing incredible use of technology, and it's all centered around better use of data to transform their business. >> I mean John Deere comes up a lot, we hear that example. Do you feel like they're sort of a leading edge of the bell curve, or are they to the more mainstream now? I mean they're certainly a mainstream company, but I feel like they're advanced, in terms of their data, more advanced than the average bear, with their data usage, what do you think? >> What's interesting about that is between now and 2018, the board of directors from all of the major companies out there will have digital transformation as part of their agenda. Probably about 60% of all of the companies that we talk to are talking about some level of digital transformation, so it's not just John Deere. You think about all of the big brands, especially with some of the big changes that are happening from a technology perspective, whether it's autonomous driving, it's you know, the use of the smartphones, right? Apple just celebrated what, it's tenth birthday for an iPhone? This is the least amount of change that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes. Just because of how fast technology is moving. >> So Jason, we've been interviewing Intel I think every show we go to, the cloud shows, server storage, you know, across the board. How did Nutanix differentiate itself, how do you partner with them? Understand of course, they've got the x86, but a lot of it's software, the hooks that Intel's been building for a long time. Bring us a little bit inside some of the sausage making. >> We've been talking about re-imagining the data center for years, and I think what's been really cool about Nutanix is they really are bringing that concept alive, and really re-imagining the data center platform. And I think what we've done is through silicon and a lot of our enabling technologies, we've always tried to provision those up for our partners to build innovation on top of, and Nutanix has done as good of a job as anyone, has really taken advantage of those capabilities, and bringing them to their customer in a way that they can consume and digest quickly, implement quickly, and really start moving fast on a data center transformation strategy, almost overnight. >> So you talked about the digital transformation, Nutanix is one of those leading indicators out there, as a strategic partner for us, of how do you help companies evolve to what they need to be to make consumer demand, and using some of those amazing data center technologies, and re-imagine what the data center looks like, that's Nutanix. >> Yeah, and Rachel, it's curious, you know, I said I've yet to find a CIO that said they have a convergence challenge or issue. Talked to lots of companies that are trying to figure out their cloud strategy, but it's more how are they transforming into being more a software company? I interviewed a large financial service company that says "We're going to be a software company that happens "to deliver these type of solutions." So what are those critical issues that your customers are talking to and how do you see Nutanix, you know, you said they're helping with the digital transformation, how do they get there? And how do they do even more? >> So there's a variety of ways that Nutanix is really transforming that whole data center industry, and a big part of it is time to market. One of the biggest roadblocks from a CIO's perspective, as you said, it's not about what they want to do, it's about how they go do it, and they start running up against a variety of roadblocks, of "Oh my gosh, that particular application stack "isn't certified on this, or this software won't work "on this hardware", and all of a sudden, a project that should take three to six months is now over a year, right? Time kills all deals, and it includes, it, you know, kills all innovation. So with the Nutanix and Intel platform, that time to delivery is shrunk so dramatically. You don't have to worry about certifying all those different types of things, and when you go to an upgrade, it's invisible. That's the way technology should be, it should just work. When you answer your phone, do you think about it not working? >> Yeah. I want to go back, you said 10 years ago was the slowest that things will ever be, if you look going forward. How do you find customers are keeping up with this? Continuous innovation, continuous change, continuous updates coming. We used to just know the tick tock of Intel, and that made upgrades a little bit easier, Now it's a software world. How do you find customers are keeping up with it, how do they try? >> So I think customers are struggling with how fast technology is moving, but one way to start to start to keep up with it is to use products like Nutanix. It takes some of the guesswork out of a variety of things in your data center. >> So how should we think about Nutanix inside of the Intel? I mean Intel is the gold standard of how to build an ecosystem. Where does Nutanix fit? How should we think about this new type of company? >> I think it starts with looking at them not as a hardware company, as much as a software company. They are truly agnostic across the platform that they deploy on. Their whole goal is to extract the applications from the hardware that it sits on, and I think really providing cloud-like capabilities for an on-prem environment so I think that's a pretty big differentiator, because they really have this software platform that runs on multiple Intel based hardware platforms, and our goal working with them is to really help proliferate that as quickly as we can because it really creates an upgrade path and a path towards transformation much quicker than was historically possible. >> So we call that, what you just described, cloud-like on prem, we call it true private cloud. Substantially mimicking the public cloud, we came up with that term because there were so many fake private clouds out there. You obviously, you see the growth, in all these markets, and the decline in many markets. You see the public cloud explode. We see this notion of mimicking the public cloud on-prem as a huge growth area. Are you seeing the same thing, can you add some color to that narrative? >> When we talk to customers, again, across multiple industries, whether it's an energy industry, it's a transportation industry, it's manufacturing, you name the industry, they're all struggling with the same thing. Yes, public cloud is exploding, but a lot of CIOs are taking a step back saying, "Hey, there's some part of my data "that I want to keep absolutely inside of my private cloud. "There's some data that I always want "to keep on prem, and there's some pieces that I want "to put out to the public cloud." So we're seeing a lot of companies kind of normalize back in that middle, where the pendulum swung so far to the right of "Hey, boom, public cloud", and now I think they're taking a step back from a privacy and security perspective saying "What's the happy medium here?" >> I think we just, public Cloud, which we love, did an incredible job of making people aware of how quickly it was possible to deploy resources or deploy VMs very quickly, in a way that was never possible before in an on-prem environment. Partners like Nutanix, and I would say Nutanix really led a lot of this, really bringing that public cloud capability to an on-prem environment. The application at rationalization and the application virtualization, a lot of those capabilities that were very simple in a cloud environment are now just as simple in an on-prem environment. That's why we see that normalization that Rachel was talking about. >> So just when we thought that this was a zero sum game, it was like public cloud versus on-prem, IOT comes in and advances in connectivity and data, it's like a tide that lifts all boats. What are you guys seeing in IOT, maybe you can make some comments there? >> Sure. So I think IOT is just beginning to catch the next wave. For a while folks have been talking about the internet of things and how it's going to help transform industries, and how you can use sensors to detect everything from soil erosion, as related to the John Deere, to "What are we doing for an average consumer "who walks down in the aisle in your favorite retail store. "How do we start to deliver them personalized messages?" So IOT is again, changing that game and moving up that sigmoid curve of change. And you go back to, look, today, right now, at this moment, is the least amount of change that you'll see, in five minutes from now, there's going to be some other big tech announcement or some big evolution, and that's the beauty of where we sit in today's world. About every hundred years we enter this big change, or this big disruption, and this one is going to be driven by compute and Intel is all about compute. >> David: Are you guys paranoid? >> Absolutely >> I think we're excited, but paranoid as well. >> Only the paranoid survive. >> That's right, that's right. >> This data explosion through IOT, it really fuels what Intel calls our virtuous cycle of growth. The more data, the more endpoints, that hit the network, the more data that creates, the more requirement for data center and data capabilities >> I totally agree, we used to say it was kind of customers that were the flywheel, and data is the potential to be the flywheel for the next ten years. >> Jason: Yeah to Rachel's point, we're excited. >> Data is the new oil. But the magic is going to be in how we refine that data. >> Yeah, I mean, I always say data is plentiful, but insights aren't, and those companies that can find those insights, and gain a competitive advantage, and as you've been pointing out, both of you, Rachel and Jason, the cycles are so fast, one insight is not enough, it's not sufficient, you have to continuously innovate, speed is the game. >> Rachel: It is the game. >> And you guys play that game well, so thanks very much for sharing your insights. Great segment. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome, alright, keep right there everybody. Stu and I will be back right after this short break, this is theCube, we're live from DC, and Nutanix .NEXT, we'll be right back. (techno music)