(techno music) >> Welcome back to the Cube. I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage here at AWS reInvent 22. We're in the Venetian in Las Vegas, wrapping up our day one coverage here in the executive summit sponsored by Accenture and with me to talk about Accenture, couple of guys who are no strangers at all to the Cube. In fact, I think we got to give you like alumni passes or something. (Chris and Merim laugh) We got to come up with something like that. Um, Merim Becirovic is with us. Uh, Merim's a global IT at Accenture. And Chris Wegmann, who's already been on once today, as a matter of fact. >> Yeah (indistinct) >> So we're going to start charging you rent, Chris. (Chris and Merim laugh) Uh, global technology and practice lead with the AWS business group at Accenture. Good, glad to have you both back and, um, you're welcome to the Cube any time, by the way. >> So don't be scared. >> Thanks, great to be back. Let's talk about >> Sure. >> What, what you folks have been up to. So, um, you are, as we were talking earlier, you are where a lot of your clients would like to be. You, you've begun this transformation. You have fully migrated to the cloud, you've learned, right? >> Yes. You've hit all the bumps along the way. So talk about your journey. >> Yeah. >> And then how you think that experience could be translated to what your clients are going through. >> Yeah, so I'll, I'll hit it from the lessons learned and working together with our business group partners. We, so Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. We have finished that journey, and as part of that journey, we have migrated all of the services it takes to run Accenture to the public cloud. So now that's done. That was complete. But now we are this, now it is this cloud continuum living in the cloud. And the, now, the thing we talk about, and I'd love to have Chris, you know, shine a little bit more, is we have built our digital core in a cloud, now. We're no longer dependent on data centers. And that has given us tremendous flexibility around how to enable the business as it has grown significantly since we started this journey a few years back. >> Yeah, you know, Merim, like you talk about, right? We talk about our client, we've talked to our clients about building this digital core, right? And, and we've been through that as Accenture, as a global IT organization, you know. Supporting well over 720,000 people. >> Yeah. >> Right? That growth over the last year has been tremendous. Right? So, without the strong digital core built on cloud, right? We couldn't do that, right? We couldn't add that number of people, right? We couldn't make the, the, the changes were needed during, uh, Covid to bring people home, working from home. You know, whether it being uh, the way we changed our business model or things like that, um, you know that was all enabled by cloud. It couldn't be done without that. And, you know, also the variable in our business, right? Is very tied now to our cloud consumption, right? So, you know, it goes up, it goes down, right? We've, you know, Merim and his team have completely built their, their their core with those, with those concepts uh, in mind. >> Yeah, I mean, you're talking about, you know, 700, 800,000 employees and how many countries did you say? >> 130 different countries, at least. >> 130 different countries. So, I mean, no small task, obviously, uh, to get everything done. When did you start? >> So our cloud journey, effectively, we started in 2015. And we were done, kind of right before Covid around 2019. We took a pause for a couple of different things but we could have probably done that faster. And if we were, if I was to do it again now, today we could probably do it in two to three years, flat. With everything that we've learned so far. >> So what's the application, then, to your clients' experiences that, I mean, been there, done that, right? >> You can, exactly right. I mean, you know, we always say that we want to be our best credential, right? And Merim and his team are our best credential in this space. Um, so, you know, a lot of our customers, you know, struggle making that commitment. A lot of 'em are past that struggle, now. They're committed, they're going. Uh, but I talk to a lot of my customers about, you know, do I, do I migrate? Do I modernize? You know, how do I do it? And, and it was interesting with Accenture, right? It, it started out very much as a migration program. >> Yeah. >> Right, so, we made the decision, Merim and his team made the decision to do a migration and now a modernization, right? And, and that's proven very effective. Uh, it, it's, it's, it's proven, you know, uh, we got that core in place, right? We were able to build off of that versus, you know, spending- it would've taken a lot more time just to start with a modernization approach. >> Yeah. Where, where do you draw the line between the two, between migration and modernization, then? Because just by migrating alone, you are modernizing, you know, some of your operations, so you're getting up to speed. But, but how do you draw that line and then how do you get people to jump over it? >> So I, I'll hit it from how our lessons learned. So, when we first started and we did the migrations it was literally lift and shift. And it was a lot of argument about lift and shift isn't worth it. But we found out it was, because it wasn't just about moving the work loads and keeping it like a data center. It was moving the work loads and then optimizing because everything in the cloud was significantly faster. So then I didn't have to consume all the services the same way I did in the data center. I can actually consume them smaller. But also as time went by, what we learned is, hey, now these services are working here. Which ones are actually costing us more money to run? And not that they were costing more than the data center, but it's relative to the cloud which ones cost more in the cloud? Then we looked at that and said, okay how do we want to modernize those? And then we modernized as container capabilities started the evolving, got much more mature. We shifted a lot of workloads to containers. But otherwise, the other principle we push very hard is big consumption of Lambda and uh, serverless capabilities on Amazon. So we have refactored multiple applications to give us that capability to say we no longer need the IAS capabilities, those servers, those VM's, and we run on, on serverless capability. And what's great about that is, now I don't have a server to patch, to scan, to remediate, to upgrade. I've moved away from that capability. And the teams can focus more on building the business capabilities the business wants. Um, like we did to our pricing team. I don't know if you knew this one, Chris, but all the pricing capability has been redone to be cloud native on, on AWS. >> And how, how do you deal with the folks that, that still kind of have a foot in the on-prem world that, um, that they're just not ready to give it up? You know, they, they like the control, they like the self-management. >> Yeah. >> They, they want to be in charge. >> Well, yeah. I mean, a lot of, a lot of our customers, it's, there's a reason why they need on-prem still. And there is on-prem, let's be clear. I mean, it, it is a hybrid cloud world for most of our, our customers, right? Whether they got manufacturing, whether they've got, you know, datas that are, you know, SCADA systems or, or operational IT systems that have to be close to their, their execution or to their, to their factories and things like that. So that's going to happen. I think everyone, and I shouldn't say everyone, but you know, most of our customers know they need to get there, right? And are somewhere on their journey, right? Very few have not started at all. Uh, but it's about acceleration, right? And I, I do think, um, we're going to see more and more acceleration. We saw it with Covid, right? >> Mm-hm. >> And then, you know, obviously I think we're going to see it again, right? With you know, kind of what's going on with the economy and stuff like that. It, it's, you know, it's a great way to push that change through. >> Right. >> And I, I'm really excited, to be honest what I'm really excited about, if I look at what Merim and his team's doing, is they're just leveraging that digital core and truly taking the investments that the hyper scaler's are making, the AWS's are making, and leveraging 'em. So we're not making that investment, right? We're a capital white company, right? So we don't like making good capital investments, right? And we're taking advantage of the capital investments. And we couldn't do that of the, of the hyper scales. We couldn't do that without being there. Right? >> Right. >> We just couldn't do it. >> And maybe, John, if I can build on that. >> Sure. >> Like, one of, one of the things for me when I think about the cloud is, I'm not alone. You know, because when you're in a data center when you're running a data center, you're kind of on an island. And on that island, if you've got security issues, if you got stuff you're dealing with with attackers, you know, you're, you're kind of on an island and you're alone. Whereas in this world, I am where all the investment is, where all the security capabilities are being built, and I have partners that are there with us that help us when these situations come up. So for me, I'm very uh, grateful that we pushed very hard in the beginning to get here. But I wouldn't have it any other way. For us. >> So like, do you- do you want to live outside the fort? >> Yeah. >> No >> No. (laughs) >> You're exactly right. >> Yeah. >> I don't want to live outside the fort. >> Right. >> There are a lot of bad guys out there right now. >> Yeah. >> All right, so, the journey is over. >> Right. You can unpack your bags and get comfortable, right? (Merim laughs) >> No. >> Hardly. >> No. >> So, so what is the, what has this done in terms of setting you up for your future plans? And, and >> So I'll talk about a couple different things and maybe you can build on it, Chris, from what you're seeing, like for us, we, we got very good at, I hate the concept of just FinOps but it's the way of being in the cloud. It's different than running a data center and uh, the way we think about building services, consuming services, allocating services, provisioning services. There's just so much more flexibility there that we can completely fine tune the service that we want to provide. That helps us from when we think about 360 degree value, as we talk to our clients, for ourselves to say it also helps just simply on the sustainability agenda, right, because now, as Amazon builds their capabilities to be more sustainable, those SKUs are available to us, we can naturally consume those SKUs much more effectively. Um, and then uh, the next thing to me, what I'm, what I'm especially excited about is all the stuff we're doing around network. So, you know, pre-Covid, 95% of our traffic was just straight to the internet because we had already finished the journey. So now what do you need a wide area network for anymore? >> Right. >> If you're not routing traffic between data centers what do you need it for? So, we have been working with, with AWS especially, like building these cloud land type capabilities and consuming it. So think of consuming, uh, network same way as you do the cloud. So I'm excited about that one. >> Yeah. That, that, I'm super excited about that, right? Because you know, network's at the core of everything you do, right? And there's always a lot of concern, hey, when I go to the cloud, my network costs are going to go up, right? Um, but I think we've proven, right? >> Yes. >> Being able, that those costs can come down, right? And we can have a better experience, uh, deal with the ebbs and flows of our business whether it's people working from home, people working in the office, you know, or at the client sites. We, we've, you know, we've got that cloud-based backbone that we support. You know, I, I mean Merim, I agree a hundred percent. I think you and your team have done a great job of cost management, cloud cost management, optimization, right? You didn't stop, right? >> No. >> You didn't lo- you didn't just live after the migration on VMs. Right? You know, you went serverless, you went, you know, containerization. >> Yep. >> Uh, and that's kept our cloud bill going down. >> Yes. >> Right. Versus going up, right? >> Yes. >> And I hear from a lot of customers concerned about cloud costs and that type of stuff, but you've proven right, >> Yes. >> That you can keep it flat, if not going down because you're using those last minutes. Sustainability is the other thing that I truly am, I, I love, right? Is, you know, we're all trying to become a more sustainable, sustainable organization. We're trying to help our clients become more sustainable organizations. And you know, you know, your ability to take on Gravitant processors, right? Which use less power. >> Yes. >> Right? Overnight, right? >> Yes. >> Or, hey, I'm using a, you know a, uh, serverless lambda, whatever, right? And I'm not running that server. >> Right. >> You know, so, you're able to show that sustainability gains, um, you know, very quickly. Which you could not do, right? You know, in just doing cloud basic migrations. >> Well, I tell you what I think is impressive, is that you put your money where your mouth is, right? >> Yep. (laughs) >> Is that, that it's, and, and if I'm going to be a client, not to, you know, give you guys a pat on the back, you don't need it. You're doing great without me. But I'd say you've been there, you've done that. And, and so I can learn from you. You understand my pain. >> Yes. >> You understand my reservations, my challenges and uh, you could be my, my headlights here. (Merim laughs) >> So, I think great approach. Kudos to you and certainly wish you both success and to your fourth and fifth appearances on the Cube. (Merim and Chris laugh) Um, we have slots tomorrow if you're arou- available. So, maybe we'll fill it up >> There you go. >> and bring it back again. >> Awesome. >> Guys, thanks for being here. >> Sure. >> It was very nice. >> Appreciate the time. >> All right. >> That's great. >> I've been talking, uh, about Accenture. This is the, of course, executive summit being sponsored by Accenture here at AWS reInvent 22. I'm John Walls. You're watching the Cube, the leader in tech coverage.

(Music) >> Welcome to the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got two Cube alum here with me, please welcome Merim Becirovic, Managing Director of Global IT Enterprise Architecture at Accenture and Chris Wegmann, Accenture, AWS Business Group technology and practices, Senior Managing Director, gentlemen, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Great to be here. >> It is nice to be back in a way right here we are at this hybrid event, but we want to talk about what Accenture is doing with its, with AWS to serving its clients. And then we're going to get into your own internal use case, drinking your own champagne. Chris go ahead and start with you, talk to us about what Accenture is doing with AWS to serve its clients. >> Yeah, Lisa, it's exciting, as you said to be back in this hybrid event and you know, for me, this will be my 10th re-invent and for Accenture we're in year 14 of our partnership with AWS and actually year six of our partnership called Accenture AWS business group. And you know, the focus over the last year has been helping our clients come out of the pandemic stronger than, than where they started. Right? And a lot of that has been around focusing our customers, getting past cloud migration, past cloud modernization, and getting further into what we now call the cloud continuum, starting to truly leverage all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to, to truly speed their transformation. You know, we work with a lot of our customers who are needing to transform even faster today than they were before the pandemic. And, you know, we're focused on helping those customers do that with AWS services. >> So Merim, let's bring you into the conversation. Now Accenture's internal IT organization has been leveraging AWS and public cloud for a while. Talk to me about that you completed the journey a couple of years ago, 95% in the cloud. Talk to me about what you're doing there. >> Sure. Lisa, so our, our journey into the public cloud is complete. As you said, we put a bow on that project a couple of years ago. We started in 2015 and we went all in on public cloud. So we, the number 95%, 95% represents a true measure of everything it takes to run Accenture. Everything addressable is in the public cloud today. So the 95% just represents a small component of things that have to live outside of the cloud. But other than that, our journey to the cloud is complete, and we are very happy being in the cloud because it has opened tremendous doors for us as a business. I'm sure we'll talk about here as we go, but it's fundamentally a different place we live in today and where we were before we were in the cloud. >> Merim, you said something really powerful there a second ago. The Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. I don't think I'd ever heard anybody say that. Talk to me about the impact, especially during the last 18 months that that cloud journey is delivered. >> I mean, one of the things I am extremely proud of for our collective global teams around the world, when the, obviously the, you know, when COVID hit and the pandemic engulf the world, the only difference for us was that people just did not come into an office to work. Our capabilities in the cloud, our capabilities of having everything in the cloud really made it that much easier for our people to go to work. We weren't fighting over resources around infrastructure. People could just work from home directly. So I'm extremely proud of the collective global team that made all of that happen as part of that execution of all those things. So it was really a very proud moment, I would say for all of us running IT. >> As well, it should be. Chris, talk about that from your perspective of facilitating that massive pivot 18, 19 months ago, and what your group was responsible for doing to enable this cloud journey to be complete. >> Yeah. I always laughed at, you know, Merim and our internal CIO organizations, we call it was our first customer, right. You know, way back when I started working in this partnership, you know, we were already starting to leverage AWS, S3 and EC2, and that insight Accenture, and we took a lot of those best practices and started helping, our clients leverages best practices. So, you know, from an Accenture, we always kind of harvest from internally what we're doing, but, you know, over the last several years, we really are our focused with the CIO organization, Merim's organization has been, you know, expanding the usage of non, you know, I, as I call Maya services, right? So past EC2, you know, past S3. Obviously there's always storage. There's always compute, but you know, truly doing and building serverless applications, truly using, you know, services, fully managed services. So, you know, the CIO organization doesn't have to spend their time doing that. And, for our customers, that's while it's, they're still early on in a lot of their journeys, that's a novel idea is a truly try to sunset IS services or EC2 and things like that, you know, and whether that's, you know, fix some containerization or things like that, I think the other big part is, is the maturing security footprint, right? Obviously, as you use one or more of these AWS services, your security posture, your presence, how you think about security. We created an asset called secure cloud foundation, leveraging many of the AWS services in the security space that have come out like guard duty and others really to help make that security foundation stronger, make it easier for our customers, including CIO to leverage those services and truly enable that move further up the cloud or further down the continuum as we call it. >> Merim, I want to get your thoughts on security from in a, because we have seen such a dramatic change in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We've seen a huge spike in ransomware. It's getting much more personal. It's now a household word. We've got the executive order. We had this rapid pivot to and hundreds of thousands of Accenture employees working from home. Talk to me about, you feel very confident in the cloud during that you didn't word where's your competence from a security perspective. >> As you said, security is the fastest growth in our business. Collectively, like you said, the bad guys don't sleep. We don't sleep either when it comes to security. One of the things that we're constantly thinking about is how do we turn on a lot of our capabilities as an example. So even, I would say at an enterprise level, it's different when you're running a big multinational corporation, 650,000 people like we do. We can't just turn everything on and hope for the best. We are very scripted in terms of how we think about those services, how we think about the processes, how we work with our CSO organization, so that we're very meticulous and very thorough in terms of what services we turn on, how we turn them on, when we turn them on? How long we make them available, because this is, this is the new world, right? We have extended our corporate structure out into the cloud. That means we have to think of different ways for how we want to consume those capabilities and services. So like Chris said, you know, the, the journey to the cloud for us is complete. A lot of it was I, as I would tell you, a lot of it was lift and shift for less. And we can talk about that if we get time, but it was more about getting into the cloud and taking advantage of the cloud where we are today, because now that we're there, we get to take advantage of all those capabilities that are there. And I would say the best part of being with on, in, in the cloud is also having the, the providers like AWS they are with us, helping us with that security posture. So it's not just us doing this by ourselves. >> So Chris, I want to talk about that Merim just said, this was mostly lift and shift. Talk to us about that. Cause when we talk to organizations in every industry, the cloud transition, the cloud journey is extremely challenging. It's complex. How did you do this? How did you facilitate this and in a relatively short time period, Chris? >> Yeah. And, and you're right. Everyone has conversations I have with my clients. You know, there's a huge debate whether to lift and shift or modernize or build new build cloud native, right? So, you know, in Accenture's situation, you know, very early on, it was identified that we can, we can do a large savings by doing a lift and shift migration, right. We were not a big data center owner, right. That wasn't, we're not a big capital intense organization. So for us, that, that journey we had, you know, colos and that stuff coming up for renewal. And we knew that we could, you know, get some early savings there and really, you know, reduce our footprint and take that investment and then invest it into, you know, true modernization. So Merim and his organization worked very closely to build the factory, to do the migrations, get that done in a very short amount of time and then turn their attention on truly refactoring rebuilding the applications. I'm super proud of the number of applications that we've rebuilt. I'm super proud of the number of applications that, that now are cloud native. And we live in these applications every day. You know, they they're everything from our performance to how we do our payroll and do our time charging and things like that. But which, you know, it was a big reason why, you know, we can access our systems remotely and at home versus going into different systems to get to that stuff. So, you know, it was very much heavily lift and shift early, then really focusing on modernization. And as Merim said, getting, you know, now it's about living there and continuing, continuing to modernize, continuing to accelerate what we're doing in the cloud. >> Yeah. Lisa, its little bit like, so our journey lift and shift was a core component of it. But the minute we decided to go to the cloud, one of the things, the first things we did, as I said, no more vans. So any new capability that we were going to build, we were going to build a cloud native micro-services based, and that's been our standard for the last 3 or 4 years ago. So any new capability that comes along today that we must do custom, we build a cloud native microservices because one of the other things that I've got on my plate is I'm trying to reduce our overall technical debt. So all of these IS platforms, I still have to maintain them, patch them, support them, upgrade them. And I would rather be much more efficient at doing those things as, as I can and reinvest money into refactoring and modernizing the rest of the application, plead through containers through microservices, et cetera, which then gives me the agility right back to actually go even faster, to enable more services for the business. >> Speed is something that we've seen become even more critical in the last 18, 19 months where we needed to everybody pivot businesses multiple times over and over. But part of the challenge there Merim, I want to get your thoughts on this is they are something cultural shift. Talk to me about, you've been at Accenture for a long time. Talk to me about the cultural shift needed to facilitate this massive transformation to cloud and how Chris's team was a facilitator of that. >> So, you know, one of the things for us, I have probably in the last five years spoken to a thousand of our clients, around our cloud journey and this culture conversation always comes up and I will say, you know, the biggest thing for us was interesting. We had those same fears. We had some same in when we first talked about going to the cloud, you know, six years ago, it was very, not everything was there, that's there today. So the teams were extremely nervous and they were confident that we could never be as, as good in the cloud as we were on, on site. Yet here we are six years later and we're constantly finding ways to add value and take, bring value back. And though, it's so same teams. And one of the things is just, we gave them the challenge to say, Hey, this is the future. We're telling our clients, this is where we're going. We have an opportunity here to do something different and they took it and the team really took it on. And they said, okay, let's do it. And they act, and we looked at how we run into cloud the many different ways, whether we're using reserved instances, whether we're using containers, whether we're using, you know, different computer capabilities, we went through all of it and we're running such a highly efficient machine right now that it's like, we're still able to continue to eat out savings even five years after the program. Even two years after the program is complete, we're still able to get savings. >> That's outstanding. That's ROI that every business and every industry hopes to be able to achieve from this. I want to switch gears a little bit now because this is actually pretty cool. Accenture is really focused also on sustainability. You guys have signed onto the Amazon climate pledge, which if you don't know what the Amazon climate pledge, and this is back in 2019, Amazon, co-founded this a commitment to be net zero carbon across businesses by 2040, which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris agreement. You're in talk to us about that. And from Accenture's perspective, why it was important to sign on to that. >> So on a, on a personal level, I love obviously sustainability as a whole, that I think about the world park for my children that are growing up. So it's very important to me on a personal level as well. But I would say at a company level, what I love about the cloud is I am there right there with them as they make investments. All of our enterprise capabilities are there. We are able to very quickly shift and use those capabilities. So as Amazon, for example, in this scenario creates new capabilities, new compute offerings, new, new storage offerings, whatever it may be. They're doing it with a sustainability lens and me by being in the cloud already, I can then turn to start using those things too. So as much as I can, on that perspective, I'm in a great place with, as Amazon puts these sustainability capabilities out there, I'm right there consuming and making them more efficient. And then the other one is obviously as much of our workloads, as we can get to a cloud native perspective, microservices perspective, then we keep reducing that compute consumption and everything else that goes along with it. And lastly, I would say, you know, the, the other thing is we're very aggressive in managing all of our systems in terms of uptime. So for example, in a data center, most, most organizations don't think about turning off their development environments and everything else. But for us, we're very rigid in this process. And we have a, we have a target of all of our development environments being down 55% of the time. And primarily that's also a sustainability play in addition to a financial savings plan. >> Awesome. Great stuff, Chris, last question for you, as we wrap up here, what are some of the things that you were excited about that's coming in cloud in the next few years? Obviously here we are at, re-invent going to be hearing a lot of news, a lot of announcements about cloud in the coming days. What excites you most, Chris? >> Yeah. You know, obviously the machine learning and AI stuff is, is always the most exciting things right now in cloud. And, you know, we've put a lot of those to use here inside of Accenture as well. And, and our, you know, in our synopsis platform, which we use with our customers to run in a more intelligent operations, we use that internally as well. But you know, one of the things that excites me the most is the continued innovation at the core. Right. And you know, whether that be, you know, chip sets, you know, Merim talked a little bit about, you know, improvement and performance improvement and power consumption, you know, grabbing time, those types of stuff that, that excites me every year, I look forward to seeing what, what they come out with and, and then how we're going to put that to use. >> Well, I look forward to talking to you guys next year, you've done such a tremendous job. You should be proud of the massive transformation that you've done. I imagine this is, would be a great case study. If it's not already written up, it should be. It's really impressive. Merim and Chris, thank you for joining me at the summit. Talking to me about what's going on with Accenture and AWS and some of the things that you are looking forward to, we appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> You're welcome for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. This is the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. (Music)

(Music) >> Welcome to the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got two cube alum here with me, please welcome Merim Bertovic, managing director of global IT enterprise architecture at Accenture and Chris Wegmann, Accenture, AWS business group technology and practices, senior managing director, gentlemen, welcome back to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be back. >> Thank you, Lisa. Great to be here. >> It is nice to be back in a way right here we are at this hybrid event, but we want to talk about what Accenture is doing with its, with AWS to serving its clients. And then we're going to get into your own internal use case, drinking your own champagne. Chris go ahead and start with you, talk to us about what Accenture is doing with AWS to serve its clients. >> Yeah, Lisa, it's exciting, as you said to be back in this hybrid event and you know, for me, this will be my 10th re-invent and for Accenture we're in year 14 of our partnership with AWS and actually year six of our partnership called Accenture AWS business group. And you know, the focus over the last year has been helping our clients come out of the pandemic stronger than, than where they started. Right? And a lot of that has been around focusing our customers, getting past cloud migration, past cloud modernization, and getting further into what we now call the cloud continuum, starting to truly leverage all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to, to truly speed their transformation. You know, we work with a lot of our customers who are needing to transform even faster today than they were before the pandemic. And, you know, we're focused on helping those customers do that with AWS services. >> So Merim, let's bring you into the conversation. Now Accenture's internal IT organization has been leveraging AWS and public cloud for a while. Talk to me about that you completed the journey a couple of years ago, 95% in the cloud. Talk to me about what you're doing there. >> Sure. Lisa, so our, our journey into the public cloud is complete. As you said, we put a bow on that project a couple of years ago. We started in 2015 and we went all in on public cloud. So we, the number 95%, 95% represents a true measure of everything it takes to run Accenture. Everything addressable is in the public cloud today. So the 95% just represents a small component of things that have to live outside of the cloud. But other than that, our journey to the cloud is complete, and we are very happy being in the cloud because it has opened tremendous doors for us as a business. I'm sure we'll talk about here as we go, but it's fundamentally a different place we live in today and where we were before we were in the cloud. >> Merim, you said something really powerful there a second ago. The Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. I don't think I'd ever heard anybody say that. Talk to me about the impact, especially during the last 18 months that that cloud journey is delivered. >> I mean, one of the things I am extremely proud of for our collective global teams around the world, when the, obviously the, you know, when COVID hit and the pandemic engulf the world, the only difference for us was that people just did not come into an office to work. Our capabilities in the cloud, our capabilities of having everything in the cloud really made it that much easier for our people to go to work. We weren't fighting over resources around infrastructure. People could just work from home directly. So I'm extremely proud of the collective global team that made all of that happen as part of that execution of all those things. So it was really a very proud moment, I would say for all of us running IT. >> As well, it should be. Chris, talk about that from your perspective of facilitating that massive pivot 18, 19 months ago, and what your group was responsible for doing to enable this cloud journey to be complete. >> Yeah. I always laughed at, you know, Merim and our internal CIO organizations, we call it was our first customer, right. You know, way back when I started working in this partnership, you know, we were already starting to leverage AWS, S3 and EC2, and that insight Accenture, and we took a lot of those best practices and started helping, our clients leverages best practices. So, you know, from an Accenture, we always kind of harvest from internally what we're doing, but, you know, over the last several years, we really are our focused with the CIO organization, Merim's organization has been, you know, expanding the usage of non, you know, I, as I call Maya services, right? So past EC2, you know, past S3. Obviously there's always storage. There's always compute, but you know, truly doing and building serverless applications, truly using, you know, services, fully managed services. So, you know, the CIO organization doesn't have to spend their time doing that. And, for our customers, that's while it's, they're still early on in a lot of their journeys, that's a novel idea is a truly try to sunset IS services or EC2 and things like that, you know, and whether that's, you know, fix some containerization or things like that, I think the other big part is, is the maturing security footprint, right? Obviously, as you use one or more of these AWS services, your security posture, your presence, how you think about security. We created an asset called secure cloud foundation, leveraging many of the AWS services in the security space that have come out like guard duty and others really to help make that security foundation stronger, make it easier for our customers, including CIO to leverage those services and truly enable that move further up the cloud or further down the continuum as we call it. >> Merim, I want to get your thoughts on security from in a, because we have seen such a dramatic change in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We've seen a huge spike in ransomware. It's getting much more personal. It's now a household word. We've got the executive order. We had this rapid pivot to and hundreds of thousands of Accenture employees working from home. Talk to me about, you feel very confident in the cloud during that you didn't word where's your competence from a security perspective. >> As you said, security is the fastest growth in our business. Collectively, like you said, the bad guys don't sleep. We don't sleep either when it comes to security. One of the things that we're constantly thinking about is how do we turn on a lot of our capabilities as an example. So even, I would say at an enterprise level, it's different when you're running a big multinational corporation, 650,000 people like we do. We can't just turn everything on and hope for the best. We are very scripted in terms of how we think about those services, how we think about the processes, how we work with our CSO organization, so that we're very meticulous and very thorough in terms of what services we turn on, how we turn them on, when we turn them on? How long we make them available, because this is, this is the new world, right? We have extended our corporate structure out into the cloud. That means we have to think of different ways for how we want to consume those capabilities and services. So like Chris said, you know, the, the journey to the cloud for us is complete. A lot of it was I, as I would tell you, a lot of it was lift and shift for less. And we can talk about that if we get time, but it was more about getting into the cloud and taking advantage of the cloud where we are today, because now that we're there, we get to take advantage of all those capabilities that are there. And I would say the best part of being with on, in, in the cloud is also having the, the providers like AWS they are with us, helping us with that security posture. So it's not just us doing this by ourselves. >> So Chris, I want to talk about that Merim just said, this was mostly lift and shift. Talk to us about that. Cause when we talk to organizations in every industry, the cloud transition, the cloud journey is extremely challenging. It's complex. How did you do this? How did you facilitate this and in a relatively short time period, Chris? >> Yeah. And, and you're right. Everyone has conversations I have with my clients. You know, there's a huge debate whether to lift and shift or modernize or build new build cloud native, right? So, you know, in Accenture's situation, you know, very early on, it was identified that we can, we can do a large savings by doing a lift and shift migration, right. We were not a big data center owner, right. That wasn't, we're not a big capital intense organization. So for us, that, that journey we had, you know, colos and that stuff coming up for renewal. And we knew that we could, you know, get some early savings there and really, you know, reduce our footprint and take that investment and then invest it into, you know, true modernization. So Merim and his organization worked very closely to build the factory, to do the migrations, get that done in a very short amount of time and then turn their attention on truly refactoring rebuilding the applications. I'm super proud of the number of applications that we've rebuilt. I'm super proud of the number of applications that, that now are cloud native. And we live in these applications every day. You know, they they're everything from our performance to how we do our payroll and do our time charging and things like that. But which, you know, it was a big reason why, you know, we can access our systems remotely and at home versus going into different systems to get to that stuff. So, you know, it was very much heavily lift and shift early, then really focusing on modernization. And as Miriam said, getting, you know, now it's about living there and continuing, continuing to modernize, continuing to accelerate what we're doing in the cloud. >> Yeah. Lisa, its little bit like, so our journey lift and shift was a core component of it. But the minute we decided to go to the cloud, one of the things, the first things we did, as I said, no more vans. So any new capability that we were going to build, we were going to build a cloud native micro-services based, and that's been our standard for the last 3 or 4 years ago. So any new capability that comes along today that we must do custom, we build a cloud native microservices because one of the other things that I've got on my plate is I'm trying to reduce our overall technical debt. So all of these IS platforms, I still have to maintain them, patch them, support them, upgrade them. And I would rather be much more efficient at doing those things as, as I can and reinvest money into refactoring and modernizing the rest of the application, plead through containers through microservices, et cetera, which then gives me the agility right back to actually go even faster, to enable more services for the business. >> Speed is something that we've seen become even more critical in the last 18, 19 months where we needed to everybody pivot businesses multiple times over and over. But part of the challenge there Merim, I want to get your thoughts on this is they are something cultural shift. Talk to me about, you've been at Accenture for a long time. Talk to me about the cultural shift needed to facilitate this massive transformation to cloud and how Chris's team was a facilitator of that. >> So, you know, one of the things for us, I have probably in the last five years spoken to a thousand of our clients, around our cloud journey and this culture conversation always comes up and I will say, you know, the biggest thing for us was interesting. We had those same fears. We had some same in when we first talked about going to the cloud, you know, six years ago, it was very, not everything was there, that's there today. So the teams were extremely nervous and they were confident that we could never be as, as good in the cloud as we were on, on site. Yet here we are six years later and we're constantly finding ways to add value and take, bring value back. And though, it's so same teams. And one of the things is just, we gave them the challenge to say, Hey, this is the future. We're telling our clients, this is where we're going. We have an opportunity here to do something different and they took it and the team really took it on. And they said, okay, let's do it. And they act, and we looked at how we run into cloud the many different ways, whether we're using reserved instances, whether we're using containers, whether we're using, you know, different computer capabilities, we went through all of it and we're running such a highly efficient machine right now that it's like, we're still able to continue to eat out savings even five years after the program. Even two years after the program is complete, we're still able to get savings. >> That's outstanding. That's ROI that every business and every industry hopes to be able to achieve from this. I want to switch gears a little bit now because this is actually pretty cool. Accenture is really focused also on sustainability. You guys have signed onto the Amazon climate pledge, which if you don't know what the Amazon climate pledge, and this is back in 2019, Amazon, co-founded this a commitment to be net zero carbon across businesses by 2040, which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris agreement. You're in talk to us about that. And from Accenture's perspective, why it was important to sign on to that. >> So on a, on a personal level, I love obviously sustainability as a whole, that I think about the world park for my children that are growing up. So it's very important to me on a personal level as well. But I would say at a company level, what I love about the cloud is I am there right there with them as they make investments. All of our enterprise capabilities are there. We are able to very quickly shift and use those capabilities. So as Amazon, for example, in this scenario creates new capabilities, new compute offerings, new, new storage offerings, whatever it may be. They're doing it with a sustainability lens and me by being in the cloud already, I can then turn to start using those things too. So as much as I can, on that perspective, I'm in a great place with, as Amazon puts these sustainability capabilities out there, I'm right there consuming and making them more efficient. And then the other one is obviously as much of our workloads, as we can get to a cloud native perspective, microservices perspective, then we keep reducing that compute consumption and everything else that goes along with it. And lastly, I would say, you know, the, the other thing is we're very aggressive in managing all of our systems in terms of uptime. So for example, in a data center, most, most organizations don't think about turning off their development environments and everything else. But for us, we're very rigid in this process. And we have a, we have a target of all of our development environments being down 55% of the time. And primarily that's also a sustainability play in addition to a financial savings plan. >> Awesome. Great stuff, Chris, last question for you, as we wrap up here, what are some of the things that you were excited about that's coming in cloud in the next few years? Obviously here we are at, re-invent going to be hearing a lot of news, a lot of announcements about cloud in the coming days. What excites you most, Chris? >> Yeah. You know, obviously the machine learning and AI stuff is, is always the most exciting things right now in cloud. And, you know, we've put a lot of those to use here inside of Accenture as well. And, and our, you know, in our synopsis platform, which we use with our customers to run in a more intelligent operations, we use that internally as well. But you know, one of the things that excites me the most is the continued innovation at the core. Right. And you know, whether that be, you know, chip sets, you know, Merim talked a little bit about, you know, improvement and performance improvement and power consumption, you know, grabbing time, those types of stuff that, that excites me every year, I look forward to seeing what, what they come out with and, and then how we're going to put that to use. >> Well, I look forward to talking to you guys next year, you've done such a tremendous job. You should be proud of the massive transformation that you've done. I imagine this is, would be a great case study. If it's not already written up, it should be. It's really impressive. Merim and Chris, thank you for joining me at the summit. Talking to me about what's going on with Accenture and AWS and some of the things that you are looking forward to, we appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> You're welcome for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. This is the AWS executive summit presented by Accenture at AWS reinvent 2021. (Music)

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering AWS executive. Something brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of the ex Center Executive Summit here at AWS reinvent I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Marum Best Aerobic. He is the managing director Global Cloud and Infrastructure Attic Center. Thank you so much for coming on the show again. We met last year. So you're a Cuba Lem. >>Yes, I am. >>So we're talking today about moving a $43 billion company to the Cloud X Century. This is X Center as its own as its own use cases. But Accenture has been engaged in a major move to the public Cloud moving a company of the size and heft of ex center. Must have been intimidating. How did you even sort of wrap your brain around the challenges? Walk? Walk us through this. >>So you know, the tough part about working at Accenture is you have 480,000 people that work for Accenture or at least 1/2 a 1,000,000 let's say, and those half a 1,000,000 people all think they can do the job better and differently than you do, right. So the first challenge is our own our own organization. But I would tell you I say that, you know, just in a joking way. They're very supportive. It was. We're telling our clients the cloud is the future. So when we told our organization we're going to the cloud, it was massive support. It was what's taking so long? Let's do this. And now, granted, this was over a little over four years ago when we started the journey. So the cloud providers in the world was very different. So today we run, you know, tens of thousands of workloads on Amazon. We run all kinds of the capability to do cloud native. We do platform service's. We consume so much cloud service that, in my opinion, we're never going back to a data center. Never. >>So what Ex center is really well known as a big advocate of the public cloud? First of all, why? Why the public club? Well, the public cloud is >>the future. I really think when you think about how especially somebody like Amazon, if you listen to Andy Jassy this morning, right, it's they are innovating at a scale and a pace that that's just truly exceptional, and it gives us opportunity to take those things and implement them to change the way we run our business. So the weak and implement a lot of these capabilities toe help enable our business and then through that, by enabling our business be a credential for not only ourselves but to our clients to say, Hey, we do this to ourselves and way can help you do it as well. >>We're walking the walk >>or totally walking the walk and we push very hard on that angle because for us, it's very important for me personally to say, you know, I started my career client service. So I know serving our clients is one of the key things for us in our business. So I want to be able to solve these things, these air hard things itself so we can solve them faster for our clients ourselves. It makes it easier for them on their journey, >>and you also understand the pain points and the challenges A CZ you said your employees, your workforce was very supportive of it, but that's not always the case. >>No, it's not. It's not in But I'll tell you, our own teams in the early days they struggled with this. To be honest, right? It was a It was a change because we were heavily, heavily virtualized. We were great at running our infrastructure. We were doing all those things. Those are the things you did back then. So then when we said the team's Hey, we're going to the cloud They said, Well, we're not so sure. Do we really think we're going to save money? And in the early days we said We're doing this because this is the right thing to do But in the end, we actually did save a lot of money going to the cloud because we learn toe work differently and I think that's one of the key messages I would convey back is you are not going to work in the cloud the same way you work in a data center. You are going to shut things off. When you don't use them, you're going to have an opportunity to optimize them. You will have an opportunity to spend new capabilities up sooner, used them for what you need and faster and then you know things you can't do in a data center. You can't spend up. You can't use Dynamo. You can't use lambda. You can't. You can't use these. Micro service is in the data center, but in a cloud you can. So now you leave yourself in a situation where you have so much capability you can turn on to enable In enterprise is just mind boggling and exciting and exciting. >>So the time table t make this transformation was ambitious, to say the least. How aggressive did you need to beating? This is a journey. You said you started a little over four years ago. >>Yeah, it took the entire program for us. Took us about three years. But the real aggressive part of the journey was we said, you know, we can't We're dabbling a little bit in it. So let's just say our starting point was around 9%. You know, one of the big things we said is, how do we get the 50% in one year? And it was like, Okay, how do we do that? So we put a program in place and we got the team organized, and we did, you know, kind of like what Andy Jesse was talking about today at the keynote. We set some top down goals. We said to the teams were going to do this. This is the future. We're not kidding. We're going to do it. We have full support and we work with the business. And we explain what it was what was going to be. And you know what? One of the first things we took the public cloud, like three months into this program, was accenture dot com. I mean, we literally three months into the program, took our market facing capability of what our clients look at. People look at to think about us. They moved into the public cloud. >>We've described as a very disciplined approach and also one that was led from the top brass. So how talk a little bit about how the transformation started? >>Yes. So the transformation was really I will tell you, in the early days it was a function of we're going to start to take thes workloads and move them to the cloud. How do you do that? We made a decision to say, Let's take this. Let's take it a data center approach perspective. We're going to shut down an actual data center one at a time. And that's how we do migrations now. A lot of clients think about it from a different perspective. From our point of view, it made the most sense of Shut down the data center and get out of that location because then you're not maintaining all these things twice the fastest you can do it. The better way to do it is to do that. So that's kind of how we approach that. We said all the workloads in the data center go now. We took on our North American workloads first because we didn't make it easy for ourselves, right, because that's where all of our production work clothes where it wasn't just the test environments. It wasn't just a, you know, development environment. It was the real deal, everything it takes to run and support Accenture And we said we're gonna move those first. And so from a transformation perspective, that was our key. And then the other one is we had this. We had this notion of cloud first and cloud only. So any new capability also, we said here on out the minute we started the program. We said no more data center. We are anything you need now is going to be provisioned in the cloud. >>And what about digitally native applications? Yes. So when you think >>about like, um, a clown native capability. So now you start to get into another. You're into cloud, You go. Oh, man, what else can I do? And then So our previous CEO announced to the world extension was no wonder going to do performance reviews. And we're like, Okay, this is great. What we gonna >>do >>about this? And we need it implemented in three or four months. So when our HR business team came to work with us, one of the things we said is, Hey, this >>is the >>time because at that point we were about six or seven months into the program of Cloud. We said, Well, you can't spend up of'em. You're gonna go into the cloud. So we built a capability to does performance achievement for 405 100,000 people globally that runs it with Lambda and Dynamo. And it's been there for a little over now, four years, believe it or not. >>Amazing. So we talk about other challenges that you face because I mean, the way you're describing it, It sounds as though it people were supportive and you had a lot of winds along the way. But of course, there there were. I'm sure there were some dark days to weigh, had some >>growing pains. I think you know, when you think about it a lot of times because a lot of work loads we did pick up. We did a lot of lifting shift. Um, and I hate that term because what we learned as we went is we could actually lift, configure and run for less. So I don't know if there's an industry term for I haven't coined one yet. If somebody here is one that they want to share with us, I'd love to hear it. But lift and shift itself is a bad. It's a misnomer because that's not how you do this right. You have to touch a little bit of something. But what happened is in the early days we weren't quite sure how to size these environments, so when we would pick them up and we would say, Well, let's let's let's kind of give it some more capability. Let's let's throw some more CPU at it. But what we learned very quickly was that costs a lot of money. And we started applying some tools that would love, help us see what the utilization needed to be. And then we learned very quickly that Oh, you know what this environment that used to exist in the data center? Well, that's >>kind of >>on a couple of generations ago. CPU a couple of generations ago, memory a couple of generations ago storage because all the stuff in the cloud is all newer, all new or CPU on your memory. So then very quickly it's not even a like for like it's a like for less. So we figured out very quickly that we can actually take a workload. Let's say they had eight CPU use and we can run in the cloud with two. And so, But it was. It was. It was growing pains through that process that we learned to say, How do we do it then? Frankly, I think a lot of times we talked about this with our clients who is how do you get the team along the way? Because it's it's and When we set the edict, the team realized they had to go do this stuff. But, you know, we thought we'd have a little bit of resistance. What we found instead was a team very eager to learn and very eager to be part of this program and part of this capability. Because they see it. They saw that it was this new stuff that we were doing. So a little bit of the early growing pains around who's gonna work on what? How do we How do we focus our training? You know, how do we get these teams to help us really drive some of this capability and as we started, enabled them or that helped us get momentum. And I think the other one is just when you start to get all these workloads and how do you actually manage this stuff? How do you manage this capability? And for us? You know, we spent a lot of time with our eccentric cloud platform friends because we needed a capability to said, How do I actually manage all this building? How do I discover all the capabilities that are out there? How do I track my compliance How do I make sure all these things are aligned to my security? Construct that in, You know, info SEC is asking us to drive. So we need to do all do all those things that we didn't have it perfect in the beginning and we learned along the way. >>So talk about some of the other benefits you've described cutting some costs. And you've also described this new mindset that so many of your employees have adopted a rials learning minds, a growth mindset, one of embracing innovation. What are some other of the benefits that you've seen? >>You know, the benefits that are to me today is just this art of the possible is just mind bogglingly so much more open to whatever you want to do. It's almost scary how much is out there. You actually have to kind of pull back a little bit and say, How do I apply some guardrails around us? And I think when I think about the other benefits are we have more capability now than ever to spin workloads up. I'll give an example, like on Amazon spot instances are one of the things that they offer. We spend up 700,000 spot instances a year to do work along the way. And it's unfathomable to even think about doing some of those things in the data center. So the flexibility that you get if you want to test the release sometimes some of these big systems you might have to bring in hardware to test that in the data center. But in the cloud I >>don't have >>to buy hardware. I could just spend up more excuse. So it's just the benefits of flexibility, the agility, the speed that not waiting on and also, I think, the other one that I think sometimes gets overlooked as Excuse me. Sometimes that gets overlooked as I don't have a capacity management team that's worried about the capacity in the data center. I don't have AH team managing the vendor. Providing the data center service is right. It's all these things. You start to turn off that you didn't know that you don't need in a cloud anymore because they're managing those things. So even even if you're some, I think some clients get lost and waiting too long to do this. But there's all these other costs around there that you're spending money on anyway, you may not realize is you think about this business case, so I think the benefits are just tremendously there. But you really have to look at it holistically. >>So this morning, on the main stage we heard Andy Jassy describes a dizzying number of new products and service is that eight of the U. S. Is coming out with How how are you thinking about those and integrating them into what you're doing at Accenture with this initiative? And what's the energy that you're taking away from? I mean, he's certainly a very dynamic leader. >>Well, the energy the energy is great at this event. Every single year, the amount of innovation that comes out, it's fantastic. I think one of the great things that came out today is this concept of we're gonna take the hyper visor. We're actually gonna move it into a chip set to help you give you more processing power on the computer. I think on the server is huge. That's a huge capability. Lets us think about how do we manage things differently? I think some of this, uh, you know, uh, capabilities run enterprise, search enterprise, search is very hard, very difficult, right? This ml capability that, you know, it's very appealing. What am I gonna do with that? How do I help my organization think about search differently? That's very appealing. And I think the other one that's you know, there are a lot of other ones around the ML and the Data Lake stuff and everything else, but I think some of these things that get overlooked sometimes the pure review with ML was awesome, right? It's like, How do I help? How do I help them? Has the machine helped me do a code peer review with my people? So those were just, you know, real quick things that come to mind. But it's just great to see all this innovation, and it becomes available so quickly, right? So you've got you have an opportunity to get into these things very fast. >>So as you look back on this journey, this transformation, what are you most proud of? And what are you most excited about in the future? I'm most >>proud of the bold bets. Not only that, we all individually took, but the team's I'm so proud of our team in taking the journey onto trusting us, tow working and pushing and learning themselves to really take this on and it's it's it's just this magical. It's like it's a compound ing thing that just infested everybody else writes. Everybody's been excited about the cloud and how do we do it? How do we do this stuff? I think you know. And then from a future perspective, I'm really interested in MAWR in As the capabilities evolve and they get announced, I think the benefit we have is as we're there. It's easy for us to see some of these things. I think the container landscape is going to be huge. All the kubernetes stack and everything else that's that's out there. We need to think about. How does that help me continue to evolve? The service's I provide either more custom cost, effectively arm or efficiently back to the business and turn on more capability faster and try stuff faster and turn it off faster. And that's the great part of the cloud, right? You get the try stuff, you get to play >>with it, >>and if you don't like it, you turn it off. You don't have to wait three years for this equipment toe. Appreciate you move on with life. And that, to me, is exciting because there's just so much innovation that's coming. There's so much opportunity for us to really just jump out there and, uh, have fun. >>Excellent old Merrin. Best aerobic. Thank you so much for coming on. The cubic pleasure talking to you too. I'm Rebecca. Night. Stay tuned for more of the cubes. Coverage of the ex center Executive Summit coming up tomorrow. We'll see you here right now. Early.

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment, we have Merim Becirovic he is the Managing Director of Accenture's Global Cloud Initiative. Matt Lancaster, Associate Director of Technology, Architecture, Science, and Miha Kralj, Managing Director of Cloud Strategy at Accenture, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for returning, I should say, Miha, you're a veteran. We're talking today about event-driven architecture. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of it, I need a definition, so what is event-driven architecture? >> Sure, so event-driven architecture, I think the simplest way to think about it is when we're doing complex series of transactions it's actually breaking it down into its constituent pieces and treating all of the segments of a transaction as separate events that can be reacted to as they happen. So if you're shopping and you're putting something in the cart, that's an event. If you're going to the next page, that's another event, if you're checking out, that's another event, right? And as opposed to treating those all as one step follows the other, right, a lot of times there are sequences and things that can happen in between there. If there's a next best offer or a product marketing interstitial that needs to be put in those things can be reacted to and composed much more simply than actually writing all the logic to put them in a big sequence. >> So on a high level I would say it's an architectural style, right, it's a style of putting systems together, which is an evolution of the most common styles that we used so far, and we went through several evolutions, about every decade we get a new and better architectural style, so a reactive event-driven style is just the one that is currently shaping to be the one that is going to replace the older architectural style called microservices. >> So why would an organization implement this event-driven architecture what kind of business challenges would the organization be looking to solve? >> Well if you want I'll start there, I mean just think so, you have a world where today I believe we're in the slowest time we're ever going to be from a technology perspective. >> Which is mind boggling. >> And what we saw this morning, right gentlemen, the amount of innovation that everyone is doing including AWS is going to be mind-numbing, so the question is going to be, how can we and what tools can we use to help us adapt for those capabilities in the future? So I think that's really one of the things is, Matt'll say I think it's easier than ever now, it was harder before but it's getting easier as the providers and everyone else is making their services more readily available for consumption. >> I think in a lot of ways as an industry, we're almost forced to move to this paradigm, whether we like it or not because I think everyone understands that every company has now become a software company once again, whether they like it or not and that means major changes to the organization model, the way people deliver. We need to be much more product-focused, and teams need to own their product and things like that, right, which is becoming the common business model that successful companies are operating around. If the architecture is still a traditional command and control architecture, two years later they're going to be back to that old work style, and frankly the market is going to punish them out of existence. So we need something where all of these wonderful, complex components that we saw in the sessions today can be decomposed into one team doing one thing with one set of components and they don't necessarily need to be aware of what all the other teams are doing because they just need to react to one another's events when they're interested in them. >> So the system, business systems always grow to the largest possible extent of what is still manageable and controllable, and using traditional architectures on top of this modern technology that allows us now to make way more complex systems, we already having clients that we see that the governance control and transparency is at its limit. So if we want to go beyond that barrier of complexity and not fear that suddenly systems will become chaotic, we need a new architectural style and we see already those limits happening, and that's why we already have an answer, we have an answer that is after microservice architecture which is reactive event-driven. >> Would you say that moving to this kind of architecture is difficult? >> It's a great question and I think it's gotten a bit easier. There's definitely some magic to actually taking a step back and decomposing the business systems and saying this component or this piece of the transaction or this piece of the organization fundamentally does this, these business events are what they really need to focus on and then make the components, functions, and systems actually emit and perform the business logic of those events and do more demand-driven design, then get into picking and choosing which, whether it's serverless functions or micro-nano-service some Kubernetes, the components allow us to cleanly separate and stream out events and react to each other but if we don't do that initial stuff on the business side, then it becomes really difficult to know who gets value where. >> I think the art of the possible in this space is very much anything can happen, and I think about things like we run a lot of our Cloud footprint, we're already 93% of the public Cloud for Accenture's IT, and I think about how we consume those things, what can we optimize, how can we do things differently, even on the concept of running infrastructure, if I have better event-driven capabilities, I can react more efficiently, I can really make a consumable service more utility service than I've ever had before, so I think that's one of the draws for me. >> When you say difficult, here is if developers that are writing code today and they already went through a couple of waves of reinventing themselves, if they already know that they need to do that again, then it's not difficult. For the developers that feel that they arrived and they already can code for the Cloud and that's it it's a difficult reinvention when they realize that although yes, their existing knowledge of procedural programming of traditional way of coding systems in the Cloud, they need to throw lots of that knowledge away and relearn how the systems are properly composed so they use Cloud the way that Cloud was intended to be used. >> And just to add to that a little bit, there's a lot of folks that will take a very traditional imperative programming paradigm and try to jam it into things like AWS Lambda and Kinesis streaming and what they end up with the end is sort of a tortured circus freak of an architecture. It doesn't help anyone and ultimately people spend six months and then get super discouraged on doing this stuff when they could have taken a step back and done it right the first time which I think is why it's important to understand that's only a few code composable components, the more layers you put in, the more complexity you're adding, the more you horizontally grow the better off you are. And if you're streaming events, you have functions that react to those events, microservices that react to those events and then gateways that can actually stream those out to interfaces, that's all you need. We don't need to overcomplicate this like we have every other generation of architecture. >> I'm trying to picture that tortured circus freak of an architecture, it's ugh, in terms of Accenture's own experience in this area I know that your company is already leveraging event-driven architecture. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about your own experience? >> So let's start with our clients first. We serve a very broad spectrum of clients. And luckily not everybody is at the forefront and also not everybody is at the tail-end, right. We have lots of clients in the high tech industry in communications and media where the needs for the leading edge is very clear, and we are focusing particularly when it comes to that latest innovation, event-driven included, particularly on those industries. We kind of belong in the front part of there, and that's why Merim and his organization is extremely versed in those modern styles. >> I think just to add to that a little bit, since I play in a slightly different space than you most of the time, I work with a lot of banks, insurance companies, capital markets, and the adoption that I see in those industries of this stuff is massive. The problem with most banks is that they've tried to change core banking systems now two or three times, they're still sitting on mainframe stuff that they built in the 70's and 80's and most of what they with payments and with different financial services and stuff they can't actually add that stuff to the speed and convenience that their customers are determining and so there's a lot of fintech startups that are disrupting that market. And if they don't change those core systems and they don't become more event-driven and we don't decouple, decompose and then eventually rebuild we're going to find folks really fall behind in the marketplace, and I think they realize that. The real magic of this is that we can, it's not a big bang three year transformation anymore, right we can build the core and then realize value within the first six months and then continually iterate and evolve and hollow out those legacy systems and eventually turn them off which is very opposed to the old way of saying we're going to do this three to five year transformation, after five years, you probably maybe kind of will realize some technology value. And to Merim's point earlier, no CEO is going to go in front of his board or her board and pitch a five year transformation, that's a really good way to get fired. >> Yeah even in our own internal environments one of the things we always think about is what are we trying first, what are we failing fast at, 'cause that's one of the key things for us and all of these capabilities and the other thing, what's happening with this space, Cloud, microservices, event-driven architectures, everything is enabling this powerful change of making for the first time I would say in a long time the network engineer, the app architect, the technical architect, the infrastructure engineer, every one of them working together to start to think about this, all of these things are happening in my environment, these events are happening, what should I do differently? How does this help me automate my capabilities? How do I react to things differently? How do I make sure that I'm catching my infrastructure before it fails, my application before it fails, there's many many levers that you could use in this space, and we're frankly trying all of them because I think the goal to me that helps is I want an automated IT experience that has less people managing it but more people reacting to the events and we're creating the world where this event-driven architecture you could say eventually is going to evolve into all this AI stuff, we're going to be the managers of AI in the future. The AI's going to run our infrastructure and I think that's the most fun part part about this. >> I think two additional points to that, I think it was very well said, one of the things the really excites me about this space is that it becomes very understand... The technology piece, the software piece becomes very understandable to the folks who understand the business side and the marketing side, et cetera. If what you're doing is just sending out events which are a piece of business functionality or marketing functionality or whatever it becomes explicable in plain English, you're reacting to one another's simple business events, and then all of those composed together can create the same value chain that before had to take six months and only a math PhD could understand. (laughing) >> It's approachable to much broader businesspeople, not just to arcane, unique eyes. >> Yeah and to the AI point I think one of the most disappointing things to me in our industry is that most of the AI projects have boiled down to a shitty chat bot that nobody actually likes to interact with. >> I know and this is the part we're missing, right. >> Because they can't actually do anything, when you finally get to a person they have none of the same knowledge, so if we democratize that information, it all gets streamed out to all interfaces all at once, and they can say okay, if you didn't get your room in time the system will go ahead and rectify that and it creates a great customer service experience instead of an IVR in text, which nobody likes. >> And I like the point, I think you hit on the point that's very near and dear for me is, as IT practitioners we've dealt a long time with the siloed ownership of data, this democratization of data is a very powerful tool I think that helps gets enabled by some of this event-driven capability because so many times people feel that oh, I own the data, I can't share this with you or I need to understand what you're doing with it, expose your data, give your teams a chance, give them the events, let them react because you don't know what you're going to create coming from it. >> Set your data free, we heard that this morning from Andy Jassy. >> There's very relatable examples of this, right, I mean how many of us have gotten off a flight, the gate has changed, it shows that on your mobile app, you walk up to the gate agent, you're in an unfamiliar airport, where do I go? And they say oh your gate hasn't changed, it's not updated on my screen. You go to the board in the airport, oh it's not updated here either, right. Then you go to the original gate, they say what are you doing here, you have five minutes to get over to the new gate, right? And then you book it all the way over there, you look at the defibrillators on the wall, you're thinking I'm really glad those are here. You get to the gate and they haven't even started boarding yet and you finally get the late boarding announcement, right? It's three bad customer services experience in one, and if all that data goes to all those interfaces all at once you have none of those bad experiences. >> Well if event-driven architecture can solve that problem, I'm all for it. >> You're in? >> Merim, Matt and Miha thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. - Absolutely, pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (digital music)