(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of "AWS re:Invent 2021". I'm Dave Nicholson, and here at theCUBE, we're running one of the most important largest events in tech industry history with two live sets right here, live in Las Vegas, along with our two studios. And I'm delighted here in our studio to welcome Scott Warren US AWS practice, vice president for Capgemini. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Dave: How's the show been going for you so far? >> Very, very good so far. It's great to be back in person. >> So tell me about your role at Capgemini. What you focus on. You're responsible for the relationship with AWS? >> Absolutely. So managing the relationship with AWS and how we partner, and then probably more importantly, kind of how we go to market with the AWS offering for our customers. So kind of understanding what the customer demand is, how we can help accelerate and get them moving faster out to the cloud, and then building that up as well as kind of industry specific offers on how we can accelerate cloud adoption. >> So when you talk about acceleration often in an organization like yours, there is the tug of war between the spoke solution hearing and pre-packaged things that serve to be accelerators. How do you go about balancing those things and tell us about some of the accelerators that you've developed? >> Absolutely. I think it's always kind of going to be a hybrid between the bespoken out of the box solutions. The out of the box solutions are inevitably always going to take some sort of customization or something like that to make them applicable within a customer's environment. But we all know it's very time consuming and expensive to build something completely bespoke from the ground up. So the way we really address that is we've built something at Capgemini we called it the cloud boost library. It is an online get lab library of thousands of code templates, infrastructure as code snippets that solve deploying your infrastructure and provision your infrastructure on the cloud, microservice design for healthcare and financial services and manufacturing and automotive. >> So industry specific? >> Not just specific and cloud in general. And so we bring that to every cloud engagement we work on. It's our real motto around that is we should never be starting on zero, starting from ground zero and anything we push out to AWS and we can always borrow, steal, modify, and change part of that library specific to that customer demand and need, and really speed up the implementation and get them out to AWS faster. >> Can you kind of double click on that? Give us an example of an accelerator inaction. You don't have to necessarily, if you've got a customer name, fantastic, or you can keep it generic. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we work for a big financial services company that's doing kind of an online data dissemination system, so thousands of public API is to disseminate data out to their customers and partners and vendors and things like that. So we were able to use that library to kind of get the framework for every single one of those APIs. A template, a kind of base function for that, and then use that kind of repeatably across those thousands of API. So we never really started from zero and said, provided 70, 80% kind of efficiency gain on that project versus kind of building it from the ground up. >> So with a customer like that, how did the initial engagement start? Was this a preexisting Capgemini relationship? Was this AWS at the table strategizing bringing in Capgemini. How does that work with your relationships with customers? >> So this was an existing customer of ours that we'd been doing application management in their data center for years. And several years ago, they had a kind of a leadership change happened and a new CTO came in and he laid down the edict that they're now a cloud first organization. So of course all his direct reports and managers started asking, what does that really mean? And they came to us as a trusted partner. And so we started walking them through our framework and template of how we bring our customers from ground zero completely in the data center, completely to a cloud first organization. And at that same time, we also began engaging our counterparts at AWS because we want to make sure we're in lockstep with what they're doing at AWS and kind of one consistent message out to our customer and doing the things the way they want them to be done. We want to unlock the funding programs available from AWS to incentivize that customer, to move out to the cloud. And then really having that kind of three legged partnership with us, the customer and AWS, puts them on the right path for success and in faster adoption of the cloud. >> Capgemini didn't just roll out of college a couple of years ago. (laughs) >> Been around a while. Been around a while. >> So you have an interesting perspective because you just mentioned being involved in the management of a customer's environment and IT landscape that is outside the purview of cloud, at least at some stage of the game. How do you turn being a legacy provider of services into a superpower instead of a liability? >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> How do you do that? And the reason why I say that superpower is because you said cap earlier and I thought in America, but it's a serious question. Some would say, well, Capgemini legacy. No, no, no. What's your reply? >> Absolutely. So what we found is the most important thing about a move to the cloud is understanding the entire application portfolio and landscape and the best way to move into the cloud. Some applications that are very prime for lift and shift. We just want to get them out of the data center, into the cloud very quickly. Other ones that are very mission critical on customer facing very important for the future of an organization. Really need to be looked at with a more modern lens in the clouds. How do we modernize this, make it cost effective, and in a long-term asset, that's going to run in the cloud in a PaaS or SaaS based service offering rather than just IaaS. So all of the legacy work under the previous work we've done for our customers, we understand their application and in data center landscape better, they do in most scenarios. So having all of that data allows us to feed that into kind of some of our tooling around assessing applications and figuring out the best migration path or modernization path. So all of that legacy knowledge kind of puts us in the driver's seat for being the best partner to actually help them with that cloud modernization. >> So with your AWS responsibility as part of Capgemini, it's a bit like having a foot on the dock and a foot on the boat? >> Scott: Yep. >> In terms of an individual customer's requirements, obviously Capgemini can continue to manage what we would refer to as legacy infrastructure while helping to modernize and migrate to cloud. What about this sort of combination of the two that represents the future specifically, AWS is support of hybrid cloud technology. The idea of Outposts, is that something that you are involved with? >> Absolutely. We're seeing kind of Outpost adoption trend up recently, actually. So when we see in certain sectors where a lot of kind of work is being done on the edge, a great example is an agriculture company we work for that has field in soil and weather sensors all over the planet. So monitoring the moisture in the soil, the nitrogen levels, the wind air pressure and temperature and humidity. And oftentimes those fields are in very remote disconnected locations. So we're seeing things like Outpost and snowball edge and different services like that become more and more prevalent for those edge use cases where compute can actually be done on the field and decisions can be made by the farmers that are planters in the field like real time. And then when connectivity comes back around, they can actually beam that back to AWS if necessary. The other kind of scenario we see Outposts really being prevalent is in very sensitive data scenarios. So we have customers in federal government work or things like that. There's just some data due to regulatory compliance that cannot be on the public cloud node yet, yet being the key word there. So Outposts becomes really important in those scenarios where the vast majority of the data and the assets go out to AWS, but the very, very sensitive data due to regulatory reasons, we keep in the Outpost can still kind of harness the power of AWS on that. >> You know, that brings up another interesting subject, the difference between where technology actually exists today and where people exist culturally today in terms of their acceptance and adoption of technology. There are absolutely cases where data residency, data governance requires that it be onsite. >> Scott: Absolutely. >> Then again, there are a lot of cases where people are just concerned about not having their arms around the data. So the perception that it isn't as safe in the cloud, as it is in the customer's data center is often a misguided, >> Scott: Very much so. >> Perception. So that's obviously an inhibiting factor to cloud adoption in some way. What are some of the other things that you see that are headwinds? Because it's been talked about widely here 80% or more of IT spend is still what we would think of as on-premises. >> Scott: Data center. Yeah. >> Not cloud. Those lines are being blurred with things like Outpost. I contend that in five years, when we talk about cloud, that's going to be sort of an irrelevant term. >> Yeah. >> It's really like, well, because it doesn't matter where it is. It's all virtualized. >> Compute and storage somewhere. Yeah. >> The headwinds that you're seeing. And again, they can be irrational headwinds or they can be technical bottlenecks. >> Yeah. I think the biggest one is business understanding what the cloud is and them adopting it. I've had a couple meetings that were a new thing for me this week, where I met with the chief marketing officer for one of our customers. So we're meeting with CTO, CIO, VPs, directors in the IT space, but this marketing officer wanted to meet with us. And she was kind of very cloud knowledgeable. She understood IaaS, SaaS, PaaS and the costing models of cloud consumption and some of the services. In her organization is kind of already all in on AWS. And she had seen this happen, this transformation happened on the IT side. And she wanted to know how can I, as the head of my marketing department start to harness the power of the public cloud to drive business outcomes within my area. And that was a really interesting conversation for me and kind of got me thinking that I think the business is going to start understanding, and that the lines between IT and business are going to begin to get blurred a little bit with the power of AWS and other hyperscalers and all the capability that's available to our customers once they get moved out there. >> In today's keynote, Swami talked a lot about data and the data-driven companies, or rather companies that are not data-driven. >> Yep. >> Are going to be left behind. And I thought it was interesting in the survey. He mentioned 9% of companies reported not looking at data at all for their decision-making process. We need a list of those companies so we can short their stocks. (laughs) And we can help them out. (laughs) Or you can help out, or you can help them out. Exactly. I'll refer a half to you, and I'll short the rest. How's that feel? Is that a deal? So within your world of things you do with AWS, with Capgemini on behalf of the customers, what are some of the tip of the spear things that are the most exciting from a buzz perspective and what are sort of the next gen things that you're thinking of? It could be something you literally just heard about announced over the last couple of days. What does the future hold? >> Absolutely. We kind of look at that is what we classify our intelligent industry offering. And so it's really industry specific offers and services that are going to kind of change how specific industries do business. A really good example is we do a lot with the automotive industry. We started working with the OEMs that are kind of producing electric vehicles and autonomous driving vehicles. And we've actually built a framework that lives on top of AWS called connected mobility solutions. So connecting all of the driverless functions of a car back to the mothership or the cloud, the cloud instance. And I think things like that are really kind of tip of the spear where it's, again, out on the edge, not in a data center or in a cloud, but gathering all that data from connected devices in different areas and kind of how we're going to manage that and enable that and make it secure and safe and reliable and things like that. >> Yeah. Yeah. I have direct experience with some of that. I have a car that won't allow me to access all of its self-driving features. I bet I can guess because of the way I drive. (laughs) Yep. The cloud is not all wonderful. It's not all lollipops and rainbows. There is a bit of a downside to it if you're a crazy maniac like myself. So Capgemini, hasn't just been a standalone organization. You've absorbed and merged with all sorts of different organizations. I imagine you have organizations that are specifically focused on AWS in addition to other clouds. >> Scott: Absolutely. I can manage that culturally. >> That's a good question. So three years ago, me as the Capgemini group as a whole entered into a three-year partnership called Project Liberty with AWS. And it was a three-year plan we had targets and numbers on both sides, but it really kind of unified how we were going to do AWS and cloud work across the Capgemini organization, all working under one program towards one common goal, on developing accelerators and solutions and go to market offerings, kind of with one thing in mind to drive that AWS partnership and growth. So that's really been kind of the big driver for us within Capgemini over the past three years, is that what we call Project Liberty internally. And then just recently about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, we acquired one of the world's leading digital engineering firms called Altron. Big presence in Europe, Southeast Asia and North America. And they brought kind of a whole new flavor of how we do cloud when we're talking about digital twin in the cloud, on the factory floor and actually engineering of products and in driverless vehicles and electric vehicles and things like that. So bringing all training and being able to include them in our overall kind of cloud AWS message and bringing their book of offers in has really expanded our offering as well. >> How has talent recruitment and acquisition been for you guys? Are you faced with the same challenges that others are? Which is we need educated people. Give the pitch, so my kids hear it. So they understand. The graduate was plastics, right? That's the future? >> Yeah. >> Cloud services, without Capgemini, all the technology that AWS produces is essentially worthless. If you can't connect it to business value and outcome, and that's what you do. So how has that looked for you? >> Yeah, we hae the same talent challenges as everyone right now. So we're really taking the thought process of let's take people who aren't traditionally in the technology field and begin training them up on the cloud and the different technology areas. >> You do that at Capgemini? >> We do that at Capgemini, yeah. So we're running in conjunction with AWS big boot camps where we bring people in and- >> Who are this people? Not to interrupt, just a few seconds left. What's the profile of somewhere? >> Yeah. So a lot of- >> I want to hear the unconventional ones, not the computer science person who doesn't know cloud. Who are you bringing in on this one? >> New college hires who majored in the non-related IT field completely psychology, social sciences, whatever it may be. But who had the aptitude and then kind of the one to learn cloud in IT. So we bring them in. And then looking in our Capgemini Organization internally at our recruiting organization, our marketing organization, our partnership organization, and some of those people who are early on in their careers and may want to pivot to the technology side. We're starting to ramp them up as well. So it's been a very effective program for us. And I think something we're going to continue to invest in further. >> That's a very satisfying part of what you do to be a part of. >> Absolutely. >> Well, Scott, I got to tell you it's been a great conversation. For the rest of us here at theCUBE our continuous coverage continues here at AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson signing off for a moment. But keep it right here theCUBE is your technology hybrid event leader. (upbeat music)