>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cube virtual coverage of the executive summit at AWS reinvent 2020 virtual. This is the cube virtual. We can't be there in person like we are every year we have to be remote. This executive summit is with special programming supported by Accenture where the cube virtual I'm your host John for a year. We had a great panel here called on cloud first digital transformation from some experts, Stuart driver, the director of it and infrastructure and operates at lion Australia, Douglas Regan, managing director, client account lead at lion for Accenture as a deep Islam associate director application development lead for Accenture gentlemen. Thanks for coming on the cube virtual. >>That's a mouthful, >>All that digital, but the bottom line it's cloud transformation. This is a journey that you guys have been on together for over 10 years to be really a digital company. Now, some things have happened in the past year that kind of brings all this together. This is about the next generation organization. So I want to ask a Stuart, you first, if you can talk about this transformation at lion has undertaken some of the challenges and opportunities and how this year in particular has brought it together because you know, COVID has been the accelerant of digital transformation. Well, if you're 10 years in, I'm sure you're there. You're in the, uh, on that wave right now. Take a minute to explain this transformation journey. >>Yeah, sure. So number of years back, we, we looked at kind of our infrastructure and our landscape. I'm trying to figure out where we wanted to go next. And we were very analog based, um, and stuck in the old it Grove of Capitol reef rash, um, struggling to transform, struggling to get to a digital platform and we needed to change it up so that we could, uh, become very different business to the one that we were back then. Um, obviously cloud is an accelerant to that and we had a number of initiatives that needed a platform to build on. And a cloud infrastructure was the way that we started today. That side, we went through a number of transformation programs that we didn't want to do that in the old world. We wanted to do it in the new world. So, um, for us, it was palming up with, uh, you know, dried organizations that can take you on the journey and, uh, you know, start to deliver a bit by bit incremental progress, uh, to get to the, uh, I guess the promise land. >>Um, we're not, uh, not all the way there, but to where we were a long way along. And then when you get to some of the challenges like we've had this year, um, it makes all of the hard work worthwhile because you can actually change pretty quickly, um, provide capacity and, uh, and increase your environments and, you know, do the things that you need to do in a much more dynamic way than we would have been able to previously where we might've been waiting for the hardware vendors, et cetera, to deliver, um, capacity for us this year. It's been a pretty strong year from an it perspective and delivering for the business needs before we hit the Douglas. I want to >>Just really quick redirect to you and say, you know, if all the people who said, Oh yeah, you got to jump on cloud, get in early, you know, a lot of naysayers like, well, wait till to mature a little bit. Really, if you got in early and you, you know, paying your dues, if you will taking that medicine with the cloud, you're really kind of peaking at the right time. Is that true? Is that one of the benefits that comes out of this getting in there? >>Well, I mean, John, this has been an unprecedented year, right? And, um, you know, Australia, we had to live through bushfires and then we had covert and, and then we actually had to deliver a, um, a project on very large transformational product project, completely remote. And then we also had had some, some cyber challenges, which is public as well. And I don't think if we weren't moved into and enabled through the cloud, we would have been able to achieve that this year. It would have been much different. It would have been very difficult to do the fact that we're able to work and partner with Amazon through this year, which has been unprecedented and actually come out the other end and we've delivered a brand new digital capability across the entire business. Um, it really wouldn't have been impossible if we could, I guess, stayed in the old world. The fact that we were moved into the new Naval by the Navy allowed us to work in this unprecedented year. >>Just quick. What's your personal view on this? Because I've been saying on the Cuban reporting, necessity's the mother of all invention and the word agility has been kicked around as kind of a cliche, Oh, be agile. You know, we're going to get to Sydney. You can a minute on specifically, but from your perspective, uh, Douglas, what does that mean to you? Because there is benefits there for being agile. And >>I mean, I think as Stuart mentioned, right, in a lot of these things we try to do and, you know, typically, you know, hardware capabilities, uh, the last to be told and, and, and always the only critical path to be done, you know, we really didn't have that in this case, what we were doing with our projects in our deployments, right. We were able to move quickly able to make decisions in line with the business and really get things going, right. So a lot of times in a traditional world, you have these inhibitors, you have these critical path, it takes weeks and months to get things done as opposed to hours and days, and, and truly allowed us to, we had to, you know, BJ things, move things. And, you know, we were able to do that in this environment with AWS to support and the fact that we can kind of turn things off and on as quickly as we needed. Yeah. >>Cloud-scale is great for speed. So DECA, Gardez get your thoughts on this cloud first mission, you know, it, you know, the dev ops world, they saw this early, that jumping in there, they saw the, the, the agility. Now the theme this year is modern applications with the COVID pandemic pressure, there's real business pressure to make that happen. How did you guys learn to get there fast? And what specifically did you guys do at Accenture and how did it all come together? Can you take us inside kind of how it played out? >>No ma'am. So we started off with us and we worked with lions experts and, uh, the lost knowledge that I had, um, we then applied >>Our journey to cloud strategy and basically revolves around the seminars and, and, uh, you know, the deep repeating steps from our perspective was, uh, assessing the current environment, setting up the new cloud environment. And as we go modernizing and migrating these applications to the cloud now, you know, one of the key things that, uh, you know, we did not along this journey was that, you know, you can have the best plans, but the environment that we were dealing with, we, we often than not have to make changes. Uh, what opened a lot of agility and also work with a lot of collaboration with the, uh, Lyon team, as well as, uh, uh, AWS. I think the key thing for me was being able to really bring it all together. It's not just, uh, you know, essentially mobilize all of us working together to make this happen. >>What were some of the learnings real quick here for your journey there? >>So I think so from our perspective, the key learnings that, you know, uh, you know, when, when we look back at, uh, the, the infrastructure that was that we were trying to migrate over to the cloud, a lot of the documentation, et cetera, was not, uh, available. We were having to, uh, figure out a lot of things on the fly. Now that really required us to have, uh, uh, people with deep expertise who could go into those environments and, and work out, uh, you know, the best ways to, to migrate the workloads to the cloud. Uh, I think, you know, the biggest thing for me was making Jovi had on that real SMEs across the board globally, that we could leverage across the various technologies, uh, uh, and, and, and, you know, that would really work in our collaborative and agile. A lot of it would lie. >>Let's do what I got to ask you. How did you address your approach to the cloud and what was your experience? >>Yeah, for me, it's around getting the foundations right. To start with and then building on them. Um, so, you know, you've gotta have your, your, your process and you've got to have your, your kind of your infrastructure there and your blueprints ready. Um, AWS do a great job of that, right. Getting the foundations right. And then building upon it, and then, you know, partnering with Accenture allows you to do that very successfully. Um, I think, um, you know, the one thing that was probably surprising to us when we started down this journey and kind of after we got a long way down the track and looking backwards is actually how much you can just turn off. Right? So a lot of stuff that you, uh, you get left with a legacy in your environment, and when you start to work through it with the types of people that civic just mentioned, you know, the technical expertise working with the business, um, you can really rationalize environment and, uh, um, you know, cloud is a good opportunity to do that, to drive that legacy out. >>Um, so you know, a few things there, the other thing is, um, you've got to try and figure out the benefits that you're going to get out of moving here. So there's no point just taking something that is not delivering a huge amount of value in the traditional world, moving it into the cloud, and guess what is going to deliver the same limited amount of value. So you've got to transform it, and you've got to make sure that you build it for the future and understand exactly what you're trying to gain out of it. So again, you need a strong collaboration, you need, uh, um, you know, good partners to work with, and you need good engagement from the business as well, because the kind of, uh, you know, digital transformation, cloud transformation, isn't really an it project, I guess, fundamentally it is at the core, but it's a business project that you've got to get the whole business aligned on. You've got to make sure that your investment streams are appropriate and that's, uh, you're able to understand the benefits and the value that say, you're going to draw it back towards the business. >>Let's do it. If you don't mind me asking, what was some of the obstacles you encountered or learnings, um, that might've differed from the expectations we all been there, Hey, you know, we're going to change the world. Here's the sales pitch, here's the outcome. And then obviously things happen, you know, you learn legacy, okay. Let's put some containerization around that cloud native, um, all that rational. You're talking about what are you going to have obstacles? That's how you learn. That's how perfection is developed. How, what obstacles did you come up with and how are they different from your expectations going in? Yeah, >>They're probably no different from other people that have gone down the same journey. If I'm totally honest, the, you know, 70 or 80% of what you do is relatively easy because of the known quantity, it's relatively modern architectures and infrastructures, and you can, you know, upgrade, migrate, move them into the cloud, whatever it is, rehost, replatform, you know, rearchitect, whatever it is you want to do, it's the other stuff, right? It's the stuff that always gets left behind. And that's the challenge. It's, it's getting that last bit over the line and making sure that you haven't invested in the future while still carrying all of your legacy costs and complexity within your environment. So, um, to be quite honest, that's probably taken longer and has been more of a challenge than we thought it would be. Um, the other piece I touched on earlier on in terms of what was surprising was actually how much of, uh, your environment is actually not needed anymore. >>When you start to put a critical eye across it and understand, um, uh, ask the tough questions and start to understand exactly what, what it is you're trying to achieve. So if you ask a part of the business, do they still need this application or this service a hundred percent of the time, they'll say yes, until you start to lay out to them, okay. Now going to cost you this to migrate it or this, to run it in the future. And, you know, here's your ongoing costs and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then, uh, for a significant amount of those answers, you get a different response when you start to layer on the true value of it. So you start to flush out those hidden costs within the, and you start to make some critical decisions as a company based on that, based on that. So that was a little tougher than we first thought and probably broader than we thought there was more of that than we anticipated, uh, which actually resulted in a much cleaner environment, post post migration, >>You know, the old expression, if it moves automated, you know, it's kind of a joke on government, how they want to tax everything, you know, you want to automate, that's a key thing in cloud, and you've got to discover those opportunities to create value, uh, Stuart and Siddique. Mainly if you can weigh in on this love to know the percentage of total cloud that you have now, versus when you started, because as you start to uncover whether it's by design for purpose, or you discover opportunity to innovate like you guys have, I'm sure it kind of, you took on some territory inside Lyon, what percentage of cloud now versus stark? >>Yeah. I just thought it was minimal, right. You know, close to zero rise, single and single digits. Right. It was mainly SAS environments that we had, uh, sitting in cloud when we, uh, when we started, um, Don mentioned that air on a really significant transformation project, um, that we've on the Turk and recently gone live on a multi-year one. Um, you know, that's all stood up on AWS and there's a, a significant portion of our environment, um, in terms of what we can move to cloud. Uh, we're probably at about 80 or 90% now. And the balanced bit is, um, legacy infrastructure that is just gonna retire as we go through the cycle rather than migrate to the cloud. Um, so we are significantly cloud biased and, uh, you know, we're reaping the benefits of it in a year, like 2020, and makes you glad that you did all of the hard yards in the previous years when you start business challenges starting out as, yeah. >>So I think any common reaction. Yeah. Still the cloud percentage penetration. Okay. >>So I do, I do guys, all I was going to say was, I think it's like the 80 20 rule, right? We, we, we worked really hard in the, you know, I think 2018, 19 to get any person off the application onto the cloud. And over the last year is the 20% that we have been migrating to extend. Right. Uh, not, I think that is also, that's going to be good diet. And I think our next big step is going to be obviously, you know, the icing on the cake, which is to decommission all of these apps as well. Right. So, you know, to get the real benefits out of, uh, the whole conservation program from a, uh, from a reduction of cap ex >>Douglas and Stuart, can you guys talk about the decision around the cloud because you guys have had success with AWS, why AWS how's that decision made? Can you guys give some insight into some of those thoughts? >>I can, I can stop, start off. I think back when the decision was made and it was, it was a while back, um, you know, there's some clear advantages of moving relay, Ws, a lot of alignment with some of the significant projects and the trend, that particular one big transformation project that we've alluded to as well. Um, you know, we needed some, um, um, some very robust and, um, just future proof and, um, proven technology. And AWS gave that to us. We needed a lot of those blueprints to help us move down the path. We didn't want to reinvent everything. So, um, you know, having a lot of that legwork done for us and AWS gives you that, right. And particularly when you partner up with, uh, with a company like Accenture as well, you get a combination of the technology and the, and the skills and the knowledge to, to move you forward in that direction. >>So, um, you know, for us, it was a, uh, uh, it was a decision based on, you know, best of breed, um, you know, looking forward and, and trying to predict the future needs and, and, and kind of the environmental that we might need. Um, and, you know, partnering up with organizations that can take you on the journey. Yeah. And just to build on that. So obviously, you know, lions like an NWS, but, you know, we knew it was a very good choice given the, um, uh, the skills and the capability that we had, as well as the assets and tools we had to get the most out of, um, out of the AWS. And obviously our CEO globally has just made an announcement about a huge investment that we're making in cloud. Um, but you know, we've, we've worked very well with AWS. We've done some joint workshops and joint investments, um, some joint POC. So yeah, w we have a very good working relationship, AWS, and I think, um, one incident to reflect upon the cyber is, and again, where we actually jointly, you know, dove in with, um, with Amazon and some of their security experts and our experts, and we're able to actually work through that with wine success, quite them. So, um, you know, really good behaviors as an organization, but also really good capabilities. >>Yeah. As you guys, you're essential cloud outcomes, research shown, it's the cycle of innovation with the cloud. That's creating a lot of benefits knowing what you guys know now, looking back certainly COVID has impacted a lot of people kind of going through the same process, uh, knowing what you guys know now, would you advocate people to jump on this transformation journey? If so, how and what tweaks they make what's, uh, changes, what would you advise? >>I might take that one to start with. Um, I hate to think where we would have been when, uh, COVID kicked off here in Australia and, you know, we were all sent home, literally were at work on the Friday, and then over the weekend. And then Monday, we were told not to come back into the office and all of a sudden, um, our capacity in terms of remote access quadrupled, or more four, five X, uh, what we had on the Friday we needed on the Monday. And we were able to stand that up during the day Monday night into Tuesday, because we were cloud-based and, uh, you know, we just spun up your instances and, uh, you know, sort of our licensing, et cetera. And, and we had all of our people working remotely, um, within, uh, you know, effectively one business day. Um, I know peers of mine in other organizations and industries that are relying on kind of a traditional wise and getting hardware, et cetera, that were weeks and before they could get the right hardware to be able to deliver to their user base. >>So, um, you know, one example where you're able to scale and, uh, um, get, uh, get value out of this platform beyond probably what was anticipated at the time you talked about, um, you know, less this, the, in all of these kinds of things. And you can also think of a few scenarios, but real world ones where you're getting your business back up and running in that period of time is, is just phenomenal. There's other stuff, right? There's these programs that we've rolled out, you do your sizing, um, and in the traditional world, you would just go out and buy more servers than you need. And, you know, probably never realize the full value of those, you know, the capability of those servers over the life cycle of them. Whereas, you know, in a cloud world, you're putting what you think is right. And if it's not right, you bump it up a little bit when, when all of your metrics and so on, I'm tell you that you need to bump it up. And conversely, you Scarlet down at a, at the same rate. So for us with the types of challenges and programs and, uh, uh, and just business need, that's come at as this year, uh, we wouldn't have been able to do it without a strong cloud base, uh, to, uh, to move forward with >>Yeah, Douglas, one of the things I talked to, a lot of people on the right side of history who have been on the right wave with cloud, with the pandemic, and they're happy, they're like, and they're humble. Like, well, we're just lucky, you know, luck is preparation meets opportunity. And this is really about you guys getting in early and being prepared and readiness. This is kind of important as people realize that you gotta be ready. I mean, it's not just, you don't get lucky by being in the right place, the right time. And there were a lot of companies were on the wrong side of history here who might get washed away. This is a super important one >>Yeah. To echo and kind of build on what Stewart said. I think that the reason that we've had success and, and I guess the momentum is we, we didn't just do it in isolation within it and technology. It was actually linked to broader business changes, you know, creating basically a digital platform for the entire business, moving the business, where are they going to be able to come back stronger after COVID, when they're actually set up for growth, um, and actually allows, you know, uh, line to achievements growth objectives, and also its ambitions as far as what it wants to do, uh, with growth and whatever they may do with acquiring other companies and moving into different markets and launching new products. So we've actually done it in a way that is, you know, real and direct business benefit. Uh, it actually enables learning to grow. >>Jim. I really appreciate you coming. I have one final question. If you can wrap up here, uh, Stuart and Douglas, you don't mind weighing in what's the priorities for the future. What's next for lion and essential >>Christmas holidays, I'll start Christmas holidays and it's been a big year and then a, and then a reset, obviously, right? So, um, you know, it's, it's figuring out, uh, transform what we've already transformed, if that makes sense. So God, a huge proportion of our services sitting in the cloud. Um, but we know we're not done even with the stuff that is in there. We need to take those steps. We need more and more automation and orchestration. Uh, we need to, um, uh, our environment is more future growth. We need to be able to work with the business and understand what's coming at them so that we can know, build that into our environment. So again, it's really transformation on top of transformation. It's the way that I'll describe it. And it's really an open book, right? Once you get it in and you've got the capabilities and the evolving tool sets that, uh, AWS continue to bring to the market, um, you know, working with the partners to, to figure out how we unlock that value, um, you know, drive our costs down our efficiency up, uh, all of those kind of, you know, standard metrics. >>Um, but you know, we're looking for the next things to transform and showed value back out to our customer base, um, that, uh, that we continue to, you know, sell our products to and work with and understand how we can better make their names. Yeah, I think just to echo that, I think it's really leveraging this end to end digital capability they have and getting the most out of that investment. And then I think it's also moving to, uh, in a dumping more new ways of working as far as, you know, the state of the business. Um, it's getting up the speed of the market is changing. So being able to launch and do things quickly and also, um, be competitive with it, you know, inefficient operating costs, uh, now that they're in the cloud, right. So I think it's really leveraging the most out of a platform and then, you know, being efficient in launching things. So putting it with the business, >>Sadiq, any word from you on your priorities by UC this year in folding. >>Yeah. So, uh, there's got to say like e-learning squares, right? For me around this journey, this is a journey to the cloud, right. And, uh, you know, as well dug the students at it's getting all, you know, different parts of the organization along the journey business to ID to your, uh, Warnock Legos, et cetera. Right. And it takes time. It is tough, but, uh, uh, you know, you got to get started on it and, you know, once we, once we finish off, uh, it's the realization of the benefits now that, you know, looking forward, I think for, from Alliance perspective is, is, uh, you know, once we migrate all the workloads to the cloud, it is leveraging, uh, our stack drive. And as I think Stewart said, uh, earlier, uh, with, uh, you know, the latest and greatest stuff that non-compete WLC, it's basically working to see how we can really, uh, achieve more better operational excellence, uh, from a, uh, from a cloud perspective. >>Well, Stewart, thanks for coming on with a century, sharing your environment and what's going on and your journey you're on the right wave. Did the work you're in the, it's all coming together with faster, congratulations for your success and, uh, really appreciate Douglas and Steve for coming on as well from Accenture. Thank you for coming on. Thanks, John. Okay. Just the cubes coverage of executive summit at AWS reinvent. This is where all the thought leaders share their best practices, their journeys, and of course, special programming with Accenture and the cube. I'm Sean ferry, your host. Thanks for watching.