(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Accenture San Francisco Innovation Hub on the 33rd floor of the Sales Force Tower in downtown San Francisco. It's 2020, the year we know everything with the benefit of hindsight. And what better way to kick off the year than to have the Accenture Tech Vision reveal, which is happening later tonight, so we're really happy to have one of the authors who's really driving the whole thing. He's Michael Blitz, the managing director of the Accenture Tech Vision 2020, a very special edition. Michael, great to see you. >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so you've been doing this for a while. I think we heard earlier, this thing's been going on for 20 years? >> It is. >> You've been involved for at least the last eight. >> Michael: I think a little bit more than that. >> More than that, so what's kind of the big theme before we get into some of the individual items? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think right now, what we're really talking about is that our real big theme is this: We the digital people. And it's that recognition that says that we've fundamentally changed. When you start looking at yourself and your lives, it's that you've gotten to a point where you're letting your cell phone track you. Your car knows where you are probably better than your spouse does. You're handing your key to Amazon and Walmart so they can deliver packages in your house. And more than that is that actually, we're trying to start to revolve our lives around this technology. I look at my own life, and we just sold our second car, specifically because we know that Uber and Lyft exist to fill that void. >> Right, well you don't have to look much further than phone numbers. How many people remember anybody's phone number anymore, right, 'cause you don't really have to. I think it's the 15th anniversary of Google Maps. >> Michael: Yep. >> This year, and to think of a world without Google Maps, without that kind of instant access to knowledge, is really hard to even fathom. But as you said, we're making trade-offs when we use all these services, and now, some of the costs of those things are being maybe more exposed? Maybe more cute or in your face? I don't know, what would you say? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's happening now is that what we're realizing is that it's changed our relationship with companies. Is that suddenly we've actually brought them into our lives. And, on one hand, they're offering and have the ability to offer services that you could never really do before. But on the other hand is that, if I'm going to let somebody in my life, suddenly they don't have to just provide me value and this is useful, is that they actually, people are expecting them to retain their values, too. So, how they protect your data, what they're good for the community, for the environment, for society, whether it's sustainable or not. Is that suddenly, whereas people used to only care about what the product you're getting, now how it's built and how your company's being run is starting, it's just starting to become important, too. >> Right, well it's funny, 'cause you used to talk about kind of triple bottom line, shareholders, customers and your employees. And you talked about, really, this kind of fourth line, which is community and really being involved in the community. People care, suddenly you go to conferences where we spend a lot of time all the utensils are now compostable and the forks are compostable. And a lot of the individual packaging stuff is going away. So people do care. >> They do, and there's a fourth and a fifth. It says that your community cares, but your partners do, too. Is that you can't, I'm going to say, downgrade the idea that your B2B folks care is that suddenly, we're finding ourselves tied to these other companies, and not just in a supply chain, but from everything. And so, you're not in this alone in terms of how you're delivering these things. But now it's becoming a matter that says, Well, man, if my partners are going to get pummeled because they're not doing the right thing or they don't have that broad scope, that's going to reflect on me, too. And so, now you're suddenly in this interesting position where all of the things that we suspected were going to happen around digital connecting everybody is just starting to, and I think that's going to have a lot of positive effects. >> Yeah, so one of the things you talked about earlier today, in an earlier presentation was kind of the shift from kind of buyer and seller, seller and consumer, to provider and collaborator. Really kind of reflecting a very different kind of a relationship between the parties as opposed to this one-shot transactional relationship. >> No, and that's right, and it doesn't matter who you're talking about, is that, if you're hiring folks for skills that you're assuming that they're going to learn, that's going to be different in three years, in five years, you're essentially partnering with them in order to take all of you on a journey. When you start talking about governments, is that you're now partnering with regulators. You look at companies like Tesla, who are working on regulations for electric cars, they're working on regulations around battery technology. And you see that this go-it-alone approach isn't what you're doing. Rather, it's becoming much more holistic. >> Right, so we're in the innovation hub, and I think number five of the five is really about innovation today. >> Michael: It is. >> And you guys are driving innovation. And, rest in peace, Clayton Christensen passed away, Innovator's Dilemma, my all-time favorite book. But the thing I love about that book is that smart people making sound decisions based on business logic and taking care of existing customers will always miss discontinuous change. But you guys are really trying to help big companies be innovative. What are some of the things that they should be thinking about, besides, obviously, engaging with Mary and the team here at Innovation Hub? >> Yeah, no, and that's the really interesting thing is that when we talked about innovation, you know, five or even 10 years ago, you were talking about, just: How do I find a new product or a new service to bring to market? And now, that's the minimum stakes. Like, that's what everybody's doing. And I think what we're realizing as we're seeing tech become such a big part is that we all see how it's affecting the world. And a lot of times that things are good is that there's no reason why you wouldn't look at somebody like a Lyft or Uber and say that it's had a lot of positive effects. But from the same standpoint is that, you ask questions of: Is it good for public transit? It is good for city infrastructure? And those are hard questions to ask. And I think where we're really pushing now is that question that says: We've got an entire generation of not-tech companies, but every company that's about to get into this innovation game, and what we want them to do is to look at this not the way that the tech folks did, that says, here's one service or one technology, but rather, look at it holistically that says: How am I actually going to implement this, and what is the real effects that it's going to have on all of these different aspects? >> Right, Law of Unintended Consequences is always a good one. >> Michael: It is. >> And I remember hearing years ago of this concept of curb management. I'm like, Curb management, who ever thought of that? Well, drive up and down in Manhattan when they're delivering groceries or delivering Amazon packages and FedEx packages and UberEats and delivery dog food now. Where is that stuff being staged now that the warehouse has kind of shifted out into the public space? So, you never kind of really know where these things are going to end up. >> No, and I'm not saying that we're going to be able to predict all of it. I think, rather, it's that starting point that says that we're starting to see a big push that says that these things need to be factored and considered. And then, similarly, it's the, if you're working with them up-front, it becomes less of a fault, on a fight of whose fault it is at the end, and it becomes more of a collaboration that says, How much more can we do if we're working with our cities, if we're working with our employees, if we're working with our customers? >> Right, now another follow up, you guys've been talking about this for years, is every company is a tech company or a digital company, depending on how you want to spin that. But as you were talking about it earlier today, in doing so and in converting from products to service, and converting from an ongoing relationship to a one-time transaction, it's not only at that point of touch with a customer, but you've got to make a bunch of fundamental changes back in your own systems to support kind of this changing business model. >> Now, and that's right, and I think this is going to become the big challenge of the generation, is that we've gotten to a point where just using their existing models for how you interact with your customers or how you protect their data or who owns the data, all of these types of things, is that they were designed back when we were doing single applications, and they were loading up on your Windows PC. And where we're at now is that we're starting to ask questions that says, All right, in this new world, what do I have to fundamentally do differently? And sometimes that can be as simple as asking a question that says, you know, there's a consortium of pharma folks who have created a joint way for them to develop all of their search algorithms for new drugs. But they're using block chain, and so they're not actually sharing the data. So they do all the good things, but they're pushing that up. But fundamentally, that's a different way to think about it. You're now creating an entirely new infrastructure because what you're used to is just handing somebody the data, and what they do with the data afterwards is kind of their issue and not yours. And so now we're asking big, new questions to do it. >> Right, another big thing that keeps coming up over and over is trust. And again, we talked a little earlier. But I find this really ironic situation where people don't necessarily trust the companies in terms of the people running the companies and what they're going to do with their data, but they fundamentally trust the technology coming out of the gate and this expectation of: Of course it works, everything works on my mobile phone. But the two are related, but not equal. >> Michael: No, I mean, they're not, I mean, and it's really pushing this idea that says we've been looking at all these, I'm going to say scary headlines, of people not trusting companies for the last number of years, while at the same time, the adoption for the technology has been huge. So there's this dichotomy that's going on in people, where at one point, they like the tech. You know, I think the last stat I saw is that everybody spends up to six-and-a-half hours a day involved on the internet, in their technology. But from the same standpoint is that they worry about who's using it and how and what is going to be done. And I think where we're at is that interesting piece that says we're not worried about a tech lash. We don't think that people are going to stop using technology. Rather, we think it's really this tech clash that says they're not getting the value that they thought out of it, or they're seeing companies that may be using this technologies that don't share the same values that they do, and really, what we think this becomes, is the next opportunity for the next generations of service providers in order to fill that gap. >> Right, yeah, don't forget there was a Friendster and a MySpace before there was a Facebook. >> Yeah, there was. >> So, nothing lasts forever. So, last question before I let you go, it's a busy night. The first one was the I in experience, and I think kind of the user experience doesn't get enough light as to such a defining thing that does move the market if, again, I love to pick on Uber, but the Uber experience compared to walking outside on a rainy day in Manhattan and hoping to hail down a cab is fundamentally different, and I would argue, that it's that technology put together in this user experience that defined this kind of game-changing event, as opposed to it's a bunch of APIs stitching stuff together in the back. >> No, that's right, and I think where we're at right now is that we're about to see the next leap beyond that. Is that, most of the time when we look at the experiences that we're doing today, they're one way. Is that people assume that, Yeah, I have your data, I'm trying to customize. And whether it's an ad or a buying experience or whatever, but they're pushing it as this one-way street, and when we talk about putting the I back in experience, it's that question of the next step to really get people both more engaged as well as to, I'm going to say improve the experience itself, means that it's going to become a partnership. So you're actually going to start looking for input back and forth, and it's sometimes going to be as simple as saying that that ad that they're pushing out is for a product that I've already bought. Or, you know, maybe even just tell me how you knew that that's what I was looking for. But it's sometimes that little things, the back and forth, is how you take something from, what can be a mediocre experience, even potentially a negative one, and really turn it into something that people like. >> Yeah, well, Michael, I'll let you go. I know you got a busy night, we're going to present this. And really thankful to you and the team, and congratulations for coming up with something that's a little bit more provocative than, Cloud's going to be big, or Mobile's going to be big, or Edge is going to be big. So this is great material, and thanks for having us back. Look forward to tonight. >> No, happy to do it, and next year we'll probably do it again. >> [Jeff\ I don't know, we already know everything, it's 2020, what else is unknown? >> Everything's going to change. >> All right, thanks again. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020, brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're high atop San Francisco on a beautiful day at the Accenture San Francisco Innovation Hub, 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower, for the Accenture Tech Vision 2020 reveal. It's where they come up with four or five themes to really look forward to, a little bit innovative, a little bit different than cloud will be big or mobile will be big. And we're excited to have, really, one of the biggest brains here on the 33rd floor. She's Teresa Tung, the managing director of Accenture Labs. Teresa, great to see you. >> Nice to see you again. >> So I have to tease you because the last time we were here, everyone was bragging on all the patents that you've filed over the years, so congratulations on that. It's almost kind of like a who's who roadmap of what's happening in tech. I looked at a couple of them. You've got a ton of stuff around cloud, a ton of stuff around Edge, but now, you're getting excited about robots and AI. >> That's right. >> That's the new passion. >> That's the new passion. >> All right, so robots, one of the five trends was robots in the wild, so what does that mean, robots in the wild, and why is this something that people should be paying attention to? >> Well, robots have been around for decades, right? So if you think about manufacturing, you think about robots. But as your kid probably knows, robots are now programmable, kids can do it, so why not enterprise? And so, now that robots are programmable, you can buy them and apply them. We're going to unlock a whole bunch of new use cases beyond just those really hardcore manufacturing ones that are very strictly designed in a very structured environment, to things in an unstructured and semi-structured environment. >> So does the definition of robot begin to change? We were just talking before we turned on the cameras about, say, Tesla. Is a Tesla a robot in your definition or does that not quite make the grade? >> I think it is, but we're thinking about robots as physical robots. So sometimes people think about robotics process automation, AI, those are robots, but here, I'm really excited about the physical robots; the mobile units, the gantry units, the arms. This is going to allow us to close that sense-analyze-actuate loop. Now the robot can actually do something based off of the analytics. >> Right, so where will we see robots kind of operating in the wild versus, as we said, the classic manufacturing instance, where they're bolted down, they do a step along the process? Where do you see some of the early adoption is going to, I guess, see them on the streets, right, or wherever we will see them? >> Well, you probably do see them on the streets already. You see them for security use cases, maybe mopping up a store after, where the employees can actually focus on the customers, and the robot's maybe restocking. We see them in the airports, so if you pay attention to modern airports, you see robots bringing out the baggage and doing some of the baggage handling. So really, the opportunities for robots are jobs that are dull, dirty, or dangerous. These are things that humans don't want to or shouldn't be doing. >> Right, so what's the breakthrough tech that's enabling the robots to take this next step? >> Well, a lot of it is AI, right? So the fact that you don't have to be a data scientist and you can apply these algorithms that do facial recognition, that can actually help you to find your way around, it's actually the automation that's programmable. As I was saying, kids can program these robots, so they're not hard to do. So if a kid can do it, maybe somebody who knows oil and gas, insurance, security, can actually do the same thing. >> Right, so a lot of the AI stuff that people are familiar with is things like photo recognition and Google Photos, so I can search for my kids, I can search for a beach, I can search for things like that, and it'll come back. What are some of the types of AI and algorithms that you're applying with kind of this robot revolution? >> It's definitely things like the image analytics. It's for the routing. So let me give you an example of how easy it is to apply. So anybody who can play a video game, you have a video game type controller, so when your kid's, again, playing games, they're actually training for on the skilled jobs. Right, so you map a scene by using that controller to drive the robot around a factory, around the airport, and then, the AI algorithm is smart enough to create the map. And then, from that, we can actually use the robot just out of the box to be able to navigate and you have a place to, say, going from Teresa, here, and then, I might be able to go into the go get us a beer, right? >> Right, right. >> Maybe we should have that happen. (laughs) >> They're setting up right over there. >> They are setting up right there. >> That's right. So it's kind of like when you think of kind of the revolution of drones, which some people might be more familiar with 'cause they're very visible. >> Yes. >> Where when you operate a DJI drone now, you don't actually fly the drone. You're not controlling pitch and yaw and those things. You're just kind of telling it where you want it to go and it's the actual AI under the covers that's making those adjustments to thrust and power and angle. Is that a good analogy? >> That is a great analogy. >> And so, the work that we would do now is much more about how you string it together for the use case. If a robot were to come up to us now, what should it do, right? So if we're here, do we want the robot to even interact with us to get us that beer? So robots don't usually speak. Should speaking be an option for it? Should maybe it's just gesturing and it has a menu? We would know how to interact with it. So a lot of that human-robot interface is some of the work that we're doing. So that was kind of a silly example, but now, imagine that we were surveying an oil pipeline or we were actually as part of a manufacturing line, so in this case it's not getting us a beer, but it might need to do the same sort of thing. What sort of tool does Theresa need to actually finish her job? >> Yeah, and then, the other one is AI and me. And you just said that AI is getting less complicated to program, these machines are getting less complicated to program, but I think most people still are kind of stuck in the realm of we need a data scientist and there are not a lot of data scientists and they got to be super, super smart. You've got to have tons and tons of data and these types of factors, so how is it becoming AI and me, Jeff who's not necessarily a data scientist. I don't have a PhD in molecular physics, how's that going to happen? >> I think we need more of that democratization for the people who are not data scientists. So data scientists, they need the data, and so, a lot of the hard part is getting the data as to how it should interact, right? So in that example, we were saying how does Teresa and Jeff interact with the robot? The data scientist needs tons, right, thousands, tens of thousands of instances of those data types to actually make an insight. So what if, instead, when we think about AI and me, what about we think about, again, the human, not the, well, data scientists are people too. >> Right, right. >> But let's think about democratizing the rest of the humans to saying, how should I interact with the robot? So a lot of the research that we do is around how do you capture this expert knowledge. So we don't actually need to have tens of thousands of that. We can actually pretty much prescribe we don't want the robot to talk to us. We want him to give us the beer. So why don't we just use things like that? We don't have to start with all the data. >> Right, right, so I'm curious because there's a lot of conversation about machines plus people is better than one or the other, but it seems like it's much more complicated to program a robot to do something with a person as opposed to just giving it a simple task, which is probably historically what we've done more. Here, you go do that task. Now, people are not involved in that task. They don't have to worry about the nuance. They don't have to worry about reacting, reading what I'm trying to communicate. So is it a lot harder to get these things to work with people as opposed to kind of independently and carve off a special job? >> It may be harder, but that's where the value is. So if we think about the AI of, let's say, yesterday, there's a lot of dashboards. So it's with the pure data-driven, the pure AI operating on its own, it's going to look at the data. It's going to give us the insight. At the end of the day, the human's going to need to read, let's say, a static report and make a decision. Sometimes, I look at these reports and I have a hard time even understanding what I'm seeing, right? When they show me all these graphs, I'm supposed to be impressed. >> Right, right. >> I don't know what to do versus if you do. I use TurboTax as an example. When you're filing TurboTax, there's a lot of AI behind the scenes, but it's already looked at my data. As I'm filling in my return, it's telling me maybe you should claim this deduction. It's asking me yes or no questions. That's how I imagine AI at scale being in the future, right? It's not just for TurboTax, but everything we do. So in the robot, in the moment that we were describing, maybe it would see that you and I were talking, and it's not going to interrupt our conversation. But in a different context, if Teresa's by herself, maybe it would come up and say, hey, would you like a beer? >> Right, right. >> I think that's the sort of context that, like a TurboTax, but more sexy of course. >> Right, right, so I'm just curious from your perspective as a technologist, again, looking at your patent history, a lot of stuff on cloud, a lot of stuff on edge, but we've always kind of operated in this kind of new world, which is, if you had infinite compute, infinite storage, and infinite bandwidth, which was taking another. >> Yes. >> Big giant step with 5G, kind of what would you build and how could you build it? You got to just be thrilled as all three of those vectors are just accelerating and giving you, basically, infinite power in terms of tooling to work with. >> It is, I mean, it feels like magic. If you think about, I watch things like "Harry Potter", and you think about they know these spells and they can get things to happen. I think that's exactly where we are now. I get to do all these things that are magic. >> And are people ready for it? What's the biggest challenge on the people side in terms of getting them to think about what they could do, as opposed to what they know today? 'Cause the future could be so different. >> That is the challenge, right, because I think people, even with processes, they think about the process that existed today, where you're going to take AI and even robotics, and just make that process step faster. >> Right. >> But with AI and automation, what if we jumped that whole step, right? If as humans, if I can see everything 'cause I had all the data and then, I had AI telling me these are the important pieces, wouldn't you jump towards the answer? A lot of the processes that we have today are meant so that we actually explore all the conditions that need to be explored, that we do look at all the data that needs to be looked at. So you're still going to look at those things, right? Regulations, rules, that still happens, but what if AI and automation check those for you and all you're doing is actually checking the exceptions? So it's going to really change the way we do work. >> Very cool, well, Teresa, great to catch up and you're sitting right in the catbird seat, so exciting to see what your next patents will be, probably all about robotics as you continue to move this train forward. So thanks for the time. >> Thank you. >> All right, she's Teresa, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Tech Vision 2020 Release Party on the 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here from theCUBE. We are high atop San Francisco at the Accenture Innovation Hub, 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower. It's a beautiful night, but we're here for a very special occasion. It's the Tech Vision 2020 reveal, and we are happy to have the guy that runs the whole thing, he's going to reveal on stage a little bit later, but we got him in advance. He's Paul Daugherty, the chief technology and innovation officer for Accenture. Paul, great to see you as always. >> Great to see you, Jeff, too. It is a beautiful evening here, looking out over the Bay. >> If only we could turn the cameras around, but, sorry, we can't do that. >> Yeah. >> All right, so you've been at this now, the Tech Vision's been going on for 20 years, we heard earlier today. >> Yeah. >> You've been involved for almost a decade. How has this thing evolved over that time? >> Yeah, you know, we've been doing the Vision for 20 years, and what we've been trying to do is forecast what's happening with business and technology in a way that's actionable for executives. There's lots of trend forecasts and lists and things, but if you just see a list of cloud, or-- >> Jeff: Mobile's going to be really big. (laughs) >> AI, mobile, it doesn't really help you. We're trying to talk a little bit about the impact on business, impact to the world, and the decisions that you need to make. What's changed over that period of time is just the breadth of the impact that technology's having on people, so we focus a lot of our Visions on the impact on humans, on individuals, what's happening with technology, what the impact on business, we can talk about that a little bit more, but business is certainly not the back office of companies anymore. It's not just the back office and front office, either. In business, it's instrumental in the fabric of how every part of the company operates, their strategy, their operations, their products and services, et cetera, and that's really the trajectory we've seen. As technology advances, we have this accelerating exponential increase in technology, the implications for executives and the stakes just get higher and higher. >> It's weird, there are so many layers to this. One of the things we've talked about a lot is trust, and you guys talk about trust a lot. But what strikes me as kind of this dichotomy is on one hand, do I trust the companies, right? Do I trust Mark Zuckerberg with my data, to pick on him, he gets picked on all the time. That might be a question, but do I trust that Facebook is going to work? Absolutely. And so, our reliance on the technology, our confidence in the technology, our just baseline assumption that this stuff is going to work, is crazy high, up to and including people taking naps in their Teslas, (laughs) which are not autonomous vehicles! >> Not an advisable practice. >> Not autonomous vehicles! So it's this weird kind of split where it's definitely part of our lives, but it seems like kind of the consciousness is coming up as kind of the second order. What does this really mean to me? What does this mean to my data? What are people actually doing with this stuff? And am I making a good value exchange? >> Well, that's the, we talk in the Vision this year about value versus values, and the question you're asking is getting right at that, the crux between value and values. You know, businesses have been using technology to drive value for a long time. That's how applying different types of technology to enterprise, whether it be back to the mainframe days or ERP packages, cloud computing, et cetera, artificial intelligence. So value is what they were talking about in the Vision. How do you drive value using the technology? And one thing we found is there's a big gap. Only 10% of organizations are really getting full value in the way they're applying technology, and those that are are getting twice the revenue growth as companies that aren't, so that's one big gap in value. And this values point is really getting to be important, which is, as technology can be deployed in ways that are more pervasive and impact our experience, they're tracking our health details-- >> Right, right. >> They know where we are, they know what we're doing, they're anticipating what we might do next. How does that impact the values? And how are the values of companies important in other ways? The values you have around sustainability and other things are increasingly important to new generations of consumers and consumers who are thinking in new ways. This value versus values is teeing up what we call a tech-clash, which isn't a tech-lash, just, again, seeing people reacting against tech companies, as you said earlier, it's a tech-clash, which is the values that consumer citizens and people want sometimes clashing with the value of the models that companies have been using to deliver their products and services. >> Right. Well, it seems like it's kind of the "What are you optimizing for?" game, and it seems like it was such an extreme optimization towards profitability and shareholder value, and less, necessarily, employees, less, necessarily, customers, and certainly less in terms of the social impact. So that definitely seems to be changing, but is it changing fast enough? Are people really grasping it? >> Well, I think the data's mixed on that. I think there's a lot of mixed data on "What do people really want?" So people say they want more privacy, they say they want access and control of their data, but they still use a lot of the services that it may be inconsistent with the values that they talk about, and the values that come out in surveys. So, but that's changing. So consumers are getting more educated about how they want their data to be used. But the other thing that's happening is that companies are realizing that it's really a battle for experience. Experience is what, creating broader experiences, better experiences for consumers is what the battleground is. A great experience, whether you're a travel company or a bank or a manufacturing company, or whatever you might be, creating the experience requires data, and to get the data from an individual or another company, it takes trust. So this virtuous circle of experience, data, and trust is something that companies are realizing is essential to their competitive advantage going forward. We say trust is the currency of the digital and post-digital world that we're moving into. >> Right, it's just how explicit is that trust, or how explicit does it need to be? And as you said, that's unclear. People can complain on one hand, but continue to use the services, so it seems to be a little bit kind of squishy. >> It's a sliding scale. It's really a value exchange, and you have to think about it. What's the value exchange and the value that an individual consumer places on their privacy versus free access to a service? That's what's being worked out right now. >> Right, so I'm going to get your take on another thing, which is exponential curves, and you've mentioned time and time again, the pace of change is only accelerating. Well, you've been saying that, probably, for (laughs) 20 years. (Paul laughs) So the curve's just getting steeper. How do you see that kind of playing out over time? Will we eventually catch up? Is it just presumed that this is kind of the new normal? Or how is this going to shake out? 'Cause people aren't great at exponential curves. It's just not really in our DNA. >> Yeah, but I think that's the world we're operating in now, and I think the exponential potential is going to continue. We don't see a slowdown in the exponential growth rates of technology. So artificial intelligence, we're at the early days. Cloud computing, only about 20% enterprise adoption, a lot more to go. New adoptions are on the horizon, things like central bank digital currencies that we've done some research and done some work on recently. Quantum computing and quantum cryptography for networking, et cetera. So the pace of innovation is going to accelerate, and the challenge for organizations is rationalizing that and deciding how to incorporate that into their business, change their business, and change the way that they're leveraging their workforce and change the way that they're interacting with customers. And that's why what we're trying to address in the Vision is provide a little bit of that road map into how you digest it down. Now, there's also technology foundations of this. We talk about something at Accenture called living systems. Living systems is a new way of looking at the architecture of how you build your technology, because you don't have static systems anymore. Your systems have to be living and biological, adapting to the new technology, adapting to the business, adapting to new data over time. So this concept of living systems is going to be really important to organizations' success going forward. >> But the interesting thing is, one of the topics is "AI and Me," and traditional AI was very kind of purpose-built. For instance, Google Photos, can you find the cat? Can I find the kids at the beach? But you're talking about models where the AI can evolve and not necessarily be quite so data-centric around a specific application, but much more evolutionary and adaptable, based on how things change. >> Yeah, I think that's the future of AI that we see. There's been a lot of success in applying AI today, and a lot of it's been based on supervised learning, deep learning techniques that require massive amounts of data. Solving problems like machine vision requires massive amounts of data to do it right. And that'll continue. There'll continue to be problem sets that need large data. But what we're also seeing is a lot of innovation and AI techniques around small data. And we actually did some research recently, and we talk about this a little bit in our Vision, around the future being maybe smaller data sets and more structured data and intelligence around structured data, common-sense AI, and things that allow us to make breakthroughs in different ways. And that's, we used to look at "AI and Me," which is the trend around the workforce and how the workforce changes. It's those kinds of adaptations that we think are going to be really important. >> So another one is robotics, "Robots in the Wild." And you made an interesting comment-- >> Paul: Not "Robots Gone Wild," "Robots in the Wild," "Robots in the Wild." >> Well, maybe they'll go wild once they're in the wild. You never know. Once they get autonomy. Not a lot of autonomy, that's probably why. But it's kind of interesting, 'cause you talk about robots being designed to help people do a better job, as opposed to carving out a specific function for the robot to do without a person, and it seems like that's a much easier route to go, to set up a discrete thing that we can carve out and program the robot to do. Probably early days of manufacturing and doing spot welding in cars, et cetera. >> Right. >> So is it a lot harder to have the robot operate with its human partner, if you will, but are the benefits worth it? How do you kind of see that shaking out, versus, "Ah, I can carve out one more function"? >> Yeah, I think it's going to be a mix. I think there'll be, we see a lot of application of the robots paired with people in different ways, cobots in manufacturing being a great example, and something that's really taking off in manufacturing environments, but also, you have robots of different forms that serve human needs. There's a lot of interesting things going on in healthcare right now. How can you support autistic children or adults better using human-like robots and agents that can interact in different ways? A lot of interesting things around Alzheimer's and dealing with cognitive impairment and such using robots and robotics. So I think the future isn't, there's a lot of robots in the wild in the form of C-3POs and R2-D2s and those types of robots, and we'll see some of those. And those are being used widely in business today, even, in different contexts, but I think the interesting advance will be looking at robots that complement and augment and serve human needs more effectively. >> Right, right, and do people do a good enough job of getting some of the case studies? Like, you just walked through kind of the better use cases, the more humane use cases, the kind of cool medical breakthroughs, versus just continued optimization of getting me my Starbucks coupon when I walk by out front? (Paul laughs) >> Yeah, I'm not sure. >> Doesn't seem like I get the pub, like they just don't get the pub, I don't think. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe not. A little mixology is another (Jeff laughs) inflection that robots are getting good at. But I think that's what we're trying to do, is through the effort we do with the Vision, as well as our Tech for Good work and other things, is look at how we amplify and highlight some of the great work that is happening in those areas. >> So, you've been doing it for a decade. What struck you this year as being a little bit different, a little bit unexpected, not necessarily something you may have anticipated? >> I think the thing that is maybe a tipping point that I see in this Vision that I didn't anticipate is this idea that every company's really becoming a technology company. We said eight years ago, "Every business "will be a digital business," and that was, while ridiculed by some at the time, that really came true, and every business and every industry really is becoming digital or has already become digital. But I think we might've gotten it slightly wrong. Digital was kind of a step, but every company is deploying technology in the way they serve their customers, in the way they build their products and services. Every product and service is becoming technology-enabled. The ecosystem of technology providers is critical to companies in every industry. So every company's really becoming a technology company. Maybe every company needs to be as good as a digital native company at developing products and services, operating them. So I think that this idea of every company becoming a technology company, every CEO becoming a technology CEO, technology leader, is something that I think will differentiate companies going forward as well. >> Well, really, good work, you, Michael, and the team. It's fun to come here ever year, because you guys do a little twist. Like you said, it's not "Cloud's going to be really big, "mobile's going to be really big," but a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more deep, a little bit longer kind of thought cycles on these trends. >> Yeah, and I think the, if you read through the Vision, we're trying to present a complete story, too, so it's, as you know, "We, the post-digital people." But if you look at innovation, "The I in Experience" is about serving your customers differently. "The Dilemma of Smart Machines" and "Robots in the Wild" is about your new products and services and the post-digital environment powered by technology. "AI and Me" is about the new workforce, and "Innovation DNA" is about driving continuous innovation in your organization, your culture, as you develop your business into the future. So it really is providing a complete narrative on what we think the future looks like for executives. >> Right, good, still more utopian than dystopian, I like it. >> More utopia than dystopia, but you got to steer around the roadblocks. (Jeff chuckles) >> All right, Paul, well, thanks again, and good luck tonight with the big presentation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> All right, he's Paul, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture innovation reveal 2020, when we're going to know everything with the benefit of hindsight. Thanks for watching, (laughs) we'll see you next time. (upbeat pop music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020, brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Francisco, at the Accenture Innovation Hub, 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower at the Accenture Technology Vision 2020 party. The party's getting started. Paul, and Mike, and the team are going to present the findings, and we're excited to have, actually, the hostess of this great facility. She's Ashley Miller, managing director of the San Francisco Innovation Hub. Ashley, great to see you. >> Great to see you again. >> So, congratulations once again. We were here last year. It was the grand opening of this facility. >> Ashley: Yes, sure was. >> You've had it open for a year now. >> We sure have. It's been a year. We also have a soft launch in September, so a little more than a year under our belt, and as you can see, the place is busy. >> Right, so you had the hard job, right? So Mike, and Paul, and all the big brains, they put together pretty pictures, and great statements. You're the one that actually has to help customers implement this stuff, so tell us a little bit about how you use the Tech Vision because it's pretty insightful. It's a lot deeper than cloud's going to be big, or mobile's going to be big, but to take some of these things to help you with your customers drive this innovation. >> Yeah, well, I don't know about having the hard job against theirs. They certainly have the hard job understanding what these technology trends are that are going to have an impact on business three to five years out, but I certainly do have the fun job, and the exciting job. I get to work with our clients every day here in the hub, and work with our 250 dedicated innovation teammates here in the hub to think about the impact of these trends to their business, so clients come in for a day, two days, a week, and we'll sit with technologists. We'll get our hands on some of these emerging technologies, on quantum computing, on artificial intelligence, machine vision, machine learning, natural language processing. You name it, we have it here. We have a smart materials showcase going on upstairs that a lot of these clients have checked out, so they can come here, they can get their hands on these technologies that are driving these trends, and then, they can sit and work with strategists, and others who can think about, what are the application of these technologies to their business? And then, what's really exciting is we have engineers here who can then help build prototypes to actually test these technologies to see what their impacts are for the business, and then, finally, support the rollout of pilots that prove successful, so it's, again, it's a fun job. I love it. >> And how does it actually work in terms of best practices? Is it starting out as some strategy conversation with the top-level people about trying to integrate say, more AI into their products, or is it maybe more of within a product group, where they're trying to be a little bit more innovative, and it really challenges on the product development path? You talked about the material science that they want to go down, what are some of the ways that people actually work with you, and work with your teams, and leverage this asset here at the hub? >> Yeah, so ultimately, it's both, and it's at all ends of the spectrum. We are here in the Silicon Valley, where clients are coming from all over the globe to understand what the trends are that are going to shape their business operations in the future, so we have clients that are coming through. Some people call them digital safaris, or innovation safaris. Some people may say that's not valuable. I think it is valuable to come and get firsthand experience, knowledge, touch and feel these things, and really dedicate time to think about the application to your business. On the other end of the spectrum, we'll have clients who are here for days, weeks, and months, and we have ongoing partnerships with clients. We've been open for about a year and a half, for that and longer to actually embed this innovation capabilities into their business, so I think maybe an answer is, what is the most successful model I see? I really get to dig into these clients who are using our services as an innovation engine to help them drive their business, and to help augment their innovation capabilities, and it's those clients I see who are continuously testing, continuously learning, understanding the impact of these technologies, driving proofs of concepts to test them who are able to make progress. >> Can it happen without top down support? I mean, we talked, unfortunately Clayton Christensen just passed away. Innovator's Dilemma, my favorite business book of all time because he said smart people making sound business decisions based on customers, profitability, and business, logical business priorities, will always miss discontinuous change. Jeff Bezos talks about AWS had a seven-year head start on their public cloud because no one down in Redwood Shores, or Waldorf was paying attention to the bookseller in Seattle, so it's hard for big companies to innovate, so is it really necessary for that top down, that, hey, we are going to invest, and we are going to saddle up, and get our hands dirty with some of these technologies for them to be successful, and drive innovation because it's not easy for big enterprises. >> You're exactly right. Innovation is hard. Change is difficult. I was a student of Clayton Christensen, and like you and many others, are mourning his passing. He made a significant impact, this area of research. Change is hard. It's difficult, so we see a lot of clients who are coming in, and are doing interesting things to overcome that inertia to stay put, and I think tops down leadership is a significant piece of that. You need to have leaders who are supporting movement, who are enabling decision making quickly, so they are supporting small decisions they're making frequently so that there's not a massive decision that happens at the end of a pilot, but rather, micro-decisions that help ensure things are being moved along, building pilots and proof of concepts, of course, helped in that movement to get buy-in, to get leaders to see the value, and to also pivot if something isn't working, so innovation is hard. Accenture's Innovation Hub helps to fill some of those gaps because really, we are a sandbox, where you can come in, build the proof of concepts, test these ideas, and then, in an ongoing, continuous way, help understand their impacts to your business. >> Right, and I'm just curious how often, as order of magnitude, this innovation around a particular, existing business, maybe it's the new materials, the new way of thinking about it, versus maybe, is this a way for them to really explore wild ideas, or go out a little bit beyond the edge of what they're going to execute in their normal, day to day, say, product development because which of those do you find is best use of your resources? >> Yeah, so again, it runs the spectrum. I mean, I think the companies who are innovating around the edges, they're spending a lot of money to run pilots, and tests, proof of concepts that may not have significant value to the core of their business, so of course, it's the companies who are really thinking about how they're going to innovate new business models, how they're going to build on these trends to figure out where their company is going in the future, and be ready, and be ahead of the curve, but in order to get there, maybe you do need to get your hands dirty, and run some tests, run some proof of concepts to understand the technology. The key is, in order to ensure that the investment in those activities is actually helping you move the needle. >> Right, so how should people, if somebody's watching this, and they want to get involved, or I'm busting my head. We're not moving as fast as we need to. I'm nervous. I have an imperative. I need to accelerate this stuff. How do they get involved, and how do they end up here getting their hands dirty with some of your team? >> Yeah, thanks for that, appreciate that. Accenture works with the largest organizations around the globe, and there's typically a client account leader, partner, from Accenture embedded into the biggest organizations, and so, for those who are existing clients, they can reach out to their client account lead, and we would be delighted to welcome them in, and do some, either, exploratory research into these technologies, or actually, do some longer-term innovation engine work, where we're helping to augment their capabilities. For those who, maybe, aren't an Accenture client, then, we do have open houses. We do quarterly open events, not only for potential new clients, but also, for people in the community for partners, for schools. We're really committed to helping to be an asset for San Francisco, for this community, so keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to come in. >> Yeah, that's great because last time when we were here when we opened there was a lot of conversation about being a very active participant in the community. You guys are sponsors with the Warriors at the Chase Center, but no, I think we had a number of people from the city and county of San Francisco in talking about the opportunities, and being an active, engaged member of the community beyond just a for-profit company. >> Absolutely, and the undercurrent of this year's Tech Vision, which is about to launch is all about thinking beyond the edges of your organization, and understanding the choices that you make, how they impact the communities you serve, so it's really important to us to be a good steward of that here at Accenture, and we have teammates accessible within the hub. For example, data enthesis, who can help you understand the decisions you're making around artificial intelligence. Are you using data securely? Are you using it in a way that makes people feel comfortable? So we have teammates here who can help clients consider the impact of these decisions that goes beyond the four walls, to really be a good steward for the next generation. >> Okay, well, next time I come, I'm wearing a white coat, so we can go get our hands dirty. >> I like it. >> All right, Ashley, well, again, congratulations to you and the team, and have a great evening. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, she's Ashley, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub for the Technology Vision 2020. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. (funky electronic music)

(bright music) >> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE We are high atop San Francisco in the Sales Force Tower in the new Accenture offices, it's really beautiful and as part of that, they have their San Francisco Innovation Hubs. So it's five floors of maker's labs, and 3D printing, and all kinds of test facilities and best practices, innovation theater, and this studio which is really fun to be at. So we're talking about hybrid cloud and the development of cloud and multi-cloud and continuing on this path. Not only are customers on this path, but everyone is kind of on this path as things kind of evolve and transform. We are excited to have a couple of experts in the field we've got Larry Socher, he's the Global Managing Director of Intelligent Cloud Infrastructure Services growth and strategy at Accenture. Larry, great to see you again. >> Great to be here, Jeff. And Ajay Patel, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager at Cloud Provider Software Business Unit at VMWare and a theCUBE alumni as well. >> Excited to be here, thank you for inviting me. >> So, first off, how do you like the digs up here? >> Beautiful place, and the fact we're part of the innovation team, thank you for that. >> So let's just dive into it. So a lot of crazy stuff happening in the marketplace. Lot of conversations about hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, different cloud, public cloud, movement of back and forth from cloud. Just want to get your perspective today. You guys have been in the middle of this for a while. Where are we in this kind of evolution? Everybody's still kind of feeling themselves out, is it, we're kind of past the first inning so now things are settling down? How do you kind of view the evolution of this market? >> Great question and I think Pat does a really nice job of defining the two definitions. What's hybrid versus multi? And simply put, we look at hybrid as when you have consistent infrastructure. It's the same infrastructure regardless of location. Multi is when you have disparate infrastructure, but are using them in a collective. So just from a from a level setting perspective, the taxonomy is starting to get standardized. Industry is starting to recognize hybrid is the reality. It's not a step in the long journey. It is an operating model that going to exist for a long time. So it's not about location. It's about how do you operate in a multi-cloud and a hybrid cloud world. And together at Accenture VMware have a unique opportunity. Also, the technology provider, Accenture, as a top leader in helping customers figure out where best to land their workload in this hybrid, multi-cloud world. Because workloads are driving decisions. >> Jeff: Right. >> We are going to be in this hybrid, multi-cloud world for many years to come. >> Do I need another layer of abstraction? 'Cause I probably have some stuff that's in hybrid and I probably have some stuff in multi, right? 'Cause those are probably not mutually exclusive, either. >> We talked a lot about this, Larry and I were chatting as well about this. And the reality is the reason you choose a specific cloud, is for those native differentiator capability. So abstraction should be just enough so you can make workloads portable. To be able to use the capability as natively as possible. And by fact that we now at VMware have a native VMware running on every major hyperscaler and on pram, gives you that flexibility you want of not having to abstract away the goodness of the cloud while having a common and consistent infrastructure while tapping into the innovations that the public cloud brings. So, it is the evolution of what we've been doing together from a private cloud perspective to extend that beyond the data center, to really make it an operating model that's independent of location. >> Right, so Larry, I'm curious your perspective when you work with customers, how do you help them frame this? I mean I always feel so sorry for corporate CIAOs. I mean they got security going on like crazy, they go GDPR now I think, right? The California regs that'll probably go national. They have so many things to be worried about. They go to keep up on the latest technology, what's happening in containers. I thought it was doc, now you tell me it's Kubernetes. It's really tough. So how do you help them kind of, put a wrapper around it? >> It's got to start with the application. I mean you look at cloud, you look at infrastructure more broadly I mean. It's there to serve the applications and it's the applications that really drive business value. So I think the starting point has to be application led. So we start off, we have our intelligent engineering guys, our platform guys, who really come in and look and do an application modernization strategy. So they'll do an assessment, you know, most of our clients given their scale and complexity usually have from 500 to 20,000 applications. You know, very large estates. And you got to start to figure out okay what's my current applications? A lot of times they'll use the six Rs methodology and they say hey okay what is it? I'm going to retire this, I no longer need it. It no longer has business value. Or I'm going to replace this with SaaS. I move it to sales force for example, or service now, etcetera . Then they're going to start to look at their workloads and say okay, hey, do I need to re-fact of reformat this. Or re-host it. And one of the things obviously, VMware has done a fantastic job is allowing you to re-host it using their software to find data center, you know, in the hyperscaler's environment. >> We call it just, you know, migrate and then modernize. >> Yeah, exactly. But the modernized can't be missed. I think that's where a lot of times we see clients kind of get in the trap, hey, i'm just going to migrate and then figure it out. You need to start to have a modernization strategy and then, 'cause that's ultimately going to dictate your multi and your hybrid cloud approach, is how those apps evolve and you know the dispositions of those apps to figure out do they get replaced. What data sets need to be adjacent to each other? >> Right, so Ajay, you know we were there when Pat was with Andy and talking about VMware on AWS. And then, you know, Sanjay is showing up at everybody else's conference. He's at Google Cloud talking about VMware on Google Cloud. I'm sure there was a Microsoft show I probably missed you guys were probably there, too. You know, it's kind of interesting, right, from the outside looking in, you guys are not a public cloud, per se, and yet you've come up with this great strategy to give customers the options to adopt VMware in a public cloud and then now we're seeing where even the public cloud providers are saying, "Here, stick this box in your data center". It's like this little piece of our cloud floating around in your data center. So talk about the evolution of the strategy, and kind of what you guys are thinking about 'cause you know you are clearly in a leadership position making a lot of interesting acquisitions. How are you guys see this evolving and how are you placing your bets? >> You know Pat has been always consistent about this and any strategy. Whether it's any cloud or any device. Any workload, if you will, or application. And as we started to think about it, one of the big things we focused on was meeting the customer where he was at in his journey. Depending on the customer, they may simply be trying to figure out working out to get on a data center. All the way, to how to drive an individual transformation effort. And a partner like Accenture, who has the breadth and depth and sometimes the vertical expertise and the insight. That's what customers are looking for. Help me figure out in my journey, first tell me where I'm at, where am I going, and how I make that happen. And what we've done in a clever way in many ways is, we've created the market. We've demonstrated that VMware is the only, consistent infrastructure that you can bet on and leverage the benefits of the private or public cloud. And I often say hybrid's a two-way street now. Which is they are bringing more and more hybrid cloud services on pram. And where is the on pram? It's now the edge. I was talking to the Accenture folks and they were saying the metro edge, right? So you're starting to see the workloads And I think you said almost 40 plus percent of future workloads are now going to be in the central cloud. >> Yeah, and actually there's an interesting stat out there. By 2022, seventy percent of data will be produced and processed outside the cloud. So I mean the edge is about to, as we are on the tipping point of IOT finally taking off beyond smart meters. We're going to see a huge amount of data proliferate out there. So the lines between between public and private have becoming so blurry. You can outpost, you look at, Antheos, Azure Stack for ages. And that's where I think VMware's strategy is coming to fruition. You know they've-- >> Sometimes it's great when you have a point of view and you stick with it against the conventional wisdom. And then all of a sudden everyone is following the herd and you are like, "This is great". >> By the way, Anjay hit on a point about the verticalization. Every one of our clients, different industries have very different paths there. And to the meaning that the customer where they're on their journey. I mean if you talk to a pharmaceutical, you know, GXP compliance, big private cloud, starting to dip their toes into public. You go to Mians and they've been very aggressive public. >> Or in manufacturing with Edge Cloud. >> Exactly. >> So it really varies by industry. >> And that's a very interesting area. Like if you look at all the OT environments of the manufacturing. We start to see a lot of end of life of environments. So what's that next generation of control systems going to run on? >> So that's interesting on the edge because and you've brought up networking a couple times while we've been talking as a potential gate, right, when one of them still in the gates, but we're seeing more and more. We were at a cool event, Churchill Club when they had psy links, micron, and arm talking about shifting more of the compute and store on these edge devices to accommodate, which you said, how much of that stuff can you do at the edge versus putting in? But what I think is interesting is, how are you going to manage that? There is a whole different level of management complexity when now you've got this different level of distributing computing. >> And security. >> And security. Times many, many thousands of these devices all over the place. >> You might have heard recent announcements from VMware around the Carbon Black acquisition. >> Yeah. >> That combined with our workspace one and the pulse IOT, we are now giving you the management framework whether it's for people, for things, or devices. And that consistent security on the client, tied with our network security with NSX all the way to the data center security. We're starting to look at what we call intrinsic security. How do we bake security into the platform and start solving these end to end? And have our partner, Accenture, help design these next generation application architectures, all distributed by design. Where do you put a fence? You could put a fence around your data center but your app is using service now and other SaaS services. So how do you set up an application boundary? And the security model around that? So it's really interesting times. >> You hear a lot about our partnership around software defined data center, around networking. With Villo and NSX. But we've actually been spending a lot of time with the IOT team and really looking and a lot of our vision aligns. Actually looking at they've been working with similar age in technology with Liota where, ultimately the edge computing for IOT is going to have to be containerized. Because you're going to need multiple modalware stacks, supporting different vertical applications. We were actually working with one mind where we started off doing video analytics for predictive maintenance on tires for tractors which are really expensive the shovels, et cetera. We started off pushing the data stream, the video stream, up into Azure but the network became a bottleneck. We couldn't get the modality. So we got a process there. They're now looking into autonomous vehicles which need eight megabits load latency band width sitting at the edge. Those two applications will need to co-exist and while we may have Azure Edge running in a container down doing the video analytics, if Caterpillar chooses Green Grass or Jasper, that's going to have to co-exist. So you're going to see the whole containerization that we are starting to see in the data center, is going to push out there. And the other side, Pulse, the management of the Edge, is going to be very difficult. >> I think the whole new frontier. >> Yeah absolutely. >> That's moving forward and with 5G IntelliCorp. They're trying to provide value added services. So what does that mean from an infrastructure perspective? >> Right, right. >> When do you stay on the 5G radio network versus jumping on a back line? When do you move data versus process on the edge? Those are all business decisions that need to be there into some framework. >> So you guys are going, we can go and go and go. But I want to follow up on your segway on containers. 'Cause containers is such an important part of this story and an enabler to this story. And you guys made and aggressive move with Hep TO. We've had Craig McLuckie on when he was still at Google and Dan, great guys. But it's kind of funny right? 'Cause three years ago, everyone was going to DockerCon right? That was like, we're all about shows. That was the hot show. Now Docker's kind of faded and Kubernetes is really taking off. Why, for people that aren't familiar with Kubernetes, they probably hear it at cocktail parties if they live in the Bay area. Why is containers such an important enabler and what's so special about Kubernetes specifically? >> Do you want to go on the general or? >> Why don't your start off? >> I brought my products stuff for sure. >> If you look at the world its getting much more dynamic. Particularly as you start to get more digitally decoupled applications, you're starting, we've come from a world where a virtual machine might have been up for months or years to all the sudden you have containers that are much more dynamic, allowed to scale quickly, and then they need to be orchestrated. And that's essentially what Kubernetes does, is really start to orchestrate that. And as we get more distributed workloads, you need to coordinate them. You need to be able to scale up as you need for performance etcetera So Kubernetes is an incredible technology that allows you really to optimize the placement of that. So just like the virtual machine changed how we compute, containers now gives us a much more flexible, portable, you can run on any infrastructure at any location. Closer to the data etcetera to do that. >> I think the bold move we made is, we finally, after working with customers and partners like Accenture, we have a very comprehensive strategy. We announced Project Tanzu at our last VM World. And Project Tanzu really focused on three aspects of containers, How do you build applications, which is what Pivotal and the acquisition of Pivotal was driven around. How do we run these on a robust enterprise class run time? And what if you could take every vSphere ESX out there and make it a container platform. Now we have half a million customers. 70 million VM's. All the sudden, that run time we are container enabling with a Project Pacific. So vSphere 7 becomes a common place for running containers and VMs. So that debate of VMs or containers? Done, gone. One place or just spend up containers and resources. And then the more important part is how do I manage this? As you have said. Becoming more of a platform, not just an orchestration technology. But a platform for how do I manage applications. Where I deploy them where it makes more sense. I've decoupled my application needs from the resources and Kubernetes is becoming that platform that allows me to portably. I'm the Java Weblogic guy, right? So this is like distributed Weblogic Java on steroids, running across clouds. So pretty exciting for a middleware guy, this is the next generation middleware. >> And to what you just said, that's the enabling infrastructure that will allow it to roll into future things like edge devices. >> Absolutely. >> You can manage an Edge client. You can literally-- >> the edge, yeah. 'Cause now you've got that connection. >> It's in the fabric that you are going to be able to connect. And networking becomes a key part. >> And one of the key things, and this is going to be the hard part is optimization. So how do we optimize across particularly performance but even cost? >> And security, rewiring security and availability. >> So still I think my all time favorite business book is Clayton Christensen, "Innovator's Dilemma". One of the most important lessons in that book is what are you optimizing for? And by rule, you can't optimize for everything equally. You have to rank order. But what I find really interesting in this conversation and where we're going and the complexity of the size of the data, the complexity of what am I optimizing for now just begs for plight AI. This is not a people problem to solve. This is AI moving fast. >> Smart infrastructure going to adapt. >> Right, so as you look at that opportunity to now apply AI over the top of this thing, opens up tremendous opportunity. >> Absolutely, I mean standardized infrastructure allows you, sorry, allows you to get more metrics. It allows you to build models to optimize infrastructure over time. >> And humans just can't get their head around it. I mean because you do have to optimize across multiple dimensions as performance, as cost. But then that performance is compute, it's the network. In fact the network's always going to be the bottleneck. So you look at it, even with 5G which is an order magnitude more band width, the network will still lag. You go back to Moore's Law, right? It's a, even though it's extended to 24 months, price performance doubles, so the amount of data potentially can exponentially grow our networks don't keep pace. So that optimization is constantly going to have to be tuned as we get even with increases in network we're going to have to keep balancing that. >> Right, but it's also the business optimization beyond the infrastructure optimization. For instance, if you are running a big power generation field of a bunch of turbines, right, you may want to optimize for maintenance 'cause things are running in some steady state but maybe there's an oil crisis or this or that, suddenly the price rises and you are like, forget the maintenance right now, we've got a revenue opportunity that we want to tweak. >> You just talked about which is in a dynamic industry. How do I real time change the behavior? And more and more policy driven, where the infrastructure is smart enough to react, based on the policy change you made. That's the world we want to get to and we are far away from that right now. >> I mean ultimately I think the Kubernetes controller gets an AI overlay and then operators of the future are tuning the AI engines that optimize it. >> Right, right. And then we run into the whole thing which we talked about many times in this building with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury from Accenture. Then you got the whole ethics overlay on top of the business and the optimization and everything else. That's a whole different conversation for another day. So, before we wrap I just want to give you kind of last thoughts. As you know customers are in all different stages of their journey. Hopefully, most of them are at least off the first square I would imagine on the monopoly board. What does, you know, kind of just top level things that you would tell people that they really need just to keep always at the top as they're starting to make these considerations? Starting to make these investments? Starting to move workloads around that they should always have at the top of their mind? >> For me it's very simple. It's really about focus on the business outcome. Leverage the best resource for the right need. And design architectures that are flexible that give you choice, you're not locked in. And look for strategic partners, whether it's technology partners or services partners that allow you to guide. Because if complexity is too high, the number of choices are too high, you need someone who has the breadth and depth to give you that platform which you can operate on. So we want to be the ubiquitous platform from a software perspective. Accenture wants to be that single partner who can help them guide on the journey. So, I think that would be my ask is start thinking about who are your strategic partners? What is your architecture and the choices you're making that give you the flexibility to evolve. Because this is a dynamic market. Once you make decisions today, may not be the ones you need in six months even. >> And that dynanicism is accelerating. If you look at it, I mean, we've all seen change in the industry, of decades in the industry. But the rate of change now, the pace, things are moving so quickly. >> And we need to respond to competitive or business oriented industry. Or any regulations. You have to be prepared for that. >> Well gentleman, thanks for taking a few minutes and great conversation. Clearly you're in a very good space 'cause it's not getting any less complicated any time soon. >> Well, thank you again. And thank you. >> All right, thanks. >> Thanks. >> Larry and Ajay, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We are top of San Francisco in the Sales Force Tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Franciscso, in the Salesforce Tower in the brand new Accenture, the Innovation Hub. It opened up, I don't know, six months ago or so. We were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stair, so if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about cloud and the evolution of cloud, and hybrid cloud, and clearly, two players that are right in the middle of this, helping customers get through this journey, and do these migrations are Accenture and HPE. So we're excited to have our next guest, Melissa Besse. She is the Managing Director, Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure Strategic Partnerships, at Accenture. Melissa, welcome. >> Thanks Jeff. >> And joining us from HP is David Stone. He is the VP of Ecosystem Sales. David great to see you. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this new entrance, with AWS coming on the scene, one of the great lines that Jeff Bezos talks about, is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the bookseller, out on the left hand edge, was coming in to take their infrastructure business. But as things have moved to public cloud, now there's hybrid cloud, now all applications, or work loads, are right for public clouds, so now, all the Enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves but it's complicated. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary, hybrid cloud versus Multi-Cloud. What do those terms mean to you and your customers? Let's start with you, Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of Multi-Cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of, I would say, a Multi-Cloud operating model, that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So, you have your public cloud providers, you have your SaaS, like Salesforce, work day, you have your PAS, right. And so when you think of Multi-Cloud, any customer is going to have a plethora, of all of these types of clouds. And really being able to manage across those, becomes critical. When you think of Hybrid-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud is really thinking about the placement of Ous. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right. Are you going to in the public, or in the private space? And you kind of look at it from that perspective. And it really enables that data movement across both, of those clouds. >> So what do you see, David, in your customers? >> I see a lot of the customers, that we see today, are confused, right? The people who have gone to the Public Cloud, had scratched their heads and said, "Geez, what do I do?", "It's not as cheap as I thought it was going to be." So, the ones who are early adopters, are confused. The ones who haven't moved, yet, are really scratching their head as well, right. Because if you don't the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so, all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy. And, I think that's where the market, and I know Accenture and HPE, clearly see the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, you said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out. Where we more often here it talked about workload, this kind of horses for courses, you know. It's a workload specific, should be deployed in this particular, kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mention data, and there's a lot of conversation, kind of pre-cloud, about data gravity and how expensive it is to move the data, and the age old thing, do you move the compute to the data, or move the data to the compute? There's a lot of advantages, if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the real negatives, in terms of potential cost implications, and we didn't even get into regulations, and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay, in the data center. So, how should people start thinking about these variables, when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Accenture's position definitely, like when we started off on our Hybrid Cloud journey, was to capture the workload, right. And, once you have that workload, you could really balance the public benefits of speed, innovation, and consumption, with the private benefits of, actual regulation, data gravity, and performance, right. And so, our whole approach and big bet, has been to- Basically, we had really good leading public capabilities, cause we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to, migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we said okay, if we create a hybrid capability, that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, and that is standard, we'd be able to offer our customers a way to pick really, the right workload, in the right place, at the right price. And that was really what our whole goal was. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, and so just to add on to what Melissa said, I think we also think about, at least, you know, keeping the data in a place that you want, but then being cloud adjacent, so getting in the right data centers, and we often use a cloud saying, to bring the cloud to the data. So, if you have the right hybrid strategy, you put the data where it makes the most sense. Where you want to maintain the security and privacy, but then have access to the APIs, and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages, of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we here a lot of the data center providers like, Equinix and stuff, talking about features, like direct connect and, you know, to have this proximity between the public cloud, and the stuff that's in your private cloud, so that you do have, you know, low latency, and you can, when you do have to move things, or you do need to access that data, it's not so far away. I'm curious about the impact of companies like, Salesforce in the Salesforce tower, here in San Francisco, at the center offices, and office 365, and Work Day, on how can the adoption of the SaaS applications, have changed the conversation about cloud, and what's important and not important, it used to be security, I don't trust anything outside my data center, and know I might argue that public clouds are more secure, in some ways that private cloud, you don't have disgruntled employees per se, running around the data centers unplugging things. So, how it the adoption of things like Office 365, clearly Microsoft's leveraged that in a big way, to grow their own cloud presence, change the conversation about what's good about cloud, what's not good about cloud, why should we move in this direction. David, you have a thought? >> No, look, I think it's a great question, and I think if you think about the, as Melissa said, the used cases, right. And, how Microsoft has successfully pivoted, their business to it as a service model, right. And so what I think it's done, it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the Salesforces of the world, have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a SaaS based offer, and so when you can do a Work Day, or Salesforce.com implementation, sure, it's been built, it's tested and everything else. I think what then becomes the bigger question, and the bigger challenge is, most companies are sitting on a thousand applications, that have been built over time. And what do you do with those, right? And so, in many cases you need to be connected, to those SaaS space providers, but you need the right hybrid strategy, again, to be able to figure out, how to connect those SaaS space services, to whatever you're going to do, with those thousand workloads. And those thousand workloads, running on different things, you need the right strategy, to figure out where to put the actual workloads. And, as people are trying to go, I know one of the questions that comes up is, do you migrate? Or do you modernize? >> David: And so, as people put that strategy together, I think how you tie to those SaaS space services, clearly ties into your hybrid strategy. >> I would agree, and so, as David mentioned, right. That's where the cloud adjacency, you're seeing a lot of blur, between public and private, I mean, Google's providing Bare-metal as a service. So it is actually dedicated, hybrid cloud capabilities, right. So you're seeing a lot of everyone, and as David talked about, all of the surrounding applications around your SAP, around your oracle. When we created our Exensor Hyper Cloud, we were going after the Enterprise workload. But there's a lot of legacy and other ones, that need that data, and or, the Salesforce data. Whatever the data is, right. And really be able to utilize it when they need to, in a real low latency. >> So, I was wondering I we could unpack, the Accenture Hybrid Cloud. >> Melissa: Sure. >> What is that? Is that your guys own cloud? Is this, you know, kind of the solution set? I've heard that mentioned a couple times. So what is the Accenture Hybrid Cloud? >> So Accenture Hybrid Cloud, was a big bet that we made, as we saw the convergence of MultiCloud. We really said, we know, everything is not going to go public. And in some cases, it's all coming back. And so, customers really needed a way, to look at all of their workloads, right. Because part of the issue with, the getting the cost and benefits out of public is, the workload goes but you really aren't able, to get out of the data center. We term it the "Wild Animal Park", because there's a lot of applications that, right, are you going to modernize, are you going to let them to end of life. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, to truly exit the data center strategy. And so, Accenture Hybrid Cloud is actually, a big bet we made, it is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability, that really augments all of the leading capability, we had in the cloud area. It is, it's differentiated, we made a big bet with HPE, it's differentiated on it's hardware. One of the reasons, when we were going after the Enterprise, was they need large compute, and large storage requirements. And what we're able to do is, when we created this, use some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client, that we had in the existing I-O-N environment, and we were actually able to achieve, some significant benefits, just from the automation. We got 50 percent in the provisioning of applications. We got 40 percent in the provisioning of the V.M. And we were able to take a lot of what I'll call, the manual tasks, and down to, it was like 62 percent reduction in the effort. As well as, 33 percent savings overall, in getting things production ready. So, this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning, at the application level, because we're going after the Enterprise workloads. And it will create these, it's an ASA that came from government, so it's highly secured, and it really was able to preserve, I think what our customer needed. And being able to span that public/private, capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know that there's enough talk, about the complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing, the CIS Admin piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about HPC, a lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with A.I. and machine learning now. Which, you know, most of those benefits are going to be, realized in a specific application, right? It's machine learning or artificial intelligence, applied to a specific application. So, again, you guys make big iron, and have been making big iron for a long time, what is this kind of hybrid cloud open up, in terms of, for HPE to have the big heavy metal, and still have kind of the agility and flexibility, of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about HPE's strategy has been, in this area of high performance compute. That we bought the company S.G.I. And as you have seen the announcements, we're hopefully going to close on the Cray acquisition as well. And so we in the world of the data continuing to expand, and at huge volumes. The need to have incredible horsepower to drive that, that's associated with it, now all of this really requires, where's your data being created, and where's it actually being consumed? And so, you need to have the right edge, to cloud strategy in everything. And so, in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge, to be able to compute and do stuff in real time. But in many cases you need to feed all that data, back into another cloud or some sort of mother. HPE, you know, type of high performance compute environment, that can actually run the more, advanced A.I. machine learning type of applications, to really get the insights and tune the algorithms. And then, push some of those APIs and applications, back to the edge. So, it's an area of huge investment, it's an area where because of the latency, you know, things like the autonomous driving, and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud, or you need cloud type capability, if you will, to be able to compute and make the right decisions, at the right time. So, it's about having the right compute technology, at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, and the right perform. >> A lot of rights, good opportunity for Accenture. So, I mean it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud, and that kind of new, verbs around cloud-like things. Is where we're going to see the same thing, kind of the edge versus the data center comparison, in terms of where the data is, where the processing is, because it's going to be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out of the edge, cause, you know, there's no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that great, and maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, Edge offers a whole bunch of, different challenges that you can control for, in a data center but it is going to be this crazy, kind of hybrid world there too, in terms of where the allocation of those resources are. You guys get into the deeper end of that model, Melissa? >> Yeah, so we're definitely working with HPE, to create some of, I'll call it our edge managed services, again, going back to what we were saying about the data, right, we saw the centralization of data with the cloud, with the initial entrance into the cloud, now we're seeing the decentralization of that data, back out to the Edge. With that, right, in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need- They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil, and exploration, if you look at media processing, right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things, and depending on where it's located, if it's on the Edge, how you're going to feedback the data as we talked about. And so, we're looking at, how do you take this foundation, right, this, I'll call it Exensor Hybrid architecture, right. Take that, and play that intermediate role. I'm going to call it intermediary, right, because you really need a really good, you know, global data map, you need a good supply chain, right. Really to make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application, at the right time. With, right, the ability to do it at speed. And so, all of these things are factors, as you look at our whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud strategy, right. And being able to manage that, Edge to core and then back up to Cloud, etcetera. >> Right, now I wonder if you could share some stories, cause the value proposition around Cloud, is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right. But it's not about cost, it's not about cost savings, I mean there's a lot of that in there and that's good, but really the opportunity is about speed. Speed and innovation. And enabling more innovation across your Enterprise, with more people having more access to more data, to build more apps, and really, to react. Are people getting that? Or, are they still, the customer still kind of encumbered, by this kind of transition phase, they're still trying to sort it out, or do they get it? That really this opportunity is about speed, speed, speed. >> No, go ahead. I mean we use a phrase first off, it's, "fear no cloud", right. To your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy. But, I think within that you get, what's the right application? And how do you, you know, fit it in to the overall strategy, of what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole, right, when you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, right, and applications, and how are you going to, some you're going to retain, some you're going to retire, some you're going to (stutters) refactor for the cloud, or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is, you're going to be looking at doing, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters, like even the hyperscalers, themselves, right. They recognize the speed, so you know, we're working with Google for instance. They wanted to get into the Bare-metal, as a service capability, right. Them actually building it, getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud architecture, that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub-millisecond latency, right. And so, they're the ones, right, everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and prebook capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well, is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers. Because it is, as we talked about in this multicloud world, lots of things that you have to manage, if you can get pieces from multiple, you know, from a partner, right, that can provide more of the services that you need, it really enables the management of those clouds sources. >> Right, so we're going to wrap it up, but I just want to give you the last word in terms of, what's the most consistent blind spot, that you see when you're first engaging with a customer, who's relatively early on this journey, that they miss, that you see over, and over, and over, and you're like, you know, these are some of the thing you really got to think about, that they haven't thought about. >> Yeah so, for me, I think it's- the cloud isn't about a destination, it's about an experience. And so, how do you get- you talked about the operations, but how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use this simple analogy, that if you and I needed a car, for five or 10, or 15 minutes, you go get an Uber. Cause it's easy, it's quick. If you need a car for a couple days, you do a rental car. You need a car for a year, you might do a lease. You need a car for three, four year, you probably by it, right? And so, if you use that analogy and think, Hmmm, I need a workload application for five/six years, putting something at a persistent workload, that you know about on a public cloud, may be the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibited. But, if you need something, that you can stand up in five minutes, and shut it right back down, the public cloud is absolutely, the right way to go, as long as you can deal with the security requirements, and stuff. And so, if you think about, what are the actual requirements, is it cost, is it performance, you've talked about speed and everything else. It's really trying to figure out how you get an experience, and the only experience that can really hit you, what you need to do today, is having the right hybrid strategy. And every company, I know Accenture was out, way in front of the market on public cloud, and now they've come to the realization, so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, it's going to be multicloud. And as long as you can have an experience, and a partner, that can manage, you know, help you define the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> Jeff: Melissa. >> I think blind spot we run into is, it does start off as a cost savings activity. And there really, it really is so much more about, how are you going to manage that enterprise workload? How are you going to worry about the data? Are you going to have access to it? Are you going to be able to make it fluid, right? The whole essence of cloud, right, what it disrupted was the thought, that something had to stay in one place, right. And, where the real time decisions were being made. Where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds, as well as, that you had to own it yourself, right. I mean, everyone always thought, okay, I'll take all the, you know, I.T. department, and very protective of everything that it wanted to keep. Now, it's about saying, all right, how do I utilize, the best of each of these multiclouds, to stand up, what I'll call, what their core capability is as a customer, right. Are they doing the next chip design? Are they, you know, doing financial market models, right? That requires a high performance capability, right. So, when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power, is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products, and services to market, and touching the customers I need. Versus, oh, I'm going to move this out to an infrastructure, because that's what cloud, it'll save me money, right. That's typically the downfall we see, because they're not looking at it from the workload, or the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator, and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff, (laughs) that's not your core. Alright, well Melissa, David, thanks for taking a minute, and I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> She's Melissa, He's David, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are high above the San Francisco skyline, in the Salesforce tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (tech music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Franciscso, in the Salesforce Tower in the brand new Accenture, the Innovation Hub. It opened up, I don't know, six months ago or so. We were here for the opening. It's a really spectacular space with a really cool Cinderella stair, so if you come, make sure you check that out. We're talking about cloud and the evolution of cloud, and hybrid cloud, and clearly, two players that are right in the middle of this, helping customers get through this journey, and do these migrations are Accenture and HPE. So we're excited to have our next guest, Melissa Besse. She is the Managing Director, Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure Strategic Partnerships, at Accenture. Melissa, welcome. >> Thanks Jeff. >> And joining us from HP is David Stone. He is the VP of Ecosystem Sales. David great to see you. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, let's just jump into it. The cloud discussion has taken over for the last 10 years, but it's really continuing to evolve. It was kind of this new entrance, with AWS coming on the scene, one of the great lines that Jeff Bezos talks about, is they had no competition for seven years. Nobody recognized that the bookseller, out on the left hand edge, was coming in to take their infrastructure business. But as things have moved to public cloud, now there's hybrid cloud, now all applications, or work loads, are right for public clouds, so now, all the Enterprises are trying to figure this out, they want to make their moves but it's complicated. So, first of all, let's talk about some of the vocabulary, hybrid cloud versus Multi-Cloud. What do those terms mean to you and your customers? Let's start with you, Melissa. >> Sure. So when you think of Multi-Cloud, right, we're seeing a big convergence of, I would say, a Multi-Cloud operating model, that really has to integrate across all the clouds. So, you have your public cloud providers, you have your SaaS, like Salesforce, work day, you have your PAS, right. And so when you think of Multi-Cloud, any customer is going to have a plethora, of all of these types of clouds. And really being able to manage across those, becomes critical. When you think of Hybrid-Cloud, Hybrid-Cloud is really thinking about the placement of Ous. We usually look at it from a data perspective, right. Are you going to in the public, or in the private space? And you kind of look at it from that perspective. And it really enables that data movement across both, of those clouds. >> So what do you see, David, in your customers? >> I see a lot of the customers, that we see today, are confused, right? The people who have gone to the Public Cloud, had scratched their heads and said, "Geez, what do I do?", "It's not as cheap as I thought it was going to be." So, the ones who are early adopters, are confused. The ones who haven't moved, yet, are really scratching their head as well, right. Because if you don't the right strategy, you'll end up getting boxed in. You'll pay a ton of money to get your data in, and you'll pay a ton of money to get your data out. And so, all of our customers, you know, want the right hybrid strategy. And, I think that's where the market, and I know Accenture and HPE, clearly see the market really becoming a hybrid world. >> It's interesting, you said it's based on the data, and you just talked about moving data in and out. Where we more often here it talked about workload, this kind of horses for courses, you know. It's a workload specific, should be deployed in this particular, kind of infrastructure configuration. But you both mention data, and there's a lot of conversation, kind of pre-cloud, about data gravity and how expensive it is to move the data, and the age old thing, do you move the compute to the data, or move the data to the compute? There's a lot of advantages, if you have that data in the cloud, but you're highlighting a couple of the real negatives, in terms of potential cost implications, and we didn't even get into regulations, and some of the other things that drive workloads to stay, in the data center. So, how should people start thinking about these variables, when they're trying to figure out what to do next? >> Accenture's position definitely, like when we started off on our Hybrid Cloud journey, was to capture the workload, right. And, once you have that workload, you could really balance the public benefits of speed, innovation, and consumption, with the private benefits of, actual regulation, data gravity, and performance, right. And so, our whole approach and big bet, has been to- Basically, we had really good leading public capabilities, cause we got into the market early. But we knew our customers were not going to be able to, migrate their entire estate over to public. And so in doing that, we said okay, if we create a hybrid capability, that is highly automated, that is consumed like public, and that is standard, we'd be able to offer our customers a way to pick really, the right workload, in the right place, at the right price. And that was really what our whole goal was. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, and so just to add on to what Melissa said, I think we also think about, at least, you know, keeping the data in a place that you want, but then being cloud adjacent, so getting in the right data centers, and we often use a cloud saying, to bring the cloud to the data. So, if you have the right hybrid strategy, you put the data where it makes the most sense. Where you want to maintain the security and privacy, but then have access to the APIs, and whatever else you might need to get the full advantages, of the public cloud. >> Yeah, and we here a lot of the data center providers like, Equinix and stuff, talking about features, like direct connect and, you know, to have this proximity between the public cloud, and the stuff that's in your private cloud, so that you do have, you know, low latency, and you can, when you do have to move things, or you do need to access that data, it's not so far away. I'm curious about the impact of companies like, Salesforce in the Salesforce tower, here in San Francisco, at the center offices, and office 365, and Work Day, on how can the adoption of the SaaS applications, have changed the conversation about cloud, and what's important and not important, it used to be security, I don't trust anything outside my data center, and know I might argue that public clouds are more secure, in some ways that private cloud, you don't have disgruntled employees per se, running around the data centers unplugging things. So, how it the adoption of things like Office 365, clearly Microsoft's leveraged that in a big way, to grow their own cloud presence, change the conversation about what's good about cloud, what's not good about cloud, why should we move in this direction. David, you have a thought? >> No, look, I think it's a great question, and I think if you think about the, as Melissa said, the used cases, right. And, how Microsoft has successfully pivoted, their business to it as a service model, right. And so what I think it's done, it's opened up innovation, and a lot of the Salesforces of the world, have adapted their business models. And that's truly to your point, a SaaS based offer, and so when you can do a Work Day, or Salesforce.com implementation, sure, it's been built, it's tested and everything else. I think what then becomes the bigger question, and the bigger challenge is, most companies are sitting on a thousand applications, that have been built over time. And what do you do with those, right? And so, in many cases you need to be connected, to those SaaS space providers, but you need the right hybrid strategy, again, to be able to figure out, how to connect those SaaS space services, to whatever you're going to do, with those thousand workloads. And those thousand workloads, running on different things, you need the right strategy, to figure out where to put the actual workloads. And, as people are trying to go, I know one of the questions that comes up is, do you migrate? Or do you modernize? >> David: And so, as people put that strategy together, I think how you tie to those SaaS space services, clearly ties into your hybrid strategy. >> I would agree, and so, as David mentioned, right. That's where the cloud adjacency, you're seeing a lot of blur, between public and private, I mean, Google's providing Bare-metal as a service. So it is actually dedicated, hybrid cloud capabilities, right. So you're seeing a lot of everyone, and as David talked about, all of the surrounding applications around your SAP, around your oracle. When we created our Exensor Hyper Cloud, we were going after the Enterprise workload. But there's a lot of legacy and other ones, that need that data, and or, the Salesforce data. Whatever the data is, right. And really be able to utilize it when they need to, in a real low latency. >> So, I was wondering I we could unpack, the Accenture Hybrid Cloud. >> Melissa: Sure. >> What is that? Is that your guys own cloud? Is this, you know, kind of the solution set? I've heard that mentioned a couple times. So what is the Accenture Hybrid Cloud? >> So Accenture Hybrid Cloud, was a big bet that we made, as we saw the convergence of MultiCloud. We really said, we know, everything is not going to go public. And in some cases, it's all coming back. And so, customers really needed a way, to look at all of their workloads, right. Because part of the issue with, the getting the cost and benefits out of public is, the workload goes but you really aren't able, to get out of the data center. We term it the "Wild Animal Park", because there's a lot of applications that, right, are you going to modernize, are you going to let them to end of life. So there's a lot of things you have to consider, to truly exit the data center strategy. And so, Accenture Hybrid Cloud is actually, a big bet we made, it is a highly automated, standard private cloud capability, that really augments all of the leading capability, we had in the cloud area. It is, it's differentiated, we made a big bet with HPE, it's differentiated on it's hardware. One of the reasons, when we were going after the Enterprise, was they need large compute, and large storage requirements. And what we're able to do is, when we created this, use some of our automation differentiation. We have actually a client, that we had in the existing I-O-N environment, and we were actually able to achieve, some significant benefits, just from the automation. We got 50 percent in the provisioning of applications. We got 40 percent in the provisioning of the V.M. And we were able to take a lot of what I'll call, the manual tasks, and down to, it was like 62 percent reduction in the effort. As well as, 33 percent savings overall, in getting things production ready. So, this capability is highly automated. It will actually repeat the provisioning, at the application level, because we're going after the Enterprise workloads. And it will create these, it's an ASA that came from government, so it's highly secured, and it really was able to preserve, I think what our customer needed. And being able to span that public/private, capability they need out there in the hybrid world. >> Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know that there's enough talk, about the complexity of the management in these worlds. Nobody ever wants to talk about writing, the CIS Admin piece of the software, right? It's all about the core functionality. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about HPC, a lot of conversation about high performance computing, a lot going on with A.I. and machine learning now. Which, you know, most of those benefits are going to be, realized in a specific application, right? It's machine learning or artificial intelligence, applied to a specific application. So, again, you guys make big iron, and have been making big iron for a long time, what is this kind of hybrid cloud open up, in terms of, for HPE to have the big heavy metal, and still have kind of the agility and flexibility, of a cloud type of infrastructure. >> Yeah, no, I think it's a great question. I think if you think about HPE's strategy has been, in this area of high performance compute. That we bought the company S.G.I. And as you have seen the announcements, we're hopefully going to close on the Cray acquisition as well. And so we in the world of the data continuing to expand, and at huge volumes. The need to have incredible horsepower to drive that, that's associated with it, now all of this really requires, where's your data being created, and where's it actually being consumed? And so, you need to have the right edge, to cloud strategy in everything. And so, in many cases, you need enough compute at the edge, to be able to compute and do stuff in real time. But in many cases you need to feed all that data, back into another cloud or some sort of mother. HPE, you know, type of high performance compute environment, that can actually run the more, advanced A.I. machine learning type of applications, to really get the insights and tune the algorithms. And then, push some of those APIs and applications, back to the edge. So, it's an area of huge investment, it's an area where because of the latency, you know, things like the autonomous driving, and things like that. You can't put all that stuff into the public cloud. But you need the public cloud, or you need cloud type capability, if you will, to be able to compute and make the right decisions, at the right time. So, it's about having the right compute technology, at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost, and the right perform. >> A lot of rights, good opportunity for Accenture. So, I mean it's funny as we talk about hybrid cloud, and that kind of new, verbs around cloud-like things. Is where we're going to see the same thing, kind of the edge versus the data center comparison, in terms of where the data is, where the processing is, because it's going to be this really dynamic situation, and how much can you push out of the edge, cause, you know, there's no air conditioning a lot of times, and the power might not be that great, and maybe connectivity is a little bit limited. So, you know, Edge offers a whole bunch of, different challenges that you can control for, in a data center but it is going to be this crazy, kind of hybrid world there too, in terms of where the allocation of those resources are. You guys get into the deeper end of that model, Melissa? >> Yeah, so we're definitely working with HPE, to create some of, I'll call it our edge managed services, again, going back to what we were saying about the data, right, we saw the centralization of data with the cloud, with the initial entrance into the cloud, now we're seeing the decentralization of that data, back out to the Edge. With that, right, in these hybrid cloud models, you're really going to need- They require a lot of high performance compute, especially for certain industries, right? If you take a look at gas, oil, and exploration, if you look at media processing, right, all of these need to be able to do that. One of the things, and depending on where it's located, if it's on the Edge, how you're going to feedback the data as we talked about. And so, we're looking at, how do you take this foundation, right, this, I'll call it Exensor Hybrid architecture, right. Take that, and play that intermediate role. I'm going to call it intermediary, right, because you really need a really good, you know, global data map, you need a good supply chain, right. Really to make sure that the data, no matter where it's coming from, is going to be available for that application, at the right time. With, right, the ability to do it at speed. And so, all of these things are factors, as you look at our whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud strategy, right. And being able to manage that, Edge to core and then back up to Cloud, etcetera. >> Right, now I wonder if you could share some stories, cause the value proposition around Cloud, is significantly shifted for those who are paying attention, right. But it's not about cost, it's not about cost savings, I mean there's a lot of that in there and that's good, but really the opportunity is about speed. Speed and innovation. And enabling more innovation across your Enterprise, with more people having more access to more data, to build more apps, and really, to react. Are people getting that? Or, are they still, the customer still kind of encumbered, by this kind of transition phase, they're still trying to sort it out, or do they get it? That really this opportunity is about speed, speed, speed. >> No, go ahead. I mean we use a phrase first off, it's, "fear no cloud", right. To your point, you know, how do you figure out the right strategy. But, I think within that you get, what's the right application? And how do you, you know, fit it in to the overall strategy, of what you're trying to do. >> Yeah. >> And I think the other thing that we're seeing is, you know, customers are trying to figure that out. We have a whole, right, when you start with that application map, you know, there could be 500 to 1000 workloads, right, and applications, and how are you going to, some you're going to retain, some you're going to retire, some you're going to (stutters) refactor for the cloud, or for your private cloud capability. Whatever it is, you're going to be looking at doing, I think, you know, we're seeing early adopters, like even the hyperscalers, themselves, right. They recognize the speed, so you know, we're working with Google for instance. They wanted to get into the Bare-metal, as a service capability, right. Them actually building it, getting it out to market would take so much longer. We already had this whole Exensor Hybrid Cloud architecture, that was cloud adjacent, so we had sub-millisecond latency, right. And so, they're the ones, right, everyone's figuring out that utilizing all of these, I'll call it platforms and prebook capabilities. Many of our partners have them as well, is really allowing them that innovation, get products to market sooner, be able to respond to their customers. Because it is, as we talked about in this multicloud world, lots of things that you have to manage, if you can get pieces from multiple, you know, from a partner, right, that can provide more of the services that you need, it really enables the management of those clouds sources. >> Right, so we're going to wrap it up, but I just want to give you the last word in terms of, what's the most consistent blind spot, that you see when you're first engaging with a customer, who's relatively early on this journey, that they miss, that you see over, and over, and over, and you're like, you know, these are some of the thing you really got to think about, that they haven't thought about. >> Yeah so, for me, I think it's- the cloud isn't about a destination, it's about an experience. And so, how do you get- you talked about the operations, but how do you provide that overall experience? I like to use this simple analogy, that if you and I needed a car, for five or 10, or 15 minutes, you go get an Uber. Cause it's easy, it's quick. If you need a car for a couple days, you do a rental car. You need a car for a year, you might do a lease. You need a car for three, four year, you probably by it, right? And so, if you use that analogy and think, Hmmm, I need a workload application for five/six years, putting something at a persistent workload, that you know about on a public cloud, may be the right answer, but it might be a lot more cost prohibited. But, if you need something, that you can stand up in five minutes, and shut it right back down, the public cloud is absolutely, the right way to go, as long as you can deal with the security requirements, and stuff. And so, if you think about, what are the actual requirements, is it cost, is it performance, you've talked about speed and everything else. It's really trying to figure out how you get an experience, and the only experience that can really hit you, what you need to do today, is having the right hybrid strategy. And every company, I know Accenture was out, way in front of the market on public cloud, and now they've come to the realization, so has many other places. The world is going to be hybrid, it's going to be multicloud. And as long as you can have an experience, and a partner, that can manage, you know, help you define the right path, you'll be on the right journey. >> Jeff: Melissa. >> I think blind spot we run into is, it does start off as a cost savings activity. And there really, it really is so much more about, how are you going to manage that enterprise workload? How are you going to worry about the data? Are you going to have access to it? Are you going to be able to make it fluid, right? The whole essence of cloud, right, what it disrupted was the thought, that something had to stay in one place, right. And, where the real time decisions were being made. Where things needed to happen. Now, through all the different clouds, as well as, that you had to own it yourself, right. I mean, everyone always thought, okay, I'll take all the, you know, I.T. department, and very protective of everything that it wanted to keep. Now, it's about saying, all right, how do I utilize, the best of each of these multiclouds, to stand up, what I'll call, what their core capability is as a customer, right. Are they doing the next chip design? Are they, you know, doing financial market models, right? That requires a high performance capability, right. So, when you start to think about all of this stuff, right, that's the true power, is having a strategy that looks at those outcomes. What am I trying to achieve in getting my products, and services to market, and touching the customers I need. Versus, oh, I'm going to move this out to an infrastructure, because that's what cloud, it'll save me money, right. That's typically the downfall we see, because they're not looking at it from the workload, or the application. >> Same old story, right? Focus on your core differentiator, and outsource the heavy lifting on the stuff, (laughs) that's not your core. Alright, well Melissa, David, thanks for taking a minute, and I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> She's Melissa, He's David, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are high above the San Francisco skyline, in the Salesforce tower at the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (tech music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Accenture TechVision 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (electronic music) >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the Salesforce Tower, the 33rd floor, brand new Accenture Innovation Hub, five stories here in the building, the ribbon cutting this morning, and we're really excited to have our next guest. He's been on many times, I think the first time in 2013. Fresh off the plane from Davos, Paul Daugherty, great to see you. >> It's great to be here Jeff and thanks for joining us at this event. It's a really big day for us here. >> Absolutely, now I didn't get your title in, I give you Chief Technology and Innovation Officer. You're really at kind of the forefront, so let's jump into the TechVision. This is something you guys do every year. You pick five kind of big trends that we should be taking a look at. There's a lot of detail. People can (laughs) take their time to read through it. But, I just want to touch on some of the highlights. What are some of the big changes from when we sat down a year ago? >> We have five trends this year. The number of trends varies a little bit, but the, you know, I think the one key takeaway and highlight from the Vision this year is this idea, the big idea, that we're entering the post-digital era, and I think many people will be surprised by that. They'll go what do ya mean post-digital? >> When you said that earlier today, I'm like post? We're just right in the meat of it aren't we? >> Right, but just to contextualize that a little bit, last year companies spent 1.1 trillion dollars on digital transformation. 94% of companies are doing some stage of digital transformation. 68% of them said they're pretty well set with their digital transformation. >> They said they're set? >> They're in good shape. Now you can question it. >> Does that surprise you? >> I question it, yes, it surprises me, and we're not sure that that's entirely-- >> Accurate? >> Representative, >> That's okay. >> But nonetheless, what is true is that every organization is adopting digital, and the question we're asking in the Vision is if everybody's doing digital, what's going to differentiate you? And, we believe that that's the characteristics of the post-digital environment where what you did leading up to now isn't going to be enough to differentiate you and lead to success in the future. In the post-digital era, it's about some new business concepts about how you shape your business and new technologies and some new corporate obligations that are going to be instrumental in your success as an organization. >> I want to dig into that a little bit 'cause I think it's a really interesting conversation. At the ribbon cutting this morning, we had representatives from the city and county of San Francisco, a representative from, I think, San Francisco State academic institution, and you said in some earlier remarks today that the responsibility for the company has moved beyond kind of stewardship for their customers, stewardship for their employees and their shareholders, but really they've got to be kind of active contributors to the community. And, that's been kind of called out over the last couple years especially in the tech industry that hey, you can't just do this stuff willy-nilly. You got to kind of take responsibility for what you can do. >> Yeah, well put, and that's one of the key things that we've been talking about in prior Visions, if you'll recall. This year, it's a big theme. The importance of this is, it's not just because it feels good. It's not just because you want to create good headlines. It's instrumental to your business success to be responsible, to create trust with your workers, employees, consumers and citizens and people in the communities you live in, and I'll explain why. What's happening is, we're creating increasingly intimate technology-enabled experiences for consumers. Think about implantable medical devices to prevent epileptic seizures. Think about the monitoring devices we use. Think about the information that's collected on us. People swipe on Tinder 1.1 million times per second, 3.7 million Google searches per second, 178 million emails per second, 266,000 hours of Netflix tracking every pause, play, fast forward, yeah per second, 266,000 hours. There's so much information collected on us out there. Our information is being used in so many different ways, and the technology is enabling companies to create individualized services for you that are great for consumers, but they're only going to be great if companies build the trust with their customers to get that data from them and if they honor the boundaries of responsibility to make sure they can sustain those products and services. >> But Paul, you scare me to death because every day we hear this breach, that breach, this breach, that breach. It's almost now-- >> Three billion identities in 2018 alone stolen. >> That's half the world, right, or almost. So, it's almost like okay, that's going to happen. And now that you're getting all this additional information, now you can tie the information from my phone that I'm takin' eight trips to 7-Eleven a day and spending way too much time on my couch not movin' around and how those things are going to tie together. One, for kind of the ethics of how the information is used when they have it, and two, it is probably going to get breached. An amazing concept you talked about earlier today, a digital twin. We hear about it from GE all the time for a jet engine, but to have a digital twin of me in some data base, that's, uh, you know, it's with everything, right? There's a good side and a scary side. >> There is, but I think this is where the idea of trust becomes very important. We need to think about, companies need to think about these services and their consumers in different ways. A lot of people, including myself, in the past have used phrases like data is the new oil. Data's the gold of artificial intelligence in this digital age we're living. I think that's dead wrong, and we got to change the mindset. Data isn't fuel or gold. Each piece of data is a fragment of a person and represents a part of a person's activity and identity, and I think if you change your thinking that way, and if you take a view that it's not all about optimizing the use of data, but it's about carefully using data in the right way that builds trust and provides value for the consumer, and you get that equitable exchange of value, that's what the future's all about. >> Right, so one of the topics, and again, we don't have time to go through all of 'em here, and you're going to give a presentation later, it's kind of just the whole machine and human interaction and how that's evolving. Specifically, I want to ask in terms of the work world. We hear about RPA, and everybody should have their own bots, and you can have bionic legs, so that you don't hurt your back if you're doing lifting. So, as you guys kind of look at how these things are melding, it's going to be an interesting combination of people with machines that are going to enable this kind of next gen of work. >> Yeah, no it'll be interesting. I think the important thing that we need to really think about is that like anything else, all these technologies are being designed by us, and we're deciding how to use them. We're deciding the principals around it, so this is about how do we design the world we want which gets back to the theme around responsibility and such. If you look at it, we find that workers are actually optimistic about the technology. Two thirds of workers are positive and optimistic about how all this technology's going to improve their job to even increase career prospects, but only half of those workers believe that their companies are going to provide them with the right training and learning. When we're talking about the human plus trend in here, the human plus worker trend is that it's not a nice to have for companies to provide learning platforms and train their employees. It's critical to their success because the jobs are changing so fast, roles are changing so fast, that if you as a company don't invest in a learning platform to continuously advance your people to fill the new jobs as they're being redefined every day, you as a company are going to get left behind, and that's what we're talking about in the human plus trend of the Vision. >> Right, another thing we hear all the time in terms of how technology's advancing on accelerating curves and people aren't so good at accelerating curves, but very specifically how no one person in one particular industry really has visibility as to what's happening in all these tangential. What's happening in health care? What's happening in drugs? What's happening in logistics? I'm in the media business, so I don't know. You guys are really sitting in an interesting catbird seat because you can see the transformation and the impacts of technology across this huge front, and it's that movement across that front which is really accelerating this thing way faster than people realize I think. >> Yeah it is, and it's a great position to be in to be able to look across like that. The thing I would say though is that unlike other eras of technology earlier, we're seeing remarkably broad industry adoption of these concepts. It's a little different in each industry as you just said, but every industry is looking at this. The interesting thing to me is one of the most common requests that I get from CEOs and from the C-Suite is they want to pull together a workshop, and they want to talk about their strategy and where they're going, and very often, more often than not now, they're saying, and I want to hear from people outside my industry. I want to hear what's happening over there. If I'm in insurance, I might want to hear what's happening in retail, or you know, they want to hear about different industries because they understand that the change is happening differently. They want to make sure they're not missing a pattern that they could apply in their own industry. >> Right, so last question before I let you go. You're speaking all the time. You're talkin' to customers. You go to cool shows like Davos and get to hang out with other big-brained people, but you get to participate in all these things, and now you have this facility. What does the Innovation Hub and these resources enable you to do with the clients that you couldn't do as we sit here in this beautiful new facility? >> Yeah, that's a great question. It's something we've worked on really hard over the last four or five years. It's creating what we call our Innovation Architecture, and it's, what we think, a unique way of putting together capability from research and thought leadership to our Accenture Ventures which is our venture capital investing arm to Accenture Labs which is our R and D and inventors to our studios where we co-create with clients to our industry professionals, the 2,000 people here in Northern California that are working with our clients everyday, and we can put all that together to turn the idea, the research, into results very quickly for our clients, and I don't think anybody can do it in the same way we can by co-like-heading all this and by the sheer investment we put into this. We invest over 800 million dollars a year in research and development, over a billion dollars a year in training for our people, and that results in things like 6,500, 6,500 patents that we generate, more than anybody else in our sector, and 1,400 of those come from our people right here in the San Francisco Innovation Hub, so it's an amazing place for innovation right here. >> All right, well Paul, thanks again for taking a few minutes. I know it's a busy day. You're gettin' ready to go present the findings for people. Where should they go to learn more about the TechVision? >> Go to accenture.com dot, uh, accenture.com/techvision. I think at midnight tonight Pacific Time it'll be out there, but by the time they see this, they'll probably have access to it, thanks. >> Paul, thanks for takin' a minute and good luck tonight. >> Always fun, thanks Jeff. >> He's Paul, I'm Jeff, you're watchin' theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Thanks for watchin'. (electronic music)

>> From the Salesforce tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019 brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in an exciting new location. Last year we covered the Accenture technology vision release 2018. It was at Minna Gallery, cool event. But this year the venue is off the hook and 33 stories high and we're really excited to be in the brand-new Accenture Innovation Hub and joining me here our first guest, John Del Santo, he is the senior managing director for the West region for Accenture and he is responsible for this beautiful five-story. So John, first off congratulations to you and the team. >> Thanks, it's been a big project opening up this place over the last year, but it's come together great. >> Yeah and this morning they had a nice ribbon cutting, all kinds of dignitaries so, you know, what does this mean in terms of kind of, you've been with the center a long time. Your presence in the Bay Area specifically, but also as part of more of this global innovation effort. >> Well I think it's this, this is bringing together all the best of Accenture that we already had in the Bay Area. We're putting it all under one roof. We're relocating everybody and we're expanding the team. So we announced 500 new technology jobs here in this location over the next year and expanding our apprentice program. But basically, it's all about bringing more talent to this location in San Francisco to do more projects with clients in this space. >> Right. So we'll get into it with some of the other folks that we have scheduled, but it's both a coworking space for the Accenture people in town and three solid floors of all kinds of labs and innovation, kind of hands-on spaces, if you will, to do this work with your clients. >> Absolutely, that co-creation, we think, is what is really differentiating us from our competitors and it's really allowing our clients to work with us and our experts, our technology experts, and the ecosystem partners that we do a ton of work with, real time to solve a problem. Brainstorm a problem, prototype it, solve it over a very short period of time. >> Yeah, I think it's a pretty unique approach that you guys have, which is imagine the future and then create the future. >> Yeah >> As opposed to just reacting to the future. And you made an interesting comment this morning about, you know, be the disrupter, not the disruptee. And my question is really, as you see the leadership at these traditional companies that are afraid of being disrupted, how are they kind of changing the way that they do things, knowing that the digital natives and the threats that they don't even see coming from a completely different direction are now bearing down, and they have to get with the program. >> Well they do have to. And then it's really our job, our purpose, you know, the talent that we have in this company's purpose is to make our clients succeed and be disrupters. Because if they're not, they will be disrupted. And so it's in our best interest to make sure we're bringin' in the best talent, pushing their thinking on ideas, and actually getting to a solution that can actually allow them to differentiate and serve their customers better. >> Right. >> So that's what we're all about, is making sure our clients are successful. >> And draggin' 'em kicking and screaming? Or are they, are they seeing-- >> Absolutely not. >> Are they seeing it in their competition? I mean, in terms of kind of that board-level discussion, where, you know, it's passe that everybody's a technology company, and everybody's doing digital disruption, but you're down in the weeds helping these people actually execute the detail. >> Yeah, well it's funny, you say everyone's a digital company, that was our big theme a few years ago at this exact event. >> Right, right. >> Absolutely, not kicking and screaming. Most executive teams, most business teams that we work with understand that they need to change. The pace of change at their business is rapid, it's faster and faster, and every year it gets faster, and so they need to actually be a lot more agile in that >> Right. >> And move quickly. >> So one of the big things in like the singularity and accelerating pace of change. And some of these big kind of macro trends that we're experiencing is that there's no single person that sees all the innovation change across this broad front, by industry, by role, etc. You guys are in a pretty unique position 'cause you actually get to see the technology innovation and the disruption and the digitization across a number of industries as well as a number of roles. So you can kind of see this big huge glacier that's moving down the valley. >> That's one of the really cool things about this particular geography and location is that literally steps from our door here on Mission Street in San Francisco, we've got clients from ten, fifteen different industries that we serve, and we can bring talent from ten or fifteen plus different industries plus the technology skills to make sure they're looking at the problem from all angles. So if it's a retailer, are they really thinking about financial services, 'cause we've got both skills here. If it's a retailer, are they thinking about platform-based selling? Do they have an omnichannel strategy? We've got the skills in this location cross-industry to help serve banks, retailers, products companies, software platform companies, etc. And I don't think you can find that anywhere else, at least in the Continental United States, given kind of where we are in our geography. >> Right. So you had a couple of special guests this morning at the ribbon cutting. You had a customer, which is great, but you also had a representative from City of San Francisco and I just want to shift gears and talk about, you know, what it is to be kind of an active member of the community. You know, the responsibility of companies we're seeing, with kind of this backlash, if you will, against some of the mega-companies out there. It's more than just taking care of your customers. It's more than just taking care of your employees and even your stockholders. But now companies are being asked to be more kind of responsible and active participants in their local community. That's always been sort of part of our ethos. It's always been part of our vision to help our clients succeed, but also to change the way the world works and lives. And therefore, we have to be really active in our communities. We're being a little bit more explicit about it lately. But it's our view that we need to be able to improve where we're working and living, 'cause our people are active and it's important that we help serve 'em. We have a very strong public service business. We serve the State of California, we serve the City and County of San Francisco as well as well as other entities in California. And it's critical for us to help improve California as we improve the businesses in California. And so it's clearly part of our mission. >> Right. The other thing I think it's interesting is kind of companies' roles with higher education. We've seen a lot of work that Accenture's doing with community colleges and, you know, it's more than just helping so that you get good talent to feed your own system, >> Right. >> But it's really, as the pace of change just continues to accelerate, you know, historical institutions aren't necessarily best-equipped to move that fast. So again, you guys are taking a much more active, you probably done it before, but more active vocal role in the local academic institutions as well. >> Absolutely, I mean, our university relationships are really, really strong, always have been. But it's always been a little selfish on our end. We're always trying to get the best talent out of the universities locally here and there's obviously great schools in the Bay Area. We want to be more engaged with those universities on projects together as well. We want more of a 360-degree relationship. We've got great examples of where we've done research with some of the universities here locally, where we've co-innovated with some of them and we want to do more of that so that there's more of a solid relationship. It's not just about us, you know, helping them find the best students to work here, >> Right. >> Which we want, (laughs) and we do every year, but making sure that we're actually involvin' them from a research perspective and any other kind of, you know, philanthropic idea that we might have together. >> Right. So big event tonight, big event this morning, >> Yeah. >> So before I let you go, it's a brand-new space, I wonder if you could share a couple fun facts for the people who haven't come to visit yet, but hopefully will come as part of a project and a co-creation about some of the cool unique features that you guys have-- >> Well some >> Built in this thing. >> Unique features in the building. First of all, there's unique features with the talent. So we have researchers here, labbers, we call 'em, from our labs, that have, you know, Accenture has thousands of patents. More than 10% of them have been actually invented here. So our inventors are a secret that we've had in Northern California for a long time and they're all based here now. We've got some really cool spaces. We've got an augmented reality room, which is basically a 360-degree room where you can, rather than having to wear virtual-reality goggles, you can actually go inside of a computer, go inside of a lab, go inside of a hospital, and get an experience that's much more hands-on and a lot more immersive, if you will, than you could any other way. We've got a maker lab where we actually are makin' stuff. So we've got a design business here where we've helped physically make not only software, we make a lot of software, everyone knows that, but we've actually made products that have embedded software in them and so there's that fabrication capability we actually have in this building as well, which is pretty unique for a high-rise. (laughs) so >> Right. No, we saw all the machines back there, >> Yup. >> Had a good tour earlier today so-- >> Oh lots of robots and toys and all that good stuff, too. >> Yeah, that's right, it's all the robot room. All right, well, John, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. Really exciting day for you and the team, >> Yeah. >> And nothing but congratulations. >> Thank you so much. >> All right. >> Thank you, thanks for coming. >> He's John, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the brand-new Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce tower. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco with a brand newly open Salesforce Tower, the 33rd floor, the middle of the brand new Accenture Innovation Hub. We're excited to have our next guest, who's been part of the Innovation Labs and the Innovation Hubs and a lot of innovation in the center for years and years and years. You've seen him before, we're at the 30th anniversary, I think last year. All the way from Paris, is Marc Carrel-Billiard. He is the Senior Managing Director for Accenture Labs. Marc, great to see you again. >> Great to see you Jeff again as well, I'm so happy. >> So, what do you think of the new space here? >> I love it, I just love it. I saw it building and everything and now it's ready, and we open it today, I mean it's just amazing. The stairs, did you see the stairs? >> I saw the stairs, yes. >> Really amazing, everything's good there. I think it's not an office, like Paul already said, it's really something better and I think it's a tool for explaining what is innovation at Accenture at play, I mean, how we use it, how we connect the labs, we use the liquid studio, all the ventures and everything, that's great. >> Great. But now it's all brought together, right? You had a couple satellite locations in the Bay Area-- >> Yeah and I think that with the story of putting all this stuff in what we call the Innovation Center, the Innovation Hub, and so putting everything in the same building and have different floors where we can address different talking with our clients. Are we talking about research? Are we talking about more polythiophene? Are we talking about, I mean ideally, it's all about driving innovation at scale. >> Right, right. >> At scale. >> So, we're here for the technology vision-- >> We are. >> Which will be in, in a little bit and then, Paul and they team will present-- >> Yep, they will. >> Five new transfer for 2018. One of the ones they called is DARQ, D-A-R-Q, >> I know. >> Which is distributed ledger technologies, formerly known as blockchain, but we don't want to call it blockchain. AI, extended reality, which is every kind of form, extended, augmented-- >> Mix relating everything, that's right. >> And quantum computer. >> You bet. >> So, from the labs point of view, from an Accenture kind of innovation looking forward, inventing the future, as you like to say, which I think is a great tagline, what are some of your priorities going forward, now that you got this great new space? Which is one of what I think 11 in the United States, right? >> So, my priorities are all of them, I mean, all of the above! Because I was like, do you remember at the time we were talking about SMAC? Like Social Mobility, there was analytics and cloud. I would say that DARQ is the new SMAC. So, we saw that basically, that technology has evolved and, from analytics, we'd like more AI work and everything, but it's still being combined and everything. You can still think about social media, collaborative stuff, we going to go through immersive reality where we going to continue collaborating. Think about cloud. I mean, just like cloud will bring you height, throughput computing power through the cloud. Well, I mean, also quantum computing can give you like amazing capability in terms of computing power. So I would say probably, like, DARQ is a new SMAC and so the lab has been working on it since, I would say, not since day one, but at the very beginning. And so, well obviously distributed ledger, you know that we have a lab in Sophia Antipolis, they're really spending a lot of time in the blockchains. So there's a couple of things that we're doing. I give you a couple of ideas. One is, maybe people talk about blockchains, and there's bunch of blockchains all over, there's like blockchains for manufacturing, there's blockchains for trade finance, there's blockchains for this and that. Problem is there's no very good interoperability between those blockchains. One thing that the lab is going to be working is how we can interoperate between those different blockchains. So you are basically a supply chain, you want to connect to a financial organization, how their blockchain will connect to your blockchain. Number one. The second thing we're going to be working on is the SMAC contract. The lab believes the SMAC contract is not smart enough. So we going to add more artificial intelligence in the SMAC contract to see what we could do better. Think about this SMAC contract as a stock procedure in database. How we make those stock procedure a little bit better. I mean, it's just analogy type of thing. >> Obviously, the blockchain conversation, any kind of demo, talking about DHL-- >> Yeah, DHL, exactly. >> But is that logistics, that merchandise move through their system, as you said, there's a lot of different touch points with a lot of different systems. So it's not an aggregated system, it's a problem, and the other thing is you don't necessarily need all the data for each person, >> You don't. >> Or transaction all along the line, right? >> You're absolutely right. And I talk about interoperability between blockchains, but there's going to be also interoperability between the blockchain that you're implementing and the legacy environment that you have. And this needs to be addressed as well. So lot of thinking about blockchains, I've always said for me that blockchain is the digital right management of your future. That kind of protocol, and we're working with companies that are basically creating movies and stuff like that, and how we leverage blockchain to change those movies between different parties. I mean, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff that we're going to be able to do. So that's blockchain. The D for distributed ledger. A for artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence obviously is something very beginner labs. We have three labs that are delegated to artificial intelligence. >> Three? >> Yup, out of seven. One here, San Francisco. The other one in Bangalore, and the third one in Dublin, Ireland. And each of them are covering a little part of the things that we want to do with artificial intelligence. It's all about accelerating the artificial intelligence, so how we're going to think about new infrastructure, a new way of doing machine learning, using weak labeling, it's all about explainable AI, how you're going to connect the knowledge graph with machine learning, so that's the probabilistic model will give you an explanation of why they've decided to select this picture, or this information and so forth. And basically the other things we're going to be working on, artificial intelligence, is that human-machine interaction, and one thing that we want to address is what we call the conversational aspect of virtual agents. If you look at virtual agents today, voice comment type of things. >> Right, right. >> You can't really engage in a conversation. I want to look at that. How they're going to understand context, and how you're going to be exchanging better, and how you're going to flow a better conversation with that. One thing that's going to be very important in everything that we're doing is going back to semantic network, knowledge management, knowledge graph. How we combine knowledge graph with all these machine learning capabilities. That's artificial intelligence in the lab. >> Then you get, we'll just work down the list, right, then you've got the extended reality. >> Extended reality. >> So whatever kind of reality it is. >> So we're going to continue doing a lot of stuff for extended reality, immersive learning, we're going to use that, I think what's going to be important for us is that not to look at extended reality just from a vision standpoint, but try to use the combinatorial effect of every immersive sense that you have. So like, basically, hearing, also, smelling, touching the aptic, and how you combine all those senses to change completely, not the vision, but the experience. What you really feel. In fact, if you go to this Innovation Hub, I don't know if you've seen that we have an igloo-- >> We did, I saw the 360. >> That's right the 360, to try to immerse you already in some quantum computing experience, I think it's a good segue way also for quantum. So quantum, is that we've been doing a lot of progress with quantum too, you know, two years ago we started already to work with D-wave and then we have work with this company called 1QBit, so we build a software, so we use their software development kit, to program the quantum computer, and then we work with Biogen to do drug discovery, and changing the way you do that, by accelerating that through quantum computing. But we've continued, we've announced basically some partnership with IBM to look at their platform, we're continuing working with other interesting platform like Fujitsu, their Digital Annealer, and so forth, and what we want to do is that Accenture is very, very agnostic related to all those vendors. What we want to do is that we want to understand more about how you program those different architecture, how you see what type of problems they can solve, and how based you can program them. And so if we use the Abstraction Layer on top of all the others, and we can program on top of that, this is really cool, this is exactly what we want to do. >> So how close is it? How close is it to getting the production ready? I mean, you got it in the new vision for 2019, I mean, what are people just playing with it or is it ready for prime-time. >> No, no, no. >> Where is it these days? >> So first of all, DARQ stuff, all the people, all of our clients-- >> I mean quantum specifically. >> Okay quantum-specific. I think we're talking about three to five years to start to have real solutions. Right now, we have prototype, but we're moving to more pilot, and I think the solution will come soon. Probably in five years time, we're starting to ascend soon. Let me give you another idea. >> So the order of magnitude difference in the way that you can compute, the AI. >> Exactly, and I think that's going to change the game. It's going to change the game on everything. Let me give you maybe a last example that I'm sure you're going to love. And it's all about optimization matchmaking. Our tech vision this year is all about hyper-personalization, plus on-demand delivery, and so that's how at the moment, you know, you're going to change the game. The momentary moment. How you're going to change the reality of people. What you're going to be able to do. I'm going to tell you that, where we're going to use quantum computing. We're going to use quantum computing to do a better matchmaking between a person who is waiting for an organ and an organ that you can transplant to this person. And the moment is the accident that happens on the street. There's going to be someone basically dying on the street, so someone dead and then you need, basically, to get this organ, it could be a kidney, for example, every organs have a time-lapse that you can use basically to transport that to someone else. Now the question is that you have the organ, it's in basically an ice-cubed environment-like box, and then you transplant that to someone, you have like few hours to figure out who are the best receiver. And this is hyper-personalization, because you need to understand the variable of all the body that is going to receive that but all the variables of the organ, until now is all main front to do the matchmaking. We're rethinking that using quantum computing. >> It's just wild, you know, what the cloud really enabled to concept. If you had infinite compute, infinite store, and infinite networking, at basically free, asymptotically approaching free, what would you build? And that's a very different way to think about problems. >> Not only will we build some amazing things, but I think we would change the reality of every people. Every people will have their own reality that they could use product and service the way they want it, and this will be a completely different, not a world, but a game set, that would be completely different. >> Marc, we're almost out of time, but I just want to ask you about Pierre, former CEO of Accenture passed away recently, and I was really struck by the linked investors. So many people, you know, I follow you, I follow Paul, a lot of people posted, what a special man, and what an impact he had, sounds really personally with most of the leadership here in Accenture. I was wondering if you could share a few thoughts. >> Well obviously, I mean, everyone's been very sad that we lost Pierre. I mean, he was just an amazing person. He was really a role model, not only in business, but in life. And he was so fun about fun of innovations, he loved the labs, he loved what we could do in it, I think he was really thinking about better future for the people, better future for the world, and everything, and it was really amazing for that. Everyone was struck really to see that. But I think there was so many testimonials pouring from our people, but what I was even more amazed was our clients. He really moved clients. And his visions is an amazing legacy for Accenture, and we're going to, I mean, this is so precious what he left us and I think that I really want the lab, every day that we're inventing something, I'm always thinking about Pierre and what he would have thought about these things. He was always enthusiastic reading our research paper and everything, so definitely the lab's going to continue to innovate, and I hope that Pierre, wherever he is, will be watching. >> I'm sure he's smiling down. >> And will be happy with that. >> Alright, well Marc, thanks a lot for taking a few minutes and congratulations on this continual evolution of what you guys are doing with labs and Innovation Centers, and now the Innovation Hub here in downtown San Francisco. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Alright. He's Marc, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at downtown San Francisco at the Accenture Innovation Hub as part of the Accenture Technology Vision 2019 presentation. Thanks for watching. See you next time. (light electro music)

>> From the Sales Force tower in downtown San Francisco. It's the cube covering a censure Tech vision twenty nineteen brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff. Freak >> here with the cue. We're >> in the center. Innovation hub, downtown San Francisco Salesforce >> Tower. The party is just getting started and you can see >> behind us. Had a ribboned coat ribbon cutting ceremony this morning. We're excited here for the Century Technology Vision awards given later today. But we're excited of our next cast. First >> time on the Cube. Ashley Miller. She's the director of Innovation West Region for centuries, actually. Welcome. >> Thank you so much. Glad to be here. >> So all these toys are for you to play with. >> They they are there so many interesting things to play with your so many incredible people. It's an incredible place to be. >> So it's a great aggregation of kind of a bunch of satellite offices. You've got three stories of really kind of active, engaging labs. I wonder if you could say I guess she had a soft opening a little while ago. Tonight was the heart opening. What are some of the ways that customers actually come in and use this facility? >> Yeah, way actually have five floors. We have the thirty first through thirty fifth floor. Five entire floors with several of those floors dedicated solely Teo, innovating with our clients and collaborating and co creating with our clients. So this is the official launch The Big Party, opening us officially with the ribbon cutting. But Way did have a soft launch over the summer, and in fact, we've been hosting many clients >> each week. >> It's it's really incredible that demand is quite high. People are very eager to come in and explore and learn as well as define strategies and actually co create solutions here with the experts. So it's it's exciting, >> so help. So they come in small teams, big teams. They come for a day a week. What are some of, you know, kind of the standard offerings? If you will t come and learn about invasion >> all of the above. We host clients as well as, you know, partners in the community, uh, students and educational groups. People who want to come in and learn about emerging technologies and their potential impact to business to society. A cz well as multiday and multiweek sessions where we're actually rode mapping solutions, building new ideas together and actually co creating prototypes and solutions to solve those those challenges >> right. So Paul, talk bitterly about your innovation, architecture's so everybody wants to know how to innovate, especially in a big company. It's it's not necessarily easy, and you guys have a bunch of assets in play. And then, as I understand it, the hub is the location where you bring all those assets under one roof. >> That's exactly right. This hub is a flagship hub where we have every element of our innovation architecture represented. So it's center has this architecture to help both ourselves innovate as well as our clients and our partners. So clients and partners can come here and access the incredible breadth of our experts, designers, engineers, builders. So here in our flagship hub, we have teammates from our research organization that's offering points of view and helping others understand. What does the future look like? We have teammates from our labs are R and D organization that's actually looking at these cutting edge technologies, quantum computing, connected devices, artificial intelligence and understanding, and using these technologies, developing prototypes to test and learn and understand their potential value. Then we have teammates who can actually build prototypes and solutions. Both connected digital devices as well as physical devices way have teammates in our ventures group who are partnering with the ecosystem of universities as well start ups as well as big ecosystem platform partners and bringing those teammates in and using their solutions to help procreate and ninety eight new opportunities for our clients. And then, of course, within our innovation architecture, we also have our delivery centers. So once you identify really game changing opportunity on, you've tested it and you understand, and it's a viable solution. Well, then you can scale it more cost efficiently through our delivery centers, >> right? So I know it might be asking you like to pick your favorite kid, but but but share. I mean, what is a Woody one or two of your kind of favorite things? That that is here in this innovation hub, that you just think it's just cool beyond compare. >> It is asking me to pick my favorite kid. There's so many incredible things here, but I can tell you what we have on display tonight. We have Mary Hamilton, the head of our labs organization, along with Theresa Tongue is a managing director within our labs and room on Chowdhry, who leads a practice of ethical, eh? I talking about the future of human and robot interaction. What does that mean for teams when they're augmented by robots? How do you do that in a fair way and in an ethical way, so that you're using the humans potential as well as the robot's potential. We have Mike Reading the head of our ventures team. We have him here, along with some of our teammates, from research Justin hers egg. And they're They're talking about the power of Blockchain to create transparency and accountability within supply chains. A CZ well is talking about some of the power of of some of the startups we're working with, like one Cuban quantum computing start up, which we partnered with Bio Gen. The healthcare company. Toe Actually use quantum computing. Teo. Increase the speed of drug discovery. It's really incredible. It takes on average in the industry. It takes ten years and a billion dollars to bring an average drug to market, and they're hoping they can speed this up significantly with with quantum computing. So way have stations on display where you can actually go inside a quantum computer where we'll use immersive technologies. And walking inside, you can actually understand and see what are the powers of quantum mechanics that enable quantum computing? Let's >> see, we >> have way have incredible leaders. So those were those >> were just going long >> so I could keep down. >> I love it. And we keep hearing about the incredible technologists that you have here that something like, I don't remember fifteen hundred out of the six thousand patents you've you've had are coming out of the people that work in this facility. >> It's it's unparalleled the talent that is in this building. Um, sometimes when I walk around, I can almost see the, you know, quantum physics coming out of their brains. They're just incredible. The talent that is here and the talent that we have accessible to our partners about TTO learn from a CZ Wells to partner with and build because these teammates, they're they're working on cutting edge things. And they're looking for partners to explore the validity of these new concepts. So a lot of times we're partnering with clients were both putting some skin in the game to test these ideas on DH. It's It's a really exciting place to be at the intersection of business and technology ideation and building solutions. >> Right? And you're not just doing it just for your clients to he had city and county San Francisco represented this morning at the ribbon cutting and really she talked about and John talked about earlier, you know, being an active participant in the community, and that's a really important piece of the >> puzzle. It is an important piece of the puzzle, and we're really passionate about being a part of the San Francisco community and helping to give back in our community as well as globally. So globally, we run a tech for good program. Where were you applying these emerging technologies to help benefit societies using things like Blockchain to make logistics distribution better and more trustworthy For companies that are delivering food? Teo indeed Populations things like using artificial intelligence built on top of Microsoft cognitive services help the blind to see doing these things. They're actually giving back to the world's population as well as our local population. Just in the last week, we hosted a group of young elementary school students coming in tow learn coding basics we're hosting. Last week we hosted one hundred students from an MBA program abroad. So we're often hosting students, clients, partners, startups. A few weeks back, we hosted a large healthtech challenge, which was really exciting. We had sea levels from some of our health companies. Come in tow, actually judge start ups from the Bay Area and to explore how those startups could tweak and refine their value statement and then explore opportunities to use those startups within the judge's organizations. So So it's a really exciting way that we're finding that being professionally generous, it pays it, tees up opportunities for centuries for our partners, way learn, they learn. And this hub is a powerful place of collaboration, >> right? What a great asset that you have to bring to bear. It's a It's a terrific story. Well, actually, thank you for taking a few minutes of your time. His party is a big part for you in the team, so I will let you get back to it. And again, Thanks for sitting down. Thank you so much. Alright, she's >> asking. Jeff, if you're watching the Cube, we're downtown San Francisco. Salesforce Tower at Thehe Century Innovation Hub. Grand opening. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (upbeat techno music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are live in downtown San Francisco, the Salesforce office in the brand new Accenture Innovation Hub. It's the grand opening, like I say the soft opening, but we had the ribbon cutting, we're presenting the Accenture Technology Vision 2019 and we're excited to have somebody who's not a technologist who's very important to technology, she's Doctor Rumman Chowdhury, she's the Global Lead For Responsible AI at Accenture. >> I am. >> Great to see you. >> Thank you for having me on your program. >> Absolutely. So I was doing some background research on you and I love you introduce a lot of your talks about the fact that you're not a technologist, you come at this from a very, very different point of view. >> I do. So I am a social scientist by background. I've been working as a data scientist in artificial intelligence for some years but I'm not a computer scientist by trade. I come more from a stats background, which gives me a different perspective. So when I think of AI or data science, I literally think of it as information about people meant to understand trends in human behavior. >> So there's so many issues around responsible AI. We can talk, probably, to all these people, go on above, you know. >> Yeah. >> We don't have too much... And the first one is really a lot in the news right now, about AI is simply a codification of existing biases often, unless you really take a very proactive stance to make sure you're not just codifying biases in software. What are you seeing? >> Absolutely. So we really have to think about two kinds of bias. There's one that comes from our data, from our models. This can mean incomplete data, poorly trained models. But the second one to think about is you can have great data and a perfect model but we come from an imperfect world. We know that the world is not a fair place, some people just get a poor lot in life. We don't want to codify that into our systems and processes, so as we think about ethics and AI it's not just about improving the technology, it's about improving the society behind the technology. >> Right. >> Yeah. Another big topic I think that's really important is if you're doing a project and you want to think through some of the ethical issues, should we be collecting this data, why are we collecting this data, why are we running these algorithms and you make a decision it's for a particular person, purpose and the value outweighs the cost. But I think where the challenge really comes into is the next people that use that data or the next use that you don't necessarily have in mind and I think we hear that a lot in terms of kind of the complaints about the current state of big tech, where everyone is doing their little piece. >> Right. >> But what happens over time as those get rolled into maybe bigger pieces that weren't necessarily what they were starting with in the first place. >> Right. >> Absolutely, it's something I called moral outsourcing. Because what we build is often, we feel like a cog in a machine, we feel sometimes as technologists people aren't willing to take the responsibility for their actions, even though we should be. If we build something that is fundamentally unethical, we need to stop and ask ourselves, just because we can doesn't mean we should. >> Right. >> And think about the implications on society. Right now there's often not enough accountability because everybody feels like they're contributing to this larger machine, who am I to question it and the system will crush me anyway. So we need to empower people to be able to speak their minds and have an ethical conscience. >> So I'm curious in term of the reception of your message when you're talking to clients because clearly there's a lot of pressure to innovate fast. Everyone is telling everybody that data's the new oil and we've got to leverage these micro-experiences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they don't necessarily take a minute to step back and reflect >> Right. >> Is this the right thing, is this the right way? Are we collecting more data than we really need to achieve the objective? So how receptive are companies to your message? Do they get it? Do they have >> Yeah. >> To get hit upside the head with some problem before they really understand the value? >> So I'll give you a phrase that everybody understands and then they get the point of ethics in AI. Brakes help a car go faster. If we have the right kinds of guard rails, warning mechanisms, systems, to tell us if something is going to derail or get out of control, we feel more comfortable taking risks. So think about driving on the freeway. Because you know you can stop your car if the car in front of you stops abruptly, you feel comfortable driving 90 miles an hour. If you could not stop your car, nobody would go faster than 15. So I actually think of ethics and AI are an ethical implementation of technology as a way of helping companies be more innovative. It sounds contradictory but it actually works very well. If I know where my safe space is, I'm more capable of making true innovations. >> Right. So I want to get your take on another kind of topic, which is really kind of STEM education versus not STEM, or ethics. >> Right. >> And it's interesting, huge push on STEM, it's very, very important thing that's going on now. But as you look not that far down the road, and this events all about looking down the future, reinventing the future. As more and more of those kind of engineering functions are taken over by the machines >> Right. >> It seems like where the void is is really more talking about what are the implications, what are the deeper questions we should be asking, what are the ethics and the moral questions before just building a better mousetrap. >> Right. So you're raising a very hot button issue in the ethics and AI space. Is it simply enough to say all technologists should take an ethics course? I think it is very important to have an interdisciplinary education but, no, I don't think one ethics course, taken out of context in college will help you. So I think that there's a few things to think about. One is that corporations need to have an ethical culture. It needs to be a good thing to be ethical, number one. Number two, we need interdisciplinary teams. Often technologists will say, and rightfully so, "How was I supposed to know thing X would happen?" It's something very specific to a neighborhood or a country or a socio-economic group. And that's absolutely true. So what you should do is bring in a local community, the ACLU, some sort of a regional expert. So we do also need to move towards creating interdisciplinary teams. >> Right. So you brought up another really cool thing I think in one of your talks, FAITH. Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Explainability >> Yes. >> Which is a, you know nobody likes black box algorithms. >> Yep. >> But fairness, specifically, is such an interesting concept. We all feel very slighted if we perceive things not to be fair. >> Yes. >> The reality is life is not fair, a lot of things are not fair. So as people try to incorporate some of these things into the way they do business, how can they do a better job, what are some of the things they should be thinking about >> Yeah. >> So they can have the faith? >> Fairness is a very complicated, complex thing and I invite you, or whenever someone asks, "What does it mean to be fair?" I point them towards this really great talk from this conference called Fat Star and it's called, 21 Definitions of Fairness. And it's all these different ways in which we can quantify and measure the concept of fairness. Well at Accenture, we took that talk and some other papers and created something called the Fairness Tool. So it's a tool to help guide discussion and show solutions on algorithmic bias and fairness. Now, the way we think about it is not as a decision maker but a decision enabler. So how can you communicate as a data scientist to a non-technical person to explain the potential flaws and problems and then take collective action? So the algorithm can help you make that decision but it's not automating the decision for you. So what it does is it helps smooth conversation and helps pinpoint where there might be bias or unfairness in your algorithm. >> Right. Well we don't have time tonight but another time we're going to >> Sure. >> Dig deeper into this and all the biomechanics and bioengineering >> Yes. >> And a lot of great topics that you've covered in a number of your talks. So I really enjoy getting to meet you and you do terrific work, really enjoy it. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> Alright, thank you. She's Rumman, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching, see you next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Accenture's taken over five floors of the Salesforce Tower, and they're opening their brand new Innovation Hub. It's pretty cool, formal ribbon cutting earlier today. We're excited to be here. It's three floors of cool innovation, then a couple work floors, so if you get a chance come check it out. A lot co-creation, a lot of neat technology happening. But we're here to talk about something a little bit different, that's championship basketball. So we're excited to be joined by Jeremy Thum, he's the senior director of digital experience from the Golden State Warriors, Jeremy, great to see you. >> Great to see you, thank you. >> And he's accompanied by Greg Jensen managing director from Accenture. Welcome. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So digital experience, you guys are getting ready to embark on a big new adventure, a big construction project just south of, I was going to say AT&T Park, Oracle Park now at the new Chase Center. >> Yeah. >> A lot of talk, really excitement, tell us about what is going on at the Chase Center. >> There's never a dull moment at the offices these days as the Golden State Warriors organization is going through a pretty big transition. A transformation from basketball team that leases a building 50 nights a year into an entertainment company that owns and operates a world-class facility. And so all eyes are pointing to this project. All thought is going onto the project, and it's a really exciting time in the organization. >> It's really an amazing story of how much impact leadership really has. I mean, you had a perennial doormat franchise, right, that hadn't been to the playoffs for a long time. And David Lee shows up as the first all-star in Lord knows how long, and they have completely transformed their franchise on the basketball side. And now you see the same kind of energy vision, vision, probably, is really the best word, and now moving from Oracle Arena, one of the most beloved basketball home courts into the new Chase Center. So I what if you can just share some insight on what it is like to work for these guys? You know, what is the passion? How do they drive it down through the whole organization? >> It's incredible. I say that on a daily basis there is an energy level and an excitement about taking this organization to the next level, and there is no rest. We know that sports is cyclical, and the performance on the court is going to be cyclical, but the business can operate in a way, and create an environment that a business can succeed and thrive. And that's part of the move into Chase Center is the organization is expanding. The business is expanding into different areas, that we've never been in before, so it's exciting. >> Right. So how long have you been working with the Warriors? >> About 18 months. >> 18 months? And why did they bring you in? What are you helping them with? >> So we are the Warriors' official technology innovation partner. And as Jeremy and the team were thinking through the fan experience, they where assembling a really great team of partners, and one of those partners is Accenture. And so the reason that I'm here is because I spent about 3 1/2 years working with other media companies on transformations, doing sort of similar fan experience design. And it's really my job to bring the best of Accenture to the Warriors and make sure that as they're innovating on the fan experience, that we're helping them and that we're there as great partners to support them along the way. >> So what are some of the things that win the new fan experience besides just being the loudest arena in the NBA? >> Well, I think the most exciting thing that I'm working on with Greg and the Accenture team is the mobile application of the future. We have a Warriors App that exists now that serves a very specific purpose. As we move into a new building in a new district that surrounds the building and have a variety of events, we need a new mobile experience, also, so we will be building this new mobile experience as an application built specifically for the local fan. Anyone that can, or should, or will be coming to the district to enjoy an event at Chase Center. And of course, as we have a global fan base, there will still be content and interesting things to bring in a global audience to the mobile app. But this is really designed for the local fan to say how can we help you if you have a ticket to an upcoming event, or if you don't have a ticket to an event but just kind of want to see what's happening on the district, how can we help that experience along the way? And all the different touchpoints that go along with a game or an event experience. >> Right. So how much of the mobile app is kind of a launching point into the other things that are happening at the Chase Center versus being kind of its self-contained experience in it of itself? >> I'd love for your opinion on this, too. >> Yeah, I think the thing that the Warriors have done really well is they've positioned technology as enabler of the overall end-to-end experience. And so think of the mobile app as sort of the gateway that ties a lot of that experience together. But certainly there are other exciting activations that will happen within the Chase Center throughout the district, and the Warriors know how to put on a great show, both on the court and off. And so it's really that blend of sort of that background technology that's orchestrating this in concert along with that front, in-your-face, exciting Warrior brand and anthem that is really going to get folks excited. >> Yeah, we talk an awful lot about how we don't want technology to be the story. We want it to live in the background and help enhance the fan experience rather than being the headline. >> Right, I was going to say I'm sure the purists are like, I want to come watch a basketball game. It's a beautiful game, this is why I'm paying a big ticket price because this is what I want to watch. I don't need all these distractions of all these other things. So when you think about the experience and integrating it, as you said, as an amplification of watching the basketball game versus a distraction or something that takes away from the core. How do you kind of balance those priorities? How do you kind of level set a new feature request or a new workflow request? Versus, you know, don't forget at the end of the day, it's still about the basketball game first. >> It is, and in addition to the basketball game, it's all about the 200 other events that will be there. Think of all the concerts and family shows that could be coming to a facility that San Francisco has never had before. So the mobile experience is supposed to get enhanced, and I think were spending a lot of time thinking through. The moment you think about coming to an event, is when that sort of experience begins, and the mobile app should be a conduit to help and not get in the way of the experience, which is that thing that's on the stage or on the court. >> Right. A really good friend of mine is Bill Schlough, he's the CIO of the Giants, right, and every year they go through some big huge technology play, whether it's a new jumbo tron or it's new wifi under the seats. It's this really cool, like you said, this delicate balance where you want to bring in the tech, and people are expected to have tech. They want their Instagram to work when they send a picture with the kids. But, again, it's got to be, I don't want to say secondary, but it is secondary or a little bit behind the scenes. >> And I think the Warriors have been really thoughtful around using the application to help coming to the district and Chase Center become an experience. And what I mean by that is, your ability to do wayfinding from your home to get to your seat. Your ability to book a car service if you choose to leave the district or after a game. The ability to just sort of make your life more simplistic around the game, so that getting to and getting from the event is much simpler and much more streamlined for the fan. But when your in that experience, sure, you can pull up the stats to see that Stephs hit 11 three pointers in a row and broken Clay's most recent record. Or you certainly can just enjoy the game for what it is. >> Right, right. All right, before I let you go, thanks for bringing the trophy, too, Jeremy. Very nice. What's one or two totally unique nuggets that you can share at the Chase Center that are completely new and maybe kind of fall below the radar that you think are pretty cool? >> Well, I don't know if I want to give too many secrets away, but I will say that I think the experience will be something that cannot miss. From the visuals and where it's placed, I think just the visuals when you see the aesthetics is going to blow everyone away. And I think, hopefully, if we do it right, the technology and the mobile experience will be an element to it, but won't be the leading story. >> All right. Well, thanks for stopping by. Congrats on all the rings. And I look forward to one more season, right? We have one more season to go? >> Here we go! >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> All right he's Greg, he's Jeremy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're in downtown San Francisco with the Salesforce Tower. We're in the 33rd floor with the grand opening of the Accenture Innovation hub. It's five stories inside of the Salesforce Tower. It's pretty amazing, couple of work floors and then all kinds of labs and cool things. Tonight they introduce the technology vision. We've been coming for a couple of years. Paul Daugherty and team. Introduce that later, but we're excited to have a couple of the core team from the innovation hub. And we're joined by Mary Hamilton She's a managing director of Accenture Labs. Great to see you Mary. >> Nice to see you too. >> And Teresa Tung also managing director of Accenture Labs. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So it's been quite a day. Starting with the ribbon cutting and the tours. This is quite a facility. So, what does it mean having this type of an asset at your disposal in your client engagements, training your own people, it's a pretty cool spot. >> Yeah, I think it's actually something that's, these innovation hubs are something that we're growing in the U.S. and around the world, but I think here in San Francisco, we have a really unique space and really unique team and opportunity where we're actually bringing together all of our innovation capabilities. We have all of them centered here and with the staircase that connects everyone, we can now serve clients by bringing the best of the best to put together the best solutions that have open innovation and research and co-creation and innovation all in one. >> Right and you had a soft opening how many months ago? So you've actually been running clients through here for a number of months, right? >> We have. So, we've been working here probably about six months in the workspaces. We've been bringing clients through, kind of breaking in the space, but just over the holidays we opened sort of all of the specialty spaces. So, the Igloo, the Immersive Experience, we've got a Makeshop, and those all started to open up so our employees can take advantage and our clients can come in. >> Right, right. >> Yeah. >> So one of the things that comes up over and over I think in every other interview that we've had today is the rock stars that are available here to help your clients. And Teresa I got to brag on you. >> Got one here. >> You're one of the rock stars, all you hear about is most patents of any services for most patents from this office of all the other offices in Accenture. >> All of Accenture >> You're probably the person. (laughs) So congratulations. Talk about your work. It's funny, doing some research, you have an interview from a long time ago, you didn't even think you wanted to get in tech. >> Yeah. >> Now you're kicking out more patents than anybody in Accenture which has like 600,000 people. Pretty great accomplishment. >> I think it's a great story how a lot about people think about technology as a geek sort of thing and they don't actually picture themselves in that role but really, technology is about imagining the future and then being able to make it happen. You can imagine an idea, and you think Cloud, and AI, VR, it's all so accessible today. You could buy a 3D printer and just print your own idea. >> Right. >> And that's so much different than I think it was even ten, twenty years ago. And so when you think about tech, it's much more about making something happen instead of, just again, coding and math. Those are enablers but that's not the outcome. >> Right, right. So what type is your specialty in terms of the type of patent work that you've done? >> I've done them all. So I start with cloud computing, doing a lot of APIs and AI. Most recently doing a lot of work on robotics and that's the next generation. >> Right. so one of the cool things here is, software is obvious, right? You get to do software development, but there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of tangible stuff. You talked about robotics, there's a robotics lab. Fancy 3D printing lab. >> There's like this, >> Yep. >> I don't know, the maker lab, I guess you call it? >> That's right. >> So, I don't know that most people would think of Accenture maybe as being so engaged in co-creation of physical things beyond software innovation. So, has that been going on for a long time? Is that relatively new? And how is it playing in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so, there's a few things we've been doing. Some of it is the acquisitions we've made, so Mindtribe, Pillar, Matter, that really have that expertise in industrial design and physical products. So we're getting to that space. And then, I'm also, as a researcher's standpoint, I'm really excited about some of the area that you'd never think Accenture would play in around material science. So if you start to combine material science plus artificial intelligence, you start to have smart materials for smart products and that's where we see the future going is what are all the kinds of products and services that we might provide with new material? And new ways to use those materials And, >> Right. >> My original background, my degree is in material science so I feel like I've kind of come full circle and exactly what Teresa was saying is how can you design things and come up with new things? But now we're bringing it from a technology perspective. >> Right, got to get that graphene water filtration system so we can solve the water problem in California. That's another topic for another day. But I think one of the cool things is really the integration of the physical and the software. I think a really kind of underreported impact of what we're seeing today are connected devices. Not that they're just connected to do things, but they phone home at the end of the day and really enable the people that developed the products, to actually know how they're being used. And then the other thing I think is so powerful is you can get shared learning. I think that's one of the cool thing about autonomous cars and Waymo, right? If there's an accident, it's not just the people involved in the accident and the insurance adjuster that learn what not to do but you can actually integrate that learning now into the broader system. Everyone learns from one incident and that is so, so-- >> Right. >> different than what it was before. >> Yeah I mean, it really points to type of shared pursuits of larger business outcomes. By yourself, a company might see their customer and impact their business and their product, but if you think about the outcome for the customer, it's around taking an ecosystem approach. It might be your car, your insurance company, you as an individual, and maybe you might be a hobbyist with the car, you're mechanic. Like this ecosystem that I just described here. It's the same across all of the different types of verticals. People need to come together to share data to pursue these bigger outcomes. >> Right, you need to say? >> I was just going to say, and along those lines, if you're sharing data, those insights go across the legal system. But then they can get plugged back in to thinking about the design, and we're looking at something called generative design where if you have that data, you can start to actually give the designer new creative solutions that they may not have thought about. >> Right. >> So you can kind of say, hey based on these parameters of the data we've received back about this product, here are all the permutations of design that you might want to consider, and here's all the levers you can pull and then the designer can go in and then say, okay, this makes sense, this doesn't. But it gives them the set of here are all of the options based on the data. >> Right. >> And I think that's incredibly brilliant. It's kind of the human plus machine coming together to be more intelligent. >> So, human plus machine, great Segway, right? What we just got out of the presentation and one of the guys said there's three shortages coming up. There's food, water and people. And that the whole kind of automation and machines taking jobs is not the right conversation at all, that we desperately need machines and technology to take many of the tasks away because there aren't enough people to do all the tasks that are required. >> I mean think about it as a good thing. As a human, the human plus workers really enabling your job to be easier, more efficient, more effective, safer. So any task that's dull dirty, dangerous, those are things that we don't want to do as humans. We shouldn't be doing those as humans. That's a great place for the robotics and the machines to really pair with us. Or AI, AI can do a lot of those jobs at scale that again, as a human we shouldn't be doing. It's boring. Now you could have human plus machine whether it's robotics or AI to actually make the human a higher level worker. >> Right, I love the three Ds there. You got to add the fourth D, drudgery. Talking about automation, right, it's like drudgery. Nobody wants to do drudgery work. But unfortunately we still do. I mean, I'm ready for some more automation in my daily tasks for sure. Okay, so before we wrap up. What are you looking forward to? We got through the ribbon cutting. Are there some things coming in the short term that people should know about, that you're excited that you're either doing here, or some of your, kind of research directives now that we got the big five from Paul and team. What are you doing in the next little while that you can share? >> Well, I'm excited to have clients coming in, so >> Yeah. >> Al lot of the innovations that we have like Quantum Computing. This is a big bet for Accenture. At the moment, at the time we started Quantum Computing, our clients weren't begging for it yet. We made that market. We went out and took a bet. We saw how the technology was changing. We saw the investments in Quantum. We made the relationships with 1QBit, with IBM and through that, now we're able to find this client opportunity with Biogen and that's the story that we published a drug discovery method that is actually much better than what would happen before. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Mary? >> For me it's about, it's also the clients and it's thinking about it from a co-research and co-innovation standpoint. So, how do we establish strategic, multiyear, long-term relationships with our clients where we're doing joint research together and we're leveraging everything that's in this amazing center, to bring the best and to kind of have this ongoing cycle of what's the next thing. How are we going to innovate together, and how are we going to transform them, talk about approximately from building physical products to building a set of services. >> Right, right. >> And I think that's just taking advantage of this to make that transformation with our clients is so exciting to me. >> Well, what a great space with great energy and clearly you guys look like you're ready to go. >> Hey, we are. >> So congrats again on the event, and thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing this terrific space with us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right. She's Teresa, she's Mary, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube, from San Francisco the Accenture Innovation Hub. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)