>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Tauni Crefeld. She is the Managing Director, communications, media and high-tech at Accenture. And Adam Burden, Chief Software Engineer at Accenture. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> So we are talking today about the future of platforms and Adam, I'm going to start with you to just sort of give our viewers a lay of the land here. It's been a few years since platform development really hit the scene. >> Sure. So it's been an interesting space for us as well. When I talk about what's happening in this area, I like to break it up into the how, the now and the wow. And the how is really what is created or enabled by these platforms. It really is extracting away the complexity. This plumbing and difficult parts of building software bespoke and systems. And it's making that complexity sort of disappear so that the real effort is expended upon building systems and enabling business value. And when we talk about how that has changed the way that we look at systems integration and development, it's actually enabling this thing that we call the renaissance of custom to a degree. And that is really kind of the how. And in the now side of this, it's interesting. When we first started tracking this space, these platform areas, I want to say it was close to eight years ago, we actually called it the Helen of Troy effect. Right? So we had the face that launched 1,000 ships. There literally were 1,000 platforms out there floating around in the ocean and some of them had a lot of sailors on it. And a few of them were just dinghies but. Now what we're seeing happen is this consolidation of platforms and it's taken a couple of different forms. Sometimes you got something like one of these really popular open source platforms like Cloud Foundry. And it's actually becoming sort of an OEM product inside of a lot of other platforms. So you see Cloud Foundry now inside of things like SAP Cloud Platform, for example. So it's popping up in surprising places. Plus you can also use the community version. But that consolidation is now sort of channeling down the number of platform options, environments that are available to build things on top of. So that's a very interesting development that's happening right now. And the wow is what's happening, you know, tomorrow. And I tell you, I see some remarkable things on the horizon. Working with our ecosystem partners, that really will change the way that clients, business, the enterprises, especially the ones that have ambitions to be the high performers of tomorrow, how they're going to enable business applications and systems for their customers. And when you talk about things like low-code and no-code platforms, imagine a scenario where you can talk to an intelligent agent and describe the system that you want to build and the scaffolding for that is created for you. So really remarkable advances and leaps forward coming ahead in the platform space and when I think about the how and how we've gotten here. The now and the wow. It's just an exciting time to be working in this area. >> So what are some of the primary benefits? As you said, you're talking to clients who want to become the high performers of tomorrow. What kind of successes are you seeing? >> So I would really group that into probably two things, Rebecca. I think the first one is around agility. One of the things I like to say is that the pace of technology change will never be as slow again as it is today. And it's sort of a daunting thing. >> Which is mind boggling in itself. >> It is. It's kind of daunting. And being here at AWS re:Invent, we're about to be bombarded with an unprecedented number of new product and capability announcements over the next couple of days. It's hard to absorb all of these things. And hard to be able to take advantage of them and for our businesses and our clients who we work with, they are looking for agility. And that's one of the key benefits that you get out of being on one of these or a part of one of these platforms. It allows them to be more responsive to the market and they can do it in a way which is really enabling them to deliver solutions faster and better than ever before. And think about the competitive threats that they're facing, right? With cloud technologies, like AWS, we really, we've democratized a lot of compute like never before. So because of that, it's a lot easier for a start up or even a company in an adjacent industry to come in and say, I'm going to start doing things in this space. I'm going to sell roofing products and I'm a car manufacturer, for example. And when you have things like that happening and it's so easy for competitors to get in and be disruptive, it's really important to business that you can move quickly. And these platforms enable just that. So agility is clearly one of them. And then the other one is around innovation. If you think about how hard it would be for my colleague here, Tauni and I if we were going to build a new customer service system that had natural language processing and a virtual agent technology in it and we were going to try and build this in our own data center, right? Stand up the infrastructure. Set up all the services. Be able to do this. Train the models ourselves. We're talking about something that could takes months or years even, just to get to the point where we're ready to start building. Yet, today, with a lot of these platforms you don't have to do any of that. You can start tomorrow and it's all as a service. It's on tap, it's on demand. And if you're going to be one of these high performers of tomorrow, using it as an innovation platform is absolutely a key component of the success of the future for that business, no doubt. >> Tauni, I want to bring you in here a little bit to the conversation. So talk to me about a specific example of a platform that Accenture has been working on. >> So I'd like to highlight OpenAP. It's just a great example of what Adam was talking about where it was a consortium of media giants that came together to build a new platform really to disrupt the broadcast TV industry and find a way of doing targeted advertising more effectively. So broadcast TV is usually done based on gender and age demographics, that's it. They wanted to find a way of really being more specific. Targeting veterans or people who want to buy trucks or whatever. And they did this by wanting to create a cloud platform that would become the marketplace between agencies and the broadcasters. You know, but because it's a consortium, there's no infrastructure, there's no starting point. It was from thin air, from scratch and they, because of the broadcast industry timelines, they wanted to do the entire, from idea to launch, in five months. And we couldn't have done that if, to Adam's point, we had to create, you know, put in servers and all that stuff. We were able to do all of that because we were able to leverage AWS as a baseline and get started with the development almost immediately. >> So talk a little bit more about this OpenAP. So it's a consortium of media companies and sort of looking at their digital competitors, with a little bit of envy here of wow, you can slice and dice your target customers so finely and you know exactly who they are, what they want to buy, what their consumer proclivities are. And they wanted to be able to do the same. >> Right. Yeah, so there's a lot of analytics that they wanted to leverage and do it in a way that there was a standard across the different media companies cause they realized that the biggest threat was coming from digital not from each other. So they kind of got together and said, hey let's find a way of doing this more frictionless. Make it more seamless. We can have a lot of the data and analytics behind it so that you could target, like I said, you know veterans or whatever. And by doing so, they're able to create that marketplace. But to do that, we had to really make it easy to use. We had to build custom UI's. Back to exactly, the Renaissance of custom. There's nothing out there in the marketplace that would do this. They were the first ones in there to really disrupt the marketplace. So it was custom UI's. API's. The whole set of capabilities that needed to be done for the consortium. >> So Adam, in terms of these platform services, talk a little bit about what you have learned so far and sort of the best practices that have emerged. The nuggets of wisdom. >> Well, thanks Rebecca. I love it when people ask me that question because then-- (Rebecca laughs) I have two things that I think are really important to keep in mind with that. One of them is that if you're building green field applications, right? It's actually time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And it's a bit hard sometimes cause there's a lot of inertia in enterprises about how you do things and how things have been done. And a lot of times they can be quite conservative too, about their approaches. So for example, if you're going to use a platform but what you're going to do on that platform is you're going to stay using waterfall development techniques you're going to have releases every three or six months or something. That's just not going to meet your businesses expectations anymore. It goes back to what I was saying a few minutes ago about the speed of change in technology. It's just not going to keep up with what potentially competitors are going to do. So, you have to throw of a lot of that baggage that you've carried with you for a long time. A great example I like to talk about in this space is actually site reliability engineering. This is a pattern for solving architecture problems that it really has become quite popular in the last couple of years and what it allows you to do is to release software a lot faster, but you have more circuit breakers inside of your applications that allow it to gracefully degrade if there's some sort of defect or problem that happens so that your customer's, your business partners, your employees, they don't see an outage. What they see is a slightly degraded service. They don't get something where it say's "404: site not available" they get a slightly degraded service. And if you follow those patterns well, you can deliver software a lot faster with higher degrees of quality but you have the comfort and assurance that it's going to do that. That actually helps you get over some of the cultural barriers as well. >> Well those cultural barriers, and I'm interested in your experience at OpenAP, too. What you just described is exactly right. Is that there is this inertia. There is this, enterprises, we've been doing things our way for a long time and they're not broke. So, can you talk about the challenges of having to overcome that? >> Yeah You know, with the consortium, we had a little bit of an advantage in that it was pure green field and the consortium was very specific about the first pain points they wanted to focus on and really wanted to build it as an MVP, you know minimum viable product, not trying to do everything at once and that was really key to us. So once we really knew what they wanted to do we put in all of the DevSecOps, agile practices so that we could move fast. We did automated testing and test harnesses and built in the security, the scalability, the performance from the beginning so that we weren't halfway down the road and then had to try to bolt that stuff in later. And we really all had a vision of what we needed to get to and we were able to leverage all of the modern technology practices to get there. I'm not going to say it wasn't hard. Five months was kind of crazy especially because it had to be ready to launch and go live. And in fact we had a beta day which was industry experts coming to test it hands on demo at Paramount Studies in California. Like no pressure, 4 months after we started. And it was awesome. But it was because we had the vision and then we had all the new tooling and the technologies and the ability to build in some of that stuff from the beginning. Which I think in a green field scenario really helped us. >> Adam, final word in terms of next years AWS Executive Summit, what are we going to talk about? We're already talking about the future platforms, what is going to be next years buzz? >> So the thing, next years buzz. I really think that there's going to be this momentum towards something called go native. And this is going to be, so there's a lot of enterprises that are taking advantage of clouds today but they're using it as compute storage and power and the real value for them is going to be unlocked by taking advantage of the native services that are there. And when we think about things that AWS re:Invent has announced in the last couple of years and I'm sure it's going to come up this year. Think about things like Lambda and Aurora and others. These are native cloud services that taking advantage of those and not just sort of bringing the other components of your older architecture with you. That will really unleash a new era of innovation for your company. You'll be able to do things faster and better. And you'll have even better outcomes for your clients, your customers and business partners than you would otherwise. So, go native. >> Go native, okay! You heard it here first folks. Adam, Tauni, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)