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