 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019. Brought to you by Accenture Interactive. Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Our next guest is Jim Lalon, CX Orchestration Practice Lead at Accenture. Customer Experience Engine, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Thanks for joining us. Customer Experience Engine, CX-E. CX-E, yes. That's your product that we work on. What's the importance of that? What's the big deal? So the big deal is there's a proliferation of technology in the world. And one of the main challenges is everything's silent. Everybody has a different lens. When you talk to the sales folks, they have a view of the customer. When you talk to marketing, they have a view. Nobody ever talks. And the problem is when these organizations, they think technology is the answer. So, and one of the things that we're always asked inside of Accenture Interactive is, well, how do you bring all this stuff together? And we kept getting asked the same question over and over and over again. And so finally we decided, you know what? Let's do something about it. Let's make this so that you move the discussion away from technology and how can you accelerate your transformation and use something like CX-E to bring that to life. Jim, you've been a pro in this business on digital. Going back, look at your history. You've seen many ways of the hype and the reality. You know, the titles of Customer Success Manager, Orchestration Practice Manager, you know, we're relevant, but now more than ever, those actually mean something. You look at orchestration. That's a big term used in cloud computing or orchestrating workloads. Customer success, that's the theme of the show. Customer experience, so now more than ever, you were starting to see some visibility into tech implementations to hard problems that were being tackled by pioneers of the past, now in front and center here. How do you summarize that market right now? Because do you believe that to be true and what is that visibility? What are people looking at right now and then what's behind it? Look, for far too long, it was always about the technology providers themselves or the, who are our customers, the organizations that hire Accenture to help them transform. But what we've seen is just a complete seismic shift. It's all about what is the customer or the consumer want. It's not about what we as organizations want, it's about what the consumers want. So we do very much see that as a trend that's moving and in order to do that, you really need to decouple your systems of engagement from your systems of record. And by doing that, it allows organizations to experiment. So there's new technology coming in every day, probably while we're sitting here, at least 100 others have come to life. But it becomes hard because when you're always having that technology come into play, how can you plug it into your own ecosystem to let the consumer get done what they want to get done on their terms? Because that's their expectation. They don't really care what your internal problems are, they just want to be able to get done what they want to get done. And if they can't, with you, they'll go somewhere else. So the practice what you're seeing is the practice is have an environment that allows you to try stuff. Yes. Without a lot of hurdles and, you know, integration. Yeah, so the standard thing would be anytime an organization wanted to try a new product, it could take anywhere from six, 12, 18 months just before they could even figure out, does it work? What we're trying to do with CXE is turn that into a matter of weeks. In some cases, in a matter of days. So by having a platform or a capability set up, so as a new application comes in, great. I already know about the customer information because I'm making that transparent to everything. I can plug it in, I can experiment. I spend a month, I measure, does this actually work? If it doesn't, great, get it out. Let me try the next thing. So it gives that flexibility to organizations which marketers love because the last thing you want to do is tell us to CMO is like, that idea you have, that's great. That's agility, that's agility. Exactly, come talk to me in nine months. So what's different now in terms of the people processing tech because we've been talking about 360 view of the customer for donkey years, right? So what's now as different is it just a perfect storm of some of these things finally coming together? Is there some particular process or kind of secret sauce to get us over this, you know, finally we're here? You know, we can finally get that view of the customer. One of the things that started to happen was you started moving the idea and the concept of a single view of a customer out of back end master data management, legacy, hard, really complex applications. And with the Polaroid foration, what they call customer data platform, CDPs, there are applications that are built natively in the cloud that are exposed through APIs. It makes it easier to stand up those capabilities. So it really starts becoming a question of, well, why wouldn't you do this? So in the past it would be, well, I got to go get capital expenditure money and I got to go through this whole business justification. Now it's, I can have something stood up literally in a matter of months, which is purpose built, and it gives you that capability to then plug and play. So that gives, especially for us as system integrators, it makes it exciting for us because we can say, you know what, I can stand up a single view of your customer. I can decouple that from the Salesforce, the Adobe's, the Marketo's of the world. ERPs and stuff that were never built for that, right? They were never built for that. That's not their expertise. Take a minute to explain what is the customer experience engine, the CXC, what is it? So in essence, it's the plumbing. It's all the stuff that nobody ever wants to do that always destroys transformations. So again, this was one of these things where every single transformation you would ever see, I don't care, pick your vendor, Adobe, SAP, Microsoft, where they always fall down is in integration. It's just the nature of the business. So what we did with CXC was we said, you know what? What I want to be able to do is I want to have a microservices-based architecture that allows me to, if I have a client-telling app one week, I can plug that in. Three weeks later, I want to use something like Tulip. I'm going to unplug what I have. I'm going to plug Tulip in. But the experience that the consumer sees on the glass doesn't change. So when I'm writing a mobile application, I'm going to use the experience APIs. What sits underneath it, and this is what CXC provides, is that system API layer to then say, you know what? I'm going to unplug Tulip. I'm going to plug in something else. The consumer is none the wise. It's like a Tesla versus a car. There's all the software updates going on behind the scenes, changing the configuration of the automobile. Similar experience. You're going to automate creative mechanisms so that the application, the workload for the user is not disrupted, but you're making modifications under the hood, so to speak. Well, think of it this way. So we'll go with the car analogy, which was probably why we went with the engine mechanism. But I was explaining it to another gentleman, and he said, he's like, you guys are like the pimp my ride of IT. I'm not changing my engine. What I'm doing is I'm adding a spoiler here. I'm adding new tires and rims here. I'm putting on flames. I'm doing all these things. But the underlying engine, or the heartbeat of the engagement, that stays the same. What you're enabling me to do as a business is tailor and adjust based on consumer expectations. So if today they really want to in-engage with us with email, next week it's through ARVR, they have that ability, and I don't have to completely retrofit my entire IT architecture. And this is the modern approach that we see people that are winning take a certain formula, and that is build software abstractions in their areas of expertise. So here, if I get this right, the CXE, the customer experience engine, is essentially your domain knowledge of the center interactive, abstracted away to make it easier for the vendors to work through your system. So you solve your own problem, but also being a customer benefit. Right, because what we firmly believe the hard part in a digital transformation is not the tech, which is easy for me to say, because I'm the propeller head in the room, but to me it's a much more fascinating conversation to say, how do we transform your people and your process to be customer centered? That's actually the hard part. It's not the tech. So by taking the tech difficulty off the table, then that allows them to jumpstart and get to the actual meat of changing how they operate. And the other piece of that, which I think is interesting, you didn't touch on that specifically, but I'm sure it's got to be there, is it democratizes the access, and the ability to do things with that data to the people that aren't necessarily tied into the ERP and tied into these other systems. So you can now have other people running algorithms, doing tests, doing experimentation, so really that democratization is so important. Well, it's amazing the empowerment that you give people when you just provide transparency of the data. So when the sales staff, if the retail rep in the store, all of a sudden has transparency of what have been the engagements that have been going on with the consumer, they can have a meaningful conversation and they're focused on how can they help that consumer in that moment. So we look at it as, the last moment that you engage with a consumer, is usually the most telling, because typically you are 20% more likely to maintain loyalty if it's a positive. You're only 4% likely if it's negative. And if anything, you will lose 32% of your population on one bad experience. Jim, I want to get your thoughts on the vendor relationship, and that's so much locking, because I think locking is really about value. If you do a good job, you get value, the customer will use you. But with cloud, tools and APIs are becoming a very key part of the tool chest, if you will, for the users and your customer base. And so we're seeing that the skills gap and the retraining that's trying to happen tends to focus on APIs and tools. So Amazon's got a cloud, Azure's got a cloud. Sure, everybody's got a cloud. No one wants to learn 10 different tool sets, right? How do you view that? Because I think we hear from practitioners all the time and they always say, you know, I just want it to work. I want infrastructure as code. I love DevOps, I love agility, but I don't want to learn all these new tool sets. So I'm comfortable with this cloud. I'm comfortable with these kinds of tooling, tool chains, or APIs. How do you see that evolving? Is that going to be automated away? Will there be innovation there? What's your thoughts there? So my general feeling is, I think you're going to continue to see more and more consolidation of adoptions in the rest-based API space, just because, one, it's easier on developers and developers win. So if you make the developers life difficult, they're just going to move to something else. So for the organizations that embrace that, they're going to continue to see that. You will start to see more and more automation, but ultimately at the end of the day, the economy that we work in runs off of APIs. And it's really the more you embrace it, the more you share information or are willing to share information, within reason. I mean, there's legal and all sorts of things that have to be looked after, but that's what drives things. So we as Accenture, we look at application partners that embrace that methodology, embrace that belief system of, let's make it easy to share data. That's one of the things that Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP are doing with the Open Data Initiative is also trying to make it easier to share information amongst different stacks. So it's a variation of that. And I do believe that you're going to continue to see more of that, just because again, the consumer, that's what they expect. And also the cloud native trend also, that's a tailwind for that movement as well, because they expect it to. Sure. What I mean to a certain extent, if you think about it, what's even cloud native anymore? Because a lot of times people say, well, I'm on-prem. Well, where are you on-prem? Well, I've got my virtual cloud sitting over here or my private cloud. It's just distributed computing. Right, it's nothing fancy about it, so it's... All right, what's getting you excited here at Adobe Summit? I mean, I'm impressed with the platform play. I think they got that right. I think they didn't overreach. It's laid out nice single view of the customer. Got the data pipeline and semantic engine on the other side of it and a variety of app integrations. Looks solid to me. What's your thoughts on Adobe? I think it's a good first step to be fair. I think it's a good first step. I actually applaud them for going down that path. I'm excited about the possibilities it gives to our customers who are embracing the Adobe stack. I'd like to see them go further, especially in terms of extending it out to other partners as well. Because it's one of those things of, there's no one platform that solves everything. That's a large reason why we established CXC is the days where you could just have all Adobe and that's going to solve everything across sales service, marketing, and commerce, there's no one provider that has that. So you need to have that ability to transfer data and to drive that experience. So I'm excited about where Adobe's going with the experience platform because I think it's a good first step, especially on their side, to try and make it easier. Again, it's about how do you make it easier to deploy applications so that you can serve the purpose for the consumer? So I think it's a good first step. How would you describe the makeup of the ecosystem community breaking down from developers to integrators and partners because as you start to see this kind of enabling platforms, as you said, it's the first step is foundational. We'll see how it kind of evolves. Ultimately, developers, to me, will be a canary in a coal mine on this one but how does the makeup of the community on the development side? What is the personas of the developers? Are they hardcore cloud guys? Are they mostly app developers? Is there some segmentation? What's your view of this? I think, so what I'm seeing is developers turning more into cross utilization of skills. There's less and less of I'm just this type of developer. It's usually more of I'm going to experiment and do a little bit of everything. What I've actually been finding interesting is a lot of developers are turning into people that sit in marketing or sit in sales operations or some people have turned it citizen integrators but it's people who do not come from a technical background but the tools that are being created today are enabling them to do more of the integration work on their own and that's one of the benefits when you have open APIs, REST-based APIs is you can put more of that power in the hands of less technical users. That's not to say you're not going to ever need hardcore developers but what I'm seeing is more and more non-technical people are getting into the development space as well. Because of the time cycles are changing. They want to be closer to the customers, they're closer to the front lines, not in the back office kind of coding away, right? You just, you don't, with consumer expectations shifting on a dime, you can't wait and that's one of the things that we spend a lot of time trying to help our IT side of the house customers is how to be flexible, how to be nimble so that when marketing or any business leader comes to you and says, hey, I want to try this out, you don't say, I'll get back to you in nine months. It should be, I'll get back to you next week. And that's really the goal of what we're trying to do. We're seeing new titles, we had a guest on theCUBE, we've been doing theCUBE for 10 years, first time we ever had a guest with a title, Marketing CIO, which was kind of business saying, look, I got to sit in the marketing team and be a CIO over here and translate and put projects together and make things happen to your point about, since an integrator, kind of like putting it all together. Well, I mean, it's no different than you see more and more CIOs become much more business focused, business savvy. They're not just, hey, I'm going to keep the lights on from a technology perspective. The more successful CIOs have that business lens. No different than the CMO. The CMOs are having to get smarter on technology and a lot of times what we're seeing is the CMOs are driving the tech agenda, not the CIOs. So as a result, I'm not surprised to see, I'm the, what'd you say it was? Marketing CIO. Marketing CIO. That's a good title. It's a new one. Jim, thanks for the insights. Great to have you on. Yeah, thank you. Love to talk tech and under the hood. Marketing tech's great. Final question for you. What's next for CXE, customer experience engine? What's going on? What's the next leg of the journey for you? So the next leg of the journey is we've already got the integration layer laid out so we can pretty much plug and play any application that is out there. We're really diving into real time analytics, real time segmentation, taking some of the power of the capabilities that are in the CDP space to drive those engagements. So it's really, it's an expansion in that data space and making it that much more accessible to our customers. That's great. You guys bring some abstraction, some automation to the table for customers. It's a cue bringing you all the data here and insights. I'm Jeffery Jeffery. Stay with us for more day two coverage after this short break.