 Hi, everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of wikibond.org, and we're here live in San Francisco. I'm here with Jeff Kelly, my co-host. Jeff's been doing a number of panels today at the GE event, and we're wrapping up the day. Jack Semple is here. Jack is the Senior Managing Director of Cloud at Accenture. Jack, thanks for coming on the queue. Thank you for even waiting out. My pleasure. So, big event, big GE, making a lot of noise in this industrial internet, but let's start with sort of your role at Accenture. Cloud, big shoes. What's Cloud all about at Accenture? Well, Cloud at Accenture is really helping our clients across all layers, from infrastructure to platform, to software as a service, all the way up to business process as a service. It's a global practice. We've done well over 4,000 projects with 60% of the Fortune 100. So a lot of disperse and very diverse experiences, whether it's implementing salesforce.com or whether it's actually helping our clients put in a private cloud. So I wonder if you could help us calibrate some data. So we sort of feel like where Wikibon and Silicon we're talking all the time how we're entering this sort of next wave of Cloud. The first one, well, first one I guess was experimental, sort of phase zero. And then in 2008, 2009, you remember everybody wanted to get, get the variable expense as fast as possible. And then the next wave was sort of the shadow IT. And it seems like that really took hold, whether it was SAS, but even more so infrastructure as a service. And now you seem to have CIOs actually embracing the Cloud. And maybe we're entering the next wave. And who knows, maybe this industrial internet is yet another wave. But I wonder if you could talk about where we're at and what your clients are seeing. Sure, I actually completely agree with the setup you had there. We are, we've moved from, you know, why use the Cloud to how to use the Cloud. Certainly the business units have recognized the value of it very early and really pushed, you know, the kind of theme that we've been using over the last year and to next year will be the hybrid Cloud. We actually launched our Accenture Cloud platform back in April, which is just about that. How to actually start pulling our technology brother and CIOs into a way to manage both their internal legacy and actually how to leverage the value of the Cloud. The intent there is, you know, to be actually a broker or an orchestrator to help them integrate the solution. So there is no doubt that our uptick and the amount of, I'll call it, implementations, the amount of transformational implementations have gathered steam in the last two years, versus being kind of very departmental. We're starting to see actually enterprise-wide implementations. So talk a little bit more about the requirements that you're seeing there. I mean, obviously Amazon's making a lot of noise in the enterprise, but that's just, you know, one arrow in the quiver of an enterprise. Talk about what enterprises are asking for and how you're closing that gap for them. Really, they're asking really two very different questions. One is mostly, you know, it starts off with the cost effectiveness question and then security quickly gets on top of that. So how do I best leverage whether it's the most price, you know, performance type of solution? So we actually spent a lot of time early on with assessments and helping to define a journey, if you will. The second area, though, and it's what's more exciting, I think, for most businesses is, you know, how do I create new business opportunities based on something like the cloud? You know, in the last session we had here, we were talking about, you know, how do we see the use of analytics and data and how I can leverage, you know, into new business operating models? And one of the major messages I try to give was we really need this trial and error capability. You know, folks have got to almost try some things. It's piloting, you know, our friends at Amazon did a great job of getting that up and started. But I think even for the enterprise, we've got to figure out more ways to help them trial and error new business models quickly. You know, some will work and some won't. And if you talk to most, you know, chief executives, they're worried about where the new revenues coming from, not the cost, you know, effectiveness. Yeah, because it's probably more expensive to rent than it is to buy. So these are cash flow standpoint, you know, CapEx, OpEx games, that's fine. But, and then security, do you agree that for many enterprises, security in the cloud is probably going to be better than what they have? Yeah, in fact, I did an interview probably about three months ago where I said the exact same thing. I said, you know, the amount of money being poured into the public companies, because they're being attacked, right? They're the ones who actually have to defend to make sure that they're ready for these attacks from outside forces. You know, they're spending more money than any enterprise actually can spend on this. Now, you know, that's kind of point one. Point two is we certainly are seeing the tools around security getting more mature. You know, it's the same thing as everything else around cloud, right? All these offerings are getting more mature and more mature. And the more we use open source actually, the more the community is helping to do that. So we do believe that eventually we'll get there. There's obviously, you know, regulations we always have to adhere to and we help our clients through that. But, you know, we're seeing more and more of what I call a back office or business processes being utilized more and more in the public cloud. Although, I'll caveat that with we just got done with a high performance IT study for our clients and private cloud will still be for us at our global 2000 clients. It's still the dominant implementation. And Jack, you're talking about this sort of what I would call deeper business integration, new opportunities. Jeff, you were hanging out today with let's see the likes of Paul Moritz and Verna Vogels, so Verna Vogels. So all this cloud, you know, brain matter must have seeped through to you. What are you talking about? Bro, certainly I think, you know, GE and Pivotal and Amazon and Accenture are really focusing, the cloud is going to play Pivotal role, no pun intended, in the industrial internet. You know, the industrial cloud is the hashtag G is using here for this event. So, I think clearly, to really leverage the industrial internet, you can't do that without cloud. It's just not possible. Because you're crossing geographic boundaries, you're crossing organizational boundaries and data by it's, but you know, but just by the very nature of the data we're dealing with it's not going to live in a central single location inside the firewall, but. So, could you help us understand maybe a little bit more about the role, specifically cloud plays? I mean, because we hear a lot about three things that we're hearing a lot about today, cloud, Hadoop, and real-time analytics. I'll put that into perspective for our audience, kind of where those three, do they intersect? Where do they intersect? How do they cooperate to enable this industrial internet? Yeah, I think there's, again, there's two angles to this. First is, you know, and was mentioned a lot during the opening ceremony or opening comments that, you know, independence of solution is important. So, the concept of actually having, you know, whether it's Amazon up front, you may use another public provider tomorrow, you may use a different private provider later on. That independence is important and we have to design to that. So, we're designing to standards, if you will, hopefully open standards. I think the second thing that we see is that, you know, we just did our tech vision and Paul probably mentioned earlier, but you know, we see every business become a digital business. And we actually see the confluence of not just analytics with cloud, but with social, with mobility, all these things are coming together because what CIO or CEO, for that matter, is going to say, just tell me about cloud without talking about how that enables other things to make my business better. So, we do see a convergence of that. You know, I mentioned in the last discussion round, you know, I think what we're trying to do here with GE, with Pivotal and with Amazon is to actually have purpose-built solutions. So, pre-integrated, we understand the business case, the business results that we expect, we can actually offer them with confidence. And I think that's part of what this is because there are all kinds of solutions out there, you know, bits and pieces. It's how do we integrate those solutions so that we can actually get to a business result? And that's where a lot of Accenture's focus is going to be over the next few years around what we call business services and having an end-to-end perspective on it. Is that solution an industrial cloud? And what does that look like? Well, I think it all depends on the requirements. I'm sorry to be that bad. No, you're right. It comes from the customer. But the answer is- But let's generalize if we can. But if you can, you know, if you turn around and say that, you know, I'm in the insurance industry and I want to do claims, right? You know, is there a reason why today they've got legacy systems that, you know, someone sitting in the back office, you know, the ultimate where we'd like to get to is claims as a service, right? And making sure that the infrastructure that's behind that, that supports that is in that, you know, I can charge you by the claim. You do one, I'll charge you for one, I'll charge you 10,000, I'll charge you for 10,000. You know, that way you can, again, trial and error. Is this the business you want to be in? Admittedly, we've got a long way to go to get all there. But, you know, part of what Accenture's doing is we are pre-integrating that in this Accenture cloud platform to try and say, these are certain solutions we're confident in that an enterprise, a global 2000 enterprise, can take to their customers with confidence. So as it relates to the industrial internet, you've got machines, you've got sensors, you're processing data locally, you're distributing data up into the cloud, you're doing analytics. So do I build that, or do I buy that? I, so first I call Accenture. Yeah, yeah. Not exactly. What I would say is in the end, you will probably want to buy a majority of it. And one of the items that I think is key for this entire area, and I think we talked briefly about this earlier, was that, you know, the skill sets to do all these new technologies is limited. So more and more, again, we want to have purpose solutions that we can say, okay, you can buy this component. Now, if you want to do the customization to make that yours or that perspective, that's the thing in house you need to do. Right, you need to, I certainly see CIOs needing to move from a builder to a, their own broker. Right, how do I become the advisor to my business units to say, here's the best solutions for you? So that's where I see this moment. So talk more about, because as your customers change, your business changes. Talk more about how the cloud has changed your business. Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, I'd say broadly, it depends on which area. It's been a big opportunity for us in the infrastructure area, because it is a transformation discussion. You know, we generally are not ones that hold a lot of infrastructure. So with the ability to rent or lease, as you say, right? It offers a freedom for us to actually operate and operate on a newer, I'll call it capability. So that's been actually very, very positive for us. I also see it as an advantage for us in the platform as a service arena. Why? Because, you know, all those things have been sitting in legacy for a long time are actually now based on the cost-benefit analysis. Now it can actually start being looked at to be moved off a legacy into a new architecture. And by the way, that new architecture offers, you know, all the elasticity, et cetera, that you didn't have before. Not saying everything will go, by the way. We do expect quite a bit to stay on mainframe and things will stay, but we see it as another opportunity of... But the infrastructure was a big barrier to moving a lot of that stuff, is what I'm saying? Correct, correct. It wasn't just the fact that it was running on COBOL and you had to freeze the code and move it. There was an infrastructure barrier. Correct. So do you see us moving to a scenario where enterprises only keep the infrastructure in-house that they really have to keep in-house for either regulatory reasons or, you know, other compliance-related reasons and basically moving everything else into the cloud to consume as a service? Is that where we're going? And the only ones that are going to have really, you know, complex internal operations are the big Googles of the world who are going to run their own infrastructure. I don't think we'll ever quite get to that full area because, again, some legacy will never go. To, you know, there are certain companies that will have the mindset that even though it could be shared, components will be shared, but there are things that they just want to say, you know, give me what I can. And that's where we spend a lot of time actually putting on-prem private cloud solutions in for them, right? So they can actually take advantage of some of the, and I'll call it some of the elasticity. But the automation and all the other capabilities around it. So, you know, in the perfect world, you get there, but, you know, when we did our high-performance IT review, like I said, private cloud is still a very main component now all the way out into 2020. So we're not talking overnight this is going to happen. It's going to be a journey, you know, and I think Paul said it before, what he said to me before is, you know, there are still mainframes out there. Remember, we all said client server would replace the mainframe? Well, I think we're going to have the same type of journey. Right, well, as RCT or David Foyer says, technologies don't really go away though. They start to fade away a little bit, but there's, you know, there's still mainframes, there's still going to be all sorts of technology out there for a long time ahead. So it certainly, as we talked about in the panel, you have to manage these heterogeneous environments, both modern technologies, cloud, internal, mainframes. It's really, we're trying to simplify, but it's still a very complex environment. It is, which is why, you know, I think what we call service integration is key. So offering services is going to end up being key because that will normalize at least up to the business units, if you will, what we're offering. And that's why I said repurposed or purposed solutions make a lot of sense. So you talked about, you're excited about these new business capabilities that are being enabled as a result of the cloud. What are some of the things, some examples you can give us that are most exciting to you? Well, you know, they come in all different flavors, you know, ones that we've been involved in or we've been involved with some oil and gas companies where they're actually, you know, they're always bringing in new companies and bringing them into the fold, if you will, and then selling them, you know, bringing them instead of bringing them into the big legacy system that can take nine to 12 months. Well, guess what? Using cloud technologies, no matter what part of the stack can take three months. You know, so all of a sudden, you're able to integrate more quickly and have, you know, basically, I'll call it the big pipe to the big ERP in the sky. So just timing-wise there, you know, we're seeing things with API management that are very impressive where, you know, folks are actually starting to publish their APIs out. You know, you've seen quite a bit with the car manufacturers and what they're enabling. So now you have these, you know, free markets that are going out and saying, okay, I can rent my car, you know, buy the hour, it's my car, not a rental shop. So those are the kind of things that we see that are just, you know, I don't think we know exactly everything we're going to see, but it certainly is unleashing capabilities that, guess what? That was in your legacy capability and you can get new revenue and value out of it. Okay, well, listen, Jack, really appreciate you coming by and sharing your insights and good luck with the initiative. We're very impressed with what you guys are doing. Partnership is a big theme and congratulations on the progress and we'll be watching for more. Thank you, it's a pleasure. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE, we're live from San Francisco. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back.