 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Accenture TechVision 2020. Brought to you by Accenture. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high at top San Francisco. It is absolutely beautiful outside. Sun is going down. We're here for a really special event. It's the Accenture TechVision kind of unveiling of the five things that we should be paying attention to as we look to 2020, the year that we're going to know everything with the benefit of hindsight. So it's a pretty exciting, pretty exciting time. We have a new guest, Mike Redding. He's the Managing Director of Accenture Ventures, telling us where the Accenture Ventures plays in all this stuff. So Mike, welcome. Well, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. It's a big day here at Accenture with the launch of the 2020 TechVision. And one of the key trends is about innovation DNA, which is really saying, how does an organization connect to the external ecosystems to systematically and scalably and sustainably innovate? And that's part of the role of Accenture Ventures. Well, it's an interesting play, right? Because unfortunately, Clayton Christensen just passed away, my favorite business writer ever. And the whole innovator's dilemma is that smart people working at big companies making sound business decisions based on revenue and their customers will always miss discontinuous change. So really you need some other things to help motivate that. And that's a really piece that you guys play. Right, exactly. Because you know what we are? We're a bridge builder. Between those highly successful, large enterprises which are big, they're slow and they're risk adverse. And the startups, which are small, fast and nothing but risk. And so for us, the role of Accenture and Accenture Ventures as being part of that innovation DNA is to say, let's make a bridge. Let's figure out how the elephant can dance. And as a result, not get caught up in those disruptions but in fact leverage them to propel those big enterprises forward. Right. Now you guys invest in all types of various AI. Let's look through the portfolio of security, big data. I love this industry X.O. What is industry X.O? Well, so a lot of places talk about industry 4.0 but we're like, why put it, you know, X.O is making a variable. Right. 5.0, 6.0, which makes it evergreen. Which says every industry on the planet is going through a transformation, you know, powered by AI, powered by all those areas you mentioned. And as a result, we want to make sure that whatever the future of any industry is, Accenture is part of it and we're bringing in the startups and of course the big technology players that are going to be the fundamental players making that transformation possible. Right. There's so much synergy, right? Because for the little guys, right? They've got all the juice behind the innovation and the really smart people and they're kind of breaking things and moving fast. But the challenges there are scale and a sales force and marketing and reach and distribution and all these things that are not too hard for the big guys. Right. That's why it's a marriage made in heaven, right? Again, if you can bring, I always like to say the analogy of you've got the aircraft carrier and then you have all the battleships and the PT boats circling around it. That's a battle group. And so that's what we really see is the opportunity is to bring what each strength, the strength of that disruption and passion and energy and capital to marry to market scale and data and customer base. Right. Put those things together unstoppable force. How do the enterprises, you know, kind of view it? Do they, obviously they see the value, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing, but is that something that's attractive to them? Is it too disruptive to them? How do they, you know, try to work these little startups? Because the other thing, right, is always vendor viability when you're a little startup doing business with a big company and they can kill you with meetings and there's all kinds of, you know, kind of interesting things that can happen to screw that up. Well, you're right on. And so that's part of where, you know, Accenture comes in as that broker, that bridge maker, because we help each other find how to match up, how not to crush the little guy with infinite meetings, you know, in an enterprise, you know, six months is quick in a startup, that's a funding cycle. Right, right. And so you got to find a way to meet each other in the middle and as a result, get the strength of each but point in the same direction and really become really good dance partners and that's what we really think any organization, because they know they need to do it, they know they want to do it, they just don't know how and that's the gap we help fill. And then how do you find your investments? Are you partnering with other venture firms? How are you kind of out prospecting for new opportunities? Well, so for us, since we're corporate strategic, we're really focused on the future of our clients business, the future of the marketplace. And so for us, it's a network game. It's everything from what the corporate venture units at our clients are up to, where they're seeing strategic bets. Of course, where the VC, of Sand Hill Road, of Tel Aviv, of Senjian and Shanghai, Bangalore, there's so many great venture capital communities. We love to syndicate, we love friends because a financial VC will bring their discipline and will bring Accenture Discipline and that's a combo pack that one plus one is three. Right, right. So I want to get your take, you've been in this for a while. And one of the themes that we hear over and over, right, is the acceleration of, accelerating pace of technology innovation, right? And this exponential curve and people have a hard time with exponential curves. We like linear curves. But it's getting steeper and steeper and steeper. So from your kind of cat bird seed as you've watched the evolution, do you see kind of, is this the only way for the enterprises to keep ahead of these things? Is it just an augment? Is it more important than it used to be? How is the landscape kind of changing as this acceleration just keeps going and going and going? Well, I think the era of build it all yourself, vertically integrated, start to finish, soup to nuts yourself, you can't do it, right? If you're a large incumbent. And, but also if you think about it this way, I would talk to audiences, especially, you know, business audiences, who's got enough budget? Nobody, there's no such thing as enough budget. The government doesn't have enough budget, right? Nobody does. But if you partner, you can leverage other people's money, their investment cycles, and as a result, for every dollar you have, you can get multiple dollars of leverage. And as a result, no matter how fast it's going, because of the public clouds, because of the big software players, you can get so much further. So even though things are moving faster, what you can leverage to adapt to that change is more powerful than ever before. So the good news is the rate of change is fast, but you're not starting from dead stop. You're jumping on a moving train and going where it's going and putting your own business spin on it. Right. The other piece is kind of the disruptor's piece. It's funny you mentioned Amazon just, you know, watched a lot of great interviews with Bezos. One of them, he talks about AWS having, you know, a seven year uninterrupted head start because no one down the road in Redwood Shores or Philadelphia or Waldorf was really paying attention to the little bookseller up in Seattle as a competitor for enterprise infrastructure. So, you know, that which is going to get you is often not the competitors that you're benchmarking against. It's not those same people that you've been competing with but can completely come out of left field. Well, and so that, again, is why we really believe passionately that with this future, the next few years, those enterprises that have an innovation DNA that get out of their foxhole and don't just look if you're a bank, don't just look at fintech, look at all tech. And thanks to this thing called the internet, it's really possible and language translation, even if you don't speak Chinese, you can get a sense of what's happening in China or you can call a friend like Accenture and we can hook you up. And regardless of the fact is you can now, if you cast that wide net, if you challenge yourself to get out of that foxhole and look around, well, then suddenly you can't be surprised, you can see it coming and you can then use your superpowers, which is incumbency, scale, balance sheet, customer base, loyalty, all those things that you brand, all the things that make you strong, you can now append that disruption to it and basically not get disrupted. So I think that's the formula for going forward. Yeah, well, I love the OnePlus One makes three formula because it really is kind of a match made in heaven, really bringing together two sets of strengths that the other person or the other party doesn't really have. So you guys been at it for a while and continued success. Well, thank you very much. All right, well, Mike, thanks for taking a minute. He's Mike, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture TechVision Launch 2020. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.