 from the Moscone Center. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco here at the Moscone Center West. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to have a distinguished panel of guests on the program. Starting down on the far side, Stephen Jones, who's the director of Shusten Architect with AWS, helping us to talk about how AWS gets to market is Chris Megman, managing director of Accenture, and then super excited to have a customer on the program. Chad Anderson is the IT director of operations at Del Monte Foods. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, Chad, we're going to start with you. Talked to us a little bit about your role inside Del Monte and really joining the cloud, something we've been talking about for years, but Del Monte's got an interest story, we want to kind of understand your role in that and start us off. Yeah, so I oversaw the project for us to migrate everything to AWS, and we started off with just needing to really understand if we're missing something here, like shouldn't we be moving to the cloud? And that ended up in a study where we just kind of went through the numbers, we looked at what the benefits were going to be, and it kind of just turned into an obvious choice for us to do it. Yeah, so back us up for a second, give us your organization, Del Monte Foods and your technology group, is this global in scope, kind of how many end users do you have, how many sites, can you give us a little bit of the speeds and feeds of what was being considered, and was it everything or some pieces, what was the impetus for the journey to the cloud? Yeah, so we have about 1,000 users globally. We are mostly in Manila for our global shared services, our business back office work is done there, and then most of it is a US footprint of plants and distribution centers and headquarters, et cetera, operations. All right, so Chris, the SI partner for this cloud journey, so bring us a little bit inside, bring us back to kind of what was the business challenge and what was your team's role in helping along those journeys? Yeah, so the business challenge was getting Del Monte, getting the heart of their organization, SAP, to AWS quickly, right? There's a short time frame, I learned a lot about fruit packing during the project, but it was about how quickly could we get there? So when we actually started, we started looking at taking seven months to do the migration of their environment, and we really got into it, really got focused on what needed to be done, looked at a lot of automation, put a lot of automation around the process, a very diligent approach, and we were able to do it, we thought we could do it in four months, and we did it in three and a half months, so very rapid, and I think, as Chad will tell you, really kind of focused on building the right architecture, putting a lot of automation, and then also getting it in there with the right performance and then being able to tune things down, because you can, you can move so quickly between instant sizes and memory, and it was a really, really exciting process to go through. Yeah, so you said originally we thought it was seven months and it was going to end up being done in half that time. That's not my experience with enterprise software rollout, so what was the delta there? How was the team able to do so well? A lot of it was obviously AWS, being able to spin up the infrastructure, being able to automate a lot of the tasks that had to be done. We did it through three different environment sets, so we started in dev, moved to test, then went to production, and each step, we automated more and more of the process, so we were able to condense the speed of the technical work that had to take place in a really short amount of time. We had to treat it also like a mission critical thing across, it wasn't just an infrastructure move, it really, the application guys were focused on this, we stopped all development of other activities going on and we really just kind of turned everybody to say, let's get this done as soon as possible and not be competing with each other. Right, just when you say stop everything, but of course the business didn't stop and it was transition- I mean like other projects. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I understand, but from the cut over and for your user standpoint, did it go pretty smoothly? Oh, definitely. These guys did an amazing job of putting together a plan that was really ready to be executed against and it took a lot of, my part was really just to kind of negotiate the extended maintenance window, but as far as the best compliment I ever got was people were like, what did you do? Like I don't even know that you guys actually did anything and from day one they took it and ran with it and we were stable, I mean, it was pretty awesome. A black box, magic happened here and all of a sudden everything's running faster, scaling easier, costs are better, some of those type of things. Cocktails and beach time. Yeah. Steve, cocktails. I didn't realize that when I moved my enterprise application in the cloud, cocktails were involved. A few cocktails were involved. So, I mean, look, I remember back a few years ago where it was like, well, sure development will do in the cloud, but I mean, SAP has really embraced cloud, full bore, very strong partner, but bring us up to how does AWS help the customers make sure that, I mean, this is critical things running the business that it runs so smoothly. What have you learned along the way? What's different here in 2018 than say it was even a year or two ago? So, a lot of great questions in there, Stu. You know, I would say this has become the new normal, right? It used to be full disclosure, DevTest training type workloads in the early days, but over the course of the years we've taken a lot of learnings with partners like Accenture and customers like Del Monte and we've taken those learnings and put them back into the platform. So, what you see today is a platform that a partner like Accenture could come in, build a lot of automation tooling around to reduce time frame from seven months down to three and a half. And I think it was around 200 servers, 50 of those were SAP related and 25 terabytes of data that were moved in a short amount of time. So, it's a combination of years worth of effort to build a platform that is scalable, is resilient and flexible, as well as the work that we've done directly with SAP that's gone right back in, right back into the platform. Chad, bring us inside kind of operations on your team. What's the before and after? What's it look like? Was there change in kind of personnel or roles or skills or, you know? Yeah, we transition services with our migration. So, Accenture team has taken over the long-term operational activities as well. It's helping us through the migration efforts. So, we had a lot of preparation that was going on besides just the server migration that was happening. And I think what's really unique about them is that because they can deliver these capabilities of the migration, they've got a lot of the tooling and the automation is built into their operational managed services model as well. And so, it's been a much easier kind of handover to those from those teams, because we're working with the same kind of vendor. Yeah, that makes sense. Most of the time, it's not just that I've migrated from my environment to the cloud, but how does that enable me new services, either Accenture from AWS, from the marketplace. What has changed as to how you look at your SAP environment and kind of capability-wise? It's just incredibly flexible now. It's just, it's one of those situations where we can start small and we can scale so rapidly and it's like, I feel like it's kind of walking into a fast food restaurant and just like, oh, I'll take one of these, one of these, one of these and you wait there and the food comes out. It just happens automatically. So, it's a great thing to see. Yeah, Chris, I remember, I interviewed a CIO a couple of years ago and he said, you know, used to give me a million dollars in 18 months and I'll build you the Taj Mahal for my applications. Today, I need to move faster and it's not a one-time migration, but there's ongoing, I've heard it time and again there. So, where does Accenture, I mean, it's not just the planning, you know, where's Accenture involved? What's kind of the ongoing engagement? Yeah, so we go into it, right? So, we start out with strategy, you know, we start out with the migration, right? The migration takes planning and execution, but really, you know, we really focus in the run area as well. Using our Accenture Cloud platform and tooling that we've built, really focus on how do you continue to optimize? How do you continue to improve performance? How do you govern? You know, how do you do things like quota and security management and that type of stuff? So, you know, I do think a lot of our customers start with cloud and think, hey, I can spin this stuff up, I can run it, I can run it just like I ran my on-premise data center and it's not the same. It's, you know, you go from a capacity planning person to a cost management person, right? You need to have a cloud architect understanding how you build your applications to be cloud ready and AWS ready. Yeah, they have a lot of great services, but if you're not taking advantage of those services, you can auto-scale, you can't do that stuff. So, you know, we really help our clients go through that entire process and make sure they're getting the most value out of AWS all the way through their run for many years after they've done the migration. Yeah. Chad, do you have any discussion of, you know, how are you reporting back to the business as to, you know, what were the hero numbers or success factors that said, hey, this was actually the right thing to do and, yeah, I mean, we're a canned food company so people are very interested in making sure that we're keeping our costs low. So, most people from a business perspective want to talk to me about the efficiencies that they're seeing and how that's going to show up in a reduction in SG&A and we've seen it. I mean, when you move to a group of people that can manage a larger set of infrastructure with a smaller group of people and the underlying services can be turned on and off is that you only utilize what you really absolutely have. Those numbers show up in our bottom line. Yeah, Steve, any other similar, you know, what do you hear from customers when it comes to SAP and what was the main driver and what are the, you know, big hero things? Yeah, so in the early days it was all about cost, right? Driving costs out of the system. Now it's the flexibility, the ability to move quicker. Chad was relating earlier how, you know, you'd spend a lot of time sizing environments and how they've actually been able to right size their environments, you know, using purpose-built equipment the AWS has built for SAP and it's enabled them to actually reduce costs and move quicker. So that's what we're hearing is a common theme now these days is, you know, it's okay to move faster and to maybe not worry about sizing as much as we used to. Yeah, for future initiatives, I mean, it's just, there's all these windows of time that are just, they're gone now for us to stand up new services. Whether it's traditional application that needs servers and compute or whether it's SaaS services, we're kind of on that platform now where we can just click and plug in items much easier. Yeah, Chad, what do things like digital transformation and innovation mean to a canned, you know, foods company? Yeah, we're desperately trying to get in touch with our consumer. So whether we're figuring out how to get improve kind of our, how we're managing our digital assets, how we're managing our pages on Amazon or our pages on walmart.com, we need to be much more in touch and much more consumer focused. And a lot of these newer technology, et cetera, they're built to run on AWS and we're ready to kind of integrate that into our existing enterprise environment. Yeah, innovation has been a big part of our customer's reason for moving to cloud. I'd say 18 months ago, you know, we saw a big transition in our enterprise customers. You know, a lot of more starting off for cost savings, for operational savings, you know, just overall improvement of their operations. And then we've seen about 18 months ago, we saw a big shift of people very much focused on innovation and using the AWS platform as that catalyst for innovation. So, you know, the business is asking for Alexa apps, they're asking for the integration. Well, SAP data has to be there to support that stuff. Right, and your enterprise data has to be there. So by doing that, it's enabled a lot of innovation in our enterprise customers. Yeah, Chad, last question, when you talk about innovation, are there certain areas that, you know, your team's investing in? Is it AI? Is it IoT? You know, we're some of the areas that you think will be the most promising and how do Accenture and AWS fit into those from your planning? Yeah, I mean, IoT is definitely an interesting area for us in getting to a point where we can measure our effectiveness in our manufacturing processes. And those are all really initiatives now that we're starting to focus on now that we've kind of gotten some of the infrastructure related stuff and we're ready to kind of build out those platforms. We're talking about scaling out our OEE software and our infrastructure. And it's just such an easier conversation to kind of plan for those activities. You know, we turned a three month sizing exercise as to how much IoT data we think we're going to have to process through these engines into a, let's go with this and if it doesn't work then we'll take an outage and we'll increase the size. So it really helps us deliver capabilities, new capabilities and new types of ways of measuring or helping our business run in a much more effective and efficient way. Anything that you've learned along the way that you turn to your peers and say, here's something I did, maybe do it faster or do it a little bit different way? You know, I think Accenture's been an amazing partner. I think a lot of people are skeptical about running their entire enterprise across the network and once you kind of bring them in and you really let them look under the cover of what you have and one of the reasons that we went with them was just the trust and the confidence that they had that we could do this. You know, it wasn't, once I kind of saw that it was like, well, I mean, let's trust the process here. I mean, these guys are the experts and so that's been, you know, a big thing is just to reach out, learn about what people are doing and there's no reason why you can't do this. Well Chad, Chris and Steve, thank you so much for highlighting the story of a customer's journey to the cloud. We'll be back with lots more coverage here at AWS Summit in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.