 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS Reinvent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Donald Klein. We have two guests for this segment. We have Brian Bohan, he is the director of the Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group, global lead at AWS and Chris Wegman, managing director Accenture Amazon Web Services Business Group. Oh my word, how big are your business cards? Well, welcome for both of you, thanks for coming on the show. So the relationship between AWS and Accenture is now in its 13th year. I want to hear from both of you, what's new, what's exciting about the relationship. I'm going to start with you, with you, Chris. Yeah, so it's been 13 great years, four years since we created the AABG, we use the acronym to make it easier to say stuff. Okay, thank you, right now you're telling me. Accenture AWS Business Group. So, you know, the partnership continues to get stronger, continues to grow, we've doubled down on the partnership this last year, really increasing our investment and our focus. We've done in the last year, really a lot of focus around industries, right? So, you know, we continue to build our teams, we continue to grow in the number of certified resources we have, you know, our clients are just eating us stuff up. So, you know, it just gives us more opportunity to grow. Brian? Yeah, I mean, I think you can see, it's consistent with what you see here at the event, and also with Andy's keynote, the emphasis on enterprise, and as we see, large enterprise is really accelerating to AWS. I think that's what we're seeing as well, right? At any given time, we have hundreds of projects going on around the world, but when we formed the business group in 2015, it was really around driving really large transformations with customers, and what we're seeing now is customers at the place of maturity and willing to take, you know, embark on those journeys, and I think we're really well set up to make that happen together as a partnership. So, as you kind of entered into this new phase now of kind of working with companies, are you seeing any kind of increasing specialization in the types of companies you're working with? Yeah, no, absolutely. So, I think that's really exciting. So, I think if you look across, you know, it's just fairly typical. We started out in a lot of horizontal capability areas, and there's still incredibly important to us around data and SAP, mass migrations, and these are areas we continue to invest in, and we tend to, you know, get even more specialized as we do so, but we're also seeing this last year is getting more industry focused. So, as we move up the stack, we start talking about cloud native development, we start talking about machine learning and analytics, customer care has become a really interesting thing, so you see a lot of companies, whether it be, you know, tire companies, CPG companies, moving from products companies extending into services, it completely changes how they think about customer care and how they need to understand their data and understand their customers. So, necessarily as you move up that stack, you have to have that deep domain expertise, and so what's fantastic is we have great technology, we're building out some teams with domain expertise, but Accenture has got thousands of people with this expertise, so it's again, this kind of, you know, combining of strengths that we're able to bring to the table for our customers. Yeah, we saw that, you know, when we started the group, we knew Accenture's strong position in industries, right? Our deep industry knowledge, you know, knowing those industries really well, we knew they would come together at some point, the technology industry, and we've seen that over the last 12 months really start to take effect. Companies are now specifically thinking about how they leverage Amazon for their specifically industry solutions and capabilities, and we're just going after that. So, Andy Jassy in his fireside chat this morning talked about innovation at AWS, and he said, we're a big company, but we need to think of ourselves as a big startup. So, here are two big companies. How do you innovate together? What is your relationship like? I mean, you said it's 13 great years, but how do you, what's your creative process? So, I'll take a stab. So, first of all, I'll say that in recognition of that, we actually, on our team, and this year, in just in light of, and Chris mentioned it, doubling down the partnership, we're growing the team we have on the AWS side to support the partnership, and when some of the things we're doing, in addition to adding industry folks, is have added a full-time team to focus on innovation. And it's innovation with customers, but it's also all the mechanisms we use. So, if you think about with AWS, a lot of customers come to us and want to understand, how does Amazon innovate? What is our culture of innovation? So, at Amazon, we have a program that we've rolled out around that. Accenture also has many mechanisms around innovation. Small teams driving very agile projects, and it's our job, that team's job on my team, to go around and pull the best of breed across the world and make sure that we're delivering that to clients every single day. And so, more and more clients want to see not just the outputs, but they want us to embed in their teams, and also show them by doing. So, yes, give us the deliverable, but we want to build the muscle around what Accenture and AWS can do together around innovation. So, that's more and more what we say. Yeah, and we follow the Amazon principles. The principles that Andy talks about that are core to innovation there, we follow them. From the beginning, when we started this partnership, we started working backwards, what we wanted it to be in five, 10 years, and we follow those. So, our teams act that way, they work that way, they follow those day in and day out, and it allows us to integrate well into AWS, into the AWS people around the world. For Accenture, it gives us, our people an insight into how AWS does it, and then we can share that with our customers as well. Interesting. So, Chris, you've been doing this for a long time, right? Okay, and so, you guys have been collaborating for a long time. When Amazon first started, right, there was a whole new breed of companies they were coming out, we call it kind of born in the cloud, right? Companies that were agile and fast moving, taking advantage of a lot of the technology stack to do things that a lot of legacy companies couldn't do. Now we're starting to see what has been termed kind of companies being reborn in the cloud, right? Older companies now that are transforming, moving their workloads to the cloud, and then getting new types of capabilities. Wondering in your work, are you seeing some examples of companies that are kind of undergoing that kind of a transformation? Yeah, absolutely. I think we see what we would call an epic disruption of these companies, right? It's happening, right? It's been happening for a while. I think they've looked at Amazon now more as not just a cloud, right? And not just infrastructure, right? Going up the stack and doing that. So they're going through these transformations, and we see them balancing between moving their workloads to AWS versus innovating, right? And also changing, they've realized they have to change the organization to go along with that. It's just not moving and acting in the same old way. So we're seeing Agile and Cloud come together to drive that transformation. So I would say almost every customer we're seeing today is going through that transformation in some form or fashion. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so that's also a really interesting change, right? I think, again, years ago, we were, you know, if you're focused on a mass migration today, you know, the conversation is if you're a pharmaceutical company, how do you get your pipeline of therapeutics out to market faster, right? How do you start thinking about patients differently? Your patient services, the data you have on those patients, how do you integrate further into the value chain into providers and payers and get that information? So, and what happens, what you find is to be able to deliver, say, precision medicine and pharmaceutical, you need to rethink about your data, then you have to look at your application portfolio and say, okay, what does that need to look like to support this completely new paradigm in serving our patients? And that's what ends up pulling the workloads through to support these new business initiatives. So I think that's a bit of a difference that we've been seeing as well in the last couple years. One of the messages we're hearing is that the journey to the cloud really represents the fourth industrial revolution. I'm wondering, in terms of the pace of innovation, are there any new technologies that maybe even just from a couple of years ago that are just table stakes today? Yeah, no, I think the table stakes, you know, AI and ML are quickly becoming table stakes, right? And so I love about AWS, right? They make the stuff easy to consume, right? SageMaker and that stuff. Last year, you know, I was able to go in through DeepRacer and going through that. I was able to do a model in 30 minutes, you know. I don't do a lot of coding anymore these days, right? But, you know, on a plane, I was able to create my first model. And, you know, so that stuff is becoming table stakes. They're making it very easy. So there is no excuse to do, you know, not do ML or AI in your application, right? It's not, I don't need a separate set of data scientists sitting off the side. So that, you know, to me and data in the cloud, right? So the, you know, the data being there so I can consume it in AI and ML, that's table stakes. There's no more, I'm just only going to put what I don't care about or, you know, what I, you know, I want a low cost, you know, data store, that it's table stakes to have that data there accessible to your people 24-7. And what does that mean for your workforce? I mean, because as you said, these are now basics. You need to know how to use these tools and they'd be willing to experiment with these technologies. How do you make sure your workforce has the right skills and the right mentality and approach? Yeah, so one of the things is, I talked a little bit about DeepRacer, right? You know, last year when DeepRacer came out, I was sitting there and kind of scratching my head and saying, what is this, right? It's a glorified RC car. And one of my team members was texting me and saying, we've got to do this, right? And what that, we've run a private league and what that's done is it's taken well over 1,400 people who had never knew what machine learning or reinforcement learning was and got them engaged in doing it, right? So now they've got that experience, they're now hungry for more knowledge through a fun activity, a competition, right? And we're all very competitive people at Accenture. So that was just, it caught on amazing, it was amazing just around the world of how these people took onto it and our employees took onto it. Yeah, the person who won that league, so it was across 30 different innovation centers at Accenture plus hundreds of people virtually building cars. And the guy who won it at a Kronzberg, Germany had never touched AWS the day before. And I don't know if this is true, the story's great. He supposedly wrote his model on the train to the innovation center that day, ran the model and came up like four or 100ths of a second off the world record. So great example, yeah, somebody who wasn't in the AWS kind of ecosystem at Accenture got turned on by this new technology, this new capability, dove in, and now he's enabled, right? And we talked about innovation. So innovation is also, like I said, not just what you're delivering for the client, but how you're doing it. So that same team actually who started the DeepRacer League down in Australia, they've been creating what they call a hackathon as a service. So working with customers, not just doing slideware and going through courseware, but getting folks in a room like this and you've seen it here at the event, have a business problem that you want to solve, get a bunch of people in a room, business people, technology people, and hack away in a low risk environment that's collaborative where you can share and you're learning by doing. So we're seeing a lot of that and so you've got to really think of new ways that you're going to enable the workforce, especially if you hope to scale this. Yeah, so one of the things obviously that Accenture brings to the table, right? AWS got a global platform, right? But you're consulting for them with global reach, right? And everybody wants to use data in new ways, but how you use data in different regions and different localities can vary, right? So how are you working with customers to be able to kind of enable that? Yeah, so obviously a lot of different regulations, country by country, right? They're changing very rapidly, right? So we have to stay on top of it. One of the things we've done is through, we formed this data business group last year, right? Which completely focused on data, right? Includes AABG folks or Amazon folks, but they're very regionally based, right? So we stood up a lighthouse here in North America in New Jersey, right? And the experts sitting in that are very well versed in what North America or the US is doing around data privacy and security and things like that. So they're taking what they learn, the same thing. We opened it in London last few weeks ago in Canada, other places. So we're definitely taking a regional focus, but we're making sure through the partnership that the techniques, the tooling, the capabilities are being pushed down into those groups. So they're taking all that experience and that knowledge but putting a local slant to it and making sure it's locally compatible. Yeah, I mean, what's interesting too is, I mean, data, we're seeing this take off in every industry, right? And it's so critical, but two of the areas that the data business group is seeing the most traction actually are financial services and life sciences, pharmaceutical healthcare. So you would think those are the two of the most regulated industries in the world, extremely sensitive data. You wouldn't think those would be the ones out in front, but they are and because there's so much value to be had, right? So even in Europe, working with pharmaceutical companies, they're together in their R&D process around patient services and being able to use native data lakes on AWS, use machine learning to gain new insights in terms of how therapeutics are working on patient populations, right? And so this is again, very sensitive information but hugely valuable and Accenture through this business group has all the capabilities so that we can have the best of both worlds, right? Have it accessible, analyze it in AWS, but have it secure as well. And a lot of research shows actually the constraints can power innovation. The fact that it, because it is so sensitive and there are these regulatory concerns around it that that in fact enables people to be more, they're forced to be more creative. Well, yeah, and it's, you know, you put, cars didn't go fast until they put brakes on them kind of a thing, right? And yeah, we see that, absolutely. And I think that's the real thing is, you know, big enterprise customers, they want to move fast, but they're public companies. They have to ensure that they're mitigating risk. So again, we're investing a lot in moving fast but doing it in a way that controls risk and is able to kind of give them the assurances that they need. And definitely the platform has helped, right? Amazon investing in that platform, bringing the tools like you saw in Andy's keynote, right? Some things around the S3 bucket, you know, that those type of things, those are enabling and those regulations us to deal with those regulations much faster, right? And less work on our side to build the things that are needed to meet those regulations. So definitely the platform growing and expanding is definitely helping us go faster. That's a great plan, right? I mean, because also if you have, you know, whether your data, your applications in your on-premises environment, chances are you don't have the granular visibility that you would like into that environment whereas you move it into AWS, you have all these tools to really get as granular as you want and really understand your environment and make sure that you have control over it. So it really creates a new paradigm for that. One of the things that really struck me during Andy's keynote yesterday, Andy Jassy's keynote, was the fact that when he was announcing all of these, this dizzying number of new products and services. I'm sure how he does that. I know. I know. Just how many of them rely on the technology ecosystem to be successful. So can you just riff on that a little bit about how really the landscape for technology has changed so dramatically in the sense that all these companies need to cooperate and collaborate and here we are. You're a living and breathing example. Absolutely. I think you'll hear Andy say it is the right tool for the right job. AWS, we're very much about giving customers choice. So there's a lot of options and we went through all the different database options that we have that are very specific to specific use cases. Now that also implies that you have to know which tools to use for the right job and you have to have very skilled craftsmen. So that's where we rely on partners like Accenture who have those skilled craftsmen in addition to our own to really extend that. And then you look at the ISV ecosystem, right? And some of those ISVs and our technology partners who've done an amazing job of taking our capabilities but then extending them further into whatever domain that they're very expert in and there's a very specific IP delivers extra value to their customers. And so that's what we want to give all this choice whether it's a customer or a technology partner, a consultancy like Accenture can really thrive. And I think if you walk through the show floor, right? You see what these companies are doing, right? And they're not afraid to innovate and they're not afraid to take on some of the bigger challenges out there, right? Because they don't have to invest in the platform underneath, right? They're able to start with something that's solid, known, recognized by the market, right? No one is going to get in trouble for building something on AWS, right? So they're taking that and taking next level and you're right, the partnerships between them, right? We see, if you just walk down there, you see them talking, right? You see them collaborating and saying, oh, well I'm doing this, if we integrate this, can we do this differently? So I think we're only going to see more of that, right? And we're going to see it more industry focused coming back to what we were talking about earlier, right? We're going to see the more things stand up in the industries. We've seen this with FinServe, we've seen this, you know, but I think across all the industries, we're going to see more of this collaboration. Yeah, I agree. In fact, I have someone on my team now that's new this year to focus exclusively on what we call the power of three. So it's AWS Accenture and plus a technology partner. And so, you know, if you look go in the executive stomach, Salesforce being a really obvious example, right? Accenture's got, you know, very large successful Salesforce practice, very important partner of AWS's. How can we come together and derive more value for our customers by figuring out solutions? You know, we announced that Dreamforce, the Connect integration with Salesforce, that's a perfect example, right? So the end-to-end customer care I talked about earlier, even more powerful, we can bring that power of three together. So going into the 13th year, lucky 13, what are some of the things we're going to be talking about at next year's executive summit? What are some of the things you're most looking forward to coming here? You know, I have to say, you know, machine learning and AI. And I had to say outpost is probably the third of my, you know, I think I love the quantum computing stuff and Accenture's been doing a lot of research and a lot of work in quantum computing. We were super excited to see what was announced, I guess Monday. And so we're super excited about that, but I think that's a little farther out, right? I think the ML, the AI, you know, the new things in SageMaker are super exciting. I think we're only going to make that stuff go faster. So I think that's all we're going to be talking about next year, right? I think we're going to be talking about all the new models that have been created, all the new problems that have been solved, and, you know, just a new paradigm and computing off of that stuff, because it's getting simpler to use, faster to use, and cheaper to use. So that's what I'm most excited about. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just, these announcements yesterday just continue to remove barriers, right? So you think about the announcement with Verizon around 5G. So now, you know, the possibilities that opens up in terms of the applications and the analysis and the machine learning that can get pushed down to the edge is really amazing, right? And what's going to be fun is, you know, we work with customers to figure out what these services should look like, but, you know, even at launch, we're not sure how they're going to be used. So now it's going to be really exciting, right? Turning all these developers, all the Accenture developers loose on this, and just, let's see what we create together. In 2020, all the developers are loose. I love it. Brian, Chris, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE again. It was a really great conversation. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. I'm Rebecca Knight for Donald Klein. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.