 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Adobe Summit 2019, brought to you by Accenture Interactive. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit 2019. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, our next guest touch wars, who's the global delivery lead for Adobe with Accenture Interactive. That was a tongue twister, great to see you. For the Adobe relationship with Accenture Interactive. That's correct. Thank you, global delivery lead, thank you. That's right. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So global big landscape, cloud computing, global impact, delivery, that's hardcore nuts and bolts are on the front lines. Tell us about what you do, what are some of the issues around delivery because that's where the rubber hits the road on all this. Well, that's exactly right. You know, when I think of my role, think of me as someone who's out there working shoulder to shoulder with customers. When it, you know, from a delivery aspect, you know, providing the capability, providing the skills, providing the talent, making sure that we're getting the results that our clients are looking for and ultimately the quality that we need to deliver for them. And you guys do a lot of work, Accenture Interactive. Got a great team that sets up all the great ideas, all the new business models, the new tech is here, people process, culture change, all going on. The end of the day comes into your, I got to deliver it. And then the outcomes that you want. That's exactly right. This is a core issue if people talk about operationalizing new things and sometimes there's change management involved, there's new culture shifts. So this is where we hear a lot. It's not the tech problem. It's the people and the culture. Can you share your view on this? Cause you're on the front lines on this one issue. It's a great point. And I think, you know, one thing is standing up technology and you can sort of get some of the nuts and bolts running. It's another thing to really get our clients and our customers enabled so that they can unleash the power of some of these platforms and technologies. You know, there's a, an entire journey map on what their own people need to go through from an ablement. There is a change management aspect around how we get those folks sort of feeling comfortable about that. And we often go through a couple of different methods to do that. Sometimes we do a two in the box where we'll sort of act with them in the same role. Other ways we'll sort of lead by example and do it and then they'll sort of shadow us and then eventually we just sort of make that transition. In some cases they just frankly, you know outsource it to us, right? And we'll take over that sort of feature of functionality or role and position on behalf of our customer and that's okay. What kind of horsepower do you bring to the table? I mean we just interviewed Nicky who handles the Accenture Interactive Operations. That seemed like a great power source standing up fast, some operational capabilities. What else do you guys do bring to the table in terms of the delivery piece? Well, what Nicky and her team do is vital for us. So when you think about what I'm out there doing I'm out there standing up these capabilities and powering our customers. And then Nicky's with her team and everything we're doing in Accenture Interactive Operations it's sort of operating that for that client, right? So once we sort of turn on some of those features and functions, then Nicky's out there with her team sort of running with it and that multi-year run and getting those customers. So do you hand the keys to her? I do. So that's the handoff is that? I do, exactly right. So once we sort of power everything on with our clients, power all that integration on and then we leverage Nicky and her team in many ways to sort of take over that run. So Todd, why don't you talk about the skills kind of the skills gap, if you will on some of the clients that you have and how are the skills and the roles evolving to execute with some of these new tooling in this kind of new process? It wasn't like build a campaign and slow roll it out. Now it's go, go, go, go, go. Oh, you're absolutely right on that. And I think, not only that, but it's evolving, right? I mean, we data scientists are more important than they ever were. And so all of our customers and ourselves are investing in how we get data science. Because at the heart of it, and if you think about what Adobe's talking about and some of the new products that are coming out, it's about building that data layer, right? And it's about taking that data layer to the next level too around security and permission. So helping our customers sort of get their arms around what it means to manage that data and all those aspects around the view of a customer is critical. Even the presentation tier, you know, Adobe provides all those amazing technologies that allow customers to drive those rich experiences, whether it's on a tablet, whether it's on a mobile, whether it's on your desktop, ubiquitous doesn't matter. But that presentation tier is just constantly changing. I mean, we didn't have, you know, the anger on the React 10 years ago, now you have all these other frameworks you have to begin to prepare for. It's like- Talk about the, one of the things, the keynote yesterday, we've got my attention was, the word, and I love the way it sounds, personalization at scale. And that's just a thing about that concept for a second. It's mind blowing. We all love personalization. It doesn't like personalization. But at scale, a lot of moving parts, this is in you guys' wheelhouse, a center in Iraq. You guys have large scale customers globally. What does that mean to you? Because, and how does that happen? That's why someone might send out 40 million emails. I mean, it's insane, the personalization experience. What does it mean? Well, when I hear something that needs to be at scale, you got to break it down to be as simple as possible. You got to figure out how you make that something super complex and dumb it down to where you truly can scale it, where you can enable people quickly. And sometimes you think big and start small. So often what we'll do is we'll help our customers say, if you want to do one-to-one personalization, we need to be thinking about how we can create content quickly, how we can create art quickly, how we can go and operationalize that globally. Because many times, you need to be working around the clock. So for me, when I think of at scale, it's how do we turn those capabilities on around the globe quickly for our clients? And basically, you need to break it down. So that's the playbook. You go to the customer saying, let's pick some use cases, get some beach head, get this figured out, make sure it's not a lot of moving parts. Yeah, and again. Use software, maybe customer experience engine, things of that nature. It sort of starts small. So I would light up some teams, take some initial use cases, maybe think about how, what are some of those initial user journeys that end in journey we want to prove out and then let's operationalize those and then we'll build on top of that over time. Let me ask you a question about the Adobe announcements. What's getting you excited here at the event? What are some of the hallway conversations and conversations after hours and all the different events going on? What are you talking about? What's the top conversation that you're involved in? For sure, AEP. When you talk about the new experience platform that's coming out and everything around there, to me, I think that's a game changer in the marketplace and I think it's also critical. Certainly ODI is all mapped in there and all the data aspects, but the new experience platform that Adobe is investing is sort of where I think our customers are driving towards and what's required in order to meet the demands of how to secure this data, how to wrap some permissions around it, how to take what we would consider PII and PHI-like data and be able to use it in more of their tools knowing that we have the integrity of our customers. What's the impact of your job with the customer experience platform? Impact our job, is it unleashes all kinds of potential. When you think about what we're out there helping our customer solution, it opens the gamut for us to go and sort of drive those next generation experiences in a much more, you know, I guess, formidable way. You know, I can- For more capabilities? Oh, absolutely. Faster institution? Exactly. What was super complex for me to build now just became a lot easier because now I have a framework and a structure and a platform that they're enabling it. How does it impact the, in your view, the customer, I mean, so the partner landscape because you guys have a lot of partnerships. Adobe is the key one, obviously. You're here at Adobe Summit, but you might have some of these little niche providers come in with a nice tool chain and say, hey, you know what? I want to plug this in. The Big Accenture Interactive Engine, you guys got a lot of global breadth. You're going to probably get some impact on the ecosystem. How do you see partners? Because if it's an enabling platform, it should be enabling something. So that's going to be a tell sign. What's your view on the partner ecosystem? Well, the first thing I'll say about that is I think we're in a unique position because if you look at the scale we have at Accenture. So although I'm in Accenture Interactive, I'm very focused on that digital and building the best experience on the planet, I have this huge engine behind me of broader Accenture that has these capabilities. I mean, what we're dreaming up around how we're working with Microsoft and SAP? Well, guess what? We already do that too. So I can bring a lot of those vendor relationships and experience as capabilities and bring them right in-house quickly. And when I need to go out to market and partner, I have those avenues and I can go bring that niche. That niche. It's like putting Lego blocks together now. Yeah. Make things auto-integrate, just put it together, right? And Adobe's continuing to invest in their IO and that allows us to integrate and plug in these things a lot quicker than we ever had before. What's the biggest challenge you see that Adobe and the marketers and marketers have in the marketplace because I lead a lot of new tech, a lot of great capabilities now emerging. There's a shift happening. Yeah. We've kind of been going slow, yard by yard, move the chains like a football analogy, but now big movement's going to happen. We see happening. We see a shift coming, big wave of innovation. What's the challenge? Definitely two challenges I think. One, it's just the speed, right? The speed in which the market is moving and how do you keep up with that speed and how do you continue to invest in your own people to learn it? And then two, I think the sheer amount of data, like the fact that we can store all this data, we have more data coming in than we've ever had before. I mean, just think of what IoT is doing to our landscape and all the data that's coming in from an IoT and now we can use that as a whole, another level of sophistication and our analytics and our segmentation. And that's a tough job, right? That's how do marketers keep up with that? It's changing their landscape for sure. And what about just kind of the point of view when they get competition that comes out of complete left field, right? That Uber and Lyft are the obviously examples that get way overused, but the companies are now competing against companies that weren't even in their radar before that were purpose built and moving at light speed to your point. How do you help those legacy guys kind of take the big leap, take the big step, get to high-speed personalization? I mean, one thing, you can't be complacent. I think if you are complacent, you're one of those small innovative companies is going to slowly eat your lunch. And so I think take advantage of that mindset that those small incubation type companies are the small thing. And maybe even think about how do I build that same type of innovation within my own halls and how do I take advantage of how that rapid development of that rapid change? And oftentimes we're helping our customers go in and bootstrap that, right? Start it, like let's go inside and let's build a little innovation hub inside your own organization to go and compete with them. Otherwise, you know, you're going to see what, like the case studies you just referenced, right? You guys are in the driver's seat for sure. I mean, I think this is great innovation. The question that we, that came up on our last segment with Jim Lalonde was, you know, he talked about the vendor dynamics. Yes. When you have the world flipping upside down, things have changed. You see, vendors lead and enable. Now you have apps dictating terms of the infrastructure and that's a cloud model. He made a good point. He said, you know, a lot of the transformational stuff is great, but then it fails during integration. And pointing out that they get to a certain point and just crashes, not crashes, that's my word. But he said, this challenges. It wasn't specific on the outcomes of the transformation. But he said pretty much it struggles and usually doesn't happen. Yeah. How do you see that? Because with now automation, machine learning, now you have agility in a marketing landscape, not just marketing cloud, but you've got all kinds of other things. It's like this sales and marketing in there and everything. You have agility. How does the integration impact and how does the delivery impact that transformation goal? What, and you're exactly right in the fact that when organizations make a big investment in Adobe technologies, they typically have a lot of other investments and other technologies as well. And so how do you create agility where you've got to plug and play sometimes more than one. And I'm sure Jim talked to you about our customer experience engine and the beauty of that, right? Where we can go and really bring a framework to our customers and our clients that allows us to take the best of all these experiences, all these platforms I should say to build the best in class experience. And that's something we absolutely bring to the table. It's a framework, we've proved it out. And frankly, we have whole bunch of connectors that already exist. So from my mind, when I'm trying to get them to be agility, I bring that type of thing to the table to help them move fast. I think that's a successful tell sign. We see with successful vendors and partners and integrators is that you guys took your core competency and wrote software around it and you packaged it up to automate the heavy lifting that, I mean, why wouldn't you do that, right? And we see it in our customers every day. I mean, I walk in our customers and I'm like, well, they have a little this, they have a little that. Then they're going to go and make this massive invest in Adobe. And it's like, they're not going to just discard and retire some of those things. So we attempt to solve that problem for them. That's a real differentiator. Congratulations, Jim was great on that. Final question for you going forward. What are you excited about? What's on your roadmap? What's next for you? What's the next leg of the journey for global delivery? Well, more delivery. Honestly, it's to continue to build out scale around all of our locations. So when you look at Accenture Interactive, we're obviously a big North America business, but we have businesses all over the globe. And it's to continue to create, to meet our customer's demands as they expand global. It's how do we deliver local and how do we deliver around the clock for them? And so for me, it's about building those capabilities everywhere you go, South America, Australia, New Zealand and Eastern Europe and making sure that we create the same delivery patterns and we leverage the same assets and accelerators like the customer experience engine in all those places. And one final question as you look at the arena of all the vendors competing. What's the winning formula? What's the posture that you see that's a successful vendor as they integrate in these journeys and these experiences? What successful makeup of a successful supplier to customers? From a technology provider? You look at all the players. You've got Microsoft, big parts of the Adobe, you've got Amazon, you've got all these, Martek stack is littered with logos, consolidations happening. There's a lot of battles on the field right now, a lot of players fighting for their future. Honestly, I think those who are going to make it as simple and as easy to empower their people to use is going to be the winner. And I think you're seeing that certainly at Adobe, but there's a lot of other formidable vendors out there who are creating very simple techniques to go and light this up. The more you can empower a business person and a marketer to do self-service, the bigger win you're going to have. And to your point about scale simplicity. Yeah. God, thanks for coming on. Great insights. Thank you so much. You're in your commentary. Appreciate it. Todd Schwarz here on theCUBE. Global delivery lead for the Adobe account for Accenture Interactive. Stay with us for more day two coverage after this short break. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. We'll be right back.