 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios. We're still getting through the COVID crisis. I think we're in week 12. I don't know, I can't even keep track anymore. But again, as part of this process, we're reaching out to our community, going out to the leaders of the community to really get some best practices, get some insight. I hear from people that are out in the community and helping other companies, as well as their own company, kind of get through these crazy times. So we're really excited to have in a brand new role, never been on the CUBE before, Selim, John Muhammad. He is the senior managing director and market unit lead of the US West. He just took over for John DelSanto, who we met when you guys opened the new Salesforce location. So Selim, great to meet you. Hi, Jeff, great to meet you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. I've been here and excited for being in this new role. So it's a new role for you, but you've been at a center, I think for 30 some odd years. So give us a little bit of history. How did, you know, where did you get started? And obviously you must like the culture. You must like the opportunities to stick with it this long. Yeah, I'm 30 years in one company. He's definitely an anomaly here in the Bay Area. I started actually in Toronto in financial services. I have an undergraduate degree in business and computer science and then MBA. You know, I was attracted to Accenture or Anderson Consulting at the time because it was a combination of business and technology and frankly, the ability to travel the world. You know, just from a personal perspective, I was born in Kenya of Indian parents. I grew up in the UK. I went to school in Canada and now I'm a US citizen. So when someone asked me where you're from, my usual answer is how much time do you have? But I've got the opportunity through Accenture to work all around the world with some amazing clients doing incredible things. So I'm excited about this opportunity to work with some of the leading clients in the world. Right. And for people that are familiar with Accenture, you guys are kind of a matrix organization. So in terms of the vertical specialty, you've been in this, they called the CMT, the communications media technology. So what's been kind of your focus from that point of view? Absolutely. So I've spent about, as I said, 30 years with Accenture, about 20 of those years were with a wireline wireless and satellite communications companies where I was helping to essentially build out the network infrastructure, the billing and customer care infrastructure for both large existing telcos, as well as emerging telcos or next-gen telcos, for example, in the wireless space in markets like India and the Middle East, which were emerging markets for us and for the wireless business. The last 10 years I've spent in the software and platforms part of our business, which is really serving our high-tech client base as well as our internet and social client base, mostly here on the West Coast. And so it's been, CMT is one of our five industry verticals. The others are products, resources, health and public sector and financial services. So we have gone to market traditionally as those industry-led P&Ls. Just in the last few months, we actually, right before the pandemic, shifted to a new operating model, which is very geography-focused. We've still preserved our core industry acumen, but we're now concentrating in specific markets with a real focus to get all of our services deployed into those markets and focused on the unique needs of each market. So it's nothing like moving to a new operating model and having to deal with a pandemic two weeks into it. It certainly tests your leadership acumen as well as your leadership team. Right, right. Well, at least you're not in it by yourself. And it's interesting from your mobile background, you got to see some significant transformation driven by the mobile, especially as you said in more rural markets that were underserved by traditional wire telephones, but wireless completely changed the game. COVID is this new kind of digital transformation opportunity. You know, we've talked about it a lot over the last several weeks and it was kind of this light switch moment. You didn't really have a lot of time to plan or any plans you had were probably laid out and very organized, you know, gantt chart way over a long, long period of time. Then suddenly it was like, boom, you can't go to work. Everybody needs to work from home. So I'm just curious to get your perspective as you look at, say, the telco transformation and some of these other transformations that didn't have either the benefit or the liability, I guess, depending on how you want to define it, of kind of this forcing function that's ready, set, go now. You don't really get to think about it or have a choice anymore. No, absolutely. Look, I'll tell you the COVID crisis, you know, I can't think of human history two billion people virtually overnight had to change their behavior. And I think that's what we've seen here and from an enterprise perspective, you know, the transformation required or the capability required to actually, you know, work, have, you know, tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of employees working from home is an arduous task. If you think about Accenture, I mean, we've been a virtual organization throughout our history. We don't really have a headquarters, our leadership team is distributed all over the world. And a lot of our workforce is actually mobile. So early on, you know, we invested in remote infrastructure, you know, cloud technologies, really allowing our people to work on client sites at home in our offices, you know, around the world and to be able to collaborate and communicate in that fashion. For those organizations that haven't invested in that kind of infrastructure, COVID has really actually created a greater separation between the leaders and the laggards. You know, the top 10% of, you know, digital transformers have actually expanded that gap and have created lasting value for their shareholders through that infrastructure investment that they've made. You know, and I think about sort of today's, you know, clients that we have here, whether it's on the West Coast or around the world, you know, at this point, we've seen more digital transformation happen in the last three months than we have seen in the last 10 years. It is on this agenda for our key clients and their boards with respect to how they create resiliency, both in their infrastructure and their business operations. So we're particularly focused on helping clients through that transformation and closing that gap between the leaders and the laggards. So that's terrific. And I wonder what you could share because we always talk about kind of the three headed monster, right? It's technology, which is certainly part of it, but it's also people in process and clearly to be able to efficiently manage a workforce of 500,000 plus people, I think are at a center these days, distributed all over the world, many languages, many time zones, many kind of expertise is what are some of those things along those three paths that you share in terms of best practices between the technology and the people in the process. Absolutely. So from it, I think, you know, technology is the underlying foundation at this point. If you don't have the remote working infrastructure and the cloud, your data and your systems accessible to a remote workforce, you're already behind. So step one is getting the basic foundation, the fundamentals in place through that remote infrastructure as well as cloud technologies. From a process standpoint, what we're seeing clients do today is actually rethink all their processes. If COVID has taught us one thing, I mean, you know, three months ago if you had asked most of the executives that we talked to, can you actually run your company remotely? You know, most would have answered, no. Today, you know, what we've proven over the last three months is in fact, that's possible. But, you know, you really now need to create lasting change in the process to be able to sort of sustain the value. You know, we're finding that people are more efficient, quality is better, engagement is better, you know, with remote working, but in order to be able to create, you know, enduring change, you're going to need to actually change and rationalize processes across the organization from selling to customer care to marketing into operations, and even in some cases, manufacturing. And that requires a cultural change as well. For organizations that aren't used to sort of virtual working, you know, it requires an engagement model change and really sort of bringing together a hybrid between, you know, physical interaction and digital interaction. One of the things we're doing actually along those lines, our team in Zurich is a pioneer of this technology we're calling Synapse, which allows you to go from sort of, you know, this kind of interaction to actually augmented reality and virtual reality environments where you can collaborate with each other in an entirely virtual world that actually replicates the real world. So we've taken our San Francisco hub and various other hub locations around the world, replicated them in sort of 3D space and allow people to interact with each other, you know, in a more human way in virtual space. So I think what you're going to see is more of those kinds of technologies creeping into the way people actually interact with each other as the new normal. Right. So for the people that weren't prepared, right, that hadn't already kind of moved down the road in terms of SaaS applications and distributed workforce and security and all those things to bake in, did they just have to go now or are they still stuck, you know, kind of holding their head in the sand, waiting for this thing to end? I mean, is there a way for some of the, you know, how do they quickly make that transformation with no planning? It's one thing if you're already kind of on your way and you just, you give it a little bit more gas, but for the people that really weren't thinking that way, do they even have a chance or it's like, sorry, you better, you're late to the party? You know, I think today, even with a standing start today, if you look at the technologies available from Microsoft, from Google, from Amazon, a lot of the big, you know, public cloud providers, you can really get up to speed very quickly. For example, we took the National Health Service in the UK, you know, using Teams, we put them online, you know, almost, you know, within a week, you know, to get them activated in a virtual environment, you know, interacting and operating their service, you know, without having invested in that technology in the past. You know, even as an organization that hasn't done that, you can move quickly, leveraging the investments in infrastructure that service providers have made over the years. I think that it requires though, a leadership change, the C-suite and the board of our clients really need to see that strategic imperative of making that change in order to be able to facilitate the change through the organization. And I can tell you that, you know, our clients are absolutely committed to that journey at this point, and are actively looking for opportunities to implement digital technology throughout every function in their organization, so that they can actually handle these kinds of extraneous shocks to their business. Right. And if you think about sort of the three areas of focus these days, it's about, you know, getting people to work, or getting back to the office wherever possible, and doing that with a focus on keeping their people safe and within sort of the regulatory environment that they operate. Secondly, it's about putting in place these kinds of digital technologies that allow sort of ongoing hybrid digital and physical workspaces, and also creating a different type of customer experience from selling to operations for their customer base. And then the last is actually thinking about a dramatic change in cost infrastructure through outsourcing. That also creates the ability to variableize your cost in the event of, you know, further extraneous shocks, because we don't know how long this is going to last. We don't know what the next wave might look like. So you really need to think about putting in place the infrastructure and the changes that allows you to endure, you know, both from a cost as well as a process and technology perspective, these changes in the future. Yeah. I want to dig into a little bit about kind of what comes next. You know, we're into this for a while. I think it's going to keep going for a while. You know, there's indications that we might be hitting into a second wave. And in my mind, you know, short of a vaccine, we're going to be in kind of an uncomfortable state for a while. But I'm just curious as to how you're hearing people thinking about what going back means. Because, you know, I have a hard time thinking that if people have been working from home for months, right, and behaviors become habits, and people learn how to be productive, and they like to be able to eat dinner with the family. You know, I just don't know, or what do you think in terms of, you know, kind of rushing back to jumping on 101 every day at seven to sit in traffic for two hours? I just, it seems like hopefully we're past that in a need to have knowledge workers be at an office altogether at the same time every day, especially now that they've learned to be productive, you know, kind of outside of that routine. What are some of the things that people are thinking about? How should they be thinking about it? And of course, there's the whole liability issue where, you know, you invite people back, somebody gets sick. I mean, we've barely kind of begun to hear the whole lawyer piece of the story, which we don't necessarily need to get into. I mean, I think the first thing is absolutely making sure that people are safe. And I think most organizations are thinking through, you know, how to put in place the controls and the processes to ensure that their people are safe. And most are thinking about this in a very phased way. You know, you're hearing a lot of our Bay Area clients announcing that they're, you know, not returning back to work this year. And, you know, several are saying, you know, perhaps even never. And so I think that, you know, there is a fundamental change, you know, happening here with respect to going back to the office. You know, our sense is that there's going to be a much more hybrid environment where it's going to be perfectly fine for folks to be working from home two or three days a week and then going to the office where it's necessary to collaborate in a physical way. And also a human way. I think that, you know, we do need as humans that, you know, that interaction, physical interaction. And so I think, you know, we may be physically apart, but we need to be socially interactive. And I think, you know, organizations are trying to figure out sort of the right blend there. But I don't think we go back to a normal, if you will, that, you know, the old normal, which was five days of the week in the office. I do think that we're going to be in a much more virtual environment. And frankly, there are some benefits of that in that, you know, if you look at our organization, because we're so global, we're able to tap into talent all around the world that can help our clients here in the Bay Area because they're more comfortable now with the use of virtual technology. So I do think that the new normal will be a hybrid environment, much more so than it has in the past. Yeah. We talked to, I don't know if you know, Darren Murph at GitLab, they're a really interesting company. They've been 100% remote from forever. So they've got a lot of really defined practices and processes in place in terms of like, you know, which communication channel is for what types of communication. And Darren's point was, you know, because they are mobile and they are in different time zones, you know, you have to be much more defined and thoughtful in the way that you organize your communications so that people can be more self-serve and that those things will also work great in a physical world. You just didn't have to happen in the physical world. And his point is, you know, when you just throw people in a room and hope that they get together, that doesn't necessarily always happen. And so by using some of these remote management techniques and processes, you're actually going to be much more effective whether you're together in a room and can go out to lunch together or you're still a distributed team. And really kind of, as we've seen this transition from kind of, do we want to put it in cloud to why don't we want to put it in the cloud? To kind of a cloud first. And then on kind of a mobile, you know, where your history is, should it be a mobile app or should it be mobile first? It almost feels like now it's going to be remote first. And then if there's a reason to come to the office, it's an important meeting. We need to get together. People are coming from out of town, but it almost feels like it's going to shift that remote's going to be the primary form. And then the physical getting together really will be secondary. I don't know if you're hearing anything along those lines. We're seeing that in our own environment. I think the level of engagement between our leadership teams here in the West and all around the world in market units is actually significantly greater. It's not that you run into someone in the hallway with, you know, especially in a very large organization like ours, you're now actually connecting face-to-face with people. You know, the days of the conference call are gone and you're actually interacting and you're peering into the lives of the homes of the colleagues that you've worked with for many years. I think that's actually a pretty fundamental social change, and actually creates a level of proximity that perhaps you didn't even see when you were together in an office somewhere and you're peering into the lives, if you will, of your counterparts. I think that's a pretty fundamental change. And if I look at the forms of engagement, I mean, we have a, you know, most of our population is under 30 around the world. And so they're used to additional channels of communication, both on the mobile handset, as well as on their laptops and desktops through, you know, online channels. And so, you know, we're actually leveraging that to be much more connected, even in this virtual world than we were in our physical world. And I think most organizations see that as an avenue to really get a pulse on what's happening with their workforce and in their business, especially in a global setting. Right. And I wonder if you could share some best practices on kind of from a leadership perspective, because, you know, you're part of Julie's executive team. I'm sure you guys are distributed all over the world. And I assume your direct reports may be a little bit less distributed now that you're running the U.S. West. But, you know, one thing we keep hearing is that the frequency and the variety of the communications has got to go up a lot, both in terms of, you know, what you're talking about and how often you're talking. And as you said, kind of getting into this, you know, kind of human side, because you are getting invited into people's homes. What can you share that you guys have been doing best practices at Accenture forever? Because you've been managing distributed teams, you know, since the very beginning. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, if you look at just this week, I spent eight hours with Julie and the entire Global Management Committee, the top 40 people or so within Accenture. You know, every morning through, you know, video conferences, you know, we interacted with Julie, highly interactive, you know, sessions where we went through our strategy for financial results, some of the key initiatives we're trying to drive. And, you know, instead of what we would have done historically is fly 40 people to some part of the world, you know, and house them in a hotel room for, you know, for two or three days to have the same session. We were incredibly more productive. You know, we had three blocked hours per day over the last three days, you know, again, using, you know, digital media to engage with each other, converse, share, you know, rich media content, much more productive use of technology and frankly, a lot less wear and tear on people flying around the world and as substantially lower cost. So I think that that's something that is here to stay. You know, I can't see us going back to the model where we, you know, fly people around for internal meetings, certainly. From a West perspective, you know, I meet with my management team, you know, we schedule calls now, you know, three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, typically, you know, we get together for an hour, we conduct sort of, you know, what's going on with the business, you know, where are the issues? What do we need to solve? And we do that entirely virtually. If you think about it, I'm getting, you know, an hour, three hours a week with my entire leadership team, you know, connected and collaborating around the same issues, you know, much more, you know, organized and concentrated way than if I ran into them, you know, at the coffee machine or at the water cooler, you know, I am actually getting more engagement, more organization and more focus through my leadership team in this new world than perhaps I would have had in the old. So I think that there's a lot of benefit to this model. I still think that there's an opportunity to get, you know, when we have large meetings and we need to sort of convey a particular message, it is nice to be able to get together with people physically, but I think that that's going to be less often now than in the past. Right, right. I just think people, it's just different, right? It's not better or worse, it's just different. You know, we had an interview earlier today. I think we had somebody on from Singapore, somebody on from India, somebody on from Germany, our host was in Boston and the production was here in Palo Alto. You know, you couldn't do that. You know, to get all those people together in a physical space is a lot bigger investment and a lot more difficult. So it's just, it's different. It's not the same as being together. We can't go out and get a beer after this is over, but at the same time, it's a lot easier to grab an hour and get together with people. So I think there is, you know, it's different. It's not a substitute, it's different. Yeah, I mean, to that point, if you think about our clients, they are global. Their executives are global. The ability to actually connect with clients have a conversation, regardless of where they are on the globe. You know, we are actually much more able to do that now because it doesn't require flying. It doesn't require sort of, you know, scheduling months ahead to make sure everyone can be in a particular location. You can literally just, you know, schedule a meeting and have it the next day. And that makes us much more responsive to our clients' needs and, you know, much more accessible to them as they have questions for us. So I think there's definite advantages to this mode of working. Right, so Celine, before I let you go, it's a great conversation and we could go all day, but we'll get back to work. But I'm just, especially since you come from a communications background and a 30-year veteran in this space, I mean, for as bad as this pandemic has been and it's bad, right? A lot of people are dead. A lot of businesses like restaurants and airlines, speaking of airlines and hotels couldn't go digital right away, right? We're fortunate to be in the knowledge business that we could. But what I really want to get your perspective is the fact that we have so many of these tools in place today that actually enabled it to happen kind of easily, right? We've got fast internet and we've got high-power mobile devices and we have a huge suite of mobile applications from Salesforce to Slack to Acuity, the software we use for scheduling. There's so many tools that you look at had this happened 10 years ago, five years ago, 15 years ago, a really different level of pain. And I'm sure as you look back to the old days, put again, application service providers and laying all this fiber and a lot of that stuff in 2000, looked like it wasn't necessarily going to pay off. But in fact, a lot of that infrastructure that was put in in those early days has really kind of shined in this moment where it had to and it's, I just love to get kind of your perspective with a little bit of a history of how these systems have developed and are in place and really enabled kind of this work from anywhere, communicate from anywhere, almost do anything as long as you got access to some type of a device and an internet connection. Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you that the broadband infrastructure investments that our telco clients have made over the last two decades or so have really come into their own through this crisis. I think if you look at the level of investment, Microsoft, Amazon, Google have made in cloud infrastructure has enabled our organization as well as many others to be able to turn on a dime with respect to this crisis. I actually think that emerging economies that are implementing, for example, 5G technologies and adopting those technologies sometimes faster than their Western counterparts are actually will leapfrog with respect to using those technologies and allow, if you will, their economies, their businesses to sustain these kinds of impacts in a much more ready way in the future than perhaps in the past. And I think that digital and digital transformation is sort of a key element to business in the future and frankly to sustaining economies. So I think mobile technology, cloud technology and the ability to sort of digitize your business and your economy are critical success factors for the future. Yeah, if not, you're in trouble because everybody else is doing it. Exactly. All right, Salim, well, thank you. Thank you for spending a few minutes sharing your insight, really appreciate it. And congratulations on the new position. I look forward to seeing you in that beautiful innovation hub one of these days as soon as we can get back outside. Thank you so much, Jeff. I look forward to having you at the San Francisco Hub and showing you the virtual implementation of that hub on our Synapse platform. Awesome, look forward to it. Thanks a lot. All right, you take care. All right, he's Salim. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.