 Welcome to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson and here at theCUBE, we're running one of the most important, largest events in tech industry history with two live sets right here live in Las Vegas along with our two studios. And I'm delighted here in our studio to welcome Scott Warren, US AWS Practice Vice President for Cap Gemini. Welcome. Thank you. How's the show been going for you so far? Very, very good so far. It's great to be back in person. So tell me about your role at Cap Gemini, what you focus on. You're responsible for the relationship with AWS? Absolutely. So managing the relationship with AWS and how we partner and then probably more importantly, kind of how we go to market with the AWS offering for our customers. So kind of understanding what the customer demand is, how we can help accelerate and get them moving faster out to the cloud and then building that up as well as kind of industry specific offers on how we can accelerate cloud adoption. So when you talk about acceleration, often in an organization like yours, there is the tug of war between bespoke solutioneering and prepackaged things that serve to be accelerators. How do you go about balancing those things and tell us about some of the accelerators that you've developed? Absolutely. I think it's always kind of going to be a hybrid between the bespoke and out of the box solutions. The out of the box solutions are inevitably always going to take some sort of customization or something like that to make them applicable within a customer's environment. But we all know it's very time consuming and expensive to build something completely bespoke from the ground up. So the way we really address that is we've built something in a capgemini we call the cloud boost library. It is a online GitLab library of thousands of code templates, infrastructures, code snippets that solve deploying your infrastructure and provision your infrastructure on the cloud, microservice design for healthcare and financial services and manufacturing and automotive. So industry specific, not just specific and cloud in general. And so we bring that to every cloud engagement we work on. And so our real motto around that is we should never be starting on zero, starting from ground zero on anything we push out to AWS. We can always borrow, steal, modify and change part of that library, specific to that customer demand and need and really speed up the implementation and get them out to AWS faster. Can you kind of double click on that? Give us an example of an accelerator in action. You don't have to necessarily, if you've got a customer name fantastic or you can keep it generic. Yeah, absolutely. So we work for a big financial services company that's doing kind of an online data dissemination system. So thousands of public APIs to disseminate data out to their customers and partners and vendors and things like that. So we were able to use that library so you kind of get the framework for every single one of those APIs, a template, a kind of base function for that and then use that kind of repeatedly across those thousands of APIs. We never really started from zero. So it provided 70, 80% kind of efficiency gain on that project versus kind of building it from the ground up. So with a customer like that, how did the initial engagement start? Was this a pre-existing Capgemini relationship? Was this AWS at the table, strategizing bringing in Capgemini? How does that work with your relationships with customers? Absolutely. So this was an existing customer of ours that we've been doing application management in their data center for years. And several years ago, they had a kind of a leadership change happen and a new CTO came in and he laid down the edict that they're now a cloud-first organization. So of course all of his direct reports and managers started asking, what does that really mean? And they came to us as a trusted partner and so we started walking them through our framework and template of how we bring our customers from ground zero, completely in the data center, completely to a cloud-first organization. And at that same time, we also began engaging our counterparts at AWS because we want to make sure we're in lockstep with what they're doing at AWS and kind of one consistent message out to our customer and doing the things the way they want them to be done. We want to unlock the funding programs available from AWS to incentivize that customer to move out to the cloud and then really having that kind of three-legged partnership with us, the customer in AWS is put them on the right path for success and in faster adoption of the cloud. Cap Gem and I didn't just roll out of college a couple of years ago. Been around a while, been around a while. So you have an interesting perspective because you just mentioned being involved in the management of a customer's environment, their IT landscape. Yep. That is outside the preview of cloud at least at some stage of the game. How do you turn being a legacy provider of services into a superpower instead of a liability? Absolutely, yeah. How do you do that? And the reason why I say that superpower is because you said Cap earlier and I thought I thought Captain America, but it's a serious question. Some would say, well, Cap Gem and I, legacy. No, no, no. What's your reply? Absolutely, so what we found is the most important thing about a move to the cloud is understanding the entire application portfolio and landscape and the best way to move it to the cloud. Some applications that are very prime for a lift and shift, we just want to get them out of the data center into the cloud very quickly. Other ones that are very mission critical, customer facing, very important for the future of an organization, really need to be looked at with a more modern lens in the clouds. How do we modernize this, make it cost effective and in a long term asset that's going to run in the cloud in a Paz or SaaS based service offering rather than just IaaS. So all the legacy work and the previous work we've done for our customers, we understand their application and data center landscape better than they do in most scenarios. So having all of that data allows us to feed that into kind of some of our tooling around assessing applications and figuring out the best migration path or modernization path. So all of that legacy knowledge kind of puts us in the driver's sheet for being the best partner to actually help them with that cloud modernization. So with your AWS responsibility, as part of Cap Gem and I, it's a bit like having a foot on the dock and a foot on the boat. In terms of an individual customer's requirements, obviously Cap Gem and I can continue to manage what we would refer to as legacy infrastructure while helping to modernize and migrate to cloud. What about the sort of combination of the two that represents the future, specifically AWS's support of hybrid cloud technology, the idea of outposts. Is that something that you're involved with? Absolutely, and we're seeing kind of outpost adoption trend up recently actually. So when we see in certain sectors where a lot of work is being done on the edge, a great example is an agriculture company we work for that has field and soil and weather sensors all over the planet. So monitoring the moisture and the soil, the nitrogen levels, the wind, air pressure and temperature and humidity. And oftentimes those fields are in very remote, disconnected locations. So we're seeing things like outpost and snowball edge and different services like that become more and more prevalent for those edge use cases where compute can actually be done on the field and decisions can be made by the farmers or the planters in the field at real time. And then when connectivity comes, comes back around they can actually beam that back to AWS if necessary. The other kind of scenario we see outpost really being prevalent is in very sensitive data scenarios. So we have customers in federal government work or things like that. There's just some data due to regulatory compliance that cannot be on the public cloud now at it yet. Yet being the key word there. So outpost becomes really important in those scenarios where the vast majority of the data and the assets go out to AWS but the very, very sensitive data due to regulatory reasons we keep in the outpost and can still kind of harness the power of AWS on that. And that brings up another interesting subject. The difference between where technology actually exists today and where people exist culturally today in terms of their acceptance and adoption of technology. There are absolutely cases where data residency, data governance requires that it be on site. Then again, there are a lot of cases where people are just concerned about not having their arms around the data. So the perception that it isn't as safe in the cloud as it is in the customer's data center is often misguided. Very much so. Perception. But so that's obviously an inhibiting factor to cloud adoption in some way. What are some of the other things that you see that are headwinds? Because it's been talked about widely here. 80% or more of IT spend is still what we would think of as on-premises. The data center, yeah. And not cloud. Those lines are being blurred with things like outpost. I contended in five years when we talk about cloud that's going to be sort of an irrelevant term. Because it doesn't matter where it is, right? It's all virtualized. Compute and storage somewhere, yeah. What are the headwinds that you're seeing? And again, they can be irrational headwinds or they can be technical bottlenecks. Yeah, so I think the biggest one is business understanding what the cloud is and them adopting it. I've had a couple of meetings that were a new thing for me this week where I met with the chief marketing officer for one of our customers. So I'm normally meeting with CTOs, CIOs, VPs, directors in the IT space, but this marketing officer wanted to meet with us. And she was kind of very cloud knowledgeable. She understood IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, and the costing models of cloud consumption and some of the services. And her organization's kind of already all in on AWS. And she had seen this happen, this transformation happen on the IT side. And she wanted to know how can I, as the head of my marketing department, start to harness the power of the public cloud to drive business outcomes within my area. And that was a really interesting conversation for me that kind of got me thinking that I think the business is going to start understanding and the lines between IT and business are going to begin to get blurred a little bit with the power of AWS and other hyperscalers and all the capability that's available to our customers once they get moved out there. In today's keynote, Swamy talked a lot about data and the data-driven companies, or rather companies that are not data-driven are going to be left behind. And if that was interesting in the survey, he mentioned 9% of companies reported not looking at data at all for their decision-making process. We need a list of those companies so we can short their stocks, right? And we can help them out. Or you can help them out. Or you can help them out, exactly. I'll refer half to you and I'll short the rest. How's that? Is that a deal? But so within your world of things you do with AWS with Capgemini on behalf of customers, what are some of the tip of the spear things that are the most exciting from a buzz perspective? And what are sort of the next gen things that you're thinking of? It could be something you literally just heard about announced over the last couple of days. What is the future hold? Absolutely, we kind of look at that as what we classify our intelligent industry offering. And so it's really industry-specific offers and services that are going to kind of change how specific industries do business. A really good example is we do a lot in the automotive industry. We started working with the OEMs that are kind of producing electric vehicles and autonomous driving vehicles. We've actually built a framework that lives on top of AWS called Connected Mobility Solutions. So connecting all of the driverless functions of a car back to the mothership or the cloud instance. And I think things like that are really kind of tip of the spear where it's again, out on the edge not in a data center or in a cloud but gathering all that data from connected devices in different areas and kind of how we're going to manage that and enable that and make it secure and safe and reliable and things like that. Yeah, I have direct experience with some of that. I have a car that won't allow me to access all of its self-driving features. I bet I can guess what car that is. Because of the way I drive. Yep. Which, you know, so the cloud is not all wonderful. It's not all lollipops and rainbows. There is a bit of a downside to it if you're a crazy maniac like myself. So Capgemini hasn't just been a standalone organization. You've absorbed and merged with all sorts of different organizations. I imagine you have organizations that are specifically focused on AWS in addition to other clouds. Absolutely. How do you manage that culturally? It's a good question. So three years ago, we as the Capgemini group as a whole entered into a three-year partnership called Project Liberty with AWS. And it was a three-year plan. We had targets and numbers on both sides, but it really kind of unified how we were going to do AWS and cloud work across the Capgemini organization, all working under one program towards one common goal, developing accelerators and solutions and go-to-market offerings kind of with one thing in mind to drive that AWS partnership and growth. So that's really been kind of the big driver for us within Capgemini over the past three years is that what we call Project Liberty internally. And then just recently, about a year and a half, maybe two years ago, we acquired one of the world's leading digital engineering firms called Ultron, big presence in Europe, Southeast Asia and North America. And they brought kind of a whole new flavor of how we do cloud when we're talking about digital twin in the cloud on the factory floor and actually engineering of products and driverless vehicles and electric vehicles and things like that. So bringing Ultron in and being able to include them in our overall kind of cloud AWS message and bringing their book of offers in has really expanded our offering as well. How has talent, recruitment and acquisition been for you guys? Are you faced with the same challenges that others are? Which is we need educated people. Give the pitch so my kids hear it so they understand. Absolutely. So the graduate, it was plastics, right? That's the future. Cloud services, without Capgemini, all the technology that AWS produces is essentially worthless if you can't connect it to business value and outcomes. And that's what you do. So how has that looked for you? We've got the closing in it. Yeah, same talent challenges as everyone right now. So we're really taking the thought process of let's take people who aren't traditionally in the technology field and begin training them up on the cloud in the different technology areas. Do you do that at Capgemini? We do that at Capgemini, yeah. So we're running in conjunction with AWS, big boot camps where we bring people in. Who are these people? I'm not to interrupt you, because absolutely a few seconds left. What's the profile of some way? Yeah, yeah, so a lot of, I want to hear the unconventional ones. Not the computer science person who doesn't know cloud. Who are you bringing in on this program? Yeah, new college hires who majored in the non-related IT field completely. Psychology, social sciences, whatever it may be. But who have the aptitude and kind of the want to learn cloud in IT, so we bring them in. And then looking in our Capgemini organization internally at our recruiting organization, our marketing organization, our partnership organization, and some of those people who are early on in their careers and may want to pivot to the technology side, we're starting to ramp them up as well. So it's been a very effective program for us and I think something we're going to continue to invest in further. That's a great, that's a very satisfying part of what you do to be a part of that. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Well, Scott, I got to tell you, it's been a great conversation. For the rest of us here at theCUBE, our continuous coverage continues here at AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, signing off for a moment, but keep it right here. theCUBE is your technology hybrid event leader.