 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re-invent 2016. Brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. I'm here in Las Vegas with 32,000, my favorite cloud friends. We're at Amazon re-invent and this thing has exploded bigger than we've ever seen it. We've been coming for years. Here's my co-host, John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE Media. And we're going to get into it with Michael LeBeau, a long time veteran of the industry. Great resume, check out his LinkedIn profile. But currently, he's the global MD of a center cloud platform. Michael, welcome. Oh, thank you. Thank you, great to be here. Yeah, so again, looking at your background before you came on. You've seen this movie from a lot of different angles. I've been around the block. We see government. Yeah, I've been around the block. I've been in the government, been at IBM, been in startups, worked with VCs and part of the appeal to go to Accenture, for me, three and a half years ago, was this driving cloud into a large, now 400,000 person organization, 30 billion in revenue. How do you kind of transform that kind of an organization to be on the right side of history when it comes to the benefits of cloud? And that's exciting. So you look at kind of governments, IBM startups, you kind of pull all that together and you apply it. And Accenture also transform as a company because going back from the old days, the big six accounting firms doing mini computer, 10 year deployments, I mean, okay, not 10 years, but it felt like 10 years. Lots of people, lots of years. Now it's a technology play for the big global integrators. Right, right. There's real tech involved, data science, machine learning. Take a minute to take us through the journey of that transformation of Accenture. Accenture's journey? Well, you know, think about it. Cloud and tech, as it has to be an enabler. Right, but you're hitting the point, right? GSI, global systems integrator is not relevant. GSI, global service integrator is. And so when you see the kind of function and capabilities that are coming out of platform like Amazon, it's service integration. And so for the last decade, the industry's been on this force march and it was kind of misguided early on with web services and SOA. But, you know, if you know one of their lead evangelists, Jeff Barr, he and I were on a panel in 2003. So it's not like we haven't thought through this, this transformation, but you know, I thought Andy's keynote this morning was just awesome because he kind of went through, started off with hardware. Started off with hardware, talking about boxes. Well, last night, you know, the silicon chips that were building, right? The scale that they bring to bear. Right, look at the different flavors, different units, you know, for all sorts of use cases, right? And then blowing that out. So what we're talking about is this evolution over the past 10 years or so, to get to this point, they still call it day one, right? That's shocking to me, right? This is like Groundhog Day. It's the longest day one in history. But it does feel like. It's the early innings, whatever you want to call it. But it does feel like there's a tipping point. There's a clear field difference from this year to last year. And essentially, I highlighted in the other portion of the keynote this morning at the Italian Energy Company, that you guys helped them. Right, we helped them move, moving their business, right? To Amazon. And that was great. I thought he was terrific. So it's not the overwrite success, and then you find out they've been working hard for years and years and years, but why do you think it's a tipping point now? What has kind of crossed over, or is there wonders? Is it just suddenly you get to a critical amount? You know what they say, right? It takes 20 years to get to an overnight success, right? And so, I think what we've tipped, I mean, a year ago we announced our joint group with Amazon, the Amazon Accenture Business Group. And that was a real tipping point for us to be on stage, to announce that joint investment around setting up a competency, people, certifications, assets, and taking that to market. So, and now is a direct result of that, right? They benefit specifically from that capability. And so, that has been, off the charts, successful as a combined entity to go after this market and help large enterprises make that move. I'll talk about the sequence of order of operations, if you will, on your plan, your practice you set up with AWS. What was the sequence of how you executed that? It's a little- If you can hear, this is live TV and someone's got a big VA system. Right? They got a bigger speaker than you do. Turn up our speakers, guys. What was the sequence of your build out of your practice? For AWS? Again, nothing overnight. So, for the last five years, we started with a small Amazon practice. We think about four years ago, we had a small group barely could fit around this table. Yesterday, we had all the Accenture people together with Accenture leadership this year. We filled a room of over 300 people from Accenture. So, you think about that level of commitment to a partnership and to a market. So, it grew incrementally. That's, it's agile. So, each year, we just kind of stepped up our game. Year over year, we built out assets. We trained people. It's just that focus around rotating to public cloud and making that work for ourselves. Because even, we eat our own dog food. So, Accenture itself, 60% of our applications, our workload, is in the public cloud. How many? 60%. 60. The average for most enterprises is less than 10%. We're already at 60%. Within the next two years, probably less than that, we'll be at 90%. So, that's over 6,000 applications already moved. And we're taking out one data center after another and migrating that workload all to the cloud. And we're proving to ourselves that it works. That it's fundamental to a business. So, the classic tale is, you know, it's cheaper to rent for a while, but at some point in time, it's cheaper to own. This clearly flies right in the face of kind of that old school presumption. So, what have you found within eating your own dog food that actually not being in the infrastructure business enables you guys to do? See, that's the misnomer, right? That you're basically renting time and when you lease it costs more. No, see, the key thing about cloud is changing your operating model. You have to have a different set of people, different orientation around how you operate in the cloud. And what you find is that you are managing to the valleys instead of the peaks, all right? You're putting in place scheduled operations so that certain boxes only run nine by five. Most boxes in the old world ran seven, 24. You didn't care, right? In a CapEx versus OpEx model, you weren't as concerned in what was happening that day. And so now you're changing the operating model around being in the day, being in the month, putting cost controls in place, putting our backs and permissions in place so you know who has access to what environments, creating blueprints so that you can one-click order stacks of compute with applications, a full stack, making it that easy just to provision, whether it's SharePoint or Sitecore or Hybris or even SAP, we've changed that whole game around standing up and provisioning these environments and then shutting them down. They're shutting it down. All right, so you got to put those policies in place in order to control those environments. Mike, I want to say on the theme of replacing the data center or moving the data center to the cloud, that seems to be- It's no mobile. What'd you think of that? That's pretty impressive. I mean, you can just truck it all out to the cloud, but that is kind of more advanced on the progress bar of enterprises, newly test dev, starting to see that that seems to be the final step, the data center. What experience do you guys have with your clients? Can you share some anecdotal data on some of the customer scenarios around ones that are seriously saying, look it, I need help. I want to be out of the data center business, maybe not 100% footprint, but majority of the stuff in the cloud. What's that like? So, there's an interesting evolution and I'll give you the four phases. What we had in the last 10 years is a lot of shadow efforts going on, Greenfield application work, that people pulled out a charge guard, went straight to Amazon, and then they spun up an environment because they could get one in five minutes, which is six months, right? So that was a big deal. You went from servers under the desk to servers in the cloud, and eventually people, IT, started to discover that people were doing this, right? And they were actually trying to go into production. And so once they went from dev test and pre-prod into production, all of a sudden you had this requirement, right? Security, policy, permissions, cost management. So you're operating now in the cloud. So that kind of started to shift the game. Once IT operations started to get involved, they wanted to sever that direct developer access to the native consoles. Why? Because of all those issues that come into play around service levels and security and whatnot. What organizations then were trying to do is, well, this cloud is really serious. We want to move more and more workload to the cloud, and we want to leverage, they have to create an integration layer to leverage the legacy data that might be still resident, all right? Because you have a lot of mode one applications that are there. So what we find is that most organizations are running bimodal. They've got this two speed IT, they've got the cloud speed, and they've got the legacy speed. They've got to integrate between them. They've got to govern these services, but they can't encumber them with restrictions or kind of heavy duty controls because what you want to do is unleash the innovation. I was amazed by certain use cases around the snowballs. That's innovation. People coming up with new use cases for technology that they couldn't imagine before, right? And so what we've seen is a lot of innovation. And so how does IT now enable that innovation? How do you kind of accelerate the agility in an organization? We just did some research on this and really that's what organizations are looking for. Help me innovate. Help me change my game before I get disrupted. And that's what cloud's all about. My final question for you is this notion of multi-cloud. Obviously Amazon's got a lot of goodness here. We're big fans of what they've done. Innovation's phenomenal. But there's still a multi-vendor scenario. Most large enterprises have that strategy. How do you talk about that with your customers? VisaV, the AWS practice? Well, I think what we're seeing and it's hard to hear because of the level of buzz in the hall here, right? What we're seeing is that there's just an excitement around the Amazon platform. And the 30,000 of your friends who are here, right? That excitement is driving. So we've got the most certifications, most competencies around Amazon. What that's doing is helping people on that journey to cloud. Now, organizations are looking at other hyper-providers. They're trying to figure out how they leverage the cloud economic model. And then that's footed based on getting rid of cement and assets and to a degree shifting people, right? In order to kind of pay for moving to the cloud. That's where the real benefit is. It's when you look at the TCO, the total cost of ownership, if you don't kind of move from one mode to the next, aggressively, you don't get the economic benefits of operating now in the cloud. And so that's really the journey that we find ourselves on. And people are doing that. They're moving now, and that's the tipping point for the next 10 years. You're going to see a wholesale shift in the market. We're entering into something I think of as the post-infrastructure era. And all that means is between serverless and cloud and containers that the whole model is just changing dramatically. And we're here to help clients on that journey. Awesome, thanks for the insight there. The world is changing. It's cloud infrastructure, post-infrastructure. I mean, you're seeing it right now here. They're doing their own silicon, making it smaller, faster, cheaper. That's the cloud law. Michael, thanks so much for sharing the Accenture update. And congratulations on your practice. With AWS. It's theCUBE. You're watching live coverage of ReInvent 2016. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with more after this short break.