 From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture TechVision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in an exciting new location. Last year we covered the Accenture Technology Vision Release 2018. It was at Mina Gallery, cool event, but this year the venue is off the hook and 33 stories high and we're really excited to be in the brand new Accenture Innovation Hub and joining me for our first guest, John Del Santo. He is the Senior Managing Director for the rest region for Accenture and he is responsible for this beautiful five stories. So John, first off, congratulations to you and the team. Thanks, it's been a big project opening up this place over the last year, but it's come together great. Yeah, and this morning we had a nice ribbon cutting, all kinds of dignitaries. So what does this mean in terms of kind of, you've been with Accenture a long time, your presence in the Bay Area specifically, but also as part of more of this global innovation effort? Well, I think this is bringing together all the best of Accenture that we already had in the Bay Area. We're putting it all under one roof or locating everybody and we're expanding the team. So we announced 500 new technology jobs here in this location over the next year and expanding our apprentice program, but basically it's all about bringing more talent to this location in San Francisco to do more projects with clients in this space. Right, so we'll get into it with some of the other folks that we have scheduled, but it's both the co-working space for the Accenture people in town and three solid floors of all kinds of labs and innovation kind of hands-on spaces, if you will, to do this work with your clients. Absolutely, that co-creation we think is what is really differentiating us from our competitors and it's really allowing our clients to work with us and our experts, our technology experts and the ecosystem partners that we do a ton of work with real time to solve a problem. Brainstorm a problem, prototype it, solve it over a very short period of time. Yeah, I think it's a pretty unique approach that you guys have, which is imagine the future and then create the future as opposed to just reacting to the future. And you made an interesting comment this morning about be the disruptor, not the disruptee. And my question is really as you see the leadership at these traditional companies that are afraid of being disrupted, how are they kind of changing the way that they do things knowing that the digital natives and the threats that they don't even see coming from a completely different direction are now bearing down and they have to get with the program. Well they do have to and it's really our job, our purpose, the talent that we have in this company's purpose is to make our clients succeed and be disruptors because if they're not they will be disrupted and so it's in our best interest to make sure we're bringing them the best talent, pushing their thinking on ideas and actually getting to a solution that can actually allow them to differentiate and serve their customers better. So that's what we're all about is making sure our clients are successful. And dragging them kicking and screaming or are they seeing it in their competition? I mean in terms of kind of that board level discussion where it's a passe that everybody's a technology company and everybody's doing digital disruption but you're down in the weeds helping these people actually execute the detail. Yeah it was funny you say everyone's a digital company that was our big theme a few years ago. It was exactly that. Absolutely not kicking and screaming, most executive teams, most business teams that we work with understand that they need to change and they need to change the pace of change that their business is rapid and faster and faster and every year it gets faster so they need to actually be a lot more agile and move quickly. So what are the big themes like the singularity and accelerating pace of change and some of these big kind of macro trends that we're experiencing is that there's no single person that sees all the innovation change across this broad front by industry, by role, et cetera. You guys are in a pretty unique position because you actually get to see the technology innovation and the disruption and the digitization across a number of industries as well as a number of roles. So you can kind of see this big huge glacier that's moving down the valley. That's one of the really cool things about this particular geography and location is that literally steps from our door here on Mission Street in San Francisco we've got clients from 10, 15 different industries that we serve and we can bring talent from 10 or 15 plus different industries plus the technology skills to make sure they're looking at the problem from all angles. So if it's a retailer, are they really thinking about financial services? Because we've got both skills here. If it's a retailer, are they thinking about platform-based selling? Do they have an omnichannel strategy? We've got the skills in this location across industry to help serve banks, retailers, products companies, software and platforms companies, et cetera. And I don't think you could find it anywhere else at least in the continental United States given kind of where we are in our geography. Right. So you had a couple of special guests this morning at the ribbon cutting. You had a customer, which is great, but you also had a representative from City of San Francisco. And I just want to shift gears and talk about what it is to be kind of an active member of the community. You know, the responsibility of companies we're seeing with kind of this backlash, if you will, against some of the mega companies out there. It's more than just taking care of your customers. It's more than just taking care of your employees and even your stockholders. But now, you know, companies are being asked to be more kind of responsible and active participants in their local community. That's always been sort of part of our ethos. It's always been part of our vision to help our clients succeed but also to change the way the world works and lives. And therefore, we have to be really active in our communities. We're being a little bit more explicit about it lately. But it's our view that we need to be able to improve where we're working and living because our people are active. And it's important that we help serve them. We have a very strong public service business. We serve the state of California. We serve the city and state of, or city and county of San Francisco as well as well as other entities in California. And it's critical for us to help improve California as we improve the businesses in California. And so it's clearly part of our mission. Right. The other thing I think it's interesting is kind of companies' roles with higher education. We've seen a lot of work that Accenture's doing with community colleges. And, you know, it's more than just helping so that you get good talent to feed your own system. But it's really, as the pace of change just continues to accelerate, you know, historical institutions aren't necessarily best equipped to move that fast. So again, you guys are taking a much more active, you've probably done it before, but more active vocal role in the local academic institutions as well. Absolutely. I mean, our university relationships are really, really strong, always have been, but it's always been a little selfish on our end. We're always trying to get the best talent out of the universities locally here. And there's obviously great schools in the Bay Area. We want to be more engaged with those universities on projects together as well. We want more of a 360 degree relationship. We've got great examples of where we've done research with some of the universities here locally, where we've co-innovated with some of them. And we want to do more of that so that there's more of a solid relationship. It's not just about us helping them find the best students to work here, which we want, and we do every year, but making sure that we're actually involving them from a research perspective and any other kind of film-thrap idea that we might have together. Right. So big event tonight, big event this morning. So before I let you go, it's a brand new space. I wonder if you could share a couple fun facts for the people who haven't come to visit yet, but hopefully will come as part of a project and a co-creation about some of the cool, unique features that you guys have built in this day. Well, so unique features in the building, first of all, there's unique features with the talent. So we have researchers here and labbers, we call them, from our labs, that have, you know, Accenture has thousands of patents, more than 10% of them are actually invented here. So our inventors are a secret that we've had in Northern California for a long time, and they're all based here now. We've got some really cool spaces. We've got an augmented reality room, which is basically a 360 degree room where you can, rather than having to wear virtual reality goggles, you can actually go inside of a computer, go inside of a lab, go inside of a hospital, and get an experience that's much more hands-on and a lot more immersive, if you will, than you could in any other way. We've got a maker lab where we actually are making stuff. So we've got a design business here where we've helped physically make not only software, we make a lot of software, everyone knows that, but we actually make products that have embedded software in them, and so there's that fabrication capability we actually have in this building as well, which is pretty unique for a high-rise. No, we saw all the machines back there, had a good tour earlier today, so. Well, lots of robots and toys and all that good stuff there. That's right, it's all the robot room. All right, well, John, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time, really exciting day for you and the team, and nothing but congratulations. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you, thanks for coming. John, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the brand new Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Thanks for watching.