 from theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE and our multi-day coverage of the IBM Think digital 2020 experience, the event experience, wall-to-wall coverage. Prasad Sankaran is here. He's the senior managing director at Accenture Technology. Great to see you. You're coming on Prasad. Thank you for having me, Dave. It's a pleasure to be on. You're very welcome. So I'm looking at your bio here. You're responsible for the relationship with IBM Red Hat. So I'm interested in that. And you're driving the Accenture Intelligent Cloud and Engineering practice. So we got a lot to talk about here. Let's start with Red Hat. Obviously it's probably the most important, at least new part of IBM. So you're in the right spot. What's going on with Red Hat these days and your practice there? Oh yeah. So Red Hat is an extremely important part of our practice. I'm very much focused on what Accenture does within the hybrid cloud space for our clients. And Red Hat with OpenShift is the most powerful platform that there is out there today in helping our clients both innovate in the new as they expand in what they're doing digitally as well as move and modernize some of the equipment they have from existing estate. You know, when the Red Hat deal was completed, I did a little breaking analysis my sort of weekly editorial segment. And I said, you know, this Red Hat Acquisition OpenShift is a linchpin. And I went right there, right where you just went. It was all about application modernization and hybrid cloud, bringing that cloud experience to on-prem or cross clouds. And so that was always my take. You know, there was a lot of sort of marketing around cloud generally, but more specifically it's, to me, it was always about that application modernization. So I'm curious as to how your clients have responded to that and whether or not I'm sort of on the right track there. Yeah, I think there are multiple factors. I mean, if you look at just broadly the areas, I think there are three areas. The first, as you correctly said, Dave is application modernization. So our clients are looking at the amount of technical debt that they have in their legacy systems. They're looking to, you know, modernize the right parts of their legacy estate, you know, while looking at the trade-off around the cost as well as the performance. So Red Hat and OpenShift really gives them the platform that allows them to do that and make, take their journey forward from an app mod perspective onto the clouds, you know, the various public clouds. The second area is actually in greenfield development. So as clients are building new applications, they want to be able to, you know, build applications that they can run across, you know, multiple platforms, whether it's private cloud or public cloud, and particularly in areas like Europe, I think this is particularly significant and we can talk about that in some more detail. And then the third area, which is emerging as, you know, is the whole area of edge and IoT, which is going to actually move a lot of the compute away from the central clouds into the edge and, you know, obviously OpenShift's going to play a big part there as well bringing all the three parts of the enterprise as it were, you know, the edge and the cloud, as well as all of the legacy and private estates that exist today. So to talk more about Europe, what's going on there? Is that a GDPR related thing? Country, you know, in country, keep the data in country. What is the issue there? Yeah, it's a little bit of both. You know, if you look at particularly financial services, but certainly other industries as well, the regulators are extremely focused on making sure that, you know, the right balance is being struck. Even if you're using public clouds, you know, they are going to talk about the amount of public cloud usage that can be for every application, the various applications that have to be actually running on a private cloud estate. So in a scenario like that, you will really want to be able to build applications that you can run across, you know, multiple different platforms. And, you know, OpenShift gives you the answer to be able to do that, to be able to, you know, have a policy-based approach to where, you know, certain workloads can be working on your private cloud, and certainly you can move it out to, you know, public cloud when the need arises. Prasad, explain the edge angle. Is that about bringing a programmability with a cloud model to the data at the edge? Maybe you can explain that in more detail. Sure, sure. And, you know, the edge and IoT and the internet of things impacts different industries differently. You know, I can talk about, you know, since we mentioned financial services, let me bring up insurance, for example. You look at autonomous, you know, cars and, you know, self-driven vehicles and so on, as they're going to change daily life. What happens in those cases is that you want a lot of that data to be processed at the vehicle level, so at the edge, rather than a lot of processing happening across the network, you know, up at the central crowd and then coming back down to the vehicle. Because the latency just doesn't allow these sorts of applications to happen. You look at multiple industries that are really being impacted by the edge. And so as that starts to become more prevalent and about 50 to 60% of a lot of this compute moves off of the central cloud to various edge applications. What you really want to have is like the versions of these platforms running on those particular devices and the rest of it running either on your private or your central cloud. So you have to be able to use and move a lot of these applications which are container-based, you know, across the platform. You know, Ginni Ramey, now Arvin, talk about how only 20% of the workloads have moved to the cloud. It's the really difficult to move workloads that are sort of the next wave. How do you see that evolving from Accenture's perspective? I think you have, I mean, you're technology agnostic, right? I mean, you really, you know, you're not a purveyor of hardware or software. And so how do you see as a kind of a quasi-independent here, how do you see that hybrid cloud, that cloud journey playing out? Yeah, I think, you know, we have the same number, by the way. I mean, we see about when we talk to our clients and we've surveyed several CEOs and CIOs, the number we arrive at is at about 20%, I think, of workloads having moved to the cloud. Now, a lot of that has been SaaS-based, you know, they've taken a lot of functions that could really be satisfied, so to speak. Now comes the part around really taking portions of your legacy estate that you need to move to the cloud, whether you're willing to do it as a pass or an IaaS, you know, it doesn't really matter. And then, you know, weave into that the requirements around data privacy, around compliance, around high performance, et cetera, which might either take you to a private cloud type of orientation or take it to various public clouds. So there's a lot of that work to be done. So what we are doing with many of our clients is really working with them, taking a lot of our tools. We have a tool that we use called Minav, which allows you to really assess a client's legacy estate and figure out, you know, what part of it that really we should be modernizing and which of the partners really that we need to be working with to be able to modernize that aspect. In concurrence with that is all of the new development that's happening, all the cloud native development, which is naturally going into, you know, a lot of these public as well as private cloud. So a lot of that work, the next, you know, let's say 30 to 40% over the next few years is going to be a lot of work that happens. And that's going to be heavier lifting as compared to, you know, the initial 20% that is happening already. Well, heavy lifting is kind of your area of expertise. I mean, think about it, Accenture, deep industry expertise, global presence. I mean, as does IBM, I'm curious as to sort of your relationship with IBM. What's the partnership like? Maybe you could describe sort of where you guys compliment each other. I know you compete in certain segments, but where do you compliment each other? You know, like you pointed out earlier, Dave, you know, we are very much technology agnostic. We have been on a public cloud journey for the last several years and really built our skills and our, you know, support around what the hyperscale as we're doing in the market. As hybrid cloud has evolved over the last couple of years, especially we see that OpenShift and Red Hat and IBM play a big part in this part of the journey, as well as IBM public cloud. We see the use of IBM public cloud continue to increase in the market. So all of these companies, I think, play a very important role in what our clients want to do to take their journeys to the cloud forward. So we're trying to piece all of that together to have the right solutions to our clients. And really it brings together, I think, three aspects. One is, you know, country specific requirements. The second is the specific industry that you're talking about. And, you know, third is technology. So really it's a intersection of region technology as well as industry. It's something that, you know, we're naturally good at. We have several clients where we do a lot of, you know, we have deep existing relationships and we certainly partner with IBM very closely. We're the largest system integrator of all of IBM software products globally outside of IBM themselves. And we've been maintaining that status for many years. We've been doing the same on the Red Hat side. So as IBM and Red Hat come together, I think at many of our clients, we're a very natural consultant and systems integrator for IBM Red Hat. We haven't talked much about MultiCloud this week. I know Stu Miniman, my colleague, has been hosting the Red Hat Summit and they're talking a lot about it. But again, I want to tap your sort of, you know, your agnostic brain. You look at the landscape and you've got different suppliers coming at it from different angles, right? AWS won't use the term. You know, Microsoft obviously has a good story there. You know, Google with Anthos, et cetera, VMware wants its piece of the pie. IBM is kind of, to me, one of the most interesting with Red Hat, of course, because not only does it have its own cloud, but it's very aggressive around supporting multiple clouds. It seems to be, you know, intent on doing whatever the client wants. Clearly that's your business. I wonder what you could share with us about your thoughts on MultiCloud specifically. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, MultiCloud is certainly where a lot of our clients are at. They have started the MultiCloud journey, you know, a few years ago. They have gone with more than, you know, maybe one hyperscaler, although they have had, you know, just few workloads perhaps in multiple of them and really focused on one of them. But as they start increasing the percentage of work that they're doing within the clouds, they start looking at a lot of these clouds for very specific reasons. And most of our clients end up using two to three public clouds. And when I look at the public cloud, certainly you mentioned all of them, AWS, Microsoft, Azure, Google, you know, with their GCP product as well as, you know, IBM with IBM's public cloud. And then with OpenShift really being able to run across all of these public clouds, allows you to actually design, you know, microservices-based applications that are containerized and you can, you know, pretty much run them across whichever cloud you want. And this is where we really, you know, work with our clients to really understand their needs and to help them with, you know, the specific clouds that they want to be working with and which applications really should recite where makes sense for them. And like I said, from a Europe perspective, you know, with GDPR, et cetera, I think that journey is a little bit, you know, further advanced than it is perhaps in other places, other parts of the world, but we're seeing, you know, much more use of multi-cloud in addition to, of course, SAS and the increased use of it. So, Prasad, your role is global, obviously, not just, you know, not just US, right? Pan the world or is it US and Europe or? No, it is, it's global. So it's US, Europe, as well as what we call the growth market. So it includes China then, is that correct? That's correct, yes. Yeah, so, okay, so now you got Alibaba, you know, playing there, so that's yet another cloud. Absolutely. And so, and one of the roles that you play as a systems integrator and somebody who's, you know, trying to trust it is, you help customers pick the right workload for the right, you know, infrastructure and make it work, obviously, and you help them de-risk. One of the things we've noted is, you know, going back to the 80-20 or 20 has moved, 80 hasn't, it's the hard stuff that a lot of that mission critical stuff hasn't moved and may never move, but some of it will. It just seems to us that, you know, moving the mission critical workloads is very risky. And so what you want to do is make sure that you de-risk that, you know, maybe keep it on, you know, if it's an IBM mission critical workload, maybe IBM's got ways to keep it safe in the IBM cloud and, you know, cross-connect them, et cetera. I wonder what your thoughts are on moving what has here to fore been hard to move workloads? Does it make sense to put them in the cloud or does it make sense to put a brick wall around them and leave them on-prem? I know it depends, but maybe you could frame that for us. Sure, absolutely. So we have, you know, a concept that we call digital decoupling. And what that really entails is, is to take a look at these monolithic applications that are running, you know, on the backend and then to look at certain feature extraction that, you know, you can perform. Take those features out, especially things that will give you access to digital channels, you know, rewrite those applications, containerize them and then be able to run them on multiple clouds. And we've been doing that with, you know, many clients, for example, you know, large hotel chains, where we've taken a lot of that functionality, containerized it, run it on public clouds. And it's only the final commit after you go through the process of figuring out, you know, what kind of room do you want, picking out the various features. It's not till the final commit that that happens on the main frame side. So feature extraction through digital decoupling, I think, offers you tremendous offloading of a lot of those features as well as processing onto the public cloud. Certainly IBM's also looking at many, in many ways in which they can move some of these core functions as well onto their public cloud. So I think the journey continues. Like you said, you know, it may not be ever that you have a hundred percent of the processing that happens on the public cloud. And again, we have to take a look at the amount of work that there is, the risk reward, the cost that it will take. And you know, with the enormous amount of functionality that has to take place, this is where we have to advise our clients on the journey as well as the order in which we achieve these things. Well, the landscape, we talked earlier about Edge, you're talking about multiple clouds, you've got on-prem, you've got mission critical workloads. And you mentioned containers, people want portability. Of course, containers are a necessary ingredient of that portability, but it's insufficient. And so you just see complexity increasing as we proceed down this cloud journey. You got to secure those containers and microservices sometimes aren't so micro. You've got to make them work across clouds. So it seems to me that you guys and your clients get a lot of work to do, which is a good thing as long as you make the business case and it's adding value to the organization. Yeah, absolutely. And then this is where you take certain functions. I think you have a lot of SaaS options, particularly around certain things that you're doing that tend to be commoditized, so to speak. Certain other functions where you don't need perhaps the elasticity that the cloud offers so you can have past solutions that you can build more quickly. But then you want other solutions that need to be more mission critical, more resilient, and certainly more elastic. And that's where you look at producing microservices, containerized applications that you can really burst across multiple clouds and so on. So these are all part of the architectures that we're building, designing, and implementing at our plant. Prasad, where can I go to get more info on this whole topic? From a hybrid cloud perspective as well as a public cloud perspective, you go to Accenture.com and you go to the cloud section. There's a lot of information as well as credentials and white papers that you'd be able to access and also gives you access to specific people that you can reach out to and contact and get further information on what we've been able to do. Very interesting conversation, Prasad. I mean, it's great to see you guys working very closely with IBM, I love it. Two global companies, deep industry expertise solving hard problems. So thanks so much for coming on the queue. Not at all, thank you so much for doing this, Dave. Very welcome and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante and it's our wall-to-wall coverage of the IBM Digital Event Experience around Think 2020. We'll be right back right at this short break. You're watching theCUBE.