 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at the Venetian part of the AWS re-invent show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Adam Burden. He is the Chief Software Engineer at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE, Adam. A cube of love. It's great to be here again, Rebecca. Thanks a lot for inviting me. So I want to talk to you about some research that you conducted about future systems. We're going to get into what future systems are in a little bit, but I first want to hear about this research itself. What was the genesis of it? What were you trying to understand? That was really interesting. First of all, we actually followed the scientific method for this, starting with a real hypothesis, and then conducted a really big research study to find out was that hypothesis true? And what we were trying to understand is we see this thing called an innovation achievement gap at many of our clients where they're investing heavily in new disruptive technologies, but they're not seeing the benefit out of it that they expect. And others, their peers often are. And why is that? And we thought that was really important to understand for our clients who are trying to compete in the digital era. So you had this hypothesis, so what did you go in thinking? Well, first of all, we went in and we said, we believe that there's a number of barriers out there that people have to really preventing them from embracing and adapting in the digital age in the right way. A lot of it has to do with what I call the inertia of legacy or the handicap of legacy. So the things that the way that they used to build systems, like the methods, can be a really serious drawback. Like if they're using waterfall techniques, maybe their legacy systems, for example, that they are not really open, they don't provide the ability to interface with them properly. Another great example of the challenges of legacy systems can really be that they're built in a more monolithic nature. And because they're built in that fashion, it's really hard to maintain them in a more of an agile way with lots of different teams working on components because they need them all to be assembled together at once. So it forces you into this release schedule which can be months long or even years long to do things. And that type of speed, that just doesn't work in the digital age. So it's holding them back. And that's some of the diagnostic that we went into this research study with saying these are the challenges that are out there. So before we get talking about the results, I want you to just define for us what these future systems are. Great, great. And this is where we really were trying to say that we think it's time for a hard reset around a lot of the way that business systems and applications are built today. And the reason that we believe that is that companies who are very large enterprises that really should be dominating in their industry, that there are so many examples of where small startups have come in and disrupted them. Things that you think should never have happened. So the democratization of technology, the introduction of cloud, et cetera, the capabilities that AWS is talking to us here at this conference about, that's what's enabling them to do it. But enterprises have so many advantages, the wealth of data that they've got, the enormous investment capacity and others, how is that possible? And we really believe it, a lot of it comes down to the way that they're using and the way they're embracing these future systems. And there's three characteristics of these things that we look at. First, we say that they're boundary-less and they really, they break down the traditional stack of IT so that it's more open and it's able to connect with services outside of their enterprise and they embrace the way that that works. So the traditional layers of application and data and compute and storage, those are really going away and everything's becoming code and much more components. Another one is adaptable. I'm a really big believer in this space because I've seen so many things come in that just makes you really kind of rethink the way that you may have built some things in the past. So that might be like blockchain or it could be DevOps or other things. And are there ways to build systems that are much more flexible and evolutionary in nature so they don't have to be completely disrupted and changed in order to embrace some new technology? So adaptable is another one. And the third one is radically human. This is my favorite one, I think, if I had one. It's about building systems for people rather than building the people around the technology that you're using. In fact, I'll give you an example. That keyboard right in front of you today, that keyboard, do you know when that keyboard was designed? Oh my God, when? 1887, or 1880s about. And basically that keyboard was designed to slow you down to keep you from typing too fast. And that was because people were typesetting newspapers and they were crossing the little bars in their typewriter. Yet today, what's the date today? 2019? We're still using that, right? Isn't it time for us to have more of a radically human approach to technology? And instead of having people design themselves around how technology works, having the technology best designed for them. So taking better advantage of artificial intelligence, maybe making AI the new UI, those types of things are really going to change it. And we think that future systems will exhibit this key characteristic of radically human in the way that they're built and organized. Okay, so I like it. Adaptable in boundary lists and radically human. What did you find? So how did you go about this survey and then what did you find? Okay, so first this was the single biggest survey of enterprise systems that Accenture's ever conducted. And we surveyed more than 8,300 companies, C level, across 20 industries and 20 different geographies. And the survey was looking at more than 100 data points from each one of them, as well as other demographic data. We collected 1.6 million pieces of data about this. We ran machine learning on the data to find patterns that surprised us. We looked at the data in terms of our hypothesis to say, what is it about these future systems? Are there some companies that are starting to do things like this boundary list adaptable and radically human space that we could learn something from? And we found some really interesting things. So when I dug into the data, maybe the biggest headline out of it was, the companies that have begun to adapt or to use these future systems type of approaches for things, we'll call them the top 10% of this group. Their revenues are growing at twice the speed of anyone else in their peer group. So think about that, like if their revenues are growing faster and everything else about their peers is the same, they're competitors, they're in the same geography, even the same industry, but the revenues of this group is changing faster. Isn't that great evidence that adopting these characteristics of future systems is super important to the business performance that you've got there? It's a huge difference. Right, so that's compelling me. So what are they doing differently? What is this 10% of companies? How are they leading the pack? Yeah, so it boils down to a couple of key things that they're really doing differently. And I'll start by saying that they look at, instead of just looking at things as applications, they look at them more as systems of interconnected solutions. And they are treating components in a way that allows them to reassemble things in different and unique ways much faster than others can do. Sometimes they're using API solutions, a lot of times they're using outside functions, outside of their enterprise to do that, and it's giving them remarkable flexibility. Another thing is the methods, the way that they build systems and what they're embracing, but it goes beyond just using Agile. It's almost like a different culture altogether. When I think about some clients that I visited that really are getting this right, and the way that they look at failure, for example, is success. And the conservative nature of a lot of enterprises, as it pertains to technology, to carefully study it before they invest, before they move forward, it's holding them back. And maybe that paid dividends for a long time when things were done in a much more waterfall nature, but in the digital age, you can't afford to take that kind of time to embrace or to try and leverage new technologies. I think another one that really stands out for me too is the breadth of disruptive technologies that they tried. And so it wasn't just that they experimented with everything that worked, they've experimented with a lot of things that maybe haven't produced the kind of results or outcomes that conventional wisdom said that they were going to. Augmented reality is a good example. I think it's taken a time for augmented reality to really start producing value in the enterprise, but it's been around for a while now. We found that the leaders had all experimented with augmented reality. It didn't necessarily mean that they'd adopted it and begun to use it, but that was actually something that separated them from the laggards. What a surprise, right? Because you would thought like, okay, well maybe the leaders are just smarter. They only choose the things that are really going to make a difference. But it's a fact that they were trying lots of different things and they weren't afraid to experiment that really made a difference for them. And not afraid to fail too, as you said. Not afraid to fail at all. Or maybe shelve it and say, not quite ready yet. Maybe in a few years we'll get there. So I thought that was fascinating and it really helped us sort of confirm that there are definitely things different that these leaders are doing than laggards. And it goes beyond just their adoption of future systems. It's the way that they were building them too and the culture that they've embraced as a result. So we had a dizzying number of announcements on the main stage this morning from Andy Jassy. So many different mainframe legacy migrations, so many different areas that AWS is moving into and starting new services. How does what you heard today from Andy Jassy translate to the research that you're doing? It's actually great. And I think it's a great microcosm of what is truly different about these leaders and laggards. All of them in some ways have said, we're adopting cloud, okay? Great, everybody's doing cloud. All 8,300 companies, I can't think of one that said they were doing nothing with cloud. They were doing something with SaaS or maybe they've got public cloud or others. But here's the difference. Here's the difference. When the leaders do cloud, they think about it differently. The laggards look at cloud as a cheaper data center. They say, okay, we can just move our compute and storage into cloud. Great, awesome. The leaders look at cloud as an innovation catalyst. They're taking advantage of the cloud native services. The things Andy was talking about today, fraud detect, private VPNs, all of the things that he was introducing and describing today, they can't wait to get their hands on that capability. And it's more than that though, because you could do this on-premise, but it's too expensive and it takes too long to do that. When you've got a cloud service provider that's making things like recognition or SageMaker available at your fingertips to do amazing things with artificial intelligence, that is what an innovation catalyst is all about. And the leaders are taking advantage of that at every turn and that's why, that's why they can do things so fast. So for the 90% that are not in this leading category, it sounds as though it'll require a real change in mindset. But are there any other, what's your advice to help these laggards improve? Yeah, so I would say it really boils down to two things I would give them. If you're in that laggard category, first of all, you can definitely move out of it. And the other thing is, is that you're in strange company. Like there's digital natives, like the most successful cloud, born in the cloud kind of companies that have this problem too. So it's kind of surprising, right? That you wouldn't expect that, but that's definitely the case. And we see lots of examples of that. The good news is though, is that you can move from A to B. And I would say it starts with doing two things. The first is, is embracing more fast and flexible technologies. So the things that I really like to see companies embrace or the things that we observed in this research that they're doing is, looking at agile at scale. Embracing product-based operating models. Doing things that allow them, like DevOps, to increase automation in the way that they're building and deploying systems. That type of change is a significant adjustment to the way that you think about technology and how quickly it can be deployed for use. And if you look at the difference between these digital, born in the cloud digital companies that are these succeeding companies in this space, that's the way that they do it. And they really, it is really kind of part of the secret sauce. So that's one thing, embracing these solutions that make them fast and flexible. And the other one gets back to what I was describing earlier about cloud. Recognize that cloud is an innovation catalyst. It is not going to be successful for you to think about cloud as just a cheaper data center. It might very well be lower cost for you to do that. But if you're not taking advantage of the cloud-native services, whether that's AWS databases like Aurora, it's the new features that they introduced around the low-latency application development, those are the things that will really allow you to do stuff much faster than you could have ever imagined on-premise. So I'd start there if I was a company as one of those laggards, and then I'd look at what is my blueprint for future systems and how do I embrace those characteristics of boundary-less, adaptable, and radically human. Cloud as an innovation engine, I love it. Adam, thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE, but it's a pleasure. It's great to be here, Rebecca. Thank you again for inviting me. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage from the Accenture Executive Summit.