 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent Executive Summit 2020 sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Everyone, welcome to theCUBE virtual coverage of the Executive Summit at AWS re-invent 2020 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. We can't be there in person like we are every year. We have to be remote. This executive summit is with special programming supported by Accenture. We're theCUBE virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier. We had a great panel here called on cloud first digital transformation from some experts, Stuart Driver, the director of IT and infrastructure and operates at Lyon, Australia. Douglas Regan, managing director, client account lead at Lyon for Accenture. And Sadiq Islam, associate director, application development lead for Accenture. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE virtual. That's a mouthful, all that digital, but it's cloud transformation. This is a journey that you guys have been on together for over 10 years to be really a digital company. Now, some things have happened in the past year that kind of brings all this together. This is about the next generation organization. So I want to ask Stuart, you first, if you can talk about this transformation that Lyon has undertaken, some of the challenges and opportunities and how this year in particular has brought it together because you know, COVID has been quote the accelerant of digital transformation. Well, if you're 10 years in, I'm sure you're on that wave right now. Take a minute to explain this transformation journey. Yeah, sure. So a number of years back, we looked at kind of our infrastructure and our landscape and trying to figure out where we wanted to go next. And we were very analog based and stuck in the old IT groove of, you know, capital refresh, struggling to transform, struggling to get to a digital platform. And we needed to change it up so that we could become very different business to the one that we were back then. Obviously, cloud is an accelerant to that. And we had a number of initiatives that needed a platform to build on. And a cloud infrastructure was the way that we started to do that. So we went through a number of transformation programs and we didn't want to do that in the old world. We wanted to do it in the new world. So for us, it was partnering up with great organizations that can take you on the journey and start to deliver bit by bit incremental progress to get to the, I guess, the promised land. We're not all the way there, but we're a long way along. And then when you get to some of the challenges like we've had this year, it makes all of the hard work worthwhile because you can actually change pretty quickly, provide capacity and increase your environment and do the things that you need to do in a much more dynamic way than we would have been able to previously where we might have been waiting for hardware vendors, et cetera, to deliver capacity for us. For us, this year, it's been a pretty strong year from an IT perspective and delivering for the business needs. Before I get the Douglas, I want to just really quickly redirect to you and say, you know, for all the people who said, oh yeah, you got to jump on cloud, get in early. You know, a lot of naysayers like, well, wait till to mature a little bit. Really, if you got in early and you were paying your dues, if you will, taking that medicine with the cloud, you're really kind of peaking at the right time. Is that true? Is that one of the benefits that comes out of this, getting in the cloud? I mean, John, this has been an unprecedented year, right? And you know, Stray, we had to live through bushfires and then we had COVID and then we actually had to deliver a project on very large transformational project completely remote. And then we also had some cyber challenges which is public as well. And I don't think if we weren't moved into and enabled through the cloud, we would have been able to achieve that in this year. It would have been much different. It would have been very difficult to do. The fact that we were able to work and partner with Amazon through this year which has been unprecedented and actually come out the other end and we've delivered a brand new digital capability across the entire business. It really wouldn't have been impossible if we could, I guess, stayed in the old world. The fact that we were moved into the new, enabled by the new allowed us to work in this unprecedented year. Just, Will, what's your personal view on this? Because I've been saying on the Cuban reporting, necessity is the mother of all invention and the word agility has been kicked around as kind of a cliche, oh, be agile. You know, we're going to get to Siddiqui in a minute specifically, but from your perspective, Douglas, what does that mean to you? Because there is benefits there for being agile. And I think as Stuart mentioned, right? And a lot of these things we try to do and typically, you know, hardware capabilities are the last to be told and always on the critical path to be done. You know, we really didn't have that in this case what we were doing with our projects and our deployments, right? We were able to move quickly, we were able to make decisions in line with the business and really get things going, right? So a lot of times in the traditional world you have these inhibitors, you have these critical path it takes weeks and months to get things done as opposed to hours and days. And it truly allowed us to, we had to, you know, rejake things, move things. And, you know, we were able to do that in this environment with AWS support and the fact that we could kind of turn things off and on as quickly as we needed. Yeah, cloud scales, great for speed. Siddiqui, I got to get your thoughts in this cloud first mission. You know, the DevOps world, they saw this earlier, they're jumping in there, they saw the agility. Now the theme this year is modern applications with the COVID pandemic pressure. There's real business pressure to make that happen. How did you guys learn to get there fast? And what specifically did you guys do at Ascension? And how did it all come together? Can you take us inside? Kind of how it all played out. All right. We started off with, as we do in most cases with much more media looping, and we worked with Lyons functional experts and the last knowledge that allowed the infrastructure to be had. We then applied our journey to cloud strategy which basically revolves around the seven hours and the key steps from our perspective were assessing the current environment, setting up the new cloud environment. And as we go modernizing and migrating through these applications through the cloud. Now, one of the key things that we learned along this journey was that you can have the best plans but legacy environment that we were dealing with, we often did not have to make changes work a lot of agility and also work with a lot of collaboration with the Lyon team as well as AWS. I think the key thing for me was being able to really bring it all together. It's not just the Accenture team or the Lyon team or the AWS team. It's all of us working together to make this happen. What were some of the learnings real quick? Learnings real quick. From here. Any there? Any there? Any there? So I think some of the key from our perspective the key learnings around that when we look back at the infrastructure that we were trying to migrate over to the cloud, a lot of the documentation et cetera was not available. We were having to figure out a lot of things on the fly. Now that really required us to have people with deep expertise who could go into those environments and work out the best ways to migrate the workloads to the cloud. I think the biggest thing for me was making sure we had on tap real SMEs across the board globally that we could leverage across various technologies and that could really work in our collaborative and agile environment with Lyon. Stuart, I got to ask you, how did you address your approach to the cloud and what was your experience? Yeah, for me it's around getting the foundations right to start with and then building on them. So you've got to have your process and you've got to have your infrastructure there and your blueprints ready. AWS do a great job of that, right? Getting the foundations right and then building upon it and then partnering with Accenture allows you to do that very successfully. I think the one thing that was probably surprising to us when we started down this journey and kind of after we got a long way down the track and looking backwards is actually how much you can just turn off, right? So a lot of stuff that you get a left with legacy in your environment and when you start to work through it with the types of people that Sadiq just mentioned, the technical expertise working with the business, you can really rationalize your environment and cloud is a good opportunity to do that, to drive that legacy out. So a few things there. The other thing is you've got to try and figure out the benefits that you're going to get out of moving here. So there's no point just taking something that is not delivering a huge amount of value in the traditional world, moving it into the cloud and guess what, it's going to deliver the same limited amount of value. So you've got to transform it and you've got to make sure that you build it for the future and understand exactly what you're trying to gain out of it. So again, you need a strong collaboration. You need good partners to work with and you need good engagement from the business as well because the kind of digital transformation, cloud transformation isn't really an IT project. I guess fundamentally it is at the core but it's a business project that you've got to get the whole business aligned on. You got to make sure that your investment streams are appropriate and that you're able to understand the benefits and the value that you're going to drive back towards the business. Stu, if you don't mind me asking what were some of the obstacles you encountered or learnings that might have differed from the expectations? We all been there, hey, you know, we're going to change the world. Here's the sales pitch, here's the outcome. And then obviously things happen. You know, you learn legacy. Okay, let's put some containerization around that. Cloud native, all that rational you're talking about. What are, and you're going to have obstacles. That's how you learn. That's how perfection is developed. How, what obstacles did you come up with and how are they different from your expectations going in? Yeah, they're probably no different from other people that have gone down the same journey, if I'm totally honest. The, you know, 70 or 80% of what you do is relatively easy because they're known quantity. It's relatively modern architectures and infrastructures and you can, you know, upgrade, migrate, move them into the cloud, whatever it is, re-host, re-platform, you know, re-architect whatever it is you want to do. It's the other stuff, right? It's the stuff that always gets left behind and that's the challenge. It's getting that last bit over the line and making sure that you haven't invested in the future while still carrying all of your legacy costs and complexity within your environment. So to be quite honest, that's probably taken longer and has been more of a challenge than we thought it would be. The other piece I touched on earlier on in terms of what was surprising was actually how much of your environment is actually not needed anymore when you start to put a critical eye across it and ask the tough questions and start to understand exactly what it is you're trying to achieve. So do you ask a part of the business, do they still need this application or this service? 100% of the time, they'll say yes until you start to lay out to them, okay, it's now gonna cost you this to migrate it or this to run it in the future and you know, here's your ongoing costs and you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then for a significant amount of those answers you get a different response when you start to layer on the true value of it. So you start to flush out those hidden costs within the business and you start to make some critical decisions as a company based on that. So that was a little tougher than we first thought and probably broader than we thought. There was more of that than we anticipated which actually results in a much cleaner environment post-migration. You know, the whole expression, if it moves automated, you know, it's kind of a joke on government how they want to tax everything. You know, you want to automate, that's the key thing of cloud and you got to discover those opportunities to create value. Stuart and Sadeek, mainly if you can weigh in on this, love to know the percentage of total cloud that you have now versus when you started because as you start to uncover whether it's by design for purpose or you discover opportunities to innovate like you guys have, I'm sure it kind of, you took on some territory inside lying it. What percentage of cloud now versus start? Yeah, at the start it was minimal, right? You know, close to zero, right? Single digits, right? It was mainly SAS environments that we had sitting in cloud when we started. Don't mention earlier on a really significant transformation project that we've undertook and recently gone live on a multi-year one. You know, that's all stood up on AWS and is a significant portion of our environment. In terms of what we can move to cloud, we're probably at about 80% or 90% now and the balance of it is legacy infrastructure that is just going to retire as we go through the cycle rather than migrate to the cloud. So we are significantly cloud-based and, you know, we're reaping the benefits of it in a year like 2020 and makes you glad that you did all of the hard yards in the previous years when you started with that business challenge you're throwing at us. Siddiq, any comment, reaction to the cloud percentage? Penetration? Sorry, I didn't catch that, but all I was going to say was I think it's like the 80 to 80 rule, right? We worked really hard in the, you know, I think 2018, 19 to get 80% of the application onto the cloud and over the last year is the 20% that we have been migrating and asked to accept, right? A lot of it is also that's going to be retired. And I think our next big step is going to be obviously, you know, pricing on the cake which is to decommission all these apps as well, right? So, you know, to get the real benefits out of the whole transformation program from a reduction of CAPEX, all things specifically. Douglas and Stuart, can you guys talk about the decision around the cloud because you guys also had success with AWS. Why AWS? How's that decision made? Can you guys give some insight into some of those thoughts? I can start off, I think back when the decision was made and it was a while back, you know, there's some clear advantages of moving with AWS. A lot of alignment with some of the significant projects and the particular one big transformation project that we've alluded to as well. You know, we needed some very robust and just future proof and proven technology and AWS gave that to us. We needed a lot of blueprints to help us move down the path. We didn't want to reinvent everything. So, you know, having a lot of that legwork done for us and AWS gives you that, right? And, particularly when you partner up with the company like Accenture as well, you get combinations of technology and the skills and the knowledge to move you forward in that direction. So, you know, for us it was a decision based on, you know, best of breed, you know, looking forward and trying to predict the future and needs and kind of the environment that we might need and, you know, partnering up with organizations that can take you on the journey. Yeah, just to build on that. So, obviously, you know, Lyon selected AWS, but, you know, we knew it was a very good choice given the skills and the capability that we had as well as the assets and tools we had to get the most out of AWS. And obviously our CEO globally has just made, you know, announcement about a huge investment that we're making in cloud. But, you know, we've worked very well with AWS. We've done some joint workshops and joint investments, some joint POCs. So, you know, we have a very good working relationship with AWS. And I think one incident to reflect upon was the cyber incident, again, where we actually jointly, you know, dove in with Amazon and some of their security experts and our experts and were able to actually work through that with Lyon quite successfully. So, you know, really good behaviors as an organization but, you know, also really good capabilities. Yeah, as you guys, your Accenture cloud outcomes research shown, it's the cycle of innovation with the cloud that's creating a lot of benefits. Knowing what you guys know now, looking back certainly COVID has impacted a lot of people kind of going through the same process. Knowing what you guys know now, would you advocate people to jump on this transformation journey? If so, how and what tweaks did they make, what's changes, what would you advise? I might take that one to start with. I hate to think where we would have been when COVID kicked off here in Australia and, you know, we were all sent home. Literally, we were at work on the Friday and then over the weekend and in Monday, we were told not to come back into the office. And all of a sudden, our capacity in terms of remote access on a quadrupled or more five X, what we had on the Friday we needed on the Monday. And we were able to stand that up during the day Monday and into Tuesday because we were cloud based. And, you know, we just spun up new instances and sorted out licensing, et cetera. And we had all of our people working remotely within effectively one business day. I know peers of mine in other organisations and industries that are relying on kind of traditional ways and getting hardware, et cetera, that were weeks and months before they could get the right hardware to be able to deliver to their user base. So, you know, one example where you're able to scale and get value out of this platform beyond probably what was anticipated at the time you talk about, you know, elasticity and all of these kinds of things. And you can also think of a few scenarios, but real world ones where you're getting your business back up and running in that period of time is just phenomenal. There's other stuff like this, these programs that we've rolled out, you do your sizing. And in the traditional world, you would just go out and buy more servers than you need. And, you know, probably never realised the full value of those, you know, the capability of those servers over the life cycle of them. Whereas, you know, in a cloud world, you put in what you think is right. And if it's not right, you bump it up a little bit when all of your metrics and so on tell you that you need to bump it up and conversely scale it down at the same rate. So for us with the types of challenges and programs and just business need that's come at us this year, we wouldn't have been able to do it without a strong cloud base to move forward with. You know, Douglas, one of the things I talked to a lot of people on the right side of history who have been on the right wave with cloud with the pandemic and they're happy, they're like, and they're humble, like, well, we're just lucky. You know, luck is preparation meets opportunity. And this is really about you guys getting in early and being prepared and readiness. This is kind of important as people realise that you got to be ready. I mean, it's not just, you don't get lucky by being in the right place at the right time. And there are a lot of companies who are on the wrong side of history here who might get washed away. This is a super important- I think to echo and kind of build on what Stuart said, I think that the reason that we've had success and I guess the momentum is we didn't just do it in isolation within IT and technology. It was actually linked to broader business changes, you know, creating basically a digital platform for the entire business, moving the business where they're going to be able to come back stronger after COVID, where they're actually set up for growth and actually allows, you know, line to achieve its growth objectives and also its ambitions as far as what it wants to do with growth and whatever they might do with acquiring other companies and moving into different markets and launching new products. So we've actually done it in a way that there's, you know, real and direct business benefit that actually enables line to grow. General, I really appreciate you coming. I have one final question if you can wrap up here. Stuart and Douglas, you don't mind weighing in. What's the priorities for the future? What's next for Lion and Ascension? Christmas holidays, I'll start Christmas holidays. It's been a big year. And then a reset, obviously, right? So, you know, it's figuring out what we've transformed, what we've already transformed, if that makes sense. So we've got a huge proportion of our services sitting in the cloud, but we know we're not done, even with the stuff that is in there, we need to take those next steps. We need more and more automation and orchestration. We need to have our environment as more future proof. We need to be able to work with the business and understand what's coming at them so that we can, you know, build that into our environment. So again, it's really transformation on top of transformation is the way that I'll describe it. And it's really an open book, right? Once you get it in and you've got the capabilities and the evolving tool sets that AWS continue to bring to the marketplace, you know, working with the partners to figure out how we unlock that value, you know, drive a cost down of our efficiency up, all of those kind of, you know, standard metrics. But, you know, we're looking for the next things to transform and show value back out to our customer base that we continue to, you know, sell our products to and work with and understand how we can better meet their needs. Yeah, I think just to echo that, I think it's really leveraging this end-to-end digital capability they have and getting the most out of that investment. And then I think it's also moving to and adopting more new ways of working as far as, you know, the speed of the business is getting at the speed of the market is changing. So being able to launch and do things quickly and also be competitive with, you know, an efficient operating cost now that they're in the cloud, right? So I think it's really leveraging the most out of the platform and then, you know, being efficient and launching things quickly with the business. Sadiq, any word from you on your priorities by you see this year unfolding? Yeah, so I'm just going to say like key learnings first, right? For me, around, you know, just journey, this is a journey to the cloud, right? And, you know, as both Doug and Stuart have said, it's getting all, you know, different parts of the organization along the journey from business to IT, to your product vendors, et cetera, right? And it takes time, it is tough, but, you know, you've got to get started on it. And, you know, once we finish off, it's the realization of the benefits. Now, you know, looking forward, I think from a lion's perspective, it is, you know, once we migrate all the workloads to the cloud, it is leveraging off-stack, right? And as I think Stuart said earlier, with, you know, the latest and greatest stuff that we're not afraid of the US, it's basically working to see how we can really achieve more better operational excellence from a cloud perspective. Well, Stuart, thanks for coming on with Accenture and sharing your environment and what's going on and your journey. You're on the right wave. Did the work. You're in the, it's all coming together even faster. Congratulations for your success. And I really appreciate, Doug, for coming on as well from Accenture. Thank you for coming on. Thanks, John. Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of executive summit at AWS re-invent. This is where all the thought leaders share their best practices, their journeys, and of course, special programming with Accenture and theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.