 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Knowledge 16, brought to you by ServiceNow. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. Welcome back to ServiceNow Knowledge 2016. This is theCUBE, theCUBE goes out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. This is our flagship program. Sadeep Raj is here, he's the MD of Cloud First at Accenture. Sadeep, welcome to theCUBE, let's get to see it. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on. Yeah, so you guys have been making moves, Accenture, big acquisition, you got some good love in the keynote from Frank this morning, the Cloud Sherpa's acquisition, but step back for a second, tell us about your role at Accenture. Well, so I've been at Accenture for 25 years, originally come from London, and now based in Philadelphia. And the role that I have at Accenture is running all of the pure play cloud applications that we're seeing strong take up at our clients. And so that means that in the CRM space, when Frank was talking about all of those different domains, I own all of those domains at Accenture where we're seeing cloud now becoming an increasing strategic driver for our clients, HCM, around service management, around CRM, around ERP and so on. So I love my job. It's the most exciting place to be right now, right? So we love talking about cloud. So let's talk about cloud for a little bit, sort of set the context here. So when you say pure play cloud, a lot of connotations, I think, real cloud versus cloud washing, and you're living this world. So what do you mean by pure play cloud? That's a great question. So these companies are ultimately born in the cloud applications, typically multi-tenant focus solutions that are driving an entirely cloud based solution for our clients. So we have other parts of Accenture that are obviously focused on other more hybrid cloud solutions, leveraging cloud infrastructure and so on. My focus is entirely on those applications that are fueling this kind of new growth around how companies are using these pure play clouds to change the way they're working. And it's different because it's a community-based approach in the way that these models are driven, in the way that these applications are engineered. It's a different in the way that they're implemented, this more agile, iterative process that our clients are adopting. And they're looking for these outcomes. So these are not one and done projects. How do they expand now to different audiences, to different business processes to kind of drive these outcomes? Those are the common trends across all of those domains that we're seeing. So you guys obviously, the hallways start with the outcomes and then work back and bring expertise and process and domain expertise within a specific vertical. And then there's some technology expertise behind that as well. But it sounds like the space that you're in is well aligned in terms of the technologies of the work days and the sales forces. There's a fundamental process change that's going about in the industry. Obviously, ServiceNow underscores that. Can you comment on that? Yeah, I think you're right. Accenture's got this massive focus now. If you go to our last earnings and the industry analysts that we kind of brief on this, Accenture's been on this journey, what we call the rotation to the new. It's basically what our clients are doing, which is they're shifting to be able to drive a transformation using digital, cloud security services to drive this rotation to the new. They're looking to get competitive advantage. So Accenture's been on this journey. We probably started ahead of the curve around that and made investments, which fuel the growth that we were seeing around our clients adopting these technologies. And as you say, the technologies are catalysts for change. Some of these are like driving significant transformative programs off the back of using these technologies as a catalyst. And honestly, that was a rationale for the acquisition. So people asked me, so what were we doing around cloud shepherds? You know, this kind of the reference that you made. I mean, last year, we were just seeing this enormous growth off the back of the strategy that we're driving. We're doing great organically, but we said, look, our clients are moving more and more in this direction. We need to augment what we're doing. And we looked at the best partner in this space. Across the platforms that they had was Salesforce, Google, ServiceNow. We're now dominating across each of those different platforms. The combined group that we have is cloud first. Very much proactively positioning these solutions to our clients. It's not like we're waiting and saying, hey, let's try this other thing first. And if it's beyond premise, it doesn't work. We'll try. We're leading with the cloud solutions proactively to stimulate that change. And that's the reason for this growth that we're seeing. It's incredible, the kind of pace. I love the announcement. Yesterday, ServiceNow very kindly granting us the leading partner for ServiceNow, the most certifications in the industry, over 800 certifications. That's amazing. And it's because we've really put that investment around this technology. How you use it as a harness for all the other services that we drive that our clients need to kind of move to the new. It's really interesting. There's two dynamics there that I'd like to dig into a little deeper. One is the cloud as a transformation agent. You know, it's not you guys going in now and saying, you guys need to change your business up, competitive drivers, et cetera. Now you've got this external focus that was traditionally kind of an IT thing that's helping. And secondly, because of the infrastructure play, I would imagine more and more of your services now can, again, go to the higher level, business process, industry expertise, transformation, and less about, okay, but now we still have to put the plumbing in to support all this stuff. Again, shifting your focus more upscale as well, or up value, if you will. I love how you put that because it's true. It's, you know, clients, they're really interested in the outcome, right? They want to be able to get the business outcome in terms of whatever we're driving around IT service management, around operations and so on. And they're looking at, how do I get this outcome best? Now, when it comes down to the plumbing, it's kind of one aspect. And frankly, it's the aspect that has been holding companies back from driving some of the business process change that's needed around these applications. The deeper integration of these capabilities with other systems across the enterprise. And how do you deploy these things from one group to another? You know, so many clients I speak to, they want to be able to standardize across all these different business units that they drive, because it's so disparate, so hard to drive change when everywhere they're doing it slightly differently. Using a platform like this to be able to create that change becomes a massive enabler. How these companies are able to move at speed is because they've shifted their operation to take advantage of this capability to constantly innovate and change. And that's exactly what you described. And then you're, that's really transformation, right? When you're able to move at the pace that their market's demanding, it's because we've engineered the services to wrap around the cloud solutions. So Deep, how does Accenture handle acquisitions generally, but specifically the Cloud Sherpas acquisition? You see some companies, and some companies do both, right? They put the company, leave it alone, keep the brand, some integrate it deeply. How did you handle the Cloud Sherpas acquisition and why? That's a great question. You know, Accenture, most people don't know, over 45 acquisitions we've done over the last couple of years, Accenture's done that. Obviously, that's just huge, right? And if you look at the last year, almost 15 of them have just been in the cloud space that we've been driving, just these cloud solutions. And our strategy around the integration is very simple, is that we use these acquisitions to kind of fuel and hunt the broader growth that we're seeing at our clients. So when we're having practices at Accenture, we want to stitch them together as much as possible to get the maximum synergy. Now, in some areas where they're completely new services that Accenture didn't provide, having kind of standalone, it makes sense to maybe kind of keep a kind of focus as a separate unit or something like that. Here, what we see with Cloud Sherpas was a massive synergy. A massive synergy because we were already driving this rotation to the new. What we just did was we went public with our cloud first message and we've named the practice, our cloud first practice, and it created a real bond between the companies. And Sherpas and our heritage team that was driving this at Accenture, it unified everyone. You know, if we're driving this cloud first message, everyone at Accenture knew it, everyone at our clients, the feedback from our clients was off the charts. They said, of course, it makes tremendous sense to us that you should be leading with this cloud first message, service now are great too. They kind of looked at this and said, oh, we're so thrilled that, you know, you're brave enough to come together. So for us, it made complete sense that we unify and integrate our practices together under this cloud first banner. What do you make of this notion of this third estate that Frank talks about, the first estate, of course, being ERP, the second being CRM, and of course Oracle SAP in the first, and I guess Salesforce in the second, and now this third estate being service management across the enterprise. And then touching deeply into those other two estates, you know, we've been getting the Kool-Aid injection for the last couple of days, but it sounds good to us. What do you make of that? You know, I'm seeing it play out at our clients. This service revolution, you know, that's a key theme, is really at the heart of what we're seeing is this platform that's very rich, that's ultimately enabling this systematic approach to automating business processes that frankly have been holding back these companies from driving change. And you imagine how many different areas of a company, we've seen that in IT, and in the IT operations, management and service management. Okay, it's beyond that, we're working with a law firm and they're completely looking at the way that they drive research requests. I mean, completely using the service, they're now a platform to be able to do that. We're like in a mining company to be able to transform the way that they're looking across 28 different divisions to unify on a single kind of process. Now they're able to move at speed. So the point is this service revolution, I think it is becoming more pervasive. People are seeing this being a platform for change across all of these processes where the workflow enablement automation is been a big opportunity for a while, now it's possible. So I got to ask you, don't hate me for saying this, my friends at ServiceNow, but three years ago when we saw where this platform was headed, we said, uh-oh, this is a collision course with Salesforce, it's going to be really interesting. ServiceNow was humble about it, but you're in the software business. Software executives at large software companies, they think that every dollar spent should be spent with them. Now here comes ServiceNow, they come along with this sort of new way to work message that's truly transformational. What do you make of that? I mean, are there swim lanes a little less clear now? You know, here's what I think about this space is that the ecosystem is so diverse and moves so fast, right? I mean, back when you and I would be having this conversation three years ago, the roadmap for these companies were set out so far, it used to move at this pace, where we still talk about the same thing six months from now, it just doesn't happen now like that. So now it's moving so fast, actually it's a good thing because the innovation that's being brought is raising the tide for everyone. Every, what we're seeing is just broader adoption. When we're starting to see more of these, you know, different companies starting to kind of drive some overlap, it's kind of fueling a deeper innovation. What's the result? I think we're going to see more hybrid solutions across the place. We're going to see the deeper integration. We're going to see cases now where companies are pushing and say, look, I want an industry version of this where you guys have figured this out. Now one of the reasons why Accenture has been kind of focusing a lot on the different industry solutions is because I want to be able to say, figure this out for me around how these solutions work together, but in my industry for financial services or for in the HR space around this function or in retail, that's the key. You know, that's how I think a lot of these things are going to get resolved is because you're going to start to see deeper end-to-end industry solutions play. Well, I want to ask you about that. You're qualified as Accenture to answer this. So, you know, for years you've seen basically value chains emerge within industries and Accenture and companies like you have really done very well with that expertise. You're one of a rare handful of maybe there's four or five companies out there that can actually go deep. Yet, we always talk about this digital transformation. Digital is data. Data is fungible across different industries. Are you starting to see these horizontal sort of use cases emerge that used to be just confined to industry? You know, it's a great question. And I think the kind of key here is you're able to take the innovation that may start off in an area and then draw those lessons learned and take the IP and leverage it in a model that you're able to apply across industries. I mean, simple things like in the beta C phenomenon where companies are trying to now drive this consumerization of IT. You learn how actually get the capabilities in the hands of people just like they expect at home. And then you think about that across one industry to next. There's some fundamental things that we're seeing from a digital enablement that you want to be able to take from one to the other. Clients are coming to us and saying, actually, I don't want to know about this industry. I want to know the ones that are doing this in this other industry. At the same time, they also want you to put it in their terms for their unique processes. So they kind of want both. And the ones that are getting both, that's where they're getting that differentiation. They're able to say, I want the best out of those other across industry capabilities combined with something that's truly unique around the industry that I'm driving. Those are the companies that kind of move in ahead really fast. So I'm curious, you know, I think Salesforce, everyone would say, you know, kind of set the stage for enterprise class, you know, shared applications that kind of broke through that security and everything that people were concerned about. But from the pure cloud plays, you see a lot of different now applications available from your client space. Are there patterns of best places to start? Is there some places that just work better than others? Is it shadow IT driven? Is it more strategic? Is it, you know, where are people kind of getting started? Cause there's a lot of different choices of kind of where do I start with my pure play cloud application? You know, this is a really interesting question because honestly, the kind of point at which to start, it varies so much from the markets and the different client situations. They're kind of honestly starting everywhere on that journey. The thing that we're laying out for these clients is the journey of how it should be mapped out in a way that they're able to get the value out of these tools that they're applying. Because the companies that fail, they start in different places, but then they become very tactical and disparate and it thing kind of wanes over time. You know, they find these kind of individual instances, different capabilities all over the place and frankly, this is across all the cloud applications suffer from this issue. The companies that succeed is when you kind of, you're able to start fast, able to kind of drive some tactical change, but could it in the context of a broader journey? And when you're able to do that, then you start to see how you can untap some value. Then you actually lay out this roadmap to say, now how do I think about an architecture that supports this deeper change, getting the data to be actually driven and shared across all these different functions? It kind of surprises people. People think, hey, software's a server, I can send this stuff on, I can leave all those architects behind somewhere. Actually what's actually happening is those architects are the ones that are needing more because this incremental change and the end states that are interim to be able to map out how this architecture is going to evolve. How do you avoid it being brittle? How do you make it flexible to be able to adapt to change? That's what these architects should be. Layer onto that, the business capabilities around it. How does the governance change around these models? How can I move as fast to get these changes out there? At the same time, I've got all these enterprise level risk controls I need to deal with. How do you get the governance right? So all of these factors make it, the companies are doing all of those things, they're able to get maximum value out of these capabilities. They're able to start anywhere, but they move towards this maximum value journey. So how is Cloud First, how does that align with this digital transformation? It feels like it's more than table stakes. It feels like it's a fundamental ingredient of digital transformations. I mean, can you be digital without being Cloud First? You know, it's a great question. We just see the two as inextricably linked. And the reason is because we think about the kind of pure digital capabilities around being mobile, having analytics kind of baked in, all the customer facing aspects of their digital capability. Those are the types of things that we think about the ingredients for digital. Well, they think about them, they're cloud powered now. Many of those capabilities, cloud is the enabler for digital change. And we see that as being a big reason why in Accenture, we actually drive our digital agenda together with our cloud practice because we see the two things going in unison. Most of our programs have a digital agenda driven by cloud. Okay, we got to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming to Cuba. Last question, you're right on. We used to go to these conferences and you'd be talking about the same thing for even a couple of years, right? Now, it's every three months, it's changing. So, we're back here next year. What do you think we're going to be talking about? I'll put you in the spot. No, close with. Still saying, Brad. Yeah, your thoughts on knowledge. You guys are a hot company with new acquisition, energized. What are your thoughts on that? I'm so upbeat about where we are. I think this whole digital transformation is going to accelerate. I mean, what we're seeing now is companies seeing this disruption on the side isn't just for now startups. It's for big companies now looking for that disruption to be able to fuel new markets and growth. And they're coming to us and saying, how can we do that? How can we accelerate it using capabilities like this? And I can see this growth just becoming, we're just scratching the surface. I mean, that's how I look at it. We're absolutely just scratching the surface around where these platforms are going to stimulate and drive the core processes around these companies. I'm so excited about it. So, Deep Raj, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Leading with Cloud, Accenture leader in the business, leading the ServiceNow community. Appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I'll keep right there, everybody. We'll be back. This is theCUBE. We're live from Knowledge 16.