 Welcome to the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture at AWS re-invent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin and I've got two CUBE alum here with me. Please welcome Mara Biserovic, Managing Director of Global IT Enterprise Architecture at Accenture and Chris Wegman, Accenture AWS Business Group Technology and Practice Senior Managing Director. Gentlemen, welcome back to the program. Hey, Jelisa, great to be back. Thanks, Lisa, great to be here. It is nice to be back in a way, right here we are at this hybrid event, but I wanna talk about what Accenture is doing with AWS serving its clients and then we're gonna get into your own internal use case, drinking your own champagne. Chris, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what Accenture is doing with AWS to serve its clients. Yeah, Lisa, it's exciting, as you said, to be back in this hybrid event. And for me, this will be my 10th re-invent. And for Accenture, we're in year 14 of our partnership with AWS and actually year six of our partnership called Accenture AWS Business Group. And the focus of the last year has been helping our clients come out of the pandemic stronger than where they started, right? And a lot of that has been around focusing our customers getting past cloud migration, past cloud modernization and getting further into what we now call the cloud continuum, starting to truly leverage all the AWS assets and capabilities and services to truly speed their transformation. A lot of our customers are needing to transform even faster today than they were before the pandemic. And we're focused on helping those customers do that with AWS services. So Mary, let's bring you into the conversation. Now Accenture's internal IT organization has been leveraging AWS and public cloud for a while. Talk to me about that. You completed the journey a couple of years ago, 95% in the cloud. Talk to me about what you're doing there. Sure, Lisa. So our journey into the public cloud is complete. As you said, we put a bow on that project a couple of years ago. We started in 2015 and we went all in on public cloud. So the number 95% represents a true measure of everything it takes to run Accenture. Everything addressable is in the public cloud today. So the 95% just represents a small component of things that have to live outside of the cloud. But other than that, our journey to the cloud is complete. Very happy being in the cloud because it has opened tremendous doors for us as a business. And I'm sure we'll talk about here as we go but it's fundamentally a different place we live in today than where we were before we were in the cloud. Mary, me said something really powerful there a second ago. The Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. I don't think I've ever heard anybody say that. Talk to me about the impact, especially during the last 18 months that that cloud journey is delivered. I mean, one of the things I am extremely proud of for our collective global teams around the world when the obviously the, you know, when COVID hit and the pandemic engulfed the world, the only difference for us was that people just did not come into an office to work. Our capabilities in the cloud, our capabilities of having everything in the cloud really made it that much easier for our people to go to work. We weren't fighting over resources around infrastructure. People could just work from home directly. So I'm extremely proud of the collective global team that made all of that happen as part of that execution of all those things. So it was really a very proud moment I would say for all of us running IT. As well, it should be. Chris, talk about that from your perspective of facilitating that massive pivot 18, 19 months ago and what your group was responsible for doing to enable this cloud journey to be complete. Yeah, I always laugh that, you know, Mirom in our internal CIO organization as we call it is our, it was our first customer, right? You know, way back when I started working in this partnership, you know, we were already starting to leverage AWS S3 and EC2 and that insight extension. We took a lot of those best practices and started helping our clients leverage those best practices. So, you know, from an extension, we always kind of harvest from internally what we're doing. But, you know, over the last several years, really our focus with the CIO organization and Mirom's organization has been, you know, expanding the usage of non, you know, IaaS, I call them IaaS services, right? So pass EC2, you know, pass S3. Obviously there's always storage, there's always compute truly doing and building serverless applications, truly using, you know, services, fully managed services. So, you know, the CIO organization doesn't have to spend their time doing that. And for our customers, that's, that's while it's, they're still early on in a lot of their journeys. That's a novel idea. Is to truly try to sunset IaaS services or EC2 and things like that, you know, and whether that's, you know, through some containerization or things like that. I think the other big part is, is the maturing security footprint, right? Obviously as, as you use more and more of these AWS services, your security posture, your presence, how you think about security, we created an asset called Secure Cloud Foundation, leveraging many of the AWS services in a security space that have come out like our duty and others, really to help make that security foundation stronger, make it easier for our customers, including CIO to leverage those services and truly enable that move further up the cloud or further down the continuum as we call it. Mary, I want to get your thoughts on security for a moment because we have seen such a dramatic change in the threat landscape in the last 18, 19 months. We've seen a huge spike in ransomware. It's getting much more personal. It's now a household word. We've got the executive order. We had this rapid pivot to, and hundreds of thousands of Accenture employees working from home. Talk to me about, you feel very confident in the cloud journey that you've done. Where's your confidence level from a security perspective? As you said, security is the fastest growth in our business collectively. Like you said, the bad guys don't sleep. We don't sleep either when it comes to security. One of the things that we're constantly thinking about is how do we turn on a lot of our capabilities as an example? Even I would say at an enterprise level, it's different when you're running a big multinational corporation, 650,000 people like we do, we can't just turn everything on and hope for the best. We are very scripted in terms of how we think about those services, how we think about the processes, how we work with our CSO organization so that we're very meticulous and very thorough in terms of what services we turn on, how we turn them on, when we turn them on, how long we make them available because this is the new world. We have extended our corporate structure out into the cloud. That means we have to think of different ways for how we want to consume those capabilities and services. So like Chris said, the journey to the cloud for us is complete. A lot of it was as I would tell you, a lot of it was lift and shift for less and we can talk about that if we get time, but it was more about getting into the cloud and taking advantage of the cloud where we are today because now that we're there, we get to take advantage of all those capabilities that are there. And I would say the best part of being in the cloud is also having the providers like AWS there with us helping us with that security posture. So it's not just us doing this by ourselves. So Chris, I'm going to talk about that Miriam, just said this was mostly lift and shift. Talk to us about that. Because when we talk to organizations in every industry, the cloud transition, the cloud journey is extremely challenging. It's complex. How did you do this? How did you facilitate this in a relatively short time period, Chris? Yeah, and you're right. Every one of these conversations I have with my clients, there's a huge debate whether to lift and shift or modernize or build new, build cloud native. So in Accenture's situation, very early on, it was identified that we can do a large savings by doing a lift and shift migration. We were not a big data center owner. That we're not a big capital intense organization. So for us, that journey, we had colos and that stuff coming up for renewal. And we knew that we could get some early savings there and really reduce our footprint and take that investment and then invest it into true modernization. So Miriam and his organization worked very closely to build the factory to do the migrations, get that done in a very short amount of time and then turn their attention on truly refactoring and rebuilding the applications. I'm super proud of the number of applications that we've rebuilt. I'm super proud of the number of applications that now are cloud native. And we live in these applications every day. They're everything from our performance to how we do our payroll and do our time charging and things like that. But which was a big reason why we can access our systems remotely and at home versus going into different systems to get to that stuff. So it was very much heavy lift and shift early and really focusing on modernization. And as Miriam said, getting, you know, now it's about living there and continuing to modernize, continuing to accelerate what we're doing in the cloud. And thanks for that, maybe Lisa a little bit like, so our journey lift and shift was a core component of it. But the minute we decided to go into cloud, one of the things, the first things we did is I said, no more VMs. So any new capability that we were going to build, a cloud native microservices base. And that's been our standard for the last three or four years. So any new capability that comes along today that we must do custom, we build a cloud native microservices because one of the other things that I've got on my plate is I'm trying to reduce our overall technical depth. So all of these IS platforms, I still have to maintain them, patch them, support them, upgrade them. And I would rather be much more efficient at doing those things as I can and reinvest money into refactoring and modernizing the rest of the application play through containers, through my services, et cetera, which then gives me the agility right back to actually go even faster to enable more services for the business. Speed is something that we've seen become even more critical in the last 18, 19 months where we needed to everybody pivot businesses multiple times over and over. But part of the challenge that I'm gonna get your thoughts on this is this is a big cultural shift. Talk to me about, you've been at Accenture for a long time. Talk to me about the cultural shift needed to facilitate this massive transformation to cloud and how Chris's team was a facilitator of that. So, what are the things for us? I have probably in the last five years spoken to a thousand of our clients around our cloud journey and this culture conversation always comes up. And I will say, the biggest thing for us was interesting, we had those same fears. We had some same, when we first talked about going to the cloud six years ago, it was very... Not everything was there that's there today. So the teams were extremely nervous and they were confident that we could never be as good in the cloud as we were on site. Yet, here we are six years later and we're constantly finding ways to add value and take, bring value back. And it's those same teams. And one of the things is just we gave them the challenge to say, hey, this is the future. We're telling our clients this is where we're going. We have an opportunity here to do something different and they took it. And the team really took it on and they said, okay, let's do it. And we looked at how we run in the cloud, the many different ways whether we're using reserved instances, whether we're using containers, whether we're using different computer capabilities. We went through all of it and we're running such a highly efficient machine right now that it's like, we're still able to continue to eke out savings, even five years after the program. Even two years after the program is complete, we're still able to get savings. That's outstanding. That's ROI that every business and every industry hopes to be able to achieve from this. I wanna switch gears a little bit now because this is actually pretty cool. Accenture is really focused also on sustainability. You guys have signed onto the Amazon Climate Pledge which if you don't know what the Amazon Climate Pledge is, this is back in 2019, Amazon co-founded this. Commitment to be net zero carbon across businesses by 2040 which is actually 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. Yoram, talk to us about that and from Accenture's perspective, why it was important to sign onto that. So on a personal level, I love obviously sustainability as a whole. I think about the world for my children that are growing up. So it's very important to me on a personal level as well but I would say at a company level what I love about the cloud is I am there right there with them. As they make investments, all of our enterprise capabilities are there. We are able to very quickly shift and use those capabilities. So as Amazon, for example, in this scenario, creates new capabilities, new compute offerings, new storage offerings, whatever it may be, they're doing it with the sustainability lens and me by being in the cloud already, I can then turn to start using those things too. So as much as I can, on that perspective, I'm in a great place as Amazon puts these sustainability capabilities out there, I'm right there consuming and making it more efficient. And then the other one is obviously as much of our workloads as we can, get to a cloud native perspective, microservices perspective, then we keep reducing that compute consumption and everything else that goes along with it. And lastly, I would say the other thing is we're very aggressive in managing all of our systems in terms of uptime. So for example, in a data center, most organizations don't think about turning off their development environments and everything else, but for us, we're very rigid in this process. And we have a target of all of our development environments being down 55% at a time. And primarily, that's also a sustainability plane in addition to a financial savings plan. Awesome, great stuff. Chris, last question for you as we wrap up here. What are some of the things that you're excited about that's coming in cloud in the next few years? Obviously here we are at re-invent, going to be hearing a lot of news, a lot of announcements about cloud in the coming days. What excites you most, Chris? Yeah, you know, obviously the machine learning and NAI stuff is always the most exciting things right now in cloud. And we've put a lot of those to use here inside of Accenture as well and in our Synops platform, which we use with our customers to run more intelligent operations. We use that internally as well. But one of the things that excites me the most is the continued innovation at the core, right? And, you know, whether that be, you know, chipsets, you know, Merrim talked a little bit about, you know, improvement in performance, improvement in power consumption, you know, graventon, those types of stuff. That excites me every year. I look forward to seeing what they come out with and then how we're going to put that to use. Well, I look forward to talking to you guys next year. You've done such a tremendous job. You should be proud of the massive transformation that you've done. I imagine this would be a great case study if it's not already written up. It should be. It's really impressive. Miram and Chris, thank you for joining me at the summit, talking to me about what's going on with Accenture and AWS and some of the things that you are looking forward to. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thanks again, Lisa. Thanks, Lisa. You're very welcome. From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. This is the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture at AWS Reinvent 2021.