 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent Executive Summit 2020 sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Welcome everyone to theCUBE's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, part of AWS re-invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today, we're welcoming back to CUBE alum. We have Kishore Durk. He is the Accenture Senior Managing Director, Cloud First Global Services Lead. Welcome back to the show, Kishore. Thank you very much, Rebecca. Nice to meet you again. Nice to meet you again. And Tristan Morrill-Horsett, he is the Managing Director, Accenture Cloud First, North America Gross. Welcome back to you too, Tristan. Great to be back and great to see you again, Rebecca. Exactly. Even in this virtual format, it is good to see your faces. Today, we're going to be talking about Minav and Green Cloud Advisor capability. Kishore, I want to start with you. So Minav is a platform that is really celebrating its first year in existence. November 2019 is when Accenture introduced it, but it has new relevance in light of this global pandemic that we are all enduring and suffering through. Tell us a little bit about the Minav platform, what it is. Sure, Rebecca. We launched it in November 2019 and it is a cloud platform to help our clients navigate the complexity of cloud and cloud decisions to make it faster and obviously innovate in the cloud. With the increased relevance, and especially over the last few months with the impact of COVID crisis and the acceleration of digital transformation, we are seeing the transformation or the acceleration to cloud much faster. This platform that we're talking about has enabled 140 clients globally across different industries to identify the right cloud solution, navigate the complexity, provide a cloud-specific solution, simulate what our clients to meet their strategy business needs and the clients are loving it. I want to go to you now, Tristan. Tell us a little bit about how Minav works and how it helps companies make good cloud choices. Yeah, so Rebecca, we've talked about cloud is more than just infrastructure and that's what Minav tries to solve for. It really looks at a variety of variables including infrastructure, operating model and fundamentally what clients business outcomes our clients are looking for and identifies the optimal solution for what they need and we designed this to accelerate. We mentioned the pandemic, one of the big focus now is to accelerate. And so we work through a three-step process. The first is scanning and assessing our client's infrastructure, their data landscape, their application. Second, we use our automated artificial intelligent engine to interact with, we have a wide variety and library of collective cloud expertise and we look to recommend what is the enterprise architecture and solution. And then third, before we go live with our clients we look to simulate and test the scaled up model and this simulation gives our clients a way to see what cloud is going to look like, feel like and how it's going to transform their business before they go there. So tell us a little bit about that in real life now as a company, so many of people are working remotely having to collaborate not in real life. How is that helping them right now Tristan? So the pandemic has put a tremendous strain on systems because of the demand on those systems. And so we talk about resiliency. We also now need to collaborate across data across people, I think all of us are calling from a variety of different places where last year we were all at the big cube itself. And cloud technologies such as teams Zoom that we're leveraging now has fundamentally accelerated and clients are looking to onboard this for their capabilities. They're trying to accelerate their journey. They realize that now the cloud is what is going to become important for them to differentiate once we come out of the pandemic. And the ability to collaborate with their employees, their partners and their clients through these systems is becoming a true business differentiator for our clients. Kishore, I want to talk with you now about MyNabs multiple capabilities and helping clients design and navigate their cloud journeys. Tell us a little bit about the green cloud advisor capability and its significance particularly as so many companies are thinking more deeply and thoughtfully about sustainability. Yes, so since the launch of MyNab we continue to enhance capabilities for our clients. One of the significant capabilities that we have enabled is the green cloud advisor. Today, Rebecca, a lot of the businesses are more environmentally aware and are expanding efforts to decrease power consumption. And obviously carbon emissions and run a sustainable operations across every aspect of their enterprise. As a result, we're seeing an increasing trend in adoption of energy efficient infrastructure in the global market. And one of the things that we did a lot of research we found out is that there's an ability to influence our client's carbon footprint through a better cloud solution. And that's what green cloud advisor brings to us. In terms of a lot of the client conversations that you're seeing in Europe, North America and others lot of our clients are accelerating to a green cloud strategy to unlock greater financial, societal and environmental benefit through obviously cloud-based circular operations and sustainable products and services. That is something that we are enhancing MyNab and we are having active client discussions at this point of time. So Tristan, tell us a little bit about how this capability helps clients make greener decisions. Yeah, well, let's start about the investments from the client providers in renewable and sustainable energy. They have most of the hyperscalers today have been investing significantly on data centers that are running renewable energy. Some incredibly creative constructs on how to do that. And sustainability is therefore a key item of importance for the hyperscalers and also for our clients who now are looking for sustainable energy. And it turns out this marriage is now possible. How can we marry the green capabilities of the client providers with a sustainability agenda of our clients? And so what we look in the way the MyNab works is it looks at industry benchmarks and he evaluates our current clients capabilities in corporate footprint, leveraging their existing data centers. We then look to model from an end-to-end perspective how their journey to the cloud leveraging sustainable and data centers with renewable energy. We look at how their solution will look like and quantify carbon tax credits, improve a green index score and provide quantifiable green cloud capabilities and measurable outcomes to our client shareholders, stakeholders, clients and customers. And our green cloud advisor sustainability solutions already been implemented at three clients. And in many cases, in two cases, has helped them reduce the carbon footprint by up to 400% to migration from their existing data center to green cloud, very, very important item. That is remarkable. Now tell us a little bit about the kinds of clients. Is this more interesting to clients in Europe? Would you say that it's catching on in the United States? What is the breakdown that you're seeing right now? Sustainability is becoming such a global agenda and we're seeing our clients tie this and put this at board level agenda and requirements across the globe. Europe has specific constraints around data sovereignty, where they need their data in country, but from a greener sustainability agenda, we see clients across all our markets, North America, Europe and our growth markets adopt this and we have seen case studies in all three markets. Kishore, I want to bring you back into the conversation. Talk a little bit about how Minab ties into Accenture's cloud-first strategy. Your Accenture CEO, Julie Sweet, has talked about post-COVID leadership requiring every business to become a cloud-first business. Tell us a little bit about how this ethos is in Accenture and how you're sort of looking outward with it too. So, Rebecca, Minab is the launchpad to a cloud-first transformation for our clients. Accenture CEO, Julie Sweet shared that Accenture cloud-first and our substantial investment demonstrate our commitment and is delivering data value for our clients when they need it the most. And with the digital transformation requiring cloud at scale, we're seeing that in the post-COVID leadership, it requires that every business should become a cloud business and Minab helps them get there by evaluating the cloud landscape, navigating the complexity, modeling, architecting and simulating an optimal cloud solution for our client. And as Tristan was sharing, a greener cloud. So Tristan, talk a little bit more about some of the real-life use cases in terms of what are we, what are clients seeing, what are the results that they're having? Yes, thank you, Rebecca. I would say two key things, right, around Minab. The first is the iterative process. Clients don't want to wait until they get started. They want to get started and see what their journey is going to look like. And the second is fundamental acceleration. The pandemic, as we talked about, has accelerated the need to move to cloud very quickly and Minab is there to do that. So how do we do that? First is generating the business cases. Clients need to know in many cases that they have a business case. And by business case, we talk about the financial benefits as well as the business outcomes, the green cloud impact sustainability impact. With Minab, we can build initial recommendations using a basic understanding of their environment and benchmarks in weeks versus month with indicative value savings in the millions of dollars arranges. So for example, very recently we worked with a global oil and gas company and in only two weeks, we're able to provide an indicative savings for $27 million over five years. This enabled the client to get started knowing that there is a business case benefit and then iterate on it. And this iteration is I would say the second point that is particularly important with Minab that we've seen impact the clients which is any journey starts with an understanding of what is the application landscape and what are we trying to do with those? These initial assessments that used to take six to eight weeks are now taking anywhere from two to four weeks. So we're seeing a 40 to 50% reduction in the initial assessment which gets clients started in their journey. And then finally, we've had discussions with all of the hyperscalers to help partner with Accenture and leverage Minab to prepare their detailed business case module as they're going to clients and as they're accelerating the clients journey. So real results, real acceleration and is there a journey to have a business case and furthermore accelerating the journey once we are by giving the ability to work an iterative approach. I mean, it sounds as though that the company that clients and employees are sort of saying this is an amazing time savings. Look at what I can do here in so much in a condensed amount of time. But in terms of getting everyone on board one of the things we talked about last time we met Tristan was just how much how one of the obstacles is getting people to sign on and the new technologies and new platforms those are often the obstacles and struggles that companies face. Have you found that at all? Or what is sort of the feedback that you're getting from employee? Sorry Rebecca. Yes, clearly there are always obstacles to a cloud journey. If there weren't obstacles all our clients would be already fully in the cloud. What mankind gives the ability is to navigate through those to start quickly. And then as we identify obstacles we can simulate what things are going to look like. We can continue with certain parts of the journey while we deal with that obstacle. And it's a fundamental accelerator whereas in the past one obstacle would prevent a client from starting. We can now start address the obstacles one at a time while continuing and accelerating the cloud journey. That is the fundamental difference. Kishore, I want to give you the final word here. Tell us a little bit about what is next for Accenture Minav and what we'll be discussing next year at the Accenture Executive Summit. So Rebecca, we are continuously evolving with our client needs and reinventing for the future. For Minav's Green Cloud Advisor our plan is to help our clients reduce carbon footprint and again migrate to a greener cloud. And additionally, we're looking at two capabilities which includes sovereign cloud advisor with clients especially in Europe and others are under pressure to meet stringent data norms that Tristan was talking about and the sovereign cloud advisor helps organization to create an architecture cloud architecture that complies with the green I would say the data sovereignty norms that is out there. The other element is around data to cloud we are seeing massive migration for a lot of the data to cloud and there's a lot of migration hurdles that come within that. We have expanded Minav to support assessment capabilities for assessing applications, infrastructure but also covering the entire estate including data and the code level to determine the right cloud solution. So we are pushing the boundaries on what Minav can do with Minav you've created the ability to take the guesswork out of cloud navigate the complexity we are lowering risk costs and we are achieving client strategy business objectives while building a sustainable earth with green cloud. Any platform that can take some of the guesswork out of the future I'm on board with. Thank you so much Tristan and Kishore this has been a great conversation. Thank you Rebecca. Thank you Rebecca. Stay tuned for more of the cubes coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit. I'm Rebecca Knight.