 Welcome back to Washington, D.C., everybody. This is theCUBE. We're here at Oracle Cloud World. Oracle does a series of events really pushing the cloud messaging. We heard today that Oracle Cloud Machine, big announcement. We did an analysis on wikibon.com. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news, all the analysis. Pat Sullivan is here. He's the managing director of the Oracle Tech Partnership for Accenture. And he's joined by Sherry Gartner, who's the vice president of the Global Accenture Partnership. Folks, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you very much. So, Sherry, I'm going to start with you. Good vibe here. You guys have done a couple of these now. I did a quick drive-by in New York. A lot of people, a lot of action around cloud. What's it like here? What's the action? Oh, it's definitely a lot of excitement, a lot of momentum, a lot of clients and teams accelerating their movements to cloud. So, good energy, good vibe. Happy, right. So Pat, talk a little bit about Accenture and what you guys are up to these days. You've always been at the heart of creating value for customers. I like to say that firms like yours are in the business of helping people make money. Because the guys, your customers, they focus on the big problems and they turn that into opportunity. So what's hot these days? Everybody's talking about digital transformation, cloud. What's on the minds of CEOs and CXOs today? Sure. Yeah, we're seeing a lot happen right now across our client base, specifically around cloud. And we've been making some significant investments for Oracle in that area. But I think the key thing is we've been working with clients around Oracle Cloud now for years. We've got about hundreds of implementations across 30 different countries. And that's pretty big. That's what's on people's minds right now and that transformation. But it's really that pivot of how to get to digital. And cloud's a big part of that. So I want to talk about the digital piece, but start with the problem. When you walk into a customer environment, what are they telling you that they're struggling with? Yeah, so I think a big piece of what's going on today is how do we get to cloud? And we're talking some of the largest enterprises out in the globe. And so that's one big aspect of it. But the other part of it is once you get there, there's a big integration problem. So I've got all of this stuff across my enterprise. How do I put that together, stitch it together, and make it work? It's not as easy as just deploy a cloud, put your data there, and it all works. So that's one area that we're focused in on. OK, and of course, we're going to talk about digital support, but I want to talk briefly, Sherry, about the partnership. You have Accenture in your title. You have Oracle in your title. You guys are pretty serious. Accenture, obviously, you can count on one hand the number of companies that have the depth of industry expertise as does Accenture. Talk a little bit about the partnership, how it's evolved over the years, and really what the focus is today. OK, it's a very good question, and I'm happy to answer that. So we've enjoyed our partnership for over 23 years, and we continue to make joint investments together. And one of them, which is very near to a lot of our clients today, is obviously the Acceleration to Cloud. So we joined and formed a dedicated business group that we launched almost a year ago, and it's the Accenture Oracle Business Group, which is a clear representation of how our partnership has grown and what we're actually taking to the market for our clients. OK, so you guys will make joint investments in that initiative. Absolutely. Talk about, Sherry, start with you. What does Oracle bring to the table, and then Pat, what does Accenture bring to the table, money, resources, talent? Talk about how that all comes together and what you deliver to customers. Right. So I think I would start with, from an Oracle perspective, obviously, everything within our software as a service, our platform as a service, infrastructure as a service is key to what actually is core to our mission and our strategy right now. So when we look at what we bring together with both organizations from an industry perspective and what our clients are looking for, it's held within the umbrella of the Accenture Oracle Business Group. OK, and from Accenture's perspective, when you approach these joint initiatives, not joint venture, but joint initiatives, what do you bring to the table? What are your main areas of emphasis? Sure. So Sherry talked about the formation of this Accenture Oracle Business Group roughly a year ago right now. It was really focused on solving those problems that our clients are having. And so there's a big gap once you get to cloud, specifically across industries. So there's a lot of things that Accenture's done over the past 20 years, a lot on Oracle technologies, where we've had to kind of supersede and fill the gaps from an industry perspective, whether that be business processes or different elements around that. So we've taken that expertise and we've transformed that onto Oracle's cloud. So those are things that we're bringing to help solve those problems and close that gap in terms of the effort that is really needed to get to that digital space in a company that is 20, 30, 40, 50 or more years old. So let's talk about digital. Particularly from an industry perspective, digital is really interesting because it seems to be breaking down the traditional vertical stacks within an industry. Manufacturing, R&D, sales, distribution, partnerships, the ecosystem used to be pretty cemented. People would stay in a single industry forever. Now you're seeing Apple go into financial services. Amazon is becoming a content company. Uber, it's just unbelievable what's happening. So start there in terms of what do you see happening across industries? Are your clients under defensive? Are they trying to be on the offense, not get Uberized? Talk about that a little bit, Pat. Yeah, it's a really good question. So from that perspective, as our clients are embarking digital, the key thing that we're helping our clients with is to become competitive, to be the leader in their industry, to take that disruption and use it to their advantage and almost use digital as a weapon across the industry. And that's where our partnership with Oracle, on cloud specifically, that's that area where we're able to take it to the digital space. So the interesting thing about that partnership, Pat, Accenture brings the deep industry expertise. Sherry, obviously Oracle writes software. So essentially, are you able to codify that industry expertise into your applications and actually deliver specific value by various industries, packaged value? So that's actually the core fundamental reason why we formed the Accenture Oracle Business Group, was solely for that to leverage the Accenture's strong industry depth and expertise, their delivery capabilities coupled with our technology, is absolutely core and critical to our mission, that our clients actually see value with. Because each of them are looking at a different way within their organization. They want that choice. And from a cloud perspective in the industry differentiation, it's critical. So Pat, what's the role of cloud and digital? Is it plumbing? Is it an accelerant? Where does cloud fit in that digital conversation? I think cloud is one of the transformative pieces that's striving a lot of this digital disruption that's happening. But it's one thing to say that, Dave. There's a lot of things that we've been doing as part of this Accenture Oracle Business Group. So you mentioned the word plumbing. One key thing, we look at more of from an integration perspective. And we've been looking at the digital glue, if you will, because our clients have applications, some custom applications that might be 20 or 30 years old. But we still have to make those work in this digital area. So we've taken a couple of our assets that we've built specifically on Oracle Technologies over the past few years, and we've applied that in this cloud space to really be able to glue what has been out there, or this cloud to cloud, cloud to customer, cloud to on-premise type concepts. And that's been a big piece to help our clients get to a true digital transformation. So one of the announcements we saw today from Oracle was the Oracle Cloud Machine. We saw this, I saw the limpses of it at Oracle Open World last fall under a different name. Now it's renamed the Oracle Cloud Machine, the ability to bring cloud-like services on-prem. So what kind of momentum are you seeing for cloud in the market generally, and specifically, would you expect to see with that type of capability from your customers? Well, we've talked a lot about cloud here in the last five minutes, right? And I think there's still those inhibitors on moving to cloud. And what Oracle's brought to the table with the Oracle Cloud Machine, it's targeting those inhibitors that our clients are having, so data sovereignty, where all these restrictions, but even with all those, whether a government may put those restrictions out there, a lot of our clients just have policies in place around security for their enterprises that prevent them from really, truly embracing cloud. So what Oracle's brought out with this is the smart move. And I think our clients are going to like how this can work from more of a non-premise perspective and give that sense of security that they're looking for. Yeah, we saw IDC speakers this morning talk about 56% of the survey base that they surveyed were embracing. They use that term, embracing cloud. So it feels like we're at that tipping point. Sherry, from a cultural perspective, Oracle, we always joke about the Larry Ellison Churchill Club, right? Oh, Oracle doesn't like cloud. It was the interpretation. Of course, that wasn't the case. Has there been a cultural shift inside of Oracle with respect to cloud? Most definitely. Talk about that a little bit. It's absolutely core to our whole mission and our strategy. So everything is about cloud. But to the points that Pat was making around the Oracle Cloud Machine and what we actually announced here today, it gives our clients the option, the choice, to have a cloud-enabled solution that they're able to realize the benefits from. So absolutely critical. So Pat, cloud resonates with customers, but it's a means to a digital end. Is it not? Can we talk about that a little bit? It is, but I don't think there's an end anywhere in place at this point. Yeah, you've never done it. So, you know, I'll give an example. I use a lot with our clients and internally across Accenture as well as, just think about your own personal situation. I can tell you in the Sullivan House, we're doubling, tripling the amount of data that we have in our household, whether it be pictures or videos. But now if you take that same example and apply that towards a corporation in a large enterprise, our clients are doubling, tripling the amounts of data that they bring in. But more importantly, they're liable for 70 to 80% of that data. So from a cloud perspective, the question you have to ask is where is that data? How important is it? And so back to the Oracle Cloud Machine, I think this is going to be something very interesting from that security space around elements like that. All right, we got a wrap. But Sherry, I'll give you the last word. What should we be watching in terms of the partnership over the next 12 to 18 months as observers? What are the key milestones that we should be paying attention to? Oh, I think from an Accenture Oracle business group, we'll take to market a very compelling and powerful proposition with industry, co-develop industry solutions with pre-built accelerators to help our clients more rapidly realize the benefits of cloud. All right, Oracle, dominating the cloud. You know, we used to hear ERP will never go to the cloud, financial services companies will never go to the cloud. That's changing. Oracle's at the heart of that. Folks, thanks very much for coming to the CUBE. Thanks Sherry, good to see you. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE. We're live in DC. Right back. Thank you.