 From the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, on the ground, with Accenture Labs 30th anniversary celebration. Hello, welcome back to our special on the ground coverage of Accenture Labs 30 year celebration. Here's to the next 30 years is their slogan. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, and I'm here with Mark Perle-Billard, who's the senior manager to Runz R&D Global for Accenture Labs. Welcome to theCUBE conversation. Thanks for joining me. So I got to ask you, Accenture 30 years, they weren't called Accenture back then, it was called Arthur Anderson, or Anderson Consultant became Accenture, now you got Accenture Labs, but you have had labs all throughout. You're right, I mean, it's pretty amazing. And I think this is absolutely right. I mean, so we had this organization for 30 years, believe it or not, and that organization is doing applied research. So what we do is that we leverage new technology innovations and racing to really solve business challenges or societal impact or societal changes and everything. So the state of the art back then, if I remember correctly, my history was converting an SNA gateway to a tech net, to a TCP IP network. Yeah, we just improved a little bit. A little bit now. We went to quantum computing, to blockchain, to different type of things like that. What a magical time it is right now. It is magic. Please share some color on today's culture, the convergence of all this awesomeness happening, open source, booming, cloud, unlimited compute, you have now more developers than ever, enterprises looking more and more like consumers. So a lot of action. What's the excitement? Share us the cutting edge labs activity. I think you said something absolutely right. I mean, I think there's a combinatorial effect of those different technology working very well together. And there's a compression on time. All those technology waves, they're maturing very fast. So one thing that we've been doing is a great example for that is quantum computing. You heard about quantum computing. Of course. That's the new paradigm of computing power, leveraging like quantum mechanics. I mean, it's really amazing stuff. And believe it or not, we've been working with D-Wave. They have a quantum computer in Vancouver and a company is called WineCubit. It's a software company. And then we've built on top of that an algorithm that does molecule comparison. And we worked with Biogen, a pharmaceutical company, to work on this. Now, the really staggering thing about it is that we talked about it like six months ago. We built the pilot in two months time, done. And then now, I mean, it's already made. Well, this is amazing. This is what highlights to me what's exciting. What you just described is a timeframe that's really short. That's right. Back in the old days, it was these projects were months and months and potentially years. Absolutely. What is the catalyst for that? Is it the technology leverage? Is it the people? Is it the process, all three? What's the take? I think it's all three. I would say that definitely the technology, as I said, I mean, get combined faster. You said very right. I mean, there's a lot of capability in terms of high performance computing. We can get like through the cloud, the storage as well. The data that we're going to be accessing. And then, I think the beauty is that putting all the people together, you know, for the quantum work, we had mathematicians, we have people from Biogen, we have our own labs, and all people together, they make the magic happen. 30 years ago, just a little history, I'm old enough to actually talk about 30 years ago, the big six accounting firms, accounting firms, ran all the big software projects. How ironic is that that today, Blockchain disrupts the even need for an accounting firm because with smart contracts, Blockchain is turning out to be a very, very disruptive operation in technology because you don't need an accounting firm to clear out contracts. Blockchain is very disruptive. What are you guys doing in Blockchain? You're absolutely right, John. And you know the first thing, so we have seven labs in our central labs, and we have one lab dedicated on Blockchain, and it's Sofia Antipolis, inside our friends. Where I'm from, by the way. And we're doing a lot of things with Blockchain. You know, a lot of people are thinking about Blockchain as a system that's going to regulate, basically, transfer, transaction, financial transaction. We want to take Blockchain to the next level. And one thing we're doing, for example, we're using Blockchain for NGOs. How are we going to track, basically, donation you're going to do? We're going to use Blockchain for- Well, that's because people want to know their money's going- That's right! Actually going to good. That's right. Not the scams that have been out there. You got it. We're going to use Blockchain as a DRM system, digital right management system. We're going to use that in manufacturing industry, in media industry, and it goes on and on and on. What is the big buzz right now with cryptocurrency? You've seen a lot of these ICOs out there. Are those legit? In your mind, is this just a bubble? Is it just a normalization's going to come? What's your take on initial coin offerings? I think to be honest with you, I mean, I think this is a progress we're seeing. I mean, we discuss about Blockchain and everything. We see some, I mean, we see some trends going there. I mean, I think it's accelerating as well, because I mean, there's going to be a lot of take-up and everything. We see also the world changing. And I think we need to look at the geopolitical context of the world and what's going to happen. So I think this kind of new regulation, the way it's going to work, I mean, it's coming on time. People's going to leverage it. So I think it's not some fad stuff. This is something that's going to stay. It's just a wild west. But it was exactly. Right now, I mean, we need to work on the right standard. We need to figure out how it's going to work and everything. What is the exciting things that you see out there right now? I mean, Blockchain just kind of gets us excited because you can imagine different new things happening. But the clients that I talked to, customers of your clients or CIOs, they have to reimagine the future. That's right. With pre-existing conditions. Right. Called legacy infrastructure. Exactly. Legacy software. How do they get the best of the magic and manage the pre-existing conditions? So there's a lot of innovation in terms of software development, new technology and everything that we have, but to connect to your legacy and leverage it as much as you can. You know, there's a big progress in artificial intelligence today. I mean, I've lived a lot of winters of artificial intelligence. Now, I think finally, maybe there's going to be some spring while because of what we talk about, the high-performance computing, the data available, and then also some new type of algorithm like deep learning and everything. That data that is somewhere into this company, we call that the dark data, people are going to be able to leverage it and then make this artificial intelligence system even more intelligent smaller and everything. So legacy is here, but we're going to leverage it and we're going to give a second life to this legacy environment, to this technology like artificial intelligence, new analytics and all those different things. So I got to ask you a kind of a politically hot question, which is the digital transformation. Yes. So there's no doubt we're in a digital transformation. Yep. No brainer. Yet, I go to conferences over and over again and I see Gartner Magic Quadrant. I'm number one in the Magic Quadrant and everybody's number one in the Magic Quadrant. So the question is, what's the scoreboard of the new environment? Because if you use the old scoreboard and the world's horizontally scalable, you're going to have a blending of Magic Quadrants. So there's going to be a disruption and that's causing confusion to the CIOs and CXOs because you got chief data officer, chief security officer, you got no perimeter for security, you have quantum computing, you have cloud. So people are trying to squint through all the nonsense and saying, how do you measure success? Yeah. And I think this is the typical question. I mean, this whole digital transformation, I understand that this is important and we need to understand, I mean, Accenture and especially the lab, it's all about result. And you know what? The mission of the lab is new, it's applied, is now. New technology applied for real challenges and I want to deliver it now. I don't want to work for six months. So my word is that our research is outcome driven. And that's exactly what we're seeing. So I told you about the quantum computing and I have another example where we are really laser focused on making an outcome. I think that's where- So to your point, people shouldn't buy promises. No. They should provide, they should buy results. That's right, that's right. So Peter Beres, who runs our research, said to me and I asked him the question, he goes, ah, that's just a bunch of BS. The ultimate metric is how many customers you have. That's right. So someone should be touting their customers. Sorry? They should be touting their customers. That's right. Not some survey. No, absolutely absolutely. And I'm really for that. I mean, just like, I want to tell you also something that I'm a very pragmatic person. I'm coming from the field where I was serving 400 clients doing everyday project delivery, you know? And I've been always doing innovation at the same time. But my view was that innovation needs to be scalable. It needs to be tangible. It needs to be outcome driven. So again, this is really the matter of the lab. And if you look at how the lab works with the rest of the organization of Accenture, this is exactly what we're doing. We connect with our studio where we can do prototyping in front of the eyes of our client. We connect with open innovation, where we connect with the best startups in the world. And I think, you know, you remember what I told you, combinatorial effect. There's a combinatorial effect with technology, but there's a combinatorial effect with people. If you put the people from startup, the best guys from the lab, the best guys from the studio is noticing that's where is the magic happening. So this is a new configuration. Yeah, we call that the innovation architecture. So this is a scalable model for being agile. And the results are what? Faster performance? Faster performance, innovative performance. And tangible outcome. Okay, Mark, you're an excitable guy. I like talking with you. What are you most excited about right now in this world that you're living in? So I told you about the technology and there's one thing that the lab is doing and we've been launching that this year and we continue expanding. It's what we call tech for good. Tech for good is how we're going to apply technology, I mean, to change society. What we're going to do for fighting hunger in India. What we're going to give, how we're going to give basically situational awareness to blind people using augmented reality and machine learning. That gives me a wake at night because this is technology for best usage. It helps our people to sleep well at night. My kids are proud of me and I think we can. Change the world. That's right. We can attract great people. All right, final question here at the celebration at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. What's the big scene here? Share with the folks who are watching who aren't here. What's happening? I think first of all, I mean the venue is amazing. I mean, Computer History Museum is probably one of my favorite museums here in Silicon Valley. I mean, you need to understand that 15 years old I started to work on IBM 360 of my uncle. So the machine over there, I know it. I worked on it. And when I see basically the progress where we are today, when we see the Cray, when we see the Quantum and everything, I feel so lucky that we're celebrating 30 years. Now I'd like to go to the next 30 years of the lab. That's what I want to do. Let's get that on our next interview, Mark. Thanks for sharing. We're next, here's to the next 30 years. This is the cube coverage of Central Labs. 30 years celebration. Computer History Museum, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.