 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re-invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Marim Beserovic. He is the Managing Director Global Cloud and Infrastructure at Accenture. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Again, we met last year, so you're a CUBE alum. Yes, I am. So, we're talking today about moving a $43 billion company to the cloud, Accenture. This is Accenture as its own use case here. Crazy, right? It is, right. But Accenture has been engaged in a major move to the public cloud. Moving a company of the size and heft of Accenture must have been intimidating. How did you even sort of wrap your brain around the challenges? Walk us through this. Yeah, so you know, the tough part about working at Accenture is you have 480,000 people that work for Accenture, or at least half a million, let's say, and those half a million people all think they can do the job better and differently than you do, right? So, the first challenge is our own organization, but I would tell you, I say that just in a joking way, they're very supportive. It was, we're telling our clients the cloud is the future, so when we told our organization we're going to the cloud, it was massive support. It was, what's taking so long? Let's do this. And now, granted, this was a little over four years ago when we started the journey, so the cloud providers in the world was very different. So today, we run tens of thousands of workloads on Amazon, we run all kinds of the capabilities. We do cloud-native, we do platform services. We consume so much cloud service that, in my opinion, we're never going back to a data center, never. So what, Accenture is really well known as a big advocate of the public cloud. First of all, why the public cloud? Well, the public cloud is the future. I really think, when you think about how, especially somebody like Amazon, if you listen to Andy Jassy this morning, right, it's, they are innovating at a scale and a pace that's just truly exceptional, and it gives us opportunity to take those things and implement them to change the way we run our business so that we can implement a lot of these capabilities to help enable our business, and then through that, by enabling our business to be a credential for not only ourselves, but to our clients to say, hey, we do this to ourselves, and we can help you do it as well. We're walking the walk. We're totally walking the walk, and we push very hard on that angle because for us, it's very important, and for me, personally, to say, I started my career in client service, so I know serving our clients is one of the key things for us in our business, so I want to be able to solve these things. These are hard things to solve, we can solve them faster for our clients ourselves. It makes it easier for them on their journey. And you also understand the pain points and the challenges. As you said, your employees, your workforce was very supportive of it, but that's not always the case. No, it's not, it's not, but I'll tell you, our own teams in the early days, they struggled with this, to be honest, right? It was a change because we were heavily, heavily virtualized. We were great at running our infrastructure. We were doing all those things, because those were the things you did back then. So then when we said to the teams, hey, we're going to the cloud, they said, well, we're not so sure, do we really think we're going to save money? And in the early days, we said, we're doing this because this is the right thing to do, but in the end, we actually did save a lot of money going to the cloud because we learned to work differently, and I think that's one of the key messages I would convey back, is you are not going to work in the cloud the same way you work in a data center. You are going to shut things off when you don't use them, you're going to have an opportunity to optimize them, you will have an opportunity to spin new capabilities up sooner, use them for what you need and faster. And then things you can't do in a data center, you can't spin up, you can't use Dynamo, you can't use Lambda, you can't use these microservices in the data center, but in the cloud, you can. So now you leave yourself in a situation where you have so much capability that you can turn on to enable an enterprise, it's just mind boggling, and exciting, and exciting. So the timetable to make this transformation was ambitious, to say the least. How aggressive did you need to be? This is a journey you said you started a little over four years ago? Yeah, the entire program for us took us about three years. But the real aggressive part of the journey was, we said, we're dabbling a little bit in it, so let's just say our starting point was around 9%. One of the big things we said is how do we get to 50% in one year? And it was like, okay, how do we do that? So we put a program in place and we got the team organized. And we did, kind of like what Andy Jassy was talking about today at the keynote, we set some top-down goals. We said to the teams, we're going to do this. This is the future, we're not kidding, we're going to do it, we have full support, and we work with the business and we explained what it was going to be. And you know what, one of the first things we took to the public cloud, like three months into this program, was Accenture.com. I mean, we literally, three months into the program took our market-facing capability of what our clients look at and people look at to think about us and move them to the public cloud. Well, what you've described is a very disciplined approach and also one that was led from the top brass. So talk a little bit about how the transformation started. Yeah, so the transformation was really, I will tell you, in the early days, it was a function of we're going to start to take these workloads and move them to the cloud. How do you do that? We made a decision to say, let's take this, let's take it a data center approach perspective. We're going to shut down an actual data center one at a time, and that's how we do migrations. Now a lot of clients think about it from a different perspective, but from our point of view, it made the most sense to shut down the data center and get out of that location because then you're not maintaining all these things twice. The fastest you can do it, the better way to do it is to do that. So that's kind of how we approached it. We said all the workloads in the data center go. Now, we took on our North American workloads first because we didn't make it easy for ourselves, right? Because that's where all of our production workloads were, it wasn't just the test environments, it wasn't just the development environments. It was the real deal, everything it takes to run and support Accenture. And we said, we're going to move those first. And so from a transformation perspective, that was our key. And then the other one is, we had this notion of cloud first and cloud only. So any new capability also, we said, here on out, the minute we started the program, we said, no more data center. We are, anything you need now is going to be provisioned in the cloud. And what about digitally native applications? Yeah, so when you think about like a cloud native capability, so now you start to get into, now that you're into cloud, you go, oh man, what else can I do? And then so our previous CEO announced to the world, Accenture was no longer going to do performance reviews. And we're like, okay, this is great. What are we going to do about this? And we needed to implement it in three or four months. So when our HR business team came to work with us, one of the things we said is, hey, this is the time. Because at that point, we were about six or seven months into the program of cloud. We said, well, you can't spin up a VM. You're going to go into the cloud. So we built the capability to does performance achievement for 400, for 500,000 people globally that runs with Lambda and Dynamo. And it's been there for a little over now four years, believe it or not. Amazing. So talk about other challenges that you face because I mean, the way you're describing it, it sounds as though people were supportive and you had a lot of wins along the way. But of course there were, I'm sure there were some dark days too. We had some growing pains. I think when you think about it, a lot of times because a lot of workloads we did pick up, we did a lot of lift and shift. And I hate that term because what we learned as we went is we could actually lift, configure and run for less. So I don't know if there's an industry term for it. I haven't coined one yet. If somebody hears one that they wanted to share with us, I'd love to hear it. But lift and shift itself is a bad, it's a misnomer because that's not how you do this. You have to touch a little bit of something. But what happened is in the early days, we weren't quite sure how to size these environments. So when we would pick them up and we would say, well, let's kind of give it some more capability. Let's throw some more CPU at it. But what we learned very quickly was, hey, that costs a lot of money and we started applying some tools that would help us see what the utilization needed to be. And then we learned very quickly that, oh, you know what? This environment that used to exist in the data center, well, that's kind of on a couple of generations ago, CPU, couple of generations ago, memory, couple of generations ago, storage, because all the stuff in the cloud is all newer, all newer CPU, all newer memory. So then very quickly, it's not even a like for like, it's a like for less. So we figured out very quickly that we can actually take a workload, let's say they had eight CPUs and we can run it in a cloud with two. And so, but it was growing pains through that process that we learned to say, how do we do it? And then frankly, I think a lot of times we talk about this with our clients, who is how do you get the team along the way? Because it's, when we set the edict, the team realized they had to go do this stuff. But we thought we'd have a little bit of resistance. What we found instead was a team very eager to learn and very eager to be part of this program and part of this capability, because they see it. They saw that it was this new stuff that we were doing. So a little bit of the early growing pains around, who's going to work on what? How do we focus our training? How do we get these teams to help us really drive some of this capability? And as we started to enable them more, that helped us get momentum. And I think the other one is just, when you start to get all these workloads in, how do you actually manage this stuff? How do you manage this capability? And for us, we spent a lot of time with our Accenture Cloud Platform friends, because we needed a capability that said, how do I actually manage all this billing? How do I discover all the capabilities that are out there? How do I track my compliance? How do I make sure all these things are aligned to my security construct that InfoSec is asking us to drive? So we needed to do all those things and we didn't have it perfect in the beginning and we learned along the way. So talk about some of the other benefits. I mean, you've described cutting some costs, and you've also described this new mindset that so many of your employees have adopted, a real learning mindset, growth mindset, one of embracing innovation. What are some other of the benefits that you've seen? You know, the benefits that are, to me today, is just this art of the possible is just mind-bogglingly so much more open to whatever you want to do. It's almost scary how much is out there. You actually have to kind of pull back a little bit and say, how do I apply some guardrails around this? And I think, when I think about the other benefits are, we have more capability now than ever to spend workloads up. Like, I'll give you an example. Like on Amazon, spot instances are one of the things that they offer. We spin up 700,000 spot instances a year to do work along the way. And it's unfathomable to even think about doing some of those things in the data center. So the flexibility that you get, if you want to test a release, sometimes some of these big systems, you might have to bring in hardware to test that in the data center. But in the cloud, I don't have to buy hardware. I can just spin up more, you know, skews. So it's just the benefits of flexibility, the agility, the speed, they're not waiting. And also I think the other one that I think sometimes gets overlooked is, excuse me, sometimes it gets overlooked is, I don't have a capacity management team that's worried about the capacity in the data center. I don't have a team managing the vendor providing the data center services, right? It's all these things you start to turn off that you don't need in the cloud anymore because they're managing those things. So even if you're, I think some clients get lost in waiting too long to do this, but there's all these other costs around there that you're spending money on anyway, you may not realize as you think about this business case. So I think the benefits are just tremendously there, but you really have to look at it holistically. So this morning on the main stage, we heard Andy Jassy describe a dizzying number of new products and services that AWS is coming out with. How are you thinking about those and integrating them into what you're doing at Accenture with this initiative? And what's the energy that you're taking away from? I mean, he's certainly a very dynamic leader. Well, the energy is great at this event every single year. The amount of innovation that comes out is fantastic. I think one of the great things that came out today is this concept of we're going to take the hypervisor, we're actually going to move it into a chip set to help you give you more processing power on the computer. I think on the server is huge. That's a huge capability that lets us think about how do we manage things differently? I think some of this capabilities around enterprise search. Enterprise search is very hard, very difficult, right? This ML capability that's very appealing. What am I going to do with that? How do I help my organization think about search differently? That's very appealing. And I think the other one that's, there were a lot of other ones around the ML and the data lake stuff and everything else, but I think some of these things that get overlooked sometimes, the peer review with ML was awesome, right? It's like, how do I help them? How does the machine help me do a code peer review with my people? So those are just real quick things that come to mind, but it's just great to see all this innovation and it comes available so quickly, right? So you have an opportunity to get into these things very fast. So as you look back on this journey, this transformation, what are you most proud of and what are you most excited about in the future? I'm most proud of the bold bets, not only that we all individually took, but the teams. I'm so proud of our team in taking the journey on to trusting us, to working and pushing and learning themselves to really take this on. And it's just this magical, it's like, it's a compounding thing that it just infested everybody else, right? So everybody's been excited about the cloud and how do we do it? How do we do this stuff? And then from a future perspective, I'm really interested more in, as the capabilities evolve and they get announced, I think the benefit we have is as we're there, it's easy for us to see some of these things. I think the container landscape is going to be huge, all the Kubernetes stack and everything else that's out there, we need to think about, how does that help me continue to evolve the services I provide, either more cost-effectively or more efficiently back to the business and turn on more capability faster and try stuff faster and turn it off faster. And that's the great part of the cloud, right? You get to try stuff, you get to play with it. And if you don't like it, you turn it off. You don't have to wait three years for this equipment to depreciate. You move on with life. And that to me is exciting because there's just so much innovation that's coming. There's so much opportunity for us to really just jump out there and have fun. Excellent. Well, Mayor Ambassador Rovick, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's a pleasure talking to you. You too. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up tomorrow. We'll see you here bright and early.