 Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE conversation from our studios in Palo Alto, California. Today, we're joined by Michael LeBeau, who's the Global Managing Director of Accenture Cloud and brings a great perspective on what is happening as customers try to move to the cloud, in part because you help direct Accenture's move to the cloud. Welcome to theCUBE, Michael. Thank you, great to be here, Peter. So Michael, tell us a little bit about yourself and what Accenture's Global Cloud Business Unit does. So, we've been at this for a long time now. I've personally been with Accenture for five years and we've been driving this transformation, not just in our industry, but for Accenture, as we pivot to cloud-enabled technologies and essentially creating, rotating to the new. And that is our focus. So how do you do that? Cloud is an enabler, it's a vehicle, it helps to create agility. We researched a whole bunch of enterprise customers not too long ago and found that every organization, like 90 odd percent, had a cloud strategy, but very few had a cloud strategy that was aligned to a business outcome. And so what I would posture is that where you have cloud aligned with business, you have cloud. Otherwise, you just have a paper exercise. Or just a new set of technologies as fail as easily as anything else that you might have. Well, like in a lab somewhere as a science experiment and not real business impact, where you're saving money or you're innovating or you're creating kind of the next, you're disrupting your industry. So where people are actually using cloud to change their business, that's where it gets exciting. And there are lots of industries across the globe where that's happening. Companies are adopting cloud. We're adopting cloud. We're now just declared 90% in the public cloud. And that's been a three, four year journey. And we figured, how do you sell this stuff if you don't use this stuff? Now I think it's a great point, Michael. So I want to use a metaphor to try to tease some of that out. So a legal scholar would say that there is constitutional law and statutory law. Statutory law guides day to day activities. So it's not unlike how you provision this or how you optimize that. And then there's constitutional law, which is basically the laws for how you change the laws. What we're talking about is two shifts going on at once within a lot of companies, and that's driving a significant amount of complexity and uncertainty. They are changing the statutory law as they think about moving to the cloud, but they're also changing the constitutional law or they're applying constitutional law. The rules of how they think about workloads, how they think about their business is changing. So let's start with some of the constitutional principles, if you will, of moving to the cloud. What did Accenture learn about the rules for changing the rules as you went to the cloud? And how are you using the historical discipline that Accenture brings to those kinds of questions and applying it to helping customers? So one of the things you learned very quickly is that your old policies, your rules, whatever regulations, laws were drafted for a bygone error, for legacy. And in the cloud, things are different. And so if you take those policies and kind of how you think about how you do things and you apply it to the cloud, then you're treating the cloud as just another data center. So right there, five years of learning, that's a huge mistake. So number one is don't treat the cloud as another data center. It's kind of that high level metal. Right, right. Because if you look at your policies and your security models, an organization would take the cloud and they would put it, the access to the cloud in a bunker in the basement, with no windows and no doors. And so you wouldn't have cloud. Cloud is democracy. It's about allowing all. So constitutionally, all people have access to the cloud and all the innovation is in the cloud. All the investment in the industry is in the cloud. We're looking at an unprecedented buildout of cloud capacity across the globe. They're opening new regions, new availability zones, all the time in new places. These are the big cloud providers. Yes, because I mean they're spending an aggregate $30 billion a year. No organization can match that. And that's just the top three. That's just Google. That's just the hyper three. Yeah, and we don't, you know, that doesn't include all the Babas doing and some of the other players elsewhere in the world. But they're not spending at the rate that the hyper three are. Got it. All right, so there's, you know, hyper three are spending about 10 billion a year each, you know, a little bit more, a little bit less. Anybody else? They're down around the single digit. One, two, maybe three. Got it. Alibaba's about, I think about three or four. All right, but everybody else is in that ones or twos. So rule number one is don't treat it as a data center. Rule number two is recognize that one of the beauties of the cloud model is that it gives you access to everybody. Yes. You guys have to determine how you want to provide that access as opposed to just the resources in your, inside your network or inside your organization. Well, so early days about the whole notion of service orientation was to publish services that can be consumed. So, you know, you want to abstract these services and you want to make them available broadly. All right. And so people talk about platforms. What's a platform? A platform is nothing without community. And so, so you're now able to do things that we've been talking about for decades. And that is, is huge. That's where all the innovation occurs. So now you're providing a level of access, level of capability, broadly speaking, it's, it's like the next revolution from the early days of the internet. And it's changing enterprise and it's changing it dramatically. And so it's not just the change, it's disruption. So now, you know, IT needs to think differently. It's probably the biggest, you know, shift, the paradigm shift that we've seen ever. And so, you know, the existing, your existing vendor stable and those relationships that you've built up over the year may not be helpful to you right now in terms of how much things are changing and how fast things are changing. And so, you know, do you have a cloud strategy? Is it aligned with business outcomes? And it's not just cost saving. It's about agility. It's about speed. It's about, you know, kind of creating an innovative culture. Do you have the right talent? These are all things that come into play in terms of your law analogy, right? That change the game. So now I need new laws. I need, you know, new ways to think about, you know, my new enterprise and how I'm going to operate. So one of the things, not only if you think about cloud as an underpinning, so we're now 90% in the cloud, but if you look at our financials, you know, we've rotated to the new. So digital cloud security are now well over 50% of our revenues. So we're taking, you know, kind of our legacy business or our core business, it's shrinking and you know, we've rotated. And now we're starting to think about the new new, which are things like machine learning and applied intelligence and whatnot, you know, blockchain, you know, new capabilities that you could do because now you have a cloud underpinning that helps you get there. I think it's a really important point because I've always argued, we've always argued at Wikibon that the cloud really in many respects is that network application development world that we've talked about. So it's, you know, so all these other things still presume that you had a whole bunch of individual pieces and it was about bringing them together. Cloud really provides a whole notion of network or, you know, internet scale computing and how you developed that really is what you're getting when you move to the cloud, right? Is that accurate? No, I mean, it's absolutely because, you know, the notion then became about orchestration, all right? Standardization, self or shared services, automation. You know, these, when I think about what cloud is, those are the words that definitely, you know, the underpinning for Y cloud, you get all of that. And so now I have shared services that I can publish out, you know, people can consume, I can orchestrate these services, I can, you know, create a standard. You know, even for GSIs, global, you know, system integrators, that's a big change because I used to, you know, just bespoke stuff on your premise. Now I can assemble stuff, all right, and make it available to you and I can change your business model overnight. All right, and so that's the kind of things that we're seeing. And so we're bringing our best people, you know, landing them at a client and saying, how do we transform? Cloud, you know, it's not just about cloud, it's not about selecting a provider. It's about a transformation of operating model. You know, it's about change. How do I educate, you know, re-skill your people, retrain them, refocus them? And it's about really just the technology platform for the future. And if you, well, I want to build on something you just said. So Accenture has moved 90% of the cloud. Maybe you have some more, I'm sure you have some more to go. And maybe that last 10% is going to be especially tricky. We'll see. But clearly you mentioned the global system integrators and you said that Accenture, your market, the way you're servicing your customers changing, how overall is the role of the GSI evolving as companies move to the cloud? Because it's, are you getting there once? Are you getting them there once and then they do everything themselves? Is there some sort of approach that you're taking to help them sustain that? Because the diffusion of knowledge about the cloud and how to get to the cloud is not evenly spread across the industry. So how is the role of the GSI changing in the mix of this transformation? So I can speak to Accenture, not the industry, for sure. So we embarked on something that we packaged as we call Journey to Cloud. J2C is our internal acronym. And Journey to Cloud has different components. It has kind of a strategy and assessment focus. It has a migration focus and a run. And that's your journey. And so we've basically codified, invested in, and hardened a set of assets and capabilities, skills, people around those three key elements so that any organization, if you just want a strategy or if you want us to take you through strategy to migration, get you to the cloud and then run that operation for you, we can do any and all. And so that really is the motion. And one of the good things about Accenture per se, I think we're probably number one in cloud, cloud services, but the point here is that we never did your mess for less. We never bought your assets, rebadged your people. There were other organizations that did that. So we weren't encumbered. And one of the things I liked about coming to Accenture is that it didn't have certain encumbrances that would kind of skew, just that culture, right? So the way we used to do things is not necessarily the way we will be doing things. You don't have a bunch of assets that you bought that you now have to service and that's going to impact your strategy. And it's going to slow you down, right? And it's going to cause whatever internal friction between the old and the new. And so you have those types of issues that go on in a lot of organizations. I mean, people love their data centers. They love the blinking lights. They like their vendors. I mean, that's inertia. You know, and so in order to move, you have to free yourself of some of these encumbrances and think differently about your new operating environment. So we've said that the difference between business and digital business is that a digital business acknowledges and explicitly acknowledges the role that data plays in their business, data as an asset. And that you can measure digital business transformation based on the degree to which a business has re-institutionalized work and organized work and organized its resources around data as an asset. It sounds as though you can do, your suggestion can do the same type of thing, thinking about cloud, where the migration to the cloud or the transition to the cloud or transformation to the cloud is how deeply have you really re-institutionalized your work around that new operating model that the cloud suggests? Is that accurate? Yeah, no, there's new roles and new capabilities that have to be thought through. There's new workflows. So your service model, your security model, your operating model, your execution model, they're all new. And if you have to embrace that, think through that and then have a change program to get you from where you are to this new place. And now, people have said by modal, right? There's this old mode and this new mode, whatever, right? But the fact of the matter is is that there's a gap between the old and the new. And so how do you bridge that gap? Now, I run a platform and so we acknowledge the legacy. So our goal is to get you from legacy to cloud. And so we have to manage the policies, the security model, the governance between the old and the new. And so how do you do that? Well, yes, it's an abstraction, but it's a control plane. And so you have to tool for it. You have to tool for the change management and for the transformation. And then you have to have an underpinning that allows you to move from legacy through virtual, private maybe to public. And that's your spectrum. And so we've invested significantly in creating that platform so that we can help organizations. Now, not everything is fully automated end to end. That would be kind of foolish, right? But you have to be able to think through how your kind of legacy IT operations approach and your new cloud operations approach, how they connect. Well, as you said, you can assess, migrate and run. And the migration is not just migrating hardware or data or workloads, it's migrating the operating model. How you think about what your business is going to operate in a digital context as part of the run process. So two quick questions, and then, well, two quick questions. Number one is that when, that there is this hump. This migrate is a hump. It's a hump from a risk standpoint. It's a hump from a cost standpoint. It's a hump from a management standpoint. Some of the dislocations might be required. I'm going to ask you to take us through that a little bit, how it worked at Accenture and how you think it's going to work elsewhere. And then finally, you've kind of described what the run relationship would be with a company like Accenture. But I want to be a little bit more explicit about that. But let's start with that hump. What is a client going to face when they look at that hump? So, that migration hump. No, no, no. The word you used and it's the right word is risk. And so how do you de-risk the risk? How do you approach this so that you understand one, you know, your cost model. Model organizations don't have an understanding. From a technology standpoint. They don't have a clear line of sight to what that cost model is. They might have bits and pieces, but they haven't really pulled it all together into a common view because they haven't had to. You know, if you think about, you know, where the cost was centered, it wasn't at a project level or an application. It was at a senior level and they bought a data center and then they depreciated it. So now, and they didn't do showback. Forget about chargeback. So now you're trying to give view in that assessment phase as to what your costs are. And, you know, if you decommissioned, exited data centers, you know, what would the savings be? Because that's the, that underwrites your migration. So we can bring clarity to that, number one. Number two, we do migration at scale. So we have factories and we have run books and we have tooling end to end. So we can discover what's not in your CMDB and we can take you from, you know, kind of your current situation to the cloud and we can do it quickly because speed is everything. So give me a year, give me a month. I've taken people out of data centers in a month. You know, we can do that because we've hardened these processes and we've built the factories in order to be able to scale that. And then once we get you there because you know, you looked at the business case but now you know, you're not just moving to an environment of continuous integration or continuous improvement or continuous deployment. You're looking at a new environment of continuous optimization. And so you have to structure the operating model so that you know at any given moment, we're moving to, you know, the ability to bill by the day. And so, you know, you're buying assets by the second. So that, you know, this is a whole- Whole resources. Yes. I think of them as assets, right? But you're right. It's about resource management and you're consuming these resources literally by the second. You know, for cloud native companies, they can, you know, wipe the slate clean every day, every night and the next morning, spin up a whole new set of resources. They've just refreshed their entire estate overnight. Other organizations are sitting there with assets depreciating on cement and they're refreshing every seven years. So it's a whole new, you know, kind of environment to be able to be able to think through that. They have DR facilities that are seeing their idol that, you know, are sucking tons of cash out of the balance sheet. What do you do with that? If you free that up and think about not just DR in the cloud, but, you know, active, active implementations of applications that are scaling up and down. So you're not buying to the peak. You're buying to a valley. You know, your whole operating style dramatically different, right? And the optimization, if I'm looking at your cost profile, I'm looking at it daily. I can see, you know, you used to over provision machines because you weren't ever sure you were going to get another one, right? So you'd buy big. Now you buy small, right? And you, and you just kind of, you know, well, you're not, you know, to me, the language change. Yeah, I'm buying for the moment, right? I mean, if I spot buy, I could buy 10,000 instances and, you know, for an hour and then get rid of it. So, you know, the whole kind of construct here in terms of how you think about, you know, consumption is dramatically different. All right, so last question. And, you know, as you think about a client's relationship after this, during the run phase, very quickly, what is the difference in their relationship with an Accenture versus what was their relationship with an Accenture 10 years ago? How is it different? How is an Accenture a cloud company? So that's 10 years ago. It's kind of hard, you know, because I think about traditional outsourcing and Accenture never really got into the market. You know, it was never your mess for less and people were locked in, they weren't happy with the level of service. It took six months to provision new hardware. So that was 10 years ago. Today, you know, you take a process, you know, provision, whatever you need, you know, not even. But Accenture has a management platform to that sustains that relationship. Well, so what Accenture wanted to do was to figure out how do we add value in this new world? All right, and so we created a management plane above, you know, multiple clouds. We said, you know, it's highly likely that there will be more than one single provider. There will be three, we bet, you know, which three long time ago. And then we built fidelity around those three and we said, well, you know, how do we, how do we add value around that? Well, you know, multi-cloud. So I just got a patent, my first patent of any on, you know, multi-cloud tagging. So it allows us to tag resources across clouds. Okay, now what does that do for you? Well, that allows you to enforce policy. So policy's not paper, policy is dynamic. So now I can govern how people use things and I can tag resources across different providers. And what does that allow me to do? Well, not only can I govern that, I can analyze that. And so the, you know, it's not data as an asset, it's data as a service. So now I have insight into what people are doing, how they're, you know, these tagged resources, how they're using them, right? Are they consistent with policy? So I can scan my entire environment every 10 minutes and I can ensure a level of compliance. So now I'm more secure, I'm more confident that not only are we, you know, governing the usage of these resources, but they're being used, you know, within policy and they're secure. And then the last thing is cost. I can look at cost. You know, so you just spun up a whole bunch of resources. Were you allowed to do that? All right. Is that within, you know, budget? So in many respects, Accenture participates in the governance process of resources as part of the ongoing- Securely and within costs. Excellent. So to provide those controls. Got it. But it's a level of freedom because you as a developer, I want you to go native. I want to coexist. And so I'll discover what you're doing, but you go straight to that console because that's the most robot. You know, they just launched a thousand new services whomever, right? You know, use them. Right. Leverage them, right? That's part of the whole, the cloud gives you access to more than you had before. Right. In 10 years ago, it was contained. Got it. It was, you know, separated from, you, you know, issued a ticket or service request. It took whatever latency, whatever process to get that service request approved. And this new age, you know, you need to be able to move fast. You need to be able to respond to whatever market demand. And so you need to like enable this community to leverage those things, not go around you. All right. But for you to support them, but ensure that it's within policy, that it's secure, and that it's, you know, cost managed. And within that whole construct, Accenture hopes to be able to help sustain those relationships, transaction costs low, so that all the richness of cloud can be bought to bear in a company's business. Very well put. All right. So Michael LeBeau, global director or global manager. Managing director. Managing director of, global managing director of Accenture's cloud platform. Thank you very much for being on theCUBE, Michael. Great conversation. Yeah, terrific. Once again, this is Peter Burris. You've been watching a CUBE conversation. Till next time.