 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent Executive Summit 2020 sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 virtual Accenture Executive Summit. The two great guests here to break down the analysis of the relationship with cloud and Accenture. Brian Bohan, director, head of Accenture, AWS business group at Amazon Web Services and Andy Tay, AABG. The Accenture Amazon business group lead, managing director at Accenture. I'm sure you're super busy, Andy, with all the action. Brian, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. I'm sorry, thank you. You guys, Accenture's been in the spotlight this week and all through the conference around this whole digital transformation. Accenture's business group is celebrating its fifth anniversary. What's new? Obviously, the emphasis of next gen, post-COVID generation, highly accelerated digital transformation, a lot happening. You got your five-year anniversary, what's new? Yeah, so if you look back, it's exciting. So it was five years ago, it was actually in October where we launched the Accenture AWS business group. And if we think back five years, I think we were still at the point where a lot of customers were making that transition from, should I move to cloud to, how do I move to cloud? And so that was one of the reasons why we launched the business group. Since then, certainly we've seen that transition, right? Our conversations today are very much around how do I move to cloud? Help me figure out the business case and then pull together all the different pieces so I can move more quickly with less risk and really achieve my business outcomes. And I would say one of the things too that's really changed over the five years and what we're seeing now is when we started, right, we were focused on migration, data and IoT as the big three pillars that we launched with. And those are still incredibly important to us, but just the breadth of capability and frankly, the breadth of need that we're seeing from customers. And obviously as AWS has matured over the years and launched our new capabilities, we're able with Accenture and in the business group, we've broadened our capabilities and deepened our capabilities over the last five years as well. For instance, this year with COVID, especially, it's really forced our customers to think differently about their own customers or their citizens and how do they service those citizens? So we've seen a huge acceleration around customer engagement, right? And we've powered that with Accenture customer engagement platform powered by Amazon Connect. And so that's been a really big trend this year. And then that broadens our capability from just a technical discussion to one where we're now really reaching out and helping transform and modernize that customer and citizen experience as well, which has been exciting to see. Yeah, Andy, I want to get your thoughts here. We've been reporting and covering Accenture for years. It's not like it's new to you guys. I mean, five years is a great anniversary. You know, check is good relationship, but you guys have been doing the work. You've been on the trend line and then this hits. And Andy said on his keynote, and I thought he said it beautifully and he even said it to me in my one-on-one interview with them was it's on full display right now, the whole digital transformation. Everything about it is on full display and you're either were prepared for it or you kind of worked. And you can see who's there. You guys have been prepared. This is not new. So give us the update from your perspective, how you're taking advantage of this massive shift, highly accelerated digital transformation. Well, I think you can be prepared, but you've also got to be prepared to always sort of it. And I think what we're seeing in recent times and particularly in 2020, what is it? I think today there are 4% of the enterprise work loads sit at the cloud, you know, that leaves 96% out there on-prem and I think over the next four to five years, we're going to see that sort of acceleration to the cloud pick up. This year as Andy touched on, I think on Tuesday in his, I think the pandemic is a forcing function for companies to really pause and think about everything from how they manage their technology, their infrastructure to security, to where their data sits, to what insights and intelligence they're getting from that data. And then eventually even to the talent, the talent they have in the organization and how they can be competitive, their culture, their culture of innovation, of invention and reinvention. And so I think when you think of companies out there faced with these challenges, it forces us, it forces AWS, it forces AABG to come together and think through how can we help create value for them? How can we help them move from sort of just pausing and rethinking to having real plans in action and then taking them into implementation? And so that's what we're working on. I think over the next five years, we're looking to just continue to come together and help these companies get to the cloud and get the value from the cloud. Because it's beyond just getting to the cloud, it's actually then living in the cloud and getting the value from it. It's interesting, Andy was saying, don't just put your toe in the water, you got to go beyond the toe in the water kind of approach. I want to get to that large scale, because that's the big pickup this week that I kind of walked away with was it's large scale acceleration. It's not just toe in the water experimentation. Can you guys share what's causing this large scale end to end enterprise transformation? And what are some of the success and the criteria have you seen for the folks who have done that? Yeah, I'll start and maybe Andy can pile on. So it's interesting if I look back a year ago at re-invent and when I did the CUBE interview then, we were talking about the ABG, we were starting to see this shift of customers. We've been working with customers for years on kind of single, what I call single threaded programs. We can do a migration, we can do SAP, we can do the data program. And then even last year, we were really starting to see customers ask the question is like, what kind of synergies and what kind of economies of scale do I get when I start bringing these different threads together? And also realizing that it's to innovate for the business and build new applications, new capabilities. Well, that then is going to inform what data you need to hydrate those applications, right? Which then informs your data strategy. Well, a lot of that data is then and also embedded in your underlying applications that sit on premises. So you should be thinking through how do you get those applications into the cloud? So you need to draw that line through all of those layers. And that was already starting last year. And so last year we launched the joint transformation program with AEBG. And then so we were ready when this year happened and then it was just an acceleration. So things have been happening faster than we anticipated, but we knew this was going to be happening. And luckily we've been in a really good position to help some of our customers really think through all those different layers of kind of the pyramid as we've been calling it, along with the talent and change pieces, which are also so important as you make this transformation to cloud. Andy, what's the success factors? Andy, Jassy came on stage during the partner day, surprise fireside chat with Doug Hume, talking about this is really an opportunity for partners to change the business landscape with enablement from Amazon. You guys are in a pole position to do that in the marketplace. What's the success factors that you see? Really from three fronts, I'd say, one is the people. And again, I think Andy touched on sort of eight success factors early in the week. And for me, it's these three areas that sort of boils down to these three areas. One is that the people from the leaders, it's really important to set those big bold visions, point the way and then, you know, set top-down goals at how we're going to measure you. Because you almost do get what you measure. To, you know, beyond the leaders, to the right people in the right position across the company. We're finding a key success factor for these end-to-end transformations is not just the leaders, but who you have imposed across the company working in a collaborative shared success model and people who are not afraid to invent and fail. And so that takes me to perhaps the second point, which is the culture. It's important we're finding for the right conditions to be set in the company that enable people to move at pace, move at speed, be able to fail fast, keeping things very, very simple and just keep iterating. And that sort of culture of iteration and improvement versus seeking perfection is super important for success. And then the third part I'll maybe touch on is partners. I think, you know, as we move forward over the next five years, we're going to see an increasing number of players in the ecosystem, in the enterprise and state. You're going to see more and more SaaS providers. And so it's important for companies and our joint clients out there to pick partners like AWS or Accenture or others, but to pick partners who have all worked together and have built solutions together. And that allows them to get speed to value quicker. It allows them to bring in preassembled solutions and really just drive that transformation in a quicker, iterative manner. Yeah, that's a great point worth calling out. Having that partnership model that's additive and has synergy in the cloud, because one of the things that came out of this week, this year's reinvent is there's new things going on in the public cloud, even though hybrid is an operating model with outpost and super relevant, there are benefits for being in the cloud and you've got partners, APIs, for instance, and have microservices working together. This is all new, but I got to ask that on that thread, Andy, where do you see your customers going? Because I think as you work backwards from the customers you guys do, what's their needs, how do you see them? Where's the puck going? Where can they skate to where the puck's going? Because you can almost look forward and say, okay, I got to build modern apps. I got to do the digital transformation. Everything is a service, I get that. But what are they, what solutions are you building for them right now to get there? Yeah, and of course with industries blurring and multiple companies, it's always hard to boil down to the exact solutions, but you can probably look at it from a sort of thematic lens and what we're seeing is as the cloud transformation journey picks up, from our perspective, we've seen a material shift in the solutions and problems that we're trying to address with clients that they are asking for us to help address. It's no longer just the back office where you're sort of looking at cost and efficiency and driving gains from that perspective. It's beyond that. It's now materially the top line. It's how do you get them driving to speed to insights? How do you get them decomposing their application set in order to derive those insights? How do you get them to sort of adopt leading edge industry solutions that give them that jumpstart and that accelerant to winning the customers, winning the eyeballs? And then how do you help drive the customer experience? We're seeing a lot of push from clients or ask for help on how do I optimize my customer experience in order to retain my eyeballs? And then how do I make sure I've got a sort of self-learning ecosystem at play where it's not just a static experience that I can sort of keep learning and iterating how I treat my customers. And a lot of that, that's still self-learning that comes from putting in intelligence into your systems, getting AI and ML in there. And so as a result of that, we're seeing a lot of push and a lot of what we're doing is pouring investment into those areas. And then finally, maybe beyond the bottom line in the top line is how do you harden that and protect that with security and resilience services? So I'll probably say those are the three areas, John. Brian, on the business model side, obviously the enablement is what Amazon has. We see things like SaaS factory coming on board in the partner network. Obviously Accenture is a big, huge partner of you guys. The business model is there. You got IaaS is doing great with chips. You have this data modeling, this data opportunity to enable these modern apps. You have to worry about the partner strategy from Andy. Talk to them just now about how partners within even Accenture. What's the business model side on your side that you're enabling this? Can you just share your thoughts on that? Yeah, yeah, and so it's interesting. I think I'm going to build a little bit on some of the things that Andy really talked about there, right? And that we, if you think about from the partnership, we are absolutely helping our customers with kind of that IT modernization piece and we're investing a lot. There's hard work that needs to get done there and we're investing a lot as a partnership around the tools, the assets and the methodology. So when AWS and Accenture show up together as AABG, we are executing off a single blueprint with a single set of assets so we can move fast. So we're going to continue to do that with all the hybrid announcements from this past week. Those get baked into that migration modernization theme. But the other really important piece here as we go up the stack, Andy mentioned it, right? The data piece, like so much of what we're talking about here is around data and insights, right? I did a CUBE interview last week with Carl Hick, who's the CDIO from Takeda. And if you hear Christophe Weber from Takeda talk, he talks about Takeda being a data company, data and insights company. So how do we as a partnership again, build the capabilities and the platforms like with Accenture's applied insights platform so that we can bootstrap and really accelerate our clients journey. And then finally on the innovation on the business front and Andy was touching on some of these, we are investing in industry solutions and accelerators, right? Because we know that at the end of the day, a lot of these are very similar. We're talking about ingesting data, using machine learning to provide insights and then taking action. So for instance, the cognitive insurance platform that we're working together on with Accenture, you think about property and casualty claims and think about how do we enable touchless claims using machine learning and computer vision that can assess based on an image damage and then be able to triage that and process it accordingly, right? Using all the latest machine learning capabilities from AWS with that deep AI machine learning data science capability from Accenture, who knows all those algorithms that need to get built and build that library. By doing that, we can really help these insurance companies accelerate their transformation around how they think about claims and how they can speed those claims on behalf of their policy holder. So that's just an example of a kind of a bottom to top view of what we're doing in the partnership to address these new needs. That's awesome. Andy, I want to get back to your point about culture. You mentioned it twice now. Talent is a big part of the game here. Andy Jassy referenced Lambda. Next generation developers will be using Lambda. He talked about CIO stories around they didn't move fast enough. They lost three years, the new person came in and made it go faster. This is a new, this is a time for a certain kind of professional and individual to be part of this next generation. What's the talent strategy? You guys have to attract and attain the best and retain the best people. How do you do it? You know, it's an interesting one. It's oftentimes, it's a significant point and often overlooked. People really matter getting the right people in, you know, not just in AWS or in our customers is super important. We often find that much of our discussions with our clients is centered around that. And it's really a key ingredient as you touched on. You need people who are willing to embrace change but also people who are willing to create new, to invent new, to reinvent and to keep it very simple. We're seeing increasingly that you need people who have a sort of deep learning and a deep, or deep desire to keep learning and to be very curious as they go along. Most of all though, I find that having people who are not willing or not afraid to fail is critical, absolutely critical. And I think that that's a necessary ingredient that we're seeing our clients needing more of because if you can't start and you can't iterate for fear of failure, you're in trouble. And I think Andy touched on that, you know, where that CIO that you referred to lost three years. And so you really do need people who are willing to start, not afraid to start and not afraid to lead. Yeah, it takes a gut check there. I just said, you guys have a great team over there. Everyone at Ascension, I've interviewed strong, talented and not afraid to lean in and into the trends. I got to ask on that front, Cloud First was something that was a big strategic focus for a century. How does that fit into your business group that says Amazon focus, obviously they're cloud and now hybrid in everywhere, as I say. How's that all working out? We're super excited about our Cloud First initiative. And I think it fits it really perfectly. It's what we needed. It's another accelerant. If you think of Cloud First, what we're doing is we're putting together a capability set that will help enable end-to-end transformations as Brian touched on, help companies move from just migrating to modernizing, to driving insights, to bringing in change and helping on that talent side. So that sort of component number one is how does Accenture bring the best end-to-end transformation capabilities to our clients? Number two is perhaps, how do we bring together pre-assembled, as Brian touched on, pre-assembled industry offerings to help as an accelerant for our customers? Three, as we touched on earlier, is that sort of partnership with the ecosystem. We're going to see an increasing number of SaaS providers in an estate, in the enterprise estates out there. And so part of our Cloud First and our AABG strategy is to increase our touchpoints and our integrations and our solutions and our offerings with the ecosystem partners out there, the ISV partners out there and the SaaS providers out there. And then number four is really about, how do we extend the definition of the Cloud? I think oftentimes people thought of the Cloud just as sort of on-prem and prem. But as Andy touched on earlier this week, you've got this concept of hybrid Cloud and that in itself is being redefined as well. You've got the intelligent edge and you've got various forms of the edge. So that's a fourth part of our Cloud First strategy. And for us, we're super excited because all of that is highly relevant for AABG. As we look to build those capabilities as industry solutions and others, and as we look to enable our customers, but also as we look to extend how we go to market and sort of couple up our joint IPs in our respective SKUs and products. Well, what's clear now is that people now realize that if you contain that complexity, the upside is massive and that's a great opportunity for you guys. We got to get to the final question for you guys to weigh in on as we wrap up. Next five years, Brian and Andy weigh in. How do you see that playing out? What do you see that's exciting for the partnership and the Cloud First, Cloud Everywhere, Cloud Opportunities share some perspective. Yeah, I think just kind of building on that Cloud First, right, with Cloud First, and we were super excited when Cloud First was announced and I think it signals to the market and what we're seeing in our customers, which is Cloud really permeates everything that we're doing now. And so all aspects of the business will get infused with Cloud and in some ways, it touches on all pieces. And I think what we're going to see is just a continued acceleration and getting much more efficient about pulling together the disparate, what had been disparate pieces of these transformations and then using automation, using machine learning to go faster, right? And so as we started thinking about the stack, right, well, we're going to get, I know we are as a partnership as we're already investing there and getting better and more efficient every day is the migration pieces and the moving assets, the cloud are just going to continue to get more automated, more efficient and those will become the economic engines that allow us to fund the differentiated, innovative activities of the stack. So I'm excited to see us kind of invest to make those bits accelerated for customers so we can free up capital and resources to invest where it's going to drive the most outcome for their end customers. And I think that's going to be a big focus and that's going to have the industry focus. It's going to be making sure that we can consume the latest and greatest of AWS's capabilities and in the areas of machine learning and analytics. But then Andy's also touched on it, bringing in ecosystem partners, right? I mean, one of the most exciting wins we had this year in this year of COVID is looking at Massachusetts, the COVID track and trace solution that we put in place is a partnership between Accenture, AWS and Salesforce, right? And bringing together three really leading partners who can deliver value for our customers. I think we're going to see a lot more of that as customers look to partnerships like this to help them figure out how to bring together the best of the ecosystem to drive solutions. So I think we're going to see more of that as well. All right, Andy, final word, your take. Thanks for innovation is picking up, things are just going faster and faster. I'm just super excited and looking forward to the next five years as the technology invention comes out and continues to sort of set new standards from AWS and as we as Accenture bring in our industry capabilities, we marry the two and we go and help our customers. Super exciting times. Well, congratulations on the partnership. I want to say thank you to you guys because I've reported a few times from stories around real successes around this COVID pandemic that you guys worked together on with Amazon that really changed people's lives. So congratulations on that too as well. I want to call that out. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. We're super proud. Thanks for coming on. Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage, Accenture, AWS partnership part of Accenture's executive summit at AWS re-invent 2020. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.