 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 the Venetian in Las Vegas. We are part of AWS re-invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by two guests for this segment. We have Prasad Sankaran. He is the Senior Managing Director Global ICI Lead. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Prasad. Thank you, everybody. And Larry Soccer, Global Managing Director ICI Offerings. Thank you so much for coming on, Larry. Nice to be here, Rebecca. So Prasad, I'm going to start with you. This week marks the one-year anniversary of intelligent cloud infrastructure, a group that you lead at Accenture. Tell us a little bit more about, first of all, why this group was formed and the journey you've had this year, the highs and lows. Sure, sure. So first of all, thank you for having us. So as you mentioned, December 1st will be one year of having formed this group. And the reason we did that was because all of our clients are going through a journey of digital transformation. And it's very important for us to be able to support that journey. So there are different elements that we have to bring together around cloud as well as infrastructure. So we brought together this group, which was actually in different parts of Accenture, as one particular group, and we call it Intelligent Cloud and Infrastructure, consists of 30,000 people, pretty much in every part of the world, supporting all different industries. And this is a way for us to bring together not just cloud computing, but also areas like networking, workplace, digital, other digital businesses that we need to be able to support in order to be able to help our clients through their journey of transformation. So this group was formed at a time of tremendous change and upheaval in the landscape. Talk to us a little bit about, we hear so much about digital transformation. Are companies ready? What's the, let us into the client mindset now. Yeah, so what happens is different industries obviously are progressing at different speeds. All of our clients are always worried about being disrupted within their industries, either by an existing competitor, or by a completely new competitor that doesn't exist. You know all the stories about the big companies that existed and almost vanished overnight. So that's something that keeps CEOs and CIOs awake at night just worrying about that. And so digital transformation is very important for them to be relevant to their clients. It's all about bringing new products to their clients, and also the speed with which they can actually do that. It's no longer enough to be a fast follower. You have to be an innovator, and cloud is the way that this innovation will happen for our clients. And so it's very important for us to be able to bring our group together, be able to support that journey for our clients. Larry, I want to bring you into this conversation a little bit. What do we require for enterprises to make this big transition? I mean, you was talking about how you need to be an innovator. You can't just be a fast follower. Well, I mean, a lot of times I look at it, just given the size, the scale of most of our clients, who are really upmarket, most of them don't have the option to just do a rip and replace and just reinvent themselves completely. So it really is how do I very rapidly modernize and transform my business to take advantage of it? And it really needs to start with your application landscape and data. So how do I start to look at the, you know, all the possibilities of the AWS's and start to reimagine, reinvent, to use cloud-native technologies? Also, a significant amount of their estates are already running in legacy environments, be it the mainframe or other environments. So how do you digitally decouple those so you can extract value out of that? And it's ultimately those decisions of apps and data that are going to drive cloud deployments and architectures. And data gravity really becomes the key decision factor to decide, you know, where do I place this? And it was a great example today. If you saw Jassy's keynote, he announced ACWA, where they're actually starting to look at, you know, how do I move compute and the processing closer to the actual data set. So actually inverting the problem and moving closer to the data. And then we see that trend starting to proliferate. The other part of the keynote that was very interesting was the 5G announcement. And first you heard about AWS pushing into local zones where they were getting much, you know, distributing it out closer to the reduced latency and really starting to push out. So ultimately we see the whole landscape being transformed by data, these new application architectures and where that data resides. And now to traditional world that we've known of hybrid with, you know, public and private is really transforming with the Amazon Outposts, with the VMCs and stuff like that into much more wonder about shared and dedicated infrastructure. Then the big, the next real big thing that starts to happen then is this whole explosion of IoT. So as price performance goes down with Moore's Law, we're going to start to see a lot more, you know, cost-effective IoT solutions. And all of a sudden a world that was very centralized, you know, you know, running up in the world of the Amazon, said the public cloud is not going to be much more distributed. So a lot more of that compute over time gets moved out there. So we're seeing a very rapidly evolving landscape, you know, apps and data ultimately driving our clients' cloud and infrastructure investments. And they're really just trying to figure out how they can rapidly transform their environments to take advantage of this new landscape. So both of you are describing this exceedingly complex environment that is changing with dizzying speed. I mean, just even this morning with Andy Jassy on stage for three hours with all of the new products and services that AWS is coming out with. What is ICI and Accenture doing to help clients navigate this landscape, Prasad? Yeah, so, you know, our theme is it's not just enough for infrastructure and cloud to be a horizontal function as it used to be. We feel that, you know, one of the things that Accenture really brings to the table is our industry differentiation. We've spent a lot of time analyzing the industries that our clients are in. So we've actually changed the theme of ICI to be three different things. The first is to be industry-led. So it's no longer good enough to be a horizontal function. We have to understand the needs of each industry and really look at how cloud and infrastructure, you know, will support that industry. The second is all about intelligence and Larry just talked about the proliferation of data, but it's also bringing artificial intelligence, making networks much more smart, you know, really infusing intelligence into everything we do. And the third is the concept of being invisible because our clients are expecting infrastructure to just be there all the time. They don't really have to understand how it works, but it has to be there. It's just like going into a room and, you know, turning on a switch and you expect electricity to be there. So infrastructure has to be very much like electricity. It has to be ubiquitous. It has to be just available all the time. So those are the things that we are trying to bring to our clients, to make it very specific for, and very industry-specific for our clients. And this goes into areas like cloud computing. It goes into 5G, edge is going to be a big part of what is going to happen in various industries. And as Larry talked about, IoT devices are going to be just proliferating. It's going to be billions of IoT devices. There's trillions of dollars being spent. In fact, I think the spend on IoT is probably bigger than any other area that I have seen probably in my working lifetime. So it's going to be an exciting time to come for us. I mean, we tend to think about artificial intelligence as this futuristic Jetsons kind of thing, but really it's here and now. Larry, can you talk a little bit about how companies are using AI and having an impact already on their businesses? Yeah, well, I mean, obviously you see a lot of AI being used for different use cases. We saw some great examples today in Jassy's keynote. We're seeing it used for video analytics, for example, and AI to try to figure out predictive maintenance type activities. So there's obviously a lot of business use cases. I think what's interesting from our perspective as well is a lot of the operational use cases. So if you take a look at it, with all these new innovations, the rapid pace of change that we're seeing with cloud infrastructure, that application landscape, we've started to rely pretty heavily first on analytics to how do we figure out what's going on? How do we operate efficiently? How do we make sure we don't put the business as grist? Really pivoting from reactive to proactive and predictive operations. We've obviously automated everything as much as we can. I see AI actually playing a very interesting role in how we optimize these environments over time. So as you get a much more complex environment, much more dynamic and ephemeral with containers, Kubernetes, serverless compute, dynamic networks that Prasad was talking about with software-defined networking, AI is going to be the only way we can tune and optimize that over time. So you've obviously got all the business use cases that we see in healthcare, that we see in mining predictive operations and stuff like that, but how we actually use AI internally is going to be critical to how we are actually able to manage cloud and infrastructure and really optimize it over time. What is the client, what's on your minds of your customers right now? We know that only 20% of companies out there have really adopted the cloud. Two thirds have really yet to capture the benefits of the cloud. What are you hearing from them? What are they saying to you? What are their pain points? So I think all of our clients realize that ultimately the cloud is going to be where they will be at, data centers are existing today, but at some point everybody's going to move to the cloud. Most of our clients have taken the easier workloads and the easy part has already been done, that's the first 20%, but 80% of the work still remains and that's the more complicated work that has to come. So they're looking to us to give them the right solutions and then there's a variety of other factors to be considered. For example, they have to look at security issues, they have to understand that there are data privacy aspects to be considered. So really it's a question of matching the right private and public options. And as Larry also mentioned, probably only 30, 40% of the data will actually sit in the central cloud. Most of the other data is actually going to move out to the edge with IoT devices and so on. So data gravity, where does your data sit? Where does your compute sit? And Andy talked about it as well today in his keynote address. These are all things that are going to keep evolving and I think that's going to really change the landscape. I mean, I think they all see the power of cloud. I mean, which in my mind, it's really around the innovation cycles. You look at the pace that they're innovating with EC2 with RDS and Redshift. So they all see that power. I think the biggest thing they struggle with are skills and culture. Because how do you upskill, retrain the organization? Everything from the new technologies, how did architect in the new world very ephemeral dynamic, a serverless world? How do you start to adopt those technologies? How do you operationalize them? How do you go beyond just agile and really do true dev sec ops where you're integrating security and operations built in from the ground floor? And a lot of times these are cultural changes. One of the things we see in cloud and infrastructure operations, for example, is how do you take operators who used to be eyes on glass, looking at consoles, turn them into developers where they're writing the next analytic algorithms to get to predictive that they're automating, you know, automation scripts to improve operations and ultimately tuning the AI engines that optimize. And I think that skills and culture barriers probably the hardest thing for them to overcome. And, you know, how do you just, you can't just go to the cloud. You've got to behave differently. You really have to transform how you use it, how you operate and really transform the organization and culture. So these change management challenges, where do you even start? Because as you said, adopting the technology is almost the easy part or at least the most straightforward. But really getting everyone on board and really changing people's mindsets and mentalities and dispositions and the way that they collaborate with each other and collaborate cross-functionally. So what have you learned within ICI to help companies and what's your advice? So I think there are three aspects that you have to get right. In fact, I was talking to one of the CIOs of a very large client of ours. And I think you have to get three things right and you've got to get them aligned and moving at the same time. The first, obviously, is the technology. So you have to understand what makes sense for you, for your industry, make the right bets because if you make a wrong decision, then you're going to set yourself back. So getting the technology right, obviously, is important. The second is the operating model, making sure that you get the right operating model in place and kicked off right up front. And the third, like Larry said, is transforming your workforce. So making sure that people have all the right skill sets when you actually have the operating model and the technology ready. So it's very important to bring all those three aspects together and a company like Accenture with our background around consulting, around change management, around technology, we're uniquely positioned, understanding our clients' industries and really bringing all of those three aspects together so that we're able to position our clients to take their journey forward. Larry, in terms of next year's Accenture Executive Summit, look into your crystal ball. You've already talked about a lot of emerging technologies, IOT, edge computing, I've talked a lot about AI, of course. What do you think are going to be the hot topics looking ahead this year with an ICI? And next year's summit? You know, I touched on it earlier. I think everyone's going to be talking about data gravity. As you get these bigger and bigger data sets, it becomes, you know, the network's always going to be the bottleneck. So even with Moore's law stretching from 18 months to 24, the amount of data we produce, particularly with IOT and Edge, is really going to transform things. And even though we've got massive network upgrades, like 5G coming along, it'll never be enough. I mean, that comes along every 12 years. You know, we're seeing a doubling of price performance and computing. So I think data gravity, you're going to start to see a very different landscape where what used to be public and private and now Edge is really going to be obliterated to much more seamless architecture. That was a lot of the keynote today. And if you start to take a look at local zones and some of the announcements today, they were already, Amazon was heading there with Greengrass. So you're going to have much more seamlessness and how do I get compute closer to the processing? You're going to be talking a lot about clustering, clustering compute around datasets versus the other way around. So I think we're going to see, and I think that's going to happen pretty fast. Usually a lot of this stuff, you know, we've been talking about IOT for years. I do think we're on the tipping point. I think we're about to see an exponential growth that just as the price performance comes together, some of the technologies have gotten there. But I think that the whole focus on data and data gravity is what you're going to hear a lot about next year. I can't wait to hear the AWS re-invent band do a little Pink Floyd or something like that for data gravity. Well, Larry and Prasad, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much. Great, thanks for back. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.