 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS ReInvent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Welcome everyone to theCUBE virtual and our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, which is part of AWS ReInvent 2020. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Today we are talking about the green cloud and joining me is Kishore Durg. He is Accenture Senior Managing Director, Cloud First Global Services Lead. Thank you so much for coming on the show Kishore. Nice to meet you, Rebecca. Great to have you. Happy to be here. So I want to start by asking you what it is that we mean when we say green cloud. We know that sustainability is a business imperative. So many organizations around the world are committing to responsible innovation, lowering carbon emissions, but what does it mean when they talk about cloud from a sustainability perspective? I think it's about responsible innovation. Green cloud is a thoughtful cloud first approach that helps boost your profits and benefit the clients by helping reduce carbon emissions. Think about it this way, and you have a large number of data centers and each of these data centers are increasing by 14% every year. And this double digit growth comes with a price, Rebecca. What we are seeing is these global data centers consume a lot of power and the consumption is nearly equivalent to the consumption of a country like Spain. So the magnitude of the problem that is out there and how do we pursue a green approach? If you look at just our Accenture Analysis in terms of the migrations to public cloud, we have seen that we can reduce that by 59 million tons of CO2 per year. And with just the 5.9% reduction in total emissions and equates this to 22 million cars of the road and the magnitude of reduction can go a long way in meeting climate change commitments, particularly for data sensitive businesses. Wow, that's incredible. The numbers that you're putting forward are absolutely mind-blowing. So how does it work? Is it a simple cloud migration? So when companies begin their cloud journey and then they confront with them a lot of questions, the decision to make in this particular element sustainable in their solution and benefits they drive, and they have to make wise choices and they will gain unprecedented level of innovation leading to both a greener planet as well as a greener balance sheet, I would say. So effectively it's all about ambition, greater the ambition, greater the reduction in carbon emissions. So from a cloud migration perspective, we look at it as a simple solution with approaches and sustainability benefits that vary based on things. It's about selecting the right cloud provider, a very carbon thoughtful provider, and the first step towards a sustainable cloud journey. And here we're looking at cloud operators, obviously they have different corporate commitments towards sustainability and that determines how they plan, how they build their data centers, how they power and the consumptions that operate there and how they retire their data centers. Then the next element that you want to do is how do you build your ambition? For some of the companies, an average on-prem drives about 65% energy reduction and carbon emission reduction of about 84%, which is kind of okay and good, I would say, but then if you could go up to 98% by configuring applications to the cloud, that is significant benefit for the world and obviously it's a greener cloud that we're talking about. And then the question is how far can you go? And obviously the companies have to unlock greater financial, societal and environmental benefits and Accenture has this cloud-based circular operations and sustainable products and services that we bring into play. So it's a very thoughtful, broader approach that we're bringing in terms of just a simple concept of cloud migration, Rebecca. So we know that in the COVID era, shifting to the cloud has really become a business imperative. How is Accenture working with its clients at a time when all of this movement has been accelerated? How do you partner and what is your approach in terms of helping them with their migrations? Yeah, I mean, let me talk a little bit about the pandemic and the crisis that is there today. And if you really look at that in terms of how we've partnered with a lot of our clients in terms of the cloud-first approach, I'll give you a couple of examples. We've worked with Rolls-Royce, McLaren, DHL and others as part of the Ventlator UK Challenge Consortium. Again, to coordinate production of medical ventilators urgently needed for the UK health service. Many of these firms have taken similar initiatives in terms of from perfume manufacturers, hand sanitizers, and to hand sanitizers and again, leading fashion labels making PPA. And again at the UN General Assembly, we launched the end-to-end integration guide that helps company essentially to have a sustainable development goals. And that's how we are partnering at a very large scale. And if you really look at how we work with our clients and what is the Accenture's role there, from in terms of our clients, there are multiple steps that we look at. One is about planning, building, deploying and managing an optimal green cloud solution. And Accenture has this concept of helping clients with a platform to achieve that goal. And here, we are having a platform called Minav which has a module called Green Cloud Advisor. And this is the capability that helps you provide optimal green cloud business case and obviously a blueprint for each of our clients. And right from the start in terms of how do we complete cloud migration recommendation to an improved solution accuracy to obviously bringing in the end-to-end perspective, with this Green Cloud Advisor capability we're helping our clients capture what we call as a carbon footprint for existing data centers and provide, I would say, the current cloud CO2 emission score that obviously helps them with carbon credits that can further their green agenda. So essentially, this is about recommending a green index score, reducing carbon footprint for migration, migrating for greener cloud. And if you really look at how Accenture itself is practicing what we preach, 95% of our applications are in the cloud and this migration has helped us to lead to about $40.5 million in benefit. And in the third year and another $3 million in annualized costs that are saved through right-sizing service consumption. So it's a very broad umbrella and a footprint in terms of how we engage societally with the UN or our clients. And what is it that we exactly bring to our clients in solving a specific problem? Accenture is walking the walk, as you say. Yes. So that is that we practice what we preach and that is something that we take it to heart. We want to have a responsible business and we want to practice it and we want to advise our clients around that. You are your own use case and so they know they can take your advice. So talk a little bit about the global, the cooperation that's needed. We know that conquering this pandemic is going to take a coordinated global effort and talk a little bit about the great reset initiative. First of all, what is that? Why don't we start there and then we can delve into it a little bit more. Okay, so before we get to how we are cooperating, the great reset initiative is about improving the state of the world and it's about a group of global stakeholders cooperating to simultaneously manage the direct consequences of their COVID-19 crisis. And in spirit of this cooperation that we're seeing during COVID-19, which will obviously either to post pandemic, to tackle the world's pressing issues, as I say, we're encouraging companies to realize a combined potential of technology and sustainable impact to use enterprise solutions to address with urgency and scale and obviously multiple challenges that are facing our world. One of the ways that we're encouraging companies to reach their Venus cloud with Accenture's cloud per strategy is to build a solid foundation that is resilient and would pivot through faster to the current as well as future times. Now, when you think of cloud as the foundation that drives the digital transformation, it's about scale, speed, streamlining or operations and obviously reducing costs. And as these businesses sees the construct of cloud first, they must remain obviously responsible and trusted. Now, think about this as part of our analysis that profitability can coexist with responsible and sustainable practices. Let's say that all the data centers migrated from on-prem to cloud-based. We estimate that would reduce carbon emissions globally by 60 million tons per year. And think about it this way, right? The easier metric would be taking out 22 million cars off the road. The other examples that you've seen right in terms of the NHS work that we're doing in UK to build a Microsoft team-based integration and the platform we rolled out for 1.2 million NHS users. And in about 16,000 users there, we're able to secure instant messages, obviously complete audio, video calls and host virtual meetings across England. So this work that we did with NHS is something that we are collaborating with a lot of tools and powering businesses on our mission. Well, you're vividly describing the business case for sustainability. What do you see as the future of cloud when thinking about it through this lens of sustainability and also going back to what you were talking about in terms of how you are helping, you're fostering cooperation within these organizations. That's a very good question of it. So if you look at today, right, businesses are obviously environmentally aware and they are expanding efforts to decrease power consumption, carbon emissions, and they want to run a sustainable operational efficiency across all elements of their business. And this is an increasing trend and there is that option of energy efficient infrastructure in the global market. And this trend is the cloud first thinking and with the right cloud migration that we have been discussing is about unlocking new opportunity like clean energy transitions. Enable by cloud based geographic analysis, material waste reductions, and better data insights. And this is something that will drive with obviously faster analytics platform that is out there. Now, the sustainability is actually the future of business which is companies that are historically different the financial security or agility benefits to cloud. Now sustainability becomes an imperative for them. And our own experience, Accenture's experience with cloud migrations, we have seen 30 to 40% total cost of ownership savings and it's driving a greater workload flexibility, better service server utilization and obviously more energy efficient public clouds that cost obviously that drive a lot of these enterprise own data centers. So in our view, what we are seeing is that this sustainable cloud position helps companies to drive a lot of the goals in addition to their financial and other goals. So what should organizations who are watching this interview and saying, hey, I need to know more, what do you recommend to them and where should they go to get more information on green cloud? You know, if you're a business leader and you're thinking about which cloud provider is good, how should applications be modernized to meet our day to day needs, which cloud driven innovations should be priorities. You know, that's why Accenture formed the cloud first organization. And essentially to provide the full stack of cloud services to help our clients become a cloud first business. You know, it's all about accelerating the digital transformation, innovating faster, creating differentiated and sustainable value for our clients. And we are powering it up at 70,000 cloud professionals, $3 billion investment and bringing together unmatched depth and breadth of cloud services for our clients in terms of cloud solutions. And obviously the ecosystem partnership that we have that we are seeing today and the assets that help our clients realize their goals. And again, to do reach out to us, we can help them determine obviously an optimal sustainable cloud first solution that meets the business needs and being unprecedented levels of innovation. Our experience will be your advantage and now more than ever, Rebecca. So just closing us out here, do you have any advice for these companies who are navigating a great deal of uncertainty? What do you think the next 12 to 24 months, what do you think that should be on the minds of CIOs as they go forward? So as CIOs are thinking about rapidly leveraging cloud, migrating to cloud, one of the elements that we want them to be thoughtful about is can they do that with unprecedented level of innovation but also build a greener planet and a greener balance sheet. If we can achieve this balance and kind of have a world which is greener, I think the world will win and we all along with Accenture and our clients will win. That's what I would say, Rebecca. That is an optimistic outlook and I will take it. Thank you so much, Kishore, for coming on the show. Thank you so much. That was Accenture's Kishore Dirk. I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the CUBE virtuals coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit.