 Live from Houston, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Now, your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live in Houston, Texas for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and this is theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal noise. We have two guests here, mixed-lattery president of North America for Avante and Stella Goulet, chief marketing officer. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So first, talk about the joint venture. I mean, I was just talking about, it seems like yesterday, but 15 years ago, Accenture and Microsoft did a joint venture. Yeah. You guys are celebrating 15 years. Yep, we're celebrating our 15th year anniversary. Since in 2000, we're now a two billion plus dollar company, 27,000 people in 23 countries. And we are working with a lot of clients to help them take advantage of digital technologies and become innovative. So the digital transformation is happening. Obviously, Gardner Symposium last week, it was the last week of two years ago, was recently, that's their big push. IOT, Intermediate of Things, is a big driver of that. Cloud, obviously Amazon had their event. We were there. Just Accenture had a big announcement with AWS, Amy Jazz, who's on theCUBE, talking about, this is really the first ending in his mind of cloud. And they're dominating the public clouding. So EMC get acquired by Dell. What a shit moment. There's an historic change in the industry. I'd like to get you guys to comment on the state of the change in this transformation and how it relates to women in tech, because we're also seeing a seed change at the same time of a huge migration of talent coming into the workforce. I mean, it's only been less than 10 years since the iPhone, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, huge network effect, peer-to-peer communication, just in and among the women in tech. So this disruption is at many levels. Could you guys comment on how you could talk? Maybe I'll start. When it comes to cloud, you led with cloud a little bit in the enterprise. I think we are definitely early days. I know that sounds odd. We've been talking about cloud for years. How can we be early days? We've seen the very successful born in the cloud companies and they're doing very well. We've seen software as a service come on very strong in the enterprise. But at least the enterprise clients that I talked to around the globe, I'm not sure that the majority have really figured out how to fully become both a service provider and a service broker at the same time and what that means for them in the enterprise. Clearly Amazon, an amazing company, I would say don't discount Microsoft. Obviously we have a Microsoft ownership share and full disclosure. But when you look at the enterprise, when you look at the fact that enterprises are going to have an on-prem component and a cloud component. And when you look at Microsoft's enterprise history and their capabilities in the cloud, I think they've got some very special capabilities out there. Multiple good cloud companies, no doubt about it. But you know, steeper than a Microsoft. Since Satya Natal took over, really you've seen Azure really dominate. We've seen just in our numbers and our research the share of voice of Azure in just a VMware ecosystem. Just that space and other spaces, they're really putting together kind of an integrated enterprise approach. And I think that's the key. If you're a born-in-the-cloud company, you look a little bit different than an enterprise who's got years of installed base. And I think different answers may be appropriate for different customer sets there. No, Mick, you said it's an interesting comment. One of our guests came on theCUBE and was inspired, and wrote a blog post and said the following thing. Was we always trying to say what inning are we and use the baseball metaphor. And he's like, no, no, guys, you got it all wrong. Because I was debating Dave Vellante, oh, we're in the early, no, we're in the eighth inning. He says, no, game one, one by Amazon. 10-nothing, 10-run rule, whatever little league. Now the big leagues is game two enterprise. And that is a different ball game. Hence, Azure is a different strategy than Amazon, although Amazon is creeping into the enterprise very fast. So game two, do you agree with that sentiment? I absolutely do. And I'm looking forward to watching it because it's going to be a fun game. Most importantly, I think it's going to be great for our enterprise clients because there's a lot of innovation, incredible capabilities that continue to be advanced, great players out in the market. And I think when our enterprise clients truly figure out how to take advantage of it, they're going to be the ultimate winners. They may be sitting in the stands rather than on the pitching mound, but I think they're going to do really well. You talked about women and so innovation is, diversity is key for innovation, right? And different ideas, different perspectives with innovation. And that's why at Avalard, we believe in encouraging diversity and having in place programs that encourage women to come into technology and grow their careers. It's good for business. It's good for our clients. It's interesting. We're talking, first of all, it's great conversation. Love talking about managed cloud, cloud native, Azure VMware and talking about the opportunity for women because this is a weird event in the sense that this conference is gravity around two major issues. Opportunity for businesses, competitive advantage around diversity and contribution. And the other side, it's a job fair. It's huge recruiting. So it's got this kind of vibe to it because there's so many new entrants coming into the workforce that are women. It's like, it's a recruiting opportunity. It is. It's most definitely you see great talent here, great place to network, a really good place to promote a brand as well. And so we're doing a lot of, talking to a lot of young women about opportunities in tech. Stella, talk about the mindset of the young talent coming in. We've been asking all the women in tech that are in our generation, my generation. I just turned 50, so I was talking about Eileen Fagan earlier. She went to cut a computer science degree in the 80s and she's a leader now. And we're like, hey, you know, you actually were the, you're the leader now. So that's a new position for her. And she has an interesting color on what the younger generation is coming in. They're full of energy. Can you share some insight into what the mindset of the young guns are coming in, these new ladies coming in? No fear, are they just? Whether it's women or men, young men, people come into the workplace today not thinking that they're going to stay in one job for the rest of their lives or 10 or 20 years. They want to have great experiences. As companies, we have to give them lots of different opportunities and help them grow. They have such great ideas. They're digital natives. They grew up with these technologies and they have so much to bring in providing you an exciting solution. So are they using email to communicate or are they getting Snapchat messages for the job interviews? It's like a whole new way of working is going on right now. And it's like, yeah, he's voiced me. I mean, voiced me, I was like the king when I was growing up. You know, it's interesting. We talk a little bit about this. I spent some time in our booth yesterday and we were showing, we do change for a business. We help our clients embrace this digital innovation and what it can mean for their business. And we were showing off some of the things that we were doing and it took them seconds before they would riff off the idea and start saying, and then you could do this and I was like, outstanding. You're exactly the type of people we want to be talking about. That's what we do for a business, which is how do we bring these ideas and then how do we synthesize them and the beauty of it is, and then you get the opportunity to do that over and over again. There's so many exciting ideas. I think this interesting opportunity your company is addressing is. I think you're unique. Maybe an experiment 10 years ago, but I think mainstream right now, a lot of the old line SIs are going to go out of business. They don't adopt a new way to approach their business model, meaning fully integrated services, multi-disciplinary, but this now correlates to some of the new younger workforce, which is it's not the pure play computer scientist anymore. It's I am a biochemistry major applying computer science to every single discipline. So this interdisciplinary thing is a huge deal. Can you comment? Yeah, there are so many different kinds of jobs. So for example, use a design and design experience because technology unless it's appealing to use, it's easy to use. People aren't going to come back and use it. So we look for people who understand behavior, psychology, people who are good at design, people who are good at change management. So it's not just sort of the technology, the solutions, architects, the testers. There's a really broad array of talents that we look for. I got to say this. I'm glad I'm not a student on campus because compared to some of the ones that I talked to last night, I'm not sure I'd be able to stack up. I had a master's in biomechanical engineering with a degree in informatics. I had one that was a computer scientist with a minor in psychology who specialized in digital. I'm thinking, wow. Yeah, and they're making about a million dollars on the weekend with FanDuel, arbitrage in their math skills on fantasy sports. It's a crazy new world. I mean, this is amazing. Yeah. Another thing, people are interested, young people today are interested in what is a company doing about corporate social responsibility? It's not just about the job. It's about the whole, I wouldn't say work-life balance because it's different. It's more than that. But what is the meaning for them when they're there? The thing that I like right now is that you mentioned natives, digital natives, but now the world's cloud natives. So the developers that I was hearing in the hall, I was hearing DevOps conference. There were DevOps multiple times. Yeah, you know the conference is rocking when you hear DevOps, which essentially these younger generations, they've never installed Linux on a machine. They've actually never actually provisioned hardware. So it's a whole other world. It is, and it was really interesting. I was talking to a professor at a university and we were talking about cloud. Now he's teaching cloud and he goes, you know, I have a really hard time teaching cloud. I thought it'd be really easy. But you know, when I described, well, if you think back to the old days of mainframes and terminals and they just sort of had this blank look on their face, the current generation has never known anything but cloud. How do you teach? Well, this is a great opportunity when they say this isn't an opportunity, this is reality. It's a very interesting change of perspective. So Micka, still, I got to get to you. I got to get your perspective. This is the hard question. This is the zillion dollar question for everybody here, in my opinion. How do you create a work environment that can actually attract that kind of talent because they're going to get forward. So, and you have a business model that's changing. It's all about outcomes, not the speeds and feeds. So you have to make an outcome-based business model sexy and relevant. I mean, how do you do that? Yeah, I mean, firstly it's providing opportunities to work on client solutions or client problems that they can see real outcome for the client and their customers. It's giving them training opportunities when they come. It's about having corporate social responsibility or other programs that are enriching that they can join. So, for example, we're looking at how can we help to close the gender, economic and technology gap for women so that they can improve in their communities and they can get involved. We just announced a relationship with the Aspire Foundation which is about mentoring women in nonprofit organizations so they can impact a billion women by 2020. And so, a young woman may not have a lot of experience. They can come in and mentor somebody. So, it's the enrichment outside as well as the- Give an example. If I can, one other point on that. So, not only is it about the what outcome I'm going to have. One of the things that I think is important to talk into these folks is, well, I'm new, what role am I going to have? One of the things we've always embodied which I think makes us a little unique is everybody counts. It's part of our core values. So, I don't care if you're part of my senior leadership team or the new hire, we're focused on one thing. We are in business to serve clients. We have to earn that right every day. If somebody's got a good idea, I don't care which side of the table it comes from, just bring it on. And I think that helps. It's also the whole transparency conversation around making things transparent and making it always learning environment. It's been some things we've been seeing crop up and bubble up to the top. And with social tools, as with the backlash of social tools is, they got Glassdoor, they got his other tools peering in on the outside perspective and also opportunities to go work somewhere else. So, having them have to work on really cool things is also a potential attract. So, with that being said, what cool things are you guys doing? And we have an innovation contest every year that brings our clients together that sets some problems for us and all of their people team up. This year, the team that hit it out of the park, me, there was a young woman from the Philippines who just did an astounding job. And that's exciting to see. So, we have things like the innovation contest. And security certainly is an area that's a lot of activity. And I'm sure that's intoxicating, at least intellectually, to offer a young student or young entrance to say, hey, we got these hard problems to solve. We have hard problems to solve, whether it be security, whether it be, there's all kinds of technological advancement, but it doesn't mean anything until you can apply it to realize a business result. Whether it's, we call it digital augmented reality, but what does a grocery store of the future look like? It's buying groceries. Why do I need digital? You'd be surprised. It's pretty compelling. Supply chain. Exactly. I want to know the traditional facts. I want to know where my meat was sourced, right? There's a lot of people who really want to understand that. And so, when you think about changing the interaction model, there's so many cool ways we can do that. And the interesting thing is we always tend to focus on the consumers and the users. Don't forget the work experience. You were alluding to this. What's it like to work in an environment? And you can just tell by the traffic on the floor, there's some companies that people have a perspective that say, oh, it'd be cool to work here. We would love to help everybody. Advance, how do you make sure you got the workplace in the future? How do you work in new and different ways? Absolutely an area we're talking about. Well, the one thing that you guys are stumbling on that I think is really compelling, at least from my standpoint, is that the digital transformation isn't an IT problem anymore. IT is essentially part of the bigger picture. So the old world might say, IT's boring, it's an IT community, we are in there. But now, with Internet of Things and digital transformation, it's dorm room to board room issues, right? So you are dealing with consumerization of IT, which is that the Internet of Things brings up the physical world, what's from airplanes to retail, and software, DevOps and cloud, and the kids have unlimited compute. So like now, like I can throw them virtual machines up there, they can go to Amazon, spin up a bunch of EC2, go to Azure, run workloads, that mainframe-like super computer performance on the weekend. And technology is not just the domain of the technologists in the business anymore. You know, look at marketing, right? Marketing is said in some places to have more technology budget than IT does. The role of marketing is changing. It's no longer enough just to be creative. You have to understand technology and what it can do for you and data and things that marketers never had to deal with. So how has this world changed your job? Because now you have client delivery, you have to deliver integrated solutions, stand-up managed servers, cloud, all this stuff, end-to-end, workload management, in-memory, Spark, data science, all this great stuff. But you guys have your own internal teams. There's a collaboration framework internally within your own companies. How do you guys do that? How do you create a collaborative environment that's speed, agile and effective? Well, I would say part of our business has never changed. We've always been in business of our clients, that stays the same. We've always been very collaborative about how we do that. I would say the tools and the techniques have changed. I've moved out of my digital dinosaur ages into something a little bit better, but I grew up with, you were mentioned in voicemail. I started with, have I checked my voicemail? Now. You have the 20 voicemails when you're out. 337, we still know the number, 337. Now it's using Yammer internally, using Twitter externally, leveraging LinkedIn to interact with recruits. I would call it this way. It's different techniques to do the same things we've done in the past, which can be very beneficial. But I'll tell you, for me personally, it's, there's a punch that I've had to unlearn and relearn. And I personally like that. Some people don't like the continual lifelong learning. That's why I'm in this industry. Because that's what it's all about. We use Skype for business a lot. And now when I have to, I look on my calendar and there's an outside phone number to call. I'm like scrabbling for my phone and writing down the password. Exactly, it's hard. It is hard. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know my kid's phone number. So there's just auto-programmed in my phone. I should know that. I mean, I should memorize. But that's the issue. We're forgetting a lot of those things. But we're working at different speeds. That is the key. It is. But it's what makes it so much fun. And one of the things I talk to folks about is, do you have an intellectual curiosity for technology and where it can go? If you've got that intellectual curiosity, one, you're definitely in the right era. You're definitely in the right industry because there's so much out there. And you were talking about dorm room to board room. The one thing that struck me is, all the folks walking around the floor, they've got a couple different choices. They can go and create a company, create and solve a business problem, go work for some non-for-profit, or they can, so it's sort of where do you get the idea for how to channel that energy? Is it coming from you, or are you just applying your insights, your capabilities, your talent to help somebody else who might not know how to get there? And I think that's more the world we live in, but both are really exciting. How has the cloud changed the business for model, in your mind, speed of the business? I mean, cloud is an enabler, it's disruptive. Simply put, the cost of failure is basically zero. And fail forward, fail fast. We heard it yesterday at the keynote. That is absolutely the key to innovation. And it's removed the bar to innovation, I think. I can spin up, I can test an idea, and if I don't like where it's going, I shut it down at night, and I'm done. It's cost me sense. Before, it was time, it was capital, the hurdle rate for an idea got a lot higher. Now, the hurdle rate's a lot smaller. We take the idea, if you get it right the first time, you didn't dream bold enough. Dream bigger, you aren't going to be everything you want. Iterate on it, agile, dev ops, whatever you want to call it, and then come back tomorrow and take it again. So I think that's, the pace and fuel, the bar for innovation has been lowered. Just the agility, the speed that you talked about. So that's a big point. In the old days, not only is there a hurdle, if you actually went down the path, you had costs involved, and you end up at a cul-de-sac, and you had to unwind that project, that could be months later. So now the diseconomies of scale of veiling always created the hurdle. So the hurdle's high, and the failure consequence is significantly lower. In your example, you can actually run R&D in real time and do the kind of ABCD testing, unlimited testing. Absolutely. With one perhaps hurdle that companies need to get over, and this is one of the places we have conversations with them about. Because of the pace of innovation, because of the opportunities, it's great. All of a sudden you wake up one day, and you say, well, why is that down? That's our core business. And you say, wait a minute, it's not our core business. We haven't even industrialized it, no one's responsible for it. So I think what happens is it introduces a new checkpoint in the enterprise. It says, okay, if this is now real, let's make sure we've got the right people and process and many times security around it so that it is real. All right, so talk about the coolest things you guys are wearing. We're going to end this segment on a little plug for the company. Share with the folks out there watching. What's the coolest thing you guys are working on that's exciting? My favorite, and it's something that we have over in our booth, is the store of the future, which we did with Co-op Italy. There is a World Expo at the moment in Milan and they wanted to create a complete supermarket just with digital signage and technology. All you have to do is point at an object or pick it up and you see in the screen overhead all kinds of information, size, what's in it, where's it come from, it's carbon footprint. That to me was really cool to see in a supermarket setting. You know, I'll pick the other one we've got, which is you taking a technology like digital augmented reality. Pretty cool stuff, my kids would put on the Oculus headset, think it's a game. What if you could use that for physical therapy for patients recovering from strokes? Now you've taken what looks like a game to many, to what it looks like a really serious. Therapeutic. Therapeutic opportunity. And they're going to get smaller, faster, cheaper too. And if it helps patients recover faster, you know, that is innovation to me. Take the technology advancement, which is great. How do you realize a beneficial result with it? Well, you guys doing some amazing things. Obviously this new world all about integrated solutions, integrated disciplines, the big problem. We all love to, you know, high five each other on the technology. We're obviously passionate about the new stuff as you guys are. There's a skills gap. I mean, there's not enough machine learning guys out there in GALs and, you know, you got data scientists, machine learning, you got, you know, DevOps, you're provisioning a whole new set of management software. I mean, there's a skills shortage. What do you guys see as a solution to that? Is it more of this? What do you guys see out there as a hopeful shining light on the hill? I think one thing, if you look at women, if you ignore a huge part of the population for a source of talent, you know, that's a mistake for companies. So I think you're making sure that we're casting a wide net for and encouraging more women into technology we increase the pool of people. The way I look at it twofold, what's the cost to retrain somebody? And what's the cost to bring somebody into the workforce? Because what I would tell you is on these new technologies, a lot of my existing technologists have to unlearn stuff. So there's this unlearning cost to then get trained on the newest, latest and greatest. At the same time, some of the new graduates have amazing passions, energies, and may already have 60, 70% of the basis covered because that's all they know. And then it's how do you fill that gap? So you got to work it as a dual prong strategy. There's amazing talent roaming this floor and it's just fun to be here. Make yourself, thanks for sharing. We got to keep in touch too. We want to do a drill down on Azure where you guys are doing with them. Certainly an air we cover heavily. This is theCUBE live here in Houston, Texas. Do you know we're podcasting now? Check out silkenangle.tv. We got guests of the week, gets our own podcast. And of course, Wednesday is women Wednesday. We highlight one of the women in tech that we've interviewed every Wednesday. We're going to hear our coverage here with women in tech, women in computing, celebration with Grace Hopper event. We'll be right back after this short break.