 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have today, we have Mahmoud Elassir. He is the CTO and Senior Vice President of Global Technology Services at Verizon and a net report, Senior Managing Director, Accenture Technology North America. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Well thanks for having us. So we're talking today about Verizon's migration to the cloud, but Verizon is a company that many people have familiarity with Mahmoud, but just lay out a few facts and figures for our viewers here. Sure, I would say Verizon is a Fortune 16 company. Last year we made $126 billion from our kind of loyal customers. We're, today we deployed, we're the first people to deploy 5G and we have 98% coverage in the US. So we're America's fastest and most reliable wireless service. So it's a company that touches so many of our lives. Earlier this year, Verizon selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider. What was, one, what was the impetus for moving to the cloud? And two, why AWS? Yeah, that's a great question, but I'd like to zoom out a little bit more and talk about what is Verizon, what's our mission and how we're kind of tackling it. And so I'd say when you think about Verizon, our mission is to deliver the promise to the digital world, right? Enable, deploy 5G and enable the fourth industrial revolution. And as part of this, it's all about empowering humans to do more, right? In global technology solutions, our winning aspiration is to develop products and services that our customers and employees love. And then we also to be the destination for world-class technology talent and be the investment innovation center for the company. So when it comes to digital transformation, we look at the enablers and where we want to invest our energy and how do we want to leverage the right partners. So at the heart of our outside technology transformation is public cloud. When you think about the public cloud, it's like where do you want us, it'll allow us to spend more of our energy building solutions and for our customers and creating value for our customers. And also public cloud will allow us in our business to experiment faster, better and cheaper. And technology our focus is to always say it on efficiency, speed and innovation. So that's our kind of a motto. And at the heart of this public cloud is a key kind of element for our journey. Well I want to get into that journey a little bit more, but Annette, I want to bring you into the conversation here. So Verizon is one of the leading communications companies that is migrating to the cloud at this scale. What are some of the lessons as you have helped and observed and also helped this partnership grow, what are some of the key takeaways that you would say? Well I think there's a couple, if you take a look at some of the lessons that our clients learn at Accenture when we go into the market, really helping our clients think about how do we leverage technology for achieving business outcomes. You just talked about some extraordinary business outcomes that you're looking to achieve and you'll do that through a variety of things, including leveraging technology. And so just like that, we encourage our clients to be thinking about what is the business innovation, what is the outcome, the disruption that we're looking to achieve through leveraging technologies like AWS, right? I think secondly, if you think a little bit about the importance in that journey of communicating that vision of what will it mean to be able to leverage that kind of technology, you just communicated a very strong vision. And that's so important to the change journey that many of these organizations go on. There's importance of the investment strategy, but ultimately the innovation that the organization itself, the engineers within the organization are a part of delivering. The kind of innovation that you'll be delivering is really, it will not only make such a big impact on those in your enterprise delivering that, but to all of us who are consumers of your business strategy, which would be fabulous. And I think in the end, one of the most exciting things, and it's really sitting, Alex, as we were talking a little bit about some of what Verizon is doing earlier in the day, one of the most important things is really thinking about how this provides an opportunity for the enterprise to change. So moving to be a much more agile enterprise, being able to respond to market changes, and certainly in the business that you're in, the market is changing every day. And so by leveraging innovative products like AWS's platform, it really provides the opportunity to constantly leverage new technology in that environment. And as you said, the market is changing every day and customers are demanding things and companies are providing customers with things they don't even know that they want until they have them in their hands. How, at a time when customer differentiation is such a key competitive advantage, how are you staying ahead of the game and making sure that you know, you're sort of getting inside the heads of your customers and then you're also delivering what they want and expect. Customers comes first at the Verizon, right? It's just at the heart of our technology is also leveraging emerging technology. So cloud is one, scaling AI, ML is another one. One of the big program we're doing is how do you move personalization to one-on-one personalization? How do you make every customer feel they have their own network, or their own network that's personalized for their needs, their own experience, their own plans, their own recognition? So that's key. So today when you think about, most companies do segmentation or personalization at the cluster level. So one of the biggest things is we're shifting now from systems of engagement and system of records, we're inserting systems of insights. And system of insight allows to build a DNA for every customer and will allow us to personalize the customer experience for every customer at the customer level based on all the data kind of we know about them from the data they use with us and will allow us to personalize their experience throughout every touch point. What will a personalized customer experience at Verizon look like in the future going forward? What are some of your goals and aspirations? Imagine you're like, you've bought every iPhone since iPhone one through like iPhone 10, right? So you're an iPhone enthusiast, right? So when you come up on our website, we recommend like the iPhone, the next iPhone. Say hey, the next iPhone is up, next iPhone rather is up. So we know more about you and your history and we recommend the right accessories. We recommend, so we tell you, hey, this stuff is coming. So you feel we are watching out for you. You're like, we know you, we know you, we know you better than anybody. So at any touch point, when you come to us, we kind of tell you what's the next thing for you. And then even when you don't know, we go like from a network kind of performance from everything we proactively kind of cater for you. That's a big one. The other one, how do you, when you want to talk to us, how do you get leverage technologies like chatbots and conversational IVRs and stuff, and make sure you feel you're like, we know you. If you have like a different accent, we recognize that accent, then you say, hey, do you want to speak in that language? So imagine the power of doing that versus today you have to do like you have a Spanish IVR, you have to have a Spanish kind of call center. Imagine through AIML and chatbots and stuff, you can recognize all the stuff and personalize the experience. Today at Verizon we're known for our network superiority and we have great customer experience, but we want to be known also for our experience the same way we're known for our network. And we believe at Verizon there is always a higher gear. So we all aspire for the higher gear and aspire our customers to feel they have a Verizon for every customer. So that's from the customer experience. And as you said, the goal is to have the customer feel that the company empathizes with them and really gets them. What about the workforce changes? I mean, and that was talking about the importance of change management and the cultural shift that these kinds of transformations entail. Have you come up against any challenges at Verizon in terms of this migration? Sure, I would say at the heart of our kind of transformation there are four main pillars. The first pillar is enabling all these modern technologies. This is like cloud, cloud native, API, AIML. And especially I go back to cloud. At the time of enabling cloud it's very important to get everybody on board at the beginning of the journey. So one of the biggest thing is to get like the security team on board as early in the process as possible and making sure the security team is a development team, not just kind of a controls team. So having an engineering team on the security side is a big one to kind of automate all this kind of, all the security controls we need in the cloud. So we have the right guardrails and have everything automated. The other thing, same thing, like with the audit teams, get them on board on the journey and have an advisory kind of board with the audit team and security team and legal teams. Everybody is onboarding on the journey. So that's how it's a key and pay lots of dividends. Investment upfront, but it pays lots of dividends so you can move faster. It's like more of a slowdown to speed up. So that's a big one. The second one is technology is one thing but you need the culture. So you need to have sustainable momentum and this kind of movement. So the proxy we wanted to have is like have AWS certifications because you need 10% believers to have momentum. So our proxy to believers is AWS certifications. So we put the program in place. We call it Verizon Cloud Train. And that train basically is like a 12 weeks, six prints and we help our teams prepare for the certification. So last year we did more than 1,000. We have more than 1,800 people probably right now certified with AWS. That's incredible. At the same time we set up Dojos which are like immersion centers. So we have like 40, 50 seats in different cities and with like five, six coaches. So if you're a team who wants to come in and move your application to the cloud, we help you do it. If you want to decompromptize your application to microservices, we help you. If you want to do APIs, we help you. So we help you build deep expertise into these technologies we are doing. So that's like transforming the teams and the upskilling, I would call it upskilling, the talent is key. Hiring great talent in key roles is also key. The third pillar is changing the way we work from what we call a project-based to outcome-based. And this is beyond agile. Agile is an enabler for this, but how do you change in a model where everything is outcome-based, where you have a business and technology team working together to move an outcome? If I want to increase my kind of video and demand revenue per customer, everybody is making all the changes, experimenting and making sure that's the need that's moving. It's not like I did my code, I delivered my, I did my testing, I deployed my app. It's what's the business impact, what's the customer kind of expectation. And the fourth one is how do you establish internal kind of communities and get out of like the thief domes and stuff and get every, have a culture of kind of sharing and cheering for others. And so we have like DevOps days internally within the company, we bring in external internal speakers. We have internal kind of inner sourcing for some piece of code. And so you have to fire on all cylinders, I would say, and get as many kind of parties included as early in the process and have also an objective to have everything as code. And it's a journey. So you have to always keep on exercising new muscles and more muscles and the more muscles you exercise, the faster you can go. So Mahmoud, Annette already shared with us her key learnings from your experience and your journey. What would you say? I mean, you're here at AWS re-invented. It's not your first rodeo. You've been to this conference many times before. When you're talking with other CTOs, CIOs and they're saying, hey, so what's it has it going for you? I mean, what's your advice for a company that is really just starting this process? Sure, I would say the movement to the public cloud is not just a cosplay. I mean, cost needs to be, efficiency needs to be there, but that shouldn't be the primary kind of objective. The primary objective should be speed and innovation. At the same time, you'll deliver a cost. There are lots of people who say, oh, do I, is it same, you can't compare the same for same, because it's different. And on-prem you can do like A, B testing and the cloud you can do A to Z testing for much cheaper. You don't need everything you have on-prem. You can experiment. So think about it accelerating the speed of innovation. That's the key one. And I said it before, but I said again, it's like all about having the right kind of injury, like from a security perspective. People would argue, oh, public cloud, is it secure? I would argue, public cloud can be more secure than on-prem because you have all the tools to kind of automatically kind of protect and detect and recover and you have more tooling to allow you to be more secure. It's having the right kind of guardrails and the right controls, right automation and right teams. So you have to build a muscle across all these fronts and have them as upfront as possible. Great, a great note to end on. Thank you so much Mahmoud and Annette. I appreciate it. Very good. It's been really fun having you on the show. Thank you. Thank you for having us. We will have more from the cubed live coverage of the AWS executive summit coming up in just a little bit.