 Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante, I'm with wikibond.org and this is Silicon Angles theCUBE. We're here at EMC World, day two. We're live in Las Vegas. This is our fourth year at EMC World. We're bringing you wall-to-wall coverage. We'd like to extract the signal from the noise and Andrew Wilson is here. He's the senior managing director at Accenture, really focusing also on the Navitair business as well. That's part of his portfolio. Andrew, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, Dave. Good to be here. It's great to be here at EMC World as well. Yeah, it's quite an event. There are 15, 16,000 people. It just continues to grow. A lot of buzz. Accenture is an organization that has really global reach, unmatched capabilities. I mean, there are very few companies who have your industry knowledge, your depth, you've got a phenomenal reputation. So let's start with sort of what you're doing here. Why are you here at EMC World? Well Accenture delivers high performance to organizations, to government agencies. And it delivers high performance through technology, consulting and outsourcing. My role is to run the infrastructure for Accenture, which touches technology, consulting and outsourcing from the design and the transformation of technology through to the operation of the ongoing service. And we do that to transform businesses and we deliver complex change programs which carry a business to new levels of operation leveraging what technology can now deliver. Yeah, and your business is largely applying technology to create a business capability. I often think in such a business as yours, well you're certainly infrastructure agnostic. And in many cases, infrastructure should be irrelevant to the customer in terms of what they see. They don't want to deal with infrastructure but you're in the infrastructure business. So it's not irrelevant. Talk about that dissonance. Well first of all, it needs to be seamless and it needs to be invisible but it is absolutely mission critical and strategic. And I think what's happened recently is infrastructure has become more visible through cloud and through virtualization and through the consumerization of IT. And so now clients and customers are more aware of infrastructure than ever before. The demands they're placing on it are different. So in the old days we were running back office operations, we were running institutions and the infrastructure as you say was invisible. Now it has to be out there and it's enabling some of the most rapid business change we've ever delivered. And so the reason I want to run infrastructure is I think it is the most strategic, the most vital and the most vibrant at the moment because the change is pervasive and that's what we're here talking about today. That's an interesting premise. So cloud actually increases complexity in a way. It does. I think for a service provider that's running mission critical, highly available services it's vitally important to get not just the technology right but the entire IT operating model. Classic legacy technology had a little bit more room for error. You could get away more with more. But with cloud it is the potential for an anarchy if you run it in a non-industrial way. So your command control, management and upgrade processes, your configuration and all of those important elements as a cloud-based provider need to be rock solid along with the technology you're running on if you're going to deliver services that you can run mission critical production on. So talk about Navitare a little bit. What's its mission and its focus? Navitare is a great example of a business enabling cloud to deliver high performance outcomes. So Navitare runs flight operations and reservation systems for low-cost airlines. But low-cost does not mean small. Low-cost airlines are looking for a very rapid solution, a very flexible and innovative solution. They're also looking not to encumber themselves with the technology that the systems are running on. They want to buy a virtualized environment. They want to buy cloud and they want to buy by the transaction. So cloud is very well placed to deal with the responsiveness and the configurability that the airlines demand. The airlines will use Navitare to enable their entire end-to-end business operation. So they will allow their end user customers to book through the web, browse and book through the web. They will then check in through the web or check in through kiosks directly linked to Navitare systems. They'll tag bags, they'll board and the flights will be dispatched all through the central Navitare engine. If the engine performs badly or isn't there, the entire airline stops. So what can you tell us about the customers? I mean, types of customers, they'll be name names, that'll be great, but share with us sort of the profile. The customers are great. It's an industry which is very challenging and demanding. It's very visible. Any form of disruption, it's immediately on television. It's very competitive and I'm cautious about naming names because of that competition. But the competitiveness they have, the sales they run and the very, very flexible systems they need are why they come to Navitare. But as a set of businesses, they're typically very, very rapid and agile and need to respond quickly and they need to change quickly. And so we have to move and change faster than you perhaps would find with either a financial service institution or even a retailer. So can we unpack the infrastructure a little bit? Can you give us a peek under the tent? What would we see? You'd see a strong collaboration between EMC and Accenture in a transformed Navitare solution. We run on EMC technology in terms of VMAX. We run with VMware because we're a highly virtualized farm. We own and run it, so it has cloud. It's not in public cloud because of the security and other regulatory requirements. And the clients demand very high availability and a lot of resilience and disaster recovery capabilities which are very sophisticated. For that reason, we've chosen to run it as an industry-aligned vertical stack which gives us the control we need but with still the flexibility of cloud-like characteristics. But it's multi-tenant. It's definitely multi-tenant. It's multi-tenant in three major production locations serving 30 countries. And it is configurable in that different parts of the infrastructure are shared to a greater or lesser extent. The EMC enablement is most shared because storage is shared. Based on the nature and scale and size of the airline, there's a different combination of physical and virtual servers. But one of the most innovative parts of Navitare is that the airline's business and sales behavior will change very rapidly. So their requirements for capacity and as a transaction engine will be very different one week to the next. We can stand up different combinations of server to allow a client to enter a very, very busy sales period when they will promote through social media, they'll promote through Twitter and Facebook, some very, very aggressive discounting and they'll want to sell their catalog and their inventory very quickly. Yet in normal operations, they may only need half or a quarter of the physical scale that the sale will give them. And so we flex and accommodate that. And we do it though without downtime and we have to do it in a way which is very sensitive to the fact that we're enabling the entire business as I said. So you mentioned it's not a public cloud. That's a taboo word I would imagine in your customer. It is. I think cloud characteristics, it's hybrid. I think it needs to be, I mean we certainly at the moment could not take it public for that reason. And we don't need to. And we're very confident in and I need to deliver control and upgrade. And I think some of the things we're seeing here at EMC world about software defined data center, the next level of virtualization will give me the roadmap I need for the future. So what will that enable you? I mean I get the whole software defined storage. I think it's great for EMC they're going to be able to integrate faster and it'll potentially cut their costs. They'll be able to get to market faster from a customer. What does that do for you? It means I can respond more quickly to a very rapidly changing market. I've had to upgrade because of some stabilization work I needed, every single production environment, every single highly data analytical reporting environment which the clients run and disaster recovery environments. And I need to do that while still delivering service. I need to provide and provision rapidly changing development environments so that they can take the new functionality which the development team continues and continuously delivers. And then I need to be able to look at new levels of virtualization in areas of the infrastructure which I think classically have not benefited from some of the fault tolerance of the storage. So certainly the network and firewalls and load balancers. And so virtualization in that space, virtualization of the whole data center I think is the future because it's going to allow me to scale the whole infrastructure not just storage and compute in a linear manner which I think is powerful. What about, how homogeneous are you? I mean, one of the things that people observe about an Amazon or a Google that they're highly homogeneous. They've got a set of standards that they build to. As a service provider, is that level of homogeneity something that you strive for or are you like a lot of service providers where you got a little bit of a lot of different things? Navite is a good example of relatively homogenous in that it is a set of configured environments that follow standards. We have to do that because we wanted to deliver the highest levels of availability and that comes with management and control protocols which as I said earlier, if we stray from that we start to get into problem areas. So I'm proud to say that we configure based on rigorous standard. That improves the speed we can configure with and it also improves our ability to stand things up and move things around much more quickly and responsively because things look and feel the same. They didn't look and feel as much the same before we used DMC. We had a more anarchic environment that had grown up more organically as clients have grown and so this industrialization intervention using the capabilities of cloud has been very important. So does you sweep that essentially? Do we sweep that? Largely? I think we certainly cleaned up and I think we created a consolidation and a convergence in code, in releases, in environments and in configuration parameters. And that was healthy and I don't mind saying that we had to come from a way behind to deliver at the next level of industrialization that we now do. Okay, so you did that leapfrog effect and that's paying off in business terms? It's paying off in business terms. The thing is operable, it's maintainable. The cost of ownership is good. I can see very much improved response times. I can see improved failover times when clusters failover on databases. I can see batch improvement. I can see complex analytical queries running 60, 70, 80, 90% faster. That delivers business value and cost to serve improvements all over the enterprise. What about this notion of converged infrastructure? Is that something that you're doing? You're looking at? You've chosen not to go down that path? No, I think converged infrastructure for the right form of work, for the right type and selection of client is going to be a vital part of our armory and then on our tools and assets. I don't think at the moment with cloud, with all the various on and off-premise solutions and everything as a service, there is a single solution that meets all workloads of every scale and type of industry and operation. I think where a service provider can help is have very clear guidelines as to what type of workload and what shape of workload should be put where in terms of cloud, in terms of on-premise, in terms of security, in terms of virtualization versus physical. And I think some of the new capabilities we're seeing here are going to enrich that tool set and so we have to upgrade to say, well now you have a different set of options, client, and we would recommend this by way of your production, your development, your DR workloads, et cetera. So, obviously you have large, well-established service companies that are competitors. Is Amazon becoming a competitor? I wouldn't have said so at the moment. We operate transforming businesses and we operate transforming whole enterprises. Amazon, I think, provides an important set of solutions and we see their use. I do challenge the public cloud in terms of its depth and range of services and I typically see us providing wrappers around those in terms of security and DR and resilience, et cetera. But I think Amazon are an important part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem is characterized by a significant number of cloud providers. Adoption is different in different parts of the world. I think it's a little bit more advanced in North America. I think we'll see a catch-up in Eala. And I think Amazon and other players will be an important part of the mix. I also think about concentration risk. As a service provider of mission-critical services, I don't want to put all my bets in one place. I want to give every client an equal focus when recoveries occur and so there's a workload allocation and balancing model which I think is going to become ever more important in the future as more and more of the fabric of the industry is enabled by infrastructure. So, Amazon, I mean, it's kind of the poster child for public cloud but so it sounds like there's a place for it in your ecosystem for the right workload, for the right situation. There's very much a place for it. It's an arrow in the quiver, as I often like to say. Okay, I want to come back to EMC. What do you want to see more of? What's on their to-do list as a partner and as a customer and a provider to your industry? To the immediate navatare industry, their to-do list is to give us a roadmap for virtualizing the entire data center. It's to give us new ways, a new cost points of supporting infrastructure. I think they're knocking it out of the park on availability since they helped us transform our production environments. We've seen no downtime as a result of storage. That's a very, very important fact. They've enabled 34 years plus of continuous elapsed production environment operation in a few months alone. That's powerful. So, they need to keep doing that. They also need to continue to evolve their ability to operate services with us. I use them for staff augmentation because these new skills won't immediately be in my organization. And so, EMC can help me by augmenting the staff base and helping us with the rapid adoption of these new technologies so we can bring them to clients more quickly. Excellent. All right, another happy customer. Applying technology, creating business action. Of course, EMC's not done, as we heard. That's good. There's a lot of room for innovation. Andrew, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure having you. Great to meet you. Thank you. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from EMC World in Las Vegas, day two. We'll be right back.