 Hello and welcome back to theCUBE. We're here breaking the signal out from the noise. Very noisy place that we're in. Then our little cubby here in Google Next 23. We're proud to be here with wall-to-wall coverage today and we're really excited to have two other cloudy guys with us with, I'm here with Dustin Robstrecce with Dustin Kirkland. We're going to be talking to PWC and I want to welcome you both on here. We have Kyle Bassett and Scott Petrie. You both are the leads of cloud and data teams at PWC, which again is a unique thing because we don't usually think PWC and think cloud and data. So we're going to really jump into and unpack that. So welcome to theCUBE. Thanks very much. That long time listener. It's good to be pretty excited to be here with you guys. Well, it's always fun when you can just dive in understand and get into what is going on in the infrastructure. Because you're seeing a lot of what is the underpinnings. Like today, again, at Nazium almost, we're here in Gen AI this whole week. So I think the infrastructure and how people build the infrastructure is just important. We just had two of the infrastructure folks, VP's who owns both on the TensorFlow processing units and on the storage and networking. So this is perfect addition and continuing on with the infrastructure. What are you seeing from your vantage point at PWC and what are you building out that you're both leading those types of teams? Yeah, I'll start just to say like at PWC we're known for the consulting side, right? For the strategies and we're known for understanding our clients business better than anybody else, right? We're the best sector oriented partner that they could have, we know their business. And that factors into how we think about cloud and how we bring it all the way back down to how we do engineering. As we make sure that we're solving a real business problem, we make sure that we're delivering real business value to our clients through engineering. And some of that story gets all the way down to like what are the foundational platforms, products, systems that we're going to use to build those to make them nimble to sort of help them on their transformation journeys and help them figure out how they're gonna evolve their business into the more and more technical days that we live in today. So I think that's a key part of what our value proposition is and that's led us to, you know, who do we partner with? How do we build the best engineering teams that we can build and how do we show up in this way that's new for us as you mentioned? Yeah, and building on that, you're talking about all the infrastructure, all the services, like I think we've all lost count of how many are available to us nowadays. You gotta stay on top of that stuff, but for our teams I think it's about how do you assemble those together? Like at the end of the day we still gotta do a lot of plumbing, we still gotta put tools together, but I'm excited that we used to have to like build systems and we'd celebrate when we got the system built, but now the conversation is starting at like what's the business outcome of this? We solve that and then we work backwards of like okay let's go take the building blocks and let's put these together and leverage cloud services to take things to the next level. Yeah, and you guys are an engineering heavy organization. Obviously listen to your customers, dig in, understand that business, and then engineer solutions. Digital transformation seems to be an important part of that. Maybe you can just talk a little bit about what that customer journey looks like for your clients. Yeah, like for us I think we gotta continue to scream from the rooftops that PWC is leaning heavy into engineering and building a whole new culture of engineering. Like it's a different space and we have a lot of pedigree in the firm, so it's like bring the whole firm together and Scott mentioned like, we're known for strategy a lot, but what customers are asking for is they wanna do the strategy, do the delivery, let's do some more strategy. I think the days of doing a lot of planning and then waiting are kind of going away, so it's building all those things together and our teams are really leaning in. Like they wanna work on cool tech, they wanna take challenges, but I think they're most proud when they look back and they say look at the business problem we solved with engineering and then how do we repeat that for other clients so they can benefit from that. So connect that to Google Cloud. We're here at Google Cloud Next, huge event. There's a bunch of clients, potential clients, prospects, but connect those clients' needs with what you can use out of Google Cloud. Yeah, that's right. We're building a large alliance relationship with Google on purpose because we think the technology that Google has to offer is top notch that we can use to deliver the outcomes that we need to for our clients. When we look at how Cloud migrations have gone over the last few years, there's sort of the lift and shift model and we saw enormous amounts of extra cost and not a lot of the benefits that people thought they were gonna get. And we're seeing a lot of opportunities and Google is a huge partner in helping us do that to save money by actually optimizing and modernizing to the cloud. And that fits closely with that digital transformation agenda, right? So how do you not just go to the cloud but make new applications that function better for your business, run your processes better, give your customers better experiences. And we're finding, working with Google to be a great alliance to help us build out the engineering into that. And so it's cloud and data. So I'm a data guy as well. So I love data. I think data is the heartbeat of a lot of the things that have been announced here. What do your teams do from a data perspective? Are you helping craft data strategies for your customers and data implementation? So hey, you had it all in these three different spots or what does that really mean that you're helping with? Yeah, I get an add on that. Like there's not a, I think what it's turned into is there's not a cloud project that doesn't have data. There's not a data project or data analytics project that doesn't need a bunch of cloud services and a bunch of automation and glue that together. So we've recently purposely brought a bunch of our teams in Canada together because we really look at it like we're better together. And we've done a lot of the grassroots infrastructure work that then customers have done well in that space. But where Scott was getting into is we really wanna focus on the beyond migration piece of the work. And we really wanna circle our thoughts and how we win around this beyond migration, which means business outcomes. Business outcomes are gonna be driven by data. There's no question. A lot of the exciting announcements we're seeing today is also, it drives the conversation back to like, I know we wanna use all this new tech and hit the ground, but do we have good data principles? Do we have governance models on that? Do we have the right data? Is it clean? So it drives back into like thinking about ML ops and some of the principles around that. So I mean, you can't have one way or the other the way I would say. And I'm sure Scott would have something to add to that. Yeah, I mean, we've built a full suite of data services though. Like you said, you have to go from data strategy to data governance to data engineering. Eventually you get to, you eventually get to the stuff people like to talk about, which is the data science, right? What do we learn when we get out of the data, right? But it's a lot of work to get to that place. And in a lot of cases, we're helping our clients build business processes that gather and collect the data and more broadly than just what is the strategy for taking care of the data you have? How do you generate the data that you need to build your business in the direction you wanna go, right? Yeah, as a product manager, it's music to my ears to hear you lead with business outcomes. If that's the goal, then work your way backwards to the solution from an engineering perspective. Is that always plan A? Is that generally how you run things? I think it has to be like the big exciting thing when I look at the PWC, obviously we wanna build engineering culture, engineering practices, and really drive, like Scott and I talk a lot about just the quality of work that we deliver. It needs to be super top notch, and if our teams are proud of what they ship and they never ship anything that they're not proud of, then that foundation is gonna build on that. And then we can focus on those deep principles, but we've got other partners of ours in the firm that we can go to on the industry level that can drive those conversations with those C-levels to say like, okay, what are we trying to solve here? And that industry knowledge that, you know, Scott and I have, we can like lean in a little bit there, but not to the depth that we can as a firm in some of our lines of service. So it's really like, for me, it's nice being able to have focus and have extreme trust to know that these industries are gonna get solved for and the experience is there to push this along. Yeah, and it would seem that PWC on the strategy side has always worked cross domain or cross vertical. Are you seeing that you're bringing that kind of expertise to the cloud and that the data ops type stuff as well and helping different verticals in different ways, different than you expected? We're absolutely seeing that as we've stood up our engineering teams, we've had to decide which way to pivot the pods that we put together, right? Like what is the line of thinking that they work across? Is it a certain type of engineering service or is it a certain type of technology stack? Well we're finding in quite a few sectors where it makes sense for it to be a sector oriented pod where they're really domain deep in some part of that sector's business model. So if it's a data pod working on a pharma company type of situation, they need to understand what the pharma business is and what it looks like to run research trials and how that business operates and how to manage that particular type of data. So they're a lot more specialized than maybe as sort of general engineering guys we thought we were gonna end up. Yeah. The only other piece I'd add to that is alliances are super important to us. So that's why we're here this week with a huge team and leaning into our Google relationships and our alliance partners. But at an engineering level, our teams like to sometimes work across cloud. Our customers demand it, right? So we haven't really always structured the delivery side of per alliance partner. We've more done it from a capability or super powers level. And then we asked teams to work across our communities like our tech communities inside of us. And then the engineering community side is like great engineers want to solve new problems every day giving them the same thing to do all the time isn't always like doesn't always stretch their mind. So we definitely have specialists for different areas but we also want to just like always learn always foster new knowledge and our customers demand us to be pretty wide in the tech stack. Right. You went exactly where I was going with the next question which was really around multicloud and data. You also mentioned just before we came on about your organization growing and including data and cloud infrastructure and those becoming much more closely together. As you think about the explosion of data, what sort of strategies are you employing with your customers to help them manage that and then turn data from a debt to a real asset so they can build off of that? Yeah, I'll start and I know Scott's got an opinion on this. Like a lot of the we need to get back to some principles again, right? Like throwing all our data into cloud without really thinking about it or doing some work around structuring or just the quality of it. It's not going to be cost effective. Like let's start there, right? Like we're going to go to cloud if the data if the data's in the cloud we better be using it. Right. You don't want a data swamp. That data swamp. Yeah. And then I think it does come down to like how do you, when we get into like PI discussions with data, like you have to have like our customers are large enterprise customers. Security and safety is really like you can't compromise on that. So getting the governance model, right? Getting the strategy, right? And then working with the business because I think back to the point earlier the value has to go to the business and a lot of the funding is coming from the business to drive these outcomes. So it's not a tech for tech play all the time anymore. And like to your point or what are those outcomes? And can you value those outcomes? And are they creating value for your organization is super important? Yeah, I think I would just add to that that setting like you started to talk about the foundation a little bit like setting your application ecosystem on the right rails is incredibly important to your speed of delivery and to being able to get on top of things like the data proliferation that we're seeing. I mean you start to look at edge computing and what that's going to do for data as more companies deployed in real ways and how are you going to process all that data? You have to have the rails in the right place to start with so that you have a smooth ride, right? You've got to build those underlying systems that are the foundation of being able to manage it and not get behind it to the data swamp point. You can't get on top of it once you've already lost control of it. So you've got to build the rails. And it's a balance, right? Like, because someone may say, well until we do all that work and get it perfect we can't go and move in all these new directions but you've got to do it at the same time, pick your battles and get value out of that. You've got to fly to plane and change the engine at the same time unfortunately. Yes, unfortunately. I think you actually hit on a little bit of a point when you were talking about having the right app basis are you talking about the customer having it or the ones that you're bringing to bear for the customer and kind of... Actually, both is the answer to that question. I would have said it depends because that's the standard consulting answer. No, actually it's both, right? So we do build products as well and we build accelerators and other kinds of tools that we bring to our client as pre-built assets. We have to have those in the right condition as well because we're on the hook for what we delivered to our clients in that manner, especially. And of course when we build something for our clients we want to do it the right way and if it's our clients building it themselves and we're kind of the player coaches for a little while we want to make sure they understand how to get it the right way, right? On the sports analogy, do you develop reusable playbooks? I mean, surely you've learned some best practices, anti-patterns over time. Absolutely. You parachute into a customer or client situation and it's not the first time you've seen this, right? Yeah, we have I'd say a catalog of... We refer to them as engineering services but it's just basically types of work that we do for our clients in the engineering space and for each of those we have what we think is unique and differentiated method about how to get that done, how to get it done right, how to get it done securely, how to get it done as fast as possible, not be too expensive, right? But try to get it done the right way and make sure that we have learned from things that have gone wrong in the past which everybody's been through those projects, right? So don't make the mistake twice. Yeah, I think that's the key and I mean both of us having been at different clouds but when you started and you talked about the migrations and the lift and shift and I think we saw a lot of people do lift and shift and now we're not big on the repatriate, we're not big repatriates about repatriating but what we're seeing is from customers we talk to or end users we talk to is there's a lot of pulling it back, refactoring and taking yet to another cloud. Are you seeing a lot of that and you're being brought into kind of like we did cloud but we did cloud wrong and now we have to go back and fix something? 100% I think everywhere. We have to get in and do surgery on some of these applications, like that's what it's gonna take. There were days when we just tried to slam it into a container, right? And that added maybe a little bit more value than moving a VM to a VM but did it really move the needle? I'm not sure because still have to manage that and there are the right use cases but we're gonna move these apps, like you're gonna look for managed Google services to do these things. Like there's like my point earlier there's a service for everything that's rock solid and generally globally scalable with a security model around it. So a lot of those times is we need full stack developers now. Yeah, like we just can't be like lick the infrastructure so upskilling our infrastructure teams that are good devs and learning some, you know, these fourth generation languages is really important. And then vice versa, the devs learning some of the automation work and tools but we have a library of stuff. Like we're not, we're gonna rewrite this and the days of being the consultant sitting in the corner filling your day. Like we're gonna show up and say we've already solved this problem and customers are, it's nice to see customers opening up to say, okay we've had this tool, yes we've been married to it for a while but we're willing to let it go to go to a cloud native kind of tool and take advantage of that. Yeah, I mean it's an ever evolving universe of technology stacks that you could sit these applications on and sit different customer experiences and so on on. I think it's interesting whenever I hear somebody say we did it wrong so we have to change the technology because you did it wrong is what you need to fix. Right. And so, we've seen clients go from one cloud to the same cloud but redo it to get the, you know, to get the modernization that they should have done the first time once they saw how it behaved. Of course we see people switch, you know, we see people switching vendors around because they didn't like the method or the experience that they had. Right. So it's every day though. It's in every client conversation that we have is exactly that, like how do I get this better? And one of the things that that UBC has is a pretty strong capability that's not really engineering even though I usually like to talk about that is cloud FinOps is a capability where we've gotten really good at, if you put a DevOps team together with a cloud FinOps team, you can really change somebody's outcomes in the cloud. Just take apps and move them forward a little bit and you know, it's a big deal to have the dashboards and the scoring of what it's actually costing you, where the cost is coming from. Transparency there. The cloud providers do a good job of giving you that data but not a lot of people use it very well. Right. And it's pretty confusing data too. I know having built a pricing model at Amazon I can tell you it's nice. We all had different ways of doing it and it was very confusing to the end customer which wasn't being very customer focused. But so with the final minute that we have here, help us understand kind of your goals here this week, your partnership with Google and how you know, PWC is really driving into the future. Yeah, for me like it's about showing up like step one, right? Like we haven't been here at this conference. This is always my busy week. Like it's so energetic being back here and seeing old friends and it's a small, it's a big place with a small industry we've been in. So, you know, part of it is just we wanna, we gotta be out there telling our story, right? Like we've invested a lot and we're bringing in a whole set of fresh thinkers and we're merging that with a very talented like a set of teammates in our firm and being here and getting to see like the product managers and getting closer to the Google engineers and building up those relationships and trust. We've got a lot of clients here and sometimes our clients don't get a chance to get together anymore. So it's funny, we need a lot. Like we've met a lot in San Francisco and you know, we probably were all from the same city sometimes in Toronto. So for me, I'm trying not to overthink it. I'm just about, it's about meaningful connections, you know, getting face to face talking about tech and getting inspired by all these new announcements that are coming to bear. And then we bring that experience back to our projects and our clients and then let's get at it. That's kind of the added so. Yeah, you said a lot of what I would have said but I'll just say building our story is probably the biggest thing. Like, you know, we know that PwC isn't the first thing people think of when you say cloud engineering. And so, you know, we're working on making sure that that message is out there with our clients, with our alliance partners, et cetera, right? Like just want to make sure people know. So, you know, something like this is a good chance for us to get out here and talk about it. So thank you for that. Yeah, well we thank you and thank you for joining us today and we really appreciate it. It's always fun, the people who are on the front lines dealing with cloud and data because it's so important and we get that from our vantage point. And I think you can't do all the other neat stuff if you don't have that right. And like you said, working backwards from a business outcome, totally dead on as we all agree. So thank you for joining us and stay with us. This is theCUBE from Google Next 23. We'll be right back with the rest of the team. I'm Rob Streche. I'm here with Dustin and Kirkland and we got John Furrier and Lisa Martin in the house and the rest of the Silicon Angle media team is out there getting the stories and delivering it to you. Thanks for hanging in there and we got four more sessions still to come with a wrap with an analyst round table. Looking forward to keeping you here. Thanks guys. Thank you.