 I won't mind that either. Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. And welcome back to theCUBE. We're here live in San Francisco on day two of our coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Troyer. I'm here with Larry Socker. Larry is the, hi Larry. We are Larry, you are the global lead for infrastructure growth and strategy at Accenture. That's great. Welcome as a first timer to theCUBE. You're now a member of theCUBE alumni. I'm now a member of theCUBE alumni. Good to be here. Awesome, awesome. So one of the themes here that we've noticed here on day two of the conference is the reality of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, the demos up on stage have been real production workloads from real companies at a global scale. And the theme, it's been a lot about OpenShift and OpenShift and that as a bridge with the rest of Red Hat's stack. So Accenture, global SI, you know, work with very big companies, very complicated problems and enabling them, hybrid cloud, is that important for you and your customers? Absolutely. Accenture actually got out very aggressively about four or five years ago with our cloud-first strategy and it was very public-centric. You know, how do you start to take advantage of the innovation of the hyperscalers, the AWS's, the Azure's, to really start to innovate, drive agile application development and get out there very quickly. However, if you take a look at our clients, you know, they're typically large, complex, global 2,000 companies and for a variety of reasons, whether it's regulatory reasons, the GXP compliance, if you go to the pharmaceutical industry, HIPAA for healthcare, you know, PCI, they've really, you know, they continue to invest in their data centers. I mean, other reasons, telco cloud's an interesting one. It's a proximity thing. It's the thing that actually connects the public providers and NFE's getting built on that. Performance, you know, if you start to look with SAP driving an eight terabyte HANA, you know, where do you start to deploy that? So, you know, and then even investments, a lot of our clients have significant investments in their data centers and infrastructure. So what we've been doing over the last, probably six to eight months, is really taking a look at a lot of the innovation that we saw from those hyperscalers and bringing it to the data center and really trying to create industrialized private clouds with the same kind of standardization that you have in the world of Amazon and Azure, and, you know, same automation, the cloud operating model, and really start to do that, not just in the data center or private cloud, but also the rest of infrastructure. And ultimately our clients are going to end up with hybrid environment. So we're, you know, we've been using our extension cloud platform to integrate, you know, the public providers now in the private side, you know, with open shifts, you know, the VMware's of the world, and even back into the legacy infrastructure. Well, that's fascinating. And also I think really grounded in reality. I mean, the tech industry, there's all these pendulums and hype cycles. And a few years ago, it's right, right? We were talking a lot about public, there was a lot of innovation, and maybe it's taken a few years for the private stack and the hybrid stack to catch up, to give you that advantage in terms of agility, and in terms of speed to market, speed to production. Can you talk a little bit about, maybe what that relationship with OpenShift, you say you're seeing, we saw, like I said, we've seen a lot of OpenShift in production, are you seeing that as well? Yeah, we definitely are. I mean, you know, we have a lot of our clients who are looking, okay, hey, I want to start getting to more serverless architectures. I want to start adopting the new technologies, agile development, you know, start to really embrace DevOps. At the same time, it's, you know, either for data gravity or for compliance reasons, there's certain applications that just can't move into the public environment. So SAP has been challenging to do it, particularly as we start to get HANA. So, you know, they've been starting to look and say, okay, well, OpenShift becomes a very attractive alternative to start developing applications that I can then, you know, run in a private environment as well as bring up into Amazon and Azure. So a few years ago, for better or worse, one of the terms people were using was lift and shift. Yeah. And people were taking their, you know, or legacy that this, a lot of years of battle-tested infrastructure and do you just hoisted into the cloud? Do I have to rewrite it? Can I containerize it? I mean, what are people doing and how are you helping them prepare? It's a great question. Going back to the scale of our clients, you know, our clients will have anywhere from 2,000 to over 20,000 workloads and applications. So the notion of lift and shift or modernization, it's not a binary problem. So what we actually did was we took our app modernization practice, which is part of our technology business. We coupled it with our infrastructure migration team. I'm a part of our Accenture Operations Group. And we created an integrated cloud factory. And then we actually took, we had two different sets of tools. We combined them into one Accelerate toolkit. And what that does is it allows us to do the upfront application portfolio assessment. We figure out the dispositions of the applications, what needs to stay together, you know. We determine which ones need to be refactored or remediated or modernized. And that's our technology organization. And then for those that we need to just migrate or, you know, a few minor changes, we then had, you know, do all the planning, the migrations of that. And we're able to do this at, you know, at scale with the factory, leveraging all the combination of onshore and offshore and these tools to do all the automation and do the, you know, the wave planning, keeping dependencies and moving data around. And we're able to do, you know, anywhere at one client, we're doing over 1,200 workloads a month. That's amazing. I mean, the scale and the speed and time to market, even in the demos here on stage, has been actually pretty surprising to me because it means that it's real. As people shift, as people are shifting their portfolios into a hybrid stance, some workloads here, some workloads in a multicloud, can you talk a little bit about how you're approaching multicloud and how you're approaching maybe multicloud over time? Well, you know, I mean, we made a big bet on our Accenture Cloud platform, so, which is really a CMP, started very public focused, you know, how do I provision and manage and optimize my workloads across the public providers. We've now started to integrate into the private side much more aggressively. We were always doing it at our clients, but it was a very custom one off. As we start to industrialize and standardize on the private side, it now gives us seamless hybrid cloud management. We're actually extending that to go to legacy. We've still got a number of clients, like insurance companies, where they've got significant business logic trapped in their mainframes. And our app modernization guys are starting to wrap those with microservices, starting to do front end development in OpenShift, it's an example, and get closer to the users for better customer experience, much more agile delivery, while still maintaining that frame. And what we find is, as you've got these distributed applications based on microservices, you now need to manage across that hybrid environment. And it's public, it's private, but it's also legacy infrastructure. Yeah, and that's got to be complicated. One of the other themes of this show, probably coming out of Red Hat's own culture of openness and of, we had a great, I love the keynote this morning talking about, well, you know, planning is great, but you know, eventually the plan is going to hit the battlefield and you've got to be adaptive and you've got to be agile. So when you are talking with a CIO and when you're talking with these leads of business and their IT leads, you know, what are some of the things that you're preparing them with and what are maybe some of the signals that they're ready to do this versus maybe not ready to do this? Yeah, you know, that's a very good question. What's interesting is, when I talk to most of the CIOs, I think they've got a pretty good handle on the technologies. I mean, it's, and not to trivialize, it's not simple technology, but I think most have focused a lot of their energy on that. I think their biggest challenges are the culture and the operating model. So, you know, if you think about how the hyperscalers do it, I mean, firstly, standardized, which I think that's, you know, these CIOs are typically do, you know, they're not driving standard t-shirt sizes. They don't have that discipline to have a standardized service catalog. What you need to automate. Traditionally, in the enterprise, everything was custom. Everything was bespoke. Exactly. So, it's not in their DNA to go to that standardization. And I mean, think about the hyperscalers. I mean, while Amazon innovates at an incredible pace, they still have a discrete set of services. And if you can automate and do real cloud operating model, you really need to have that level of standardization. The whole operating, the business and operational transformation is very difficult. You know, it's interesting. Now, the apps guys have typically done a reasonably good job. I mean, getting out there and using agile development. You know, they're embedded in the BUs, doing their sprints, et cetera. Still some work to be done for the infrastructure guys. You know, if you start to take a look at it, if you could have an app team doing two week sprints, they're ready to drop code. All of a sudden they have to wait 12 weeks for the infrastructure to catch up. So we've been spending a lot of time looking at how do we enable software to find infrastructure? How do we start to even do, you know, infrastructure as code with similar sprints and embed into the BU scrums, et cetera. Talent's a huge issue. I mean, they're all struggling. It's very hard to get people with native cloud skills. You know, it sourced them in the market. So most of our clients are really struggling. I mean, it's good for us as an integrator and bring them to bring those skills, but they too need to develop those skills. Well, and that all in some way solves itself over time as standardization happens, right? As Kubernetes becomes more ubiquitous, you will have more people trained up in Kubernetes. Same thing with some of the infrastructure layer. Maybe can you drill down maybe a little bit more into the infrastructure and how are you helping, so they say the infrastructure folks become more agile. You know, at some point you've got mainframes. They're not moving. So you kind of have to wall them off with some agile layers in the middle. We've been big proponents of software to find infrastructure. I think VMware's actually done a pretty good job getting the market up to speed on software to find data centers. So how do you first use virtualization techniques? Like, you know, if you think about VMware's NSX or Cisco's ACI, how do you deploy those to provide a vehicle to do the automation and then severe, just very intense automation? Now, if I have to standardize first, but then I start to automate. So whether it's VMware with V relays, it's Ansible. So I mean, we've seen Red Hat do some great work around Ansible and doing that automation. We use Chef in our extension cloud platform, but really starting to drive that similar type standardization and automation. But you have to change how you operate to do that. And I think that's where a lot of people struggle. So they may have automation projects, et cetera, but they haven't really fundamentally shifted how they do it. So at one of our clients, a life sciences client, we actually were doing, we were implementing a software to find data center. We had ServiceNow as the front end portal, V relays automation integrated with the GXP compliance system. And we just kept iterating through in two weeks, sprints, we would incrementally deliver first minimal viable product to compute and storage and up the t-shirts. We got into more database as a service, eventually even being able to spin up SAP basis instances. And we were able to leverage a lot of the automation, including the network, which is oftentimes a long pull in order to accomplish that. Right, right. So starting with bite-sized pieces, incremental improvements. And that's the great thing about Agile, right? I mean, and the problem is that the apps guys have known it for a while. As infrastructure guys, we're a little new. So we've actually taken our Accenture DevOps platform and we've created an infrastructure as cloud plugin, you know, that uses GitHub and Jarrah to now deliver drop releases of infrastructure as code. Well, that's great. I mean, you mentioned a lot of different tools and platforms here, a lot of them open source, right? We're here at Red Hat Summit. I think one of the, again, one of the signals of this week, they were, you know, announcements with Microsoft, announcements with IBM, you know, very serious, and you all have been working with them, very serious, enterprise ready ecosystem here. Do you get any pushback about the open source nature of some of these things? You know, less and less. And a number of years ago, there was clearly, you know, because of particularly licensing enterprise-grade applications, I think that, you know, I think people have become much more comfortable with open source. I mean, one thing I would often look at is Kafka. I mean, you look at, I mean, I see so much Kafka getting deployed right now. It's, you know, an open source model. It's, you know, I'm seeing it used in so many different use cases and development. So I think a lot of, and thanks to Red Hat, you know, give them credit for bringing open source to mainstream and to the enterprise market, putting, you know, licensing around it. So I think, no, I don't see the same kind of pushback anymore, and I think the world's changed. It's kind of the new model, right? It's either both at the cloud layer and then at the infrastructure layer and the automation, everything like that. You know, maybe talk a little bit more about some of the Accenture, what I've been gathering here, right? There's a bunch of open source tools you're using, but you have your own tool sets too, right? And the Accenture cloud. Can you talk a little bit about? Yeah, so the Accenture cloud platform, I mean, we do use a lot of third party technologies. We're not going to go reinvent the wheel. We're going to pull in the best of products that we can. And it does, and we started off, I mean, it's been out there for about five years. You know, we have an orchestration platform that's built into it. We do use a lot of Chef to do, you know, the provisioning of the environments. You know, and we keep evolving it. We've changed out billing optimization engines and now are very focused on how do we push it into the private world? So that brings in new tools and capabilities to do that automation. So we continue to push that. The next big step that we're focused on is the application and infrastructure management. So one of the emerging problems is we start to see microservices get adopted and you're going to get applications that might have a front end running serverless in Amazon, you know, with Lambda, you know, a distributed private cloud with a couch DB, you know, database cache. How do you manage all that, right? Yeah, and then a mainframe reservation system. So this is one of our, you know, one of our clients has that environment. How do you manage and troubleshoot across that environment? So the ability to first look at what I'll call the application or service topology, you know, up in the tools, like I just saw a Dynatrace presentation at the ease of the world, but then go, you know, the east-west topology and then mapping north-south into virtualized and physical infrastructure. And this to me is going to be one of our, you know, more difficult challenges because at the, you know, at the same time you've got that complexity, it's getting more complicated. You know, I think containers become much more dynamic. You software-defined networking becomes a lot harder to sexualize and troubleshoot that. So we started to look at the assurance or service management side and really start to innovate, you know, more there. Yeah, that's amazing. And I think that's going to become more and more necessary, right? We, you know, with big companies, global, you know, distributed all over the world, distributed on multiple platforms with private, with private components, all these services mixed together with service bus, you know, you know, when that blows up, it's going to blow up spectacularly. Yeah, exactly. And we've all been on those calls with 50 people that we can't afford to do, you know, and it's, I'm a network guy, everyone points at us. So I really do want the tooling and instrumentation. I mean, the other big change that's interesting is the operator is going to change. I mean, I think there's two major elements to that. It's obviously, you know, DevOps, you know, development and operation is getting, you know, much tighter together. SRE is a great example of that. And I think we, you know, if I look at DevOps right now, I feel it's still very dev-centric. I mean, we're great on CICD pipelines. Not quite as good on the ops side. I think we got some room to change there. Oh, there's a lot of growth and journey. And I love that the community, like we can all learn together and I think open source and all these pieces are a big piece of it. But I look at on the infrastructure side and the infrastructure operation side, one of the things we're looking at now is how do we transform both our clients' operators and our own operators when we do outsourcing? So how do we take them from what was traditionally eyes on glass looking at consoles and now write the next, you know, data ingestion scripts, the analytic algorithms of visualizations, you know, write the next automations to streamline something. And over time, tune the AI engines as we start to adopt AI to particularly around performance optimization. You know, how do we start to incorporate that? Absolutely. I think, yeah, we're all facing that. I mean, it sounds like I really enjoyed learning about how all everything that Accenture's bringing to the table on this enterprise journey to the cloud. Larry, thanks for joining us. Larry's Larry Soccer, Global Lead for Infrastructure Growth and Strategy at Accenture. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Thank you, I enjoyed it. We're here, we're just wrapping up here. We've been live here for two days at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco. We're closing up our second day. We'll be joining you in the morning tomorrow as we finish off the conference. You can always count here live on theCUBE.