 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, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Michael LeBeau. He is the Global Managing Director Accenture Cloud Platform and Chris Mikulski, Enterprise at Architect at ETS. Thank you both for coming on theCUBE. Great to be here. Thank you. So Chris, I'm going to start with you. ETS, the world's largest non-profit educational testing service, give our viewers a little history. Sure, we're the gorilla in the test assessment industry. So ETS Educational Testing Service has been around since the 1940s. We do, our mission is to advance the quality and equity in education through test assessments, through research and related services. So a big thing of what we do is just to try to find out more about the state of education in the world, in the United States and then do what we can to improve that. So ETS has grown up with, to relate this to Accenture and everything. ETS has grown up with IT. We've been around since the 40s and so we've used traditional IT for quite a long time. And over time, we realized obviously that there's constraints and stuff like that on some of the traditional IT. So we understood that we needed to figure out ways to become more competitive, to stay a leader in the industry, to innovate, innovate faster. So that's how we ended up engaging Accenture and working on an effort to migrate to the cloud and give ourselves capabilities to become more innovative. So you're talking about this need to innovate, this need to stay competitive and ahead of the crowd. So why, so tell me, you announced a big partnership with Accenture this morning, a large transformation project. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, no, absolutely. So this has been, Chris has been the principal architect driving that whole agenda for some time. And so why Accenture? Why look to the outside in order to partner with somebody in order to realize that innovation? Yeah, so I'll give you a little bit of history on that. So back in, we've been for years actually messing around with things in the cloud, trying out Amazon and everything. And we quickly realized after doing some POCs and pilots that there's a lot to this. It's not just going to be a trend and it's not just a fad that's out there and everything. But it's hard, it's tough. And so what we needed is we needed somebody who had the capabilities, the experience, the knowledge, the history of doing this already before. And so in around 2017, we engaged Accenture already early on. They helped give us some foundational understanding about movement to the cloud. And then over time, we decided, yeah, we really need a lot more help with this. We need a managed service provider in the mix. We need capabilities to migrate to the cloud. We need help with security, that kind of thing. And ultimately, though, the big goal here is to be more agile, to be more innovative. And we have to do it fast and we have to do it at scale. So yeah, so we did our due diligence. We looked around and after talking to Accenture, it was clear to us that they had that capability. They- So that's why Accenture. So tell me a little bit about what Accenture, what this partnership entails. What are we bringing to it? Exactly. What are you bringing to the table and helping ETS achieve its goals? Yeah, no, absolutely. So we've been partnered for a while, as Chris indicates. And what you realize is there's a journey. Since 1940, you have this IT organization. You're delivering whatever set of value and capability to the business, but the business is hungry, right? The leadership wants to innovate. They want to do new things, but they can't. And so they realize that and, you know, if you move kind of on your own, you move slowly. And if speed is of the essence, which for most organizations it is, then what do you need? Well, you need the tools, the capabilities, the skills. You have to trust somebody to enable that vision. And it's kind of like, you know, if you're a surgeon, do surgery, right? We'll do everything else in order to enable you to spend time innovating. And so what we bring is the whole strategy, the business case development as part of the journey. We show what we can do kind of where you are today and where you will be quickly. We can migrate and transform the workload. And so when we talk about this relationship, it's the whole end to end, but it doesn't stop there, right? So it's not just kind of what we should build, how we should build at the architecture. It's not just moving the workload into the cloud. It's then running it securely, as Chris pointed out, and to optimize it so that it's not just this whole notion of DevOps and agility, those terms are tied together. So we want to enable the agility, all right? But we want them to be able to then leverage it. Don't go direct to Amazon, go direct to any other provider. You know, enjoy the innovation that we're hearing about this week and leverage all that. So this is the key thing. And so this partnership creates the ETS cloud platform. It's their basis, their foundation to now innovate and enable their broader business so they can bring new capabilities to education. So I'm so excited, right? This is such a great partnership and the outcome is going to be so important, I think, to ourselves, right, to our communities. So it's great stuff. The last thing, though, is we want to de-risk this. So the point here is that how do you package all that, all right, so we have something called Accenture Prime. Not to offend my friends. I've heard of another Prime before. So this is about how Accenture is priming the capacity, the services, and being on point for ETS. So one throat to choke, kind of, all right? So you can, you know, that's my throat. And so I'm here to make sure he's successful and the organization is successful and that's really the point. So, you know, everything from the tooling, the cloud management capabilities, to set the policies, the security, cost manage, the, you know, cloud management services, the cost in cloud optimization, and the contracting is all through Accenture. One stop shop, all right? And that's what we're here for. Yep, and that's really important to us because, you know, ETS is, our goal isn't to be out there and be the best at, you know, creating the cloud, building a cloud environment, migrating to the cloud, managing the service of cloud and secure. We want to do what our core competencies are in furthering education and, you know, advancing the quality of it. And so Accenture allows us to do that. They are the enabler. So we can now, we don't have to worry about that part. You know? So I love this, that Accenture is really allowing you to do surgery or really to actually focus on the testing. And so how, with Accenture taking care of you, enabling you, how are you now innovating? What are sort of the goals and aspirations on the table now that Accenture, because they're in the background, helping you? Sure, so yeah, we're going to be able to do more things in the mobile space. We're going to work in furthering their capabilities in doing data analytics. We want to, I mean, oh my goodness, the conference, you know, it's all about artificial intelligence. There's a whole lot of stuff on that. We need to figure out how are we going to do that and how are we going to use that to get better information to, again, accomplish that mission to further quality of an equity in education. So the capabilities and the speed at which we're going to be able to do things is just very exciting. And what's really cool is that you see it in people, they see the change at ETS already and they know what's coming. And so it's already fostered this new and renewed feeling of creativity and it's becoming pervasive and so you feel it. Everybody's coming up with new ideas and we're trying out new things and with the help of Accenture, we're going to be able to do that like a lot faster and in volume. And another thing I didn't mention is, and I think you might have said this earlier, what's really nice too is we know that even in the cloud you can do cost optimization. But cost optimization, it takes a lot of paying attention to and a lot of attention. And the folks at Accenture, they explain to us what they would do and it's great how your service provider is telling you how to save money. I just love that, you know? That's awesome. So you know that, right? You can do that for everyone, right? Yeah, but it's great. There's so much you can do in the cloud and to be able to leverage that. So again, we could focus on our core competencies. It's just an excellent story. It's a good thing. Excellent, excellent. And Michael, I mean, is that really sort of what you're always bringing to the table is you focus on your core competencies, we can take care of the rest. Right, so yeah, you think about the managed service and how do you, it's not, so how do you allow you to do what you do, but also how do you de-risk the whole value problem? All right, because a lot of organizations honestly struggle with how to move to the cloud. And one of the things that Accenture's done, I'm not sure if you know, is we've moved our entire business to the public cloud. So we're 95% in the public cloud today. And so I've made a lot of mistakes, all right? But we've taken all of those lessons learned and we've built that into our platform, our skills, our competencies, and now we can apply that. So Chris doesn't have to make the same mistakes. You were your own giddy pig. Right, we ate our own dog for our own dough, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, so we figured early on, a number of years ago, that you can't really sell this stuff if you don't use this stuff. And so that was kind of an aha moment, I would say, at one of the re-invents like four years ago. We really have to go all in, all right? We have to move our business so that we can learn how to help others do it. And it's thrilling, it really is, because you see that with organizations that are just starting today, they really don't know what they don't know. So all right, call me. We will help you understand that and we've structured this whole thing under this notion of journey to cloud, where we can apply that to your business and you want to get there in a year, two years, we've done this with various organizations. Let's just move, let's get there. Stop the analysis paralysis and let's go. That's the message. What will we be talking about at next year's Accenture, AWS Executive Summit? I mean, sort of when you think about ETS and the things that you're going to be able to accomplish faster this year and in the years to come, what's most exciting to you about this? Well, I know from my side, I'm hoping that you guys are going to be saying, oh my goodness, ETS has become a lean, mean innovation machine. All right. Okay. That's what I want. That's what I want to see, you know? Great. And so I think that, I think with Accenture's help and we're going to be there. So that's what I think you'll see. We're going to be one to watch along with Accenture. So absolutely. Yeah. That's great. We love the fact that ETS wanted to come out at this event and say, this is what we're doing, right? I mean, we're going to climb that mountain, we're going. I mean, so that's, I love that, right? And, you know, so, and to help others realize, yes, you can, yeah, let's go do this. And so here's a, here's an organization, you know, 70 odd years old, right? Yep. I'm saying, no, we, we want, this guy sounds like a startup guy from the valley. That's what we want. We want to become like a startup again. Yeah. Like we got to have that enthusiasm and energy, right? That's what we want to do. And he was talking about the cultural differences so everyone's feeling more creative and get the juices flowing and sharing ideas. Right. And the ability to fail 100%. Yes. You need to be able to fail faster and be okay with that. You know, it's a whole cultural change too, you know? There was a lot in the traditional IT, everything back then, it's like, oh no, you know, you know, failure is, is failure, it's bad, you know? But no, we're going to learn from it and everything, but we need to be able to do that faster and learn from it. And so, yeah, a startup mentality, lean, being lean, being more innovative. Yeah. I want to go work there. Yeah. Right? I know. It's an exciting time. Yeah. This is great. Well, Chris and Michael, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a really fun conversation. Oh, good. Thank you. Good to be here. It's a great question. I appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight. We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit.