 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 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests this segment. We have Brian Bohan, the AABG Global Business Lead at AWS, and Chris Wegman. Welcome back to theCUBE, Managing Director Accenture AWS Business Group. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us here. So I want to start with you, Chris. It's been three years since Accenture and AWS announced this relationship. Bring us up to speed on and sort of what's happened in those three years. Yeah, it's been a fast-paced three years. We've seen AWS continue to mature the platform, grow their number of services. We've seen our customers go from looking at just lift and shifting workloads in AWS to now doing full cloud native services, machine learning, containerization. All the really cool stuff they can do on the platform. So for the business group, we've gone through that journey and that maturity as well. They started very focused on things like lift and shift migrations and cloud management and investing in assets and capabilities, now to really focus on innovation and helping our customers drive that innovation on top of that platform. I want to get into that, but you've also recently said you're going to continue to expand this partnership, Brian. And so what does this mean? Yeah, I mean just kind of keying off some of the things Chris talked about, right, is that, and I think we've talked about innovation specifically, really where we're going to focus. And we're also going to talk about vertical and industry solutions, which I think we'll talk about a little bit later. But, you know, even if we look at where we've had a lot of success in the mass migrations, moving enterprise applications like SAP to AWS, what we're seeing now, customers are in their maturity curve where they're there in the cloud. And now they're asking, what can I do, right? So I had SAP at my core systems in the cloud. And so we're investing heavily in, as Chris mentioned, some of the modern technology. So application modernization, cloud native development. Andy and his keynote today talked a lot about database freedom. So now that you're in the cloud, how can we start looking at your database portfolio? Start using some RDS or Aurora, some other native AWS services. So these are ways that we can innovate with our customers that, you know, you typically maybe don't think about, but are critically important. And I would say on the other side, and what Chris mentioned as well, is the investments we're making in machine learning and in AI and analytics and edge computing. And then really at the core of that is data, right? And what we find with these kinds of projects is you need to move very, very quickly. And you also need to prove out the concept. So these are two important things. And so what we're doing as a big investment in the partnership is investing something we call Launchpad. So this is a mechanism in kind of in Amazon parlance. We can think about it as two pizza teams. So several nodes of two pizza teams around the world. And these folks are 100% focused on driving innovation, driving POCs and pilots and prototyping and asset development in the innovation areas around AWS machine learning, analytics, connect. So new modern customer care capabilities. So that's really important. And then kind of related to that very closely is our innovation studio. So these teams will be located across the world. Some of them in or around liquid studios that Accenture has. So the innovation studio is a place where we can bring clients to get together and we can execute on working backward and ideation and design thinking sessions. So we can take it from an idea to actually a concrete implementable set of requirements and then use that Launchpad team to execute very quickly. So this is something we're really excited about. So I'm interested, you bring clients into the studio. Now why is that so important to get everyone in the room together? Yeah, I think, you know, what we've seen is it gets them out of their day to day environment, right? And in an innovative environment where they can go through that innovation process, come up with those ideas and then very quickly see them in reality versus sitting and writing a bunch of requirements down and things like that. So the whole design thinking process and going through that we find works very well in a very innovative studio type format. So how does it work? I mean, you know, a client comes, you're together, Accenture, AWS together with the client saying what are your problems? And so how do they, how do you help them learn to think expansively about what their biggest challenges are? So we start with some design thinking workshops. So thinking about what they're trying to achieve, not the technology, right? We get to the technology, but what they're trying to do, how do they want to think about the problem differently? And we do the working backwards. So ideas, you know, where do you want to, where do you want to end up, you know, either a press release or something like that that documents where they want to be. Then we work backwards at leverage of design thinking and then going to the ideation phase, look at what will work, what might not work and then how technology, we can use the AWS technology. So the technologists are there that say, oh, if we can go use these three services off the platform, we can actually deliver this and, you know, take advantage of this data that you may not have had before to help me answer that problem. And the technologists are also saying, we can leverage these three existing technologies. We can also build some more stuff. Yeah, and I think, you know, Andy was again hitting home the right tool for the right job. And as Chris mentioned, we don't start with the technology, we really start with the problem. And what's really cool about this is that Accenture's got very mature and developed and deep capabilities through their digital practice around design thinking, working backward. And when folks come visit Amazon, one of our most popular EBC or executive briefing session is around Amazon culture and how does Amazon innovate? So we've programatized that as well into our working backward methodology that we work with clients. And what we've done is we've married these two things together. So we're able now to bring the best of both worlds and help our customers through that journey getting from idea to actual realization. And then as you saw, we now have, I don't know how many services, 130 plus services, there's plenty of things in the bag that our technologists can then start working together with the clients to solve those problems. So it's really exciting. How do we innovate? That is sort of the question of the hour, the question of the era. At a company like Amazon that is now so big but still is famous for its startup mentality and its ability to innovate and deliver products that customers don't know they need until they have them in their hot little win. How do you do it? I mean, what is the secret sauce? So I mean, there's a few things and I don't have time to talk about all of them but I think culture, we've talked about it a little bit is hugely important and you just can't graft on or import culture. You saw Guardian, CIO talk today, how important it was. They didn't start with technology of the cloud. They started with actually redesigning their workspaces and how their teams work together. That's super important. So at Amazon, we work in what we call two pizza teams. So every team is fairly atomic, fairly small. They interact with other teams but they can make decisions autonomously and move fast. And then the other thing that we reward moving fast is if you're going to move fast, you're also going to make some mistakes. You're going to take risks, you're going to experiment and you're going to fail. So Jeff Bezos likes to say, if you're not failing, then you're really not innovating. So we want to see controlled failures and we want to make sure that when we are failing, it's what we call a two-way door meaning that if we fail, we can come back through the door and do it again. We haven't committed ourselves down a path where we can't retrieve. So again, small teams, a culture, a culture that also rewards risk taking, controlled risk taking and failure. And that's also I think why AWS and the cloud is so important because now we have a platform where you can spin up nodes to run your analytics and your machine learning. If it's wrong, it doesn't work, you just tear it down and that's it, you start over. So it's a great platform for that as well. Chris, what have been some of the most exciting, exciting new business ideas, models, approaches that you've come up with? We're having a number of really fascinating guests on theCUBE. What personally excites you most? Yeah, I think one of the things is the researchers LifeSides Cloud and some of the work we've done with AWS and Mark around that, to bring the research all together, to make the researchers jobs much easier, bring all that data together and get the value out of the data. I was amazed when I first got involved in that and didn't realize how much time was spent just duplicating data across different systems during the research process. And that's a lot of wasted time by very, very smart people. Just coding data in and by us being able to do that, it just opens up the possibilities of what research can do. And it's all about, when we say, how can we help lives to be better? And that's something that's truly doing it. Other thing is just customer interaction. So one of the things I've talked about and I've been very excited over the last couple years was Amazon Connect, future next generation call center capabilities. Again, like Brian said, as a service, you can step up very quickly. You don't have to go and buy PBX's and install them and go through that whole and what the 360 relationship that you can build with those services that customers are demanding and asking for, right? And go into organizations that have not been known for great customer care. And now within a few years, they can do 360 type customer and omni-channel and pass-off chats and stuff like that. You know, all the things that Amazon themselves as a dot-com business are famous for, right? And they can get there. So it just, you know, those things just excite me and I see the clients get really excited when we go and sit down and talk about that stuff. And how are they measuring the ROI? Because, I mean, as you said, at a company like Merck that is doing life-saving medicine every day, it's kind of obvious, but at a company that maybe is not good with customers and then to suddenly have this more customer-centric call center, it really can change things. So how are they measuring what they're getting out of this? So they're measuring the sentiment of the customers, right? Which Amazon can help you do too, right? So they're really understanding, you know, how satisfied the customers are. They can tell by the way they're talking to their reps and listening to the recordings and stuff like that and, you know, see how angry they get and how much that reduces over time, right? And really get there, right? They're looking at customer satisfaction scores, right? Almost every call center finishes up with some type of survey, right? So they're looking to see how those surveys have improved. They look at call volumes, they look at how many they're able to answer via chat bot or via text and things like that and how many of those a customer care rep can do at the same time. You know, when you're on the phone, it's usually you only can talk to one person, but a customer care rep might be able to take four or five calls at the same time via chat and be able to help customers which reduces the time waiting on the phone, right? And the less time you wait on the phone, the happier the customer is. Brian, last word, what do you think we're going to be talking about it at AWS 2019? So I think it's, if you look at the trend that we're seeing, so as we move more into the innovation services, what also is true is that we're getting increasingly focused on industry problems, right? And Chris already mentioned one with Life Sciences and the Research Life Science Cloud because, you know, migration is sort of a migration across industries with some variances, but when you're talking about deep applied learning and analytics, it's going to be very specific. So I think what we'll see next year is a lot more things like the Research Life Science Cloud across industries, right? So we're diving deep in financial services and capital markets and banking around things like money laundering and anti-fraud platforms, right? We're working across over into, you know, P&C and insurance on kind of completely new ways to have customers think about how they engage with their P&C insurance companies. So as we dive deeper into this and as we apply a lot of these up the stack innovation services, I think we're going to see a lot more really compelling, exciting business solutions specific to industry problems. And I'm just super excited about that. Great, well, we're looking forward to seeing you here again. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure we will be. Looking forward to it. Next year. We'll be here. It'll fly, it'll go fast. Chris, Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.