 Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS ReInvent 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. A lot of great action here, a lot of great solutions, great keynote. The future of cloud is going to be all about purpose-built software platforms, enabling more and more SaaS, faster performance with custom chips, all enabling great stuff. Got two great guests here. We're going to talk about it from Accenture. We've got Kartik Narin, global lead of Accenture's cloud first. Welcome to the program, good to see you. And Chris Wegman, AABG, Accenture, Amazon Business Group, technology lead, senior manager director. Thanks for coming on. Great to be here. I was commenting before we came on about Accenture's work you guys been doing with the clouds. In my article I posted before ReInvent, Dave Vellante coined the term super clouds, which we kind of just put out there. But the idea that people can build really strong platforms that enable a new kind of SaaS has been a big wave. Connect has been a great example we heard on stage from Adam, CEO. Chris, this has been something that's been a real change where it's not just lift and shift and refactor, it's build value in a platform and new SaaS capabilities. What's your reaction to that? Yeah, I would absolutely agree. We've seen this change over time. We've seen the lift and shift and modernize and it's definitely moved into the super clouds. I like the term, but we call them cloud continuums which we'll talk a little bit about. But yeah, it's about building these purpose-built solutions. I think if you look at the keynote today you look at everybody that was on stage, United and everyone talking about what they're building, they're technology companies now. They're not just a business. You guys did some new research, coining new terms and cloud first. What is this all about? What is this new wave you guys are talking about? Yeah, so John, you know, a few years ago when people talked about cloud, they generally meant public cloud. I think the definition of cloud is changing and expanding. And from now on, whenever people talk about cloud it's actually a cloud continuum. It's a continuum of capability from public to edge and everything in between, all seamlessly connected by cloud first networks, which means all the capabilities that customers used to get from one public cloud destination, they can actually access that across the continuum, whether that be in their own private data center using the capability of cloud with AWS's Outpost and other capabilities, or they could use the capability in their edge location, whether it's their retail centers, their warehouse locations, manufacturing, and so on and so forth. So organizations are using the power of cloud beyond one purpose and one destination, but more as an operating system going forward. Chris, what's your take on this redefinition of cloud? What's your take on it? I think it's much needed. I think Andy kicked it off last year when he recognized the term hybrid. We all, it's been around a while, kind of chuckled because they finally said the word, but if you look at the keynote today, they just continued it. Adam picked it up and ran with it. If you look at all the services, wavelength and all the different services, there's not a single customer that I have that's just using EC2 or S3, right? They're using all these different services. You saw today, you saw all the different services that United put up on the screen, that Dish put up on the screen. So yeah, it's how people and companies, if they're truly going to transform and truly use cloud to transform, you have to use the whole continuum. Yeah, and I think the continuum message is a good one because if you look at what the evolution is, it was interesting too, Adam went on and did kind of a history lesson. In the beginning, it felt like I was in a Star Wars movie, like back in the old days and then you kind of progressed, you had to be really elite to roll your own cloud. And the hyperscalers did that, you saw that. Now you still have elite technical people, but now this general purpose or purpose built, it's like having prefabricated platforms. An open source, we've learned that why do you want to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to? So if I want to call center, I get connected. If I want to have a big plug-in platform, I can still build on top of it and have that SAS unique application. This seems logical. This is new. This is the continuum. I mean, it seems obvious now looking at it, but how far along are people getting this? Kartik, what's your take on this? I think customers are getting it. They are looking at cloud more as an operating system for their future innovation. They like the concept that they got from the public cloud, which is easy configurability, consumability, and automatability of their infrastructure assets. And when you can get that capability as an operating system for your entire enterprise and you could innovate across the spectrum, that's extremely powerful. We see companies accelerating their adoption to cloud, but we are also seeing over the last three years, a lot of that adoption was using cloud as a migration destination. But now, with the power of the cloud continuum where innovation is available with so many new services that Adam launched today, you could use truly cloud as an innovation engine. And we're actually seeing that the clients who are using the cloud continuum for innovation are doing much better than the ones that are using cloud as a migration destination. In fact, they are doing 2x to 3x use of cloud for innovation and uplifting knowledge work. They are actually using 3x more cloud for sustainability purposes, so huge, huge value. Yeah, I mean this is a great point, great insight, because what you're saying is essentially you can't hide anymore. The projects are either going to be successful or not, you can see whether it's users or not. Now you're tying cloud adoption and outcomes together where you can look at it and saying, we need to make this outcome work, not for building, for building's sake. Those projects were discovered during the pandemic. Why are we doing that? So you can't hide the ball anymore. And everybody's got to do it now, right? I mean, you don't have a choice. The pandemic is now forcing companies to change, they've changed, and the research shows that the companies that have truly adopted the whole continuum are doing much better than the other companies. What's the big pattern in this continuum research, you guys, what's the big takeaway that you guys have found in that study, in that customer experience that you're having? What's the big aha moment? I think there are a few things. Number one surprising aspect is that the companies that use cloud for a broader innovation objective actually was saving more than the ones that use cloud just as a cost saving initiative. That was a big aha moment. Number two, when you talk about all of this innovation that AWS provides, sometimes it's easy for organizations to struggle of saying, this looks like this is only for the elite companies or this is only for the digitally native companies to follow. But our research show that the companies that were successful adopting cloud continuum, the ones that we call as continuum competitors, 60% of them are pre-digitally born organizations and they were reaping the benefits and they were growing faster, saving more, being more innovative than all others. So this is truly usable across the spectrum of the G2000 enterprise. Yeah, and I think it's no brainer, but now that you have customers that are transforming, they have multiple clouds. You have AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. People are trying to find their swim lane. We heard about skill gap shortage. We did some reporting on that, that this idea of multi-cloud, hmm, maybe not, I can't hire enough people. I'm going to bet on this cloud, maybe use that cloud. How are people looking at that? How do you guys see that the cloud competitive continuum or how is the cloud competition affecting the cloud continuum from a customer standpoint? Yeah, I mean, you got to look at it. You know, to use the whole continuum, you've got a lot of cases, you got to be on the same cloud, right? You can use the whole, you got to use all the different components, all the different services. So I think we are seeing customers that are picking one and starting with one, and then adding others. I see a lot of my customers who are using multiple clouds, but they're using them in different business units, right? So they may pick one business unit to go deep with AWS on, they may go use another business unit to go deep on another cloud, right? So yeah, I mean, everyone is getting multiple, but a lot are starting with one and then adding a second one or a third one along the way. Perfect, this is what I was trying to get out of my story. It's a hard, very nuanced point, but if you look at the success of, say, Snowflake and Databricks, all bet on Amazon. And they're super clouds, they are on Amazon, but they're now working with Azure as well, because why wouldn't you want to open up your market? Exactly, and even industry companies that want to monetize their capabilities using the digital ecosystems are doing that, for example, Siemens wanted to bring all their capabilities in manufacturing and machine operating system into a platform called MindSphere. And they knew that their end goal was going to be multi-cloud, but they wanted to practice leveraging the power of cloud with one platform, and when they created MindSphere, they started with AWS and they created that solution in the public cloud, in private cloud, also at the edge, by leveraging the power of cloud from public to edge and proved it out, and once it started working and they were able to roll it out for customers, now they are giving customers the choice to be able to use it in other clouds as well. You know, Carter, you mentioned earlier at the top of our interview about the platform of the cloud and Dave and I were talking on our keynote review, we did a history lesson of when Microsoft owned the monopoly of Windows, the system software, and they had the application suite with Office, but they still wanted developers to build on top of Windows, okay? But now with cloud, that's one big Windows platform-like thing. So the developers ecosystem is evolving and so one of the things we're watching, and I want to get your reaction to this, is in every major inflection point in the computer industry, when new ways to build or write code rolled out, the application owners always wanted their software to run on the fastest platform. Speeds and feeds matter in these shifts because why would I want to have my software run slower? What's your reaction to that? Absolutely, and again, there's a lot of things that the industry is going through and we are pushing the envelope on digitization and today's keynote, when you saw CEO of NASDAQ talking about the technology bottlenecks that were preventing the matching algorithm to be finally taken to cloud, now the capability that's available with AWS is what is enabling that matching algorithm to be taken to cloud through the power of edge. So there's so much technology innovation that's happening that's constantly expanding the boundaries I mean that's exactly the point and I wrote this in my story and came out on the keynote today which was Adam saying the cloud's expanding, that's the continuum. If it's running cloud operations, does it matter what it is? I mean, if you're at the edge and you're running cloud, maybe because you want latency, of course you want to have low latency, why wouldn't you want outposts? Again, this is all cloud operations. DevSecOps data is now kind of cloud operationalized. That seems to be what's happening. And I think the developers love the fact that they can write for one and put it anywhere, right? And whether it's a EKS on inside, I don't even know what you call anymore, the public cloud, right? Or all the way out at the edge, right? You write it once, you can deploy it there and it makes their lives a lot easier. And as you said, it's all about performance so they get the best option. Well, we'd love having you guys on theCUBE. Essentially you guys have really smart, talented people, always great commentary. Dave and I were looking at reviewing the tape, so to speak, it's not really tape anymore. It's digitally stored on S3, but we look back at 2016 when we first started talking about horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized applications. If you look at the keynote today and squint through the announcements, Amazon's going to offer full horizontal scalability and vertical specialization at the app level with machine learning capabilities. This means that you need data to be horizontally addressable, which is kind of counterintuitive, but you're seeing all the success on data lakes and lakes. This is the new architecture. It's kind of proven now. What do you guys think? Yeah, again, the aspect of cloud is about democratized innovation. The first element is, even though there's so much infrastructure build out and infrastructural elements where there's continuous innovation going on, the enterprises and developers are moving from by versus build decisions to assembling and consuming options. And when they assemble and consume, they want newer and newer services to be available that is very specific to their industry and specific to functions, whether it is supply chain function or manufacturing function or so on and so forth. For this, there are going to be specific data that is going to be required or operational for that particular use case, but the whole idea of predictive analytics and AI and machine learning and data science is about how do you find correlations between operational data for a particular capability with things that in the previous world was unrelated. For that, you need to bring all of this data together. Time will tell whether all the data is going to move to one location or is there going to be distributed computing of that data with more technology, but that's the role that data is going to play in these verticalized solutions. Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. I want to get you guys, well, we've got one couple of minutes left. Advice to people that are looking to go this next level, that they know the continuum is coming, you guys have been providing great solutions and advice to your customers, for the folks watching, what advice can you give where they're just putting their toe in the water or want to go full in? Yeah, so we found in the research that there were some common patterns that were followed by these continuum competitors, the ones that were succeeding or winning in the cloud and there was namely four of them. The first one and these four can be adopted by others for them to also win in the continuum. The first one was looking at the power of the continuum, how the technology is evolving and creating a strategy to take advantage of the evolution of the continuum. That's number one. Number two, this is about organizational change. So don't go about this change in a soft manner. There are elements that you need to change within your organization to imbibe this wholeheartedly. That's the second thing. Third thing is one common aspect that all the continuum competitors followed was, they put experience in the forefront for everything, for their end customers. Last but not the least, this is a holistic journey and an enterprise-wide journey and this would require CSO level, CEO level commitment on a longer term to achieve this. So with these four things, most companies can achieve the successes that the continuum competitors are seeing. Awesome, is that, Chris, real quick, 30 seconds, what's your advice? Don't be afraid, it's pretty simple. The water's warm, come on in. Yeah, come on in. A lot of gone before you, right? And it can be scary, it can be daunting, right? A lot of services. Don't be scared, get in and go at it. Yeah, one of the jobs I love about being a Cube host is you talk to people many years earlier, you guys got it right at Ascension, congratulations. You were deploying, you saw this wave of purpose built before anyone else and congratulations and great success. Thanks for having us. Thanks for coming on the Cube. Okay, I'm John Furrier, you're watching us here, live in Las Vegas for 80 of us re-invent 2021 coverage, the Cube, the leader in tech coverage.