 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Teradata possible here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host and analyst, Rob Stratche. We are joined by Shriram Anand. He is the North America Market Lead Data and AI and Global Practice Head of Delivery at Accenture. Welcome, Shriram. Thank you. And Jordy Almgren. He is the Executive Vice President of Americas at Teradata. Thank you both for coming on the show. It's great to be here. So I'm going to start with you, Shriram. It's a very distinct relationship between Teradata and Accenture. Can you, what is the business opportunity for both these companies? And I'll start with you, but I also want to hear your idea. I think we have had a very extensive relationship with Teradata over the years. We believe it's a very robust platform for customer analytics, even before cloud. And over the last few years, Teradata has really pivoted to adding to their suite of products that makes it very compelling to move to the cloud. And as we have publicly announced our focus on AI, our CEO has announced a $3.5 billion investment to help clients reinvent AI. We believe a platform like Teradata is really at the core of it because it helps to get data from different sources, make it very easy to go accelerate time to market, make it faster, cheaper, and better. And that's why this partnership is very timely and important for us. And how about you, Jordy? Well, there's a couple of key differentiators to this partnership that I'd highlight. One is we needed to make sure that the partnerships that we were nurturing had the same global reach and scale that we have as an organization. Teradata, 40-year organization, and it's important that we can reach the customers at every aspect of the globe. The other side is the concept of customers or client centricity, and that cultural philosophy for the respective teams is just such an important aspect of how we want to go to market together. And having done business with Accenture since 2002 in my career, I've always seen that as really their North Star, and it falls so nicely into how we want to present ourselves to customers to offer the right business outcomes at the right time. So it made really good sense for this to be a partnership to invest in and we've been so happy with the thing so far. So it's mutual business interest, but also a common culture. Common culture, it's so important, yes. Yeah, and I think, again, knowing Accenture and it's around how the people, the processes and the technology really come together. How do you see this as a global relationship from the Accenture point of view? We are, in essence, a global company. We operate in so many different countries, 50-plus countries, we have three large markets, and we truly see this as a global opportunity because we have different markets where we see penetration of the cloud in a different way. And also the footprint of data as a solid platform is very, very strong in certain industry domains. So as part of our partnership, we actually did a global campaign. We are doing an activation tour in every market. North America is actually the last stop, but then we are going into a city-by-city tour to really promote our partnership together. So we're very excited because we see our clients responding to that. We have account teams coming to those meetings from our client teams. And it's a very interesting partnership, very complimentary, because we bring that industry knowledge, the client relationship knowledge of the client's process, and Teradata brings that platform. So together we believe we can create a compelling platform to allow the clients to migrate to the cloud, do more with AI, and really realize the power of AI. Yeah. So, Jordy, can you talk a little bit about the go-to-market collaboration between these two companies, and what are some insights there? Well, the first is coming back to common goals. We both operate from a cannot fail mentality with these large enterprise customers, whether it's the largest airline manufacturers in the world, to largest health plans, to the largest banks. We simply have to get it right. So ensuring that we have super tight collaboration and integration with the partnership at Accenture is paramount importance for us. So as we look at the go-to-market motion or the collaboration, it starts with one view of the customer and what their priorities are, back to that client centricity. And then from there, operating from a business outcome perspective of how do we bring this forward with the most efficient, most powerful, and really the most innovative platform we can find. And for us, that's a unique aspect of the relationship that we're doubling down on. We're in the midst of an activation tour. So we have one kicking off here in North America, this week, in fact, in Atlanta, with the Accenture teams. And then we'll be doing those in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, really just to make sure that we are working through all of the dynamics that can potentially make a partnership either great or derail it. So these are ongoing. I want to talk to you about what Jordy just said, Sri Ram, about this idea of this partnership and all of the intricacies and little people and processes because it really comes down to the people that are going to have to do the collaborating themselves. There's the technology for them, there's the people side of things. How, with these enormous partnerships where there are so many moving parts, do you get everyone on board? And what are the kinds of, you talked a little bit about the common culture, the common goals, but how do you bring everyone along and make sure everyone's pulling in the same direction? Yeah, that's very, and especially for a complex organization like Accenture, it's very hard. We have groups aligned by technology, by industry, but the common goal is really the business value. I think Steve spoke about it a little bit earlier in the keynote. We try to get our clients and our account teams aligned on business value. How can we give the business value to the client? So the case study we just showed earlier showed a retailer and how they did customer marketing, customer preferences. We believe this is not just a technology conversation. So if you elevate it from the technology conversation to a business conversation, we find automatically our clients are interested in listening, our client account teams are interested in listening, and they are interested in taking us as together to their actual client teams to really drive more work. Yeah, well just following up on that because I totally agree, and I think the message has been very loud and clear here so far today that it is about how you drive backwards from the customer, your customer, Mr. and meaning their customers to the business case that you have in the use case. How do you see, and we'll start with you Shriram, how do you see this changing from an industry because you got data and AI in your title? And it's all the rage. And I think AI is one of those where thankfully we're not seeing everybody trying to build a chat GPT thankfully, but they're trying to figure out what is that business case and how do you see the industry taking on the data industry and the AI industry changing as this comes in? Yeah, I see the AI as the destination, right? AI is a differentiator as our CEO says and data is the enabler, right? So you cannot build AI in a comprehensive way without fixing your data foundation, right? Without fixing your data quality. What's the point of having data that's inconsistent if you're going to do AI or a generative AI? You're going to get wrong results. So we see those intrinsically connected but AI is the conversation that we have with the customers and how can they get to AI? But the data platform, it starts with a data platform and it starts with a platform like Teradata especially for over 170 customers where we jointly are working together across all industry domains who have worked on Teradata for years and decades in fact. So helping them migrate to take advantage of AI is a huge journey and we believe platform like Vantage Cloud Enterprise really makes it easier for them to make that journey and really achieve the promise of AI. And it kind of ties in with your cloud first strategy that Accenture has as well. So how do you see it from your side that again? Well, I think it becomes a little bit about what we're talking about today here at Possible and there's a mix of innovation. There's a mix of responsibility. All of these things start taking hold. Now I have to add, I don't win on the exciting title. Sreeran has the AI, the data analytics title but I would say this. Looking at the initiatives underway in both of our respective organizations under Julie Sweet, she's done a complete reorganization to focus on AI, generative AI, data analytics, ML and here with Steve McMillan leading at Teradata we're finding much the same. That is a great innovative space for us but we're still so early in this. This is somewhere between everyone wants to call it at this point the next large trend. I think going about this responsibly is important and it starts with customer. What is the customer trying to accomplish with this and listening to this idea that CIOs and CEOs want to be able to use a chat GPT browser across their entire organization to make business calls today, that's a bit cavalier. There's a great way for that to be important to organizations. It's up to us respectively, Accenture and Teradata to guide customers through that journey so they get the most value from that investment that they've made in whichever platform, whichever integrator they're using. These are really interesting conversations because it is tempering the excitement and the potential of AI to really revolutionize and change how business is done with also what we heard Kara Swisher talking about on the main stage this morning with real fear and anxiety about the danger that it possesses. How do you, both of you, talk to customers about this and in really realistic, honest ways about, as you were saying, trust in AI, responsible AI, how do you even bring up those kinds of conversations? I think it's an education. Right now it's a hype cycle so everybody wants to do AI but the question is can you do AI? And even if you can do AI, can you do it in a responsible way, in a reliable way across your enterprise? So right now a lot of the conversations we are having are educational assessment based where we are looking at the business case. Where can you do AI? In all my career I've seen many tech trends come and go. This tech trend is unique because it's not just a tech trend. It's compliance, it's legal, it's HR, it's regulatory, it's everything. So a lot of the conversations now are educational, helping customers understand where can they do it in a reliable way and really getting them to reality on what their capabilities are and what it's going to take for them to get there and that's where we use our ecosystem partnerships to give them that best possible lens and the most optimal way to migrate to get achieving that. Yeah and I was going to say and I think what's interesting is we were talking to Lenny Colburn, one of your customers federated cooperatives out of Saskatoon there and I think he was saying that really, they're looking at how they use Teradata, really modernize and move towards that in a business case driven way. Is that what the kind of conversations you're having? Well it is, I was with one of the largest retailers in the world this past month and they asked me what does modernization mean to me and it became a really interesting discussion because I pivoted exactly to that idea of a business. What is the business problems they're trying to solve and I didn't try and make it a platform or a technology play and I guess I wanted to add on that, I joined Teradata two years ago and it was at the height of everything needed to be cloud native in this space and I would say that's less of a conversation we're having at the moment with customers. People have taken a little bit of a pause and they've said, does it all need to be in cloud? Does it all need to be, can it be in a hybrid environment or a multi-cloud environment which is a unique value proposition of Teradata's? Where the conversations are now is, hey can we have your data science team your analytics specialist AI team come in and do innovation days so we can start to understand what this really means to us. So that's a little bit of making sure we're responsible about playing to the trend at the time but also making sure that we have an opinion on how best to use it and that's where we get FCL as you mentioned and the Saskatoon example, how do we make that real? It starts coming down to that business outcome where we can really put something behind this respectively between an Accenture partnership and a Teradata partnership. You brought up workforce issues and we know that the technology industry is not finding the skills that it needs, the people that it needs to fill the jobs that it has. How do your companies deal with these labor shortages and upskilling your current workforces to fill the needs of your clients tomorrow? Great question. We adopted two prong strategy. We know that those talented AI developers who have been there, done that, it just doesn't exist in scale, right? And so we have hired and continue to hire what we call luminaries, leaders who have implemented AI in different organizations and combine that with the scale that we have in our market units in each of our geographic platform like India, China, Philippines, even in North America, in Latin America, we are scaling that technology in tens of thousands. So training, we have partnerships with even organizations like Teradata, what our cloud partners bring those trainings in. So through training, we want to double and triple that headcount, but combine that with the leaders and luminaries who have been there, done that, so can have that senior client conversation but have the scale behind them to support it. Yeah, if I may. So we're taking it a couple of different ways. First is we're looking at the intersection of industry and analytics. Are we breathe as industry? We've been doing this for 40 years. So having a viewpoint on how analytics and general AI and the like all play into an industry space, super important. And I'd like to think we stand at a good precipice to lead that forward with our customers. The delicate balance on workforce many in companies like ours are, they're in an aging situation. It's sometimes hard to find someone with Teradata experience because we've been around for 40 years. So we are implementing a very strong internship program and we're not just looking at data science and people coming out with computer science degrees. We believe that you can always teach someone how to do Python coding or teach them about Jupyter notebooks. It's how do you understand the perspectives that that individual coming out of an economics degree background maybe with a minor in computer science can actually impact the thinking differently? And that's a big strategy for us going into next fiscal year. Right, right, right. No, I love that and I think again it's not about just having the skill, the technical skill sets. It's also about having the business knowledge and I think you both have talked about that and I think you also kind of hit on the perspective of moving to cloud and Teradata has been around for a long time and I think the innovation and what's coming and being talked about here today is really exciting because Teradata's always been about data and I think that's been exciting. How does Accenture really helping people get to cloud with Vantage Cloud? How is that going and how do you see that roadmap? It's for any clients who have, who are existing Teradata clients. Now all of them are looking to get to the cloud at some point on one of the major platforms and we believe the Vantage Cloud approach offers a very practical and timely and risk-free way to do that. We have client stories that we jointly have where we have gone to market in three months, six months where we have seen the same implementation if we were to rip and replace can take upward of three years and 20, 30 million dollars and it's never always successful. Because we are able to leverage a platform like Vantage Cloud we can take the same scripts, the same data, make it work very quickly and we can then tie it into AI pipelines or other downstream systems that they want to use and really get those business use cases done faster. That's the most compelling value proposition for us. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think it is about time to value definitely. That makes a lot of sense. Shri Ram and Jordy, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, this was a great conversation. Thank you. Thank you for having us. I'm Rebecca Knight for Robstretches. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Teradata Possible.