 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on day three of our continuing coverage, AWS re-invent 2017. We've had an amazing three days, lots of great guests, lots of great conversations. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend and we're very excited to be joined by two guests new to theCUBE. Please help us welcome Adam Burden, the Senior Managing Director of Advanced Technology and Architecture at Accenture. Welcome to theCUBE, Adam. Thank you so much. And Sandra Stonem, one of the Managing Directors of Technology and Operations at DBS Bank. Welcome, all of you from Singapore. Thank you, yes. Great to have you guys here. So we hear great things, that there is a remarkable story that DBS has that started last year when you guys attended AWS re-invent 2016. Talk to us about what you discovered last year and how this has facilitated your journey to cloud your transition. So if I may, maybe I'll start a little bit before that because actually we've been playing with AWS before that. We actually have a huge transformation strategy that takes us towards cloud. And so we've actually been using AWS for infrastructure as a service, just scaling. So we were putting our trading system grid onto that. So that was our initial exposure. And then what happened to AWS last year is that I came to re-invent and I saw all these rich, rich services that AWS were providing and I thought, we actually can't afford not to be building on this. So from then I went back and with my organization, I basically said, look, we need to be building natively on AWS. And so that's what we've been doing. So we invited an Accenture to come and help us because they actually have more experience of building natively on AWS, taking advantages of those services. And we invited them in, they've been working together with us and we've got now native AWS applications using serverless. So Sandra, talk to a little bit more about that process because politically it's tough to move something as very consistent, very stable as a bank to a digital transformation and then even select not just a partner to help in that transition, but AWS. How was that first set of conversations when you got back from re-invent 2016, excited about the transformation opportunities? What were some of the internal discussions? Well, as I said, we actually had a whole technology transformation strategy underway at that point. So we'd actually really looked deeply at ourselves and we'd looked also at the tech giants that are out there and we'd created this whole technology transformation strategy that basically meant we needed to go completely cloud native, cloud native infrastructure, cloud native applications, complete automation on everything and a very agile and fast moving business environment as well to work with us. So we actually had that whole strategy in place and that was all underway and we were starting to work with AWS. So this was actually just an extension of that strategy. Tell me a little bit about this digital transformation strategy. I'm sure a lot of others would love to learn from what you guys are doing. What were the top three business goals that this transformation strategy needs to drive? Okay, so what we did actually, maybe I'll tell you a bit about it. We call it Gandalf and the reason we call it Gandalf is we actually took a look at all the tech giants and we said how can we, DBS be standing tall among the tech giants? So the tech giants that we looked at were Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn, Facebook and we said how can we be the D in Gandalf that kind of became our sort of codename and our galvanizing strategy and to help people understand what that really meant internally we actually came up with five key themes and we put them in a wheel and we've got kind of five cheeses in the wheel if you like. Three of them are really about the organization and the culture. One of them is organized for success. One of them is to change from project to platform. One of them is high performing agile teams. So those are kind of the three organization and culture focused and then we have two that are very specific to technology. So one of them is designed for modern systems and the second one is automate everything. And on each of these five themes we then have a whole load of sub themes and that gives people a little bit more idea of what they can do and that strategy we've found has been very galvanizing for the whole organization so that everybody in the organization they know if they're aligning to the strategy because they're doing one or more of these themes or sub themes. So Adam, this is kind of the perfect customer. They already gone through a transformation. You don't have to have the conversation. Cloud is in the technology. It's more of a business process. What was it like engaging DBS for the first time in their transformation? Well the good news is I was actually with Sandra at the reinvent conference last year so I saw some of the light bulbs go on during that process and we engage with DBS. They've been a client of Accenture for many, many years and we're delighted to have an opportunity obviously to work with them. Going in and having these discussions though and helping them identify the right workloads to move to serverless technology is something that we've done a lot for other clients and we move workloads all the time to AWS and there's lots of different techniques to do that. You can just lift and shift. You can move things into containers and move them but for the right workloads you can get truly breakthrough results, benefits and value release by moving them to serverless and that's what we were able to identify for them and we worked through a process to do exactly that with that experience. So it was actually very pleasant because we'd had an opportunity to see that process from the very beginning and I think that the inspiration at the end of that that we've created about the value that can be generated is going to help to really drive even further adoption of cloud and other serverless technologies at DBS as a result. One of the things that I love that you're talking about is the cultural transformation. How long has DBS been in business? Since 1960s. Quite a long time. So the strategy that you laid out, I love also not just the cultural transformation those are hard and so challenging but also the fact that as a bank you want to be like one of those big tech leaders and I think that's going to be incredibly inspirational for people to hear your story that even in terms of adapting the culture but even attracting talent that you have such big aspirations. How did you establish the strategy? What were some of the cultural elements that you have successfully changed and how quickly were people able to get on board with this? Yes, okay so it's a very long journey and there are many different facets to that journey. We have a CEO who's very driven to be digital to the core and so he's very visionary and has really sort of set targets for us as an organization. So embracing digital, embedding ourselves in customer journeys, driving sort of joyful customer journeys, making banking joyful is one of our missions. So he really set some of these strategies even challenging us as well to be a data driven company because we feel that's very much the future. So we have a CEO who's really set many of these strategies out there but even so to make it happen in the organization is difficult. The agile teams is one aspect where we've really been looking at what does it mean to be agile and sometimes you can be tech agile but not business agile and so what does it really mean to be business led agile? And so that's a long learning journey, we're still on it but we're getting some successes and so now that helps to start get other people on board. We also look at innovation so we have an innovation officer and he feels that his job, his job of himself and his team is not to produce product but to actually change the culture of the organization so that we look like a 22,000 person startup. And so he tries to many, many different things whether he's bringing in speakers or whether he's working with us to align to startups and work with startups so that we can really get exposure to how startups work. Many, many different aspects of what he does to just encourage innovation among everybody right from the senior leadership down. So many different aspects of the cultural transformation. Another area is one we're grappling with at the moment is how we do funding. When we want to move from projects to platforms how do you take away that big cumbersome way of working where you fund these big initiatives and you have to wait for a long time to get any output and how do you move that more to a sort of iterative evolution of a platform that the business really owns and champions. So all of these things it actually crosses all aspects of the organization and I think you have to do all of them. You have to take every facet and work on it and move it forward. So Adam, large company like DBS comes to you with these big aspirational goals, become a platform from a technologist perspective, architect, that's exciting to hear. However, baby steps and chunks. What were some of the first steps that you guys took after identifying opportunity and workload? What was one of some of the first technologies you engage AWS with? Well, Accenture, well first of all I should probably explain that I'm a customer of DBS as well. They're my bank in Singapore. So I care very deeply about making sure that the work we're doing, even more so than Accenture probably would normally. The things that we do to help a client get started on a journey like this, first of all helping to identify the applications. A lot of times one of the very first things that we do is we look at different patterns. So almost like a sewing pattern, right, that you would follow and be able to repeat over and over again, different patterns for how workloads should actually move. And we use those as ways that developers can kind of follow a recipe book almost. So that in the future as they're moving new workloads or they're building new services that they do it in a very similar style and technique. Those initial steps, those processes kind of set the tone for how the migration process will go and you can really expand from there. If you try to do too much at once without really getting a nucleus of it right, you'll have a lot of varying standards and it'll be much harder for you to be able to make the kind of progress that you want. So we typically try to start with a really good marquee, a couple of projects, get those going really, really well, save those patterns and then expand upon them as more and more workloads actually move. That's one of the key elements of success we find early on. So Adam, as you engage with customers and you're coming to a show like this, it's great that customer gets really excited about the business opportunity, but working internal IT for a long time, exposing just a little bit of the capability of AWS is both good and bad because now you've exposed AWS and developers want the whole thing. They'll look at something like Sage Master, I think is the AI solution from yesterday. A recognition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want that today. But you have to be able to roll it out in a controlled fashion. How do you guys handle governance once you embrace a opportunity in a relationship with a company like AWS? Well, I can speak about one. Sandra, why don't you talk about that from DBS's perspective and then I'll give you Accentures as well. Yeah, so no doubt about it, it's challenging, but governance is changing regardless of whether you're looking at cloud internally or cloud externally, governance is changing. Now the whole focus is to give developers self-service access to everything they want to do. So they can deploy, they can run tests, they can do all of those things themselves. So that applies whether you're looking at private cloud or whether you're looking at public cloud. Now obviously in public cloud, all of those controls that you have internally, not only they need to change for the new world, but they also now need to translate, if you like, into public cloud. So things don't just necessarily, you can't just necessarily move them and apply the same things to public cloud as you do to private cloud. So you have to go and reinvent them in public cloud. AWS is good in that they give you all the tools to do it, but the tools are not already set up, so you do have to learn about it and you do have to build slowly over time and that's why we started with simple things like infrastructure as a service, which we can just scale up and down. And now we're moving to the more complex, which is using the native services, which obviously need more governance around them and contain more data. And so it's a learning process, but basically if you've got a great organization internally that really understands what it is you're trying to control, then you need to be able to translate that and see how that applies to AWS. One of the things that interests me, Adam, is what you talked about with the recipes and recipes, the consistency. How important was that for DBS, Sandra, in terms of, all right, they've got some prescriptions here on how we can be successful. You talked about governance, the steps to take, so that, like Keith was saying, you get exposed to all these things, you got to kind of control everybody, but talk to us about the recipes and this kind of playbook for success and what that means to DBS to be able to do things in a streamlined fashion and be successful. So there was the real reason that we brought Accenture on board is because they've actually looked at applications before, enhanced applications that the people have built, and then they've looked at what would that look like if you were to rebuild that from scratch on AWS using native services. And so they were able to work with us and work through difficulties with us to actually transpose those applications onto an AWS native format. So that was actually very helpful and that's been our learning. So the team that's been working together with Accenture has now learned. We've taken other applications from there and we're now looking at sort of just starting directly building natively on AWS based on what we've learned. So actually it's very valuable and I would say expedited our journey. Excellent. So let's talk about some of those newer services. Infrastructure is a service. We can do what we do in our data center today in AWS much faster. There's instant value there. But as we start to expand out and look at something like serverless. How does DBS and Accenture in general look at something like serverless and taking advantage of Lambda? I'll tackle that one first maybe. Serverless technology for Accenture has been something that has really allowed our clients to move from looking at cloud as a data center to looking at cloud as a platform. And it's an epiphany actually for many of our customers where they look at, well, absolutely we can move our workloads into cloud. Maybe we'll get a lower operating cost. Maybe we'll get some other benefits of being there. But now I can begin to actually in serverless and other techniques I can take advantage of the native services there to actually operate at a far lower cost and enrich it with new capabilities. Think about adding text to speech capabilities from Polly. Think about adding image recognition facilities. Think about the other capabilities that you can now have because you're on a cloud platform that you wouldn't have if all you were looking at it was as simply another data center. And that is the light bulb that goes on. And why I think serverless from a breakthrough standpoint about the cost structure, the granularity of how things are metered and actually priced but then the richness of features that are available you're inventing your future there. It's available at your fingertips. You do have to control the governance. You have to make sure that you've got some guardrails around that, but the developers will be incredibly creative with those services and you will have new features that will delight your business users and your clients much faster than you'd ever been able to in the past. I love that ignite your future. I wish we had more time because I wanted to ask you both about what you're excited about that was released and Adam got this great grin in his face. But unfortunately we are out of time. We want to thank you both, Adam and Sandra for joining us and sharing what you guys are doing. It sounds like the light bulbs are going off continuously burning and we look forward to hearing more of your great successes. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. And for my co-host Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from AWS re-invent 2017. Stick around, day three of coverage. We've got more great stories coming back.