 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re-invent from Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by two guests for this segment. We have Greg Sly, he is the SVP platform and infrastructure at Verizon. Thank you so much for coming on, Greg. Thank you, you're happy to be here. And Amal Fadke, he is the managing director Accenture Global Network Services. Thank you so much, Amal. Thank you, Rebecca. So Greg, I want to start with you. Wani, everyone knows Verizon, it's a household brand. Tell our viewers a little bit just about how big you are, what countries you're in, your reach. Okay, well we're a global company. There's about 135-ish thousand employees in the company. The brands in there, you know, they include Yahoo and AOL and HuffPost and Riot and others, so we have a much more global reach with some of those brands overseas. Verizon is obviously very well known in the US and overseas as well, but that's really where our big plays are now. We're big in Asia as well with our e-commerce sites and stuff, so it's global and it's everywhere, so. So give our viewers an overview of this current state of where you are in your journey to the cloud, the cloudification of Verizon. Sure, so the last probably two years, we've really put a lot of focus into moving out of our data centers and into the cloud. We focus primarily on workloads that are right for the cloud because as during this journey we went, there's obviously huge data lakes and huge amounts of data over two Xs of bytes of data and trying to move that to the cloud is obviously takes some time, but a lot of our front-end apps from anything from where you order your phone or where you order services to whether you're on Yahoo Fantasy Sports or on Finance page, those things tend to work well in the cloud and they're built for the cloud for very bursty type workloads, so we spent a lot of time moving a lot of our applications plus all the new Greenfield applications up into the cloud. So we're a considerable way down the path now on that. We're now getting to the tail end with these kind of massive data sets on what's our next step for those and that's what we're working on now. Amal, I want to bring you into this conversation a little. What are you seeing right now across the industry, the current state of deployments? So I mean, just building on what Greg said, Rebecca, it's almost the third wave of cloudification that we see now, so you know that we had this aggregation of hardware and software and most operators started to go globally towards cloud and then they sort of had the second wave which was really their own private cloud infrastructures and now because we are here, you can see clearly the amount of public cloud infrastructure that's starting to come in and become relevant to these deployments. So it's almost the third wave where I see a lot of our clients globally looking at hybrid cloud type models for deployment and that really accelerates that cloudification journey because now you see a lot of workloads moving to a hybrid cloud environment. Just by the size of the ecosystem of suppliers and partners that are involved will give you a sense of how accelerated this has become. I mean, the last three years I've seen in this event doubling of the number of partners who are just moving their workloads, whether it's compute, storage, network to a hybrid cloud environment. So that acceleration has started and we expect in the next two to three years this will become mainstream. I'm always right, we've been down that exact same journey where we've done a lot of things up into the cloud like in AWS now, but we've also done a private cloud which enabled us as more like a development or a on-prem tool that allowed us to build, learn and take applications that were not really ready for the cloud or native for the cloud, build them on-prem where there'll be a little bit more freedom to do some things and then learn and then move them up to the public cloud. So we've been down that exact same journey. So I also want to ask about a buzzword here, 5G, 5G, the arrival of 5G, what it means to your industry and whether or not being in the cloud is a necessary prerequisite to really capture all the benefits. You want to start or me? Sure, I'm good. Go ahead. So I was just saying, if you look at 5G, Rebecca, the reason it's so fundamentally different from previous generations is because 5G opens up a bunch of use cases, the traditional 3G, 4G networks did not and the size and scale of those use cases, including like billions of devices and having really cool use cases like gaming and health and automotive and robotics, in turn places a huge burden on a network infrastructure which means cloudification does become a massive prerequisite. There's a level of scale, size, devices, latency profiles is something you only get when you are on a cloud infrastructure. So Greg, I don't know. Yeah, I agree 100% and this is going to drive new innovation that we've never seen before. As we, obviously being Verizon 5G is one of our big, big bets obviously and that's one of the things that Andy and Hans talked about yesterday at the announcement here at Reinvent and where we're seeing now with cloudification, it's literally I think one of the cornerstones of how it's going to work because we're going to have to put so much out to the far edge and out into as close to the customers as we can. The only way you're going to do that is through the cloud and using the cloud services like Outpost and other services to push that out close to our customers. So 5G and cloud are synonymous. They're going to go hand in hand. It's the only way that's going to work. I mean, if I just say one last thing on what Greg said, cloudification was happening anyways and it was a great efficiency driver for all organizations. 5G's almost come in and lit a match and said he's a lot of revenue opportunities that you can get on top and that has just accelerated the whole thing with distribution of 5G and cloud. So that's going to happen now. Yeah, I think we're really only seeing the beginning. It's so early on in 5G and the journey to the cloud that I think next year's Reinvent and the year after that, I think we're going to look back and say this was really just the very beginning of what we're learning, what this technology can do for the world. I want to ask about innovation and this is something that Andy Jassy talked about in his fireside chat this morning is how AWS maintains its startup mentality even though it is of course a enormous company. How do you think about innovation and approach innovation at Verizon? How do you make sure you are continuing to experiment and push boundaries even though you are a large and complex organization yourself? It's a good question. It's something we're always pushing. I think it starts from the top with Hans. He's made one of his key pillars of innovation of what we have to drive, listening to our customers and building on what they need. But we've spent a lot of time on redefining how we work to adapt to the cloud. So the days in the past of, we'll do one release every quarter. It's now, how many releases a day can you do? And the only way you can do that innovation through bucket testing, through A-B testing is literally embracing the cloud and doing small tests here and there on stuff. So it's really now learning from the internet startups, trying to keep that startup mentality in the company the size that's 137,000 employees. But it's building that culture and I think Hans has been a great leader to really drive that different way of working. We've seen a dizzying number of announcements from AWS, new products and new services that are coming out. What has most caught your attention and how are you thinking about how to help clients capture the benefits of what AWS is offering? You know the thing that struck me yesterday when I was looking at the keynote was this is probably the first time there is a recognition in the industry that it's an ecosystem play. You know and what I mean by that is a lot of the challenges that were seen in the last couple of years around getting 5G mainstream, getting all these things in the market was who does it, who supports them and this whole ecosystem. And yesterday's announcement where Andy and Hans and other carriers like Vodafone and so on are coming in and saying you know what, let's do this together. Let's collaborate. To me that really hit the mark because as you start building specific use cases to make this real for a consumer like us, you will see that an ecosystem play is the only way to make this a reality. And that's what really struck me. If you look at wavelength, if you look at local zones, all the announcements that were done yesterday, all of them require app development communities as great partnerships, it requires hardware partnerships, services firms, it requires a firm like Accenture to come in and do this secret sauce. So there's a lot of things that have to be done there and I believe that's what really caught my eye that it's an ecosystem now. The amount of collaboration going forward is going to be unprecedented because no one company is going to be able to do all of it. So how, you're both technology veterans. I mean you're just babes, you're just teenagers of course but thinking about how different it is today versus when you were just beginning your careers in terms of, I mean we have this idea of this cutthroat competitive world of technology but as you said, these companies need each other. I mean they're competing of course but they also desperately need each other to make sure their business models are successful. So can you just describe this landscape for our viewers in terms of what you've seen as changes and whether or not these changes are for the good? Well, starting in the mainframe days which is where I started and then kind of when Windows NT in the distributed compute, you're right. It was very, do it ourselves. We're the only ones that can do it. You have to hide everything from all your competitors because we're providing a solution and nobody sees anybody else a secret sauce and obviously protecting IP was key. Now we've seen open source take a much broader stroke across the canvas and we've also now everyone's got, what do we best at and how do we use that rather than trying to be all things to everybody and building partnerships, so you're right. You know, we have partnerships with company that we compete with but we also have relationships going we need to work together to make this happen. So it is completely different from what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago on how you're collaborating on one part of a company who's competing with one area but you're actually collaborating to build a product to go to market together on another one. So it's really interesting. I mean the market forces have changed dramatically. I mean, I remember when I was in my telecom operator days with BT, you know, we used to, as Greg said, you know, love technology. We used to start in the labs, end in the labs, you know, engineering was our sort of bread and butter and then this focus on customer centricity in the last couple of years around, so much choice, so much availability of solutions in the market and as Greg said, the collaboration is a must do now and that's why that focus changed for us. You know, I see now this customer centricity becoming so important that what does the end user really want and then that comes with it a realization that says, okay, I am not able to provide this by myself but I do know how to solve for it and that's when you have to bring in others who can create that solution. You're absolutely right because, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago technology was still so new most people weren't comfortable yet and really knew what it could do or what they wanted and it was a room full of architects designing what it was going to be. Now it's a room full of customers telling you what they want and going at it so it's completely changed now where we'll build what the customer, what we think the customer needs, now we're building what the customer tells us they want. So it's been a 180. So Greg, I know before the cameras were rolling you were talking about how you'd been to this conference years ago and now just the growth that it has experienced has really shocked your system. What kinds of conversations are you having? What are the messages that you're hearing that are particularly resonant to you right now? This idea of the fourth industrial revolution, do you buy it? I absolutely buy it and you know, it's not just drinking the Kool-Aid because I work at Verizon, it's actually seeing what's possible in health, what's possible in gaming, automotive, industry like you were saying at the beginning. One thing that struck me and part of it was through the conversation we were having of how many people I've met here and when I was walking through the expo downstairs of like, oh we have a relationship with them now, we have a relationship with them, there's like half the floor down there that we have some sort of relationship with that we're either a customer, a partner or providing services to that it's changed where before you'd have a booth and you're like, how many people can we get over there? Now it's like, how do we get a booth with our partners that we can talk about a common solution that we're providing back so. It's been amazing from like, you know, it reinvented four or five years ago, it's like one hotel was still pretty full to like four or five hotels now with 65,000 people or something, it's amazing but the conversations before too used to be, we can only talk if we go into a private room over here. It's now that there's so many people and so many conversations and they're like, oh let me pull them all in, let me pull Rebecca in because we're all talking about the same thing now, so it's become more open, they're still sure there's IP and things we have to protect and we all have our company strategies but there's now there's so much collaboration, there's a lot more conversations going on now. Yeah, I mean the focus will now move to how do we operationalize this industrial revolution? Because that's where a lot of engineering horsepower, a lot of scaling would have to happen in terms of it would be great to launch health as a service or gaming as a service and all of these things but when things go wrong, which they will in the early years of adoption, somebody's going to have to take the call, somebody's going to have to manage the customers, somebody's going to have to, because that's where the test would happen in terms of, okay, this is going to stick and this is going to work. So to me, the next two to three years of this event will be around how do I operationalize and scale what we've now started? Because I think that's where the sort of rubber is going to hit the road. And I think even at Accenture we see this with all our work, it's moving more and more towards how do I monetize the use cases? How do I now build on it? How do I implement at scale? So that's really what I see happening. Coming up, we're on the cusp of 2020, there's so many new emerging technologies and of course the old technologies which are still pretty new, machine learning, AI, IoT, what are some of the most exciting trends that you're looking at coming in next year and the next three to five years in terms of your business and industry-wide too, Amal. Well for me, there's obviously this stuff that we're talking about with 5G and Waving, but one that really struck me at this conference was how we're going to be treating data differently or I should say storage of data differently, where before it was like by huge storage devices and you'd have petabytes and petabytes or exabytes of data in a data center somewhere, it's now distributed out to the far edge, it's going to be much more in the cloud, much more dispersed. Obviously that's going to bring challenges around with GDPR, with the California Protection Act, all of those that are coming as well of how we're going to deal with that, so absolutely 5G and the announcements that went on yesterday but in my slice of the world, looking at how we're going to manage, transform, handle, distribute data and how we're going to protect users' privacy through all of that is really interesting and I think a new field that we're, it's just changing so rapidly day to day. And one that's really part of our national conversation too in terms of privacy and security, Amal? Well I think to me the key trend would be adjacencies and what I mean by that is we've always been a little bit siloed traditionally in terms of, there is a telco industry solution and then there is a mining solution and then there is a automotive solution, right? And the technology is blurring these lines now, like as Greg said, I can have a intelligent 5G conversation with a German car manufacturing company that I wouldn't have dreamed of having a couple of years ago. So that trend is set to accelerate because 5G, H compute, all of these things are going to be more and more applicable to adjacent industries and this is why I always believe the telecom sector has a pivotal role, almost a orchestrator role that says as these industries look for solutions, we have those, we just haven't adapted and customized. That I think would be a big trend I see other industries are going to cash in on what we've done. Amal, Greg, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a really fascinating conversation. Thank you, pleasure meeting you. Our pleasure. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.