 Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier here at Palo Alto at our CUBE headquarters. We're here with John Del Santo, Senior Managing Director at Centra for a CUBE conversation. John, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks John, great to be here. So we were just talking before we came on camera about Centra and all the stuff you guys are doing. You guys are in the cloud heavily. We've been following you guys have probably one of the most comprehensive analytics teams out there and global SI market and just how the world's changing. So it's pretty fun and looking forward to this conversation. So I got to ask you first before we get started, I want to jump in with a ton of questions. What is your role at Centra? You're in the Bay Area. Take a minute to explain what you do for Centra and what's your territory. I've got the best job at Centra. So Centra's got close to half a million people right now and my job is I'm responsible for our business on the West Coast, across all of our industries, et cetera. I've been here 32 years so I've seen a lot of things happen in the Bay Area and I now have the responsibility of making sure that we're doing great work for our clients and we're doing great work in the community and that we're providing great opportunities to the thousands of people that work for us here in the Bay Area and across the West Coast. So it's a lot of fun. Obviously West Coast is booming and for tech it's been a hotbed and obviously the industries across the board now is global. I got to ask you because you've been around multiple ways of innovation and a Centra's been, had their hands in enabling a lot of value creation for clients. You guys have a great reputation. It's a lot of smart people but the ways are always kind of different in their own way but sometimes it's the same. What's different about the way we're living now because you can almost look back and see the major inflection points now. So the PC revolution, client server, interoperability, networking stacks, one standard. Then you saw the internet come. Now you got Web 2.0 and now you've got the whole global. You've got things like cryptocurrency and blockchain. You have multiple clouds. You have a whole new game changing dynamic going on with IT infrastructure combined with open source at a whole another level. So how is this wave different? Is it like the, how would you compare? Well, I think all the technologies that have waved through my career at least have been real enablers for the business model that the companies had at the time and that they evolved. What we see now is epic disruption. So the waves now are, we have digital native companies that are just disrupting the heck out of the industry or the company that we're trying to help. And so it's now about pulling all those technologies together and really figuring out a new business model for a client, figuring out a new distribution channel, a new product that's maybe native natively digital. And so it's very, very different, I feel, than it was five, 10, 15, 20 years ago through some of the other waves. Talk about things going on in the Bay Area before we get into more of the global things because I think the Bay Area is always kind of a leading indicator. I call it a bellwether. Some cool things happen. You've got things like the Gold State Warriors got a stadium that's being built. I'm watching the World Series with the Red Sox and you see Amazon Statcasts. You're seeing overlays. You're seeing roads around. All these things are changing the work and play. The Bay Area's got a lot of leading indicators. What are some of the projects that you've been involved in? What's happening now that you think's worth noting that's exciting that piques your interest? Yeah, I mean, we work across every industry and we do a ton of work in tech but I actually find some of the more interesting projects are the ones we're doing for healthcare companies in the Bay Area, some of the utilities in the Bay Area, some of the big resource companies, some of the financial services institutions because like I said before, all of those industries have disruption coming or have been disrupted and so we're doing some work right now around patient services and healthcare and pharma that is really interesting. It's meant to change the experience that a patient has that you and I have when we interact with our healthcare providers or the whole industry. And so those kinds of projects are really interesting because a lot of these industries are old and sort of have a big legacy of state and model that they need to transform from so they need to move fast and what we kind of describe it as a wise pivot, they sort of need to move but they need to make sure they're moving at the right time. They can't hurt their existing business but they got to pivot to the next business model and that's happening in lots of places and you're right, I think it is happening a lot in the Bay Area and the West Coast is sort of a bellwether. I want to get your thoughts on some of the moments that are going on in tech. You mentioned before we came on camera you worked for Apple in the old days and Tim Cook was just recently tweeting yesterday that had tweets going around privacy was at this big GDPR conference. The role of regulatory now is in changing some of the West Coast dynamics used to be kind of fast and loose West Coast, innovate and then it gets operationalized globally with tech, tech trends. What's the tech enablers now that you see that they're involved that actually have to deal with regulatory and is regulatory an opportunity? You mentioned utilities, finance, those are two areas you can jump out and say, okay we see some of their privacy is another one. So you have a perfect storm of tech and regulatory frameworks. How's that impacted your job in the West Coast? Well, I mean, GDPR is we live with every day and clearly we're doing a ton of work in Europe and I think that's one of the advantages Accenture has is being a big global company and being able to take lessons learned from other parts of the world that are likely to come to the United States, et cetera. But I think the combination of tech and regulatory are going to be merging together here pretty quickly especially when we talk about AI and data privacy and that sort of thing. But it's definitely been an evolution. Great to hear Tim's point of view on what Apple thinks. And it has been really fun in my life to see Apple in the 80s, when I worked there, they were a client of mine in the 80s. I worked with Nex Computing in the 90s and then obviously they're a big partner of ours now. So it's been a really interesting evolution. What are some of the growth accomplishments you guys have in the Bay or actually has been growth here for you guys? Obviously we've been seeing it. Well, I think the amount of tech driven disruption or digital transformation we call it is growing like crazy. So 20 years ago we were doing a lot of e-commerce work. We kind of shied away from doing Y2K work and a lot of our competitors saw that as a big opportunity. We didn't think it was a lot of value for our clients, fixing old systems. And so we pivoted to e-commerce in a very aggressive way. And I would say now that's evolved even further where more than close to two thirds of our business here on the West Coast is what we call the new which is cloud security, digital analytics. And I really think it gets down to, we were talking a little bit earlier about the data. And so we have more data scientists than we've ever had and we probably hire them one or two every day out here on the West Coast and it's about the data. Data is driving our consulting business, it's driving our technology business, it's driving what we're doing with AI obviously and things like that. So the transformation's been pretty tremendous. So take a minute to explain the data. You mentioned a lot of things. You got data and then you got cloud and you mentioned earlier you got kind of cloud first companies. You got born in the cloud, born in AI, AI first, data first, these new companies that are essentially disrupting incumbents. Also your clients that are kind of born before the cloud and they got to transform. Is digital transformation one of those things or both of those things? How would, how does digital transformation translate to the clients that you guys work with? Well, every client has a unique set of needs depending on where they came from. We do a lot of work with the digital natives. We do a lot of work with the unicorns out here on the west coast. And their needs are different. They need to learn how to scale globally. They need help in the back office. They need help sort of maturing their business model. We do a lot of work with legacy, financial services companies, healthcare companies, that sort of thing. They need to figure out how to sort of pivot to digital products or digital interactions with their customers. We have a very large business now in Accenture Interactive around helping to find customer experiences for clients. And we think it's our mission to sort of help our clients really redefine that relationship with their customer, their supplier, their supply chain. And the experience is a key part of that given expectations as well. Yeah, we have a lot of CUBE conversations around IT transformation as well. And, you know, out at CIO, big time firm, you won't say the name because it's a little out of them, but he said, we've been outsourcing IT for so many years, but now we got to build the core competency internally because now it's a competitive advantage. And they have to ramp up pretty quickly. Cloud helps them there. And they need partners that can help them move the needle on the top line of the business, not just cost control and operational scale, or whether it's horizontally scalable scale out or whatnot, top line revenue. This is what the bread and butter of the companies are. So how are you guys engaging with the clients? Give some examples of how you're helping them with a digital strategy to drive their business. How do you engage them? Do you do the standard sales calls, engagements? Do you bring them to a technology center? As the world starts to change, how do you guys help those clients reach those top lines? Yeah, a perfect client for us. We're really good at helping clients cut costs and get really efficient and be good with their peers on cost structure. We love a client where they want us to help them with that and they want to pivot the savings to the new part. The way, one of the things that triggered a thought when you mentioned that was we like to bring our clients into our innovation hubs. So we've had labs here in the West Coast for a long time. We now have 10 innovation hubs in the US. We have a very large one in San Francisco now and so we'll bring a client into our innovation hub and really roll up our sleeves with the client and over a week or two weeks or three period of time, you really brainstorm on how, you know, envisioning their future for their company, build a minimal viable product if we have to out of our rapid prototyping capability and really envision what the target and state of their business could be, of their product could be or their customer interaction. And we'll model it. Rather than sort of do a study, do another study, do a PowerPoint presentation, let's roll up our sleeves and figure out how to really pivot your business to the new and then take it from there. And then come to your location for like a period of time. Yeah, so we'll have, you know, any given day we'll have at least two different clients in our location doing either a couple of day workshop, a multi-week workshop and it's co-creation. It's us collaborating with our clients to figure out a solution. A good example is we had one of our large clients from the West Coast in there recently and we're trying to figure out how to use drone technology to drive analytics in, you know, over a geography to provide better data than to minimize risk. And we've got a number of co-creation projects now going on with them to figure out how do we take that into a solution that not only helps their business but maybe is a commercially available system. Yeah, our Wikibon research team brings us all the time with IoT and security. You're starting to see companies leverage their existing assets, which is physical as well, which is digital, and then figure out a model that makes them work together because these new use cases are springing up. So what are some of those use cases that you guys see happening? Because you mentioned drone, because that's an IoT device, essentially. There's all these new scenarios that are emerging. And the speed is critical. It's not like you can't do a study. There's no time to do a study. There's no time to do these things. You got to get some feet on the ground. You got to have a product in market. You got to iterate. This is the DevOps culture. What a success. We did a project for a big ag company, not actually a West Coast based company, but they came to our labs to look at it. And basically what we did was we covered an area that's basically size of Delaware in terms of drone video. We were able to drive analytics from that and 10 times faster figure out for them where the forest was weak and where it wasn't, where they had to worry about vegetation, where they might have disease issues or other risks they were facing them. And those analytics we were able to drive a lot faster. And so rather than manually going around this huge, you know, huge square mile set of geography, they were able to sort of do it through technology a lot faster. Yeah, just a side note, I was talking to Paul Daherty and interviewed him. He's, we were celebrating, covering the celebration, your 30th anniversary of your labs. And one of the interviews I did was a wacky idea which made total sense was during like a car accident or a scene where there's been a car accident, they send drones in first and they map out the forensics first. And he's like, okay, who would have thought of that? I mean, these are new things are happening that are changing the game one on the road because they'll open up faster. They get the data that they need. They don't have to spend all that physical time laying things out. This is not just a one off. This is like in every industry. Absolutely. Is there an industry that's hotter than another for you guys? You'll always hear oil and gas, utilities, financial services, it's kind of the big ones. What are some of the hot areas that you guys see the most activity on this kind of new way of taking existing industries and transforming them? You know, I don't know if I could pinpoint an industry early on, I mean, because I see, you know, what we're trying to do with anti-money laundering and banking is really moving the ball forward. But we're doing patient services and pharma and healthcare is pretty aggressive. Even some of the things we're doing for some of the states and governments around, you know, citizen services to make sure that, you know, because all of us have expectations now on how we want to interact with government and, you know, our expectations are not being met in just about every department, right? So we're doing a lot of work with states around how to, you know, kind of provide a better experience to the citizens. So I don't know if I could pinpoint an actual industry. But one of the fun ones we just, you know, that we're involved with out here in our patch is one of the big gaming companies in Vegas. We are doing a lot of video analytics and technology. And again, it's something like 20 times faster to be able to detect fraud, being able to figure out what's going on at a gaming table and how to provide rewards quicker to their customers, keep them at the table faster or longer. He's got a nice stack of chips always going down. Get him a comp room, he's feeling down. Look at his facial expressions. I can almost imagine, I mean, this is the thing, I would agree, I think this every vertical we see is being disrupted. Just mentioned public sector is interesting. We were riffing at an Amazon event one time around, you know, who decides where the self-driving cars, these towns and cities don't have the budget or the bandwidth to figure out and reimagine the public services that they're offering the citizens. The consumerization of IT hits public sector. And they need help. So again, every industry's going on. Okay, well I want to step back and get some time in for analytics because you guys have been investing as a company heavily in analytics in the past 10 years. Past, I think seven years, you guys have been really, really ramping up the investment on data science, analytics. Give us an update on that. How is that going? How has that changed? And what's the update today? Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, again, you mentioned the labs being here for 30 years, a lot of our data scientists and big machine learning and big data folks, frankly, started the labs here years and years ago. And so we've now got one of the largest analytics capabilities, I think, of any services company globally. We called it applied intelligence. It's a combination of our analytics capability and artificial intelligence. And we basically have an analytics capability that's built into all the different services that we provide. We think it's, everything's about analytics, just about. I mean, clearly you can't do a consulting project unless you've really got a unique analytical point of view or unique data around assessing a client's problem. You really can't do a project or implement a system without a heavy data influence. So we are adding, you know, frankly, I think every day I'm improving more analytics headcount into our team on the West Coast in lots of different practices. And it sort of spans industries, it spans all the platforms and that sort of thing. We're the largest with most of the big data players. You know, I think one of the consistent trends with AI, which is now being the word, artificial intelligence AI, is kind of encapsulated the whole big data world because big data is now AI because of the implementation of it. You're seeing everything from fraud, you mentioned anti-money laundering, you know your customer, these kinds of dynamics, but you get the whole dark web phenomenon going out there with fraud. All kinds of underground economies going on. So AI is a real value driver across all industries around, one, understanding what's happening, and then how to figure out how applications to development could be smarter. This is kind of relatively new concept for these scale out applications, which is what businesses do. So how is that going? Any color commentary on the impact of AI specifically around how companies are operationally changing and re-imagining their business? Well, I think it's very early days for most of our clients and most big companies. I think we've done some recent surveys that say something like 78% of our clients believe that AI is really, really important and they're not at all prepared to deal with or apply it to their business. So I think it's relatively early days. We, there's a huge fight for skills. I mean, so we're building our team and that sort of thing. We're also classic Accenture. We grow skills pretty well too through both on the job training and real training. And so I think we're seeing sort of baby steps with AI, there's a lot of great and expanded solutions out there that we're able to apply to business problems as well. But I think we're in relatively early days. It's almost as if, you know, the old black box garbage in garbage up, you have good data and you got to understand data differently and I think what I'm seeing is a lot of data architect going on, figuring out how do we take the role of data and put it in a position to be successful is kind of like, cause then you use AI. That's great, but what about what we missed this data set? You got to have fully exposed data sets. So this is all new dynamics. So you have to iterate through it and you'll have solutions that'll start and restart. All right, so final question for you. Tell us about this technology hubs again. So you have the labs, get that. So how many hubs do you have, technology hubs? Well in the U.S. there's 10. But I would say in the West Coast it's really San Francisco and Seattle right now. With San Francisco being our flagship. And frankly it's a flagship in the U.S. We've had the 30 year presence of our labs here on the West Coast and we've had design studios on the West Coast. We've had our, what we call liquid studios which is a big rapid prototyping sort of capability. We've had our research, et cetera. We've pulled all of those locations. So our lab started in Palo Alto, went to San Jose and is now in San Francisco. We've pulled all those locations together into what we're calling the innovation hub for the West Coast. And it's a five story marquee building in San Francisco and it's where we bring our clients and we expect to have literally, I think last year we had 200 and something client workshops and co-creation sessions there. This year I think the number's going to go to 400. And so it's really becoming a fabric of all of our practices. How important is the co-creation? Because you have a physical presence here and it's the flagship for the innovation hub. And it's an accumulation of a lot of work you guys have done across multiple things you've done. Labs, liquid labs, all that stuff coming together. How important is the co-creation part as a mechanism for fostering collaboration with your clients? Co-creation's certainly hot. Your thoughts on co-creation. Great question and I would tell you, Accenture's kind of gone through waves as technology's gone through waves and so we were always an enabler for our clients' projects and we did a lot of project work. I think we're in a wave now where we're going to be the innovation partner. We continue to sort of be named the innovation partner or the digital partner for certain clients. And we're going to do that through co-creating with them. And it's not just at their site, et cetera. It's going to be co-creation in our labs where we're taking advantage of the hundreds of data scientists and computer researchers and technical architects that we have in our labs to create something that's new and fresh and purpose built for their particular business model. So we think co-creation is a huge part of the formula for us being successful with our clients over the next 10 years. And so that's why we put this infrastructure in place. Expect it to expand and to be sold out and that sort of thing. But it's a good way for us to build capability and really, really viable solutions for our clients. So it's not just a sales development initiative. It's an operationalized engagement and delivery mechanism for these guys. Exactly, exactly. I mean, it has its self-markets, but it's not about marketing. It's about, you know, we'll have tours and we'll have little tourism through our center. And so clients will say, well, look at that maker lab. Look what you're doing with that client. I want one of those, right? I need to do that in my business, even though I'm in a different industry. So it's not really a marketing tool per se. It's a way for us to interact with clients. Well, it's a showcase in the sense of where you can showcase what you have and if clients see value, they can go the next step. It's an accelerated path to outcomes, reimagining businesses. Okay, final question. What have you learned from all this? Because now you guys have a state-of-the-art engagement model, delivery model around cloud, all these things coming together, perfect storm for what you guys do. As you guys look back and see what you've built and where it's going to go, what are the key learnings that you guys came out of the West Coast team around pulling it all together over the years? What's the key learnings? Well, I think that our clientele is just thirsty for innovation and innovation now. It's not about sort of let's envision the future and we'll get to it some other day. It's what can we do right now and what journey, you know, what glide paths are the way on to change our business. So the pace is just radically different than it used to be. And so it's about changing, you know, rapidly changing, putting real innovation on it and collaborating with clients. And at a pace that we've never seen before. I've been here 32 years and I've just never seen the pace of change. That's great, John. So I think some of them are really appreciated. We'll get a quick plug-in. What's coming up for you guys? What's going on the West Coast? What's happening? Well, we're in event season right now. So we just finished all the, you know, we're wrapping up Oracle Open World. We just won five awards at Oracle Open World. We just did an acquisition on the West Coast to beef up our Oracle capabilities. We've got re-invent and we have all kinds of events coming up, but it's been a pretty busy season. So cloud and data has certainly helped rise the tide for your business? 100%. I mean, the cloud is taking an extension from, you know, kind of in the back of the office and put us into the front office over the last 10 years. Well, certainly it's awesome. It's re-leveling the playing field, allowing companies to scale out very rapidly, bringing in DevOps culture, new kinds of modern application developments, real value being created. Super exciting time. Thanks for coming in and sharing the time. John DelSanto here in theCUBE for CUBE Conversations, Senior Managing Director, Ascension. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE Studios for CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching.