 Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit, 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. CUBE virtual, we're remote, we're not in person this year, like last year soon. We'll be back in person. We've got a great guest here, Mark Potts, managing director at Accenture for the Red Hat relationship. Mark, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Hey, thanks for having me, John, I really appreciate it. You know, we've been covering pretty extensively throughout this event as well as, you know, the many, many years, the impact of cloud computing. Obviously, you guys have a really big strategic relationship with IBM and now Red Hat, Red Hat's part of IBM. It's pretty clear that, you know, that Red Hat's got this operating system mindset of open source and, you know, innovation. It's extending into cloud, cloud native and Edge, distributed computing. That's kind of in their DNA, if you will, distributed computing and system software and open source. Kind of the perfect storm. So really interesting as this enables new services. You guys are on the front lines working with the biggest companies in the world as the global business is changing. So I want to get your take on Red Hat and what you guys are doing together. But first, give a quick overview of Accenture's role with Red Hat, your role there and what you do. Yeah, thanks, perfect, John. So Mark Potts, as you mentioned, I'm the managing director responsible for our global business with Red Hat and our partnership with Red Hat. As you probably saw in our announcements last fall around the September timeframe, Accenture made a very large bull announcement about forming a new cloud-first business unit within Accenture. And so we're going to invest $3 billion into that business unit. We're going to dedicate over 70,000 people worldwide to that business unit and that cloud-first initiative. And as part of that cloud-first initiative, we've also developed our new hybrid cloud strategy. And we're looking for new partners and existing partners to help us grow in that hybrid cloud strategy and that hybrid cloud business. We see Red Hat as a very important partner in that business. And as you mentioned, they've also been in the distributed computing for a long time. We also see them as a partner for clients that are lifting and shifting and migrating to the cloud on rail, like SAP and other workloads like that. And I'm excited to talk to you today about OpenShift and Ansible and all those great technologies that Red Hat brings to the table for our hybrid cloud approach strategy. It's awesome, great investment. I love what Paul Carmillier was saying on his keynote. Every CIO should be a cloud operator. I mean, running business at scale. This is what hybrid cloud is all about. And so with your new hybrid cloud strategy and the formation of the new business group at Accenture, what kind of challenges are you guys looking to solve? What are the opportunities that you're seeing for companies? How do you guys solve those challenges? What are you guys looking at right now? Yeah, it's a great question. And as you mentioned, the keynote. So, Karthik Narayan, who actually runs our cloud-first business was actually part of that keynote with Larry Stack as well, or Larry Stack, sorry, as well. And so, he mentioned in his keynote something called the cloud continuum, right? And so, historically Accenture has been working with our partner on cloud-native development, moving to about 20 to 25% of the existing workloads in the data center, the easy stuff to the cloud, right? But now we realize that there's a need for the hybrid cloud. There's a need to modernize maybe on-premise. There's a need to maybe modernize in the cloud one way or the other. And then we also look at the holistic view of cloud on-prem edge. And that's what Karthik's talking about when he's talking about the cloud continuum. And that's a very important part of our strategy within Accenture. And OpenShift really helps us meet those needs. So, if a client is a little bit nervous about taking some of those complex workloads, but they want to modernize and they want to use the latest and greatest cloud-native technologies, but they want to do it on-prem and move to the cloud a little bit later, they can do that with OpenShift, right? And Red Hat, that's a great platform for that. Maybe it's a client that wants to lift and shift and get to the cloud as soon as possible, close their data centers, save that cost of money, and then modernize later, but they don't want to necessarily be locked and want to be locked into one cloud provider. Again, OpenShift is great for that. Take those legacy workloads that you move to the public cloud, modernize them on Red Hat, OpenShift, maybe it's Rosa on AWS, maybe it's ARO on Azure. And then when you're ready to, you can move those to any other public cloud if you'd like to when you're ready to, right? And that whole control plan as we call it, being able to see across public cloud on-prem, the edge is really important for our story and our strategy and Red Hat, OpenShift and Red Hat, the satellite and those technologies bring a lot to the table for us to meet those needs of our clients and customers. That's great insight there, Mark. I really appreciate that. And one of the things it brought up when he was saying that, I was thinking myself, okay, the cloud conversation has many evolutions and go back five years was, oh, move to the cloud. Everyone was moving to the cloud. That was the big discussion point. Now it's enterprise ready to cloud, get that next level scale. And as you know, in the enterprise, we do everything complicated. It's a lot of legacy and it's existing stuff. So this is the next enterprise at scale is the conversation that includes hybrid multi-cloud around the horizon. So with that, can you expand on what you mean by this cloud continuum that you refer to, that essentially refers to, and what is needed to make it a reality for customers? Yeah, I mean, what's really needed is the latest greatest in hybrid cloud technology like OpenShift and what Red Hat brings to the table. It's also new skills and new capabilities and policy management and those types of things that are important for a company to decide when they're ready to move those workloads to the cloud. They need the ability to see across their entire infrastructure, like I mentioned earlier, whether that be a public cloud provider, or whether that be in their existing data center in a colo or on the any edge, like in a retail store or something like that. We need the ability to see across those, that all that infrastructure is a single control plane so we can manage and know where things are and feel confident about security and everything with our clients. The other big thing that we need is skills, skills to build the migration, the modernization and more importantly, the interaction and integration into legacy workloads like the mainframe for example. Accenture's got a lot of use cases leveraging Red Hat OpenShift for a cloud coupling solution where we interact and build new applications that connect to the mainframe, sitting right next to the mainframe, but they're new digital mobile applications, web applications that can be quickly modified and deployed into production at a rapid pace, right? And so when we look at everything that's needed, it's skills, it's technology partners like Red Hat and then it's really building assets and offerings to help make that journey for our clients better and secure. We just found out here at the event that you guys at Accenture have been recognized as Red Hat's global systems integrated partner of the year for North America, congratulations on that. What do you see as some of the key reasons for the recognition? Was there anything that they called out in particular? Obviously you guys have a great track record, well-known brand, you're known for, you know, creating a lot of value for companies as they do digital transformation. What's the recognition for this year? Yeah, and we're super excited about this, right? I mean, this is, we've been partners with Red Hat for a long time. I think we are one of the first system integrators if not the first system integrators to partner with Red Hat many years ago, right? So to get this award and get it for the first time is it's super exciting for us, right? And so we're very grateful for that recognition and opportunity. You know, I think what really what really got us the recognition for this award was really the effort we put into our partnership over the last 12 to 24 months, right? We had a really big business in Europe with GDPR and the risk averse of going to the public cloud in Europe, OpenShift and Red Hat really have taken off. In North America, our business was lagging behind Europe and we significantly invested with Red Hat in new offerings and new clients and new people, right? New talent to build a better business and partnership in North America. You know, I think a lot of the things that we got recognized with were what I mentioned earlier. Some of our cloud coupling solutions for an insurance client in North America where we're building cloud native applications on Red Hat, OpenShift sitting next to the mainframe. We're building new cloud native applications for a transportation company in the South region of the US, right? So it's really that business transformation work that we're doing, working with the legacy but building new core applications for our customers that are truly portable, nimble and agile and they can use to get speed to the market and get to the cloud. Cloud First organization, you guys are investing billions of dollars, three billion that was referenced, I saw an article, I think we covered it as well on siliconangle.com. Congratulations, Cloud First also implies that cloud native is going to be there. Mark, in all your years in the industry, talk about from your personal perspective and even from a century, the shift that's happening because it's almost mind blowing what's going on in the sense of so fast this is accelerated, even the pandemic accelerated even further. The opportunities that are available now that weren't there before and what it's done to the project timelines and what it's done as a forcing function. Could you share your view on the reality of the current situation and opportunities for companies to take advantage of that wave? Yeah, and I think Accenture's done a great job talking about this recently, even from our C-suite down, right? And Karthik will mention this as well as Kino. I mean, we are seeing an acceleration to get to the cloud. That was completely unplanned for us. I think the numbers I heard was we thought most clients are going to get to the cloud in eight to 10 years and be fully in the cloud in eight to 10 years, but that's accelerated with COVID and the pandemic, right? We're looking at four to five years. We think most of our clients will be, you know, majority of their infrastructure and everything and new applications and legacy applications will be in the cloud, right? So the change and the impact that the pandemic had a significant impact on our customers and their need to get to the cloud. We've even seen those that were leaders in the cloud journey accelerate even more, right? And they're being rewarded for that acceleration, right? A lot of our customers that were first to cloud are seeing the benefits and seeing the ability to scale for the pandemic, like a lot of our customers in the US in particular. And I think OpenShift is going to help us with that, right? And Red Hat in particular. And let's not be lost on the fact that REL is a great product out there as well. We have many of our clients that are running SAP on well and that lift and shift and moving SAP to Azure or to AWS or Google or something like that is a viable solution for it to help accelerate our customers as they expand, right? We've seen internationally a lot of our customers that have been really focused just in their local region are now expanding their business outwards and now they need to get to the cloud to be able to expand those businesses. You know, it's interesting, Mark, as you know, just as we were talking, just think about my experience over the years in the computer industry, everything had to display something else, disrupt something. You know, the mainframes were disrupted by client server. Now we're living in an era where with the containers and microservices and service meshes and cloud-native technologies, you can embrace existing legacy and abstract away some of the complexity on the integration side, right? So you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. And I think this phenomenon has opened up a new class of services. And you know, the people I talk to and interview the leaders in the industry all have the same kind of view. And the ones that stand out are the ones that recognize that the operating system of business will be software. And that software hasn't yet been built in clouds at the beginning. It's not just, you know, one cloud. So I think what's interesting about Red Hat is that they're operating system people. You almost see, you know, Arvin kind of snapping the lines and kind of cornering the market on the operating system for business. And applications then are a thousand flowers that bloom from that. So very interesting take here. Again, that's my opinion. I don't think they've said that formally, but if you look at it, that's kind of what's going on. What's your reaction to that? I think you're a hundred percent right. I mean, you know, I also carry a little bit of the responsibility on the IBM side. And you mentioned mainframe and I mentioned mainframe a handful of times, right? There's a lot of customers that have this legacy estate like the mainframe in particular. But they need to be nimble, right? I need to be agile and mainframe is a challenge sometimes around that, right? And so to your point creating those applications that participate with the mainframe allow the mainframe to participate better with these cloud native applications and these new digital transformation applications is a very key component to it. And so I a hundred percent agree with everything you said. And I think we're going to see more around this operating system type software. And almost to an extent, you kind of view Red Hat OpenShift as kind of that new operating system, right? And you look at some of the announcements that Red Hat has made around Palantir, right? And adding Palantir and ISVs to their, to marketplace to allow customers that have bought OpenShift or make it easy for clients to buy Red Hat OpenShift and then bring in these ISVs that have been certified, they're secure, they're easy to consume and buy it through Red Hat's marketplaces is very exciting and very interesting and very easy to do, right? Once you get that Red Hat OpenShift layer and they're that operating system now you're bringing in products all over the place, right? And all the new stuff. And I think we're going to see a lot more of those announcements during summit as well. Yeah, I think it's a 20 year run here and it's trillions of dollars as it's been forecasted. Mark, great to have you on. Super valuable resource, great insight. Well, we got you here. Let's get a quick free consulting minute here for the customers watching. What's your advice? I need some help here. I want to go to the cloud. I want a good, I want enough headroom so I can grow into. I want to foreclose any opportunities. I want to move to the cloud. I want to have a hybrid distributed computing architecture. I want to program my business. I want infrastructure as code. I want DevSecOps. What's my playbook? What should I do? Yeah, so sensors got a real smart approach and strategy around this. We leveraged an assessment approach really to look at what's in your data center today and what you have from an infrastructure and application standpoint. We actually call six hours. We have a seventh hour where it can completely rewrite an application. And we would apply those six hours or seven hours to that assessment to help you figure out the disposition of your applications and your infrastructure to figure out what is the right cloud? What's the right journey? I mean, we talked about the mainframe and mainframe being an anchor in a lot of our clients' data centers. How do we move those applications that have data gravity challenges to those legacy applications to the cloud? How do we consider that? So the right way to do it is take a holistic approach, do the assessment, do the disposition of your applications and then let's let Accenture put together a full plan of how we would migrate you into the public cloud. Mark Pots, Managing Director of Accenture. Congratulations on your North America Award partner of the year and also awesome to hear. And we've been covering, again, Cloud First. Totally believe it. Great investment. That's going to pay back huge dividends for you guys and having the hybrid, which is pretty much determined as a fact now in the industry. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on. Robert, thanks for having me and thank you Red Hat for the award. Really appreciate it and look forward to talking to you very soon. All right. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, host. Thanks for watching.