 We're back, this is Dave Vellante, this is theCUBE, Accenture is here. Derek Steeleberg and Pat Sullivan work in the Oracle practice at Accenture. Accenture is a company that really is unmatched with global scale, industry expertise, and is one of the leading consultancies in the world. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. So, Pat, I want to start with you. So, Oracle, back in 2005, you know, at Larry Elson used to say, he used to denigrate his competitors for writing checks, not code. And then he turned around and bought PeopleSoft. And that really changed the business and certainly created new opportunities and challenges for Accenture that you guys capitalized on. And then with the acquisition of Sun in 2009 and the integration in 2010, Sun became this hardware company which stunned a lot of people. But of course, the message has been clear and consistent for the last several years now about engineered systems, hardware and software, engineered together. Now over the years, you guys have made a lot of money helping customers take all this hardware complexity and making it work with software. And now these engineered systems come in and drop it in, everything's beautiful. So how has that affected your business and how do you guys capitalize on something like that? It's a great question, Dave. You know, actually, I think it's had a profound effect on our business in a very positive way in a sense that what engineered systems are allowing us to do is just quite frankly get better performance out of some of the solutions we've been implementing with our clients. You've got to remember that as a systems integrator, it's our job to stitch all these products together, whether it's hardware and the different layers of compute and storage and network and then all the products as well with it. What engineered systems helps us with is it takes a lot of the risk out from a project perspective by having that all collapsed. Now, there's the marketing message from Oracle that you plug it in and it turns on and everything is great. And then there's the reality. Is that not 100% true? It's something. 95%. But, I mean, there's the complexity behind that is really in making it a reality out of clients' sight. Well, a lot of that too is organizational, isn't it? Because today you've got organizations that are very much networking here and the server there and storage there and they don't necessarily talk to each other. So is that a role that you guys play is to help them sort of transform their organizations so they can do more higher value activities? Absolutely. And generally, every time we walk into an account where they've taken on engineered systems, that's usually the first thing that is out of order. It's just that the teams aren't used to talking together. They're not used to working together and we do have to educate them. We have to train them. But that's a big part of the project as well. So Derek, I had to start in the weeds just because there's so much around engineered systems but let's up level it a bit. I mean, here we are at Oracle Open World. We're seeing the transformation of Oracle. We're hearing about cloud. We're hearing about human capital management. You know, a lot of focus on fusion apps. A lot of focus on industries. You guys are the king of industry expertise and industry prowess. So take us through sort of what's new with Accenture specifically as it relates to Oracle and Oracle Open World. Thanks, David. You know, I think that the announcements that Oracle has made have really created a lot of opportunities for Accenture and for our clients. If you look at what's going on in the space and cloud and what our clients are grappling with in terms of managing costs, managing total cost of ownership and trying to increase their flexibility, the cloud offerings that Oracle is bringing to the market, they've really now turned the corner from an Accenture perspective to be very, very competitive and to be relevant to our client base, the Global 2000. So we're seeing a lot of interest from our clients in the G2000 base in Oracle's cloud offerings. So we see a lot of opportunity to work with our clients to implement these systems. So we're quite excited about that. So what are they asking us? Because the Oracle cloud, I mean, there's Oracle Public Cloud, there's stuff like Aliqua and Tileo and other companies that they've acquired. What are your customers asking for your help in with regard to the cloud? They're asking for our help to kind of help them understand how all these pieces parts fit together. What's ready for prime time? What's not ready for prime time? What's the roadmap that they should be pursuing in order to do the implementations and how to go from point A where they are today to an end state where a lot more of their business systems are sitting in the cloud, but not everything, not every client wants to put all of their business systems in the cloud. So they're looking from us to help them find that right balance. Yeah, so I mean, you guys are the independent, you don't have a dog in the hardware fight, you don't really care who wins that argument. I mean, you're working in the Oracle practice, so obviously you want to help your customers maximize the Oracle piece, but you're really trying to help people take the best of what solutions are out there and drive new business value. So what are your clients trying to do? Is it big data? Is it new analytic systems? Is it getting more out of their existing systems? Is it compliance? All of the above, talk about some of the real drivers in your customer base. Yeah, as you can imagine, it's a little bit of all of that depending on which client you're talking about. Some really are focused on driving down their costs, so how do they optimize? How can they leverage engineered systems to drive down costs, improve the TCO, and increase their flexibility? Others really see IT as a strategic weapon for themselves to gain competitive advantage. And so they're looking to see what new technologies will bring, whether it's analytics, whether it's exolytics, how they can leverage the new technologies really to drive better customer value and to compete better in the marketplace. So I wonder if you guys could talk about some of the results you've seen specifically with engineered systems. Pat, can you share with us some metrics or even high level stories around what customers have achieved working with you? Yeah, I can actually give you a story in regards to one of our clients, it's a life sciences client. And basically what they've been doing is the most expensive part of what it takes to develop a drug is really in that clinical trial space. It can cost anywhere from a billion to two billion dollars as part of that effort. So if you can find cost savings in that, it's obviously the place you want to target. What we've done is we've teamed up with Oracle as well as all the big pharmaceutical companies, quite frankly, in the globe. And we've developed a solution that does just that. So basically what it does is the first time we've ever been able to take analysis from different drugs that have been developed in the analysis and do cross trial analysis if you will. What that allows these companies to do is, quite frankly, they can use that information, what's happened in the past, with the regulatory boards in the different countries, which represents significant cost savings. But this is all really around providing analytics on a very old set of data. However, I think the big part on this is that historically we haven't been able to do this. We haven't had the horsepower, the systems. And even if we did, it was just so expensive that it wasn't something a client would take on. So this is a game changer from that perspective. Also, and then we heard this morning, Thomas Curran in his keynote was talking about key value stores and Hadoop connectors and all these things that you didn't used to associate with Oracle. So I wonder if you guys could talk about what your customers are, you know, you hear about the big data themes and data is the new source of competitive advantage. You hear bromides like data is the new oil. Do your customers believe that? Do they, Derek, believe that data is the new source of competitive advantage? Are they trying to become data driven or are they just trying to keep their heads above water day to day? I think you have to ask yourself, what is the key business value that having big data solutions are bringing? And look at it from that perspective. So there are certainly clients who see the need to, whether it's an oil company analyzing a ton of data or a life science company analyzing a ton of data. There are certainly clients out there who see the need to analyze massive amounts of data in real time or near real time to help drive their business. So I want to change the subject to security. We heard a lot, I mean, you hear a lot of Oracle messaging around security. They've obviously done a good job. Larry basically has always said, you know, security in the database is where it should be done, not in the application. He's sort of poo pooed multi-tenancy with prism and the whole NSA discussion that's been going on. Are your clients more sensitized to security and where their data is stored? Who's got access to their data encryption, whether or not encryption is or data is encrypted? That whole discussion seems to have a new light, shed new light on the topic of security. What's Accenture's angle there? Yeah, I think, you know, remember Accenture's a global company. So we deal with a lot of European companies, obviously the rules and regulations for analyzing data, for moving data around in Europe, a lot different than in the US. They don't like their data stored in the US, is there? They don't like their data stored outside of the EU. So I think what you see is that, I would say that especially in Europe and in Asia, the clients have always had a very heightened sense of concern around data and on data security. I think the whole NSA prism thing has brought a little of that back to the US as well. I wouldn't say necessarily that clients are more concerned. I would just say that clients remain concerned about that. Right, so Pat, I wonder if we could talk, you go back to this notion of hardware and software engineered together. The metaphor that people often use is the iPhone of the enterprise, but you were alluding to before, we're not quite there yet. Do you feel like we'll ever get there? Is that a vision that we can work towards where the infrastructure actually becomes transparent and we can focus more effort and get more ROI out of the processes and applications or are we decades away from that in your view? I think if you're a brand new company starting from scratch day one, it's viable with what you said in terms of using these systems to actually get started and have a quick start. I think the challenge that we deal with is we're working with clients who have been in business for a hundred years or more and they've got data, they've got processes, there's just a lot of complexity. So regardless of how easy engineering systems can make things, there's still a lot of work that has to happen to be able to turn on those features. Once they're turned on, however, it's definitely simplifying architecture. But Derek, that's got to be one of the biggest challenges that your customers face. As Pat was saying, most clients aren't coming from a blank sheet of paper. They got to get from point A to point B, they hear about all these hot trends, but they can't get there overnight. And their application portfolios are incredibly complex. They comprise thousands and thousands of applications, many of which aren't really widely used, but some business processes rely on them. How does Accenture help customers get through that? Marass. They say when God created the world, he didn't have, in seven days, he didn't have to deal with the installed base, right? So that's very, very, very true. You know, what we try to do is help our clients figure out which other legacy applications are strategic, how do you encapsulate those if you want to keep them, which of the legacy applications are no longer providing business value, how do you replace those, what's a step-wise approach to doing that? Obviously you can't tackle everything at once, and obviously you want to do it in terms of minimizing the business disruption and maximizing the value to the customer and your clients. So you have to kind of plan out a roadmap to figure out the best way to make that happen. So business value, that term, I mean, it's kind of like, you know it when you see it, right? But a lot of times it's fuzzy to people. So how do you guys help people understand what business value is and how to measure it? Do your customers just know and then you form your processes around that? Or you'd be surprised the number of customers who really don't necessarily track some of the metrics that they need to be tracking to understand business value today. So one of the things you want to do is encourage companies who are going through a large-scale business transformation to understand what are the major metrics that drive their business that will move the needle for them, where are they today, and where do they want to get to to be competitive? Now that's kind of, I mean I presume that's one of Accenture's big differentiators. I mean you guys have metrics in virtually every industry out there. Maybe talk about that a little bit. How do you guys differentiate from some of the competition? Well as you know Accenture operates across pretty much every industry and what we do is with our industry experts, they have a good understanding of what best practice is, what good and best looks like in a particular industry, and what's applicable then to the client. And so what we try to do is help them find that right set of metrics, the right set of processes along the dial to maximize the return for them. Okay so let's see, so we're here at OpenWorld. What are some of the more exciting things that you see that you want to take back to your customers that you can maybe help them take advantage of? You know there's a couple things from my perspective. Obviously there's a lot of talk around data and I think what's interesting is we're seeing clients, the highest growth number out of all their projections that they have across the business is in data these days. Anywhere from 70 to 150% and they're liable for 80% of it these days. So data's going to be a big play, how to organize it, how to analyze it in those areas. So I'm certainly excited to see since most of our customers use Oracle Database, what we can do to actually make it better for them. Other things we're looking at obviously are things around mobility, cloud. We like what we're hearing but we're certainly going to focus there and look to build offerings in those spaces. Yeah so mobility is something that you don't hear Oracle talk about too much other than identify the trends. You hear a lot from their big competitors, SAP in particular. Do you feel like Oracle needs to do more there or are they on top of things from your client's perspective? What's your feeling about Oracle's mobile strategy? I think that Oracle is going down a path right now. I think they have a very good strategy. So it's the execution of the strategy that's to come. In our business it's actually an opportunity because we're not going to wait for that to happen in a sense. We're helping clients today right now and there are certain tools that we've taken advantage of from Oracle that are actually getting us down that path. Yeah you don't have to wait. You can just go out and you're like a chef. You just pick the best ingredients, right? All right Derek, I'll give you the last word. Advice for customers. You talked about getting through the install base. What's your advice for customers that are trying to go through an IT transformation? We didn't talk too much about IT transformation but all your customers are transforming. What's your advice to guys that are trying to go through that type of transformation? I think it's really about starting with the end in mind. Where do you want to get to? And then I think it's recognizing that it's not really an IT transformation is not necessarily IT led. It shouldn't necessarily be IT led. You really have to think about the business and where you want to get through from the business. Make sure the business is on board and then drive it from that perspective. Typically what we see, if we see a transformation that fails, it's because it's an IT led initiative not working with the business. Words of wisdom from a company that has the chops to be able to give that type of advice and see a lot of things go right and a lot of things go wrong. So gentlemen, thank you very much for coming on the theCUBE. Thank you David, appreciate your time. All right, keep it right there. We're back with our next guest. We're going wall to wall. This is theCUBE. We're here live at Oracle Open World in San Francisco.