 Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage here at AWS ReInvent 22. We're in the Venetian in Las Vegas, wrapping up our day one coverage here in the executive summit, sponsored by Accenture. And with me to talk about Accenture, a couple of guys who are no strangers at all to theCUBE. In fact, I think we got to give you like alumni passes or something. We got to come up with something like that. Miriam Besarovic is with us. Miriam's a global IT at Accenture. Chris Wegman, who's already been on once today, as a matter of fact, so we're going to start charging you rent, Chris, global technology and practice lead with the AWS Business Group at Accenture. Glad to have you both back, and you're welcome to theCUBE anytime, by the way, so don't be scared. Thanks John, great to be back. Let's talk about what you folks have been up to. So, you are, as we were talking earlier, you are where a lot of your clients would like to be. You've begun this transformation, you've fully migrated to the cloud, you've learned, right? You've hit all the bumps along the way. So, talk about your journey, and then how you think that experience can be translated to what your clients are going through. Yeah, so I'll hit it from the lessons learned and working together with our Business Group partners. So Accenture's journey to the cloud is complete. We have finished that journey, and as part of that journey, we have migrated all of the services it takes to run Accenture to the public cloud. So now that's done, that was complete. But now it is this cloud continuum living in the cloud. And the thing we talk about, and I'd love to shine a little bit more, is we have built our digital core in the cloud now. We're no longer dependent on data centers, and that has given us tremendous flexibility around how to enable the business, as it has grown significantly since we started this journey a few years back. Yeah, you know, Mayor, I'm like you talk about, right? We talk to our clients about building this digital core, and we've been through that as Accenture, as a global IT organization, supporting well over 720,000 people. That growth over the last year has been tremendous. So without the strong digital core built on cloud, we couldn't do that. We couldn't add that number of people. We couldn't make the changes we needed during COVID to bring people home, working from home, whether it be the way we changed our business model or things like that. That was all enabled by cloud. It couldn't be done without that. And also the variable in our business, right, is very tied now to our cloud consumption, right? So it goes up, it goes down, right? We've, you know, Mayor and his team have completely built their core with those concepts in mind. Yeah, I mean, you're talking about, you know, 700, 800,000 employees, and how many countries did you say? 130 different countries. 130 different countries. So, I mean, no small task, obviously, to get everything done. When did you start? So our cloud journey, effectively, we started in 2015, and we were done kind of right before COVID around 2019. We took a pause for a couple of different things, but we could have probably done that faster. And if I was to do it again now today, we could probably do it in two to three years flat with everything that we've learned so far. So what's the application into your clients' experiences that I mean, I've been there, done that, right? You can- I mean, you know, we always say that we want to be our best credential, right? And Mayor and his team are our best credential in this space. So, you know, a lot of our customers, you know, struggle making that commitment. A lot of them are past that struggle now. They're committed, they're going. But I talked to a lot of my customers about, you know, do I migrate? Do I modernize? You know, how do I do it? And it was interesting with Accenture, right? It started out very much as a migration program, right? So we made the decision, Mayor and his team made the decision to do a migration and now a modernization, right? And that's proven very effective. It's proven, you know, we've got that core in place, right? We were able to build off of that versus, you know, spending a lot more time just to start with a modernization approach. Yeah, where do you draw the line between the two? Between migration and modernization then? Because just by migrating alone, you are modernizing, you know, some of your operations. So you're getting up to speed. But how do you draw that line? And then how do you get people to jump over it? So I'll hit it from how our lessons learned. So when we first started and we did the migrations, it was literally lift and shift. And there was a lot of argument about lift and shift isn't worth it. But we found out it was because it wasn't just about moving the workloads and keeping it like a data center. It was moving the workloads and then optimizing because everything in the cloud was significantly faster. So then I didn't have to consume all the services the same way I did in the data center. I can actually consume them smaller. But also as time went by, what we learned is, hey, now these services are working here. Which ones are actually costing us more money to run? And not that they were costing more than the data center, but it's relative to the cloud, which ones cost more than the cloud. Then we looked at that and said, okay, how do we want to modernize those? And then we modernized as container capability started to evolve and got much more mature. We shifted a lot of workloads to containers. But otherwise, the other principle we push very hard is big consumption of Lambda and serverless capabilities on Amazon. So we have refactored multiple applications to give us that capability to say, we no longer need the IaaS capabilities, those servers, those VMs, and we run on serverless capability. And what's great about that is, now I don't have a server to patch, to scan, to remediate, to upgrade. I've moved away from that capability and the teams can focus more on building the business capabilities that the business wants. Like we did to our pricing team. I don't know if you knew this one, Chris, but all the pricing capability has been redone to be cloud native on AWS. And how do you deal with the folks that still kind of have a foot in the on-prem world? That they're just not ready to give it up. They like the control. They like the self-management. They want to be in charge. Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of our customers, there's a reason why they need on-prem still. And there is on-prem, let's be clear. I mean, it is a hybrid cloud world for most of our customers, right? Whether they've got manufacturing, whether they've got, you know, data that are, you know, SCADA systems or your operational IT systems that have to be close to their execution or to their factories and things like that. So that's going to happen. I think everyone, and I shouldn't say everyone, but you know, most of our customers know they need to get there, right? And are somewhere on their journey, right? Very few have not started at all. But it's about acceleration, right? And I do think we're going to see more and more acceleration. We saw it with COVID, right? And then, you know, obviously, I think we're going to see it again, right? With, you know, kind of what's going on with the economy and stuff like that. It's, you know, it's a great way to push that change there. And I'm really excited, I'll be honest, what I'm really excited about if I look at what Merrim and his team are doing is they're just leveraging that digital core and truly taking the investments that the hyperscalers are making, the AWSs are making and leveraging them. So we're not making that investment, right? We're a capital-wide company, right? So we don't like making good capital investments, right? And we're taking advantage of the capital investments and we couldn't do that of the hyperscales. We couldn't do that without being there, right? We just couldn't do it. And maybe, John, if I can build on that. Sure. One of the things for me when I think about the cloud is I'm not alone, you know, because when you're in a data center, when you're running a data center, you're kind of on an island. And on that island, if you've got security issues, if you've got stuff you're dealing with with attackers, you know, you're kind of on an island, you're alone. Whereas in this world, I am where all the investment is, where all the security capabilities are being built, and I have partners that are there with us that help us when these situations come up. So for me, I'm very grateful that we pushed very hard in the beginning to get here, but I wouldn't have it any other way. Do you want to live outside the fort? Yeah. No, I don't exactly. I don't want to live outside the fort. There are a lot of bad guys out there right now. All right, so the journey is over. You got unpacked your bags and got comfortable, right? Hardly. So what has this done in terms of setting you up for your future plans? So I'll talk about a couple of different things and maybe you can build on it, Chris, from what you're seeing. For us, we got very good. And I hate the concept of just FinOps, but it's the way of being in the cloud. It's different than running a data center. And the way we think about building services, consuming services, allocating services, provisioning services, there's just so much more flexibility there that we can completely fine tune the service that we want to provide. That helps us from when we think about 360 degree value as we talk to our clients for ourselves to say, it also helps just simply on the sustainability agenda, right, because now as Amazon builds their capabilities to be more sustainable, those SKUs are available to us. We can naturally consume those SKUs much more effectively. And then the next thing to me, what I'm especially excited about is all the stuff we're doing around network. So pre COVID, 95% of our traffic was just straight to the internet because we had already finished the journey. So now what do you need a wide area network for anymore? If you're not routing traffic between data centers, what do you need it for? So we have been working with AWS, especially like building these cloud WAN type capabilities and consuming it. So think of consuming network same way as you do the cloud. So I'm excited about that one. Yeah, I'm super excited about that, right? Because networks at the core of everything you do, right? And there's always a lot of concern, hey, when I go to the cloud, my network costs are going to go up, right? But I think we've proven, right? Being able to, those costs can come down, right? And we can have a better experience, deal with the ebbs and flows of our business, whether it's people working from home, people working in the office, are the client sites. We've got that cloud-based backbone that we support. I mean, I agree 100%. I think you and your team have done a great job of cost management, cloud cost management, optimization. You didn't stop, right? You didn't just live after the migration on VMs, right? You went serverless, you went containerization. And that's kept our cloud bill going down, right? Versus going up, right? And I hear from a lot of customers concerned about cloud costs and that type of stuff, but you've proven, right? That you can keep it flat if not going down because you're using those customers. The sustainability is the other thing that I truly, I love, right? Is we're all trying to become a more sustainable organization. We're trying to help our clients become more sustainable organizations. And, you know, your ability to take on Graviton processors, right? Which use less power, right? Overnight, right? Or, hey, I'm using a serverless Lambda or whatever, right? And I'm not running that server. So you're able to show that sustainability gains very quickly, which you could not do, right? In just doing cloud-based migrations. Well, I tell you what I think is impressive is that you put your money where your mouth is, right? Is it that it's, and if I'm going to be a client, not to, you know, give you guys a pet on the back, you don't need it, you're doing great without me. But I'd say, you've been there, you've done that, and so I can learn from you. You understand my pain. You understand my reservations, my challenges, and you could be my headlights here. So, I think great approach, kudos to you and certainly wish you both success. And to your fourth and fifth appearances on theCUBE, we have slots tomorrow if you're available. So, maybe we'll fill it up and bring it back again. Guys, thanks for being here. I appreciate the time. I've been talking about Accenture. This is the first executive summit being sponsored by Accenture here at AWS re-invent 22. I'm John Walls, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage.