>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE.
Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit.
Brought to you by Accenture.
>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage
of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas, Nevada.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight.
We have two guests for this segment.
We have Michael Liebow.
He is the Global Managing Director Accenture Cloud platform,
and Chris Milkosky, Enterprise Architect at ETS.
Thank you both for coming on theCube.
>> Great to be here,
thank you. >> Thanks, great to be here.
>> So, Chris, I'm going to start with you.
ETS, the world's largest non-profit
education testing service.
Give our viewers a little history.
>> Sure, we're the guerrilla in the test assessment industry.
So, ETS, Educational Testing Services,
been around since the 1940s.
We do...
our mission is to advance the quality
and equity in education through test assessments,
through research, and related services.
Big thing of what we do is just try to find out more
about the state of education in the world,
in the United States, and then do
what we can to improve that.
ETS has grown up with--
to relate this to Accenture and everything--
ETS has grown up with IT.
We've been around since the 40s
and so we've used traditional IT for quite a long time.
Over time, we realized obviously that there's constraints
and stuff like that on some of the traditional IT.
We understood that we needed to figure out ways
to become more competitive, to stay a leader
in the industry, to innovate, innovate faster.
That's how we ended up engaging Accenture,
and working on an effort to migrate to the Cloud,
and give ourselves capabilities to become more innovative.
>> So, you're talking about this need to innovate,
this need to stay competitive and ahead of the crowd.
So why, so tell me, you announced a big partnership
with Accenture this morning.
A large transformation project.
Do you want, tell us a little bit more about that.
>> Yeah, no, absolutely, this has been the--
Chris has been the principal architect,
driving that whole agenda
for some time, so why, why Accenture,
why look to the outside in order to partner
with somebody in order to realize that innovation?
>> Yeah, so, I'll give you a little bit of history on that.
Back in we've been for years actually messing
around with things in the Cloud,
trying out Amazon and everything.
We quickly realized after doing some POCs and pilots
that there's a lot to this.
It's not just going to be a trend and it's not just a fad
that's out there and everything.
It's hard, it's tough.
What we needed is we needed somebody who
had the capabilities, the experience, the knowledge,
the history of doing this already before.
In around 2017, we engaged Accenture already early on.
They helped give us some foundational understanding
about movement to the Cloud.
Then over time we decided, yeah, you know what,
we really need a lot more help with this.
We need a managed service provider in the mix.
We need capabilities to migrate to the Cloud.
We need help with security, that kind of thing.
Ultimately though, the big goal here is to be more agile,
to be more innovative and we have to do it fast
and we have to do it at scale.
Yeah, so we did our due diligence.
We looked around and after talking to Accenture,
it was clear to us that they had that capability.
>> So that's why Accenture.
Tell me a little bit about what Accenture--
what does partnership entail? >> What do we bring into it.
>> Exactly,
what are you bringing to the >> It's a great question.
>> Table in helping ETS achieve it's goals?
>> Yeah, oh no, absolutely.
We've been partnered for a while,
as Chris indicates,
and what you realize is there's a journey.
You know where, since 1940, right,
you have this IT organization,
you're delivering whatever set of value
and capability to the business,
but the business is hungry, right?
The leadership wants to innovate,
they want to do new things, but they can't.
They realize that and
if you move on your own, you move slowly,
and if speed is of the essence,
which for most organizations it is,
then what do you need?
Well, you need the tools, the capabilities, the skills.
You have to trust somebody
to enable that vision.
And it's kind of like if you're a surgeon,
right, you know, do surgery.
We'll do everything else
in order to enable you to spend time innovating.
What we bring is the whole strategy,
the business case development as part of the journey.
We show what we can do, kind of where you are today,
and where you will be quickly.
We can migrate and transform the workload.
When we talk about this relationship,
it's the whole end to end but it doesn't stop there.
It's not just what we should build,
how we should build it, the architecture,
it's not just moving the workload into the Cloud,
it's then running it securely,
as Chris pointed out and to optimize it,
so that it's not just this whole notion
of devops and agility, those terms are tied together.
We want to enable the agility,
but we want them to be able to then leverage it.
Don't go direct to Amazon, go direct to any other provider.
Enjoy the innovation that we're hearing
about this week and leverage all that.
This is the key thing.
This partnership creates the ETS Cloud platform.
It's their basis, their foundation to now innovate
and enable their broader business,
so they can bring new capabilities to education.
I'm so excited.
This is such a great partnership,
and the outcome is going to be so
important, I think, to ourselves, to our communities.
It's great stuff.
The last thing though is we want to de-risk this.
The point here is how do package all that?
We have something Accenture Prime.
Not to offend my friends.
(laughs) >> I've heard of another Prime.
>> Right, so this is about how Accenture's priming
the capacity, the services, and being on point for ETS.
So, one throat to choke, kind of, right?
You can, you know, that's my throat.
I'm here to make sure he's successful.
And the organization is successful.
That's really the point.
Everything from the tooling of
the Cloud management capabilities, to set the policies,
the security, cross manage the Cloud management services,
the cost in Cloud optimization and the contracting
is all through Accenture.
One stop shop.
That's what we're here for.
>> That's really important to us
because ETS, our goal isn't to be out there
and be the best at creating the Cloud,
building a Cloud environment, migrating to the Cloud,
managing the service of the Cloud, and secure.
We want to do what our core competencies are
in furthering education and advancing the quality of it.
Accenture allows us to do that.
They are the enabler.
We can now, we don't have to worry about that part.
>> I love this that Accenture is really
allowing you to do surgery,
or really to actually focus on the testing.
With Accenture taking care of you,
enabling you, how are you now innovating?
What are the goals and aspirations on the table now
that Accenture, because they're in
the background helping you.
>> Sure, so yeah, we're going to be able
to do more in the mobile space.
We're going to work in furthering our capabilities
in doing data analytics.
We want to, oh my goodness, the conference
it's all about artificial intelligence.
There's a whole lot of stuff on that.
We need to figure out, how are we going to do that?
And how are we going to use that to get better information
to, again, accomplish that mission,
to further quality of and equity in education.
The capabilities and the speed at which
we're going to be able to things is just very exciting.
What's really cool is that you see it in people,
they see the change in ETS already,
and they know what's coming.
It's already fostered this new and renewed feeling
of creativity and it's becoming pervasive,
and so you feel it.
Everybody's coming up with new ideas
and we're trying out new things.
With the help of Accenture,
we're going to be able to do that a lot faster
and in volume and another thing I didn't mention
is, and I think you might have said this earlier,
what's really nice, too, is we know that in the Cloud
you can do cost optimization.
Cost optimization, it takes a lot of paying attention to,
and a lot of attention.
The folks at Accenture, they explained
to us what they would do.
It's great how your service provider
is telling you how to save money.
I just love that, you know.
(laughing) It's awesome.
You know that, right?
>> You can do that for everyone, right?
>> But it's great, you know, there's so much you can
do in the Cloud and to be able to leverage that,
so, again, we can focus on our core competencies.
It's just an excellent story.
It's a good thing.
>> Excellent, excellent.
And Michael, is that really what
you're always bringing to the table?
You focus on your core competencies,
we can take care of the rest.
>> Yeah, you think about a managed service
and how do you allow you to do what you do,
but also do you de-risk the whole value prop?
Because a lot of organizations honestly struggle
with how to move to the Cloud.
One of the things that Accenture's done,
I'm not sure if you know,
is we've moved our entire business to the public Cloud.
We're 95% in the public Cloud today,
and so I've made a lot of mistakes, all right.
But we've taken all those lessons learned,
and we've built that into our platform,
our skills, our competencies.
Now we can apply that so
Chris doesn't have to make the same mistakes.
>> You were your own guinea pig.
>> Right, we ate our own dog food, right?
Because we figured early on
a number of years ago, that you can't really
sell this stuff if you don't use this stuff.
That was an aha moment, I would say,
at one of the Reinvents four years ago.
We really have to go all in.
We have to move our business
so that we can learn how to help others do it.
It's thrilling, it really is,
because you see that with organizations
that are just starting today.
They really don't know what they don't know.
All right, call me.
We will help you understand that
and we've structured this under this notion of joining
the Cloud where you can apply that to your business
and you want to get there in a year, two years,
we've done this with various organizations.
Let's just move, let's get there.
Stop the analysis paralysis and let's go.
That's the message.
>> What will we be talking about at next year's
Accenture, AWS Executive Summit?
When you think about ETS and the things
that you're going to be able to accomplish faster
this year and in the years to come,
what's most exciting to you about this?
>> Well I know from my side, I'm hoping that
you guys are going to be saying,
"Oh my goodness, ETS has become
"a lean, mean, innovation machine."
>> All right. (laughs)
Okay, yeah. >> That's what I want.
That's what I want to see.
I think with Accenture's help we're going to be there,
so that's what I think you'll see.
We're going to be one to watch along with Accenture.
Absolutely. >> Yeah.
No, that's great.
We love the fact that ETS wanted to come out at this event
and say, "This is what we're doing.
"We're going to climb that mountain, we're going."
I love that.
And to help others realize, yes, you can.
Let's go do this.
Here's an organization, 70 odd years old, right,
saying, no, we wa--
this guy sounds like a startup guy from the Valley.
>> That's what we want.
We want to become like a startup again.
We got to have that attitude again.
>> Enthusiasm. >> Yeah, no, it's true.
>> The energy. >> Right, right.
>> That's what we want to do.
>> And he was talking about the cultural differences.
Everyone's feeling more creative and get the juices flowing
and sharing ideas and insights.
>> And the ability to fail.
>> A hundred percent, yes.
You need to be able to fail faster and be okay with that.
It's a whole cultural change, too, you know.
There was a lot in the traditional IT,
everything back then, it's like, oh no, you know,
failure is failure, it's bad.
But no, we're going to learn from it and everything,
but we need to be able to do that faster
and learn from it.
Startup mentality, lean, being lean,
being more innovative, yeah.
>> I want to go work there.
(laughs) >> Yeah, right?
It's an exciting time. >> This is great.
>> Well, Chris and Michael, thank you so much
for coming on theCube, a really fun conversation.
>> Well, good, good. >> Thank you.
>> Thank you. >> Good to be here.
>> These are great questions, appreciate it.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more
from theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit
here in Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit.