>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCube,
covering Google Cloud Next 2018.
Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hello everyone, welcome back, this is theCUBE's
live coverage, we're here in San Francisco, Moscone West
for Google Cloud's big conference called Next 2018.
The hashtag is GoogleNext18.
I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, our next guest
is Traci Gusher, Principal, Data and Analytics at KPMG.
Great to have you on, thanks for joining us today.
>> Yeah, thanks for having me.
>> We love bringing on the big system, global,
some integrators, you guys have great domain expertise.
You also work with customers, you have all the best stories.
You work with the best tech.
Google Cloud is like a kid in the candy store
>> It sure is. when it comes to tech, so my
first question is obviously AI in super important to Google.
Huge scale, they bring out all the goodies to the party.
Spanner, Bigtable, BigQuery, I mean they got a lot
of good stuff.
TensorFlow, all this open source goodness,
pretty impressive, right, >> Yeah, absolutely.
the past couple years what they've done.
How are you guys partnering with Google, because now that's
out there, they need help, they've been acknowledging it
for a couple years, they're building an ecosystem,
and they want to help end user customers.
>> Yeah, we've been working with Google for quite some time,
but we actually just formalized our partnership
with Google in May of this year.
From our perspective, all of the good work
that we have done, we're ready to hit the accelerator
on and really move forward fast.
Some of the things that were announced this week, I think,
are prime examples of areas where we see opportunity
for us to hit the accelerator on.
Something like what was announced this week with their
new contact center, API suite, launched by
the Advanced Solutions Lab.
We had early access to test some of that and really
were able to witness just how accelerated some of these
things can help us be when we're building end-to-end
solutions for clients.
>> There's a shortcut to the solutions because with Cloud,
the time to value is so much faster, so it's almost
an innovator's dilemma.
The longer deployments probably meant more billings,
( laughs) right, for a lot of integrators.
We've heard people saying hey we've gone, the old days were
eight months to eight weeks to eight minutes
on some of these techs, so the engagements have changed.
At the end of the day, there's still a huge demand
for architectural shift.
How has the delivery piece of tech helped you guys
serve your customers, because I think that's now
a conversation that we're hearing is that look,
I can move faster, but I don't want to break anything.
The old Facebook move fast, break stuff,
that doesn't fly in enterprise.
>> No, it doesn't (laughs).
>> I want to move fast, but I need to have some support there.
What are some of the things that you're seeing that are
impacting the delivery from integrators?
>> Well, some of the technology that's come, that's reduced
the length of time to deliver, we see and a lot of our
customers see as opportunity to do the next thing, right?
If you can implement a solution to a problem quicker,
better, faster, than you can move on to the next problem
and implement that one quicker, better, faster.
I think the first impact is just being able to solve
more problems, just being able to really apply
some benefits in a lot more areas.
The second thing is that we're looking at problems
differently, the way that problems used to be solved
is changing, and that's most powerfully noted, as we see,
at this conference by what's happening with artificial
intelligence and with all the accelerators that are being
released in machine learning and the like.
There's a big difference in just how we're solving
the problems that impacts it.
>> What are some of the problems that you guys are attacking
now, obviously AI's got a lot of goodness to it.
What are some of the challenges that you're attacking
for customers, what are some examples?
>> Our customers have varying problems as they're looking
to capitalize on artificial intelligence.
One of the big problems is where do I start, right?
Often you'll have a big hype cycle where people are really
interested, executives are really interested, and I want
to use AI, I want to be an AI-enabled company.
But they're not really sure where to start.
One of the areas that we're really hoping a lot of our
customers do is identify where the low hanging fruit
is to get immediate value.
And at the same time, plan for longer strategic types
of opportunities.
The second area is that one of the faults that we're seeing,
or failure points that we're seeing in using
artificial intelligence is failure to launch.
What I mean by that is there's a lot of great modeling,
a lot of great prototyping and experimentation happening
in the lab as it relates to applying AI to different
problems and opportunities, but they're staying in the lab,
they're not making it in to production, they're not making
it in to BAU, business as usual
processes inside organizations.
So a big area that we're helping our clients in is actually
bridging that gap, and that's actually how I refer to it,
I refer to it as mind the gap.
>> That is a great example, I hear this
all the time, classic.
Is it, what's the reasons, just group think,
I'm nervous, there's no process, what's holding
that back from the failure to launch?
>> There's a few things.
The first is that a lot of traditional IT organizations
embedded in enterprises don't necessarily have all
of the skills and capabilities or the depth of skills
and capabilities that they need to deploy these models
in to production.
There's even just basic programming types of gaps,
where a lot of models are being constructed using things
like Python, and a lot of traditional IT organizations
are Java shops and they're saying what do I do now?
Do I convert, do I learn, do I use different talent?
There's technology areas that prove to be challenging.
The other area is in the people, and I actually spoke
with an analyst this morning about this very topic.
There's a lot of organizations that have started
productionalizing some of these systems and some of these
applications, and they're a little bit discouraged
that they're not seeing the kind of lift and the kind
of benefits that they thought they would.
In most cases--
>> Who, the customers or the analysts?
>> The customers.
>> OK, alright.
>> Yeah, I was having a conversation
with an analyst about it.
But in most cases, it's not that the technology is falling
short, it's not that the model isn't as accurate as you need
it to be, it's that the workforce hasn't been transitioned
to utilize it, the processes haven't been changed.
>> Operationalizing it, yeah.
>> The user interfaces aren't transitioning the workforce
to a new type of model, they're not being retrained
on how to utilize the new technology or the new
insights coming from these models.
>> That's a huge issue, I agree.
>> Isn't there also, Traci, some complacency
in certain industries?
I mean you think about businesses that haven't yet totally
transformed, I think of healthcare, I think of financial
services, as examples that are ripe for transformation
but really haven't yet.
You hear a lot of people say well, it's not really urgent
for us, we're doing pretty well, I'll be retired by then,
there seems to be a sense of complacency in certain segments
of enterprises.
Do you see that?
>> I do.
And I'll say that we've seen a lot more movement
in some of those complacent industries in the last
six to 18 months than we have previously.
I'll also say going back to that where do I start element,
there's a lot of organizations that have pressing business
challenges, those burning platforms, and that's where
they're starting and I'm not advocating against it,
I'm actually advocating very much for that,
because that's how you can prove some real
immediate value.
Some organizations, particularly in life sciences
or financial services, they're starting to use
these technologies to solve their regulatory challenges.
How do I comply faster, how do I comply better,
how do I avoid any type of compliance issues
in the future, how do I avoid other challenges
that could come in those areas?
The answer to a lot of those questions is if I use AI,
I can do it quicker, more accurately, etc.
>> Are you able to help them get ancillary value out of that
or is it just sort of, compliance a lot of times is like
insurance, if I don't do it I get in trouble
or I get fined.
But are you able to, this is like the holy grail
of compliance and governance, are you able to get additional
value out of that when you sort of apply machine
intelligence to solve those problems?
>> That's always the goal.
Solving the regulatory problem is certainly what I would
say are the table stakes, right?
The must-have.
But the ability to gain insight that can actually drive
value in the organization, that's where
your aim really is.
In fact, we've worked with a lot of organizations,
take life sciences, we've worked with some life sciences
organizations that are trying to solve some compliance
issues and what we've found is that many times in helping
them solve these compliance issues, we're actually
gathering insights that significantly increase
the capability of their sales organization,
because the insights are giving them real information
about their customers, their customers' buying patterns,
how they're buying, where they might be buying improperly.
And it's not the table stake of what we're trying to do,
the table stake was maybe contract compliance,
but the value that they're actually getting out of it
is not only the compliance over their distributors
or their pharmacies, but it's also over the impact
that they're going to have on their sales organization.
For something like an internal audit department
to have value to sales, that' like holy grail stuff.
>> Yeah, right, yeah.
>> What about the data challenges?
Even in a bank, who's essentially a data company,
the data tends to be very siloed, maybe tucked away
in different business units.
How are you seeing organizations, how are you helping
organizations deal with that data silo problem,
specifically as it relates to AI?
>> It used to be that the devil was in the details,
but now the devil's in the data, right?
>> I love that.
>> There was a great Harvard Business Review article
that came out, and I think Diane Green actually quoted
this in one of her presentations, that companies
that can't do analytics well can't do AI yet.
A lot of companies that can't do analytics well yet,
it isn't because they don't have the analytical talent,
it's not because they don't know the insights they want
to drive, it's because the data isn't in the right format,
isn't usable to be able to gain value from it.
There's a few different ways that we're helping
our clients deal with those things.
Just at the very basic level is good data governance.
Do you have data stewards that are owning data,
that are making sure that data is being created
and governed the right way?
>> That's a huge deal, I imagine--
>> Inequality and. >> It's huge.
>> Inequality-- >> inequality, meta data.
>> Garbage in, garbage out.
>> Lineage of data, how it's transformed.
Being able to govern those things is just imperative.
>> It could be just a database thing, could be a database
thing, too, it's one of those things where there's
so many areas that could be mistakes on the data side.
Want to get your thoughts on the point you said earlier
which I thought was about technology not coming out
and getting commercialized or operationalized.
For a variety of reasons, one of them being processes
in place, and we hear this a lot.
This is a big opportunity, because the human side
of these new jobs, whether you're operating the network,
really they need help, customers need help.
I think you guys should do a great job there
given the history.
The other trend that came out of the keynote today
I want to get your reaction to is there's a tweet here,
I'll read it, it says "GCB Cloud will start serving
"managing services, enterprise workloads, including Oracle,
RAC and Oracle exit data, and SAP HANA through partners."
Interesting mind shift again, talk about a mind shift, OK.
Partners aren't used to dealing with multi-vendors,
but now as a managed service will change the mechanism
a bit on delivery because now it's like OK, hey,
you want to sling some APIs around, no problem.
You want to manage it, we got Kubernetes and Istio.
You want a little Oracle with a little bit of HANA?
It brings up a much more diverse
landscape of solutions. >> It does.
Which makes the partners like sous chefs.
You can cut the solutions up any way you want.
To your point about going faster, to the next challenge.
Normal, is that going to be the new normal, this kind of
managed service dashboarding?
You see that as the...
>> I think it is, and I'll take it a step, sir,
I'll take it a step further beyond managed service
and actually get a little more discreet.
One of the things that we're doing increasingly more of
is insights as a service, right?
If you think about managed service in the traditional sense
of I've got a process and you're going to manage that process
end to end for me, that technology end to end for me,
I do think that that's going to slowly become
more and more prevalent.
That has to happen with our movement to putting our
applications in the cloud, and our ERPs in the cloud.
I think it is going to become more of the norm than the less
but I also think that it's opening the door for a lot
of other things as a service, including insights
as a service.
Organizations can't find the data science talent that they
need to do the really complex types of analysis.
>> Your insights as a service comment just gave me
an insightful, original idea, thank you very much.
>> You're welcome.
>> I'll put this in the wrap-up, Dave, when we talk about it.
Think about insight as a service, to make that happen
with all the underpinning tech, whether it's Oracle
or whatever, the insights are an abstraction layer
on top of that so if the job is to create great experiences
or insights, it should be independent of that.
Google Cloud is bringing out a lot more
of the concept of abstractions.
Kubernetes, Istio, so this notion of an abstraction layer
is not just technical, there's also business logic involved.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> This is going to be a dream scenario
for KPMG, >> We think so.
for your customers, for other partners.
Cause now you can add value in those abstraction layers.
>> Absolutely.
>> By reducing the complexity.
Well Oracle, that's not my department, that's HANA's,
that's SAP, who does that?
He or she's the product lead over it, gone.
Insights as a service completely horizontally flattens that.
>> Yeah, and to that point,
there's magic that happens
when you bring different data together.
Having data silos because their data's in different systems
just, that's the analytics of 1990.
Organizations can't operate on that anymore,
and real analytics comes when you are working at a layer
above the system's and working with the data that's coming
from those systems and in fact even creating signals
from the data.
Not even using the data anymore, creating a signal
from the data as an input to a model.
I couldn't agree with you more.
>> Whole new way of doing business.
This is digital transmitting, this is the magic of Cloud.
Traci, great to have you on.
>> Yeah, thanks for having me.
>> It's going to be a whole new landscape changeover,
new way to do business.
You guys are doing a great job, KPMG, Traci Gusher.
Here inside theCUBE talking about analytics AI.
If you can't do analytics good, why even go to AI?
Love that line.
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