Cenk Ozdemir, PwC | AWS re:Invent 2022

This is texturong TV. Hey, welcome back. Welcome to reinvent in Las Vegas reinvent 2022 and we are at our secret location the win in our text trunk studios here for Textron TV interviewing some great folks having some real good conversations really kind of getting a feel for what's happening where it's on top of mind for folks and definitely seeing some Trends in that so I'm very pleased to be joined by Jake old Amir who is cloud and digital leader at Price Waterhouse, right?

Absolutely. Well, thanks for the invitation. Yeah, the great conference 50,000 people only one place of your closest friend very good.

Yeah, very exciting shoulder to shoulder. So, you know, I'm interested because you know, when you work at a company, like press water, you can see a lot of different projects and customers and challenges same thing here, right? You have a good diversity of lots of companies working on lots of problems.

Lots of challenges. What do you see is sort of you're coming here and validating what you've heard from First maybe you've seen some things that might have added to your perspective. Well, first of all in my role I go to many of these conferences.

In fact, this is my ninth one this year the level of excitement. That we met is incredible and I think it's because it reminds me the old days of Erp where there is so much ecosystem built around the cloud. When you go to the show floor, you're going to see hundreds of companies.

Some of them you've never heard about but they play a great role in building this next gen architecture. So, you know one thing that's pretty clear is massive interest super high energy and building over very large ecosystem. Around the cloud architecture infrastructure SAS layer security everything around it is is developing at a lightning speed.

So there was it's very exciting to see yeah. This is just one threat. It's all of it, you know horizontal three-dimension.

All right. Yes, somebody just today described it and I went to the first reinvent so I can relate to it. It's kind of earlier.

It's more about the the it, you know, organization it admin, you know infrastructure person today. It's about Builders and and yes, it's about people in those folks that are in new roles like Esther here platform engineering or you know, taking kind of just the devops or whatever might be but it may it made me think about it really is people who are kind of building out their part of that puzzle whether a software developer or you know, that's engineer. Absolutely.

I think one thing that's interesting when you look at the early days of the main frame and client server wave right one thing that's very different now is The you know AWS and other hyperscalers are not just infrastructure. There is so much. In fact, when you look at the keynote today, there was multiple announcements of what we call the packaged innovation in the cloud.

So that's one thing that's very different. So what you're seeing is not just A new infrastructure, you move your stuff to with high level of flexibility and Agility and you know, that's not just it and that's that's actually the the main topic around, you know, there's a lot of talk around value out of cloud. In fact, we've done our Cloud survey and majority of the people talk about value out of cloud because Although a lot of migrations happened everybody moved their data and apps to the cloud especially running in containers and they say well, we're not getting any value because the real Value Story is going to be complete when you modernize those applications meaning.

Get out of the containers and attach them to all the microservices that you know are available to you. And then the second wave I think is going to actually be radically increasing the value curve is we have a lot of clients that have their front office and middle office written 20 30 years ago. You know all Legacy companies so all those applications when they have to be replatformed.

right first technically they have to be Rewritten with Cloud native Technologies second. When our clients rewrite those applications, they're going to actually do it as a transformation program looking at processes data. You know operating models so, you know, very different we see that as the real unlock of the value versus just hey, I moved everything and where is the value right your point about?

It isn't just another data center. Someone else the data center. Absolutely.

It's bigger. It's a whole Suite of say services and layers of things that you use as part of 100% Turn your apps. I'm curious because the big choice and modernization, right the debate of is it lift and shift?

Is it lift and shift with some modification or is it that's just a step on the way to changing the whole thing to collaborative. It seems like this kind of gone back and forth. Yeah.

We'll we want to be all Cloud native. Well, that's really hard. Maybe we don't but which what's your read on where we are in that really adopting Cloud.

Well, very interesting question because I think I had about 12 meetings since yesterday with different clients because we asked Consultants. We also test our theories and hypotheses with our clients and with our partners like AWS. One thing that is very important and everybody has to think about is I think the cloud Revolution started as a as a cosplay, you know shut down your data center and move to the cloud.

It's cheaper. It's more capable. It's flexible.

But now some of that has been done without a full end to end plan. To look at which data which workloads? Should sit where?

okay, and and that's a very critical point because that kind of an upfront Cloud strategy and Cloud planning. It's not just technical. It's also functional and it's industry specific.

If you have moved everything up. Then realize that maybe some certain applications should be either on premise. Or on the edge that type of planning is causing the confusion you're describing because what our clients are recognizing is hey, I got some things like if you have large amount of Imaging and things like that your storage costs may not be feasible to move to the cloud.

Right? So doing that planning right up front and figure out what sits where is gonna avoid that confusion? Otherwise there is a huge risk of What we call creating Legacy in the cloud.

And I think what that's going to cause is that's going to cause this vacillation of complexity. Because when you really think about it, most of our clients will be multi-cloud by Nature how it doesn't necessarily mean. It's AWS plus Azure plus gcp well sap is going on cloud.

Oracle runs on cloud Salesforce, so There is a huge risk of overcomplication because what happens if your company is sitting on seven clouds now you have multi-cloud orchestration problems. You have data syncing problems. You have security going across multiple clouds you have issues of what's the the real source of data issues.

So what we're thinking about is You know convincing our clients to do a thorough Enterprise level cloud strategy first. before you're executing all these different moves and what that strategy would also help is a good level of consumption planning because value out of the cloud is also not just running stuff in containers, but hey, I might have bought some overconsumption. Hmm.

so what we're trying to do is build that strategy correctly how our clients figure out which workloads should sit where for the appropriate use case and then from there make sure that they understand how to set up. Let's not call it simple. But let's call it the appropriately complex architectures.

so that the the Computing and the value going forward is going to be in line with the expectations. Well, I think it's I think what the habits we have so have and so I would contribute to your strategy session or maybe you've already got to plugged in is not everything needs to move at the same pace of innovation. Yes, like I might need to modernize my inventory application hundred percent.

I want to do massive things with it because that drives my business but versus this Logistics planning application that kind of good and we don't really have to invest a lot in it. I don't really want to do a ton of things to that though. I may want to make, you know, go into Cloud native or maybe not but it's also planning that Dimension to say what part of the business do.

We really want to accelerate. We need to be a Nimble and fast or Innovative Market. 100% And I think this is a You can even use the term like there's a tech transformation.

Mm-hmm. There is a business transformation with a small tea and a big T. What what this Cloud move gives you that opportunity to do it in those different types.

And I think that's where that planning comes into play. But I mean look, it's you know, when you talk to AWS, they will tell you that they're just getting started. You know, whatever the ratio is.

It's probably middle to High Teens where all the workloads. In the universe have moved to the cloud. So I think there's a lot of learnings both on the hyperscaler side as well as the the companies and client side and I think that in in the next two three years as this wave accelerates.

I see a more conscientious thinking around. Right on. How do I use this Innovation out there?

And while I'm spending all this money, how do I transform myself? And create new customer channels create new paths to growth and not just do an infrastructure. Yeah, not just retool.

That's right, right. That's right the stack of the application because it's interesting too. We talked about multicloud.

You buy three companies. They all may be on Amazon with you. There's four clouds inside Amazon.

That's right. Right. I mean there are different the infrastructure all parts of it.

So even that is a challenge that you know, you can be with one provider one hyperscaler, but not necessarily be you know, uniform or consistent across 100% places that you're using it 100% But I mean, there's other Trends in the cloud, right? The one thing is We as pricewaterhousecoopers we're looking at. You know our heritage of business Consulting and Technology Consulting it automatically makes us think about industry and function.

So the the dimension of industry in the cloud is still developing. And most likely it's going to develop pretty fast. There's still some concepts of Industry clouds being talked about and developed.

But this is something that's going to be very interesting to watch because there's some experiments out there around some of the providers like snowflake around like if you're in the same industry, can we share some of the data and I turn on some data you can see so I can see the same data from you. It's not IP driven, but it helps all of us. Those kind of concepts are going to continue to develop.

And I think that the the, you know, our clients are looking for industry specifics. both on the cloudification of erps SAS as well as Cloud capabilities so you know while we talked about this. You know Innovation or transforming Yourself by modernizing and Cloud native development.

I think the whole industry angle or industrialization of the cloud. Content both apps and data is going to be a very interesting thing to watch I think. You know hyper scales are going to get into it because it will increase consumption.

And our clients are going to be very interested in it because it gives them agility flexibility and new innovation right that they're looking for. 5. 6.

So that's something that's important to watch what happens to that? You know first maybe experiments, but then then becoming, you know industry standard capabilities that are provided by either erps or the cloud and it's going to all probably merge at some point. It kind of new models to business new models new business models new sharing models.

I think these are all being You know discussed in in different ways depending on who you talk to. Great. Was it fun talking with you Jake?

What would you like folks to be able to go check out is it learn about the cloud strategy? Well, it's okay PWC. We're we're making a big investment in the cloud, especially industry clouds as well as what we call the Beyond migration agenda, which we're think is the the unlock so watch us follow us pay attention to us, and there's a lot to come good a lot to get stuff shank goes into here from freshwater house.

Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for coming man.