John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, broadcasted live at the GE Industrial Internet event yesterday in San Francisco. They had a chance to talk to Paul Daugherty, CTO of Accenture, who is responsible for Accenture’s technology innovation and growth agenda.

Accenture is not a big software developer on the market, it’s more like an “independent player with a point of view”. They work with the best technology that are going to deliver the best value for their clients, and that involves a number of tech vendors and tech companies. They have to be ready to work with whatever technology is right for a certain client, making recommendations for the most effective technology in solving a certain problem for the client.

The path to industrialized internet

For Accenture, digital business is what got the ball rolling towards the industrial internet. The momentum shift across the digital world started in retail and in more customer-oriented markets, with companies moving to digital commerce.

Nowadays, a client trying to capitalize the digital part of their company is hindered by the fact that the manufacturing and the physical part of the business is often outside the scope of their IT system; it’s not connected, it’s not online.

Accenture looked at ways to achieve that digital values for companies that operate in the B2B type of industries, and that led to the notion of industrial technology, the convergence of industrial and operations technology with information technologies. IT and OT coming together with information technologies.

Flexibility is key for future architecture

Combining various fields experience and comprehensive capabilities across all industries and business functions, Accenture helps clients shift into high-performance mode. There is not one architecture solution that is going to solve all the problems in a certain industry, so the challenge will be having a flexible platform and understanding the data historian type of technologies. So, when speaking about the right platform and the industrial internet, “it’s about coming up with the right architecture and the smart engineering to solve specific problems for clients,” says Daugherty. It doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all type of platform, but one which allows the blending and engineering of different platforms and techniques.

Furrier agrres in spotting this challenge, because somewhere along the line there’s a conflict. People want Agile platform and the ability to vertically integrate without losing some other opportunities. Regarding the question of how the stacks need to work inthis environment, Daugherty explains that one of the things the partners share is the view of how stacking needs to work in certain environent. At the cloud level, Amazon provides great capabilities, but clients want and choose different solutions. Some opt for private, other for hybrid cloud.

Layering Cloud Services: New analytics, new standards.

There’s a cloud layer and there’s a layer above the cloud, to allow movement of things across platforms. Daugherty mentioned the Accenture Cloud Platform, which is a management tool of this abstract environment beyond the cloud. This is a hybrid cloud platform service that aggregates cloud services for enterprise customers, minimizing the IT governance.

Accenture Mobility Management Services manages machine to machine and data to data ingestion across a variety of platforms. Clients interested in a cost-efficient way to deliver broad, innovative mobility services to new devices can start off right with the Accenture Mobility Managed Services offer. AMMS is designed to help them launch mobility services quickly, creating new revenue streams while lowering operating costs.

The other common layer apart from cloud is a common analytics layer. By gathering all data from all platforms, it allows data scientist to learn from other models and deliver better outcomes based on evolution of better analytic models. That’s the highest level of tooling and standardization in Doherty’s opinion, and that’s a vision Pivotal is embarking on with their data fabric.

Vellante wanted to know if standards will emerge across these industries or if the industry specific data standards will be the norm. Daugherty thinks some standards will evolve based on certain domain and industries; some problems will need to be solved on an industry’s basis, but data platforms need to be very modular.

Daugherty explained again the the mantra of Accenture: “We want to simplify the outcome for our clients, giving them business value quicker.” The markets gets trained to buy based on outcome and, what we can see in today’s market is Capability as a Service.