As the SAP Sapphire conference continued to gain steam, viewpoints from companies that have existing relationships with SAP, as well as those from newcomers, mingled and influenced each other, informing each.

Steve Convey, managing director at Accenture, Inc., joined John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about ways his company is engaging with its customers, the joint ventures between Accenture and SAP and what customers want to keep them competitive.

Working together

Early in the interview, Convey expanded on the Accenture-SAP relationship. “The Accenture and SAP Business Solutions Group is a venture … all about doing codevelopment of business applications, specifically for industry use-cases,” he said. “So the idea here is that leveraging the power of all of the technology that SAP has, with HANA and their IoT platform, and all the great industry knowledge that Accenture has, identify those things that are gonna make the biggest impact in the industry, and then do codevelopment, design, build, take it to market, and implement it for our clients.”

Convey clarified that while “it’s not a separate business entity,” the two companies did work very closely together on this effort, with “separate divisions within both of our organizations that focus entirely on this subject.”

Listening to customers

Convey also emphasized how customer expectations and desires were influencing Accenture’s business goals. “What our clients are telling us is that they have their large ERP systems, they’re looking for the roadmap to move to the cloud … to move to digital, so every organization’s trying to become a digital organization, for lots of different reasons,” he said. “Leveraging memory databases, doing advanced analytics, trying to improve the customer experience; what they recognize is they’ve got to be multi-velocity in the way that they build applications.”

Convey continued: “What I think our clients are telling us is that there’s a hybrid model that they want to use to implement technology; they want to have their own expertise in house, but if they’re not in a position to be able to acquire talent that quickly, they want to be able to leverage organizations like Accenture to be an arm of development for them,” he added.

Moving forward quickly

The later part of the interview touched on Accenture’s plans for the future and what technologies they expect to see causing major disruption in that time. “There’s two disruptive pieces of technology or trends that I think a lot of companies are grappling with and trying to figure out ‘what the heck do I do with this?’. One of them is artificial intelligence, the other has to do with image and pattern recognition. And all of this is effectively in IoT.”

Convey laid out his assessment of how intellectual property is edging toward shorter and shorter “shelf life,” with a freshness duration of approximately 18 months open to companies to implement their new ideas before copycats spring up and start devaluing its presence in the market.

“I think the trick is, if we’ve got some great idea that’s going to create industry differentiation for you, you can’t take two years to get it into the marketplace, you’ve got to have development cycles that are measured in weeks, not in months or years,” he said. “For Accenture, industry is everything.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE