While the handling of data and applying analytics insight to business processes are taking much of the spotlight in what software-led services can offer to the enterprise, the potential for innovation in the infrastructural side of business is growing to prominence as well. One partnership aimed at the infrastructure side of things is the recently announced Amazon-Accenture Business Group, which made Accenture one of AWS’ first cloud migration competency partners.

In Las Vegas, NV, at this year’s AWS re:Invent conference, Michael Liebow, global managing director, Cloud Platform, at Accenture plc, sat down with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about the company’s new partnership with AWS and changes brought to operations models by the coming of cloud.

Function and marketing

Early on, Liebow made the point that “GSI, Global Systems Integrator, is not relevant; GSI, Global Service Integrator, is. And so when you see the kind of function and capabilities that are coming out of a platform like Amazon, it’s service integration.”

And as Accenture makes efforts to place itself in the course of that integrative transformation for its customers, its alliance with Amazon is making it easier to not only have that functionality at its disposal, but to bring it directly to customers.

Announcing the Amazon/Accenture Business Group, Liebow said, “was a real tipping point for us, to be on-stage, to announce that joint investment around setting up a competency, people, certifications, assets, and taking that to market. … That has been off-the-charts successful as a combined entity to go after this market.”

Dog food data

And Accenture is making sure they’re not just selling these services; in Liebow’s words, “We’re eating our own dog food. … We’re taking out one data center after another and moving that workload to the cloud, and we’re proving to ourselves that it works.”

He also struck out at the “misnomer about cloud that you’re basically renting time, and when you lease, it costs more. The key thing about cloud is it’s changing your operating model,” he said, with that affecting the focus and workteams, “and what you find is that you are managing to the valleys instead of the peaks.”

Where businesses may have once been content with running operations 24/7, there’s now a 9-to-5 schedule for those compute boxes, with cost control and a sense of the work done in a day or month driving organization from capex to opex focus. But that’s hardly the stopping point, Liebow said.

Instead, it’s raising new questions of development. “What we’ve seen is a lot of innovation, and so how does IT now enable that innovation? How do you kind of accelerate the agility in an organization?” he asked.

“That’s the tipping point for the next 10 years. You’re going to see a wholesale shift in the market. We’re entering into something I think of as the post-infrastructure era, and all that means is, between serverless and cloud and containers, that the whole model is just changing dramatically, and we’re here to help clients on that journey,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure: AWS and other companies sponsor some AWS re:Invent segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE