How a legacy infrastructure provider historically operating in the data center and on-premises, has shifted its focus to providing advanced cloud services was explored at the recent AWS’ re:Invent conference.

One key is to capitalize on the legacy work, a senior executive believes.

“All of the previous work we’ve done for our customers, we understand their application and in-data-center landscape better than they do in most scenarios,” said Scott Warren (pictured), vice president for U.S. AWS Practice at Sogeti, part of Capgemini Service SAS. “Having all of that allows assessing applications and figuring out the best migration path or modernization path.”

Warren spoke with David Nicholson, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how a large IT provider was adapting to cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Getting into actual engineering

Some applications are prime for lift-and-shift, according to Warren.

“We just want to get them out of the data center into the cloud very quickly,” he said. “Other ones that are very mission critical or customer facing, very important for the future of an organization, need to be looked at with a more modern lens.”

The firm is going about this in a couple of ways. One is through a GitHub-like code snippet library that helps with the dichotomy between bespoke applications costing a lot of money and an out-of-the-box solution needing customization.

Offering code templates, such as infrastructure as code and microservices, solves that for disparate verticals, according to Warren.

“We bring that to every cloud engagement we work on,” he said. “We should never be starting at zero. We can always borrow, steal, modify and change part of that library.”

Another directional shift the IT provider has gone toward is including more engineering in its offerings. It shortcut to this through its purchase of Altran, which specialized in digital twins and self-driving cars, for example.

“Engineering of products … the lines between IT and business are going to begin to get blurred,” Warren concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Capgemini Service SAS sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Capgemini nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE