“The merit of all things lies in their difficulty,” said Alexandre Dumas, author of “The Three Musketeers.” He very well could have been talking about cloud transformation under the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taking that journey to cloud alone is a daunting task. So some companies are seeking out expert advice. Providing a textbook example are global biopharmaceutical powerhouse Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. and cloud computing cohorts Amazon Web Services Inc. and Accenture plc.

“It’s that diversity of talent, diversity of skill and viewpoint, and even culture,” said Brian Bohan (pictured, center), director and global head for the Accenture AWS Business Group at AWS. “We see that in the power of three.”

Bohan; Karl Hick (pictured, left), chief digital and information officer at Takeda; and Arjun Bedi (pictured, right), senior managing director at Accenture, spoke with Rebecca Knight, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit. They discussed how Takeda, AWS and Accenture have joined in a triple alliance to leverage the power of cloud for healthcare innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

A need for speed sends Takeda to seek partners

Takeda’s journey to cloud began long before AWS and Accenture joined the party. But the effort, while steady, was slow and localized. “We just weren’t seeing the impact at scale that we wanted to see,” Hick stated. “There’s a need ultimately to accelerate and broaden that shift.”

Impelled by the pandemic and company growth, the Takeda IT team started thinking outside the box for ways to speed its digital transformation. The solution they hit on was to leverage the strategic partner model.

Labeling the process “the power of three,” Hick set out to create a very different collaborative model where partners share the responsibility for the transformation journey. This includes understanding that the three combine to create more than the sum of their resources, that success is shared, and that all decisions are made with a one-team mindset.

“We always think about [the cloud journey] as a collective group so that we can keep that front and center,” Bedi stated. “It [has] allowed us to move at speed, be more flexible, and ultimately all be looking at the target the same way.”

The power of three comes to the forefront with the cultural shift toward patient-focused innovation, according to Hick.

“There is a focus on innovation at a rapid speed so we can move ultimately from treating conditions to keeping people healthy,” he said. “We’re working on things like, how do we create this patient-obsessed curiosity and unlock innovation with a growth mindset and the level of curiosity that’s needed not to just continue to do the same things, but to challenge the status quo.”

When people think about cloud, they tend to think about infrastructure technology, according to Bedi. “The reality is that the cloud is the true enabler for innovating at scale,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit. Neither Accenture LLP, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE