>> Narrator: Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Cube. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost, John Troyer. There's nothing we love more when we're at the User Conference is to actually be able to dig in and talk with the users. I want to welcome to the program Opal Perry who is a divisional CIO at Allstate. Did the keynote this morning. A really good community here. I know they were excited to hear your story and thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks, it's great to be here with you. >> So Opal, we hear this term the digital transformation. Some people think it's just a buzz word but you talked in your keynote about the transformation that's going on in your world. Why don't you give us a quick overview of your role and what this transformation has been. >> Sure, so I've been with Allstate almost six years and I'm one of the vice presidents on the technology leadership team so we both work together as a whole team on initiatives that affect the entire enterprise. And then my particular day-to-day focus is Divisional CIO of Claims. We're a large insurer. The number publicly held insurer in the U.S. We support claims for auto, property, Allstate business insurance. It's a outstanding time to be in the business because there's just so much going on in technology. There's so many immersion areas and particularly when we are able to knit them together to serve our customers from insurance protection, restoration standpoint. It's really powerful. We do say and hear transformation so much that it feels sometimes like an overused term but I haven't found a better word for it yet because I think things really are transformative. We've been used to, for many years in the industry, change. Right, continuous improvement. We're always trying to change and get better. But what's happening now with this conversions of forces is truly transformative. We're not just replacing one way of doing things with a slightly improved way. We're changing the way people interact and serve the customer. >> And Opal, what was the driver for the change? Was there a pain point or competitive pressure? What drove this change? >> At Allstate, it's all about the customer opportunity. As I mentioned this morning, we've got 16 million customer households and that's just a tremendous responsibility and also a tremendous opportunity. To us, it was thinking about how do we bring the forces of this great 86-year-old company to bear and use the digital and technology changes emerging and really do that in support of giving our customer a better and better experience. How do we protect them? How do we restore them? >> As you are making this transformation to... We're here at the Cloud Foundry Summit, so interested in the Cloud Foundry story, how some of that decision process, obviously the tech is really cool, A. So was this coming out of the developers first, the technologists first or was it more of a needs analysis from the top-down that like a platform instead of technologies like Cloud Foundry? It could be what we need. >> It really came from a number of quarters but the tipping force was from our infrastructure area. As we looked like a lot of large companies do at what's the future of infrastructure, both in the data center, themes that have been emerging for many years in Cloud. There were a number of us that are leaders at Allstate that came from a banking background so we had seen previous era changes. Prior to Cloud Foundry been instantiated, I'd worked more in home-grown paths and seen that opportunity both from the developer but also from the infrastructure and so when Andy Zitney had joined us, he's with McKesson now, but he had joined and was our CTO for a period of time and had background from Chase and PayPal and various areas. He came in and build our platform team and really looked through their selection process, determined Cloud Foundry was a great option for us and something that we could grow with over time to start meeting the needs. But it was really an interest of saying hey, let's let infrastructure get out of the way, provide the foundation for the developers, and let the developers innovate great software for the business. But let's let the platform take care of things. He brought early awareness to a lot of those factors. >> Yeah, I think the joke is that nobody should be righting their own cryptographic software anymore (Stu chuckles). Nobody should be writing a distributed key-value ParaStore anymore. The Cloud Foundry people will tell you nobody should be writing their own platform anymore. That's hard enough, let somebody else take care of it. >> Yeah, maybe if you're a PhD student (interviewers chuckling) or researching the next great idea but in terms of being within an enterprise, whose primary role is to serve customers in a different way. Again, it just takes care of a lot of the lifting. That took a while when we introduced it for some people to understand. People would say to me why are you adding another layer? Getting them to understand the power of the abstraction and that's what we're really doing. We're lifting up above so we don't have to be worried so much about the exact infrastructure we're sitting on. >> That upscaling process that you're talking about, that training process. Both from the developer side and the operational side, there's a learning curve. Some people embrace it and some maybe not so much. Can you talk a little about how people have gotten trained up on the new skills, how you're helping people do that? >> Yes, in our platform team, it really started with Matt Curry who joined us a few years ago. He's a awesome engineer but also a great leader. He really set the tone culturally for the platform team to be learning environment and for people to share a lot. So a lot's really happened where he's led the hiring and training and seating of the platform team. From a developer perspective, when we looked across the enterprise and realized we've got a couple thousand developers that have worked for us for decades across different areas, we needed to do something more to reach scale more quickly. Initially, we were pairing with Pivotal and that was effective in getting some good results but we thought in order to make that scale and scale more quickly, we wanted to take a different approach. We partnered with Galvanize and brought in-house a 12-week bootcamp-style approach. >> Opal, one of the things that really resonated in your keynote, you talked about painting a picture as to how this technology really impacted your customers. There was a tree, there was a sun, there was your lab's environment and roots. Maybe if you could tease that out a little bit for us and explain how this technology really impacts your users. >> Yes, well, one I think in using that metaphor, it kind of acknowledges the environment is somewhat organic, right? The platform is still growing a lot, the ecosystem we're in, we have the chance to both contribute to the community and to take from it as it develops. To me, that's a really strong notion. The notion that particularly in leadership, we're kind of we're gardeners in a way, right? We're fostering the growth and so I thought that it's a really good example of thinking about as a tree or any plant really grows. It needs a variety of factors so I said our customers are like the sun to us, they're the reason for existing, and that's what we're all orbiting around. But the air represents all the business opportunity. The winds of change have been blowing mightily for years. The soil in which the tree is planted is like all the great Cloud Foundry instances. It's the training, it's the new role definition, it's the holistic program that really defines how we work as a digital product team. We put all that together and we need constant leadership support on a number of grounds to really make sure we take and cement the change. >> What about the developers? Where do they fit in this natural, organic analogy. >> They're the growing, thriving, strong plant itself. I think both. We aim for each individual product team and each individual, whether it's developer, product manager or designer to be continuously growing and using their creativity, discipline, strength, to bring us great business results. And then when you kind of back out and look at our network or product teams, that's a really important thing to me. An enterprise of our scale is very few breakthroughs will occur, I believe, because of a single digital product innovation. It's really in the ability to knit together different products to provide an end-to-end service or experience to the customer. >> How do you look at the public cloud? You know, Cloud Foundry allows? We were talking about BOSH, a multi-cloud environment. Where does your applications and deployments live today and how do you look at the public cloud? >> You know, we're still exploring some of the possibilities. Matt and his team have been very active looking. We started with on-premise installation for Cloud Foundry. And for myself, leading a development team, it's great as the platform is a look to kind of burst out into a multi-cloud environment. It'll be transparent to my team as long as we're operating to run on our Cloud Foundry instance, they can take us wherever we need to go. They've been doing a lot of work with our security team and other areas of the company to determine what's the right way to forge the path forward. I had a meeting with them Friday and they've got some great design things in the works. I think the next six moths to a year, are going to be looking at some real strong expansion of our cloud strategy. >> How does security fit into this whole picture? Obviously, a major concern for every CIO these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to us, we've taken a real security-first approach. We're been our CISO team has been working really closely with Matt and the Cloud engineers and they're just defining how do we want to segregate parts of our environment? How do we follow the principle of trust no one and build security in from the get-go? Again, it's a little bit like the platform itself. I'm confident when they get a solution in place, they'll minimize the burden on my developers and we can just have a security-first mindset but have a lot of the hygiene taken care of by the platform implementation. >> Again, something you don't want to differentiate on. You want to be built into the foundation, or the roots, maybe of our metaphor here. >> Opal: Yes. I heard ya. >> Opal, can you talk a little bit about the apps? Obviously, we've already used words like scale here today. Allstate's a big company. You've got lots of apps. Legacy apps, many different kinds of stacks, generations of technology. How are you choosing what ends up being is this greenfield or things that are being moved? How are you all looking at different applications inside the company? Where they live on which cloud and how they get modernized? >> We're lighting the business needs and strategy, really drive how we prioritize. It really is a matter of a lot, at this point, triage and prioritization. We've got a rich set of opportunities. When we're building new apps in-house, we're certainly looking to take a cloud-first approach. Again, a lot of that's within our own walls today but we know that with the Foundry, it offers us the option to burst out at a later date and leaves us some optionality. The Allstate Corporation, the Allstate brand of insurance is what's best known but in Claims, I also support we have a brand called Encompass Insurance so we're looking to provide support for multiple companies and build technology that can serve everyone. There are a lot of cases too, in an ecosystem like ours, where we're working with third party vendors and they're increasingly offering cloud-based solutions. Again, we do a lot of work with them from the security and compliance perspective to make sure that their strategy is consistent with ours. To make sure we take appropriate care of our customer data. And then I personally get really excited by the refactoring opportunities. I'm really fortunate in Claims that our core claims system was implemented just about 10 years ago. I call it legacy now, but it's not, (John chuckles) as far back to the dark ages as some of the other systems that you'll find within the walls of enterprises. It was build as our last big monolithic implementation and we've been doing decoupling there. So whenever we know we're going to do a decoupling, we look for what opportunity to implement new cloud native microservices and again just stand that up in our environment with the platform team. >> I wanted to ask also about culture and technology adoption. We're sitting here in the middle of Silicon Valley. This cloud phenomenon driven a lot from Silicon Valley. Sometimes people think this cloud native stuff, it's for startups, it's for the kids, it's for whatever. You're based in the Midwest and I also, I'm an Illinois boy myself. You get sometimes, kind of a inferiority complex about the coast, both coasts. But this does not seem to be a coastal phenomenon. This does not seem to be something that only a startup can learn. This is Allstate, a mature company and with a Midwestern base, can you kind of talk a little about was there anything about that in terms of people saying we can't do that here or that sort of thing? >> No, no, I mean, in fact, I think it's a global phenomenon. I was living for almost two years in Belfast, Northern Ireland. We have a division there, Allstate Northern Ireland and we saw a lot of Foundry activity among different companies there. Of course, there's a European summit every year, as well, so I think it's just good common sense. A lot of us, again, before Cloud Foundry came through were working with the different predecessor technologies and Spring and Vmware, you know various aspects and kind of knitting together which felt like reinventing the wheel. So it's just good business sense, good common sense when there's a solution that you can leverage. I think it's just like you were commenting earlier, right? If it's there and you can use it and you can allow the focus to be on what really differentiates you as a business to your customers. That's the way to go. >> Opal, the last question I have for you is there either commentary on any of the announcements that were made this week or are there any things that you're hoping really, for either Pivotal, the fFundation in general, your ecosystem that would make your life easier that's kind of on your to-do list from the vendor side? >> There's so much to take in. I think it's probably still going to take me a week to absorb all the implications. It's great to watch the dynamics going on. I think Microsoft joining the Foundation, that's a very good move 'cause we have so many different technologies within our enterprise so to understand how different vendors are working and playing together in some way is really good. I think Abbey and the Foundation, they've been fantastic about always soliciting input from members like us and members of the community about what we want to see. For me, it's always a big eye-to-word scale. Again, we're a huge enterprise. There are even larger enterprises here that have started running and when this really becomes the we all achieve the aspirational goals and it becomes the day-to-day backbone. It's just making sure this is really hardened to run at true enterprise weight. I think that the enterprise scale of the future is going to be even bigger than what it has been historically because with all these new products, we're driving an appetite towards greater and greater customer interaction. I saw that in banking ten years ago and I think we're going to see it in insurance more and more so we just want to know that we're all working together to get that strength and that power that the customer needs. >> Opal Perry, really appreciate you sharing Allstate's digital transformation with us and our audience, for John and myself. We'll be back with more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit. Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Opal: Thank you. (gentle lively music)