>> Hello, my name is Petar Bojovic, director of technology infrastructure from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. I have been with this organization for over three years and I own system engineering across private and public cloud, virtualization, OS, backup, storage, OpenShift platform, and automation. I have been implementing significant change improving our operating model since I arrived. Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina is transforming healthcare by changing the current model. We are focusing on something called value-based healthcare. Traditionally, healthcare model is typically a fee for service or capitated approach in which providers are paid based on the amount of health care services they deliver. Fee for service versus outcome. So when you go to a doctor and you do an office visit, they charge you for every item that they see you with. Based on that, they send that to my organization to adjudicate those claims. Value-based healthcare, on the other hand is a healthcare delivery model in which providers, including hospitals and physicians, are paid based on patient health outcomes. The value in value-based healthcare is derived from measuring health outcomes against the cost of delivering those outcomes. Well, we want to do the same and derive value out of IT as well. Significant value can be attained through automation on all levels. Just like most journeys, mine began with motivation. Let's talk about how I got here, how did I get started and how you can do it too. But first let's talk about Ansible. The automation engine is designed to provide an easy, reusable and platform-independent vehicle to automate complex and repetitive tasks. First off, Ansible is an open-source tool. It is very simple to use and set up. Even better, it's extremely powerful and flexible. You can orchestrate the entire application environment, no matter where it's deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs. Back in 2018, we had to build 150 jump server VMs in under 24 hours. Well, we leveraged some of the cobbled automation tools and scripts to get this done within that timeline. Without leveraging these tools and automation, this would have taken at least a week to facilitate the build. So a couple key takeaways from that exercise. Number one, this was awesome. All right, number two. We saw amazing potential in automation. Number three, we ran into network and other related build issues. Number four, we were unsure what to do next and where to focus within the realm of automation. So fast forward to May, 2019. My infrastructure engineering team introduced infrastructure automation software, you guessed it, Ansible to Blue Cross North Carolina to reduce overall IT costs, increase agility, productivity, and delivery while reducing delays and reliance on outside managed service providers or those repetitive manual tasks. So in the past, to provision a single server or virtual machine would take a minimum of 10 business days. That's not the overall process. That is just the deployment, would take 10 business days and over 20 hours of work, resulting in a cost of approximately $3,300 in charges per build. That's over $3,000 per build per server. However, with the automation platform provided by Ansible, this effort was significantly reduced. Reduced to under one business day, a half-hour worth of work and zero managed service provider charges. Let's fast forward a bit, to middle to late 2019. Blue Cross North Carolina decided to re-host the Facets application platform in-house within our co-locations. Well, Facets is a claim adjudication platform. After a medical claim is submitted, the insurance company Blue Cross determines their financial responsibility for the payment to the provider. This process is referred to as claims adjudication. Blue Cross was faced with the requirement to create roughly 1000 virtual machines as quickly as possible across all regions. Development, tests, training, QA, UAT, P stage, a staging environment, production, NDR. Well, our current managed service provider projected requiring 12 dedicated staff members and 16 weeks to process this request. Nope. There had to be a better way. By leveraging automation, the existing infrastructure engineering team was able to successfully provision all the required servers across three business days, in a total of 16 hours as well as nine weeks ahead of the project plan schedule, resulting in a cost avoidance of over $850,000. That's amazing, isn't it? Well, since then, the infrastructure engineering team has continued to use automation to assist teams both inside and outside of IT by reducing hours spent on repetitive tasks. Automation has increased the speed and accuracy of account creation, security hardening, and remediations, environment-wide configuration changes and software agent installations, just to name a few. This implementation had a significant positive impact on cost savings and cost avoidance and how quickly we can deliver and deploy infrastructure for projects. How were we able to implement this meaningful change? Well, I'll tell you, we started to evangelize and convert those naysayers to the wonderful world of automation. "Automate everything" was our mantra, even automate the automation. We'll eventually get there. It took a top-down approach to really accelerate use and adoptions. I spoke to anyone and everyone I could, my VP did the same, and even my CIO, Jo Abernathy. She started touting how important automation will be to the organization, its value, and how we can stay competitive and deploy faster and deliver at the speed of innovation. Wow, just wow. With a top-down approach for automation, we are empowering teams throughout the business to focus on those areas that are ripe for automation. Repetitive mundane tasks, those that are time delays are ideal candidates and allow these teams to focus on their core workload, versus time spent on those repetitive tasks. We are flaunting our automation successes within IT infrastructure to other departments in IT and the business at large. These conversations are opening up new possibilities to empower team members to leverage automation to deploy and deliver more quickly to meet the demand of enterprise projects and initiatives. Since its inception, the team has delivered on every project request ahead of schedule for infrastructure build, think about that. Every project request has been delivered ahead of schedule from an infrastructure perspective. That's fantastic. Well, automation is not new to the company, my company, nor yours. There's many tools, we use scripting, there's a lot available, but with Ansible and the way we've been able to implement it and make meaningful impact quickly, is new to the industry. We have been able to automate and reap significant cost avoidance in a short amount of time. Other similarly-sized companies are leveraging the same tool for longer and are not able to accomplish as much as we did in a short of time. We had motivation. Since starting this initiative, we are averaging cost avoidances in excess of $250,000 monthly. As difficult as it is to implement something new in most companies, the team implemented this capability and way of thinking within months. The sheer dedication to the business objective and the can-do attitude allowed us to be extremely successful. Thank you very much for your time and allowing me to tell my story.