(electronic music) >> Presenter: Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat (electronic music) >> Welcome back here on The Cube, continuing our live coverage at Red Hat Summit 2019 as we come to a near conclusion of our three days of wall to wall coverage for you here. All the keynotes, it's been and the guests we've had just a lot of fun and certainly an educational opportunity for Stu Menimen and myself and we're looking forward to our next couple of guests here. We have Khurshid Sohail, an application developer at UPS and Nish Jani, a senior application development manager at UPS. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. We appreciate the time. [Developers] Thanks for having us. >> Presenter: Thank you. And so you have representation on the keynote stage of this morning. UPS did, talking about some of the changes underway there and your Red Hat relationship for those at home who work privy to that. Just to set the stage for in terms of what you're doing with Red Hat and what you're gonna be doing with them as they came up with a couple of releases this week. Nish, if you would? >> Sure. So as you know, UPS is delivering products and services to over 200 countries and from a scalability perspective, we deliver over 21,000,000 packages per day and during our peak season, it grows to over 30,000,000 packages a day, and last year we averaged 200,000,000 tracks a day on our tracking system and last peak we went to 335,000,000 tracks in a single day and that was all built on a new open-shift platform that we developed. >> Just a little bit of data. >> Yeah. >> All right. >> Yeah, you know I love when you talk to, you know, so many customers today who scale and it's like "oh, okay. How many transactions we have." It's like "oh, you talk logistics", you're like oh, okay. You talked a lot of numbers there but when you talk about the driver and how many officers they have and the amount of data that goes in. It's like, okay, how many supercomputers do you have? And you know, hundreds of PhDs solving this. Maybe we're just a little bit in tide, you know, the logistical pieces that go there and how, you know, I mean this is not, you know, a just "Okay, go do your route" as we have in the past. >> Yeah, so from a driver perspective, we've offered services to the drivers that take out the human search for needing to deliver packages. We have an orion system which tells the driver exactly where to go and where to deliver the packages and optimize the routes for them from a visibility perspective which is the products and services Khurshid and I support. The driver is able to do their jobs and deliver their status and deliver packages on time so for our customers, they see an updated status in real time. From a VI perspective, which is our visibility information business engine which was our new platform that we built last year, it was a long journey into the process, part of our digital transformation. We got into the transformation as a need for customers who wanted more out of their products and services that we offered today, and as far as being able to do faster market and provide visibility in a real-time sense. >> Presenter: Yeah. >> We always love when you hear some of these digital transformations. Like okay, you know, I think if UPS does logistics, those were pretty complicated before. >> Absolutely. So, like you needed a digital transformation. Maybe we could start with, you know, what were some of the objectives, what were we, you know, what was holding you back or limited before and you know, let's go to the after when you get through there. >> Sure. So before we were on a monolithic system, a legacy system and the costs per track were very expensive and your to drive new need we needed to redevelop ourselves and redesign ourselves and the way we did that was we transformed by moving away from our traditional waterfall models which typically took six months to deploy new services and we went to within weeks, and the way we did that was to develop agile methodologies and using open-shift we were able to develop and deploy applications more quickly and Khurshid can talk a little bit more about VI application and how it works. >> So pretty much what our goal was to get the old track system off the legacy model off into a containerized, on premise, cloud-based platform. So we successfully accomplished that, essentially 20 years worth of data we did in a year, so we're pretty proud of that, not to toot our own horn, but yeah. We got everything going with open-shift, and a couple of other Red Hat products like AMQ, JBoss, Fuse for AMQ and we also worked like Nish mentioned with the agile methodologies and principles so we were successfully able to create a type of environment for other applications that UPS see as a, you know, kind of a look up to so other applications can see what we've did and they can get themselves over in the same direction. >> Yeah, so can you bring us inside a little bit the organization. Was this a new team that came in? Was there a combination of the new and old? You know, the retraining. >> Yeah, so the team was formed out of some of the old members of the team that knew visibility inside and out. My team done the front-end of UPS.com's tracking application and we've brought in team members that were new and were able to develop the application in a short amount of time. So we've nearly formed a team, we've put together a parallel path from the old system to the new system then we transitioned over and it was seamless to the custom. >> You were talking about customer choice, we were speaking earlier before just about competition, so you have to be extremely responsive to customer needs and my choice is something that comes to my mind that you offer that gives great flexibility to a customer but tremendous complexity I would think to you because you have kind of like an X and a Y, you have a package, you've got a delivery point and now you throw the Z in with a time of day change or location change and to coordinate that so your efficiencies, your fuel efficiencies and route efficiencies are still maintained. And how do you do that in your environment? And whether that's something that Red Hat, is that something that is enabled by the technology that you're deploying of theirs? >> Sure, from a visibility perspective my choice product? have been very successful. We're able to deliver B to C packages to our individual customers or our consignees which help them choose where and when they want their package and also be able to see a delivery time. From a complexity perspective, sure. It adds a ton of complexity because we need to know what addresses to go to and what changes are done to the packages prior to them being delivered. From an open-shift perspective, that's partly going to be our digital transformation to transform that visibility and provide that information and bringing more products and services to those customers and lower latency of time. >> Okay, so containerization is something that's relatively prevalent for the audience here, but it's still relatively young in maturity. Just wondering as you rolled out the solutions, any learnings you had or any, you know, I don't want to say stumbling blocks, but you know, things that you learned along the way that maybe your peers should, could learn for. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you should say stumbling blocks 'cus as anybody knows, whenever you go through anything new there's opportunities to learn and there's monumental opportunities of failure and I think UPS knows and we've pride ourselves in failing fast, learning from our mistakes and getting to the next level. So like you mentioned with containerization and open-shift, the ability for us when we used to deploy every six months, now we get to deploy in two weeks to production and before that we could deploy in a matter of minutes so we could test all these tools and everything that open-shift offers gives us the ability to serve our business and give the most information to our customers. So open-shift and Red Hat have done a great job in helping us reach our maximum potential and we look to continue that partnership. >> Yeah, so was there anything, you know, in that speed to delivery and being more agile that, you know, "Oh jeez, security, "we should have pulled them in sooner." Or you know, so and so should have, but we forgot to include them in the original discussions. >> No, when we went through the transformation of moving the tracking application, we went through all the options and open-shift was just a natural partner, a natural fit. At the time we were going through a proof of concept with the product with another team and as the VI project came along it was just a natural fit to use containerization and use the speed of deployment, automated testing and pipelines in order to deploy this new application. (coughing) >> You used an interesting phrase there, for shit about failing fast and we've heard that a couple of times this week in different flavors. What about the lack of fear and failure and almost like that failure is not always a bad thing because it leads to improvement. But you have to have a certain amount of confidence underpinning that. So talk, I'm just curious from a company culture standpoint, what kind of confidence is there about that failing fast and how technology allows you to make up the ground that you might have lost by failure, especially in today's world, there's so much more capability and so much more at your disposal. >> Yeah, so I may, I think that benefits us and allows us to fail fast is management like Nish and our upper level management, they give us the opportunity to make these mistakes because they know we're going to learn from them and just talking about open-shift and like you said, when we fail, we have to make up that ground. When we make those mistakes the platform that we're on allows us to pivot from that and make it a success story right away. So we noticed that we were able to learn from mistakes quickly and with the help and support of management we were able to implement real-time solutions and deploy them right away. >> Yeah, in addition to that we're able to deploy in a short period of time so we know we're at a minimum two weeks away from the next deployment. So we could quickly restore functionality within minutes or within days if necessary. So, you know, previously we weren't able to do that, so fail fast didn't quite work in the waterfall method. >> So Nish, you know, the VI project has rolled out. What does that mean to your relationship to the business? And also ultimately, how has it impacted your ultimate customers? >> Sure, so from an external customer perspective, obviously we're able to, speed to market products and services faster to our customers and provide better visibility to the customers. From internally in the organization, we've significantly reduced our cost to serve and as we continue to transform on the VI platform using open-shift and partnering with Red Hat, we'll be able to transform other visibility products in the future and going forward we're able to take folks like Khurshid and develop them further and use our skill sets that we've learned and develop our people faster. >> So where do you want to jump in next? I mean, in your world Krashid, I would think that's probably one of the more exciting questions is, you know, what now? What next? Where are we going with this? In terms of your core business, you know, where's the efficiency gain that you'd like to see? Where's the customer service you'd like to improve? >> Yeah I mean, from a business perspective we're always looking to serve our business and bring products to platform that are gonna be useful to the customers. So what we currently have in VI today, we're looking to create more visibility products for our customers and from a technical standpoint, and we were at Red Hat Summit 2019, they've announced some crazy cool things. >> What's the craziest cool thing you've heard this week? >> We're looking forward to open-shift 4, we're looking forward to Cofcus Dreams, and Corcus which is really cool, and just operators, the list goes on and on. I could talk to you about it for days and days. We were here for three days, you got three more days ready? >> Sure. (laughing) Tape is cheap. (laughing) >> Yeah, we're looking forward to a lot of cool things that Red Hat's going to provide and we're gonna run with it. >> Yeah. We're looking forward to continued relationship with Red Hat and offering new products and services that can make our businesses run better. >> Like for example, if you could, if I were to say, a military build a rocket ship right now, you know, what's it gonna look like? What area of your business would you like to literally dabble in and say "Okay, I think this will work." It might right now, look to be a little bit futuristic or down the road, what scenario could you paint possibly to give us an idea about what you're thinking? >> So our next focus to business is to serve up the small and medium business, right? So we've been talking about the modulus product and serving residential addresses and serving residential folks but we want to start focusing on the small and medium businesses and offering the same services and capabilities so our next plateau, our next capability is to provide those services to the small and medium businesses so they can grow and partner with UPS. >> And I think, as Nish mentioned, with the utilizations from Cofcun actually bringing some of these technologies into our containers, bringing more security layers like there's a lot of great vendors here and partnering with them and bringing them into our services, it will open the doors for us a lot, and like Nish mentioned with my choice and small business, I think will allow them a better customer experience with partnering up with some of these new people. >> Presenter: You bet. Well thank you both. Thanks for being here and sharing your time, good to see you. Good keynote this morning as well, so please be sure to pass that along and we look forward to seeing you down the road. >> Developers: Thank you. >> Thank you both. Back with more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2019, you are watching theCUBE live from Boston. (electronic music)