(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering your Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> And welcome back to Boston, we continue our coverage here in theCUBE of the Red Hat Summit and welcoming now to theCUBE stage for the first time, I believe, David Gledhill. Who is the group chief information officer and head of group technology and operations at DBS Bank. David, good morning to you. >> Morning, hi, it's great to be here. >> All the way from Singapore, and he was early for the segment this morning. So you get extra points for that, congratulations. >> Put that up to jet lag. (men laughing) >> Thanks for being with us. David, anymore we talk about companies in general, everybody says everybody's a tech company now, right? Not the way it used to be. How is that playing out in your world in financial services as far as how deeply ingrained you have to be with the technology? >> Yeah, so very much, we are. Tech transformation started about 10 years ago. Been CIO of the company about 10 years. And frankly, the first five years were just fixing the basics. So getting in place what we'd call world-class systems. Doing a bunch of stuff on resilience and security and all of that kind of stuff. And the other thing, and this is the dramatic change, you know 10 years ago when I joined the company, we were 85% outsourced to managed service vendors. So I had technology people that basically were signing contractors and managing service agreements. We didn't have technology DNA. Over those five years and a full 10 years actually. We've been doing a lot about just insourcing and rebuilding our technical muscle if you like. So now we're, we've gone from 85% outsourced to 90% insourced. So we run, build and manage our own. We're now a technology company. >> And five years ago, we had a real big shift and we were closest to what was going on in China and so probably saw this before many, many of the other banks saw this around the world. Of what Alibaba was doing with Ant Financial and Tencent and this whole, just complete disruption of how customers interact with the banking industry. So we got an early lead on this digital transformation and really for the last five, six years have been doubling down on building a pure digital offering and we see ourselves as a technology company providing banking services, not as a bank with some technology department in the backend. >> Yeah, I'd love if you can, a little bit, to help us dig into that because, I think back it was okay, what does digitization mean 10 years ago, it was like oh, okay, I need to make sure I have a good website and maybe a good mobile app. Which is a fine starting piece, and also the piece you talked about is when it was outsourced, I'm managing pieces but I sign up for what I need today and when the business needs something, those outsources aren't necessarily tied to them, so you're playing telephone with them. Most the companies I've talked to that have brought skills back inside, it's because the needs of the business are constantly asking for more and it can't be well, it's not part of our contract with what we have. We'll get to that in a year or two. >> Yeah, yeah, so that's a very interesting shift. It plays out in a number of different dimensions. First of all, let me go into that question of business and tech and that separation. When we were managed service, it was literally writing contracts and the specs and handing to vendors. It was just a horrible process. And how can you be a modern technology firm like that? So insourcing, for us, was one big thing to owe those people, but when you insource, then you end up with a business unit and a technology unit. And you still have got silos, so how do you break that? Because that really is a problem. If you look at the way technology companies work, they don't work like that. Five years ago when we said, okay, how do you make that flip to being the digital company? We went very deep into how some of the great technology companies operate. We wanted to understand, what is it? How does that DNA work? How does that culture work? How do they organize themselves? How do they build technology? How do they become agile, speed to market? And so we looked at, we studied Google, Amazon, Netflix Apple, LinkedIn, Facebook and we call them the Gandalf companies. And we said, how can we be more like them? Well, a Gandalf is missing a D. And fortunately at DBS, we happen to have a D. (laughing) So our goal became how do we become the D in Gandalf? And that was just like a lightening rod through the organization because all of the sudden it said to our people, forget about biz and tech and things. You need to think about how these technology comp operates and be more like them. Which means there's no separation, there are no silos we are together building great technical products for our customers so we need to re-think the organization to make sure that happens. >> There's magic. (laughing) You've got a saying, making banking joyful. >> Yep. >> All right, which is not exactly the emotion that I associate with having to deal with my bank. It's fine, but joyful? A very unusual adjective there. What's that all about? And again, at the end of the day, how does technology enhance that? How does that compliment that and really boosted that? >> Yeah, so it was quite a radical moment for us. That came up, we were at a leadership meeting and talking about what is our purpose and how do we. Lots of people talk about customer journey, thinking and stuff like that but how do you bring that to life and one of the execs there said, well what about making banking joyful? And the rest of us just looked at him like he was from a different planet. Saying, are you kidding, what do you mean by that? But as we thought about it more, it has a great meaning and a great purpose to it, that we're not there just to do transactions but we're there to enrich lives, create new businesses, to make customers feel great in their financial stability, in the way they deal with us. And it applies on so many levels. So if you're a bank teller, you understand how to make banking joyful by just that, going the extra mile, in terms of service. If you're in infrastructure, and you're dealing with data centers and servers, you understand that making banking joyful, you must be there all the time. You must have sub-second responses, you must feel great in the customers hands, so it's something that you can apply to all aspects of banking and everybody plays a part in making banking joyful for our customers. >> All right, so David, bring us inside a little bit your organization, you said transforming to a technology company. What's that mean, what technology are you using? We're here at the Red Hat Show. Open-source, not the first thing that people think about when they they think about banking. So how does that fit into the culture that you're building? >> Yeah, yeah, okay, so, this Gandalf thing that I talked about, that's great as a logo and a mindset shift, but it doesn't get you very far. And so what we came up with is five key elements that have to change. And we had to work on to become more like a technology company. And one was a shift from projects to running technology like a series of platforms. That enables you to do agile at scale, but for that you need to organize very differently, which is the third thing. And then the fourth thing is that you need to build for modern systems. The legacy way of building technology just wasn't going to get us to where we needed to be as a technology company. And then the last bit is alternate everything. So, if you want speed to market and agility, you have to alternate. That modern technology stat, it was very obvious to us that the legacy, corporate technologies that we used to build systems, were just not going to win it for us. And so that's our move to open-source. Red Hat was a fabulous partner in that and we used Red Hat extensively throughout our entire infrastructure. And so we went through this rapid modernization of moving to open-source, moving to open-source database we used Merare DD quite extensively, but also, picking up pieces of the open-source from the Gandalf companies. We've seen the way they use open-source to scale. Plus also, to provide just amazing services. So for example, Netflix. We run a bunch of banking platforms on Netflix, believe it or not. It's kind of cool, banking on Netflix is a kinda crazy concept, but we brought that do life. What is is that Netflix we loved? We loved their engineering discipline around chaos engineering and the use of chaos to really build resilient platforms. So in our whole test and deployment framework, we have a lot of Netflix chaos elements built into that to make sure that when we actually are testing, we're testing for chaos and random failures which we inject into those platforms. We don't do it in production like Netflix do quite yet. This whole concept of site reliability and chaos and excellence of service is again something we learned from the Gandalf companies. So Gandalf was not just a, oh yeah, let's pester in the heart of the business article. It was really, let's use their engineering disciplines and design principles to build our own systems. Our network, Facebook, which is, you think of it as a network company. We think of network and the infrastructure layer. And our infrastructure and our networking is designed on a bunch of concepts that Facebook have about how they build their network within their data centers. >> Can you help connect the dots, you talk about a phenomenal technologies, chaos engineering, networking like these global companies. How does that lead to the outcome that you talked about? You know, joy to your end users? >> So if you want to make banking joyful, you have to be super-reliable. You have to be on the edge of the innovation curve all the time. Which means you need to be test and learn, which means you'll be very agile. You need to be able to scale very well and the open-source technologies enable us to scale superbly. You need to be able to to perform as well, superbly well. When I joined the company, our measure of how well our applications were performing is are they up or down? And then we advanced that to, well, are they up and maybe 80% of the time they responded within four seconds. Those are terrible measures because they're not joyful. That means 20% of the time we're awful. That doesn't bring joy to a customer. So what brings joy is we've now scrapped all those things and we're starting to look at performance, for example at the 99th percentile, so anything below that is just noise and the signal is what is our worst performing 99%, because if you wanna be joyful every single time that a customer opens your application you wanna be there and respond well, et cetera, et cetera. Same thing goes for customer science. Where do you get customer drop offs and how do you fix problems? So customer science and the engineering disciplines around observing and instrumenting a platform all the time become very , very important. So it goes very, very deep. You know it's a simple concept. But totally changes the way we engineer. >> Your line of work, or your industry obviously is very security oriented, right? >> Yeah. >> I think of healthcare being another with health information what have you. But certainly financial services, so in the open-source community, how do you address this, I would say it's not a clash by any means, but it's a concern, I would think, still that you have to be micro-observant of security practices and yet this is an open-community and exchange of ideas and could be an exchange of vulnerabilities or problems, too. >> So, sure, and we absolutely do. There are certain things that we, certain places that we won't go, or we will go but only for experimentation reasons because of that question. But you know arguably, we think that open-source company can more secure over time than non-open source, because you're also getting a bunch of people fixing it the whole time. And we've seen some of the issues with some of the open-source and the heart bleed and those other bits and pieces. But they were shut down pretty quickly and found pretty quickly. So we move with caution, we're very cognoscente. We move with our eyes open and it's really the zero day vulnerabilities that we are exposed to. But equally, if you're in a proprietary state. The whole thing that came up with the X86 platform in terms of the vulnerabilities there that apply open-source or not. So yeah, security issues exist everywhere. >> Right, all right, so, David, bring us in. You talked about some of the open-sourced technologies. Where does Red Hat fit into this? What's it like, how have they advanced that journey that DBS has been on? >> So for the heavy lifting, for the big applications that we want to run, and the majority of our workload going with open-source is fine, but you want to have open-source that also you think isn't going to break or have big security vulnerabilities to your question. And that's really where a partner like Red Hat comes in because it gives us access to all the wonderful benefits of open-source with a trusted partner that's putting industrial strength quality releases out that we can really rely on and bank on. So, in awhile we used open-source, at the periphery and true open-source that we just plug it off the internet. The really very, very high demanding workloads and very secure workloads we will always work with a partner that can wrap that into an enterprise-quality offering for us. So Red Hat has gone from zero to running way over 50%, 60% of our workload. And we'll continue to put it even more on that because it's a platform we can trust. >> That's great, so, when you look at your journey overall, how far are you along that journey? Anything when you look out, what are some of the things that are exciting you looking forward? >> So while we believe we're ahead of most banks. There are some that are in the mix, Goldmans are pretty far advance, Duetsche, a couple of the others, Capital One, a few. But it's a sort of rare breed. We're about 80%, 90% done on our transformation journey to get stuff to what we'd call cloud ready or optimized. But we think we're just scratching the surface because if you think about plugging ourselves into customers lives, making banking joyful, our external brand promise for that is live more, bank less. And nobody wakes up in the morning and says, oh, I can't wait to go to my local bank branch and go and do some banking. >> (laughing) I heard Steve talking about it yesterday. >> Actually there is one place. My wife loves going there because we do some great free cookies at DBS. >> John: Oh, excellent. >> But other that my wife, the rest of the planet doesn't really do that. >> John: Fair enough. >> If you want to live more, bank less, it's how do we get the toil of banking away from customers yet embed ourselves in their journeys. And for that we believe that this whole play on ecosystems is very important. So being a creator of an ecosystem or participating so that we take the banking toil out, and yet we inject ourselves, be that leisure or travel or insurance or whatever. And you don't see the bank, the bank is invisible. Then you're live more, bank less. To do that, you need great ecosystems. And we think three things help us to plug into ecosystems. Number one is you have to be able to scale very easily. And all the work we've done on the Gandalf stack means that were no longer afraid of scale, just bring it on. The second thing you need a lot of connectivity, and DBS two years ago, we launched the world's largest banking API platform. We went live with 150 different APIs and 60 live partners at the time. That's now grown to over 350 APIs and 100s of corporates and SME partners that wanna partner with us to pug us into their offering. So the more we do that, the more we disappear and let people live more, bank less. >> Well, next time, if you wanna bring some cookies with you, by all means, okay. (David laughs) We're always up for that, David, thanks for the time. >> Sure. >> We appreciate that and good luck on the mission and the journey there at DBS. >> Sure, thanks very much and great to be here, thank you. >> David Gledhill joining us this morning here, as we continue our coverage of the Red Hat Summit. We're in Boston. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE, joined by Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, as we wrap up our coverage here of the Red Hat Summit here in 2019. We've been here in Boston all week, three days, Stu, of really fascinating programming on one hand, the keynotes showing quite a diverse ecosystem that Red Hat has certainly built, and we've seen that array of guests reflected as well here, on theCUBE. And you leave with a pretty distinct impression about the vast reach, you might say, of Red Hat, and how they diversified their offerings and their services. >> Yeah, so, John, as we've talked about, this is the sixth year we've had theCUBE here. It's my fifth year doing it and I'll be honest, I've worked with Red Hat for 19 years, but the first year I came, it was like, all right, you know, I know lots of Linux people, I've worked with Linux people, but, you know, I'm not in there in the terminal and doing all this stuff, so it took me a little while to get used to. Today, I know not only a lot more people in Red Hat and the ecosystem, but where the ecosystem is matured and where the portfolio is grown. There's been some acquisitions on the Red Hat side. There's a certain pending acquisition that is kind of a big deal that we talked about this week. But Red Hat's position in this IT marketplace, especially in the hybrid and multi-cloud world, has been fun to watch and really enjoyed digging in it with you this week and, John Walls, I'll turn the camera to you because- >> I don't like this. (laughing) >> It was your first time on the program. Yeah, you know- >> I like asking you the questions. >> But we have to do this, you know, three days of Walls to Miniman coverage. So let's get the Walls perspective. >> John: All right. >> On your take. You've been to many shows. >> John: Yeah, no, I think that what's interesting about what I've seen here at Red Hat is this willingness to adapt to the marketplace, at least that's the impression I got, is that there are a lot of command and control models about this is the way it's going to be, and this is what we're going to give you, and you're gonna have to take it and like it. And Red Hat's just on the other end of that spectrum, right? It's very much a company that's built on an open source philosophy. And it's been more of what has the marketplace wanted? What have you needed? And now how can we work with you to build it and make it functional? And now we're gonna just offer it to a lot of people, and we're gonna make a lot of money doing that. And so, I think to me, that's at least what I got talking to Jim Whitehurst, you know about his philosophy and where he's taken this company, and has made it obviously a very attractive entity, IBM certainly thinks so to the tune of 34 billion. But you see that. >> Yeah, it's, you know, some companies say, oh well, you know, it's the leadership from the top. Well, Jim's philosophy though, it is The Open Organization. Highly recommend the book, it was a great read. We've talked to him about the program, but very much it's 12, 13 thousand people at the company. They're very much opinionated, they go in there, they have discussions. It's not like, well okay, one person pass this down. It's we're gonna debate and argue and fight. Doesn't mean we come to a full consensus, but open source at the core is what they do, and therefore, the community drives a lot of it. They contribute it all back up-stream, but, you know, we know what Red Hat's doing. It's fascinating to talk to Jim about, yeah you know, on the days where I'm thinking half glass empty, it's, you know, wow, we're not yet quite four billion dollars of the company, and look what an impact they had. They did a study with IDC and said, ten trillion dollars of the economy that they touch through RHEL, but on the half empty, on the half full days, they're having a huge impact outside. He said 34 billion dollars that IBM's paying is actually a bargain- >> It's a great deal! (laughing) >> for where they're going. But big announcements. RHEL 8, which had been almost five years in the works there. Some good advancements there. But the highlight for me this week really was OpenShift. We've been watching OpenShift since the early days, really pre-Kubernetes. It had a good vision and gained adoption in the marketplace, and was the open source choice for what we called Paths back then. But, when Kubernetes came around, it really helped solidify where OpenShift was going. It is the delivery mechanism for containerization and that container cluster management and Red Hat has a leadership position in that space. I think that almost every customer that we talked to this week, John, OpenShift was the underpinning. >> John: Absolutely. >> You would expect that RHEL's underneath there, but OpenShift as the lever for digital transformation. And that was something that I really enjoyed talking to. DBS Bank from Singapore, and Delta, and UPS. It was, we talked about their actual transformation journeys, both the technology and the organizational standpoint, and OpenShift really was the lever to give them that push. >> You know, another thing, I know you've been looking at this and watching this for many many years. There's certainly the evolution of open source, but we talked to Chris Wright earlier, and he was talking about the pace of change and how it really is incremental. And yet, if you're on the outside looking in, and you think, gosh, technology is just changing so fast, it's so crazy, it's so disruptive, but to hear it from Chris, not so. You don't go A to Z, you go A to B to C to D to D point one. (laughing) It takes time. And there's a patience almost and a cadence that has this slow revolution that I'm a little surprised at. I sense they, or got a sense of, you know, a much more rapid change of pace and that's not how the people on the inside see it. >> Yeah. Couple of comment back at that. Number one is we know how much rapid change there is going because if you looked at the Linux kernel or what's happening with Kubernetes and the open source, there's so much change going on there. There's the data point thrown out there that, you know, I forget, that 75% or 95% of all the data in the world was created in the last two years. Yet, only 2% of that is really usable and searchable and things like that. That's a lot of change. And the code base of Linux in the last two years, a third of the code is completely overhauled. This is technology that has been around for decades. But if you look at it, if you think about a company, one of the challenges that we had is if they're making those incremental change, and slowly looking at them, a lot of people from the outside would be like, oh, Red Hat, yeah that's that little Linux company, you know, that I'm familiar with and it runs on lots of places there. When we came in six years ago, there was a big push by Red Hat to say, "We're much more than Linux." They have their three pillars that we spent a lot of time through from the infrastructure layer to the cloud native to automation and management. Lots of shows I go to, AnsiballZ all over the place. We talked about OpenShift 4 is something that seems to be resonating. Red Hat takes a leadership position, not just in the communities and the foundations, but working with their customers to be a more trusted and deeper partner in what they're doing with digital transformation. There might have been little changes, but, you know, this is not the Red Hat that people would think of two years or five years ago because a large percentage of Red Hat has changed. One last nugget from Chris Wright there, is, you know, he spent a lot of time talking about AI. And some of these companies go buzzwords in these environments, but, you know, but he hit a nice cogent message with the punchline is machines enhance human intelligence because these are really complex systems, distributed architectures, and we know that the people just can't keep up with all of the change, and the scope, and the scale that they need to handle. So software should be able to be helping me get my arms around it, as well as where it can automate and even take actions, as long as we're careful about how we do it. >> John: Sure. There's another, point at least, I want to pick your brain about, is really the power of presence. The fact that we have the Microsoft CEO on the stage. Everybody thought, well (mumbles) But we heard it from guest after guest after guest this week, saying how cool was that? How impressive was that? How monumental was that? And, you know, it's great to have that kind of opportunity, but the power of Nadella's presence here, it's unmistakable in the message that has sent to this community. >> Yeah, you know, John, you could probably do a case study talking about culture and the power of culture because, I talked about Red Hat's not the Red Hat that you know. Well, the Satya Nadella led Microsoft is a very different Microsoft than before he was on board. Not only are they making great strides in, you know, we talk about SaaS and public cloud and the like, but from a partnership standpoint, Microsoft of old, you know, Linux and Red Hat were the enemy and you know, Windows was the solution and they were gonna bake everything into it. Well, Microsoft partnered with many more companies. Partnerships and ecosystem, a key message this week. We talked about Microsoft with Red Hat, but, you know, announcement today was, surprised me a little bit, but when we think about it, not too much. OpenShift supported on VMware environments, so, you know, VMware has in that family of Dell, there's competitive solutions against OpenShift and, you know, so, and virtualization. You know, Red Hat has, you know, RHV, the Red Hat Virtualization. >> John: Right, right, right. >> The old day of the lines in the swim lanes, as one of our guests talked about, really are there. Customers are living in a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world and the customers are gonna go and say, "You need to work together, before you're not gonna be there." >> Azure. Right, also we have Azure compatibility going on here. >> Stu: Yeah, deep, not just some tested, but deep integration. I can go to Azure and buy OpenShift. I mean that, the, to say it's in the, you know, not just in the marketplace, but a deep integration. And yeah, there was a little poke, if our audience caught it, from Paul Cormier. And said, you know, Microsoft really understands enterprise. That's why they're working tightly with us. Uh, there's a certain other large cloud provider that created Kubernetes, that has their own solution, that maybe doesn't understand enterprise as much and aren't working as closely with Red Hat as they might. So we'll see what response there is from them out there. Always, you know, we always love on theCUBE to, you know, the horse is on the track and where they're racing, but, you know, more and more all of our worlds are cross-pollinating. You know, the AI and AI Ops stuff. The software ecosystems because software does have this unifying factor that the API economy, and having all these things work together, more and more. If you don't, customers will go look for solutions that do provide the full end to end solution stuff they're looking for. >> All right, so we're, I've got a couple in mind as far as guests we've had on the show. And we saw them in action on the keynotes stage too. Anybody that jumps out at you, just like, wow, that was cool, that was, not that we, we love all of our children, right? (laughing) But every once in awhile, there's a story or two that does stand out. >> Yeah, so, it is so tough, you know. I loved, you know, the stories. John, I'm sure I'm going to ask you, you know, Mr. B and what he's doing with the children. >> John: Right, Franklin Middle School. >> And the hospitals with Dr. Ellen and the end of the brains. You know, those tech for good are phenomenal. For me, you know, the CIOs that we had on our first day of program. Delta was great and going through transformation, but, you know, our first guest that we had on, was DBS Bank in Singapore and- >> John: David Gledhill. >> He was so articulate and has such a good story about, I took outsourced environments. I didn't just bring it into my environment, say okay, IT can do it a little bit better, and I'll respond to business. No, no, we're going to total restructure the company. Not we're a software company. We're a technology company, and we're gonna learn from the Googles of the world and the like. And he said, We want to be considered there, you know, what was his term there? It was like, you know, bank less, uh, live more and bank less. I mean, what- >> Joyful banking, that was another of his. >> Joyful banking. You don't think of a financial institution as, you know, we want you to think less of the bank. You know, that's just a powerful statement. Total reorganization and, as we mentioned, of course, OpenShift, one of those levers underneath helping them to do that. >> Yeah, you mentioned Dr. Ellen Grant, Boston Children's Hospital, I think about that. She's in fetal neuroimaging and a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. The work they're doing in terms of diagnostics through imaging is spectacular. I thought about Robin Goldstone at the Livermore Laboratory, about our nuclear weapon monitoring and efficacy of our monitoring. >> Lawrence Livermore. So good. And John, talk about the diversity of our guests. We had expats from four different countries, phenomenal accents. A wonderful slate of brilliant women on the program. From the customer side, some of the award winners that you interviewed. The executives on the program. You know, Stefanie Chiras, always great, and Denise who were up on the keynotes stage. Denise with her 3D printed, new Red Hat logo earrings. Yeah, it was an, um- >> And a couple of old Yanks (laughing). Well, I enjoyed it, Stu. As always, great working with you, and we thank you for being with us as well. For now, we're gonna say so long. We're gonna see you at the next Red Hat Summit, I'm sure, 2020 in San Francisco. Might be a, I guess a slightly different company, but it might be the same old Red Hat too, but they're going to have 34 billion dollars behind them at that point and probably riding pretty high. That will do it for our CUBE coverage here from Boston. Thanks for much for joining us. For Stu Miniman, and our entire crew, have a good day. (funky music)