>>Hi, everyone. My name is my uncle. My uncle Poor I worked with Geo reminds you in India. We call ourselves Geo Platforms. Now on. We've been recently in the news. You've raised a lot off funding from one of the largest, most of the largest tech companies in the world. And I'm here to talk about Geos Cloud Journey, Onda Mantis Partnership. I've titled it the story often, Underdog becoming the largest telecom company in India within four years, which is really special. And we're, of course, held by the cloud. So quick disclaimer. Right. The content shared here is only for informational purposes. Um, it's only for this event. And if you want to share it outside, especially on social media platforms, we need permission from Geo Platforms limited. Okay, quick intro about myself. I am a VP of engineering a geo. I lead the Cloud Services and Platforms team with NGO Andi. I mean the geo since the beginning, since it started, and I've seen our cloud footprint grow from a handful of their models to now eight large application data centers across three regions in India. And we'll talk about how we went here. All right, Let's give you an introduction on Geo, right? Giorgio is on how we became the largest telecom campaign, India within four years from 0 to 400 million subscribers. And I think there are There are a lot of events that defined Geo and that will give you an understanding off. How do you things and what you did to overcome massive problems in India. So the slide that I want to talkto is this one and, uh, I The headline I've given is, It's the Geo is the fastest growing tech company in the world, which is not a new understatement. It's eggs, actually, quite literally true, because very few companies in the world have grown from zero to 400 million subscribers within four years paying subscribers. And I consider Geo Geos growth in three phases, which I have shown on top. The first phase we'll talk about is how geo grew in the smartphone market in India, right? And what we did to, um to really disrupt the telecom space in India in that market. Then we'll talk about the feature phone phase in India and how Geo grew there in the future for market in India. and then we'll talk about what we're doing now, which we call the Geo Platforms phase. Right. So Geo is a default four g lt. Network. Right. So there's no to geo three g networks that Joe has, Um it's a state of the art four g lt voiceover lt Network and because it was designed fresh right without any two D and three G um, legacy technologies, there were also a lot of challenges Lawn geo when we were starting up. One of the main challenges waas that all the smart phones being sold in India NGOs launching right in 2000 and 16. They did not have the voice or lt chip set embedded in the smartphone because the chips it's far costlier to embed in smartphones and India is a very price and central market. So none of the manufacturers were embedding the four g will teach upset in the smartphones. But geos are on Lee a volte in network, right for the all the network. So we faced a massive problem where we said, Look there no smartphones that can support geo. So how will we grow Geo? So in order to solve that problem, we launched our own brand of smartphones called the Life um, smartphones. And those phones were really high value devices. So there were $50 and for $50 you get you You At that time, you got a four g B storage space. A nice big display for inch display. Dual cameras, Andi. Most importantly, they had volte chip sets embedded in them. Right? And that got us our initial customers the initial for the launch customers when we launched. But more importantly, what that enabled other oh, EMS. What that forced the audience to do is that they also had to launch similar smartphones competing smartphones with voltage upset embedded in the same price range. Right. So within a few months, 3 to 4 months, um, all the other way EMS, all the other smartphone manufacturers, the Samsung's the Micromax is Micromax in India, they all had volte smartphones out in the market, right? And I think that was one key step We took off, launching our own brand of smartphone life that helped us to overcome this problem that no smartphone had. We'll teach upsets in India and then in order. So when when we were launching there were about 13 telecom companies in India. It was a very crowded space on demand. In order to gain a foothold in that market, we really made a few decisions. Ah, phew. Key product announcement that really disrupted this entire industry. Right? So, um, Geo is a default for GLT network itself. All I p network Internet protocol in everything. All data. It's an all data network and everything from voice to data to Internet traffic. Everything goes over this. I'll goes over Internet protocol, and the cost to carry voice on our smartphone network is very low, right? The bandwidth voice consumes is very low in the entire Lt band. Right? So what we did Waas In order to gain a foothold in the market, we made voice completely free, right? He said you will not pay anything for boys and across India, we will not charge any roaming charges across India. Right? So we made voice free completely and we offer the lowest data rates in the world. We could do that because we had the largest capacity or to carry data in India off all the other telecom operators. And these data rates were unheard off in the world, right? So when we launched, we offered a $2 per month or $3 per month plan with unlimited data, you could consume 10 gigabytes of data all day if you wanted to, and some of our subscriber day. Right? So that's the first phase off the overgrowth and smartphones and that really disorders. We hit 100 million subscribers in 170 days, which was very, very fast. And then after the smartphone faith, we found that India still has 500 million feature phones. And in order to grow in that market, we launched our own phone, the geo phone, and we made it free. Right? So if you take if you took a geo subscription and you carried you stayed with us for three years, we would make this phone tree for your refund. The initial deposit that you paid for this phone and this phone had also had quite a few innovations tailored for the Indian market. It had all of our digital services for free, which I will talk about soon. And for example, you could plug in. You could use a cable right on RCR HDMI cable plug into the geo phone and you could watch TV on your big screen TV from the geophones. You didn't need a separate cable subscription toe watch TV, right? So that really helped us grow. And Geo Phone is now the largest selling feature phone in India on it. 100 million feature phones in India now. So now now we're in what I call the geo platforms phase. We're growing of a geo fiber fiber to the home fiber toe the office, um, space. And we've also launched our new commerce initiatives over e commerce initiatives and were steadily building platforms that other companies can leverage other companies can use in the Jeon o'clock. Right? So this is how a small startup not a small start, but a start of nonetheless least 400 million subscribers within four years the fastest growing tech company in the world. Next, Geo also helped a systemic change in India, and this is massive. A lot of startups are building on this India stack, as people call it, and I consider this India stack has made up off three things, and the acronym I use is jam. Trinity, right. So, um, in India, systemic change happened recently because the Indian government made bank accounts free for all one billion Indians. There were no service charges to store money in bank accounts. This is called the Jonathan. The J. GenDyn Bank accounts. The J out off the jam, then India is one of the few countries in the world toe have a digital biometric identity, which can be used to verify anyone online, which is huge. So you can simply go online and say, I am my ankle poor on duh. I verify that this is indeed me who's doing this transaction. This is the A in the jam and the last M stands for Mobil's, which which were held by Geo Mobile Internet in a plus. It is also it is. It also stands for something called the U. P I. The United Unified Payments Interface. This was launched by the Indian government, where you can carry digital transactions for free. You can transfer money from one person to the to another, essentially for free for no fee, right so I can transfer one group, even Indian rupee to my friend without paying any charges. That is huge, right? So you have a country now, which, with a with a billion people who are bank accounts, money in the bank, who you can verify online, right and who can pay online without any problems through their mobile connections held by G right. So suddenly our market, our Internet market, exploded from a few million users to now 506 106 100 million mobile Internet users. So that that I think, was a massive such a systemic change that happened in India. There are some really large hail, um, numbers for this India stack, right? In one month. There were 1.6 billion nuclear transactions in the last month, which is phenomenal. So next What is the impact of geo in India before you started, we were 155th in the world in terms off mobile in terms of broadband data consumption. Right. But after geo, India went from one 55th to the first in the world in terms of broadband data, largely consumed on mobile devices were a mobile first country, right? We have a habit off skipping technology generation, so we skip fixed line broadband and basically consuming Internet on our mobile phones. On average, Geo subscribers consumed 12 gigabytes of data per month, which is one of the highest rates in the world. So Geo has a huge role to play in making India the number one country in terms off broad banded consumption and geo responsible for quite a few industry first in the telecom space and in fact, in the India space, I would say so before Geo. To get a SIM card, you had to fill a form off the physical paper form. It used to go toe Ah, local distributor. And that local distributor is to check the farm that you feel incorrectly for your SIM card and then that used to go to the head office and everything took about 48 hours or so, um, to get your SIM card. And sometimes there were problems there also with a hard biometric authentication. We enable something, uh, India enable something called E K Y C Elektronik. Know your customer? We took a fingerprint scan at our point of Sale Reliance Digital stores, and within 15 minutes we could verify within a few minutes. Within a few seconds we could verify that person is indeed my hunk, right, buying the same car, Elektronik Lee on we activated the SIM card in 15 minutes. That was a massive deal for our growth. Initially right toe onboard 100 million customers. Within our and 70 days. We couldn't have done it without be K. I see that was a massive deal for us and that is huge for any company starting a business or start up in India. We also made voice free, no roaming charges and the lowest data rates in the world. Plus, we gave a full suite of cloud services for free toe all geo customers. For example, we give goTV essentially for free. We give GOTV it'll law for free, which people, when we have a launching, told us that no one would see no one would use because the Indians like watching TV in the living rooms, um, with the family on a big screen television. But when we actually launched, they found that GOTV is one off our most used app. It's like 70,000,080 million monthly active users, and now we've basically been changing culture in India where culture is on demand. You can watch TV on the goal and you can pause it and you can resume whenever you have some free time. So really changed culture in India, India on we help people liver, digital life online. Right, So that was massive. So >>I'm now I'd like to talk about our cloud >>journey on board Animal Minorities Partnership. We've been partners that since 2014 since the beginning. So Geo has been using open stack since 2014 when we started with 14 note luster. I'll be one production environment One right? And that was I call it the first wave off our cloud where we're just understanding open stack, understanding the capabilities, understanding what it could do. Now we're in our second wave. Where were about 4000 bare metal servers in our open stack cloud multiple regions, Um, on that around 100,000 CPU cores, right. So it's a which is one of the bigger clouds in the world, I would say on almost all teams, with Ngor leveraging the cloud and soon I think we're going to hit about 10,000 Bama tools in our cloud, which is massive and just to give you a scale off our network, our in French, our data center footprint. Our network introduction is about 30 network data centers that carry just network traffic across there are there across India and we're about eight application data centers across three regions. Data Center is like a five story building filled with servers. So we're talking really significant scale in India. And we had to do this because when we were launching, there are the government regulation and try it. They've gotten regulatory authority of India, mandates that any telecom company they have to store customer data inside India and none of the other cloud providers were big enough to host our clothes. Right. So we we made all this intellectual for ourselves, and we're still growing next. I love to show you how we grown with together with Moran says we started in 2014 with the fuel deployment pipelines, right? And then we went on to the NK deployment. Pipelines are cloud started growing. We started understanding the clouds and we picked up M C p, which has really been a game changer for us in automation, right on DNA. Now we are in the latest release, ofem CPM CPI $2019 to on open stack queens, which on we've just upgraded all of our clouds or the last few months. Couple of months, 2 to 3 months. So we've done about nine production clouds and there are about 50 internal, um, teams consuming cloud. We call as our tenants, right. We have open stack clouds and we have communities clusters running on top of open stack. There are several production grade will close that run on this cloud. The Geo phone, for example, runs on our cloud private cloud Geo Cloud, which is a backup service like Google Drive and collaboration service. It runs out of a cloud. Geo adds G o g S t, which is a tax filing system for small and medium enterprises, our retail post service. There are all these production services running on our private clouds. We're also empaneled with the government off India to provide cloud services to the government to any State Department that needs cloud services. So we were empaneled by Maiti right in their ego initiative. And our clouds are also Easter. 20,000 certified 20,000 Colin one certified for software processes on 27,001 and said 27,017 slash 18 certified for security processes. Our clouds are also P our data centers Alsop a 942 be certified. So significant effort and investment have gone toe These data centers next. So this is where I think we've really valued the partnership with Morantes. Morantes has has trained us on using the concepts of get offs and in fries cold, right, an automated deployments and the tool change that come with the M C P Morantes product. Right? So, um, one of the key things that has happened from a couple of years ago to today is that the deployment time to deploy a new 100 north production cloud has decreased for us from about 55 days to do it in 2015 to now, we're down to about five days to deploy a cloud after the bear metals a racked and stacked. And the network is also the physical network is also configured, right? So after that, our automated pipelines can deploy 100 0 clock in five days flight, which is a massive deal for someone for a company that there's adding bear metals to their infrastructure so fast, right? It helps us utilize our investment, our assets really well. By the time it takes to deploy a cloud control plane for us is about 19 hours. It takes us two hours to deploy a compu track and it takes us three hours to deploy a storage rack. Right? And we really leverage the re class model off M C. P. We've configured re class model to suit almost every type of cloud that we have, right, and we've kept it fairly generous. It can be, um, Taylor to deploy any type of cloud, any type of story, nor any type of compute north. Andi. It just helps us automate our deployments by putting every configuration everything that we have in to get into using infra introduction at school, right plus M. C. P also comes with pipelines that help us run automated tests, automated validation pipelines on our cloud. We also have tempest pipelines running every few hours every three hours. If I recall correctly which run integration test on our clouds to make sure the clouds are running properly right, that that is also automated. The re class model and the pipelines helpers automate day to operations and changes as well. There are very few seventh now, compared toa a few years ago. It very rare. It's actually the exception and that may be because off mainly some user letter as opposed to a cloud problem. We also have contributed auto healing, Prometheus and Manager, and we integrate parameters and manager with our even driven automation framework. Currently, we're using Stack Storm, but you could use anyone or any event driven automation framework out there so that it indicates really well. So it helps us step away from constantly monitoring our cloud control control planes and clothes. So this has been very fruitful for us and it has actually apps killed our engineers also to use these best in class practices like get off like in France cord. So just to give you a flavor on what stacks our internal teams are running on these clouds, Um, we have a multi data center open stack cloud, and on >>top of that, >>teams use automation tools like terra form to create the environments. They also create their own Cuba these clusters and you'll see you'll see in the next slide also that we have our own community that the service platform that we built on top of open stack to give developers development teams NGO um, easy to create an easy to destroy Cuban. It is environment and sometimes leverage the Murano application catalog to deploy using heats templates to deploy their own stacks. Geo is largely a micro services driven, Um um company. So all of our applications are micro services, multiple micro services talking to each other, and the leverage develops. Two sets, like danceable Prometheus, Stack stone from for Otto Healing and driven, not commission. Big Data's tax are already there Kafka, Patches, Park Cassandra and other other tools as well. We're also now using service meshes. Almost everything now uses service mesh, sometimes use link. Erred sometimes are experimenting. This is Theo. So So this is where we are and we have multiple clients with NGO, so our products and services are available on Android IOS, our own Geo phone, Windows Macs, Web, Mobile Web based off them. So any client you can use our services and there's no lock in. It's always often with geo, so our sources have to be really good to compete in the open Internet. And last but not least, I think I love toe talk to you about our container journey. So a couple of years ago, almost every team started experimenting with containers and communities and they were demand for as a platform team. They were demanding community that the service from us a manage service. Right? So we built for us, it was much more comfortable, much more easier toe build on top of open stack with cloud FBI s as opposed to doing this on bare metal. So we built a fully managed community that a service which was, ah, self service portal, where you could click a button and get a community cluster deployed in your own tenant on Do the >>things that we did are quite interesting. We also handle some geo specific use cases. So we have because it was a >>manage service. We deployed the city notes in our own management tenant, right? We didn't give access to the customer to the city. Notes. We deployed the master control plane notes in the tenant's tenant and our customers tenant, but we didn't give them access to the Masters. We didn't give them the ssh key the workers that the our customers had full access to. And because people in Genova learning and experimenting, we gave them full admin rights to communities customers as well. So that way that really helped on board communities with NGO. And now we have, like 15 different teams running multiple communities clusters on top, off our open stack clouds. We even handle the fact that there are non profiting. I people separate non profiting I peoples and separate production 49 p pools NGO. So you could create these clusters in whatever environment that non prod environment with more open access or a prod environment with more limited access. So we had to handle these geo specific cases as well in this communities as a service. So on the whole, I think open stack because of the isolation it provides. I think it made a lot of sense for us to do communities our service on top off open stack. We even did it on bare metal, but that not many people use the Cuban, indeed a service environmental, because it is just so much easier to work with. Cloud FBI STO provision much of machines and covering these clusters. That's it from me. I think I've said a mouthful, and now I love for you toe. I'd love to have your questions. If you want to reach out to me. My email is mine dot capulet r l dot com. I'm also you can also message me on Twitter at my uncouple. So thank you. And it was a pleasure talking to you, Andre. Let let me hear your questions.

>>Hi, I'm Peter Burress. And welcome to another cute conversation. This one from BMC Helix is immersion days in Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California One of the biggest challenges that every IittIe organization faces. In fact, every business is how to start merging greater control through I t sm as well as greater change and evolve ability of systems through Dev ops. It's a big topic. A lot of folks looking at how best to do it. We've got a great person here to talk to us about it. Dick Stark is the president CEO of right star Dick. Welcome to the Cube. >>Well, thanks very much for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity beyond the Cube here. >>Excellent. Well, why don't we start? Tell us a little about right start? >>Sure. Right. Stars in I t sm consultancy and we happen to be a dev Ops consulted to say at the same time, we're also a BMC solution provider and lasting solution provider. Now, we've been a BMC solution provider for for 16 years, so we've been in this space a long time and we've earned several accolades up along the way. We made it into the Forrester I t s m service provider. It's not called a Magic Quadrant because that's what God gardener uses. But instead it's a wave report. And so we made it sort of into the far right hand quadrant there. And if you added up all the points we ended up in North America being rated number five out of all the different idea Sam Consultancy. So it's very proud about that. And then last year with BMC, we were the North American Solution provider of the year in the D S. M space. >>Well is an export person, I can tell you Congratulations. Those waves very seriously. Let's jump into this question, though off what does I t. S m from a technology and people in process standpoint have to do to accommodate some of the changes that are being founded and defusing out of the Hole Dev Ops world, which is just having an enormous impact on our I t thinks and does >>it really has. And you know, we've been in the space a long time and I t s m Sometimes I tell the words are interchangeable and there are about if you can believe this about three million people That ended up getting an Idol certification of some short like an Idol Foundation certificate. And over time, that's been have been a really a big, big deal. However, Idol now is lost, its luster just a little bit. And it's allowed Dev ops to sort of sneak in or add dollar whatever you won't want to call it, and I'd listen. Standing still, though, they've bounced back and bounce back in a hard way. And they've they've come up with what's now called Idle for an Idol For was just released this this year, and it takes some of those Dev ops principles, and it has its own value stream as well and is a result Idle for or agile idol or whatever you wanna call it now is taking a little bit stronger position. And when I say Dev ops principles, it's things like Collaborate. It's things like promote, it's It's things like operate and automate. It's It's It's all about it again. It's all about collaboration in some of these other values that that you'll see in Dev ops. I guess what what happened is we spent a lot of time on the Idol side of things, and we did things for process sake and a good example would be changed management and spent a lot of time putting together is change management processes per this idol framework. Okay, And what what happened is that a lot of the users then rebelled a little bit because it might take longer to go through and fill out all the paperwork of It's not paperwork the online tool set then to do a change than to actually perform the change itself. So I don't got a little bit of a bad rap. And so that's where this whole Dev ops thing has come in. And the whole idea right now is to get Dev and Ops under the Shame umbrella, because that's not typically very used to do. But it's, but it's certainly happening. >>Well, let's talk about why that intersections happening, right? So I'm gonna I'm gonna show a little bit of history from my perspective as well, you know, I told began, First of all, it started in some government agencies many years ago, but it started as the basis of it was How do we take better care of the assets with an I T. Which at the time were mainly hardware. In many respects, what we've seen happen over the last 25 30 years that Idol has been an extent. Is that the nature of the assets that I t recognizes? His acknowledges delivering value for the business has changed. We've gone from hardware to infrastructure is code. That's where Dev Ops is so many respects. What you're saying is that Iittle is now trying to bring the best of what it means to do a good job of asset management with a new class of assets. Namely, software is code infrastructures code, and that's where we have to have that marriage. I got that right. >>That's that's correct. And you don't want to have silent silos. You want to be a silo buster if if anything else. And I just wanted to mention something else that I think is kind of fun along with this Idol. Four. We now do what's called the Mars Lander simulation traded it replaced. If you've heard of the Apollo 13 simulation, will Mars four, even though it's idle for specific, it's really all about Dev ops, and I took the Mars board just about a month or so ago, and it's a lot of fun. You sit down and the whole objective is to get get to Mars and you're a business. So and you're going to be selling the data that you're going to collect along along the way. And so the whole idea is to is to make a profit, and you have all these different roles that you play. When I went through it, I was the release manager then. But you might have a business analyst. You might have a service desk person. You have vendors and a it's it's really it's very realistic that and typically like a lot of large enterprises, you start playing the game and it's just chaos, and you have to go back and try this over and over again until essentially you get it right. And I was surprised how easy it is to get sucked in. If you're in a big enterprise, your silent, you have a specific role that you have to d'oh and you have instructions how you're supposed to do that and you want to stick to it. Whatever you know, whatever your assignment is, you have to do that. But that's not the right thing to Dio. Remember, it's about collaboration. It's about transparency. It's been it's about posting your goals, posting the results and moving forward from from there. And so I was surprised how I got sucked into it. And so I can understand why we need to make some progress in this space. And it's all about getting people to change their behavior a little bit in some of these new tool set certainly help >>well, as well. You're going back to what you said. He used to be the three R's of any regime or rolls responsibilities and relationships, and so the roles have are evolving. But often it's just in name only the responsibilities. You know today it's still code. It still has to run on hard, where it's not a bunch of hamsters, they're doing things. But as you said, it's really the relationships amongst the various actors as we introduce more business people. As technology gets put into position to generate more revenue or to do more with customer experience, the relationships are being pressured, are being really pushed to evolve. So how do you see in your practice in right stars practice. How do you see the relationships between Dev ops and I T s M and the business starting to evolve so that you can have amore coherent, comprehensive view of how you make sister? Well, >>I think in that particular case, it's gonna take some time. I mean, it's not gonna happen overnight. I mean, that's why you have agile coaches, or that's while you have the scales agile, or the safe framework is because people don't get it. And they need to understand how to work together better with others. And so it's not gonna happen by just implementing a new new tool set turning the key and then say, OK, everything's gonna be fine. It's good to get the integration between the different tool sets. And the technology is certainly there to do that. But without having some instruction to begin with and having the door in users cooperate. You're not going to see that kind of kind of performance improvement or cost statements or whatever it is that you're looking for. You're not going to see that >>they're one of the biggest challenges in any changes. Abandonment. The user's ultimately abandoned. So as you look a tte. The ideas M tool set that you're utilizing mainly from being right is it is that there's a degree of there's always a degree of pedagogic tool away, it says. Here's how you should do things. What you're discovering is that tool set is really catalyzing. Helping to catalyze positive changes in your mind within a lot of your customer base is, well, the >>thing about Helix, and I'm very excited about this because we're making a lot of good progress with. He likes our customer base that we have right now and give you a good example. George Washing University were based in a D C. Area day. If they are, too, they've been a long time remedy customer. We've moved them to Helix, and then, just recently, when I say recently started a year ago in August, they moved to the BMC Chap Cat box platform. Then, this past August, they totally went cold turkey with chatbots throughout the entire university. That makes a tremendous difference in the performance and not just performance, but also on the cost and the efficiency that the university, particularly from a service management perspective, is providing to its university employees and to its students, just like you mentioned today in the keynote session that it's all about mobility. And practically practically all the students there rely on their their cellphone day in and day out. And so when they have a question at G W. If it's how do I get a new account? How do I get a park parking permit? G on the wireless in my dorm room isn't working. You don't pick up the phone and call. Nobody does that you texted at. And this is a chap off its power by IBM Watson, and it works great. And there's lots of good things that are gonna come out of that. For example, students, I think they probably still have to turn paper sent. You know, maybe that's all Elektronik Lee delivered, but I think you might still have to print out a paper and turn it into your professor. You know, I'm not sure, but bluebirds Anyway, you're probably you're probably gonna do this late at night when the service desk is an open. So what do you do if you can't get the printer to work? Well, you pick up your cell phone, you text in that That the issue and bingo. You've got a response. So those are the sorts of things that are gonna make for a tremendous amount of impact, and it's gonna cause people to change their behavior in really a good way. Another good example. We have another longtime hospital customer. They have a 24 by seven service desk. They're huge, and they pay a lot of money to operate that 24 by seven. But they hardly get any call said at night. Right? Because not that many people work. So why don't they just turn that and you start using chatbots and think of that the r A. Y. It's just incredible. And I think you're going to see more. And that more situations like that as we move forward. >>Dick start President CEO of right Starr. Yep. Thanks very much for being too. >>Thanks very much. Appreciate it. Okay. >>And what's going on? Peter Burress. You've been watching other cube conversation from BMC Helix immersion days in Santa Clara. Thanks very much. Next time