>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube >>With digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm lisa martin, exciting conversation coming up about vaccine cloud management. I've got two guests with me, tim Elka is here, the sales and delivery director of IBM Services for Salesforce and fred Thompson joins us as well. The C. I. O. Of the health service executive in Ireland. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >>Either I have to be here >>so we're very socially distant northern California UK. Glad to have you guys here. We're gonna talk about what the health service executive or HST and Ireland has done with IBM and Salesforce to facilitate vaccine management. But Fran let's go ahead and start with you talk to us a little bit about HSC >>So that the HSC provides public health and social services to everyone living in Ireland. Okay. We that acute hospitals community services nationally. We directly employ about 80,000 people and we fund a further about about 40,000 people. Um and our annual budget is slightly north of 21.6 billion a year. We are the largest employer in the state of the largest organizations the state. Uh you know, we provide a huge range of services right across the whole spectrum and we also fund other organizations who provide those services as well. So we would we would fund some voluntary and charity organizations and we would also uh by services from the latest A GP and other organizations as well. >>So talk to me about a year or so ago when the pandemic hit, what were some of the challenges that HSC faced and then when it came time to we have a vaccine, we have multiple vaccines that roll out um capability. What were some of the challenges that you faced initially? >>So from a an organizational perspective, um, there are, there were huge challenges in that. We were like every other health service worldwide facing uh, an enormous pandemic that was impacting on people. And this is all about people, it's all about people's lives. At the end of the day, people can talk about numbers and they can talk about costs and they can talk about other elements at the end of the day. This is about individual people's lives, their families and their communities. And for the HFC, our challenge was really about how do we manage to protect the totality of the population in Ireland as much as we can from, from the ravages of the virus. Um, and you know, the initial challenge we had was around contact tracing and managing that before a vaccine became available and once the vaccine became available it was then how do we stand up and national vaccine solution that we would be able to deliver and record vaccine to the totality of the population who were getting back? >>Yeah. So there was no pre existing vaccination program. Of course, probably in most places, you needed to get health care workers vaccinated ASAP. And it's also needed to be a national program. So what did you do next? After determining? All right, we need to work with some partners to be able to build technology to facilitate uh equitable, efficient rollout of the vaccine. >>So we did have regional vaccine systems and we do have a number of vaccine programs out there that were that were managing flu vaccine, heP C vaccine. But we needed we did we didn't have a national program and we needed to vaccinate people immediately. Um, and we also wanted to make sure that vaccine program was not dependent on the HSC infrastructure because, you know, we want to be able to vaccinate people in non HSC sites and we wanted non HSC staff to be able to vaccination. Uh, and we didn't want a huge pre dependent on our existing infrastructure. Um, so the first thing we did, we we looked at a number of vendors. Um, and we chose IBM as our partner with Salesforce. And that partnership is really a strategic partnership and it's a partnership that we worked through all the bumps and all the lumps of the program together. Um, and you know, and and there there have been challenges, but like it's too working with him and his team and through our team that we've overcome some of those challenges. Um, and like when we started off, remember the very first conversation I had with him as legislators, we need to vaccinate healthcare workers now, okay, you've got two weeks to start, um and we need to configure a system, get it up and running and to be able to um roll it out to the hospital And two. I'm very quickly then to all of our nursing care homes. Now, that was the challenge. >>And let's bring tIM in is this is a radically quick project from MPB to roll out in two weeks to talk to us about first about the IBM partnership with Salesforce and what you're building together. >>Absolutely. And it's great and Fran. It's interesting to hear you speaking about the run into this because from my perspective, a week before we all started this, we had a simple conversation called into Health Service Executive has some talking about some vaccination program, how can we help? And then within a week we've gone from zero to having how many calls with Fran and team just to understand and with the salesforce team to really understand how the 33 parties can bring the best of IBM, the best of Salesforce and the best of HSC in terms of the adaptability and what we need to get done to get those vaccinations up and running for the health care workers. Now, you know when franz said to me, we need something in two weeks, there was absolutely clarity. If you can't do it in two weeks there's a door, right? So we knew exactly the challenge and that's the kind of thing right before christmas that we were so fortunate to really bring in the team like everyone you think about this, everyone has probably the 14th of december, I was thinking of winding down thinking of having their christmas holidays and vacation time and everybody from the irish team and from the english team said no or cancel, christmas will cancel everything. So it's really christmas came early and christmas was canceled all at once, so and the key bit here, the strategic partnership is, I'm in the sales force have been working together for years and years and years growing out a partnership, we know their products really well, we've got huge capability in that space, but actually with the new health cloud part of it, the vaccine management parts are quite new to salesforce as well, only launched back in august september time, so it's quite new, so we had to go in together as a sort of partnership there to say to just get this done. So we had the best people from salesforce, I know the product, the best people from IBM all turning up on the 14th of december and saying right, we've got to get this done By the 29th with christmas and christmas holidays in the way the vacation time in the way, I think we have 36 hours of time off to eat turkey and fill ourselves before getting back to the wheel and really getting this done and to get I think was four acute hospitals we went into as of the 29th to start the vaccination program, so trying to do that, understanding everything is a compromise at that point, but it has to be secure, you know, this, this is, this is personal data going into these systems, so you can't forget about all the aspects, it's got this minimum but minimum with those kind of constraints as a health system. So it needs to be secure, it needs to also be that national platform going forward as well. So basing on a great platform like Salesforce, you know, you can scale out, you know, you've got those options to grow in the future, but yeah, not without a lot of challenge and then working out what's now getting to know each other, but if we only talked about twice before, we have to know each other pretty well now, um, but just trying to work out how we then structure, what's going to happen every two weeks afterwards, How is that going to move forward? We're going live every two weeks and we haven't done that now for the last three months, So good fun. >>So yeah, good fun. And but so much work to get done and according huge, coordinated effort in a very short time period, during a very challenging time. Talk to me a little bit about France, but you launched this um cloud management vaccine, Cloud management in january 2021 today to thank you. Told me one million people have been vaccinated so far. Talk to me about what the IBM Salesforce solution enables you to deliver to the HSC and to the irish citizens. >>So we have delivered a million vaccines. Okay to uh to stage is uh there's a dose one of those two for most people in Ireland. Um and there's about 720,000 people have got their dose one and the balance I've got, I've got the dose too, that's about sort of just about one in five of the population. That has to be that there has to be vaccinated. And one of these were very conscious of is that, you know, an organization is that we need to take a risk-based approach to this. So we need to look at the most vulnerable groups. There were lots of people who were dying from, you know, from this and they were all the a lot of people are elderly groups and people who were who were vulnerable with uh with pre medical condition. So our challenge was how do we, how do we vaccinate those people quickly and effectively uh and also vaccinate health care workers who are going to care for these people? Uh and and that's what we're, we prioritize the work. So we have to go into 50 acute sites, about 600 or so care homes. We set up a lot of what we call pop up clinics literally attended the in a location or we took over a sports hall or whatever we did. We rolled it out to the GPS to about 2.5 1000 G. P. Site. Um and all of that was being done while we were building the system. So we were, you know, building the system and designing the system on two weeks prints. We have to be agile way too quick. We can make huge compromises and we know that okay. I mean everyone wants a perfect system which is to make the compromise and look and see what you need to do now to keep the program running and how you manage that were, you know, Uh about 3000 users all to be set up fairly quickly or a little over between 1000 users so you can manage all that as you're going through everything. >>I think agile is the name of the game here. Tim talked to us about how you're delivering the agility in such a 10uous time. >>Well, we're all virtual which is added to the mix. But the funny thing with that agility, we've got a span of people across all the countries and everywhere that we can bring to that that party and we're running a normal but I was kind of a normal agile project except normally it would take 23 months to really get that team working effectively, getting to know each other and we just not had time to that to do that. So there's been a core team here and we're bringing in the experts around it. But really just everything is working with Fran work very hand in glove, trying just to work out what we need to do here to look at the next sprint, to look at the next go Live, to look at the compromise. How do we compromise for two weeks? What can we live with for two weeks? What's in the backlog for now? And Fran and I have many conversations, what do we need to do this week and then what's next week? And that's the level of fluidity And that's in part because of the way the pandemics and the response to pandemic is mapping out as we saw the vaccines are changing availability, is changing the rollout plan is changing. None of us have worked through a pandemic before. So agility is the name of the game at the highest level. I think we're all now very used to being sorry, there's a problem. Something's changed. Can we adapt the system to you know where normally in a sprint, I'd be thinking I've got some fixed requirements for two weeks. I'll build that and then do the next two weeks, everything is up for grabs and we're just having to maintain quality at the pace, the responsiveness and balancing it all as an IBM team and you think, and whilst we're also doing that on a platform that it takes time to configure and build these things as well. So it's some of it is you're gonna have to wait a few days. So sorry, you know, in a few days is really probably sometimes the maximum amount of time that can be, you can differ. But as Fran and everyone in the HRC and the, the national immunization office, everyone's pragmatic about realizing we're all in this together and it's really just being one single team, one unit working out and very open and transparent about the, after the possible >>we're doing something, go ahead. >>And we had a phrase, there was like, those are the pieces, we just just do it now and, and we did a lot of that. Okay. Um, you know, where there were things that were prioritized, we're in the middle of a sprint. Um, there were there were changes in the program or there were changes in how, how the vaccination was going to be delivered. Um, and we couldn't wait the week. Just it wasn't available. So we have this thing is just gonna do it now and him and the team, you know, drop what they were doing, you know, made the changes, we test them fast and we put them in and and that gave us then, you know, an extra time to actually then deliver the rest of the sprint and we have to do that. Several Okay. Several very, very late night to deliver >>and I imagine that's still going on. But to wrap here guys, amazing work that you've done together so far with the Salesforce vaccine Club Management rolling out across the HSC, you said one million vaccinations delivered many hundreds of thousands in the queue. I'm sure more iterative work and sleepless nights. But what you're doing for the country of Ireland is literally as friends in the beginning. Life saving Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today on the program. >>You're welcome. Thank you. You're very welcome. Thank you. >>Tim and Fran. I'm lisa martin. You're watching two cubes coverage of IBM think 2021. >>Mhm >>mm.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation I am stupid a man and this is a special cube conversation we've been talking a lot of course for many years about the ascent of cloud and today in 2020 multi cloud is a big piece of the discussion and we're really happy to help unveil coming out of cell al kiram which is helping the networking challenges when it comes to multi cloud and I have the two co-founders they are brothers I have Amir who is the CEO and a DIF who is the CTO the Khan brothers thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the launch of the company thank you sue for having us on the show it's a pleasure to see you again all right so Amir we've had you on the program your previous company that you've done was of course the fella you the two of you have worked together at I believe five companies successful companies acquired you know the most recent one into Cisco so a mirror obviously you know you know strong networking theme your brother the CTO I was going to talk to us about the engineering but give us you know just the the story of Al Kyra what you've been building and now ready to unveil to the world certainly needs to so in around 2018 timeframe we started looking into the next big problem to solve in the industry which was not only a substantial you know from the market size perspective but also from the customers perspective was solving a major pain point so when we started looking into the cloud customers and started talking to our customers they were struggling from the cloud networking perspective even in a single cloud and it was a new environment for them and they had to understand all the nitty-gritty details of each one of these clouds and when you go to multi cloud environment it becomes exponentially complicated to address not only connectivity but how to deploy services like firewall and other services including low balancers and IP address management etc and remote access so we started digging deeper into this problem and start working with the customers and took a clean sheet of paper and came up with a very comprehensive approach to offering a solution which is as a service this time we are not shipping any hardware or software it is you know just like any other SAS application you just come to our portal I just drag and drop literally draw out your network and click on provision and you know come back after 40 minutes or so your full global cloud infrastructure is up and running so out if your brother laid out a pretty broad vision there any of us from the networking world we know there's a lot of complexity there and therefore it takes a lot of work when I want to do things simply as a service is you know a huge growth area bring us inside the engineering challenges that you and the team have been working on to build this solution second let's do so we've been working both our men and myself in the networking industry for more than 25 years now and our the way we have worked and what we have believed in is that we need to solve customer problems we never believed in like doing a science project so here also we started working with customers as we have always done in the past we understood the customers pain points the challenges they were facing especially in this case and in cloud networking space multi-cloud networking space based on the user requirements users or the customers use cases we started the building a service and here what we have built is a complete network as a service it's a multi cloud met work as a service which not only provides connectivity to multiple routes but also addresses the needs for bringing in networking services as well as security services making sure that you have a full policy based infrastructure on top of it you have deep visibility into into the clouds as well as into on-premise into and visibility into and monitoring troubleshooting and all of it is delivered to you as a service so that's what we have been doing here at ELQ here excellent so when we look at multi-cloud of course you know every cloud they have some similar things they have some different things they all tend to do things a little bit differently you know one of the secret sauces that have been talked about for the last few years is ESP BAM space like you and built with Nutella to help really enable those environments so if we've got a diagram here which I think will help explain a little bit as you know we're out here it how it plugs into these different environments walk us through a little bit what we're seeing here and what you're actually doing a tell Kira so here we are building a global unifying the multi cloud Network it's consumed as a service think of it as consuming it just like you would consume any other SAS like our SAS issue so you come to lqs portal you register and then there you go and you start building your global multi-cloud unified network with integrated services so here what you see is is a Elka's cloud services exchange with comprises of cloud exchange points you can bring these up these cloud exchange points up anywhere on the globe you can decide like what networking services security services you need in these cloud exchange points you can connect the multiple clouds from there you can bring your existing on-premise connector matiee into the CX PS all these CX B's have a full mesh of overlay high speed low latency connectivity among each other so there is a full network which comes up between these CX B's and this the whole infrastructure scales with customers as as a customer scale so it's a horizontally scalable veil a very highly redundant and resilient infrastructure which we have both all right so armor now that we understand the basics of the technology you've got some strong investors including Sequoia kleiner perkins give us you know what is being announced day you're coming out of stealth where are you with the product you know how many employees you have and where are you with the discussion of customer adoption so stew we're obviously bringing this to the market and we will be announcing it on April 15th it's available for the customers to consume our solution as a service on that day so they are welcome to reach out to us and we'll be happy to help them and as a matter of fact just come to our website and register for the service and yeah we rightly said that we have a superstar team of not only the venture capital companies but also the board members representing those companies the bill Cochran and mamoon Hamid Wright who the leading VCS are on the board of our company including myself inactive all right I'm all right love to actually bring up the second slide that we have here walk us through you said you know the service you know how do people get started how do they understand you know what would walk us through what what they do so the biggest challenge when we started looking into these problems you know Stu was that it was very complicated you have to piecemeal bring up instances and the cloud and stitch them together and when you try to integrate the services that was a different challenge for the customers right so we wanted to make sure that it was so simple and clean that the customer didn't even have to think about any underlying construct on any of the clouds they should not have to worry about learning each individual power from the you know networking perspective so here's your portal you just come you know step one is come to a portal or register step two is you start drawing your network based on your intent what on-prem an activity you want to bring into this service what type of services you need like all all the firewalls and then you know what pilots you need to connect and everything happens seamlessly the from on pram pram through services into the cloud and across multiple clouds it's a seamless service that we have created and with full analytics capabilities and full governance built in alright so I'll to bring us into what this means for customers you know how do they manage it you know is this the networking team is it the cloud architects you know what api's are there how does this fit into kind of what customers are doing today and you know solve some of those challenges that we laid out earlier in the discussion yes trauma from the customers perspective it's as I said it's it's completely delivered as a service customers come to our portal they draw out the network they select the services they click on provision and the whole network comes up within minutes so the main thing here is that from a customer's point of view if they are connecting to different clouds they don't need to understand any of the underlying specifics or underlying constructs of any of the of the cloud in order to bring can I bring up connectivity so we what we are doing here is we are abstracting the clouds here so we are building a virtual cloud network so if you if you think of if you compare it with what we did in the in the previous life be virtualized the when so here would be a doing is we are virtualizing the cloud network so underlying doesn't matter which cloud you sit on which cloud you need to connect to which networking services whether cloud native services or whether you you want to consume our care services or we also support like customer bringing in third-party services as well so it's all all offered from our platform all offered is a service for to the customer again no expertise required in any of the underlying networking constructs of any of these cards give us what we should be looking at from a technology roadmap from Akira through the rest of 2020 good question as to so as I mentioned earlier our roadmap is dictated by customer requirements so we prioritize what customers need from us so we have come out with a scalable platform we have come out with a marketplace for networking services in there in the near term we'll be expanding our market place with more services we will be addressing more use cases and when I talk about use cases I can give you some examples like there's a view you not just only need connectivity into cloud you might have different requirements from from throughput perspective or bandwidth perspective or different services that you need to front-end your cloud but you may have certain applications such as internet basing application where you eat like traffic coming in from the internet inbound to those applications you might need services like a load balancer like an external load balancer in our services exchange you might also need like a firewall you might need traffic engineering or sorry service eaning capability is where you would chain service through multiple or traffic through multiple of these services like a firewall in the load balancer so we have built a platform which gives you all those capabilities going forward we will be adding more services more use cases to it we have a long ways ahead of us and we will be putting all our effort in delivering a roadmap as we go all right so Amma your technical team definitely has their hands full and uh you know robust after work on uh give us the the high-level what we should be looking for out Kira for people that are out there you know multi-cloud and networking you know tend to get talked a lot there's many big companies and some small ones what will separate al Kira from the rest of the market today and what should we be looking to see the company's progression through 2020 yeah thanks for asking that yeah certainly I mean you know from the solution perspective out it's said that you know it's so fundamentally important to have a very strong basis right and that's what we have done we are bringing out a certain number of services and now we will continue to grow on that will create a big marketplace we will continue to improve on which clouds we connect to and how and we will be building our own services in certain cases as well now building a technology is just one piece of it we have to go out to market with a company that the customers can trust every single you know the department in that company whether it's sales or how they do business with us all the business back-end pieces have to be sorted out and that's what we've been working with and you know then go to market partners that is very very important right support is very important so let me spend a little bit of time on go to market strategy we have been working with the service riders so that we can extend our reach not only to the large customers but also to midsize customers across the globe so you will see us in the future announcing major service water partnerships as well as we've been working with large sis bars and system integration in a partners and also we have taking a slightly different approach this time because it's a service so we are going with telecom master agents which have been you know working with the service providers the cloud providers the cable providers as a channel and they have a huge reach into the customer base so we we have a very comprehensive strategy not only from the go to market in the technology perspective but also how we are going to support our customers and continue to build a relationship to build a lasting company yeah I'm a super important point there absolutely we've seen the maturation and change in the service providers as today they are working with many of the public cloud providers and they're as you said a close touch point and a trusted partner of our customers all right so before I let you go you know YouTuber brothers everybody in today's day and age is spending even more time with family but you know your your situation you've worked together for a long time what keeps bringing the two of you together working together and then talk about that ball so I mean we're very close-knit family we have four brothers and one sister and obviously active and I have been the closest because we have been working together for the longest we have at least work in five different companies together our families travel together we have three daughters each we live about five minutes you know walk from each other and we you know just have this bond where we not only have you know the family close but also very close-knit friends a circle which we both hang out with and we you know obviously have common interest in the sports as well we play squash and tennis and work out so after four if they want to take a stab at it but also yeah so we've always been very close in fact we've been together for the last like ever since I can remember like even even college days he was we were roommates for for some time also he ever say we have like our circle of friends is the same also so again we're very close and we work well together so we complement each other's skills and and it's it's worked out in the past hopefully it will work out again and I look forward to working with them for many many more years to come yeah well I'm or not - thank you so much for sharing the the coming out of stealth for Al Kyra we definitely look forward to watching your progress and you know seeing how you're helping customers in this multi-cloud world thank you for joining us - thank you so much thank you for having us all right I'm Stu minimun and thank you so much for watching this special cube conversation on the cube [Music]