>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain. It's KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, and my cohost for two days wall-to-wall coverage is Corey Quinn. And we're always thrilled when we get to speak to a user, and not just any user but Fernando Alvarez, who is a cloud architect at X by Orange. Fernando, muchas gracias for joining us, Sir. >> It's a pleasure. >> So Orange, we are familiar and many people are. X by Orange though, maybe you could explain to our audience a little bit what this group is, inside of a large global brand. >> X by Orange is a subsidiary from Orange Spain, and from a Orange telecom group in France, and what we try to do is to reinvent the way that telco companies operates. Going more natural of a way than the traditional way. So it's more or less what we're trying to do, and we started operations in September of last year, just with a different proposal, to see if it could make it viable for the small and medium businesses in Spain. >> Yeah, so digital transformation, you know, many people talk about it, but I've had some really good conversations with customers in the last year or so. Data is so important to businesses these days. Being data-driven, and being software at the core of what you do. So, it's sometimes overstated that every company will be a software company some time in the future. But you have done these transformations before, and that's what brought you into X by Orange. So, tell us a little a bit, your role as a cloud architect, what's your mission and what's your role in the org? >> Well, my mission is to make all the different pieces inside the whole IT stack to work together, especially in a cloud environment. So from the designing from the whole ecosystem that supports the platform, and at the same time supports the whole company as a tech operator, or multiple tech operators. What my role is to make sure that everything fits together. We're trying to accomplish it and we're very happy to have it in a cloud environment, in public cloud and using Kubernetes, as our continuing orchestration engine. >> So, can you lay out are you in one public cloud? Many public clouds, data centers? What is your-- >> We are now in one public cloud in AWS but having this cloud orchestration layer allows us to move to, or to go multicloud or hybrid cloud as soon as we want to do it. But I think that we have to keep it simple from the beginning. Having a tight schedule to start operations is key to (stuttering) have our value proposal into the market and to do so we have to do it in a simple way so going first in one public cloud, going public cloud first because it's not a logical movement in a big company even though we are in Spain now but normally, big enterprises want to do in their own way in a private data center so what we want is to be very fast and to do so the election is clearly logical to go public cloud and to have an orchestration engine like Kubernetes to do everything, no? >> Do you find that making decisions that enable portability in the future if you want to move to alternate clouds or go hybrid, is in any way constraining what you're able to do or the speed you're able to innovate with? >> Yeah, but I think benefits are way better than the drawbacks of that. Normally every single decision you have to make about the architecture of NEPs, one of the key aspects is to see if it involves vendor blocking for any of the components on the stack for example in the public cloud. But I think it's worth the effort because most things that you can design as an engineer or as an architect can be solved not only using (stuttering) A specific solution from a specific cloud provider but using a more generic way. In this way then you can assure that you can move more or less easier to other cloud or to other infrastructure. >> All right, so I guess it begs the question, you said it's AWS today and Kubernetes, it's OpenShift yes? >> Yes. >> That is the, the Kubernetes platform? How did you come about choosing that and you know, obviously Red Hat, one of their strengths is working in lots of different environments so as you go to that hybrided multicloud was that the driver for them? Or were you a Red Hat customer? How did you end up with OpenShift? >> Yeah, that was one of the drivers. And the other was the support for the platform. We were in a really tight schedule and we knew Kubernetes well enough but we weren't sure if our knowledge were enough to be in operations in only nine months. So for that we get Red Hat on board, to have all their knowledge in terms of support and the professional services to help us to define how to do things with their platform on OpenShift and because OpenShift is like Kubernetes distribution we were sure enough that we share the Kubernetes way of doing things so that for us was a logical election. >> What was it that drove your move to the public cloud in the first place? And I guess your entire digital transformation by extension? >> Did you say what, sorry? >> What drove your entire decision to first go to the public cloud and secondly, to go I guess as part of your larger digital transformation? >> The main reason probably was the speed. At the beginning the whole company was started thinking that we were going to build our platform on a private cloud, but once we made the numbers and see that that needed one more year to start operations, with zero value to the customer, the decision was pretty easy. Let's go public cloud and let's think about this, if it really adds value in the future. >> All right. So Fernando if I heard you right you said nine months from you know, >> Yeah. >> when you went to deployment. Big companies aren't necessarily known for their speed of change. >> (laughing) Yeah. >> Talk a little bit about the organizational dynamics. How much internal ramp up there was versus relying on your partners and your vendors to be able to help you meet those schedules. >> The good news is that we had the full Orange support to start a new company and we started as a separate company recently because we wanted to be very fast. So instead of having all the processes from the big company to do something that maybe it will fail, or maybe it will affect the brand, we decided to start a new company from scratch, with Orange in its name because we have all the (stuttering) well-known, All the brand is well-known in the world, but at the same time we wanted to start from scratch. That's why we started with a little people, with most of them were coming from, some were industry instead of the telco industry and we started to build from scratch the whole company and that we were 20 in February 2018 and now we are more than 200 and we started operations in nine months from January 2018. So I think it was a really completely success in terms of speed. >> If you were going to do it all again starting over, what would you do differently? >> That's a really good question. Probably I will put even more effort in transmitting the right culture because when you grow a lot you have to be very carefully in transmitting the right culture to the new commerce. Because it's very easy to let dissipate the culture that you create at the beginning when you are only 10 or 20 people and it's very difficult to maintain it when you are 200. And then if you are 200 with a wrong culture you are transforming yourself in a big company with a small revenue so, that's something that needs to be taken into account. >> Okay, so what's the road map from here? Does the 200 then help infuse into the rest of the company? How do things work going forward? >> Well, what are we doing now is to, we build up a completely new IT stack, that was from the beginning multi tenant to host multiple telco operators and now we are hosting our second telco operator. That's Orange Spain branch for small and medium enterprises, that is now coming to our stack, so this is in our run up for this year, what we are doing is integrating all the stack from Orange Spain to the new one. And at the same time, trying to complete our portfolio with new products. And these new products could be managed and commercialized by X by Orange as a telco provider and also by Orange Spain as another telco provider. >> Right. When people look this show there are so many projects going on and so many different pieces. We sometimes hear "There's a lot of choices, how do I make them?" How did X by Orange, how did you figure out what pieces of the stack was Red Hat, mostly prescriptive as to how you do, or were you choosing the service mesh and all the other various pieces and what can you tell us about your stack? >> Well what I can tell you is that we put a lot of effort on designing the stack by ourselves, not having any turnkey solutions, because we think that this is key for the success of the company. Because normally telco operators put a lot of effort in their core network but they don't put so much effort in the software technology, but now things are changing a lot and we really think that the software layer is as much as important as it was the network. And here is the real perceived value from the customer now resides in the software pack, so we designed each part individually and we selected the right partners for starting the development of each part and then make altogether to work. Instead of going of a full stack provided by a unique company. >> Perfect. As you've gone down this path have you started to look down the serverless environment at all? Or are you strictly in a more container based approach? Let me broaden that a bit. Are you looking into functions as a service and other serverless technologies? Or are you mostly keeping it to more commonplace things that are half a step back? >> Well, in telco industry what is traditionally the vendor, the traditional vendor for the telco industry are the network vendors that are more in their way of virtualization instead of their continuation on not even to mention the deploying serverless. So we are putting a lot of effort on making them to understand and some of them they are understanding it really, really well, that it's key to have their products be able to make an extreme automation. So it's a pity that we don't have enough time (stuttering) to use technologies like serverless. We use them for little operations in our internal stack but we are not at the point of using it in products that we have because what we are doing is trying to, for example, to move the management part of the network services to the containers and now our efforts are in that place. >> And to be very clear, that's absolutely the right answer. You have to meet your customers where they are with things that are appropriate fits for the problems that they have. And average gating for a technology stack because, oh, it seemed like the right answer when I polled a bunch of people on stack overflow or something, is never the right answer to solve those problems, unless "How do I make people "on stack overflow happy?" is the question. Spoiler, you can't. >> Yeah, that's completely true, yeah. >> So Fernando one last question I had for you is here at a big show, what are you looking to get out of the show? What excited you to bring you to the event? And any other things around your experience so far, what you're hoping to do that you could share? >> I think that the most important thing when we're talking about the internal structural transformation for any sized company is the people and the mentality of the people. So I can never say enough times that we really need to invest time with people to embrace the change, to embrace the kind of culture that is behind... The CloudNative mentality because if not, if we don't do so, what we are doing is just transporting our old stack to a new technology without changing anything. So put in that effort, talk with people, make this change happen together with people that is working already in big companies is key for the success of any story. >> All right, well Fernando Alvarez, really appreciate you sharing your story. Congratulations on the progress so far. >> Thank you very much. >> And best of luck in the future. >> Thank you. >> All right. For Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)