(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America, 2018, Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stew Miniman here with theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. My co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, we have Berna Devrim, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing of Platform at Red Hat. And we are thrilled to have a customer on, Nico Wellner, who's a Unix Systems Engineer with Finanz Informatik out of Germany. Thank you both so much for joining. Alright, Berna let's start with you. Just give, your first time on the program I believe, so a little bit about your background. You've been with Red Hat less than a year so tell us your role there. >> Yeah, yeah I've been at Red Hat for nine, 10 months now. I've very very excited to be here in the Open Source community development model. It's a very unique opportunity, as I've been leading the platform's marketing, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenStack platform, of course, which is why we are here at OpenStack summit. >> Great. We've got Rhel, and RHV, and RHOSP, and lots of other "LMNOP's." So Nico, give us a little bit about your background. Tell us about your organization and then lets get into the mini case study we'll do with you. >> It's an honor for me to be here. Thank you very much for this. I working for Finanz Informatiks, as you said, and it's a centralized IT service provider in the S Finance Group in Germany, for savings banks and state banks. We always have about 400 institutes. Savings banks, individual savings banks. On our systems we are supporting more than 120 million accounts, bank accounts, nearly half of them online accounts. We also develop the software for the savings banks for our customers, not savings banks only. Also, assurances and state banks. We operate the applications we developed previously. It's a huge and amazing company with a lot of different groups and systems. >> Well, we're really glad you could make it here. With GDPR banging down the door in just a couple of days we expect everybody in Europe to be pretty busy getting ready for that. Tell us your role inside the organization. What's your team do? Your title has Unix in it, so what's that entail? Give us the scope of what you cover. >> I'm assistant engineer, as you said and I'm working in the department. We are integrating and operating the Unix systems, which are AIX, we have a huge AIX, and why-mite and a huge Lenox, and why-mite in our data centers. On these Lenox systems, we started with OpenStack in 2014, with testing, and went into production in 2015, half a year later. We integrated OpenStack. We operated and served for our customers internally on the OpenStack platform. We host one of our core applications, it's the internet banking for our customers, as I said for about 50 millions account. We have multiple OpenStack Clouds. My department is responsible for the clouds and for operating them well. >> Nico I wonder if we step back for a second and what led to you going down this path. Was the company figuring out its cloud strategy? Obviously financial institutions, we understand there's governance, compliance, security is a huge concern. What does Cloud mean to your team? What led you to OpenStack? Let's start with kind of that problem statement that you had. >> Yeah, it was the main reason we introduced OpenStack was the time to market was our applications, it was our environment. And it's a plummet process. Took a long time normally and the environment. With OpenStack we could dramatically increase the time to deploy the systems from days or weeks to minutes. So we solved one huge problem with OpenStack. What was another reason was vendor lock-in. We wanted to avoid vendor lock-in. So we decided for OpenStack because it's a huge open source software, great community, and very stable, in our case. So it's OpenStack for us. >> So Berna, I've actually had the opportunity to interview quite a few Red Hat customers. I remember three years ago we were actually in the other hallway here talking to FICO about their role out of Red Hat OpenStack. I hear some similar themes, but you've got access to way more customers than I do. What are you hearing from customers in general? Is this kind of the typical? Is speed and agility at the top of the list when it comes to their Cloud environment? >> Exactly Stew, just like Nico said, actually. Our customers tell us all the time that it is about speed and agility. But it's also about different types of use cases and the workloads that they're actually looking at in their environments. Very popular ones, the use cases are. For example, scale-out IS, as well as they have test environments for the clouds needs applications, for example. Also we do see that big data analytics, NFV also. So there are many different types of use cases we see from our customers. We also have been hearing that they are actually using Open Shift on top of the Red Hat OpenStack platform. Majority of them are either deploying it or planning to deploy containers. So we do see a lot of different, but similar, aspects as well. >> Yeah. Nico have you started to go down that path with containers, Kubernetes, all that stuff yet? >> Not so far. We plan to do so. In general will use containers, we are planning to. But we already started the process, but it would take a little bit. I'm saying that we're not sure if start with OpenStack, containers on OpenStack or plain, but I think that with OpenStack could be a great way to do so. Because one of the reasons is our OpenStack environment is very reliable. This is important for us, very important for us and our customers. Over the years, as I said, since 2015 we had no outage due to OpenStack and the whole environment is great for us. >> That's great. So where are you now in your Red Hat OpenStack deployment? You have an OpenStack in production and now you're already a Red Hat customer in other products and you're now going out with Red Hat OpenStack platform, is that correct? >> Yes that's correct, yeah. >> I'm kind of curious. One of the conversations around OpenStack is the component nature of it and that many OpenStack deployments are different. So as you're now deploying Red Hat and you were already on OpenStack, are the skills transferable? Do you find the the processes transferable? Do you feel that this was a good investment, no up time for three years now and now you're moving to this new platform. Do you and your team feel like you're able to properly instrument and maintain and operate it? >> I think it's the best platform for us for infrastructure and management, Lenix and why-mite. We want to in-wolf it furthermore. >> Stew: And the skills will still transfer? The skills you've known for years will still transfer to the new OpenStack? >> Yes we have only a few people working actively on the design and the architecture, and operating for OpenStack. It's turned out that we could do fine with them. Now we have huge experience with OpenStack, feel comfortable with it. We are planning to increase the OpenStack environment, slightly I think. But scale out works great for us. The OpenStack itself, in our case, we could very flexible do a systems releases, which is one important thing for us. I think the OpenStack itself is the best platform for us and our application tools. >> That's great. Berna I was at Red Hat Summit and the interesting thing there for me was the portfolio, the breadth of portfolio, right? One of the messages was clear. You've always depended on Red Hat Enterprise Lenix, and that's still there and containers are Lenix. There was lot of multi-cloud talk and stuff like that, and OpenStack was part of the mix. Can you talk a little bit about OpenStack as part of the Red Hat portfolio and what you all are bringing to the table, and how you're thinking of open shift on OpenStack and that sort of thing? >> Yeah, exactly. As you pointed out Red Hat is all about open hybrid cloud. Within that Red Hat OpenStack platform plays a big role, of course as you can imagine. What we are trying to do at OpenStack platform is to help our customers like Nico get towards the digital transformation. With that comes, again, the need for speed and agility. What we are enabling with OpenStack platform is we would like to call it powering the digital transformation through enabling our customers to accelerate their businesses by simplifying their applications and delivery as well as the services delivery, which then, of course, moves towards innovation, fast innovation at the speed of the business. At the same time, we are trying to enable IT teams to be empowered so that they can actually do the innovations at their own pace without worry, with all of the Red Hat portfolio, as you pointed out. Yeah. >> Nico, we'd love to hear your take on digital transformation. I think back, five years ago we were talking about financial institutions, oh well we need to go mobile. Well it's much more than that for most companies that I talk to. Do you consider a digital transformation in your company? How does that relate to what IT does to what the business does, to what your users need? >> It's one of our core tasks in our company to help our customers for digital transformation. Finanz Informatik itself sees itself to be the best partner for our customers to do this transformation. With leading technologies like OpenStack and a special case was Red Hat OpenStack, of course, which is a product which enables us to be flexible, secure, and fast with our environment, and to drive this process of digital transformation in the S Finance Group, Savings Finance Group. >> Alright, so you've been at this for three or four years now with OpenStack, I'd love to get what learnings you've had for peers of yours that might be earlier in their journey. What have you learned? What advice might you give them? Let's start there. >> Overall I would say the OpenStack environment is very reliable. More reliable as I thought at the beginning. But it's turned out it's really good. From the automation perspective it's a really nice, let's say tool, for our environment. I found OpenStack is a great project with a lot of software components you can combine. We have a flexible platform. We can add some components we do not have today, but are part of OpenStack community of OpenStack product at all, to enable additional functionalities to the environment, let's say for containers, for object solid, and something like that, and new services for our customers to decrease the time to market. >> Okay. One of the things that this show we're seeing is looking beyond where we've been. I think the keynote this word, people are asking to do more and in more places. Everything from containers, and edge, and server lists, and the like. What's interesting you these days as you look down the road? Different technologies that are in your roadmap in the future, inside or outside OpenStack? >> For our company, we are in the process to integrate new needs for our customers and we are planning to do a lot of big data. Maybe OpenStack could be part of the white platform forward for the future we are planning. I think it will be much more diverse in future because right now we do have one application running on it, one co-application. It's a co-application where we partnered for us. But we will maybe will spread it or enable it for other applications, because of the great experience we've made with it. >> Nico and Berna, thank you so much for giving us the updates on where you stand with OpenStack and all of your deployment. We'll be back here with lots more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver for John Troyer. I'm Stew Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)