(Upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE got two great guests from Deloitte Consulting Dave Knight who manages the Red Hat Relationship, Lee he's the lead there, and Mike Bourgeois who's the Public Sector Managing Director both from Deloitte Consulting LLP official name. Guys, great to come on, and we were just talking before camera about all the stories. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Like I said we were just talking about all the stories from the transition from pre-COVID, COVID. Now we've got a view into post-COVID. I want to dig into that 'cause there's a lot of things happening. You guys have been in the trenches, front lines bringing solutions, but before we get into that, can you guys just introduce yourself share your roles at Deloitte and give us a quick overview of what you work on. >> Yeah, so again, thanks for having us John Dave Knight I'm a solution architect and Global Red Hat Alliance Manager for Deloitte. I've got responsibility for making sure that play nicely in the sandbox together or we've got a joint customer and solutions to deliver to those customers. >> Hi everyone, thanks for having us John, I'm a Managing Director Mike Bushwa out of Boston Texas. I am coming up on year 20 and Public Sector Consulting. My area of expertise is large state government systems that serve the needs of millions of citizens and thousands of state workers, good to be here. >> Yeah. Great to have you. And I wanted to chime in with you right away because Mike you are living in probably one of the hottest markets Public Sector. I've been following that for many, many years, generations actually from the early computer industry GSA contracts, all these contracts you've got all the Public Sector, they move very slowly but now the pandemic, there was no place to hide. Everything got pulled back, disruption, you can't just shut down critical infrastructure and critical services. People had to move fast. What was your experience and how is it now give us a taste of some of the challenges and the landscape. >> You bet John, so we talked a little bit before we started this, but my 20 year consulting career, I can't think of anything really in close to this, other than maybe Y2K and as Dave mentioned the Affordable Care Act Legislation in 2009, though that was a much smaller scale as it turned out to be. So I would be remiss not to share examples of extraordinary challenges our clients have had related to the pandemic. Department of Labor and Health and Human Service Agencies for example, responded to the pandemic in rapid timeframe that were rarely seen in government. Citizens that were used to coming in appealed offices, We're now required to do most things virtually. Deloitte has been privileged to assist clients with digital solutions across the country in response to this unprecedented event. And so I'd like to share just a couple of examples. The first is for Department of Labor, the pandemic contributed to millions of layoffs throughout the country Department of Labor workers found called volumes increasing by a 1000% in some cases, the amount of increased volume required agencies across the country hire temporary workers to help out. Millions of new unemployment claims needed to be filed in benefits rapidly provided to citizens of name. So the big challenge was the agency had to figure out how to rapidly file claims into the unemployment system, rather than requiring new citizens to use an external web application they were really unfamiliar, the agency needed more efficient approach. The approach we used was to create an internal web application that enabled workers to file unemployment insurance claims on behalf of citizens. Workers collected the necessary data from citizens and claims were filed into the system. The application enabled workers to focus on filing claims rather than sort of a technical support role showing how to people use an external web application. More citizen were served in much less time, claims are filed efficiently by train workers which resulted in benefits being received in a much more timely fashion. And so a second example is, with Department of Human Services. So one stay as mentioned Citizens were used to going into field offices but suddenly they were told you can't come into the field office. So once they provided a 100% virtual application and the important part here is certification solution for the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or DSNAP for short. this application was stood up in two weeks, families who needed food assistance can now apply and be certified for benefits remotely. Today over 50,000 cases have certified and citizens receiving food nutrition assistance. Back to you John. >> So, I mean obviously there's some great use cases you got, basically I got to work at home, new architecture there you got to have a new workflows. I mean, this poses some real challenges. How did you guys put it together? I mean, Dave take us through where this all fits in with the Red Hat, because obviously now it's new deployment new capabilities have to be deployed for the pandemic. How does this bring together the partnership with Red Hat? >> Yeah, so great question and it really plays to the strength of both Deloitte and Red Hat, right? The success stories that Mike has illustrated show how we can quickly pivot as a firm to delivering these types of solutions and help our customers think through innovative ways to solve the problems. So, I mean the prime example that Mike just gave, everything used to be done in offices. Now it's all done remotely cause you can't go to the office even if you want to. And that is very much aligned with the innovation we get with our partnership with Red Hat, right? They've led the way in open source and some of the technologies that we've leveraged that our solutions include, answerable for automation, some of the middleware products, and I would say one of the cornerstones is the OpenShift Platform. Now that allows us to greatly accelerate the development and delivery of those solutions to our customers. Sort of again, aligning our innovative thinking with Red Hats Innovative Technologies. >> What would you say if someone said, "what's the partnership strengths and what needs specifically are you addressing with customers and customer needs?" >> So I, again, I think our lean towards innovation is a common thread across both firms and where we have our greatest strength. We like to take our customers on a journey but it's not our journey, it's their journey, right? So we help them figure out where they want to go and how they want to get there in a way that aligns with their business goals, their budgets all the sort of factors that drive those things and Red Hat is very open to that approach. They sort of invented the crowdsourcing of open source they made it into a business model. They've developed that from literally nothing. And that aligns very nicely with us. That's one of the key strengths. We also are firm believers in open source again to the degree that our customers like the leverage that to drive their journeys. And we're seeing that, especially in the Public Sector Space as being a key driver of the technologies they employ. >> Mike, I want to come back to you on this open ma component open question, open source, open to technology open innovation out in the open as Red Hat calls it. How does Red Hat open source software, address the needs for your customers for security and on-premise considerations. >> I'll talk a little bit about open source principles in general still the open source principles of transparency meritocracy community problem solving and collaboration. These are on its of both software innovation as well as organizational transformation. One of the highest demand transformation needs that I'm seeing in the market is the desire to adopt innovative technology, and most importantly, moving workloads to the cloud. It's no longer a thought, it is an imperative moving workloads to the cloud, on new deals hosted in the cloud, on an existing, is it large systems let Deloitte help us get to the cloud. So I believe the key to success embracing the cloud is recognizing first the need for change in people, processes and technology. The vehicle for this transformation is DevSecOps and innovative open source platforms, such as the OpenShift platform that Dave mentioned. OpenShift focuses on people, processes and technology and the security conversation becomes even easier. I mean, I see Linux was around for years, and we've always used Linux on our Java based workloads now we can have the conversation about saying, Hey, well that se Linux operating system we've been using for years now, there's this really cool Container Management Platform that we can solve real problems like auto scaling, in my Health and Human Services career, I can remember every year when open enrollment comes around systems engineers are teed up, and ready to manually add those to a BMR cluster or something like that. Well, now we don't have to do these things. We can rely on Kubernetes so auto scale, and then and get rid of those instances when workload demands seven resolved. So it's a really cool technology kind of behind the scenes. It's not the dog and pony show sometimes but in the end it helps the clients and Deloitte remain consistent with those service level agreements. >> That's a great example about the open enrollment illustrates the fact that, you got to provision more stuff to take that load on it. It's always hard in Public Sector you might not have the speed. So I got to follow up and ask you, you guys have had wins in the Public Sector lately with Red Hat, you guys Deloitte and Red Hat working together and get some wins under your belt, on around cloud and cloud and technology obviously with the pandemic has needs there. Are you guys seeing any particular sector challenges specifically around Public Sector as it goes this next level a lot of modernization happening we're seeing that, but any challenges that you're seeing, can you give some examples of how these challenges are being addressed? First talk about the challenges and then give some examples of how they're overcoming them. >> So I can jump in here with this one then, and Mike I think you probably have some maybe Public Sector specific examples, but one of the things that I think is common across all industries is resource constraints, right? And particularly as we look for human resources and not in the HR sense, but developers, CIS admins those types of resources as Mike said, the cloud is here to stay, right? And it's not something that people are thinking about it's de facto part of the conversation. And that's great, but it leads to silos of skills which puts further sort of strain on a limited pool of resources within most sites IT organization. So something like an OpenShift, something like an Ansible solves problems related to resource constraints, because they're skills that are portable across cloud environments, right? If you can manage OpenShift you can manage OpenShift on-prem, you can manage it recently released AWS version of that ROSA on the Azure version of that. So it's no matter where you're running it you've got a common set of skills and access sort of a force multiplier, same thing with Ansible automation, right? If you can write scripts, with an Ansible you can do those repeatable tasks in a much more efficient fashion. And again sort of multiplying the capacity of your existing workforce. >> So you've got an operating leverage there. I mean, this is what you're getting at is that, Public Sector and other commercial areas they kind of got to get used to this fact that, you get some leverage here, you get some operating leverage. >> More or less has always been a thing in IT. And it's not relenting that's for sure. >> It's been more at the more, with less has always been kind of a tagline for budget cuts, right? You can squeeze more out of the investment. Here it's kind of like do more with less than the sense of there's more net new things happening with leverage. So, I mean, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's more with less from a resource perspective, right? Typically it was budget, but no money is just another resource. Now we're getting into the personnel side of it. The other thing I would say is, something like an OpenShift Platform allows the Mike's point around DevOps, it allows the developers to develop, right? I have an article in wired.com about this, where developers are saddled with meetings and they have to become concerned with infrastructure and they have traditionally and security. And I am I doing all these things that aren't related to development. If you have a good DevOps Platform in place the security folks can build guard rails into the platform and the developers can just go develop which is what they want to do in the first place. Yeah exactly, that's another riff on the more, with less, again in a resource, the human resource way versus the budget way. >> Yeah, and that really is where OpenShift ties in. Mike what's your take on this? Because with this kind of program ability infrastructure as code DevSecOps kind of modern developers, Public Sector loves that, because they just want to build the new apps. They got to modernize. So change the infrastructure once. And then a lot of ma many benefits on top of it. It's almost like, it sounds like an operating system to me. >> Yeah, lots of thoughts going around my head right now but I'll say the more with less to me when I'm having client conversations is imagine a world of higher innovation, more technology at lower costs, right? I mean, so CIO is light up when I explained to them the orders of magnitude cost savings on top of the innovation introduced to their environment. So when moving workloads to the cloud is not as easy as just packaging up a binary and dropping in on a name, your cloud provider, right? There's an entire, a blueprinting strategy. There's a Cloud Native Architecture, modernization discussion, so we do those sorts of things, at Deloitte and we work with clients very closely to do that. I want to say teaming with Red Hat allows us to be proactive with our design and reference architecture validation. The Collaborative Partnership in Relationship allows us to connect senior engineers from Deloitte and Red Hat. So we have low level strategic discussions, we validate our assumptions and optimize to use a Red Hat technology. What we're doing in Public Sector is separating the monolithic application into layers. And whenever it comes to technologies like Ansible, like OpenShift, like Jenkins, all of these things that any application needs and Public Sector, we're saying out to the account teams across the country, look this is a slower layer DevOps Platform. And by the way, you can run any .Net or Java based workload on it. So we're trying to make opinionated reference architecture so that regardless of the solution, we can just go to market with that platform that tried and true production application. So I'll give a quick example John, if now's a convenient time regarding, well, one of the things that we've done for particular state client. >> Definitely yeah, give the use cases we love those. >> Yes so one of the impactful modernization that struck my mind was the State of Washington. They've mentioned the affordable care act earlier, there are two major things that came out of that. One was the eligibility and enrollment systems had to be modified across all 50 states. But the second thing and the primary driver behind the affordable care act was health insurance exchange. A way for millions of citizens to have access to healthcare using Subsidized Health Insurance Plans. So in Washington and health benefits exchange is that health insurance exchange, State of Washington has been a client of Deloitte since 2012. The solution was originally designed using closed source proprietary products. There are three drivers for change. The first is the API gateway was end of life and needed to be replaced. Number two was the client wanted it to move health benefit exchange to the cloud from an on-premise hosting arrangement. And third is reducing cost of those solution with innovative products. So the agency was looking for a platform that provided flexibility, auto-scaling and performance and lower cost of ownership. So we worked with the agency and we evaluated a variety of API Management and Integration Platforms after reviewing the outcomes for each proof of concept the agency decided to move forward with Red Hats, three skill API Management Platform, Red Hat Fuse for Integration and OpenShift Container Platform that offered the auto-scaling continuous integration tools and out of the box monitoring and reporting capabilities proactively monitor the health of the solution. I often describe a little bit of OpenShift as a data center or DevSecOps in the box. It just is all there. You don't need to add layers on top of OpenShift install and configure it, tune it and just you're off and running in a short amount of time. So three outcomes I'll mention, go ahead, John. >> NO continue, I thought you were finished. So on the outcomes side, the first outcome the agency substantially lower the cost of ownership using commercially supported open source while increasing access to innovative emerging technology. So the agency wanted a solution not only to meet their current needs, but extend the solution going forward. The beautiful thing about OpenShift is you can drop a container images into the platform without installing an operating system. It's all just there and it's spreading to be extended. The number two outcome cloud migration. Deloitte work collaboratively with the agencies and infrastructure and managed services team to successfully migrate the health benefit exchange to the cloud. And the last thing a bit obvious, but that's successful release, working collaboratively with our client. We were able to migrate the solution within 100 days from making the products decision. The cut over to the new solution was seamless with minimal downtime and zero production issues or exceptionally proud of that. >> Great stuff, great use case. And again, those are great business examples. Dave, I want to get this last question to you and Mike can chime in too. As Red Hat Summit evolves, and we're hearing the theme here at the event about transformation is the innovation, Innovation is about scale. When you hear the words like in a box or Hybrid Cloud you hear about an operating environment. So it's an opportunity to set the table for the next generation, this is what I see. What do you guys see as people talk about Hybrid Cloud and soon to be Multiple Cloud? Because you guys you said have tough relationships. You deal with IBM and Red Hat and you probably deal with other people. Clients want, from what we hear they want back to the Multi Vendor Open Connection Distributed Environment. That's what they want. So how does your relationship evolve, given all this is happening? How do you see the future, please chime in. >> Thanks, that's a fantastic question. I actually think the market is coming catching up to where I've been thinking for quite a while. And that is the Hybrid is kind of where it's at. A lot of customers have been in some sort of Hybrid mode as part of the step or a journey to the cloud, getting all the way to the cloud. But I think we're seeing some transition. I know customers are starting to ask me more and more about Hybrid solutions for a variety of reasons, right? The easy workloads for the most part have either been moved or be are being moved, or at least there's a strategy and a plan to get them moved. And now we're starting to be asked about some of the more difficult architecture type questions, right? The workloads that are a little bit more sticky to the on-premise model. And so Hybrid becoming more of the endpoint as opposed to a step along the journey. The other big thing is some repatriation, right? Workloads coming off of cloud. Maybe they seem like good candidates but for whatever reason, the cost drivers or other things weren't realized, let's get them back on premise. Maybe it's a regulatory thing and new regulations are making folks uncomfortable. So I see Hybrid as a pretty interesting next wave of cloud, Deloitte as a far or we're skilling up or tooling up in order to address the needs of our customers, again are starting to ask us these really challenging questions about Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures. >> Yeah and just the key point there is that you think about it like with the way you're discussing it, it's a platform, not a tool, right? So if you think about it like a platform then you can move things around and look at architectures and changes of how resources and workloads are deployed and then what data you're getting from it. Whether you bring it to a factory, for instance you say, Hey, okay, we're going to put it on prem because it's a factory or whatever, and you need more data. What was the changeover? This is like a day to operations kind of mindset. What's your comment on that? >> Well I mean I have actually going back three years now, one of the marketing lines that we developed internally, was moved to a platform, not a provider. But because you get that flexibility, now, the reality is what works stay where they're put for a variety of reasons. But I think one of those reasons could be, because they're put in places where they tend to not want to move, right? So if we could put them into a platform where, there is some portability built into the platform, I think we might have a different sort of outcomes for customers. And I think architecture is absolutely the key, right? That to me is the secret sauce here. >> Mike set up for you to close us out here, platform, Public Sector, Hybrid, that's what they want. It's an ideal scenario for anyone in Public Sector and in general, and why wouldn't you want to have a great platform that's it can be programmed, and rearchitected at will for the benefit of the business powered by software. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, all good points and I will agree with Dave that Hybrid is certainly evolving. Eight years ago, Hybrid was consuming and address validation API in the cloud and not custom coding that, but today I do agree that Hybrid Cloud is all about a vehicle a way of moving workloads across data centers. It's an architecture that is encapsulated by something like an OpenShift so that you can federate your workloads across data centers. You can put them in one or easily moved them to the other. Maybe that's for a variety of reasons. It could be compute and storage is being reduced by one provider versus the other. So the solutions were we're designing today, they are data center agnostic, we're not being tied to data centers anymore. The best design solutions, you can just let them move in their easy manner. So that that's my take on Hybrid Cloud. And I would say the and Red Hat are making investments to help us advance that thinking help us advance those solutions. We had Deloitte have created a Red Hat OpenShift lab environment, and we've done this purposely to validate reference architectures to show account teams the way we have delivered the very very large accounts to show them what DevSecOps to means from a product perspective and to give them opinionated processes to be successful in delivering these large type solutions. >> Dave, Mike, thanks for coming on, and I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE and sharing the perspective on the Red Hat Relationship with Deloitte Consulting. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> This is CUBE Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021, am John for your host, thanks for watching.

>>Yeah, yeah, hello again and welcome to our last session of the day before we head to the meat. The experts roundtables how T Mobile is building a data driven organization with thought spot and whip prone. Today we'll hear how T Mobile is leaving Excel hell by enabling all employees with self service analytics so they can get instant answers on curated data. We're lucky to be closing off the day with these two speakers. Evo Benzema, manager of business intelligence services at T Mobile Netherlands, and Sanjeev Chowed Hurry, lead architect AT T Mobile, Netherlands, from Whip Chrome. Thank you both very much for being with us today, for today's session will cover how mobile telco markets have specific dynamics and what it waas that T Mobile was facing. We'll also go over the Fox spot and whip pro solution and how they address T mobile challenges. Lastly, but not least, of course, we'll cover Team Mobil's experience and learnings and takeaways that you can use in your business without further ado Evo, take us away. >>Thank you very much. Well, let's first talk a little bit about T Mobile, Netherlands. We are part off the larger deutsche Telekom Group that ISS operating in Europe and the US We are the second largest mobile phone company in the Netherlands, and we offer the full suite awful services that you expect mobile landline in A in an interactive TV. And of course, Broadbent. Um so this is what the Mobile is appreciation at at the moment, a little bit about myself. I'm already 11 years at T Mobile, which is we part being part of the furniture. In the meantime, I started out at the front line service desk employee, and that's essentially first time I came into a touch with data, and what I found is that I did not have any possibility of myself to track my performance. Eso I build something myself and here I saw that this need was there because really quickly, roughly 2020 off my employer colleagues were using us as well. This was a little bit where my efficient came from that people need to have access to data across the organization. Um, currently, after 11 years running the BR Services Department on, I'm driving this transformation now to create a data driven organization with a heavy customer focus. Our big goal. Our vision is that within two years, 8% of all our employees use data on a day to day basis to make their decisions and to improve their decision. So over, tuition Chief. Now, thank >>you. Uh, something about the proof. So we prize a global I T and business process consulting and delivery company. Uh, we have a comprehensive portfolio of services with presents, but in 61 countries and maybe 1000 plus customers. As we're speaking with Donald, keep customers Region Point of view. We primary look to help our customers in reinventing the business models with digital first approach. That's how we look at our our customers toe move to digitalization as much as possible as early as possible. Talking about myself. Oh, I have little over two decades of experience in the intelligence and tell cope landscape. Calico Industries. I have worked with most of the telcos totally of in us in India and in Europe is well now I have well known cream feed on brownfield implementation off their house on big it up platforms. At present, I'm actively working with seminal data transform initiative mentioned by evil, and we are actively participating in defining the logical and physical footprint for future architectures for criminal. I understand we are also, in addition, taking care off and two and ownership off off projects, deliveries on operations, back to you >>so a little bit over about the general telco market dynamics. It's very saturated market. Everybody has mobile phones already. It's the growth is mostly gone, and what you see is that we have a lot of trouble around customer brand loyalty. People switch around from provider to provider quite easily, and new customers are quite expensive. So our focus is always to make customer loyal and to keep them in the company. And this is where the opportunities are as well. If we increase the retention of customers or reduce what we say turned. This is where the big potential is for around to use of data, and we should not do this by only offering this to the C suite or the directors or the mark managers data. But this needs to be happening toe all employees so that they can use this to really help these customers and and services customers is situated. This that we can create his loyalty and then This is where data comes in as a big opportunity going forward. Yeah. So what are these challenges, though? What we're facing two uses the data. And this is, uh, these air massive over our big. At least let's put it like that is we have a lot of data. We create around four billion new record today in our current platforms. The problem is not everybody can use or access this data. You need quite some technical expertise to add it, or they are pre calculated into mawr aggregated dashboard. So if you have a specific question, uh, somebody on the it side on the buy side should have already prepared something so that you can get this answer. So we have a huge back lock off questions and data answers that currently we cannot answer on. People are limited because they need technical expertise to use this data. These are the challenges we're trying to solve going forward. >>Uh, so the challenge we see in the current landscape is T mobile as a civil mentioned number two telco in Europe and then actually in Netherlands. And then we have a lot of acquisitions coming in tow of the landscape. So overall complexity off technical stack increases year by year and acquisition by acquisition it put this way. So we at this time we're talking about Claudia Irureta in for Matic Uh, aws and many other a complex silo systems. We actually are integrated where we see multiple. In some cases, the data silos are also duplicated. So the challenge here is how do we look into this data? How do we present this data to business and still ensure that Ah, mhm Kelsey of the data is reliable. So in this project, what we looked at is we curated that around 10% off the data of us and made it ready for business to look at too hot spot. And this also basically help us not looking at the A larger part of the data all together in one shot. What's is going to step by step with manageable set of data, obviously manages the time also and get control on cost has. >>So what did we actually do and how we did? Did we do it? And what are we going to do going forward? Why did we chose to spot and what are we measuring to see if we're successful is is very simply, Some stuff I already alluded to is usual adoption. This needs to be a tool that is useable by everybody. Eso This is adoption. The user experience is a major key to to focus on at the beginning. Uh, but lastly, and this is just also cold hard. Fact is, it needs to save time. It needs to be faster. It needs to be smarter than the way we used to do it. So we focused first on setting up the environment with our most used and known data set within the company. The data set that is used already on the daily basis by a large group. We know what it's how it works. We know how it acts on this is what we decided to make available fire talksport this cut down the time around, uh, data modeling a lot because we had this already done so we could go right away into training users to start using this data, and this is already going on very successfully. We have now 40 heavily engaged users. We go went life less than a month ago, and we see very successful feedback on user experience. We had either yesterday, even a beautiful example off loading a new data set and and giving access to user that did not have a training for talk sport or did not know what thoughts, what Waas. And we didn't in our he was actively using this data set by building its own pin boards and asking questions already. And this shows a little bit the speed off delivery we can have with this without, um, much investments on data modeling, because that's part was already done. So our second stage is a little bit more ambitious, and this is making sure that all this information, all our information, is available for frontline uh, employees. So a customer service but also chills employees that they can have data specifically for them that make them their life easier. So this is performance KP ice. But it could also be the beautiful word that everybody always uses customer Terry, 60 fuse. But this is giving the power off, asking questions and getting answers quickly to everybody in the company. That's the big stage two after that, and this is going forward a little bit further in the future and we are not completely there yet, is we also want Thio. Really? After we set up the government's properly give the power to add your own data to our curated data sets that that's when you've talked about. And then with that, we really hope that Oh, our ambition and our plan is to bring this really to more than 800 users on a daily basis to for uses on a daily basis across our company. So this is not for only marketing or only technology or only one segment. This is really an application that we want to set in our into system that works for everybody. And this is our ambition that we will work through in these three, uh, steps. So what did we learn so far? And and Sanjeev, please out here as well, But one I already said, this is no which, which data set you start. This is something. Start with something. You know, start with something that has a wide appeal to more than one use case and make sure that you make this decision. Don't ask somebody else. You know what your company needs? The best you should be in the driver seat off this decision. And this is I would be saying really the big one because this will enable you to kickstart this really quickly going forward. Um, second, wellness and this is why we introduce are also here together is don't do this alone. Do this together with, uh I t do this together with security. Do this together with business to tackle all these little things that you don't think about yourself. Maybe security, governance, network connections and stuff like that. Make sure that you do this as a company and don't try to do this on your own, because there's also again it's removes. Is so much obstacles going forward? Um, lastly, I want to mention is make sure that you measure your success and this is people in the data domain sometimes forget to measure themselves. Way can make sure everybody else, but we forget ourselves. But really try to figure out what makes its successful for you. And we use adoption percentages, usual experience, surveys and and really calculations about time saved. We have some rough calculations that we can calculate changes thio monetary value, and this will save us millions in years. by just automating time that is now used on, uh, now to taken by people on manual work. So, do you have any to adhere? A swell You, Susan, You? >>Yeah. So I'll just pick on what you want to mention about. Partner goes live with I t and other functions. But that is a very keating, because from my point of view, you see if you can see that the data very nice and data quality is also very clear. If we have data preparing at the right level, ready to be consumed, and data quality is taken, care off this feel 30 less challenges. Uh, when the user comes and questioned the gator, those are the things which has traded Quiz it we should be sure about before we expose the data to the Children. When you're confident about your data, you are confident that the user will also get the right numbers they're looking for and the number they have. Their mind matches with what they see on the screen. And that's where you see there. >>Yeah, and that that that again helps that adoption, and that makes it so powerful. So I fully agree. >>Thank you. Eva and Sanjeev. This is the picture perfect example of how a thought spot can get up and running, even in a large, complex organization like T Mobile and Sanjay. Thank you for sharing your experience on how whip rose system integration expertise paved the way for Evo and team to realize value quickly. Alright, everyone's favorite part. Let's get to some questions. Evil will start with you. How have your skill? Data experts reacted to thought spot Is it Onley non technical people that seem to be using the tool or is it broader than that? You may be on. >>Yes, of course, that happens in the digital environment. Now this. This is an interesting question because I was a little bit afraid off the direction off our data experts and are technically skilled people that know how to work in our fight and sequel on all these things. But here I saw a lot of enthusiasm for the tool itself and and from two sides, either to use it themselves because they see it's a very easy way Thio get to data themselves, but also especially that they see this as a benefit, that it frees them up from? Well, let's say mundane questions they get every day. And and this is especially I got pleasantly surprised with their reaction on that. And I think maybe you can also say something. How? That on the i t site that was experienced. >>Well, uh, yeah, from park department of you, As you mentioned, it is changing the way business is looking at. The data, if you ask me, have taken out talkto data rather than looking at it. Uh, it is making the interactivity that that's a keyword. But I see that the gap between the technical and function folks is also diminishing, if I may say so over a period of time, because the technical folks now would be able to work with functional teams on the depth and coverage of the data, rather than making it available and looking at the technical side off it. So now they can have a a fair discussion with the functional teams on. Okay, these are refute. Other things you can look at because I know this data is available can make it usable for you, especially the time it takes for the I t. G. When graduate dashboard, Uh, that time can we utilize toe improve the quality and reliability of the data? That's yeah. See the value coming. So if you ask me to me, I see the technical people moving towards more of a technical functional role. Tools such as >>That's great. I love that saying now we can talk to data instead of just looking at it. Um Alright, Evo, I think that will finish up with one last question for you that I think you probably could speak. Thio. Given your experience, we've seen that some organizations worry about providing access to data for everyone. How do you make sure that everyone gets the same answer? >>Yes. The big data Girlfriends question thesis What I like so much about that the platform is completely online. Everything it happens online and everything is terrible. Which means, uh, in the good old days, people will do something on their laptop. Beirut at a logic to it, they were aggregated and then they put it in a power point and they will share it. But nobody knew how this happened because it all happened offline. With this approach, everything is transparent. I'm a big I love the word transparency in this. Everything is available for everybody. So you will not have a discussion anymore. About how did you get to this number or how did you get to this? So the question off getting two different answers to the same question is removed because everything happens. Transparency, online, transparent, online. And this is what I think, actually, make that question moot. Asl Long as you don't start exporting this to an offline environment to do your own thing, you are completely controlling, complete transparent. And this is why I love to share options, for example and on this is something I would really keep focusing on. Keep it online, keep it visible, keep it traceable. And there, actually, this problem then stops existing. >>Thank you, Evelyn. Cindy, That was awesome. And thank you to >>all of our presenters. I appreciate your time so much. I hope all of you at home enjoyed that as much as I did. I know a lot of you did. I was watching the chat. You know who you are. I don't think that I'm just a little bit in awe and completely inspired by where we are from a technological perspective, even outside of thoughts about it feels like we're finally at a time where we can capitalize on the promise that cloud and big data made to us so long ago. I loved getting to see Anna and James describe how you can maximize the investment both in time and money that you've already made by moving your data into a performance cloud data warehouse. It was cool to see that doubled down on with the session, with AWS seeing a direct query on Red Shift. And even with something that's has so much scale like TV shows and genres combining all of that being able to search right there Evo in Sanjiv Wow. I mean being able to combine all of those different analytics tools being able to free up these analysts who could do much more important and impactful work than just making dashboards and giving self service analytics to so many different employees. That's incredible. And then, of course, from our experts on the panel, I just think it's so fascinating to see how experts that came from industries like finance or consulting, where they saw the imperative that you needed to move to thes third party data sets enriching and organizations data. So thank you to everyone. It was fascinating. I appreciate everybody at home joining us to We're not quite done yet. Though. I'm happy to say that we after this have the product roadmap session and that we are also then going to move into hearing and being able to ask directly our speakers today and meet the expert session. So please join us for that. We'll see you there. Thank you so much again. It was really a pleasure having you.

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q recovery AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Welcome back. Everyone's Cube coverage here in my reign Middle East, part of A W s Amazon Web services Summit, sir. Second year covering the evolution and the Revolution to cloud computing. This year, the big news is a Davis has a region spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in the Middle East region or next gases. Ahmad Hamadan, CEO and CO. Front of Uniform Nick, a super hot company. Congratulations on your success. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you, Joe. So we just talked before we came on camera. This ap I economy that we've been covering in death you been living? This is your world. You have a really big business. Not a lot of employees. Less than 200 employees, billions of transactions. Ap I transactions. This is This is the successful man we've been seeing in the public companies truly, among others. Messaging application integration. This is cloud now, right? This is happening. What's your story? >> Okay, so >> you know, these times I would say it's a golden age for the technology in the region on for the cloud specifically when we started back in 2006. Uh, you know, we're very lonely. We're we're not even in that time in the club. So we started just tow, solve the issue off bulk messaging through writing a script or software that allow us to broadcast a message to a group of people. But along the journey, we realized that businesses need tools, especially a B I's that will allow them tow, tow each toe a wider, I would say audience with a seamless integration. And this is how the cloud communication industry emerged. So we avoid our baby eyes for businesses from all around TV region, especially with segments or sectors that have a mass communication need, like banks in government retailers on the E businesses, >> the data is the data in this business is a fascinating. Before we get into some of those questions about the origination story, how did it all start? >> Okay, so I wasn't at the university a teenage off 22 probably on I leave the one of the student clubs. Andi. I wanted to communicate a message Tau 400 people on, you know, the limitation of the mobile. Back then, I couldn't do it. It's terrible experience. You cannot send two more than 10 people. The text is not full. You know all these complications. So being a software engineer on Dhe, you know, I had an idea. There should be a solution that you can write code, publish it online, and then it will do the magic for you. For months later, I apartment with my brother was a software, you know, geek more than I on dhe. You know, already >> older or younger, brother. >> Younger brother. Okay. Yeah. Hey, was at high school on then four months later, we're life sending thousands of messages over the Internet. It was like magic friends and family like it. It's really making money on, you know, for us, you know, You know, it's like when you have 4005 thousand's a big money for us. That way, any each month, Andre, Like moving forward 2008. I decided this is the dream we need to scale this and, ah, venture out of this small, you know, experiment on. Then I left the job and dedicated my time to scale that business. And I moved the business toward the business and the cloud and communication. Our first move to the cloud was, Ah, 2010. We used aws toe move most of our infrastructure to the cloud on By 2013 we completely divert it into the cloud communication business where the focus is into the FBI. The integration with the applications at the customer systems on Ben allow them tow, communicate to, you know, 100 of millions off >> and then mobile phones, obviously GPS built in application. Tsunamis happened. Exactly. People want to interface with the companies. The other phone? >> Exactly. I will give you an example. You know, you come to my mind while you're talking. We used to have customers back in 2010 descend on Lee along the year like maximum one million transaction the same customers nowadays, like nine years later, they send at least 200 million transactions, so you can imagine the growth in the use cases on the adoption from the customers. Use it now for engagement for notification, for awareness for security and authentication for personalized marketing content, like hundreds of fuse cases like we do some analysis in the behavior of the customers and the consumer on. We realised that in a modern society on individual interact digitally with at least 50 grands and a day. This is huge. You can do the math if you multiply this by 100 million population than there is a massively huge number of transaction and data's being >> percent. What are you guys doing now? Is mainly targeted application developers or businesses as a turnkey solution? What's the What's the value proposition? >> So, >> UH, >> two years like nature, we realized that we cannot target or the market and serve, or the customers we need to focus into the sick man that has hypertension. Then we identified five segment where we tell her our solution, our value proposition toward those segments on it's aligned with the trends in the region. Maybe it's not applicable to other regions. Eso number one for us is the online banking segment. I would see the financial industry with all the, you know, evolution off the authentic and the online and mobile banking. So those are number one. We do integrate our system with their current systems out off the shelf. We don't do much of a cast immunization. We usually provide really integral components toe toward their system, and then they hook up their system two hours, and then they have the dashboard and blood form to orchestrate the communication. The number one is the M government. It's also a, you know, an industry that is evolving in the region. The number three for us is the businesses, and they're very hot, very high potential growth. I would say the number one in terms of growth a business include the e commerce on demand delivery, the food delivery applications you name it on then. The fourth industry for us is the retailer who are moving now toward the reality and the engagement. More to them prison share themselves in this stuff word for them. And the last one is the I would say the hospitality and the, you know, the, you know, hotels and, you know, travel agents. >> I think anyone building an app would want this of their mobile. So what's what's your take of the ecosystem? Entrepreneurship now much different in one year. You have an Amazon region here. What do you think's gonna happen? It's gonna be like you and your brother all over again with other entrepreneur. >> Exactly. You know, when I you know, see, photo interpreters usually approach me for, you know, kind of mentorship and coaching. You know, we're at the stage little bit, you know, being fruit difficult. You know, >> the situation's got the scar >> tissue. Yeah, So I usually told them guys, it's like being so easy for you. You know, at this time, I know that with all the luck, I would say support the barrier to entry had become much less. But at least there are many things you don't need to think how you figure out. It's already there. Just need to have the badge and dedication, and then you'll find many people to support you. Especially, I would say there is only one areas not yet will, you know, covered in the region, which is the access to the talents. I think this is a worldwide problem, even for Forks in the Silicon Valley. But in terms of funding thes of doing business, sitting up ventures, access to the technology platforms like the cloud infrastructure in terms, off advice, mentorship and coaching there is, I would say, an abundant off that available today for for interpreters. And I can tell the next five years you will see a huge value being created out of this. >> Yeah, instead of riding, waves will be running s curves. So it's easier now, Still hard to build a company. But you're right. I mean, go back 10 years ago. You to put it all together, >> Takes us six months to set up the company. You know, legally, back in 2006 >> to get the infrastructure legally, get servers, get some funding, prototype it, get it launched its customers. Now they have a partner network. These kids are spoiled. >> But you know, it's difficult >> today to differentiate yourself because you will find tons of people are either doing or planning to do the same. >> They gotta build some smart intellectual property. This one machine learning is gonna be a great opportunity. That's gonna be a domain expertise kind of thing. You guys have a nice niche, and broad market is growing good. Calm, surround it. Got all kinds of systems out there that need this >> Exactly. You know, the question today is not if the tools and support is available or not. The question is, how you gonna use those tools to create something unique? >> I'm a great to See you. Thanks for coming on and sharing your experiences. You're an inspiration to the other entrepreneurs out there again. Remember Entrepreneurship like a family. Took a team, sport. Pay it forward. The other generations coming online. Absolutely. Congratulations on your success Cube coverage here by rain talking to start ups. This is going to be a hot market for entrepreneurship If the capital markets conform around it. The Cube is here covering it here and by rain. Stay with us for more at a debate summit. If this trip

(electronic music) >> Presenter: Live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat (electronic music) >> Welcome back here on The Cube, continuing our live coverage at Red Hat Summit 2019 as we come to a near conclusion of our three days of wall to wall coverage for you here. All the keynotes, it's been and the guests we've had just a lot of fun and certainly an educational opportunity for Stu Menimen and myself and we're looking forward to our next couple of guests here. We have Khurshid Sohail, an application developer at UPS and Nish Jani, a senior application development manager at UPS. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. We appreciate the time. [Developers] Thanks for having us. >> Presenter: Thank you. And so you have representation on the keynote stage of this morning. UPS did, talking about some of the changes underway there and your Red Hat relationship for those at home who work privy to that. Just to set the stage for in terms of what you're doing with Red Hat and what you're gonna be doing with them as they came up with a couple of releases this week. Nish, if you would? >> Sure. So as you know, UPS is delivering products and services to over 200 countries and from a scalability perspective, we deliver over 21,000,000 packages per day and during our peak season, it grows to over 30,000,000 packages a day, and last year we averaged 200,000,000 tracks a day on our tracking system and last peak we went to 335,000,000 tracks in a single day and that was all built on a new open-shift platform that we developed. >> Just a little bit of data. >> Yeah. >> All right. >> Yeah, you know I love when you talk to, you know, so many customers today who scale and it's like "oh, okay. How many transactions we have." It's like "oh, you talk logistics", you're like oh, okay. You talked a lot of numbers there but when you talk about the driver and how many officers they have and the amount of data that goes in. It's like, okay, how many supercomputers do you have? And you know, hundreds of PhDs solving this. Maybe we're just a little bit in tide, you know, the logistical pieces that go there and how, you know, I mean this is not, you know, a just "Okay, go do your route" as we have in the past. >> Yeah, so from a driver perspective, we've offered services to the drivers that take out the human search for needing to deliver packages. We have an orion system which tells the driver exactly where to go and where to deliver the packages and optimize the routes for them from a visibility perspective which is the products and services Khurshid and I support. The driver is able to do their jobs and deliver their status and deliver packages on time so for our customers, they see an updated status in real time. From a VI perspective, which is our visibility information business engine which was our new platform that we built last year, it was a long journey into the process, part of our digital transformation. We got into the transformation as a need for customers who wanted more out of their products and services that we offered today, and as far as being able to do faster market and provide visibility in a real-time sense. >> Presenter: Yeah. >> We always love when you hear some of these digital transformations. Like okay, you know, I think if UPS does logistics, those were pretty complicated before. >> Absolutely. So, like you needed a digital transformation. Maybe we could start with, you know, what were some of the objectives, what were we, you know, what was holding you back or limited before and you know, let's go to the after when you get through there. >> Sure. So before we were on a monolithic system, a legacy system and the costs per track were very expensive and your to drive new need we needed to redevelop ourselves and redesign ourselves and the way we did that was we transformed by moving away from our traditional waterfall models which typically took six months to deploy new services and we went to within weeks, and the way we did that was to develop agile methodologies and using open-shift we were able to develop and deploy applications more quickly and Khurshid can talk a little bit more about VI application and how it works. >> So pretty much what our goal was to get the old track system off the legacy model off into a containerized, on premise, cloud-based platform. So we successfully accomplished that, essentially 20 years worth of data we did in a year, so we're pretty proud of that, not to toot our own horn, but yeah. We got everything going with open-shift, and a couple of other Red Hat products like AMQ, JBoss, Fuse for AMQ and we also worked like Nish mentioned with the agile methodologies and principles so we were successfully able to create a type of environment for other applications that UPS see as a, you know, kind of a look up to so other applications can see what we've did and they can get themselves over in the same direction. >> Yeah, so can you bring us inside a little bit the organization. Was this a new team that came in? Was there a combination of the new and old? You know, the retraining. >> Yeah, so the team was formed out of some of the old members of the team that knew visibility inside and out. My team done the front-end of UPS.com's tracking application and we've brought in team members that were new and were able to develop the application in a short amount of time. So we've nearly formed a team, we've put together a parallel path from the old system to the new system then we transitioned over and it was seamless to the custom. >> You were talking about customer choice, we were speaking earlier before just about competition, so you have to be extremely responsive to customer needs and my choice is something that comes to my mind that you offer that gives great flexibility to a customer but tremendous complexity I would think to you because you have kind of like an X and a Y, you have a package, you've got a delivery point and now you throw the Z in with a time of day change or location change and to coordinate that so your efficiencies, your fuel efficiencies and route efficiencies are still maintained. And how do you do that in your environment? And whether that's something that Red Hat, is that something that is enabled by the technology that you're deploying of theirs? >> Sure, from a visibility perspective my choice product? have been very successful. We're able to deliver B to C packages to our individual customers or our consignees which help them choose where and when they want their package and also be able to see a delivery time. From a complexity perspective, sure. It adds a ton of complexity because we need to know what addresses to go to and what changes are done to the packages prior to them being delivered. From an open-shift perspective, that's partly going to be our digital transformation to transform that visibility and provide that information and bringing more products and services to those customers and lower latency of time. >> Okay, so containerization is something that's relatively prevalent for the audience here, but it's still relatively young in maturity. Just wondering as you rolled out the solutions, any learnings you had or any, you know, I don't want to say stumbling blocks, but you know, things that you learned along the way that maybe your peers should, could learn for. >> Yeah, I mean, I think you should say stumbling blocks 'cus as anybody knows, whenever you go through anything new there's opportunities to learn and there's monumental opportunities of failure and I think UPS knows and we've pride ourselves in failing fast, learning from our mistakes and getting to the next level. So like you mentioned with containerization and open-shift, the ability for us when we used to deploy every six months, now we get to deploy in two weeks to production and before that we could deploy in a matter of minutes so we could test all these tools and everything that open-shift offers gives us the ability to serve our business and give the most information to our customers. So open-shift and Red Hat have done a great job in helping us reach our maximum potential and we look to continue that partnership. >> Yeah, so was there anything, you know, in that speed to delivery and being more agile that, you know, "Oh jeez, security, "we should have pulled them in sooner." Or you know, so and so should have, but we forgot to include them in the original discussions. >> No, when we went through the transformation of moving the tracking application, we went through all the options and open-shift was just a natural partner, a natural fit. At the time we were going through a proof of concept with the product with another team and as the VI project came along it was just a natural fit to use containerization and use the speed of deployment, automated testing and pipelines in order to deploy this new application. (coughing) >> You used an interesting phrase there, for shit about failing fast and we've heard that a couple of times this week in different flavors. What about the lack of fear and failure and almost like that failure is not always a bad thing because it leads to improvement. But you have to have a certain amount of confidence underpinning that. So talk, I'm just curious from a company culture standpoint, what kind of confidence is there about that failing fast and how technology allows you to make up the ground that you might have lost by failure, especially in today's world, there's so much more capability and so much more at your disposal. >> Yeah, so I may, I think that benefits us and allows us to fail fast is management like Nish and our upper level management, they give us the opportunity to make these mistakes because they know we're going to learn from them and just talking about open-shift and like you said, when we fail, we have to make up that ground. When we make those mistakes the platform that we're on allows us to pivot from that and make it a success story right away. So we noticed that we were able to learn from mistakes quickly and with the help and support of management we were able to implement real-time solutions and deploy them right away. >> Yeah, in addition to that we're able to deploy in a short period of time so we know we're at a minimum two weeks away from the next deployment. So we could quickly restore functionality within minutes or within days if necessary. So, you know, previously we weren't able to do that, so fail fast didn't quite work in the waterfall method. >> So Nish, you know, the VI project has rolled out. What does that mean to your relationship to the business? And also ultimately, how has it impacted your ultimate customers? >> Sure, so from an external customer perspective, obviously we're able to, speed to market products and services faster to our customers and provide better visibility to the customers. From internally in the organization, we've significantly reduced our cost to serve and as we continue to transform on the VI platform using open-shift and partnering with Red Hat, we'll be able to transform other visibility products in the future and going forward we're able to take folks like Khurshid and develop them further and use our skill sets that we've learned and develop our people faster. >> So where do you want to jump in next? I mean, in your world Krashid, I would think that's probably one of the more exciting questions is, you know, what now? What next? Where are we going with this? In terms of your core business, you know, where's the efficiency gain that you'd like to see? Where's the customer service you'd like to improve? >> Yeah I mean, from a business perspective we're always looking to serve our business and bring products to platform that are gonna be useful to the customers. So what we currently have in VI today, we're looking to create more visibility products for our customers and from a technical standpoint, and we were at Red Hat Summit 2019, they've announced some crazy cool things. >> What's the craziest cool thing you've heard this week? >> We're looking forward to open-shift 4, we're looking forward to Cofcus Dreams, and Corcus which is really cool, and just operators, the list goes on and on. I could talk to you about it for days and days. We were here for three days, you got three more days ready? >> Sure. (laughing) Tape is cheap. (laughing) >> Yeah, we're looking forward to a lot of cool things that Red Hat's going to provide and we're gonna run with it. >> Yeah. We're looking forward to continued relationship with Red Hat and offering new products and services that can make our businesses run better. >> Like for example, if you could, if I were to say, a military build a rocket ship right now, you know, what's it gonna look like? What area of your business would you like to literally dabble in and say "Okay, I think this will work." It might right now, look to be a little bit futuristic or down the road, what scenario could you paint possibly to give us an idea about what you're thinking? >> So our next focus to business is to serve up the small and medium business, right? So we've been talking about the modulus product and serving residential addresses and serving residential folks but we want to start focusing on the small and medium businesses and offering the same services and capabilities so our next plateau, our next capability is to provide those services to the small and medium businesses so they can grow and partner with UPS. >> And I think, as Nish mentioned, with the utilizations from Cofcun actually bringing some of these technologies into our containers, bringing more security layers like there's a lot of great vendors here and partnering with them and bringing them into our services, it will open the doors for us a lot, and like Nish mentioned with my choice and small business, I think will allow them a better customer experience with partnering up with some of these new people. >> Presenter: You bet. Well thank you both. Thanks for being here and sharing your time, good to see you. Good keynote this morning as well, so please be sure to pass that along and we look forward to seeing you down the road. >> Developers: Thank you. >> Thank you both. Back with more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2019, you are watching theCUBE live from Boston. (electronic music)

>> Man: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> And we are back live in Boston as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Red Hat Summit 2019. It is our sixth year here at the show and this year obviously some huge announcements. A significant moment it's been for Red Hat, we heard from Jim Whitehurst a little bit ago. Stu Miniman, John Walls, we're now joined as well by Niall Fitzgerald, who is the GM of IT Application Architecture and Design at Spark NZ. Niall, good afternoon, or I guess good morning still we're in an Eastern time zone. >> Yeah it's the middle of the night in New Zealand I'd say. >> Yeah, so Spark NZ New Zealand. Tell us a little bit first off about Spark NZ. What the folks back home are doing right now, work-wise, and your role with the company. >> Yeah, so Spark is the largest provider of telecommunication services in New Zealand. All the traditional type of services you'd expect, mobile, broadband, et cetera. We came out of the traditional kind of post office, so we've a lot of heritage, and about four years ago we rebranded from Telecom New Zealand into Spark. To represent that we were changing from being a telco into much broader range of digital services. Our purpose is to help all New Zealanders win big in the digital world. >> Niall, step back for a second. Talk to our audience that might not know the telecom industry as well as you, I've been an observer and participator in the industry but you know back in the dot com boom it was like limitless bandwidth and we're gonna do all these wonderful things, and cloud and digitization, have put some new opportunities as well as stresses and strains on your industry so, you know what's going on and you said you rebranded? >> Yeah, look, I think it's well-known it's been a tough last few years for most telcos in the world. I was listening to Red Hat talking yesterday about 60 consecutive quarters or more of growth, I don't think there's any telco in the world that probably has the same story. Like most, we're facing kinda decline in all the traditional revenues like voice and text and things like that, so we're all having to kinda rebrand ourselves and deliver much higher levels of customer service. People expect the same levels of service from us that they do from Amazon, Google, and everyone else. In Spark what that means to us is we've moved into lots of new things as you said, things like ICT, we're now very big in cloud, we've recently launched a Spark Sports brand and we've got streaming right to the key events like Formula 1. We're going to stream the Rugby World Cup, which is a massive event for New Zealanders, so looking forward to seeing that and Ireland on the all blacks in the final in September this year. So yeah, lot going on. Tough times but forcing us to keep changing every year. >> And so, about these changes that you're making whether technologically based, let's just deal with that. What is that ultimately going to do for you in terms of better customer service delivery? So, you've got inherent challenges, you've talked about them at all, that the world's changing, how we use this medium, this communication opportunity is changing, and you've been just a little behind the wave, hard to keep up with it, so rapidly changing. How much of a challenge is that? And then how are you going to address this going forward? How do you stay relevant? >> Yeah I think we're lucky in one regard because if I look back about five, seven years ago we were like most traditional telcos. We had a spaghetti for want of a better description of systems, and then we had all was multiples of everything, at the time we had 19 integration layers and 10 billing systems and it wasn't uncommon. But way back in 2012 we actually embarked on a massive transformation program, and we spent five years consolidating all of that infrastructure so going into about 2017 we were very lucky in that we had a massive foundation laid already, so what that then enabled us to do was to actually push away calls from our contact centers into mobile apps, into digital adoption. We've been a big embracer of things like big data and robotic process automation as well to try and take cost out of our industry. So, I think we're quite well placed. Now that allows us to do things like innovate new products for our customers so we bundle things like Spotify and Netflix. It allows to introduce things like Spark Sports brand, which we couldn't have done five years ago before the transformation We just wouldn't have been able to enable these things with our existing kind of legacy IT estate. >> So how's open-source play into all this for you? >> Yeah open-source, I suppose our first foray into open-source was when we went to start embracing big data and automation. So we started using things like Hadoop and various other things and our entire platform is based around open-source. We changed to an IMS network recently and we started embracing things like OpenStack, and then it really took us to a new level recently when we started working on Red Hat's Fuse, and OpenShift we started implementing that. >> Okay, so the OpenStack show for many years, the last few years we saw the telcos coming in specifically for network function virtualization or NFV. Is that what you're using in that space? >> Yeah, we are. Interestingly, at this conference I've heard a lot of people talk about OpenShift and OpenStack, obviously, particularly in the telco game. We actually came out a bit differently from the application space. So we had an integration platform that we had put in through this transformation phase which had served us well, and was connecting all of our 40, 50 systems together. But it was coming up to a life cycle event, and we decided we'd look externally and see had we options beyond just upgrading it. So we started looking around, and we effectively found Fuse, and in bringing in Fuse we then brought OpenShift in, which is quite different to what I've seen from a number of other people, they're bringing in things like OpenShift and building on top of it. We did it the other way around, you know? And we did it primarily for cost reasons, you know? >> Yeah, so talk a little bit about that impact of Fuse and OpenShift, what that means. Were you already down the containerization journey, or did that help drive >> Niall: No, no some of that modernization? >> That's exactly what happened. If I'm honest we hadn't really explored containerization too much because we had come to the end of our kind of transformation journey. Open-source and containerization wasn't around when we went through that. So we kinda needed some really core reasons to move on, so, yeah effectively what happened was we looked at Fuse, I was gonna say primarily for cost, but we were looking for something that we could migrate to where it makes sense. We were looking for something that wasn't a massive lift for the people who worked in our integration already, so they could be rescaled into it, and interestingly we turned agile recently which has changed the way we look at the needs of our systems. So our old integration platform, if we needed to deploy a change we had to take an outage, which was fine when we had a centralized IT department who deployed once a month and took a two hour outage, but when you have 20 tribes all developing features in isolation and they wanna go straight through to production, if everybody took an outage then our systems wouldn't really be up very often. So one of the key things that we were looking at for our new integration platform was can we deploy hot and can we scale? So that's basically where Fuse came into us. >> Okay, so can you? >> We can and we do. Still a little bit nervous about pressing the button mid-day and doing stuff >> Right, simultaneously and thinking this has really gotta work, right? >> Yeah then normally, >> We saw it today though on the demo stage, on the keynote. You know, simultaneous operations going on. >> No, we do it, and they normally don't tell me when they're doing it they just do it and tell me it worked afterwards, but no it's actually been really successful and you can imagine connection 40 or 50 systems together is effectively the equivalent of about 2,000 API's and we managed to migrate, we're about 70% of the way through. But we've managed to migrate those without actually impacting the systems that use them and that's probably been one of our most successful IT projects that I've seen. >> It's funny, you said we were towards the end of our transformation journey, and of course I think we all understand, it is just, I might've reached a marker in my journey, but it needs to be a continuous process. And you went through an agile transformation. So bring us in a little bit. Organizationally, what happened there. Some of the good, the bad, and the ugly of agile, 'cause I mean agile's always an ongoing thing. >> It is, yeah. So about the start of last year we started to think about agile and the need to change our ways of working. And we looked at a number of models overseas, and companies like Spotify and various banks, and we settled on a model of chapter and tribes. And we took about six months in looking at what that meant for us as an organization and all of the things that we needed to change. Everything from, people's contracts to people's titles. We got rid of all complex titles and moved down to simple things like Developer, Tester, et cetera. We had to train our people in agile so we ran boot camps for over 2,000 people. We had one with 500 people attend. We had to review all of our processes and see where we had centralized things like IT governance or procurement. How do you actually manage this when you have up to 20 different people effectively, or tribes doing their own developments, so over a period of about six months we went through all of these. We started with a concept of some forerunner tribes so we could figure out how this thing actually works, you know? And get some lessons. And then on the first of July last year, about a 2,000 people in various buildings packed up their stuff in their desks and moved into a new world, into their tribes with different working spaces and different collaboration areas and all the tools that we need. So, yeah we're about nine months down that journey now and it's been good. >> How many total employees? >> We have about 5,000 in total. >> 5,000, so you had 500 at one time. 10% of your workforce in training at one time. >> That's right, yeah. Absolutely. >> How do you keep the wheels on the bus rolling? Because I mean you're asking people not only to learn new skills, but learn them in a new environment, and learn them literally in a new place. I mean that's just massive change and I think, we're human beings. We're creatures of habit to a certain extent. You had to hit a lot of bumps along the way. >> Yeah, so one of the key things we did upfront was we said the operate part of our business, which is effectively things like our contact center, our sales staff, our service desks, we will not go agile with those on the first day, because they operate in a slightly different way of working. The people in our stores, et cetera. So we had a concept of agile light and agile heavy. So we kinda parked them for a minute so that we wouldn't do exactly what you say and let the wheels fall off the trolley. And we took to people that were the IT developers, the product development staff, and all of that, which came to just over about 2,000 people, and we firstly flipped those 2,000 people and put those through bootcamp. But even as you say, scheduling the boot camps, we made sure that we always had the right people on the ground and we would schedule smaller boot camps for them later if we needed to do it, but yeah. >> So nine months in now. You talking to your peers, if they're gonna go through. Any key learnings, what were some of the most challenging things that you ran into? >> I think probably the major one is that agile at its heart is a way of working, and despite the name it's actually quite prescriptive in how you should work, you know? When you pick up the agile book it tells you all the ceremonies you need to run and the processes that you need to run as well. And I think you need to be pragmatic in how you implement it because there are so many different flavors of agile. The one flavor, even with an organization of Spark size, it doesn't work. So the tribes and squads that are building out new products compared to the tribes that are doing things like upgrading systems, they will work in different ways. So I think the first thing is be pragmatic, take the goodness and the intent of agile, but implement it in how it works for you. And there's some other practical considerations, like prior to being agile we had quite a large number of our technology partners were based offshore in India, and you know it's quite difficult to run a 10 AM stand up in New Zealand setting the priorities for the day and the sprint plans, when, you know, four members of your team are asleep in India. You know, they're missing out on all of the goodness and the collocation and the sharing, so one of the things we had anticipated that, so luckily enough we had moved a lot of those people onshore in advance of agile, you know? But it is a big cultural change for everyone in the organization, not least the leadership teams as well. >> John: Well you got through it. >> We got through it, but there's no going back. >> Absolutely, no you're in the deep end now. Well, Niall, thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time joining us here on theCUBE, and I think that an Irishman is always welcomed in Boston. >> Thank you very much! We've been enjoying the hospitality. >> Yeah the door's always open. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. Niall Fitzgerald, joing us from Spark NZ. Back with more here on theCUBE, you're watching this live at the Red Hat Summit 2019.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. Brought to you by five nine. >> Yeah, good afternoon. Welcome to Orlando, Florida The Cube is here at Enterprise Connect. Twenty ninety nine. Lisa Martin with my co host to Minuteman Stew and I have been Here's starting on Day two stew. Good afternoon, >> Lisa. Great to see Yeah. Day two of three. Enterprise Connect. >> It's not that sunny >> here in the Sunshine State, but the nice thing about the Gaylord is it's a nice controlled environment. Walk by. I saw the alligator for bid. They've got nice planning. They've got I love in the atrium there. There's great branding of thie E c. Nineteen. Everybody's taken photos of it. I saw some drone footage in the keynote this morning showing some of the setting here. So >> it's a It's a nice >> event way said sixty five hundred intended, which is nice. It's not one of these, you know, twenty thirty thousand. You're just buried by people toe big Expo Hall. But, you know, you could really get to talk to some people and enjoy the size of the show. >> Yeah, I agree. The size is great. It does no pun intended. Facilitate that collaboration and communication. You mentioned a number of attendees about one hundred forty vendors, and you can hear the noise behind soon. MIAs were in the ex ball in the booth of five nine and lots of conversations going on. This is an event that I find very interesting state because we talk about the contact center were all consumers every day. And we talked about this with a lot of our guests yesterday that the customer experience is absolutely table stakes for an organization, that it's essential to deliver an Omni Channel customer experience meeting with the consumer wherever they want to be and also facilitating a connected conversation so that if a shot is initiated and then the consumer goes to social or makes a phone call, that problem resolution is actually moving forward before we get into. Today's key knows a couple of really interesting things that you and I learned yesterday with some of the guests that we had on when we were talking with Blair Pleasant. One of the things that she and five nine uncovered with some research is that an employee's satisfaction was lower on the ratings for a lot of corporate decision makers, which was surprising from a collab and communications perspective that if employees, especially those agents on the front line, are having some challenges, it's going to be directly relating Tio customer Lifetime Value. >> Yeah, it was a little bit surprising, you know, if you think about just in general, you know, often the admin is not the key focus there. It's I need to get business outcomes. I need to get R. A Y. You know what I care about is, you know, how is my customer doing? But at the end of the day, you talk about the contact centers. If I don't have an agent that's engaged, really, how is that conversation going to go with the customer? So they need to think about that, You know? How will the technology help them do their job? Better help them game mastery faster? There were some things that I saw really parallel toe conversation we're having about cloud in general, which is, you know, there's lots of technologies out there, but it's often it's not the technology issue it is, you know, the organization and the people issue in the keynote this morning there was a big customer panel and that was definitely something we heard. I love one of the customers actually said We're going to make all these changes And they had the Don't panic towels, which, of course, harkens back to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy S O. You know, we know things are going to change. There might be some things you need to work through. But don't worry, we're there to help on. We will get through this and at the end, it should be better. >> No, I like that. You brought that up. I love that Tabal. Don't panic because, you know, we were talking yesterday a lot about the customer experience, the expectations of this rising, empowered consumer also the agent experience. But then, of course, there's the internal collaboration that's essential to all of this. And as I think, the gentleman that you're referring to was from Continental G talking about Hey, we don't have all the answers. But adoption of these tools internally is critical, but it's also a cultural sort of stepwise process. I thought that was very cool, that they actually were very transparent with their people. We identify this is not going to be smooth sailing, but it's an essential part of our business growth. >> Yeah, I tell you, it was really interesting. Listen, the panel there was one of the companies up there. They're pretty large and they said, Look, we're going to standardize on a single tool and everybody's going to get on board. And I actually bristled a little bit when I heard that because, you know, the engineering group versus the marketing group versus you know, the Contact Centre. There's certain things that they need to be able to collaborate. But thing like, you know, one tool to rule them all. You know, it sounds a little bit tough out there. Yes, there needs to be some standardization, but, you know, we see that in the cloud world. You know, it turns out customers are using multiple clouds out there because there should be a main one that we focus on. But if I need a best of breed piece for here, or if there's ah, feature functionality, they can't get elsewhere. I need tohave that, and we see that at this show there's just such a diverse ecosystem meant, and there's one hundred forty there's people that make device. There's all these software pieces, there's some big hubs. And then there are all the ancillary things that help plug and enhance and do this because there is some great innovation going on here. Some cool software, things that we're hoping toe, you know, take everything from, you know, White Board and voice two speech and globalization to the next phase. >> Yeah, that was very interesting. Especially the Microsoft teams demo. That Lori writing team this morning, The panel Now that you talked about, there were seven, uh, customers from a variety of industries. Kurtz was their continental. We mentioned, I think, paychecks. I'm curious to get your thoughts on when they were talking about their plans to migrate to cloud, all in some percentage, considering the numbers that we heard yesterday stew in terms of the cloud penetration for the contact center market, what were your thoughts? They're about those things. All in Depends on what makes sense. >> Yeah, It reminds me of what we were talking about in the public loud discussion two years ago. Way No cloud is growing at a very fast pace. Look at our friend here at five. Nine they were growing at a much faster pace, then the contact center. Overall, I believe they're growing somewhere twenty five percent as opposed The industry as a whole is growing at about nine percent. So we understand that cloud is growing faster than the market overall. And it was one of moderated. The panel said that today is about a third, a third, a third on premises hybrid in public and where that kind of steady state will be. I think it's still too early to tell in this industry, just as it is in cloud overall. But absolutely I burst a little bit when it's like, Well, you will never do this one this way. Well, you know, never is not something that we like to say in it because you never know when when that will be possible. You know, my background I worked on virtual ization, started out in test Devon. It reached a point where really there was no technical reasons that it couldn't do it when he rolled. The really large companies will never use cloud for it. Really. Who is better it scaling and updating and making sure you can manage an environment then those hyper scale players. You know, Microsoft got a big present here. You don't ask him. Like her soft customer. Uh oh. You're running off his three sixty five. You're living on Azure. What version of that are you running? And do you have the latest security patch as opposed to? If I have a Windows desktop and I'm not doing up a weight, have I done my patron? If I Donald this stuff and you amplify that by thousands of you know of agents and Contact Center, we know that Cloud has certain speed, agility and being up to get new features and updates in there that I just can't do nearly as well if it is something that I am installing and having to maintain myself or with a service organization, >> right? And so we talked yesterday with the number of guests about what are some of the imperatives to move to cloud in the end, the sum of the non obvious ones cost obviously, is one that we talk about all the time rights to it. Any show that we're at, but also the opportunity for businesses to leverage the burgeoning power of a I. Of course, every show we go Teo Isa Buzzword Machine learning. And of course, the cloud provides the opportunity for there to be more data to train the machines to be better at context and her overall. And, of course, internal communications. >> Right. And something that I like to hear at this show is start talking about a PC compatibility. You talk about the partnerships that are going on, It is not one software stack we're talking about platforms. We're talking about how integrations can happen so that if somebody has the cool new thing that does, you know, a real time engagement better than what I had before. Well, I could probably plug that in, and it's going to work on my platform. You know, everybody here talks about Well, whether you're, you know, a web, acts of Microsoft teams a zoom shop O r. You know any of those various environment, other? Everybody's working across those environments. We've had some standardisation here s O so that whichever one I've chosen, I'm not locked into one environment. And you know, I can help modernized the pieces as a need and take advantage of those new innovations when they come >> Absolutely all right. So, stew, you're a man on the street last night. Tell us some of the interesting things that you heard in some of the folks that you met Way. >> It's interesting. We think we talked about it in our open yesterday. There are a number of companies that have been around for a while And what are they doing today? What is their focus? And couple of companies have done rebranding. So the big party there was a line and I managed to get myself in. Is Polly So Polly has rebranded? Of course it was Polycom and Plantronics coming together. How many times we hear it on the keynote stage that they mentioned that everywhere you go, they're branding is there, So look kudos to their branding and messaging team. We're going to have their CEO on the programme tomorrow, but, you know, you know, the CEO talked about, you know, their new logo. It's like the meaning behind it. Of course, Polly means many, but there's three piece, and if you look at it, it looks like the iconic conference phone. So, you know the room was in there. Everybody is enjoying the appetizers and the open bar. But, you know, there was people, people, no polycom. I'm back in our conference room. We've got one of those speaker phones in there in the nineties. I usedto, you know, sell their conference phones in their video conferencing When I worked for was now a via but was lucid at the time. So there's a lot of intersections. Thie. Other thing I've really found is it feels like everybody here, you know, at one point in their career either work for Cisco or worked for, you know, the Lucent family. You know, of course, T back in the day had the whole telecom space, but it is like many other shows. We go to a rather interconnected community here on DH. You know, we'd guess on It's like, Oh, yeah, Cisco, Skype. And now at five nines. Yeah, it is friendly. You don't see some of the, you know, some of the places we go There's bitter rivalries between, you know, key competitors, and yeah, while you know, all the contact centers don't love, you know that they're there. Brothers and sisters, a two competitors there. Chances are they've worked with half the people there on, you know, Sometimes the future will be working with again. So it's it's a it's a good atmosphere. The people I've talked to really enjoy coming to the show, a Zoe said at the top. >> And this show has evolved over the last night. We were talking about yesterday twenty eight, twenty nine years, starting out as being called PBX and then re branding to Voice Con and then in about twenty eleven to Enterprise Connect. And it was interesting that because the word innovation comes up all the time, as does evolution of communications and collaborations. But when the king it was his kicked off this morning they talked about This is the biggest ever enterprise connect that they've had. So you can feel and you can hear it behind us the momentum, the excitement he talked about. There's a lot of cover artery here. There's a lot of two degrees of separation and tech, but the opportunities for every business, whether yours selling a small particles service on the Amazon marketplace or you're a big a global enterprise, the opportunity to connect and deliver a superior a competitive advantage to your customer experience. This table stakes these days if you don't have that opportunity. Those capabilities. There's going to be something that's going to come and replace you in a heartbeat. >> Yeah, absolutely. At least I have a background in space. But there were places where our walk Drano said, Wow, there's applicability for our business. I mean, we use a number of the collaboration Sweets, You know, I mentioned, I've got I've got maps for, you know, not just the Google sweet, but all the collaboration tools on there's technology that I'm like Gucci. I want to understand that a lot of them are downloaded an app. You can start using them for free. And then there's a Freeman model and and others arm or enterprise licenses on. It's been interesting to watch some of that dynamic as to, you know, it is the pricing. Is Mohr built for the mobile and cloud world than the traditional? You know, I'm going to buy boxes and have a huge capital expense up front. So >> what do you think if you look back to your early days in the call center when you were just a young pup, how much easier your job have been? If you had had some of the capabilities that we're talking about >> now least I wish, you know, back in the nineties, you know, if I just had linked in alone, I could have supercharged s o much of what I did. But all these other tools, right? Putting at my fingertips information. It was like, you know, Lisa tell you date myself in the nineties and taking a call where everybody that works in the call center You knew the area code of every single environment that it didn't tell you where it wass you would be like, Oh, yeah, I, too want to hide in New York. How you doing? You could be whether you're saying good morning or good afternoon based on what part it was like. Oh, wait, I'm talking Arizona. They don't follow daylight savings time. We'd remember all that stuff today. There's too many exchanges. Everybody takes their phone numbers wherever they go. S o it was It was a smaller country back then. But in the other hand, the technology is actually going to give us the opportunity to be ableto imbue that allow humans to focus on the empathy and connectedness that today's digital age sometimes tries to tear away from us. >> Exactly. We need that empathy in that connectedness. So, stew, we have a great program today. Stick around. We've got some folks from Selah Jin we've got. It's now on the programme within communications Fuse. Tetra VX five nine, of course. And there in that little and zoom this afternoon. Yes, thank you. Five O'Clock for student a man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to see CUBE's exclusive coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018 live in San Francisco, California at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, your cohost of theCUBE with John Troyer co-founder of Tech Reckoning advisory and community development firm. Our next two guests Mike Piech Vice President and General Manager of middleware at Red Hat and Mark Little, Vice President of Software Engineering for middleware at Red Hat. This is the stack wars right here. Guys thanks for coming back, good to see you guys again. >> Great to see you too. >> So we love Middleware because Dave Vellante and I and Stu always talk about like the real value is going to be created in abstraction layers. You're seeing examples of that all over the place but Kubernetes containers, multi-cloud conversations. Workload management and all these things are happening at these really cool abstraction layers. That's obviously you say global I say middleware but you know it's where the action is. So I got to ask you, super cool that you guys have been leading in there but the new stuff's happening. So let's just go review last year or was it this year? What's different this year, new things happening within the company? We see core OS' in there, you guys got OpenShift is humming along beautifully. What's new in the middleware group? >> There's a few things. I'll take one and then maybe Mike can think of another while I'm speaking but when we were here this time last year we were talking about functions as a service or server-less and we had a project of our own called Funktion with a K, between then and now the developer affinity around functions as a service has just grown. Lots of people are now using it and starting to use it in production. We did a review of what we were doing back then and looked around at other efforts that were in the market space and we decided actually we wanted to get involved with a large community of developers and try and move that in a direction that was pretty beneficial for everybody but clearly for ourselves. And we've decided, and we announced this publicly last year but we're now involved with a project called Apache OpenWhisk instead of Funktion. And OpenWhisk is a project that IBM originally kicked off. We got involved, it was tied very closely to cloud foundering so one of the first things that we've been doing is making it more Kubernetes native and allowing it to run on OpenShift. In fact we're making some announcements this week around our functions are service based on Apache OpenWhisk. But that's probably one of the bigger things that's changed in the last 12 months. >> I would just add to that that across the rest of the middleware portfolio which is as you know, a wide range of different technologies, different products, in our integration area we continue to push ahead with containerizing, putting the integration technologies in the containers, making it easier to basically connect the different components of applications and different applications to each other together through different integration paradigms whether it's messaging or more of a bus style. So with our Jboss Fuse and our AMQ we've made great progress in continuing to refine how those are invoked and consumed in the Openshift environment. Forthcoming very shortly, literally in the next week or two is our integration platform as a service based on the Fuse and AMQ technologies. In addition we've continued to charge ahead with our API management solution based on the technology we acquired from Threescale a couple of years ago. So that is coming along nicely, being very well adopted by our customers. Then further up the stack on the process automation front, so some of the business process management types of technologies we've continued to push ahead with containerizing and that was being higher up the stack and a little bit bigger a scale of technology was a little bit more complex in really setting it up for the containerized world but we've got our Process Automation 7.0 release coming out in the next few weeks. That includes some exciting new technology around case management, so really bringing all of those traditional middleware capabilities forward into the Cloud Native, containerized environment has been I would say the most significant focus of our efforts over the last year. >> Go ahead. >> Can you contextualize some of that a little bit for us? The OpenShift obviously a big topic of conversation here. You know the new thing that everyone's looking at and Kubernetes, but these service layers, these layers it takes to build an app still necessary, Jboss a piece of this stack is 17, 18 years old, right? So can you contextualize it a little bit for people thinking about okay we've got OpenStack on the bottom, we've got OpenShift, where does the middleware and the business process, how has that had to be modernized? And how are people, the Java developers, still fitting into the equation? >> Mark: So a lot of that contextualization can actually, if we go back about four or five years, we announced an initiative called Xpass which was to essentially take the rich middleware suite of products and capabilities we had, and decompose them into independently consumable services kind of like what you see when you look at AWS. They've got the simple queuing service, simple messaging service. We have those capabilities but in the past they were bundled together in an app server, so we worked to pull them apart and allow people to use them independently so if you wanted transactions, or you wanted security, you didn't have to consume the whole app server you actually had these as independent services, so that was Xpass. We've continued on that road for the past few years and a lot of those services are now available as part and parcel of OpenShift. To get to the developer side of things, then we put language veneers on top of those because we're a Java company, well at least middleware is, but there's a lot more than Java out there. There's a lot of people who like to use Pearl or PHP or JavaScript or Go, so we can provide language specific clients for them to interact. At the end of the day, your JavaScript developer who's using bulletproof, high performing messaging doesn't need to know that most of it is implemented in Java. It's just a complete opaque box to them in a way. >> John F: So this is a trend of microservices, this granularity concept of this decomposition, things that you guys are doing is to line up with what people want, work with services directly. >> Absolutely right, to give developers the entire spectrum of granularity. So they can basically architect at a granularity that's appropriate for the given part of their job they're working on it's not a one size fits all proposition. It's not like throw all the monoliths out and decompose every last workload into it's finest grain possible pieces. There's a time and a place for ultra-fine granularity and there's also a time and a place to group things together and with the way that we're providing our runtimes and the reference architectures and the general design paradigm that we're sort of curating and recommending for our customers, it really is all about, not just the right tool for the job but the right granularity for the job. >> It's really choice too, I mean people can choose and then based on their architecture they can manage it the way they want from a design standpoint. Alright I got to get your guys' opinion on something. Certainly we had a great week in Copenhagen last week, in Denmark, around CUBECon, Kubernetes conference, Cloud NativeCon, whatever it's called, they're called two things. There was a rallying cry around Kubernetes and really the community felt like that Linix moment or that TCPIP moment where people talk about standards but like when will we just do something? We got to get behind it and then differentiate and provide all kinds of coolness around it. Core defacto stand with Kubernetes is opening up all kinds of new creative license for developers, it's also bringing up an accelerated growth. Istio's right around the corner, Cubeflow have the cool stuff on how software's being built. >> Right. >> So very cool rallying cry. What is the rallying cry in middleware, in your world? Is there a similar impact going on and what is that? >> Yeah >> Because you guys are certainly affected by this, this is how software will be built. It's going to be orchestrated, composed, granularity options, all kinds of microservices, what's the rallying cry in the middleware? >> So I think the rallying cry, two years ago, at Summit we announced something called MicroProfile with IBM, with Tomitribe, another apps vendor, Piara and a few quite large Java user groups to try and do something innovative and microservices specific with Enterprise Java. It was incredibly successful but the big elephant in the room who wasn't involved in that was Oracle, who at the time was still controlling Java E and a lot of what we do is dependent on Java E, a lot of what other vendors who don't necessarily talk about it do is also dependent on Java E to one degree or another. Even Pivotal with Springboot requires a lot of core services like messaging and transactions that are defined in Java E. So two years further forward where we are today, we've been working with IBM and Oracle and others and we've actually moved, or in process of moving all of Java E away from the old process, away from a single vendor's control into the Eclipse Foundation and although that's going to take us a little while longer to do we've been on that path for about four or five months. The amount of buzz and interest in the community and from companies big and small who would never have got involved in Java E in the past is immense. We're seeing new people get involved with Eclipse Foundation, and new companies get involved with Eclipse Foundation on a daily basis so that they can get in there and start to innovate in Enterprise Java in a much more agile and interesting way than they could have done in the past. I think that's kind of our rallying call because like I said we're getting lots of vendors, Pivotal's involved, Fujitsu. >> John F: And the impact of this is going to be what? >> A lot more innovation, a lot quicker innovation and it's not going to be at the slow speed of standards it's going to be at the fast, upstream, open source innovative speed that we see in likes of Kubernetes. >> And Eclipse has got a good reputation as well. >> Yeah, the other significant thing here, in addition to the faster innovation is it's a way forward for all of that existing Java expertise, it's a way for some of the patterns and some of the knowledge that they have already to be applied in this new world of Cloud Native. So you're not throwing out all that and having to essentially retrain double digit millions of developers around the world. >> John F: It's instant developer actually and plus Java's a great language, it's the bulldozer of languages, it can move a lot, it does a lot of heavy lifting >> Yep. >> And there's a lot of developers out there. Okay, final question I know you guys got to go, thanks for spending the time on theCUBE, really appreciate certainly very relevant, middleware is key to the all the action. Lot of glue going on in that layers. What's going on at the show here for you guys? What's hot, what should people pay attention to? What should they look for? >> Mark: I'll give my take, what's hot is any talk to do with middleware >> (laughs) Biased. >> But kind of seriously we do have a lot of good stuff going on with messaging and Kafka. Kafka's really hot at the moment. We've just released our own project which is eventually going to become a product called Strimsy, integrated with OpenShift so it's coognative from the get-go, it's available now. We're integrating that with OpenWhisk, which we talked about earlier, and also with our own reactive async platform called Vertex, so there's a number of sessions on that and if I get a chance I'm hoping to say into one >> John F: So real quick though I mean streaming is important because you talk about granularity, people are going to start streaming services with service measures right around the corner, the notion of streaming asynchronously is going to be a huge deal >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Mark: And tapping into that stream at any point in time and then pulling the plug and then doing the work based on that. >> Also real quick, Kubernetes, obviously the momentum is phenomenal in Cloud Native but becoming a first class citizen in the enterprise, still some work to do. Thoughts on that real quick? Would you say Kubernetes's Native, is it coming faster? Will it ever be, certainly I think it will be but. >> I think this is the year of Kubernetes and of enterprise Kubernetes. >> Mike: I mean you just look at the phenomenal growth of OpenShift and that in a way speaks directly to this point >> Mike, what's hot, what's hot? What are you doing at the show, what should we look at? I'd add to, I certainly would echo the points Mark made and in addition to that I would take a look at any session here on API management. Again within middleware the three-scale technology we acquired is still going gangbusters, the customers are loving that, finding it extremely helpful as they start to navigate the complexity of doing essentially distributive computing using containers and microservices, getting more disciplined about API management is of huge relevance in that world, so that would be the next thing I'd add. >> Congratulations guys, finally the operating system called the Cloud is taking over the world. It's basically distributed computer all connected together, it sounds like >> All that stuff we learned in the eighties right (laughs) >> It's a systems world, the middleware is changing the game, modern software construction of Apple cases all being done in a new way, looking at orchestration, server lists, service meshes all happening in real time, guys congratulations on the all the work and Red Hats. Be keeping it in the open, Java E coming around the corner as well, it's theCUBE bringing it out in the open here in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier with John Troyer we'll be back with more live coverage after this short break

live from San Juan Puerto Rico the cube covering blockchain unbound brought to you by blockchain industries hey welcome back everyone live here at the cube in Puerto Rico for our extended coverage exclusive coverage two days wall-to-wall I'm John for the coast the cube co-founder Silk'n angle Media Inc we're here at Alber geo founder of digital bits I owe two days our racket here in Puerto Rico Puerto Rico great to see you thanks for having me guys keep alumnae you're like you know my wingman on the crypto yeah we both were at poly Connie - you're the only cube alumni their first show in crypto as we start our tour now we have a mask probably like 40 interviews so now have 40 new cube alumni but a great community growing a new level of interesting dynamics I want to get your reaction to in any wave there's always a start entrepreneurs making things happen then the promoters the promoters and the entrepreneurs cheerlead each other they cheer lead but it gets up to the point where there's a lot of growth and then the next levels a new set of stakeholders investors global players new stakeholders governments are it's happening now for me this is the moment I starting to see the ecosystem going to that next level blockchain unbound the event we're here at Puerto Rico is a combination of developer conference industry conference investor conference economic world forum rolled into one so it's kind of a unique thing you've been doing a lot of presentations your sponsor here even though your startup a lot of conversations do you agree with that your thoughts your reaction yeah there's definitely the topics or the presentations both yesterday and today have covered all those areas that you discussed with in addition to die would say there's a focus on Puerto Rico itself I mean this particular event that we chose to sponsor which like to point out that everyone is promoting our logo simply by wearing the lanyard for the event but you promise not even out yet no we actually we had an announcement this week so we issued a press release basically articulating for everyone to understand the vision for our blockchain and also announcing that it's going to be launched on Monday so we're really excited about that the team's been working really hard over the past you know number of months working away and we have more exciting news that obviously would be coming up very shortly in terms of what we've done and so forth but our actual blockchain network is going live on Monday I know slaughter is also a sponsor they had a hot deal you've a hot deal your Protestant alia is coming out on Monday you have an announcement what is the product the digital bits it's an open-source project yeah so what's it going to end blockchain infrastructure protocol so I'm watching you know network that we've launches but anybody can tokenize on this blockchain however the specific vision for our project is to support the loyalty rewards industry we see a huge 1/3 of points every year that I guess you go unredeemed the in the United States alone is over 100 billion dollars and perceived value points sitting on the balance sheets of these issuers from retailers airlines so on and so forth it's a huge liquidity issue that number grows every year and so that's what that's one dot o and blockchain has the opportunity to bring loyalty rewards obviously many other things into to dot o and change that game of them and eliminate tremendous amount of friction and challenges that traditionally been experienced by consumers businesses and so forth in the space and so on our blockchain businesses whether it's their existing loyalty program or new loyalty Ramkin tokenize that program on our blockchain and you know so we're not ourselves operating loyalty program but we are very much supporting that industry and in addition to that these various points that are tokenized on our blockchain can be you know consumers could trade points say four points be and so on that's awesome also al you've been also active in the community here in Puerto Rico I've noticed that you've been involved in a lot of activities here on site Puerto Rico since the hurricane sideways big problems aid now getting back on its feet of this community has been doing a lot of stuff you've been very answering that what's going on explain to the people what is the vibe in Puerto Rico is it is it rebounding is it rebound is on the rebounding coming back the role of check the attacks breaks there's a lot of things going on here and there's a number of events obviously this week and going into early next week under this theme called restart week you know from what we've all learned is that there's still a lot of parts of the cylon without power and so forth what's really great I think about this event among other things is that all the proceeds from this event it's a non-profit so go to the people of Puerto Rico and beyond that there is a community here whether it's you know early in the morning for the course of the day and so forth they can you know arrange initiatives and what-have-you to you know do things here to help give back and there's a not I don't think it's just isolated this week has obviously been a lot of news in terms of things that have been happening leading up to to now and and things happening in the future blockchain you and the botching community put the current securities and so forth are really focused on wanting to help you know this island and I think it's a wonderful Island I mean it's you know it's my first visit here but I you know it's it's not it's not hard to fall in love with Barbara Cuba's landed here for two days we're wrapping up two days of coverage what's your observation in the hallways I hear a lot of things happening I heard one VC our investor not VC but now a token investor seven deals mo use a lot of smart people here so the block tower guy earlier I see all the legacy whales are here so the entrepreneurs are here a lot money flowing around there you know so there's obviously a lot of news in terms of how regulation is evolving some jurisdictions faster than others in terms of the introduction of clarity and what-have-you but that clearly doesn't appear to be flopping the enthusiasm in blockchain I mean and it's just further validation in terms of how powerful this technology really is and and you know we'll continue to find its way into into society and so forth I you know well I think it's people have faith that you know in some of these jurisdictions that aren't necessarily moving as quickly that they'll get there and and so you know as a result of that people just continue to stay in the game because it's great to be early so I got to ask you about the just overall activities on-site off-site cowan agendas around the corner tomorrow yes response to there as well by the way well you're flush with cash why sponsor I'm just curious um so because you're a start-up you don't have a product that's right but you pray to the company yes yeah and so we were getting our brand out there now we're coming out of stealth mode this is the first event that we chose to sponsor when agent obviously being the second and so very important we want to let consumer as businesses you know the community know what what we're doing with watching and you know we have and again the course of the next few weeks additional announcements will be making in terms of great people that are involved great partners and so course we're really excited to get that up and the utter in the open and at the end of the day when you build a product marketing is important alright and so this is a great community to support proceeds are going to the this particular event foresees go to a great cause and a lot of great people here so you know among the people on the planet that we would love to have know what we were up to and so that's why we made the decision so as you're doing an IC oh we're not doing an IC engine yeah okay what what are you doing so we have a lot of interest obviously in our project and you know we basically are taking alternative compliant approach to to this and we'll be announcing that obviously at some point in the future but when I said the legal practice no one in practice that one I'll try to knock you off your game go back and rephrase the question so how are you financing this so the great thing is that we've done nothing crypto in terms of creating you know having capital to build this so meeting your own capital yeah we had our own capital so digital bits was born in a company called fuse chamber so a few chain races traditional equity to go do what it wanted to do and among those things was to give birth to this open source project called digit the digital bits project and so you know we didn't need to prematurely create a token just for the sake of having a funding event so we would have capital to build this we did not need to do anything crypto related to be able to have capital to build a blockchain now you are doing crypto related so the show what what's happening with us is that again the network goes live on Monday will be clearly distributing for the market the utility and you know organically you'll see use of what we've done and obviously during stealth mode we evangelize with key partners and prospective partners which gonna be on that your launch who's gonna be using your chain so it will be obviously businesses that are looking to tokenize but in addition you have names we have names what you know unfortunately I can't say the art this time I get announced my money we will be announcing in the future yeah so not on Monday okay I'm Monday we we've Monday on the launch will announce who are amongst the new additions to the team as well on Monday I've been following the launch will will now so who some of the partners are as well well rumor has it you got a hot deal I can tell by your body language you try not to reveal it what's been the reaction for this project it's been phenomenal I mean it's you know obviously as an entrepreneur to to see a vision become a reality and for others share to share that enthusiasm is is is you know it's humbling and so but you know we're very focused we know it's still you know it's a saying that I like you know you know you know with in early in the early days it's not necessarily the time to you know crack open the champagne you still have to demonstrate product market fit you have to help build a market in our particular case so there's a lot of hard work launch it's a start line it's just like it's only a step along the whole process so a lot more steps ahead but we're very focused we know we believe we know what we need to do and it's gonna be a phenomenal year for us all right what's coolest thing you heard this week and the weirdest thing you heard this week no coming no calm that was the weirdest thing you heard okay we know some weird things going on ow cube alumni wingman on the crypto for the cube great to see you good to have you back on thank you very much good stuff Alberto entrepreneur founder of digital bits yo I'm John furry - cube more coverage here in Puerto Rico blockchain unbound after the short break

>> (announcer) Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Fortinet Accelerate '18. Brought to you by Fortinet. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Cube. We are live at Fortinet Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, with my co-host, Peter Burris. And we're excited to be joined by Myk Conrad, the VP of Product Management at Ribbon Communications. Myk, welcome to the Cube. >> Well, thank you very much, and it's great to be here. >> So tell us about Ribbon, your Technology Alliance's partner. Tell us about Ribbon Communications, and what you guys do with Fortinet. >> Okay, so a few things. Ribbon Communications, we basically are a security and cloud company, in the voice and video space. So what does that practically mean? That means we sell something called a session border controller, which is a voice and video firewall, into both service providers and into enterprises. So an example would be, when you make a mobile call, with AT&T, or Verizon, or Deutsche Tel, or British Talk, I mean, whoever your particular service provider is, that voice session becomes an IP packet, wends its way through the network, and as it's wending its way through the network, it has to be potentially encrypted, it has to be protected, denial service attacks, all of that stuff, that's what we do. Now how does that work into what Fortinet does? We are a part of their cloud security fabric, and we have the ability, with a new product that we're launching, or have launched this week, or announced this week. It will be actually GA and available in the summer. It will be included in passing information into the security fabric. So we protect voice and video, Fortinet protects data, web, email, you know, everything that they do very well. What we are, what this new product that we call Ribbon Protect is, is going to be a bridge between the voice and video world of IP communications, and the data world that Fortinet works with. And we're going to be passing information and talking between those two worlds, and therefore adding an extra layer of security to that. So that's how we work with them. >> (Peter) So voice and video have some certain special communications requirements, and basically, you're bringing the capacity to do voice video security, and the special requirements associated therein into the Fortinet ecosystem. >> (Mykola) Yeah, so a great example is, so let's use an enterprise as an example, alright? So let's say you're a big bank, somebody along the lines of a Bank of America, and I'm not saying it's Bank of America, or Wells Fargo. I'm not naming anyone, but just along those lines. Big bank. You probably have a SIP trunk, which is an IP trunk, and IP packets for communications coming into a data center, or multiple data centers around the world, and into individual branches of all your retail locations. And those are voice and video packets. And your tellers, or your contact center agents, are picking up the phone, and that's all IP audio and video. Or they might be using a handset, and again, that's all IP to the laptop, or to the handset. And they're having these conversations. You may want to encrypt those conversations. You definitely want to make sure, if a contact center is up, and it's doing mortgage calls, it's taking individual requests for checking account balances, that that contact center stays up. In the world of IP, especially in SIP communications, it's very easy to send a denial service attack against, for example, a contact center, and bring that down. So nothing keeps somebody from generating, from a single laptop, 20 gigabytes, 30 gigabytes, or petabytes worth of calls into a contact center. And that will bring down the infrastructure, unless you're protecting that infrastructure with a download service type of device. Similar, very analogous to what you would see is in a DDoS device that, for example, Fortinet sells, on the data side, to protect your web servers and your email servers, and all the other things, except on the voice side. So that's what we do. And now, with Ribbon Protect, we're going to be taking all the information that we're gleaning, as these ports are being opened and closed, and as we are getting attacked on the voice and video side. so an IP address comes in. We've decided that there's a lot of bad calls coming in from that side of the fence. We blacklist that. We will then pass that information over to the data side of the house. Through the security fabric, we will pass through, and then Fortinet can, on their side, say, "Hey, this is now blacklisted also." So any packets coming from that IP address that are doing something else, that have nothing to do with voice and video, because it's two separate networks, typically, will now be protected. So now the bank has an added level of security. >> (Peter) And Fortinet propagates that, cascades it throughout. >> Cascades it throughout their entire partner ecosystem. >> Right. >> So that's what we do. And we have deep visibility into SIP. So one of the things, as an example, firewalls are very good at opening and closing ports. And the default for most firewalls is port closed. The problem is with SIP it's a phone call. Ports are typically closed. A call comes in, and it's ringing. You answer, and when you answer the UDP port has to be open, so that a media stream can come through and cut through the call, so you can actually have a conversation. Otherwise, the packets will get blocked, and there will be no conversation. You'll get one-way audio, or no audio. We have very good visibility into which ports are being assigned the duration of that call, so when somebody says, "Okay, bye." Hang up, click, and you kill that packet stream, that port will get closed automatically. A lot of firewalls don't do that. They keep the ports open, because they don't know at that SIP level that a call's coming through right this very second for Myk, open the port for three minutes because he's talking to his mom, conversation's over, close the port, because they don't go to that depth of information on the SIP application level. We do, because that's our job. And we then pass that information, say, "Listen, you should be closing this port, or opening this port." We have a lot of visibility that firewalls just don't have. And now, as part of the security fabric, we're going to be passing that information onwards. So now we're going to have a stronger security perimeter for enterprises as well as service providers that are using the combination of our session border controllers, Ribbon Protect, the new product that's coming out, and the Fortinet panoply of products. >> So if I'm a CSO at a bank, and we were speaking with Fortinet's CSO earlier today, and kind of talking about the evolution of that. We talked as well, I think with John Madison, about the security architect. If I'm the CSO at a bank, or a service provider, what is my material value that this technology alliance is going to give to my organization? >> (Mykola) That's a good question. So there's a couple different aspects of this. So let me talk about Ribbon Protect. We frame Ribbon Protect in three different value propositions: one is for telephony fraud, or communications fraud, another one is in cybersecurity threats, and a third one is network visibility. So I'm going to start with network visibility and work my way back up that chain. So there's a value proposition, not necessarily for the CSO, but for the CIO and the people running the communications network, in having really good visibility into the communications network, an end-to end view across multiple different disparate items. So let me give you an example. Typical bank will have Cisco, they might have Juniper, they might also have an Avia system, when it comes to communications, they might have an old Nortel system, they might have some cloud communications from a Vonage, or a Fuse, or Verizon. All these disparate systems, all under this one CIO, and a call comes in, and nothing works. For some reason it's not routing correctly, the contact center agent isn't getting the call. You know, have you ever called, and you get transferred, and you get dropped? That's the problem. And then when they try to troubleshoot that, it's very hard, because there's so many disparate elements. So the first thing you need is visibility. So from a CIO perspective this product, Ribbon Protect, will give you visibility into the network, and that will allow you to troubleshoot and bring the network up. Then you go into the next level. So once you have visibility. So you can't provide security until you have visibility into a network, so now that you've got this N10 visibility, now let's talk about security. Two different types of security threats that our customers are seeing when it comes to communications. One is sort of robo dialing, toll fraud. And I would even put denial service attacks sort of in there. Denial service attacks also go to the next level, which is cybersecurity. But robo dialing: how many of you are getting calls all the time now? I'm getting them on my mobile, literally, I get like three or four a day on my mobile phone from a different random number, because they know my area code and they think if they mask it, it's a friend of mine, and I'll answer the call. That's becoming more and more prevalent. Now think about if you're an enterprise, and if you're a CSO, and now you're tasked with keeping these employees productive, but they're starting to get all these random calls, your contact center agent. And we've actually had this happen to customers of ours, where they picked up the phone and they were getting random garbled noise on the other end. And you're a contact center agent, your job is to sit there, and you hear these weird noises in your earphone, you hang up, next one comes in, it's weird noises. Third one comes in, it's actually a person that is asking about their mortgage. Great. That's your job. But then the next one is some weird ... It brings productivity way down. So there's that one area. And then there's toll fraud, which is in the billions of dollars, now, of cost to both enterprises and service providers, where people are doing things like calling Zambia, or weird little countries, and routing through enterprise networks. So that's another aspect that a CSO would be worried about. And lastly, and the most important one, is the cybersecurity issue. Packet-based denial service attacks across your entire system, that can not only take down your web server and your email server, but also your communications, your real-time communications, but also exfiltration of data. So what we've seen is the following: a hacker comes in through the data side and understands the network typology, puts in some malware, but because they're using something from Fortinet or somebody else, they can't do anything with that information. There's no way out. But here's the SIP network, this UC network, sitting in the system, and it's sort of unguarded, not that there's no guards there in place, but the data side, if you look at everything that Fortinet and others have been putting out, that side of the fence is getting a lot of attention. And over the last few years even more attention, as hacks have taken place, and PII has been stolen. But on the SIP side of the fence, that hasn't really happened as much. And so we believe that's the weakest chain right now, or will soon be the weakest chain. And hackers will use the open ports, because if your just using a firewall, those ports are open. The range of UDP ports to put media through is wide open. It has to be, otherwise it won't work. And so they can exfiltrate data through that. So they use some other means to find the typology of the network, get in, and then they can pass data out through that. And it might look like a good media stream, like a video call, and we've actually seen examples where people have sent video and embedded, underneath that, data inside the video. >> They piggyback. >> And they piggyback it. So you're going to see, the value to the CSO is, listen, if you're concerned about people finding a different way into your network, you're protected against, or you think you're protected against malware, you're protected against email, you're protected against web server attacks. Well have you really thought about the UC side? So if I'm a CSO, I should be really worried about securing that side of my fence, because I haven't been worried about it for the last three or four years, and there's been an increase in attacks, or increasing amount of attacks on that side of the fence. And then there's these other values of Ribbon Protect that hit other aspects of the IT chain. So we believe that there's a, sort of three core value propositions, two that really affect the CSO, and one that's more of a CIO issue. >> Well, look, once a port's open it's open. >> Correct, yeah. >> And video and voice do have characteristics that if a device is set up to introspect it and understand it, then it can recognize it. But as you said, your general-purpose firewall typically is not looking at that. And you don't want to introduce an entirely distinct and separate management platform, and paying, if you don't have to. So the CSO gets to see the same paying, while the CIO gets to ensure that voice and video happens without being hit? >> (Myk) And works. Yes. >> And at the same time, that the CSO is getting the paying that they need, so they have some visibility into what's going on with the network. >> (Myk) Exactly, and that's the entire purpose of this product. We believe it meshes nicely with what Fortinet's talking about, in that they have their Fortiguard Artificial Intelligence product that they've been talking about, and how it's detecting what's going on in the network, and millions of nodes, and features, and really actually quite sophisticated stuff. I just sat through an entire presentation on it. We are doing the same thing with Ribbon Protect, where we have an artificial intelligence layer that would sit inside the company, but it's specifically looking at the communications pathways, what's normal communications, what's abnormal communications. what's normal packet flows on the communications side, and abnormal communication flows. And putting two and two together, and doing machine learning, similar analogous things to what they're doing on the data side, and on the virus malware detection side, is what we're doing on the communications side, and putting together our own database, again, similar to what they have, where they have a database, and they apply that database of known bad, known good, to their ... And we're doing the same thing, and then we're going to share that information into the Fortinet fabric. >> So you're really collaborating and, it sounds like complimentary technologies. >> (Peter) Yeah, you're complimenting. >> That the customer benefits from. We've got about a minute left, but I'd love for you to share, maybe at a super high level, an example of a joint Fortinet/Ribbon customer, where the CIO and the CSO are being very happy with the technologies that you are delivering in this collaboration. >> I can't name any names, unfortunately, but we are talking with a large service provider right now, that is very enamored of Fortinet, and uses them extensively on the data side, to provide services to their customers, meaning: as a service provider, you're providing data and managed services to your enterprise customers. And they also use us today to provide voice services - >> (Peter) To secure voice. >> To secure voice services to the same set of customers. And so now what we're talking about is marrying the two, not sending data to Fortinet, and what is getting this service provider very excited is to be able to offer a differentiated service to their enterprise customer base, something that the other service providers can't, because they either aren't using Fortinet, or aren't using us. They need somebody that is using both, and this particular one happens to be using both of us, so we can put Ribbon Protect into their environment, into their network, and it'll start sharing their information, and what that will allow them to do is market to their customers at a higher level of security, and even to the point where they might be able to go out and say things like, "The most secure voice video system in the world today." >> (Peter) Yeah. They're expanding the scope of a common security footprint, and thereby allowing a new class of services to be provided to, whether CSO or CIO. >> And they view it as a differentiator for themselves. >> (Lisa) That's exactly what I was thinking - >> Which is why, when they're talking to the CSO or the CIO, why should you use us versus the other three guys you're probably talking to right now, well here's one reason. There's probably a few others, but here's at least one reason. >> Differentiation, a key fundamental for digital transformation. Well Myk, Mykola, thank you so much for joining us on the Cube. You're now a Cube alumni. >> Thank you very much, happy to be an alumni. >> (Lisa) Excellent. We want to thank you for watching the Cube's continuing coverage of Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. For my co-host, Peter Burris, stick around. We've got great interviews coming up next. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube. Covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. (techno music) >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. And welcome back to Red Hat Summit. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Stu, we were saying this is your 100th Red Hat Summit, so congratulations on reaching that milestone. Joe Dickman is here. He's the senior vice president of Vizuri. Cool name, love it. And Michael Quintero, or Quintero if you prefer, of LogistiCare. He's an enterprise solutions architect. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So Vizuri. Love the name. It strikes a visualization. It's (mumbles) trendy. Tell us about Vizuri, and tell us about your relationship with LogistiCare, and we'll get into it. >> Vizuri is the private division of a company called AEM Corporation. We created the brand to serve the commercial market for research and development. We became partners with JBoss before Red Hat's acquisition, so we jumped into open source in like 2003. And since then, we've built a business around open source technologies, and market leading technologies that bring value. We found LogistiCare because they solicited us for some work to help them transform their organization. And it's worked out well. I mean, Michael and I have been working together for about 18 months. >> So, tell us a little bit about LogistiCare. >> So LogistiCare is the world's largest provider of non-emergency medical transportation. So, we service the health market around people have benefits. The insurance companies don't provide transportation, and the members come to us and we broker the transportation for them. Been in business for quite some time. Do about 70 million trips a year, a little bit more. And we have roughly 80% of that market. And we just want to stay on top of, and be recognized as the world leader in that capability with the best services and the care for our members. >> So JBoss of course was like the second pillar for Red Hat after Red Hat (mumbles) Rob Bearden, who was a CEO at the time, and Cube alum and friend. But so, how did you utilize that capability, the sort of whole middleware, and how does that affect your digital transformation? And where did you guys all fit together? >> So, well digital transformation is a business strategy, not a technology. So, we looked at our need to be more flexible, and dynamic, and innovate. Our legacy, our what we call classic internally, software stack is limiting. It's not service oriented. It's not extensible. It's a compiled, executable, distributed -- serves the business very well. In fact, we're still using it today in some aspects. We haven't fully replaced it. But it's long in the tooth, and it's difficult for us to reach that new business requirement and test and deliver it scale. So, I joined the company to help modernize that architecture. Very quickly recognized that in order to get to scale, and loosely coupling, and massive customization, that microservices was a good solution for us. And when we surveyed the market for a partner that could help take us there, software wise, Red Hat has the most complete stack. They offer everything we need to do, and then they have the things we think we're going to do in the future. So, we looked around for somebody who could help us get to the Red Hat, enable to that, with Docker, and get to an auto-scaling kind of solution so we have infrastructure on demand. And we found Vizuri as a partner. They were able to help us enable the technology and teach us how to do things that we weren't presently doing. Because we didn't have any kind of scale solution in-house, it was just put more web servers out there. >> We started small, it started with a Business Process Management System. If you think about all the logistics that are necessary for coordinating medical transport, "I'm a dialysis patient. I'm somebody that is home-bound. I need to get to a physician appointment." We took that domain knowledge, that's part of one of the pillars of digital transformation. It's infrastructure, it's integration, and it's knowledge management. We started with knowledge management. Think about all the complex business rules for manage care organizations, reimbursement, right? Which is what LogistiCare does. Quickly after we solved that problem, we looked at integration, and we said, "Well now we have all these trading partners." So we guided LogistiCare into their next purchase which was Fuse. So now we had an API strategy for publicly linking them to other consumer providers, because they are a logistics organization for reimbursement. And as Michael said, we started building data centers. Or LogistiCare did. But guess what? Containers and OpenShift came in and we started provisioning our development environments to Amazon Web Services. And when they saw the cost-savings, they abandoned building out on-prem data centers, and went Cloud-native. >> So there's also a revenue drive, or component, as well, right? >> It is. It is. It's an OpEx (mumbles) and the CapEx cost-savings. >> Let's unpack both of those. >> Joe: Sure. >> Where do you want to start? Cost or the telephone numbers? (laughs) >> So, we're mostly a call center based company in history. Right? We have 20-something call centers around the country. We service most of the U.S. And we have a variety of contracts with medical care providers, like Aetna, and Wellpoint, and Blue Cross, and those type people. And then the managed care organizations come in. So, we look to reduce our OpEx by diminishing the number and the interfaces that we have with our call centers. People don't have to call in to the call centers to do business with us. You know, something like one-minute reduction in call-time is about a six or seven million dollar a year benefit for us. And there's a lot of things that people can do for themselves. I mean, you can call in and cancel a trip that they've had scheduled. We figured that about 30% of the cancellation rate, if we could get that done through a service interface, through an IVR, where you can come in and say "I'm not going to go." and cancel it. That's a five or six million dollar savings for us right there. Just in 30%. >> Michael, I'm curious. Was there any hesitancy inside to say, "Okay. I'm going to kill data centers, going to go to a public Cloud." You know, how did that transition go? And anything, you know, kind of the good, the bad, and the ugly that you could share. >> So, well, we're a healthcare company. HIPA and HITRUST certified coming. And there's a certain amount of fear on Cloud migration. So we had to demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and abilities around getting secure, scalable solutions out to the Cloud. And this is our core application. If we don't do this well, we could become Blockbuster and go away. Right? So we don't want that. So, we had Vizuri come to the table and help us understand just how secure we can be, how OpenShift is helping us make sure our information is never violated. There's great integrity in it. And then we did prototyping, and we actually evaluated it, and we have third parties that come in and take a look at our solution and say, "Can I penetrate that? Can I get into your information?" So, and, we also are subject to audit, not only by the federal government, but by all of our payer partners. So we have to be above the line in every criteria, and we think that we are. >> The other thing that you mention was, when we talk about OpEx, right? That's human capital. He talked about the minute per time on a call. We also reduce tribal knowledge. Think about all these new managed care organizations in health care. Is it the call center representative, is it our responsibility to train them on this car, and this company requires a car service, this company requires an ambulance. That knowledge, if we could eliminate that and put that in the middle tier. Now what we do is we have given them a business scale. Now they have a business strategy for taking on new managed health care organizations. Do you have different compliance rules? Do you have different knowledge? It is no longer us having to go back out to those 20 call centers and re-train everybody, because you never know where the consumers are coming from. So, what they do is they answer the phone, they put their information into the system, and the system makes the deterministic call as to what car service, when, and how it's reimbursed. >> So, you say you automated essentially that tribal knowledge. >> Joe: We did. >> Eliminated it. >> And we reduced it so it not only reduced the calls per time frame, but it sped up our time of getting a call center agent from three weeks of training down to basically one. >> Yes, and we have the ability now to support all of our contracts from any call center. So if there's disaster recovery models, or, you know, Phoenix for instance is one of our larger call centers and they get heavy downpours of rain there. There are times when people can't get to work, or they have outages. We can't afford for that function to be offline. So those skills are very easily moved to another call center to support the members that would call in there. Just route the calls. And there's no local knowledge about, you know, my contract in Arizona does a certain thing, or in the Southwest, so it's very simple to support our population from any call center. That gives us the benefit of providing very high quality service, 'cause people when they call in, they expect us to service them. >> Joe, I want to follow up. We were talking about kind of, you know, hesitancy, healthcare tends to be a little bit conservative. I hear things like microservices, and containers. You know, these are still relatively new things. Is (mumbles) -- sorry, OpenShift the solution that allows you to deliver that with confidence to your customers? >> Yes. OpenShift. (laughs) >> Yeah, sorry about that. (laughs) >> No worries. (laughs) OpenShift does. What happens is the Docker container format enables us to pre-configure those servers and those workloads, and we talked about microservices. We wanted to reduce the business decisions or the integrations into the smallest component. What we also wanted to do was provide some taxonomy with them. These are for billing, these are for scheduling, these are for a different aspect of the business. By that, we can change, and we can change often. >> Mhm. >> How long did it take before if we wanted to make a change to some of the infrastructure? >> So. >> Weeks? Months? >> Well, even longer. I mean infrastructure is hard to acquire. And you only talk about CapEx expense. It's very easy, I mean there's a refresh cycle for equipment that you get. So even when you have it, you have to pay attention to maintenance and keeping that thing going forward. As you add scale to your business, you got to go acquire more storage. And it's not a dynamic thing. You have to plan -- the planning cycle is very difficult. We moved to the Cloud. Now we have infrastructure on demand. There's a myriad of choices of platforms and solutions that we can apply to our business model. Things we hadn't even thought of before. We're actually looking now at potentially moving our call centers away from our in-house standard, and moving to an Amazon provided call center solution. Because it can scale. And we can consolidate. And we can provide service from anywhere in the world. That's a big benefit to us. >> It is. So call center as a service, essentially. >> Michael: Yes. >> Is something you're evaluating. >> Think about how big they are. 80 million rides, right. What they didn't want to do is be disintermediated by the newcomers. Right? The Uber's, the Lyft's. They had a large footprint. So, he used the word Blockbuster before, and that's what they use a lot internally. >> Dave: There's one left, in Alaska, I heard. (laughs) >> Who remembers Blockbuster? And then they remember how Blockbuster was no longer in business. So what they wanted to do is to ensure that -- they agilely transformed not only the software engineering discipline, but their firm beliefs. So, everybody from business analysis through implementation has this new agile approach. And one of the features that we developed, we used to send people home after four hours of dialysis in taxi cabs. So, an executive, or team, at LogistiCare said, "We need dependency. We need certified drivers." They actually entered into a business relationship with Lyft. And you want to talk about an agile enterprise? We developed a custom interface into Lyft with a scheduling service that never existed, within five weeks. >> Michael: That's right. >> We would never have been able to do that. And we moved our first ride after five weeks, and since then, we're currently up to about five or six thousand. But it's going to scale to thousands. And the goal is to, again, as Michael said, let people interface with LogistiCare by their device of choice. If we don't have to have people call in to cancel rides, or call in to schedule, then the business scales, and it scales without human capital. >> And the enablers there, (mumbles) we always talk about it, people, process, and technology. So the technology behind that was, what, you're living this API economy that everybody talks about. >> Michael And Joe: We are. >> Joe: That is exactly what we did. >> And then you've got underneath that, OpenShift, what else is sort of there that you're leveraging? >> BPMS, BRMS. So, Business Process Management System. Business Rules Management System. JBoss fused for an integration strategy and Camel Routes. And then Openshift, and then we do Ansible for doing server provisioning. >> And I have to ask you about the security question again. Stu was (mumbles) poking at it before. We've heard from a lot of practitioners that the security in the Cloud is just fine, it is great actually. The challenge is, it doesn't necessarily exactly map the edicts of our organization. So, is that, did you find that? And did you have to maybe change the way in which you plugged into AWS, or was it just sort of out of the box for you? >> So, you have to understand the shared responsibility model when you move to the Cloud, right? I mean they're very good at the security in the Cloud, or of the Cloud, and you have to be good at the security in the Cloud. You can choose bad technology at Amazon and be insecure. But they have a published, HIPA standard, that if you use these technologies, then you can be HIPA certified. We applied our HITRUST certification standards to our choices. We're making very solid -- and this isn't willy nilly. I mean I've been in a HIPA solution for 20 years. So it's not like I don't know what is required, and what the auditors are going to ask us. So, but I do want to redress one point that we can't go past. Is that (mumbles) Our customers are getting better service from all this we're doing. >> Joe: I agree. >> When somebody calls us and says, "I'm ready to go home from the doctor." and they didn't know what time they were going to go home when they scheduled their ride to the doctor, we can get somebody there in 10 minutes now to come and get them and take them home. >> Dave: Wow. >> That's a great satisfier. Rather than having to wait 90 minutes for us to find somebody that can go pick them up. That world has changed, right? And that's a great customer satisfier and that is why they're going to love continuing to do business with us. >> Great business outcome from something that you probably couldn't have done, you know, five years ago? Even maybe two years ago. >> They're a social caring organization. One of the largest rides that they do is for kidney dialysis. And those people, I mean, I've never had it, but somebody sitting there after four hours of dialysis, the last thing you want to do is wait 90 minutes for a cab. You want to go home. You also want to have an authoritative source that the drivers are credentialed drivers. And that's something that we're working on so that not only do these older generations, right? And think about the baby boomers, which I'm actually part of. >> Michael: Me too. (laughs) >> The age population is growing. So the need for these types of services is growing too. And we become accustomed and we get set in our ways. And people might be fearful. Any taxi showing up, versus now, a Lyft shows up, you know who the driver is. You see the car, you see that. There's a high degree of confidence that LogistiCare has the best interests of their constituents. So they manage that type of business. So it's not just technology, it really is a caring and methodical organization. >> But we have the ability to follow patterns that are already established. We look at how Netflix handles their widely distributed kinds of interface devices. You know, how do they figure out what kind of data-stream to send back to what he's got in his hand versus what I have. We're following the same kind of model, and we're using the technology platform to our best advantage to make sure that we're talking to someone who's got a flip-phone differently than we are talking to someone who's got a (mumbles) Plus, right? (Dave laughs) Because the payload can't be the same, but the backend services don't need to know that. We built a solution here that can examine the request and return the right data-stream. So, "Where's my ride?" Might be "Just around the corner." or it might be a map with a breadcrumb trail and a picture of the driver and all of that. Like you get with a Lyft or an Uber. So, you know, we're building it. >> Great case study, gentlemen. Thanks very much for coming to the Cube and sharing it. >> Well, thank you very much for having, we enjoyed the time. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be right back with our next guests. This is the Cube. We're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. Be right back. (electronic music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Host: Live, from Boston Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome to day two of the Red Hat Summit here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are welcoming Jim Whitehurst, who is the president and CEO of Red Hat. Thanks so much for taking the time to sit down with us. >> Thanks, it's great to be here. >> So, I want to talk about the theme of this year's conference, which is celebrating the impact of the individual. In your keynote you talked about the goal of leadership today is to create a context for the individual to try, to modify, to fail, to just keep going. Sounds great. How do you do that? >> Well that's why I say, leadership is about creating a context for that to happen. So you have to create a safe environment for people to try and fail. And you know, this is a tough one, because somebody fails 20 times, you know, maybe it's time him to find a new career. >> Rebecca: (laughs) >> But, you have to create the opportunity for people to fail in a safe way and actually then learn from that. And one of the things I talk a lot about, especially CEOs and CIOs is, you got to create that context. The world that we used to live in was all about taking variance out, you know, Lean Six Sigma process. Innovation's all about injecting variance in, and there's no way to inject variance in without making errors. So how do you, I want to say reward making errors, but you certainly want to reward risk taking and recognize, by definition, some risks aren't going to play out. And that's all about culture. Yeah, it's about process and reward systems, but it's mainly about culture. >> So reward, risk taking, no blaming, what are some other defining elements of this culture in which individuals can feel free to take risks? >> Well, I think a big part of it is you have to celebrate the people who try things And you celebrate taking the risk. You don't necessarily celebrate the successes, right? It's like, you know, in school, you miss something, that's bad, you get something right, that's good. Well we have a tendency to say, let's celebrate the successes, versus actually celebrating the risk taking. And so, there are some processes and systems you have to put in place. You have to have systems in place to make sure no one can risk 100 million dollars. If every Red Hatter could risk 100 million dollars, we'd be in trouble. But you have to figure out how you give enough latitude, enough free time. And, I was just yesterday talking to some Red Hatters who had moved over from IBM. They said, "It's great, we can try new things." Now, try new things within a context of a certain amount of budget or a certain amount of time. So there are processes and systems you have to put in place, but ultimately it's culture more than anything else. It trumps anything else. >> Jim, in your keynote, you said, planning is dead, and that, you know, we're lousy predictors, things are changing so fast. Your role though, you're CEO of a public company that has 60 quarters of consecutive revenue growth. So, it seems you guys are doing pretty well at getting involved in some of the waves that are happening, understanding how to keep growing at a steady pace. Maybe you can reconcile that a little bit for us, as to how you're doing that. >> Yeah, so, one of the reasons that I think that we've been able to navigate a whole set of fairly significant transitions in technology is that we don't select technology, we select communities. And I think that's a really important subtlety. So, we didn't come in and say, "Oh, we like OpenStack more than we like CloudStack of Eucalyptus or the other opensource IaaS that were out five years ago. We looked and observed that OpenStack had built the biggest user base. You know the reason we're significantly involved in Kubernetes today, versus Diego, or Swarm, or the other orchestrators for containers out there, is we observed it was building the biggest community. And, we don't just glom on, we actually kind of get in and contribute ourselves. But we look more to say what are the best communities and let's get involved in that. I don't know what the Kubernetes roadmap is for the next five years, but I'm confident that it has the best community that will drive the right direction for-- >> It's probably a little over-simplified to say you looked for the VHS ecosystem versus the Betamax best technology. >> Rachael: (laughs) >> No, exactly. Exactly, but that's what we think we're good at is observing when a community is the best community. And I say that, it's not just a matter of observation. Whether it's OpenStack or Kubernetes, we get in a help think about governance, right? So, one of the things I think really helped OpenStack is we saw it had the best user community, but we help put together the governance structure, which truly made it neutral, made it open. And so, we try to actually help in doing that, but it really is about identifying communities rather than technologies. >> Is it ever possible that you could identify the right community that might have certain elements, but it's got elements that wouldn't quite work for the opensource way, can you change that community? Is it possible to go in and push a new culture into that community? >> We think we're actually pretty good at that. Now, I think there's a mix of not every community has to be the same. We often talk about, there is no opensource community. There are are literally two million open source communities. And Linux has a culture, many of our projects in JBoss. So Drools is different than Fuse that's different than others. And so, it's okay that the cultures can be different. The key is they all have to have a common element about being open, and committing to being open, and truly being a meritocracy, cause if they best ideas don't win, that's when communities fall apart. And that's actually one of the biggest places where they fall apart. So, I do think we can influence open, and I think just by our contributions we probably influence the cultures of some of those communities. But we don't try to say is there's a Red Hat way to do community. There are a lot of different ways. >> Jim, we look at the cloud space, open is one of these terms that doesn't necessarily mesh with your definition with what the cloud guys do. You guys, of course, supported Red Hat Linux in every single cloud environment that I can think of. For many years you have a expanded partnership with AWS. But, I was debating with Sam Ramji yesterday, from Google, about like, there is no open cloud. There are clouds that use opensource, opensource can live here, but all the big public clouds are built on their platforms and openness is a challenge there. What's your thought as to how you fit there? And then we'll want to get into some of the discussion of the AWS announcement. >> Yeah, sure. So, in defense of the public clouds, it's impossible to offer a physical offering that has hardware in a software stack without it having some of your technologies that don't make it totally open, right? Or transferable. >> Is this why we never saw a Red Hat Open Cloud? >> Well, it's just that, yeah, it doesn't quite make sense in our context for that reason as well. So the role we try to play is, we do try to play the abstracter role, and we do that at multiple levels. So, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs across a physical data center, virtual data center, and the major clouds. And that's an abstraction point that we think adds value. Because all the way back to 15 years ago, Red Hat Enterprise Linux meant that you could run the same application on a Dell server or an IBM, or an HP Blade, right? And so, we're working to apply that at the cloud level, certainly at the operating system level, but, because of all the services and the growth containers, we needed to do it at another level, and that's what we're doing with OpenShift. So, OpenShift allows you to run on physical, or on virtual in your own data center, on the major public clouds, and take advantages of the services underneath, but do it in a little bit more of an abstracted way. >> All right. So, we had Optum on yesterday, who was also part of the keynote. He's using OpenShift. He's using AWS. He was very excited about the opportunity of OpenShift being able to extend those Amazon services. You and Andy Jassy doing a video this morning. Give us a little bit of the inside look. You know, how long did it take to put this together? My understanding, it's not shipping today, but coming a little bit later this year. Give us a little bit behind what happened. >> Yeah, so. You know, this really started off with a breakfast Andy and I had in January, where we said, look, our teams are working really well together, and we've been partners since 2008, but kind of from the bottom up, I think we were taking very much an incremental approach of what we could do together, what customers we could work with. And, I think it's a little bit in the context of they've been out some other kind of big deals with some other vendors, and so, why don't we think about, what's a true net new offering. So let's now just talk about, oh, running it on Amazon's lower cost. I mean, clearly there's a cost thing there, but, what can we do that's like, wow, actually changes the life of some of the people who are using our technologies. And so what we decided is, well, wouldn't it be amazing, literally at breakfast we were talking about it, if OpenShift, which is used by enterprises all around the world, could actually leverage the thousands of services that AWS is putting out, right? So, right now, if you want to use all of these services, you have to be on AWS, which is great, but there are a lot of customers for whatever reasons, for regulatory reasons, or just by choice or economics, who decided to run on-premise or elsewhere. And so, by making those thousands of services available, it's a win-win all around. For Amazon, it's a ability to expose some really amazing innovation to many, many thousands, hundreds of thousands of developers, and for us it's a way to expose all this innovation to our developers, without kind of forcing someone necessarily to go all-in on cloud. Now, I'll say that we were literally, you know, Sunday night still getting the final contract done. >> Rebecca: (laughing) >> But I would say, when you have a really clear, differentiated source of value for customers, the deal came together, I think, relatively quickly. >> Yeah, et cetera. One of the things we've been trying to reconcile a little bit is, when you talk to customers about where their applications live, that hybrid or multi-cloud world, versus the offerings that are out there, it was a mismatch, because, you know, they were like, oh, I'm using VMware in one place, and I'm using Amazon somewhere else. I've got my SaaS in a different place. We're starting to see Amazon mature their discussion of hybrid through partnerships of yours. OpenShift looks like something that can really help enable customers to kind of get their arms around those environments in many locations. >> Well, I think so. One of the things, if you really go and talk to developers, developers really don't care that much about infrastructure software, and they shouldn't care. And, it's interesting. I think developers right now are really enamored by containers, because containers somewhat makes their life easy. But, I was talking to some of the folks in Red Hat that deal a lot with developers, and they say, ultimately developers shouldn't want to care and don't want to care about even containers. They just want to write code, and they want code to work, right? And one of the cool things about OpenShift is that's kind of what you're doing, is you're saying write code. Yeah, use any of the services you want from anywhere you want to use it. They're all there. They're all available. You don't have to worry about, I want this service, so I have to run this on Amazon, or, hey, I got my database on-premise, so I got to run here. Let's just make it easy. And I think that's one of the cool things about this announcement that's cool for developers, but it's also unique that it's something that only we could bring together. >> Yeah, serverless is something that's been gaining a lot of buzz to kind of say, right, it's underneath there. There's probably going to be containers, but my people writing applications don't want to worry about that. Speak to, it's the application affinity and that tie to kind of modernization of applications that seems to be one of the biggest challenges we've been facing for the last couple of years. Why are companies coming to Red Hat, working across your solution set to help them with that challenge of their older applications, but also kind of building the new businesses. >> Well I think for a couple reasons. So first off, if we really think about what Red Hat is, we call ourselves a software company, but we give away all our IP, so that's a stretch, right? >> Rebecca: (laughs) >> You know, when we think about our overall mission is, we think, there's enterprise customers here with a set of challenges, and there's all this phenomenal innovation happening in opensource communities. How do we build a bridge between those. So certainly that's product. So we create opensource, well, products out of opensource projects. It's about architecture, and then it's about process. And we talked about open innovation labs. But in part of thinking about that's what we do, we obviously start off say, well, what are enterprise problems, and what are technologies that help solve those problems? So, one of the things that we've driven so hard into our container platform is the ability to run stateful applications, right? So it's great to talk about scale-out and cloud native, and we certainly do that, but go talk to any CIO and 99.9% of their application portfolio is stateful. And so, we think about that and we drive those needs. And the reason we're the second largest contributor of Kubernetes isn't just because we're nice people. It's because we're trying to drive enterprise needs into these projects. And so, I do think that technologies that would ultimately emerge, and the products we're able to put out, help enterprises consume opensource in a way that is actually value adding. >> I wanted to ask you about the examples that you used in the keynote today. The three that you highlighted were governance. >> Jim: Yeah. >> And I think that that was really interesting because you're showing how opensource is bringing new innovations and ideas into government and agencies not necessarily known for innovation. Where do you see the future of technology in government coming together? >> Well, one of the reasons I wanted to use government examples is that I actually wanted to highlight, well, what's the role of government when you start thinking about innovation. So, certainly, we could've brought up a lot of examples. You know, yesterday the Optum folks that are big users of our platform, and they've kind of created a context for innovation among their developers. But the reason I wanted to highlight governments, and really try to do it from regions around the world, was to say there is a role for government when you start thinking about what is the new system underneath the economy. So, in the 1940s and 50s in the US the interstate highway system was an important piece of infrastructure. We've always thought about roads and bridges and airports as important for creating the underpinnings for an economy, and that's really, really important in a world of physical goods. And it's not that we don't have physical goods now, but more and more we still have to start thinking about information assets. And look, I've gone and seen the FCC and advocated for net neutrality and all that stuff. And so, certainly broadband as a fundamental infrastructure's important, but I think that government plays a more important role. Whether that's education, and we could spend two hours on education, but even kind of creating these contexts where you make data available. That's what I loved about the British-Columbia example. But broadly it's like, how do you create a context for more citizen participation. I think it's just as important in the 21st Century as roads and bridges were in the 20th Century. >> Jim, you mentioned net neutrality. I'm curious your take on just kind of the global discussion that's going on. A lot of your customers here are international, you've got open communities. The question about net neutrality, trade. It feels like many people, we interviews the president of ICANN a few years ago, and was worried about, you know, are we going to have seven internets, not one internet, because there are certain Asian, and even like Germany, worried about cutting things off. How does that impact your thinking? Do you guys get involved in some of those governmental discussions? >> Well we do. A matter of fact, we actually do have, I'd say a small government affairs team that advocates around these issues. Because we see it too, even with OpenShift, where you start saying, well, different privacy laws in Europe versus the US, but what if someone's running OpenShift in Europe, but it's actually instantiated in the US, and who can get access to what data. Those are really, really important issues. And it is a little bit like, you know, we ought to pick the same railroad gauge, right? To some extent, we need to have a set of consistent policies, not necessarily in every area, but enough that you can actually have the free flow of information, without worrying about, oh my god, I'm exposing myself to felony privacy issues because I'm hosting this application on a cloud that happens to be in the US. So there's some real issues that we have to work through. And they're so bleeding edge and so complex, I'm not sure that we're quite ready to get those done. But these are going to be critical, critical to the economy of the 21st Century. >> The other thing, I can't let you go without asking you about just the opensource business models themself. I've been listening to podcasts. We had a couple of companies go IPO recently. >> Jim: Yeah. >> They're better involved, and they're like, oh wait, I'm an enterprise company, I'm a software company. VC, you shouldn't invest in opensource because they can't monetize what they're doing. What's your take on the investment and business prospect for the other companies that are not Red Hat? >> Well, look, I'm thrilled to see Cloudera going public. Obviously Hortonworks public. MuleSoft recently. And I know some of those are hybrid models, they have an open core, and they have some other proprietary around it. But look, it's still dollars that are getting invested in opensource software I think we've clearly proven a model that you can have 100% opensource and build a successful business. For a whole set of technologies, it's clearly a better innovation model. The thing that I continue to push people is, don't think about it as selling IP. And this is, I've actually had conversations with several university presidents about this same issue. University education is more about the content. Don't be scared of MOOCs, right? And most people kind of get that, a university education, yeah, content's a part of it. But there are 50 other things that make up an education. So that's when I always come back to opensource companies and say, assume the content's free, because it's going to be better if it's totally free. And now think about, how do you build a model around the fact that content's free. And, I think education's a great one. Your industry in media is certainly one that needs to continue to innovate around business models as well. So, rather than saying, let's take a development model that's superior in a number of regards for a set of technologies, especially around infrastructure, and say, let's hamper it, and make it work in the old school business model. Let's continue to work to innovate business models that allow the innovation to happen, because it's going to happen, right? You do have to recognize that so much of what you're seeing in opensource is really a byproduct of what Google and Facebook and others are doing. And that's going to continue, so the best innovation's going to come there. You got to figure out business models that work for it. >> You got to figure them out Thank you so much, Jim. Jim Whitehurst, we appreciate your time. >> It's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will return with more from the Red Hat Summit. (upbeat techno music)