>>Mhm Yes. Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of red hat summit 2021 Virtual. I'm john for your host of the cube we're here with Roberto Pellegrini, head of architecture and digital ai services from stam he's remote promoting in from Milan Italy Roberto. Great to see you. Thanks for joining us on the cube. >>Great to see you too john. Thanks for having me here. >>Love the virtual events. We can bring people in from all around the world. I love the virtual. I mean it's one of the trade us for not being in person as we can still get you in. Thanks for coming on. Before we get started. I want to dig into the digital architecture of what you guys are doing. Very compelling in a hybrid cloud. It's got you got all the things going on which I like. But before we start, can you provide a short overview of Snam who are your customers? What is your company's focus and what's your role there? >>Sure. So his name is one of the worst leading energy infrastructure operators. And we basically beat the energy infrastructures and offering the way the services our mission is to guide the evolution of the energy sector and leave the energy transition to a low carbon future. And as you can see in our last investment plan, we declared our net zero-carbon objective to bridge by 2040. This is why we basically are investing a lot in uh, technology in renovating our technology stack in order to provide our business line with the most innovative sustainable energy network, thanks to which we are already guaranteeing stable supplies to europe of natural gas. >>Love your title. Love the fact you've got the ai piece in there. Um, what about specifically is your role? What do you oversee? >>I'm responsible for architecture, digital and artificial intelligence services. That basically means that uh, with with my team and my extended team of the digital technology department are designing the entire technology stack for islam. And I'm specifically focusing more on developing intelligent than usable services for our business lines >>awesome. You guys were there, it's nam have transformed a lot the stack. That's cool. When you get into that, you redesign your applications map. Right? So it's really edge to cloud now. Edge up to the cloud. What were the business drivers and the objectives to reach that goal? Because that's really a great use case. I mean you got the edge to deal with intelligent, you got industrial, global business drivers and objectives. >>Yeah. Our main business drivers has always been to to increase the effectiveness of our processes and business lines so bear support the decision of our internal line of business. And we soon discover that we need a more data in order to do that. And we structure very extensive of your program. But those data provide information about internal states of our assets because they're coming from the census and we thought what about the environment in which our assets are located. So uh following up on that we integrated data coming from remote sensing technologies. So think about drones and satellites. Major data and we soon discover that we needed to renew and extend our technology stack from edge to cloud as you said. And to be the scalable that the platform in order to process this new level of uh data this way we think we will be able to enter the new volume of data that we predict. It will be 100 times what we currently manage and efficiently use AI and machine learning to the riding side from this new scale and complexity. So we're talking about big data >>repairs. I gotta ask you could you take a minute to describe your transformation journey you guys went through and how red hat helped you guys execute the digital transformation? >>Yeah we basically started working in 2018. We read up to set up our 12 grade in a snap. We basically needed to decide what to scale what you lift and shift what we factor in order to move our application to a modern architectural stack. And right up to us with this uh we use open ship for our container orchestration platform and from this we're developing our new application act. Then in 2019 we decided to accelerate the moving of our application workloads. We started moving 10-20 of our work clothes on open shift. And since then most of our new software project Islam, a club native and developed on open shifts. We're still in the process of leveraging modern architecture. So microservices based and using our continual construction platform and other software as a service platform in order to complete the modernization of our application that And we are targeting 2023 2024 to complete the entire process but as you know, is an ever changing landscape. So you basically never complete such a task in some way. >>Do you see red hat technology helping stem in its ecosystem for energy efficiency and aiming for low carbon emissions? >>I think that open ship provide provide us with the right level of flexibility and agility to move at the speed of our new businesses. That's one way to look at the quest and the other one. Uh huh. I think it would be in terms of energy efficiency and the carbon footprint that our application workloads generate. And I think that uh in that in that respect it could happen in the mid to long term, probably so it will be in proportion to the workloads. We will be able to re factor as purely reactive so as non blocking apps. This probably in fact for the same business service could improve the effective resource consumption, so indirectly saving energy and CO two, >>you know, I love this conversation and I know you're in Italy and wish we could be in person but I'm glad to get you on because you guys are kind of an example of the main theme at the conference this year, which is an edge, you know, intelligent edge and IOT, but you know, I O T has been around for a while and we've talked about it before, but now with the cloud and connecting to the cloud, that's a huge topic here at red hat summit 2021 you guys are well versed on the call O. T. Technology operational technologies and what's interesting is kubernetes and containerized orchestration all help operators, operations people. So you have this ot tight integration where the operational technology, old school technology people and the stack and the people in the disciplines are meeting the old I. T. And creating a new thing. So I have to ask you, what are these, what's that world like what are some of the use cases that you're working on and you're planning to deploy? >>Yeah. Yeah. Yeah exactly. It's exactly like that name has a long ot history as you said. So right now we have a complex brownfield uh, situation for our edges and gateways on the field. There are various technical components that resigns on the field. You must consider that Italian network, the Italian Transportation Network has more than 34,000 km of pipeline and differently sides of plants across the country. So we have several already several use cases currently running on our data centers that could benefit we think from distributed processing at the edge. Think about for example physical security. So just to give you an example privacy preserving local video processing for anomaly detection done at the edge, it's much more effective in our opinion. Poor hierarchical processing for data intensive task that involves field data so that you can process the data coming from the field at different level and take to the central data center only was needed. And we're also working on the usual problem there is with with the Widow Tea with the operation of the countries that is standardization. So we have many exogenous components and communication protocol there and you know without a proper rieti stack gathering and normalizing the data for a higher level process could become cumbersome. So security is also is also a relevant topic because it is usually preserve and the physical and natural layer and we we think that we can introduce variety pre main improvements about this. We're expanding the level of cybersec to the food technologists act, bringing modern internet security standard to the edge. We're pushing continue realization to the edge, being able to orchestrate our work clothes from data centers to the cloud. And we think that we this will provide us with a high level of flexibility and a better exploitation of the geographical distribution of our data. And last but not least we're standardizing our gateways and edges and this will help us streamline the message of the transfer conversion and normalization uh of the data we will receive from the field >>awesome. I gotta, I gotta ask for such a great job on the edge. I think that's a great vision. Uh building insecurity, it's important having that edge intelligent is really well done. Congratulations. Love the vision. I gotta ask you, what's your future plans for um Snam technology journey as a whole. What's your vision? What's your next step? >>So well, what we would like to focus on uh in the coming years is how to best leverage the average cloud environment we currently set up. So right now we have an average cloud environment with the data center and one cloud tenant and having our poor clothes running on open ship would make it easier for us to leverage the offering of different club providers and of course to best exploit what we currently have on our tenants. Second one is find the best way to leverage IOT. So as I said before, our focus in the coming years will be to complete our IOT foundation, rolling out our edges are gateways and put our new unified opposition system to work. And this will provide the computational backbone of our intelligent investments. And finally, uh and this is a less objective that is will be built on top of the other two. We must find different ways and export different ways to leverage data and artificial intelligence. So we need to exploit our data uh in order to generate insight for our business lines. Need to the scale of our new data streams, artificial intelligence machine learning, we think will be ubiquitous in our applications right now. We're already using it but not at the scale uh that the new data streams uh well we'll need and most of the algorithms are working on data that are apart from legacy system and scare the system. So they are specifically created for each project. We're about to begin an exciting data journey where everything will reside on a unified data platform and our data scientists, our data analyst in the business lines will be able to derive value from them >>awesome. You know, you guys are great customer use case. I love the real operational impact. I talked with a lot of other practitioners and end user enterprises and I get the same question and I got the statement. They say actually security needs to be built in, but the challenges and where they want to, what they want to do. And I want to get your thoughts on this. If you don't mind commenting, they all say, I want to run cloud native applications, cloud native applications from my data center to the cloud and then out to the edge and with this as a distributed platform, one operation set, whether it's O T I T I want to make that, that's my endgame. In the short term, I get there fast. So I gotta ask you for those people that want that is open shift, a good solution for that. In your opinion, >>we, we of course think it is uh, it is part of our IOT foundation, uh, is not the only technology components, but is one of the, one of the most relevant and it is absolutely happiness in uh, enabling the possibility of orchestrating more clothes uh, from the cloud to the edge. And we will be able to give you more information about that as soon as uh, we will release the first Distribue work clothes within 2021. So I'll be happy to to answer any any questions from our peers or or other colleagues from other industries. >>You guys have thousands and thousands of sites. This is the classic industrial edge implementation, closely monitoring just monitoring the pipes. I mean, you gotta monitoring the system just physically. I mean, this is like a, just a physical thing. So now as you have technology, you guys have to monitor and get that early detection of any gas leaks, this is critical to your business. Um how is that changing? How is that environment changing with technology is more automated? What's your vision? How are you guys looking at that? >>Well, we, we surely are trying to move along to two main drivers. The first is um, unification and standardization of how we monitor all these distributed technology stock. This is very important because even for the simplest use case, you're now dealing with distributed application and this is a entirely different game to what we are used to basically. And and um uh the the other rather the other relevant thing is how can we get the best from um the machines we put on the field. So in other in other in other terms, how can we standardize how we connect to the machines we have on the field and how much intelligence we need to put there and how to test it. And in order to do that, we're thinking about um building a digital twin of our assets that will enable us to being able to test and to end before getting to the real thing on field. How will it work? What are the security vulnerabilities, potential security vulnerability and other aspects uh of the technology infrastructure and the data infrastructure? And we think this is very important because in some way uh in order to provide the acceleration and the scale that we uh are going to provide uh to, to our company, we need to be sure well in advance that what we designed will work in practice without getting to the field. We would like to get into the field where everything is already tested, >>repair too. Great to have you on the cube. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in from Milan Italy. Um cute virtual. It's one of the benefits and hope to see you in person soon at the next event. But great use case, love your environment, love how you're looking at that platform is a distributed platform and bringing that O T T together data center to the cloud to the edge. That's a really relevant use case and architecture. So congratulations. >>Thank you very much, john and I hope to see you too very soon. Alive >>when I'm in Italy, we're gonna come by and do a site visit and uh, see each other coming on. I appreciate it. Thank you. >>Absolutely. >>Okay. Cube coverage for Red Hat Summit 2021. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.