>> 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.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering ServiceNow Knowledge17 brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back this is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick Rob McDonnell is here he's the head of Enterprise Products at Air New Zealand Rob thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure thanks for having me. >> So Air New Zealand you know energy costs are down that's good for the airline business isn't it. >> Anything that's good for the barrel price of oil. >> It's priced like a tax cut to the consumer, we all go traveling. Tell us a little about the organization and your role. So we're in New Zealand headquartered out of Auckland in New Zealand Asia Pacific based but we have routed that travel to London as well. Asia Pacific is our core business. I'm part of the Digital Leadership team in the Enterprise Products, that's products like a typical IT function would run, like a CIO would run. So we have a product organization which we've had in place for the last year and a half. One of the product managers looks after our customers. So for online booking, mobile app and customer experience, one of my colleagues looks after the operational products another colleague looks after air points products with the frequent flier program. And I look after everything else internally so you've got HR products, you've got finance, help desk, incident management, we've got mobility, offices, workspace and collaboration, so there's really quite a bit in there. >> So what are the big drivers in your business that are affecting those things that you look after. >> Probably the primary one now is the new focus and a renewed focus on the internal customer. Since we started in this role a year and a half ago I've been mandating and championing the cause of the internal customer. Typically, it's about the revenue and the external customer but for me it's about the internal customer. And I've got 12 and a half thousand Air New Zealanders that I consider my customers. Those guys are the ones that wake up in the morning, they look at their Apple watch and check a message, or they login in the morning and that experience has to be correct, it has to be right when they walk into the office and when they swipe in with a badge or want to do something like get a payroll slip or something. That experience is my primary driver. So, we're looking at typifying what we have so fixing the pain-points is probably my first thing. Remove all the pain points out of the way of my customers my users, make sure they can operate. Make the job the challenge, not the tools they are using. Focusing on mobility, so focusing on the more mobile workforce that we have. I'd reckon about 60% of my user base is considered mobile. We got crew and pilots that you wouldn't see in the head office from one day to the next. A big push on cloud for obvious reasons, and then future workspace. >> So tell us about your ServiceNow journey, when did that start? >> So our ServiceNow journey started just over a year and a half ago. We had quite a frustrating environment where we had a bad reputation for digital services. People weren't too happy calling our help desk. The name of the product we had was called assist an internally branded product, people called it Cease and desist, the reputation was, we had a bad reputation. So one of our primary goals was to get that reputation back, earn it back and really try and delight out customers. So we had gone through some product selection and ServiceNow came right on top and was the product of choice for us to implement. So we were able to replace four platforms with ServiceNow. We had one platform we buying parts off the internet a couple things to keep it going, so was a bit of a shaky situation. Bad user experience, so implementing ServiceNow we made sure that we took a, when we did the reorganization for digital, we stopped the project and changed it to be a business organizational change project not an IT project. So it wasn't IT delivering a product to the business it was a business choice and a business decision so we changed, stopped the project, introduced and implemented change management as part of the project, we brought in different skills in terms of Agile ways of working and we changed the product structure as well to suit. We went live with an MVP last year, we pushed out redesigned platform January last year, was about 70% ready, so again it was a new feeling for Air New Zealand staff having a product that wasn't perfect, but just suited for going live. And then we went live with the full suite of what we were doing in June, July last year. It's been an awesome journey. >> So you made the decision to sweep the floor of these four other platforms. At the point at which you made that decision you did a contract with ServiceNow. What happened, how long did it take you to get to that MVP, what did you have to do. I mean the old saying is God created the world in six days but he didn't have an install base. You had to deal with that existing infrastructure how did you go from that point to the MVP how long did it take? >> Our approach was to, we were trying to de-risk or learn more about what the experience is going to be for our customers, so we went live, onboard in Helsinki so one of the first customers to go live on the Helsinki product. In the interim, we took the existing platform and we reskinned it with a brand new look and feel. The brand new look and feel was around how we wanted our customers to experience service management. So we followed them in terms of their role rather than just rolling out the product. So we reskinned the existing product and we reiterated and reiterated on what they wanted. Changing the features in the screen and rolling that one out. So we knew we had a really really good product and on the day we went live, we just basically flipped the switch. We didn't carry over any existing tickets, migrated hardly any of the data, started from scratch basically by flicking a switch. The product we went live with on the ServiceNow platform looked exactly like the one we reskinned in preparation for when we de-risked it. >> How long did that take to get to MVP? >> MVP was about two months and we included design. Then the remainder was about three months. >> What are some of the things you're measuring in terms of the customer satisfaction? Obviously nobody is saying cease and desist anymore. But what are some of the things you are measuring getting feedback from your internal customers? >> People like the product they like the platform. They like the fact that we can access it on a mobile phone. Which again, is a new thing for internal staff and Air New Zealanders. Along side the digital changes we were making some physical changes too. So we introduced a new help desk along side both at the airport and in the city offices. So again, people were getting physical and digital experience when we went live. And like I said I like the product, I like the simplicity and our business partners enjoy the speed that they can get catalog items up and get their teams more efficient and more effective. The ability to do pre-approved changes has driven a lot of efficiency, I think we have over 75% of pre-approved changes. We had things like I think 26% of our calls to the help desk were for password resets we're using this took to help reduce those numbers. We introduced a new MPS score as well or a digital happiness score for our internal customers. So we have it for external, so we've introduced that for internal. We promote that on the front of our portal as well so people can give us feedback in terms of what they like and what they don't like. So it's fairly responsive in how we react to what they want in the product. >> You avoided custom modules or did you do some custom modification to the platform? >> Mainly configuration to get it where we wanted to go. The look and feel in the portal was fairly custom but using code components available on the platform. >> Yeah, so when you upgrade you don't have to do the heavy wrestling with the modules. >> No it was an easy journey. >> And then how about a single CMDB is that something that you guys have adopted. >> So CMDB we delayed until this year. We're actually starting it next month. >> What's the conversation like internally around CMDB? Is it, you got a lot of different parts of the organization and is it going to be a single CMDB for the entire organization or are there going to be multiple CMDB's? >> So it's a big, scary topic, and the lady we're getting on, we're talking about it in iterative approach start small and build out. Primarily it will be the core enterprise stack, shared services stack, then we need to look at, and again it's wonderful being here at Knowledge and learning how far people are pushing it in terms of their external customers, so I'm looking at operations, I'll be looking at IoT and figuring how I can use that platform to be more effective. Having the CMDB will be a good starting block for that. >> You said IoT. >> So opportunities for us are around, we're an airline we have plans, we have power machines, we have engines on planes so you would have heard GE being mentioned quite a bit here. So what's the opportunity with those products and how can we use service management for event management of those stacks? When we think about the digital workplace environment and the connected devices, how do we use ServiceNow in that environment and how do we use it effectively? I think there's a great opportunity for us there. >> Can you take us back into the discussions internally when you had to sell the project internally to the management. Who did you have to involve, what was the business case? >> I think the business case was primarily lead by IT. Or the old IT because it was our product. All the onus on the project resided in IT, so I think the sale around the cost of the platform the duration on implementation, it wasn't too hard to sell in terms of the risk we were carrying on the legacy platforms. I think the opportunity if you flip it around the other side it was an easier conversation to our customers to say this is what you're getting and they were quite keen and quite eager to get involved in the implementation. >> What have you seen so far, it's early days but what kind of results have you seen? Can you share any metrics with us? >> I'll give you some indications early on about pre-approved changes and we have a bit of a, I'll defer on the exact numbers on our desk, we have so many parameters going on in New Zealand it wouldn't be fair to anybody. >> Well so just generally the business impact how would you describe that? >> Very positive, so we use it in the GSS area so Group Shared Services, so they're finding it far more effective to engage with their teams allocating work and automating the workflow. We have quite a queue, quite a backlog of other areas that want to get involved and automate and optimize. >> Where do you see this platform going? Do you see it driving into different parts of the business? We hear a lot about that at this conference is that something that you guys are looking at? >> Yeah, we rolled out to a group, our ground service equipment team, so they use it for example, a rampload or someone on the tarmac notifying a vendor that there is something wrong with a piece of equipment. So that optimizes that flow. So we're saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So that's quite an efficiency gain. So looking to push into again, more HR and finance, Group Shared Services. Looking to optimize against our work day implementation in July, so make sure those two platforms work together very well and build a platform appropriately. >> OK, so you'll bring in the HR piece, is that right? >> Yeah, we'll need to find a, I've been having lots of conversations the last few days around how those two behemoth products fit together how you use them effectively and that's where we need to get to. So how do you use a portal on the front end to make it easier for the customer or the user to do what they want without having to think about what platform they need to go to. >> How about the show? You mentioned it's great being here, as a quasi-noob. Is this your first? >> This is my first Knowledge. I think it's fantastic. >> Things you've learned? What kinds of things are exciting you here? >> I like the ServiceNow people amazing, passionate, including the guys back in Australia and New Zealand a few of them are here, I can see the passion back there and I can see it here so it's quite collegial and it's amazing to see. I think the event's awesome, it's massive. Keynote was fantastic, it was really good. And just the energy with the vendors and the passion that people have for their customers and the business value they can get from this product, that's one of the key things I'm hearing from all the conversations. >> It sounds like you're getting what's been talked about over and over which is such the peer input in terms of helping you figure out where you're going to go next. >> Yeah, lot's of people are here to learn, but also lots of people are here to share and I'm learning that time and time again. Which is great. >> Rob thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your story. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17. Be right back.