>> 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.

(energetic electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE! Covering POLYCON18, brought to you by Polymath. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is exclusive live CUBE coverage here in the Bahamas for POLYCON18, it's a crypto event. Just talking economics. It's all the players in the space really discussing the future. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest, Bill Tai, friend, Facebook friend, industry legend, venture capitalist, kite surfer. His Twitter handle is @kitevc. Follow him. He's also involved in Bitfury and a lot of Bitcoin-related activities. Been a mentor to others. Great to have you, Bill. >> Thank you, John. I really appreciate you having me on the show. >> You tweeted in 2010, "This Bitcoin thing is interesting. "Check out this white paper." Can? >> Yeah, that was a >> Seminal moment. >> You know, back then I didn't know it would be, maybe a seminal moment. I was just lonely. (laughing) So, and the back story there, a very good friend of mine is Philip Rosedale, and he had approached me when he was starting a site called Second Life, where you basically create a digital avatar, maybe of yourself, maybe not, and you have this kind of, you know, world where you have people in an unstructured environment. And in the very early days of Second Life, when people were kind of just milling about, I said to Philip, I said, "Hey, Philip. "You know, maybe we should create a currency." I said, you know like, "If you think about it. "Think about what is Las Vegas? "Las Vegas is this pile of sand "but there is this metropolis on it. "How did that happen?" I said, "You know, if you took ten people, "sat them in a circle, and you put one poker chip "in the system, and said 'Pass it to the right,' "and everybody did that a million times a year. "Everybody would have a million dollars of income. "And then you could take chunks off "and build a casino, and build a resort, "and you'd have Las Vegas." So I said, "Let's do that." And so the Linden dollar was born. And so, soon, there was this thriving economy in Second Life that just, it was quite amazing to see. And so, when Bitcoin came out in 2009, as soon as I heard about it, I wanted to see what it was. So I went to the site and I read the paper, and it just seemed really cool. And so I started to play with it a little bit, and by 2010, I just thought it was really cool, but no one else had seen it. >> Yeah. >> So I took to Twitter to say, (laughing) "Is anyone out there "using this P to P digital currency?" You know, and >> It's funny. Our first web, You know, I started SiliconANGLE in 2009. David and I partnered in 2010. Our first website, the developer didn't want PayPal. He wanted Bitcoin. It was 22 cents, I think, at the time and we used the site for about half a year, and then we changed it and went back paid fiat. But if you think about where these come from, you brought up Second Life. Okay, online virtual world, really ahead of its time, but really set the stage for what we're seeing now. Gaming people who know virtual currencies, thrive on crypto. >> Yeah. Yes. >> So I'd like to get your perspective. Because, I know you've done a lot of investing in mobile and gaming, and what not. Where does that cross over? Because there's been a lot of virtual currencies going on in games. >> Yes. >> For a long, long time. >> Yes. >> How is that influencing and impacting this industry? >> Well, you know it's, I guess you have to ask, when you ask, you know, where does the real and where does the digital, like do they cross? And what are they? What is currency? Is the U.S. dollar real, right? And actually, let me pause for a second and reach down to my phone, because did you see a tweet today from Sheila Bair? I have to read this. Okay, so I just saw a tweet from @zerohedge earlier today. Sheila Bair, on Bitcoin, Quote, "I don't think we should ban it. "The green bills in your pocket don't have "an intrinsic value either." >> Well, look, the government wants to get rid of paper money. The people want to get rid of paper money. Why not? >> What is it really? Right? I mean so >> Backed by the U.S. military maybe, I don't know, I mean what >> What is it? >> What is it? Right. >> That's a good question. >> So I don't really see a difference. You know, they're kind of the same thing. You know, it's just something that people believe in, as the embodiment of value exchange. Whatever it is. So if it's a green piece of paper, or it's not. If it's shell, if it's a pebble. There is a fascinating book that you can read called The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. He's at Stanford now at the Hoover Institute, but he got widely known after the great financial crisis unfolded. He basically wrote a book called The Ascent of Money which tracks the history of value exchange across civilized communities, for thousands of years, from pebbles to shells, to feathers, to credit, to default swaps. And coined the term "Cimerica," which is sort of the interdependence of the cash flow. And what became apparent to me when I read that, was that the world of ICOs is actually no different than anything we've experienced in civilized humanity. You know, if you think about, even in the United States, in the 1800s, at one time there were over 200 currencies circulating at the same time. If you think about the formation of the United States as colonies, a bunch of guys get off the boats. They draw lines around the forest. Here's Connecticut, here's Vermont, here's New York, here's Virginia. Let's do an ICO. They all did an ICO. If you think about it, they created their own unit of currency per their community and geography, no different than what's happening today. >> When Lincoln was shot, there was a five dollar confederate bill in his wallet, right? I mean, the confederates had their own money. >> Yeah, and also you brought a point up in the conference you were in in Dubai, which I thought was really intriguing, and provocative, but also kind of real. The Oil Dollar Association post-World War II, >> Yeah >> Essentially wasn't actually securitizing oil That was an ICO. >> It was the tokenization of oil, right. Yeah, so, you know, the modern currency system that we have today, that is commonly known as the Petrodollar, so it's actually a relatively recent phenomenon. So if you think about, of course, the quote "U.S. dollar" was around a little bit longer than 1944, but it was really at Brett Woods that the dollar had its sort of birth to become the world's standard currency. And, you know, this is maybe a little bit of an over-simplification, but think about the picture after World War II. So, you basically have every major productive economy have war, destroy themselves. The U.S. enters late, finishes it all off completely, and you basically have 100 million people milling about. A little bit like Second Life, right? So, what do you do? Got to make them productive. Create a currency, set of currencies. So for every community of interest, like every token community of interest, you say, "Well, here's a lira, here's a franc, "Here's a pound, here's a mark. "Let's take gold, "reference the dollar to gold, and reference "every one of these currencies against the dollar. "Gentlemen, start your engines." Right? >> There you go. >> So how is that different than an ICO? Okay, so that was fixed to gold for a long time until people started to game it. And when the French accumulated a lot of dollars and they realized, whoa, there's more dollars than there is gold, I'm just going to go cash all this in. So they literally came over to take all the gold, and then the president took it off the gold standard. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> So it had to couple with something. So what it the utility token that that became? That became referenced to petroleum because the U.S. had basically forced everybody in the Middle East to accept dollars as payment and what that did was it created the dollar as a storage of energy. So you could basically take a token of oil and, as a separate nation, you could store that through your trade, if you had sort of a surplus, and you provided yourself energy security. >> Well, most currencies, right, historically have had a pretty short shelf life. Presumably the same will be true in the Blockchain world. >> Don't know. >> The crypto world. >> Yeah, it's, if you look at the history of humans over six million years, and it's arguable it's at four or six, or whatever it is, you're right. Like there have always been multiple currencies all the time. And very rarely have they ever become sort of like super-dominating currencies. That is also a very recent phenomena. I think, driven by the industrial revolution, and a combination of the Petrodollar and scale economics and manufacturing. So, so that >> Yeah, and overwhelmingly here, at this event, people feel like security tokens, as an asset class, are going to vastly overtake utility tokens. >> You know, actually, securities are a whole, I mean regular securities, (laughing) that's an interesting subject altogether. Right, okay, so there was a time, in my lifetime, when I was a securities analyst at Alex Brown in the '80s, and in that period of time, everything traded at ten times earnings, right? So you had a barometer for, a stock should be valued at this, because is should have a PE of actual real earnings. >> Dave Vellante: Independent of its growth or anything else, right? >> Yes, and if it grew, you had a PEG ratio, so you'd have a little bit higher growth, and so a little higher PE, but what's happened to securities over time, of that ilk, okay, you had to get these companies profitable to get them public in that era, and then over time the sort of like network effects have come in, and communities of interest have formed around companies. So, and the structure of securities has moved from give me something with earnings multiply it by a number to get the value, to give me a share of something that has no voting rights and no earnings. Does that sound like a token? That's Snapchat, right? (laughing) >> So you literally have, you know, Google, Facebook, all these companies now issue shares that don't have the characteristics of equity shares. They don't vote. What are they now, right? So tokenization is sort of a natural extension of that. >> Dave Vellante: Do you see that as a >> They don't have dividends either >> You see that as a fundamental shift in the value equation, the perceived value equation? Both? Is it sustainable? >> I think it's basically, so, you know, I go back and forth on this, because is it a trend line or is it a return in the past? Right? So what is a confederate dollar that was in Abraham Lincoln's pocket? It's a belief. So what is a share of Snapchat? It's a belief. It doesn't have earnings >> John Furrier: And a token is a belief. >> Right. >> But the trend is securing something, right? So the trend we're seeing is, obviously the ruling, first of all the ruling in Switzerland was interesting. You now have a trading so an asset, so security, asset, and then trading. So they kind of went a little bit deeper, which I think is helpful. >> Yeah. >> For the community. But what are they securing? So the trend, as we see, is percentage of revenue, non dilutive and equity in the classic sense, so kind of a token. And then some sort of either buyback options, people are doing things like that. Do you see patterns like that? What are you seeing for? >> Well. >> I mean a security token makes sense. It's all credited. The paperwork's known. >> Yeah, so, you know, it feels like, so some people refer to sort of Bitcoin as digital gold, you know, and in that sense, like gold is a commodity but is the root of securities, you know, whether it's gold ETF's or something, because you perceive a limited supply, and you perceive a storage of value, so that is where I think Bitcoin sits. But then I think this whole other category of utility tokens, that may be considered security tokens by definition of law, that resembles the petrodollar. And as we were talking about earlier, you know gold used to represent or a dollar used to represent a share of gold, but it didn't anymore. So what was underpinning it? It was basically, in my opinion, the ability for that token to have utility as an instrument to purchase oil for your energy security. And so, I think that's kind of where the utility tokens are today. >> You're a leader in the industry, and you're well-known. Communities need to thrive. And factions form, curriencies form, and can be very productive, and also can be counterproductive. >> Yeah. >> So what is the unwritten rules that you guys are putting forth. Are people meeting? Are you talking? And sometimes, as people make money, which a lot of people are making a lot of money right now. I mean, for some people, it's the first time. Didn't have money, make money. You know, egos kind of come in. So all of these are normal things. But again, this is a societal community dynamic, >> Yes. >> But super important. Institutional investors are coming in. >> Right. >> Big money. This isn't Burning Man. This isn't. Burning Man's cool, but you can't model this industry after Burning Man. Maybe you could. I don't know. What is your take? >> Well, you know, it's, I think that the guiding principle really needs to be looking out for the greater good, because I think that is the issue that everyone is trying to solve for. And it's not just endemic to Bitcoin and Blockchain. It's a societal issue that's been with us since the creation of civilization. And I don't know how to solve for that, but I think you need people to stand up and just make sure that people are thinking about that all the time. You know, and I think, over my career, I think I started as kind of like a geek hacker, sitting in the back of the room, working on little microchips and building stuff, and I still do that on weekends sometimes, but, you know, for whatever reason, I've been thrust into this role now where I do have a set of communities of interest that started actually around kiteboarding, but it became sort of a larger community around entrepreneurship. And we've actually, I have a 501(c)(3) that supports ocean causes and entrepreneurial things, and it's called ACTAI Global, and we have a couple value statements. We actually, we're codifying it, so we actually have a little pin, you know the ACTAI stands for Athletes, Conservationists, Technologists, Artists and Innovators, and all of us collectively, we combine our energy to work on causes. Some of the things that we support are around ocean conservation and the preservation of ecosystems, but we also work on a lot of other entrepreneurial efforts to help each other. But the thing that I've realized with our group is we've been very productive as a community, and you see a lot of companies that are born in our community, funded in our community, like, you know, whether it's Canva or Zoom, or any number of projects that turn into community-based companies because the group of people, they think and they stand for something greater than themselves. So that's kind of one principle. It's sort of like, how do you, how do you place your values as something to support the greater community, and that's something that I think, if everybody would just think about that a little bit, and stand for something greater than themselves, the world would be a better place. And on that note, the second ethos that we operate to is that we strive to leave every person or place we touch better than before we touched it. So when you see us like kiting at a beach, you'll see us picking up garbage, too. You know? We don't go someplace without trying to improve it a little bit. And I think we help each other on the companies, too. And I think the last thing that people really should try to do, everybody in this world of technology, has a little bit of a superpower, whatever that is. You know, they wouldn't be doing the things that they're doing if they weren't totally insanely focused on a piece of technology. They know something that other people don't. And if everybody would just try a little bit to use the powers the universe has granted them, to empower others, to unlock other people, the world would be a better place. So I think, you know, I think all of these factions, if we could just get people to stand for something greater than themselves, work to make people and places better off than before they touched them, and empower other people, I think we'll have some great outcomes. >> You know, empathy, empathy is a wonderful thing. And also you mentioned, know your neighbor. You know, that's a big thing. We're doing our part here in theCUBE, bringing our mission content. Bill, been great to have you on. And we'll get that clip out on the network about your mission. Great stuff. >> Thank you, thanks. >> And great to see you >> It's an awesome philosophy. >> be successful, you're a great leader. People look up to you, and certainly we're glad to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. Hey, more live coverage after this short break here on theCUBE in the Bahamas for crypto currency, token economics, POLYCON18. We'll be back with more after this short break.