(intro music) >> "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> We're not going to- >> Hey everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Dave Nicholson, day four of MWC23. I mean, it's Dave, it's, it's still really busy. And you walking the floors, you got to stop and start. >> It's surprising. >> People are cheering. They must be winding down, giving out the awards. Really excited. Pier, look at you and Elias here. He's the vice president of Engineering Technology for Edge Computing Offers Strategy and Execution at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Dan Cummins, who's a fellow and vice president of, in the Edge Business Unit at Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I love when I see the term fellow. You know, you don't, they don't just give those away. What do you got to do to be a fellow at Dell? >> Well, you know, fellows are senior technical leaders within Dell. And they're usually tasked to help Dell solve you know, a very large business challenge to get to a fellow. There's only, I think, 17 of them inside of Dell. So it is a small crowd. You know, previously, really what got me to fellow, is my continued contribution to transform Dell's mid-range business, you know, VNX two, and then Unity, and then Power Store, you know, and then before, and then after that, you know, they asked me to come and, and help, you know, drive the technology vision for how Dell wins at the Edge. >> Nice. Congratulations. Now, Pierluca, I'm looking at this kind of cool chart here which is Edge, Edge platform by Dell Technologies, kind of this cube, like cubes course, you know. >> AK project from here. >> Yeah. So, so tell us about the Edge platform. What, what's your point of view on all that at Dell? >> Yeah, absolutely. So basically in a, when we create the Edge, and before even then was bringing aboard, to create this vision of the platform, and now building the platform when we announced project from here, was to create solution for the Edge. Dell has been at the edge for 30 years. We sold a lot of compute. But the reality was people want outcome. And so, and the Edge is a new market, very exciting, but very siloed. And so people at the Edge have different personas. So quickly realize that we need to bring in Dell, people with expertise, quickly realize as well that doing all these solution was not enough. There was a lot of problem to solve because the Edge is outside of the data center. So you are outside of the wall of the data center. And what is going to happen is obviously you are in the land of no one. And so you have million of device, thousand of million of device. All of us at home, we have all connected thing. And so we understand that the, the capability of Dell was to bring in technology to secure, manage, deploy, with zero touch, zero trust, the Edge. And all the edge the we're speaking about right now, we are focused on everything that is outside of a normal data center. So, how we married the computer that we have for many years, the new gateways that we create, so having the best portfolio, number one, having the best solution, but now, transforming the way that people deploy the Edge, and secure the Edge through a software platform that we create. >> You mentioned Project Frontier. I like that Dell started to do these sort of project, Project Alpine was sort of the multi-cloud storage. I call it "The Super Cloud." The Project Frontier. It's almost like you develop, it's like mission based. Like, "Okay, that's our North Star." People hear Project Frontier, they know, you know, internally what you're talking about. Maybe use it for external communications too, but what have you learned since launching Project Frontier? What's different about the Edge? I mean you're talking about harsh environments, you're talking about new models of connectivity. So, what have you learned from Project Frontier? What, I'd love to hear the fellow perspective as well, and what you guys are are learning so far. >> Yeah, I mean start and then I left to them, but we learn a lot. The first thing we learn that we are on the right path. So that's good, because every conversation we have, there is nobody say to us, you know, "You are crazy. "This is not needed." Any conversation we have this week, start with the telco thing. But after five minutes it goes to, okay, how I can solve the Edge, how I can bring the compute near where the data are created, and how I can do that secure at scale, and with the right price. And then can speak about how we're doing that. >> Yeah, yeah. But before that, we have to really back up and understand what Dell is doing with Project Frontier, which is an Edge operations platform, to simplify your Edge use cases. Now, Pierluca and his team have a number of verticalized applications. You want to be able to securely deploy those, you know, at the Edge. But you need a software platform that's going to simplify both the life cycle management, and the security at the Edge, with the ability to be able to construct and deploy distributed applications. Customers are looking to derive value near the point of generation of data. We see a massive explosion of data. But in particular, what's different about the Edge, is the different computing locations, and the constraints that are on those locations. You know, for example, you know, in a far Edge environment, the people that service that equipment are not trained in the IT, or train, trained in it. And they're also trained in the safety and security protocols of that environment. So you necessarily can't apply the same IT techniques when you're managing infrastructure and deploying applications, or servicing in those locations. So Frontier was designed to solve for those constraints. You know, often we see competitors that are doing similar things, that are starting from an IT mindset, and trying to shift down to cover Edge use cases. What we've done with Frontier, is actually first understood the constraints that they have at the Edge. Both the operational constraints and technology constraints, the service constraints, and then came up with a, an architecture and technology platform that allows them to start from the Edge, and bleed into the- >> So I'm laughing because you guys made the same mistake. And you, I think you learned from that mistake, right? You used to take X86 boxes and throw 'em over the fence. Now, you're building purpose-built systems, right? Project Frontier I think is an example of the learnings. You know, you guys an IT company, right? Come on. But you're learning fast, and that's what I'm impressed about. >> Well Glenn, of course we're here at MWC, so it's all telecom, telecom, telecom, but really, that's a subset of Edge. >> Yes. >> Fair to say? >> Yes. >> Can you give us an example of something that is, that is, orthogonal to, to telecom, you know, maybe off to the side, that maybe overlaps a little bit, but give us an, give us an example of Edge, that isn't specifically telecom focused. >> Well, you got the, the Edge verticals. and Pierluca could probably speak very well to this. You know, you got manufacturing, you got retail, you got automotive, you got oil and gas. Every single one of them are going to make different choices in the software that they're going to use, the hyperscaler investments that they're going to use, and then write some sort of automation, you know, to deploy that, right? And the Edge is highly fragmented across all of these. So we certainly could deploy a private wireless 5G solution, orchestrate that deployment through Frontier. We can also orchestrate other use cases like connected worker, or overall equipment effectiveness in manufacturing. But Pierluca you have a, you have a number. >> Well, but from your, so, but just to be clear, from your perspective, the whole idea of, for example, private 5g, it's a feature- >> Yes. >> That might be included. It happened, it's a network topology, a network function that might be a feature of an Edge environment. >> Yes. But it's not the center of the discussion. >> So, it enables the outcome. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> So this, this week is a clear example where we confirm and establish this. The use case, as I said, right? They, you say correctly, we learned very fast, right? We brought people in that they came from industry that was not IT industry. We brought people in with the things, and we, we are Dell. So we have the luxury to be able to interview hundreds of customers, that just now they try to connect the OT with the IT together. And so what we learn, is really, at the Edge is different personas. They person that decide what to do at the Edge, is not the normal IT administrator, is not the normal telco. >> Who is it? Is it an engineer, or is it... >> It's, for example, the store manager. >> Yeah. >> It's, for example, the, the person that is responsible for the manufacturing process. Those people are not technology people by any means. But they have a business goal in mind. Their goal is, "I want to raise my productivity by 30%," hence, I need to have a preventive maintenance solution. How we prescribe this preventive maintenance solution? He doesn't prescribe the preventive maintenance solution. He goes out, he has to, a consult or himself, to deploy that solution, and he choose different fee. Now, the example that I was doing from the houses, all of us, we have connected device. The fact that in my house, I have a solar system that produce energy, the only things I care that I can read, how much energy I produce on my phone, and how much energy I send to get paid back. That's the only thing. The fact that inside there is a compute that is called Dell or other things is not important to me. Same persona. Now, if I can solve the security challenge that the SI, or the user need to implement this technology because it goes everywhere. And I can manage this in extensively, and I can put the supply chain of Dell on top of that. And I can go every part in the world, no matter if I have in Papua New Guinea, or I have an oil ring in Texas, that's the winning strategy. That's why people, they are very interested to the, including Telco, the B2B business in telco is looking very, very hard to how they recoup the investment in 5g. One of the way, is to reach out with solution. And if I can control and deploy things, more than just SD one or other things, or private mobility, that's the key. >> So, so you have, so you said manufacturing, retail, automotive, oil and gas, you have solutions for each of those, or you're building those, or... >> Right now we have solution for manufacturing, with for example, PTC. That is the biggest company. It's actually based in Boston. >> Yeah. Yeah, it is. There's a company that the market's just coming right to them. >> We have a, very interesting. Another solution with Litmus, that is a startup that, that also does manufacturing aggregation. We have retail with Deep North. So we can do detecting in the store, how many people they pass, how many people they doing, all of that. And all theses solution that will be, when we will have Frontier in the market, will be also in Frontier. We are also expanding to energy, and we going vertical by vertical. But what is they really learn, right? You said, you know you are an IT company. What, to me, the Edge is a pre virtualization area. It's like when we had, you know, I'm, I've been in the company for 24 years coming from EMC. The reality was before there was virtualization, everybody was starting his silo. Nobody thought about, "Okay, I can run this thing together "with security and everything, "but I need to do it." Because otherwise in a manufacturing, or in a shop, I can end up with thousand of devices, just because someone tell to me, I'm a, I'm a store manager, I don't know better. I take this video surveillance application, I take these things, I take a, you know, smart building solution, suddenly I have five, six, seven different infrastructure to run this thing because someone say so. So we are here to democratize the Edge, to secure the Edge, and to expand. That's the idea. >> So, the Frontier platform is really the horizontal platform. And you'll build specific solutions for verticals. On top of that, you'll, then I, then the beauty is ISV's come in. >> Yes. >> 'Cause it's open, and the developers. >> We have a self certification program already for our solution, as well, for the current solution, but also for Frontier. >> What does that involve? Self-certification. You go through you, you go through some- >> It's basically a, a ISV can come. We have a access to a lab, they can test the thing. If they pass the first screen, then they can become part of our ecosystem very easily. >> Ah. >> So they don't need to spend days or months with us to try to architect the thing. >> So they get the premature of being certified. >> They get the Dell brand associated with it. Maybe there's some go-to-market benefits- >> Yes. >> As well. Cool. What else do we need to know? >> So, one thing I, well one thing I just want to stress, you know, when we say horizontal platform, really, the Edge is really a, a distributed edge computing problem, right? And you need to almost create a mesh of different computing locations. So for example, even though Dell has Edge optimized infrastructure, that we're going to deploy and lifecycle manage, customers may also have compute solutions, existing compute solutions in their data center, or at a co-location facility that are compute destinations. Project Frontier will connect to those private cloud stacks. They'll also collect to, connect to multiple public cloud stacks. And then, what they can do, is the solutions that we talked about, they construct that using an open based, you know, protocol, template, that describes that distributed application that produces that outcome. And then through orchestration, we can then orchestrate across all of these locations to produce that outcome. That's what the platform's doing. >> So it's a compute mesh, is what you just described? >> Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a software orchestration mesh. >> Okay. >> Right. And allows customers to take advantage of their existing investments. Also allows them to, to construct solutions based on the ISV of their choice. We're offering solutions like Pierluca had talked about, you know, in manufacturing with Litmus and PTC, but they could put another use case that's together based on another ISV. >> Is there a data mesh analog here? >> The data mesh analog would run on top of that. We don't offer that as part of Frontier today, but we do have teams working inside of Dell that are working on this technology. But again, if there's other data mesh technology or packages, that they want to deploy as a solution, if you will, on top of Frontier, Frontier's extensible in that way as well. >> The open nature of Frontier is there's a, doesn't, doesn't care. It's just a note on the mesh. >> Yeah. >> Right. Now, of course you'd rather, you'd ideally want it to be Dell technology, and you'll make the business case as to why it should be. >> They get additional benefits if it's Dell. Pierluca talked a lot about, you know, deploying infrastructure outside the walls of an IT data center. You know, this stuff can be tampered with. Somebody can move it to another room, somebody can open up. In the supply chain with, you know, resellers that are adding additional people, can open these devices up. We're actually deploying using an Edge technology called Secure Device Onboarding. And it solves a number of things for us. We, as a manufacturer can initialize the roots of trust in the Dell hardware, such that we can validate, you know, tamper detection throughout the supply chain, and securely transfer ownership. And that's different. That is not an IT technique. That's an edge technique. And that's just one example. >> That's interesting. I've talked to other people in IT about how they're using that technique. So it's, it's trickling over to that side of the business. >> I'm almost curious about the friction that you, that you encounter because the, you know, you paint a picture of a, of a brave new world, a brave new future. Ideally, in a healthy organization, they have, there's a CTO, or at least maybe a CIO, with a CTO mindset. They're seeking to leverage technology in the service of whatever the mission of the organization is. But they've got responsibilities to keep the lights on, as well as innovate. In that mix, what are you seeing as the inhibitors? What's, what's the push back against Frontier that you're seeing in most cases? Is it, what, what is it? >> Inside of Dell? >> No, not, I'm saying out, I'm saying with- >> Market friction. >> Market, market, market friction. What is the push back? >> I think, you know, as I explained, do yourself is one of the things that probably is the most inhibitor, because some people, they think that they are better already. They invest a lot in this, and they have the content. But those are again, silo solutions. So, if you go into some of the huge things that they already established, thousand of store and stuff like that, there is an opportunity there, because also they want to have a refresh cycle. So when we speak about softer, softer, softer, when you are at the Edge, the software needs to run on something that is there. So the combination that we offer about controlling the security of the hardware, plus the operating system, and provide an end-to-end platform, allow them to solve a lot of problems that today they doing by themselves. Now, I met a lot of customers, some of them, one actually here in Spain, I will not make the name, but it's a large automotive. They have the same challenge. They try to build, but the problem is this is just for them. And they want to use something that is a backup and provide with the Dell service, Dell capability of supply chain in all the world, and the diversity of the portfolio we have. These guys right now, they need to go out and find different types of compute, or try to adjust thing, or they need to have 20 people there to just prepare the device. We will take out all of this. So I think the, the majority of the pushback is about people that they already established infrastructure, and they want to use that. But really, there is an opportunity here. Because the, as I said, the IT/OT came together now, it's a reality. Three years ago when we had our initiative, they've pointed out, sarcastically. We, we- >> Just trying to be honest. (laughing) >> I can't let you get away with that. >> And we, we failed because it was too early. And we were too focused on, on the fact to going. Push ourself to the boundary of the IOT. This platform is open. You want to run EdgeX, you run EdgeX, you want OpenVINO, you want Microsoft IOT, you run Microsoft IOT. We not prescribe the top. We are locking down the bottom. >> What you described is the inertia of, of sunk dollars, or sunk euro into an infrastructure, and now they're hanging onto that. >> Yeah. >> But, I mean, you know, I, when we say horizontal, we think scale, we think low cost, at volume. That will, that will win every time. >> There is a simplicity at scale, right? There is a, all the thing. >> And the, and the economics just overwhelm that siloed solution. >> And >> That's inevitable. >> You know, if you want to apply security across the entire thing, if you don't have a best practice, and a click that you can do that, or bring down an application that you need, you need to touch each one of these silos. So, they don't know yet, but we going to be there helping them. So there is no pushback. Actually, this particular example I did, this guy said you know, there are a lot of people that come here. Nobody really described the things we went through. So we are on the right track. >> Guys, great conversation. We really appreciate you coming on "theCUBE." >> Thank you. >> Pleasure to have you both. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're live at the Fira. We're winding up day four. Keep it right there. Go to siliconangle.com. John Furrier's got all the news on "theCUBE.net." We'll be right back right after this break. "theCUBE," at MWC 23. (outro music)

[Music] welcome back to red hat summit 2021 my name is dave vellante and you're watching the cube where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise of course virtually in this case and i'm pleased to welcome victor carumpus who is the senior vice president of digital banking at bank mandiri coming in from jakarta welcome to the cube victor great to see you hi dave great to see you and great to be invited here thank you yeah you're very welcome i i wonder if you could just give us an overview of the bank maybe talk a little bit about your strategy your customers you know what the what the focus is of your company and what your role is there okay uh maybe i'm i'll give a short overview about bang mandir itself so bang money is a state-owned enterprise owned by the government but we also public company currently we already have a very big distribution channel in so uh you know indonesia is an island country it's very huge country so we are we are representing all over indonesia from province of aceh and i'm up to profits of papua and we have about 2600 branches all over indonesia and about uh 15 000 atms all over indonesia so bangladesh itself is focused on a lot of segment customers like indonesia from the corporate side small medium enterprise and also retail banking now uh we are we are currently focused in turning ourselves to become having to have more digital capability and currently in our uh current situations actually it is very good uh about 95 percent of our transactions is already coming from the electronic channel so it's only about five percent that coming from the branches but we know that this is still a journey uh and we are building more digital capability and features and functions on our digital channels to our customer got it um okay and so your your your digital journey kind of coincides i guess in a way with your your your container uh adoption journey uh i think that started a few years ago um and so maybe you could talk a little bit about that i i mean in thinking about modernizing your application portfolio obviously containers been around forever but they weren't packaged in a way that could actually be easily you know utilized and now you're seeing people in i.t roles like yourself really leaning in maybe you could talk about some of the technology considerations that impacted that desire to actually leverage containers i think uh first it's about the scalability because with a monolithic architecture it's kind of difficult to scale up for only specific features by doing container microservices we have options to scale up in a very fast way because one of the features is auto scaling on the container architectures uh one monitor is a very focused on the transaction banking so you might say bangladesh is supporting the economy of the country because in a in any given time in bangladesh we we're running about four thousand transactions per seconds that's a huge transactions number and have having said that uh our channel like i told you already running about 95 percent of the transactions so scalability is always important for us because especially like like now is the the in indonesia is a festive month it's a ramadan month where muslim is actually doing fasting but at the same time actually there's a lot of needs and people do a lot of transactions and on this kind of festive seasons the transition can be increased up to 40 or 50 suddenly and that's kind of things always happen in bangladesh and we must be ready and we must have a scalability on demand now containerization is enabling us to do that other thing is about flexibility because on the old days actually when we want to set up a new environment it's very difficult and takes a lot of time and that's affecting the time to market our products by doing the containerizations and putting it on a ci cd continuous integration called the development plan platform we are we call devsecops platform that kind of things becoming automatic because we set up the devsecos platform and the third one is the consistency actually so by by doing the contact investigations we can put the the apis on our back-end apis in the container itself and actually it's deliverable environment and a consistent experience to our customer because for example we promise our customer that every transaction should be finished within two seconds from their mobile banking up to our hosts and back forward to their mobile banking is only two seconds so that kind of thing is driving us to move to the current technology which we're using containerization and micro services great okay so 4 000 transactions per second you can't can't do that on erc20 ethereum for all you crypto fans out there that's that's pretty high volume uh and if i understand it correctly victor your role is really to envision this digital environment and then ultimately make it happen from a technology standpoint is that correct that's product that's got it yeah so okay so you now have a number of of product lines and teams you're using the same container platform maybe you could share with our audience some of the best practices and learnings that that you've taken away on this journey so i think first of all we can reuse a lot of components by doing this containerization platform is different when we still use the monolithic platform like the application server of java application server uh by using containerization actually uh be providing like a service banking as a service so whenever we build a new channel for example the first one we built a new service for example like a fun transfer service but when we create another channel for example a corporate banking electronic channel or we create another uh let's say wealth management channel whatever we already built before can be reusable instantly by using this technology so uh if i might say that actually there is a lot of best practices coming by using this platform and my team get a lot of benefit in terms of faster development time and also they can deliver the product and service in a high quality manner minimize the number of errors as well you know there's a lot of choices out there obviously i wonder if you could share what led you to the choice of red hat and open shift okay so first of all before we choose the platform actually we also comparing ourselves with the with the fintechs and also with the big tech in indonesia as well so we see we see that actually they already start using kubernetes and uh their platform is quite stable and even they can support about 90 to 100 million of customers without any issues at all so when we see this uh we choose a lot of we learn about a lot of platform and we finally choose opencv because we think that openshift and we we already do our research openshift is quite stable and for banks like us that have for having 4500 transaction per seconds stability is number one uh availability is also number one now uh having said that after doing our research we choose openshift and we implemented openshift in our environment because we promise our customers to provide 99.95 percent uh availability can i just i'm sorry to interrupt you victor can you just repeat that you cut out a little bit so you you said you you promised your customers to deliver and then you cut out a little bit can you just repeat what you just said there okay so we're giving a promise to our to our customer providing a 99.95 availability so this is the starting point of our channel sure in the efficiency we have efficient also to providing four nines which is 99.99 but i mean the starting point is 99.95 and because we have that the demand that requirement that's one of the reason we choose the openshift and red hat as our technology stack platform got it okay and so i have a question um what was it like in terms of just the skills and the adoption uh for your developers uh was it was it a big gap to go from where you were to you know where you are today did you have to what kind of training did you have to do did you have to do any sort of outsourcing to accelerate that maybe you could describe that how you close that skills gap so definitely in the beginning is quite challenging because although they are using modern languages like jaffa or kotlin but uh to understand the concept and to design correctly yes we we did a lot of training to them uh it takes a it takes me about three months to give them the proper training uh in terms of building the right uh microservices platform and also to building modular architecture in terms of the customer channel because this will be the fundamental when you build it correctly in the beginning and actually at the later point you will enjoy the benefit so the first three months actually is training and doing research and development and doing a lot of trial and errors but after the three months actually we already have the right technology stack have the right models and our devsecops is already working then actually after that the speed is very fast because uh it sprints uh we do agile way of working the agiles dlc it's only one month so every one month we already have new features coming in so that's what we call a huge transformation a digital transformation inside of our bank it's three months actually not bad i mean i would i would have thought on average it's going to take five or six months to get people up to speed so three months is pretty good and i'm also inferring that you weren't just paving the cow path you weren't just saying okay let's take our traditional and then you know re refactor it to digital you had to re-envision what digital looked like because the digital is different uh than the traditional uh so so that's actually pretty good uh ramp rate i wonder if you could just go ahead and comment if you could because when you say about uh revamp so actually it's not on the id side not only but also the business side we implement new way as well so actually if clearly they're implementing a new model so they're using a design thinking and also a co-creation model where now when we building a product so we're not writing the old product in a new way no we totally building it from from scratch and involving our key customer and our stakeholder when we're building this product so actually we implementing new models what we call design thinking and also uh co-creation with our customer so that's actually changing the face of the customer electronic channel a lot and and actually when we when we want to to deploy we invite our customer to test it first we call it like usability testing if they like it we continue to design if they they don't like it they give us a feedback how they would like it to be changed and and that's we appreciate our customer feedback because customers experience is everything now yeah so so the product can be accepted if the experience on that product is really making customer uh solving their problem solving the customer problem and making them enjoying uh doing transactions in our mobile banking product i think this is a really important point for people to understand so you weren't just paving the cow path i call it you're taking the old and and just trying to refactor it and make it exactly turn it into digital you had to really think about the business the business processes the dependencies the customer experience and then bring it back um what have been some of the business outcomes of this initiative and maybe you could we then after that we can get into some of the the future plans so so the outcome uh i think this journey uh since last year uh not last year actually since no october 2019 we already started the journey uh what took us by surprise is actually the pandemic uh suddenly the first three months when we have the pandemic of coffee we are being forced to close a lot of branches for temporary because we want to avoid the pandemic situations and that time actually the the demand using our digital channel is increasing a lot but because we already prepared actually we get the benefit one of the thing is uh the business benefit is relating so during the pandemic nobody can come to the branch and mostly the account opening actually happening online so uh we even got about 9000 account opening per day which is something that we are not imagining before so uh the benefit is very clear by using this this technology actually enabling us to provide digital capability for our customer and enabling us to open more accounts we see ourselves can grow even not linear but exponentially grow by using this platform uh talking about that indonesia is a is a huge country with we have about 200 250 million populations and actually there's still a lot of people is not having a bank account at all now by doing this actually we open opportunity doing financial inclusion for those people that need a banking account now they can reach us by using the digital platform as well yeah that's an awesome story and it goes back to the to the reason the real motivator for for moving to kubernetes and containers was scale uh and and you know it's you obviously started your digital journey prior to the pandemic but a lot of customers and i'm sure you as well were were forced to speed up a portion anyway of the digital component uh because of the pandemic like you said you couldn't people couldn't walk into the branches so but now you've got some more time to think about that journey you've had a lot of learnings 2020 was like a petri dish of experimentation but but in real time having to serve customers what's the future look like for the bank's technology journey okay so basically we uh we are not stopping only on the retail side yeah uh we want to redefine our customer journey also on the wholesale side and also on the small medium enterprise there is still a lot of things that need to be done uh and required by the customer actually so uh on the on the on the sme side we want to give them easier access uh for uh financing their businesses i think when we are back to the new normal uh the business need to have funding for for starting their business again so building an sme platform for them will will help a lot and will help the country as well on the retail side actually like i told you uh we are focusing on the more financial inclusion because uh i give you example right uh from the 230 million of indonesians uh populations i think by today maybe it's only about 50 million customers that already have a banking account so there is still a lot of people that need an access faster and cheaper and more efficient way for doing banking transactions so that's this also will become our focus and the last part is actually corporate what we see now a lot of the corporate require us to open uh api connectivity doing open banking with them the government actually the central bank supporting it supporting all the banks they are trying to create an api playbooks now and then they create they want to create an api standard for all the core all the use corporate also can connect it to the bank directly using api so this is also our focus because it will help the country economy when the economy costs the transaction costs getting more efficient getting more cheaper and there's a lot of transaction can be supported by our bank as well so i think i think that's the the future that we are imagining and i'm really hope that the pandemi will be finished and we come back to the to the new normal and we can support more transactions for this country yeah you're here to that i call it the new abnormal but so this is this is a great story everybody loves to talk about disruption we do as well and but people think oh it's out with out with the old in with the new and it's not like that this is a great story victor of uh of an established incumbent that is modernizing its its applications and its digital experience and of course the incumbent has the advantage of it's a real business it has customers that has a data it has experiences it and if it can modernize its infrastructure and and it's in its application portfolio it actually has an advantage because it's got way more features way more data way more customers and more resources so victor thanks so much for coming on thecube i really appreciate you sharing your story thank you dave thank you for inviting me thank you that was our pleasure and thank you for watching red hat summit 21 this is thecube you

>> Live from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit, here in our nation's capital. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting with John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment, we have George Gagne, he is the Chief Information Officer at Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Welcome, George. And we have Christopher McDermott, who is the CDO of the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Welcome, Chris. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> So, I want to start with you George, why don't you tell our viewers a little bit about the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. >> Sure, so the mission has been around for decades actually. In 2015, Secretary of Defense, Hagel, looked at the accounting community as a whole and for efficiency gains made decision to consolidate some of the accounting community into a single organization. And they took the former JPAC, which was a direct reporting unit to PACOM out of Hawaii, which was the operational arm of the accounting community, responsible for research, investigation, recovery and identification. They took that organization, they looked at the policy portion of the organization, which is here in Crystal City, DPMO and then they took another part of the organization, our Life Sciences Support Equipment laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, and consolidated that to make the defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Under the Office of Secretary Defense for Policy. So that was step one. Our mission is the fullest possible accounting of missing U.S. personnel to their families and to our nation. That's our mission, we have approximately 82,000 Americans missing from our past conflicts, our service members from World War II, Korea War, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. When you look at the demographics of that, we have approximately 1,600 still missing from the Vietnam conflict. We have just over a 100 still missing from the Cold War conflict. We have approximately 7,700 still missing from the Korean War and the remainder of are from World War II. So, you know, one of the challenges when our organization was first formed, was we had three different organizations all had different reporting chains, they had their own cultures, disparate cultures, disparate systems, disparate processes, and step one of that was to get everybody on the same backbone and the same network. Step two to that, was to look at all those on-prem legacy systems that we had across our environment and look at the consolidation of that. And because our organization is so geographically dispersed, I just mentioned three, we also have a laboratory in Offutt, Nebraska. We have detachments in Southeast Asia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and we have a detachment in Germany. And we're highly mobile. We conduct about, this year we're planned to do 84 missions around the world, 34 countries. And those missions last 30 to 45 day increments. So highly mobile, very globally diverse organization. So when we looked at that environment obviously we knew the first step after we got everybody on one network was to look to cloud architectures and models in order to be able to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate, so we developed a case management system that consist of a business intelligence software along with some enterprise content software coupled with some forensics software for our laboratory staff that make up what we call our case management system that cloud hosted. >> So business challenges, the consolidation, the reset or set-up for the mission, but then the data types, it's a different kind of data problem to work, to achieve the outcomes you're looking for. Christopher, talk about that dynamic because, >> Sure. >> You know, there are historical different types of data. >> That's right. And a lot of our data started as IBM punchcards or it started from, you know, paper files. When I started the work, we were still looking things up on microfiche and microfilm, so we've been working on an aggressive program to get all that kind of data digitized, but then we have to make it accessible. And we had, you know as George was saying, multiple different organizations doing similar work. So you had a lot of duplication of the same information, but kept in different structures, searchable in different pathways. So we have to bring all of that together and make and make it accessible, so that the government can all be on the same page. Because again, as George said, there's a large number of cases that we potentially can work on, but we have to be able to triage that down to the ones that have the best opportunity for us to use our current methods to solve. So rather than look for all 82,000 at once, we want to be able to navigate through that data and find the cases that have the most likelihood of success. >> So where do you even begin? What's the data that you're looking at? What have you seen has had the best indicators for success, of finding those people who are prisoners of war or missing in action? >> Well, you know, for some degrees as George was saying, our missions has been going on for decades. So, you know, a lot of the files that we're working from today were created at the time of the incidents. For the Vietnam cases, we have a lot of continuity. So we're still working on the leads that the strongest out of that set. And we still send multiple teams a year into Vietnam and Laos, Cambodia. And that's where, you know, you try to build upon the previous investigations, but that's also where if those investigations were done in the '70s or the '80s we have to then surface what's actionable out of that information, which pathways have we trod that didn't pay off. So a lot of it is, What can we reanalyze today? What new techniques can we bring? Can we bring in, you know, remote sensing data? Can we bring GIS applications to analyze where's the best scenario for resolving these cases after all this time? >> I mean, it's interesting one of the things we hear from the Amazon, we've done so many interviews with Amazon executives, we've kind of know their messaging. So here's one of them, "Eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting." You hear that a lot right. So there might be a lot of that here and then Teresa had a slide up today talking about COBOL and mainframe, talk about punch cards >> Absolutely. >> So you have a lot of data that's different types older data. So it's a true digitization project that you got to enable as well as other complexity. >> Absolutely, when the agency was formed in 2015 we really begin the process of an information modernization effort across the organization. Because like I said, these were legacy on-prem systems that were their systems' of record that had specific ways and didn't really have the ability to share the data, collaborate, coordinate, and communicate. So, it was a heavy lift across the board getting everyone on one backbone. But then going through an agency information modernization evolution, if you will, that we're still working our way through, because we're so mobilely diversified as well, our field communications capability and reach back and into the cloud and being able to access that data from geographical locations around the world, whether it's in the Himalayas, whether it's in Vietnam, whether it's in Papua New Guinea, wherever we may be. Not just our fixed locations. >> George and Christopher, if you each could comment for our audience, I would love to get this on record as you guys are really doing a great modernization project. Talk about, if you each could talk about key learnings and it could be from scar tissue. It could be from pain and suffering to an epiphany or some breakthrough. What was some of the key learnings as you when through the modernization? Could you share some from a CIO perspective and from a CDO perspective? >> Well, I'll give you a couple takeaways of what I thought I think we did well and some areas I thought that we could have done better. And for us as we looked at building our case management system, I think step one of defining our problem statement, it was years in planning before we actually took steps to actually start building out our infrastructure in the Amazon Cloud, or our applications. But building and defining that problem statement, we took some time to really take a look at that, because of the different in cultures from the disparate organizations and our processes and so on and so forth. Defining that problem statement was critical to our success and moving forward. I'd say one of the areas that I say that we could have done better is probably associated with communication and stakeholder buy-in. Because we are so geographically dispersed and highly mobile, getting the word out to everybody and all those geographically locations and all those time zones with our workforce that's out in the field a lot at 30 to 45 days at a time, three or four missions a year, sometimes more. It certainly made it difficult to get part of that get that messaging out with some of that stakeholder buy-in. And I think probably moving forward and we still deal regarding challenges is data hygiene. And that's for us, something else we did really well was we established this CDO role within our organization, because it's no longer about the systems that are used to process and store the data. It's really about the data. And who better to know the data but our data owners, not custodians and our chief data officer and our data governance council that was established. >> Christopher you're learnings, takeaways? >> What we're trying to build upon is, you define your problem statement, but the pathway there is you have to get results in front of the end users. You have get them to the people who are doing the work, so you can keep guiding it toward the solution actually meets all the needs, as well as build something that can innovate continuously over time. Because the technology space is changing so quickly and dynamically that the more we can surface our problem set, the more help we can to help find ways to navigate through that. >> So one of the things you said is that you're using data to look at the past. Whereas, so many of the guests we're talking today and so many of the people here at this summit are talking about using data to predict the future. Are you able to look your data sets from the past and then also sort of say, And then this is how we can prevent more POW. Are you using, are you thinking at all, are you looking at the future at all with you data? >> I mean, certainly especially from our laboratory science perspective, we have have probably the most advanced human identification capability in the world. >> Right. >> And recovery. And so all of those lessons really go a long ways to what what information needs to be accessible and actionable for us to be able to, recover individuals in those circumstances and make those identifications as quickly as possible. At the same time the cases that we're working on are the hardest ones. >> Right. >> The ones that are still left. But each success that we have teaches us something that can then be applied going forward. >> What is the human side of your job? Because here you are, these two wonky data number crunchers and yet, you are these are people who died fighting for their country. How do you manage those two, really two important parts of your job and how do you think about that? >> Yeah, I will say that it does amp up the emotional quotient of our agency and everybody really feels passionately about all the work that they do. About 10 times a year our agency meets with family members of the missing at different locations around the country. And those are really powerful reminders of why we're doing this. And you do get a lot of gratitude, but at the same time each case that's waiting still that's the one that matters to them. And you see that in the passion our agency brings to the data questions and quickly they want us to progress. It's never fast enough. There's always another case to pursue. So that definitely adds a lot to it, but it is very meaningful when we can help tell that story. And even for a case where we may never have the answers, being able to say, "This is what the government knows about your case and these are efforts that have been undertaken to this point." >> The fact there's an effort going on is really a wonderful thing for everybody involved. Good outcomes coming out from that. But interesting angle as a techy, IT, former IT techy back in the day in the '80s, '90s, I can't help but marvel at your perspective on your project because you're historians in a way too. You've got type punch cards, you know you got, I never used punch cards. >> Put them in a museum. >> I was the first generation post punch cards, but you have a historical view of IT state of the art at the time of the data you're working with. You have to make that data actionable in an outcome scenario workload work-stream for today. >> Yeah, another example we have is we're reclaiming chest X-rays that they did for induction when guys were which would screen for tuberculosis when they came into service. We're able to use those X-rays now for comparison with the remains that are recovered from the field. >> So you guys are really digging into history of IT. >> Yeah. >> So I'd love to get your perspective. To me, I marvel and I've always been critical of Washington's slowness with respect to cloud, but seeing you catch up now with the tailwinds here with cloud and Amazon and now Microsoft coming in with AI. You kind of see the visibility that leads to value. As you look back at the industry of federal, state, and local governments in public over the years, what's your view of the current state of union of modernization, because it seems to be a renaissance? >> Yeah, I would say the analogy I would give you it's same as that of the industrial revolutions went through in the early 20th century, but it's more about the technology revolution that we're going through now. That's how I'd probably characterize it. If I were to look back and tell my children's children about, hey, the advent of technology and that progression of where we're at. Cloud architecture certainly take down geographical barriers that before were problems for us. Now we're able to overcome those. We can't overcome the timezone barriers, but certainly the geographical barriers of separation of an organization with cloud computing has certainly changed. >> Do you see your peers within the government sector, other agencies, kind of catching wind of this going, Wow, I could really change the game. And will it be a step function into your kind of mind as you kind of have to project kind of forward where we are. Is it going to a small improvement, a step function? What do you guys see? What's the sentiment around town? >> I'm from Hawaii, so Chris probably has a better perspective of that with some of our sister organizations here in town. But, I would say there's more and more organizations that are adopting cloud architectures. It's my understanding very few organizations now are co-located in one facility and one location, right. Take a look at telework today, cost of doing business, remote accessibility regardless of where you're at. So, I'd say it's a force multiplier by far for any line of business, whether it's public sector, federal government or whatever. It's certainly enhanced our capabilities and it's a force multiplier for us. >> And I think that's where the expectation increasingly is that the data should be available and I should be able to act on it wherever I am whenever the the opportunity arises. And that's where the more we can democratize our ability to get that data out to our partners to our teams in the field, the faster those answers can come through. And the faster we can make decisions based upon the information we have, not just the process that we follow. >> And it feeds the creativity and the work product of the actors involved. Getting the data out there versus hoarding it, wall guarding it, asylumming it. >> Right, yeah. You know, becoming the lone expert on this sack of paper in the filing cabinet, doesn't have as much power as getting that data accessible to a much broader squad and everyone can contribute. >> We're doing our part. >> That's right, it's open sourcing it right here. >> To your point, death by PowerPoint. I'm sure you've heard that before. Well business intelligence software now by the click of a button reduces the level of effort for man-power and resources to put together slide decks. Where in business intelligence software can reach out to those structured data platforms and pull out the data that you want at the click of a button and build those presentations for you on the fly. Think about, I mean, if that's our force multiplier in advances in technology of. I think the biggest thing is we understand as humans how to exploit and leverage the technologies and the capabilities. Because I still don't think we fully grasp the potential of technology and how it can be leveraged to empower us. >> That's great insight and really respect what you guys do. Love your mission. Thanks for sharing. >> Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Ferrer. We will have much more coming up tomorrow on the AWS Public Sector Summit here in Washington, DC. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2017! Brought to you by Red Hat! (electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit, I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, I'm here with Stu Miniman, our guest today is Jason Hoffman. He is the vice president and global head of cloud infrastructure at Ericsson. Thanks so much for joining us here. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> Thank you. So, I want to start out by talking about the cloud market today, and where we are. We've heard here at the summit that the number one thing on customers' minds is cloud strategy. Is that, does that resonate with you? And what are you hearing from customers? >> Cloud's an interesting topic. Because it's both an infrastructure approach, sometimes people use it for a delivery model, sometimes people use it to describe a business model, sometimes people use it to describe a number of things. For me, for most companies, cloud's not strategic. Cloud's tactical. Cloud may be strategic to Amazon, cloud may be strategic to Microsoft, we've yet to see whether it's truly strategic for Google, and that, but for most people it's tactical. And I think it's a fine distinction to make, because tactical means there's stuff to do, and if you look at the thing to do, it's pretty clear that that approach to infrastructure is on highly accessible, industrialized infrastructure. And I anchor that in infrastructure because in the absence of that type of infrastructure then your delivery models and business models and stuff don't apply, basically. >> Jason, you bring up an interesting point, we heard in the first day keynote, they said, "One of the top priorities for end users is, "to build a cloud strategy." Because when I talk to most users, they've been very tactical, it's like, well, we moved our scene around, to SaaS. Everybody did. I'm starting to move certain business apps to SaaS. I've, everybody tried Dev, you know, on Amazon, and played with a number of other clouds, but you look at that, I had a guy who wrote for me, he was like, "We don't have hybrid cloud. "We have composite cloud." Because I've got all those things there, it's like, "How do I shop?" It's like, well, I stop at a convenience store where I need, I go to the store, and I get lots of stuff from Amazon. Sounds like how we do cloud! So where do you see, from the users that you talk to, I mean, you've been involved in this since the early days, so it feels like we talk a lot about cloud stuff, but it feels like we're getting a little bit more real, I'm heartened to see that users are starting to, you know, think about strategic, how they put things together, where do you see the customers you're talking to? >> Well, I mean, I think a lot of the customers are educated by the market. And the market tends to use a lot of these marketing terms, like composite, rather than getting down to what the actual sort of issues are. The issues, even if we go back to the highly accessible, industrialized type of infrastructure, I mean, the issue there is. Customers need to simplify things. They largely would like to do that through some type of, quote unquote, "automation". And they would like everything that they do under one governance model. Essentially, what you'd call life cycle management, or governance, or whatever. But these types of things that both the infrastructure, and the nature of the things that you do on it, are too complex. And they tend not to be, you know, once they're basically put in place, they tend not to be touched again. You know, so in fact, if you look at a good definition of like, legacy. Legacy, for me, is when the cost of keeping something as is, is basically cheaper than the replacement process. And actually if you look at that sort of cost curve, the day that something is best to leave as is, and it's very expensive to replace, is the day it goes live. >> So the legacy curve-- >> It's like driving a car off the lot. >> The legacy curve is actually a U-shaped curve. You know, in there. And in fact, the day something goes live, it's like a sieve and at some point, three, four, five years down the road, it's not legacy, and then about three, four, five years after that, it's legacy again. >> Reminds me of what Jeff Baso said, "There will never be a day two for us, "we are always going to stay day one, "focused on creating new stuff, "because otherwise once you go kind of steady state, "the decline is coming soon after." >> Yeah, and I think, I mean, if you look at now, myself having started I dunno, 20 plus years ago in scientific computing, and then, you know, meeting HPC and these types of efforts, and then showing up in sort of what one would call the quote unquote, "cloud world", the effort there has largely been the same, I mean, it's one of these ones where, infrastructure by its very nature is always risky to manage. You know, meaning things like, continuously deploying things into infrastructure, always runs the risk of making infrastructure inaccessible to people. You know, you don't instantly like, if a new operating system image comes out, you don't reboot 100, 000 servers. And then the applications that sit on top of it, and have historically inherited that risk from the infrastructure. And the effort has largely been separating those two. So that applications get freed of the risk from the underlying infrastructure, and then you can start applying a certain approach to the infrastructure, not really caring about what's on it. And cloud is pretty much this emergence of infrastructure, as its own practice. And it's going from traditional IT environments, where that sort of operational model, and that economic model, is not the center of anybody's product designs, to an operational and economic model that is at the center of everybody's sort of product designs. And the KPIs around what you're doing there, and whether you're successful, are relatively simple. And that is, you know, are you continuously improving, in terms of capacity, capabilities, and unit economics. You know, if you're not, if you don't have an exponentially decreasing unit economic curve, within, you know, a five year period of time, then you're probably not doing, you know, quote unquote, "cloud" right. >> Jason, we know with Ericsson's background, you've got strong positions in the telecom space, working a lot on the NFB solutions, expect that's a hot area of working with Red Hat, can you kind of sketch out for us, just where Ericsson sits in the marketplace today of where customers are coming to you, with kind of key partnerships? >> The element for us is that we're a 141 year old Swedish multinational. And we've been in the same business for 141 years. And that we provide the communication backbone for the world. And so, on one part of the business, is that if you see 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE, or stuff on the phone, or if you use a mobile phone in somewhere like North America, 100% of all that traffic goes over Ericsson applications. And so you know, we're a very dominant provider of that radio edge, if you will. The other thing we have, from an application portfolio perspective, is everything you need to be a telecom. So everything ranging from the network functions, through OSS environments, PSS environments, customer front ends. And the like. And the telecom space, has been undergoing some pretty dramatic changes, in some ways. Or not dramatic changes, depending on one sort of attitude over the last few years. The first one, is even though that far radio edge, if you will, has tens of millions of points of presence globally, that talk to billions of devices, that's a very algorithmically driven, event driven, very industrialized type of infrastructure. It's fair to say that if you look at the typical definition one would apply to hyperscale, it applies to the radio edge. It also applies to the sort of hyperscale cloud providers. In between those two things, is roughly about one to two trillion U.S. dollars of investments that sits in tens of thousands of facilities globally with pretty much the computer history museum of hardware and operating systems and everything else inside of it. It's effectively this whole middle mile infrastructure. For us, we sort of view the virtualization of everything that's in the telecom space, and uplifting it to a common infrastructure approach, is pretty critical to get a handle on that middle mile infrastructure. >> Jason, you know, when I think about the telecom space, we're talking about 5G now, these roll outs tend to take a while, we measure things in years, if not decades, before they roll out. Jim Whitehurst got on stage this morning, said, you know, "Planning is dead, "we don't do a 10 year big data plan, "we won't do a ten year AI plan." How does, you know, your set of the market live in this greater changing world, how do you look forward, can you predict like we did in the past? That's a, so I think yes and no. I mean, we, you're correct in that if you take a market like India, India's going to hit 200% 2G penetration in 2020. And so, we're talking about something that's going to happen 20 years after it started in other parts of the market. You have spots like Papua New Guinea, that are, have 2G networks throwing 200, 300% year over year. And so when you look at this globally, the roll out of these technologies are on, typically, a 30 year time schedule, overall. And they result in people owning assets that they have for at least 30 years. In many cases as well. So on one aspect, there is very long term planning that has to exist, and we have some customers we've had for a century. From that point of view, they have to know those types of plans. On the other end, is if you look at what we have to start doing from a technology standpoint, is enabling just a tremendous amount of flexibility, to be able to just get out of this legacy hamster wheel. This idea that the second you go and deploy something somewhere, you can't touch it again, and you can't continuously improve it again. You know, we're trying to sit down and say, "If we go out and do these types of deployments, "we need the ability "to actually continuously improve these." In fact, that's really what the industrialized word means for us. And so, for many of these things, you know, we've been taking certain approaches. I mean, interestingly enough, if you look at the actual mobile edge of things, the radio edge of things, that is one where there is one hardware platform, it comes in tens of form factors, we'll go and deploy out that infrastructure, and whether it's a 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, narrow band ILT infrastructure, it's purely unlocked in software. And so that is a good software to find, sort of infrastructure. And you do it that way because at the end of the day, somebody's got to go into a jungle and put a cell tower up, and you don't want to go out there again. And we want to take that same sort of thinking throughout the rest of the infrastructure. >> Jason, it always fascinates me, if you look at this space, I mean, I remember we interviewed you back at Joint, we were talking a lot of the show about containers, and there's things that we've tried in the past, and now it's coming at it again on edge computing, is something we're starting to talk about, it's a little bit difficult to predict how long some of that will take, and some of the cycles, but maybe to wrap us up, talk to us a little bit about this, you know, Ericsson's planning for the future, what are some of those big challenges that you see, that we as an industry need to tackle, and maybe some of the things that will earlier wins and stuff, that you know, might take a little bit longer. >> Yeah I mean, a little bit longer, and if I look out really, probably the next 15, 20 years, I mean the type of middle mile industrialization they're doing today is a prerequisite for all the IOTUs cases to show up on 5G. Because there's simply not enough middle mile capacity in the world, or capabilities there, to even have it go to an amazon type perspective. So even if that all ends up there, so, now it's going to be this very large effort of I think, bringing these two worlds together, and on the hyperscale cloud providers, you have a very industrialized approach in infrastructure, and it's very supply chain driven, and it's very sort of, easy to cookie cutter out. On the extreme end of the infrastructure, on the radio edge, it's the same what. And, but all the stuff in the middle's not. And if you look at the channelage from a cloud perspective, it's about taking those sort of learnings from the book ends of the infrastructure, bringing it to the middle, if you will. And starting to think about what, because edge computing's a great example, it's like, what does it mean when you start using that, from an end user perspective? You're not going to go to a pull down menu, and pick 12, 418 availability zones from a list of 120, 000 global availability zones. You're not going to automatically have issues around data sovereignty and everything else like that, just sort of be tackled. So I think in many ways, when we start looking at some core concepts that live in hundreds of facilities, and sort of large cloud providers, and some of these concepts where we manage to do things in tens of millions of base stations, talking to billions of devices, the reality for me is when you look at the redo, and now the more global use of that infrastructure that's in the middle, it's going to require developer accessibility, and a certain degree of programmability that doesn't actually exist yet. And you know, of course it's an open question of how much you do it. I mean, you know, you're going to have to scale topologically, rather than sort of scale in other ways. And a lot of that stuff's just not done yet. >> Jason, thank you so much for joining us, we really appreciate your time. >> Anytime. >> We'll be back with more of theCUBE's coverage of the Red Hat Summit, after this. (electronic music)