>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to Red Hat Summit in Boston, everybody. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Luis Uguina is here, he's the Chief Digital Officer at Macquarie Bank, and he's joined by Rajay Rai, who's the head of digital engineering at the bank. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Congratulations on the keynote this morning. >> Luis: Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So, really liked the video, actually they show your colleague. Richard Heeley said, "We're digital first." That's your title, digital. Both of your titles. We look at Uber and Amazon, and eBay as the reference model. Most banks, you wouldn't expect that. Where does that come from? >> Luis: Well basically, if you see the banking industry, we have been a full digital business for a long time. So we're not any more moving money, real bank notes >> in Pony Express. >> Rajay: 1s and 0s (laughs). On the Pony Express, but the biggest issue is, with this full digital banking that we have where we're moving 1s and 0s, we have a quite old approach in terms of the culture and how we are doing things. So for us being digital first, means that we have the whole value chain is going to be digital. So from idea to execution we are removing every single thing that is not pure digital. And this starts with the backend systems, and then it's the way we work, the way we empower teams, the way we are doing things now in the bank. >> So, Rajay, we saw today, this morning, one of the videos, using OpenShift to take legacy applications, modernize them. You guys have gone through a similar, not identical, but similar process. Is that correct, and can you describe that. >> Absolutely. I think what's really important to understand is when you start trying to migrate to the cloud, you've got to consider various aspects of application development and packaging your application. So if you have a legacy application, your strategy and your container strategy needs to support... It has to be semi-structured, if you know what I mean. You've got new modern applications that need to be shipped out, and you've got legacy application need to be shipped into a container. And you've got to use the right technology, right strategies, be agnostic to the container. So what you do is take your applications, make them portable across various life cycles and the infrastructures that deploy 'em. >> Rajay, could you explain, what's your relationship with public clouds? How do you think about what applications you put where and it sounds like you've got building in some flexibility into how you're architecting things. >> So what we're doing is... Of course, we decided fundamentally, our objective was no matter what technology we pick, we need to make sure we're cloud agnostic. So you don't want to be picking one cloud provider and putting all your eggs in one basket. You've got to have the flexibility of moving things around, be it hybrid, be it on-prem, be it on the cloud, or picking any provider you want. So having a container technology, provides you the ability to be portable across various cloud environments. >> Luis, what's the conversation like in the corner offices of the bank? And what's your role, input in terms of strategy overall, the impact on the industry, the drivers, just wealth management in general, and other activities of the bank. Maybe you can describe that in strategic terms. >> So the role basically means what I'm doing every single day is basically transforming the way we're doing things. So at the end, we have a clear strategy in terms of how the business needs to behave. But then, how the technology is going to help the business is basically the strategic discussion that we have every single day. So about moving into the cloud, what we're moving into the cloud, if we're moving mission critical applications, or we are just moving other kind of applications, how we empower the teams to be doing things, what is the overall digital strategy that we have in terms of who is going to be doing work, and how we are going to modify, how we're going to upgrade the developer experience. So one of the things that is really important for us, and is key in our digital strategy is, probably one of the best assets that we have in Macquarie that is all the engineers that we have. At the end, when you are delivering a full digital experience to the customer, everything is happening from a engineering point of view. So for us, discussing with the engineers, how is the approach, how we are going to move in different applications, what is going to happen when. So basically is the discussion we have every day. >> And your north star, so to speak, is simple and enriching user experience, and speed is the other thing I heard. >> Luis: Yup, yup, yup. >> And that's really where presumably your team comes in, right? >> Rajay: Absolutely. So you know, the businesses come up with ideas, and it's coming in really fast, so how do you double down on the winners? How do you pick the winners? How do you test and learn? So as an organization, from an engineering perspective, and from a business perspective, what's really important is for an organization to have a platform for execution. And the platform is not something you buy off the shelf. What you need to do is ensure that you have the right technology, people, process, and culture, altogether, to ensure that you have a certain amount of responsible autonomy in picking the technologies and the softwares that you wish to use in order to provide more value to the business. So if you think about software being the most important thing when it comes to creativity today, how do you provide that in the hands of the developers. As Solomon Hykes said this, from Docker, said, the vision of Docker was to provide tools of mass innovation in the hands of a common developer. And that's what we're attempting to do here. Once we do that, it will free up the ability for our organization, or our developers to innovate, and not worry about the complexities that you have with traditional environments. And containers provide you that platform. >> I'm wondering if you can share, organizationally, most companies, it's not like you started with 1000 developers five years ago. What's that migration of engineering talent? How much was retraining? How much was bringing in people that could help you attain this vision? >> Actually, when Luis joined, he set up the Ninjas. What we did was, about 2 1/2 years ago, 3 years ago, we set up the Ninjas, which Luis set up, and that team was, responsibility was to bring value to the business. Not only innovate in isolation, but to have direct... You innovate, and have a direct value to... You know, provide that value. So not have disconnection between an innovation lab and what's really required by the business. So we did that first, brought in the talent, we used... It was a lot of learning curves, so we brought in functional programming, we introduced distributed technologies like Cassandra, Solar, and Spark. We're a huge supporter of open source. At Macquarie Bank, in BFS, Banking and Financial Services, we have lots of meetups. So that way, what happened is, we started supporting the community as such. We host a lot of these meetups. We encourage people to come, and learn. We do the same in our organization, so we started small, and then started making sure that we could take that across the various other business units. >> Luis, I'm curious, from the banking industry in general, do you see a lot of your peers getting involved in the open source thing? I think back to 10 or 15 years ago, it was like, oh well, IT was... Big banks spent a ton of money on IT, they have expertise they want to do, so sharing was a lot of times tough, even though usually, there was behind the scenes, some peers talking, but what do you see happening in the banking industry with IT? >> So what I think is, a lot of things are happening right now and they are changing really, really fast. So obviously, 10 years ago, speaking about the open source, basically with this old days mindset were, I'm not going to put in my system something that I haven't developed, or something that is not from a well-known company that is going to be helping us, just in something happen. But I think the new culture that we have in the banking industry where you need to be faster, and you need to be able to deliver faster services, at higher speed. The only way you can do that is by using open source, and by sharing what you are doing with others. So we have a lot of meetups at Macquarie where we are sharing what we are doing with other banks, and we are happy to be sharing what we are doing, and we're happy just to be understanding what's happening in the market. So what I think is, if we want to be ahead of the pack, the only way is by having a completely different approach in the banking industry. We cannot maintain the old days approach and trying to be the number one in that space. >> Your data strategy has to fit into this. Both of you have digital in your title. That means both of you have essentially, de facto data in your title. What is the relationship to... Do you have a Chief Data Officer, or are you it by de facto standard? >> Luis: We have, yup. >> And what is your data strategy? How is that evolving? >> I think what's happening today in the world is... It's important to understand that data analytics is moving from downstream to upstream. So the technologies you have need to evolve as well. What we believe in is, you need to have two forms of strategies. One is a cold strategy, one is for your hot data strategy. So you have a strategy where you have solutions like Hadoop, and then you have solutions like Cassandra, that's sitting on the edge, closer to the customers, enabling you to have that always-on architecture follow you. If you have to support follow you anywhere applications, you need to have data on the edge, persistent there, cached there, in a distributed manner, and it can provide the data at high speed. So it's all about fast data, which is a combination of streaming data which doesn't fit in memory anymore, having to access large amount of data that's in batch, running small batches on the edge, and combining them and providing the power that you need. So you need hot and cold to come together to provide that power that you need today. >> And are you bringing analytics and transaction workloads together. What role does application development play in terms of being able to speed that up? >> So we use a unique way of doing this, actually. What we've done is, firstly we've got a small set of team that is focused on this, focused on bringing the data alive. So, we call it the smart data store. We're using distributed technologies like Cassandra, we use Spark, and we use Solar. So when you have a conversation, if somebody's calling up a bank, they call a bank because they have a reason to call and ask a question. And for example, you spent your money in a fuel station somewhere, and you've forgotten where, in London for example, you could say, how much did I spend in fuel in London? So that's how a brain thinks, so having that capability is important. So we use full text search, we use a lot of predictive analytics, machine learning, to tag the transactions that we get. So we're doing a lot at the edge. That entire strategy is essentially called Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing. I think Gartner calls that HTAP and it's Trans-analytics when it comes to Forrester. So that's a strategy we use in our data at the moment. >> Excellent. So what's next for you guys on the horizon? Again, back to strategy, so you've sort of laid out this vision of simplification and speed, you're working toward that, I think you said 50 applications that you've migrated- >> Luis: Yup, yup. We've migrated already. >> More of that, presumably. What's the next big hurdle? >> So for us, once we have the platform, we now have the basic building blocks that will allow us to do the next jump into the future. So for us, right now, we are working this with all those, that enrichment that Rajay has been speaking about. So we have really good knowledge about what's happening in the bank, and what's happening in the customer's life. The next step, what is going to be a game changer again for the financial industry, we think, is starting to understand the behavior of the customer. And speaking about the behavior of the customer means that as a customer, we deliver one platform, and we deliver quite same capabilities to every single customer. But how the bank is going to behave with every single customer is going to be different. And the system needs to be able to learn from the customer behavior. One example is, a couple of years ago, we send push alerts every time that you are using your card. And what happened is every single morning, when I buy my coffee, I receive the push alert that says, "Hey, you have spent $3.50 on your coffee". What I'm doing is just I'm just swiping my alert. But Rajay is probably doing something different. So what the banks are able to say here is, hey Luis, you're not really interested in this push alert. So the system should be saying, Luis, from now on I'm going to remove this alert from your push alert system. And just in case something strange happen like instead of $3.50, $35, or two transactions in the same second, you're not going to receive that. So the system should be able to learn from my own behavior, and should be able to deliver a completely different experience to every single customer. Right now, we are building the system, and we have the basic building blocks. We're not yet there, but probably will be in six, seven months, there. And where things are, we're going to deliver a completely transformational experience to the customer. >> Great. Alright, gentlemen, we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on the initiative, really great stuff. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. Right back. (digital music)