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

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. I'm John furrier, host of theCUBE We've got a great segment with a customer Roberto Calandrini, Head of Architecture, Digital and AI services for Snam customer need to leak oil and gas and AI services for Snam customer need to leak oil and gas great industrial IOT and digital transformation. Roberto, thank you for coming on the cube and spending the time. >> Hi, John. Good to see you. Thank you for inviting me. >> That's awesome. Before we get started, I love the story and again I think security edge and in, in in disease industry for disruptions is huge story here. But before we get started, talk about Snam. Give me a quick overview of Snam, who you guys are. What's your focus customers you have and your role there. >> Of course. So it was not is one of the major global energy infrastructure company and is managing a international and a national asset specifically and a national asset specifically in the natural gas utility segment. There's what the story Kelly Snam did. And it recently positioned itself as a leader of the energy transition, investing a lot in startups of the energy transition, investing a lot in startups mostly focused on, for example, H2 so hydrogen, these the very recent topic, bio Nathan with numb for environment sustainable mobility, energy efficiency, and reforestation. So we kind of So we kind of expanded our core businesses in terms of positioning ourselves much more within the energy transition segments and still developing a lot, what we used to do in the natural gas, in the natural gas industry. And my role there is, as you said, Head of Architecture And my role there is, as you said, Head of Architecture Digital and AI Services. So I'm basically responsible for managing the entire technology stack of Snam and focusing a lot on developing artificial intelligence services for our business lines. >> That's awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that. Let's talk about the digital transmission you've been rearchitecting. You guys redesign your applications map impacting your architecture from the data center to the edge recently, even the center of that your responsibility for the business. What were the business drivers and objectives for you to reach that transformation goal and target? >> Yeah, thanks for, for the question. So they basically, we were mainly interested in exploiting three main three main objectives with our transformation. The first was very much related to our business strategy. So having a more agile So having a more agile and flexible digital architecture that will still on one one end provide us with the reliability that we need in order to sustain our business critical application. And on the other end, provide the agility And on the other end, provide the agility and flexibility the speed in some sense that our new business line will lead in order to succeed. So let's say speed and agility. The second one was a focus on platformization and servitization of our industry specific application. So what we used to develop, as So what we used to develop, as let's say, very focused full stack application now, thanks to the modern architectures can be developed on top of platforms or using microservices. on top of platforms or using microservices. And that will apart from providing us agility And that will apart from providing us agility and flexibility will give us more alignment will give us more alignment between what we invest. So the cost of our software development efforts So the cost of our software development efforts and the business value we derive and the business value we derive from the software we produce basically. >> John: Can I... >> So I focus on value. >> Can I ask you real quick on the business drivers? Can you talk about the impact of domain expertise? One of the trends we're seeing is you want to scale of cloud and having an architecture that's going to enable value creation and customer value for your customers but in these vertical disruptions these new opportunities in these industries like you're a very specialized industry get natural gas and you still need that domain expertise if you want to tap in and advantage of the AI. >> Absolutely. >> Can you share your vision on how you're doing that and how that relates to the business driver? >> Yeah. So let's say that this is very, very aligned with >> Yeah. So let's say that this is very, very aligned with with our strategy that focuses with our strategy that focuses on platformization servitization. So if you think So if you think about how we can explore the best, the value of our people so our industry specific expertise, there are two main ways. The first is to build from scratch as we used to do The first is to build from scratch as we used to do in the past full stack applications that are really focused on a specific, this specific need of a business line. And so focused on the business side of the industry or we can leverage modern architecture and develop services that serve that specific need. and develop services that serve that specific need. So this will let us basically being able to So this will let us basically being able to So this will let us basically being able to satisfy our internal customer. So our internal clients and the business need and at the same time, being able to use that software so that service for an external customer or potential potentially for, for our peers. So in order to provide value exploiting our business expertise, in order to, for example you cited AI using what we developed as an AI system, for example, for two in order to solve demand for customer problems and provide that same business value for, for for other companies that are are they share our same business need. >> Yeah. It's a data workload. I mean, it's at the end of the day you need the data >> Exactly. >> and that's going to come back. I want to unpack the data workload when we talk about the edge, but real quick, I want to talk about the role red hat played in your journey to execute your architecture and transformation. Can you share how Red Hat helped you in this? >> Sure. So let's say that, you know, >> Sure. So let's say that, you know, it all began in two, 2018. it all began in two, 2018. When we started to set up our cloud readiness map When we started to set up our cloud readiness map in order to assess what we will, we'll be able to transform. in order to assess what we will, we'll be able to transform. So scale lift and shift or refactor of of our application map into a modern architecture application. into a modern architecture application. So this cloud readiness journey started So this cloud readiness journey started with assessing the level of modularity with assessing the level of modularity with assessing the level of modularity in some way of some of our main applications. And what we started to do is to develop the first blueprints in order to start to develop new system in order to start to develop new system and new application on a cloud native framework and new application on a cloud native framework and Red Hat really Apple with this but providing a container orchestration platform OpenShift on which we started to build up our new, our new application, that up our new, our new application, that so the cloud native application by application map so the cloud native application by application map then in 2019, we started to accelerate this then in 2019, we started to accelerate this let's say moving to a CNA environment journey. let's say moving to a CNA environment journey. let's say moving to a CNA environment journey. And we started to move the first 10 to 20% And we started to move the first 10 to 20% of our workload on the platform as a service environment. of our workload on the platform as a service environment. So an OpenShift and this is something that we are still doing while at the same time, developing different project at the same time, developing different project that tries to turn what we used to have developed that tries to turn what we used to have developed as custom application toward platforms. as custom application toward platforms. So we are basically transforming our application map leveraging the power for what regards to the customer application of modern architectures. So microservices bays So microservices bays and the container orchestration platform provided by Red Hat OpenShift. And at the same time the other main technological driver is platform migration. the other main technological driver is platform migration. So with basically trying to leverage, especially for the processes that are already very standardized. for the processes that are already very standardized. So usually corporate processes. So staff SEF function processes what we're doing there is to build on top of very what we're doing there is to build on top of very let's say industry standard platform. I don't want to, to provide you with names but you can imagine most but you can imagine most of them are software as a service platforms. And this is really happiness because we are as a target. And this is really happiness because we are as a target. We are, we have as, as a target for 2022 to basically have the number for 2022 to basically have the number of application with respect to the number of application our application map of 2018. our application map of 2018. >> So big, big step increase in applications. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah >> That's great. That's cool. And then the ecosystem of energy efficiency and aiming for lower carbon emissions that's a goal you guys are helping with. How is Red Hat helping in the ecosystem in your ecosystem? Do you see them going above and beyond? >> You know, the, for what regards to new business lines? I think that the container orchestration platform I think that the container orchestration platform so OpenShift would provide us with the right level so OpenShift would provide us with the right level of flexibility and agility to move of flexibility and agility to move at the speed of those businesses. That is quite different with respect to our classical ones and frequently needs a much higher speed of development. and frequently needs a much higher speed of development. >> Yeah. Awesome. Well, that's great. Great to see that success with Red Hat let's let's shift gears to the topic of the edge. >> Yeah We've been reporting on Silicon angle industrial edge for many years now. And we were calling out the security potential there as risky, obviously it's, it's it's industrial there's you also got generic edge which is consumer edge and everything in between the edge is just part of the network. And you think about this, this is important for you are what are you doing for you are what are you doing with the edge and IOT from a use case standpoint? What have you already done? And what are you planning to deploy soon? Take us through your, your edge IOT use case how it is today and how you see it tomorrow. >> So let's say that Snam has long OT history that basically started that Snam has long OT history that basically started at the very beginning of our SCADA system. So what we have right now is quite complex Brown So what we have right fields situation for what regards edges and gateways fields situation for what regards edges and gateways fields situation for what regards edges and gateways and technical component that resides on, on the field. and technical component that resides on, on the field. So you can, you, you, you must consider that the Italian network is for the modern that the Italian network is for the modern modern 34,000 kilometers and modern 34,000 kilometers and as many different plants, small, medium, and as many different plants, small, medium, and and large plants spread across the country. and large plants spread across the country. And what we are trying to do leveraging also Red Hat technologies among with Red Hat technologies among with with others is trying to get the benefit with others is trying to get the benefit of containers and microservice development. So the benefit coming from cloud native application and getting those to the edge. from cloud native application and getting those to the edge. So the usual problem So the usual problem with OT as historically been a standardization with OT as historically been a standardization so a very heterogeneous number of components Virginia's protocols of components Virginia's protocols in order for them to communicate with the charters and relatively low level of security. with the charters and relatively low level of security. This is, this was mainly due to the segregation principle This is, this was mainly due to the segregation principle physical segregation principle that used to physical segregation principle that used to dominate the OT field with IOT. Of course, as you were saying we are terrifically expanding the attack surface we are terrifically expanding the attack surface from the cybersecurity standpoint, but at the same time that is mainly why we are approaching that is mainly why we are approaching in a very structural way. Our technology stack implementation including security by design in all our architectural blueprints and implementation. And we strongly believe that pushing the capability And we strongly believe that pushing the capability of container orchestration and containerization to the edge and being able to orchestrate that from the cloud or from our data centers will provide us with a very high level of high-quality and flexibility and the capability to exploited best the geographical distribution of the data. to exploited best the geographical distribution of the data. You know, you were saying a center point will be You know, you were saying a center point will be was soaked around data, and it is correct, but it in our specific case, our data basically came from points in our specific case, our data basically came from points in our specific case, our data basically came from points as I was saying, spread it all across the country. So having different data, gravity points enabled So having different data, gravity points enabled by container rise and centrally orchestrated by container rise and centrally orchestrated by container rise and centrally orchestrated environments will enable us to get the best also environments will enable us to get the best also in terms of, from the cybersecurity perspective because what will be acquired on the centralized environment is only exclusively on the centralized environment is only exclusively what is needed at the centralized environment. what is needed at the centralized environment. All the rest on our target architecture will be entirely elaborated on the field, very close to where the data physically on the field, very close to where the data physically and this will be excludable exclusively enabled by by a containerized approach. >> That's awesome. Great, great. A use case there, Roberto, what's next A use case there, Roberto, what's next for your future plans and your technology journey? Obviously AI is going to be very important and data and leveraging that you've got the core cloud data center edge perspective. >> Yeah, of course. Yeah. What, what, what's next? >> What's your future? Let's say, let's say that what we currently implemented is Let's say, let's say that what we currently implemented is and in average cloud environment so we basically have two data center and one cloud tenant, our infrastructure due to, again and one cloud tenant, our infrastructure due to, again and one cloud tenant, our infrastructure due to, again the use of OpenShifts will be easily extensible the use of OpenShifts will be easily extensible the use of OpenShifts will be easily extensible to other potentially to other cloud providers. So we will move, we're evaluating the move to a multicloud So we will move, we're evaluating the move to a multicloud a hybrid multicloud environment. At the same time our main focus right now is to close our IOT foundation. our main focus right now is to close our IOT foundation. And within the IOT foundation I think the main focus right now is on gateways and edges. I think the main focus right now is on gateways and edges. As you were saying, these are quite complex components As you were saying, these are quite complex components and must be greatly evaluated, especially from the cybersecurity standpoint and last from the cybersecurity standpoint and last but not least the data we need to. but not least the data we need to we started our data platform journey and we currently are acquiring data from legacy systems and we currently are acquiring data from legacy systems different kinds of legacy system and SCADA system. What we would like to reach is a complete IOT What we would like to reach is a complete IOT What we would like to reach is a complete IOT acquisition system that will be directly connected to our components, acquiring data on the field. Right now we are in, let's say Right now we are in, let's say in the middle of this digital transformation and we are hemming to close our and we are hemming to close our our journey in the next couple of years. >> That's great, Roberto, great story. Love the conversation. First of all, I love your title Head of Architecture, Digital AI Services. I mean, that speaks to this modern error of, of, of cloud distributed computing. You hit all the hit, all the key things, right? It's an architectural system distributed system. It's a digital business. Now, even though there's physical assets offline, online coming together in a modern way and AI really speaks to the underlying data which is combination of many, many things, you know you're you get all the action there. >> Roberto: Yeah! >> How do you feel? What's your advice to other people in the same boat you're in? >> No, I, I think that, that the interesting part of what we do that the interesting part of what we do at least in, in my specific area, and this is what digital at least in, in my specific area, and this is what digital or sustained for is digital service design. This is something new that is quite uncommon within the utility sector. And it is basically a group of people that apart And it is basically a group of people that apart from being technologists focus a lot on the interaction from being technologists focus a lot on the interaction design of what we are or what we are trying to build design of what we are or what we are trying to build in terms of the technology stack. So these are people that basically try to make the very So these are people that basically try to make the very complex technology stack we talk about in our interview much more simple the, to the final user and think about the level of interaction, complexity about the level of interaction, complexity that all our user will have with our technology stack. Especially when we talk about IOT now, and you start to interact, not just with digital systems, but also with digital or physical systems. with digital or physical systems. So yes, we, we, we have a lot on our plate >> It reminds me of the late eighties, early nineties when open standards really hit the scene and then incubated and then accelerated was seeing that same dynamic happening now with cloud. And you're a pioneer and really appreciate you taking the time to come on The Cube and speak with me about this and share your story. And more importantly than Red Hat success there. 'cause it's Red Hat summit, a story here, Roberto. Thank you very much for sharing your insights and experiences. >> Thank you for your time, John. This has been a pleasure. >> Really appreciate it. Okay. That's Red Hat CUBE coverage here with theCUBE. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)