(upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, we got a great segment here on taming complexity. Niranjan Ramsunder and Raghu Bongula, Senior Vice President of Engineering TSYS, and Niranjan is the Chief Technology Officer of UST. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. You've got a great use case here, taming complexity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So this is a great example of some of the major wave we're seeing coming in that were reporting this re:Invent is that this next generation of cloud scale powered by data and business value at the modern application layer, at the top of the new stack, if you will, going to call it that. This is the theme everyone's talking about, you've got Edge, all these things are happening, but at the heart of it is the complexity. So Niranjan, take us through what you guys are doing at UST with Raghu and his journey on the transformation. Set us up. >> Sure, John. Thanks, John, and Raghu, thanks for joining us. So when you look at AWS, John, you got it right. The situation has matured to a level where the real complex applications, the one which needs low latency, high throughput are now moving to the cloud, and concerns about data security, about privacy, about how to manage systems are not in my control are now getting resolved, and an important example of that is what TSYS and Raghu are doing in the sense of really taking their core functionalities, their fundamental business processes and moving it to the cloud. So it has been a great experience for us working with Raghu and the entire TSYS team on how a business function moves. What are the reasons why you would move? What considerations will you have? And then, you know, proving that it really is functional, that is critical because business has to see value. It's not just cloud because it's attractive, it is because cloud has a purpose. So we'd love to hear from Raghu as well on what are the motivations, but that is really what excites us, thanks. >> Raghu, before you get into your, the why on the transformation, I just want to set it up. You guys are running a very big business. You have a lot of business legacy systems built in place, your transforming to the cloud, you can't just kill the old to bring in the new, you got to work together, this is part of the benefit of the cloud. So with that said, take us through the journey, what's the purpose, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Take us through the highlights. >> Sure, John, thank you. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk here. So, you know, as I mentioned, I'm Raghu Bongula, I lead the delivery of platform analyzation and cloud migration programs at TSYS. TSYS, which is part of global payments, you know, is focused on payments and card processing for the issuer banks. We are the number one card issuer processor in the United States, and I think we lead in many countries across the world. So we run the most mission critical systems in the financial services. So our platforms are a combination of, you know, low latency workloads which span in thousands of transactions per second and also high-throughput workloads like a high throughput batch workloads, which, you know, which deal with the hundreds and thousands of, you know, transactions per second, you know, and, you know, in the current mainframes. So our challenge has been how to take this systems, you know, which have been so successful for so many years with the cloud, how do we kind of take that? You know, how do we kind of approach that? That has been our challenge. I think we have been, you know, in this journey along with UST to solve those. The motivations for us, you know, from my perspective, to take our platforms to the cloud, you know? There are many, but these are some of them, the first one being the business agility, you know? Right now, I think like any other company who is running on on-premise, they are bound by the infrastructure and you know, the rigid state of the data centers. So cloud provides us agility for us to take advantage of the infrastructure, you know, take advantage of the service (indistinct) build so that we don't have to build it ourself, we can use those Lego blocks to solve high-order problems for example. And so other, you know, advantage we have is the ability for us to offer the solutions across the world. Now today, if we go across the world and try to offer our solutions, you know, we are sometimes, I think, you know, are forced to look in to build a data center, which can be, you know, definitely expensive and also time taking, you know? And we lose the market opportunity in many of those cases. So what cloud does provide, in this case, AWS provides this, with this span of regions they have across the world, it provides us an opportunity for us to kind of quickly take our solution to any of these regions where we don't serve today, okay? And last but not least, the security. So I think security is, you know, is a foremost. The security of what we see in AWS, you know, is, you know, definitely meets our needs and our customers', and you know, we feel that to get that sophistication it's going to be more and more tougher in the on-premise environment. >> That's great stuff. I mean, Niranjan, we're talking about this all the time with cloud. This year and this kind of inflection point is where it goes the next level, you know? I mean, Raghu is running a very successful global payments system, a lot of transactions. So, you know, the metaphors range, you know? "Changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet," I've heard that one. That's kind of what's happening here, He's got to be successful. You can't just like put the pause button. >> Yes, and there are more than one, you know, allegory which fits your... One is of course is the airplane engine changing, the second, the pilot is changing as well. So it does, you know, it's not just enough to take care of technology moves and ensure business still runs, but at the same time, the people who are supporting it today work on older technologies, they need to move along with the change so that we don't lose the knowledge, they have the systems. And the one important part where we are contributing to this whole engagement is documenting their systems which have been written over a period of 30 years and ensuring that all the rules and subroutines and the nested loops within that get translated correctly and get tested correctly as they move to the cloud. So it is definitely in the engine, but you know, the entire transformation has to be seamless and business should not know better, it should be nothing happened except that now we're on the cloud, that is really where the fun part is. >> Raghu, I want to ask you, when you guys sit in the room and say, "Okay, we got to do this." What are the key business benefits are expected from this modernization program? I mean, I get the agility, that's, you know, check the box, yeah, we want to be more agile. What does that translate into from a benefits standpoint? >> Yeah, so build that agility for us means, you know, our ability to kind of adapt to the market needs as quickly as possible, which is, you know, we deal with different demographics, different regulatory environments across the world. So if a need arises to quickly build a payment product or a card product to serve a particular industry or a particular domain or a particular vertical, you know? Across the world, we want to be able to kind of quickly put together what we have in a, you know, a marketable solution, okay? So that's what it means for us and the business agility, and we want to be able to do across the world, so if we see an opportunity, you know, anywhere in the world, we want to be able to kind of quickly deploy our solution, tie our Lego pieces, build a product or, you know, configure a product which satisfies that particular vertical or that particular regulatory region across the world. >> All right, question for both of you guys. I would love to ask the same question if you don't mind answering it from the different perspectives that you're taking. What were the major challenges that you guys have anticipated and addressed in this program? Because you know, this is probably going to... I can almost guess how many times we bump up against something that's a little speed bump, it says, "Okay, whoa, okay, how do we do that?" 'Cause remember, it's all net new sometimes should be factoring your... not just re-platforming. So can you share some of the major challenges that you've anticipated and how you've addressed them with this modernization program? >> Sure, I can go first, and then, you know, Niranjan, feel free to add, you know, anything which I would have missed. From my perspective, I think, you know, when we run the most mission critical systems in the financial services, so a lot of customers depend on our systems to kind of perform their day-to-day financial leads, okay? So uptime, high availability are utmost important to us. At the same time, the ability to process through billions and billions of transactions we deal with everyday, you know, that is of utmost importance to us. So the solutions have been running for a long time in the mainframes, tuned for many years, performing at scale, as mentioned again, you know, very low latency with thousands of transactions per second, you know, in case of real time transactions or very high throughput, you know, workloads, then getting hundreds and thousands of transactions per second. So taking, and again, in most cases, are, you know, in our case, they're running as a monolith. Now, how do you take, you know, a system like this and break it down into microservices and apply it on the cloud? And how do you deal with data, for example? So the data is sitting at one place. Now you cannot... what you cannot do is come Monday and turn off everything on the on-premise and put everything on the cloud for something like this, so you need an iterating migration path. How do you build a iteration migration path when the plane is moving and make it happen? I think that has been the challenge. The way we address this, we have built various patterns, you know, to kind of take that right out to the cloud using, you know, a Securus pattern, okay? Using a CDC and a Securus pattern, so we build what we'll call... you know, a framework called data fabric, which allows us to kind of seamlessly migrate applications and where the applicants can live on both ends and successfully, you know, solve the traffic, for example. We build techniques, you know, like pilot testing using pilot testing framework which allows us to kind of do a A/B testing which is the application is running on the cloud, application is running on on-premise, but we run the transaction, we complete it at both locations and make sure that it behaves the way we have anticipated it to behave, for example. So this was some of the challenges we had and we've just gone over some of the techniques we have open in our case to solve that problem. >> Yes, to add to that, John, you know... >> Great by the way, great insight. Awesome, thank you for sharing. >> Sure. To add to that, I think what Raghu was saying and what we found with the project, what is happening is it has fundamental implications to people in their daily lives. You know, someone going to buy milk at the grocery store, I mean, they cannot have their transaction stopped, it is not like I can be 99% right, you have to be right. And therefore it's important that we capture the requirements in the right way and make sure that they are reflected correctly in the target, that's one part. The second part is that we are not, as you heard earlier from Raghu as well, not re-platforming, we are rewriting all of the critical activities because the paradigms have shifted, the way coding is done, the way you are, you know, composing code, and the way your writing functionalities have changed are therefore making sure that the principals have not changed, the functionalities have not changed, but the way of delivery is changing. That continuity of business functionality through the process has been a very interesting part of the project. As far as we are concerned, we're still a work in progress that's still going on and it is really exciting to see how Raghu and the team have got these huge volumes, and they've got a new way of working both happening together and that's what we are happy to participate in. >> Yeah, and just a quick highlight, I want to call out the fact that they are writing their own code, they're getting patents. This is the new normal, right? I mean you got to build it. And this is all software value, this is what cloud does. I do want to give you a chance to explain to the folks UST and what the benefits are for working with you guys as an Amazon implementation partner, what's the benefits that customers get? Obviously, you got migrations like this that are modernizations programs, taming complexity, obviously a key, on account here. What does other customers get from working with you? >> Yeah, so AWS provides all of the technology underpinnings in terms of the functionalities, the functions, which are available out of the box, and, you know, it's all in those category from AWS. You get a lot of capabilities in terms of their architecture and their support for their transformation. What we provide on top of it is a willingness to take ownership for outcomes, that we make sure that what AWS offers is actually working for the end client targeted, for example, TSYS, and make sure that we do it in a time and in a speed which meets business requirements, and taking that ownership for our outcomes is a very key add-on that UST provides towards what AWS provides. There are other minor benefits, for example, AWS will invest in something that'll partner with UST in terms of migration, in terms of, you know, some subsidy of the world required in the initial stages, but the real value comes because we make sure that AWS and TSYS are both successful, and it becomes our job to make sure that we are part of a successful rollout rather than just a roll out. >> Raghu, I got to ask you. Obviously, the fun part is writing code and when you have DevOps and DevSecOps fully operational, it's infrastructure as code, that's the dream scenario, right? So how close are you to that? And what's next on this modernization wave? >> Yeah, as part of this journey, I think what we have embarked is, I think, you know, in fact our code is kind of the base foundational element. I think everything, what we are doing, as part of this migration, we are taking advantage of how a large enterprise, you know, should operate. Like, you know, we operate across the world, we have teams across the world building a lot of solutions every day. So we have built, you know, in fact, our code using something called service catalog, it's an offering from AWS, to help with large enterprises converting to the... or migrating to the cloud. So we are using that as our foundational layer to help us build that, and I think we are looking forward to it. I think, you know, where we migrate all of our applications, and take advantage of the true power of the cloud, especially in the, you know, in the data space, in the ML space and in areas we are not necessarily are not able to as easily, you know, adapt on the on-premise. >> John: Niranjan and Raghu, thank you so much for coming onto theCUBE, sharing the UST story, TSYS, great customer example, really great use case, great insights into taming complexity, because that's what the now the opportunity is to do and to recast and reset and a refactor business innovation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you very much John and Raghu. >> Keeps coverage here at theCUBE AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, thanks for watching. (relaxed atmospheric music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, we got a great segment here on taming complexity. Niranjan Ramsunder and Raghu Bongula, Senior Vice President of Engineering TSYS, and Niranjan is the Chief Technology Officer of UST. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. You've got a great use case here, taming complexity. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John, it's a pleasure to be here. >> So this is a great example of some of the major wave we're seeing coming in that were reporting this re:Invent is that this next generation of cloud scale powered by data and business value at the modern application layer, at the top of the new stack, if you will, going to call it that. This is the theme everyone's talking about, you've got Edge, all these things are happening, but at the heart of it is the complexity. So Niranjan, take us through what you guys are doing at UST with Raghu and his journey on the transformation. Set us up. >> Sure, John. Thanks, John, and Raghu, thanks for joining us. So when you look at AWS, John, you got it right. The situation has matured to a level where the real complex applications, the one which needs low latency, high throughput are now moving to the cloud, and concerns about data security, about privacy, about how to manage systems are not in my control are now getting resolved, and an important example of that is what TSYS and Raghu are doing in the sense of really taking their core functionalities, their fundamental business processes and moving it to the cloud. So it has been a great experience for us working with Raghu and the entire TSYS team on how a business function moves. What are the reasons why you would move? What considerations will you have? And then, you know, proving that it really is functional, that is critical because business has to see value. It's not just cloud because it's attractive, it is because cloud has a purpose. So we'd love to hear from Raghu as well on what are the motivations, but that is really what excites us, thanks. >> Raghu, before you get into your, the why on the transformation, I just want to set it up. You guys are running a very big business. You have a lot of business legacy systems built in place, your transforming to the cloud, you can't just kill the old to bring in the new, you got to work together, this is part of the benefit of the cloud. So with that said, take us through the journey, what's the purpose, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Take us through the highlights. >> Sure, John, thank you. Thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk here. So, you know, as I mentioned, I'm Raghu Bongula, I lead the delivery of platform analyzation and cloud migration programs at TSYS. TSYS, which is part of global payments, you know, is focused on payments and card processing for the issuer banks. We are the number one card issuer processor in the United States, and I think we lead in many countries across the world. So we run the most mission critical systems in the financial services. So our platforms are a combination of, you know, low latency workloads which span in thousands of transactions per second and also high-throughput workloads like a high throughput batch workloads, which, you know, which deal with the hundreds and thousands of, you know, transactions per second, you know, and, you know, in the current mainframes. So our challenge has been how to take this systems, you know, which have been so successful for so many years with the cloud, how do we kind of take that? You know, how do we kind of approach that? That has been our challenge. I think we have been, you know, in this journey along with UST to solve those. The motivations for us, you know, from my perspective, to take our platforms to the cloud, you know? There are many, but these are some of them, the first one being the business agility, you know? Right now, I think like any other company who is running on on-premise, they are bound by the infrastructure and you know, the rigid state of the data centers. So cloud provides us agility for us to take advantage of the infrastructure, you know, take advantage of the service (indistinct) build so that we don't have to build it ourself, we can use those Lego blocks to solve high-order problems for example. And so other, you know, advantage we have is the ability for us to offer the solutions across the world. Now today, if we go across the world and try to offer our solutions, you know, we are sometimes, I think, you know, are forced to look in to build a data center, which can be, you know, definitely expensive and also time taking, you know? And we lose the market opportunity in many of those cases. So what cloud does provide, in this case, AWS provides this, with this span of regions they have across the world, it provides us an opportunity for us to kind of quickly take our solution to any of these regions where we don't serve today, okay? And last but not least, the security. So I think security is, you know, is a foremost. The security of what we see in AWS, you know, is, you know, definitely meets our needs and our customers', and you know, we feel that to get that sophistication it's going to be more and more tougher in the on-premise environment. >> That's great stuff. I mean, Niranjan, we're talking about this all the time with cloud. This year and this kind of inflection point is where it goes the next level, you know? I mean, Raghu is running a very successful global payments system, a lot of transactions. So, you know, the metaphors range, you know? "Changing the airplane engine out at 30,000 feet," I've heard that one. That's kind of what's happening here, He's got to be successful. You can't just like put the pause button. >> Yes, and there are more than one, you know, allegory which fits your... One is of course is the airplane engine changing, the second, the pilot is changing as well. So it does, you know, it's not just enough to take care of technology moves and ensure business still runs, but at the same time, the people who are supporting it today work on older technologies, they need to move along with the change so that we don't lose the knowledge, they have the systems. And the one important part where we are contributing to this whole engagement is documenting their systems which have been written over a period of 30 years and ensuring that all the rules and subroutines and the nested loops within that get translated correctly and get tested correctly as they move to the cloud. So it is definitely in the engine, but you know, the entire transformation has to be seamless and business should not know better, it should be nothing happened except that now we're on the cloud, that is really where the fun part is. >> Raghu, I want to ask you, when you guys sit in the room and say, "Okay, we got to do this." What are the key business benefits are expected from this modernization program? I mean, I get the agility, that's, you know, check the box, yeah, we want to be more agile. What does that translate into from a benefits standpoint? >> Yeah, so build that agility for us means, you know, our ability to kind of adapt to the market needs as quickly as possible, which is, you know, we deal with different demographics, different regulatory environments across the world. So if a need arises to quickly build a payment product or a card product to serve a particular industry or a particular domain or a particular vertical, you know? Across the world, we want to be able to kind of quickly put together what we have in a, you know, a marketable solution, okay? So that's what it means for us and the business agility, and we want to be able to do across the world, so if we see an opportunity, you know, anywhere in the world, we want to be able to kind of quickly deploy our solution, tie our Lego pieces, build a product or, you know, configure a product which satisfies that particular vertical or that particular regulatory region across the world. >> All right, question for both of you guys. I would love to ask the same question if you don't mind answering it from the different perspectives that you're taking. What were the major challenges that you guys have anticipated and addressed in this program? Because you know, this is probably going to... I can almost guess how many times we bump up against something that's a little speed bump, it says, "Okay, whoa, okay, how do we do that?" 'Cause remember, it's all net new sometimes should be factoring your... not just re-platforming. So can you share some of the major challenges that you've anticipated and how you've addressed them with this modernization program? >> Sure, I can go first, and then, you know, Niranjan, feel free to add, you know, anything which I would have missed. From my perspective, I think, you know, when we run the most mission critical systems in the financial services, so a lot of customers depend on our systems to kind of perform their day-to-day financial leads, okay? So uptime, high availability are utmost important to us. At the same time, the ability to process through billions and billions of transactions we deal with everyday, you know, that is of utmost importance to us. So the solutions have been running for a long time in the mainframes, tuned for many years, performing at scale, as mentioned again, you know, very low latency with thousands of transactions per second, you know, in case of real time transactions or very high throughput, you know, workloads, then getting hundreds and thousands of transactions per second. So taking, and again, in most cases, are, you know, in our case, they're running as a monolith. Now, how do you take, you know, a system like this and break it down into microservices and apply it on the cloud? And how do you deal with data, for example? So the data is sitting at one place. Now you cannot... what you cannot do is come Monday and turn off everything on the on-premise and put everything on the cloud for something like this, so you need an iterating migration path. How do you build a iteration migration path when the plane is moving and make it happen? I think that has been the challenge. The way we address this, we have built various patterns, you know, to kind of take that right out to the cloud using, you know, a Securus pattern, okay? Using a CDC and a Securus pattern, so we build what we'll call... you know, a framework called data fabric, which allows us to kind of seamlessly migrate applications and where the applicants can live on both ends and successfully, you know, solve the traffic, for example. We build techniques, you know, like pilot testing using pilot testing framework which allows us to kind of do a A/B testing which is the application is running on the cloud, application is running on on-premise, but we run the transaction, we complete it at both locations and make sure that it behaves the way we have anticipated it to behave, for example. So this was some of the challenges we had and we've just gone over some of the techniques we have open in our case to solve that problem. >> Yes, to add to that, John, you know... >> Great by the way, great insight. Awesome, thank you for sharing. >> Sure. To add to that, I think what Raghu was saying and what we found with the project, what is happening is it has fundamental implications to people in their daily lives. You know, someone going to buy milk at the grocery store, I mean, they cannot have their transaction stopped, it is not like I can be 99% right, you have to be right. And therefore it's important that we capture the requirements in the right way and make sure that they are reflected correctly in the target, that's one part. The second part is that we are not, as you heard earlier from Raghu as well, not re-platforming, we are rewriting all of the critical activities because the paradigms have shifted, the way coding is done, the way you are, you know, composing code, and the way your writing functionalities have changed are therefore making sure that the principals have not changed, the functionalities have not changed, but the way of delivery is changing. That continuity of business functionality through the process has been a very interesting part of the project. As far as we are concerned, we're still a work in progress that's still going on and it is really exciting to see how Raghu and the team have got these huge volumes, and they've got a new way of working both happening together and that's what we are happy to participate in. >> Yeah, and just a quick highlight, I want to call out the fact that they are writing their own code, they're getting patents. This is the new normal, right? I mean you got to build it. And this is all software value, this is what cloud does. I do want to give you a chance to explain to the folks UST and what the benefits are for working with you guys as an Amazon implementation partner, what's the benefits that customers get? Obviously, you got migrations like this that are modernizations programs, taming complexity, obviously a key, on account here. What does other customers get from working with you? >> Yeah, so AWS provides all of the technology underpinnings in terms of the functionalities, the functions, which are available out of the box, and, you know, it's all in those category from AWS. You get a lot of capabilities in terms of their architecture and their support for their transformation. What we provide on top of it is a willingness to take ownership for outcomes, that we make sure that what AWS offers is actually working for the end client targeted, for example, TSYS, and make sure that we do it in a time and in a speed which meets business requirements, and taking that ownership for our outcomes is a very key add-on that UST provides towards what AWS provides. There are other minor benefits, for example, AWS will invest in something that'll partner with UST in terms of migration, in terms of, you know, some subsidy of the world required in the initial stages, but the real value comes because we make sure that AWS and TSYS are both successful, and it becomes our job to make sure that we are part of a successful rollout rather than just a roll out. >> Raghu, I got to ask you. Obviously, the fun part is writing code and when you have DevOps and DevSecOps fully operational, it's infrastructure as code, that's the dream scenario, right? So how close are you to that? And what's next on this modernization wave? >> Yeah, as part of this journey, I think what we have embarked is, I think, you know, in fact our code is kind of the base foundational element. I think everything, what we are doing, as part of this migration, we are taking advantage of how a large enterprise, you know, should operate. Like, you know, we operate across the world, we have teams across the world building a lot of solutions every day. So we have built, you know, in fact, our code using something called service catalog, it's an offering from AWS, to help with large enterprises converting to the... or migrating to the cloud. So we are using that as our foundational layer to help us build that, and I think we are looking forward to it. I think, you know, where we migrate all of our applications, and take advantage of the true power of the cloud, especially in the, you know, in the data space, in the ML space and in areas we are not necessarily are not able to as easily, you know, adapt on the on-premise. >> John: Niranjan and Raghu, thank you so much for coming onto theCUBE, sharing the UST story, TSYS, great customer example, really great use case, great insights into taming complexity, because that's what the now the opportunity is to do and to recast and reset and a refactor business innovation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you very much John and Raghu. >> Keeps coverage here at theCUBE AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, thanks for watching. (relaxed atmospheric music)