(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)

>>Good morning friends. Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube Day four of our coverage of AWS. Reinvent continues. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. You >>Can tell it's day four. Yeah. >>You can tell, you >>Get punchy. >>Did you? Yes. Did you know that the Vegas rodeo is coming into town? I'm kind of bummed down, leaving tonight. >>Really? You rodeo >>Fan this weekend? No, but to see a bunch of cowboys in Vegas, >>I'd like to see the Raiders. I'd like to see the Raiders get tickets. >>Yeah. And the hockey team. Yeah. We have had an amazing event, Dave. The cubes. 10th year covering reinvent 11th. Reinvent >>Our 10th year here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean we covered remotely in during Covid, but >>Yes, yes, yes. Awesome content. Anything jump out at you that we really, we, we love talking to aws, the ecosystem. We got a customer next. Anything jump out at you that's really a kind of a key takeaway? >>Big story. The majority of aws, you know, I mean people ask me what's different under a Adam than under Andy. And I'm like, really? It's the maturity of AWS is what's different, you know, ecosystem, connecting the dots, moving towards solutions, you know, that's, that's the big thing. And it's, you know, in a way it's kind of boring relative to other reinvents, which are like, oh wow, oh my god, they announced outposts. So you don't see anything like that. It's more taking the platform to the next level, which is a good >>Thing. The next level it is a good thing. Speaking of next level, we have a couple of next level guests from T-Mobile joining us. We're gonna be talking through their customers story, their business transformation with aws. Glenn Curing joins us, the director product and technology. And Nick Chris, senior manager, product and technology guys. Welcome. Great to have you on brand. You're on T-Mobile brand. I love it. >>Yeah, >>I mean we are always T-Mobile. >>I love it. So, so everyone knows T-Mobile Blend, you guys are in the digital commerce domain. Talk to us about what that is, what functions that delivers for T-Mobile. Yeah, >>So the digital commerce domain operates and runs a platform called the Digital commerce platform. What this essentially does, it's a set of APIs that are headless that power the shopping experiences. When you talk about shopping experiences at T-Mobile, a customer comes to either a T-Mobile website or goes to a store. And what they do is they start with the discovery process of a phone. They take it through the process, they decide to purchase the phone day at, at the phone to cart, and then eventually they decide to, you know, basically pull the trigger and, and buy the phone at, at which point they submit the order. So that whole experience, essentially from start to finish is powered by the digital commerce platform. Just this year we have processed well over three and a half million orders amounting to a billion and a half dollars worth of business for T-Mobile. >>Wow. Big outcomes. Nick, talk about the before stage, obviously the, the customer experience is absolutely critical because if, if it goes awry, people churn. We know that and nobody wants, you know, brand reputation is is at stake. Yep. Talk about some of the challenges before that you guys faced and how did you work with AWS and part its partner ecosystem to address those challenges? >>Sure. Yeah. So actually before I started working with Glen on the commerce domain, I was part of T-Mobile's cloud team. So we were the team that kind of brought in AWS and commerce platform was really the first tier one system to go a hundred percent cloud native. And so for us it was very much a learning experience and a journey to learn how to operate on the cloud and which was fundamentally different from how we were doing things in the old on-prem days. When >>You talk about headless APIs, you talk, I dunno if you saw Warren a Vogel's keynote this morning, but you're talking about loosely coupled, a loosely coupled system that you can evolve without ripping out the whole system or without bringing the whole system down. Can you explain that in a little bit more >>Detail? Absolutely. So the concept of headless API exactly opens up that possibility. What it allows us to do is to build and operator platform that runs sort of loosely coupled from the user experiences. So when you think about this from a simplistic standpoint, you have a set of APIs that are headless and you've got the website that connects to it, the retail store applications that connect to it, as well as the customer care applications that connect to it. And essentially what that does is it allows us to basically operate all these platforms without being sort of tightly coupled to >>Each other. Yeah, he was talking about this morning when, when AWS announced s3, you know, there was just a handful of services maybe at just two or three. I think now there's 200 and you know, it's never gone down, it's never been, you know, replaced essentially. And so, you know, the whole thing was it's an asynchronous system that's loosely coupled and then you create that illusion of synchronicity for the customer. >>Exactly. >>Which was, I thought, you know, really well described, but maybe you guys could talk about what the genesis was for this system. Take us kind of to the, from the before or after, you know, the classic as as was and the, and as is. Did you talk about that? >>Yeah, I can start and then hand it off to Nick for some more details. So we started this journey back in 2016 and at that point T-Mobile had seven or eight different commerce platforms. Obviously you can think about the complexity involved in running and operating platforms. We've all talked about T-Mobile being the uncarrier. It's a brand that we have basically popularized in the telco industry. We would come out with these massive uncarrier moves and every time that announcement was made, teams have to scramble because you've got seven systems, seven teams, every single system needs to be updated, right? So that's where we started when we kicked off this transformational journey over time, essentially we have brought it down to one platform that supports all these experiences and what that allows us to do is not only time to market gets reduced immensely, but it also allows us to basically reduce our operational cost. Cuz we don't have to have teams running seven, eight systems. It's just one system with one team that can focus on making it a world class, you know, platform. >>Yeah, I think one of the strategies that definitely paid off for us, cuz going all the way back to the beginning, our little platform was powering just a tiny little corner of the, of the webspace, right? But even in those days we approached it from we're gonna build functions in a way that is sort of agnostic to what the experience is gonna be. So over time as we would build a capability that one particular channel needed primary, we were still thinking about all the other channels that needed it. So now over a few years that investment pays off and you have basically the same capabilities working in the same way across all the channels. >>When did the journey start? >>2016. >>2016, yeah. It's been, it's been six years. >>What are some of the game changers in, in this business transformation that you would say these are some of the things that really ignited our transformation? >>Yeah, there's particularly one thing that we feel pretty proud about, which is the fact that we now operate what we call active active stacks. And what that means is you've got a single stack of the eCommerce platform start to finish that can run in an independent manner, but we can also start adding additional stacks that are basically loosely coupled from each other but can, but can run to support the business. What that basically enables is it allows us to run in active active mode, which itself is a big deal from a system uptime perspective. It really changes the game. It allows us to push releases without worrying about any kind of downtime. We've done canary releases, we are in the middle of retail season and we can introduce changes without worrying about it. And more importantly, I think what it has also allowed us to do is essentially practice disaster recovery while doing a release. Cuz that's exactly what we do is every time we do a release we are switching between these separate stacks and essentially are practicing our DR strategy. >>So you do this, it's, it's you separate across regions I presume? Yes. Is that right? Yes. This was really interesting conversation because as you well know in the on-prem world, you never tested that disaster recovery was too risky because you're afraid you're gonna take your whole business down and you're essentially saying that the testing is fundamental to the implementation. >>Absolutely. >>It, it is the thing that you do for every release. So you know, at least every week or so you are doing this and you know, in the old world, the active passive world on paper you had a bunch of capabilities and in in incidents that are even less than say a full disaster recovery scenario, you would end up making the choice not to use that capability because there was too much complexity or risk or problem. When we put this in place. Now if I, I tell people everything we do got easier after that. >>Is it a challenge for you or how do you deal with the challenge? Correct me if it's not a, a challenge that sometimes Amazon services are not available in both regions. I think for instance, the observability thing that they just announced this week is it's not cross region or maybe I'm getting that wrong, but there are services where, you know, you might not be able to do data sharing across region. How do you manage that? Or maybe there's different, you know, levels of certifications. How do you manage that discontinuity or is that not an issue for you? >>Yeah, I mean it, it is certainly a concern and so the stacks, like Glen said, they are largely decoupled and that what that means is practically every component and there's a lot of lot of components in there. I have redundancy from an availability zone point of view. But then where the real magic happens is when you come in as a user to the stack, we're gonna initially kind of lock you on one stack. And then the key thing that we do is we, we understand the difference between what, what we would call the critical data. So think of like your shopping carts and then contextual data that we can relatively easily reload if we need to. And so that critical data is constantly in an async fashion. So it's not interrupting your performance, being broadcast out to a place where we can recover it if we need to, if we need to send you to another stack and then we call that dehydration. And if you end up getting bumped to a new stack, we rehydrate you on that stack and reload that, that contextual data. So to make that whole thing happen, we rely on something we call the global cart store and that's basically powered by Dynamo. So Dynamo is highly, highly reliable and multi >>Reason. So, and, and presume you're doing some form of server list for the stateless stuff and, and maybe taking control of the run time for the stateful things you, are you leaning into to servers and lambda or Not yet cuz you want control over the, the, the EC two and the memory configs. What, what's, I mean, I know we're going inside the plumbing a little bit, but it's kind of fun. >>That's always fun. You >>Went Yeah, and, and it has been a journey. Back in 2016 when we started, we were all on EC twos and across, you know, over the last three or four years we have kind of gone through that journey where we went from easy two to, to containers and we are at some point we'll get to where we will be serverless, we've got a few functions running. But you know, in that journey, I think when you look at the full end of the spectrum, we are somewhere towards the, the process of sort of going from, you know, containers to, to serverless. >>Yeah. So today your team is setting up the containers, they're fencing 'em off, fencing off the app and doing all that sort of sort of semi heavy lifting. Yeah. How do you deal with the, you know, this is one of the things Lisa, you and I were talking about is the skill sets. We always talk about this. What's that? What's your team look like and what are the skill sets that you've got that you're deploying? >>Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it's a challenge and it's a, a highly specialized skill set that you need. And you talk about cloud, you know, I, I tell developers when we bring new folks in, in the old days, you could just be like really good at Java and study that for and be good at that for decades. But in the cloud world, you have to be wide in, in your breadth. And so you have to understand those 200 services, right? And so one of the things that really has helped us is we've had a partner. So UST Global is a digital services company and they've really kind of been on the journey up the same timeline that we were. And I had worked with them on the cloud team, you know, before I came to commerce. And when I came to, to the commerce team, we were really struggling, especially from that operational perspective. >>The, the team was just not adapting to that new cloud reality. They were used to the on-prem world, but we brought these folks in because not only were they really able to understand the stuff, but they had built a lot of the platforms that we were gonna be leveraging for commerce with us on the cloud team. So for example, we have built, T-Mobile operates our own customized Kubernetes platform. We've done some stuff for serverless development, C I C D, cloud security. And so not only did these folks have the right skill sets, but they knew how we were approaching it from a T-mobile cloud perspective. And so it's kind of kind of fun to see, you know, when they came on board with this journey with us, we were both, both companies were relatively new and, and learning. Now I look and, you know, I I think that they're like a, a platinum sponsor these days here of aws and so it's kind of cool to see how we've all grown together, >>A lot of evolution, a lot of maturation. Glen, I wanna know from you when we're almost out of time here, but tell me the what the digital commerce domain, you kind of talked about this in the beginning, but I wanna know what's the value in it for me as a customer? All of this under the hood plumbing? Yeah, the maturation, the transformation. How does it benefit mean? >>Great question. So as a customer, all they care about is coming into, going to the website, walking into a store, and without spending too much time completed that transaction and walkout, they don't care about what's under the hood, right? So this transformational journey from, you know, like I talked about, we started with easy twos back in the day. It was what we call the wild west in the, on a cloud native platform to where we have reached today. You know, the journey we have collectively traversed with the USD has allowed us to basically build a system that allows a customer to walk into a store and not spend a whole hour dealing with a sales rep that's trying to sell them things. They can walk in and out quickly, they go to the website, literally within a couple minutes they can complete the transaction and leave. That's what customers want. It is. And that has really sort of helped us when you think about T-Mobile and the fact that we are now poised to be a leader in the US in telco at this whole concept of systems that really empower the customers to quickly complete their transaction has been one of the key components of allowing us to kind of make that growth. Right. So >>Right. And a big driver of revenue. >>Exactly. >>I have one final question for each of you. We're making a Instagram reel, so think about if you had 30 seconds to describe T-Mobile as a technology company that sells phones or a technology company that delights people, what, what would you say if you had a billboard, what would it say about that? Glen, what do you think? >>So T-Mobile, from a technology company perspective, the, the whole purpose of setting up T-mobile's, you know, shopping experience is about bringing customers in, surprising and delighting them with the frictionless shopping experiences that basically allow them to come in and complete the transaction and move on with their lives. It's not about keeping them in the store for too long when they don't want to do it. And essentially the idea is to just basically surprise and delight our customers. >>Perfect. Nick, what would you say, what's your billboard about T-Mobile as a technology company that's delivering great services to its customers? >>Yeah, I think, you know, Glen really covered it well. What I would just add to that is I think the way that we are approaching it these days, really starting from that 2016 period is we like to say we don't think of ourselves as a telco company anymore. We think of ourselves as a technology company that happens to do telco among other things, right? And so we've approached this from a point of view of we're here to provide the best possible experience we can to our customers and we take it personally when, when we don't reach that high bar. And so what we've done in the last few years as a transformation is really given us the toolbox that we need to be able to meet that promise. >>Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, talking about the transformation of T-Mobile. Great to hear what you're doing with aws, the maturation, and we look forward to having you back on to see what's next. Thank you. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and Dave Ante, I'm Lisa Martin, you watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for Day Three coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage of IBM's Cloud Show and their Watson Data, IoT and more. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next two guests are Matt Kalmenson, VP of North American Sales and Cloud Service Providers at Veeam and Andy Vandeveld, VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Veeam. Guys, welcome to the Cube. >> Andy: Thank you. >> Matt: Thank you for having us. >> Andy, I want you to just set the table. We are familiar with Veeam. We're going to do your event. You've got a big event coming up in New Orleans. The Cube will be there. We've been watching you guys for many, many years. The Cube is on its eighth season. I think Season One, 2010 at VMworld. You've been very, very successful. But you're not a public company, but yet you guys act like a public company. You release your revenue and earnings. Set the table about what Veeam is, where you guys are at, and the current status. >> Sure. We're a company that's been around for 10 years, founded by our founders, Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev. The company has grown significantly in the data availability space over the 10 years. We just announced our earnings, or our revenue, for the first time just last quarter. Last year we did $607 million in total revenue. And that's at a 28% growth. So we're a very high-growth company, even though we're at significant run rate of revenue. We've got 2,500 employees worldwide. We'll grow that substantially this year. We've got 240,000 customers worldwide. We're growing 4,000 new customers a month. So we're really a growth company. But we're a privately-held company. We like it that way. It allows us to do things that public companies might not be able to do because of their quarterly reporting requirements. We can make investments where we think investments need to be made for the future, as opposed to having to always watch the profitability. >> Yeah, the 30-day shot clock, as they say, or the quarterly shot clock, 90-day shot clock I mean. So you guys are very successful. Congratulations. And that's, by the way, a great story that you guys kind of act like a public company without being public. So it's like the best of both worlds. You guys are doing well. Congratulations. What's the secret sauce for you guys? Just for the sound bite. We'll get into some of the questions. We have some specific questions about IBM InterConnect. But why is Veeam winning? What's happening? Because you guys are really moving the needle. Quickly explain the secret formula of why Veeam is so successful. >> Well, I think it cuts across a couple of different dimensions. One is, we have a really great culture within the company. And so we have a culture of innovation. People feel like they're invested in the success of the company. And everybody is joining in that. And I think that really helps. We have great technology. We used to have an "It Just Works" tagline. Customers love that, particularly when we talk about their backup and data-protection solutions. They don't want to have to have people monitoring it on a regular basis. It just works. So I think customers love the technology. We have a great employee base, great executive team, and we have great partnerships, like the one here with IBM. And I think those are all key to the success. >> So I want to go back a little bit and sort of set the table on some of the big mega-trends that led to Veeam's ascendancy. When you go back to the early days of virtualization, you had this situation where you had underutilized servers. And then VMware essentially allowed us to consolidate those servers and dramatically increase the utilization, 'cause applications running on these servers, the servers were highly underutilized. The one application that needed all that sort of dedicated server power was backup. So when virtualization went from nothing to whatever, 60, 70% of the market, backup got choked. And it needed an answer. And one of those answers was Veeam. And it shot up and exploded as a company. You've done very, very well. There's more to it than that, distribution channels and so forth. Now we enter the Cloud era. And people now talk beyond backup, about availability. So what can we learn from the virtualization era? What's similar, what's different now? And why is the discussion shifting from one of backup to one of sort of always-on availability? >> So, it's a really good question. And if you think about the trends that we've seen, we've gone through this trend to a completely virtualized world. Yet when we still talk to CIOs, and Veeam's gone out and done studies where we've talked to CIOs, and when we talk to them, we hear that they still have the same challenges that they've had in the past. And that is, over 90% of them are still saying that their most critical needs are application uptime and their access to data. So when we go out and talk to hundreds and thousands of CIOs, they say, "We still have these needs: "access to our applications and access to data." Yet when we talk to them about how those needs are being met, over 80% of them say there's this gap. There's this gap, and while they still have those needs, those needs are not being met. And we call that the availability gap. And Andy and I were talking this morning over a cup of coffee, and he said, "You know what the availability gap is? He said, "Think about it like this." Think about when you're using your cell phone, and that cell phone is going down to 10%, 9%, 8% and 1%. And you get that feeling inside that "I'm about to lose service." And we all know that feeling when you lose connectivity on your cell phone. Now think about that as the CIO or someone who's relying upon that data. That's the availability gap that we see in the marketplace. And that's the gap that Veeam bridges. We bridge that availability gap. So we've addressed that from a virtualization perspective and, now, moving into the physical world too. But now as we move forward, we're seeing another dynamic change in the marketplace, of course. And that's Cloud. Now consumers want to think about different ways to consume technology. They want it on-prem. They want a managed solution. They want in a public cloud. They want it in a private cloud. And the way Veeam addresses that solution is essentially by saying, "However you want to consume your technology, "that's okay by us." If you want to consume your virtualized environment and have it backed up on premises, fantastic. If you want it backed up and managed by a managed service provider, that's okay too. If you want to have that data and information and back it up in a public cloud, great. Or in a private cloud. Or move it between those environments. We'll have the solutions to meet those needs. So we're going to meet this need of having uptime of applications, uptime of data, and availability of data, minimizing that availability gap that these CIOs are facing and allow them to manage and run data and applications and have it available to them no matter what scenario or platform they're running it in. So that's a vision that's more than just selling backup insurance. >> Matt: Absolutely. >> I mean, you just kind of answered it, but I'll ask it generally. How do you guys communicate your vision to CIOs? >> Well, I think we communicate it just like Matt said. When you talk about backup, that is sort of a yesterday story. It's really about making sure that those customers can get access to their data and that they can keep their applications, and, frankly, their businesses up and running. So when we go in and have a conversation with a CIO, we can delineate for them the specific business impacts of not having a robust availability platform. And that takes on different dimensions from a product perspective. So it's not just backup and recovery anymore. It's backup and recovery, but it's availability. It's, how do you orchestrate data across platforms? These are the source of new issues that Veeam has been addressing for the past few years. And I think it's what gives us an advantage in the data protection space. >> Now, it's a very competitive market. A lot of legacy vendors, of which IBM is one of them. But yet you're here at InterConnect as a major IBM partner. Help us understand what the relationship is with IBM, where it fits in the organization. Is it just Cloud? Is it across the entire organization? Fill us in. >> Yeah, so it is a strategic partnership for us. It's not just a single business-unit partnership. We're across the business units inside of IBM. And sure, there's IBM Spectrum Protect, which is a competitive product. But there are so many more opportunities for Veeam and IBM to win together that we're not going to worry about the few areas where there's some overlap. We just announced a few months ago that we're integrating, doing snapshot integration, for IBM Storwize and SAN Volume Controller, which we'll provide in our next version, version 10. It's coming out later this year. And that's a big thing. We don't do storage integration, snapshot integration, with all storage vendors. So when we can make a commitment like that, it's a meaningful commitment to the partnership. And so we have this great relationship on the storage side and other parts, but the genesis of the partnership actually started in the Cloud area with Matt's team and some guys on Matt's team that really drove hard to get a foothold in the relationship. So I'll let Matt talk about the Cloud relationship. >> Thanks Andy, and it's been a great relationship, because, while Andy focuses on the global alliances, I have a little bit more of a narrow focus around the Cloud, which really isn't so narrow. So we tend to team up together very well. And what really got our relationship kicked off was having the VMware Cloud Foundation, which runs on the IBM Cloud, where Veeam is the essential backup product that runs the management components of that platform. So, anything on the VMware Cloud Foundation, which sits on the IBM Cloud platform, is backed up and managed by Veeam. So that's now available. And that was really the genesis of the relationship from a Cloud perspective, so that was very, very exciting. >> And Bluemix, they're in the mix? >> Bluemix is in the mix. And that VMware Cloud Foundation actually leverages the Bluemix platform. And then there's several layers of the Bluemix Cloud platform. And now we're going to be in the Bluemix catalog, what is called the IMS catalog, which will be for everyone who's looking to provision a cloud service, can go ahead and pull down and choose to provision VMware and some infrastructure and other services and have it backed up by Veeam. >> So that deal between IBM and VMware was a real catalyst for your relationship? >> Matt: A real catalyst for us. >> Now, of course, VMware's done other deals. They just did one with Amazon recently. But my understanding is the IBM relationship-- >> Well, Pat's been clear. It's a multi-cloud world. So the thing that's clear from this show is, multicloud is what's happening. So that's-- >> Well, what this has given us the ability to do is say, no matter what your customer looks like, there's an opportunity for us to partner and work together. So if you think about the VCF, the VMware Cloud Foundation, might be some organizations that are enterprise in scope, that have a large, on-premises type of deployment. So we're looking for large automation platforms that are looking to automate moving to the Cloud or maybe move back from the Cloud to on-prem, but nevertheless have these very high-end availability needs and business continuity needs. Now, if you think about the IMS platform in Bluemix, which might be a traditional hit-the-keyboard and looking for some infrastructure that you might spin up in a born-in-the-cloud company, from day one, we'll have some services available there for you as well. So you can go from a small SMB company that might be born in the Cloud to a legacy Fortune 100 company that has some kind of cloud foundation needs. And between the partnerships of our organizations we have solutions to meet those needs. >> One of the interesting things to me about Veeam is when you started out, when you were in your eating glass mode, you were going to VMUGs and doing all that sort of hard work with the hardcore VMware practitioners. Now you're on your way to a billion dollars. And you're striking partnerships with companies like IBM. How have the conversations changed in terms of who you sell to, who you're interacting with. Obviously more CIOs are probably paying attention to the investments that they're making. How has that changed? >> Well, just from the Veeam perspective, these partnerships are extremely important. Companies like IBM have relationships with enterprises that go back decades. And, for us, that's an opportunity for us to leverage their trusted advisor status with those decision makers in the enterprise. Our business started, and we have a very robust small and medium-size business. We have a strong and growing enterprise business. And we're looking for the enterprise as our growth vehicle to get to a billion dollars. So partnering with enterprise-class partners like IBM is really a key force. >> I mean, you guys can bring your value proposition pretty much to any environment. To your cell phone analogy about the battery power, which we've all seen. But, you know, Dave's on Verizon. I'm on AT&T. So this is the same dynamic in the Cloud. This is where you guys are looking for the growth. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, I think that's a pretty good analogy. And the way I kind of think of it is, we have the best solutions in the marketplace for availability needs, regardless of the size of the organization, the end-user needs, regardless of the go-to-market strategy and regardless of the platform. So by building, and as we continue to move up market and aggressively build partnerships like the ones with IBM, it allows to address the business needs no matter what those business needs are. And partnerships like the ones with IBM allow us to scale to great lengths. >> Matt and Andy, I want to ask you a question for the folks watching, 'cause here at IBM InterConnect, the IBM relationship that you guys outlined, what's the major to-do for Veeam this year? I mean, in terms of, as you accelerate. You've got 600 million in revenue. What's the core message that you're sending the marketplace in terms of where that growth's going to come from? And what's the tag, what's the bumper sticker for Veeam right now? >> I think it's around the Cloud. I think that's an area where we're putting a heavy investment. We're hiring great people. And for us, we see that data protection is going to have to span the Cloud environment. Now, it's going to be on-prem, it's going to be in the Cloud, it's going to be a hybrid. But from our perspective >> Matt: It's everywhere. >> Yeah, becoming much more robust in the Cloud is really going to be a focus area for us this year. >> Yeah, I would agree. I would tack onto that continuing to scale into the enterprises very aggressively. We've built out a large enterprise organization strictly focused on the enterprise. We've had the technology to address the enterprise needs, but now we've dedicated sales teams and organizational structures just to address the enterprise. And continuing to bring out our Cloud sales organizations and make sure that everyone within our organizations also has a benefit by not only understanding the Cloud business, but our sales teams are compensated to sell Cloud solutions. So it's not like we have a stovepipe organization that just goes sell Cloud, and then somebody else who goes out and sells an on-prem solution. We have teams that are focused on compensation that works together so that our teams can go out and send the message of, "consumption's your decision". We want to help you make the right business decision. We want to help make the right technological decisions. But how you consume, that's up to you. And we're here to help you coach, here to help guide, here to help show some maps on how you can do that. We know we have the right availability solution no matter what needs or what consumption model of what path you want to go down. >> And the enterprise has certainly changed. And you guys understand the enterprise readiness. And you've got product leadership. So that seems to me to be the magic. >> And also the relationship with an organization like IBM because that helps us bridge those gaps. >> Well, congratulations guys, for great success and a good relationship with IBM. Great story. Love the story of being private with this kind of transparency. It's rare, and so congratulations Andy, Matt. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining the Cube. More live coverage. Stay with us all day, Day Three of exclusive coverage of IBM InterConnect 2017. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us. More after this short break.