(upbeat techno music) >> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Sumo Logic Illuminate 2018. Now, here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Sumo Logic Illuminate, at the Hyatt, at the airport in Burlingame. We're excited to have, from Virgin Money Digital Bank, two great guests, we love to get customers on, Andy Makings, he is the head of Cloud operations, Andy, good to see you and Julian Howe, head of Cloud Business Office. >> Hi >> So welcome gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> How're you liking the weather? >> It's great. >> Improvement already. (laughing) >> Improvement already, alright. So let's jump into it Virgin Money Digital Bank, what is that exactly? >> Yep. >> Do you want to take that? >> Oh okay, I've been there longer, yeah. 2017, start of 2017, they decided to build a completely new digital bank, for Virgin Money, as an offshoot to the core bank, Virgin Money Brand, using the same banking license with our partner, TenX Future Technologies in London. So building a bank from scratch, whole new business model, data driven, data analytics, Big Data DevOps Agile, whole new business model completely. >> So just starting in 2017 so, you're still pretty early on the journey? >> Yeah, so still in the build phase, pilot phase, and then go live next year. >> So A, what are the key drivers to that decision? That's a pretty innovative decision, which doesn't surprise us, right? Virgin always seems to be kind of out on the leading edge but, when the conversation happened, what is a hundred percent digital bank? How is that different than a traditional bank, besides obvious things, like branches, but, what are some of the motivations, some of the attributes? >> I think they wanted to leverage the brand, of course, Virgin, 'cause there's a lot of new digital bank start ups, which they're competing against. So they thought , let's do it from scratch, let's do it how we want it, make it truly focus on data, driving customer value through the data. And they thought, we can compete because we've got this big Virgin Digital Brand, that we can really use to get customer base. >> Right. >> Yeah, so I think that was the big driver, compared to what they're currently doing, with the bank, the core bank, and what they want to do with the brand new bank. >> Wow. But it's not co-mingled so you're not leveraging existing data, existing clients, or all those things, or are you seeing kind of a transfer over? >> Eventually we may, but that's the future. Yeah, the first thing is to launch the digital bank and then we'll see where the Big Data platform, that we're putting in, drives. Yeah, it makes sense to economies of scale to obviously migrate the rest of the customers. >> So when does it launch, what's the timeframe? >> 2019. >> 2019? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Okay, so you're here at Sumo Logic, what role is Sumo playing in this big project? >> Well, so from my perspective, so I'm looking at, so Andy's been involved in, as he said, for the last 12 months, in terms of building the new platform, really making sure that we're bringing on the bleeding edge technologies, and tech partners and, certainly from my perspective, it's around making sure that I understand who we're going with, what technologies we're using, and how we can utilize those technologies, going forward, to really make sure that our customers are getting the best service from the new digital proposition. >> Right. >> And Sumo Logic is absolutely part of that. >> And are you building your own cloud eco system, in the back, or are you using one of the public clouds? >> Yeah, I'm using Amazon, Amazon public cloud. >> Using Amazon public cloud. >> Yeah, so my team's responsible for building the Big Data platform, TenX Future Technologies are responsible for building the API based banking platform, and then we take streams of data into the data and analytics platform that we're building. So Sumo, obviously, is our logging platform, and we'll then use more and more features of Sumo as they release, so, logging initially, everything goes into Sumo, for the whole of the Amazon platform that we're building, and the data lake, and then what we'll do later on is we just started beta work to do the SIM implementation for security and then we're revolutionizing the SOCs, security operation center, as well to be cloud based, sort of driven because, obviously traditionally, we've been hosted in data centers. >> Right, so you're using it now as part of your build-out process, but then you'll be using it again obviously in your operations as well. >> Absolutely. And yeah and some of the messaging out from this morning with the keynote around just the business intelligence and customer metrics and data that Sumo Logic can almost sort of draw in and present back. >> Right. >> I think that's really powerful. >> Right, are there certain kind of customer features that you look forward to offering that you just can't do in the traditional bank or is it more a lot of kind of marginal improvements because you've got the data? >> It's more the agility, I think. >> Yeah. >> Agility of build. Agility of delivering new business features so it's business driven. As I say we're doing proper DevOps, proper agile across the business in the new digital bank. >> Right. >> Whereas before it's more traditional in the core bank, as we call it. >> Right. >> So it's silos of teams, sand storage, yeah, systems administrators, legacy, so. >> And it is, yeah, that transition into a digital business, as well so how we're set up and how we're aligned, not just the technologies that we're looking to use and the companies we're looking to partner with. >> Right, so on the data driven, you know, being a data driven company in this new bank, I'm fascinated by some of the financing options that are there now, I mean these are some of the pure digital plays that you've been talking about where they're making loan decisions based on some really strange factors that you would think, no way could you make this loan based on a traditional kind of analysis, you would never do it. >> Yep. >> And yet they're pulling some data somewhere that's telling them that this is actually a good loan, so I assume those are the types of things you're looking forward to? >> Yeah, of course. So when we take the feeds from obviously TenX, the platform that TenX is providing with the new customers but you also take feeds from the existing data warehouses, yeah and then we build business models on top of that in the data lake with the data science team and they then get pushed back in to feed scoring models and things like that across the digital platform. And that will just grow and grow. There'll be more and more models as the business gets more mature. >> Right, any super big hurdles that you didn't anticipate that you got to get over to make this happen? >> Technically no, I think more about business transformation. Yeah, we're still part of a bigger bank that holds a bank licensing so a lot of it's around education of cloud, public cloud so that's been key, we've done quite a lot of presentations to the core bank. Especially around the security teams and managing expectations and what they need to look at and how dynamic. We're using LAMDA a lot, so they've got to get their head around how all that works and yeah, what they're doing with that and how dynamic it is. We can spin out thousands of servers in minutes. That's been a bit of a hurdle. >> Right. >> But I think we're getting there and I think the next few months as we build more of the platform we'll definitely get there better. >> Yeah. >> And I think you hit the nail on the head around agility. It's being agile enough and being able to keep pace with, this, the innovation you see with companies like Sumo Logic. >> Right so it's like the parent Virgin Bank kind of looking over the shoulder, going, hey, hey, hey, what're you got? How do I get some of that? >> No, they're fully involved, obviously. They're excited, same as we are, by the prospect of what we're doing because it should drive more customers. >> Well I was going to say, is there going to be some spillover, I would imagine, in terms of innovation and features and those types of things as well? >> Yeah. >> I know already some of the tools we're putting in, we've gone through the pain of going past the security validation and put in, they're now looking and go, well actually that's really useful for hybrid cloud if you want to move some of the existing workloads into public cloud. If we want to, say, leverage marketing or leverage log platforms or leverage monitoring platforms? >> Right. >> As well as the automation we're putting in, we can easily, all the designs have been built to bring in other business units and business areas within the current business. >> Yeah, I'm curious was there push back on using a public cloud for this all 100% digital bank? How did that decision finally get sorted out? I mean, I think generally we're past it for a lot of people obviously in our business but I would imagine, there's still some stodgy guys that are, you know, wearing very expensive suits in mahogany row that are probably like, are you kidding me, you know? >> Yeah, there's still a lot of compliance to sort out. Obviously we've done some, there's more to do as we go nearer to production. >> Yeah. >> There's been some hurdles, we'd be lying if we said there wasn't. >> Right. >> But there's definitely been some hurdles but I think we're getting there and of course, other additional banks have done it in Amazon as well. >> Exactly. >> You're following that model and you need to get through the regulatory compliance. >> And it's about having, making decisions based on facts and there's increasing numbers of facts around how secure and how successful and the benefits that cloud platforms give you. >> Right, it took a while for the facts to kind of out weigh the hype, right? Not so much the hype but the scare. >> The scare is thing, yeah, once you can show, you know we did a BAC late last year to show that we could do it and it was secure and it went through more pen testing than most of the current products would go through, purely because of that scare. >> Right, right. >> They were scared of going to public cloud. >> Interesting. >> Yeah. >> So when again is the anticipated launch date? I won't hold you to it, I'm not-- >> Yeah, 2019. >> Yeah so next year. >> 2019, yeah. >> Yeah, 2019. >> Sometime between January 1 and December 30th? >> Yeah, yeah. (laughing) >> I think it's Q1, I think officially it's Q1. >> Alright. >> Early rather than late. >> Early rather than later, yes. >> It's a great story, I mean an old bank coming out with 100% digital bank. >> Yeah. >> It'd be an interesting story to watch unfold, we'll look forward to it. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright Andy, Julian, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day and I hope you enjoy the rest of your time almost in San Francisco, you got to get up there, at least one, right? >> Yeah, we're going to try to go there, yeah. >> Alright he's Andy, he's Julian, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Sumo Logic Illuminate 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)