 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. And welcome back to Boston. We continue our coverage here on theCUBE of the Red Hat Summit and welcoming now to theCUBE stage for the first time. I believe David Gledhill, who is the Group Chief Information Officer and Head of Group Technology and Operations at DBS Bank. David, good morning to you. Good morning, hi, it's great to be here. All the way from Singapore, and he was early for the segment this morning, so you get extra points for that. Congratulations. Put that on the jet lag. Thanks for being with us. David, anymore, we talk a lot about companies in general. Everybody says everybody's a tech company now, right? Not the way it used to be. How is that playing out in your world and financial services as far as how deeply ingrained you have to be with the technology? Yeah, so very much. Our tech transformation started about 10 years ago, being CIO for the company about 10 years. And frankly, the first five years were just fixing the basics. So getting in place, what we'd call world-class systems, doing a bunch of stuff on resilience and security and all of that kind of stuff. And the other thing, and this is the dramatic change, 10 years ago when I joined the company, we were 85% outsourced to manage surface vendors. So I had technology people that basically were signing contractors and managing service agreements. We didn't have technology DNA. And so over those five years and a full 10 years actually, we've been doing a lot about just insourcing and rebuilding our technical muscle, if you like. So now we've gone from 85% outsourced to 90% insourced. So we run, build, and manage our own. We're now a technology company. And five years ago, we had a real big shift and we were closest to what was going on in China. And so probably saw this before many, many of the other banks saw this around the world. Of what Alibaba was doing with Ant Financial and Tencent and this whole just complete disruption of how customers interact with the banking industry. So we got an early lead on this digital transformation. And really for the last five, six years we've been doubling down on building a pure digital offering. And we see ourselves as a technology company providing banking services, not as a bank with some technology department in the back end. Yeah, I'd love if you can a little bit to help us dig into that because I think back, it was like, okay, what did digitization mean? 10 years ago, it was like, oh, okay, I need to make sure I have a good website and maybe a good mobile app, which is a fine starting piece. And also the piece you talked about is when it was outsourced, I'm managing pieces, but I sign up for what I need today. And when the business needs something, those outsources aren't necessarily tied to them. So you're playing telephone with them. And most of the companies I've talked to that have brought skills back inside it because the needs of the business are constantly asking for more. And it can't be, well, that's not part of our contract with what we have, we'll get to that in a year or two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's a very interesting shift. I mean, it plays out on a number of different dimensions. So first of all, let me go into that question of business and tech and that separation. So when we managed service, it was literally writing contracts and specs and handing to vendors. I mean, it was just a horrible process and how can you be a modern technology firm like that? So insourcing for us was one big thing to own those people, but when you insource, then you end up with a business unit and a technology unit. And you still got silos. So how do you break that? Because that really is a problem. If you look at the way technology companies work, they don't work like that. So what we did was, five years ago when we said, okay, how do you make that flip to being a digital company? We went very deep into how some of the great technology companies operate. We want to understand what is it? How does their DNA work? How does their culture work? How do they organize themselves? How do they build technology? How do they become agile? And so we looked at, we studied Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn, Facebook, and we call them the Gandalf companies. And we said, how could we be more like them? Well, a Gandalf is missing a D. And unfortunately at DBS, we happen to have a D. So our goal became, how do we become the D in Gandalf? And that was like a lightning rod through the organization because all of a sudden it said to our people, forget about biz and tech and things. We're, you need to think about how these technology corporations be more like them, which means there's no separation. There are no silos. We are together building great technical products for our customers. And so we need to rethink the organization to make sure that happens. It was magic. You've got a saying, making banking joyful. Yeah. All right. Which is not exactly the emotion that I associate with having to deal with my bank. It's fine, but joyful. Very unusual adjective there. What's that all about? And again, at the end of the day, how does technology enhance that? How does that complement that and really boost that? Yeah, so it was quite a radical moment for us. That came up as we were at a leadership meeting and talking about what is our purpose and how do we, lots of people talk about customer journey thinking and stuff like that, but how do you bring that to life? And one of the execs there said, well, what about making banking joyful? And the rest of us looked at him like he was from a different planet. So are you kidding me? What do you mean by that? But as we thought about it more, it has a great meaning and a great purpose to it. That we're not there just to do transactions, but we're there to enrich lives, create new businesses, to make customers feel great in their financial stability and in the way they deal with us. And it applies in so many levels. So if you're a bank teller, you understand how to make banking joyful by just that, going that extra mile in terms of service. If you're in infrastructure and you're dealing with data centers and servers, you understand that making banking joyful, you must be there all the time. You must have sub-second responses. You must feel great in the customer's hands. So it's something that you can apply to all aspects of banking and everybody plays a part in making banking joyful for our customers. All right, so David, bring us inside a little bit. Your organization, you said, transforming into a technology company. What's that mean? What technology are you using? We're here at the Red Hat Show, open source, not the first thing that people think about when they think about banking. So how does that fit into the culture that you're building? Yeah, yeah, okay. So this Gandalf thing that I talked about, that's great as a logo and a mindset shift, but it doesn't get you very far. And so what we came up with is five key elements that have to change that we had to work on to become more like a technology company. And one was shift from projects to running technology like a series of platforms. That enables you to do agile at scale. But for that, you need to organize very differently, which is the third thing. And then the fourth thing is you need to build for modern systems. The legacy way of building technology just wasn't going to get us to where we needed to be as a technology company. And then the last bit is automate everything. So if you want speed to market and agility, you have to automate. That modern technology stack, it was very obvious to us that the legacy corporate technologies that we used to build systems were just not going to win it for us. And so that's our move to open source. Red Hat was a fabulous partner in that and we use Red Hat extensively throughout our entire infrastructure. And so we went through this rapid modernization of moving to open source, moving to open source database. We used MariaDB quite extensively, but also picking up pieces of open source from the Gandalf companies. We'd seen the way they use open source to scale, plus also to provide just amazing services. So for example, Netflix. We run a bunch of our banking platforms on Netflix, believe it or not. It's kind of cool. Banking on Netflix is a kind of crazy concept, but we brought that to life. And what is it about Netflix we loved? We love that engineering discipline around chaos engineering and the use of chaos to really build resilient platforms. So in our whole test and deployment framework, we have a lot of Netflix chaos elements built into that to make sure that when we actually are testing, we're testing for chaos and random failures, which we inject into those platforms. We don't do in production like Netflix do quite yet, but this whole concept of site reliability and chaos and excellence of service is again something we learned from the Gandalf company. So Gandalf was not just, oh yeah, let's pass around the Harvard Business article. It was really, let's use that engineering disciplines and design principles to build our own systems. On network, Facebook, which is, you think of as a network company, we think of network work in the infrastructure layer. And our infrastructure and our networking is designed on a bunch of concepts that Facebook have about how they build their network within their data centers. Can you help connect the dots from us? You talk about phenomenal technologies, chaos engineering, networking like these global companies. How does that lead to the outcome that you talked about, joy to your end users? So if you want to make banking joyful, you have to be super reliable. You have to be on the edge of the innovation curve all the time, which means you need to be test and learn, which means you'll be very agile. You need to be able to scale very well and the open source technologies enable us to scale superbly. You need to be able to perform as well superbly well. So when I joined the company, our measure of how well our applications were performing is are they up or down? And then we advanced that to well, are they up and maybe 80% of the time they're responding within four seconds. Those are terrible measures because they're not joyful. That means 20% of the time we're awful. That doesn't bring joy to a customer. So what brings joy is we're now scrapped all those things and we're starting to look at performance, for example, at the 99th percentile. So anything below that is just noise and the signal is what is our worst performing 99% because if you want to be joyful every single time that a customer opens your application, you want to be there and respond well, et cetera, et cetera. Same thing goes for customer science. Where do you get customer drop-offs and how do you fix those problems? So customer science and the engineering disciplines around observing and instrumenting a platform all the time become very, very important. So it goes very, very deep. It's a simple concept, but totally changes the way we engineer. You know, your line of work or your industry obviously is very security oriented, right? Yeah, yeah. I think of healthcare being another with health information and what have you, but certainly financial services. So in the open source community, I mean, how do you address this? I wouldn't say it, it's not a clash by any means, but it's a concern, I would think still, that you have to be micro-observant of security practices and yet this is an open community and exchange of ideas and could be exchange of vulnerabilities or problems, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sure, and we absolutely do. So there are certain things that we, certain places we won't go, or we will go only for sort of experimentation reasons. Because of that question. But arguably, we think that open source can become more secure over time than non-open source because you're also getting a bunch of people fixing it the whole time. So, and we've seen some of the issues with some open source and the hardly and all those other bits and pieces, but they were shut down pretty quickly and found pretty quickly. So we move with caution. We're very cognizant, we move with our eyes open and it's really the zero-day vulnerabilities that we're exposed to. But equally, if you're in a proprietary stack, you know, the whole thing that came up with the X86 platform in terms of the vulnerabilities there that applied open source or not. So, yeah, security issues exist everywhere. All right, so David, bring us in. You talked about some of the open source technologies. You know, where does Red Hat fit into this? You know, what's it like? How have they really advanced that journey that DBS has been on? Yeah, so, you know, for the heavy lifting for the big applications that we want to run and the majority of our workload, you know, going with open source is fine, but you want to have open source that also you think isn't going to break or have big security vulnerabilities to your question. And that's really where a partner like Red Hat comes in because it gives us access to, you know, all the wonderful benefits of open source with a trusted partner that's putting, you know, industrial strength quality releases out that we can really rely on and bank on. So, you know, while we use some open source at the periphery and true open source that we just plug it off the internet, the really very, very high demanding workloads and very secure workloads, we will always work with a partner that can wrap that into an enterprise quality offering for us. So Red Hat has gone from zero to running way over 50, 60% of our workload and we'll continue to put even more on that because it's a platform we can trust. That's great. We're so when you look at your journey overall, you know, how far are you along that journey? Anything when you look out, you know, what are some of the things that are exciting you looking forward? Yeah, so while we believe we're ahead of most banks, there are some that are in the mix, Goldman's pretty far advanced, Deutsche a couple of the others that we, Capital One few, but it's a sort of rare, rare breed. You know, we're about 80, 90% done on our transformation journey to get stuff to what we would call cloud ready or optimized. But we think we're just scratching the surface because if you think about plugging ourselves into customers large, you know, making banking joyful, our external brand promise for that is live more bankless. And you know, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, oh, I can't wait to go to my local bank branch and go and do some banking. I heard Stu talking about it yesterday. Actually, there is one place my wife, my wife loves going there because we do some great free cookers at DBS. Oh, excellent. But other than my wife, you know, the rest of the planet earth doesn't really do that. So if you want to live more bankless, it's how do we get the toil of banking away from customers, get embed ourselves in their journeys. And for that, we believe that this whole play on ecosystems is very important. So being a creator of an ecosystem or participating so that we take the banking toil out and yet we inject ourselves, be that leisure or travel or insurance or whatever. And you don't see the bank, the bank is invisible, then you're living more bankless. To do that, you need great ecosystems. And we think three things help us to plug into ecosystems. Number one is you have to be able to scale very easily. And all the work we've done on the Gandalf stack means that we're no longer afraid of scale. Now just bring it on. The second thing you need a lot of connectivity and DBS two years ago, we launched the world's largest banking API platform. We went live with 150 different APIs and 60 live partners at the time. That's now grown to over 350 APIs and hundreds of corporates and SME partners that want to partner with us to plug us into their offering. So the more we do that, the more we disappear and let people live more and bank less. Well, next time, if you want to bring some cookies with you, by all means, okay? We're always up for that. David, thanks for the time. We appreciate that. And good luck on the mission and the journey there. DBS. Thanks very much and great to be here. Thank you. Thank you. David Gladhill joining us this morning here to continue our coverage of the Red Hat Summit. We're in Boston. You're watching theCUBE.