 Live from Vancouver, Canada. It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. Here with theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver, my co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program. We have Bernad Deverem, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing, a platform at Red Hat, and we thrilled to have a customer on Niko Wellner, who's a UNIX systems engineer with finance, informatics out of Germany. Thank you both so much for joining. All right, Bernad, let's start with you. Just give your first time on the program, I believe. So a little bit about your background. You've been with Red Hat less than a year, so tell us your role there. Yeah, I've been at Red Hat for about nine, 10 months now. I'm very, very excited to be here in the open source community development model. It's a very unique opportunity, as I've been leading the platform's marketing, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenStack platform, of course, is why we are here in the OpenStack Summit. All right, great, yeah. We got RHEL and RHV and RHOSP and lots of other LMAOPs. So Niko, give us a little bit about your background. Tell us about your organization and then let's get into the kind of mini case study we'll do with you. It's an honor for me to be here. Thank you very much for this and I'm working for Finance Informatic, as you said, and it's a centralized IT service provider and the S Finance Group in Germany for the savings bank and state banks. Overall, we serve about 400 institutes, savings banks, individual savings banks, and we, on our systems, we are operating more than 120 million accounts, bank accounts, and nearly half of them online, our online accounts, and we also develop the software for our savings banks for our customers, not savings banks only, also assurances, and state banks. And we operate the applications we developed previously. Also, it's a huge and amazing company with a lot of different rules and systems. Well, we're really glad you could make it here with GDPR banging down the door and in just a couple of days, we expect everybody in Europe to have been pretty busy getting ready for that. Tell us, your role inside the organization, what's your team do? Your title has UNIX in it, so what's that entail and kind of give us kind of the scope of what you cover? Yes, I'm a systems engineer and I'm working in the department and we are integrating and operating the UNIX systems, which are AIX, we have a huge AIX environment and a huge Linux environment and data centers. And on these Linux systems, we started with OpenStack in 2014 with testing and went into production in 2015, a half a year later. And we integrated this OpenStack, we operated and serve it for our customers internally and on the OpenStack platform, we host one of our core application, it's the internet banking for our customers, as I said, for about 50 million accounts and we have multiple OpenStack clouds and my department is responsible for the clouds and for operating them well. Yeah, Nico, I wonder if I can step back for a second and what led to you going down this path was the company figuring out its cloud strategy, obviously financial institutions we understand, there's governance, compliance, security is a huge concern. What does cloud mean to your team? What led you to OpenStack? Let's start with kind of that problem statement that you had. That is what the main reason we introduced OpenStack was the time to market with our applications and with our environment. And the deployment process took a long time normally in the legacy environment. And with OpenStack, we could dramatically increase the time to deploy the systems and from days or weeks to minutes, so we solved one huge problem with OpenStack and what was another reason is vendor login. We want to avoid the vendor login and so we decided for OpenStack because it's a huge open source software, great community and very stable in our case. And so it's OpenStack for us. All right, so Bern, I've had the opportunity to interview quite a few Red Hat customers. I remember three years ago we were actually in the other hallway here talking to FICO about their rollout of Red Hat OpenStack and I hear some similar themes but you've got access to way more customers than I do. What are you hearing from customers in general? Is this kind of the typical, is speed and agility at the top of the list when it comes to their kind of cloud environment? Exactly, Stu. Just like Nico said actually, we are customers tell us all the time that it is about speed and agility but it's also about the different types of use cases and the workloads that they're actually looking at in their environments. Very popular ones. The use cases are for example, scale out IS as well as dev test environments for the cloud native applications for example. Also we do see that big data analytics, NFV also. So there are many, many different types of use cases we see from our customers. We also have been hearing that they're actually using OpenShift on top of the Red Hat OpenStack platform. Majority of them are either deploying it or planning to deploy containers. So we do see a lot of different but similar aspects as well. Nico, have you started to go down that path with containers, Kubernetes, all of that stuff yet or? Not so far. We plan to do so. In general we lay with containers, we are planning too but, and we already started the process but it would take a little bit. And I think we're not sure if start with OpenStack, containers on OpenStack or plain but I think with OpenStack could be a great way to do so. And because one of the reasons is that our OpenStack environment is very reliable and this is important for us, very important for us and our customers. And over the years, as I said, since 2015 we had no outage due to OpenStack in the whole environment and it's great for us. And so it's- That's great. So where are you now in your Red Hat OpenStack deployment? You're preparing to go into production with OpenStack in production and now you're already a Red Hat customer in other products and you're now going out with Red Hat OpenStack platform? Is that correct? Yes, it's correct, yeah. I'm kind of curious, one of the conversations around OpenStack is the component nature of it and that many OpenStack deployments are different. And so as you're now deploying Red Hat and that you were already on OpenStack are the skills transferable? Do you find that the processes are transferable? Or do you feel like this was a good investment? You know, no uptime for three years now and you're now moving to this new platform. Do you and your team feel like you're able to properly instrument and maintain and operate it? I think it's the best platform for us for infrastructure management in the Linux environment and we want to evolve it furthermore. And the skills you've known for years will still transfer to the new OpenStack? We have only a few people working actively on the design and the architecture and operating for OpenStack and it turned out that we could do fine with them and we have, now we have huge experience with OpenStack, feel comfortable with it and we are planning to increase the OpenStack environment slightly I think but the scale out works great for us and the OpenStack itself, in our case, we could very flexible do systems releases and so on is one important thing for us and so I think the OpenStack itself is the best platform for us and our application to hold. That's great. So, Berna, I was at Red Hat Summit and the interesting thing there for me was the portfolio, the breadth of portfolio, right? One of the messages was clear, you've always depended on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and that's still there and containers are Linux and there was a lot of multi-cloud talk and things like that and OpenStack was part of the mix. So can you talk a little bit about OpenStack as part of the Red Hat portfolio and what y'all are bringing to the table and how you're thinking of OpenShift on OpenStack and that sort of thing? Yeah, exactly. As you pointed out, Red Hat is all about open hybrid cloud and within that Red Hat OpenStack platform plays a big, big role, of course, as you can imagine and what we are trying to do with the OpenStack platform is to help our customers like Niko get towards the digital transformation and with that comes again the need for speed and agility and what we are enabling with OpenStack platform is the, as we would like to call it, powering the digital transformation through enabling our customers to accelerate their businesses by simplifying their applications and delivery as well as the services delivery, which then, of course, moves towards innovation, fast innovation at the speed of the business. At the same time, we are trying to enable IT teams to be empowered so that they can actually do the innovation at their own pace without worry with all of the Red Hat portfolio, as you pointed out, yeah. Niko, would love to hear your take on digital transformation. I think back five years ago, we were talking about financial institutions. Oh, well, we needed to go mobile. Well, it's much more than that for most companies that I talked to. Do you consider digital transformation in your company? How does that relate to what IT does, to what the business does, to what your users need? Is one of our core tasks in our company to help our customers for digital transformation and finance informatics itself sees itself to be the best partner for customers to do this transformation. And with leading technologies like OpenStack and in a special case with Red Hat OpenStack, of course, which is a product which enables us to be flexible, secure, and fast with our environment, and to drive this process of digital transformation in the S Finance Group, the savings finance group. All right, so you've been at this for three or four years now with OpenStack. You look back, I'd love to get what learnings you've had for peers of yours that might be earlier in their journey. What have you learned? What might advice might you give them and let's start there. Yeah, okay, yeah. Overall, I would say the OpenStack environment is very reliable, more reliable as I thought at the beginning, but it turned out that it's really good. And yes, from the automation perspective, it's a really nice, let's say, tool for our environment and what I found OpenStack is a great project with a lot of software components you can combine and we have a flexible platform. We can add some components we do not have today but are part of OpenStack community or OpenStack project at all and to enable additional functionalities to the environment. Let's say for containers or for object storage, and something like that and new services for our customers to decrease the time to market. Okay, one of the things that this show we're seeing is looking beyond where we've been. I think the keynote is where people are asking to do more and in more places everything from containers and edge and serverless and the like. So what's interesting you these days is you look down the road, different technologies that are in your roadmap in the future, kind of inside or outside OpenStack. For our company, we are in the process to integrate new needs for our customers and we are planning to do, we will do a lot of big data and maybe OpenStack could be also the right platform for it and for the future we are planning. So while we are still on planning, I think it will be much more diverse in future because right now we do have one application warning on it, one core application. It's a core application, very important for us, but I think we will maybe spread it, enable it for other applications because of the great experience we've made with it. Very well. Niko and Berna, thank you so much for giving us the updates on where you stand with OpenStack and all of your deployment. We'll be back here with lots more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver for John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.