 So, next up, we're going to actually bring up a panel of end-users. Ron Miller has been kind enough from TechCrunch to moderate this panel of amazing end-users. Coming up on stage, we're going to have Susanna Brown from American Airlines, Justin Stone from Liberty Mutual, Christopher Chautina from Comcast, Ines Ildrum from Boeing, Andy Rosequist from Zipcar, and Andrea Yeager from Allianz to talk a little bit about their journey. So, come on up on stage. Slintz on. Thank you. Thank you. Give him better. Thank you. I like that music. Yeah. All right. Good morning, everyone. I'm Ron Miller. I'm from TechCrunch. And I'm up here with this group of Cloud Foundry users to figure out why they chose Cloud Foundry. But we're going to be looking at this in the broader context of digital transformation inside large organizations and how Cloud Foundry itself can be a catalyst for change inside your companies. And, you know, I think it's more than hyperbole to say that the technology choices that you're going to make today could have a big impact on your future success as companies. So, I'm going to ask these people who are working inside these large organizations and really pushing their companies to a more modern context why they've chosen the software and processes they've chosen to make that happen. So, to get us started, I'm just going to, because there's a lot of us and I want you to be able to know who's talking, I want to have everybody introduce themselves briefly and then we'll get into the questions. Let me get started, Chris. Chris Trotina, director of software development at Comcast. We've been using Cloud Foundry for about four and a half years. Susanna Brown with American Airlines. We became a gold member of the community last year. And I manage operations technology, which are a lot of the systems that keep our planes up in the air. And as Sildrem, the digital transformation environment program director, we actually help her keep the airplanes going. So, my job is... And they sell them airplanes too. Exactly. We just sold a few last week. So, my job is to create the modern development environment globally so we can produce the software that's necessary or the other products that will transform how we serve and produce better products and how we serve our customers. I'm Andy Rosequist from Zipcar. So, I lead our operations, platform and security teams. And so, what we use a platform based on Cloud Foundry to help us deliver the future of mobility and to keep innovating. Andrea Jaeger with Alliance in Germany. I'm head of department on the operation side. And we started to use Cloud Foundry a couple of years ago, also in an effort to make the user or the customer experience an excellent one. And Justin Stone, director and the cloud and security enablement team at Liberty Mutual. We're leveraging Cloud Foundry to help solve all sorts of problems for our net new applications as well as our application modernizations, tackling any of those challenges from how we deliver the software but also how we make it more secure. All right. So, I think that when I was thinking about this and how we talk about Cloud Foundry and the organizational change that it drives, it's like, what is the ultimate purpose of this? And it's to make a better experience for your customers. And how do you produce services and products that make a better experience? So, when you guys look at using Cloud Foundry, how have you found that helps improve your ultimate customer experience? So, I'll take this one first, I suppose. So, probably, Susanna and I are very popular at parties. People are always happy to provide their feedback about their cable service and their alums. Right. Comcast has been on about a two-year journey where we introduced the net promoter score system. We started out, I think, negative 15, something like that. And I'm pleased to say that two years later here we are now at 0.8. So, at least we've hit neutrality. I would like to say a lot of that has to do with our Cloud Foundry implementation. Prior to one of the strongest reasons for customer dissatisfaction was the availability of our applications. With Cloud Foundry, we've introduced about 60% improvement in our availability, which has dramatically improved the ability of our customers to interface with self-service and our frontline employees to work with our customers. So, for us, it's really been all about speed of delivery. So, in addition to just not just getting customer experience improvements, but also consistency in the customer experience depending on the channel in which our customers choose to engage with us. So, we're wanting to make sure that if you're checking in at the kiosk or on your mobile device that the options and the experience is consistent. And we were finding that whenever we had a major request from our business units, the change because it cut across multiple channels of delivery could potentially take up to 12 months. By having that experience now consolidated and using Cloud Foundry and ours is based more on the IBM Cloud, we've really been able to reduce our delivery of major projects to, I know this is still long, but two months. And for us, that's incredible. Well done. Yeah. I think at Boeing, one of the things that we're doing, I'll take a little bit of a history lesson first. So, user experience dates tens of years ago when we're building aircrafts either in defense on the ones that we fly on. It's extremely important that all your dashboards and everything is very well designed for the user. So, the user centric design have been at the heart of the company, but recently I think what we've seen is in our systems, the software systems, we haven't really focused as much. We've been on par with the industry, but that's just not good enough. So, we've leveraged Pivotal Cloud Foundry as a part of our build measure learn cycle and be able to improve that build measure learn and iterate. We did start with a couple of months instead of a couple of years and now we're able to iterate on a daily basis on our designs. You know, with that, for us, I think the difference has also been not just the technology that enables all of that, but the process changes within the entire life cycle of the products. You are so much more directly engaged with your customer and you get constant feedback. That's something that we've really been focusing on to really talk to them and find out how they'd like the product. Yeah, I would echo that as well. I think the customer feedback loop is dramatically improved. The test quality, everything that's going out the door is higher quality. We have less issues in production than we've ever had before in this platform. It helps to have a really strong pipeline and platform team that's supported for us. And we have some of those folks here today, but that helps tremendously in regards to the confidence that the business has when you're making commitments to deliver things. There's never that doubt anymore that you're going to get it out the door. So I would even, like, I would talk about it as a two-phase cycle of engagement. So one of Zipcar's core values has been obsessed about the member experience. And a couple of years ago we said, let's take that and let's also focus that internally and obsess about the engineer experience and making it, like, by creating better engagement for our engineers and better ability to see the immediate results of their actions, our engineers are able to engage directly with our customers. And that's able to let us really cut those feedback cycle times very, very down. So what I'm hearing is that using Cloud Foundry caused an improvement in internal processes that led to improved customer experience. But what I'm curious about is how Cloud Foundry contributed to that internal process improvement, that kind of feeds out back to the customer. So how about that? And I can take that. That's pretty good. And I've been very vocal being in a Cloud Foundry summit saying that I really don't want to think about infrastructure. What Cloud Foundry and especially the pivotal distribution helped us do is made it so obvious that the infrastructure wasn't the problem. It was all the processes around it. So being able to install in a couple of hours, and I think you were doing it every 30 minutes or something like that. Something like that, yeah. Yeah, so we installed the first instance in four hours and stood it up and then like, okay, now what? So the whole process and the ecosystem really got exposed. So we were able to focus on the things that we really needed to change that grew over the last 100 years rather than, you know, is really the install going to work. But it also facilitates the sharing, right? That sense of community and sharing of knowledge and I think that there is a lot of excitement around that as well of developers being able to educate others, developers on those best practices. So I think it's... Don't think about infrastructure, but also creating community knowledge. Yeah, the collaboration piece has been a huge one for us. You know, because of the speed, you have to actually talk to each other. If you're going to get something out there fast, it's true. Imagine that. Now, all of a sudden you have to talk to your security guy. They have to be part of the team, your architects, everybody. Ops, dev, everybody's around the same table to get this stuff out the door as quickly as the technology allows you to do it. We've definitely made some changes in how our teams are organized to be more fully capable from suit to nuts and naturally helped in our partnerships with our application teams solve their problems faster. Instead of needing to call five different styles of organizations, they can get stuff done in the room fully empowered and not having to call management like they had to in the past to escalate. And that catches on really, really fast. And one team sees another team do that and they want to ask how and why they can take advantage of that. And Cloud Founders have the core of a lot of that, but it's how they're working together that is really what's making them successful as well. Yeah, I think it's both the collaboration and the infrastructure, as Suzanne Annann has mentioned. On our side, late last year, we were tasked with building a mobile virtual agent for our customers using AI and ML built on top of Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry was really the secret ingredient that allowed us to build it in about eight weeks on top of hybrid cloud, private and Amazon. And with such close-knit collaboration built on the community of folks that we had assembled, we were able to pull that off and we're already getting ready to roll out to new channels. So Cloud Foundry has really enabled us to make what seemed to be impossible in the past suddenly possible. So it sounds like it's improving communication across the organization. And typically with the technology kind of driven solution, the IT people kind of control that and then the business process people feel like, okay, this is just something that's being pushed on us. It sounds like from what you guys are saying that there's a lot more collaborative process across the organization. So I'm curious, how does using Cloud Foundry really drive that kind of collaborative process so that you're getting people who normally wouldn't be involved in a software process involved earlier in the process? And it's not just something, oh, here's this piece of software that they created for me and now I have to use it. When you can see directly the impact of the conversation you're having. So if you're a business user and you're trying to do something in the internally developed software and it's not working and when it's fixed an hour later, you have a reason to keep coming back and talking. Instead of it being, oh, it's going to take us a year to fix it. So everyone just lives with the pain. No one engages and there's a cycle of distrust. By having that speed of execution, there's an incentive to talk to each other because you can actually see results of that conversation go live and impact directly. Very fast. And I'll build on that. I think Subha also mentioned part of what we did is when you go start going this fast, you start running into a lot of the internal politics and bureaucracy. And what we've done to overcome that is we've, since we made technology less relevant to the discussion because it's working, we started talking about what's the outcome. So we brought in the business upfront and actually spent as much time as necessary to understand what are we trying to accomplish. So we brought them as product managers from the business units and then we brought in designers and made that a bonafide, one of the key skills in the team that focused on the users and then we had really the right technology in the team to be able to work and build that balanced team. And they work together and they eat breakfast together and they just really talk to each other. And as a result, they deliver daily. You know, I think IT is now part of the business discussion. They're pushing the business to describe what their customer-centric vision is so that IT can enable the transformation, the digital transformation. But if you don't have the picture clear from a business perspective, you know, you can digitize a little bit here and there but that's not going to really make the difference. I think there was a failure, you know, in the 90s when you had enterprise software that was kind of pushed on to the people inside the organization. It was a terrible user experience. The change cycles were long as you pointed out, Indy. And the people were just like, well, this is what we have to use but people are getting better consumer experiences and they want that to work too. So how does Cloud Foundry push that better consumer-like experience both to internal users and externally, you know, customers? I think one of the biggest things that's happening within Comcast and almost going back to some of the discussion previously is that open-source mentality and collaboration that comes with Cloud Foundry has really led us to change dramatically the way that we engage with our business partners. For the first time, we've set up a portfolio-based domain that is now allowing us and enabling our business partners to prioritize their work for us and make the kind of trade-offs that, in the past, would have come to IT to make. And I think Cloud Foundry is a key enabler for that in so far as it's almost removed technology from the discussion, I believe, as Ennis was saying. And we're now able to deploy with such frequency that our business partners can immediately see that impact and it's no longer a matter of having to wait six, nine, 12 months to see what they want to see. That's really changed the game for us. I think one of the things we're seeing is our start-up time to get something out the door to a customer to get feedback on is much more rapid, even for a new developer coming in the door today that doesn't know the system whatsoever. We've proven that we can get them delivering code into production for feedback inside of a day. And not that long ago, weeks ago, that took up to 23 days. Best case scenario. On Cloud Foundry, right? We had to do a lot of work to tie it back to all of our enterprise-class systems that we had to abide by that made it a better experience for that application to interact with every other application we have because at the end of the day, it's a hybrid, right? We can't run everything on Cloud Foundry. I haven't been able to yet. It might be a little bit easier, I would assume. But, you know, that's been a big win for us. So any developer can come in and leverage the toolset to get code out the door fast without having to learn all of the history of the company and the intricacies to make that happen, which has been really powerful. You guys are all dealing with legacy systems being large. Oh, yeah. Companies that have been around for a long time. So, you know, that's an interesting point that you bring up that, you know, you can't put everything on Cloud Foundry. And the Cloud Foundry applications probably have to interact with existing legacy tools. I mean, especially, I mean, you probably have all kinds of things in an airline and, I mean, all of you. So how does working with Cloud Foundry, how does that work and play nicely with, you know, existing systems inside the organization? Well, I think it takes a bit of architecture. I don't know if you guys like or not, but we started with no architecture when we first started and said we're going to take it all out. All processes, all architecture, and we're finding out that actually a good bit of architecture works really well. So one of the things we're doing right now is we've announced last year this air show that we have an analytics platform. So that's a customer facing data platform that's really helping our customers be able to leverage their data and be able to do better service to you. So it's airlines or other services companies. So our analytics platform is using Cloud Foundry. So being able to release capabilities into that more frequently actually helps. And what we're doing is we're just following some methodology like the Strangler method is one of them. So you build around the system and you kind of encapsulate the old systems and be able to just create that little interface and the services and API. Just a little bit of architecture goes a long ways to be able to leverage the old systems. Strangler pattern is really key NS, absolutely. At its core, much of Comcast business still runs off of a 25 to 30 year old mainframe system that we've built a whole number slew of microservices now on top of using Cloud Foundry. That is really what's enabling us now for the first time to look at a next-gen billing system that when we roll out will completely change the way that we engage with our customers the kind of services that we offer and it's really the level of standardization now that's happening across the teams throughout the organization is for the first time what's making that a possibility. One of the things that's been very empowering for our teams is we just ask our developers where their pain points are and if that's an area they think is worthwhile to take on a challenge to make their life easier so if there's a lot of break fixes that are going on there, if it's a code they're changing much more rapidly, the business needs changed that's where we started and that's what kind of built the momentum because the developers wanted to fix it and we gave them a leeway to go tackle that so it wasn't always necessarily a business problem that we went after first it was time that the developers spent now they're times freed up and they can go tackle other things. But how do they get back to tying in through your legacy billing system and your legacy whatever they are whatever you're using your ERP systems and all of that How do they get back to it? How do they tie into that? If they're using Cloud Foundry to build this modern kind of architecture and application there's still a need to be able to tie back into those existing back-end systems and I'm wondering how easy is it to do that when you have these systems that Christmas say like a 25-30 year old mainframe? It wasn't easy, right? It's an ongoing challenge that we deal with every day, yeah. Well, and some of them we're going through the process of looking at those legacy systems to try and figure out which ones are portable which ones can be moved into the new world and which ones we have to just I don't know what you call it put them in a bubble or whatever and it's not as bad as it sounds you wrap around it not to choke it But it lets you carve out the idea Just carve out But the goal has to be to figure out a way to get it all So our mainframe system is about 50 years old a little older than Comcast's You went They were still bringing two airlines together Our focus has been much more on the customer-facing application so far and my organization that's in part why I'm so excited to be here at this conference is really learning all of the benefits of CF and we're hoping that we can take experiences from other big companies to accelerate our journey and once again leverage the community and the knowledge of the community to make that happen so I have to make notes on a bunch of different things we've already talked about Well, given another example I just thought about this might be intriguing to some we have a lot of Fortran applications because it's an engineering company Airplane Design is on Fortran, it's still pretty cool And do you have developers that can actually program in that? Absolutely engineers and not software engineers but other kinds of engineers Or over 50 We had this system on airplane performance navigation so when we go into a sales process we use it to demonstrate the range of our airplane capabilities and one of the critical systems in that was written on Fortran on HP UX I think or some other, not mainframe we're getting rid of mainframe in a couple of months So the team actually took that and put it in a container and slapped it into Cloud Foundry very quickly and what that enabled is that bottleneck system became now an enabler that you can scale out using the cloud and on demand and the systems that took several hours to process now it takes a couple of minutes and they're going to take a couple of seconds so they can run many like thousands of simulations by scaling out leverage in the platform Yeah, I mean time is flying here I'm going to ask the culture question Abby and Subu were talking about this earlier and Subu was particularly articulate about the cultural issues and trying to get change done across an organization and he talked about fear versus freedom and those kinds of issues and I'm wondering when you look at Cloud Foundry in this context of a broader organizational shift and change to a more modern company, customer driven company that can move quickly and hopefully not break things How does that cultural question come into play for you guys when it comes to pushing the change out from you guys as change agents? You know it's the most important piece of that in my mind is for the entire organization to realize it's not an IT change it's not just the technology change but the change and the transformation has to happen within the entire company so you know the senior management folks have to be on board you have to get your employees to realize the potential and the exciting opportunities that come with this but then it's also really all of the different organizational units including an HR or finance everybody has to really buy into this to make it successful because otherwise it's just going to be one small little piece and it's not going to be as transformational as what I can be And when you have even when you have the buy in however the reality is that there is fear and people resist that change so one of the things that we started doing about a year ago within my group was we did automation challenges so going to what Justin was saying in terms of finding the areas that could be the biggest help to our developers letting them come to an automation challenge once every quarter to bring their problems and then have the teams swarm around it you know sometimes something would work but sometimes it would fail and we would just report out what the outcome of that challenge was because it really becomes a behavioral change of being okay with that failure and accepting it and hopefully through that reducing the fear of change It's going from a culture of fear to a culture of trust and it's about building trust across the organization and it's not just about getting rid of the fear of change but it's about trusting that other people will do what they need to do in order to make it successful and for us it's about tying it back to what we care about which is the people that are driving our cars and that's what we care about and how can we make their lives better and that lets us get through a lot of the sort of fear and distrust that may exist large organizations are set up to protect themselves from change there are structures in place there are lawyers there are HR teams there are management layers that work to protect the organization as a structure and I wonder how you break through all of that with all of the advantages that this system is offering you they're obvious but they still when you have a large company with a lot of people and a lot of management and I'm sure a lot of lawyers how do you no offense to the lawyers how do you get the organization shifting in a new direction with all of that kind of working against that process I'll share our approach I think we have two things we've done one change is hard first of all we all need to accept that we need to change I can demonstrate in my example is very good and helping people to get through that change is extremely important I've created this program that I'm leading that is chartered to create these new environments where there are new norms and when those I consider them like the formula one racers so we're the pit crew so when the development team is trying to release code and do all the things that they need to do they run into issues so as a result the pit crew goes back and says so what happened here is it a legal problem or is it a process problem and then we get through and then systematically transform the processes the HR practices the financial practices all of that at the corporate level so we can do this as a normal day-to-day life so that's the investment that we've made as a part of our second century enterprise systems to make that business change while Abby and Subu were speaking earlier I was reflecting back on our own transformation and the change from a competitive to a collaborative culture and I think a lot of that takes great leadership we were fortunate on our side with folks like Mike Chris of Fully and Greg Otto and Paul Roach who really came up with the right shared goals across the organization we subscribed to a process called four disciplines of execution or 4DX very popular now in the industry and it was amazing how when we rolled that out to the teams suddenly an outage in my system no longer where folks kind of go now that's his problem now everyone was jumping on board to make sure that it was resolved that culture shift was huge that's one of the things I meant when I said earlier the entire organization has to be on board you have to change your incentive systems you have to change all of that to make it happen but just to give an example of how we've been moving this change forward we created just a couple of small teams and had them using the new processes showing the success of their small project and then growing it from there so we created training centers in separate locations to provide them with the environment that they needed to get the job done and now we're beginning to bring that back into the larger organization it's a process, it's a journey so we talk a lot about the successes that we build on and those are important to maintain that momentum of the team, that excitement we struggle with it at times but we're trying to celebrate some of the failures we talk about it but you've got to kind of walk that talk a little bit with your team when they try something and they learn but we're not using it we still try to celebrate that a little bit we put it in the art newsletter that goes out here's what we tried, it didn't go well we're not going to do that and we're going to tackle this other thing next and we're learning that in days and weeks instead of weeks and months and the business sees that and they see the investment to that failure isn't as significant as it would have been just a year or two ago and you have to really embrace the people that are willing to take those first steps because they're really very courageous in what they're doing and I heard a presentation in one of the government groups yesterday I love what the guys were saying they called it the coalition of the willing that they were putting themselves out there to make change happen and that's hard well we are at the end of our time I'm afraid this was a really great discussion I only got to scratch the surface of what I wanted to talk to these people about he has three pages of questions so we're going to continue backstage I'm keeping them until tomorrow but why don't you give them a round of applause