 Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my host, John Troyer. Really excited to welcome to the program one of the keynote speakers from this morning, Mojean Lefebvre, who is the SVP and Chief Information Officer. We always love CIOs from Liberty Mutual Insurance Global Specialty. Thank you for your keynote this morning and thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. So you went through a lot of data and a lot of information in your keynote. Liberty Mutual, they spend a billion dollars in tech yearly. So I mean, there's certain technology companies that spend that much. As the CIO, what are some of the biggest things on your plate and we'll get into the discussion of Cloud Foundry and Cloud and everything as we go from there? Sure, so I'd say probably the priorities differ by the business unit you're in. The specialty business has generally been a bit more manual and we have over 200 or so insurance products. So really automating it is very different from automating consumer insurance which is really focused on home and auto. So really right now our focus is increasing the productivity and the risk assessment for a lot of our underwriters. And then I'd say probably analytics, pricing, making sure that we're assessing risks correctly is definitely another point of focus for us. With so many products we understand the rate of change must be difficult. In your keynote you spoke about embracing cloud and agile methodology. Maybe take us back to what some of the pain points were and led to yourself in management to embrace this big change. Yeah, absolutely. So several things are going on. One is that we see a lot of new players entering the world of insurance and it's both about new capital coming into the world of insurance just because there's not enough investments that capital can be put towards. So insurance is one place to come to. And the other is technology players that are coming into our world. You know companies like Metro Mile, Lemonade, the list goes on and on. And so really our world is changing. Technology is driving a lot of that change and so we know that we've got to be a big player in that area as well. And as I said really we've got to become one of those software companies that can actually sell insurance as opposed to the other way around. I'd say some of the other things that are happening is the fact that our employees, our consumers now have all these other software companies that they have experience with and so their expectations are very different. You know they've got one experience when they're at home and then they come into the workplace and it looks like they've gone back a hundred years. So that paradigm needs to change. So those are some of the things that have really made us think we have no choice but to truly change the way that we deliver software. We've got to get out of this mode where everything takes multiple years and multiple millions of dollars and really at the end of the day the people that you started to work with are no longer even there to appreciate what you've delivered to them. And usually it's not what they asked for anyway. As you adopted the Cloud Foundry platform one of the things about Cloud Foundry even very early in its life cycle was that it was associated with digital transformation and cloud native, especially once it was joined up with pivotal labs. So how much of as you all embarked on this journey I mean this is the great thing about here at Summit there is a lot of talk about digital transformation a lot of talk about agile and that's what we were just talking about. Some shows you go to, right? It's a lot about features and a lot about speeds and feeds and a lot about the latest biggest. So how much of part of it as you all were adopting this platform was that digital, that culture of digital transformation surrounding the actual tech? How important was that? So I think that was very important because again as I said we know that that's what the consumers expect. They no longer want things to be manual. They want things to be at the tip of their fingers and so really transforming us from being a company that's very paper intensive to really being more and more digital was critical to us. The very first application that we actually put in the cloud which was in my business unit was for document management in Alfresco. And actually what we named it was we're going paperless. And so it's something that we started about three years ago and today I can say that, yep, we are paperless. And so the great thing about Alfresco was that it was indeed cloud native and that was very important to us. We started out looking at some of the other solutions that are out there, I won't necessarily name them but they did not lend themselves to the cloud and so really going with a cloud native solution that would enable us to become much more digital and paperless was very critical to us. You talked a lot about developer adoption now that in your journey, where you are now in your journey was that a tough sell at the very beginning? Or did developers go, wait a minute, this is going to save me a lot of time, I'm on board. So you mean with cloud foundry in general? With cloud foundry in general, yeah. So if anything I'd say it was probably the developer community that really started this out and so by the time that the leadership and management kind of started to pay attention there were pockets of developers who were just very, very bought into it and so I would say that went a long way. And then made it easier to sell it to other developers because I say there are much more listening to what their peers are saying than what we have to say. And then really meeting with the pivotal labs guys, I mean I'd say those folks have truly a magical way of selling their story and they've truly helped us not only sell it to our developers but also sell the story to our business. I'd say the mindset shift from thinking I'm going to have everything in one go versus no I'm going to get it in iterations and I'm actually going to trust the fact that the next releases are going to come is a big mind shift and Pivotal was instrumental in helping sell that to us. One of the benefits of cloud foundry is to give you flexibility as to where your applications and data live. That being said, a majority of customers that have deployed cloud foundry are doing it on premises. How do you kind of manage what stays in your own environment, what handles in the public cloud in my understanding you're doing quite a bit of AWS today. What's your viewpoint for you and management on public cloud? Yeah so we certainly see public cloud as the future. I know Chip mentioned something about well it's not going to be cheaper. We're actually counting on that in the end from a total cost of ownership perspective that it will be cheaper and we truly mean it when we say we want 75% of the people writing code and by that I mean the staff within the IT group of course and we don't want them to have to worry about the infrastructure and so while we've started with AWS we absolutely have a relationship with Microsoft as well. We definitely want to be independent of this cloud and I would say something like cloud foundry definitely allows you to do that. Yeah and so when you're looking at that total that full TCO you don't have the fully burdened I have gear and I have people managing that gear and all the operations there. If you can shift that piece of it you're not differentiated on the infrastructure or have those needs. You want to focus on those thousands of products that you have and you're people coding to create those next applications. Exactly we want to focus on the value add. That's where we want our people to really be focusing and we want to let the cloud players who do it extremely well to be doing that for us. You put forth in your key notes some pretty audacious metrics. I think it was 60% of the workload in public cloud, more than 50% of apps to release code on daily basis and you wanted 75% of the IT staff to write code. How'd you come up with those numbers? How were you doing against those? So yeah so about a year ago once we decided that the imperative for change was so critical the IT leadership team got together and we spent a couple of days off site and we said let's come up with what we're calling today our IT manifesto. And so we said we just have to change and there are multiple things that we're going to change. And we said we're going to put some what we called bold audacious moves or BAMs as they've come to be known together. And so those were just some, we knew they were out of reach to some extent. But we said if we don't really put some goals that are really hard to reach we're never going to get there. What are some of the headwinds there? What have slowed you from meeting those and any lessons learned that you chaired to your peers on what you've learned going through this? So certainly deciding what goes to the cloud first is one of those areas that we're learning as we're doing. We know that it's easy when you're working in a green field and it's something new. So yeah you can very easily say I'll build it in the cloud. When you're looking at what your existing environment is and what you move to the cloud one of the questions is well if we move all of our dev environments how's that going to interact with the production environments? If you have them in different clouds other things are how it interacts with Active Directory and LDAP and some of those things. And I'd say finally it would be kind of the global applications always make it much more difficult as you think. How do you replicate among different clouds in different geographies? Those are some of the blockers that we've got to tackle and make sure that we get around. One of the interesting parts of any kind of enablement strategy at any company is skills, upskilling. So how have you been approaching that in terms of this new cloud native world? Both for the devs, is this here at Cloud Foundry Summit? Are people here learning? I mean there's new certifications. Yeah, so I say it's a multi-throng approach. We definitely have partnered with several companies to put some training together to make sure that we're training our staff. We've started a program that we call Go For Code and so we've asked for volunteers for people who are not coding today and who want to get there that actually they go to these coding schools and they're going to spend the next two to three months actually learning how to go. It's very rigorous. So they might have been technical in an infrastructure way before and they want to learn how to code? Yeah, it may be that or they may have just been business analysts who are just doing requirements gathering or project management and they want to learn how to code. So we've tried to be as transparent as possible because when you say I want 75% of my IT staff to be coding and if you've got 50% we're not coding today there's a message in that and so of course it's up to us to make sure that we're providing the tools and what's needed for that to happen. Our goal is to get anyone on our staff who really wants to get there and is willing to put the sweat in to be able to do it because we also know it's not like, you know software engineers are just lying out there on the streets and there's a shortage of software engineers and that's going to become more and more of a problem so really getting our own employees that we value greatly to be able to do that transformation I think is critical for us. Another great line you had in your keynote was out with the annual in with the weekly I think you said it was 16 releases in five months. The counter to that and I'm curious how you deal with it and talk to your peers is how do people keep up with just all the changes that are happening? I mean, I talked to the companies that create code on this regular cadence and they can't keep up with it and how do you make sure your staff doesn't get burned out? Yeah, I'm so great, great question again. You know, we're at the very beginnings of our transformation. The one thing I will say is looking at the team that did this and did the 16 releases in five months versus teams that are working on annual releases. The energy, the enthusiasm, the excitement and hopefully some of it came through in the video that you saw is just phenomenal. So I'd say, you know, I'm much less worried about them burning out than, hey, can we keep the others as excited? I would say automation and things like Cloud Foundry that actually help you automate your pipeline are critical. You cannot do multiple releases or daily releases if you don't have those tools. If you truly get to the point where you do have the automated pipeline, I think a lot of that is done for you. So that's what we're gearing towards and driving towards. One of the things that people always love to pontificate is in the future, what is the role of the CIO? I'd love to see you embracing things like Cloud because it was like, well, when I had gear and I had capital budget, I understood it, but you know, I'm changing the role, I'm doing that. What have you been seeing as the change in your role and anything down the line you see and how that changes? Yeah, I mean, so you're right. So a lot of people say, well, there is no need for a CIO in the future. I'd say there's probably more and more need for very business-oriented, strategic CIOs who also understand technology really well and they're the epitome of someone who understands technology and is the head of engineering, so to speak, but also making sure that they can work very well with the business and understands the impact of technology on the business. I mean, I'll be waiting for the day where the need for someone like that goes away. I don't see it coming too soon. All right, one final question I have for you is what brings you to an event like this? You know, spend the time, give the keynote. What do you get out of it personally and for your company? So one is really learning, because again, if you want to, it's kind of like if you're a doctor in medicine, if you want to keep up with what's going on around you, you've got to educate yourself. So certainly that aspect of go out there, see what's going on, making sure that you're keeping up with new technology, that's one thing. The other was my experience with Pivotal has been phenomenal and so I thought it was critical to actually take the opportunity to share that. Hopefully others will learn. One of the tweets that I saw was, well, if a big 100-year-old insurance company can do this, then nobody has an excuse. And I'll say, yeah, of course, yeah. So it's really both to give back and to continue to learn and then to reconnect with colleagues. Cornelia and I actually worked together over 10 years ago. So just coming here and being able to have dinner with her tonight is going to be very enjoyable. Absolutely a tight knit community. Really appreciate you coming on the program. We welcome you to the CUBE alumni list now. Our community of the thousands that we've had on the program. So for John and myself, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit. Thanks for watching the CUBE.