 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PostgreSQL Vision 2021, brought to you by EDB. Welcome back to PostgreSQL Vision 21 where theCUBE is covering the innovations and open source trends in this new age of application development and how to leverage open source database technologies to create world class platforms that are cost effective and also scale. My name is Dave Vellante and with me is Roberto Giordano who is the end user computing corporate and database services manager at Borsa Italiana, the Italian stock exchange. Roberto, great to have you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks Dave and thanks to the EDB friends for the invitation. Okay, and we're going to dig in to the great customer story here. First, Roberto, tell us a little bit more about Borsa Italiana and your role at the organization. Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, Borsa is the Italian stock exchange. We used to be part of the London stock exchange, but last month we left that group and we joined another group called Euronext. So we are now part of another group, I could say. And right now within Euronext, Euronext provided the biggest liquidity pool in Europe just to mention something. And basically we provide the market infrastructure to our customers across Europe and the world. So probably if it happens for you to, I don't know, buy a little bit of Ferrari, for instance, probably use our infrastructure. So I wonder if you could talk about the key drivers in the exchange business in Italy. I mean, I don't know how closely you follow what's going on in the United States, but it's crypto madness. There's the Reddit army driving up stocks that have big short positions. And of course, the regulators have to look at that and there's a big debate going on. I don't know what's it like in Italy, but what are the key drivers that are really informing the priorities for your technology strategy? Well, you mentioned, for instance, the few typical cases that added a little bit of volatility to the global markets and also to our markets. As an IT professional running market infrastructure is our first goal to provide an infrastructure that is reliable and with the lowest possible latency. So we are very focused on performance and reliability just to mention the two main drivers within our systems. Well, and you have end user computing in your title and we're going to get into the database discussion, but I presumably with COVID, you had to pivot and that piece of your job was escalated in 2020, I would imagine. And you mentioned latency, which is a key factor in obviously in database access, but that must have been a big challenge last year. Well, it was really a challenge, basically we moved just within a weekend the whole organization working remotely and it has been like this since February 2020. Think about the challenge of moving almost 1,000 people that used to come to the office every day to start to work remotely. And as within my team and user computing this was really a challenge, but it was a good one. At the end, we succeeded and everything worked fine. From our perspective, no news is a good news, because normally when something doesn't work we are on newspapers. So if you didn't hear about us, it means that everything worked just fine. You know, it's amazing, Roberto, we're both in the technology business, you're a practitioner, I'm a observer. But I mean, if you're in the tech business most companies actually pivoted quite well. You have always been a digital business, different. I mean, if you're Ferrari and making cars and you can't get semiconductors, but most technology companies actually made the transition quite amazingly. Let's get into the case study a bit. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your organization's infrastructure and applications, what it looks like and particularly your database infrastructure. What does that look like? Well, we are a multi vendor shop. So we like to pick the right technology for the right service. This means that my database services teams currently manage several different technology where Postgres plays a big role in our portfolio. And because we currently support both the open source, fully open source version of Postgres but also the EDB distribution. In particular, we prefer to use the EDB distribution where we need specific functionalities that just EDB provide. And when we need a first class level of support that EDB in recent year was able to provide to us. And when you say full function, are you talking about things like acid compliance, two phase commits, I mean, all these enterprise capabilities, is that right? Or maybe you could be specific. Just to mention one, for instance, we recently migrated our Intraside Availability Solution using the EDB failover manager that is an additional component that just EDB provide. Yeah, okay, so part recovery obviously is, and so that's a solution that you want to get from the EDB distro as opposed to having to build it yourself with open source tooling. Yeah, correct. Well, basically historically, we used to rely on OS clustering from that perspective but over the years we found, even if it's a technology that works fine, it has been around for decades and so on, we faced some challenges internally because within my team, we don't own also the operative system layers. So we want a solution that was 100% within our control and perimeter. So just a few months ago, we asked the EDB folks if they can provide something and after a couple of meetings, also with their pre-sales engineers, we found the right solution for us. So quick long story short, just a quick proof of concept, few tests together, again, using the EDB consultancies and then beginning of this year, we went live with the first mission critical service using this brand new technology. Well, brand new technology for us. EDB created a few years ago. Right, and I do have some follow-up questions there, but I want to understand what catalyzed the, what was the motivation for going with an open source data, I mean, you're a great example because you're multi-vendor, so you have experience with all of it, the full spectrum. What was it about open source database, generally EDB specifically that triggered the choice? Well, thanks for the question. This is one of the questions that I always like. I think what really drove us was the right combination between easy to use, so simplicity and those good value for money. So we like to pick the right database technology for the right kind of service slash budget that the service has and the open source solution for a specific service, it's our first choice. So we are not, I could say, a company that use just one technology. We like to pick the best upgrade that the market can offer, and in some cases, open source and policy in particular is our choice. How involved was the line of business in both the decision and the implementation? Was it kind of invisible to them or this was really more of a technology decision based on your interpretation of the requirements? I'm interested in who was involved and how you actually got it done? Well, I think this decision was transparent for the business. At the end, they don't really have that kind of disability. They just provide requirements in particular in terms of performance and reliability. And so this is something they are not really involved about. And obviously, if we are in a position to save a little bit of money, everybody's happy, even the business. So what did you have to do, that makes sense to me. I figured that was the case. Who were the stakeholders on your team? I mean, what kind of technical resources did you require and implementation resources? Take us through what the project, if you will, looked like. How did you do it? Well, it's a combination of database expertise. I got the pleasure to run a team that is made by very, very senior, very, very skilled database services professional that are able to support more than what technology and also are very open to innovation and changes. Plus, obviously, we need also the relevant development teams on board when you run this kind of transformations. And it looks like also they like the idea to use Postgres for this specific service I got in mind. So it was quite easy, not big discussion, you know? What was the elapsed time from when you said, okay, we're in, you know, signed the agreement, we're going here, you made the decision to actually getting into production? Well, as I mentioned, we run services and applications that are really focused on high availability and performance. So generally speaking, we are not a big organization. Also, we run a business that is highly regulated. So as you know, as you can imagine, we are an organization that don't have a lot of appetite for risk, you know? So generally speaking, in order to run this kind of transformation is a matter of several months. I would say six, nine months to have something delivered. That's space. Right, okay, well, that's, I mean, that's reasonable. I mean, if you could do it inside of a year, that's I think quite good, especially in the highly regulated industry. And then you mentioned kind of the failover, the high availability capabilities. Were there other specific EDB tools that you utilized to sort of address the objectives? Yeah, absolutely. In particular, we use POSgress Enterprise Manager, AKA PAM, okay? And very recently, we were involved within ADB about, I could say specifically developing one functionality that we needed back in the day. I think together with PART, these are the three ADB specific tools that we use right now. And I'm interested in, I want to get to the business impact. And I know it's early days for you, but the real motivation was to save money, simplify. I would actually, I would imagine your developers were happy because they get to use modern tooling and open source. But really, your industry is bottom line, right? I mean, that's really what the business case was all about. But I wonder if you could add some color there in terms of the business impact that you expect. And I mean, I don't know how much visibility you have now, but anything you can share with us. Well, thinking about the EFM implementation, that the business impact was that in case of a failure, the DBA team, the database services team is able to provide a solution that is within our 100% within our perimeter. So this means that we are fully accountable for it. So in a nutshell, when you run a service, the less people, the less teams you have to involve, the more control you can deliver. And in some, again, very critical services, this is a great value. Okay, so, and where do you want to take this? I mean, how do you see, what's your, if you're thinking about your Postgres and generally an EDB roadmap, where do you want it to go? Well, I stay to trends within the organization. The first one is about migrating more existing services to open source solution for database is going to be Postgres. Another trend I see within my organization is about designing applications, not only to be, to use Postgres as the database layer. I think both trends are more or less running at the same speed right now. You know, a lot of the audience members at Postgres Vision 21, just like you, they're managing day-to-day infrastructure, they're expert practitioners. What advice would you give to somebody that is thinking about, you know, taking this journey? Maybe if you had to do something over again, maybe what would you do differently? How can you help your peers here? Well, I think, in particular, if you are, I can say, a big organization that runs highly regulated business, in some cases you are a little bit afraid of open source because there is this, I can say, general consideration about the lack of enterprise level support. I would like to say that it is just about the past because there are a bunch of companies like EDB that are 100% capable of providing enterprise level of support even on the open source distribution of Postgres. Obviously, then, if you are going to go with their specific distribution, the level of support is going to be even more accurate. But as we know, EDB currently is the main contributor of the Postgres community, and I think this is an insurance for every organization. So your advice is don't be afraid, is that right? Yeah, my advice is absolutely don't be afraid. And if I can mention also about the cloud technologies, this is also another topic where if possible, I would like to suggest to not being afraid. EDB as every, I would say, organization within the IT industry is really pushing for it. And I think for a lot of cases, not all of them, but a lot of cases, there is a great value about design services application to be cloud-native or migrating existing application into the cloud. Okay, but being a highly regulated industry and being very much aware of the narrative around open source, et cetera, you must have had just a little piece of your mind saying, okay, I have to manage this risk. So is there anything specific you did with managing the risk that you would advise was it? Or is it really just about good change management? I think it was mainly about good change management. When you got the relevance stakeholders that you need on board and we are, everybody's going into the same direction that basically is about executing. Excellent, Roberto, I really appreciate your time and your knowledge that you share with the audience. So thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. Thank you, David, it was a great pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of Postgres Vision 21. We'll be right back.