 Good afternoon, welcome back to Chicago. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. Day one of our coverage of Ansible Fest 2022. John, it's great to be back in person. People are excited to be here. We've had some great conversations with folks from Ansible and the community and the partner side. One of the things I always love talking about, John, is talking with organizations that have been around for a long time that maybe history, maybe around nearly 100 years. How are they embracing technology to modernize? Yeah, we've got a great segment here of the financial services leader, end user of Ansible, so it's a great segment. Absolutely. Please welcome Noor Shadeed to the program. The senior, SVP, excuse me, senior technology manager at Wells Fargo. Noor, it's great to have you on the Cube. Thank you for joining us. Of course, happy to be here. Talk a little bit about technology at Wells Fargo. I was mentioning to you, I've been a long time customer and I've seen the bank evolve incredibly so in the years I've been with it. But talk about technology, Wells Fargo was a technology driven company. Yeah, so I like to consider Wells, being a financial institution company. So I consider us a technology company that does banking. As a customer, like we were talking about, there's so much that we've been able to release over the couple of years. I mean, decades worth of automation and technology has been coming out. But lately, the way we provide for our customers, how fast at scale what we're doing for our customers, it's been significant. And I think our goal is always how can we enhance the process for our customers and how can we provide them the next best thing? And I think technology has really allowed us to evolve with our customers. The customers we're so demanding these days, right? I think one of the things in short supply in the last two years was patience and tolerance. Yes, yes. And I don't think that's coming gonna rubber band back. Yeah, no, I don't think so. Talk to us about how Wells is using automation to really drive innovation and surprising delight those customers on a minute by minute basis. Yeah, and so, you think about banking, we've been able, with automation, we've been able to bring banking into the 21st century. You do not have to go to a branch to manage your money anymore. You do not have to go into pause at your check inside of a branch. You can do it through your mobile app, right? That's driven by automation and innovation, right? And we've all of these back ends tools working for us to help get us to this next generation of banking. You, we can instantly send money to each other. We don't have to worry about, I need to go and figure out how I'm gonna get money to this person and I need to wait X amount of days. You have the ability and you feel safe being able to manage your money at the organization. And so, automation has really allowed us to get to this place where we can constantly enhance and provide features and reliability to our customers. It's interesting you mentioned that you guys are a technology, you can have it do banking. It reminds me of the old iPhone analogy. It's a computer that happens to make phone calls. So like, this is the similar mindset. How do you guys keep up with the technology? So we, it's tough, right? Because there's so much that comes out and I think the only thing that's constant in technology is change, right? Because it's constantly evolving. But what we do is we integrate very well with these new tools. We do proof of concepts where we try to, what's on the market? What's hot? How can we involve these new tools in our processes? How can we provide a better end result for our customers by bringing in these new tools? So we have a lot of different teams that bring their jobs are to do these proof of concepts and help us build and evolve our own strategies, right? So it keeps us on our toes and I think it keeps all these new things that are coming out in the market. We're a part of it. We want to evolve with the latest and greatest is and it's been working, right? As customers of financial services and us managing our money through banks. It's been great. The business is the application. Yes. And how do you guys make that happen when it comes down to getting the teams aligned? What's the culture like? Yeah, so at Welles, we have evolved so much over the last few years. The culture right now is we want to make changes. We are making changes. We want to drive through innovation. We want to be able to provide, it's a developer centric approach right now, right? We want to push to the next and the greatest. And so everybody is excited and everybody's adapting to all of what's happening in the environment right now. So it's been great because we're able to use all of these new features and tools and things that we were just talking about by allowing our developers to do that work and allowing people to learn these new skills and be able to apply them in their jobs, which is now creating this better result for our customers because we're releasing at such a faster pace and at scale. Talk about how you talked about multiple groups in the organization really investing in innovative technology. How do you get buy-in? What's that sort of pyramid like up to the top level because to your point, you're making changes very quickly and consumers demand it. You can do everything from home these days. You don't have to go into a branch. We just changed dramatically in the last few years. What's that buy-in conversation like in the organization? If you don't have leadership buy-in, it's very difficult to make those changes happen, but we at Wells have such a strong support from our leadership to be a part of the change and constantly evolve and get better. So the way we work is we're such a large organization. We bring in our business teams and we talk to them about what is it that's best going to better our customers? How do we also not just support external but internal? How do we provide these automated tools or processes for people to want to do this next work and do these new releases for our customers? And so we bring in our business partners and we bring in our leadership and our stakeholders and we kind of present to them, this is what we're trying to do. This is the return that you'll get. This is what our customers will also receive and this is how we keep evolving with that. How has the automation culture changed? Because big discussion here is reuse, team work, I call it multiplayer kind of organizations where people are working together because that's a big theme of automation. Reuse, leverage, can you explain how you guys look at that? Yeah, it's changed the way that we do banking because we now have, we're eliminating a lot of the repetitive tasks in the toil because we have partners that are developing these services so specifically with Ansible. We have these playbooks. Rather than having every customer write the same playbook but with their own little flavor to it, we're able to create these generic patterns that customers can just consume simply by just going into a tool, filling out that playbook template credentials or whatever it is that they need and executing it. They don't have to worry about developing something from scratch and it also allows our customers to feel safe because they don't have to have those skills out the box to be able to use these automation tools. They can use what's already been written and execute it for their jobs. So that makes things go faster? The benefits are what? Speed? Faster stability, right? We're now at speed, stability, scalability because we're now able to use this at scale or it's not just individual teams trying to do this within small spaces. We're able to, we're reliable, right? Automation allows us to be reliable internally and for our customers because you're not asking, there's no human intervention when you're automating, right? You have these opportunities now for people to just, it's one click solution or your end-to-end, you got self-healing involved. It's really driving the way that we do our work today. So automation sounds like it's really fueling the internal employee experience at Wells as well as the customer experience and those two things are like this to me, they're inextricably linked. 100% because if you need it, they need to be together, right? You want your internal to also be happy because they want to be able to develop these solutions and provide these automation opportunities for our teams, right? And so with the customers, they're constantly seeing these great features come out, right? We can, you know, with AIML today, we can, we're now able to detect fraud significantly quicker than what we would have, what we could have done a couple of years ago and developers are excited to be able to do that, right? To be able to learn all these new tools and new technologies. What's interesting, Wells is you guys are like an edge application, everyone's got the banking in their hand, fintech, obviously money's involved so there's people interested in getting that money, security hackers or whatnot. So when you got speed and you got the consistency, I get that as you look at securing the app, that becomes a big part of what's the conversations like there, because that's the number one concern. And it's an edge out, I got my mobile, I got my desktop, everything's in the cloud, I'm on premise. Yeah, and I think for us, security is number one. We want to make sure that we are providing the best for our customers and that they feel safe banking, whatever financial service you're working with, you want to feel like you can trust that your money with those services, right? So what we do is we make sure that our security partners are with us from day one. They're a part of the process, they're automating their pieces as well. We don't want to rely on humans to do a lot of the manual work and do the checking and the logging. You want it to be through automation and new tools, right? You want it to be done through trusted services. You don't, you know, security is right there with us. They're a part of our technology organization. They are in the technology org. So they're the ones that are helping us get to that next generation to provide more secure processes and services for customers. And that's key for trust. Yes. And trust is critical to reduce churn and to increase the customer lifetime value. But people, and especially with the amount of generations that are alive today in banking, you need to be able to deliver that trust intrinsically to any customer. Yes, 100%. And you want to be able to not only trust the service, but yourself that you can do it, you know, when you make it, when you go into your app and you make a payment or when you go in and you want to send direct, you want to send money to a different bank account, you want to be able to know that what you just did is secure and is where you plan to send it. And so being able to create that environment and provide those services is everything, right? For our customers. What are some of the state of the art kind of techniques or tradecraft around building apps? Because, I mean, basically, you're digitally transformed. I mean, you guys are technology first. Yeah. The app is the company. Yeah. That's the bank. How do you stay current? What's some of the state of the art things that you guys do that wasn't around just a few years ago? Yeah, I mean, right now, just using, we're using tools like Terraform and Ansible. We're making sure that those two are hand-in-hand working well together. So when we work on provisioning, when we're doing provisioning where it's all, you know, it's automated fully end-to-end, you know, AI ops, right? Being able to detect reoccurring issues that are happening. So if you have an incident, we want to make, we want to learn from that incident and we want to be able to create, you know, incident tickets without having to rely on a human to find that problem that was occurring and self-healing, right? All of this is starting to evolve and bringing in the proper alerting tools, bringing in the right automation tools to allow that self-healing to work. That's, you know, these are things that we didn't have, you know, a decade ago. This is all coming out now as we're starting to progress and really take innovation and, you know, automation in itself at scale. What's the North Star internally? You guys say, hey, you know, down five years down the road, bridge to the future, we're transforming, we've continued to innovate, scale is a big deal, data, data sovereignty, all these things are coming up. And what's the internal conversation like when you talk about a future state? Yeah, I think right now we're on our cloud transformation journey, right? We're moving, right now we have workloads into our two CSPs, our public cloud. Also providing a better service for infrastructure and being able to provide services internally at a faster space, right? So moving into the public cloud, making sure everything's virtualized, moving away from hard, you know, physical hardware or physical servers. That's kind of the journey that we're on right now, right? Also machine learning, we want to be able to rely on these, you know, bots. We want to be able to rely on things learning from what we're doing so that we don't make the same mistakes again. Where would you say the most value or the highest ROR that you've gotten from automation today? Where is that in the organization? There's so much, but what I mean, we're doing it because of all of the work that we're doing, there's a lot that I could list, but what I will say is that the ability to allow self-healing in our environments without causing issues is a very big return. Automating, failovers, right? I think a lot of our financial institutions have made that a priority where they want to make sure that their applications are active active and also that when things do go wrong, there is something in place to make sure that that incident actually doesn't take down any problems. I think it's just also investing in people. Right now, the market is hot and we want to make sure that people feel like they're being able to contribute, they're using the latest and greatest tools, they're able to upskill within our own environments at the firm. And I think our organization does an amazing job of prioritizing people. And so we see the return because we're prioritizing people. And I think a lot of institutions are trying people first, people first, but I can say that at Wells because we are actually driving this. We're enforcing that and we want our engineers to get certifications. We're providing vouchers so that people can get those cloud certifications. It's when you do that and you put people first, everything kind of comes together. And I think a lot of what we see in our industry, it's not really the technology that's the problem, it's process because you're so, we're working at large scales, our environments are massive. So my three years at Wells have seen a significant amount of change that has really driven us to be a lot better. On that point, how about changing of the roles, IT, I mean, back in the day, IT serves the business, you know, IT is the business now, right? As you've been pointing out, what is the role's change as automation scales in? Is it the operator? I mean, we know it's going with devs. Devs are doing more IT in the CICD pipelines. We see that velocity check, good cloud native development. What's the ops scene look like? It seems to be a multi-tool role where the versatility of the skillset is the quick learner, you know. Yeah, what's your view on this new persona that's emerging from this new opportunity? Yeah, and I think that's a great question because if you think about where we're going and even the term DevOps, right, it means so many things to different people, but literally when you think about what DevOps is, allowing our developers and our operations to work together on one team, it's allowing, you know, our operation engineers aren't, you know, years ago, ops engineers were not doing the development work, they were relying on somebody to do the development work and they were just supporting, making sure our systems were always available, right? Our engineers, our ops are now doing the development work, they're able to contribute and to get, they're writing their own playbooks, they're able to take them into production and ensure that they're being used correctly. We are a change-driven execution organization, everything is driven through change and allowing our ops engineers or production support engineers to write their own playbooks, right? And they know what's happening in the environment is powerful. You're seeing DevOps become a job title. It used to be like a function of philosophy and then SRE, I'm the SRE, I'm like how many servers do you have? I'm like no, a cloud. I'm like yeah, what's next dad? I think with SREs, it's important that if you have site reliability engineers, you're working towards those non-functional requirements, making sure that you're handling those key components that are required to ensure that our systems and our applications and our integrations are up there and they're meeting the standards that we set for those that don't fall. And I think Red Hat Ansible nailed it here because infrastructure is code, we get that, infrastructure as configuration is code, but Opses code really is that SRE outcome. SRE obviously came from the Google background, but that means infrastructure is just doing its thing. The Opses automated, that's an interesting concept. Yeah, because it's still new, right? A lot of organizations used to see and they probably still see operations as being, their role is just to make sure that the lights are on and they have the specific access so they're not touching code. But the people that are doing the work and know the environment should really be the ones under creating the content for it. So yeah, I mean, it's crazy what's happening now. So I got an analogy that's going to be a banking analogy, but for tech, you know, back in the automation, oh, I'm going to put my job out of business. ATMs are going to put the teller out of business. There's more tellers now than there are before the ATMs. So that metaphor applies into tech where people are like, what's automating a way? Is it my job? And so people know it's not, but what does that free up? So if you assume, if you believe that's good, you say, okay, all the grunt work and the low level and differentiated heavy lifting gets automated away, great. What does that free up the talent to do? So when you, so, and that's great that you bring it up because I think people fear, you know, of automation, especially people that weren't doing automation in the past and now their roles are now, they're able to automate those roles out. They're fearful that they don't have a space, a role anymore, but that's not the case at all. What we prioritize is now that those new engineers have this new skill set, apply them, start using it to be a part of this transformation, right? We're moving from, we went from physical to virtual to now, you know, we're moving into the public, moving into the cloud, right? And that transformation, you need people who are ramping up their skill sets, you know, being a part of one of the tools that I own is Terraform at Wells. That, you know, right now our priority is we're trying to ramp up the organization to learn Terraform, right? We want people to learn, you know, this new syntax, this new, you know, HCL. And it's, you know, people who have been automating some of the stuff that they're doing in their day to day and now trying to learn something new so that they can contribute to this new transformation. New functionality, higher value services. Yes, yeah. It brings tremendous opportunity for those folks involved, automation. Yes. On so many levels. Last question, Nor, for you, was what, you know, as we are rounding out calendar year 2022, entering into 2023, that patience is that we talked about is still not coming back. What's next for Wells as a technology company that does banking? I mean, you name it, we're working on it because we want to be able to deliver the best for our customers. And I think right now, you know, our digital transformation strategy and moving into the public cloud and getting our applications re-architected so that we're moving into microservice driven apps, right? We're moving these workloads into the public cloud in a seamless way. We're not lifting and shifting so that we're not causing more problems into the environment, right? And I think our goal is, right, like I was saying earlier, people and evolving with the technology that's coming out. We're not, you know, we are a part of the change and we are happy to be a part of that change and making those changes happen. Equal first, automation first, sounds outstanding and I will never look at Wells Fargo as a bank again. Yeah, perfect, great, that's all I know. It's been such a pleasure having you on the program, talking about how transformative Wells has been and continues to be. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Our pleasure, thank you guys. For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE all day, I'm sure. Live from Chicago at Ansible Fest 2022. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and John and I will see you tomorrow morning.