 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019 brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back here on theCUBE, continuing our live coverage at Red Hat Summit 2019. As we come to a near conclusion of our three days of wall-to-wall coverage for you here, all the keynotes that's been on the guests we've had. Just a lot of fun and certainly an educational opportunity for Stu Miniman and myself. And we're looking forward to our next couple of guests here. We have Kershid Sohail, who's an application developer at UPS, and Nishjani, a senior application development manager at UPS. Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. We appreciate the time. Thanks for having us. Thank you. And so you had representation on the keynote stage this morning. UPS did talk about some of the changes underway there and your Red Hat relationship. For those at home who weren't privy to that, just to set the stage for in terms of what you're doing with Red Hat and what you're going to be doing with them as they came up with a couple of new releases this week. Nishj, if you would. Sure. So as you know, UPS is delivering products and services to over 200 countries. And from a scalability perspective, we deliver over 21 million packages a day and during our peak season it grows to over 30 million packages a day. And last year, we averaged 200 million tracks a day on our tracking system and last peak, we went to 335 million tracks in a single day and that was all built on a new open shift platform that we developed. Just a little bit of data. Yeah. All right. Yeah, I love when you talk to so many customers today, oh, scale. And it's like, okay, how many transactions do we have? It's like, oh, you talk logistics. You're like, oh, okay, you talked a lot of numbers there but when you talk about the driver and how many options they have and the amount of data that goes in, it's like, okay, how many supercomputers do you have? And hundreds of PhDs solving this. Maybe bring us a little bit in time. The logistical pieces that go there and how, I mean, this is not just, okay, go do your route as we had in the past. Yeah, so from a driver perspective, we've offered services to the drivers that take out the human search for needing to deliver packages. We have an Orion system, which tells the driver exactly where to go and where to deliver the packages and optimizes the routes for them. From a visibility perspective, which is the products and services to appreciate and I support, the driver is able to do their jobs and deliver status and deliver packages on time. So for our customers, they see an updated status in real time. From a Vive perspective, which is our visibility information business engine, which was our new platform that we built last year. It was a long journey into the process, part of our digital transformation. We got into the transformation as a need for customers who wanted more out of their products and services that we offered today and as far as being able to do faster to market and provide visibility in a real time sense. We always love when you hear some of these digital transformations, like, okay, I think of UPS, those logistics, those were pretty complicated before. So you needed a digital transformation. Maybe we can start with, what were some of the objectives? What were we, you know, what was holding you back or limited before? And, you know, let's go to the after when you get through there. Sure, so before we were on a monolithic system, legacy system and the cost per track were very expensive. And in order to drive new need, we needed to redevelop ourselves and redesign ourselves. And the way we did that was we transformed by moving away from our traditional waterfall models, which typically took six months to deploy new services. And we went to, within weeks, and the way we did that was to develop an agile methodologies and using OpenShift, we were able to develop and deploy applications more quickly. And Kershid could talk a little bit more about the vibe application and how it works. So pretty much our goal was to get the old track system off the legacy monolithic system off into a containerized on-premise cloud-based platform. So we successfully accomplished that, essentially 20 years worth of data we did in the year. So we're pretty proud of that, not to tutor our own owner. But yeah, so we got everything going with OpenShift, a couple other Red Hat products like AMQ, J-Bus, Fuse for AMQ, and we also worked, like Nish mentioned, with the agile methodologies and principles. So we were successfully able to create a type of environment for other applications that UPS could see us as a look up to. So other applications can see what we did and they could get themselves moving in the same direction. So can you bring us inside a little bit the organization? Was this a new team that came in? Was there a combination of the new and old, the retraining? Yeah, so the team was formed out of some of the old members of the team that new visibility inside and out. My team had done the front end UPS.com tracking application and we brought in team members that were new and were able to develop the application in a short amount of time. So we newly formed the team, we put together a parallel path from the old system to the new system and we transitioned over and it was seamless to the customer. Yeah, you're talking about customer choice. We were speaking earlier before we started just about competition. And so you have to be extremely responsive to customer needs. And my choice is something that comes to my mind that you offer that gives great flexibility to a customer. But tremendous complexity I would think to you because you have kind of like an X and a Y. You have a package, you've got a delivery point and now you throw a Z in with a time of day change. Or a location change. And to coordinate that so your efficiencies, your fuel efficiencies and route efficiencies are still maintained. So how do you do that in your environment? And whether that's something that Red Hat, is that something that is enabled by the technology that you're deploying of theirs? Sure, so from a visibility perspective, my choice product has been very successful. We're able to deliver B2C packages to our customers or our consonies which help them choose when and when they want their package and also be able to see a delivery time from a complexity perspective. Sure, it adds a ton of complexity because we need to know what address is to go to and what changes are done to the packages prior to them being delivered. From an openshift perspective, that's part of going to be our digital transformation to transform that visibility and provide that information and bringing more products and services to those customers at lower latency of time. Okay, containerization is something that's relatively prevalent for the audience here but it's still relatively young in maturity. Just wondering as you rolled out the solutions, any learnings you had or any, don't want to say stumbling blocks, but things that you learned along the way that maybe your peers could learn for? Yeah, I mean, I think you should say stumbling blocks because as anybody knows, whenever you go through anything new, there's opportunities to learn and there's monumental opportunities to fail. And I think UPS knows and we've pride ourselves on failing fast, learning from our mistakes and getting to the next level. So like you mentioned with containerization and openshift, the ability for us, when we used to deploy every six months, now we can deploy in two weeks to production. And before that, we could deploy in a matter of minutes so we could test all these tools and everything that openshift offers gives us the ability to serve our business and give the most information to our customers. So openshift and Red Hat have done a great job in helping us reach our maximum potential and we look to continue that partnership. Yeah, so was there anything in that, speed delivery and being more agile that OG's security we should have pulled them in sooner or so and so we forgot to include them in the original discussions? No, when we went through the transformation of moving the tracking application, we went through all the options and openshift was just a natural partner and natural fit. At the time we were going through a proof of concept with the product, with another team and as the Vibe project came along, it was just a natural fit to use containerization and use the speed of deployment and automated testing and pipelines in order to deploy this new application. Yeah, you used an interesting phrase there, Krishit, about failing fast. And we've heard that a couple of times this week in different flavors, but about the lack of fear of failure and almost like that failure is not always a bad thing because it leads to improvement. But you have to have a certain amount of confidence and underline, underpinning that. So talk, I'm just curious from a company culture standpoint, what kind of confidence is there about that failing fast and how technology allows you to make up the ground that you might have lost by failure, especially in today's world where so, there's so much more capability and so much more at your disposal. Yeah, so if I may, I think what benefits us and allows us to fail fast is management like Nish and our upper level management, they give us the opportunity to make these mistakes because they know we're going to learn from them. And just talking about OpenShift and like you said, when you fail, we have to make up that ground. When we make those mistakes, the platform that we're on allows us to pivot from that and make it a success story right away. So we noticed that we're able to learn from mistakes quickly and with the help and supportive management, we're able to implement real time solutions and deploy them right away. Yeah, and in addition to that, we're able to deploy in a shorter period of time. So we know we're at a minimum two weeks away from the next deployment. So we could quickly restore functionality or within minutes or within days if necessary. So previously we weren't able to do that. So fail fast didn't quite work in a waterfall method. So Nish, now that the Vibe project has rolled out. What does that mean to your relationship to the business and also ultimately what is it, how has it impacted your ultimate customers? Sure, so from an external customer perspective, obviously we're able to speed to market products and services faster to our customers and provide better visibility to the customers. From an internal in the organization, we've significantly reduced our cost to serve. And as we continue to transform on the Vibe platform using OpenShift and partnering with Red Hat, we're able to transform other visibility products in the future. And going forward, we're able to take folks like Kershid and develop them further and use our skill sets that we've learned and develop our people faster. So where do you want to jump in next? I mean, in your world Kershid, I would think that's probably one of the more exciting questions is what now, what next, where are we going with this? In terms of your core business, where's the efficiency gain that you'd like to seek? Where's the customer service that you'd like to improve? Yeah, I mean, from a business perspective, I mean, we're always looking to serve our business and bring products to the platform that are going to be useful to the customers. So what we currently have in Vibe today, we're looking to create more visibility products for our customers. And from a technical standpoint, I mean, we're at Red Hat Summit 2019, they've announced some crazy cool things. Like what's the craziest cool thing you've heard this week? We're looking forward to OpenShift 4, we're looking forward to Kafka Streams and Corkus, which was really cool. And just operators, I mean, the list goes on and on. I could talk to you about it for days. We were here for three days. You got three more days to ready? Sure, tape is cheap. But yeah, we're looking forward to a lot of cool things that Red Hat's going to provide and we're going to run with it. We're looking forward to a continued relationship with Red Hat and offering new products and services that could make our businesses run better. Well, like for example, I mean, if you could, if I could say, I'm going to let you build the rocket ship right now. What's it going to look like? What area of your business would you like to literally dabble in and say, okay, I think this will work, but right now it might look to be a little bit futuristic or down the road. What scenario could you paint possibly? Give us an idea about what you're thinking. So our next focus of business is to serve up the small and medium business, right? So we've been talking about the My Choice product and serving residential addresses and serving residential folks, but we want to start focusing on the small and medium business and offering the same services and capabilities. So our next plateau, our next capabilities is to provide those services to the small and medium businesses so they can grow and partner with UPS. And I think, as in this mentioned, with the utilization from Kafka and actually bringing some of these technologies into our containers, bringing more security layers, like there's a lot of great vendors here and partnering with them and bringing them into our services, it'll open the doors for us a lot. And like Nishments and with My Choice and small businesses, I think will allow them a better customer experience with partnering up with some of these new people. You bet. Well, thank you both. Thanks for being here and sharing your time. Good to see you. Good keynote this morning as well, so please be sure to pass that along and we look forward to seeing you down the road. Thank you. Thank you guys. Thank you both. Back with more coverage from Red Hat Summit 2019, you are watching theCUBE live from Boston.