 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SousaCon Digital, brought to you by Sousa. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of SousaCon Digital 20. Really excited we get to talk to the Sousa Executive, their partners, and their customers. In this segment, we have one of the customers, he's in the keynote, I'm really excited to talk to him. Gunther, a push, Nick, he is the CIO of D-A-M-G. If you're not familiar with them, they are the central institution for meteorology, geodynamic, the oldest weather service in the world, based out of Austria. Gunther, thank you so much for joining us, great to see you. Thank you for being here, thank you. All right, so obviously weather, something we are very interested in theCUBE, we talk how important data is and data is of course central to what your service is doing, providing data to organizations that they can do lots with it. Give us a little bit, we probably don't have time to go through the 150 plus year history of the organization, but tell us a little bit about what your organization does and especially your role as CIO, what's involved with that? Let me hook in and one thing you said, we are the oldest weather service in the world. I always tell people, we are doing big data analytics till 8051 and actually that's true. We have actually two big data centers based in Austria. We are operating about 20 petabytes of data, 100,000 data sets per minute. What is very, very interesting for tech guys, we have one small data center additional on over 3000 meters above sea level on the observatory. It's in the middle of the glacier, you can't imagine how cool that is when you go up into the glacier and there you have a lot of sensors, a lot of measurements and a lot of data collecting. Configurations, actually we are also using a lot of supercomputers, we do simulating, we do a lot of AI, we did big data analytics and the most important thing, we do a lot of cooperation with the people that are out there. Yeah, in 1851 wasn't exactly supercomputers, you're gathering data from a lot of sources. Help us understand a little bit, what are some of the asks that the business have for you? What are the kind of challenges in 2020 that might be a little bit different than they were years ago? Where that comes from quite different source. Actually in 1851 it was more for the king for their wars. Nowadays it's much more peaceful, thank God. It's more for sporting, it's more for producing things, it's a lot of logistics, but it's actually for all the human people out there. And therefore we have to use a lot of data, a lot of processes and a lot of different customer journeys. Our most important thing is customer first. So we try to produce our forecasts our integrated processes especially for the customers. Just a quick example is the Olympic Winter Games. The ZMG is doing the forecast for the last two Winter Games because we are doing now casting, we're very good at now casting. That means the forecast between the next five minutes with a vertical grid of 100 to 150 meters, which is very, very important for some kind of events. But we do audit forecasts as well. The only thing we cannot forecast, but we also do our earthquakes. That means natural earthquakes on the one side. On the other side, artificial earthquakes which are produced through normally bombs or nuclear bombs. And we are working with the CTPTO, the UN organization together to analyze and to measure this illegal nuclear tests to make the world a little bit a better place. Yeah. So Gunther, it's interesting you mentioned in the early days it was weather for the king. One of the things we look about in data, especially in the public sector, is what data, where do you collect it from? How much pairing is there? Can you talk a little bit about how it goes kind of beyond your borders and is there, I guess, how do you work with other organizations? There any data that shared, any of the models there? How does that work together in your organization? The most important thing is to link data, to link our data to other organizations and to collect other data from other organizations. It's not forecast anymore. It's forecast integrating into processes, especially in the business processes. Weather doesn't stop at the borders. That's the good thing. So we had a lot of collaboration with our neighbors, with other weather services from our neighbors. That's one thing to have them pick picture for our models, for our simulations. But what we also do is a lot of crowd data. Because the more data we get, the more data we can assimilate to our model, the better, the higher is the resolution of our forecast. So we do a lot of integration of this crowd source weather. That could be on the one hand, a simple app, that could be a weather station in your home, but that could also be a photograph, what you do with your smartphone, where we do artificial intelligence algorithms to get out the information about clouds, about damages, what we integrate again in our models, in our simulations, and give you the better forecast as a response. We have a big cooperation, for example, with the Austrian Fire Department. They get the best forecast we can ever do, a specialist forecast for the emergencies. When there's a fire in the woods, for example, they need a special soil moisture, for example, they need wind directions, they need wind strength. They can use this on their smartphone, they can use it on their smartwatch. They do pictures of the emergency, send it back to us, we analyze it and do a live modeling through our supercomputers to have a better forecast on this place. Excellent. You talked a bit about communities, leveraging lots of different technologies. I guess that's a good way for us to help connect the dot to us talking here at SUSECon. Obviously, open source, the community's a big piece of what we are hearing at the show. Talked to us a little bit about SUSE, what technologies are you using them? What's the role of open source? Is that a key piece of how you look at technology? Nothing's more boring than the weather from yesterday. So what we need is a really fast development of our forecasts to our customers. And SUSE helps us there. We have special services, especially on our supercomputers, where we use the special SUSE operating system. We use SUSE on our storage systems, on our software-defined storage system to have a weaker development to our customers, to our cooperation partners. And the last big thing is, we use SUSE on containering platforms and on AI platforms. So the new SUSE AI platform, we try to do forecasts for avalanches, for snow avalanches. And that's a really, really big effort at the moment because there are people dying every year in Australia in the Alps because of avalanches. And maybe we can save some of them because we do a good forecast together with SUSE. Excellent. You talk about moving to containerization. Give us a little insight. You are a government agency. How easy is it for you to take advantage of new technologies? Any guidance you can give us the things that you've gone through that might be able to help? Innovation and new technologies kind of moving on the edge because on the one hand, we are 24-7 the whole year long. We have to be high availability, very, very stable. On the other hand, we want to have new technologies, new innovations. So it's really, really working on the edge. We use two groups, two separate data centers. On one hand, we do all the stable thing, the high availability things. On the other things, on the other data center, on the other group, they are doing the cool new things. They do containerization. They do blockchain and they do artificial intelligence moves. And the thing is they are working together. They are connected. Let me tell it this way. We have a very, very experienced head of our one group, our stable 24-7 group and very, very young, high potential in our innovation group. To be honest, first two weeks, we hated each other because one guy wanted to have the innovation and going forward and forward and forward. And the other one said, no, stop. We have to be stable. That's the most important thing. After four weeks, we have a lot of maintenance for sure and with a lot of guidance. They started to love each other because they can learn from each other. And that's the main point. We learned about all these things. Now we can combine stable technology with new technology with cool new things, which can be proved on the one side and integrated in the stable side a little later. That's an excellent story to learn from. Learning so important, great to hear that the more traditional reliable group and the new innovation group work together. Of course, can't let you go talking about weather without touching on climate. So anybody that's watched the space with this global pandemic has been some interesting, I guess you'd say positive side effects. There are parts of the world where pollution is cleaned up, major impacts on climate that I'd expect you have some interesting data on. What can you share when it comes to climate change? Any advice you'd give for business leaders that are looking to help contribute in a positive way? Okay, sure. Actually, in our data center, we are also data hub for the ESA, the European Space Agency for the Sentinel data. This data is very interesting because it shows a direct impact how the climate is changing. The most important thing I can tell you as a CIO, it is changing. That's the most important thing. What we are looking for is, how can we combine data to stop this climate change? How can we show other leaders, politicians, ETC, how to stop it? How can we work against it? And how can we cooperate to work against it? The thing is, if we only show as a weather service our climate data, that's nice to have. We see a curve that's going to be warmer and warmer and that the parameters are changing, but that's not the goal. The goal is, how can we work together? How can we link data together to stop pollution, to stop several kind of attributes to stop climate change? We started to do some collaborations with big companies. One of these is SUSE, one of these is YLL Packard, to work together to combine resources, to combine compute power, to combine storage, to combine knowledge, especially data, how to stop climate change. Excellent. So good, their final question is anything you've been seeing change, being a CIO, question we always have, something we heard in the keynote is the changing role of the CIO, you talked a bit about AI, talk about you live with actual clouds and supercomputers. So what in 2020 is kind of different about the role of CIO? What I really learned is IT is not supporting a company or the supporting department anymore. IT is the strategic partner of each domain we have. We had all our scientists and they always told us, we are the scientists and we need IT. From several years now, they started to work together with the IT, with artificial intelligence, with big data analytics, with several platform, with integrations, how to solve problems. So the CIO especially is not supporting a company or the IT leader anymore. It's more the management partner of the management board. So that means the integration of the CIO in the whole company is much, much more than it was several years ago. Mac Whitman, I met you years ago and we had a good talk, told me there is no company anymore without IT, that's not correct. There is no company anymore that is IT. Even every culture is IT, everything is IT. It's no support anymore, it's linking anymore. Excellent, yeah, Gunther, I have such an important point to talk about if a company is going to thrive in the modern era, data is such a critical piece of that. That gives you as a CIO a seat at the table to work closely with them because if the business needs to be driven by data, the CIO's role of connecting IT and the business is so important. Thank you so much for sharing your stories. Pleasure to talk with you. Thank you, it was a pleasure. All right, and we'll be back with more coverage from Susick on Digital 20. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.