 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. And we are back live in Boston as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Red Hat Summit 2019. It is our sixth year here at the show and this year obviously some huge announcements, significant moment, it's been for Red Hat. We heard from Jim Whitehurst a little bit ago. Stu Minimum, John Walls were now joined as well by Nile Fitzgerald, who is the GM of IT application architecture and design at Spark in Z. Nile, good afternoon, I guess good morning still, we're in the Eastern time zone. Yeah, I think it's the middle of the night in New Zealand. Yeah, so Spark in Z, New Zealand. Tell us a little bit first off about Spark in Z, what the folks back home are doing right now, work-wise, and your role with the company. Yeah, so Spark is the largest provider of telecom communication services in New Zealand. All the traditional type of services you'd expect, mobile broadband, et cetera. We came out of the traditional kind of post office, so we have a lot of heritage and in about four years ago, we rebranded from telecom New Zealand into Spark to represent that we were changing from being a telco into more much broader range of digital services. So our purpose is to help all New Zealanders win big in the digital world. Nile, step back for a second, talk to our audience that might not know the telcom industry as well as you. I've been an observer and participated in the industry, but back in the dot com boom, it was like limitless bandwidth and we're going to do all these wonderful things and cloud and digitization and put some new opportunities, as well as stresses and strains on your industry. So what's going on and you said you rebranded? Yeah, look it's been, I think it's well known, it's been a tough last few years for most telcos in the world. I was listening to Red Hat talking yesterday about 60 consecutive quarters or more of growth. I don't think there's any telco in the world that probably has the same story. Like most, we're facing kind of decline in all the traditional revenues like voice and text and things like that. So we're all having to kind of rebrand ourselves and deliver much higher levels of customer service. People expect the same levels of service from us that they do from Amazon and Google and everyone else. So in Spark, what that means to us is we've moved into lots of new things. As you say, things like ICT, we're now very big in cloud. We've recently launched a Spark Sports brand and we've got streaming rights to key events like Formula One. We're going to stream the Rugby World Cup, which is a massive event for New Zealanders. So looking forward to seeing that in Ireland and the All Blacks in the final in September this year. So yeah, a lot going on. Tough times, but forcing us to keep changing every year. So about these changes that you're making, whether you know, technologically based, let's just deal with that. What is that ultimately going to do for you think in terms of better customer service delivery? So you've got inherent challenges, you've talked about them at all, that the world's changing, right? How we use this medium, this communication opportunity is changing and you've been, not you, but you're just a little behind the wave. Hard to keep up with it, right? So rapidly changing. How much of a challenge is that? And then how are you going to address this going forward? How do you stay relevant? Yeah, I think we're lucky in one regard because if I look back about five, seven years ago, we were like most traditional telcos. We had a spaghetti for want of a better description of systems and then we had always multiples of everything. At the time we had 19 integration layers and 10 billing systems and it wasn't uncommon. But way back in 2012, we actually embarked on a massive transformation program and we spent five years consolidating all of that infrastructure. So going into about 2017, we were very lucky that we had a massive foundation laid already. So what that then enabled us to do was to actually push away calls from our contact centers, into mobile apps, into digital adoption. We've been a big embracer of things like big data and robotic process automation as well to try and take cost out of our industry. So I think we're quite well placed. Now that allows us to do things like innovate and new products for our customers. So we bundled things like Spotify and Netflix. It allows us to introduce things like Spark sort of brand which we couldn't have done five years ago before the transformation. We just wouldn't have been able to enable these things with our existing kind of legacy IT estate. So how's open source playing to all this for you? Yeah, open source. I suppose our first foray into open source was when we went to start embracing big data and automation. So we started using things like Hadoop and various other things. And our entire platform is based around open source. We changed to an IMS network recently and we started embracing things like OpenStack. And then it really took us to a new level recently when we started working on Red Hat's Fuse and OpenShift, we started implementing that. Okay, so at the OpenStack show for many years, the last few years we saw the telcos coming in for specifically for network function for translation or NFV, is that what you're using in that space? Yeah, we are. Interestingly, at this conference, I've heard a lot of people talk about OpenShift and OpenStack, obviously, particularly in the telco game. We actually came out a bit differently from the application space. So we had an integration platform that we had put in through this transformation phase which had served us well and was connecting all of our 40, 50 systems together. But it was coming up to a life cycle event and we decided we'd look externally and see had we options beyond just upgrading it. So we started looking around and we effectively found Fuse and in bringing in Fuse, we then brought OpenShift in which is quite different to what I've seen from a number of other people. They're bringing in things like OpenShift and building on top of it. We did it the other way around, you know? And we did it primarily for cost reasons, you know? So talk a little bit about that impact of Fuse and OpenShift, what that means. Were you already down the containerization journey or did that help drive some of that modernization? That's exactly what happened. If I'm honest, we hadn't really explored containerization too much because we had come to the end of our kind of transformation journey. Open source and containerization wasn't around when we went through that. So we kind of needed some really core reasons to move on. So, yeah, effectively what happened was we looked at Fuse. It, as I say, primarily for cost. But we were looking for something that we could migrate to where it makes sense. We were looking for something that wasn't a massive lift for the people who worked in our integration already. So they could be reskilled into it. And interestingly, we turned Agile recently which has changed the way we look at and the needs of our systems. So our old integration platform, if we needed to deploy a change, we had to take an outage, which was fine when we had a centralized IT department who deployed once a month and took a two hour outage. But when you have 20 tribes, all developing features in isolation, and they want to go straight through to production. If everybody took an outage, then our systems wouldn't really be up very often. So one of the key things that we were looking at for our new integration platform was, can we deploy hot and can we scale? So that's basically where Fuse came into it. Okay, so can you? We can, and we do. Still a little bit nervous about pressing the button but being simultaneously, this is really good work, right? We saw it today though, on the demo stage, right? On the keynote, we saw simultaneous operations. Now we do it, and they normally don't tell me when they're doing it, they just do it and tell me it worked afterwards. But no, it's actually been really successful and we've, you know, you can imagine connecting 40 or 50 systems together. This is effectively the equivalent of about 2,000 APIs and we managed to migrate for about 70% of the way through but we managed to migrate those without actually impacting the systems that used them. And that's probably been one of our most successful IT projects that I've seen. Yeah, well it's funny, you talked about, you said we were towards the end of our transformation journey and of course, I think we all understand, it is just, I might have reached a marker in my journey but it needs to be a continuous process and you went through an agile transformation. So bring us in a little bit organizationally, what happened there? You know, some of the bad and the ugly of agile because, I mean, agile's always an ongoing thing. Yeah, so about start of last year, we started to think about agile and the need to change our ways of working. We looked at a number of models overseas in companies like Spotify and various banks and we settled on a model of chapter and tribes and we took about six months actually in looking at what that meant for us as an organization and all of the things that we needed to change. Everything from people's contracts, you know, to people's titles, we got rid of all complex titles and moved down to simple things like developer tester, et cetera. We had to train our people in agile so we ran boot camps for over 2,000 people. We had one with 500 people attend. Get to review all of our processes and see how would, where we had centralized things like IT governance or procurement, how do you actually manage this when you have up to 20 different people effectively or tribes doing their own development? So over a period of about six months, we went through all of these. We started with a concept of some four runner tribes so we could figure out how this thing actually works, you know, and get some lessons. And then on the first of July last year, about 2,000 people in various buildings packed up their stuff on their desk and moved into a new world into their tribes with different working spaces and different collaboration areas and all the tools that we need. So yeah, we're about nine months down that journey now and yeah, it's been good. How many total employees? We have about 5,000 and 12,000. 5,000, so you had 500 at one time, 10% of your workforce in training at one time. That's right, yeah, absolutely. How do you keep the wheels on the bus rolling? Because I mean, you're asking people not only to change their, you know, learn new skills but learn them in a new environment and learn them literally in a new place. I mean, that's just massive change and I think for just more human beings or creatures that have it to a certain extent, that's got it. You had to hit a lot of bumps along the way. So one of the key things we did up front was we said the operate part of our business which is effectively things like our contact center, our sales staff, our service desks, we will not go agile with those on the first day because they operate in a slightly different way of working, the people in our stores, et cetera. So we had a concept of agile light and agile heavy so we kind of parked them for a minute so that we are at the time so that we wouldn't do exactly what you say and let the wheels fall off the trolley and we took to people that were the IT developers, the product development staff and all of that which came to just over about 2,000 people and we firstly flipped those 2,000 people and put those through bootcamp but even as you say, scheduling the bootcamps, we made sure that we always had the right people on the ground and we would schedule smaller bootcamps for them later if we needed to do it, but yeah. So nine months in now, you're talking to your peers if they're going to go through any key learnings, what were some of the most challenging things that you ran into? I think probably the major one is that agile at its heart is a way of working and despite the name, it's actually quite prescriptive in how you should work, you know? When you pick up the agile book, it tells you all the ceremonies you need to run and the processes that you need to run as well and I think what you need to be pragmatic in how you implement it because there are so many different flavors of agile, the one flavor even with an organization of Spark size, it doesn't work, you know? So the people, the tribes and squads that are building out new products compared to the tribes that are doing things like upgrading systems, they will work in different ways. So I think the first thing is be pragmatic, take the goodness and the intent of agile but implement it in how it works for you and do some other practical considerations like we had prior to being agile we had quite a large number of our technology partners were based offshore in India and it's quite difficult to run a 10 a.m. stand up in New Zealand setting the priorities for the day and the sprint plans when four members of your team are asleep in India, you know? They're missing out on all of that, the goodness and the co-location and the sharing so one of the things we had anticipated luckily enough so we had moved a lot of those people on shore in advance of agile, you know? But it is a big cultural change for everyone in the organization not least the leadership teams as well, you know? Well, you got through it. We got there. You've managed, right? There's no going back yet. Absolutely, no, you're in the deep end now. Well, now thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time here to join us here on theCUBE and I think that an Irishman is always welcomed in Boston. Thank you very much. We've been enjoying the hospitality. I'll bet you have. The door's always open for you. Thank you very much. Now, Fitzgerald joining us from Spark NZ. Back with more here on theCUBE. You're watching this live at the Red Hat Summit 2019.