 Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Roberto Calandrini, head of architecture and digital and AI services from SNAM. He's remote, remoting in from Milan, Italy. Roberto, great to see you. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Great to see you too, John. Thanks for having me here. Love the virtual events. We can bring people in from all around the world. I love the virtual. I mean, it's one of the trade-offs of not being in person as we can still get you in. Thanks for coming on. Before we get started, I want to dig into the digital architecture of what you guys are doing. It's very compelling in a hybrid cloud. It's got all the things going on, which I like. But before we start, can you provide a short overview of SNAM? Who are your customers? What is your company's focus? And what's your role there? Sure. So, SNAM is one of the worst leading energy infrastructure operators. And we basically beat the energy infrastructures and offer integrated services. Our mission is to guide the evolution of the energy sector and lead the energy transition to a low-carbon future. And as you can see in our last investment plan, we declared our net zero carbon objective to bridge by 2040. This is why we basically are investing a lot in technology, in renovating our technology stack in order to provide our business line with the most innovative sustainable energy network, thanks to which we are already guaranteeing stable supplies to Europe of natural gas. Love your title. Love the fact you got the AI piece in there. What about specifically is your role? What do you oversee? I'm responsible for architecture, digital and artificial intelligence services. That basically means that I'm with my team and my extended team of the digital technology department are designing the entire technology stack for SNAM. And I'm specifically focusing more on developing intelligent and usable services for our business lines. Awesome. You guys over there, it's NAM have transformed a lot. The stack, that's cool when we get into that. You redesign your applications map, right? So it's really edge to cloud now, edge up to the cloud. What were the business drivers and the objectives to reach that goal? I mean, cause that's really a great use case. I mean, you got the edge to deal with intelligent, you got industrial, what were the business drivers and objectives? Yeah, yeah, our main business drivers has always been to increase the effectiveness of our processes and business lines. So to bear support the decision of our internal line of business. And we soon discovered that we needed more data in order to do that. And we structure a very extensive IoT program. But those data provide information about the internal states of our assets because they're coming from the census. And we thought, what about the environment in which our assets are located? So following up on that, we integrated data coming from remote sensing technologies. So think about drones and satellites, major data. And we soon discovered that we needed to renew and extend our technology stack from edge to cloud, as you said, and to be the scalable data platform in order to process these new level of data. This way, we think we will be able to enter the new volume of data that we predicted will be 100 times what we currently manage. And efficiently use AI and machine learning to derive insight from these new scale and complexity. So we're talking about big data. Robert, I got to ask you, could you take a minute to describe your transformation journey you guys went through and how Red Hat helped you guys execute the digital transformation? Yeah, we basically started working in 2018 with Red Hat to set up our cloud readiness map. We basically needed to decide what to scale, what to list and shift, what to refactor in order to move our application to a modern architectural stack. And Red Hat helped us with this. We use OpenShift for our container orchestration platform. And from this, we're developing our new application map. Then in 2019, we decided to accelerate the moving of our application workload. We started moving 10 to 20% of our workloads on OpenShift. And since then, most of our new software project is now a club native and developed on OpenShift. We're still in the process of leveraging modern architecture. So microservices based and using our container orchestration platform and other software as a service platform in order to complete the modernization of our application map. And we're targeting 2023, 2024 to complete the entire process. But as you know, it's a never changing landscape. So you basically never complete such a task in some way. Do you see Red Hat technology helping SNAM in its ecosystem for energy efficiency and aiming for low carbon emissions? Well, I think that OpenShift provides us with the right level of flexibility and agility to move at the speed of our new businesses. That's one way to look at the quest. And the other one, I think it would be in terms of energy efficiency and the carbon footprint that our application workloads generate. And I think that in that respect, it could happen on the meter long-term probably. So it will, in proportion to the workloads, we will be able to re-factor as purely reactive so as non-blocking apps. Disparably, in fact, for the same business service could improve the effective resource consumption. So indirectly saving energy and CO2. You know, I love this conversation. I know you're in Italy and wish we could be in person but I'm glad to get you on because you guys are kind of an example of the main theme at the conference this year which is an edge, you know, intelligent edge and IoT. But you know, IoT has been around for a while and we've talked about it before but now with the cloud and connecting to the cloud, that's a huge topic here at Red Hat Summit 2021. You guys are well-versed on they call OT technology, operational technologies. And what's interesting is Kubernetes and containerized orchestration, all help operators, operations people. So you have this OT, IT integration where the operational technology, old school technology, people and the stack and the people and the disciplines are meeting the old IT and creating a new thing. So I have to ask you, what are these, what's that world like? What are some of the use cases that you're working on and you're planning to deploy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's exactly like that. It's known as a long OT history as you said. So right now we have a complex brownfield situation for our edges and gateways on the field. There are various technical components that we signs on the field. You must consider that the Italian network, the Italian transportation network has more than 33,000 kilometers of pipeline and differently sized plans across the country. So we have several, already several use cases currently running on our data centers that could benefit we think from distributed processing at the edge. Think about, for example, physical security. So just to give you an example, privacy preserving, local video processing for anomaly detection done at the edge is much more effective in our opinion for hierarchical processing for a data intensive task that involves field data so that you can process the data coming from the field at different level and take to the central data center only what's needed. And we're also working on the usual problem there is with a with a with OT with a with operation of technology that is standardization. So we have many heterogeneous components and communication protocol there. And, you know, without a proper IT stack gathering and normalizing the data for a higher level processing could become cumbersome. So security is also a relevant topic because it is usually a preserve at the physical and natural layer. And we think that we can introduce with IoT three main improvements about this. We're expanding the level of cyber stack to the full technology stack bringing modern internet security standard to the edge. We're pushing containerization to the edge being able to orchestrate our workloads from data centers to the cloud. And we think that this will provide us with a high level of flexibility and a better exploitation of the geographical distribution of our data. And last but not least, we're standardizing our gateways and edges. And this will help us streamline the messy data transfer conversion and normalization of the data we will receive from the field. Awesome, I got to ask first of all, great job on the edge. I think that's a great vision of the building in security. It's important. Having that edge intelligence is really well done. Congratulations, love the vision. I got to ask you, what's your future plans for SNAM's technology journey as a whole? What's your vision? What's your next step? So what we would like to focus on in the coming years is how to best leverage the hybrid cloud environment we currently set up. So right now we have an hybrid cloud environment with a data center and one cloud tenant and having our workloads running on OpenShift would make easier for us to leverage the offering of different cloud providers and of course to best exploit what we currently have on our tenants. Second one is find the best way to leverage IoT. So as I said before, our focus in the coming years would be to complete our IoT foundation, rolling out our edges, our gateways and put our new unified opposition system to work. And this will provide the computational backbone of our intelligent gas network. And finally, and this is a less objective that is will be built on top of the other two. We must find different ways and exploit different ways to leverage data and artificial intelligence. So we need to exploit our data in order to generate insight for our business lines. And due to the scale of our new data streams, artificial intelligence machine learning, we think will be ubiquitous in our applications. Right now we're already using it, but not at the scale that the new data streams will need. And most of the algorithms are working on data that are from legacy system and SCADA system. So they are specifically created for each project. We are about to begin an exciting data journey where everything will reside on a unified data platform and our data scientists, our data analysts in the business lines will be able to derive value from them. Awesome. You know, you guys are great customer use case that love the real operational impact. I talk with a lot of other practitioners and end user enterprises and I get the same question and I go to the statement. They say, obviously security needs to be built in, but the challenges and where they want to, what they want to do, and I want to get your thoughts on this if you don't mind commenting, they all say, I want to run cloud native applications, cloud native applications from my data center to the cloud and then out to the edge and with a, as a distributed platform, one operation set, whether it's OT, IT, I want to make that, that's my end game in the short term. I want to get there fast. So I got to ask you, for those people that want that, is OpenShift a good solution for that in your opinion? We, we of course think it is. It is part of our IoT foundation is not the only technology component, but is one of the most relevant and it is absolutely happiness in enabling the possibility of orchestrating workloads from the cloud to the edge. And we will be able to give you more information about that as soon as we will release the first distributed workloads within 2021. So I'd be happy to answer any any questions from our peers or other colleagues from other industries. You guys have thousands and thousands of sites. This is classic industrial edge implementation, honestly monitoring, just monitoring the pipes. I mean, you got monitoring the system just physically. I mean, this is like just a physical thing. So now as you have technology, you guys have to monitor and get that early detection of any gas leaks. This is critical to your business. How is that changing? How is that environment changing with technology? Is it more automated? What's your vision? How are you guys looking at that? Well, we surely are trying to move along to two main drivers. The first is unification and standardization of how we monitor all these distributed technology stock. This is very important because even for the simplest use case, you're now dealing with distributed application. And this is a entirely different game to what we are used to basically. And the other relevant thing is how can we get the best from the machines we put on the field? So in other terms, how can we standardize how we connect to the machines we have on the field and how much intelligence we need to put there and how to test it? And in order to do that, we're thinking about building a digital twin of our assets that will enable us to be able to test end-to-end before getting to the real thing on fields. How will it work? What are the security vulnerability, potential security vulnerability and other aspects of the technology infrastructure and the data infrastructure? And we think this is very important because in some way, in order to provide the acceleration and the scale that we are going to provide to our company, we need to be sure well in advance that what we designed will work in practice without getting to the field. We would like to get into the field where everything is already tested. Robert Till, great to have you on theCUBE. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in from Milan, Italy. CUBE Virtual is one of the benefits and hope to see you in person soon at the next event. But great use case, love your environment, love how you're looking at that platform as a distributed platform and bringing that OT, IT together, data center to the cloud to the edge. That's a really relevant use case and architecture. So congratulations. Thank you very much John and I hope to see you very soon. Bye. When I'm in Italy, we're going to come by and do a site visit and see each other. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. Absolutely. CUBE Coverage for Red Hat Summit 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.