 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and of course this year, the event is really happening globally where people are. So we're talking to Red Hat executives, their partners, and we're always thrilled when we get to talk to the customers. So joining me from Buenos Aires, Argentina, I have Maria Alejandro Trozi, who is the Deputy Manager of Solutions Architecture at Edinore. Alejandro, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks to you, of course. I'm pleased to be here. All right, so we know we're living in some challenging times right now. Certain things become very important. Everybody's working at home. Of course, Edinore is energy. So talk about something that is essential. You look at Maslow's hierarchy. Want to make sure, number one, everyone's healthy. And pretty soon after that, your company is making sure that things get running. So why don't we start with a little bit. Edinore, tell us a little bit about the company and your role in the organization. Yeah, of course, of course. Well, Edinore is the largest electricity decision company of Argentina with almost 5,000 employees and the 3 million customers in part of Buenos Aires City and surroundings. It represents a nine million population and we have the residential, commercial and industrial customers. So we bring electricity to homes, to schools, to hospitals, to airport and well, of course, commercial and industrial customers that are in our concession area. Excellent. Great. And Solutions Architectures, tell us a little bit about your role there for view of your group. Well, I am part of the information systems of the knowledge information direction in Edinore and as a solution architecture area, we are hoping to establish good architectures for business objectives for the business to meet their objectives in a very or in the best quality and in the best way. We are seeing how the trends, how technology moves, how industries, similar industries and companies are moving beyond technology and architectures and we try to go this way for the company. Great. So just so I understand. So is that the infrastructure piece is cloud part of the mix? Where is your connection to really the business applications? Any developers? Yes. What do you think about the org? I usually think about it as a glue, as a glue that join our pieces together. Applications, infrastructure and all the pieces that makes a solution that it involves software, but it depends on how well it depends on infrastructure, security and so on. There's an infrastructure area, a security area, a solutions area in IT too, in our IT too and architecture is one of them and we try to glue all these pieces to meet the requirements. Yeah, I love, you give that analogy of the glue bringing things together. We know the pace of technology continues to change so fast. The requirements of the business don't stand still. So bring us inside to help us understand some of the integration challenge that you're facing, what drivers of the business are causing you to evaluate what you're doing and tell us a little bit about what you're using today. Yeah, we had a lot of challenges some time ago. We had a lot of integrations running and I think that I usually see these challenges in some, several ways. The integrations that we're running and we're having trouble, we're having a lot of issues or maybe issues in data, in quality and in performance or availability too. And most of these issues were because of online transactions that maybe started to grow much more and started to add some complexity to the system platform that was almost for batch processes. So we have a huge amount of online integrations that started to be big, to be big in volume, to be critical for the business and maybe we don't have, we didn't have the right of the picture. We had to do with a lot of handcraft job with a lot of efforts behind, a lot of micro batches and so on to keep things running, but with a lot of efforts behind that. And the other ask, yeah, tell me. Yeah, just very typical challenges that I'm hearing from you. Help us understand what, how do you choose the technology partners that you're working with? It is the paradox of choice out there. There are so many companies, so many products, especially, I know you're company, you've got some DevOps pieces. I look at the DevOps tool chain today and it is more than any one person can comprehend. So how does that or approach who you integrate with and choose the various pieces? Okay, well, the center of the evaluation or the decision was integration, of course. The center of the evaluation process and the research was about integration. But we wanted an integration platform or to build an architecture, an integration architecture that could solve all of the issues that I mentioned before, all of the issues that we had, but that it could take Edenor to a next stage that prepare us for what, in that time, we could see as the future requirements. And nowadays, they are almost the actual requirements, but at that time, two years ago, we are some kind of future requirements like DevOps, microservices, APIs, and cloud, well, cloud, the cloud requirement was one of the first that we managed at IT, the new concept and for Edenor, and we had to manage all of that, some platform that prepare us for all that were coming and for a cloud or hybrid architecture. So we started our research and we found in Red Hat an excellent technology, but this is a technical aspect and the other aspects that we look for were the experience in the region, maybe there are a lot of technologies that could be great, but maybe aren't present in our region. It's not just the case of integration because integration platforms or the biggest or the best integration platforms, I think that are mostly here, but with many technologies, it could happen that maybe there are good technologies, but not with some pre-sensing in our local region. But adding that, I would say that experience in similar industries and pre-sends and most important for us, and it works really well, a supportive way of working that the company could support us, support all along the project, not just the post-implementation support, but also support for all the terms and all the learning process, all the implementation process. And we could find all of these in Red Hat, of course, that's why we chose it. Absolutely, so Alejandro, tell me where are you with the rollout of what you're using with Red Hat? What have you put into it? Give us where you are so far. Well, we started with an initial phase, pilot phase, where we chose some initial services that were not so complicated, not so complex, not so critical, but with a good sample of what we have in terms of protocols, in terms of patterns, in terms of connectors with other systems. So we started with this kind of sample of all of that and not making some changes in the way of working. It's something like, well, okay, let's go and try the technology, let's put some third services and let's learn. One of the services was not so complicated, but it has had a lot of volume, a lot of transactions. We have almost 800,000 events per day with that service and was maybe the one of the most important of that initial phase in terms of scalability. And we could test it and see the bright of the technology with that pilot. Excellent, and so what's been the result inside the organization? Has that impacted development time? Is it something that your ultimate end customers would have any positive results after you've rolled this out? Well, yes, after we started or we finished the initial pilot phase, we started another phase that consisted in, well, review all the integrations, flows and review which ones were the most critical for the business and have a lot of issues in the actual architecture. So we agreed with the rest of the teams, solutions teams and business teams as well to start to making real changes. So another initiative started that consisted in implementing agile methodologies in trying the scrum framework, for example, and we thought that it was a great combination to try new ways of working in this new phase of integration engineering. So these new services that we arrived, were about where between the outage management system, the system that manages on the technical grid frame of the electricity service and the field management system that is the system that manages all the workforce in the street, the logistics or distributes the work or the prior, in terms of priorities. So all these flow, all of these flows are synchronous or online flows. We have to send data and simultaneously just to change or to review those priorities all the time to make a user schedule and repair things better and faster. I could say that the business and I and our team would be a lot of increases in agility and speed. We could solve issues faster. For example, I learned about how teachers could flow in terms of seconds rather than in minutes and the development processes, the fix processes to have to, we could fix problems in production maybe in a day when sometimes we took weeks. So we could find things like that but with a new way of working too that could take all of the technology could bring. Excellent. Well, when you talk about integration platform, traditionally middleware sits right in the middle between the infrastructure side of the house and all the app development pieces that you have. So I'm just curious as you've rolled out the solution with Red Hat, have there been any cultural changes? One of the things we've been looking at is, can tooling help bring teams together? How much retraining do you need to do? How much fear and uncertainty is there from groups? So from an organizational standpoint, how has this gone inside of Edinor? Well, we have a few huge changes and I can mention some of them or the most important. One of them was that we have to reorganize or many teams have to reorganize their activities. Maybe it's not a structural or organizational situation but functional, the way that the teams maybe organize their activities. We started to build a team where we have a product owner, a scrum master, devs and architects from different providers, all teams and different specialties all working together in the same space and with kind of dedication, I couldn't get full dedication but yes, we agreed to dedication that could give that team the autonomy and then the communication and the collaborative space that we needed. So the teams and managers of those teams had to reorganize their activities and it was possible thanks to that, thanks to them. But the other aspect was that we have to learn the technology and learn new ways of working at the same time and it's not just to have a training, this is an important aspect but besides that, we have to incorporate all of new, this new concept. This is a difficult or the most difficult part because we could do training and take courses but that we really incorporate those new ways of working is really difficult. And we were in viewing the processes team, helping the team just to not to make a hybrid or something that is not genuine because we wanted the genuine change in the way of working just to see better results. Then maybe we could get more flexibility with time, with some level of maturity but in the first time we saw another expert tell us that it's better to attach to the pure sense of the way of working, a new way of working. So we have to incorporate all of that to make a genuine change. Great, well Alejandro, my final question actually, I want to talk a little bit about community. So you've been to Red Hat Summit before, many of the things that you were talking about and the chains that you're going through, many of the companies I talked to, of course, the vendors are going to help you. Red Hat, that their partners, if you have a channel partner, they will help you but oftentimes it is the peers in the community that are an important piece of this that you can learn from others, you can contribute back what you're learning. So the question for you is, this week we're coming together while being a part at Red Hat Summit. So tell us how you engage with the community, the importance of Red Hat ecosystem and your peers in the community around using these sorts of solutions. Well, I always said Red Hat people, or Red Hat group that are near me here in Argentina and now with the US guys that I'm really thankful of all the Red Hat community because they've made real great things and it's really amazing to see the great technology that they could build as a community, as a whole community in all the world, all around the world people contributing and coding technology and this is the biggest collaborative experience I think that we could see and we could learn of a very high collaboration, very much and very spread around the world. It's really a great inspiration for all of that, all of these, all of us. All right, well, Alejandra, thank you so much for sharing your story and all of the updates with Ed and Nor and wish you best of luck with the rest of the rollout of the projects you're working on. Thank to you for giving me this opportunity, it's a pleasure to talk to you. All right, lots more coverage from Red Hat Summit. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.