 Hi, everyone. So, thanks for joining us today as part of this open source as a services vendor presentation. My name's Chris Howard and I'm the open source lead at EPAM Systems. So, a little introduction to myself, I've been consulting for 10 years mainly on digital transformation and I'm leading at the moment on all of EPAM's open source activities. So that includes our open source consulting, our OSCI, which is our open source contributors index tool, a enliadurai gweithio i dylunio llwynt yn symud y llyfr adapt wedi ein ddylun i'r gwybod yn eu cyflawn i'r wneud? Rydym y gallwch cyflawn i Hipam hefyd yn 1993 a eu hynny'n dweud sefydig cydwle angenhau agnigol. Ond yna bosb gweithio gyflawnio ar gyfer y cyflawn i gysylltu strategiol i gwybodaeth sylwyr hebodol, We are in a unique position and very pleased to Beans I when where we can do both. And this really allows us to provide real business value to our customers. So let's get started. So the first thing we are going to be considering is, what does open source mean to us here at EPAN? Well, as you can see on the slide there, EPAN systems believes in the principles and power of the free and open source software paradigm. Well, you could say that sounds like we have got it perfectly understood, But it really wasn't that simple to start with. So as a services vendor, we really found ourselves in a position where we had to write our own book on this as our engagement with open sources is quite different to many other types of organisations. In particular, perhaps like some of the organisations that many of you here today might be familiar with, technology providers, banking and financial institutions. So in 2011-12, we started our journey down the open source path, and we really had to think about how we could embrace and contribute to open source as a services company in a worthwhile way. We had to work out what that meant for us whilst at the same time making sure that aligned with our activities, our core business and assured that we played, as is very important, an active part in the open source community. So fast forward eight years, and with a pretty good grasp, we like to think of how we do open source and how we focus our efforts across the different faces of open source in our organisation. And we split our open source engagement into three clear channels of activity at EPAN, and I don't use the term silos here because I do genuinely believe, and we should see that later, these areas overlap and support one another. But like I say, more of that later. So our first channel is our client projects, and this encompasses our engineering and delivery work in the open source space that we do in collaboration with clients as part of their own project engagements. It's quite self-explanatory, and we'll touch on that a bit more detail around this shortly, but it really is about helping our clients with project work and their own open source journeys. The second area is our open source projects, and these are open source projects that are drawn out of innovation and our client team needs within EPAN, where we then recognise the value of this solution and thought that it might be worthwhile to consider or contribute that to the wider community. So in this instance, we've moved our internal IP, our EPAN IP, to open source through our own release process, and I'm going to talk a little bit more around our open source release process in due time. And for me, I really find these open source projects the most rewarding, because it's really great to see the energy and the eagerness from colleagues around the idea of open sourcing something that they've built, and then that continued sense of attachment that they'll then have to that solution. And it really motivates me to have them to see them deliver great quality code and support their contributions moving forward on the back of the sense of achievement and attachment that they have. But of course, it's great to have them personally be responsible for a solution that's now being used by others outside of EPAN or its original team, and that's really rewarding. And of course, some of you may be thinking, well, as a commercial organisation, there's a possibility that this outward contribution might well lead to generating a revenue stream. And that's true, and Anna will mention that, but that's not the primary goal of this open source project channel that we have. And our third channel is the Supported Project Channel, and this is where we engage with industry and community projects that we contribute to. So, for example, Apache Big Data or Drupal, the automotive Linux space that we're working in at the moment, as well, of course, our collaboration and ongoing commitment to industry consortia like Finos, who we're engaged with here today. And these Supported Projects are typically where we've got engineers, consultants and analysts with expertise in technologies and the associated languages contributing to products and projects that are sitting within the industry vertical or a community for that specific language that they're most focused upon. And we've established competency centres here within EPAN that focus exactly on that, be that our Drupal or Apache competency centres or our life science, financial services and insurance verticals. So, for us being an active contributor and explicitly supporting these community initiatives strengthens our expertise internally, but also allows us to support our clients better. It's a win-win. But what do these three groups there for look like in practice? Well, in the first instance, our engagement with clients. Well, as a services vendor, this is the most obvious in terms of what we're offering to support our clients in their own success, and we do this in two ways. One, the delivery angle, so our engineering and development. The key to success here and being true to the topic of this talk as a service vendor is to ensure that we're supporting clients in the delivery of their own open source solutions, be that homegrown solutions within their own development teams or solutions taken from the community. And here it's about ensuring that individuals we put to work with these clients are skilled, knowledgeable, passionate and really understand the solutions that they're engaged with. And we ensure that these people, as a vendor, demonstrate a real interest and commitment to the development of furthering of not just the client's project and work, but the open source solution they're engaged with. This opportunity for us and for our colleagues to influence and direct open source projects and further derive the success within a service business as a key contributor is key to this part of client projects. But the second and the more exciting, particularly given my own experience, is the consultancy, the advice and support, and the second way is how we engage with our client projects through supporting our clients with an open source adoption, growth and maturity. It's not common to find service vendors that have such a strong commitment to open source coupled with engineering excellence, so we're really proud of this. And for other service vendors, perhaps listening today, it's a unique position you're in to support clients if you've got such a strong grasp of open source already too. So for us, this engagement is about helping our clients understand open source practices, overcoming hurdles, misconceptions and generally supporting them in selecting the right infrastructure and technical decisions. So we work with clients who are right at the beginning of their journey, considering how they might do that first for a or step into consuming open source, all the way through to clients who are using open source but perhaps keep hitting governance roadblocks or legal complications around IP rights or a lack of ongoing support. And of course, we make recommendations on what kind of solutions to engage with within the community, where there might be an opportunity, perhaps even for our clients to open source some of their own IP, borrowing ideas from our second channel, which of course brings me on to that. Open source projects. So our second channel, well, these are solutions, innovations and products that have been driven out of both client and eternal work that we at EPAM here as an organisation believe will be valuable to the wider community. So for us as a service vendor, the opportunity for us to expand our audience for these EPAM born solutions, if you like, moving from a create and consume mindset to a create and contribute way of thinking is a really great way for our developers and engineers to value and be valued about the works that they're engaged with. And the number of EPAM born and led projects that we're pushing through to open source is growing more and more rapidly. And I know you can see some key facts there on the screen, but we've well over 70 already in the world being used on a daily basis, and we're continually developing improving by EPAM's own engineers and more importantly, external contributors. So I thought I might share some information now around one of these EPAM born solutions and a little bit more about its story. So you can hopefully now see the EPAM report portal or the report portal that's now out there in the world. And this is exactly the kind of tool that we developed and through using internally saw the benefits that this could provide to the wider community. We started to work on this tool in 2012 and successfully use this for four years for our own benefit. And some of its features and I say incredible features can be seen there on the slide, such as decreasing test effort by 90% and integrating with a broad array of frameworks. But in 2016 we felt as part of our ongoing commitment to open source and indeed being a good open source citizen that it would make sense to release this to the wider community. And it was the right decision. Since then it's been deployed by 60 plus EPAM clients and has its own dedicated team of 25 people here at EPAM. So you might say, well that's very exciting, but that's still within EPAM. But what's even more exciting is that it has a total of 59 unique contributors, both those who've never even engaged with EPAM and those who perhaps were in EPAM and now moved on to other things. So with over a thousand commits alone on GitHub, we're super proud to push this tool out to the community and really seen it blossom. And we hope that our ongoing commitment to the tool itself shows that we are really engaged and who knows how many more of our solutions might have equal success. This really reinforces our second channel around open source projects and the value they bring both internally, but also externally to the wider community. So what about that final channel? Well, our supported projects. Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, these are the projects consortia, communities and initiatives that EPAM actively is a member of and contributes to as a good open source citizen. And we're here today as I mentioned as members of FINOS, which I'm sure most of you are familiar with as the FinTech open source foundation, where we recently transitioned our glue projects and soon to be our time based project into their own FINOS landscape. So if you think back to the overlaps and synergies that I spoke about before, this is a perfect example. Glue, an EPAM open source project that we believe with the support of FINOS and their engaged contributors and members would be valuable to the community and financial industry to sit within their landscape. Well, on that notion, we moved it from sitting within EPAM's open source space, our second channel if you like, to now residing as a key offering within FINOS. Our engineers continue to support and contribute it, but the focus now is much more on organisations and contributors to really push forward its development and usage across the FS sector. It wasn't selfish for us to keep this because we knew that by pushing it out to be a supported project, we were furthering the industry and driving innovation. But you might say, well, why, particularly as a service vendor? Well, as a service vendor, it just makes business sense for us to embed our employees in established range of communities and groups, because if we can maintain our own awareness about what is happening in these communities and frameworks, then we can absolutely stay abreast of changes and latest innovation. But secondly, to do more than simply build solutions around these frameworks and tools, but to actively participate in their development. So take Drupal, for example. If we can be responsible and co-responsible for developing the backlog definition book fixes and being a truly active member of this community, then we'll receive so much more value than simply building a tool on top of it. And it's that final engagement of the three channels that are highlighted that wraps up our kind of relationship with open source externally. So from client to create and contribute, and then finally to community. So we've heard a lot about our external engagement, but how do we encourage open source contribution within EPAM? And how do we drive ongoing contribution from our employees to open source solutions? Well, the next few slides should give an overview of some of the ways in which we here at EPAM, a service company, really do drive open source within our organization. So the most important thing we've realised is that employees, be that engineers, analysts, account managers, presales or leadership need to be able to find the home of open source within EPAM. And that's represented by open source there sitting within the middle of what you can see on the screen. The idea of an organization doing or living open source is great, but there still needs to be someone owning this and a team supporting its development and growth. So we created a dedicated space within the organization, our open source project office, if you like, although a little less defined, that provides everyone with a simple, easy to find point of reference for their open source activities and engagement. And we sit across the organization. We're not tied to a specific function, so we're accessible to all and we're also not related specifically to a team or a specific project or deliverable. We're always available and always accessible. So on the left hand side of the screen, you can see the kind of activities that my team and I get up to in terms of provision or providing. So promoting working on open source solutions freely and removing barriers to doing so, or perhaps developing a culture of innovation and a strong internal community around open source, something I'm particularly passionate about. Or finally, rewarding individual open source contribution celebrating successes, which I'm going to come on too shortly. But on the right hand side, you can see more of the support role that we exist to provide. And that's the more kind of meaty items around reducing legal complications through clear guidance on what is an is an EPAM IP perhaps, or perhaps when colleagues might want to notify us that they're engaged on something, which I'm quite proud to say is quite few occurrences now given the kind of stream working and narrowing down this process we've established. Or perhaps it's supporting on educating the sales and account managers on the value of open source, which I'm sure here today we're all aware of, but making us an active part of client conversations. Or indeed it could be actually working with the delivery and project teams to support them on solutions to establishing suitable ways of working given their clients open source demands. Or even perhaps recommending potential open source solutions over paid software, or even engineering a bespoke solution itself. Now we know we don't have it perfect and please don't think that we do, but there's lots more we'd love to be able to do and provide to our colleagues. And the diagram above purely shows us at a high level the kind of remit that our open source team has within EPAM. We're constantly improving and we're always taking ideas from the community and indeed some of the speakers at this conference around what provision and support offerings we can provide to our community to continue growing. And as part of giving our teams all that they need, and of course being a good open source citizen, we also encourage our teams to contribute back to us and to our community. So the next slide, as I mentioned earlier, our release process visualizes some of the solutions, some of the stages, sorry, that our solutions have flown through as part of that open source release process. So this is our open source release process here at EPAM. I'll be it with a few less words to enable me to share it with you today. But what's important about this is that this process is visible and accessible to anyone in the organization, and it's as stripped back and succinct as possible. And it's been through, I can assure you, many iterations where we've managed to cut out various stages, red tape approvals, sign offs, etc. And really bring it down to the key activities and stakeholders. So, as the open source capability, we're always behind, as hopefully my last slide indicated, our teams through supporting them with questions where necessary, because it's really important for us to not stifle innovation. So we make sure that this release process is as simple and as straightforward as possible. And you can see along the top of the four stages. So we start with one inception, moving through preparation, release and promotion. And within each of these four stages we have typical activities, be that notifying us about the project, through to perhaps doing security scans, setting up repos on GitHub, and then even shouting about it and promoting the solution. And we typically see projects go through this process in about a month. So from the point at which they present that idea to us, all the way through to us handing over that repo to them, we're talking about three or four weeks. And of course, as I mentioned, in the true spirit of collaborative working, we take on all feedback and indeed in our release stage, we have a stage where they can actually feedback on how the open source team have done as part of this process. And we know that this process works. And as a services vendor, that's super important because we've built this process and I can assure you that when my inbox receives a notification around a new project, I've already seen that people have perhaps jumped to stage two and done the various scans already. And in my opinion, that's fantastic. As a services vendor, our employees are our primary measure of success. So it's really important that we make these processes as easy as possible. And those inbox notifications are testament to that. But it's also important that we value our employees and we ensure that we celebrate their successes and their innovations and indeed their contributions. So how do we do that? Well, here you can see some of the initiatives we have within EPAM to reward contributions to open source, but also encourage further innovation. So at the top left, and I'll take a little time just explaining each of these, we can see badges. So we use our indexing, where we're able to see a daily record of those contributing to open source projects. And I'll talk about our indexing when we come down to the OSCI index. But it provides us with an opportunity for each month to award contribution for a single commit, all the way up to those people doing hundreds of commits. And these badges fit in with our larger corporate badging system. So through gamification, we're encouraging more engagement in open source because individuals and employees want to receive more badges to have a better reputation at a corporate level. The motivation here is about looking good within the company, but at the same time looking great within the open source community. A second area around what we do as a services vendor, and one that's probably the most weighty, is our executive recognition. Our leadership really are on board with us in recognising the importance of open source. And off the back of this, when we tell them good news, perhaps that one individual has done something in the financial services community, or there's a leader in the Drupal competency. Our executive recognition happens where they jump on board, send them an email and notification award them in some way to say thank you for being on board with us as part of this. And a third one is our EPAM garage. And it's not based about cars, but I'm sure many of you have incubators, innovation spaces, garages, whatever you choose to call them. So through linking up with the EPAM garage, we present a unique opportunity to open source the innovation and the solutions happening in that space. The garage in EPAM is able to rapidly solve problems and iterate these with some of these solutions then entering that release process we just spoke about. It gives us a unique opportunity to see what's going on within the innovation and the innovative areas of the business to then present an opportunity to perhaps start pushing those out to the wider community. Now the OSCI index some of you might be familiar with, but this is an EPAM tool that was rolled out last year and provides a ranking of the top contributors by organization in the open source space driven by GitHub contributions, and you can find that online. But this tool really drives innovation because it encourages our employees and our individuals to contribute to EPAM's ranking through wanting to increase our own ranking through their efforts. And indeed we've seen other individuals and other organizations engaging with us to say, how can we bring this culture to our own organization, particularly in the services space to encourage our employees to really help us show that we're walking the walk and not just talking it. And our final thing around this ranking and contribution is productisation. So as a team we're always keeping our eyes on as the open source team, always keeping our eyes out and our finger on the pulse of what the delivery project client teams are doing within EPAM. And we recognize in the opportunity proactively to support teams of open source and highlight the value in doing so they choose to pursue it. All of these approaches or five I just went through really help us develop, recognize and celebrate open source contribution within the organization. So as we come towards a closing point, to some things that hopefully I've set the scene that amongst some of the very largest service providers there are a few that are prominent contributors to open source. But there are others that have embraced open source and been on a similar journey to us in understanding how to thread it throughout their business. And we'd really love to see more and more of the service providers jumping on board and being identified as real top contributors in these spaces. But if we go back to thinking about open source as a services vendor and consider those three channels that we mentioned at the beginning. It is clear that the primary focus of a services company remains of the delivery client work. That's why we're all doing the job we do. But the through offering that through offering open source solutions created both internally through sourcing open source alternatives through supporting community development and through providing consulting as we mentioned earlier on perhaps open source adoption and growth. These unique avenues that service companies possess when compared to other organizations providers all with a great opportunity to embrace open source with open arts. This notion of building a culture of open source within an organization through some of the methods I've just shared. But indeed some of your own as well and continually pushing your business and your employees to support the community and those industry projects to our avenues available to service vendors who want to join the open source journey. And in the last few minutes, I really wanted to give you two recommendations that we've learned because I think it's always important to have some key takeaways. Well, there's two of them. The first, formalizing open source. So a few years ago, I mentioned we started our journey in 2012, but a few years ago, we had a number of individuals in the organization who were responsible for the open source office or team. And unfortunately they moved on to other exciting things or left to focus on other areas of focus. What happened was things like our knowledge base, that central point in the organization, everything around it kind of disappeared. That lack of control that we possessed over open source is just an idea meant that actually that whole culture left the organization too. So the lesson we learned here is that we absolutely need to formalize open source and that's why we set up that kind of core offering that umbrella across the organization. And I'd encourage you all who perhaps are in a similar situation thinking that open sourcing your organization is an idea at the moment or a culture to formalize that. And the second is inclusion is key. And this is a really recent lesson we learned, but a fantastic one is that we've been recognizing and celebrating all of these employees, perhaps through some of those methods I just mentioned. But actually what we weren't very good at doing is recognizing the people who were under the radar. The people who were doing incredible things in open source, the people who were innovating and pushing out to the community, perhaps even contributing in their own time. But we just weren't visible for them, but they weren't visible for us sorry, we didn't know who they were, we didn't have a channel to find that out. And we're doing more and more at the moment to look at our data sources and the ways in which we find these people, or indeed encourage them to tell us themselves through perhaps making open source far more ingrained in our day to day. So the lesson we learned here was literally reach out to be as inclusive as possible and avoid any rewards or recognition that are perceived as unmotivational. So perhaps those could be, we're awarding one particular data source, but if you happen to be contributing another, then perhaps you're off our radar. So for us that's a real action point moving forward. So it has been an absolute real pleasure to be able to share these insights with you today. And I do hope that you've heard a few useful actions or initiatives to take back to your respective organizations, and in particular those of you too from service vendors. In particular, it will be great to see a few more service companies really picking up that challenge that I've thrown down to join us in the open source world. I want to thank you very much for listening and I do wish you a fantastic remainder of the conference. Thank you.