(upbeat music)
>> Amdocs is a leader in providing software and services
to some key industries like telecommunications,
media and financial services.
In our next session,
we welcome Cedric Gegout,
who's the Head of Technical Products at Amdocs
and we'll learn about Amdocs modernization journey
and how it added value for their end customers.
Cedric, welcome.
>> Welcome, how are you?
>> Good, thank you.
So describe your modern application, your portfolio
and what you're delivering for customers.
>> So Amdocs is a business versus players.
So we are providing a full digital suite for our customers.
Our customers are communication service providers,
which have to deploy
a full digital suite customer experience.
we're for the full O BSS tax.
So actually Amdocs is one of the leader
in this kind of of digital transformations.
>> Yeah, so of course you talk about OSS and BSA.
I mean, you're talking
about some really hardened stacks, right?
The telco industry say what you want about it, but boy
the phone works when you dial it.
So you got sort of a decades old, you know
platform that you guys have been evolving over the years.
Describe this modernization journey
and the role that Couch base played, you know
what value does this offer, this modernization offer
to your organization and Couch base fit?
>> Yeah, exactly sense for that.
So basically what is all solution is, you know
it's a portfolio of a large number
of components which have to deal with
from the experience of the user and from
and then dealing all the activation of the services
in the network in order to deliver a solution
pure service like mobile services
or communication services to, to the end users.
So we have a full suite, which was previously based on
you know, on technologies, based
on Oracle with what and things like that.
And what we did is that we do a modernization
of this something like six years ago
a bit more than six years ago
we start to modernization and thought transformation
of our product into a cloud native solution.
So, and when we did that, we start with Couch base
as a partner to provide the cloud native database.
So we are actually delivering, we have an R and D of more
than 8,000 people developing this product.
It's a product which is used by more than 300 customers.
So it's real product that needs to
be very flexible, that needs to address many kind
of use cases from, or telco or customers, which are CSPs
usually Ts the O one telco.
So we, what we wanted to build is a full cloud native
solution that can work on any cloud
then can scale very easily
and can address multiple use cases, okay.
And that's why coach base, when we selected coach base,
it matched a lot of requirements and features we had.
And when we decided to modernize our product,
we decided to work with Couch base.
>> Yeah, so you had a lot of experience
in legacy with Oracle and web logic.
I'm curious, just a little follow up.
Why didn't you stay with Oracle?
You mentioned got to run on any cloud.
You got to be flexible, but could you
double click on what Couch base delivered
from a requirement standpoint that was such a good fit?
>> Well, is a good fit with technology such as Couch base,
is first, it's a no skill database, right?
So it's in term of performance
for some of the use case that we have.
It's very important to have, you know
technology which are out
and optimized for a more secure use cases.
So the first thing, the second thing, as I mentioned
the scalability, the fact that you can almost infinitely
you can increase the size of your cluster.
You can have more servers
and this will scale, you know, very rapidly.
And also what were very interesting to have
from Couch base is the ability to have something
which can be replicated across multiple sites.
So with the X DCL technology from Couch base
which enabled to build, you know
very modern architecture with deployment
on multiple agents to have disaster recovery,
active sites, you know, things like that
which are very becoming
like the main requirement for our customers now.
>> Okay, so I'm presuming there were parts
of your application portfolio that you
weren't going to touch and throw away
but you had to collect or connect the new with the old
that's always, you know a challenge.
I'm wondering what advice you'd give to an organization
that's kind of investing in a similar path
trying to deliver the best digital experiences to customers.
You know, what would you say are the modernization
you got to have, must haves, whether it's architecture,
you know internal culture, what are some of those items?
>> So the ideas you're right.
I think the integration with the legacy systems is actually,
you know a very important topic in all domain,
in the telco domain.
But we, we made a very, I would say drastic choice
or brave choice choice when in six years from now
when we decided to reformat to re-platform
completely our portfolio.
Okay, So we change more than 95% of our portfolio.
And 95% of our portfolio today are cloud native
which means that they can be deployed
on any cloud that actually they are fully scalable.
And still, we did this transformation.
Now when we do the digital transformation of the
of our telco of the customer system
then we need to integrate with legacy systems
and we need to help our customers to migrate
from their legacy systems to cloud native solutions.
And doing so it's important to have in the database domain,
it's very important to have a solution,
which is very flexible
in term of what kind of data I can manage.
And I can, as I said scale easily, for sure
but also it's secure
because when you are moving the data from a legacy system
Oracle base or whatever to another type of
data base you want to be sure that you are
you can do it securely and you are not compromising
in any sense in term of security, scalability, et cetera.
Right? So in this case, I mean,
I will say, and in this approach, in this point journey
Couch base was very important component in our strategy,
for all the reasons I mentioned, right?
It's very cloud native, it's scalable, it's secure,
it's another product telco grade.
So that's why it's really the key aspect here.
>> You know, this notion that 90, you really replatformed
90% of your portfolio and made a cloud native,
that's a brave move because a lot of companies do
that I've talked to they'll build an abstraction layer
and microservices and make that piece Cloud native
and then have that kind of overlay.
You decided not to do that.
Why is that?
Was that for performance reasons,
you were worried about you just
bringing along technical debt.
I mean, that really must have been an interesting
discussion internally in your company.
>> Yeah, it's true.
I mean, the main motivation,
the main driver was business flexibility because now
we live in a world where our customers
what they need is to be able to test a new feature quickly.
They need to be able to scale the system
in a matter of hours, okay?
So we are not in a domain anymore where
when you have to upgrade something,
you need to take a few days,
it needs to be done very quickly.
And the only way to achieve those requirements,
these business requirements is to be cloud native
it's to build microservices and to really rely 100%
of microservices architectures,
because this is the only way
you will have the business flexibility.
You will be able to have a resilient architecture.
You know, you can deploy this
with full high availability across multiple zones
and multiple regions and things like that.
So any modern architecture today that is competing with us,
actually will be microservices based architecture.
There is no other way to achieve the,
to meet the requirement of the market today.
And especially when 5G is coming,
things will become much more complex
will become much more distributed.
You cannot work anymore with the MongoDB architecture.
And again, I think the database is no way different,
needs to follow the same kind of architecture
needs to follow the same principles.
So that's why, I mean, another point about right?
>> Yeah, so if I had to summarize,
it sounds like your top three requirements
would be flexibility which you're getting from
the cloud native and microservices piece.
The scale and the security is that right?
Did I get that right?
The three top requirements?
>> That's right.
And the resilience as well.
I mean, the fact that now, you know
with microservices architecture,
if one of the system is done
he knows how to sell to, to restart it himself right.
Itself. Sorry.
So,that's this kind of architecture that we build.
It's an architecture, which can be resilient
in a sense that it can sense itself
and it can ensure full availability.
And if something is going down or
is not working properly,
then all sort kind of mechanisms will happen in order to
to go back to a stable state.
>> Yeah, so you've got that automation in there,
so it doesn't require the labor that it might have
you know, 10 years ago.
So you're obviously embracing cloud native, microservices.
So you're on that journey.
I'm curious, what are you doing with that?
You're freeing up, you guys used to
you bring in lab coats and dig in
and to figure out what's wrong or restart the system.
Where are you in your journey?
And how are you sort of re-allocating those resources
and where do you see that going?
>> Yeah. Okay.
So that's a very good point because actually
when we build this new system, which is enabled to,
you know, to self heal, heal himself, right.
Actually the question was more
about how we can improve the system even more
how we can be sure that, you know,
any issues that we are facing will not happen again,
will not occur again.
Okay, and this is a SRE principle, okay,
practice that we have now
people are walking on automation,
they're building automation around
all of this recovery procedures, all about fixing.
So they're not actually digging into this
the application now anymore into the system.
They learn how the system is working
and building all the right automation,
the task to ensure that the system
is constituently resilient, right?
So that's the practices, all organization is now
built around, you know, this kind of, this approach,
DevOps, pure DevOps being fully agile
obviously having an SRE organization
or SRE oriented organization.
And that's the only way, you know
you can reach very high,
higher SLA in terms of availability.
>> So the big problem that your
traditional telco customers have is that the amount
of data that there's servicing going through the roof
and the cost per bit is sinking like that.
And you have all the over the top providers coming in,
creating these customer experiences with modern applications
and they've owned the customer data.
You mentioned 5G,
so I'm interested what the future of modern apps
looks like for Amdocs and your customers
because 5G gives your traditional telco customers
the ability if they can have these flexible systems
that you're providing to now have
better relationships with customers
and actually kind of reclaim, you know, some of that
value that they've lost to a lot of competitors.
Your thoughts on the future.
>> So first, you know, technically speaking,
we will have two challenges.
One is about data.
Another one is about distribution of the workload.
Okay, because when we are speaking about 5G,
we're speaking about the age,
we are speaking about the fact that an application
may be allocated very closely to the network
because it needs to be, to achieve, you know, to
to deliver very short latency
and this application can move, okay?
So you will have to be able to
distribute completely your solutions, okay.
And that's why we're working closely with
the cloud providers at AWS as Azure or Google.
And because we need to be sure that the applications
or the systems that we're building will be able to
distribute the application as closest as possible
to the end users.
So that's one of the key challenges,
which means that the application
needs to be very profitable,
needs to be very scalable.
And then it needs to be able to move very quickly
from one place to another.
That's really what is happening now
and what will become the norm with 5G.
The other challenge is behind the communication
of all these components is really the data
because now we will capture more
and more data coming from the different systems.
And I'm not speaking only about the customer data
who they are, what they are, what they
they like and what they want to do, et cetera.
I'm speaking also about the monitoring data of the systems.
Okay, so we will generate a lot of information
and this information needs to be traded very quickly
needs to be stored in very large data lake.
And we will need to have extraction
and manipulation of the data very quickly
to give the right informations to the applications.
In this case, okay, it's very important to have application,
to have databases that can, as I said, scale very quickly
but also we'll be able to have very high density node,
you know, sense that will increase certain amount of memory
or sentimental storage, you can store a lot of data.
And this is where we are always, you know,
checking what is the best technologies and so far, you know
Couch base is the technologies that we're using
for stocking, storing all the those data.
Because it's the ratio in term of performance
and the number of data you can store is very high.
Okay, so that's another challenge that we are addressing.
Of course Couch base is not the only solution,
but it's another one.
>> Excellent,okay, we're going to leave it there Cedric.
Thanks so much, a great story
and really appreciate your insights.
>> You're welcome, Dave.
Thank you very much.
>> Okay. That's it for today.
I hope you've enjoyed
the Application Modernization summit
made possible by Couch base.
We shared some fresh survey data
and got the perspectives of three expert analysts.
We got an outstanding roadmap from Ravi Mayuram
who is the CTO of Couch base.
And of course, we got the customer angle from Cedric.
So look, maybe you're an organization
going through a modernization initiative.
And if you're thinking about what the future
of applications looks like,
check out Couch base on the road this summer
the Application Modernization Summit,
it's hitting the road traversing North America and Europe,
find out where there'll be,
near you by visiting couch base.com/road show.
Ravi is going to be there along with other thought leaders
and peers who will be sharing learnings and best practices
on how to modernize now and for the future.
And you'll get a chance to interact
with some of those peers,
something that everyone I know is looking forward to.
This is Dave Volante.
Thanks for joining us today.
And thanks for watching theCube.