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>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts,
it's theCUBE, covering your Red Hat Summit 2019.
Brought to you by Red Hat.
>> And welcome back to Boston,
we continue our coverage here in theCUBE
of the Red Hat Summit and welcoming now to theCUBE stage
for the first time, I believe, David Gledhill.
Who is the group chief information officer
and head of group technology and operations at DBS Bank.
David, good morning to you.
>> Morning, hi, it's great to be here.
>> All the way from Singapore, and he was early
for the segment this morning.
So you get extra points for that, congratulations.
>> Put that up to jet lag.
(men laughing)
>> Thanks for being with us.
David, anymore we talk about companies in general,
everybody says everybody's a tech company now, right?
Not the way it used to be.
How is that playing out in your world in financial services
as far as how deeply ingrained you have
to be with the technology?
>> Yeah, so very much, we are.
Tech transformation started about 10 years ago.
Been CIO of the company about 10 years.
And frankly, the first five years
were just fixing the basics.
So getting in place what we'd call world-class systems.
Doing a bunch of stuff on resilience
and security and all of that kind of stuff.
And the other thing, and this is the dramatic change,
you know 10 years ago when I joined the company,
we were 85% outsourced to managed service vendors.
So I had technology people that basically
were signing contractors and managing service agreements.
We didn't have technology DNA.
Over those five years and a full 10 years actually.
We've been doing a lot about just insourcing and rebuilding
our technical muscle if you like.
So now we're, we've gone from 85% outsourced
to 90% insourced.
So we run, build and manage our own.
We're now a technology company.
>> And five years ago, we had a real big shift
and we were closest to what was going on in China
and so probably saw this before many,
many of the other banks saw this around the world.
Of what Alibaba was doing with Ant Financial
and Tencent and this whole, just complete disruption
of how customers interact with the banking industry.
So we got an early lead on this digital transformation
and really for the last five, six years
have been doubling down on building a pure digital offering
and we see ourselves as a technology company
providing banking services, not as a bank
with some technology department in the backend.
>> Yeah, I'd love if you can, a little bit,
to help us dig into that because, I think back it was okay,
what does digitization mean 10 years ago,
it was like oh, okay, I need to make sure
I have a good website and maybe a good mobile app.
Which is a fine starting piece, and also the piece
you talked about is when it was outsourced,
I'm managing pieces but I sign up for what I need today
and when the business needs something,
those outsources aren't necessarily tied to them,
so you're playing telephone with them.
Most the companies I've talked to
that have brought skills back inside,
it's because the needs of the business are constantly asking
for more and it can't be well,
it's not part of our contract with what we have.
We'll get to that in a year or two.
>> Yeah, yeah, so that's a very interesting shift.
It plays out in a number of different dimensions.
First of all, let me go into that question of business
and tech and that separation.
When we were managed service,
it was literally writing contracts
and the specs and handing to vendors.
It was just a horrible process.
And how can you be a modern technology firm like that?
So insourcing, for us, was one big thing
to owe those people, but when you insource, then you end up
with a business unit and a technology unit.
And you still have got silos, so how do you break that?
Because that really is a problem.
If you look at the way technology companies work,
they don't work like that.
Five years ago when we said, okay, how do you make that flip
to being the digital company?
We went very deep into
how some of the great technology companies operate.
We wanted to understand, what is it?
How does that DNA work?
How does that culture work?
How do they organize themselves?
How do they build technology?
How do they become agile, speed to market?
And so we looked at, we studied Google, Amazon, Netflix
Apple, LinkedIn, Facebook
and we call them the Gandalf companies.
And we said, how can we be more like them?
Well, a Gandalf is missing a D.
And fortunately at DBS, we happen to have a D.
(laughing)
So our goal became how do we become the D in Gandalf?
And that was just like a lightening rod
through the organization because all of the sudden
it said to our people, forget about biz and tech and things.
You need to think about how these
technology comp operates and be more like them.
Which means there's no separation, there are no silos
we are together building great technical products
for our customers so we need to re-think the organization
to make sure that happens.
>> There's magic.
(laughing)
You've got a saying, making banking joyful.
>> Yep.
>> All right, which is not exactly the emotion
that I associate with having to deal with my bank.
It's fine, but joyful?
A very unusual adjective there.
What's that all about?
And again, at the end of the day,
how does technology enhance that?
How does that compliment that and really boosted that?
>> Yeah, so it was quite a radical moment for us.
That came up, we were at a leadership meeting
and talking about what is our purpose and how do we.
Lots of people talk about customer journey, thinking
and stuff like that but how do you bring that
to life and one of the execs there said,
well what about making banking joyful?
And the rest of us just looked at him
like he was from a different planet.
Saying, are you kidding, what do you mean by that?
But as we thought about it more, it has a great meaning
and a great purpose to it, that we're not there
just to do transactions but we're there to enrich lives,
create new businesses, to make customers feel great in their
financial stability, in the way they deal with us.
And it applies on so many levels.
So if you're a bank teller, you understand
how to make banking joyful by just that,
going the extra mile, in terms of service.
If you're in infrastructure, and you're dealing with
data centers and servers,
you understand that making banking joyful,
you must be there all the time.
You must have sub-second responses, you must feel great
in the customers hands, so it's something that you can apply
to all aspects of banking and everybody plays a part
in making banking joyful for our customers.
>> All right, so David, bring us inside a little bit
your organization, you said transforming
to a technology company.
What's that mean, what technology are you using?
We're here at the Red Hat Show.
Open-source, not the first thing that people
think about when they they think about banking.
So how does that fit into the culture that you're building?
>> Yeah, yeah, okay, so, this Gandalf thing
that I talked about, that's great as a logo
and a mindset shift, but it doesn't get you very far.
And so what we came up with
is five key elements that have to change.
And we had to work on to become
more like a technology company.
And one was a shift from projects to running technology
like a series of platforms.
That enables you to do agile at scale, but for that you need
to organize very differently, which is the third thing.
And then the fourth thing is that you need to build
for modern systems.
The legacy way of building technology
just wasn't going to get us to where we needed to be
as a technology company.
And then the last bit is alternate everything.
So, if you want speed to market and agility,
you have to alternate.
That modern technology stat, it was very obvious to us
that the legacy, corporate technologies that we used
to build systems, were just not going to win it for us.
And so that's our move to open-source.
Red Hat was a fabulous partner in that
and we used Red Hat extensively
throughout our entire infrastructure.
And so we went through this rapid modernization
of moving to open-source, moving to open-source database
we used Merare DD quite extensively, but also,
picking up pieces of the open-source
from the Gandalf companies.
We've seen the way they use open-source to scale.
Plus also, to provide just amazing services.
So for example, Netflix.
We run a bunch of banking platforms on Netflix,
believe it or not.
It's kind of cool, banking on Netflix
is a kinda crazy concept, but we brought that do life.
What is is that Netflix we loved?
We loved their engineering discipline
around chaos engineering and the use of chaos
to really build resilient platforms.
So in our whole test and deployment framework,
we have a lot of Netflix chaos elements built into that
to make sure that when we actually are testing,
we're testing for chaos and random failures
which we inject into those platforms.
We don't do it in production like Netflix do quite yet.
This whole concept of site reliability
and chaos and excellence of service is again something
we learned from the Gandalf companies.
So Gandalf was not just a, oh yeah,
let's pester in the heart of the business article.
It was really, let's use their engineering disciplines
and design principles to build our own systems.
Our network, Facebook, which is, you think of it
as a network company.
We think of network and the infrastructure layer.
And our infrastructure
and our networking is designed on a bunch of concepts
that Facebook have about how they build their network
within their data centers.
>> Can you help connect the dots, you talk about
a phenomenal technologies, chaos engineering,
networking like these global companies.
How does that lead to the outcome that you talked about?
You know, joy to your end users?
>> So if you want to make banking joyful,
you have to be super-reliable.
You have to be on the edge
of the innovation curve all the time.
Which means you need to be test and learn,
which means you'll be very agile.
You need to be able to scale very well and
the open-source technologies enable us to scale superbly.
You need to be able to to perform as well, superbly well.
When I joined the company, our measure of
how well our applications were performing is
are they up or down?
And then we advanced that to,
well, are they up and maybe 80% of the time
they responded within four seconds.
Those are terrible measures because they're not joyful.
That means 20% of the time we're awful.
That doesn't bring joy to a customer.
So what brings joy is we've now scrapped all those things
and we're starting to look at performance,
for example at the 99th percentile, so anything below that
is just noise and the signal is
what is our worst performing 99%,
because if you wanna be joyful every single time
that a customer opens your application
you wanna be there and respond well, et cetera, et cetera.
Same thing goes for customer science.
Where do you get customer drop offs
and how do you fix problems?
So customer science and the engineering disciplines
around observing and instrumenting a platform all the time
become very , very important.
So it goes very, very deep.
You know it's a simple concept.
But totally changes the way we engineer.
>> Your line of work, or your industry obviously is very
security oriented, right? >> Yeah.
>> I think of healthcare being another
with health information what have you.
But certainly financial services,
so in the open-source community, how do you address this,
I would say it's not a clash by any means,
but it's a concern, I would think, still that
you have to be micro-observant of security practices
and yet this is an open-community and exchange of ideas
and could be an exchange
of vulnerabilities or problems, too.
>> So, sure, and we absolutely do.
There are certain things that we, certain places
that we won't go, or we will go but only
for experimentation reasons because of that question.
But you know arguably, we think that open-source company
can more secure over time than non-open source,
because you're also getting
a bunch of people fixing it the whole time.
And we've seen some of the issues
with some of the open-source and the heart bleed
and those other bits and pieces.
But they were shut down pretty quickly
and found pretty quickly.
So we move with caution, we're very cognoscente.
We move with our eyes open and it's really
the zero day vulnerabilities that we are exposed to.
But equally, if you're in a proprietary state.
The whole thing that came up with the X86 platform
in terms of the vulnerabilities there that apply
open-source or not.
So yeah, security issues exist everywhere.
>> Right, all right, so, David, bring us in.
You talked about some of the open-sourced technologies.
Where does Red Hat fit into this?
What's it like, how have they advanced that journey
that DBS has been on?
>> So for the heavy lifting,
for the big applications that we want to run,
and the majority of our workload going
with open-source is fine, but you want to
have open-source that also you think isn't going to break
or have big security vulnerabilities to your question.
And that's really where a partner like Red Hat comes in
because it gives us access to all the wonderful benefits
of open-source with a trusted partner that's putting
industrial strength quality releases out
that we can really rely on and bank on.
So, in awhile we used open-source, at the periphery
and true open-source that we just plug it off the internet.
The really very, very high demanding workloads
and very secure workloads we will always work
with a partner that can wrap that into
an enterprise-quality offering for us.
So Red Hat has gone from zero to running way over
50%, 60% of our workload.
And we'll continue to put it even more on that
because it's a platform we can trust.
>> That's great, so, when you look at your journey overall,
how far are you along that journey?
Anything when you look out, what are some of the things
that are exciting you looking forward?
>> So while we believe we're ahead of most banks.
There are some that are in the mix,
Goldmans are pretty far advance, Duetsche,
a couple of the others, Capital One, a few.
But it's a sort of rare breed.
We're about 80%, 90% done on our transformation journey
to get stuff to what we'd call cloud ready or optimized.
But we think we're just scratching the surface
because if you think about plugging ourselves
into customers lives, making banking joyful,
our external brand promise for that is live more, bank less.
And nobody wakes up in the morning and says,
oh, I can't wait to go to my local bank branch
and go and do some banking.
>> (laughing) I heard Steve talking about it yesterday.
>> Actually there is one place.
My wife loves going there
because we do some great free cookies at DBS.
>> John: Oh, excellent.
>> But other that my wife,
the rest of the planet doesn't really do that.
>> John: Fair enough.
>> If you want to live more, bank less, it's how do we
get the toil of banking away from customers yet embed
ourselves in their journeys.
And for that we believe that this whole play
on ecosystems is very important.
So being a creator of an ecosystem or participating
so that we take the banking toil out,
and yet we inject ourselves,
be that leisure or travel or insurance or whatever.
And you don't see the bank, the bank is invisible.
Then you're live more, bank less.
To do that, you need great ecosystems.
And we think three things help us to plug into ecosystems.
Number one is you have to be able to scale very easily.
And all the work we've done on the Gandalf stack means
that were no longer afraid of scale, just bring it on.
The second thing you need a lot of connectivity,
and DBS two years ago,
we launched the world's largest banking API platform.
We went live with 150 different APIs
and 60 live partners at the time.
That's now grown to over 350 APIs
and 100s of corporates and SME partners
that wanna partner with us to pug us into their offering.
So the more we do that, the more we disappear
and let people live more, bank less.
>> Well, next time, if you wanna bring some cookies
with you, by all means, okay. (David laughs)
We're always up for that, David,
thanks for the time. >> Sure.
>> We appreciate that and good luck on the mission
and the journey there at DBS.
>> Sure, thanks very much and great to be here, thank you.
>> David Gledhill joining us this morning here,
as we continue our coverage of the Red Hat Summit.
We're in Boston.
You're watching theCUBE.
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