(lively upbeat music)
- Joseph, It's great to connect today.
I'd love to talk to you about your cloud migration
as part of GE and a little bit about yourself.
- Excellent yeah great to be here today, Merrie,
and thank you so much for having me.
A little bit about myself.
I've been in GE for 10 years.
Right now, my role in GE is I lead the corporate finance
digital technology platform as a service organization,
responsible for all finance platforms
in the GE tier I business units.
A little bit about our project
and why we decided to go into cloud.
Back in 2019, we had a choice to make.
We could either refresh our on-premise
Oracle-engineered systems
or we could move into a public cloud.
Ultimately, we decided that cloud was the best route
for organization and Microsoft Azure
was a huge part of that.
- So, Joseph, I understand your key Oracle workloads
were important to migration.
Tell us how you went through assessing which ones to move
and your decision framework.
How did you decide Azure as your destination of choice?
- Absolutely so over the last two years,
we've moved hundreds of Oracle databases and workloads
into Microsoft Azure.
Our systems really included Oracle finance systems
including Oracle EPM, financial consolidation planning
and analytics tools
as well as Oracle eBusiness suite platforms.
Now the decision process was conducted back in 2019
and it involved a number of POCs
across several public cloud platforms.
In December of that year as we were really getting
toward the final decision,
we had one last meeting with Microsoft.
That particular meeting was amazing.
I mean, the team there from Microsoft
really demonstrated their commitment to customer focus
and seeing that my team would be successful.
Additionally, there was a key metric that was
really announced around that time.
And that was the partnership between Oracle and Microsoft.
That gave me the peace of mind that Oracle products
would be certified and supported in Microsoft Azure.
- Thanks, Joseph, let's talk further.
How did you define success for this migration?
And then how did you overcome technical complexities
associated with moving such mission critical databases?
- Absolutely, yeah, there were really three CTQs
or success factors in our decision, right?
The first, stability.
We needed to ensure that we would have incredible uptime
across all of our platforms,
even during regular maintenance cycles.
Next will be performance.
We're running running on engineered systems
at that time, they were designed to run Oracle software.
We needed to maintain current
or better performance in that comparison.
And then finally cost, we needed to be cost efficient.
We were almost ready to pull a trigger
on making a very large capital investment.
We really needed to make sure that the cost in Azure
was going to be something that was going to be efficient
and get better even over time.
So in terms of the complexity,
there was a number of complexities
that occurred throughout the project.
The first was surprisingly performance.
We worked with the support engineers.
We found that our systems would be best
operating with proximity placement groups.
Co-locating those databases
along with our application servers
and performance shot through the roof.
Our data is no small dataset on-prem.
We had to get large amounts of data into Azure.
Moving terabytes of data was no simple task.
Finally storage and VM sizing.
It was learned throughout the project that the size
of the VMs and the size of the storage mounts
were going to be an impact on performance.
And working with the Microsoft team,
we were able to engineer a solution
that helped us achieve our goals there.
- Thanks, Joseph.
That's great to hear the migration partnership
was so successful.
What further post migration benefits
and value are you deriving from Azure's infrastructure?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So post migration has been fun, right?
Our team was not a cloud team
when we first got into Azure.
We had a bunch of engineers that were on premise.
We had zero cloud experience on the team
and we had to walk before we would run.
Performance was probably the biggest surprise, right?
Upon go live, we would see anywhere
from 30 to 50% performance improvement over on-premise.
And it wasn't an application or two.
It was every single system that we moved into Azure
was seeing that performance boost.
And we're even seeing it after upgrading systems
in Azure over time.
The improved processing of the new CPUs,
the new hardware that Azure releases every year
is just getting better as time goes on.
Other benefits, I mentioned performance and stability.
Automation keeps getting better across our system
as our team gets more familiar
with the different tools in Azure.
And ultimately, we have some very happy customers
that I interact with on our side,
just from the speed that they can close the books
that we can lock our consolidation cycles.
Reporting is improved and much more.
Overall it's been a really good experience.
- Well, I love how you started
by moving to the cloud is fun for our teams.
And then talking about how much performance you get.
I think those two are
definitely linked. - Absolutely.
- So what's next, what's next
on your cloud migration and modernization story?
- Yeah, so I mentioned before
that we didn't have a whole lot
of cloud experience on our team.
We're getting there now.
We've been in the cloud now for two and a half years,
lot of training.
Our partnership with Microsoft doesn't just end in Azure.
We're actually taking advantage of true cloud technologies.
And Kubernetes is really a start of that.
Later this year, we're going to be going live
with a number of GE's finance applications in the cloud,
starting on AKS.
So that's really the next phase.
Getting these web applications spun up
the way that they should be running in the cloud,
either in application service environments or Kubernetes
is really the next phase for us.
- Well, Joseph, I'm really excited to continue
our partnership on what's next in your cloud journey.
I also have to stop and say, before we end,
you have a beautiful picture
of the University of Michigan football stadium
in your background.
So I have to say as an alumni, go blue.
- Go blue, Merrie, thank you so much for having me.
It's been great.
- Thank you.
(upbeat music)
Martin, it's great to have you here.
Thank you for your time.
I'd love to hear more about LTHT,
a little about the organization
and a little bit about yourself.
- Well, thank you very much for having me Merrie.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust
is one of the largest and busiest acute hospitals in the UK.
It has over 20,000 members of staff
and each year, it treats over one and a half million
patients, over 200,000 of which are emergency patients.
And my role as an Associate Director for Digital
is with responsibility for developing
our electronic health records.
- It's a weighty job to be
in such an important part of that business.
And I'd love to click a little bit into the EHR
the electronic health records
and how that system moved to Azure.
- Currently our electronic health record
is set on on-premise infrastructure
which is supporting a large number of other trust systems.
And it clearly doesn't currently have the flexibility
to handle a platform
that is constantly growing and evolving.
So between 2015 and today,
the number of electronic forms completed using our platform
has gone up from about 25,000 per month to over 1.6 million,
which is a level of growth
that just means that the infrastructure
sometimes struggles to keep up.
And this is clearly a risk.
It addresses a number of the requirements
that we have for multiregional disaster recovery.
And it provides a level of maintenance support
and transparency of cost and performance,
which we've not previously had.
So as a result, we've been able to work with Microsoft
and it's Azure platform in order to
undertake quite a substantial transformational project
with no disruption to any
of our day-to-day clinical services.
- Martin, it's so great to hear the progress to date
for this mission critical EHR system.
I'm sure that privacy, security, and compliance
were really key requirements in moving to the cloud.
Can you talk about that a little bit
and how that you work with Azure to help?
- Yes, I mean, NHS organizations take data privacy
and security incredibly seriously,
and that's recognized first and foremost
at a trust board level.
So security was incorporated into our process of migration
from the outset, and we're using the advisor tools
within Azure to identify changes in patching maintenance
and any suggested security changes to ensure that
we are as compliant as we can be.
- Like you, Microsoft takes trust very seriously.
And as you can imagine,
it's core to many customers like you.
Customers also care about how cloud keeps
and helps modernize their application experiences,
especially as they do it in a hybrid model.
Can you share some of your thoughts on modernizing
your applications to Azure, given a hybrid approach?
- Because we develop our own application,
one of our biggest challenge has been flexibility,
and COVID has indicated that to a large extent.
Azure has given us a little bit of that flexibility.
We did try a lift and shift approach
to our infrastructure to try
and get some of that instant resiliency,
but we very much decided partly through doing
and learning that actually we needed to look
at migrating our application in a different way
by amending and changing the technology itself.
We were very much caught
in a bit of a transferring all of our problems
on-premise into the cloud,
which wasn't really going to serve us particularly well
in the longer term.
And cloud has provided that flexibility
that when we combine it with more of a DevOps approach,
it really means that our team has got a greater control
over the technology and the infrastructure
that we choose to use and when it's available.
- Well, I think that leads me to my next question
now that you've unleashed modernization
in this part of your journey,
what's next on your hybrid app
innovation strategy with Azure?
- I'd certainly hope us to be doing some
of the practical things better,
like improving our nonfunctional testing,
optimizing our costs over time,
but also focusing on real clinical benefit
like recognizing that by the use
of the Microsoft Firestore,
and our sharing of data with the health and social care
partners across the region
and there'll be lots of challenges for us as a EHR provider,
extension of our mobile app,
how is digital care going to be
supported in a modern building?
And I think that's going to be really challenging for us.
And we hope that obviously the steps
that we've taken to date
will put us on a really good foundation for that.
- Martin. Thank you so much.
I learned a lot by just listening
to your journey about migration,
but also thinking about it from the perspective
of a healthcare institution
and what's now possible looking ahead at healthcare
and it's just really heartening to look at
how we can all impact people's lives, doing what we do.
So thank you for your time today.
- Thank you very much.
(bright music)
- Hello and welcome Jens.
I'm super excited to have you here today.
I'd love to ask first, can you tell me a little bit
about Volkswagen Financial Services
what you offer to customers, your role there?
- Yeah, sure Merrie.
So Volkswagen Financial Services
is a central finance captive for the whole Volkswagen group.
We have Porsche, we have Audi and several other brands.
So over the last 70 years,
we increased our business fields massively.
I'll start with the core financing.
So we decided in the last year to modernize
our whole IT infrastructure
with platforms, infrastructure, databases, all that stuff
and you can imagine that Microsoft and Azure Stack
takes a huge part of this modernization journey.
- I'd love to learn more.
It's really interesting to hear about you
as a financial piece of an automotive arm.
And then thinking about that during the last two years
of COVID, how has that impacted your business
and have you evolved your application portfolio to adapt?
- Yeah, so a continuous 24/7 demand service
was not new for us,
but you can imagine that, especially in the pandemic,
the digitalization was a big booster for us.
During this period, I think scalability and availability
were very, very important during this time.
The goal was during this pandemic
especially for our business department
that they don't relinquish any kind of business features.
What was our approach?
Our approach was not a typical lift and shift
put it from one data center to the other one.
We refactor and modernize our applications.
We have applications which run on Windows server 2008
and our approach was to put it on Azure Stack
and the PaaS services.
So that was a very huge and modernizing
of our whole 120 applications during this period.
We are not in this office, like I'm sitting now,
because of the pandemic.
So collaboration and communication was also hard to handle.
And we decided to use also Microsoft Teams
as a central communication and collaboration platform.
Also with the subsidiaries like France, Mexico, or the UK.
- That's great to hear and such great flexibility
through our technologies during this challenging pandemic.
I'd love to hear a little bit more
about Volkswagen's financial hybrid cloud approach.
As you know, Microsoft has embraced hybrid cloud
as the reality of our customers.
Would you share how you went on developing that strategy?
- I'll start many years ago, our CEO Mario Daberkow
decided to have a multi-cloud
and hybrid cloud strategy in place.
We are a regulatory driven company.
We are supervised by the European Central Bank
and talking about diamond and pearls.
What I mean with diamond and pearls, our data.
Our data we have to put it in our safe
and our approach was the safes in our own data center.
That's why we decided to put it
on the Azure Stack environment.
Furthermore, we have the first services
like credit card push notification
services in the cloud.
So we have about 10 services also in the public cloud.
But in the meantime, our part of management
decided to put more data in the cloud
because of encryption trends too and all these topics.
So I'm very looking forward in the future
that we also have more power in the public cloud
and benefit from the Azure hybrid environment.
- It's really interesting to hear
about your hybrid scenarios from a regulated industry.
We hear a lot about that from customers.
Would you also tell me a little bit
about the benefits of modernizing your applications
when you work with Azure
and then you layer that in taking a hybrid approach.
I'd love to learn more there.
- Yeah. Benefits.
I promised myself, don't talk about costs in this point,
but to sum it up.
From my point of view, we have two areas
to talk about the benefits.
One is the technical area,
and the other one is a functioning area.
So talking first about the technical area
I think I have three pillars.
The first thing is Microsoft Defender
or Microsoft Security Center.
Because cyber crime, security, Lock 4G,
all these relevant topics at the moment are very crucial.
Second one is maintenance.
We want to have the newest firmware updates, the patches,
the hardening, all this stuff without any downtime.
So for me, maintenance the a second
very big part from the technical benefits.
And the third one and the least one
is onboarding or provisioning new applications.
Because we want more applications,
we have 49 countries in our company.
So there are still a few hundred applications left,
which can come on our platform.
So it have to be fast and not only taking few weeks
to onboard new applications.
So that are the technical side.
If you ask my customers, who are my customers?
My customers the business department, of course,
and the application management services.
I they will put four things in a quadrant.
The first one is rapid deployment.
We can fast deploy new technologies, new features,
for the business department.
And the new thing, slotting.
So we can put applications
into production without any downtime.
That will be the first one.
The second one, scaling on demand.
If we have a dealer weekend
or a huge month in process,
every company knows this point of view.
We can increase the scalability in minutes
and before it takes almost a week.
The third thing is the public features.
We have push notification services.
We have other huge services, we can modify it
by our own and then we can use it.
And the last one and for me
the huge and biggest one is definitely Application Insights.
With this monitoring tool, logging diagnostic performance,
it's huge, it's massive.
- It sounds like you're well on your journey
and you have your IT department and your business customers
both on that journey with you.
So the next question is what's next
on your hybrid app innovation strategy with Azure?
- First one is we want to increase the capacity
of the transaction between public and Azure Stack hub.
So we want to use more hybrid benefits
and put a network interface in place to use it more.
And the other two big topics are definitely
Azure Arc to have an overview
about our on-premise environment
and all these stuff and Azure Hyperconverged Infrastructure
because we want to take a look
what could be infrastructure as a service platform,
what could be a platform SQL databases,
so that will be definitely the next steps for us.
- Excellent, thank you for your time today, Jens
and learning about Volkswagen Financial Services
hybrid application modernization, what's next,
it's been great to learn this.
Thank you for your time today.
- One more thing, I know this quote is not from Bill Gates,
but I want to use this opportunity to thank the whole team
at the Volkswagen Financial Services.
During this whole project, they all did a tremendous job.
I'm very proud to be part of this team.
They are hundreds of people.
They are eight countries.
And as I always said in my own company, Azure rocks.
(bright music)