Alessandro Musumeci - Moving to the Cloud to Improve Customer Experience: Lessons Learnt

Right now, I just wanna go directly to the next best practice broad project. Let me introduce Alexei Mui. He's the CIO of the fed de Los data in Italy. So the Italian stays railway. Great to have you hear the title of his presentation, moving to the cloud to improve customer experience lessons learned here. Thank You. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Martin. Good afternoon, ladies gentlemen, my name is Alexei mochi. I am the chief information of Italian railway group.

I would like to thank the European association organizer for this opportunity to present the experience of the real experience of Italian res to move from an inhouse system to cloud services. This experience was made starting from 2010 and it was one of the best, the most important European experiences. It's important to underline fast. All that information technology in Italy started in Italians was in 1927, started the first use of electronic mechanical of course machine, not a computer, of course not an electronic computer.

The first use in Italy, we adopted an IBM electronic mechanical machine for where I using and accountability. After that first, this step we made other important steps. For example, using electronic computer, the first electronic computers in Italy to automatize, for example, the cards for the payroll, the sellers, the salad is the full consumption kilometers travel, et cetera. And of course we made other important steps in our environment.

For example, using the first electronic IBM computer for accountability in 17 and adopted the Siemens German computers for a reservation for 1970 2000, using other computers, unity computers, for example, for centralized or network, that is a very, very important problem in Italian west and adopting a European for telecommunication in 1985. Now Italian rail is one of the most important rails group in Europe. We have two important challenges in our job.

The first is competition because of course we are in competition against other railways companies in Italy, in competition against fly lines in competition, in a European framework. And of course we are looking and working with other companies. We have a partnership in France, in Sweden, in Switzerland, in Germany with different companies. And we are involved in an important international jobs to refurb to realize new railway lines in all the world. Until now we have a company with 70,000 people with a very, very big railway lines in Italy. Okay.

In, in 2010, we started the realization of the new information system moving from an, an old company and in our company partially owned by Italian rails called TF. This company was an inhouse company related in 19, that was old concept company. We decided to use the public bid. We started a pub, an European public bid for one, one time, 1 billion Euro for a seven years contract to move from. They now all the information system to a new cloud information system.

This public bid was won by an Alliance of Italian companies, telecom, Melia, Al MAVA engineering and analo, and Saudi CS is one of the company of MEIA group. And they started in 2011. The job for cloud realization for rails. It's important. Toline the most important things from old to the new contract because we changed completely the perspective in the old contract. We bought service owned by res.

We bought in different several years, of course, more than 2000 service in the new contract, we are able to buy only service level management, only cloud services with specific service level agreements. And we are able only to buy, to, to buy services. In the old contract, we bought manpower in the new contract. We are able only to buy function points, capability for projects. In the old contract, we were able to have a geographical distribution or resources in the new system. We have centralized virtualized and optimized system, of course, with a big optimization or resources.

In the old contract, we work with adaptation specific system for Italian res in the new contract. We ask the market for standard system RP system. In the old contract, we have different contracts for each separate company of Italian airways group. The new contract is a framework or contract in which there is a catalog of services and any company is able to select the services that they want. And of course, we move from in-house company to a cloud camp, the system manage it by independent suppliers. This is the framework that depicted the movement from, sorry. Okay.

Now start, start. I think that start.

Okay, starting, sorry. And this is the movement from the old system. The starting is okay. Service. Okay. With virtualization system, of course, all the piece of the whole service was moved appliance application by application. And of course we moved all the databases to a centralized database machines.

Of course, the suppliers manage all this complexity, moving from the, all the system to two different data centers, one main data center and another become data center, moving all the pieces of the old system. They use it a specific technology called the center shrink to zip, to shrink all the system and to reduce the space, the consumption and the complexity. This is the progress report that we maintain for one year.

We started the immigration of the old applications in October, 2011, and we finished it after one year, we move about 300 application, of course, testing every application, not only every application as a single application, but of course the connection between different application between the reservation system networks in system infrastructure system, accountability system. And so on. This is the framework in which there is a novel view of the virtualization system. As you see, we move from big number of physical server to a beginning number of virtualized service.

We reduce the standard system from 2000 service to about 200 service. And this is the result in physical space. It was the old system and the new system. There are now few numbers of the Italian railway information system. Now with the cloud virtualization, we have about more than 4,000 manager dust. We move more than 300 applications.

Of course, we review all the application and we use this opportunity to turn off some old application and to move and consolidate to new applications. And of course we are working with more than three petabytes of the, of the many storage and important things was the business continuity system.

We have specific architecture that tasked to suppliers to assure business continuity 24 hours, seven days a week in, there are some framework, some system in our personal computers that manage in every moment in real time, all the application, we use a specific product of computer associates that has some piece in every application to check the availability, the performances, the state of the applications in every moment in the life. And at the hand, an important part of the job to move to cloud computing was the disaster recovery.

We decided to have two different point of execution for cloud computing, one in the center of Rome. And one about 50 kilometers far, that is the data center for disaster recovery.

Of course, we have a specific connection for disaster recovery. The two data centers are connected with 40 gigabytes for second high speed lines. And we have the specific window of five minutes to have the replication of the data and the, all the application ready for backup. And at the end, this moving from, from now system to cloud computing was an opportunity to manage more business request.

We review, we get the chance to review all client needs to review the sustainability of the system, consider that the new system, the new information system and the consumption is less than 70% of the old system and improving security and operational efficiency of the system. It was of course important. The organizational change inside Italian railway, because moving from an house system to cloud computer system request a completed different organizational structure. For example, we, we have more ops expense and of course we, now we have less investments in CapEx.

Then we review completely our accountability framework and we review completely the governance model. Now my employees are able to make more governance of the new contract. And of course the request for analysis for programming is very less to conclude. Okay. Lesson learned is the key in my experience of the very successfully move from inhouse owned by the client's system to cloud computing system is in few things.

The first is very important to review in a very critical way, the existing information system, making analysis and looking in the future perspective in a 10 years perspective, it's very important to review the contractual side and to understand what happened when the contract will finish. It's very important to set up some close for ending on the contract and the specific close to request to suppliers.

It's very important to get this chance, not only for technological things, but for business things, because my chief officer don't understand about disaster recovery, about virtualization, about server consolidation. This is not important for him. It's important for me, but not for him for him. Important business result are important.

The result of Italian re was in the market then is say to get the chance to move from one side to another, to use, to get some business goals, not only technical goals, virtualization open source legacy, refurbishment, mobile, but to look for business result, offering business result to the business side, it's very important. The financial availability of the suppliers is very important. The financial plan, because the cloud computing means big investments by the suppliers means big capability to reduce cost and to optimize system.

It's important to review the organizational structure, our organizational structure to make more governance to are able to don't make, but to check, to control, to test, to make some organizational things and had end. It's very important to set up a system, to check all the service level monitoring, according to key performance indicator of the company. This is very, very important point because it's necessary to measure in every moment, the availability of the system, the capability of suppliers to get the right system and the right service that you want.

This is my presentation, my experience, I would like to present the Italian train in motion, but it is not possible. Then I would like only to thank you using an Italian train. This is the new Italian train that we will use next year is fresh, is a train that run more than 360 kilometers for one hour. I hope that this train will connect the room with as soon as possible. Thank you.