The bread and butter revolution
According Alexis Superí, Santander Architecture Manager Technology in Santander Argentina, the way to a digital transformation It successfully imposed, first, the hiring of 900 developers.
“Until a year and a half ago, the bank outsourced 90% of its technological endowment. We depended on suppliers for any solution we wanted to implement. With the arrival of Diego Salama – Director of Technology and Operations – we suggested that if we wanted to take ownership of the products, improve them and streamline them, we had to put together our own development team ”explained the computer engineer in the past Red Hat Openshift Commons Gathering on September 21, making the preview of the Forum that, for the first time, was completely virtual.
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The Red Hat Forum Latin America was attended by representatives of important companies.
It happens that the paradigm of permanent change and crisis management may be known in certain settings. But banking is, by history, used to the solidity, which it needed until recently to sell certainty to its customers. With the birth of Fintech, and DeFi -which operate with cryptocurrencies on Blockchain- the enormous and bureaucratic banking structures are seen in the urgency of becoming greyhounds, such as the comparison that Salama used in his participation in the “Cultural Transformation Panel and Modernization ”To describe the challenging digital transformation scenario that Santander has been facing for a year and a half.
In a nutshell, What is basic for a digital native company, such as being scalable, flexible, adaptable to changes and quick to reflect, for a bank can be an exercise in tightrope walking.
However, with his feet on the ground, for Superí, the best way to explain this technological and cultural revolution in Santander is by arguing that the enormous change that they promote, despite seeming pretentious, is laying the foundations for the future. . That is why “it is the bread and butter of our organization. That which we have to know how to do very well, in which we have to be very mature, to be able to move on to doing more complex things, ”says the Santander Manager.
Is it not the most expected, on the part of the clients of the banking entities, that their mobile application is updated incorporating functions that make it increasingly simple, useful and practical?
“Of course,” says Santiago Sinelnicof, Principal Architect of Red Hat Solutions for South America and the Caribbean. “In that sense The Red Hat OpenShift platform is the technological infrastructure that allows a bank to improve the response time in solving a problem in its app, from months to minutes”, He adds.
The advantage that Sinelnicof describes could be explained as follows: whereas in traditional software architecture, in order to innovate, a company had to ask its systems supplier to modify something in a program that was generic – and, therefore, the changes were expensive and slow in addition to the fact that the client’s interest did not necessarily coincide with that of the provider – working with applications developed in the hybrid cloud, through Plataforma OpenShift de Red Hat, the same IT team of the company modifies its software as and when it wants, without intermediaries.
But even using this platform, since Red Hat is considered as the leader in enterprise open source, the improvements that a company introduces in its software can then be used by the other members of the community, which results in the real benefit of becoming open source. This is a guarantee of constant innovation, a dynamic that corporations like banks need like water, so as not to be left behind.
Migrate to the cloud, or die
Averaging Tuesday morning, Sebastián Cao, Senior Director of the Office of Technology of Red Hat Latin America, opened his presentation on the future of business by providing a fact that is as objective as it is surprising: “9 out of 10 companies that appeared in the Fortune 500 in 1995 no longer exist today.” With that laconic diagnosis raised from the outset, it was not difficult for him to explain the urgent need for large companies to reconsider the benefits of the open hybrid cloud.
It is enough to observe two famous examples to understand that the disappearance of large companies in recent years is explained by their inability to adapt to technological changes.
This is what happened with Olivetti (typewriters) versus computers. The Italian firm that lived its golden years in the 60s and 70s, was liquidated by the beginning of the 80s, when the PC took hold. And the same happened with the giant Blockbuster, a global leader in home cinema until the beginning of this century, when it was surrendered to streaming, today dominated by Netflix. In both cases, these are companies whose ranking was enviable until they succumbed to the digital avalanche.
In this sense, the Red Hat Forum It left no room for doubt: managing a hybrid cloud (public and private) on a platform like OpenShift allows working with containers whose update and implementation is agile and adapts to sudden increases in demand. Ideal and absolutely necessary for organizations that decouple their management system from the digital services they provide to the consumer or end user.
For this reason, both Edenor and the Ministry of Health of the Nation were featured on Tuesday. In a talk moderated by Jorge Payró, Sales Director for Red Hat Argentina, Luis Lenkiewicz -Head of Information Technology at Edenor- and Fernando Núñez –National Director of Governance and Integration of Health Systems– they talked about the technological transformation that they launched with Red Hat, both in the private and public spheres.
While the representative of the electricity supplier described the progress in the culture of data in the company, whose effect is the possibility of doing analytics and creating value with the information that is collected, for his part, Núñez detailed to what extent the An open source solution allows the digital health systems of each province to become interoperable, even above the great asymmetries of the country.
The digital transformation seems to suggest that, for the great players, the immediate future imposes them to avoid any tie to unalterable principles, as well as to take care of trying magic solutions whose foundation is not supported by the knowledge of experts. Perhaps the challenge today is, more profoundly, to change to keep changing, because change is what keeps us alive.
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