Synchrony’s Slavik Zorin speaks at the BlueMix and delivers DevOps keynote address at the IBM Innovate 2014 [VIDEO]


S1 00:04 – Steve, IBM

So it’s been an exciting ride with Bluemix, and I’m very hyped over this application. So and I get tired of charts. I get tired of charts. So how about we see some live code? Does that work for you? It’s always a little high risk, but showing code at a developer conference is about like having a heart attack at a medical group. So it’s not a bad place to be. So if you start to see things come down, please rush the stage and help us out. So we’ve got BART here with us today, and what we’re going to show is pretty cool. So we’ve been talking about this whole notion of system of record and system of engagement. So we’re going to show how we’re actually taking a database, and we’re going to be drilling right into their mainframe in San Francisco and showing how we use Bluemix to extend that with mobile capabilities. So we’re really going to truly show that system of record turning into a system of engagement. So I’d love to introduce to the stage– we’ve got Ravi Misra, CIO of BARTS, Slavik Zorin from Synchrony Systems and Corey Grimes, as well. Big round of applause. [music] Ravi, thanks for joining us. I appreciate all the help. And why don’t you tell us a little bit about BART?

S2 01:34 – Ravi Misra, BARTS

Oh, thank you, Steve.

S1 01:35 – Steve, IBM

Appreciate it.

S2 01:36 Ravi Misra, BARTS

Good morning, everybody. The San Francisco Bay Rapid Transit district is a heavy-rail public transit system that connects the downtown of Oakland, San Francisco to the surrounding cities. BART operates 5 lines, 104 miles of track, 44 stations in 4 counties. BART started operations in 1972. With average, we did traffic of 400,000 passengers. It is the fifth busiest, heavy-rail rapid transit system in the United States. So that’s 400,000 people looking for service every day, on-time performance. To support the round the clock operations, BART relies on the maintenance and reliability information system called MARIS. MARIS is a maintenance system which is used by BART operations to make and break trains, to look at the status of the trains, and some very mission-critical web-based application that is used by supervisors and engineers to track the status of our cars.

S2 02:51 – Ravi Misra, BARTS

But there’s something missing. It’s not mobile. While our workforce is mobile, the application is not. So we had to do something about this to provide a better response and better service to our customers. We decided it was time for us to explore some options. So we called on Synchrony Systems, the team that we had a lot of confidence in, as they had successfully migrated our legacy application from a plank server environment to a web 2.0. This time, Synchrony brought to our attention the possibility of using a cloud-based solution. This is where we were introduced to the possibility of developing using IBM Bluemix Cloud platform. Slavik gets excited about technology. I get excited about results. The key factors that helped us choose to pilot with Bluemix were speed of development, production deployment, a secure access to our on-premise database because we didn’t want the database to reside in the Cloud. Today, you’ll see a demo of the mobile app and how it was developed. And the results are impressive. Thank you.

S1 04:34 – Steve, IBM

Ravi, thank you so much. Fantastic, wonderful job.

S3 04:37 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Thanks, Ravi. Thank you.

S2 04:38 – Ravi Misra, BARTS

Thanks.

S1 04:39 – Steve, IBM

Slavik?

S3 04:40 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

How are you?

S1 04:41 – Steve, IBM

Corey? Demo gods are with us today?

S4 04:44 – Corey Grimes, Synchrony Systems

Absolutely, absolutely.

S1 04:45 – Steve, IBM

Good, good, good. Let’s talk a little bit about what you brought today.

S3 04:47 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

All right. Well, we’ve heard from Ravi here about MARIS and the web application itself. And what we have here is the mobile app, and the mobile app that is going to be used, basically, also by supervisors and managers to get real time information as things change in the yard. All right. So the next really, is how we did it. And we did it with Bluemix. And we did use Bluemix and DevOps, actually, to extend the current application, and to extend it with a hybrid cloud, and to provide instant access to the yard tracking on a mobile device. We used the Cloud integration that we can see behind us, the Cloud integration service to connect to the on-premise database, as Ravi stated, in a secure way, and also, the back-end service– the mobile back-end service, in order to get the push notifications to notify. So we’re ready to roll, actually.

S1 05:42 – Steve, IBM

Okay, let’s take a look and see what you have.

S3 05:44 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Please take the app.

S1 05:45 – Steve, IBM

All righty. You have me tethered today.

S3 05:48 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Yep, we do.

S1 05:48 – Steve, IBM

I have to link close with you here.

S4 05:50 – Corey Grimes, Synchrony Systems

That’s right.

S1 05:51 – Steve, IBM

So we see down here the mobile MARIS app. And click on that.

S3 05:55 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Okay, that’s your–

S1 05:56 – Steve, IBM

Excellent. I assume you’ve given me administrator access, so I don’t need a password today, right?

S3 06:00 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Absolutely. Only you [laughter].

S1 06:03 – Steve, IBM

Very secure today, very secure today. So here what I see is Hayward Richmond Daly City and– I’d assume these are railyards?

S3 06:12 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

That’s correct. You can tap on one of them, yeah.

S1 06:14 – Steve, IBM

Okay. And then I assume if one’s red, then we may have a problem or–

S3 06:18 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

That’s exactly right.

S1 06:18 – Steve, IBM

–a car’s offline or in maintenance.

S3 06:20 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

That’s right.

S1 06:20 – Steve, IBM

So I click on one.

S3 06:23 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

And we can see– yeah. So this is your track. If you filter it right there–

S1 06:26 – Steve, IBM

You’ve got cars in–

S3 06:27 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

You could just watch the tracks that have cars on it, exactly.

S1 06:29 – Steve, IBM

So here we’ve got two red cars on ST15.

S3 06:33 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

That’s right. That’s the track 15, and both of them are red. So why don’t we do this? Why don’t we go now to the web system, on-premise? And we’ll take a look and see what information we can–

S1 06:44 – Steve, IBM

What we have going on those cars.

S3 06:45 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Yeah, exactly. So you could see that we have car 2510 and car 1847, actually, that are offline.

S1 06:52 – Steve, IBM

We need that screen up [inaudible].

S3 06:55 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

The screen is going to show, but–

S1 06:56 – Steve, IBM

Okay, we’ll get it.

S3 06:58 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

But we’re looking at it. We’re looking at it.

S1 06:59 – Steve, IBM

We’ve got a beautiful demo here [laughter].

S3 07:02 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

All right. But it would be nice if you could look at it, too.

S1 07:07 – Steve, IBM

So we have a full panel on the server here showing more detail in the cars, etc., as to what’s online or not. Now, you seem to have more information here than what we’ve got on the phone. Can I get that information here?

S3 07:18 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Well, it’s funny you should ask. So we–

S1 07:21 – Steve, IBM

I’m poking, and this is as far as I can go right now.

S3 07:24 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

That’s as far as you can go, but we actually prepared for you an implementation, a feature here that we staged on Bluemix.

S1 07:31 – Steve, IBM

Ravi gave you a requirement on the way down today?

S3 07:32 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Gave us a requirement and said that we have to do this before we actually showcase. So we’re going to actually take you through it on Bluemix right now. So what you see here right now is the first part. So this is the stage where we stage the code. You can see the first part, which is the rest call from the node js server application mobile back into the Cloud integration service. And that’s the part that actually gets the data from the on-premise environment, right?

S1 07:57 – Steve, IBM

Yep.

S3 07:58 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Okay, good. You’re going to show the second part. That’s the one that implements the actual method that accesses the Cloud integration. Okay. And that returns the data. And you can see the parameter. It’ll get passed from the client, and that’s how we get, actually, the data. Next, we actually define the get request, we kind of keep walking up. We define the get request and that’s what routes– that’s the URL. It routes to the back-end so that the client gets the car details. And the only thing that’s left now, is everything else that we’ve given the client. So we can switch to the final part, and we can see the four changes we’ve made here. You’ll see that there is a service call to node js mobile back in service. We’ll see that there is a method that actually packages– that long method right there. That’s the one that packages the data that’s going to be displayed on a mobile device. The ven handler itself that actually handles, implements the request, and of course, you’re tapping registration and the event listserv, itself. All right? So these are all the changes that we’ve put together. They’re all staged. And right now, we’re going to be ready to go and actually go through the process of committing it, pushing it, and publishing it. And this is all configured with auto publish, so hopefully, this is going to do it all automatically.

S1 09:09 – Steve, IBM

So with this new feature– I mean, I’ve got to, again, dedicate the server to it. I’ve got to wait, what, three months to put it in production? I should see this about Christmas, right?

S3 09:18 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Yes. 30, 45 seconds.

S1 09:19 – Steve, IBM

30 or 45 seconds [laughter]? Okay, okay. Okay. So we’re going to push that change out. You saw the green bar, so it’s going live. And maybe we can talk about my red cars.

S3 09:30 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

All right, maybe we can. So why don’t we do this? Why don’t we switch meanwhile, and actually see what happens if, on the field, we actually fixed it? So let’s go switch the application. And this is the car number 1847, so let’s select car number 1847. And somebody’s actually going to change it to a go state. So now, it’s in the no-go. It’s red, and we’re going to switch it to go. And if you pay attention now, hopefully, as we update the application live, we’re going to be able to see the real time push notification, if everything is working well. Go for it.

S1 10:05 – Steve, IBM

Car status changed. Status is go for 1847 on storage track 15. Fantastic.

S3 10:10 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Fantastic. So if you follow this through, you should be able to see change now live to one–

S1 10:14 – Steve, IBM

So I’m down to one, right? And I’m down to one in here. Fantastic. This is great.

S3 10:19 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

That’s right.

S1 10:20 – Steve, IBM

So how about our other change, now? Do you think it’s through?

S3 10:23 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Let’s hope that the publish is completed. We’re going to go back to the dashboard and see if everything is green. Are we all green, Corey?

Cool. So that means we’re going get– it’s exactly right. So we’ll close the application. Reload it back again.

S1 10:33 – Steve, IBM

Okay, so we’ll pull it back up.

S3 10:34 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

All right. You can still log in, I hope?

S1 10:36 – Steve, IBM

I’m still the administrator.

S3 10:37 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

That’s still administrator. All right.

S1 10:41 – Steve, IBM

So I guess [crosstalk] over there.

S3 10:42 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

So you still have one left. Yep. Let’s take a look. If you can now look– see that feature live–

S1 10:49 – Steve, IBM

Fantastic. More car details directly from the database in San Francisco. Fantastic.

S3 10:54 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Outstanding.

S1 10:54 – Steve, IBM

Fantastic. Now, you guys have both been in consulting quite a bit. So we’ve taken an existing database on a mainframe in San Francisco. We’ve done extensions to it, allow for push notifications. We’ve built a mobile app. We’ve added capability to it. How long would it have normally taken you before Bluemix and DevOps?

S3 11:12 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Takes about six months to do something like that, normally.

S1 11:14 – Steve, IBM

How long did it take you to do this product like this?

S3 11:16 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

This time, 15 days.

S1 11:17 – Steve, IBM

15 days. 15 days. [applause] Fantastic. Thanks, Slavik.

S3 11:22 – Slavik Zorin, Synchrony Systems

Thank you.

S1 11:22 – Steve, IBM

Corey, thank you so much. Fantastic. Are you excited? I am.