
So then if I extend that. Two years ago, we launched DevCloud, UBS DevCloud, which is effectively an open ecosystem built on the public cloud, where all our software engineers can have a seamless experience from dev, to test, to deployment. -deploy solutions as they run. That speed up the time to market, also lowers the cost, which obviously affects the clients. With DevCloud, we can also constantly improve our apps, so that they are no longer 10 years old, but instead they continue to be relevant.
Now, the biggest benefit as well as moving to the cloud is that things that used to take, say, five days, are now only one, which helps improve the productivity of our engineers and makes it one good place to work. We have an expression here that we use a lot, which is, “All engineers, all developers wait for the same speed.” So, anything we can do to reduce their waiting time is a plus. If we have the best engineering talent, if we have the best platforms, we can create the best experience for our clients, how they engage and interact with us.
Laurel: You mentioned cloud computing, and to create a more definitive timeline here, in late 2018 UBS announced a plan to make the company more effective and efficient through cloud computing. After February 2021, it was ahead of that schedule, with 50% of computing taking place in the private and public cloud. So it’s clear, a big transition, if you’re talking, just in 2016, about mainframes, but what does the transition to the cloud allow the company to do?
Mike: The strategy we set at the end of 2018 is to move, within four years, towards a cloud setup that is third, third, third. So, the third is hosted in the private cloud, the third in the public cloud, and the third in the mainframe. And we want very clear goals, to try and move and change the organization, and how we’re going to progress and what that means. We are ahead of schedule with what we want to do. I would also say that our cloud development has prepared us for unpredictability, and we’ve seen that through COVID, we’ve seen it through the surge in volumes, which is happening at high vol, because of some situations in the world. We need greater capacity to deal with high trading volumes, and with the cloud, you have burst elasticity, because you can burst for more capacity. At the same time, we always ensure that business-critical applications are stable, and in fact, our availability is above 99.999%. So, the five nines available, and that puts us among the leaders in the financial industry.
Also, because we set up our cloud-based employees, which we call A3, anytime, anywhere, from any device, which is now a workspace, we enable 95% of our employees to work from home. So, we see more than 60,000 users logged in simultaneously, a huge increase in the use of communication tools, so 3 million Skype calls per week. The Cloud finally makes us more flexible, stronger, more transparent, I think our facilitation of other ecosystems is easier. All this is good for our clients. This is something I always come back to, even the piece that seems unrelated to the client means we can meet their needs faster and maintain security.
Laurel: As part of this company-wide initiative to think more strategically about tech investments, UBS recently joined the Green Software Foundation as a board member, in part to support the company’s push for net zero greenhouse gas emissions across all of its operations by 2050. So how does joining the Green Software Foundation affect the choices you make in building and deploying software?
Mike: Yes, I mean, on a strategic level, UBS is fully committed to sustainability, and I think as an individual, but as a member of GEB, it’s a priority as a whole. We have thousands of applications running in our global business, and I think one of our big steps in our evolution is not just accelerating our digital transformation, but how do we do it the right way? So how do we use those greener development principles as a big part, an important part, of our sustainability approach?
We’ve made strides in reducing our carbon emissions, and that could be moving from on-prem data centers to the cloud, or reducing, or actually eliminating idle, power-hungry resources. Now, we are also looking more and more at whether we can use carbon-aware applications and then users can choose options with the lowest emissions. Green Software Foundation is a cool group, join them to share best practice and knowledge with other members about that journey to continue cutting carbon emissions. I think we, along with others, can really take the lead here.