Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud, APJ | Fubon Bank Modern Private Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation

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Simon Chang

Senior Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer

Taipei Fubon Bank

From academic labs to banking: How private cloud is powering real-world change

Companies chasing innovation are often forced into compromise. Public cloud delivers speed and scale, but at the cost of visibility, control and sometimes even sovereignty. On-prem environments offer stability but struggle to keep pace with modern demands, especially as AI workloads and data complexity surge. Enter the private cloud — a middle path that promises both flexibility and governance, with infrastructure designed for control and scalability.Broadcom’s new VMware Cloud Foundation 9 builds on this idea, aiming to eliminate the either/or tradeoff

play_circle_outline Introduction of Simon Chang, CIO of Taipei Fubon Bank, by Christophe Bertrand.

play_circle_outline Overview of Taipei Fubon Bank's role in Taiwan's financial landscape.

play_circle_outline Simon's responsibilities as CIO, overseeing IT strategies across branches.

play_circle_outline Navigating Regulatory Restrictions: The Shift to Private Cloud Strategies in Taiwan's Banking Industry with VMware and VCF

play_circle_outline Continued exploration and adaptation to new technologies and AI advancements.

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Fubon Bank Modern Private Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation

Simon Chang

Senior Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer Taipei Fubon Bank

Simon Chang, chief information officer of Taipei Fubon Commercial Bank Co. Ltd., joins theCUBE’s Christophe Bertrand at the “Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud” event to discuss how the bank is modernizing its infrastructure to meet evolving regulatory and operational demands. Their conversation explores Taipei Fubon’s transition to a virtualized environment and its strategic embrace of private cloud technology.

Chang shares how the bank balances innovation with compliance, navigating tight controls while driving digital transformation. The s... Read more

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What is the introduction and background of Simon Chang, the Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Taipei Fubon Bank? add

What is the role and significance of Taipei Fubon Bank within the Taipei Fubon Financial Holdings Group and its standing in Taiwan's banking sector? add

What are the responsibilities and geographical scope of the bank CIO's role? add

What are the regulatory requirements and considerations for using public cloud services in Taiwan's banking industry? add

What changes or developments occurred regarding the use of public cloud by banks in Taiwan after September 2023? add

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Christophe Bertrand

>> Hello, everyone. And welcome back to our event, Broadcom Delivers the Modern Private Cloud. We have a very special guest today, Simon Chang, who is the Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Taipei Fubon Bank. My name is Christophe Bertrand. I'm a principal analyst here focused on infrastructure, cloud, data protection, data resilience, you name it. I love data. I follow the data. More importantly, I would like for you, Simon, to introduce yourself to our viewers. Tell us who you are and how do you end up in this great position? And tell us about the bank itself.

Simon Chang

>> Okay. Hello, everyone. Very nice to meet everyone in this virtual space. My name is Simon Chang. I'm the CIO for the Taipei Fubon Bank. And before I introduce myself, I think I'll just start with what the Taipei Fubon Bank is, does. Taipei Fubon Bank is the key element of the Taipei Fubon Financial Holdings Group. It is one of the largest financial holdings group in Taiwan. And as Taipei Fubon Bank, we are one of the top three banks in Taiwan. And our business is more on the commercial bank side, where we do the corporate banking, we do the retails, consumer banking, and also the treasury. And the special part for us is we are also the designated banking for the Taipei City government. So we do a lot of government-related payment service for the entire Taipei citizens. So we are probably considered one of the most famous groups in Taiwan. And other than the banking, we also have the insurance, the securities, the brokerage house, and also the trusts. And we also actually have the telecommunication companies and also e-commerce. And the group is also running a professional basketball team and also the baseball teams as well. So we are very diversified and a lot of business going on. And then we, as a group, we actually leverage the whole synergy. And so here I am.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So what is your job? Tell us maybe about your typical day, if there is a typical day.

Simon Chang

>> Yes, we do have a typical day. My job as the bank CIO, basically I overlook the whole information technology strategies, and also working very closely with all the different business side. And my job covers not only in Taiwan, but also all the branch office overseas, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam. We just opened up an office in Australia and actually planning to open another office in Japan and also India. We're looking at all the different countries and try to expand our reach. So my job basically is not only taking care of all the technical issues in the company, but also try to work out with the different business part, and then also reporting direct to the CEO and also the chairmen. And so all my best and love to talk with other good friends like you and share my experience with other people in Taiwan, also in the globe. And hopefully you can make the things better soon here.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, thank you. And you described essentially a conglomerate with many activities, but I'd like to focus on the bank for a second and I want to get into the technology essentially with a private cloud component and the strategy behind it. Could you tell us in your words, what would make this bank different from any other bank around the world? You are in a very unique position in Taiwan. You have a very unique environment in terms of the business, and clearly a lot of attention from a number of regulators, et cetera. So tell us about what would be very different from any other banking environment in the world, and how does that affect your strategy from an IT perspective and from a technology investment standpoint?

Simon Chang

>> Okay. Chris, that's a fantastic question. Okay. That's probably one of the key questions in the whole discussion. Because what happened in Taiwan, which is very, very different than the things happen in the other countries in the other part of the world is... And before that, I'll just touch base on myself. I actually came back from Hong Kong about four years ago and joined Fubon about four years ago. And one thing I learned in Taiwan is that in the banking industry, the FSA or FSC basically they have very strict conditions of using the public cloud. It's about when I first come back here. So what that means is every application or every system you move into the public cloud, you have to go through a pre-certification process with the regulatory bodies there. They have to make sure that all your application is doing fine, you're meeting all this information securities concern, your personal data protections, your controls, and your monitoring. And back then, they also asking the public cloud has to be resided in Taiwan, in Taiwan soil. That means if you want to use anything offshore, that's also prohibited. So that means that your selection or your choice are very limited there. So back then, what the difference for the banks in Taiwan versus the banks in any other countries is most of the people actually start developing the private cloud strategies using the private cloud to develop their own native cloud application. And then starting from there, using container technology and try to move the application from their previous legacy application into the more modern cloud application there. So in Taiwan, most of the bank, their forecast in the past couple years has been always in private cloud with the container technology. And in that basically the VMware, the VCF has played a very important part of how you're going to make sure that your local private clouds infrastructures are meeting the requirements of almost the same as what you use in the public cloud. Okay.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Okay. So let's talk about this for a second because I think this is very important. Now we understand the general context, which is very unique, very clearly. So you have stringent requirements and choices that are limited, yet still you have the ability to build something that's going to be yours. Well, now you have to find the right parts. So what was your journey to decide to implement and go towards VCF? What type of requirements did you place on the technology as you were selecting a partner to work with?

Simon Chang

>> If we were trying to build up a private cloud, basically what you try to accomplish is the benefit you can use the public cloud. And one of the benefit of using the public cloud is so you can boost some of your performance or your capacity while needed there. So when you design your private clouds, basically the first thing you have to consider is how are you going to mitigate the same capabilities in your data centers? And that's what the private clouds, one of the challenge there. And so what we did back then is we take this opportunity to also review our own data centers' architecture and start moving. Because if you want to try to put as many computer system resources in the data center, what you end up is you're going to short up the space, you're going to increase the cost, and you're going to increase the management cap, the burdens, image all these additional machines or additional servers there. So our decision is to move into the virtualization solution where we can combine all the different machine into and use the physical servers as much as possible, meaning combine everything into the virtual environment. And then that give us much better controls and then also saving the space and also especially on the ESG side where people are very conscious of the energy consumptions, the chilling waters, and all these other things there. So by taking the physical servers and putting into virtualization environment, basically we are able to really mitigate the public cloud environment in our private cloud, and then we can start taking the whole advantage of the private cloud and moving our whole application into this new more modern applications there.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So it sounds like you've had a great opportunity to design something new here and improve from the legacy environment you were in as you itemize the hardware. Obviously the power consumption and all of these components, essentially a lot of constraints that obviously you have to worry about. So I'm curious about what has resulted from this effort? I know it's a process and a journey and it's definitely not over and the story continues probably every day. But what can you share with us in terms of what you've been able to achieve so far and maybe also share with us what you see as the next step in your implementation and your evolution?

Simon Chang

>> Sure. Yeah. I think obviously the first step is to remove all the physical machine to this whole virtualized environment. And over times, we have been able to move around the 2,400 VMs and then almost over 70% of our applications are all in this new virtualized environments right now, which is a really big accomplishment. But over times, what we also end up finding out is initially if you don't have a process and you don't have automation tools, setting up or managing the whole virtual environment is actually a very high source work task. I'll give you examples. We used to set up, if we get a request from an application owners, which we need to set up a virtual environment for him, sometime it takes more than 10 hours or sometimes even days. Because other than setting up the environment, you have to go through all this requirement process. You make sure that the paperwork is in press. And after you set up, you need to make sure somebody's coming here and do all the checkings. And so there's a lot of end-to-end task you need to accomplish in order to make the environments available for the users there. So what we've done in the next stage is to combine the whole process together. We're actually linking the whole virtualization environment, the VCF, with our own internal system, about 18 of them. And we make it a streamlined process. So where we can reduce the whole setup time from the 10 hours or more than 10 hours into one hour. If we need to commission the environments, we can also commission from 2.5 hours into 10 minutes and also reduce more than 70% of the human works in there. So you click a button and then basically you got everything as possible done for you. We also have a maker-checkers category there, so make sure that people actually do something and then another people can actually check that too. So we actually have done this whole thing to make the moving or migration into the virtualization environment much more smooth and then so people can really see the benefit of that. And so the whole virtualization environment become one of our IT foundation in our IT operations right now.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So you've achieved something very impressive from an operational efficiency standpoint, as you were describing provisioning and all of the various components, and what I think has brought to you a lot of stability back into the business, to the application owners, the various projects you have to serve and all of these audiences you have to serve. So just as a reminder, early on in this conversation, you talked about all of the businesses and the types of businesses you support, the individuals, the commercials, et cetera. And those are very different businesses in banking, no question. And certainly when you talk about basketball or baseball, that's totally a different story as well in terms of the business of the organization, maybe even more interesting. But that's something we're going to talk about in a second here. Let's double click a little more on your strategy moving forward. You hinted at a couple of things. And tell me what do you see as the next couple of years, what are you going to be doing in terms of the big things that you have on the board? And maybe we should talk about using AI and internal AI. Or is it private AI use?

Simon Chang

>> Yeah. Chris, that's a really big question, so I'll take my time to answer your question there. I think the first question is, okay, we haven't done a lot of good things in our environment right now by using the virtualization technology with VMware. And along the way, I think one of the things we also found out and we also build up is we unified the process together. What that means is we are able to build up a process which not only is suitable for our local on-premise environment, but also for the private cloud. And we actually take that extent into the public cloud, the management as well. So what that means is I can use my single interface and single management tool. I can measure all my on-premise, my legacy environment, my new private cloud environment, and also my future public cloud environments. And by using that, I think it will give us, when we move into this public cloud, then we have a much better controls and we don't have to change all the different process and procedures. And my guys can really get into the whole management and controls much quicker. So we have built that. And after being up this process and tools and controls, then what we start doing is we start moving our application. Actually, I forgot to mention that, where the government or the regulatory body actually opened up using of the public cloud since 2023, September 2023. So after that, almost all the banks in Taiwan are start serious looking at moving their internal application into the public cloud. But we are ahead of them because we are actually building up the whole control structures way ahead. So by having that, basically we are able to move our applications into the public cloud with the same management skills and same management control and policies as we are doing in the local. Which is what we are going to try to do in the next couple of years, is to leverage the public cloud's capability and the benefit of that and start using that in there. And come back to what you mentioned about the AI. And I think a lot of people are actually very, as you know, GenAI has been a boom for the past couple of years. I probably went to at least 200 AI seminars in the past two years. And also everybody was talking about how they use AI. And from my side, I think AI is, I think we have been using AI for at least for the past 50 years, but the GenAI is very different. GenAI is a very different AI models and the usage than the previous, what we call the next AI or analytic AIs. So we have been taking that very serious. And one thing about using the GenAI, all these different language model, different like GenAI's models, is that we don't know which one is really going to be the future. There's new things come out almost every day. And you can't really spend all the different times and try to rebuild up a infrastructure just for particular AI models for you to really verify that. So when I was working with the VMware and Broadcom, and what we found out is the whole so-called private AIs concept is actually very, very suitable for our needs, where you can really build up the whole private AI infrastructure and you can really quickly swap in and out different models for you to verify which one is better or use them in the different scenarios. Which is as you know in the banking, we have very different usage of using the AI power. So it's not only one AI models fit everyone. So you need something for audio, you need something for the documentation, something for customer service. So it's a very different diversified environment for you to use it. So my understanding with the Broadcom is the private AI is actually very, very suitable for our needs, and that's why we are going to be spend some time and some effort into understanding and then try to merge that into our existing infrastructures here.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Well, it's amazing how much you've been able to achieve in very little time. And it's really great to hear what the platform has allowed you to do. In terms of operational efficiencies, again, looking at all the various use cases with AI, literally the market is changing, the technologies are changing on a daily basis, so this is very impressive. Look, we've covered a lot of ground, so I'd like to do something, maybe just ask you maybe for a piece of advice, a best practice for our viewers. What would you like them to think about and to do next as an item or as a best practice?

Simon Chang

>> Yeah. Well, I think being a CIO, I think that the difficult part is not only if I look at the technology. I think technology, most of people can, they probably do this on a day-to-day basis there. But I think the most difficult part from my side which I can give other people some advice is that sometimes you try to solve one problem and you try to get the one solution. But as you mentioned, our role is changing. It's a big challenge coming all different ways. And you need to be able to give your users or your business partners the total solutions. And when I say total solution, it's a solution which can not only meet the business requirements or their needs, but also from a cost saving part and then from a future expansion. And sometimes the benefit is not really so easy to be seen. And that's how you bring up all this thing together and then try to explain this to your management teams there. And for me, I think choosing the right technology is always much easier. Because we have been seeing many, many different cases in Taiwan where very large investment, spend four or five years, they end up just going down the toilet. They never work at all. Because if you really don't have a really good understanding of your technology needs and also where your business is going to be going forward, then sometimes this tooling doesn't match. And then once you put in your effort and people and there is just going to be really become a mess. So my advice to people is sometimes you have to find the right partner and you can be really working with them like at Broadcom. For me, they are very, very important. They probably play a very good important strategy in our overall implementation as well. So we have to really understand technology, spend the time, and you really work close with them. And I think that will make life much easier.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Simon, thank you so much for joining us. And to our viewers, thank you for watching this segment. Simon, best of luck for the next project and thank you for your time.

Simon Chang

>> No problem. And thank you, everybody. Okay. Again, very nice to see everybody in this virtual space. We're looking forward to see you again soon.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And everybody stay tuned for more coverage of this special event with Broadcom talking about the modern private cloud. My name is Christophe Bertrand, principal analyst here at theCUBE Research. Thank you for your time.