Lots of companies dream of breaking up with proprietary technology vendors and going full open source. Much leading-edge innovation is happening outside stuffy corporations in vibrant open-source communities. But can companies with major up-time requirements and security obligations depend on free software with no support or supervision?

A number of years ago, DBS Bank Ltd. decided it didn’t want to be a bank anymore; it wanted to be a digital technology company providing banking services. To achieve this, it stopped relying so heavily on technology service providers outside its own walls.

“Ten years ago, when I joined the company, we were 85% outsourced to managed services vendors,” said David Gledhill (pictured), chief information officer and head of group technology and operations at DBS Bank. “I had technology people that basically were signing contractors and managing service agreements. We didn’t have technology DNA.”

Gledhill spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Red Hat Summit in Boston. They discussed how adopting open-source technology and breaking department silos transformed DBS (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

The different shades of open source

DBS dove in deep and investigated the inner workings of technology companies. It wanted to become one itself — not just a regular company with a technology department on the backend. “The legacy way of building technology wasn’t going to get us to where we needed to be as a technology company,” Gledhill said.

The company turned to insourcing technology and building its own technical muscle. It is now 90% insourced. “We run, build and manage our own. We’re now a technology company,” Gledhill stated.

It shifted from doing individual projects to running technology like a series of platforms. “That enables you to do agile at scale,” he said.

The bank’s technologies include some free open-source software. However, it relies on Red Hat Inc.’s managed open-source packages for critical workloads. “The really very, very high-demanding workloads and very secure workloads — we will always work with a partner that can wrap that into an enterprise-quality offering for us,” Gledhill explained.

DBS has liberated its services from its base as a bank. It now offers them through multiple partners like Netflix Inc. “Banking on Netflix is a kind of crazy concept, but we brought that to life,” Gledhill said.

The company is expanding such partnerships with an extensive set of application program interfaces. “The more we do that, the more we disappear and let people live more and bank less,” Gledhill concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2019. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Red Hat Summit. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE