Boeing Information Technology CTO: Vaho Rebassoo

Interview:

Dan Farber: Vaho, thanks for joining me.

Vaho Rebassoo: You're welcome; it's a pleasure to be here.

Dan Farber: What are some of the innovations that have happened over the years that have really transformed the way that aircraft are manufactured?

Vaho Rebassoo: Well probably the biggest was with the triple 7, when we went into the all-digital design. And the digital design actually was only a part of the benefit, because once you had the digital design then you could start doing the digital mock-up and you could do digital testing and you could model your manufacturing processes all using that digital model of the airplane.

Dan Farber: And how has the factory floor changed? Given that there's a lot of technology around, mobile technology, wireless technologies. And how has that impacted the speed of delivery and the cost to manufacture?

Vaho Rebassoo: Well when you think of the size of our Everett factory for example, it's a hundred acres, one building.

Dan Farber: That's in Everett, Washington?

Vaho Rebassoo: Yeah, the largest building in the world. And so if you don't have what you need to do your job in terms of information, the possibility is that you might have to walk a couple of hundred yards. I think the quality and the productivity have increased enormously because of that.

Dan Farber: So for example the manuals are those all electronic and available to the mechanics and engineers?

Vaho Rebassoo: Yeah. The descriptions of the parts and the descriptions of the job can be available electronically now.

Dan Farber: That seems like a huge challenge, given that an airplane has two to three million parts.

Vaho Rebassoo: Yeah. So one of the technologies that we're working with right now, that is actually quite a bit of challenge, is something called "Real Time Location Service" or RTLS. And that's a technology that uses the WiFi access points to multiple access points to look at a signal that comes from an active RFID device and when that signal comes it tries to do some triangulation or time-stamping to see what the location of that part was. So that can help you find a part that might be lost. And given the size of our factories, if something gets lost it can take a long time to find. I can remember the days when we had a flyer come by and they ask you "have you seen this part?" and the part is twenty feet long and ten feet high.

Dan Farber: Not exactly a needle in a haystack.

Vaho Rebassoo: And obviously worth a lot of money. The other thing is then tracking parts through progression from one workstation to another in the factory to know whether your progress is moving the way it should.

Dan Farber: Is this technology deployed widely, or is it in test phase?

Vaho Rebassoo: This is relatively new technology. We have some installed at a couple of locations. I think you would characterize it a little bit more as pilot.

Dan Farber: Pilot for an active RFID implementation.

Vaho Rebassoo: Yeah.

Dan Farber: What are some of the other technology issues you're working on?

Vaho Rebassoo: Security would be another one of those. A large part of our job is to make access to the information easier. Well, everything you do to make access easier means that if somebody has somehow cracked that shell around your network. We have a notion that we refer to as "defense in depth" so that we're not going to be dependent just on our firewalls to protect our resources.

Dan Farber: A multi-layered approach to security?

Vaho Rebassoo: Yes. Embed more of the security in the network and in the end systems and so forth. So that's one other technology, and one of the largest issues we're dealing with is the infrastructure reliability. We can't afford to have the computing resources have any glitches with them. So we're putting a lot of emphasis on reliability. A large part of our business actually is providing information to our customers and information to our suppliers. Well our customers have huge expectations. We actually have penalties built in; in some cases where we have to provide a certain reliability. Because if an airplane is stranded for lack of maintenance on it and they need our information to do that maintenance, then they've got to have that information available.

Dan Farber: So as CTO you are setting the direction, maybe you can share some of the directions that you are setting these days.

Vaho Rebassoo: Well a large part of this direction is trying to integrate infrastructure in the software arena. One of the key things is we are doing work with mobility and wireless, that's a very hot technology area, that, as we discussed, has a lot of promise, in the data center and server arena. One of the challenges is to take advantage of virtualization technologies, where you can have multiple servers on one physical server.

Dan Farber: Just to focus a little bit on the virtualization and servers, do you have any idea how many servers you want to get to? If you have 10,000, or 30,000 servers, you want to get down to one third that number?

Vaho Rebassoo: Well we have over 10,000 servers and at least with the Windows type of servers, where there's a little more organizational applications probably, we expect to get reductions, based on industry trends, and some of our experience, we ought to get ten to one reductions in physical servers. When we move to the various Unix servers that we have, I don't think that that's a realistic goal, overall, because those are larger applications and make better use of the resources, but even there I would expect to get a three or five to one reduction. I haven't totally done the math, because we're just starting the journey, but I would expect that we would end up with 20 or 30 percent the number of physical servers.

Dan Farber: Are you also doing storage consolidation along with that?

Vaho Rebassoo: Yes. We have embarked now in the past few years on deploying storage area networks and probably the biggest step originally was getting an enterprise wide direction and standards so everybody's building to that storage model. We're going into shared storage environments.

Dan Farber: Now, in a company the size of Boeing with a long history, and you've been there, again, for a couple of decades, is it difficult to change infrastructure, for example, such as going into a more virtualized environment, or going to shared storage?

Vaho Rebassoo: Yes, very.

Dan Farber: What do you think makes it so difficult to effect those kinds of changes?

Vaho Rebassoo: It's really the complexity of our company, our organization. When you stop to think about it, the organization reflects the complexity of the product. We build very complex products: space stations or airplanes. The people who build the tail section of the airplane have to communicate with the people who build the nose, because the people in the nose telling the tale what to do when you're flying it. So everybody has to interact with everybody else. That causes a complexity that was a major undertaking and needed some really high-level, executive support.

Dan Farber: On the networking side, are you pushing towards this notion of converged networks: voice, data, multimedia? So that, for example, on the factory floor, you can push live video to someone who's working on some part of the plane.

Vaho Rebassoo: Our intent is to do that. We've been moving fairly strongly toward Voice Over IP, Video Over IP. I think to some extent, the wireless devices, the cell phones, are going to help lead the charge, cause now you got video on cell phones, as well as voice and text types of things, and those same capabilities, we're expecting, we're going to have on the whole range of devices up to laptops and tablets and everything. My vision is that five or seven years from now, if you go in the factory, every employee is going to have some sort of mobile device, because all you need to do is save one trip back to where the information is, or one trip back to communicate with somebody, and you've proved, then, the cost of that device. The value of information is going to be that high, and the cost of that communications device is going to be that low. five years from now could be

Dan Farber: Could be free. Could be free; paying for some data. So as you're looking out into the future, what do you see as the biggest challenges that Boeing has ahead on the technology front?

Vaho Rebassoo: Well, I think the biggest probably is in terms of technology. We have been working now for a few years at least, like a lot of other companies, on trying to do what you might refer to as application simplification or business simplification, or application rationalization or something like that. Where we have several thousand applications. If you were to draw a picture of how they interact with each other, it would be a spider web of incredible density. It's hard to do any planning and moving into new technology or new capability when anything that you stick into that spider web has all of these different ramifications, and interactions with all these other applications that then have to change. We need to migrate toward a model that has less applications and the applications with more structure to them and better-defined interfaces, so that change can come more readily.

Dan Farber: Have you defined that model yet?

Vaho Rebassoo: Well, I think parts of it are defined in parts of the company. I think one of the best areas we have is in the HR area, where we have a pretty good portal-based approach toward things, and there's a structure behind that.

Dan Farber: Is that a service-oriented structure?

Vaho Rebassoo: It is. To logistics. Not strictly speaking Web services, but it's moving in that direction.

Dan Farber: Great. Vaho, thanks very much for speaking with me.

Vaho Rebassoo: You're welcome. It's a pleasure to be here.

Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Vaho Rebassoo, who's the CTO for Computers and Network Operations at Boeing. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber, thanks for watching.