The UK’s Royal Mail Group is one of the oldest mail carriers in the world – pre-dated only by the mail services of Portugal, and of the Roman Empire. The modern Royal Mail, explains Martin Moore, has been innovating with cloud for some time – exposing its APIs in a controlled and secure way, and helping the business understand its customers’ needs. Martin and Karen Dewar discuss the competitive advantages that IBM Cloud brings to Royal Mail Group.

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Karen Dewar: Martin Moore is Platforms Delivery Director for Royal Mail Group; one of the oldest mail carriers in the world. What some people might not know is that certainly from an IBM perspective, we consider you as really an innovator in your use of cloud technologies to drive competitive advantage into your business. So, tell us a little bit more about your use of cloud-based technologies.

Martin Moore: So at Royal Mail we’ve been innovating with cloud for quite a while now. We started off with the IBM private cloud; and that’s where we implemented our API Connect platform. You know, the key driver for that was to expose our APIs in a secure way out to our customers. And that went tremendously well. It took us about three months from inception through to the actual final delivery of the project.

That now exposes our APIs in a much more easily controlled way. We get analytics, we get data, from all those interactions. Even down to what customers are making what sort of enquiries. So we can really start to understand our customers’ needs.

And due to the success of that, we’ve actually moved from the public cloud now to a dedicated IBM Cloud platform. And that’s really enabled us to ensure that we’ve got a highly scalable solution as our APIs really take off. And – yeah – it’s a really good foundation for the future.

Karen Dewar: Brilliant! How are you seeing the cloud bringing you some competitive advantage? Because I guess the speed is one of the key aspects of that.

Martin Moore: The speed is the key thing. That’s why there’s a cloud first strategy now. And I think we need to innovate more, we need to fail fast, as other people do. We need to just get out there and just try things. So, we’ve changed our ways of working.

And the benefit of that is, we’re now able to on-board our customers in a handful of hours or days, instead of what used to take weeks or months. And the way that we on-board them is now far more secure and modern; so our customers are happier, we’re happier, and – you know, it just works really, really well.

Karen Dewar: Fabulous, and: what does the future hold for Royal Mail Group? What do you see as the sort of, challenges, and maybe advantages, of adopting a multi-cloud strategy?

Martin Moore: For me, the key thing is about laying down the foundations of how you govern and manage your multi-cloud environment from day one. You need to consciously decide what processing powers you need to run where. Different clouds will give you different advantages in different places.

But coupled with that, we need to ensure that our traditional, sort of, hub-and-spoke integration method, is modernised. And we need to have more of a federated integration service. And be cloud agnostic.

Karen Dewar: Thanks Martin.

Martin Moore: Okay! Thanks Karen.