>> Narrator: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco. It's the Cube. Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube. I'm with Dave Vellante. We are here in San Francisco at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium which is why we're sporting some concert t-shirts. >> Who. >> The Who and the Clong. >> Roger. Roger Delchi. >> Roger. We are here with the CIO of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Pure customer, Ben Nathan. Ben, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for having me. So, talk to us about the shool of medicine at UCLA. You are the CIO there, you've been there for about three years. Give us a little bit of the 10,000 foot view of what your organization looks like to support the school of medicine. >> Sure. We're about 170 people. We have changed a lot over the last three years. So, when I got to UCLA there was 25 separate IT organizations, all smaller groups, operating in each individual department. And, they had built their own sets of managed infrastructure, distributed throughout every closet, nook and cranny in the school. We've consolidated all that under one set of service lines, one organization, and that's including consolidating all the systems and applications as well. So, we've brought all those together and now we're additionally running IT for three more health sciences schools at UCLA, nursing, dentistry, and school of public health, Fielding School of Public Health. Like a lot of CIOs, you serve many masters. You got the administration, you got the students, right. You've got the broader constituency. The community, UCLA. Where do you start? What's the quote on quote customer experience that you're trying to achieve? That's a great way to put it. There's really sort of four pillars that we try to serve. The patient being first and foremost. So, for us, everything is built around a great patient experience. And, that means that when we're educating students it's so they can be great providers of patient care. When we're doing research, When we're doing that research in an effort to eradicate disease et cetera. And, when we're doing community outreach it's also around improving health and peoples lives, so, in IT, we try to stay very connected to those missions. I think it's a large part of what drives people to be a part of an organization that's healthcare or that's a provider. That mission is really, really important. So, yes. We're serving all four of those things at once. >> So, you had lots of silos, lots of data, that's all continuing to grow but, this is data that literally life and death decisions can be made on this. Talk to us about the volumes of data, all the different sources that are generating data. People, sensors, things and how did you make this decision to consolidate leveraging Pure Storage as that foundation? >> Yeah, there's and incredible amount of work going on at UCLA. Particularly in their research education and patient care spaces. We had every brand of server in storage that you've never heard of. Things bought at lowest, bitter methods but, the technical data that we had incurred as part of that was enormous. Right, it's unsustainable. It's unsupportable. It's insecure-able. When I got there and we started to think about how do we deal with all of this? We knew we had an opportunity to green field an infrastructure and consolidate everything onto it. That was the first, that was started us down the road that led us to Pure as one of our major storage vendors. I had worked with them before but, they won on their merits, right? We do these very rigorous RFP processes when we buy things. The thing that really, I think, got them the the victory is us is that the deduplication of data got us to something like an eight to one ratio of virtual to physical. So, we get a lot of virtual servers running on relatively small amount of storage. And, that it's encrypted you know, sort of the time, right? There's not like a switch you might flip or something a vendor says they'll do but it >> Always on. >> doesn't really do, it is always on. And, it's critical for us. We're really building a far more secure and manageable set of services and so all the vendors we work with meet that criteria. >> So, is as a CIO, I would imagine you don't want to wake up every day and think of storage. With all due respect to our friends at Pure. >> That's true. >> So, has bringing it in for infrastructure in, like Pure, that prides itself on simplicity, allowed you to do the things that you really want to do and need to do for your organization? >> Yeah. I'll give you a two part answer. I mean one is simply, I think, it's operationally a really great service. I think that it's well designed, and run, and managed. And, we get great use of out it. I think the thing that makes it so that I don't have to think about it is actually, the business model that they have. So, the fact that I know that it's not going to really obsolete on its own, as long as you're like in the support model, you're upgrading the system every few years, changes, you know the, model for me, 'cause I don't have to think about these new, massive capitalization efforts, it's more of a predictable operational costs and that helps me sleep well because I know what we look like over the next few years and I can explain that to my financial organization. >> Just a follow up on that, a large incumbent storage supplier or system vendor might say, "Well, we can make that transparent to you. We can use our financial services to hide that complexity or make a cloud-like rental experience or you know, play financial games to hide that. Why does that not suffice for you? >> Well, I think, first and foremost we sort of want to run our financials on our own and we're pretty anxious about having anyone else in the middle of all that. Number two is it seems to me different in terms of Pure having built that model from the ground up as part of their service offerings. So, I don't think we see that with too many other vendors and I think that obviously there's far less technical than what I had in the previous design but it can still add up if you're not careful about whatever, what server mechanism you have in place, et cetera. >> But, it eliminates the forklift upgrade, right. Even with those financial incentives or tricks, you still got to forklift it and it's a disruption to your operation. >> Yeah, and I'm sure that's true, yeah. >> So, when you guys were back a year and a half or so, maybe two years ago, looking at this consolidation, where were your thoughts in terms of beyond consolidation and looking at being able to harness the power of AI, for example, we heard a lot of AI today already and this need for legacy infrastructures are insufficient to support that. Was that also part of your plan, was not simply to consolidate and bring your (speaks very rapidly) environment unto Pure source but also to leverage a modern platform that can allow you to harness the power of AI? >> Yeah. That was sort of the later phase bonus period that we're starting to enter now. So, after we sort of consolidate and secure everything, now, we can actually do far more interesting things that would've been much more difficult before. And, in terms of Pure, when we had set out to do this we imagined doing a lot of our analytics and AI machine learning kind of cloud only and we tried that. We're doing a lot of really great things in the cloud but not all of it is makes sense in that environment. Either from a cost perspective or from a capabilities perspective. Particularly with what Pure has been announcing lately, I think there's a really good opportunity for us to build high performance computing clusters in our on premise environment that leverage Pure as a potential storage back end. And that's where our really interesting data goes. We can do the analytics or the AI machine learning on the data that's in our electronic medical record or in our genomics workflows or things like that can all flow through a service like that and there's some interesting discoveries that ought to come from it. >> There's a lot of talk at this event about artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, how do you see AI in health care, generally? And specifically, how you're going to apply it? Is it helping doctors with diagnosis? Is it maybe maintaining better compliance? Or, talk about that a little. >> I think there's two things that I can think of off the top of my head. The first is decision support. So this is helping physicians when they're working directly with patients there's only, there's so many systems, so many data sets, so many way to analyze, and yet getting it all in front of them in some kind of real time way so that they can use it effectively is tricky. So, AI, machine learning, have a chance to help us funnel that into something that's immediately useful in the moment. And then the other thing that we're seeing is that most of the research on genomics and the outcomes that have resulted in changes to clinical care are around individualized mutations in a single nucleotide so there's, those are I guess, quote, relatively easy for a researcher to pick out. There's a letter here that is normally a different letter. But, there are other scenarios where there's not a direct easy tie from a single mutation to an outcome. so, like in autism or diabetes, we're not sure what the genetic components are but we think that with AI machine learning, those things will start to identify patterns in genomic sequences that humans aren't finding with their typical approaches and so, we're really excited to see our genomic platforms built up to a point where they have sequences in them to do that sort of analysis and you need big compute, fast storage to do that kind of thing. >> How is it going to help the big compute, fast storage, this modern infrastructure, help whether its genomics or clinicians be able to sort through masses amounts of data to try to find those needles in the haystack 'cause I think the staff this morning that Charlie Jean and Carla mentioned was that half a percent of data in the world is analyzed. So, how would that under the hood infrastructure going to help facilitate your smart folks getting those needles in the haystack just to start really making big impacts? >> UCLA has an incredible faculty, like brilliant researchers, and sometimes what I've found since I've gotten there, the only ingredient that's missing is the platform where they can do some of this stuff. So, some of them are incredibly enterprising, they've built their own platforms for their own analysis. Others we work with they have a lot of data sets they don't have a place to put them where they can properly interrelate them and do, apply their algorithms at scale. So, we've run into people that are trying to do these massive analysis on a laptop or a little computer or whatever it just fails, right? Or it runs forever. So, giving them, providing a way to have the infrastructure that they can run these things is really the ingredient that we're trying to add and so, that's about storage and compute, et cetera. >> How do you see the role of the CIO evolving? We hear a lot of people on the Cube and these conferences talk about digital transformation and the digital CIO, how much of that is permeating your organization and what do you think it means to the CIO world going forward? >> I wish I knew the real answer to that question. I don't know, time will tell. But, I think that certainly we're trying to follow the trends that we see more broadly which is there's a job of keeping the lights on of operations. And you're not really, you shouldn't have a seat at any other table and so those things are quite excellent. >> Table stakes. >> Yeah. Right. Exactly, table stakes. Security, all that stuff. Once, you've got that, you know, my belief is you need to deeply understand the business and find your way into helping to solve problems for it and so, you know, our realm, a lot of that these days is how do we understand the student journey from prior to, from when they maybe want to apply all the way 'til when they go out and become a resident and then a physician. There's a ton of data that's gathered along that way. We got to ask a lot of questions we don't have easy answers to but, if we put the data together properly, we start to, right? On the research side, same sort of idea, right? Where the more we know about the particular clinical outcomes they're trying to achieve or even just basic science research that they're looking into, the better that we can better micro target a solution to them. Whether it's a on prem, private cloud, or public cloud, either one of those can be harnessed for really specific workloads and I think when we start to do that, we've enabled our faculty to do things that have been tougher for them to do before. Once, we understand the business in those ways I think we really start to have an impact at the strategic level, the organization. >> You've got this centralized services model that was a strategic initiative that you put in place. You've got the foundation there that's going to allow you to start opening up other opportunities. I'm curious, in the UCLA system, maybe the UC system, are there other organizations or schools that are looking at what you're doing as a model to maybe replicate across the system? >> I think there's I don't know about a model. I think there's certainly efforts among some to find, to centralize at least some services because of economies to scale or security or all the normal things. With the anticipated, and then anticipating that that could ultimately provide more value once the baseline stuff is out of the way. UC is vast and varied system so there's a lot of amazing things going on in different realms and we're I think, doing more than ever working together and trying to find common solutions to problems. So, we'll see whose model works out. >> Well, Ben. Thanks so much for stopping by the Cube and sharing the impact that your making at the UCLA School of Medicine, leveraging storage and all the different capabilities that that is generating. We thank you for your time. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are live at Pure Accelerate 2018 in San Francisco. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.