>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Chris Menard, he is the lead storage administrator at Brown University. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Chris. >> Thanks for having me. >> So in your role, you would do storage, backup recovery, and disaster recovery. I mean, I think our viewers, we have a sense of what you would do at a large Fortune 500, But what do you at an Ivy League University? What kinds of things are you working on? >> So from disaster recovery we're doing things to protect all of the data that the university has. So research data, academic data, business data. So we're making sure that if something were to happen in Providence itself, we would be covered and have access to our data, our applications. If our data center were to go away. >> So in a way your constituents are a lot larger because you're also thinking, is it student data as well? So student data, research data? >> Yes, so student data, research data, administrative data, faculty data. Any kind of data that gets generated by pretty much anybody that either works or attends the university. >> Chris, wonder if we step back for a second. We're here at Microsoft Ignite, I know that Microsoft has a strong connection with higher education. But have you been to this show before? What's the relationship between the university and Microsoft that you have interactions with? >> So this is my first time coming to Ignite with Brown. I've been to Ignite when it used to be called TechEd, so a long time ago. But we do have a pretty good relationship with Microsoft. Obviously, we have everything from Windows Operating Systems all the way up to cloud services with Azure. Something that we just kind of started delving into this year. So we're looking at running things like Remote app in the cloud. We have some of our disaster recovery data in the Azure cloud as well. And I'm sure they'll be more to come as we learn more about what we can put there and how that can help us. >> Yeah, Microsoft really sits at the center of this multi-cloud discussion. As you've said, they've got SaaS offerings. They've got public cloud. >> Yep. >> They're in your data center. How does Brown look at, kind of, cloud overall? And you said starting to look at some of the public cloud offerings. So maybe give us a little bit of what you can about this strategy today. >> Right, so, we are doing a lot with secondary backups, secondary data for our backups going to the cloud. So for disaster recovery, hopefully in the future we'll be able to use that data for test and dev or maybe moving workloads from one place to another place. We're looking at putting some actual workloads in Azure, in the cloud for bursting capabilities, things like that. >> Yeah, you look at data in a multi-cloud world, tell us, what are you looking for when you talk about how you manage your data in a multi-cloud world? Even we talk about, some people when they went to SaaS they were like, "Oh, I don't need to worry about things like "security and data protection." Well, those people might have had to learn faster or they'd be out of a job. So what do you look and how do you use? >> Right, so security is definitely one of the main concerns. So, I mean, we have a whole security team that that's all they do is look at these projects and look at what we're trying to do and say, "Wait a second, what's the security around it?" As far as the tools that we're using for security. >> Data protection. >> Data protection we're using Cohesity. We just started using them at the beginning of this year. We switched off, we were a long time Legacy backup infrastructure. So a lot of moving parts. We decided that we wanted to find something that was more streamlined and was looking to the future with the way that they did data protection and disaster recovery. >> And where do you use the Cohesity solutions? Is it in your data center, public cloud, which offerings? >> So we have a Cohesity Appliances in our data center. We protect all of our virtual machines and physical machines using Cohesity. We tier that off into Azure cloud as a secondary copy, so then we have flexibility on what we can do with that data now that it's been virtualized and sent off to the cloud. >> Great, and are you realizing any cost savings? I mean, I know it's still early yet, you've only recently gone to Cohesity. But what's the... >> We have realized a lot of cost savings. Probably about 50% reduction in costs, CapEx style costs. And we also have reduced some of our year-to-year maintenance with licensing. >> All right, maybe talk about the operational side of things too. How many people did you have managing these kind of environment before? What's it look like after? What's that change mean? >> We have the same amount of people still managing the same environment. The only difference is now we're not spending as much time. So we kind of manage it across different teams within our environment. So our systems teams will do recoveries of virtual machines or data, whereas my team will actually manage the backups and adding clients and troubleshooting and things like that. Our team probably saves 10 or 15 hours a week. And the other teams about the same, with not having to troubleshoot things that just weren't working in the old platform compared to the new platform. >> Yeah, it was actually one of the things in the keynote this morning Satya Nadella was talking about business productivity. You always say it's nice if I could shave off an hour here, five hours there. There's always fear in IT, it's like, "Oh, wait, "they're going to put me out of a job." But the reality is you've always got more projects to work on and more things to do. >> There's always something else for us to do, which we're finding there's plenty of work for everyone to do. So we don't have to spend that time doing things that we shouldn't have been doing. >> I'm curious about how you stay on the cutting edge. I mean, typically you think about academia in general as being a little slow to adopt the latest and greatest technologies. And yet, this is where the research gets done, so much of it at these top universities. So what's the balance in your experience, and how do you stay abreast of all the new gizmos? >> We're pretty lucky because we're more of the central IT for the university even though we do work with researchers in different departments. So we are always constantly out there looking for, how can we do what we're doing now better, more efficiently, maybe cheaper, maybe not? But we're constantly looking for, what's the best way we can deliver the service that all of our users need. And it's a pretty broad base of users. Like you said, from students to researchers to just regular admins. They're all very different workloads and different users. >> All right, so, Chris, as you've rolled out Cohesity and you're starting to adopt Azure, what learnings have you had? If you're sitting down with one of your peers, and you hear them said, "I'm looking at this." What was the experience? What can I do to make it a little faster, save the team some heartburn maybe? >> I would say the biggest thing is just to do your homework. Go out and look and see what are your pain points today. And talk to people like Cohesity and say, "Honestly, here's my pain points, what can "you do to help me?" Cohesity's sat with us from the very beginning and they were very open to, "We can help "you with this, this, and this. We can't do that, "but we can get it into the product down the road." And they've done with with a lot of things that we've asked for to help us with whatever our needs might have been. >> Yeah, anything particular that you're asking of Microsoft, Cohesity, or others in the ecosystem that would help you do your job better? >> Not at this exact moment. Since we started with Cohesity, we have put in some requests with them over the first couple of months. And the product has evolved, maybe not because of stuff that we only asked for. I mean, it could have been a whole hundred other customers that asked for the same thing. I'm not sure. But they're very quick to put those things into the system, and they roll out updates very, very quickly and keep it going. >> Yeah, so we talk about education might be slow to adopt things. You've got a storage group, storage is not known as the latest and greatest. How do you manage things like upgrades? I was standing in line waiting and joking, it's like, "We're in a Microsoft event, remember Patch Tuesdays?" Yeah, how do you look at the, kind of, cloud on-demand, always on the latest generation versus balancing to make sure that things are trusted, secured, and tested? >> You're exactly right. In the storage world you might only do an upgrade once or twice a year at most. With Microsoft you're doing them once a month, maybe. With Cohesity, if they tell me there's a new upgrade or a patch, I'm ready to install it on a moment's notice. It's non-disruptive and the support team they have is so very good and quick that even if something were to go wrong, I am very confident they would have it fixed in very short order. So the confidence level with doing upgrades is very high. >> In terms of one of the big buzz words we hear, at this conference as well as at other technology conferences is "digital transformation." What does that mean to Brown University? Or does it mean anything? >> Well, it does. Our CIO had put out in his last year that we were going to start working on digital transformation as one of our big projects. What that exactly means for like my group is just what we have to do to support whatever the other groups are going to do to support moving toward a digital transformation. So if that means buying some new storage, or adding more storage to what we have, or talking to them about what apps are being added and how can we back that up and how can we perform disaster recovery services for those? That's the kind of things that our group would be worried about. More so than, what's the actual digital transformation itself. So it is something that is on our plate, but it's not the actual transformation itself. >> Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a lot of fun talking to you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Rawlinson Rivera. He is the Chief Technology Officer, global field, at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Rawlinson. >> My pleasure, my pleasure. >> So, I want to hear from you what you're hearing from customers. This is obviously your first time at Microsoft Ignite. What are you hearing from them? What are they telling you? What are their challenges they're facing? Lay it on us. >> I mean the reception we've got here's been incredible. Everyone's kind of really looking into some of the things we're able to do with regards to disaster recovery, beyond some of the normal backup stuff that we're known for. But we got a chance to talk to a couple of executives, CIOs here where from different countries, different continents too where they've been actually very excited about some of the things that we can do, overcoming some of the challenges, in particular around disaster recovery and data mobility are some of the things we can actually do today very well. So, we're having, I've been having pretty good amount of conversations with respect to that and the reception's been incredible. >> So, we're talking about the recovery. What is a CIO, what keeps the CIO up at night in terms of that? What is he or she saying to you about that? >> For some time we've been talking about how we need to be able to leverage a public cloud and a cloud that kind of for use them as a form of disaster recovery, but it's always been a challenge to do that, moving data from one place to another from your private data center to a public data center and maintaining that sort of continuity and the ability to maintain business going after that happens. We're able to now produce a solution that can do that, where these guys can actually validated without having to actually have an actual distaster recovery to see if it really works. And when you have, when you can do that these sort of executives are like, okay I have a better way to sleep now. These are some of the things that I can now go to bed and safely know that if I have a failure, I have the solutions in place with enough of an ecosystem that allows me to come all the way across to my public cloud and kind of keep things going as it should be. >> Rawlinson, I think you bring up some really good points customers now have, they're living in a multi-cloud world, so they've got a lot of different tools out there. Making these choices aren't easy, it's like, well, they've got to choose to find their providers, they've got their existing data center, they're doing stuff as asked. We've seen Cohesity at a lot of these shows now and especially Microsoft plays across this broad spectrum so maybe give us a little bit more how important we know data is the lifeblood of companies, but how are things different from them today than where they might have been a couple of years ago to be able to take advantage of these new things? >> Well, Stu we've been at this for several years, sort of several different sort of companies since we've been around, but,when you think about the fact that there's so many different solutions, different silos, different. Those are probably the most, one of the biggest challenges, the biggest problems that exist in that world, when we have that many components in play, there's that much more risk to introduce into that sort of solution. What we're able to do now is basically consolidating, collapsing all these different silos and delivering a solution that can actually be natively integrated with the cloud, providing mobility, the necessary replication capabilities in order to move the data from one place to another. It eliminates sort of the risk, give you a risk adverse type of approach for DR, which is something that everyone needs in this particular case. When you are having a disaster recovery, risk is not something else you need to worry about when you want to come back up from a failure in that particular case and that's one of the things that we actually introduce and provide, were the particular solutions. >> Yeah, it's a conversation we've been having with Microsoft all week. Trust, Microsoft's a trusted brand out there. >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> We've had them forever. Maybe give us a little insight on what you hear from the Microsoft customers, you and I, we've, certain other shows we're much more familiar with, this has a little bit of a different vibe than-- >> Absolutely. >> Some other shows. Maybe, what are you hearing? >> So here, obviously, being able to work within the Microsoft ecosystem, being able to utilize and provide a right solution for the right application of the use, sequel shared point of exchange, not only about protecting their information, their data, but now how can I move it from on-prem to my actual Azure cloud. Being able to have those capabilities seamlessly without having to worry about anything else is something that customers really worry about now. How can we actually take your on-prem data, regardless of what infrastructure, virtual infrastructure resides on and put it on my private or my public Azure cloud. By being able to do that successfully without ruining and changing the behavior and the security of these applications is key and that's some of the things we can actually do very well seamlessly without having to do any afterthought, not having to introduce multiple components to do that and keeping everything simple and safe, which is actually what every customer wants. >> As CTO, global field, your role is really about defining and communicating Cohesity's vision and strategy. Two questions, number one, has Microsoft done that effectively at Ignite for its own products and strategy? And number two, when it is the Cohesity Ignite conference or you'll have some other za-za name after it, what do you want participants and attendees to come away with? >> What we look for is basically I think Microsoft has done a very good job with us here. We've also been able to sort of come into their show for the first time and sort of showcase our capabilities and the reception has been incredible, right? I think our session here was packed. People were just coming around the booth looking at some of our capabilities. For in the future, whenever we come up with, when Mohit decides to have the Mohit show somewhere else, right? I think it will be, it should be similar. It should be about an ecosystem, our customers, all of the folks want to come and see how we can, how we grow. We are in the midst of developing and growing our own ecosystem and some of the things we're doing and bringing forward and you'll see that come about, right? That's the same sort of a strategy we want to kind of maintain and it'll be a great thing for everyone to see and sort of come and communicate and experience and not just our own stuff, right? Because it's not about us all the time. We provide a specific solution and specific capabilities, but when we turn into an ecosystem where everyone comes in and plays into it and we're having a very tight partnership with Microsoft, but we want to grow that and eventually get to more things than we actually do today. >> Yeah you bring up an interesting point, we know how important ecosystems are especially, it's a software world. I can't do it all myself even though, we, it's interesting we had one Microsoft guest on and he talked about for certain ad solutions, they're going to vertically integrate all the way down to that end device, Microsoft will do end to end, but then you have things like the open-data initiative. They know when you talk about data, of course Cohesity heavily involved in data needs to go a lot of places. The open-data initiative, when you get companies like Adobe and SAP and Microsoft standing up and saying I want to be able to take that data and leverage it across these various solutions. Curious, do you have any feedback on that initiative, that ecosystem, and how does Cohesity look at making sure that you're open and work across all the solutions that your customers need? >> Look, we know very well that it's not our world and everybody is, wants to live in it, right? So the whole point is about ecosystem is very important, I can tell you that within our engineered organization, Mohit himself we're looking into how do we provide the ability for our platform to be consumable, not just by us, but by everyone within our ecosystem within in the industry. If there's a particular application that you as a customer use, you may want to use it on our platform to leverage our capabilities for your information. So these kind of initiatives are already in play to be announced soon. So we, for us, it's what we need to do, right? It's actually, given the customer, not only are the capabilities of our platform, but choice, 'cause we're always not going to be able to deliver and do some of the things that other applications are dedicated to do more effectively. We might be able to do it to a certain degree, but we want to give the customers the ultimate experience, the ultimate accessibility, to their data, to their information, which is, at the end of the day, it is what we say today, it's the new oil, right? Which is, that needs to be actually properly mind leveraged and protected and utilized and accessed. Without it, you'll be in some sort of a limited sort of approach within your business. >> Sutton Nudella was up on the main stage talking about his company's culture and about the idea of being a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. How would you describe Cohesity's culture? >> Well I got to tell you, it's tough. Because we have a series of geniuses working in this company and we're small, but they guy at the helm is obviously the brainiac, I would say. But our culture is to basically, we're very receptive, we believe in really staying humble and letting everyone sort of have a place to play. Open minded as always. A lot of things that happened at Cohesity happened in a short period of time because the way in which we listen to customers, the way in which we listen to the actual engineers themselves, and we're very customer-focused. A customer could come in with the right amount, with the right demand, in the right amount of time, in the right place, and we will basically deliver that specifically for them very quickly. And that sort of culture, it's important not only for us, for the business, but also for within the teams within themselves because everyone seems they're collaborative, everyone seems to be part of something that's going on and they can contribute to the, to what we're doing, which is changing some of the things that are actually within the data center, we're really pushing the needle forward and changing some of the things there. >> How do you maintain the culture? Because you are growing so fast, you are hiring so many new people. How do you make sure everyone is on the same page and pulling together? >> I got to tell you, the people that we bring in, it's not about the skills, right? Skills is one thing and skills is many many and everyone has skills, everyone has something to offer, but one of the things that we look at when we're screening folks to work at Cohesity, is how do they going to work? How do they behave? What are their, you know, what are their passions? That's just as important as the skills that they're bringing. Because one of the things that they'll do is that they may not know the technology and the things we're working on specifically there, but they're willing to learn and when it's collaborative with the team, and kind of move that on and get better and better as we go, that's very very important to us. >> Alright, Rawlinson, we talk about the speed of things changing. Let's look out. We're back talking with Cohesity, Microsoft Ignite 2019. What are we talking about with Cohesity? >> Well, it will be much more than what we so far see now, right? So, obviously we have, we came into the industry with this particular process or approach of data protection. Obviously, it's beyond that. So some of the things that I see us in how the future will be is that secondary storage, secondary data and applications, to be honest, it will be much more interesting and a lot better, in a sense, than the traditional storage function it is. Storage is about feats and speeds, I want performance, this and that, but a part that we play is what to do with your information, where to put it, where to place it, where to access it, process, compliance, who can get to this point. We're looking at information in a way that, we're calling it private, public clouds, they would be, probably, a primary and a secondary private, public cloud, for different purposes, being able to not only provide access to information, but also providing compliance, reporting, out of, I mean, instantaneously. We can no longer manage information or data in the speed that it's growing from a human perspective. There's just no way we can keep track of that. The result of that is a lot of risks, data leakage, all the problems that you see in the world, we are out to actually fix that, overcome that, right? When we can provide a solution where things are now seamlessly happening within the environment, you don't have to worry about all these different things. Microsoft plays a big part of that. Microsoft Office 365, all the things, all of the information that's stored and honed within the Microsoft ecosystem and their applications, we are specifically looking to make sure that is as seamless as possible so that now we're dealing with access my information, process information, get information where I need to go, without humans probably having to touch it. The more human touches we have, the more the risk. We want to make things that are more automated, accessible, utilize some of this AI machine learning, so that some of these things that actually happen much more effectively with less risk. >> I want to hear about customers. We've actually talked with a lot of Cohesity customers this week. We've had Brown University on, we have HKS later today, Lynn Lucas mentioned some examples of at Penn and at Burke. What else, even if you don't name names, I want to hear about the kinds of, the kinds of results you're hearing and the kind of ROI that customers are getting from Cohesity products and services. >> I mean, I've talked to so many in different verticals, whether it be, finance, medical, even, there's so many of them and everyone is really excited about the fact that when it comes to RI, one of the things that we're, like, out of the box, when everyone thinks of Cohesity, they look at what we can do, it's just, from an operations perspective, what we can reduce enough in that action. Not only from a software, hardware perspective what they're doing, but when you think about operations, we simplify operations so that when it comes to operations and efficiencies, we want to mitigate the risk in that process and they see it immediately, which by the way, whenever you introduce any new solution to any infrastructure, to any business, the biggest challenge is not the technology, it is how am I going to take that into my operating procedures and consume it as one? Because, listen, we can double click and we'll have people do that for days without a problem, but how do we do that and come into your systems effectively so that you can consume me, the smaller piece, with the larger part of the infrastructure, which is not the main point yet. We're able to do that very effectively. We come in and we complement the rest of the infrastructure that you have and we come into your consumption model. It's not about my interface, it's not about my server's catalog, we come into your service catalog. Whenever you talk to these guys and you see that, whenever I bring that up front, it not only I talk to them, I show it to them, they're like that's what I'm looking for. And showing it to folks, it's a lot different than when you show a logical diagram and tell them, oh this is what we can do, no, no, no. This is what we can do, this is your world, when we're in in your operating procedures. >> Yeah, you bring up a definitely something we agree and talk about on theCUBE a lot, which is the technology piece oftentimes is the easy part and we know technology's hard, but it's how do I change that mindset and the pace of changes so fast something I we've talked about for a number of years and I have a slightly different take on it now is, like, well, geez, how can I keep up? And the answer for me and I'd love your viewpoint on, is like, look, nobody can keep up on everything. What you need to have is you have to have trusted partners, your channel partners are the ones that are going to say, oh hey, I understand in your environment, here are some of the things that can help you because nobody, even I've had the chance to interview some of the smartest people in our industry and they're like, I can't keep up with the pace of innovation inside, so what do you hear from customers as to how they keep up, how they learn about new technologies. Are they more willing to try new vendors and new ways of doing things? Or are they just going to incrementally, wither themselves away to death? >> It is tough. I mean our industry changes, it is sort of the results of our gain, right? So how do we make and help our customers evolve and let them sort of look at what they can keep, try and keep up with. There are some key points here and, actually, we play in a world that our specific plays around the data, right? So when it comes to that, no one wants to put their data at risk, no one wants to expose a new tool to sort of, maybe, expose some sort of a leakage or a problem. Our ecosystem, our partnerships, are what with trusted partners within the industry, Microsoft think people of this kind of caliber, where there's trusted, there's trusted advisors, there's several companies already, we come in and we compliment each other, but the point is that we're, we want to deliver something that is not going to expose anyone at risk, but it gives them the opportunity to sort of adapt the portion that they need. One example of that is that we have the ability today when it comes to application portability that I haven't seen before. We've seen a lot of things, for example, in the industry and a lot of solutions for that. Today, we have a very simplistic solution that allows anyone to take their workloads or their application from on-prem to Microsoft Azure seamlessly. One single task, one place. And those are the type of solutions that you would want and become trusted because they're not going to change anything, I can rely on this thing working and coming into a Microsoft Azure cloud and consume it any way I want to do it. >> Rawlinson Rivera, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> It was a pleasure having you here. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sai Mukundan. He is the Director of Product Management, Cloud Solutions at Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks, Rebecca, thanks. So nice to have you guys here at the Cohesity booth. >> And thank you for hosting us, I should say, yes. >> Absolutely, it's been wonderful. >> So we already had you colleague Lynn Lucas on this morning, she was terrific. And she gave us a high level vision of the news. Why don't you break it down for us. Explain to our viewers exactly what Cohesity was announcing here at Ignite. >> Sure. So, broadly speaking, we announced three things this morning. The first one, we've seen a lot of customers, Optic Office 365, in fact, that's one of the first or initial use cases of how they adopt Microsoft's solutions more off as a service. So the ability to now backup and recover old 365 has come up quite a bit in our customer conversations. So we announced a solution that will be available shortly, so customers can leverage the same Cohesity platform that we had up until now to also backup and recover old 365. So that was number one. Number two was around Azure Databox. So, this is a relatively new offering from Azure. It was up until now, it was in preview, and now it's going GA. So the fact that we can now integrate with Azure Databox as a means for customers to move data from on-premise to Azure, a great initial seeding for long term retention. And the fact that we integrate seamlessly with that, that was the second piece of the news. And then the third one is really around a hybrid Cloud message in the margin. Really, hybrid, I know-- Stu, you like to refer to it more as it's an operational model. It's not about what the Cloud is but it's more of an operation model. And in that model, customers are always looking to leverage it for disaster recovery purposes. And their ability to fade over to Azure and then bring it back on-premise, fade back, that capability is the third underpinning of the announcement this morning. >> And Sai, one of the challenges that we have is, if we look at Cloud and say it's an operating model. Well, the challenge we have is it really is a multi-cloud world. If you look especially here in the Microsoft ecosystem, absolutely, start with Office 365. Microsoft pushed a lot of customers to the SAS model. I have my data center, I'm probably modernizing things there, and then I have the public cloud. Well, when I look at my data, I want to be able to manage and interact and leverage my data no matter where it lives. So, that's where-- I said Microsoft lives in all those places, and it sounds like your integrations are going to help customers span and get their arms around their data and leverage their data no matter where it lives. >> Yeah, I particularly like the use of the word span, because as you may know, we call our underlying distributor file system the spanifest. (laughing) Right? So the idea is that it spans on-premise Cloud, and your point, multi-cloud as well. So the ability to use the same platform, and that's really what drives customers today. When you look at what are the three aspects of our solution that they like, I would say one is the scale ability. The fact that they can start small and then scale as their environment grows, that's important. The second is around, everything plays around automation, API driven, API first architecture, right. And the fact that we are policy based, API driven really really resonates with them. And the third one is the simplicity and ease of management. I mean, you can build all these solutions, but at the end of the day, it has to be simple for customers to consume. And that's something that really resonates with prospects, partners, and customers we talk to. >> Sai, wondering on the Azure Databox, if you could help unpack that a little. We have some Microsoft guests on, Jeffery Snover walked us through. There's a couple of different versions of them. Some are for data movement, some of them there will be really kind of edge, compute, and AI capabilities there. Which ones do Cohesity use, what do you see is the use cases that you'll be playing in? >> Sure, so before I go into the solution and the use case. I think one of the key aspects of why that announcement is important for us, is it also shows the kind of engagement and close technology partnership that we have established with Microsoft, Azure, right. The fact that we are one of their launch partners, both during the preview and now in the GA timeframe. It's important for both customers and partners, because that gives them a good, sort of, understanding that we are there in establishing thought leadership. We are there in working closely with Microsoft in this case, along with other technology partners out there. Just coming back to the solution itself, there are a couple of flavors of Databox. So the one that we have done extensive integration with is Databox. There's another version offered, which is called the Databox Edge, which also has Compute in it. But the idea here, the use case is really around when customers are looking at Cohesity, there is backup and recovery that they can do from on-premise. But Azure and Azure Blob Storage in particular becomes a seamless extension for long term retention. Now, there are a few customers, and I can relate to several who asked, "Hey, I have a large enough "data set that needs to be seeded initially." And obviously the network becomes a bottle neck in that case. So with Databox, the ability to now transfer the data into your on-prem, like you get the Databox shipped to your on-premise, get it loaded, true Cohesity. Seamlessly get it hydrated in our Azure account, and from that point on we only send the changes or the incremental data. So that is really appealing to both customers, as well as partners who are really engaged in these migration projects in some cases. >> I'm really interesting what you're talking about with the thought leadership and your approach to partnerships, because Microsoft selecting Cohesity as a partner, it's a real stamp of approval for Cohesity, a real validation that this company's for real. How do you then think about who you will partner with? Particularly if the company is, say, only five years old or pretty new to the space or maybe not as well known. >> I think one of the things that Mohit Aron, and he's a pioneer in the spirit systems and is the founder of Cohesity. One of the things that he established, right from the get go is the ability for the product to scale, scale on-premise, but also that the Cloud has to be very seamless. It's a natural extension of what the architecture is intended to do or achieve. And so that kind of made it easier for us on the product team to figure out who is it that we need to partner with. Azure is obviously a leader in that space, particularly over the last few years. I want to go back to something that was mentioned in the keynote yesterday. It's not a know it all, but it's a learn it all, right. The learning that we have had as we have grown Cohesity and the product has grown and as we acquired customers and talked to prospects is they want to work with the likes of Microsoft Azure, leverage the infrastructure that they have to offer. So we started there. We said if customers are asking for it, we do it and we learn along with them on why and what the use cases are. And it started with, going back to my earlier comment, long term retention. And now, as an extension to that, with the hybrid cloud where not only storage, but leveraging disks, leveraging Azure Compute, that's now become an extension of what we started off with. And so we have Azure DataPlatform Cloud Edition, which is Cohesity running on Azure. So I would say how we made the decision in this case, A. the product and the foundation really set that for us, but B., more importantly, the customers really asking for it and asking for that integration made it easier for us to determine that, hey we absolutely need to partner with the cloud renders. >> Sai, I'd like to build off of that, the customers and what they're asking for. This is a very large ecosystem here. To be honest, we know that Azure, Microsoft is a big player in Cloud, when I look at this show, Azure's a piece of the overall discussion. So, I was a little surprised. Not that we're hearing more about Azure here, but, it's because if you look at just order magnitude, how many customers Microsoft has on Windows and Office, obviously that's going to dwarf customer adopts in general. Where are your customers when the talk about Cloud adoption, your customers? Do you find them more in a Windows customers in their own data center versus Azure? What are your customers doing and adoption of Cohesity Cloud products in general? >> So if you look at the typical on ramp of customers, more often than not, at least I would say over the last couple of years, our customers have typically started with the on-premise. Because their immediate pain point was the platform can do a lot of things. Customers are always looking to also solve that immediate pain point while looking into the future. So the immediate pain point was really around how do I make my backup and data protection systems, first of all, simple, efficient, and less fragmentation. And while I'm doing that, how can I then potentially invest in the platform that is capable of doing more. And that's something that Cohesity offered in the on-premise world. And as a natural extension to that, as both from the bottoms up, as storage admins and backup admins started looking at leveraging Cloud or Azure in particular for as an extension of their storage infrastructure, as well as from the top down. You know, more of like the business decision makers and the CIOs driving that mandate of, hey, I want you to think about Cloud first and have that mindset. I think it really appealed to them. Because now they could start leveraging Azure Blob, again, back to that long term retention, legal hold, compliance standpoint. And then building off of that, building off of that to do test dev. We have a great feature, it's called Cloud Spend. The ability to take some of the on-premise infrastructure. And your earlier questions too, we have seen customers both VMware, Windows Hyper-v environments. Believe it or not, some customers still have physical systems. And the fact that Cohesity can take care of all that in the on-prem world, while seamlessly helping them adopt Cloud is really the kind of customers that we have seen in this journey that we have taken along with our customers and partners. >> Well this is theCUBE's first time at Ignite. I know you're relatively new to Ignite. >> I'm even surprised about that. I would think you guys would have made a number of appearances, but I'm glad it's the first time and it's at the Cohesity booth, so wonderful. >> We're so excited, but what are some of the things you're going to take back with you from this conference? >> I think for me, this conference, as has any other such conference in particular, it's really the excitement. You go back and you reflect on the last three, four days you spend here, and it's about all the great conversations that we have had with customers, prospects, and partners. Secondly, we heard a session earlier this morning, a Cohesity session, we had Brown University join us. And then there's going to be another one tomorrow. We're going to have UPenn and HKS. We are working on your alma mater Cornell, by the way, Stu. So we'll get them soon. >> Excellent, excellent. Go Big Red. >> So the fact that we have all these sessions and some really great attendance. And attendance from folks who are yet to embrace the Cohesity solutions. So it's great for us to get our message out. >> Getting the word out. >> Get our word out there. And I would say the last thing for us is also showcasing to Microsoft here in particular, the fact that we have this big presence here and the excitement it's having is a great message to the Microsoft executives and the leadership team that we work with as well to show more love, we already have enough that we get attention from them. But this is more of a validation for them to say there's more that we should be doing and could be doing with Cohesity. So I think those are probably the three things I'll walk away with and build on what we learned from Ignite here. >> Excellent, well thank you so much, Sai, for coming on the show. It was great having you here. >> Thanks, likewise. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more at theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite in just a little bit. (techno music)

(energetic music) >> Live from Orlando Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Lynn Lucas. She is the CMO of Cohesity. Thanks so much for coming on the program, Lynn. >> Oh, just so excited to be here with you guys and host you in the Cohesity booth for the first time at Microsoft Ignite. >> It's been a lot of fun. There's a lot of buzz around here, and it's fun to be right, to be your neighbor. Exactly. >> Great. >> So today, there's been a lot of news, some new exciting announcements of integrations with Microsoft. I wonder if you can walk our viewers a little bit through what Cohesity announced today. >> Absolutely. So, we have been partners with Microsoft for some time, and today, we announced extensions to our capabilities with Microsoft Azure and Office 365. So Cohesity now extends data protection and backup for Office 365, including granular recovery of mailboxes and granular search for discovery purposes. We also have extended our integration with the Azure data box, and we also are increasing our DR capabilities for our customers with Azure so we now have fail back from the Azure Cloud for disaster recovery purposes. So, just continuing to see tremendous growth, hundreds of Microsoft customers with Cohesity, and these new capabilities are going to expand the possibilities for them. >> Lynn, it's an interesting conversation these days 'cause, you know, in our research, and we've talked about this, data's at the center of everything, and the challenge for customers is data's everywhere. You look here at the Microsoft show, well, I've got all my traditional stuff, I've got my SaaS stuff, my PubliCloud stuff, now Edge with the data box things there. Microsoft plays across there, and it sounds like Cohesity is playing in all of these areas, too. >> Absolutely, and I thought, you know, Sacha did such a good job in the keynote yesterday of really laying out the imperative for digital transformation, data being at the heart of it, but also laying out one of the key challenges which he pointed out, which is the data silos. And, I think Cohesity is right smack in the center of that conversation because we've always been about consolidating secondary data silos. And, you know, our partnership with Microsoft, really, I think, reinforces what they've been talking about, which is also a hybrid strategy that the bulk of customers that we talk to see that their data is going to be on premise, it's going to be in the cloud, and increasingly, it's goinna at the Edge, and we span all of those locations to create this one operating environment so that things like the new open data initiative, I think, will be much easier for customers because they won't be wondering, well, is my data all in one place to be operated on? >> So, talk about the problem of the data silos, because, as you said, it's one of the biggest challenges that companies face today. They are data rich and yet, this data's here and this data's here. Can you describe a little bit about what kind of problems this is for companies, and why this matters? >> So, I think it's just something folks are starting to really get a handle on. As I talked to individual folks here at the show, you'd be surprised at how many aren't even really sure, maybe, how many islands they have, you know, so, even mapping where is all my data, I think, is a capability that many organizations are still getting their arms around. And the challenge, of course, is that in today's world, it's very expensive to move large data sets, and so you want to bring compute to the data, which is what a hyper-convergence in Cohesity is about. And, when you look at the imperatives at the board level, the CEO level, they increasingly see that data becomes really the true competitive advantage for most organizations, and yet, if they can't operate or bring compute to that data and do something with it, they're really at a handicap. We call, you know, some of the newer companies are kind of data-centric or data natives, the Air BNB's, the, maybe, Netflixes of the world, not everyone aspires to be them. As well, not everyone has the resources that those companies may have had or just stay short period of time. Most organizations have the benefit of years of data. We want to level the playing field and allow them to become competitive with their data by providing that single foundation. >> Yeah, Lynn, it's a big show here. They said thirty thousand people and a really diverse ecosystem. What really surprised me is the spectrum of customers that you have here. I mean, we know Microsoft has a long history in higher education. We spoke to one of your customers, Brown University, and of course, long history they have with Microsoft. What are some of the things that you're hearing from customers, maybe, what's different at this show than some of the other, cloud and kind of younger shows that we might go to. This show's been around about almost thirty years now, so. >> Yeah, you know, isn't it, you know, I hate to give our ages but, I think we've been doing this for a while now, right? And Microsoft has been part of the IT ecosystem in a major way, and it's great to see the vibrancy here and how they're talking about AI and ML and moving forward with it. You know, what strikes me here is that a lot of the organizations here are now really understanding the pragmatism of having a hybrid strategy of what makes sense in the cloud as well as what may continue to be on prem for them. I think we complement that well. I'm really excited, too, about the idea that we are going to be using machine learning to be doing a lot more that humans simply can't keep up with in terms of the data growth and then doing something productive with that. And I think that's a conversation that we're just tapping the surface of here at this show. >> Yeah, you've said something that really resonated with me. You know, we have people that have been in the industry a while and, I look at you, your founder, Mohit, and this isn't his first rodeo. He'd been looking at data back from a couple of generations of solutions, and people are very excited. Machine learning, as you said, we used to talk about automation and intelligence around this environment. Now, I lived in the storage industry for quite a while, and we've talked about it but it feels more real when I talk to the architects and the people building this stuff. They are just so excited about what we will be able to do today that we talked about a decade or so ago but now really can make reality for customers. >> No, absolutely, and I think, you know, we have our own investment in that. Helios, which we announced just last month, you know, provides that machine learning capability because what we hear from our customers is what they love is the ability to have simplicity because, let's face it, IT environments continue to grow in complexity. They're looking for ways to subtract that complexity so they can apply their talents to solving the primary mission, as I call it, of their organization, whether that be public sector or private sector, adoing that in a simpler way. You know, look, one of the great stories that one of our customers is talking about here is how Cohesity helped him with a standard thing that most IT organizations have, which is, we're going to do a power shut down and we've got to perform a DR failover, and this particular organization, University of Pennsylvania Annenberg, had a set of twelve websites which, the professors and the students rely on, and it was going to take them literally almost a month to try to move them, and they didn't have that kind of time, and with Cohesity, with our DR capabilities, he was able to do that literally with a few clicks, kept the community of professors and students happy, and didn't spend, more importantly, twenty days trying to rebuild websites for a standard IT event, right? That's the kind of real life story in terms of what IT gets back that they can invest in other more important focus areas for their business. >> Well, for their business and also, just for their lives giving people their time back, their weekends back, their time at night >> Weekends and nights, right? >> With their families, yeah. >> We all need that. >> Satya Nadella is such a proponent of an improving workplace productivity, even five percent, he says, can make this big difference. Can you talk a little bit about how you view that workplace productivity at Cohesity and your approach to giving people either time to concentrate on more value for their companies or just their lives? >> So, again, a super story that we have from another customer that is here at Microsoft, and is an Azure customer, and a Cohesity customer. HKS, one of the world's most respected architectural firms, designed AT&T Stadium, there's a new major pediatric hospital going in in Dubai. They operate in ninety-four countries with remote designers and architects, and because of their inefficient backup processes and archive processes, they literally were having their associates have to work weekends as well as losing time on their projects, and time is money, and they, you know, in some cases, are penalized if they don't make certain dates. And so, I think, these are really pragmatic examples. On average here, pulling some of the folks here, I've heard that they can get a day a week back, sometimes for their administrator who now doesn't have to do repetitive manual tasks anymore. >> One of the things we always love digging into is, you talk about people's jobs and some of the new careers that are happening. We talked to one guest earlier this week. He said, if you're a customer and you learn Azure as what you're doing, like, you're resume is gold. We've talked to, and the really early Edge, like site reliability engineering, he said, don't put SRE on your resume or every recruiter will be calling you up and you won't even be able to answer your phone. Cohesity, you're doing a bit of hiring also. Maybe you could talk about- >> We are! >> What are you seeing from customers and what are you looking for internally? >> We have tremendous good fortune, we grew three hundred percent in revenues year over year, we're hiring in our RTP offices, in our San Jose, in India, around the globe. You know, we look for the best and the brightest, a lot of engineering talent, marketing talent as well, really, across the board but, you know, I think to the point you just made for the IT folks that are here, looking forward as to how you are going to help your business with your data infrastructure or data flows throughout their organization is, to me, where some of the career movement is happening when you hear the talk about how important it is to so many aspects of the business. >> And what are the sort of challenges that you're having with hiring, or are you? I mean, you're a red hot company, but, are you finding it difficult to find the kind of skills, the kind of talent that you want? I mean, what is, what's the candidate pool like? >> You know, so, I think what's really interesting, we are red hot, we have a lot of applicants so, I'd say, in general, no, we're very blessed that way. I think, though, more businesses, including ours, are finding it's difficult to get, say, those data scientists, right? Some of these also front end or back end developers, you know, it's not just the technical companies that are recruiting for that anymore. It's not just the Cohesitys and the Microsofts that are looking for that talent, but it's now also the Netflixes or, you know, the eBays, et cetera, right? They are all looking for the type of talent that we are and so, in general, I think that this bodes well for young people or folks really anywhere in their career watching about, thinking about, where the talent needs are, and there's a lot of activity and interest in people with those kinds of skills. >> You know, let me just follow up on that. So, Cohesity is a Silicon Valley-based company but, as you mentioned, you've got an RTP location. We've seen quite a lot of Silicon Valley-based companies that are starting to do a lot more hiring outside 'cause it's, I'm going to be honest, really expensive to live in the valley these days. So, any commentary on that dynamic? >> Well, you know, I think you're in Boston, not the lowest cost market either in the country. >> True, it's true! >> Yeah, you know, I think with a lot of the technology that's out there, you know, people don't have to be co-located, and we certainly also look to develop and invest in other communities around the globe, so we're not looking solely in San Jose but also in RTP, we've got headquarters in Europe as well as, of course, in India. So we look for talent everywhere, and, my own personal team, you know, I have folks basically around the US as well as across parts of the globe because talent, in many cases, is what matters and where you are physically, you know, some of the great technology that's out there can help break down those barriers of time and distance. >> Finally, this conference, it's thirty thousand people from five thousand different companies around the world. What is going to be, I mean, we're only on day two, but, what's been your big take-away so far? What's the vibe you're getting here at Ignite? >> You know, the vibe has been one of energy, of excitement. I've talked to a lot of folks from around the globe. I've been actually, pretty amazed at some of the people from different countries around the globe that are here, which is fantastic to see that draw in, and I feel like there's a general sense of excitement that technology and what Microsoft's doing can help solve some of the bigger challenges that are here, in the world, and for their own businesses, and we really look forward to Cohesity helping them lay that great data infrastructure foundation, consolidate their silos and help them build a foundation for, you know, doing more with their data. >> Great. Lynn Lucas, thank you so much for coming on theCube. It was great, great talking to you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite and theCube's live coverage coming up in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Man: Live from Washington DC it's the Cube. Covering .conf2017, brought to you by splunk. >> Welcome back to Washington DC, Nations capital. Here for dotconf2017 as the Cube continues our coverage. The flagship broadcast of silicon idol tv. Along with Dave Alonte, I am John Walls. Glad to have you with us after we've had a little lunch break. Feeling good? >> Feel great, good conversation with customers, dug into the pricing model, got some good information. >> What did you learn at lunch? >> Well talk about it at the end of the day. >> Alright, good, look forward to it. Let's talk healthcare right now. Derek Merck is with us right now. He is the director of computer vision and imaging analytics at the Rhode Island Hospital. Which is the teaching hospital for Brown University. Derek thanks for joining us here on the Cube. Good to see ya. >> Absolutely, very excited to be here. >> So, well and as are we to have you. Director of computer vision and image analytics, so let's talk about that. What falls under your portfolio, and tell us where does Splunk come into that picture? >> It's been an interesting journey, Rhode Island hospital is a huge clinical service. Takes really good care of the people of Rhode Island. I'm in diagnostic imaging, so I work with all the CT scans, the MR's, radiography, ultrasonography, and what I try to do is automate the data that is coming off all of these machines as much as possible. So, you know typically the patient will come in, they'll get imaged for some reason, the physician will take a look at that image and make a diagnosis, and then that image goes into an archive. It may be used again later if the patient comes back but other than that it is not really used at all. With these sort of emergence of computer vision access to training images, sets of data, has become really critical. Diagnostic imaging has become really interested in taking better account of what imaging they have so that they can try to answer questions like what's alike about these images. What is different about these images, and automate diagnosis. What's similar about all the images of patients who have cancer, versus patients who don't have cancer. Which is basically what a radiologist job is, is to go and look at this patients image and figure out does this patient have cancer or not. SO that is the way you would teach a computer how to do it in an automated fashion. SO I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how do you keep, how do you take, keep better track of what is available and be able to ask these sort of population based questions about what we have in our portfolio of data, our data portfolio. I spent a lot of time writing systems by hand in python, or other kinds of scripting tools. I spent a lot of time trying to interface with the hospital informatics systems, the electronic medical record. The electronic medical record again really meant for taking care of patients it is not meant for population analytics. We ended up basically building our own health care analytic system just to keep track of what we had. What were the doctors saying about different cases. Show me all the cases where the doctors think that some particular thing happened. And be able to ask these questions in real time, generate huge data sets, anonymize them, run them through computer vision algorithms, train classifiers. Diagnostic imaging is really excited about this kind of technology. There has been a lot of interesting side projects as well. One of the most, one of the things that administration is the most interested is because of these kinds of systems we are keeping a lot better track of radiation exposure, per image, so the CT scanners will tell you how much radiation was used for an individual study. But again our analytic systems historically you have no way of saying what's the average? What's high, what's low? Its months of latency, six months of latency between when you run a scan and when American College of Radiology comes back and says some of your scans were a little high in radiation exposure. Whereas now because we keep track of all this data we have this real time dashboards and that is the kind of thing we use Splunk for. WE keep track of all the data we are collecting and then we create these dashboards and give them to people who haven't had access to this kind of analytics before. For looking at utilization, optimizing work flow, things like that. >> I am just kind of curious when you mention like x-rays and maybe Dave you know more about this than I do. But it seems like it is kind of a standard practice you have a certain amount of exposure for a certain amount of test, and that data I don't know how but it sounds like it is more critical to have that kind of data than someone a layman might think. I was curious of the analytics of that. What are you using to determine there in terms of that exposure? >> There's always a trade off with radiation based imaging. There is a lot of non radiation based imaging. Like you may have heard of magnetic resonance imaging, or MR. Those are thought to be perfectly safe. You can get MR's all day long. If fact they do give MR's to people all day long for research purposes sometimes. >> You climb in the tube, I don't want to climb in the tube. >> You get a little claustrophobic >> They are expensive >> That is the thing, we don't have very many of them. They are very slow but they're safe. Ultrasounds very safe, we give ultrasounds to pregnant women all the time very safe, but they don't give you very quality images back. They give you a very small field of view and things are wiggling around. A CT scan is super fast and it gives a physician all the information they need in a snap shot. CT scanners are so fast now they can freeze your beating heart. They can make a revolution around your body of thickness so they can capture your heart while it is in motion. You know like with anything if you have a camera and you take a picture of someone running across the screen you don't see the person you just see this sort of blur, right? Now with modern fast aperture cameras you can take a picture of nutrinos and things that are impossibly fast. I don't know that that's actually true. You might wand to edit that out. (laughing) >> But conceptually >> A CT scan is the same sort of thing. Your heart is beat all the time, your lungs are moving all the time. Your bowls are moving all the time. Your blood is coursing through your veins all the time. It is so fast it can freeze it and give you this volumetric data back. They use that for all kinds of different things. They're not able to do with other kinds of imaging modalities The downside is that they're potentially somewhat dangerous, right? People have known since the 1890's when x-rays were first discovered by Wilhome Rankin that if you put somebody under an x-ray beam for too long, your hair will fall out, you'll get skin burns, all kinds of things that these early pioneers of x-ray did to themselves without realizing it. Documenting all of these problems that can happen, and a CT can uses ionizing radiation if you get too many CT scans you'll get skin reactions, or other kinds of things. It is really important to keep track of the risk to benefit ratio there. People give you a CT scan if you fall down and you hurt your head. They give you a CT scan cause they're worried that you are going to die if you don't get the CT scan. Along with that is this idea of how do you track how many CT scans an individual patient gets in a year. Right now the hospital has a hard time keeping track if somebody comes into the emergency room of automatically identifying oh this patients already had six CT's should we put them in line for a MR instead of another CT. Again these are the kinds of things that we are able to get at through using, through better management of our data and organization of our data. >> You mentioned that you're doing more of this real time analysis, Splunk is obviously a tool that helps do that. Other tooling, are you using cloud based tools? >> We have to be really careful about cloud based stuff. There is this protected health information that everyone's really concerned about. Working with data at the hospital is really walking a fine line you need to be very conscious of security. There really reluctant to let non anonymized data out to cloud sources for storage. There are some ways of getting around that, but basically we run all of our servers in house. There's a couple of big data centers down in the basement of the hospital. Mostly they have clinical duties but we have a number of research servers that are installed down there as well. They're managed by the same IT staff in this sort of hardened architecture. I actually can't do any work from home which is an unusual kind of experience, I am used to being able to log in remotely. >> Oh darn (laughing) >> Or you spend too much time on the job. >> Some times you'd like to >> I'm ambivalent about it, there's goods and bads about it. >> So how do you deal with that streaming infrastructure and real time analysis. Do you guys sort of build your own? Any kind of resource tools, or >> I use a lot of open source tools. Traditionally the hospital wants to pay for everything. They feel like if they pay for things then it comes with uptime guarantees. When I build my systems though, because I'm working on shoestring budgets, And because I believe in open source. I use open source where ever I can. I wanted to mention we're actually for a lot of the work that we do supported through Splunk for good. So I don't pay for a full Splunk license, Cory Marshal who runs Splunk for good, has sort of recognized the value of some of the stuff that we're doing with dealing with non traditional data. It's not the sort of standard things that the other people who are working in the healthcare space with splunk are working with. We are working with imaging data. We are working with patient bedside telemetry data, you know the EKG signals and the heart rate signals. And aggregating all this stuff in to one place to make more sensible alerts and alarms. Oh this patient set off an alarm three times in the last hour I should send a page to the nurse who is taking care of this person. It's different that the kind of business optimism that I think a lot of people in the healthcare space are using splunk for. >> SO you have your core mission around diagnostic imaging. As we sort of touched on you have all these other peripheral factors in your industry. The affordable care act, obviously there's HIPPA, there's EMR, there's meaningful use. How much does that affect your mission? Does it get in the way? Is it something you have to be cognizant of like constantly, obviously HIPPA. Other factors? >> I try to just be cognoscente, I try not to let anything get in my way. Almost all of these things that you talk about they're really meant to protect the patient. I make sure that everything that I do is working with data is that we are anonymizing things, were using data securely, and we are trying to help the patients. I think I just have this moral check in my head of what is what I am doing right now good for my department, good for my institution, good for my patient. Then because I am aware of all these other rules they are very complicated and hard to navigate. At the end of the day I can say I understood that rule, I followed that rule, and what I did was the appropriate thing to do. >> It's like house rules. >> Yeah >> Okay, talk a little bit more about splunk, how are you using it, what it does for your mission, for your operation. >> What I came to the conference this year to talk about is this dose management system that we built that I think is really important. We've had vendors coming in and telling us that medicare isn't going to pay hospitals, or is going to reduce reimbursement to hospitals who can't prove that they're using ionizing radiation imaging appropriately. So what does that mean? No body quite knows exactly what that means. How do I tell whether my hospital is adhering to these rules that are ill defined and these vendors are coming in and they're trying to sell us solutions that are like a hundred thousand dollar a year licenses. Administration is taking this seriously, they're trying to figure out which of these vendors are we going to give money to. In the mean time a bunch of the CT technology staff and I basically put together a system that answers all these questions for them using Splunk. We use splunk to collect meta information about how all the scanners system wide are being use. We have 12 CT scanners, they shoot 90,000 different studies every year. Each one of those studies may be hundreds or even thousands of slices of data in these volumetric data sets. It's a huge amount of data to keep track of. Your not using Splunk to keep track of the imaging per se. Your using splunk to keep track of what imaging you collected. So it is a small fraction, it is just the metadata about each one of the studies. That metadata comes with a bunch of interesting information about what the radiation exposure for each one of those studies was. Splunk has these wonderfully adaptable easy to use tools. That once we covert our strange dicom, device independent communications in medicine data, we flatten it, normalize it, turn it into generic data, it is Json, it's dictionary files. Then splunk has these great tools that can be applied instead of to business analytics and optimization to image analytics and optimization. We build our dashboards on top of splunk to show per institution what was the average dose? Per protocol, per body type, you can track which technologist have the lower doses and higher doses. We found all kinds of interesting things. My favorite story the chief technologist was just telling me. I was putting together my slides for this presentation that I did here about this. I said we need an example of a does outlier. Some time when we had a higher than expected radiation event. We never have dangerously high radiation events. >> Good caveat, thank you. >> All the machines care about is whether you're harming some one and we never harm anyone. The machines don't track, this one is a little higher than you would expect it so that you can say why is that, what happened there? But now we do using our splunk dashboards. So I asked him can you get me an example for my slide deck. He literally just looked over to the monitor that he had open and he says oh right here. Here is a patient who had a 69. These numbers are irrelevant, they're supposed to be 50. He knows what the numbers are supposed to be, to me numbers are just numbers. This patient had a 69 and he picks up the phone, this was 5 minutes ago, he calls down to the control room. He says I'm not blaming anyone but why did Mrs So and So have a little bit higher radiation dose? 69 is not dangerous by the way, alarms don't go off until like 75 or 80 or something like that. So he just called and he asked what was going on with this patient. She had a dislocated arm. Okay I understand. This was a head scan, I was like Scott what does a dislocated arm have to do with a head scan? He said well she went through the CT bore with her arm up over her head which is not the way but it was the only way she would tolerate. So the CT thought she was this big and it had to raise the amount of radiation that it was putting into her to go through a larger object. So he documented that, he put it down, and again we used splunk for ticketing for outlier identification. So he put this one into the outlier identification database that we have, he picked other for the reason because we don't have a drop down menu with dislocated arm. Marked it as closed and it is justified, so when the JCO Joint commission on hospital accreditation comes trough and they say well what do you do to manage your higher than expected radiation exposures? We can both say well we never have unsafe radiation exposures it is all documented right here. When it is higher than usual this is the way we document it, and here are examples of ten or twenty of these odd instances where something happened. Either it was completely justified like this lady where the machines were used appropriately, that was appropriate. Or very occasionally we'll find something strange like an improper head holder was being used at one site for a while. It was resulting in these head CT's should usually be around 45 or 50 and instead they were 55 or 60. They went and they took the metal head holder and replaced it with a carbon fiber head holder that they should have been using and then all of a sudden our doses came down, and we documented it. >> It was a dislocated arm, let's leave it at that alright and we are happy with that. Derek thanks for being with us >> Oh absolutely >> Appreciate the time here on the cube and glad to have you here. Continued good luck with your work at Rhode Island. >> Thank you very much, you guys have a good day. >> Very good thank you. Derek Merck joining us here on the cube. We'll continue live from Washington DC right after this. (upbeat music)