Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>> Go on my lead. >> Dan: All right, very good. >> Five, four. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is Corey Quinn and we're thrilled to welcome to the program two gentlemen from CERN. Of course, CERN needs no introduction. We're going to talk some science, going to talk some tech. To my right here is Ricardo Rocha, who is the computer engineer, and Lukas Heinrich, who's a physicist. So Lukas, let's start with you, you know, if you were a traditional enterprise, we'd talk about your business, but talk about your projects, your applications. What piece of, you know, fantastic science is your team working on? >> All right, so I work on an experiment that is situated with the Large Hadron Collider, so it's a particle accelerator experiments where we accelerate protons, which are hydrogen nuclei, to a very high energy, so that they almost go with the speed of light. And so, we have a large tunnel underground, 100 meters underground in Geneva, so straddling the border of France and Switzerland. And there, we're accelerating two beams. One is going clockwise. The other one is going counterclockwise, and there, we collide them. And so, I work on an experiment that kind of looks at these collisions and then analyzes this data. >> Lukas, if I can, you know, when you talk to most companies, you talk about scale, you talk about latency, you talk about performance. Those have real-world implications for your world. Do you have anything you could share there? >> Yeah, so, one of the main things that we need to do, so we collide 40 million times a second these protons, and we need to analyze them in real time, because we cannot write out all the collision data to disk because we don't have enough disk space, and so we've essentially run 10,000 core real-time application to analyze this data in real-time and see what collisions are actually most interesting, and then only those get written out to disk, so this is a system that I work on called The Trigger, and yeah, that's pretty dependent on latency. >> All right, Ricardo, luckily you know, your job's easy. We say most people you need to respond, you know, to what the business needs for you and, you know, don't worry, you can't go against the laws of physics. Well, you're working on physics here, and boy those are some hefty requirements there. Talk a little bit about that dynamic and how your team has to deal with some pretty tough challenges. >> Right, so, as Lukas was saying, we have this large amount of data. The machines can generate something around the order of a petabyte a second, and then, thanks to their hardware- and software-level triggers, they will reduce this to something that is 10 gigabytes a second, and that's what my side has to handle. So, it's still a lot of data. We are collecting something like 70 petabytes a year, and we keep adding, so right now we have, the amount of storage available is on the order of 400 petabytes. We're starting to get at a pretty large scale. And then we have to analyze all of this. So we have one big data center at CERN, which is 300,000 cores, or something like this, around that, but that's not enough, so what we've done over the last 15, 20 years, we've created this large distributed computing environment around the world. We link to many different institutes and research labs together, and this doubles our capacity. So that's our challenge, is to make sure all the effort that the physicists put into building this large machine, that, in the end, it's not the computing that is breaking the world system. We have to keep up, yup. >> One thing that I always find fascinating is people who are dealing with real problems that push our conception of what scale starts to look like, and when you're talking about things like a petabyte a second, that's beyond the comprehension of what most of us can wind up talking about. One problem that I've seen historically with a number of different infrastructure approaches is it requires a fair level of complexity to go from this problem to this problem to this problem, and you have to wind up working through a bunch of layers of abstraction, and the end result is, and at the end of all of this we can run our blog that gets eight visits a day, and that just doesn't seem to make sense. Whereas what you're talking about, that level of complexity is more than justified. So my question for you is, as you start seeing these things evolve and looking at other best practices and guidance from folks who are doing far less data-intensive applications, are you seeing that a lot of the best practices start to fall down as you're pushing theoretical boundaries of scale? >> Right, that's actually a good point. Like, the physicists are very good at getting things done, and they don't worry that much about the process, as long as in the end it works. But there's always this kind of split between the physicists and the more computing engineer where the practices, we want to establish practices, but at the end of the day, we have a large machine that has to work, so sometimes we skip a couple of steps, but we still need, there's still quite a lot of control on like data quality and the software validation and all of this. But yeah, it's a non-traditional environment in terms of IT, I would say. It's much more fast pacing than most traditional companies. >> You mentioned you had how many cores working on these problems on site? >> So in-house, we have 300,000. >> If you were to do a full migration to the public cloud, you'd almost have to repurpose that many cores just to calculating out the bill at that point. Just, because all the different dimensions, everything winds working on at that scale becomes almost completely non-trivial. I don't often say that I'm not sure public cloud can scale to the level that someone would need to. In your case, that becomes a very real concern. >> Yeah, so that's one debate we are having now, and it's, it has a lot of advantages to have the computing in-house, and also because we pretty much use it 24/7, it's a very different type of workload. So we need a lot of resources 24/7, like even the pricing is kind of calculated differently. But the issue we have now is that the accelerator will go through a major upgrade just in five years' time, where we will increase the amount of data by 100 times. Now we are talking about 70 petabytes a year and we're very soon talking about like exabytes. So the amount of computing we'll need there is just going to explode, so we need all the options. We're looking into GPUs and machine learning to change how we do computing, and we are looking at any kind of additional resources we might get, and there the public cloud will probably play a role. >> Could you speak to kind of the dynamic of how something like an upgrade of that, you know, how do you work together? I can't imagine that you just say, "Well, we built it, "whatever we needed and everything, and, you know, "throw it over the wall and make sure it works." >> Right, I mean, so I work a lot on this boundary between computing and physics, and so internally, I think we also go through the same processes as a lot of companies, that we're trying to educate people on the physics side how to go through the best practices, because it's also important. So one thing I stressed also in the keynote is this idea of reproducibility and reusability of scientific software is pretty important, so we teach people to containerize their applications and then make them reusable and stuff like that, yup. >> Anything about that relationship you can expound on? >> Yeah, so like this keynote we had yesterday is a perfect example of how this is improving a lot at CERN. We were actually using data from CMS, which was one of the experiments. Lukas is a physicist in ATLAS, which is like a computing experiment, kind of. I'm in IT, and like all this containerized infrastructure kind of is getting us all together because computing is getting much easier in terms of how to share pieces of software and even infrastructure, and this helps us a lot internally also. >> So what particular about Kubernetes helps your environment? You talk for 15 years that you've been on this distributed systems build-out, so sounds like you were the hipsters when it came to some of these solutions we're working on today. >> That has been like a major change. Lukas mentioned the container part for the software reproducibility, but I have been working on the infrastructure for, I joined CERN as a student and I've been working on the distributed infrastructure for many years, and we basically had to write our own tools, like storage systems, all the batch systems, over the years, and suddenly with this public cloud explosion and open source usage, we can just go and join communities that have requirements sometimes that are higher than ours and we can focus really on the application development. If we base, if we start writing software using Kubernetes, then not only we get this flexibility of choosing different public clouds or different infrastructures, but also we don't have to care so much about the core infrastructure, all the monitoring, log collection, restarting. Kubernetes is very important for us in this respect. We kind of remove a lot of the software we were depending on for many years. >> So these days, as you look at this build-out and what you're looking, not just what you're doing today but what you're looking to build in the upcoming years, are you viewing containers as the fundamental primitive of what empowers this? Are you looking at virtual machines as that primitive? Are you looking at functions? Where exactly do you draw the abstraction layer, as you start building this architecture? >> So, yeah, traditionally we've been using virtual machines for like the last maybe 10 years almost, or, I don't know, eight years at least, and we see containerization happening very quickly, and maybe Lukas can say a bit more about the physics, how this is important on the physics side? >> Yeah, what's been, so currently I think we are looking at containers for the main abstraction because it's also we go through things like functions as a service. What's kind of special about scientific applications is that we don't usually just have our entire code base on one software stack, right? It's not like we would deploy Node.js application or Python stack and that's it. And so, sometimes you have a complete mix between C++, Python, Fortran, and all that stuff. So this idea that we can build the entire software stack as we want it is pretty important. So even for functions as a service where, traditionally, you had just a limited choice of runtimes, this becomes important. >> Like, from our side, the virtual machines still had a very complex setup to be able to support all this diversity of software and the containerization, just all the people have to give us is like run this building block and it's kind of a standard interface, so we only have to build the infrastructure to be able to handle these pieces. >> Well, I don't think anyone can dispute that you folks are experts in taking larger things and breaking them down into constituent components thereof. I mean, you are, quite obviously, the leading world experts on that. But was there any challenge to you as you went through that process of, I don't necessarily even want to say modernizing, but in changing your viewpoint of those primitives as you've evolved, have you seen that there were challenges in gaining buy-in throughout the organization? Was there pushback? Was it culturally painful to wind up moving away from the virtual machine approach into a containerized world? >> Right, so yeah, a bit, of course. But traditionally we, like physicists really focus on their end goal. We often say that we don't count how many cores or whatever, we care about events per second, how many events we can process per second. So, it's a kind of more open-minded community maybe than traditional IT, so we don't care so much about which technology we use at some point, as long as the job gets done. So, yeah, there's a bit of traction sometimes, but there's also a push when you can demonstrate that we get a clear benefit, then it's kind of easier to push it. >> What's a little bit special maybe also for particle physics is that it's not only CERN that is the researcher. We are an international collaboration of many, many institutes all around the world that work on the same project, which is just hosted at CERN, and so it's a very flat hierarchy and people do have the freedom to try out things and so it's not like we have a top-down mandate what technology we use. And then somebody tries something out. If it works and people see a value in it then you get adoption from it. >> The collaboration with the data volumes you're talking about as well has got to be intense. I think you're a little bit beyond the, okay, we ran the experiment, we put the data in Dropbox, go ahead and download it, you'll get that in only 18 short years. It seems like there's absolutely a challenge in that. >> That was one of the key points actually in the keynote is that, so a lot of the experiments at CERN have an open data policy where we release our data, and so that's great because we think it's important for open science, but it was always a bit of an issue, like who can actually practically analyze this data for people who don't have a data center? And so one part of the keynote was that we could demonstrate that using Kubernetes and public cloud infrastructure actually becomes possible for people who don't work at CERN to analyze this large-scale scientific data sets. >> Yeah, I mean maybe just for our audience, the punchline is rediscovering the Higgs boson in the public cloud. Maybe just give our audience a little bit of taste of that. >> Right, yeah, so basically what we did is, so the Higgs boson was discovered in 2012 by both ATLAS and CMS, and a part of that data, we used open data from CMS and part of that data has now been released publicly, and basically this was a 70-terabyte data set which we, thanks to our Google Cloud partners, could put onto public cloud infrastructure and then we analyzed it on a large-scale Kubernetes cluster, and-- >> The main challenge there was that, like, we publish it and we say you probably need a month to process it, but we had like 20 minutes on the keynote, so we kind of needed a bit larger infrastructure than usual to run it down to five minutes or less. In the end, it all worked out, but that was a bit of a challenge. >> How are you approaching, I guess, making this more accessible to more people? By which I mean, not just other research institutions scattered around the world, but students, individual students, sometimes in emerging economies, where they don't have access to the kinds of resources that many of us take for granted, particularly work for a prestigious research institutions? What are you doing to make this more accessible to high school kids, for example, folks who are just dipping their toes into a world they find fascinating? >> We have entire programs, outreach programs that go to high schools. I've been doing this when I was a student in Germany. We would go to high schools and we would host workshops and people would analyze a lot of this data themselves on their computers. So we would come with a USB stick that have data on them, and they could analyze it. And so part of also the open data strategy from ATLAS is to use that open data for educational purposes. And then there are also programs in emerging countries. >> Lukas and Ricardo, really appreciate you sharing the open data, open science mission that you have with our audience. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We're in day two of two days live coverage here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, we're here in New Orleans in the state of Louisiana, and to help Keith Townsend and myself, Stu Miniman, wrap up we're glad to have one more customer. We have the great state of Louisiana here with us, we have Michael Allison, who's the Chief Technology Officer. We also have Derek Williams, who's the Director of Data Center Operations. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so I think we all know what the state of Louisiana is, hopefully most people can find it on a map, it's a nice easy shape to remember from my kids and the like. But, Michael, why don't we start with you? Talk to us first about kind of the purview of your group, your organization, and some of the kind of biggest challenges you've been facing in recent times. Sure, we are part of the Office of Technology Services, which is a consolidated IT organization for the state of Louisiana. We were organized about four years ago. Actually four years ago this July. And that brought in the 16 Federated IT groups into one large organization. And we have the purview of the executive branch, which includes those typical agencies like Children and Family Services, Motor Vehicles, Public Safety, Health and Hospitals, Labor, etc. >> And Derek, you've got the data center operations, so give us a little bit of a scope. We heard how many organizations in there, but what do you all have to get your arms around? >> Sure, so we had, you know, there's often a joke that we make that if they've ever made it we own one of each. So we had a little bit of every type of technology. So what we've really been getting our arms around is trying to standardize technologies, get a standard stack going, an enterprise level thing. And really what we're trying to do is become a service provider to those customers where we have standard lines of service and set enterprise level platforms that we migrate everybody onto. So do you actually have your own data centers? Your own hosting facilities? What's kind of the real estate look like? >> Absolutely, so we have, the state has two primary data centers that we utilize, and then we also use a number of cloud services as well as some third-party providers for offsite services. >> So obviously just like every other state in the union, you guys have plenty of money. >> Always. >> Way too many employees and just no challenges. Let's talk about what are the challenges? You know, coming together, bringing that many organizations together, there's challenges right off the bat. What are some of the challenges as you guys look to provide services to the great people of Louisiana? >> Well as Derek kind of eluded to, technology debt is deep. We have services that are aging at about 40 years old, that are our tier one services. And they were built in silos many, many years ago. So being able to do the application or actualization, being able to identify those services, then when we actually shift to the cultural side, actually bringing 16 different IT organizations into one, having all those individuals now work together instead of apart. And not in silos. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had over the last few years is really breaking down those cultural barriers and really coming together as one organization. >> Yeah I totally agree with that. The cultural aspect has been the biggest piece for us. Really getting in there and saying, you know a lot of small and medium size IT shops could get away without necessarily having the proper governance, structures in place, and a lot of people wore a lot of hats. So now we're about 800 strong in the Office of Technology Services, and that means people are very aligned to what they do operationally. And so that's been a big shift and kind of that cultural shift has really been where we've had to focus on to make that align properly to the business needs. >> Mike, what was the reason that led you down the path towards Nutanix? Maybe set us up with a little bit of the problem statement? We heard some of the heterogeneous nature and standardization which seems to fit into a theme we've heard lots of times with Nutanix. But was there a specific use case or what led you towards that path? Well, about four years ago the Department of Health and Hospitals really had a case where they needed to modernize their Medicaid services, eligibility and enrollment. CMS really challenged them to build an infrastructure that was in line with their MIDAS standards. There was modular, COTS, configuration over customization. Federal government no longer wants to build monolithic systems that don't integrate and are just big silos. So what we did was we gravitated to that project. We went to CMS and said, hey why don't we take what you're asking us to build and build it in a way that we can expand throughout the enterprise to not only affect the Department of Health but also Children of Family Services, and be able to expand it to Department of Corrections, etc. That was our use case, and having an anchor tenent with the Department of Health that has a partner with CMS really became the lynch pin in this journey. That was our first real big win. >> Okay how did you hear first about Nutanix? Was there a bake off you went through? >> It was, yes, very similar. It was the RP process took a year or so and we were actually going down the road of procuring some V blocks, and right before the Christmas vacations our Deputy CIO says hey, why don't you go look to see if there's other solutions that are out there? Challenge Derek, myself, and some others to really expand the horizons. Say, if we're going to kind of do this greenfield, what else is out there? And right before he got on his Christmas cruise he dropped that on our lap and about a month later we were going down the Dell Nutanix route. And to be honest it was very contentious, and it actually took a call from Michael Dell who I sent to voicemail twice before I realized who it was, but you know, those are the kind of decisions and the buy in from Dell executives that really allowed us to comfortably make this decision and move forward. >> So technology doesn't exactly move fast in any government because, you know, people process technology and especially in the government, people and process, as you guys have deployed Nutanix throughout your environment, what are some of the wins and what are some of the challenges? >> That's a funny point because we talk about this a lot. The fact that our choice was really between something like VBlock, which was an established player that had been for a long time, and something a little more bleeding edge. And part of the hesitancy to move to something like Nutanix was the idea that hey, we have a lot of restricted data, CJIS, HIPAA, all those kind of things across the board, RS1075 comes into play, and there was hesitancy to move to something new, but one of the things that we said exactly was we are not as agile as private sector. The procurement process, all the things that we have to do, put us a little further out. So it did come into play that when we look at that timeline the stuff that's bleeding edge now, by the time we have it out there in production it's probably going to be mainstream. So we had to hedge our bets a little. And you know, we really had to do our homework. Nutanix was, you know, kind of head and shoulders above a lot of what we looked at, and I had resiliency to it at first, so credit to the Deputy CIO, he made the right call, we came around on it, it's been awesome ever since you know, one of the driving things for us too was getting out there and really looking at the business case and talking to the customers. One of the huge things we kept hearing over and over was the HA aspect of it. You know, we need the high availability, we need the high availability. The other interesting thing that we have from the cost perspective is we are a cost recovery agency now that we're consolidated. So what you use you get charged for, you get a bill every month just like a commercial provider. You know, use this many servers, this much storage, you get that invoice for it. So we needed a way that we could have an environment that's scaled kind of at a linear cost that we could just kind of add these nodes to without having to go buy a new environment and have this huge kind of CAPX expenditure. And so at the end of the day it lived up to the hype and we went with Nutanix and we haven't regretted it, so. >> How are the vendors doing overall, helping you move to that really OP-X model, you said, love to hear what you're doing with cloud overall. Nutanix is talking about it. Dell's obviously talking about that. How are the vendors doing in general? And we'd love to hear specifically Dell Nutanix. >> We've had the luxury of having exceptionally good business partners. The example I'd like to give is, about four months into this project we realized that we were treated Nutanix as a traditional three-tier architecture. We were sending a lot of traffic more south. When we did the analysis we asked the question, a little cattywampus, it was how do we straighten this out? And so we posed a question on a Tuesday about how do we fix this, how do we drive the network back into the fabric? By Thursday we were on a phone call with VMWare. By the following Monday we had two engineers on site with a local partner with NSX Ninja. And we spent the next two months, with about different iterations of how to re-engineer the solution and really look at the full software-defined data center, not just software-defined storage and compute. It is really how do we then evolve this entire solution building upon Nutanix and then layering upon on top of that the VMWare solutions that kind of took us to that next level. >> Yeah and I think the key term in there is business partner. You know, it sounds a little corny to say, but we don't look at them as just vendors anymore. When we choose a technology or direction or an architecture, that is the direction we go for the entire state for that consolidated IT model. So, we don't just need a vendor. We need someone that has a vested interest in seeing us succeed with the technology, and that's what we've gotten out of Nutanix, out of Dell, and they've been willing to, you know, if there's an issue, they put the experts on site, it's not just we'll get some people on a call. They're going to be there next week, we're going to work with you guys and make it work. And it's been absolutely key in making this whole thing go. >> And as a CTO one of the challenges that we have is, as Derek has executed his cloud vision, is how do we take that and use it as an enabler, an accelerant to how we look at our service design, service architecture, how do we cloud optimize this? So as we're talking about CICD and all these little buzzwords that are out there, is how can we use this infrastructure to be that platform that kind of drives that from kind of a grass root, foundation up, whereas sometimes it's more of a pop down approach, we're taking somewhat of an opposite. And now we're in that position where we can now answer the question of now what, what do we do with it now? >> So sounds like you guys are a mixed VMWare, Nutanix hardware, I mean software, Dell hardware shop, foundation you've built the software-defined data center foundation, something that we've looked at for the past 10 years in IT to try and achieve, which is a precursor, or the foundation, to cloud. Nutanix has made a lot of cloud announcements. How does Nutanix's cloud announcements, your partnership with Dell match with what you guys plan when it comes to cloud? >> That's a perfect lead in for us. So you're absolutely right. We have had an active thought in our head that we need to move toward SDDC, software-defined data center is what we wanted to be at. Now that we've achieved it the next step for us is to say hey, whether it's an AWS or whomever, an Azure type thing, they are essentially an SDDC as well. How do we move workloads seamlessly up and down in a secure fashion? So the way we architected things in our SDDC, we have a lot of customers. We can't have lateral movement. So everything's microsegmentation across the board. What we've been pursuing is a way to move VM workloads essentially seamlessly up to the cloud and back down and have those microsegmentation rules follow whether it goes up or back down. That's kind of the zen state for us. It's been an interesting conference for us, because we've seen some competitors to that model. Some of the things Nutanix is rolling out, we're going to have to go back and take a very serious look at on that roadmap to see how it plays out. But, suddenly multicloud, if we can get to that state we don't care what cloud it's in. We don't have to learn separate stacks for different providers. That is a huge gap for us right now. We have highly available environment between two data centers where we run two setups active active that are load balanced. So the piece we're missing now is really an offsite DR that has that complete integration. So the idea that we could see a hurricane out in the golf, and 36, 48 hours away, and know that we might be having some issues. Being able to shift workloads up to the cloud, that's perfect for us. And you know, then cost comes into play. All that kind of stuff that we might have savings, economy of scale, all plays in perfectly for us. So we are super excited about where that's going and some of the technologies coming up are going to be things we're going to be evaluating very carefully over the next year. >> At the end of the day it's all about our constituents. We have to take data, turn it into information that they can consume at the pace that they want to. Whether it be traditional compute in a desktop or mobile or anywhere in between. It was our job to make sure that these services are available and usable when they need it, especially in the time of a disaster or just in day-to-day life. So that's the challenge that we have when delivering services to our citizens and constituents. >> All right, well Mike and Derek, really appreciate you sharing us the journey you've been on, how you're helping the citizens here in the great state of Louisiana. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching our program. It's been a great two days here. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our programming. Thanks Nutanix and the whole crew here, and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you.