from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] welcome to this cube conversation lisa martin here with one of dell technologies customers what a great time to be talking about a candy company clifton dorsey joins me the vp at world corporation clifton welcome to the cube all right thank you i appreciate being here so i know royal corporation does more than candy but you know here we are approaching the holidays and and i think all of us could just use a feel-good story about candy but i know you do more tell our audience a little bit more about where else from a corporation standpoint sure war el corporation has been in family and it's a family-owned business for 50-plus years we're a co-packer co-manufacturer so you won't really see a world candy bar out there but we really help bring to life a lot of innovative ideas around the candy and the good for you products for a lot of our partners so talk to us about you're obviously working with dell technologies give us uh an insight into your data center operations your it environment before the solution that we're going to be talking about what was that like physical on-prem cloud sure well our data center kind of falls right in line with the same time of year as a horror story when i first came here and got on board a lot of outdated equipment despair and equipment separated our backups were they were few and far between um the the equipment was so old that some of it wasn't even supported anymore we had antiquated systems but the biggest thing is the confidence level you have zero confidence that your system stay running your backup it was an everyday occurrence just to try to get a reliable backup for just a piece of the data let alone all of our um all of our data and information that we had that confidence factor is table stakes and especially now it's it's if a company can't have confidence that their data is secure and protected that's you know folks that can't might not be around tomorrow but talk to me a little bit about from a workload's perspective what were you protecting vm's erp systems give us a slice of that data in terms of its impact in the business sure and you're correct you know having that that confidence level in the systems is what you need our sql databases are in there our erp system's in there our file servers and at the time even our email server was in there so any one of those goes down it's a business impact you know you have to look at what can't you do when that happens on our manufacturing floor we're collecting a lot of data coming back off the floor for all of our folks and purchasing and procurement and our run times to make sure that we're hitting our our dates on time so even our shipping and receiving team needs to know how the floor is running to know if we're going to hit those ship dates and when to schedule the truck so it literally all correlates and all comes together and i imagine also not just does that involve every aspect of world's business internally but relationships with the partners that you are helping fulfill right that's correct because we're making their product if they can't have a product on the shelves that impacts them you know so we really have to do everything that we can to make sure our systems are up make sure everything is running and really fulfill their order and get it out there so you can have that product yeah that's why often we talk about data protection and brand reputation go hand in hand so talk to me when you came into world you must have seen nowhere to go but up talk to me about some of the things that you said we have got to for example aging physical infrastructure we've got to replace that we obviously have to be able to have reliable data protection because we have to have the confidence that we can enable our teams and uh our partners but what were some of the things that you said all right let me kind of get a phased approach here what are we gonna change and why are we gonna do it with dell technologies sure so looking at our business continuity plan you don't have a good dr so you have to start looking backwards of where do you start so we have zero backups our data's not protected we have zero confidence in it we go back a little farther our systems aren't really there for us to back up so it really started at the appliance level in our server level to get rid of all of the old information get a new subset of servers in so we have a new vxrail environment in it integrates great with the integrated appliance ties directly into it so we have backups we have everyday backups we have fast and speedy backups then we can offload those to an off site so we now truly have a full business continuity plan and a dr disaster recovery situation that's critical because i was reading your case study and where there was no dr before talk to me about the ability to to leverage the clouds of now with what you've implemented uh and the power protect series you've now got the ability to from a dr perspective i just want to understand that especially here we are you know towards the end of 2020 when there's been such a shift to remote operations what's that cloud benefit like from a dr standpoint it's been great um you know we were old tape backups so someone had to be here to switch out the old tapes you know and hope that how do we get them off site who's taking them home what vault are they living in you know with the remote aspect all of that worry goes away everything is offloaded everything goes into a cloud if there is a situation we just work through our cloud environment we can reinstate business literally a click of a switch yeah i was looking at some of your statistics and it looks like about a 6x reduction in your backup windows and a huge reduction in your physical footprint the data center also imagine more green tell us a little bit about it from that perspective sure yeah a couple points should hit there i mean our deduplication and compression rates are higher than what we're expected by far so that's been a great spot as far as we don't need as much physical storage to hold all of that well with that we were able to take our racks we had three server racks we went down to half of one server rack so your heating and air conditioning your heating and cooling cost comes down your power cost comes down all of that soft cost that stretches around this environment really has a benefit for us i'm also thinking too in this time of everything shifting and data protection becoming business critical your team's productivity won we talked about um the the backup big reduction in backup windows but your team must be must be much more productive and also i imagine from confidence from a reputation standpoint your executives or senior management probably now has the confidence because you have the confidence that the data is secure yeah lisa that's true and even down to our user level when i first got here i mean our users were complaining about not being able to print a word document i mean not being able to print a document that's that's fundamental stuff started diving into it and our systems are just old disparate and weren't configured the best so our team's really been able to revamp all of that redo all of that and the confidence level around the organization has just really improved and it's great to see we now have a lot more time to work on tomorrow than living in the trenches of today which everyone needs right now since this it's pivot after pivot after pivot i'm curious how long ago did you come in like how many years ago did you find this antiquated system yeah i've been here a little over two years now okay so fairly recently what were some of the things that you think world was stuck in was it cultural was it operational what was it that you helped influence in terms of we have to make a change now sure one of the things for me is one of the old phrases i think is the worst phrase is well because we've always done it that way you know so getting a fresh line and a fresh look on something was able to really help out the innovation that dell brings to the table falls in line with the innovation that we bring for candy so let's look at what they have let's look at how they tie together but we have to do a full forklift of our infrastructure in our data center you want to look at the integrated systems and you know how you get that best performance not the best bang for the buck when it comes to the budget because if they're unbudgeted dollars you really got to get every dollar to stretch farther and looking at the vxrail with the integrated appliance and with the cdra to offload to you know a cloud site it was a perfect package it was the perfect pairing for what we needed but going from you talk about you know we've always done it this way and you're right we hear that a lot and it's well why you can do it so much differently can you imagine if they were still doing it that way in the era of covid but thinking about this big switch from um a big physical um footprint to going to hyper converged infrastructure how was that transition that you helped drive how did it shift the culture at world because i imagine it 50 year old company in leicester right yeah i believe it did i believe it helped everyone kind of just look at everything and say just because it works to get us here is it going to work with get us to tomorrow so everybody really started looking at different situations and different things when we sat down with our users we changed the entire desktop experience you know we have new laptops we have new operating systems we have the way things are working better so it really changed the culture through and through so you know when you go to work you want systems to work when you come in the last thing you want to deal with is oh is a computer is going to be down do i have to call it today so getting that scalability was great but getting that reliance from the user in from the keyboard the whole way back to your edge was a huge win for us and let's look at your team now having more time to be innovative especially i'm curious what you've been able to do the last six to seven months that you now have this reliable infrastructure data secure internally people can print things they can check their emails without having to bother i.t what are some of the new maybe strategic areas that you've been able to get involved in because you have the time to focus on them we're really getting involved with more of the plant all the equipment on the floor trying to collect that data and correlate all that data coming off the floor and now we're able to have a little fun of how do we get the data on the floor real-time collection back into the system and how can we have technology help drive that innovation on the floor when our r d department comes to us about we have a new product that needs to run where do we run it i'm now able to work with the manufacturing manager and say that type of product runs best on this machine and here's the data to support that that's really the fun of what we can do for tomorrow so does this now enable you to become data-driven whereas before maybe not so much yeah i agree yes very much so and it's good data it's not hypothetical data that someone put on a piece of paper and thought through it's really good data that we can correlate and collect and that's critical especially right now as everybody wants everything real time and the consumer demand is changes every industry and i think it's probably going to be a pretty big demand still this year for candy i know uh that sounds pretty good right about now i'd love to get your advice for men and women in your position coming into maybe a legacy business that has an antiquated infrastructure how do you recommend how do you advise that they go about approaching leadership and their teams to do a complete transformation i think it starts with a good partner you've got to have a good partner and able to put things in order i like to call it one hand to high five you have to have that good partner to fall back on you build a good solid solution and then you look at your budget can do but it's all about the culture if you can find out where your culture is suffering because people are upset when they come in because something doesn't work what's the root cause of that how do you get that out of play you know work with your folks i always say i want people to drive in happy i want people to drive home happy how do we make sure that is and i know it sounds weird coming from vit guy but you have a huge impact so when you can look at everyday experience of sitting down coming into your office and sitting down at your technology and it works it's just one level of stress that we no longer have i said it's a huge level of stress that you don't have and i think that's that's an important point that you bring up you want people to come in happy and leave happy but you also really challenge them to get out of your comfort zone just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean we should still should and actually if we do there might be a competitor right behind us that's ready to come in and take over this is a competitive differentiator and especially in the time of this dynamic environment in which we live the status quo the comfort zone probably going to be a factor in determining i think the winners of tomorrow do you agree with that i do agree with that and what we actually found is when we asked people to kind of think outside of their box and step back a minute we found that they were doing something as a as a band-aid well i have to now do it this way and it just became status quo when we pulled that band-aid off we kept going back kept going back kept going back found out you're doing something because it wasn't fixed four processes ago let's fix that now it's not even a thing you know so it just leverages them more time to think more outside of the box so how do i better this situation and they can really look at everything they do how do i make it better down to how the orders come in how we process the orders to even how we ship them out and how we package them up in the truck well when you were talking about band-aids like band-aid on band-aid on band-aid i just think inherently complexity yes so talk to me in the last question here as we wrap up here from a from a simplification perspective how has dell technologies helped transform and simplify the environment i don't know that i have the word i've been thinking for that how is that because it's been so monumental that they've done for us i mean down to we've been able to revamp our data center and i know that that sounds odd well it's just a vxrail it's just it's not it's being able to simplify all of the stuff we had down into 5u of rackspace allowed us to clean up our data center clean up that complexity everything's running inside of there we no longer have you know a tape drive sitting somewhere else we now have more man hours and the soft cost we have more man hours to do a lot more of the tomorrow world so the complexity we can at our own level of complexity when we want for security or anything else but we're not we don't have a whole spider web of stuff going on that we have to work through just to see where we need to start and that's really as you said what's the word it's transformative but it sounds to me like what you're doing as a leader yourself and with dell technologies is really enabling the organization or has enabled it to get out of its comfort zone embrace modernizing take out complexity where it's not needed and focus on business outcomes which at the end of the day is the most important thing it is and you know we have our own research and development team here for you know what's the next candy you're going to see on the market we have our own innovation team i challenged every one of the departments that i work with to think the same thing what's next in your world how can you re-innovate what you have what what haven't we thought of um you know and the old thing is no idea is a bad idea let's put it on the table let's bet vetted out let's see if it works but then also working with the other departments the other departments are now able to collaborate well i didn't know that you needed that yep that's the data i need oh that's easy here you go and it has really streamlined processes from from start to finish that collaboration is essential will clifton thanks for sharing what you're doing with dell technologies the um the new dp series great work there we look forward to hearing more of what's to come from world well i do appreciate thank you so much for your time lisa and the dell team um the appliances and everything has been great for us so we appreciate everything dell's done thank you excellent i know you have that confidence because you talked about it all right guys for clifton dorsey i'm lisa martin you're watching this cube [Music] conversation