>> Announcer: Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCUBE. Covering .cof2017. Brought to you by Splunk. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to the nation's capital, theCUBE coming to you here from the Walter Washington Convention Center at .conf2017, Splunk's annual get-together, along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. Good to have you with us here on theCUBE and how's your flying experience these days here in the States? Baggage, security, you happy? Well we're going to make you a little less... (laughs) Dubai Airports has just an exceptional network of operations that are going on right now, from soup to nuts and Michael Ibbitson is the VP of Technology and Infrastructure at Dubai. He joins us now here on theCUBE, and Michael, first off, glad to have you here in the States. >> Thank you. Good to be here. >> Good to see you, sir. You ran through on the key note stage a litany of checks that we all go through here in the States of, yes we'd love... better security, better baggage, even the golden bathroom, which I can't wait to hear about. But tell me about your focus with technology and Dubai, and what you're bringing to the job and how you're trying to revolutionize the travel experience. >> Yeah so, in Dubai we're really, really pushing the envelope in terms of volume, numbers of people going through the airport, but also we want to make it the best passenger experience we possibly can. We're already the biggest international airport in the world, going to be doing nearly 90 million passengers this year, growing to 100 million by the end of the decade, but we want to drive experience as well. And the airport is constrained, so we've got a limited site, so we now have to figure out how to do it to greater efficiency, automation, making the passenger experience better. You can get much better throughput in an airport if you take out all the queues. So that's a better experience. So you get both at the same time. >> Well, tell us about the security lines then, because Dave and I both relate to this here in the States. Sometimes they can be tedious to work through. So how are you addressing that through technology. >> Well, through lots of different ways. I mean, we put sensors all over the airport for lots of different things, and one of the key areas we've done it is in security. So we have some sensors that measure the queue length for us, which is really important. It allows us to understand what's happening now, in real time, deploy additional staff to support that, but also predicts what's happening over the next few hours, so we can be ready for whatever's coming next. On top of that, we then take data out of the lane itself, in real time, so we can see how many people are passing through, how many alarms they're setting off, and then we can use that data over time to understand the behavior of passengers. Certain destinations drive more security alarms, so we can now understand that and then try and pre-inform those passengers about what to do so everybody gets through faster. >> So kind of, like a way, is in reverse for the security line. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Love it, that's great. >> So, you mentioned the golden bathroom, I got to ask you-- (laughter) We saw some data that only 10 percent of the people admit that they don't wash their hands when they leave the bathroom, but your data suggests its 25 percent of the people do not. I wonder if part of that reason is the reason that I often get frustrated is, when you put your hands underneath, nothing comes out. (laughter) >> John: You're waving underneath, right? >> In modern Dubai, airport bathrooms must actually give me water when I ask for it, is that right? >> Yeah, well, we like to think we've got pretty efficiently working bathrooms, that's for sure, but I think the challenge with the bathroom one, we wanted to understand how to make bathrooms cleaner and a nicer environment for everybody, and when you're doing 90 million passengers a year, that's a lot of people going to the bathroom. We put sensors all over the bathrooms, not CCTV, want to make sure that's clear. It's all like presence sensors, door lock sensors, when the faucets are on or off, people stood at basins, and that's just given us so much insight into how people actually use the bathroom. So we know that at peak hours, the number are quite low in terms of people who wash their hands after using the bathroom, but off-peak when it's quiet, the number goes right up to 100 percent. So, we think we've got some work to do on capacity, and understanding how people use the bathroom, and also maybe on the cleanliness. Maybe people are leaving because it's the lesser of two evils. Do I wash my hands, which doesn't look like a nice environment to wash my hands, or do I just walk out? >> So, some of the stats. 90 million passengers a year go through your airport and that'll be 100 million, over 100 million by 2020, is that right? >> Michael: On the current growth, yeah. >> And then 150 million bags, you handle, each year. >> Michael: That's correct. >> So there's a lot of data that you're collecting. So hence we're here at .conf. How do you use Splunk to sort of manage all this data? >> So we have two Splunk instances. We have one that does all of our IT stuff, and then we have one that's focused on all the business services, operations, if you like. And it's the business one that is kind of the most interesting because it drives the most debate and discussions about the future, and how we should plan the airport, and how we should drive performance. We have about four and a half billion data points in our Splunk, in our business Splunk instance, and it grows by somewhere around 12 to 14 million data points a day. Just baggage alone, every bag generates about 200 data points. Now, people don't probably think that from the outside, when you put the bag in, you drop the bag at the check-in desk and then you don't see it again til you to the other end, but there's so many check points that it passes, security screening that it goes through. It gets transferred in terms of jurisdiction between airline, airport, ground handler, and then it gets loaded onto the aircraft. All of these things, we create data points for all of those. So we can track it through your whole journey. I think these are fantastic opportunities for us to start thinking about how we might share that data the consumer in the future. We'd like to get to a point where your bag journey is just as well-informed as your own journey. >> Yeah, so, a little bit more on that then, I mean, just in terms of what your real life experience, what you hope it will be, in terms of your baggage, You were talking about taking down baggage arrival to a matter of seconds? >> Yeah so, you as a passenger, you arrive at the airport. You've got a process to go through before you're going to get reunited with your baggage, and that might be 10 minutes or 30 minutes, depending on the size and the nature of the airport that you arrive at. But as we know now, based on the data we have in Splunk, and we've been analyzing this data over the last four or five months, we know exactly how long it takes to get a bag from any aircraft stand to any point where you pick it up. And we can average that over a serious period of time. So if we can do that historically, we can start to predict that into the future. Based on the current conditions of the airport, we should be able to give you and exact time that your bag's going to arrive on that carousel. Maybe it will be down to a few seconds, maybe it'll be in the next 30 seconds your bag will arrive, type of message, but we want to give you that message to your phone. >> Think how nice that would be, Dave, if you're waiting at the baggage carousel, with another 150 of your best friends, and everybody's crowding around, watching for their bag to come out, but you know your bags about to come out in 20 seconds. >> Well, I always say it's one of my pet peeves everybody crowds around, and you can't see. Take three steps back and we'll all be better off. I wanted to ask you Michael, though, as a consumer of airline products and services, there seems to be a difference between the airport and the airline in terms of their data. You have a lot of data, the airlines obviously have a lot of data. Of course, they're competitive with each other. What kind of collaboration do you have with the airline, what kind of data do you share? >> So, I mean it really depends on the nature of your airport. Are you a hub for a big carrier, or do you have lots of small airlines all operating there, to how you might go about doing that. In both the airports that I've worked at recently, we've run projects to integrate the airline data into our systems. Cause we're just so much more well informed about what's happening and what's going to happen in the future when we do that. We spent the last couple of years working with Emirates, who's our biggest airline, to integrate their data, but we also have FlyDubai, who've got a huge flying program with us as well, and integrate their data so that we can start to combine the two data sets. And we do that within Splunk, so we know what's going on. The baggage data that I talked about, the 200 data points, I mean that comes from three different entities in reality. It's the airline at check-in, and the passengers data about their booking and everything else, the baggage system itself, and the security process it goes through, which is our data, and then the ground handler, which again is another set of data, because that bag then onto the aircraft, and inform the airline of where it is. And then that all gets combined back again at the point where you board the aircraft to make sure that that passenger and the bag are all on the same flight. So we've been pulling all that data into our systems and then sharing that back across the teams, to provide people with a lot more insight. So the airline wants to know the bags are going through successfully, the ground handler wants to know how many more they've got to come. So by sharing that data through a platform like Splunk, we're hopefully making a lot of breakthroughs. >> I think that's huge, because the mobile app is a game changer for an airline passenger. But the diversity of mobile apps, and the quality of the mobile apps is the function of the data model that each airline and their back-end processes, and you can tell some of the airlines that have sort of antiquated back-end processes, and those that don't have as much baggage, right? No pun intended. And so, my question is, with tools like Splunk and some innovation on your end, are you able to sort of unify those disparities? >> Yeah, and you've also got to remember something about the passenger, right? No passenger comes to an airport for an airport tour. They're coming because their going to fly somewhere, right? (laughs) And this is important. So they book a ticket to an airline, we might be able to integrate that data from all these different organizations at the airport, but who are you as the passenger really going to get that information from at the last moment? Probably from the airline because you're going to use their app, because you bought your ticket through it, and you're going to check in through it, and you maybe have a car service booked through it. So we would rather... we could be the combiner of that data, but then pass it back to the airline to display to you as the passenger, cause that makes more sense. But what's important for the passenger is that data is consistent at every point in the journey, whether you find it out from the airport, or whether you find it out from the airline, you want it to be the same. You don't want conflicting information. So that's what we can do by deciding to join these things together, but make sure that the consumer interface is the right one for the right time. Now that wouldn't work for us with Emirates because they're so huge and they have so many passengers for us, but for some of the smaller airlines, like British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, you know they have two, three flights a day with us, it might make more sense for their passengers to use our app in that situation. So it really depends who you are and what you're flying for, but we see that there's opportunity across that space, but what would be important is that every app tells the same story and has the same data >> John: It's like uniformity, right? >> Yeah, because that gives you so much confidence as a customer if that flight screen changes at the same time that your app pushes a notification to you, and it's exactly the same data, that's a huge amount of confidence that this is all really accurate and timely, and then you get to make decisions off that. >> I was struck by the comment that you guys are out of space and I think the way you phrase it is the city grew up around the airport. You'd think Dubai, I have not been, but you'd think Dubai, planning ahead, has lots of resources, but they're subject to the whims of metropolitan growth. Your challenge then is to use efficiency to squeeze more out of that fixed space. What are you doing in that regard? I mean that's a major CIO challenge. How do you deal with that? >> Yeah, I have to admit, that was the challenge that attracted me to the role, like how do you take this airport... when I joined it was about 78 million, couple of years back, and now pushing 90, pushing 100 by the end of the decade. That was the challenge for me, and that was the focus of the CEO, he said the only way we're going to grow this business is to figure out how to do more people, or more planes, through the same space. And that's really exciting, and the only way to do that is looking cutting out the waste wherever you can. Redefining the processes in areas, and removing all of the queues and all of the bottlenecks in the airport, whether that be in the airspace, on the airfield, in the terminal buildings for the passengers, in the baggage area for the bags. You've got to remove all those bottlenecks and I think, as a passenger, queuing up just wastes time and space. If we can make sure nobody ever queues, then everybody will get through the airport faster, which means we can do more people. We can take more people through the airport. So that's really the focus, and we have an internal project that we call queue-busting and it's literally just about busting the queues, busting the lines, as you call them here, and getting rid of them, because they're the thing that creates the capacity constraint-- >> Yeah, you talk about all these sensors you have around the airport, you talk about all the data that you're gathering, billions and billions of data points, so what don't you know that wish you did, or that you hope you can, relatively soon? >> I mean one of the things, so we know, like, the queuing time, all the major touch points, and that's been fantastic and we've, in our transfer security areas, in the last two years, we've lowered transfer security queuing from over eight minutes to an average of four minutes and 47 seconds, so we're really precise on this stuff now, it's great. But what we don't know is, the people's entire journey. So, we know that you queued in a certain place for four minutes, and you might queued up at check-in for maybe 10 minutes as well, but what we don't know is how long it took you to get between those points, which route you took, what's the most efficient, how to get you to spend more money in the airport because we... that's our business model, right? So that is where we need to learn a lot more, and I think there's a lot of work going on in that space, and we're doing some trials on some cool technology to figure out how to help you find your journey, make the most efficient overall journey through the airport, not just at the key check points. And obviously give you more time to enjoy the experience, we have shops and restaurants, we've got spas and swimming pools and hotels inside our airport, which we'd love for people to use more of, and I think we can do that if we can help them plan their journey better, so, I think there's still a lot of data out there. >> Well and, when you look at your strategic planning road map, how much runway do you have? I mean, you're using efficiency to utilize your space better, drive more revenue, customer satisfaction, avoiding the huge cutbacks of building another airport, which is not going to be as convenient. How much, again no pun intended, how much runway do you have in terms of that strategic plan? >> Well based on our current expectations, predictions that we have, we're looking at this site being able to do about 120 million, maybe we can squeeze a bit more out of it, >> Decade, plus? >> Yeah, I mean there's lots of exciting things we might have to do with the airfield to try and land more planes. We do about 65 flights an hour, off our two runways. We don't have the luxury of really wide-space runways, so we may have to come with some new ideas on that front. But about 120 million we think, which would be easily the biggest airport in the world. It's helped by the enormous fleet of A380s that Emirates uses. Of course we get a lot more passengers for every flight. But that's probably about as far as we can go. But the airport was designed for 90 to 95 million, so we're already going to bust that by about 30 million. So yeah, hopefully we can extract that, and then you never know what we might be able to do. >> Great, great story. >> Hopefully go further. >> Well it's fascinating, it really was. Great job on the key note stage today and certainly wish you continued success down the road here, I think we've run out of puns. (laughter) So, I'll leave it at that, but safe travels, if you will, home, and thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Michael: Thanks very much. >> Michael Ibbitson from Dubai airports. Back with more from theCUBE here in just a bit. Washington, DC coming to you live. Back with more in a bit. (upbeat techno music)