(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. It's theCUBE live at AWS re:Invent 2022. We're hearing up to 50,000 people here. It feels like if the energy at this show is palpable. I love that. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, we had the keynote this morning that Adam Selipsky delivered lots of momentum in his first year. One of the things that you said that you were looking in your breaking analysis that was released a few days ago, four trends and one of them, he said under Selipsky's rule in the 2020s, there's going to be a rush of data that will dwarf anything we have ever seen. >> Yeah, it was at least a quarter, maybe a third of his keynote this morning was all about data and the theme is simplifying data and doing better data integration, integrating across different data platforms. And we're excited to talk about that. Always want to simplify data. It's like the rush of data is so fast. It's hard for us to keep up. >> It is hard to keep that up. We're going to be talking with an alumni next about how his company is helping organizations like Cisco Meraki keep up with that data explosion. Please welcome back to the program, Matthew Scullion, the CEO of Matillion and how Hoshang Chenoy joins us, data scientist at Cisco Meraki. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Matthew, we last saw you just a few months ago in Vegas at Snowflake Summits. >> Matthew: We only meet in Vegas. >> I guess we do, that's okay. Talk to us about some of the things, I know that Matillion is a data transformation solution that was originally introduced for AWS for Redshift. But talk to us about Matillion. What's gone on since we've seen you last? >> Well, I mean it's not that long ago but actually quite a lot. And it's all to do with exactly what you guys were just talking about there. This almost hard to comprehend way the world is changing with the amounts of data that we now can and need to put to work. And our worldview is there's no shortage of data but the choke points certainly one of the choke points. Maybe the choke point is our ability to make that data useful, to make it business ready. And we always talk about the end use cases. We talk about the dashboard or the AI model or the data science algorithm. But until before we can do any of that fun stuff, we have to refine raw data into business ready, usable data. And that's what Matillion is all about. And so since we last met, we've made a couple of really important announcements and possibly at the top of the list is what we call the data productivity cloud. And it's really squarely addressed this problem. It's the results of many years of work, really the apex of many years of the outsize engineering investment, Matillion loves to make. And the Data Productivity Cloud is all about helping organizations like Cisco Meraki and hundreds of others enterprise organizations around the world, get their data business ready, faster. >> Hoshang talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cisco Meraki, how you're leveraging Matillion from a productivity standpoint. >> I've really been a Matillion fan for a while, actually even before Cisco Meraki at my previous company, LiveRamp. And you know, we brought Matillion to LiveRamp because you know, to Matthew's point, there is a stage in every data growth as I want to call it, where you have different companies at different stages. But to get data, data ready, you really need a platform like Matillion because it makes it really easy. So you have to understand Matillion, I think it's designed for someone that uses a lot of code but also someone that uses no code because the UI is so good. Someone like a marketer who doesn't really understand what's going on with that data but wants to be a data driven marketer when they look at the UI they immediately get it. They're just like, oh, I get what's happening with my data. And so that's the brilliance of Matillion and to get data to that data ready part, Matillion does a really, really good job because what we've been able to do is blend so many different data sources. So there is an abundance of data. Data is siloed though. And the connectivity between different data is getting harder and harder. And so here comes the Matillion with it's really simple solution, easy to use platform, powerful and we get to use all of that. So to really change the way we've thought about our analytics, the way we've progressed our division, yeah. >> You're always asking about superpowers and that is a superpower of Matillion 'cause you know, low-code, no-code sounds great but it only gets you a quarter of the way there, maybe 50% of the way there. You're kind of an "and" not an "or." >> That's a hundred percent right. And so I mentioned the Data Productivity Cloud earlier which is the name of this platform of technology we provide. That's all to do with making data business ready. And so I think one of the things we've seen in this industry over the past few years is a kind of extreme decomposition in terms of vendors of making data business ready. You've got vendors that just do loading, you've got vendors that just do a bit of data transformation, you've got vendors that do data ops and orchestration, you've got vendors that do reverse ETL. And so with the data productivity platform, you've got all of that. And particularly in this kind of, macroeconomic heavy weather that we're now starting to face, I think companies are looking for that. It's like, I don't want to buy five things, five sets of skills, five expensive licenses. I want one platform that can do it. But to your point David, it's the and not the or. We talk about the Data Productivity Cloud, the DPC, as being everyone ready. And what we mean by that is if you are the tech savvy marketer who wants to get a particular insight and you understand what a Rowan economy is, but you're not necessarily a hardcore super geeky data engineer then you can visual low-code, no-code, your data to a point where it's business ready. You can do that really quick. It's easy to understand, it's faster to ramp people onto those projects cause it like explains itself, faster to hand it over cause it's self-documenting. But, they'll always be individuals, teams, "and", "or" use cases that want to high-code as well. Maybe you want to code in SQL or Python, increasingly of course in DBT and you can do that on top of the Data Productivity Cloud as well. So you're not having to make a choice, but is that right? >> So one of the things that Matillion really delivers is speed to insight. I've always said that, you know, when you want to be business ready you want to make fast decisions, you want to act on data quickly, Matillion allows you to, this feed to insight is just unbelievably fast because you blend all of these different data sources, you can find the deficiencies in your process, you fix that and you can quickly turn things around and I don't think there's any other platform that I've ever used that has that ability. So the speed to insight is so tremendous with Matillion. >> The thing I always assume going on in our customers teams, like you run Hoshang is that the visual metaphor, be it around the orchestration and data ops jobs, be it around the transformation. I hope it makes it easier for teams not only to build it in the first place, but to live with it, right? To hand it over to other people and all that good stuff. Is that true? >> Let me highlight that a little bit more and better for you. So, say for example, if you don't have a platform like Matillion, you don't really have a central repository. >> Yeah. >> Where all of your codes meet, you could have a get repository, you could do all of those things. But, for example, for definitions, business definitions, any of those kind of things, you don't want it to live in just a spreadsheet. You want it to have a central platform where everybody can go in, there's detailed notes, copious notes that you can make on Matillion and people know exactly which flow to go to and be part of, and so I kind of think that that's really, really important because that's really helped us in a big, big way. 'Cause when I first got there, you know, you were pulling code from different scripts and things and you were trying to piece everything together. But when you have a platform like Matillion and you actually see it seamlessly across, it's just so phenomenal. >> So, I want to pick up on something Matthew said about, consolidating platforms and vendors because we have some data from PTR, one of our survey partners and they went out, every quarter they do surveys and they asked the customers that were going to decrease their spending in the quarter, "How are you going to do it?" And number one, by far, like, over a third said, "We're going to consolidate redundant vendors." Way ahead of cloud, we going to optimize cloud resource that was next at like 15%. So, confirms what you were saying and you're hearing that a lot. Will you wait? And I think we never get rid of stuff, we talk about it all the time. We call it GRS, get rid of stuff. Were you able to consolidate or at least minimize your expense around? >> Hoshang: Yeah, absolutely. >> What we were able to do is identify different parts of our tech stack that were just either deficient or duplicate, you know, so they're just like, we don't want any duplicate efforts, we just want to be able to have like, a single platform that does things, does things well and Matillion helped us identify all of those different and how do we choose the right tech stack. It's also about like Matillion is so easy to integrate with any tech stack, you know, it's just they have a generic API tool that you can log into anything besides all of the components that are already there. So it's a great platform to help you do that. >> And the three things we always say about the Data Productivity Cloud, everyone ready, we spoke about this is whether low-code, no-code, quasi-technical, quasi-business person using it, through to a high-end data engineer. You're going to feel at home on the DPC. The second one, which Hoshang was just alluding to there is stack ready, right? So it is built for AWS, built for Snowflake, built for Redshift, pure tight integration, push down ELT better than you could write yourself by hand. And then the final one is future ready, which is this idea that you can start now super easy. And we buy software quickly nowadays, right? We spin it up, we try it out and before we know it, the whole organization is using it. And so the future ready talks about that continuum of being able to launch in five minutes, learn it in five hours, deliver your first project in five days and yet still be happy that it's an enterprise scalable platform, five years down track including integrating with all the different things. So Matillion's job holding up the end of the bargain that Hoshang was just talking about there is to ensure we keep putting the features integrations and support into the Data Productivity Cloud to make sure that Hoshang's team can continue to live inside it and do all the things they need to do. >> Hoshang, you talked about the speed to insight being tremendously fast, but if I'm looking at Cisco Meraki from a high level business outcome perspective, what are some of those outcomes that a Matillion is helping Cisco Meraki to achieve. >> So I can just talk in general, not giving you like any specific numbers or anything, but for example, we were trying to understand how well our small and medium business campaigns were doing and we had to actually pull in data from multiple different sources. So not just, our instances of Marketo and Salesforce, we had to look at our internal databases. So Matillion helped us blend all of that together. Once I had all of that data blended, it was then ready to be analyzed. And once we had that analysis done, we were able to confirm that our SMB campaigns were doing well but these the things that we need to do to improve them. When we did that and all of that happened so quickly because they were like, well you need to get data from here, you need to get data from there. And we're like, great, we'll just plug, plug, plug. We put it all together, build transformations and you know we produced this insight and then we were able to reform, refine, and keep getting better and better at it. And you know, we had a 40X return on SMB campaigns. It's unbelievable. >> And there's the revenue tie in right there. >> Hoshang: Yeah. >> Matthew, I know you've been super busy, tons of meetings, you didn't get to see the whole keynote, but one of the themes of Adam Selipsky's keynote was, you know, the three letter word of ETL, they laid out a vision of zero ETL and then they announced zero ETL for Aurora and Redshift. And you think about ETL, I remember the days they said, "Okay, we're going to do ELT." Which is like, raising the debt ceiling, we're just going to kick the can down the road. So, what do you think about that vision? You know, how does it relate to what you guys are doing? >> So there was a, I don't know if this only works in the UK or it works globally. It was a good line many years ago. Rumors of my death are premature or so I think it was an obituary had gone out in the times by accident and that's how the guy responded to it. Something like that. It's a little bit like that. The announcement earlier within the AWS space of zero ETL between platforms like Aurora and Redshift and perhaps more over time is really about data movement, right? So it's about do I need to do a load of high cost in terms of coding and compute, movement of data between one platform, another. At Matillion, we've always seen data movement as an enabling technology, which gets you to the value add of transformation. My favorite metaphor to bring this to life is one of iron. So the world's made of iron, right? The world is literally made of iron ore but iron ore isn't useful until you turn it to steel. Loading data is digging out iron ore from the ground and moving it to the refinery. Transformation of data is turning iron ore into steel and what the announcements you saw earlier from AWS are more about the quarry to the factory bit than they are about the iron ore to the steel bit. And so, I think it's great that platforms are making it easier to move data between them, but it doesn't change the need for Hoshang's business professionals to refine that data into something useful to drive their marketing campaigns. >> Exactly, it's quarry to the factory and a very Snowflake like in a way, right? You make it easy to get in. >> It's like, don't get me wrong, I'm great to see investment going into the Redshift business and the AWS data analytics stack. We do a lot of business there. But yes, this stuff is also there on Snowflake, already. >> I mean come on, we've seen this for years. You know, I know there's a big love fest between Snowflake and AWS 'cause they're selling so much business in the field. But look that we saw it separating computing from storage, then AWS does it and now, you know, why not? It's good sense. That's what customers want. The customer obsessed data sharing is another thing. >> And if you take data sharing as an example from our friends at Snowflake, when that was announced a few people possibly, yourselves, said, "Oh, Matthew what do you think about this? You're in the data movement business." And I was like, "Ah, I'm not really actually, some of my competitors are in the data movement business. I have data movement as part of my platform. We don't charge directly for it. It's just part of the platform." And really what it's to do is to get the data into a place where you can do the fun stuff with it of refining into steel. And so if Snowflake or now AWS and the Redshift group are making that easier that's just faster to fun for me really. >> Yeah, sure. >> Last question, a question for both of you. If you had, you have a brand new shiny car, you got a bumper sticker that you want to put on that car to tell everyone about Matillion, everyone about Cisco Meraki, what does that bumper sticker say? >> So for Matillion, it says Matillion is the Data Productivity Cloud. We help you make your data business ready, faster. And then for a joke I'd write, "Which you are going to need in the face of this tsunami of data." So that's what mine would say. >> Love it. Hoshang, what would you say? >> I would say that Cisco makes some of the best products for IT professionals. And I don't think you can, really do the things you do in IT without any Cisco product. Really phenomenal products. And, we've gone so much beyond just the IT realm. So you know, it's been phenomenal. >> Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you back on the program. Congrats to you now Hoshang, an alumni of theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> But thank you for talking to us, Matthew, about what's going on with Matillion so much since we've seen you last. I can imagine how much worse going to go on until we see you again. But we appreciate, especially having the Cisco Meraki customer example that really articulates the value of data for everyone. We appreciate your insights and we appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Privilege to be here. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Pleasure. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. You're watching theCUBE. We're at UiPath Forward Americas. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. TheCUBE is the leader of, what are we the leader of? (laughs) >> Live tech coverage, Dave. >> The leader in live tech coverage. I've been blowing that line every week. Thanks for watching, everybody. We've got a great segment here. Jean Younger is here. She's the vice president, Six Sigma Leader, Security Benefit. She's to my near left, and Donna O'Donnell is here, director of key accounts at UiPath all the way from New York. Donna, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Great to see you guys. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> All right, so we're well into day one. We're getting the Kool-Aid injection from customers and UiPath constituents, but Jean, let's start with you. Talk about your role, what's the company do, fill us in. >> Our company is an annuity company. We sell financial products for life insurance and annuities. We have about 30 billion under management, so it's a fairly large company out of Kansas. So, my role there is as a Six Sigma leader. We go in and we look at areas that need improvement or across the company, and one of the things I found, I'd been with the company almost five years now, and what I found is a lot of times, we're really good about putting manual processes in and never getting rid of 'em. We have day two issues of a tech. A tech goes live and you got a list of day two stuff that didn't get fixed, never gets fixed. It's just easier to do it, and cheaper, to leave it manual. So we have a lot of that in the company. With my job, seeing the various processes throughout the company, I was like what can we do to get rid of some of this stuff, get rid of that, get knowledge work back on the worker's plate instead of manipulating a spreadsheet or creating a report that they do every morning and it takes 'em the first 30 minutes or the first seven hours of their day is creating this one report every single day. We started looking at technology and came across UiPath. >> See, we call it GRS, getting rid of stuff. >> Jean: Yep. >> So, Donna, your job is to make these guys successful, right? >> Absolutely, so basically I just facilitate the smart people within the company. I listen to the business needs that Jean and other large clients have. We bring the resources, the products, and if we can't find it, we will absolutely find it and do everything we can to meet the needs. >> So, what's your automation story? When'd you get started? Paint a picture for us, the size, the scope. >> Okay, so last year about this time is when I started looking into it. I had just rolled out of another area that we had completely destroyed and built back up, and I was on to my next escapade in security benefit. >> Dave: Are you a silo buster, is that the new-- >> Yeah, I kind of go in and fix things. I'm kind of a fixer is basically what my job is. We'd rolled out and came back into Six Sigma to start looking and this came up. I'd seen the technology and I was like I wonder if it could work in our company. And so, we started doing kind of dog and pony show. We'd pull the different silos in, talk to 'em and say hey, here's what RPA can do for you. Is that something that you have some processes that might work? And we knew that there were processes in there, but we brainstormed with 'em for about 30 minutes. And out of that 30 minute, hour long conversation, we came out of there with about a hundred processes that people had already identified. And we kept going through there, I took that information, I built a business case, 'cause I knew to get the money, I needed to show them that there would be cost out potentially, and/or that I could take resources and move 'em into more critical areas that we didn't have the staffing. And so I had instances where, one of them that we're doing is out of our HR department. During the raise and salary time, they had two individuals that spent 60 hours a week for four months doing the same thing, same report over and over, and that's one of the processes we're actually going to implement here pretty soon. So, I came up with 'em and put the business plan together and asked for the money, and after kind of a long journey, I got the money. >> Long journey. (Jean and Donna laugh) >> It's never short enough is it? Jean, I mean, one of the things, Six Sigma is really good at measuring things. I mean, that's how you understand everything. You want to reduce variation. There was a line that really jumped out at me at the keynote is I want to go from pretty accurate to perfectly accurate, and when you were describing that there were a lot of things that were manually done. I mean, I lived in engineering for a lot of years and it was anything that somebody had to manually do, it was like oh wait, how can we change that? Because we didn't have RPA 10 years ago when I was looking at this, but how are you measuring these results? You talked about people doing repetitive tasks and the like. What other things are you finding to help get you along those reducing the variation inside the company? >> You know, it's interesting because I also teach the Six Sigma courses there, and one of my slides I've had for years teaching that class is most business processes are between 3.2 and 3.6, 3.8 sigma, which is like 95 to 98% accurate, and I said that's all the better we can usually do because of the expense that it would normally be to get us to a Six Sigma. You look at the places that have Six Sigma. It's life threatening, airplane engines. You hope they're at least Seven Sigma, those type of things, but business processes? 3.5, 3.2. But now, I get to change that because with RPA, I can make them Six Sigma very cheap, very cheaply, because I can pull 'em in, I got my bot, it comes over, pulls the information, and there's no double-keying. There's no miskeys. It's accuracy, 100% accuracy. >> So, what's the ripple effect in terms of the business impact? >> Cost savings, efficiency, customer experience. I mean, think about it. You're a customer, you get your policy, your name's wrong. How happy are you? You're not real happy. You send it back. So, no more of that. I mean, that's huge. So anything touching the customer going out of our business should be exactly how they put it on the application, especially if it was typed. Now, if it was handwritten, all hands are down on that, but if it was typed, it should be accurate. >> Donna, that's really powerful. I worked in a large corporation, we had a Six Sigma initiative and we know how much time and effort and people we were going to put in to have this little movements. >> Incremental change. >> An incremental change here to say. >> Donna: Pretty amazing. >> Blown away to tell you, Six Sigma and it's cheap. Well, what are you seeing? >> And I absolutely see. So, in addition to cost savings, it makes her more agile. But the big thing is, it makes it error free. The robots work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Runs on itself, and Jean's going to get those efficiencies that she needed. >> How about let's talk more about the business case? I'm interested in the hard dollar piece of it. I've talked to a number of people at this show and others, and they tend not to just fire people. They got to redeploy 'em. Sometimes the CFO goes well, where's my hard dollars come from? So, where did your hard dollars come from? (laughs) >> From the CFO. (laughs) And right now, I have to prove that out yet. We're just in its infancy. We're just starting to bring up processes. In fact, yesterday and today we're dealing with several processes coming up, and so realistically, right now I've got about 300 processes. We haven't timed 'em all out yet, but I know right now that's between probably 12 and 15,000 hours of time savings that we will get on an annual basis. >> Okay, what one of the customers said today is, one example they used is they actually put it in next year's budget >> Correct. >> Which I loved. In other words, we're going to do more revenue for the same headcount, or less cost or whatever it is. That's a reasonable justification, maybe even better, right? Because it's got some forward motion to it. Is that kind of discussion and thinking come up? >> Headcount is under discussion right now. We're going through budgeting right now, and so yeah, that was part of the way that we justified the less headcount. Instead of hiring to fill another position, we would remove jobs from a certain person and be able to shift them into another role. And so that savings, non-hiring, as well as one of the processes we're doing is in our investment area. They couldn't afford to get another person. They couldn't get another headcount, so I gave them a headcount with a bot. I'm doing all their processes that they've only been able to do on a monthly basis, we're doing 'em every day. It's 52 processes they're going to do every day. It's an amazing, I gave 'em a head right there, bam. >> But we're also finding that the folks that were doing the mundane and repetitive tasks can focus on more creative work, more interesting work that they believe in and that they're motivated to do. We see that happening all the time. >> What does that mean for culture inside your company? Was there resistance at first? I have to think it's got to improve morale that it's like oh wait, I'm not getting in trouble for making mistakes now and I can go focus on things that fit better. >> You know, I think ultimately it will. Initially, there was a feeling gosh, the bots are going to take my job. But that was one thing we were pretty careful about initially going out and just saying what is it that you can't do? We all work 50, 60, some of them people are working 70 hours a week, and if I can take 10 or 20 hours away from them, they are lovin' us. There's individuals that are saying come here. I'll show you what I need. They also realize the ability of the bot to do it right all the time takes a little stress off of them, because they know they're going to get the right numbers, then, to analyze, 'cause that's a big thing. In the finance area, in the close, in the accounting area, what we're doing there is we're taking a lot of those simple process that somebody has to do and do them for them so then guess what? We can close earlier, get our books closed earlier in the month, as well as allow them longer time to analyze the results. So instead of the book's closed and then we go uh-oh, found a problem. Got to reopen the ledger and make an entry, we have less and less of that. Those are expectations that are set right now for our teams is that hey, let's get rid of the stuff that we can, and then let's see what's left. >> And Dave, I used to meet with clients and they used to say wow, this is a really interesting technology. Tell me about it. And now they're like holy crap, I'm behind the eight ball with my competition. How do we get this going quick? How do we get it going fast? In 2016, it was a $250 million industry, and by 2021, it's going to be a $3 billion industry we learned today. So it's pretty powerful. >> I think those numbers are low, by the way. >> I think they're low, too. What they said today, it's going to be a $3.4 billion industry. >> I think it's a 10x factor, probably by 2023 to 2025, I think this is going to be a $10 billion business. I've done a lot of forecasting in my life. That's just a gut feel swag, but it sort of feels like that. I think there's some pieces that are, there's some blind spots in terms of use cases and applications that we can't even see yet. Culturally, the light bulb moment, just listening to you, Jean, was the, first of all you're saying, you want your weekends back? Yeah! And then the second is it sounds like the employees are involved in sort of defining those processes, so they own it. >> And that's how we're scaling. I mean, we already realized we're a bottleneck. Our COE is a bottleneck and so we're like hey, right now, finance, it's not the end of the year. It's end of quarter, but those process are lighter than end of the year. So hey, can we get anything done? They're doing our documentation for us. They're actually taping themselves doing it, they're writing up the documentation. We come in and we look at it, and then we have a programmer doing it, but we're talking about how do we move that programming piece down to them as well, so we can get our scale up? Because I can't get through 300 processes in my small COE without a lot of help from the business. >> But Dave, most of our clients, the way that they scale very quickly is through partners. So, partners can do one of many things. They can be the developers, they can be the implementers, they could create the center of excellence, or they could pick which are the low-hanging processes. When we started off with Jean while she was going through the approval process, I brought out four partners, I gave 'em my own little mini RFP. They each had a four-hour time slot. They presented in front of Jean and we narrowed it down to two, and two of the partners are here at this event today. Most clients need to depend on partners. >> Well, that's key Donna, right? And I've said before, when you start seeing the big names that are around here, you know it's an exciting space. They don't just tiptoe and play around and games. They do some serious work for businesses. We got to turn the conversation to diversity, generally, but I also want to ask you specifically about women in tech. So, Stu and I were in a conference at Splunk earlier this week. The CEO of Carnival had a great line about diversity. He said, a big believer in diversity, of course. He's African American, and he said 40 years ago when I cracked in business, there weren't a lot of people I worked with that looked like me. I thought that was striking, Stu. I think there's always been women in tech, but not enough and a lot of stories about things that have happened to women in tech. It's changing slowly. A lot of women enter the field and then leave because they don't see a path to their future in things they like. What do you guys think about the topic, two women here on the panel today, which is our pleasure to have you. You can see, we need help. We have women working for us, (Jean and Donna laugh) but there's an imbalance there. >> You're right. >> What do you tell someone like us who's trying to find more women or more diversity and bring them into their-- >> Jean has many opinions in this space. Go ahead, Jean, I love your opinions in this space. >> I told the story at one of the UiPath events. I've been, as a lawyer, chemist, I've always been in pretty much a man's world. That's been my life in corporate America, and all along as I looked back, Donna was the first woman that sat across me to negotiate a contract. The entire time that I've been in the tech world, in the business world in corporate America, I had women working for me when I was at an insurance company negotiation very large contracts and stuff. They were on my side of the table. She was the first woman that I negotiated with on the other side of the table, and I think that's really sad, and I think we all have to look and say, how can we do better than that? How can we make us diverse? I look around here and you have all colors, all sizes, it's wonderful and it energizes you. And I am really a true believer in a really diverse workforce. I look at that and I think, 'cause they bring so many cool ideas, they think differently. Young, old, you put 'em all in a room and it's just amazing what they come up with, and I think if business leaders would hear that and think about that instead of hearing the same type of person, what's that same type of person that has your same background going to give you? He's not going to give you the transformation, or he or she. It's going to be kind of the same, what you're used to. You need that jolt, and I believe the more diverse people that we have around the table trying to solve the problem, it's amazing. I sat, last week, and I had a 22-year-old woman come into my office, Shirat, who's 30-ish and from India, and I had Amy who grew up in Topeka, hasn't left Topeka, myself. We were sitting around a table and another guy came and he probably 30. So you had a big, broad range. Somebody just out of college, me that's been out of college a long time, sitting around the table and we came up with, they thought they were dead in the water, and within 30 minutes of us just throwing different ideas out, we came up with a solution that we could continue going with. I mean, their faces were downtrodden and everything when they walked in, and when they left, we were excited, we were ready to go. Now, if we don't nurture that type of conversation, we're never going to get diversity. That's what diversity's about. If you think about it that way, wow. We went from having a problem that was a total dead stop and we weren't going to be able to proceed to 30 minutes later having a great solution and keeping running. And I truly believe it was because we had a diverse group of people around that table. >> Studies have been done of the clear value of diversity, the decisions that are made are better and drive business value. One of the challenges is finding the people, and it was pointed out to me one time, it's just because you're looking inside your own network. You got to go outside your own network, and it takes longer, it's more work. You just got to allocate the time, and it's good advice. It's hard work, but you got to do it to make change. >> And sometimes you got to take a chance. Sometimes, because it is outside of your network, you're not comfortable necessarily with the answers they give you or the way they approach a subject. I mean, you've got to feel comfortable, and CEOs and CFOs and the C-suite has to start thinking about that, because if you wanted to be transforming, that's how you transform. You don't transform thinking the same way every day. You're not going to transform. >> Let me ask you a question. You said you're a fixer, so I wrote down the adjectives that I would use to describe a fixer, and I want to know if this has been the way in which people have described you. You got to be smart, you got to be a quick study, you got to be a good listener, you got to be confident, self-assured, tough, decisive, collaborative. Are those the adjectives that have described you as a fixer over the years? >> Yes, I think those are you qualities, by the way. >> I don't doubt they're your qualities. Is that how people refer to you in business? >> Yeah, I think so. I mean, I've done the test where they say are you a collaborator or do you push? And I get the mix. I'm either a collaborator or I'm a person that's pushing her own belief, and I know exactly who said I was a person that was only pushing her own belief, and I know the ones that said I was a collaborator. But that is, you got to be collaborative. >> I believe you have those attributes, but the reason for my question is a lot of times when it's a woman fixer, those aren't the adjectives that they would use to describe you. It would be abrasive or combative. I mean, you hear adjectives like that. Same exactly attributes as a male fixer, just described differently. Has that changed in your view? >> I go about things probably a little bit differently than men do, and I've had to adapt. Like I said, I've been a chemist. What was I? 8% of the community of chemists is a woman, so I've had to adapt my style. And I do a lot of drive-bys, I do a lot of one-on-one discussions over the lunch, over hey, do you have a few minutes? I need to talk to you. So, I do a lot of that type of collaboration before I ever get into that big meeting where I'm pushing my one direction. I've got my buddies all lined up already, and so I don't think it feels like I'm abrasive or that I'm, because I've fought those battles privately already. So maybe I've adapted my style that I don't get those types of reactions, but that's what you got to do. You've got to learn how to work the system. >> At the same time, I think that, and this is a compliment, I think Jean on the outside, it's tough to earn her respect in the beginning, but if you do, there's nobody more fiercely loyal than Jean. So you got to earn your way in there, and that's got to be consistent, like a 15-step process to get there. (Jean laughs) >> Yeah. >> And you can't let go because if you let go-- >> Dave: They're hard to get, huh? >> She's going to make you think on number six day you're not good enough, and then you just got to keep on going. So I understand what you're stating, Dave. You have to keep on going, and if you get there there's nothing that Jean wouldn't do for you. As she's here, she's on the advisory board of UiPath. She is the most, once you prove yourself, that's it. It's going to be hard to change that, but it's not easy to get there. >> So this inherent bias, people are tribal in nature and they're biased. Does things like automation and RPA, AI, does it eliminate that bias or does it codify it? >> Wow, interesting question. I don't know, I don't know the answer to that. >> Dave: I don't think anybody knows. >> I don't know that either. >> I've never really thought about it. I mean, to me RPA is just another tool in my toolkit, you know? And if I can fix it with AI, great, or UiPath, if I can use that to fix it with RPA, great. If I need another toolkit, I'll go use that toolkit. But I do know that it's a way that individuals, you can get a lot of young people into your organization that have great ideas. I'm stocking up with interns and I'm using, like I said, woman we hired, she was my intern, graduated in May, and the next day she had a full-time job. And she's done a phenomenal job. And that's what RPA has done for our business, because it's an entree in that then they're in and they're doing this simpler technology, then people see how wonderful they are and they can go and move into bigger and better roles. And that's what I'm trying to encourage is get some really smart people in with this tool, and that's what UiPath has enabled, I think, people that maybe they're not the best coders, or maybe they're not the best BAs, but you put that together and they're knocking it out of the park. The young ones are knocking it out of the park on this technology. It's amazing. >> We did several blockchain and Crypto conferences this year, you want to talk about diversity, and I mean it's old money, it's new money, it's women, it's people in turbans, it's people with color. It's actually quite amazing, and one of the older investors, I asked him what's your secret? He said, "I surround myself with millennials." (laughs) >> Jean: Correct. >> That was good advice, but very diverse crowd in Crypto. You don't have to be Ivy League, Silicon Valley and white, Caucasian, to be successful, right? >> Dave, I was representing RPA at a Women in Tech conference last week in the FinTech environment, and I was talking, sitting next to Crypto and Bitcoin and at the end, the lines lined up for RPA. And I would say to the girls, why are you lined up for RPA? And they basically said you are the disruptor. RPA is the disruptor. There was a speaker here today that says RPA's the gateway drug to artificial intelligence, which is absolutely true. RPA is operational right now, it's working today, and there's elements of AI that are here today, but there's elements that are future technology. But RPA's completely ready to go, operational, mainstream in most enterprise companies. >> And I know we kind of went off topic there but it's relevant and it's important and it's a passion of ours, so really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Stu. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward in Miami. Right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this special Cube conversation with a practitioner, a real-world enterprise journey to the Cloud. I'm here with Jake Burns, who's the Vice President of Cloud Services at Live Nation Entertainment, in from L.A. Jake, thanks for coming in to our Marlborough Studio, appreciate you having in. >> I'm glad to be here. >> So tell me about your role. >> So, I'm head of cloud services for Live Nation, and what that means is, me and my team are in charge of infrastructure for IT, including cloud infrastructure, as well as the move to the cloud, which we completed early 2017, enterprise messaging, which includes e-corporate email, DNS, database services, and storage management. >> So, recent journey. How did it start? Was it a top-down push, did you go to management and say, "Hey, we got to do this," describe that dynamic. >> Yeah, so it started off as kind of a bottom-up push. >> Dave: Really? >> For a number of years I've been really wanting to get us involved in public cloud, at least in some level. But, it really didn't hit critical mass until our CEO, late 2015, had a mandate that we're going to move 100% to cloud, and modernize all of IT. And that's when we really hit the ground running. >> Why did, from a bottom-up standpoint, why did you guys want to do that? Was it because cloud's cool, that's where all the action is, the developers want to be there, or was it something else? >> We spent a lot of time managing infrastructure and data centers, and it's just not part of our core business. We wanted to focus more on satisfying the business, and providing value to the business. And, our time could be better spent really helping solve their problems, rather than deal with hardware and systems. Another thing is just business agility in general. If we want to stand up a new system, the typical lifecycle could be three to six months, just to get an application up and running. With cloud, we can do that in days, weeks, worst case. So, being able to respond quickly to business needs is something that's really important to us, and we saw with public cloud that we could do that a lot more efficiently. >> And when you think about the early cloud days, the rhetoric was all about agility, and it actually, that really was the main business benefit. You guys of course saved a lot of money too, and I want to get into that, but how did you get started? It must have been, kind of a little nervous, like the first time you jumped off a high cliff or something. Right, because you have an existing business to run, and yet you're going to migrate everything. Migrate's like this evil word, so how did you get started? >> For us, we realized very early on that this was a big technology change for us, and it was going to require new skills that we didn't have, so the first thing we did, was we really just got training across the board. We brought trainers from AWS to our offices, and we did every training program that they offered. Got the certifications. And made sure that we really understood what we were dealing with before we got started. So that was really step number one. >> And how did that go? Were they really supportive? Everybody says AWS, really not hands-on, they just send me an email. How did that go? >> In the beginning, there's resistance. Just like all projects like this, people are concerned they're going to lose their jobs. >> Dave: Resistance from your guys. >> Oh, yeah, yeah- >> Not the AWS people, they were- >> Oh, no, of course, right. No no, our guys, before they really understand the situation, it looks like we're being outsourced. We're moving all of our infrastructure. This is our job. We're managing hardware, we're managing servers, we're managing data centers, and all that stuff's going to go away, so what are we going to do, right? So, really, even before the training, the priority for me was to get people to understand that this is not something that's a danger for your career. Quite the contrary. This is going to make you more valuable. You're going to get trained on this technology. You're going to get real world experience, moving a Fortune 500 company to the cloud, and at the end of this, someone is going to need to maintain it. So not only will you have job security, but you're probably not going to care about job security at the end of this, because you're going to be so valuable in the marketplace. >> So, we're all in sales, aren't we? So you had to sell them a little bit on the concept, but then they responded positively, it sounds like. >> Yeah, and part of that is because it's the truth. I was telling them the truth, so it was an easy sell. But it's a very important component of any cloud migration project like this. If you don't have support from your people, it's not going to succeed. >> Okay, so you get through the training. Your guys are onboard, you have alignment there, and then take us through sort of the journey. How long did it take, what were some of the challenges that you faced? >> The target was 12 months to move everything, and we're talking about 668 servers, 118 applications, including Oracle, SAP, some really things that are not trivial to move to the cloud. We were able to move 90% of everything in 12 months, and then the long tail took an additional five months, so that's 17 months in total to move everything. >> And that long tail, was that the Oracle apps? >> Yeah, so our strategy was to move the easy stuff first, as we learned, because we learned along the way. We really didn't know what we were doing when we started. By the end of the project, we knew exactly how to do the project. >> Easy stuff like messaging? >> Like single server applications that are running supported software, where we have a business stakeholder that's cooperative. >> Dave: Web stuff? >> Yeah, like internal stuff, like our monitoring systems, things that we completely control. >> Dave: Things that were under the control of IT, didn't involve a lot of politics, and ... >> Jake: Exactly. >> Learn there, okay. >> Right, so the idea was, get real world experience moving live production systems on the easy stuff, and it kind of builds up our skillset, but at the same time it builds forward momentum, which is critical for a project like this. There's a lot of people that are just waiting for the first failure to kind of put a stop to the whole thing, right? There's a lot of skepticism as to whether this can even be accomplished or not. So, getting, I truly believe a key component for a project like this is to get momentum on your side early on, and the way you do that is by attacking the easy problems first, and then get progressively more difficult as you go along. And so at the end, you end up with the most difficult applications to move, but at that point, you have full buy in from everyone because you've been successful so far, and you and your team are practiced and accomplished, and have the skillsets necessary through moving all the more easy stuff before that. >> Okay, and just a quick aside, I have to ask. So, Oracle is kind of using licensing as a weapon, especially, there's this, I call it urinary Olympics, sorry, with Oracle and AWS. You may not have visibility on it, if you don't we can move on, but was that a concern? >> Absolutely, yeah. So this was a major problem that we've had to deal with, and Oracle doesn't make it easy. They don't necessarily want their customers moving to AWS. So, that was part of the challenge. Part of the challenge was, how do we move this without having to pay more in licensing? And what it really comes down to, is you have to make your Oracle databases run more efficiently in AWS, in order to lower the core count, which is what the licensing is based on, in order to keep your costs neutral, because Oracle will charge you double for your database, per processor, in the cloud in AWS than they will on prem. So, really the only way around that, besides negotiating with Oracle if you're able to do that, if you're not able to do that, then your only option is to make it run twice as efficiently from a processor standpoint. >> Thank you for sharing that with our audience. We've written a lot about ways to reduce your core count. Ways to make IO optimized, and if you can do that, you can actually save a lot of money. Maybe we'll have you back on at Reinvent, and we can talk more about that. But so, back to your story here. You got a huge budget to do this, right? Big bag of money to say, go move to AWS? >> Unfortunately, we didn't have that luxury. So, we run very lean. So we had essentially a flat budget, 2016, when we did the majority of these moves. So we just had to find a way to do it without spending money. And so, it was a bit of a juggling act. We were decommissioning systems in the data center, and canceling support contracts, so we were able to kind of use some of that money and repurpose some of that money for moving to AWS, but we really didn't have a budget for hiring consultants, or to buy expensive software, or anything like that. So, what we had to do was, basically become the consultants, to do the cloud migration. And so, that's where that training comes into play. So by training the team, and getting them up to speed, and essentially creating cloud engineers, we were able to be internal consultants to the business, perform the move internally at a very low cost. >> All within that sort of 12/17 month timeframe, you were able to affect that skills transition. >> Right, so we were simultaneously maintaining the old infrastructure, moving the infrastructure to AWS, and maintaining the infrastructure in AWS. So there were a lot of long hours. >> I'll bet. That's weekends. >> But, we were enthusiastic about doing it. Everyone was very excited once we got going, and so people were willing to do it. You talk about the people challenges. I think we've addressed that a little bit anyway. What were some of the other challenges? You got a reasonably sized application portfolio, you got data, you got your backup systems. What were some of the challenges that you faced, and how did you address them? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. One thing that people don't realize is that AWS isn't necessarily designed for enterprise applications. It's getting a lot better. But, there are some things where it just doesn't fit automatically. So, one area where that's especially true is with storage. AWS has a fantastic storage offering, especially with S3, their object storage. But unfortunately, most enterprise applications, they can't utilize. Legacy enterprise applications won't utilize object stores, they want block storage. >> They don't want get put, they want block storage, okay. >> Yeah exactly. And then the block storage in AWS is different than the block storage than what you're used to in the data center, typically. So, kind of allowing these applications, like Oracle, to work on AWS's block storage can be a challenge. It can be expensive, and there can be some risk there, just because of the way that it works. So, this is where using a third party makes sense. This is one of the rare circumstances where I think using a third party makes sense. We found a company called Actifio that does virtual storage in AWS, and one of the great things about this product is it essentially mimics the way that the old storage worked in our old environment, in our data center. So the application continued to function. So we're able to take snapshots, we're able to clone environments, we're able to do all of these things that we are not able to do in AWS natively, with the Actifio product. And it saved us a lot of money, and allowed us to avoid a lot of having to change our workflows to get around some of the delays with doing snapshots and stuff natively. >> And is your strategy to have this sort of hybrid approach between on prem and public cloud, or multiple public clouds? Is that part of the strategy, and how does this capability fit into that? >> Yeah, it's a great question. Our initial strategy was 100% going all in with AWS, and officially that's still our strategy. I am a proponent of multi-cloud in certain circumstances. For example, disaster recovery and backups, I think it makes sense, if your 100% in the cloud, to have a second cloud provider to hold your backup data, just so you don't have everything in one place. I think, for the same reason, hybrid cloud makes a lot of sense. And I think also hybrid cloud makes a lot of sense, just because not all applications are a good fit for a public cloud, and Oracle, SAP, would be two of those examples. Now we were forced to move everything to AWS, and it was a fun challenge, and we were able to accomplish that. But doing it over again, if we had the option of doing hybrid cloud, there may be a couple applications that I would say keep it on prem, because it just works better that way. >> And, can you double click on the storage virtualization capability that you talked about. Kind of how does that work, and how do you have to ... Were there any kind of things that you had to do to prepare for that? Any sort of out of scope expectations that customers should be aware of? >> With Actifio it's a pretty turnkey solution. So, there's a little bit of a learning curve, but there's a learning curve with using the AWS native tools as well. So I would say probably less of a learning curve if you use a product like Actifio, because it's more familiar to the people that are already working on these systems. So if you have existing staff, and they're used to doing things in the data center, and they're used to doing things with traditional enterprise storage, the Actifio tools is going to look a bit more familiar than the AWS tools. So, there's a learning curve either way, but I would say look at a product like Actifio if you're an enterprise trying to do this. >> So what was the business impact of using Actifio? Then I want to ask you about the whole move to AWS. Did it speed the time to deployment for AWS? Did it help you cut cost? What was the business impact? >> Unfortunately, we didn't become aware of this product until after we had moved. So, we're in the process now of replacing some of our storage devices with virtual storage with Actifio. But I wish we had found this product sooner. I advise anyone who's new at this, anyone who's doing a migration, to leverage something like this to actually move their data, because it's a much more efficient way to do it. So, if I could go back in time, I would do that. >> What would have been the business impact? Is this time and money? >> Yeah, time and money, for sure. So, the moving of the data is one of the biggest challenges that you're going to have moving to cloud. We had a petabyte of data that we had to move, and that's no small task to get that moved in 12 months. So, any tool that you can use that can make that more efficient, is going to shorten the amount of time you're going to be doing the migration. And, consequently, shorten the amount of money that you spend doing the migration. Also it would have saved us a lot of time, because now we're going back and having to change things, and put things under Actifio. If we would have done it like that to begin with, we wouldn't have to spend that effort after the fact. >> Why does Actifio make it more efficient? Is it data reduction? Is it automation? >> So essentially the biggest benefit is that it allows you to not have duplicates of your data. So, if you have a dozen or so copies of your database, for different types of environments, test, UAT, dev, etc., and you're duplicating those, and storing each one of those separately, you're going to pay for each one of those separately, and have to manage each one of those separately. If you're able to use virtual storage, then you really have one copy of the data, or however many copies of data you really need to be protected, and the rest of those can be virtual copies. And those don't cost you anything from a storage point of view. The other benefit is, if you want to clone an environment, or copy an environment, or take a snapshot of an environment, it can happen instantaneously, rather than wait for the hours or days that it would take to copy a large dataset. >> So it becomes the single point of control, with a catalog, and give you visibility over all your data, and your copies, and allows you to manage that, is that correct? >> Yeah, and the management becomes a lot easier, because you have software that's keeping track of your snapshots, and keeping track of all your copies of data, rather than try to track that all manually. >> Okay. Let's bring it back to the big AWS picture. So you move to the cloud. What was the business impact of that? You mentioned agility. Did you save money? How much? Maybe give us some visibility on that. >> Because we're so cost conscious, saving money was a priority. I don't think it's necessarily something to expect, especially initially, if you're an enterprise moving to the cloud. Cost shouldn't be the driver. Agility should be the driver. But, in our case, we were able to achieve 18% reduction in TCO, on year one. And, that's just because we were just very focused on cost. We're very cost sensitive, and it's very important for us to be efficient, and to not spend money unnecessarily. I know that's a priority for everyone, but it's a top priority for us. And so, my point is it can be done. You can move to the cloud. You can move 100% to public cloud if you're an enterprise, and you could make it cost neutral, or even favorable. It is possible. >> So you hear a lot of stuff in the press about how the cloud is very expensive. You could actually do it cheaper on prem. Based on your experience, you don't buy that. >> Well, I wouldn't say that's false. You can, in a lot of circumstances, do it cheaper on prem. It really depends on the workload. So I mentioned earlier that I think hybrid is probably the right approach for most people. So just because we're saving money by going 100% cloud, doesn't mean we wouldn't save more money if we went hybrid cloud, and put the more expensive things that run in cloud, on prem. So, because it's pay for what you use, the things that you very heavily utilize, those are good candidates to keep on prem. The things that are more bursty, those are the things that are better candidates to put in the cloud. The easiest things, candidates to put in the cloud, are disaster recovery and backups, those are no-brainers. DR because that's only something you need to scale up when you use it. So anything that you need to scale up when you use it, or anything that scales up and down, those are the best candidates for cloud. >> Okay, now I understand you're kind of an expert at cutting the AWS utility bill. Maybe you could give us some advice on how to do that, and how'd you learn how to do that? >> Yeah, so that's kind of my area of focus now, is now that we're in the cloud, getting those costs reduced as much as possible. So, there's a lot of ways to do this, but I like to keep it simple, and attack the things that have the biggest impact first. So, people like fancy solutions, but it's really simple. The biggest thing you can do is delete things you're not using. You're paying for consumption, so find things that are not being used, and simply delete them. After that, then find things that are oversized, and right-size them. And then, another big thing is, in the cloud, you have such an easy access to spin things up. To take snapshots of data, to copy data, and it's the classic problem in IT, where everyone requests what they want, and they never tell you when they're done with it. So, it needs to be a full-time effort, to be actively looking for resources that are unused. Snapshots that are no longer needed, volumes that are no longer needed, instances that are no longer needed, and be cleaning those things up on a continuous basis. I find that that's a large percentage of what my team does now, and that's one of the things that keeps our costs in line. >> That's interesting. We always talk here about GRS, getting rid of stuff. Not only did you get rid of a bunch of stuff when you moved in the cloud, you said 600 servers, you got rid of unused capacity, you got rid of a bunch of data, which must have made your general counsel happy, but you're now actively continuing to get rid of stuff. Like you said, it's volumes, it's snaps, and so the things, now you're in the cloud, that GRS mentality is sort of ingrained. >> It has to be. I think that anyone who's in the cloud for some time is going to realize this. You're going to have inflation of costs, simply by doing nothing. So, just to keep your cost neutral, you're going to have to be deleting things on a continuous basis. Now if you want your costs to go down, that's even more difficult. You have to be more aggressive with it. But, just as it's easier to spin things up in the cloud, the good news is it's easier to keep track of what you have, and find things that can be deleted in the cloud, because you don't have to go in the data center and track things down. Everything is virtual. It all can be automated. It's all done, it can be scripted. So, everything's easier. Spinning things up's easier. Cleaning things up is easier, you just have to make it a priority, and make sure it gets done. >> So, some of the financial people in our audience might be listening and saying, "Eh, you know, okay, year one. Roughly 20% savings. It's not that exciting." But we haven't quantified the sort of other business impacts in terms of agility, and that's a harder thing to quantify, but it's early days for you still. Do you expect to get on that S curve, and really start to see a major business impact, beyond that 17, 18%? >> That's a great question. That 18% reduction in TCO, that's just infrastructure costs, so that's not taking into account things like how long does it take for us to spin up an application, and what does that cost the business, that delay? We're not taking that into account. How about the opportunity cost of, we want to try something, but it's too expensive because we've got to buy servers, and we got to hire people to build the application, and install the operating system, all that kind of stuff. Those opportunity costs, they're not captured either. Now, we can try as many things as we want, very inexpensively, and only keep the things that work. So I think there's a lot of hidden cost savings, a lot of hidden value that's very difficult to capture. But, we certainly have those benefits, even if we're not articulating it, and counting it very well, the business feels it, and it's certainly a superior level of service. >> Well it's kind of like when we first got email. Nobody really quantified it, but the productivity impact was enormous. Or the first local area network that you ever installed, and the collaboration that that brought, it's one of those things that's, it's probably telephone numbers, but it's hard to quantify, right? You said the business people see it. Do the finance people see it as well, and are they supportive of this? >> Yeah, it takes a while I think for the non-technical teams to catch up, and really get to where we're at in terms of an understanding of what we're dealing with at this point. So, they're starting to see it. But, all the financial models have to change. All the budgeting needs to change. There's a lot of things that, beyond IT, this kind of transformation affects, and those processes have to change, and those processes generally change more slowly. So procurement needs to change, finance needs to change, security needs to change. Everything really, it's a new world. And once they catch up and kind of really grasp what we're dealing with, I think the whole business is going to be transformed. >> So two last questions. You talked about maybe things you'd do differently. Maybe some advice. But let's focus clearly on advice to your colleagues that are trying to do something similar, get to the cloud, what would you tell them? >> Invest in your people. Focus on cost savings day one. Don't look at doing that after the fact. And don't get too caught up in all the fancy methodologies, and fancy tools. Everybody's going to try to sell you something. Everybody's going to try to tell you they have the best way to do it. But, in general, those things are just going to add complexity to your project. I say keep it simple, keep it lean. Leverage your own people. Because at the end of the day, somebody's going to have to support this environment as well, and if you're relying too much on outside help, then they're not going to be there when it's all said and done. So, consider the endgame. Consider the end state, and how you're going to support that, because it's one thing to be successful migrating to the cloud, but then you have a whole new set of challenges after that. And you're going to have to live with that moving forward. And, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's a great thing. But it's something different, and you're going to have to be prepared for that. >> Own it. >> Jake: Own it. >> Yeah, okay. And then, last question, just sort of what's next for you guys? You're just sort of getting started here. You've made a tremendous amount of progress in a year and a half. What's next? Where do you want to take this thing? >> Like I said, right now we're really focused on cost optimization. I think that, like you alluded to earlier, the cloud could be very expensive. The range of how much it can cost is, it's amazing, right? So, this is uncharted territory. We don't know how expensive it should be, how cheap it should be. We just now that we can affect that, to a large degree. So I'm interested in seeing to what degree we can affect that, and I want to see how efficient we can make this. 18% favorable TCO is one thing. Let's see if we can get 30% or 40%. So, really I'm focused on optimizing for cost, security, which is a whole new world in the cloud, and going from there. >> Jake Burns, awesome having you on. Thanks very much for your insights. >> Jake: My pleasure. >> Really appreciate your time. And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City It's theCube covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Ballante. We're joined by Mike Rodgers. He is the CSIO of Pilot Flying J. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Pilot Flying J and your relationship with Inforum. >> So Pilot Flying J is a travel center. We cater to basically over the road truckers and we do have a big gas business too. We operate about 700 locations. Most of them are owned fully by Pilot Flying J. Some of them are dealers where they have a relationship with us. They're in our network but we don't know them. So we run the majority of the locations and we own about 40% of the overall road diesel market. >> Rebecca: In the US and Canada? >> In the US and Canada. >> Okay and talk about your relationship with Inforum. >> So our relationship with Inforum really goes back to Lawson. I've been with the company for about two years. We run Lawson. David Clo-thy will tell you probably 25 years. The company has very rapidly. Started off as a small little Tennessee company. Well now it's a rather large company and we felt we knew we had to make a change relative to our human capital management and our financial systems is because we basically outgrew it. And we like to write a lot of things so we wrote a lot of applications out of our desperate sylo. And of course it's a lot of technical debt that goes along with them. So when I start with the company. We started on valuation process and picked for as the partner to replace all of our financial systems, and all of our human capital management systems. >> And so you migrating from traditional legacy lawson to the cloud suite. >> Pretty much, I would characterize it as a migration but we had very little in the vein of human capital management. And what we did have, we wrote ourselves. For example, we wrote our own applicant tracking system, which we'll of course have to integrate into lawson. So we have an integration layer that we have to support there and that's just one. There was a slide put up this morning that showed that we're going to eliminate 26 systems that we either bought as the best of breed type of application or we wrote ourselves. >> So how painful is that? Is that why you-- >> It's extremely painful. >> They brought you in for this task and you obviously knew this coming in or just-- >> Oh I knew this coming in. >> Dave: No surprise. >> No surprise and by the way, pilot is no different than a lot of other retailers in other companies out there. We've got a lot of technical there and I will tell you the more I see about Inforum. The more I think we made the right decision. I really like the cloud strategy. I'd like the integration associated with all the different functions specifically within the HCM suite. It's not a roll up like some of the other guys have rolled up. They bought but whether it's PeopleSoft or whatever and they many talk about it being integrated, bit it's not as integrated as the Inforum suite. >> So if I may, sorry. We want to stay on the migrations for a second because it's non-trivial and people. The conundrum of migrations is nobody wants to do them because it's just such a heavy lift. But the longer you wait, the more technical debt you accrue. >> I use to say you have to get off the treadmill. You have to stop and say we're not going to keep digging ourself in this ditch and it's going to be painful. It's going to be expensive. It's going to be disruptive and I use to say the (indistinct speaking) usually get fired. That really is, I might say that laughingly but-- >> Dave: You got a got attitude about-- >> It's hard, okay. It's a hard thing not just for the IT guys. It's a hard thing for the organization with respect to change management. >> So incredible amount of planning obviously. You knew your freezing code. >> Pretty much because why would we continue to develop something. I wouldn't say we were 100% frozen. Things come out especially in HR where there's a regulation thing. >> Dave: Compliance, right. >> Right compliance and you got to do it so we got pretty good at saying we're not going to, we're going to wait for Inforum. And we've got a lot of it implemented. We're continuing. We got a nice plan. An iterative plan, we're not trying to blow the ocean and convert everything all at once. Very good engagement from the business. We have a lot of business partners here with us. Like the IT representation at this conference. It's the smallest compared to the business. >> So I would think a key there though is because when you freeze code. It slows your business down, but then when you actually go to the new platform. You want to be able to move faster and leap frog your competition. >> I would argue that really, because we really didn't have much. It really hasn't slow much down. Where we had to do something from a compliance perspective, we've done it. But it hasn't really slowed us down. The leap frog that we're going to do when we implement the whole cloud suite is going to be enormous. >> Sorry about. >> I wanted you to step back a little bit and tell our viewers about some of the specific HCM challenges you have and what you, talk about the pain, I guess is what I want you to describe. >> We run travel service. We're open 365 days a year, 24/7. They never close. They're all on food operations. >> Rebecca: Of the three quick services food operations. >> It could be up to three. If we don't have three in every stores someone said that. We may have one in every store plus a deli operation that we run ourselves and we actually create the food. Whether it's pizza, meatloaf whatever the truck drivers really want with respect to our food offering. They want something different, more variety. So yeah, it's a very complex business. It's hard and we're very spread out throughout the country. We're not necessarily in a big cities like New York. you're not going to see a pilot in New York City. You're going to see a pilot or a flying J on major interstates throughout the country. So there were spread out. So connecting with our team members has been a challenge for us. And our owner Jimmy Haslam will tell you that we probably have not any give himself a vibe. And we are connecting with the team member so we're doing a lot to facilitate that connection. We'd actually partner with the Disney Institute to help us with that. And we've actually called Inforum for project connect. So it's going to provide that connection platform to those team members that are spread throughout the country and Canada for that matter. That we don't get to see that very often, if ever. >> We're hearing a lot at the keynote retail has been highlighted a lot and Pilot J is a form of retail in that sense. And talking about how important it is for the customer experience. The trucker themselves who come in to apply at Pilot Flying J. >> Our strategy is focused on making it a great place to work. In other words, doing the right things for our team member and the investment at Inforum is really going to provide that platform. The other part is making it a great place to shop, and we want our customer to come back. Okay we sell a commodity, let's face it. We sell diesel. You can buy it down the road. We want the experience when they come into our store. We want to take care of our guest like nobody else takes care of them. We got a truck driver. There was an article written in New York Times but you don't throw away people. These guys, you got it, you're wearing it. Your tie, your shirt, whatever came on a truck, and these guys, they're great people. I've talked to a million of them. We want to be the place where they come that feels like home and we want to make a better day for the truck or the driver. It's a tough job. They work hard. They're waking their families. When they come into a pilot. It should feel like somewhat of an oasis. >> Right so, it's super clean I understand. >> Yeah, we try to make them clean. Remember If you're a truck driver and you're away for week's on end. You're going to shower at our locations and so the showers are cleaned and maintained after every shower. Nobody gets in a dirty shower. The rest it's challenging. We have 3000 people come through our doors every day at every location so it's challenging to keep the rest rooms in particular clean. But the showers are cleaned before anybody gets in them. >> And you own the real estate or you lease it? >> We own. >> Dave: Really. >> I'm sure we lease some of this. I've got a question for Dave. We own most of our-- >> But your in the real estate business too. >> Oh yeah. We're definitely in the real estate business. >> What about the data? How is the way in which you use data evolving? >> It's evolving very rapidly and we are a data rich company especially with respect to the professional driver which is the majority of our profitable business. They scan their loyalty card whenever they come. We have a 92% swipe rate and that's because they use those points to buy food, buy showers. >> Rebecca: They're rewarded. >> They're rewarded and it's lucrative to them. They're managing a business so they use that as currency. So that data provides us with the ability to solve. We needed utility along the customer journey. For example, we may know when a guy needs a shower and we may have a fuel buying advantage at a certain location. Offer them a free shower if he fuels at location X because it's beneficial for him and us. Okay we're going to give him a free shower or a free slice of pizza if we feel we have an advantage with respect to purchasing petroleum. >> You're building loyalty. >> Right and builds loyalty so that's on the customer side. >> Rebecca: That's the nudge they need to walk in-- >> To be able to use our digital platforms, our digital properties to take the data and drive behavior, and loyalty. It's really about loyalty. We want to give good things to our loyal customers, take good care of them and solve the problems they have. 'Cause they'll come back. And Jimmy says we want them to come back. He says it and we do things that are going to solve the problem they have. They're going to come back because it's the least friction. >> Are you using data for the logistics in any way, for these truckers in other ways? >> Yeah, that's not Inforum, however well for the truckers. We're using logistics with respect to how we procure petroleum. And I'm probably not going to get into a lot of that because we feel it's a competitive thing there with respect to how we do it. And we are investing a good bit of money into how we procure and manage how we distribute petroleum to our various locations. >> That's a data lever. You got advantage better than-- >> That's where a lot of data reach and we can use data very effectively. >> So data literally is oil. We had a guest on. >> Well data is abundant insights aren't necessarily so that's where you're making money. You've mentioned before Mike that you said you are more confident after you go through this migration, but Inforum was the right decision. What gives you that confidence? Can you double click on that? >> Yeah, it's a couple of things. Number one, and we talked about the technical debt right. So lifting everything to the cloud give me a unique opportunity to eliminate the technical debt 'cause we're not going to write it. We're going to stay current on the latest release of the software. Whereas if you looked around here, everybody will tell you they're behind releases, releases, releases on enterprise software that they've purchased from somebody else that's not in the cloud. So number one elimination of technical debt and staying current on the existing platforms. You really can't customize it. You can customize it within the tool so with the customization or configuration or extensibility carries along as they operate the software. That's the biggest events and I think being in the cloud. I was showing some data to my boss the other day regarding how our infrastructure investment has gone up. Really been able to manage the actual investment with the number of servers, VMware and all that we're running has grown exponentially. That's 'cause we hadn't retire anything. We're going to, with Inforum we're retire 26 platforms. They're going away. They'll be out of the infrastructure and it will be in the cloud. I don't have to manage anymore. >> You're getting rid of stuff, wow. >> Mike: Getting rid of it. >> GRS recall, that never happens in IT. >> I took personal responsibility for the decommissioning aspect of the project. >> I'm going to ask you another IT question is that latest release because you're in the cloud and you're multi-tenet, you have to go essentially into the next release. Does that create down stream problems for you. How do you plan for that? >> Well we're new into it, okay. We're working with Inforum on that and it's perfect now but they get it. We got to be careful when we make the release so we can be prepared for it. So far there have been upgrades and it's been nerve racking. A new release of code that we hadn't really tested or whatever but I think we'll get that route resolved. I said it's new, we got to become efficient in how that happens. We need a little bit of prior notice. >> Dave: Forced agile. >> Yeah, forced agile. Here it comes. (laughing) >> There's a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence here at Inforum. Where would you say Pilot Flying J is with regard to using artificial intelligence as part of your workforce. Giving your workers access to it and also more tools to make the right decision at the right time. >> I think it's at the stage now where it's really cool and it's somewhat of a buzz thing. AI when machine learning. I think it's going to be very relevant and probably not the too distant future. It's not on my immediate road map to worry about artificial intelligence. We thought about doing a project with IBM on fuel procurement and pricing with Lawson. It's just really not quite ready yet. What we can develop is deep insights with the data we have to make better decisions, and put power in the hands of our pricing team or our logistics team to make really good decisions. I think that's for us. Let's get that perfected and then we talked about the voice recognition that we heard yesterday. That I think is imminent and I think it's important for us and it's going to be on our road map because as a truck driver. I'm driving and if I can have the ability to ask questions of our app and purvey information back to that driver, without him having to touch his phone. There's a value of that. Most that has to be architected through the right type of data. How we structure our data to be able to access via natural speech but it is something that is on our road map. >> How large is your IT organization? Roughly. >> In number of people? >> Dave: Yeah. We have about 250 people in our IT organization but we do have a significant use of partners. >> And they're distributed or? >> No, they're in Tennessee. And for the notes popping now we use offshore resources with certain integration partners. We have a couple primary integration partners that we're using. >> So reason I'm asking so as you move to this cloud sass platform. How are you thinking about protecting your data and is it changing. >> It's a good question. And all of a sudden, for awhile there I think we do a great as securing it. We invested a significant amount of money protecting our data. I think I'd be naive to say that we could do a better job than Amazon web services. >> Dave: I would agree, no offense. >> And I think one of the gentleman was speaking yesterday said the same thing. And one of my guys looked at me says that's what we've been saying. I think there's always a risk. Security is a big deal especially with what's happened with one-acry and the subsequent problem. There's going to be more. I think that Amazon could be on top of it. I think together we can do a good job on security. It doesn't worry me anymore than it worries me everyday with respect to my own infrastructure. And it does worry me just not anymore. >> Great, well Mike, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a really enlightening conversation. >> Okay, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Ballante. We'll have more from Inforum in a little bit. (uptempo piano music)

hi everybody we're back this is Dave vellante from Wikibon Oregon here with Jeff Frick this is silicon angles the cube the cube we go into events like this we're at knowledge service now is user conference we try to extract the signal from the noise would bring you we love sports analogies here we like to bring you the best athletes tech athletes week all them so Carolyn Hollingsworth is here she's I know Carolyn you're a fan of a football but we're going to call you a tech athlete so Karen's with Lennox internationals he's an IT practitioner there Carla thanks a lot for taking some time and coming on the cube so tell us a little bit about Lennox about the organization and what's your role there Lennox is a global manufacturer of furnace and air conditioning equipment were based in Dallas Texas and we have sales of about five billion dollars a year and i'm the senior manager of service operations ok so this conferences amazed this first knowledge conference I've been to I presume you've been to others or is this year first oh this is actually my fourth kind of okay so you were here an inning so they had a few before that I'd be close but so it's it's evolved over the years I told oh yes it seems like year-over-year it doubles yeah so it's gotten bigger and more diverse or in terms of just the content or is it still sort of focused on you know leveraging the platform and now it's got more diverse I mean they've added you know discovery and their this new orchestration which is run book that's new this year they're always adding new modules so and then to now they're really pushing platform that's the custom applications you can build outside of IT so do you they tell us it's really easy to write applications can you write applications on the platform oh yes really okay you a programmer by trader I programmed in a past life okay really don't program today but I can't go in and build screens within service now and do reporting it's very easy so I was a program of past life too and not a very good one which is why I know hosting the cube but I have an idea for an app so I'm dying to get my hands on the platform so I can play around with what they just came out with a brand new app that they say that anybody can sit down and write application app creator right yeah so I will test that anybody claims oh they said we have a hackathon going on I believe tomorrow yeah we actually come in that earlier today you're in there filming at that phone is underway there they're working till midnight I made sure that they had pizza and caffeine and I think they're gonna have a little bonus Vegas entertainment visiting at some point in time so tell us more about how you're using service i'm really interested in the sort of before and after described life before service now came in you know what was that like and how did it change and we'll get into the implementation a little bit well before service now we did have an application for the help desk to take tickets but that's about all we did nothing else within IT really had a system like service now after we brought service now and you know we it's a complete package they keep you know they say erp for IT well it truly is you can do ticketing we're doing change change management discovery of all of our assets we've built our own applications for access management even departments outside of IT are coming to us now and saying hey we see what you've done with service now we have something we think that maybe we could use it for so we've built applications for HR we're building an application for our R&D department to track the various incidents and changes that goes on with the large test cells for HVAC equipment marketing we have some small retailers that has pieces and parts for our HVAC equipment around the United States we've built an app for them to bring in new equipment and it has to go through a workflow and be approved by like a district manager pricing changes sales programs I'll have to be approved well we build an app for them that runs on service now also so prior to service now you had the collection of sperm and I've seen the spreadsheets and it's an asset spreadsheet and the spreadsheets on top of spreadsheets and that's that what that describes your environment oh yes definitely and somebody owns the spreadsheet this is totally right yeah this is before you know google doc so I chose I got it you take it you take it so you had all this sort of conversion simultaneous versions going on convictions or email email was always a big way to pass around test the various people can you take care of this can you do that now you may be very well may have had project management systems right actually we had a homegrown project management so a lot of customers right there yeah homegrown or Microsoft projects or you know whatever 37signals I mean there's there are many out there so how did ServiceNow sort of change things in other words what can you do now that you couldn't do then we have one system where everything is so there's no you know before someone would say this is the way it is and another one might be tracking the same assets or the licenses and we had 22 answers now we have one system that is the record their goal we called our golden record so everything is in service now it's connected to each other if you know if you think of erp for manufacturing is you know everything is connected to each other right so you see each other you used to have to add one plus the other divide by two and say okay that's a truth so parents can you talk a little bit about mobile I'm Mobile's impacting your business we keep hearing about we keep hearing about I think of the Linux guy out in the truck checking in on the HVAC outside the house and the commercial actually they are actually building computer controls into our units now they've announced a couple of them but it's going to be able to call home when it has a problem and it's just starting but I mean they're actually taking this mobile idea to our products and arses we're doing some plc's where our sales force is getting iPads and they're going to be doing some apps within Salesforce calm and talk about that one but it's okay you got to manage a lot of different idea I so many puzzles of that we're starting to delve into mobile we're looking at possibly replacing all of our laptops with either notebooks or tablets so we have a lot of PLC's going on right now just trying to put a strategy together as to what our mobile is going to be but it's coming towards us all different ways were there challenges in terms of would be so you bring in service now you get the single system that we call to the gold golden record record were there challenges in getting rid of stuff we have to keep army called GRS getting rid of stuff getting rid of for instance legacy systems that had sort of embedded themselves into the organization and how did that go how did that all come about well let me tell you first how ServiceNow got into our organization we had this older system and we had it for 10 years and I mean it was meeting our needs we thought I mean we didn't really have any problems with it we weren't looking for a new system and yeah I remember this is five years ago we I got an email out of the blue for with a little embedded commercial for her demo for service now and it was I mean just sort of like mind boggling what they were saying they could do and how it was all packaged in one package and basically I you know I want that just for that just for that day and what we'll use cases they that they outline that grabbed you so effectively it's just that everything you know is there erp system for IT everything was there is connected we had the system we had all we had was ticketing if you wanted problem you had to buy another module if you want to change it by another module everything you wanted was more money this was one package one subscription price and you know you got it all and but it took me a year to convince my peers and our vp that we should be looking at this now why did it take so long what was the kind of friction what was the discussion like well it's like well why didn't we you know the use case why did why do you need a new tool you know this'n seems to be you know taking stock broke right wife is it and Lennox is a very conservative company and and we have in the past run a lot of old software as probably a lot of companies do if there's not a real need there you know they don't go out and look at in retrospect it was broke right in your hair to what you're doing now so how did it affect your business I mean did you get more competitive are you able to you know track better people or you out cost how we we posed it after you know I got some doubles going and everybody in the you know interested in looking at this we convinced our vp that we should go global with this because before Lennox was very structured that each locality because her global had their own IT systems and their own IT support groups so while they reported in dotted line into dallas the headquarters everybody sort of did their own thing so we came up with this program will we were going to do standard global processes with 80 and so that's where we started and then we were going to use service now as the tool of choice so we started down that path and it didn't make a big difference to the business because now most of our IT processes are the same across the globe and you know we're asking everybody to do things the same way go to service now and just work that way so you stuck with it for a year and a half I mean you don't seem like the type of person who's gonna start pounding the table and intimidating people that doesn't seem to be your style so so I bet you but at the same time you you kept at it so it was you know a year and a half before you were able to convince people so how did you go about that sell process I'm really well rhian give advice to the other position Hunter wonder you're watching the shutter say Carolyn help me my senior guys to make us make the sleep in here today thirty percent of it yeah well I till was really becoming big at the time and there was a lot of news going on about I chill and you know we do listen to you know gardener and Forester and people like that so I told was getting big and I think you know it just came at the right time with our vp to say well you know maybe this is something we should look into and you know we got all the senior management together and basically he said you know everybody's got to put their thumbs on the table that we're doing the or we're not going to do it and everybody came to the table said yes it sounds like a good thing to do so what are you most proud of the accomplishments that you've made both professionally and personally as it relates to this initiative I think that our support and operations department or groups are working the most efficiently that the most efficient that they can and I think that you know we're responding to our customers needs a lot faster we're not hearing all the complaints that we heard before that you know hey this has been broke when you're going to fix it you know we're even trying to become more proactive we've brought in some monitoring tools that we didn't have before to help us along those lines so just to be more customer-centric and you know sort of instead of saying no to the customer say okay we can do it now so all this I mean you're using the lines of indoor so all the stuff we hear about from going no to now that's not just to you that's not just marketing you're actually living that is that fair statement yes I mean like I said we started putting up our own applications and now we have all these customers who wouldn't normally come to support and ask that though they have an application built they go to our project side of the house but they're coming to us you know we're working with safety and HR and R&D and you know I could double or triple my staff just to keep up with the request we're getting from outside of our teeth and you're able to do that so the businesses and helping you fund that yes it's got to feel great it's so easy to make an application I mean the other ERP system we use is SI p and you know to get a system up in sa peas big dollars 6 8 9 10 12 months and we literally built the application for our retail stores in two weeks so I mean I've been around IT a long time and I've just seen the finger pointing and what do you spending our money on it sounds like you're you've flipped or in the process of sort of flipping that tality is that is my overstating that er no I think that's that's gotta feel great I mean good congratulations hi Carol doesn't thanks very much for coming on the cube and sharing your story the story of Lennox your personal story and really congratulations on all the great progress oh thank you there's a pleasure all right keep it right to everybody will be back our next guest is marina Levinson who's the founder former at netapp CIO we've had a couple of