>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Michael Smith, he is the director of infrastructure at HKS, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey thanks for having me, excited to be here. >> So Mike, HKS, tell us, you're based in Dallas you're an architecture firm, tell us about some of the big projects that you have worked on. >> Sure, yeah, so I've been with the firm since April. Really excited to get on board and really kind of understand the rich history, we actually turn 80 this year so we'll have a really big celebration of the company. So yeah, HKS, we do a lot of sports entertainment so Dallas Cowboys, AT&T stadium, the Vikings home, L.A. Rams, so about 30% of our mix is sports entertainment so you may not know the company but you certainly know the buildings we design. >> Some well known buildings, exactly. >> Actually when you talk an 80 year old firm, and I think of those two buildings, well I'm a techie, I'm a geek, there's a lot of technology that goes into that. I'd love just a viewpoint as to how the company looks because 80 years ago I'm sure they didn't have the tech people in there, design is very much there, how does that you know the culture and inside the company a little bit? >> Sure, yeah so that's really the neat thing right, so everyone thinks that it's a company full of architects right and for the most part it is, but we have nurses on staff right, why? Because we build hospitals. We have people that understand how buildings work. So part of our five stakeholders, the community, is actually one of those stakeholders. So we're not just listening to the client who's asking us how to build it, we're seeing how that building is going to fit into the community, into its surroundings, and how it's really going to interoperate right cause these buildings are going to be around for what, you know 10, 15, 20 years until the next one gets built. >> So what are you doing here at this conference? What are the kinds of people you want to meet, the kind of connections you want to make? >> Sure, yeah, so first off I made some great connections. And that's one of the things I love about coming to things like Ignite. This is my first time here but I've loved it. I tell ya I really enjoy hearing people and hearing about the same challenges that I'm facing and then there's understanding how they're using the various pieces of technology to kind of piece that together. >> Alright so Mike, you're director of infrastructure, so we know infrastructure well, it is our first time at this show but we have been doing infrastructure shows for many years, maybe give us a little bit about your background and what's under your domain at HKS? >> Sure, yeah, so yeah I've worked for the last 20 years mainly for architectural engineering firms right, and so and there's a lot to be said for understanding the specific industry that you're working in right, so obviously it's not just about Word documents and Excel files, you're talking about very large CAD files and having to traverse from office to office right, and so you have to have a very robust infrastructure. So I've got basically the entire networking servers, WAN, LAN, Internet, VoIP, oh yeah and I've got cyber security under my profile as well. We run a small shop at HKS, but yeah so the company's doing really really well and we've got 24 offices globally, 19 here in the US and like I said we manage that really a 24/7 shop. >> Alright so you've got a number of locations, when we talked to infrastructure people the role of data and how do I manage it, how do I do things like disaster recovery and like usually are pretty important, how is it in your world? >> Yeah so obviously disaster recovery, to me that's the backbone of IT right, specifically of my group, and if we can't do that right, if we can't do a data protection correctly then to me we really shouldn't be working on any other project. And that's really where Cohesity comes into the equation right, so when I came on board we had a legacy solution, it was working right, it just and talking with the business really partnering and understanding what their expectations were, we realize that there were some gaps. And ended up talking to Cohesity through a vendor did an amazing whiteboarding session with just some folks that I really felt like cared about and understood our business and then yeah so we've been I guess since about mid-July, we've been implemented on our Cohesity solution for data protection globally, we're about 75% of the way there in what, just a month and a half? So from a speed of implementation standpoint right. But we've really made some leaps and bounds, gains and kind of those requirements that our customers are asking of us and kind of returning, you know basically returning them back to work. >> Yeah, can you paint a little picture of kind of the before and after for us? >> Sure yeah so we've always had a cloud strategy, so we've been partnered with Microsoft for several years, great Office 365, we've used Azure for backup, but I wouldn't say that it was really an optimized solution. And so if we had an actual outage, what we were talking about is you know a fairly long time to pull those resources back down to on-prem and so what we've implemented with our Cohesity solution is basically a system now where when our customers come in and 95% of the time they can get their files back on the phone with the first level technician. So before I was going to a third level sysadmin, basically requiring them to stop what they're doing, work on their restore right, and in some instances it may have been a day before we returned that customer back to work so if you can think about the ability to really just return them back into their normal work process, almost instantaneously, I mean the RTO is really incalculable when you start talking about soft dollars like that. >> Talk about, you mentioned how coming here you talked with lot of people in your industry or people maybe not even in your industry, but you realize you all share similar challenges, and you just talked about the disaster recovery and how that can really keep you up at night. Can you talk about a few of the other problems and challenges that you encounter and how Cohesity has helped you? >> Sure, yeah, so you know I think obviously in the forefront of everybody's mind is security right, and the fact that I have security within my group so understanding that in the topics of data in motion, data in rest right, topics of encryption so you know all of our data as it's pulled into Cohesity is encrypted and so obviously and then as that sits in Azure that's encrypted so that transaction is secure. You know I think the overall management of the infrastructure really having that single pane of glass that Cohesity can offer, that was huge challenge when I came onboard because the solution that we were using was really meant for file replication and so in order to find out if something worked we had to go to 81 disparate sources to see if that worked right. And so today I can come in in the morning, I got a guy that starts at 6 a.m. God bless him, and by the time I get in anything that happened overnight is completely remediated, I can look at one single pane of glass, I can see a bunch of green and honestly if there's red I can see it and I know that something failed and I can pinpoint exactly what we need to do to fix it. >> Mike you said you were about 75% of the way deployed. Walk us through where you're going with it, what you've been learning along the way, and any lessons learned along the way that you could share with your peers, as to how the experience has been, what they might want to do to optimize things. >> Sure, yeah, so I think we're about 75% of the way, we've got a lot of our international sites that are coming onboard now, we're learning a lot about our network. We're learning a lot about different things and so I would say before you do an implementation of this size, really make sure that you have a good handle on patching. Making sure that all of your resources are patched. The last thing you want to do is find out you have a resource problem with slow latency and it's due to a patch not being applied right. And then just understanding you know the time frames involved right? So we've targeted about 75 days to get fully onboard but we're talking almost a petabyte of data across one gigabit connectivity right, and so when you start talking about that there's lot of, we're doing a lot of mix and mashing, bandwidth throttling and all that kind of fun stuff in order to get up and running. >> Yeah so I'm kind of laughing a little bit over here because it's been a punchline in the Microsoft community, it's like oh well you know is it patch Tuesday yet or things like that. We've come so far yet there's still some things that hold us back, that leads me to my next question is you know what's exciting you in the industry in tech and your job, what's working great and what on the other hand are you asking your vendors, what would make your job and your group's job even better whether that be Cohesity, Microsoft, or others? >> Yeah so I think as a company that, we have a lot of data right, and at first as the role of the person responsible for that data, you know it was oh my gosh we have a lot of data. And it was actually a couple of months ago, something clicked in my head and I said, we have a lot of data. (hosts laughing) And guess what? We can do analytics on that data. And so you know I think machine learning is going to be huge right. I think being able to do a lot of those tasks that we count on, you know I have people that are doing things two to three times a week, maybe between eight and five. Well those are things that with machine learning we can have those algorithms basically running 24/7 and so we can start making leaps and bounds progress over what we're doing today. HKS is really big into understanding what the value add is in building a building right? It's not just about the architecture. There's value to that, and so what other value items can we provide to our customers that because you know to be honest technology is becoming a commodity right? How much longer before core services like your architecture and your engineering start to become commodities? And so that's really where I think analyzing that data. And so I was at VMworld a few weeks ago and I was talking to a Cohesity engineer and I really expected him, I said what's next on the road map from data analytics? And I expected to hear x, y, and z. And he looked at me and he goes, What do you want to see next? What do you want to do with your data? Let's partner with you and make that happen right. Now I'm smart enough to go, I don't know what that next thing is but we have really smart PhD-type people that do so we're really looking forward to that next phase. >> I'm interested in teams because you talked about the very diverse employee base at HKS. You said you've got nurses on the team, I'm imagining you have hospitality experts, you've got the PhD types, you've got the science people, and the architects. So how do you get all these people with very different functional expertise to work together and pull together and all be on the same page? >> That's actually a great question. So interestingly enough, I sit right next to a librarian and she's in IT right, and they work in our Global Knowledge Management group which does SharePoint so who better to understand how to start to classify and organize information than someone who's a trained librarian right? So I think what we're really excited about is our IT team has really been really rebuilt say over the last two years and it's been rebuilt with people who have a real passion for their industry but also kind of a broad understanding of how everything interconnects and so we're really kind of building a culture that says if there's information there, it's shareable. We're not holding anything close to the vest. If you want to understand, if I use too many acronyms when I talk, then ask me what they are right. And so I think that right there, that fosters a lot more involvement and people give more of themselves incrementally when they understand that hey there's skin in the game and yes I'm a librarian and I may not know the technological things that you do, but if I say well hey what if we do it this way, we're not just going to blow that idea off and we're going to actually incorporate that into the greater solution. >> Great, Mike we talk a lot about AI at the show and IoT and you're doing buildings, I'm curious how things like all the censors and everything impact what you're doing, how you partner with your clients on that. >> Sure, yeah, so we've got a great team that really focuses on that entire extended set of technologies so obviously drone technologies, sensor technologies, and so I think a lot of those, those are I won't even say that they are even forward looking anymore. Those are, especially sensor technology, so I mean I've worked in environments where we had 24 by seven cameras on a job site so general contractor probably hates it but a PM from anywhere in the world can look at his project, his or her project, and they can see their progress right? Well you know then at what point does that extend to, well I'm going to launch a drone here and I'm going to go look at a very specific piece and a very part of that technology. And so yeah I think it's one of those things if you ever start sitting on your laurels in IT, if your feet ever get off of the toes moving forward, you're already behind. So you know I think things like AI, machine learning, you know I've talked to some people that'll go, well we're two to three years away from that. And I said, in two to three years those will be things of the past right? You have to, you don't have to be bleeding edge, but you have to understand where you can leverage those technologies for your business. >> Give us a little candy here. Paint a picture of what the building of the future is, whether it's the stadium of the future, the hotel of the future, just get us excited here. What are some of the things >> Sure yeah. that you're looking at? >> So I actually talked to a gentleman a couple weeks back and they're building a hotel and this hotel has Bluetooth sensors in the room right, can't do any kind of cameras or anything like that but basically what it can do is based upon the signal saturation of the Bluetooth, it can tell you how many people are in that room cause it understands the dissipation of the signal through the normal human body right. So take that down to your typical occupancy sensor that so you leave the room, maybe you're sleeping late, well the room doesn't think anybody's in there so it turns the temperature up, turns the lights on, does whatever it does right. Well with this new technology it can't do that. So fast forward on and maybe it's a little bit more scary. So now you go from your room and you walk down to the lobby bar, you walk past the lobby bar. Well the wireless devices know the MAC address of your phone because you used that number when you checked in, so as you get close it pops you a hey, you want to 15% or how much do you want to free drink at the bar if you come in here? So I think understanding the connectiveness of everything and then really not being afraid of it. There is a Big Brother aspect to all of this, but just kind of understanding that you know, kind of in the Elon Musk vein is that we have to understand and we have to control where that technology is going but I think if you're afraid of it like that and you know, I'm not going to, I'm never going to stay at that hotel because of the things that they do, then I think you're missing out. >> Right, exactly. Well thank you so much Mike, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much >> A lot of fun talking to you. I appreciate the opportunity. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida coming up just after this. (light techno music)