>> Narrator: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. It's the Cube. Covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Comvault. >> Welcome back to the Music City. This is the Cube at Commvault GO. I'm Stu Miniman with my Co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program one of the users of the show, actually, going to get to see her on stage at the keynote tomorrow. Ah, Michele Buschman who's the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Thanks so much for jointing us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, ah, give us a little bit about your company and your roles of responsibility there. >> Sure, so, um, as you mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Um, I pretty much am responsible, you know, in the acting role or CIO, CTO, and CISO. So, I manage all technology for the company reporting to the COO. Um, our company is a top 15 independent mortgage bank. Um, we do about 10 billion dollars in mortgages a year, and have about a 25 hundred employee user base. >> Alright, so you've just got a couple of roles there, and luckily your in an industry, not much regulation to worry about, things aren't changing, things are kind of static. You just kind of put in a couple hours at the office and go, go take a nap, right? >> Ya, right (laughing). >> Um, why don't you tell us, what are some of those dynamics that are driving your up level business that are impacting, uh, the technology side. >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, you know, the mortgage industry is somewhat cyclical, and we are in that range where interest rates are going up, um, margin pressures are high. So, you know it's all about doing more with less and saving money. Um, in traditionally in the mortgage banking world, um, you know, IT resources, you're always a little bit short? Um, and so, that, you know, drives me to look for strategies that allow me to leverage my technical resources more for business value operations, than managing infrastructure, keeping lights on, um, which has really motivated us to move to the Cloud, and adopt platform type solutions similar to Commvault to be able to be more efficient with our few resources that we do have in our technology team. >> Alright, can you speak a little bit about Cloud. What is that driver, what does Cloud mean to your organization? And ah, yeah, what is the strategy as it sits today? >> Absolutely, so, um, we're kind of unique, I guess, to an extent in that, you know, when I walked into the organization four and a half years ago. The bulk of our critical business applications were already Sass hosted applications. Um, that grew out of the need because they had such a small technical team, um, you know, for the investments to manage the infrastructure to host applications is very high. So, um, luckily enough, I already had a head start, ah, in that the bulk of our critical business applications were CSS Sass hosted, so, um, what I've done since then is to look for those solutions that are more commodities. So, you know, why manage email on Prem when, you know, Microsoft can do a way better job than we could with the small staff we have. So, you know, it's slowly been, you know, taking each application, pulling it out, putting it into the Cloud, so that my team can be better leveraged to actually work on security initiatives, and um, business value, and transformation type of solutions. So, it is part of it is a, you know accessibility as well. Um, you know, we're in a changing environment where we want to be able to deliver our, um, employee workforce to be able to work anywhere, anytime, on any device, and in order to do that, we have to have solutions that are sitting out there, and accessible to them, um, and not always just sitting behind the firewall in the data center. >> So, let's talk a little bit about data management, data protection as it pertains to the business. What are some of the drivers, especially if you are in the Sass world that make you look at data protection suites as opposed to consuming native solutions within those services? >> Oh, absolutely. So, I very much have a strategy around platform services. Uh, when I walked into the organization, there's probably 30 different applications that were out in the environment, and none of them talked to each other. Um, when you're trying to manage, you know, bringing data across the organization to compile it and aggregate it to actually have something useful to the business. You have to have connected systems, but when you have a small team, it's very difficult to do that development working, connect all those systems, and manage them. So, what I like to look for is a platform solution, um, that will allow me to grow, um, as my budget allows, to add on the different modules that that platform solution, um, offers to me. So, you know, for example, you know, today's budget, I might have a certain limited amount that I can invest, but if I pick a solution that ultimately might give me 70, maybe 80 percent of the needs, um, then I'm only having to add in maybe a couple of other solutions and that cost to integrate and manage, and so overall it reduces the overall cost and complexity of the environment. >> So, you're in a mismatch of ten billion dollars a year in mortgages issued, yet, small IT staff, Sass solutions. When you think of Commvault 20 years, enterprise less solution, you don't think necessarily simple, easy to use, initially, so, why Commvault? >> Oh, absolutely, so, um, again within the first year I was there we went through a huge market share grab and so we grew 75 percent market share, and when I walked in the door, we needed to do investment in infrastructure. So, um, the original forecasts were totally blown out of the water, so the investment we made in small to midsize business type of solutions, we out grew before our contracts were due. So, when I went into this, um, we took about an 18 months, um, to take out time to find the right solution. Uh, we looked at about 6 different vendors, um, you know, we did a little bit of POC work, uh, we did references, um, and ah, basically at the end of the day I was looking for something that had a really good vision, um, that was platform driven, so I could continue to add additional products as budget allowed. Um, that had the ability to have more of a single pane of glass and very little man power to manage, um, and then, reliability was huge. Um, you know, we had some challenges with our previous solution of feeling comfortable that our backups would work in the event we had an incident. So, you know, when we looked at Commvault, um, you know, it may have been, um, you know, it's an enterprise solution which is what I wanted. I could scale without rip and replace. Um, great reputation, great vision, good, technology, you know, bones. Um, and so, you know, when I would go to the board for that, I said, you know, the investment may be a little bit more than a lower end solution, but it's going to give us the capability to grow with the business. >> You know Michele, it's interesting, if you dialed back and said you were looking at this five years ago, I wonder if the pricing strategy that Commvault had in place would fit what you're looking for. I'm sure you've seen as a customer, um, when I hear, you know, I kind of want to be able to reach that vision, but do it incrementally. Sounds like something you might get more from a startup? Maybe give us a little bit of insight what you've seen, how you look at this relationship, and what are some of those things that you are looking to add on in the future. >> Oh, absolutely, so, you know, absolutely, financials always come into place, right? You've got to be able to afford what you're putting into place. Um, you know, I will say that, um, their pricing model did change, you know, cause we had looked at that previously, and it was a pretty high price point to get in with the licensing under the perpetual licensing models. Um, so, with the change of how Commvault kind of moved with the times, more subscription style, made it a little more affordable for some of the smaller businesses to take advantage of. Um, and so, you know, that's how I kind of looked at it for, plus at the end of the day, if you're looking for a quality product around security, and recovery, and backup, it's worth the money to invest in something you feel comfortable that's going to meet that need. Um, and grow with you without, again, having you know, who wants to go through a migration every three years when your contracts up, right? Um, and then, as far as the other products, I'm looking, you know, at some of the new products that they've officially announced. It was really exciting to hear the CEO and COO talk today about the automation that they are building cause that plays absolutely into what we're trying to do in our organization. As we need stuff, you know, again, acception processing is what I always talk about. I only want to have to touch things when it's not working, and, you know, when there's some sort of exception. Um, and, so, I'm really excited about the way Commvault's headed down that path with the automation. Um, and then, also the data piece. Being able to really categorized the data, know if it's outdated or not. I mean, this is a very well known industry issue that we have, we are data hogs in the mortgage business. Um, and our users are as well. Uh, and so being able to identify the data that I have, I mean, you know, I walked into a situation where there's been no purge of data. You know, being able to really identify what is valuable date to not purge vs. the data we want to purge to reduce that footprint to reduce the risk for any kind of potential breech, or security incident. You know, the more you have out there, the more the chance you are going to get hit. >> So, you wear a bunch of hats that seem kind of in conflict especially, seeing that you report up to the COO. Security being the most interesting one. >> (Michele) Uh huh. >> How does your role as the CISO and your selection of the data protection suite, data management, impact your decision to go with a Commvault. >> Oh absolutely, that's huge as well, right? Um, you know, in our industry, we obviously are responsible for um, being custodians to a lot of personal information to consumers, so we have NPI, PI all over, and it's not even just with my critical business system vendor, you know, caus I rely on them heavily, they're much larger, they have, um, larger security teams, and larger budgets to typically protect our data. But, we also have that data internally into our own data warehouse. So, um, data protection is key. Um, so looking at products that will allow us to simplify that, have visibility into it, you know, that's another area I'm really looking forward to expanding my Commvalt use into as we start to actually, Um, you know, one of the other projects we're going to be working on potentially is moving our data warehouse to Microsoft Azure. So, um, you know, really having that, um, security plan figure out before the data is up in the cloud. >> Michele, I wonder what your experience has been with recovery. Is that something you test? Have you had to actually do a recovery? What is your experience been? >> Yeah, so, you know, knock on wood, I'm not sure if there's wood under here, but, you know, knock on wood. We haven't had a major incident, um, however, what we do, have done, now that we've actually deployed Commvault fully, um, is in, you know, it's too bad it's not a couple weeks from now because we're actually going to do a full DR exercise with our new backups now that are fully deployed with Commvault. >> So, you'll take a vacation the week after (laughing). >> So, we're going to actually test that out. That's one of the things that I task my team with is once my backups and everything was in place that we're going to, you know, do a tabletop exercise, but actually try to do a full recovery of some systems with the new backups to make sure we are all in good shape. Uh, but with that being said, I can already tell you just from a, um, you know, our old system to our new system, you know, with the features sets that we have available in Commvault compared to what we had in our other solution. The time to recover individual files is exponential. You know, our other solution, we had to recover an entire folder, not just individual files. And then, we're really excited also of being able to eventually being able to push out some self service file restoration capabilities that Commvalt allows us to do as well. >> So, as a natural consumer of, as a service, offering a mission critical businesses. How important is Commvalut role map to, as a service, for enterprise class solutions. >> Oh, I think that's great. I actually can't wait to see what they have to offer around that. Again, you know, um, I might be a unique use case, I don't know, because that's really how we manage our business from the IT side because of limited budget, limited resources is leveraging vendors. Um, so, I'm really excited to see how that evolves actually. Um, you know, from a service perspective. >> Okay, Michele, it's your second time coming to this event. For audiences that didn't come, what did you get out of it, what excites you the most coming to an event like this? >> I think there's two key things that I really enjoy going to conferences about. Um, one of course, is always the networking opportunities. I always, meet other people who have the same challenges that I do, and you know, they're looking at the same products, and being able to exchange ideas, um, and how you solve problems, and, you know talking to other people about real life issues, um, is so valuable. Uh, the other piece is always getting myself out of the office and getting more education. So, you know, really seeing what's evolving, what's changing, um, you know, what are the partners doing that work with Commvault, what's Commvault, you know, doing? Really, getting out of the office to have a chance to really get educated around that and what's really unique to about Commvalt GO to, is that a lot of it is customer based. Uh, you have customers up talking about their use cases and how they've implemented the product, so it's real life, ah, education, and not just, you know, um, a vendor up there talking about their product and selling it, right? >> Absolutely, we appreciate you sharing your story, Ah, with our audience here, and uh, congratulations on all the progress, ah, American Pacific Mortgage. And ah, boy, you know, tired of thinking of all the hats you've been wearing for those of us that wear a few hats, ah, we can definitely, ah, you know, appreciate that, alright. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more programming here at Commvault GO. Thanks for watching The Cube. >> Michele: Thank you.