>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's The Cube covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover Madrid 2017. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. Jesse St. Laurent is here. He's the CTO of Hyperconverged at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and he's joined by Jacobus Steyn, who is the GM of IT Operations at Key Price Insurance at South Africa. >> That's correct. King Price Insurance, yeah. >> Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Dave: Jesse, good to see you again. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> What's happenin' at Discover? Hyperconverged, all the rage. Taking over the world. >> Yeah. (laughs) Hyperconverged taking over the world. I think, yeah, virtual machines continue to be a big challenge for customers, right? They're still exploding. As much as we talk about all the other cool things that are happening in the industry, a lot of times, it's the old unsolved problems that just won't go away, right? And it's funny to call VMs the old problem, but in some ways, they're kind of forgotten at times as we talk about next generation stuff. But, the reality is, you know, hyperconvergence still growing like crazy, still helping the customers simplify that management experience. So, for us, that's, you know, running on the Gen 10 platform from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. You know, just rock solid server platform in terms of delivering customers the same thing we've been delivering, right, which is that predictable performance and simple management experience to provide IT for them. >> Yeah, VM ware's the new legacy and we should all have such a legacy. And okay, Jacobus, let's get into it. First, tell us about your organization, Key Price. >> Yeah, so, King Price is a short term insurance company in South Africa started off about five years ago by a very innovative CIO. So, he's been in the insurance industry most of his life. But, he didn't like what he was doing in the insurance industry, so he kinda like wanted to reinvent the whole insurance industry. So, he came up with this one of a kind business model. And our biggest selling point today is that as your car value depreciates on a monthly basis, so does your insurance premium, and that is our biggest selling point in the short term industry when it comes to vehicles. And that's really been taking off in South Africa. And I was telling some other guys this morning, it's actually surprising that nobody else in South Africa has tried to copy that 'cause it's a winning model for us. >> Dave: Sorry, that happens monthly? >> Monthly, yeah, we decrease your premium on a monthly basis. >> You guys sell it to the U.S.? (laughing) >> (laughs) Not yet. But yeah, definitely on the maps. >> Dave: I mean, it's so logical, right? The replacement costs are going down, so why wouldn't your premiums go down? >> Yeah, one thing, it is quite logical. So it is, there's obviously a lot of questions about how your repair costs goes up on a monthly basis, on a yearly basis, and the RAND dollar is not always very healthy for us. But, I mean, we do all the math in the background and it makes sense. It's more valuable to retain a customer on the book, than having to replace a customer every five or six months. So, keeping a customer on the books while decreasing it's premium, in the long run, it make a lot more sense. >> So if you could keep churn below a threshold and maintain that customer relationship for a long enough period of time, you get profitable. >> Yeah, 'cause I mean, in South Africa, especially, the short term insurance industry is extremely competitive. So, the acquisition cost of the customer is very high. We've got various forms of leads coming in via websites and partners and things like that. But the price just to get a customer on the books is extremely high, so the longer the customer stays on the book, the sooner he pays off all his acquisition. And that way, we actually return that into the customer. >> Radio ads are the big thing in the U.S. for-- I don't know if that's the case in South Africa, I mean... >> We've tried a few radio ads. It's not-- >> It's not the main technique? >> No, no, definitely not- >> What is? What is the main channel? Is it online or-- >> So, we're very big on social media. So, the one thing that we've adopted from the get-go is definitely technology. And that is evident in every aspect of our business. So, we really push social media. We've got a whole team looking after social media. We've got brand ambassadors working at our business. We do some TV ads, but again, that's quite pricey. Some billboards still, yeah, little radio ads, but predominantly-- >> Social's productive, then. >> It is. >> Alright, let's get it. I love talking about your business, especially disruptors to the insurance business. I mean, it's just sitting there waiting to get disrupted, so-- Let's get into the infrastructure side, maybe paint a picture for us. What's that look like? >> Yeah, so, when I joined the company about two and a half years ago, they were just starting with this whole virtualization thing, so it was kind of like new to them. Having started up just five years ago, it was like a hundred IT guys working there, but some of them were working in marketing and some of them were working in management. So, it was all over the show. And my main job was actually just to consolidate in that entire environment and get them on this journey. With the competitive of the market, it's really important for us to get proper product to market quickly and that's one of the challenges that I faced from day one is that our inability to actually get product to market because of a lack of proper infrastructure, the turn around times in getting environments up and running. And it was literally to the point where we were detrimental to the business. We were causing serious downtime. Business was running major losses almost on a monthly basis because systems were down. They were ill managed. And then, luckily for us, we came across the guys from HP SimpliVity and they came in there. We deployed some of their technology on a proof of concept basis, you know, development space 'cause that was our biggest burning challenge at that point. The developers shouting for environments and we just couldn't provide that. So, we thought, you know what, let's invest this in a development space and see how it goes and if it works, we'll see how it goes from there. I think they dropped three cubes there, commissioned them, started moving their development teams across and two months, three months later, when the guys from HP were there to pick up their POC cubes, we just said, "No way, guys. Where do we sign for this? (laughing) You're not taking this out of my server room." And from there, it just, the adoption into the production environment was so quick. We instantly order three more cubes for the production environment. So, there's still that definite split between production and development. And that just allowed us to actually allow the developers, again, to get almost fresh daily copies of the production environment, to allow them to develop products to do some modeling against the production environment in their own spaces. And that's really lifted their performance to such an extent that we now got that whole agile sprint running in two week cycles. >> So, we've done some research. It suggests that when you bring this kind of infrastructure into the development world, you can actually get as high as seven X productivity improvement in developers. Have you seen those kinds of jumps? >> Yeah, definitely. The one challenge that we had, so the guys from development were really trying to adopt a whole agile development methodology. But, again, the infrastructure was a detriment to them 'cause they were hoping to have the environments up and running by Tuesday morning when their sprint would start, but then, two, three days later, we were still trying to restore copies of the databases onto their environments. So, they ended up with three days left of their two week sprint. So, I mean, that alone, the fact that we can have the environments up and running within hours, that's definitely a major improvement for them. And mid sprint, we can actually just decommission their environment, restore it back for them. So, infrastructure is no longer the showstopper in the development team and it's definitely just taken off for them. >> Common story of land and expand, dev impact, productivity impact. How's that compare? >> I think it is a common thread. And I think, you know, one of the other things that happens typically is from a land and expand perspective, those first systems go in. They're for POC, they're for development environment, and the theory is, they're isolated. And then, what happens is everybody realizes that it's easier to provision. It's more agile for the development team. It's easier for IT. And suddenly, the old environment just kind of atrophies and the new environment keeps growing. So, if you look at your environment, you had some traditional infrastructure within your environment. How much has that expanded versus the SimpliVity environment since you went live with SimpliVity? >> Yeah, we have actually-- We no longer are investing in that portion of our infrastructure 'cause it's... It's still, I mean, it's good technology and it's still valuable to us, but we will just put that on a normal run out. Things that we cannot get value from a SimpliVity perspective like, well, like, I think I was telling Jesse this morning, we've got a method of contracting because we are entirely paperless, our method of contracting is literally the call that you make to the client to close this policy deal. So, that is our proof if there is a claim or whatever the case might be. So, all those recordings we need to keep for seven years. So, those are the type of things that we saw in an all traditional infrastructure currently 'cause there's no deduplication there. There's no compression of any value there, so we're just chipping all that old kinda like-- >> Pure archive. >> Yeah, pure archive type of approach to that environment, yeah. >> Did you feel like you've achieved a substantially similar operating model to what people talk about with the public Cloud on PRIM? >> I think that the ease of deployment and the fact that it is so so simple-- I mean, the guy that's currently doing it, it's one guy, so again, our team is not very big. We've got the one guy looking after the entire server infrastructure environment. But the ease of deploying that and the fact that it's so simple, he can do it from anywhere and it's literally one or two clicks and he's got it up and running. It's, for us, it's definitely really very similar. >> I mean, that's the goal, right? I mean, it's kinda why you got into this business is-- >> So, before the acquisition, SimpliVity's theme was to simplify IT. With Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, it's to simplify hybrid IT. But the message in the approach hasn't changed. If we can give IT cycles back to focus on things that return value to the business, that's the goal at the end of the day, right? It's taking time away back from all those tasks that, the classic keeping the lights on tasks, allow the business to do something productive. >> But it's also to make the cycles that remain that much more valuable as well. >> Yeah, absolutely, and anything we can do that takes, you know, day to day management tasks off the plate of the IT organization, allows them to be that much more productive, you know, developers having their whole sprints, I mean, that's night and day in terms of productivity back to the business. In terms of the performance that customers see in their environment, what you're-- You have a critical nightly batch job in your environment, right? >> Yeah. >> And what was your pre and post experience there? >> So, the one thing that we do, I mean, the monthly decrease, that's a big cycle job that runs very often in our environment. So, it's all part of the financial billing cycles that run, so we've got this one job that runs at, I think it's actually on a weekly basis, and that would kick off on a Sunday evening and we would literally have the guys from the finance team getting up, starting the job, and sitting there, waiting for 14 hours for this job to complete. Number one, the environment was not very trustworthy, so they had to be up to make sure that it actually completes. And post or actually migrate-- Us migrating them onto the SimpliVity environment, the guy phoned me up the next morning and said, so he got up at one, kicked off the job, and two hours later, it was done. And he said, something must be wrong. This can't be happening. (laughs) So, that's literally, that's 12 hours saved time. The challenge we had that that job actually ran into our production environment or office hours, so the effect that health had on our entire business was just bad, bad for IT, bad for rep for IT. >> Alright, last question. >> When it failed. >> Sorry? >> When it failed. >> Well, even if it ran, it ran for 14 hours. It had ran into business hours. If it failed-- >> But it wasn't bad for the business after you got to two hours. >> No, no, no, I mean, that was like by three in the morning it's all sorted. And even if you had the failure on the job itself, you could just rerun it like once or twice and it would still be outside business hours. >> Alright, last question. For each of you. Your respective to dos. Jacobus, what on your to do list, then Jesse what's on HPE's HCI to do list? You first. >> Yeah, so King Price is definitely seriously looking at expanding internationally. So, what we are busy doing is to actually redesign our entire architecture structure of our infrastructure and our network and our security. So, we are busy planning to deploy another active data center. We'll probably be in South Africa still, but to get that full value of the RAM optimization that the SimpliVity offer, the compression that we can see to actually have a proper duplicate data center up and running to ensure business continuity. >> Yeah, for us, the market knows us for our product in the VCR market, in the VMR market. Real next growth area for us is around Hyper-V, so big excitement there around seeing that market expand. We've seen a lot of excitement from customers around multi-hypervisor. That's an area both with what's happening with SimpliVity from a platform perspective, as well as the other technologies from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise really coming together to offer that multi-Cloud experience for customers. >> Excellent, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on The Cube. It's great to see you again. >> Thanks for having us. Jesse, Jacobus. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Dave: Good luck, go forward. >> Yeah, great stuff. >> Okay, keep it right there, everybody. Peter and I will be back at Discover Madrid to wrap right after this short break. (techy music)