live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 on to you by del technologies and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to day two of the cubes live coverage of del technologies world here in Las Vegas at the sands Expo I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host stu minimun we have two guests for this segment we have Kunal Rove Allah he is the SVP software engineering Dell EMC and yet edie your your Dominion SVP product development Dell EMC thank you both so much for coming on the queue thank you thank you thank you so as we know customers are dealing with a tsunami of and apps this is what from Michael Dell from his words it is it is it is exceedingly complex there is so much to manage can you just lay the foundation and just tell our viewers what you're hearing from customers and the specific challenges they're facing I think customers have been pretty specific with us and they've been very consistent about it their business is being disrupted by digital transformation data is exploding and it's hard to manage and then on top of it they're they're working as hard as they can to cope with that growth best they can but that's often causing them unintended consequences in making things either less efficient or harder to manage in their data centers and in their operation so our job is and that and that those factors are making it difficult for them to realize that your benefit of all the data that they have so our job is to help them unlock all of that potential that's sort in their data alright so Kunal data protection got some good call outs in the keynote new brandings power protect can you walk us through you know what's new what to rebrand and you know what we should be taking away absolutely still so it's been an exciting morning already as you heard we've announced Dell EMC pulpit that software and Dell UMC power protect X 400 it is our new next-generation data management software platform and the new next-generation multi-dimensional data management appliance and with power protect we believe that it will help midsize and large enterprise organizations transform from what is traditionally been a traditional form of data protection - more of a data management space and their management solutions so that's what happens with power protect protect comes as you have heard in different form factors you can deploy it as a software or it can come as an appliance but it gives you the ability to set up policies and manage the data where you can create the backups you can create the restores and restore the data that you need at the same time have other use cases to help with data management problems that customers are running into today so as we know that the landscape is really changing there are new threats there are new requirements that companies need to abide by what are the sort of can you walk us through some of the specs of this and exactly what it does yeah absolutely so it is it is a based on a modern architecture it is software-defined and we see that a lot of the transformation that we're seeing in the industry is driving towards software-defined we do see that there is a need for data protection to reside closest to where the data is or where the application owners are so if you think of customers that have thought about data protection in the past is sometimes as an afterthought they've run into challenges when they've had incidents or they've lost data if you think about how do you best protect some of this data if you give the powers to the customers that are closest to the data or the data owners there's a good chance of success with data protection strategies so having self service driven architectures as well as capabilities to help with centralized IT management are key parts of what we do with power protect and then if you think about just the explosion of data that we've seen and the usage and the widespread usage of cloud it is cloud enabled multiple ways of using power protect in the cloud storing to the cloud clout hearing to the cloud so there are a lot of things that we can do with multi cloud environments that customers have as well as having simplicity of management so these are some of the key pillars that come together as you think about power protect software as well as the appliances yeah so I'm wondering if you can just bring us in a little bit cuz I look at the challenges out there we know one of the one of the biggest things in IT is nothing ever dies you know I've got old environments out there that I need to be able to manage that data protection layer is something that it you know it can sometimes be you have to be able to do it over time because it needs to work with so many different environment so I've got everything from you know boy my mainframe and you know my make legacy applications to the latest cloud native wonderful multi cloud things like you know we saw Microsoft up on stage talking about can you give us you know what you're hearing from customers what are they finally you know moving forward and how do you manage that breadth of you know data that you need to be able to deal with the diversity both of their workloads that are being protected in the environments and the distributed data centers that they have in the operational towns they have is tremendous that's why we have a portfolio products so we have a portfolio both in the software side as well as the appliance side that deal with the different challenges that they have whether it's on the edge with our virtual edition in in larger data centers with things like data domain and some of our data suite product a to protection suite products as well as in this modern data protection space and the new products that we're introducing today so we need they customers need diversity and how we protect their data and then they need different options for for how and where that they they do that anything specifically you know that you know is different now than it would have been five years ago when it talked about diversity of environments or media that they're working on we talked about tape earlier and one of the challenging things is we keep you know building new products that don't have some of these features because we think that's not where the markets going but even on our entry data domain appliance we just added tape capability to it because that's what customers feedback is they said even in the smallest case we still have a need for that in our in our environment all right so so 2019 is not the year that tape finally dies obviously there's not new tape probably being deployed but customers still have tape in their environment and they need a way to protect but also be able to access and leverage the data that's in their tapes we had a customer we're talking about big data and then they said you know the biggest data is on our tapes but it's locked up so we need a way to have accessibility for that data and bring it into our business and our transformation unlocking the data no matter where it resides whether it's on the tape whether it's on disk whether it's in the cloud no matter how far it is from where the applications are and being able to provide a solution that helps unlock the data bring it to where it is required and be but to use it again is acting a key part of what we're trying to solve I know that so many people are eager to memorialize tape but I what I'm trying to what I'm trying to think about is how are you talking with customers about these these things because there are there is sort of an unease with we've had data over here and we're not ready to migrate it over it this way and how are you sort of holding your customers hand and when walking them through these decisions I mean it's there's no cookie cutter answer because it is different for every organization so how do you help a customer think through these very big challenges I think one of the key parts of this is having conversations with the customers to think about what their objectives are what their standard objectives are for their environments now in certain cases we've seen customers that have governance or compliance requirements because of the industries that they play in one customer for example is talking about backups being required for 50 years so there are customers that have long term retention needs or situations where they want to have backups or data stored for different purposes as you think about what these s loz are and as you talk about the top two customers about what problems they want to solve defining what the solution is and how that solution helps them meet their SLA or meet their business objectives is a good way that customers understand what we can present and how we can help them and I think one thing I'd add is we can also approach it from a portfolio perspective so when we talk about solving their problems we don't need to talk about it just as data protection but as a portfolio so we can bring in VX rail discussion and power edge and different storage options and we can build them a solution that is encompassing all the different things that will really solve their problem yeah let's get underneath the covers here for a second you brought up some of the platform pieces what's the update on the appliance piece you know as that fits into the power project family yeah so we have an appliance instantiation that both is a hybrid so a combination of spending media and flash as well as in all flash appliance we needed and that was kind of one key tenant as having the performance options available at different cost points another option another requirement was scale out so we needed we have customers that need starting at a half to buy it or even a petabyte but we also have customers that want to start 6,400 TBS and and that's what our appliances allows not only to scale in place so they can buy one and then they can grow it in place or they can actually add nodes and scale out as another way to deal with the data the data explosion so I think the appliance is offering both this penomet and earlier software to find it is scale out and it has cloud you know coverage in that it's object aware it's loud aware and I think with the software platform that we build that integrates seamlessly with the appliance we have the ability to drive automation that helps with customers deployments as the environments continue to change one thing that's consistent with every customer that we speak to is that environments aren't stagnant they keep evolving they keep changing and it's not just an expansion of the environments but there are different types of workloads that come in there are different types of deployment models that they have and with the automation that we built-in it's easy for customers to use the automated policies to help with the data protection that we provide so let's talk about the data for a second you know one of the objectives I love you talking about how much data they have on tape they want to unlock that how much are you having conversation with the customer about the value of data and how important that is to their business and where you know your solution set really helps to be able to business unlock that value sure so I think it is very clear to us in all of our conversations that I think data is becoming the new currency I think data is the center of all of the decisions that are getting made within organizations identifying what the critical data is what the critical applications are where the data is important for continuous operations of a business in a lot of cases data is continuously required for all businesses now but what are some of the data what is some of the data that helps with the decision making that is required for businesses succeed is important so once there has been an identification of what this data is what the classification is for the data having different strategies to protect that data to help restore from that data backups is a critical part of what we have worked with customers yes not all data is created equal and then different different workloads DIF data needs a different strategy to make sure that it's weather well-protected it's resilient and accessible anything in the modern work workloads that are impacting you think kind of the a IML you know IOT type environment where there's a lot of data and when you talk about not data it's a very created equal it's like okay sometimes there's a lot of data but you know I don't necessarily want to spend as much on some of these classes data I want to be able to use them how does that fit into the discussion so as we think about how we built the architecture we build an architecture where there are services that help with collecting more data and more information that can help with decision making within the product if you think about different forms of modern data that is available whether it be containers whether it be applications that are residing on Prem more seamlessly transition to the cloud bringing the right amount of data back having analysis on that data and have been protected is critical so I think those are key key components of how we solve the data protection problem yeah that that and having patented industry-leading efficiency and data reduction technology - it's gonna cost money wherever you save the data but if we can optimize and reduce that provide a great total cost of ownership that's that's key for these customers is because a lot of a lot of it seems easy upfront but then long term those costs can escalate whether it's on Prem or in cloud and we have to make sure that they they maintain a good TCO and I think to add to that also the application owners understand their data better than anyone else does giving the power to the application owners on when they need to protect the data what they need to do with the data when they need to restore from that data is a critical part of driving success for the customers while we do that it is important that the central IT teams are able to enforce the compliance and governance across the entire environment as well whether it be existing workloads new workloads new applications but we want to provide the central IT team the ability to have that SLO driven compliance framework and that's what the platform presents as well I want to ask you to sort of look into the future a little bit and we're talking a lot about as you said there are companies organizations their data needs are not stagnant they are always changing that is really the one true constant of this technological world that we live in what do you think we're going to be talking about in 2020 and 20 20 25 when we heard from the keynote there's going to be enough data to fill the Empire State Building 13 times our change is just staggering in and of itself I mean what are some of the the things that organizations need to be thinking about to make sure that they are preparing for the future I think we talked a little bit about AI in ml I think integrating more and more of those technologies into the product so that they're they're making decisions and they're being smart without the user intervention and they're even understand the quality of service quality of data and making those decisions we integrated ml into the new appliance product to help one of the biggest challenges our customers face is managing the capacity and maintaining good d-do performance and we integrated ml in order to decide where to put that data both for capacity and performance I think we're gonna further see the integration of that technology on our end as well as the customers end all right so bring us on home power protected new branding new products I hear the power name I'm sure Jeff Clark's happy when we talk about you know getting alignment across the portfolio I've talked a lot of the other power groups this week you know what's your customers you know take away as to why this is different yet you know the comfort of the history and experience that EMC and Ella brought in this space for many years so it for all of us it's a very exciting announcement it is our new modern data management platform that we've launched with power protect you get the ease of the simplicity of deployment you get the full integrated start if you have the appliance deployment form factor if you have the flexibility with the software deployment that you need you have the ability to protect and do all of your data management use cases or drive the deer management use cases for critical workloads and I think that's the that's the key problem the customers are trying to solve it's also the platform that's built with our trusted architectures and it's built on on what we've we've done very well with the trusted architectures we built so I think with that power protect gives you from that customers will be able to use and will be able to expand the businesses in the future as well I think well said I think we saw in the demos today of the many of the storage products and data protection products you see a very consistent UX across those products and we want we want as can all was saying bringing the trusted technologies that we've had but bring them in a modern usable way and if you know a little bit about using a power edge or VX rail or an e CS product as soon as you get this new power protect product actually we've been bringing that technology to some of our other products it'll feel familiar and it'll be easy to use so that's a great note to end on Edie canal thank you so much for coming on with you thank you thank you we will have so much more coming up on day two of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world in just a little bit I'm Rebecca Knight force to minimun

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, it's theCube! Presenting Big Data: Silicon Valley Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back to theCube. We are live on our first day of coverage at our event BigDataSV. I am Lisa Martin with my co-host George Gilbert. We are at this really cool venue in downtown San Jose. We invite you to come by today, tonight for our cocktail party. It's called Forager Tasting Room and Eatery. Tasty stuff, really, really good. We are down the street from the Strata Data Conference, and we're excited to welcome to theCube a first-time guest, Kunal Agarwal, the CEO of Unravel Data. Kunal, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So, I'm a marketing girl. I love the name Unravel Data. (Kunal laughs) >> Thank you. >> Two year old company. Tell us a bit about what you guys do and why that name... What's the implication there with respect to big data? >> Yeah, we are a application performance management company. And big data applications are just very complex. And the name Unravel is all about unraveling the mysteries of big data and understanding why things are not performing well and not really needing a PhD to do so. We're simplifying application performance management for the big data stack. >> Lisa: Excellent. >> So, so, um, you know, one of the things that a lot of people are talking about with Hadoop, originally it was this cauldron of innovation. Because we had the "let a thousand flowers bloom" in terms of all the Apache projects. But then once we tried to get it into operation, we discovered there's a... >> Kunal: There's a lot of problems. (Kunal laughs) >> There's an overhead, there's a downside to it. >> Maybe tell us, tell us why you both need to know, you need to know how people have done this many, many times. >> Yeah. >> How you need to learn from experience and then how you can apply that even in an environment where someone hasn't been doing it for that long. >> Right. So, if I back a little bit. Big data is powerful, right? It's giving companies an advantage that they never had, and data's an asset to all of these different companies. Now they're running everything from BI, machine learning, artificial intelligence, IOT, streaming applications on top of it for various reasons. Maybe it is to create a new product to understand the customers better, etc., But as you rightly pointed out, when you start to implement all of these different applications and jobs, it's very, very hard. It's because big data is very complex. With that great power comes a lot of complexity, and what we started to see is a lot of companies, while they want to create these applications and provide that differentiation to their company, they just don't have enough expertise as well in house to go and write good applications, maintain these applications, and even manage the underlying infrastructure and cluster that all these applications are running on. So we took it upon ourselves where we thought, Hey, if we simplify application performance management and if we simplify ongoing management challenges, then these companies would run more big data applications, they would be able to expand their use cases, and not really be fearful of, Hey, we don't know how to go and solve these problems. Do we actually rely on our system that is so complex and new? And that's the gap the Unravel fills, which is we monitor and manage not only one componenent of the big data ecosystem, but like you pointed out, it's a, it's a full zoo of all of these systems. You have Hadoop, and you have Spark, and you have Kafka for data injection. You may have some NoSQL systems and newer MPP platforms as well. So the vision of Unravel is really to be that one place where you can come in and understand what's happening with your applications and your system overall and be able to resolve those problems in an automatic, simple way. >> So, all right, let's start at the concrete level of what a developer might get out of >> Kunal: Right. >> something that's wrapped in Unravel and then tell us what the administrator experiences. >> Kunal: Absolutely. So if you are a big data developer you've got in a business requirement that, Hey, go and make this application that understands our customers better, right? They may choose a tool of their liking, maybe Hive, maybe Spark, maybe Kafka for data injection. And what they'll do is they'll write an app first in dev, in their dev environment or the QA environment. And they'll say, Hey, maybe this application is failing, or maybe this application is not performing as fast as I want it to, or even worse that this application is starting to hog a lot of resources, which may slow down my other applications. Now to understand what's causing these kind of problems today developers really need a PhD to go and decipher them. They have to look at tons of law rogs, uh, raw logs metrics, configuration settings and then try to stitch the story up in their head, trying to figure out what is the effect, what is the cause? Maybe it's this problem, maybe it's some other problem. And then do trial and error to try, you know to solving that particular issue. Now what we've seen is big data developers come in variety of flavors. You have the hardcore developers who truly understand Spark and Hadoop and everything, but then 80% of the people submitting these applications are data scientist or business analysts, who may understand SQL, who may know Python, but don't necessarily know what distributed computing and parallel processing and all of these things really are, and where can inefficiencies and problems really lie. So we give them this one view, which will connect all of these different data sources and then tell them in plain English, this is the problem, this is why this problem happened, and this is how you can go and resolve it, thereby getting them unstuck and making it very simple for them to go in and get the performance that they're getting. >> So, these, these, um, they're the developers up front and you're giving them a whole new, sort of, toolchain or environment to solve the operational issues. >> Kunal: Right. >> So that the, if it's DevOps, its really dev is much more sufficient. >> Yes, yes, I mean, all companies want to run fast. They don't want to be slowed down. If you have a problem today, they'll file a ticket, it'll go to the operations team, you wait a couple of days to get some more information back. That just means your business has slowed down. If things are simple enough where the application developers themselves can resolve a lot of these issues, that'll get the business unstuck and get them moving on further. Now, to the other point which you were asking, which is what about the operations and the app support people? So, Unravel's a great tool for them too because that helps them see what's happening holistically in the cluster. How are other applications behaving with each other? It's usually a multitenant, multiapplication environment that these big data jobs are running on. So, is my apps slowing down George's apps? Am I stealing resources from your applications? More so, not just about an individual application issue itself. So Unravel will give you visibility into each app, as well as the overall cluster to help you understand cluster-wide problems. >> Love to get at, maybe peel apart your target audience a little bit. You talked about DevOps. But also the business analysts, data scientists, and we talk about big data. Data is, has such tremendous power to fuel a company and, you know, like you said use it to deliver and, create and deliver new products. Are you talking with multiple audiences within a company? Do you start at DevOps and they bring in their peers? Or do you actually start, maybe, at the Chief Data Officer level? What's that kind of entrance for Unravel? >> So the word I use to describe this is DataOps, instead of DevOps, right? So in the older world you had developers, and you had operations people. Over here you have a data team and operations people, and that data team can comprise of the developers, the data scientists, the business analysts, etc., as well. But you're right. Although we first target the operations role because they have to manage and monitor the system and make sure everything is running like a well-oiled machine, they are now spreading it out to be end-users, meaning the developers themselves saying, "Don't come to me for every problem. "Look at Unravel, try solve it here, "and if you cannot, then come to me." This is all, again, improving agility within the company, making sure that people have the necessary tools and insights to carry on with their day. >> Sounds like an enabler, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> That operations would push down to the DevOp, the developers themselves. >> And even the managers and the CDOs, for example, they want to see their ROI that they're getting from their big data investments. They want to see, they have put in these millions of dollars, have got an infrastructure and these services set up, but how are we actually moving the needle forward? Are there any applications that we're actually putting in business, and is that driving any business value? So we will be able to give them a very nice dashboard helping them understand what kind of throughput are you getting from your system, how many applications were you able to develop last week and onboard to your production environment? And what's the rate of innovation that's really happening inside your company on those big data ecosystems? >> It sort of brings up an interesting question on two prongs. One is the well-known, but inexact number about how many big data projects, >> Kunal: Yeah, yeah. >> I don't know whether they fail or didn't pay off. So there's going in and saying, "Hey, we can help you manage this "because it was too complicated." But then there's also the, all the folks who decided, "Well, we really don't want "to run it all on-prem. "We're not going to throw away everything we did there, "but we're going to also put a lot of new investment >> Kunal: Exactly, exactly. >> in the cloud. Now, Wikibon has a term for that, which true private cloud, which is when you have the operational processes that you use in the public cloud and you can apply them on-prem. >> Right. >> George: But there's not many products that help you do that. How can Unravel work...? >> Kunal: That's a very good questions, George. We're seeing the world move more and more to a cloud environment, or I should say an on-demand environment where you're not so bothered about the infrastructure and the services, but you want Spark as a dial tone. You want Kafka as a dial tone. You want a machine-learning platform as a dial tone. You want to come in there, you want to put in your data, and you want to just start running it. Unravel has been designed from the ground up to monitor and manage any of these environments. So, Unravel can solve problems for your applications running on-premise and similarly all the applications that are running on cloud. Now, on the cloud there are other levels of problems as well so, of course, you'd have applications that are slow, applications that are failing; we can solve those problems. But if you look at a cloud environment, a lot of these now provide you an autoscaling capability, meaning, Hey, if this app doesn't run in the amount of time that we were hoping it to run, let's add extra hardware and run this application. Well, if you just keep throwing machines at the problem, it's not going to solve your issue. Now, it doesn't decrease the time that it will take linearly with how many servers that you're actually throwing in there, so what we can help companies understand is what is the resource requirement of a particular application? How should we be intelligently allocating resources to make sure that you're able to meet your time SLAs, your constraints of, here I need to finish this with x number of minutes, but at the same time be intelligent about how much cost you're spending over there. Do you actually need 500 containers to go and run this app? Well, you may have needed 200. How do you know that? So, Unravel will also help you get efficient with your run, not just faster, but also can it be a good multitenant citizen, can it use limited resources to actually run this applications as well? >> So, Kunal, some of the things I'm hearing from a customer's standpoint that are potential positive business outcomes are internal: performance boost. >> Kunal: Yeah. >> It also sounds like, sort of... productivity improvements internally. >> And then also the opportunity to have the insight to deliver new products, but even I'm thinking of, you know, helping make a retailer, for example, be able to do more targeted marketing, so >> the business outcomes and the impact that Unravel can make really seem to have pretty strong internal and external benefits. >> Kunal: Yes. >> Is there a favorite customer story, (Kunal laughs) don't have to mention names, that you really think speaks to your capabilities? >> So, 100% Improving performance is a very big factor of what Unravel can do. Decreasing costs by improving productivity, by limiting the amount of resources that you're using, is a very, very big factor. Now, amongst all of these companies that we work with, one key factor is improving reliability, which means, Hey, it's fine that he can speed up this application, but sometimes I know the latency that I expect from an app, maybe it's a second, maybe it's a minute, depending on the type of application. But what businesses cannot tolerate is this app taking five x amount more time today. If it's going to finish in a minute, tell me it'll finish in a minute and make sure it finishes in a minute. And this is a big use case for all of the big data vendors because a lot of the customers are moving from Teradata, or from Vertica, or from other relation databases, on to Hortonworks or Cloudera or Amazon EMR. Why? Because it's one tenth the amount of cost for running these workloads. But, all the customers get frustrated and say, "I don't mind paying 10 x more money, "but because over there it used to work. "Over here, there are just so many complications, "and I don't have reliability with these applications." So that's a big, big factor of, you know, how we actually help these customers get value out of the Unravel product. >> Okay, so, um... A question I'm, sort of... why aren't there so many other Unravels? >> Kunal: Yeah. (Kunal laughs) >> From what I understood from past conversations. >> Kunal: Yeah. >> You can only really build the models that are at the heart of your capabilities based on tons and tons of telemetry >> Kunal: Yeah. >> that cloud providers or, or, sort of, internet scale service providers have accumulated in that, because they all have sort of a well-known set of configurations and well-known kind of typology. In other words, there're not a million degrees of freedom on any particular side that you can, you have a well-scoped problem, and you have tons of data. So it's easier to build the models. So who, who else could do this? >> Yeah, so the difference between Unravel and other monitoring products is Unravel is not a monitoring product. It's an intelligent performance management suite. What that means is we don't just give you graphs and metrics and say, "Here are all the raw information, "you go figure it out." Instead, we have to take it a step further where we are actually giving people answers. In order to develop something like that, you need full stack information; that's number one. Meaning information from applications all the way down to infrastructure and everything in between. Why? Because problems can lie anywhere. And if you don't have that full stack info, you're blind-siding yourself, or limiting the scope of the problems that you can actually search for. Secondly is, like you were rightly pointing out, how do I create answers from all this raw data? So you have to think like how an expert with big data would think, which is if there is a problem what are the kinds of checks, balances, places that that person would look into, and how would that person establish that this is indeed the root cause of the problem today? And then, how would that person actually resolve this particular problem? So, we have a big team of scientists, researchers. In fact, my co-founder is a professor of computer science at Duke University who has been researching data-based optimization techniques for the last decade. We have about 80 plus publications in this area, Starfish being one of them. We have a bunch of other publications, which talk about how do you automate problem discovery, root cause analysis, as well as resolution, to get best performance out of these different databases? And you're right. A lot of work has gone on the research side, but a lot of work has gone in understanding the needs of the customers. So we worked with some of the biggest companies out there, which have some of the biggest big data clusters, to learn from them, what are some everyday, ongoing management challenges that you face, and then taking that problem to our datasets and figuring out, how can we automate problem discovery? How can we proactively spot a lot of these errors? I joke around and I tell people that we're big data for big data. Right? All these companies that we serve, they are gathering all of this data, and they're trying to find patterns, and they're trying to find, you know, some sort of an insight with their data. Our data is system generated data, performance data, application data, and we're doing the exact same thing, which is figuring out inefficiencies, problems, cause and effect of things, to be able to solve it in a more intelligent, smart way. >> Well, Kunal, thank you so much for stopping by theCube >> Kunal: Of course. >> And sharing how Unravel Data is helping to unravel the complexities of big data. (Kunal laughs) >> Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. >> Now you're a Cube almuni. (Kunal laughs) >> Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. >> Kunal, thanks. >> Yeah, and we want to thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with George Gilbert. We are live at our own event BigData SV in downtown San Jose, California. Stick around. George and I will be right back with our next guest. (quiet crowd noise) (techno music)

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way. >> Welcome back to Miami. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. This is Day two of the mon 2019 3 cubes. Third year at V mon, We did New Orleans. We did Chicago last year. Course here at the Fountain Blue in Miami. Great venue for an event like this. I'm Dave a lot. It was my co host, Peter Burroughs. Abba Dabbas. Eye is Adi is here. He's the head of a Charles Russell speech. Liza London based law firm. How about great. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thankyou. So you tell us about this judge. Interesting name. Charles Russell. Speech lease. It was a merger of two firms, Right. Tell us how it all came about. >> Back in 2,014 Charles, loss of species performed for a merger between two different companies. Charles docile and speaks Lee Burcham from a 90 perspective. That was very interesting for the two departments coming together s So we have a limited time period where we had to merge these two companies Two different systems different data centers, different data sets. So it was formed by emerging back in 2,014 for five years on way here today >> that we see this a lot, you know, Emanate goes down. The acquiring company of this sounds like it was a merger. You know, they sort of battle. Okay, who's going toe? Really? Which framework is going to win? Because I'm sure had that conversation. But so to take us through that merger, what it entailed what? What the scenario looked like and how you plan for it. Sure. >> So I was part of the Charles. Also legacy Charles Russell team on, then obviously speaks about. Some had their own team as well. So initially, when we first found out about the merger, it was essential for the two teams to get together to work out. Okay, What systems? You have free mail. What systems you have for document management system playing trump cards. Which is who's got the best system and which way do we wantto move forward? A little. >> Ah, >> so but being a law firm, most law firms around the world and in the UK especially used the same types of software so essentially that from that perspective it was It was it was quite simple. But then way had to work out. How do we How do we go forward with this? Because two different headquarters in the London area. Which office do we move into? Sort of logistics around that. Can we fit in pre merger? It was six. Charles Lawson had sickle. Roughly 600 people, especially birds, had roughly 500 people. So pretty comparable. Yeah, yeah. So working out space logistics was was an issues >> making that even even more complicated, right? Yeah. >> One of the things that's interesting about a law firm, like versus a traditional manufacturer or AW financial services firm that has a lot of very fast right writing systems and have to scale on those lines is a law firms feature very complex dogs, very complex in from out of files, a lot of files that are written. But at the same time, you have to be repurposed to a lot of different work flows very sensitive to external contingent regulatory change. And so you have all of that happening, especially, I mean, two years ago from now on MySpace steak, and it was you're getting into brexit stuff, too, so that also had to be a source of uncertainty. So how has it been combining external regulatory issues the way that technology is being used in law firms and some of the new work clothes that you guys trying to support? And then adding, On top of that, the complexity of bringing these two firm GPR >> GPO itself was It was a year old project for us on. Obviously, we've got offices. The Middle East, but obviously is in the Far East on DH in Central Europe has well, so data logistics or where it sits, is an issue for us as well. So GDP, ours being a big project for us in terms of the merger itself. It was it was very, very difficult for the two I T departments to come together on actually work out. How how do we go to one unified systems? Essentially one doctor man, just in one email system. All of that took a lot of plan in law project management on essentially within the legal press itself. We got doubted in the time frames that we had that we can achieve it on within. I think It was 18 month period. We had merged order, different systems and various offices because speech the Bertram and Time is what I had. Offices in Zurich and Geneva were to merge with different offices together as well. So it was. It was a big, big task for the i T department on the firm itself. >> They're very tight migration deadlines. And and as you started to approach those deadlines you had to worry about, Okay, When we're going to cut over, how do we avoid downtime? How do we make sure that we don't? You know, I have bad data, data, corruption and the like. So how did you plan for that? And how did it go? >> So wait, we're here. C'mon on DH. Veen was It was it was a big part of our migration process. So where we had two different parts of the business Different storage systems, Different actualization system's way used to mean a CZ. The middleman basically, to my great data, from one day to center to another, using swink it. So where there was a large amount of terabytes and terabytes, amount of data way had swing kit available to us using team were able to be to be essentially a love the environments into the swing care and then bring them over to the other side of the business. And vain was essentially part on on top of that, making sure that the data that we were coming that will bring in a cross is true and not corrupt on DH, that using some of their technology is sure backups and stuff like that really, really was essential to, you know, do migration going well >> And was was Wien installed and both organizations at the time? Or was that something that you had to sort of redeploy? >> And yeah, So Legacy Charles also had way was actually myself going back probably eight years ago. Version For a time, I think team had 20,000 customers. So to here >> there were version 10 now 33 150 >> 1,001,000, 4,000 month. >> That makes me proud that we invested in vain when we did good car. So yeah, it was It was a good call from us, and essentially three other side of the business did not have. But then we just wait. Expanded our Venus State to look at both sides and then bring him across on. And then, ever since then, we've grown our vamos state across the world, across all of officers. So >> So how did you do that? So that was that was another migration that had to occur. And did you? You kind of do those simultaneously. Did you do the theme of migration first, and then bring the two systems together? >> Do you seem to do Stouffer special sauce in the migration? >> Yeah. So Veen was essentially a tool that we used to my great data sensors from one data center to another using their backup technology using their replication technology, we were able to replicate all of one side's virtual machines to the other. And then that gave us that gave us the flexibility as well. When when we had the limited down time periods that we've had, they give us the flexibility to actually Circe the business is during these particular ours. We're not gonna be able to You're not gonna have access to these systems because we're going to bring up systems from point A to point B. So veen was essential to them if >> you had to do it over again. If he had a mulligan, what would you have done differently? What what advice might you give to somebody who's trying to go through a similar migration? >> I would say Give your partners and lawyers more realistic time. Pray the time frame that we would get. >> Or don't let them give you an unrealistic time for him. >> Exactly. Yeah, so says ensured that the amount of work it's it's not just day to itself. You know, we're talking network and we're talking security. We're talking, you know, to to similar sized companies coming together. We were very, very limited time frame, consolidating all of their systems into one which is essential for the two parts of the business to collaborate together because, you know, way could have taken our time. We could have got to take this free four years a CE, far as we're concerned. But the fact that we did do it in such a quick time for him and that business to parts of the business from Day one can collaborate much better with each other. So >> we talked a lot about digital business transformation and you know, our approach or our observations on the digital business transformations, the process by which you altar and change your firm to re institutionalize the work. Change your game. Tomato Grover. All governments model as you use data as an asset, so that's affecting every firm everywhere. How's it affecting a law firm and you know your law from specifically on? How is that going to change your stance in your approach to data protection >> Data is incredibly important to unlawful. A zit is to most most organizations, but in terms of, you know, one of one of the things that's quite important in terms of law firms. We work with the financial institutions, so we held information by that. We hold personal data way hold all times of information. Charles Oscar speech leads works with Aware is of law apart from Kunal. So the areas of law that they worked with his vast in terms of the amount of data that we hold and essentially I mean, for us data is the most important thing that runs the firm and having visibility tow our data. How do we How do we work that data? How do we then market based on the data that we have? How do we market ourselves from that data. You know, there might be one area the business that's dealing with a family issue, family law. But then, you know that that could correspond with the litigation issue. You know, how do we work that data? To be to be an advancing to our businesses is extremely important. For >> what? What do you think of the announcements this week? I'm kind of curious. I was liketo ask the practitioners of what they think about. You know what was announced. You had, uh, well, you had the ve made $1,000,000,000. That's kind of fun and cool, but But you had the with the program, which was kind of interesting. The whole ap I look the beam availability orchestrator, where they're really talking about recovering from backups as a host that needed to recover from, you know, a replicated instance. You know, some of the automated testing stuff was kind of interesting. They talked about dynamic documentation, things you saw this week that you'll actually go back and say, Hey, I can apply that to solve a problem. Sure. >> So, essentially, I think I've been a really good question is very relevant to us many of not just ourselves law firm but many of the other law firms around the world are now looking at cloud based services now for us. I mean, this was a big thing five years ago way you know, everyone was talking about public clouds. Us. We're now we're now looking clouds and where basically, we've bean pushed by the vendors themselves to go towards cloudlike Citrix, for example. Their licensing model was based around their services. So is Microsoft in Mike's off? You don't you don't really have, you know, exchange anymore. Within premises you have off 365 A lot of the SAS applications are moving toward the cloud on DH. What wrote me? I had to say doing the keynote in regards to act, too. And how team are trying to be the visionaries in terms of look at that cloud is their next big thing for the next 10 years, offering often a crucial and for businesses like ours who have limited exposure to cloud technologies limited understanding, essentially having a tool that could migrate from one cloud to another. It's fantastic, you know, we've offered, you know I've spoken to, obviously are United directors around the other law firms where I wanted to have gone to the public cloud. But they don't know how to come back in and having a tall that essentially gives you that flexibility to bring it back in house to go form a ws to zoo. Or if there's a particular assess application, for example, that piers better with a W s. But you've got your other application that piers with that particular application is your Why would you want to have in the door? You'll probably want to move into a W eso for us, I think. What? The message coming out of'em on this year has bean really, really helpful for us. >> So So when you started with theme, they had it said 20,000 custom You like the 20001st customer on DIT was coincided with the virtual ization, you know, craze. Do you feel like the team knowing what you know about them, you have a lot of experience with them Consort of Replicate that success in this town intendant and in Act two, >> I think when I first looked at them, Wow, this is really, really simple. It's a bit like an iPhone. You know you given iPhone to your grandmother or to your children, and they have to play with it. And I see the beam as an intuitive piece of software that easy fighting professionals to get on with it, as their slogan said a few years ago. It just works. It does just work. Wear were great advocates of him. It's worked wonders for us. We've acquired smaller businesses using we've managed companies using and when I see you know, when you go to the sessions and you see the intelligence behind their thinking, I think going back to your question I think Wei si oui, si, vamos a strategic partner for us when we see their vision and we believe in their vision, and I think what they're doing in terms of what they working on next few years, I think we're well favor there, and I think, you know, essentially, that's where the most of their business is going to come from, >> where you sit down with, you know, rat mayor over over vodka and he says, Tell me the one thing I could do to make your life you know, easier, better you can't say cut prices s a hellhole. But what would you advise him to >> make my life better >> other than Jim instead of >> yeah, eyes that >> would make you crazy. >> So in terms of a zoo, a technology, >> your business relationship or something, she'd like to see them do that would. I >> think in terms of mergers and acquiring companies, seen license rentals will be a good thing. I know, I know. They give you a valuation license keys, and that's something that you can use. So, for example, if we were to acquire a company that has hundreds of servers and PM's having license rentals for a period of time, able >> to spin it up and spin it down actually allowed >> Exactly. Yeah, that would be an advantage. I think in terms of what you know what they're doing in the marketplace, and a lot of law firms use him. I feel I can't do any more than they are doing now. And in all the years that we've used to be my fingers on eight years now, but we've only had one serious problem, and the way they got that problem, you know the way, the way they communicated to reverse the way they a lot of different teams across the the Europe and the US go involved. I think, you know, in terms of service, in terms of software, in terms of what they what they do for us. I don't think there's anything more to add. Teoh. Right? Maia's vision. >> That's great for their custom of it. Well, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube is not heavy. Really? Thank you very much. You're welcome to keep it right there, buddy Peter, and I'll be back with our next guests right after this short break. We're live from Miami at the front of Blue Hotel. You're watching the Cube from Vienna on 2019 right back.