>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back here on the Sands as we're at the AWS re:Invent day one of our coverage here. We're here Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday live here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage from the show. We're Hall D again, if you're in the area, come on by, say hi to Justin Warren and myself. Along with Justin, I'm John Walls. We're joined by Andy Langsam, who's the COO of N2WS. Say Andy, good to see you today. >> Good to see you too. >> Thanks for being here. And Danny Allan, who's the Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam Software. Danny, good afternoon to you. >> Thank you very much. >> Now we could talk about a lot of things, Canadian citizenship, fractional ownership, a lot of great conversation. So let's talk about data. And of course, the paramount need these days, right? Everybody's got to know I'm alright, I'm secure, I've got this big warm blanket around me. What are the two of you doing to give people with those kind of concerns the ability to sleep at night peacefully, knowing their data's safe? >> Well, you know N2W was founded on the premise of not to worry, that was the founder's vision. And if you could convince somebody that was doing the backup in disaster recovery not to worry, that was a great way to get started. But we're excited today, we've announced N2WS Version 2.4 and it's focused on taking your EC2 snapshots and putting them into S3's storage to lower your cost by up to 40% and 50% and so that's one of the things that we're talking about today. >> Danny. >> Yeah and so if you expand on that, so this is data protection for the cloud and one of the things historically we've focused on as well is data protection in the data center. So that brings the two together and gives you data protection holistically, across wherever your environment happens to be, and goes beyond that, not just data protection but how can I take the data and do more with it? And so we're excited and it seems to be resonating with customers. We have, what, 189% year over year growth on the cloud side. It's just huge, it's a booming business. >> I would assume that you don't have any problem getting people's attention these days, I would assume. >> No we don't, you know, at the booth, it's just amazing, you know, eight, nine thousand sign up batch scans and people all wanting demos and wanting trials of the software. You know, any time you can talk about cost reduction from five cents a gig on EC2's storage to two cents on S3, it's a tremendous savings for our customer base and so they're very excited. We did a survey recently and over 50% of our customers spent over $10,000 a month on storage cost in AWS. So if you think about that and if they can save 40% on that, that's real savings, more than the cost of the software alone. >> Sure. >> Yeah. >> One thing about cloud that often sort of went past people because they were used to the data center and they were used to how they protected their data in the data center. And cloud kind of changed the way that you had to do that and you have think about them in a slightly different way. So clearly N2WS is part of the solution to that. But when you have people who have a bit of data in both of those systems, how do you help them understand which techniques they should use for data which is in the cloud compared to data that's in their data center? Or am I able to just use the same techniques and just go, "You know what? "I'll take care of you and we'll just "turn it on and it'll magically work for you"? >> It's not the same techniques but it's the same platform. And the reason I say that is in the cloud, here in AWS for example, you don't have access to the hypervisor so you can't do a snapshot of the hypervisor, you have to call an API and say, "Gimme a copy of the data." If you're in your own data center, you say, "Take a snapshot of the storage "level or at the hypervisor level." So there's different techniques but at the end of the day, it's still data protection, and with a single platform, that's what's so exciting about this release, Backup and Recovery 2.4, is you have a single platform that you can manage data protection both on and off premises so that you can leverage where is the best place, location, for this workload, and I can protect it across no matter where it chooses to live. >> Yeah, that is something that we've been hearing all day today here at theCUBE is that people are talking about putting their data wherever they want it to live. It could be in the cloud, it could be on their own data site, it could be out at the edge. So whatta you see as the vision, like, where are customers going with this, where do we want to put data? We heard for a long time that we should migrate all of our applications into the cloud. Clearly there are a lot of organizations who are doing that. There are some who have put some things into the cloud and they're actually taking them back out again. >> Sure. >> Where are you seeing customers moving their data around? >> Well, the answer to that, of course, is it depends. There's no single answer for everything. What I say is the cloud is excellent for certain things like variable based workloads or you need a mass amount of compute for a certain amount of time. What people have tried to do sometimes is just lift and shift, take what's on premises and move it to the cloud, and sometimes what ends up happening is they put it back on premises 'cause they realize hey, the cloud's not a charity, they're actually putting in margin there for that brick load. >> They're good. >> So there's use cases for all of this. I think actually what gets exciting is as people design for the cloud, use Lambda and serverless-type functionality, that will become a lot more sticky and so our focus is wherever the customer chooses to run the workload, we're not going to dictate it one way or the other. In fact, one of the great things that we enabled is portability. If you choose to be in point A today, you can move it to point B and back again, so we give that portability that ultimately allows the customer to solve what their business need is. >> You mentioned the customer growth, I think it was like 189% you were saying, is that net new customers to Veeam completely, is that Veeam customers who are growing into using this new product and putting their data in the cloud, where is growth coming from? >> So that growth, that growth has been since we've been acquired by Veeam back in December, it's almost been a year now we were acquired by Veeam and we've been, being acquired has allowed us to focus on the customer and innovation versus going out and raising money from investors as a small company, right? And so we've had 189% growth in our business in terms of revenue since we've been acquired. And it's really accelerating both on the growth side in all sizes of customers. We've got customers recently like Notre Dame and Cardinal Health. And then we have people getting into the cloud, you know, for the very first time and they go to the Amazon Marketplace, they search through the catalog, they find the N2W products, they download it and, well, they provision it and onward they go. >> Yeah, you mentioned Cardinal Health. >> Yep. >> Let's talk about the sector in general. I mean, very unique concerns, obviously, when it comes to whether it's protecting imaging or patient information or whatever it might be. What have you seen in terms of addressing the needs of that sector because obviously this is an area that's growing, there's more capability than ever, and yet our concerns in it are growing with that. So I mean, what do you guys see in that space? >> Yeah so I think, you know, in the health care sector in general, I think what they're really concerned about is the compliance requirements. It's not just backing up the data but it's the requirement that you have a back up and can restore and you can recover from a disaster or from internal hacking or from whatever, an outage, whatever it might be, and if they don't do it, the repercussions are very, very high. And I think that the whole world with GDPRS and things like that are all coming together to dramatically raise the requirement to be more secure than ever and your backup and disaster recovery strategy is paramount to them. They won't be talking about, "We're going to do this." Some customers say, "We're going to do this ourselves, "we'll write our own code." We won't see that in the health care space or the financial space. >> So I see kind of three interesting areas. One is, they typically will have very specific applications like APEC and Meditech that they need you to protect that are aware of that type of application, so that's one part of it. The second is, there's a lot of certifications required to deliver health care services, so you HIPAA and HITECH and, you know, BAA certifications and all these things, and that certainly comes into play when you're talking about the cloud, so you need to have that conversation. And then lastly, ransomware comes up a lot because there's been a lot of ransomware attacks and malware attacks specifically directed at the healthcare industry. So those are the three kind of areas that we have probably the most conversations about. >> Right, yeah malware has been the best advertisement for backup and recovery, ever. It's kind of fabulous, in a way, in a scary way and we don't actually want to encourage this kind of behavior, but for those of us who have lived and breathed backup for awhile, it's like, "Finally, "people can take this seriously." So that's something that people have realized that, okay, I need to have this. What are they looking at next? Where are customers looking to Veeam and to N2WS, what are they looking for you to add next? >> So I'd say the next kind of big step, so to date we've been very much reactive as an industry, right? "Help me protect my data." "Let me get it back" when they recover to the cloud or move from one cloud to another cloud. Now we're getting customers saying, "You have all this data, you understand the context of everything that I own, help me get smarter in my business so that I can drive the business to make decisions more quickly." So, "Give developers a copy of the data "so that they can iterate on it more quickly." "Give a copy of the data to my GDPR experts 'cause "they need to analyze the data and do something with it." And so we're moving away from just being reactive to business needs to being proactive and driving the business forward. And I think where it gets really interesting, as we go down the road and now this is buzz words, I admit, but around machine learning and artificial intelligence, we're actually, we leveraged a lot of the algorithms that are existing in clouds like AWS to help analyze the data and make decisions that they don't even know that they need to make. And that decision could be, "Hey, you need to "run this analysis at two in the morning "'cause the instances are cheaper." That type of predictive analysis helps the customer reduce cost but also drives the business forward. >> Yeah, so how do you move into that kind of advisory space from a more traditional that we'll protect your data. How do, do customers come to you and say, "Actually, you have our data anyway, "why don't you do this for us?" or are you going to customers proactively and saying, "Hey, we can do this for you, "we have access to this data and we can tell you that, "we can provide these insights to you, "would you like some more of this?" Which way does that conversation tend to go? >> It's a bit of a mix, what I'd say is that the data protection face or the storage, you know, the traditional IT person becomes kind of the help desk and then because they've enabled self service recovery, file level recovery, item level recovery, these other areas of the business come in and say, "Hey, can I use that self service to do X and Y?" So it's a new buyer, it's a new constituent, but they're actually looking to IT to enable them to do more stuff with the data. >> Okay, so it's basically, "I want to interact with you "in a similar way that I'm already doing it, "and you've proven your work in this area, "maybe you could do it over here as well." >> Exactly. >> Sounds like a great opportunity for growth. >> And not just on legacy, I mean, one of the interesting things with the N2W software is we enabled, for example, data protection on DynamoDB. So people think of databases and they think SQL Server and Oracle but we can do this, even in cloud RDS-type workloads with DynamoDB, to help them drive cloud hosted workloads faster for the business as well. >> Well, you mentioned Notre Dame, can we have any connections on the playoff ticket situation, can we -- (laughter) >> I wish. >> Just want to make sure. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us and let's get back in maybe three or four weeks, we'll talk about that, okay? >> It'll be great, yeah, it'll be interesting to see who the final four are going to be. >> That's for certain. Thank you both -- >> Thank you. >> Find the information, really enjoyed the conversation. Back with more here from AWS re:Invent, we are live in Las Vegas, Nevada. (electronic music)

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us, the CEO of Avaap. Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon! >> Good to see you again! >> Absolutely, big pleasure, it was great talking to you for the last two years, and a pleasure to be back here. >> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap, I've read a little bit, I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language, what do the five letters represent? I mean how did you come up with the title? >> You know, that's the first question that gets asked, the two questions I get. >> Sorry to be cliche, but I'm just really curious! >> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?" and the other question is, "What is Avaap?" and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at Avaap, so, Agni, which is fire stands for passion, 'cause I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do; if you're passionate, you'll follow through and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation, sky is tied to goals, we're very ambitious. We've been able to have a rocket ship type of growth, so far, and we continue to aspire to do more. We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience, cause we like to be globally eco conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy, and the more there is transparency, the better there is organizational development. >> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions, and the relationship with Infor, walk us through that a little bit, of why you're here. >> Absolutely, so, we are Infor's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that, because we just came off the stage getting four awards with Infor this year. >> Congratulations! Fantastic. >> Yeah, thank you very much. They were overall partner of the year five years in a row. Our partnership with Infor, started five years ago, before that it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room, and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said "I want to do two things, I want to make software that is industry specific." And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said "We want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies. Cloud, mobile, big data." Right? So I had a great opportunity, and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the Infor basket, and just doing Infor. And that served us well of going from 20, at that point we were like 25 employees, to having over 450 today. >> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past is you got in early, and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in, so you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding? >> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead, so that actually, that's a question I got, is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't, because it's a validation of what's occurring in this eco system with the big system integrators coming in. And with a rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs, because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management, and we do what we do best, which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services. >> The deep, deep Infor, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? Infor's specialty is the last mile, micro-industry capabilities, and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep Infor expertise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So give us an example of, you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera. Where do you come in? where does Infor sort of, where does their micro services, or micro-function leave off, and where do you pick up? >> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example, in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christus Health, they are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60 thousand employees. They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, Supply Chain, Financial. Went through a large system selection process the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to Infor and Oracle as the two lenders that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on Infor as their vendor of choice, they did a services RFP, which we partnered with Deloitte, because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services, that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor, that we have within our healthcare team. So, we bridged and built an alliance, that, today is starting the project journey in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus, to make that project a success. >> In the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that Infor and Oracle had, were what? the coverage of the functionality across the suites, was it the cloud capabilities? What's the high level of that? >> So the one thing that I will tell you, is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable, so the way it's starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud, there's a lot of education already around single tenant, and multi-tenant, and they understand. So it starts with the cloud platform, that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform, and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant, as opposed to individually hosted for each customer. And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see what not a product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but their business processes, and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where Infor really came ahead at Christus. >> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean, Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?" I'm presuming the customer cares because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Verses okay, we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? >> Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts a customer to have to take their system down, and then bring it back up, and here it's done without the customer even finding out, so it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is a cost, which in today's world not as much, because hardware's become very cheap. But it's still conquered hardware that's sitting on the premise, as opposed to individually putting it out there, as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security, on multi-tenant capable software, it's more secure than your single tenant capability. >> And Avaap brings that to the table. So it's not, I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function, so yours is what? Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? >> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align, and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have a offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today, and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process, and post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare, is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR, you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR, and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other. And the systems need to be really integrated, to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that, so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in. >> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? >> Right. >> So what's goin on these days? You obviously, last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, there's some uncertainty around that, certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers, EMR is still you know, a big deal. What are the hot trends, what are the drivers, and how are you guys responding? >> ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market, so there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars, of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in a midst of what I think, is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry are on ERP platforms that we're seeing, there were 55 system selections done, just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years, we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. >> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead. >> So swap-- what's... the fundamental of that decision? >> So there are a lot of legacy providers, so the market is going to get consolidated, so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers, there's, if you count mid market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base. >> Very fragmented, isn't it? >> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright. >> So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform, officially said that they are stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional, individual health system that exist in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded, because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. >> Yeah I mean a lot of these, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini-computer era it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX, and we'll become a valuated re-seller, and healthcare was such a huge opportunity, and so under technologized, not a word but, and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated, now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right? >> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. >> Yeah, and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time, to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary, and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform, and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled, for the healthcare industry, specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today. >> Who does that last mile functionality, if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor, is it the SI, is it some other internal software developer? >> So, the software developers as Infor is, trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS, as an example come in, to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. >> You do that work, is that right? >> We do that work, absolutely. >> Okay, and then, how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their road map? Soma's got his ERD pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys, and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become advantageous for others? >> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product, that's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board, ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out. >> Well you could. >> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs >> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific, and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team, that allows us to see their road map and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP, for healthcare. So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point, manual, laborious, takes a business uses away. So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation, which has been in the field, we have, close to 100 customers using it, allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle, and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. >> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare, you have another interest inside of your business, with a little Beatles connection. So fill us in on that a little bit. >> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one, and I definitely want to talk on both of them, because those are important parts of our business, One is retail, we did get retail partner of the year award, and Stella McCartney, is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter, and has built a very reputable shoe company, that's a brand highly sought after, and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications, using cloud suite fashion, which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform. >> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right? >> That's cool, that is cool! >> Absolutely! >> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here, thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Congratulations on all the progress! >> It's always good to be here! >> It is full speed ahead. Good for you. Dhiraj Shah from Avaap >> Thank you! >> Back with more on theCUBE. We're at in Informen, Informer rather, (laughs) I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum! >> Inforum! >> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing) >> 2018, D.C. Did it again. >> Excellent! (bubbly music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back inside Dell EMC World 2017 here on theCUBE, we continue our coverage. Day 3 here in Las Vegas from the Sands Expo, sandwiched in between the Palazzo and the Venetian. A great show, a great vibe, and it's been a good show for Virtustream. And we have with us the president and CTO and a co-founder from Virtustream joining us now, Kevin Reid. Kevin, good to see you, how've you been? >> Been great, it's just very energizing being here this week. >> Yeah, what about the week for you? I'm sure you have a couple of announcements we'll get to in just a moment, but just want to get your take on the show here as we wind down. >> You know, the show's just been incredible. You know of course, it's the first year that they're all coming together, if you will, as the brand of Dell EMC as one show for the stage. It's been a great stage for us, great audience, looking at the range of countries and clients represented. We've actually just been blown away at the energy behind what Dell Technologies now represents as the overall set of brands in the portfolio. >> So let's get to the news that you made this week. One in the healthcare space, I know very important space for you, and in the connector space as well with vCloud. Let's go ahead and take them one at a time if you would. >> Absolutely, so healthcare cloud, you know, for us just a fantastic area when you look at just all the regulatory issues associated with healthcare in general, and certainly we don't have enough time on this show to go into what all that means, but the ramifications are. >> No, we'd like to get into HIPAA compliance if you don't mind. >> We actually talked about it yesterday, so if you want to talk about it again. >> Just kidding, just kidding, we don't have time here, right (laughs). >> It's just been fantastic because with all that change becomes all the investments that the healthcare companies are having to make, whether it's in EHR or EMR and as you look at changing out those systems of record that really run the critical patient care for those healthcare providers, it really presents a great opportunity. So what we've done is said let's leverage our core competencies of mission critical and let's gear that towards the healthcare space and let's leverage our compliance in HIPAA and other things like that and be able to bring to the market a capability that's multi-talented, that's utility oriented, but has that mission critical SLA that we're accustomed to providing our clients over the years. So we're very excited about that. We think it's a great market, a great industry overall, and we've seen fantastic feedback even in this show from clients who are very excited to now engage and what that could mean for them. >> So, Kevin, the connector announcement. VMware, we're at De\ll EMC World, VMware a huge part of the Dell Technologies' portfolio. What's the news around connector? >> So with the connector, what it really allows us to do is take what has been our cornerstone differentiation over the years, which is really around the mission critical, high service levels, when you think about guaranteed service levels, almost think of us as more of a managed infrastructure, as a service that has those high SLAs associated with it. So having clients be able to take the VMware estate and then be able to provision and manage workloads that are then being provisioned into the Virtustream, high SLA mission critical environment, is a big step for those enterprise customers. It's a big step for Dell Technologies as a brand. And it doesn't necessarily change the fact that you can also do that to other public cloud providers, you just get a higher level of service by doing it with Virtustream. >> So let's talk a little bit about that value prop of Virtustream. Doing the acquisition, it kind of made sense to me. EMC, traditional enterprise, high availability company, you know you had the VMAX 5, 6, 9s array. Virtustream, you guys did a wonderful job with taking a complex application SAP, providing some provisioning tools around that, and making that a consumable resource in the cloud. Talk to me a little bit about the conversations you've had on the show floor with traditional Dell EMC customers. Are they starting to really warm up to this expansion of the Virtustream brand beyond SAP into other mission critical apps? >> Absolutely, and that really represents the huge growth opportunity for us. As Virtustream we were very successful, as you mentioned, going into the SAP application space because typically SAP will be the system of record for a lot of these large enterprises. And what happens is, with your system of record, things like data persistence and performance guarantees, high IO, large footprint workloads, they're absolutely germane to those systems of record, but SAP is not the only application that fits into that category. When you look at all the different verticals and you look at the areas like we mentioned with healthcare and some of the key applications like Epic and MEDITECH and Cerner, and then you look at the other verticals, there are always these very key systems of record that require that sort of heavy weight capability around mission critical. And so leveraging all of our learnings in the application space, that we can bring that level of mission critical infrastructure performance with that application-centric automation that is focused on that kind of capability, it just makes sense. So it opens up the aperture in terms of the number of apps that we can now run on the Virtustream platform. Technically we could do it before, but now with the reach of Dell EMC, it not only allows us the account penetration by getting in there with relationships that are already leverageable with Dell EMC, but it allows us to also reach the partner community on the software side and be able to talk to application vendors that we can actually bring on to the platform as well. So we're very excited about that. >> So this isn't really anything new for you guys in essence. SAP is what I like to call one of those core center of gravity applications, it's heavy. You're going to have a lot of applications around SAP, and those applications are going to be just as critical, transaction applications, payment processing, big data apps, and you guys have hosted those applications before. What are some of the lessons learned from hosting the SAP ecosystem of applications that you're being able to now transfer that to other enterprise applications? >> Well there are a couple of very key lessons that we've learned. So first of all, you're absolutely right in the sense that when you have that mission critical nucleus, all the things that sit in the ecosystem come along with it. And for us, we've always for years been able to run anything that runs on the x86 platform, so we're certainly not limited to any specific application set. But what we've learned actually over the years in dealing with that concept of the ecosystem, the peripheral systems, is integration. And not only integration in the sense of technically allowing those systems to talk to each other, but we find is when a client is looking to set up a new training environment, or a new testing or QA environment, or they're even leveraging the concept of utility and consumption, if you don't need that system active at night, then you should shut it down. And if you don't need it on the weekend, you should shut it down, but yet in a lot of these complicated systems, the way in which the integration comes up and which systems talk first and then second and then third, are very critical. So over the years we've picked up on things like that level of application automation, what we call landscape management. So you're not just managing a VM, you're managing an entire landscape, which you have to blueprint and then say, for that blueprint, if you're going to shut it down, what's the way of doing that that's fastest, but also runs the least risk of data corruption or other issues that can occur if you just, for some reason, fall out of sequence. So that's one of the very critical lessons that we've learned. The other piece of it is really around tweaking the environments where we've found that by analyzing the actual resource consumption of these apps, which we measure on five minute increments, it allows us to have a much better introspection, if you will, of that entire landscape. And so it allows us to predict whether it's at night or certain times of the month, you know if you're in financial close as an example, or for some of our very labor intensive environments that have warehouses or manufacturing, time and attendance systems that kick in at certain shift change hours. And being able to predict when they need the resources and allocate those resources accordingly. So these are some of the very critical lessons that we plan to take from our years of running and perfecting the art of running SAP and taking them to some of these other mission critical applications as well. >> Well, Kevin, again, great news that you've launched this week in a couple of respects. Glad to hear the show's going well. And just want to congratulate you personally, I mean, I always like having co-founder on the show. It's just, you build something from scratch and obviously it's worked extremely well, so congratulations on that. >> Thank you very much. >> John: I admire that, so good for you. >> Thank you. >> Good to have you, Kevin Reid from Virtustream with us here on theCUBE. Back with more from Dell EMC World 2017 in just a bit. You are watching theCUBE here on SiliconANGLE TV. (bright techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Walls. Today we are talking to Chhandomay Mandal. He is the Senior Consultant Product Marketing here at Dell EMC, as well as Pat Harkins who is the CTO Informatics and Technology Services at Royal Victoria Health Center. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> So, Pat, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Royal Health. >> Sure. Well, Royal Victoria Regional Health Center in Barrie, Ontario. We're about an hour north of Toronto, Ontario. It's a regional health center, variety of services. We provide oncology, cardiac, child and youth mental health, and what we're doing up there is providing a regional role, regional services for Meditech. We're host Meditech for a number of other hospitals in our area, and we're currently looking to expand that, and increase our volume, but also change platforms as well. >> So tell us about some of the biggest challenges that you see. >> Some of the biggest challenges that we're seeing right now is within Ontario, is the actual funding model, of course. Everything's a little bit tighter. But from a technology perspective, is actually staying with technology, with limited budgets and so forth, and staying with the latest, greatest, providing the best service to our customers, our physicians, our clinicians, which in turn is the best patient care. >> Chhandomay, you look at a client like Pat, who has very specific needs in health care. You've got time issues, you've got privacy issues. How do you deal, or what do you see as far as health care IT fitting in to what you're doing and the services you're providing to somebody like Pat, specifically knowing that these are very unique challenges and critically important challenges? >> Sure. We at Dell EMC look at what the problem is holistically. As Pat was mentioning, in the health care IT, one of the challenges we see is providing consistent high performance with low latency so that the clinicians, physicians can access the patient data in a timely way, quickly, they do not spend more time entering the data or accessing the data, rather spending more time with the patients. Then there is another problem that Pat alluded to. For any EHR, electronic health record systems, it is actually a consolidation of many workloads. You have the EHR workload itself, then you have analytics that needs to be run on it. There are other virtualized applications, and then there is distal partualization, because all the physicians now says they need to access the patient data. So effectively, we need to have platforms, and in this particular case, essentially All-Flash platforms that can offer very high performance, consistently low latency, high storage efficiency in terms of reduced footprint so that Pat and other health providers can consume less rack space, less space in the data center, reduced power and cooling, all those things, and at the end of the day, ensuring the copy data that they have between all the databases, those are efficiently managed and kind of like transforming the health care IT business workflow. That's what we at Dell EMC come with our All-Flash portfolio for health providers like Royal Victoria Health. >> So Pat, on your side of the fence then, from your perspective, limited resources, right? You've got to be very, very protective of what you have, and obviously you have your own challenges. How do you balance all that out in today's environment, where speed matters? Efficiency matters now more than ever. >> And that's, efficiency matters big time with our physicians, and what's happening is we look for partners like Dell EMC to help us with that. One thing that was happening in our experience with efficiency and with timely presentation of data, we weren't getting that with our previous vendor. And when we went to Dell EMC we work with them as a partner and said, "How can we improve on that? "What can we look for?" And we looked at Flash as being that solution, not only providing the performance that we were looking for but also providing built-in security that we were looking for, but also providing even more efficiency, so when the physician, the clinicians were getting that data, they get it in a timely manner, and that means that they're actually spending more time with the patient, they're not searching for the data, they're not searching for reports and so forth. >> Are you hearing any feedback from the patients themselves about how things have changed at the health center? >> Well, for me I'm still stuck in the dungeon. I'm in IT, so we're in the basement, right? so I don't necessarily-- >> John: Glad you could get out for the week. (laughing) >> Exactly. You know, we grow mushrooms in that area. So what's happening with, I don't necessarily talk with the patient, but we're getting the positive feedback from our clinicians and physicians who are then, if they're happy, that means they're providing usually, providing better patient care, and so that means the patients are happy. (audio cuts out) >> Is understanding the true, the point of patient health care from the point they're born to the point that their life ends, and what we're understanding is how getting that data and being able to provide that information to clinicians, see trends, be able to treat, be more proactive instead of a reactive in health care. That's the goal, and with technology and the storage and collecting the data and analytics we'll actually be able to provide that in the future. >> Chhandomay, from your perspective here, what is it about XtremIO you think that makes this a good match? And now you've had X2, right, and sorry Pat. >> Pat: No, it's fine. >> You just deployed, what, six months ago, you said? But now you've got an X2 version to consider, perhaps for your next deployment. What's the fit? Why does it work? >> So you mention Dell EMC XtremIO. So the core premise of XtremIO is we will be able to provide high performance, consistently in low latency no matter what workload you are running, no matter how many workloads you are consolidating on the same array. It is the same high-performance, low-latency, and we have in line all the time, data reduction technologies that are all working on in-memory metadata, which essentially boils down to we are doing all those storage operations at the control plane level without touching the data plane where the data actually lives or exists. So that in turn helps us to consolidate a lot of the copies. You mentioned analytics, right? You have your production database for your patient data, then you need to load those data in an ETL system for running the analytics, then you possibly have your instant development copies, copies for back-up. Now with XtremIO, all the copies, we do not store anything that's not unique, through that entire cluster, and all the metadata is stored in memory, so for us we can create copies that do not take any extra space, and you can run your workloads on the copies themselves with the same performance as in production volume and with all those data reduction and all those technologies that all those data services run. So what that in turn makes Pat's life easier is he can reduce the footprint, he can reduce or consolidate all the workloads on the ATA itself, and his application developers can bring the medical applications online much more faster, he can run his analytics and reports faster, being proactive about the care, and in a nutshell, pretty much taking the storage maintenance, storage planning, storage operations out of the picture so that they can innovate and they can spend time innovating in IT, helping patient care, as opposed to doing routine maintenance and planning. >> So it lets him focus on what he wants to do. You're not spending a majority of your time on mundane tasks, you're actually improving your operations. Give me a real-life example if you can. We talk about more efficiency and better speed, these are all good things and great terms to talk about, but in terms of actually improving patient care, or providing enhanced patient care, what does it mean? How does it translate? >> Well, how it translates is in a lot of cases with the physicians and what we've seen already with them, just with them, they're able to, because we actually improve performance, we're actually able to get more data in analytics, as we say, but then we're able to produce those reports and turn it around in a lot of cases, a lot quicker than what we've been able to do before. An example was, once we moved to XtremIO and our decision support team. Used to take 14 hours to run some of the reports that they were getting. They would start 'em at four o'clock in the evening, they would run to six a.m. in the morning, roughly. When we put the XtremIO in and they ran the same reports they started at 4 o'clock. By six p.m. that night they were completed. They actually called me because they thought they had something wrong. (laughing) It's never been that quick. >> John: Boss, this is too good. >> Exactly. >> John: I messed up. >> And so they actually ran the report three times, and they cued the QA against the report to understand that yeah, it is that efficient now. Now that we've turned that around we actually provide that to the clinicians. We're getting better patient care and they're able to get their information and react quicker to it as well. >> Talking about the massive amounts of data that's being generated that now needs to be analyzed in order to optimize performance, how much do your developers know about data, and are you doing more training for them so that they know what they're doing? >> Well, we always provide training. We're always working on that, but the thing is, we are providing more training and we're providing it to the point that they actually have to be able to mine that data. There's so much data, it's how to manage the data, mine the data. Our analysts at RVH is that we look to Meditech, our EHR vendor as well, to help us on that, but at the same time we're looking to, we're increasing our data warehouses, we're increasing our repositories and registries so that when we do have that data, we can get at it. >> I'm wondering too if using this kind of cutting-edge technology has had an impact on your recruitment. Michael Dell in his keynote mentioned how increasingly, employees are saying the kinds of technologies that's being used is having an impact. >> No, absolutely. I know our vendors, our staff are very excited about the technology. Where we were going before, they weren't, not that they weren't happy, but we were always dealing with mundane tasks. We had some issues that were always repetitive issues that we couldn't seem to get through. Now that we've actually upgraded to the Flash storage and moving through that, they're excited. They love the management, the ease of use, they have a lot of great ideas now it's actually, they're becoming innovative in their thoughts because they know they have the performance and the technology in the back end to do the job for them. >> I hate to ask you what's next because you're six months into your deployment, but this is a constantly evolving landscape, constantly improving. Obviously the pressure is at Dell EMC is responding really well, competitive pressures. What is your road map? If you look two, three years down the road in terms of the kinds of improvements you want to get, the kinds of efficiencies that you can get gains in, and then realistically from a budgetary standpoint, how do you balance all that together? >> Budgetary, there's always the constant discussion with our CFO, and so he's been very supportive, but where we see it going is we want to be able to actually, maybe not even necessarily go to the Cloud but become a private Cloud for our partners and be able to provide a lot of these regional services that we couldn't before with the technology that we had, and be able to expand the services. In Ontario we're seeing some budget constraints, as I mentioned. A lot of these smaller sites, the patients, the customers, as we would say are expecting the service, but with technology and the dollars, they might not be able to do it on their budget, but as we bring stuff back into our data center and be able to provide the technology, we've been able to spread that out, not only from storage, compute side, as well as virtualization, VDI desktops and so forth. That's where I see we're going over the next little while. >> How much learning goes on between your colleagues at CTOs at other health centers, and even health centers and hospitals in the states? Do you talk a lot about-- >> You know what? We do talk a lot. We share stories. Some good, some bad, but we try, we all have the same problems, and why re-create the wheel when you could actually learn from other people? So a lot of the CTOs, we do get together, informally and formally, and understand where we're going and then we also reach out through our vendors and through some of our user groups and so forth to the US and to some of our cohort CTOs down there to understand what they're doing, because they look at it from a different lens at times. >> So speaking of a different lens, from the other side of the fence, Chhandomay if you would, where are you see this headed in terms of your assistance in health care IT, what X2 might be able to do? What kinds of realizations do you think are on the horizon here, and what's possible for a health care provider like RVH? >> So all the organizations, if you look across the industry, they are in the digital transformation journey. Health care providers are no exception, and what we are enabling is the IT transformation part, and Dell XtremIO, and with the XtremIO X2 that we just announced, we are enabling that IT transformation for all of our customers, including health care providers like Royal Victoria Health. Now, with X2, specifically, we continue to improve upon the high performance, the unmatched storage efficiencies that we offer, effectively, again, bringing down the cost of hosting different types of workloads, managing it on a single platform with a much lower total cost of ownership for the health care providers like Pat, so that at the end of the day, they will be able to provide better patient and better care for the patients, be it like a doctor or clinician, trying to access the data from their endpoints or the finance or billing department trying to turn over the bills in a much shorter span as opposed to the typically 45 days turnover that we see. So that's where we see not only just XtremIO X2, but Dell EMC, the All-Flash storage portfolio, helping the customers in their digital transformation journey in health care, and with the IT department, going into the IT transformation journey to help with it. >> Chhandomay, Pat, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It was great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Walls. We will have more from The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World after this. (electronic music)