(Soft music playing) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We're here with Scott Strickland. Who's the executive vice president and CIO of Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. Scott, great to talk to CIO's, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for inviting me, Dave. >> You're very welcome. All right, let's let me, let's get into it. You guys, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, obviously that industry hard hit by the COVID pandemic. Uh, I got to say though, your executives doing a great job, you guys just had your earnings call. Your stock is more than doubled since the March low. So obviously hanging in there, well-run company, but how did the, how did you respond to the, to the, and adapt to the COVID impact? What was your first move? >> Our first move, um, when we looked at COVID, we're on the sharp end of that proverbial hospitality spear. You know, we're in an industry where people are going to see this first and COVID is going to be very apparent as people stop traveling. So the first thing we saw is actually in China, because we're a worldwide company. We saw obviously the impact of COVID there. So we had a little bit of a head start in terms of planning here in North America. And we were already planning for possible hotel closures and for different work environments. The very first thing we did was actually take our corporate staff, roughly 1400 people off campus in a 36 hour period. And we're really, really proud of that. The second thing we did was, we looked at how do we help our franchisees as they consider possibly closing their hotels? Or how do they react to a much lower occupancy type environment? >> Yeah. So, okay. So you had like a canary in a coal mine with visibility in China. You didn't, you didn't wait, you acted. I want to bring up a chart guys, if, if you would. Um, this is data from our data partner ETR, and every quarter they go out and ask customers, you you going to adopt new, you going to spend more, that's the green, are you flat spending? Are you going to decrease spending, or are you going to kind of replace the platform? This is specific to Zscaler and you can see, and this was taken, Scott, right at the height of the US lockdown. And so what impressed me is that well over half, well, 52% of the customers that they talked to said, they're going to spend more on Zscaler. Now of course, part of that was the work from home pivot the investment in security. But I wonder Scott, if you could tell us, what does this picture look like for Wyndham? >> So as we were migrating off site, we realized that we needed a different set of security solutions for us. We had implemented Zscaler from an end point security. They have additional security in terms of putting applications behind them. So they can serve almost as a VPN and you don't have to leverage VPN to get to some of your apps in the future. And we're going to be spending more with them actually to implement that solution. So for us, we're going to be in that box, in that eye area there, where we will be spending more with Zscaler in the next six months than we did in the prior year. >> So what, what do you think happens with this kind of work from home? Um, basically you saw, I just saw Twitter said, "Hey, we're going to make it permanent." Other companies said, "Hey, we're going to make it through the end of the year." What's your thinking in terms of that work from home, you know, hybrid, how are we, how was Wyndham going to respond going forward? >> On a go-forward basis, we're going to go to a hybrid model. So what that'll mean for us is we're going to be looking at the equivalent of shifts, almost, so two days on, a deep cleaning, two days on and rotate that through so that you have different shifts of people who necessarily aren't, aren't interacting with each other. We also, before we even went off site, we were looking at a work-from-home model and what COVID did, is it really accelerated it for us. So when we go back into the offices, we're going to have roughly 20% of our staff, that's going to remain as Twitter referred to them as "permanent work from home." These are roles that only need to be in the office once every two to three weeks. And then we're going to go to that rotational schedule for the rest of the folks for that phase one. >> So one of the other things that our friends at ETR looking into is sort of what CIOs are expecting, in terms of the shape of the recovery. People talk about a V-shape, uh, which, you know, some people expect, but not most, most people expect some kind of U shape recovery down for maybe a couple of quarters and then come back over the next several quarters. Or an L shape down for three or more quarters. And then very slowly coming back, you know, maybe into the late '20, '21, some of the harder-hit industries like airlines, you would expect that. What's your thinking in terms of the shape of the recovery. >> As we look at the recovery, we try to make it a database decision right now. And so we work a lot with Smith Travel. They provide most of the data actually for the hospitality industry. Looking at occupancy and guests preconceptions, are they willing to come back in? Are they willing to check into a hotel? And what Smith is forecasting right now is a very gradual U over the next year and a half or so. Now that said, we believe that we're well positioned in the industry because as people do start to travel again, we believe they're going to want to go to "drive-to" hotels. And with 9,000 plus hotels worldwide, and the top economy brands around such as Super 8 and Days Inn, those are classic drive-to hotels. You know, you're going to go drive and visit your parents, who you haven't seen in a while. You need to stay somewhere overnight off the highway. You're going to check into a Days Inn, we believe we're going to be well positioned to capture some of the initial market share when it does return. >> Well, true. I think people, I mean, people have cabin fever and young people I think are going to be more receptive, you know, people with a lot of disposable income. So I think that could actually bode well, and it'd be some upside for industries like yours. I want to talk about, you know, get into the security aspect, the cloud. Um, you obviously have a CSO. Um, We'll talk about that. You, you, you were, uh, your CSO was a peer, uh, is that right? How, what's your relationship to your CSO? >> Sure. So at Wyndham hotels and resorts, the CSO reports into me, he reports into IT. He's a group vice president level reporting into me as an EVP. However, really when we think about it, I, I treat him as a peer. And what I love about having him in my group, is he can be part of those technology decisions and the development cycle from the beginning. So what that enables us to do is we're not coming along later and putting security into one of our products. He's part of the security decisions as we develop our products. Whether it's an application, whether it's an infrastructure, whether it's even a new networking solution. He's part of those decisions from the beginning, which has been great. And he's the type of guy actually, that the rest of my teams want to work with. And they want to work with his security teams and ask them questions. So he serves as a trusted advisor for us. >> So that's an interesting model. And I think it's one that's going to gain traction because, you know, if the, if the security team is sort of an isolated island, you know, it's sort of all falls on them. You've got a seat at the table. Security, of course, as we know is a board-level topic right now. So let's, let's talk about your environment. I kind of want to talk about, you know, pre- and post-COVID, but also pre- and post-Zscaler. So let me, let's paint a picture. You know, a lot of organizations, you've got the corporate headquarters, you've got a lot of appliances. Um, You've got, maybe got people working from home, tunneling through and a VPN. You got your data center somewhere, but you've got all these cloud apps as well. Um, So it's a changing environment. You've got to bring your own devices. What did you know, go back a little bit, however much is appropriate. What did Wyndham look like in the pre-mode? >> So in the pre-mode we had seven global offices scattered throughout the world. And our main office on the Parsippany campus was roughly 1400 people across two buildings. We used a classic, uh, Cisco sort of infrastructure with multiple redundant data lines brought in, and then the heavy duty switches that didn't turn off, loaded it into a wifi network as well. We then had a dedicated line out to our co-location facility and that in turn, then served out into our public cloud, such as an AWS or Google. So that was our pre picture. We were in process. Even prior to this, we were in the process of saying, okay, we have some of this legacy hardware in it and the Cisco-type environment, how do we deploy that so that it can be cloud first? So we were halfway through a Meraki implementation all the way from the switch level and the wifi level so that we could administer that remotely. And what this has done for us is we've actually accelerated that implementation. Uh, the good thing about everybody being out of the office is it's pretty easy to send one or two people in, to complete some of that work in the closets and get our backbone adjusted. So what we've been doing is we've been working at fixing that backbone, replacing it with the Meraki switch and wifi equipment so that we can remote administer it from anywhere in the world, which is, is suddenly has opened up a whole new level of ability to follow the sun, ability to possibly even outsource that or leverage lower cost resources to do some of that. They don't have to be based here in the New York, New Jersey area. >> So maybe the big sort of challenges that you face. A lot of organizations will tell us, you've got different users coming in from different apps. They've got different security policies, uh, different standards, you got shadow IT, um, with, with, you know, not really enforcing our corporate edicts. Uh, what were some of the challenges that you faced that maybe the objectives of bringing in Zscaler? >> Sure. So the last part that I didn't really cover, that it'll help play into some of these challenges is our co-location facility. Originally we had three data centers and we migrated those three data centers largely into the cloud, into an AWS or into a SaaS-based environment. But for some of those applications that just you can't, we put it into a co-location facility and then paid a third party to manage that, so that we're out of the administration and data center business. So that's, that's part of that pre so when this came along and we suddenly said, okay, how do we lock everything down? How do we ensure that we understand how people are going to access this? Um, we only had two or three applications that had a significant user base where we needed to invest in VPN, where we needed to ramp up our VPN licenses because suddenly everybody's going to be at home. >> For example, the beautiful part is, is what we had our, our biggest applications. Those were already cloud-based. So those were already being accessed by people who just had a network connection. And that was why originally we chose, we chose Zscaler because we wanted our folks no matter where they were. And the classic example, our CSO was working there at Starbucks and they need to access our HR, uh, SaaS-based application. We can do that with confidence, from a Starbucks or from a coffee shop, you know, any coffee shop in the world, because we know we have Zscaler installed on their end point because we know it's going to go through that level of scrutiny and we'll have that protection. So even if the network is being sniffed or there's something weird going on, there we'll be protected. So Zscaler has been a partner for us on that for about a year or so. And then I spoke earlier a little bit about us, uh, looking at their VPN-like solution where you put the applications behind Zscaler so that you no longer have to go in with VPN and double-click and get a token from a company like RSA or something of that nature. You can just make it, you know, a virtual application that you can access via Zscaler as well. >> And let me just understand Scott, that would be essentially like a security cloud that you would be putting in front of all applications or just your private applications. >> That's a great way to think about it, Dave. Yes, is it would be a security cloud that we would put in front of all of our applications. So we have it in front of our applications that are SaaS-based, and then we would start putting it in front of our applications that are based in our co-location facility. >> So Scott, when I talk to CSOs and I ask them, what's their number one challenge, they'll tell me "lack of talent." "We've got all these devices and we're running around and we just can't find the talent." So I'm wondering, is that a main challenge of you and what is the business impact of this sort of new security regime that you're putting in place? >> So what's really worked well for us is we've been able to recruit some of the best and the brightest and keep them here because we're continuing to implement these cloud-based security tools. So Zscaler's, one of them, we have others in our suite there, and that's what excites security guys and gals is that they get to play with some of the new toys and we get to migrate from something that was legacy to something that's brand new and they continue to get to improve their resume. Yes, but they also get to play with play with the new toys and some of the shiny new objects. Our retention rate in our security team is unheard of in the industry. We are single digit turnover, voluntary turnover a year over year on our security team. And again, these are guys and girls that could go into the city and make more and they purposely chosen not to because we let them be at the front edge of, of security. >> Well, that's, that's a pretty interesting metric. Because a lot of times you guys don't, like air traffic controllers, you know, the eyes bleeding, staring at screens all day and it's, you know, you got to, you got to win every day. You know, the bad guys only have to win once. But, but so, okay. So what has been the business impact of sort of this new approach that you've been taking, this sort of cloud-first approach? >> What it's allowed us to do is to look at the threats that are actually most important. So if you look at security, you know, you have your traditional DDOS attacks, you have SQL injections, you have some of these lower-level type attacks by automating a lot even. And by putting it into the cloud, we're not worried about most of that anymore. What we can really focus on now is the state-sponsored agencies or the criminal agencies that are coming after us with very, very sophisticated phishing attacks or mail. We had some physical mail attacks recently that are trying to penetrate us in ways that we've never seen before. And again, that's exciting for the security team because they get to focus and they get to almost think like one of these hackers and say, okay, if they're trying to get in here, where, where do we believe we're not protected? How do we go on the offensive a little bit here? We have, we have a threat-hunting organization as well. >> And I'm actually, if you had a Mulligan, I don't know if you golf of, if you do, hopefully. >> I do, I do every time Dave, >> Yeah, yeah, you know, my, my golf, my golf club went out of business. I got to find another one. But, but if you had a mulligan, what would you do over again? What kind of advice would you give to your peers? >> My mulligan on this would have been to have moved faster. When we started, our original migration of the cloud back then even then there was concerns about, can the cloud be as secure as your physical data center? And the answer there is absolutely yes. If you've ever toured one of these Tier Ones, you know, such as an Amazon or a Google and you take a look at their security versus our physical security, tear off that band-aid, execute the migration, and wherever possible as you do that migration, don't go a legacy-for-legacy. Don't do a lift-and-shift. Instead, take the opportunity to transform, do a lift-and-transform while you're doing that. Not a lift-and-shift. So my mulligan would be go faster. And if I got a bonus mulligan, then I'd say a lift-and-transform, not lift-and-shift. >> Yeah. That's great advice. I mean, I tend to agree with you. I think that the work that we've done in the research that we've done really underscores what you've just said. There is a shared-responsibility model, uh, but shared responsibility is great. Uh, when you, when you're working with a, like you say, an Amazon or an Azure or Google. Um, so last question is, you know, when you look forward, we've been so tactical early putting out fires, but as you start to come out of this thing, how do you see, you know, some of the things that you're going to preserve from the past maybe, but what does the future look like? I mean, it's kind of ironic. This whole thing hit at the start of a new decade. So I think we all agree. And maybe, maybe you do too. Maybe you don't, I'd love your thoughts. We're just not going to go back to 2019. So as you start to think of the, the midterm and the longer term, what's your, what are your, some of your planning, assumptions, and some of your thinking? >> They say, Dave, "never to waste a good crisis." And we've learned a lot out of this crisis. Uh, one is that we don't need a traditional work-from-home model, and we're going to be able to collapse actually our, our campus down into a single building, and then go with that shift, uh, approach that I spoke to earlier. If I look forward into the medium and the longer term, what we're seeing is we're seeing that our franchisees and our guests, things are going to change. When you check into a hotel, you're going to want to have that as contact-less an experience as possible. So how do we offer the technology at scale to our guests and franchisees to enable that? That's beyond just mobile check in, and that's beyond mobile checkout. You know, that's keyless entry, that's mobile payments. That's the ability to choose my room, perhaps on my mobile device. You know, there's, there's a whole new world. I believe that's coming, ordering my, my room service on my mobile device from my room without leaving my room. You can start to see it in this brave new world, you know, post-, post-COVID that we're going to be able to leverage a lot more contact-less, a lot less face-to-face technologies, but still enable a good guest experience when they're at our hotels. >> Well, I'm excited about that because I mean, as, as theCUBE, you know, our businesses do go into events. I mean, mostly because we're all in the studio now, but we do a lot of travel. And this notion of accelerating the digital transformation and leaders like yourself, Scott, really driving that, I'm excited about the new experiences. So I really want to thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing with us the best practice and, and your journey. Appreciate it. >> Hey, thanks for reaching out, Dave. Good to be here. >> All right. And I thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft music playing)

(energetic funk music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you remote from our Boston-area studio in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and really happy to welcome to the program, actually, from down the road from where I'm sitting, but testing our coast-to-coast live-to-air remote capabilities, of course, everybody is working from home or things like that, Rob Strechay, CUBE alumni and friend of the program. Rob, it's great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on. Really glad to help you guys out and get on here and talk about what's goin' on, 'cause this remote thing is definitely going to be the wave for the next month or two, at least. >> Yeah, so, Rob, you spend a lot of your time talking to companies about strategic planning and the first thing for you is, in the industry, sometimes we talk about these black swan events, the things that, you know, we had our plans in place, a lot of companies either had their 2020 sales kickoffs or were getting ready for them, and all of a sudden, basically, everything that you were planning for, let's stop and re-evaluate, because coronavirus stuff is hitting, economic conditions globally are being impacted. What's the first thing that you tell people when you're advising when something completely unexpected and far-reaching, that we might not have full information on, hits? >> Yeah, I think there is, it's a great way to target and say, "Okay, where can I trim the fat, "but at the same time, where do I not "want to over-rotate or panic?" And I think that's a big piece of it, is that you don't want to go and panic too much and say, "Hey, we have to throw everything out." I think there's an opportunity, and there's definitely opportunities, but if you're looking at the different verticals that are being hit by this, if you look at things like healthcare, we have HIMSS that's supposed to be going on this week that was canceled, and all of the medical professionals and IT professionals at those hospitals are pretty much on lockdown. So if you're selling into that vertical, maybe then it is time to panic a little bit, or find another vertical, or understand how you go cross-vertical, in a way. So you have to evaluate what's going on, but don't panic, don't over-react to these types of events. >> So, Rob, you've worked with a lot of companies that provide disaster recovery. In the IT space, it's, "How do I deal with a failure?" One of the things that I know a lot of companies look at is when things go wrong, when there is some natural disaster or, like what we're having today, is, "Do I jump in and say, 'Hey, we can offer things'?" You see a lot of the companies that are providing remote services, take your Google, Microsoft, Zooms, are, "Hey, here's a free tier that you're able to use," but how much do you jump on this as a marketer, or how much do you just say, "Hey, we're here for you, "if there's anything we can do to help there," but you don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing or trying to profit off of some widespread disasters? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly it. The ambulance chasing part, you have to use a little common sense when you're going into these, and I think that goes a long way. You don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing, and, for instance, some of the small- to medium-size companies I've been watching in the tech and talking to some of their teams, they're putting out information, saying, "Hey, we're still up." If they're shipping hardware, "Hey, we're "still within our lead times. "We've built out enough capacity prior to this "and we'll be able to ship within 14 days of an order." So, reassuring their customers that they can get the kit out to them. At the same time, they're saying, "Hey, here is "what we're seeing from our customers, "that, if you're having trouble even once we do "ship it, you don't have somebody on site "to take it in, so we can offer services "to help you with that. So, helping them do staff augmentation or do things in a different manner, I see that as not the ambulance chasing aspect of it. I think if you're marketing into it, it's a little tough when you say, "Hey, well, "I'm the best remote desktop thing going, "and everybody can work from home," and trying to say, "And by the way, you have to buy into this "particular tier to get your entire company going." I think, again, you can look at, how do you share, maybe, the pain or share a loss leader going in, and look to build that. If you have confidence in your product, you'll get them on board, and they'll continue to do this, and they'll continue to move forward with it, because, like you said, I don't think anybody was necessarily prepared for a quarantine of an entire country, like Italy, or something of that nature. >> Yeah, the remote work is definitely a very hot topic. That doesn't necessarily mean that today is the day to start the 5,000-person virtual desktop project. >> Exactly. >> Because we know how long these things have a lead time. Rob, I want to ask you, actually, when you talk to customers, you've spent a lot of time in your career talking to customers, one of the buzzwords we've had in the industry is digital transformation. One of the big outcomes of digital transformation is to be able to react and move fast and be more agile. So I just wanted to get your take on what you're hearing from customers, where, of course, it's a spectrum, but what they're doing, and is this something that they should they should put on hold, is it something is going to help them prepare for things that they weren't necessarily thinking about? >> I think it's the latter, right? I think you're really, I would push in on digital transformation at this point in time, because you're not going to know what's going to break until you get into these situations, and I would say that we've seen a couple in the financial industry as we've gone through the volatility in the markets where they've pushed in on digital transformation, or there are some startups that have really pushed in on doing things in a new way from the traditional financial services companies, and they've found out, hey, stuff is breaking, and they're going to pay some fines to the SEC. And some of the traditional ones that have their digital transformation projects, they've bumped into this same exact thing, where they were having outages. So it's not just the new startups, it's some of the older, more established players that are finding out that, hey, you don't know until you get into that war, you don't know until you engage that enemy, per se, as that black swan event, what's going to break. So push in, I would almost double down on it, and say, "Listen, this is going to be "the way that helps us smooth these out. "As we can distribute things out, "we don't have, necessarily, one data center "where everybody has to go to, "and now that entire county is locked down, "or there's the National Guard surrounding it "and you can't get to it." >> Yeah, Rob, I'm wondering if you have any commentary on just the general dispersion of the workforce. You've worked for a variety of sizes of company, you've been a remote worker, you've worked for companies where you're far separated from the headquarters. Any kind of tips or recommendations from your background that you'd have for people and today? >> Yeah, I think, again, for the people who haven't done it before, it is an adjustment. You actually find that you work more hours being at home than you would in a natural, an office. I think that also, how do you keep your sanity when you're really distant from people, and how do you keep that connection and that culture? I definitely think that these solutions, like Teams and Slack and what have you, and Zoom and Webex, have come a long way to help connect people, and I think it's really leveraging those tools around you to have that connection. And I think that we've seen some of the announcements of people about putting out guidelines of, "Hey, here's how we have a remote workforce." And I've seen, actually, more, and it's been a trend out on the West Coast for a little while, where their engineering teams, the dev teams, are very diverse and very disparate because you can't find everybody in the Valley anymore. So how, maybe some of the people are in Washington, maybe they're in Oregon, and California, you have some on the East Coast, or even over in the Ukraine, for instance. Trying to create events to bring everybody together, doing more outreach as an executive to the entire company, becomes critical because sharing of that information is what people want to understand. They want to feel connected back into what's going on at what they perceive as corporate. >> Yeah, so some great commentary there, Rob. Yeah, absolutely, we've seen plenty of the software companies out there that have not only tooling, but best practices on how to do this, as well as, through social media, I've seen a lot of blog posts, things on Twitter and the like, yeah, and some things that you don't think about as much. I'm not regularly a remote worker, but, right, make sure you take time to eat, make sure you've blocked out the hours that you're going to have meals with family. And something I always noticed is, "Oh my gosh, I might spend an entire day "like this on conference calls (Rob laughs) "or sitting and working," as opposed to, if you're in the office, you get up, you walk around, you talk to some people, and it's like, you need to make sure you stretch (laughs) a little bit-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because otherwise, you can end up sitting for eight hours, and that's really not good. >> Rob: (laughs) Yeah, definitely need those mental breaks. >> Yeah, all right, Rob, I want to give you the final word. What's, let's kind of put beyond some of the things that are right in front of us right now, give you kind of an open technology space. What's interesting you out in the market here in the early parts of 2020? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of very interesting things going on with AI, and I think people are finally starting to get past the hype of "AI this, AI that" and trying to look at what the use cases are behind AI, and how that's really going to help reinvent some of the technology that we have used. I kind of always say that everything old is new again. But I think there's going to be some great new tech coming out that will help enable these types of digital transformations, and I see a lot of new companies approaching AI and not just saying, "Hey, I'm an AI company," but, "Here's the use case that I'm really fulfilling." And I think that's showing some of the maturity, I think that's going to help as this artificial intelligence or machine learning really starts to push in and help people become more operationally efficient, so maybe then we can start to realize some more of cloud, and more of this, "Hey, I had this data center, "now I am moving everything to the cloud," versus, "Well, I'm going to move it, "but I'm going to lift and shift, "and I still have the operational legacy." >> Yeah, absolutely. If I can do a little compare and contrast, back in the big-data world, everybody used to always complain that we had the best minds in our business working on how we could optimize people clicking on an ad, (Rob laughs) and when I look at AI, there's a lot of tech for good out there, there's amazing outcomes, there's things that it can really be transformational. All right, Rob, I know that you've been doing a little bit more writing, you're posting on LinkedIn some of your strategy. If people want to learn more and keep an eye on what you're doing, what would you recommend? >> Yeah, I would say go onto my Twitter feed, @RealStrech, and-or go to my LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me there. It's Rob Strechay, you can find me there pretty easily. There's not many Strechays in the world. So feel free to connect with me and view my articles there, and really, this has been a lot of fun. >> All right, well, always good to get two boys from Parsippany, New Jersey, to get together, talk about technology, and share it with the community. Rob, great to catch up with you. >> Thanks, Stu, take care. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, everybody, and thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (energetic funk music)