(upbeat music) >> From Washington, DC, it's theCUBE, covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, here at the Ritz-Carlton, in Washington, DC. Have about 460 people, it's a good mix of enterprise users, of course there's government agencies, as well as a lot of service providers, which is really where ScienceLogic started and has, many of their customers are in that space. And happy to welcome to the program, coming to us from Europe, a first time guest on the program, Luc Horee, who's RCloud and innovation Manager at Realdolmen, who's, as I said, a service provider. Thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you, no problem. >> So, you're based in Belgium, you're a service provider, tell us a little bit about Realdolmen, a little bit about the size, scope, number of users, and we'll take it from there. >> Realdolmen is an Belgium company, around 1,500 people in an country that is small compared to the U.S. So we have an total of 11 million people. One of the biggest service providers in Belgium, but we also do reselling, and we also do service integration. Our customers it's Belgium, it's what we call SMB market. But we have around, in total, I think three thousand customers in Belgium. Some only are buying products or licenses, others are in fact in full manage service operations. >> Okay great, yeah, the SMB market, as you call it, we understand, especially for service providers, really important market, help them, I don't want to have to manage my IT, I want to be able to go to experts that can do this. >> That's one of the reasons, yeah. >> RCloud and Innovation Manager, it's an interesting title, tell us a little bit about your role inside the company. >> I already worked for more than 36 years in the company, so I had a lot of jobs within the company. In the previous job I was a Operations Manager, and now I am RCloud and Innovation Manager. RCloud is our private cloud that we are using for hosting customers and serving customers. It's and active-active data center where we can do disaster recovery, set up, and so on. So for customers that are no longer interested in building their own data centers, that's what we doing. And it's for some of them also an in between on-premise data center and public clouds. So we have customers moving to Azure and AWS, and sometimes they just stay for specific reasons in our RCloud. Innovation Manger is about how do we set up, how do we improve our tooling, and how do we improve our processes in helping and unburdening our customers. >> You mentioned the public clouds like Azure and AWS, do you have relationships with them, do you have connections into some of those public clouds? >> We are Microsoft partner, so most of our customers are going to Azure, but it's also building up in Amazon, and we did receive some questions also about Google. >> Okay, great. So when we talk about operations, service providers, very rapid change environment, typically you have a lot of customers to be able to deal with, give us a little bit about what's changing in your business, the infrastructure management and the tooling space. >> In the tooling space, IT is moving, IT in motion is what we heard in the keynote this morning. Customers are expecting a lot, about dashboarding, they want to see how their business is behaving not about what is a device doing. We need to monitor more and more applications, and the business lines. So that's why we are implementing ScienceLogic, or had an implementation of ScienceLogic, and now we doing the second phase in building more runbook automations, more dashboarding, more experience levels instead of SLS or XLS. >> Great, I want to get to the automation, but first, you've only been using ScienceLogic for a couple of years now, bring us back to, was it a bunch of in-house tooling that you had created for managing before that drove us there, paint us a picture of kind of the before and how you ended up with ScienceLogic. >> We had Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager, we had Nagios, we had some plugs-in on this tooling, so it was I think in total six or seven tools, and we did some interfacing about it. But yeah, seven tools interfacing, not easy to run, a lot of management, a lot of people involved, a lot of skills required, so the reason was simplify it. >> So did you completely eliminate those seven previous tools? >> Yup, as of the 1st of April this year they are gone. >> All right, so there was a little bit of a journey, can you walk us through a little bit about there, was it prying it away from certain people, was it maturity from your side or from a product standpoint, what were some of those points that took a little while to get there. >> It took a while just to convince everybody in the company, set up an organization, it's not only the tooling it's also the organization need to be involved, a lot of communication, there's a change process going on, and we implemented, the first customers were in November 2017 on the system, and since then every month we added sometimes two, sometimes five, sometimes seven, sometimes one, as customer, so the people internally and externally need to get used to the product, so that's step-by-step, keep it simple, do it slowly but fast, and with a deadline. >> So, you talk a little bit about your organization operationally, what's the impact then to your ultimate end user, do they see anything, has it changed how, has it improved cost? >> It's changed certainly for the customers, because the old tools, there was no multi tenancy, there was not easy logon, so they had no access to the dashboards, they were just waiting for the monthly reporting and say, okay, it was up, okay we were, now they can have access, we use single sign-on to do that, so the customers are happy that they can see, they can see line of business dashboarding, and so on. And certainly internally it did improve a lot of cost savings, because a lot of the things we are doing now is automation, and we started the integration with our ITSM tool, and that will go live, normally next week. >> Okay, what ITSM tool are you-- >> It's a German tool, it's from a company called OMNINET, and the tool is called OMNITRACKER. >> Great, talk now about that automation, where have you come so far, where do you see it progressing in the future? >> We started first with some task automation, we have an 24/7 operation team, first-line, and they were doing a lot of manual tasks, so where we can, and what we first did was automate some manual tasks. And now we are progressing with ITSM integration, bi-directional integration, and then we will start with removing from old mailboxes, where we can do some restart automatically, so we will take a look at the incidents, see what we can do, see if we can do some automation with that, and we will certainly progress very far, as far as possible to do more and more automation and less manual work. >> Great, tell us, you've attended this event before, what brings you back to the event? >> First of all I want to see a lot of the demos, what's coming, because we are today, 8.12 version was announced, we are on 8.9, we will move next week to 8.10, so what is coming, so I have to talk internally to people, okay, what's coming, I need to convince all program managers, service delivery managers, I can talk to customers what is coming, what they can expect, so that's one of the reasons. The other reason is to talk to other customers of ScienceLogic, what are you doing, what's helping you, what's not, and so on. >> Yeah, I noticed one of the things they talked about is making it easier to upgrade from versions, when you think about the cloud world, as we talk about it, is, if your customers are in Azure, you don't ask them what version of Azure they're running, you're running whatever version Microsoft has it, they patch it, they update it, if security fix happens it goes there, when you talk about moving from 8.9 to 10 to 12, that process of when do I do it, how do I do it, how's ScienceLogic doing it, keeping things easy to upgrade, were there things in the keynote that you were ready to jump on? >> We started with, the first version 8.3 or 4 I think, and we always try to be in good shape in the newer releases. So we already had some experience with upgrading, and it's going smooth. And whatever I heard from the system engineers, it's going better and better and better. So normally we have only a very small outage to do that, in fact it should be minimal, sometimes they switch over or something like that, when a database is changed, but normally operations is always running 24/7, and there is no interruption for operations. >> Has there been anything at the show that you've seen so far, either through the demos, talking to some of the experts, or in the keynote, that you want to highlight? >> One of the things that I have seen is the connection with the application, with the APM tools, that's what our customers also are requesting more and more, the integration of infrastructure and application, and the multi cloud of course. >> Yeah, that's definitely something we've heard. All right Luc, I want to give you the final word, things to take away, for people that haven't come to a ScienceLogic event, what you think that they should take away from an event like this. >> For me the greatest take-away is come here to learn. Come here to see what is possible, what the future is, what AIOps will mean in the future, prepare yourself for the next three to five years, that's the main reason. >> Great, well thank you so much, preparing for the next three to five years, we know the pace of change isn't slowing down at all, so it's great to be able to talk to a practitioner that's helping to manage and deal with so many of those environments, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you. >> All right, and we'll be back with more coverage here, be sure to check out thecube.net for all interviews, I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks so much for watching. (upbeat music)