>> Announcer: Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest but a company we've had on the program before. Brian Gregory is the director of Cloud Strategy and Engineering at Express Trips, I'm sorry, Express Scripts, and Express Scripts booth is actually right behind us on the stage. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, you were giving us a little bit of background about, I believe it's been about three years you've been with the company. Why don't you share with our audience Express Scripts company that many of us have probably used, less likely that everybody knows who you are and your role there. >> Yeah, so my role today, again, is a Cloud Strategy Engineering director, but it's really focused on building out the next-gen platform, making infrastructure irrelevant, if you will, and making our developers go faster and making everything as streamless as possible. >> And Brian, just for our audience that doesn't know Express Scripts, give us, what's the brain of the company and what are you known for. >> We serve 85 million patients today, 3,000 contractor. We have, if you go look at what we do as a business, the pharmacy benefit management side, our goal is to basically make prescriptions safer, more affordable, for all of our patients. So if you think about what we're doing, that's really what we're doing, and we like to say pharmacy smarter. And for us, that's our major goal in everything we do. So my team, anybody's team, doesn't matter what you're doing in technology, that's your end goal, to deliver value to those patients and your clients and so that's what we focus on. >> Well, Brian, it's a good thing. IT's changing all the time, at least health care, nothing's been changing radically, changing all the time. So, bring us inside what you did when you came inside the company. Your role, as you said, infrastructure. Wanted to worry about that less, that's something we hear a lot. >> Right, and one thing I should clarify is that Express Scripts has always been a technology company. If you look at their grass roots and what they were built upon, in 30 years they grew to 100 billion dollar business, really by utilizing technology at the end of the day. When I came in, I was managing some infrastructure teams and database organizations and we decided that this was, the whole digital transformation, or cloud strategy, was a real thing, so my leadership asked me to take this on as an initiative, that was my background, that's where I came from, my grass roots, if you will, from Savs and Centurylink and that became a full-time role. It came to one point where you can't do both, this is taking off and it's being a real thing. Our main goal was to say, how are we going to step outside the box? We still have to run a 100 billion dollar organization. But we got to figure out what the new is, right, you're going to invent that next light bulb, and we've got to maintain the current one. And so, for us, we wanted a full-fledged platform. It wasn't about just spitting out BM's and delivering those, I think we'd had that covered. It was really about figuring out how we're going to figure out cloud, cloud in general. And then what about multi-cloud and how do we get a platform that could seamlessly integrate with all of those. >> And Brian, what was the underlying driver there in the business? Is it you needed to develop more software, you needed to move faster, what's the why, was it cost savings and things getting out of hand? >> Yeah, all of the above. I think specifically it's about delivering value, delivering value to patients as fast and seamless as possible. And so we wanted to figure that out. The old ways, if we all go back in our years of, there were days that I would get hardware and physically, I'm going to figure out how to put the drive so that they're getting more IO or whatever. Those projects have been solved, right, and if you look at companies 10 years ago, they were like, virtualization is scary, I can't do that, I have production workload. So the trend in the market is to keep moving up the stack, and so ultimately, that's where you end up focusing on. Where do we deliver value as an IT organization? That's not for us to go build a homebrewed system that does any of those things. You can go buy those things, integrate them and figure out how they can drive value in your business. So that's what we wanted to do, get a platform. The first goal we had was actually a really interesting story. We wanted to build a new mobile application that would allow consumers to go on and make a user experience much better than it had previously been. If you wanted to order prescriptions, you could go onto this app and say, not just, can I order that, but I can also see what the prices are at different places local to you, the distance to those, and then what would it take if you did a 90-day fill for our home-delivery program and you could sign up via that method. And that was really what we were going after, that end user experience to say, how do we change the experience for our consumers. Not necessarily the back-end stuff, the day-to-day batch processing that they don't really care about how that's done as long as it's done within the time threshold that that's supposed to be done. >> Brian, can you talk a little bit about the process of getting to where we are in terms of, you talked about trying to figure out cloud, and part of that is figuring out which platform to go with and then part of it is finding the people with the skills to, once you've decided on a direction, to help you figure it out. Can you talk just a little bit about maybe that learning journey for you, for Express Scripts? >> Sure, sure. Yeah, it's really interesting, 'cause when I talk, I feel like this was five years that I've been doing this specifically at Express Scripts, when really, it's 18 months that we've really stood up our internal hybrid cloud and got our platform installed. So, yeah, it's learning by doing but the nice thing about everything we're doing, and you hear this all the time, is that we can iterate, you can make changes. It's not like you have to wait three months and then you can't shift or can't course-correct. Learning, the team's been amazing, so I grabbed some people within, they got re-trained on this is the new stack. I also brought in some people that had previously worked with me that had some of the skill sets. Really, it's people that are curious in nature and want to learn. But then you go, that's a neat story, we can stand up a cloud or use an external one, you can stand up your pads. But at the end of the day, what do you do next, how do you start to engage developers? 'Cause when we opened the doors for business, it wasn't like we had everybody standing there waiting to get in. You had to convince them of, these are the features, not convince them, show them the features and the functionality and why it mattered to them. Why does it matter now, and then you go, okay, that's great, and you start to, I would say my team focuses probably 80% of their time on teaching people how to fish, hoping that the developers get better and the consuming of the platform, they help each other and we see a lot of that happening in our slack channels and hipchat and different things, communication tools where they're helping each other, so we're not even having to answer all the questions. But then you get the whole problem of, all right, well, now we've got release management we're going to start working with and that opens a whole new can and they're transforming as well and they're definitely changing their processes. But it gets hairy when you start looking at, well, we've got to keep the tourniquet over here 'cause we can't afford any disruption or outages for our patients. But these new guys, if they check all these boxes, they should be able to deploy whenever they feel like in the middle of the day and we should feel comfortable doing that because it's now micro-service, it's not some monolith thing that they don't understand. >> Brian, can you give us a little insight on the state of your application, so I think most people understand something like cloud foundry, oh, I wanted to build that new app, that's a great use case. How many applications have you moved over, do you have a percentage you measure? I heard the Liberty Mutual keynote was like, what percentage of workloads they have there, what percentage of people code, how fast they release code on this thing, what metrics do you use? >> Yeah, so I had this conversation last night. We don't have, I can tell you that we have over 1100 applications that have moved in 18 months, so I would tell you that, when it started out, we had specific goals of migrating existing lift and shift and refactoring and things like that. What we found was that there's all this net new coming in, not just what we're doing is blowing up within the company, but they're also doing that on the developer's side and they're doing a lot of new things so those new projects clearly migrate over or come in the door starting out with cloud-first strategy. Then you start to lift and shift, and you really have to start cherry-picking what makes sense. Some things you go, there's not really the value, there's no user experience behind this, it's literally just a monetary thing, maybe or maybe not. But you start taking the dollars that you're going to put towards migrating this, and then you're like, well, it's not really a win-win. So what we found was that allnet news coming this direction on the cloud foundry platform, and the workload that makes sense, and then we started cherry-picking things that we re-wrote in spring and they're slowly migrating. But today we're at 1100, we just hit 1100 apps, which is pretty good for 18 months. >> That's really impressive in 18 months. Any lessons learned there as to things you could do to move faster or mistakes that were made that you could tell your peers, hey, watch out for this? >> Yeah, I definitely have a lot of those but, at the same time, I feel like lessons learned are the best thing, the best thing we do is fail, literally, because then you learn something from it and you move forward. I think the one advice, some advice I would give to people is, don't get hung up on trying to be perfect. If there's a lift and shift opportunity and you only get 60 to 70% of the goodness of moving this thing, then just go ahead and do it, don't say, well, but it's not perfect, and we want to make this app completely different, 'cause that's where people get stuck on. I think once they realize they just try some things and then you can get over there and change it and make it perfect down the road. But some people are like, why would I move one to one, I should refactor this app and maybe have it multiple per one and those are great conversations but I think it keeps people, the old analysis paralysis conversation, and it's like, just try it, just go. I would say another good story we had is, we have an outcomes conference that we host, Express Scripts. We had, they were trying to come up with a new way to do basically a content management solution show a digital benefit guide, and they came in and they wanted to try one technology. Didn't work out, two weeks later they came back and were like, well, it doesn't deliver that, so we tried something else. And we tried four different things for this person and they got to where they wanted to be but the important part was that we could change on the fly. In the old days, it was like, you ordered hardware or you ordered BM's, you were stuck because he had dates to deliver and we basically, we can change things. If it doesn't work we'll try something else and you can move around and do things at scale where you couldn't before. >> It sounds like a set of outcomes that the business side, the executive side, leadership, can actually point to and recognize as helping transform the business. You're here at the conference, a sponsor of the conference, participating at the conference. And you're a pharmacy benefits company, so, that's an interesting position to be in. But it sounds like the business and management supports you and recognizes that this is helping move with velocity. >> Yes, so from the top down, we are a technology company at heart. This is what we do and the company has come a long way with, when I got there, the fact that we're here sponsoring it means a great deal to me because this is, after all, an open-source tech conference, which is amazing. It's nice to talk about, get some branding out there and talk about what we're doing so people know that, hey, there's a lot of really cool things happening. Maybe we recruit some people at the end of the day as a result, you never know. But yeah, it's really about just branding and then supporting the community and getting out the word of what we're doing and why it matters. >> Last question I have for you, Brian, is, a lot of discussion about multi-cloud and things like Kubernetes enable that. Can you share what public cloud or public cloud you use, how you look at that dynamic? >> Yeah, so we've got a few things in the works. So there's a few POC's happening, I would tell you that our internal cloud is where we have everything hosted today. We've built an internal hybrid cloud. >> So you have the data centers? >> Yeah, we have multiple data centers and we have our internal hybrid clouds built out. We are evaluating some external capabilities, we're also doing some partnerships, you can actually go read about. Our CIO just released a story about that. We're definitely looking for that, where's our burst-able capacity. With our data and with what we have going on, going external is a much different conversation than where my previous company, we're talking about Hippa compliance and a lot of different data issues that we've got to make sure we're protecting and our most important thing to do is protect that data from our patients. So there's no reason for us to go, we have to get out external at this point, but we do see that as an important part of our key going forward to say, this is part of our strategy, to say, we've got to get an external solution as well. >> Brian Gregory, always love the stories of how digital transformation are helping to impact everyone who uses prescriptions. I mean, no better way of helping people, so we'll be back with lots more coverage here of Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Thanks for watching The Cube. (techno music) >> I remember when I had such a fantastic batting practice, I walked by a couple of sports writers in that era.