>>Hi and welcome to another cube conversation this time from BMC helix immersion day at Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. I'm Peter Burris, your host for today. One of the biggest challenges that every company faces as they try to think about how they're going to do more with digital services and operation in support of more complex business. And the need for greater simplicity is how to extend their ecosystem to include other sources of knowledge, other sources of insight about how a company can accelerate its journey to this new D S O M world. And to have that conversation, we've got a great partner, uh, here at BMCs helix immersion days. Rob graves is the vice president at data trend. Rob, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you Peter. Glad to be here. >>So tell us a little bit about data train. It's a, it's a BMC partner. You've been around for a long time, helping customers do some relatively important infrastructure things. Where are you guys today? >>Yeah, well I'll go back a little history. We've been in business since 1987. Same two owners, a lot of stability. They continue to drive the business for us. Um, heavy in the infrastructure space, really got started in the data center and a regional multi-site, uh, businesses, large enterprises in the hospitality, retail, financial services, et cetera, where we've grown up, um, started out like a lot of businesses selling hardware and pretty quickly as customers ask for higher value, have moved into consulting and broader services, really consider ourselves, uh, infrastructure centric systems integrator if that's a mouthful. That's really who we are and what we do. Um, as we have all of those consulting practices, more and more, we realized the need to understand our customer's environments better, oftentimes better than they even do. And came across a product called Tideway, which was launching the U S became one of their launch partners here in the U S and shortly thereafter BMC acquired them. So we became a BMC partner in 2009 and it's just been a great journey ever since. Um, at the time they were probably the most robust discovery tool and uh, uh, they've continued to keep that leadership since then. >>Well, let's pick up on that. So discovery is historically been a kind of a domain that was used mainly by an it group to have some, a little bit better understanding of what types of things they needed to do, a task needed to perform. But in a digital business, discovering digital assets becomes absolutely a strategic capability. So how has discovery of volved and then how are you using it to bring these new levels of value? >>It's a great question and it's a more and more essential as the world gets more complex and devices get more complex with cloud, with IOT and centers, Penn transient or right. It was one thing to, to be able to recognize I have these physical service servers here in my data center or maybe even in remote offices. Then, um, our friends at VMware came along and made everything virtual. So how do I manage a workload going from this physical device to another physical device? Fantastic. Actually one of my favorite Cuba, uh, interviews ever of old friend of mine, Pat Gelsinger, I just love watching all his cube interviews just came off of VMworld, very bright tastic love. But, um, they really got that going as cloud really started to, to launch, okay, now I've got application workloads, pieces of my it all over the place. Um, and keeping on top of that is just daunting. Right? And somebody's gotta give BMC a lot of credit, uh, as they've continued to remarket themselves and, and build capabilities. They are absolutely at the front of the curve, the BMC helix discovery product, um, all sorts of competitors, little startups through some very large players. But whenever we bring it into a customer, hands down, we're able to get more done. That comprehensive view of the infrastructure through the applications, through the business services. Um, we constantly come in and replace other products. Bring this back in. >>Well, one of the things that I've observed as a guy who has spent a lot of time watching the industry is, uh, technologies like discovery were especially important at the very largest enterprises because they had all these physical assets that they, that people were buying and installing and they never knew quite was what was on the network. And it was always like this thing was kind of, maybe it was appropriate for a mid size enterprise, but it didn't have the same numbers. But when you start introducing, as you said, virtualization or software robots or other transient assets and resources that are going to have a significant impact in how the business operates, the number of things that you have to stay on top of means it's now an appropriate set of technologies for virtually any size organization. Do you see that as well? >>Absolutely. And especially companies that have lots of locations, lots of sites complex it, I love that BMC jumped pretty early into extending the, the helix discovery into the IOT space. We do a lot of multisite deployments. Um, we're part of the, several of the large OEMs, IOT systems integration programs. And when you're starting to talk hundreds, thousands, even millions of devices out there, how do these companies, these users keep track of all that and make sure that they're operating properly? The security is a big issue. I mean, one of the best things I like about the helix discovery is, uh, how can you secure something you don't understand? I mean, I can't tell you how many times we've gone in with discovery. Uh, to handle one use case. Something as simple as, um, populating a CMDB or, uh, making sure that dr plan is, is solid or relocating a data center, which kind of the classic use cases of a discovery product. >>And you have the security guys come into the room just cause they're everywhere. They have to be watching everything, right? Then all of a sudden I, one of the large stock brokerages, all of a sudden the security guy jumped in the front room and said, stop, stop. What is that? And he points at our application map that came out of helix discovery. It's that, that should not be talking to that. Right. And uh, you know, basically found a big vulnerability just because of an application dependency that the security team wasn't aware of. Um, BMC has got quite a few good examples where they'll almost an accidental big security play happen just from a security guy being in the room and watching the output from discovery and seeing things that their tools had never shown them. >>And I do not want to be the guy that agitated the security guy in a meeting like that. So I was great. Isn't that the satellite board is pretty funny. So, so tell us a little bit about your customer base and how they are utilizing some of this new tooling, uh, to, uh, to extend current but also alter and change future types of business. >>Yeah, there's a, a variety of, uh, great stories. We typically play in larger enterprises, a lot of fortune one hundreds. Um, I'll, I'll leave some of the, uh, our good customers nameless, protect the guilty and the innocent. Right. But, uh, one of the large airlines, you know, went through an exercise of stamps, new dr capability. Uh, it's still wrapping that up. Um, they've had a number of unplanned outages based on new changes. They're doing a lot of change, modernizing applications, moving into new data centers. Screen new dr capabilities. You know, they thought they had decent understanding. Their environments went through their change control process. Oops. Didn't realize that other applications would depend on this server that we just did in the last upgrade on, um, took their line down for a couple of hours. You know, that's not good. Um, uh, bringing in these discovery tools very quickly, they've seen, Hey, I can prevent that. >>I can really understand in real time what's talking to what and make sure I avoid out. That's a big one. I mentioned some of the security conversations. Uh, something that we've been doing some innovation with BMC is getting to some of the discovery as a service type of capabilities and that's allowing us to do some what we're calling micro use cases. Even some simple challenges like, um, a network switch maintenance. Everyone wants to reduce the cost of, of hardware maintenance. What's really hard to discern with hundreds or even thousands of switches, which ones are supporting which workloads. So we can go into an environment and say, Hey, you've got a thousand network switches. You know, 500 of them are just supporting test. I want you to take those off 24 by seven, two hour support and really give them a real time mapping. And that's a money saver right there. That's been very difficult for them to figure out on their own. Um, because that connection from the infrastructure to the apps and the services that are being delivered. So there's a variety of different use cases like that. >>So when you think about where data trends is going to go and, uh, as your business expands in response to the new types of things that customers want to do, where do you think you're going to be spending your time with customers in say, three years? And how is this set of digital services and operations management tooling going to make it possible for you to deliver that service more reliably, more profitably, et cetera? >>Yeah, no, it's uh, it's interesting. Um, while we grew up in the data center, we touch a lot of, uh, large edge environments as well. And we're seeing more and more innovation coming at the edge. Uh, Sanjay from gen pack spoke earlier and you used a great phrase again, innovation at the edge, governance at the core, and it's really, um, something that, uh, we're seeing a lot. So new workloads out on the edge. Gotta be able to understand that, see what's out there, because more and more compute and analytics that can be done at the edge, not in your data center. That's a place we're putting a lot of focus right now. >>Rob graves, vice president of data trend. Thanks again for being on the queue. All right. You got it. Thank you. And once again, this is Peter Burris from the Santa Clara Marriott at BMCs helix immersion days. Thanks for watching. Until next time.