>> Mind the fact that HP just started re-selling Veeam. We now have a combination of a very strong technology portfolio, deep integration, and a commitment to good market partnership. The combination we think will be very exciting for HP member and Veeam customers in the years to come. >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back, welcome to theCUBE and VeeamON 2017, my name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Vladimir Val Taft is here, he's the principle infrastructure architect at Granite Construction. Val, good to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure. >> So tell use about Granite Construction, what do you guys do? >> Well Granite is one of the largest public construction companies in US. It's your publicly traded company, it's actually one of the S&P 500 where the annual revenues are over 2 1/2 billion dollars. And if you see, on the East Coast, if you see Tappan Zee Bridge, that's one of the flagship projects of Granite Construction as an example. Also roads, tunnels, airports, heavy constructions. >> Is that the old Tappan Zee or the new one that's been going up? >> Vladimir: The new one. >> Oh yeah, yeah it looks great. >> Yeah I flew over it last week on my way to Orlando, I said, "Ah that's the new Tappan Zee." >> Looking forward to making it easier to get down to New York City, New Jersey area. >> So yeah, it's one of the flagship projects we're proud of. >> And then your role as a principle architect, tell us about that, and your background there. >> Well, construction industry is not known for over investing in IT. If you look at Gartner's reports, construction industry typically is around 1+% of revenue, and that's where Granite is. So when the new team took over IT, there was an org change, we inherited a lot of technical debt. And that was, plus expiring our lease on the data center, which was actually going to be closed down by a major vendor, and we had to move it very quickly. >> Okay so you come to a show like VeeamON to learn from your peers, figure out best practices. I mean that's what you hear from people, but what's the event been like for you? What's the conversation been like and where are you focused? >> Well, we chose Veeam as a partner, technology partner, for a number of, I believe, good reasons. So one of the motivations for me to come here was to establish better contacts with Veeam organization, also I realized that the technical depth here is, I would say, superior to many other events I had attended, so I was really searching for that depth. As well as the right contacts, because we are right outside of the Silicon Valley, so we're actually doing forward looking things, I can give you some examples. >> Dave: Please, yeah. >> We were site number 141 for the SDN implementation using Cisco ACI as an example. We are a proud customer of ServiceNow. >> I was there last week, and ServiceNow knowledge. >> That's right, actually I did go to Orlando. And well we also, HP is our preferred vendor so all of them are present in this form and some of the announcements, I really had a good fortune to hear first hand, actually make our life easier now. >> So anytime I hear of a ServiceNow customer, I know they've been through some kind of transformation and when you talked about technical debt, and I'm inferring that you've modernized some of your infrastructure, that's a big part of what you have to do as IT architect. Can you talk about that, first of all is that correct? And what did you have to do to achieve that? >> Well as a team we had to, as I mentioned, repay a lot of technical debt in a short period of time. And move our data center, but our main data center is just it, is just one data center. Granite is operational from coast to coast, we have more than 40 regional and branch sites, they have their own computer installations, computer rooms or mini data centers. We have 120, depending on the time of year and the volume of business, of construction sites which are also IT sites. So even the scale of that operation is a challenge. >> Val, with so many locations, can you speak to the impact that Veeam has with what you're doing both operationally and just in general? >> Sure, again in this reasonably short period of time, Veeam helped us as a tool to enable Veeam level backups, coz we had to virtualize very quickly and then move over the wire from the old data center with the expiring lease, lease expiration was really like, surprise, for the new team so the new data center at AT&T, (mumbles) Veeam was there as a backup tool to secure the baseline for the main data center. The main data center is VMware, so Veeam apparently has great name in the VMware community but then the field is pure Microsoft, and with Hyper-V Veeam was there right on time with support for pure Microsoft environment so that's what enabled our field, securing the basis for the field which we didn't have any backup standards, we couldn't get full control of our data, the ownership, the governance was not there, the backups were disjointed so at this point when we nailed what I started referring to as Veeam on the ground, we have that baseline. And here on the show floor I made contacts with the Veeam partner, who actually can look at the Veeam backups, analyze them and it's a low cost answer for us, to really better understand the dark data we inherited. Some of that might be backups of the old backups of the old backups, some of it may have PII. Again it's one extra benefit of attending the show was establishing contacts with the partners who actually complement the Veeam solution. Frankly getting this information of the field is more of a challenge, especially if or when we deal with very good resellers and partners Veeam has but there is always a delay getting this information first hand, expedite things. >> Alright Val, we're out of time so thank you very much for coming to theCUBE, appreciate it >> My pleasure. >> Good to meet you. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman live from VeeamON 2017, we'll be right back.