(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)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. We are at AWS re:Invent, along with Rebecca Knight, I'm John Walls. A lot of energy still behind us here. >> It's amazing. >> Have you noticed that? >> This is day three, people, wow. >> And again, I know a lot of you watching, you come to shows, you attend these things, and you realize that day three sometimes can be a little bit >> Sleepy, yeah. >> Slower, yeah. Not so here, this place is still very much alive. >> Sin City. >> Yeah. Easy, easy now. (group chuckles) We're joined by a couple of gentlemen right now to join us here, Prathap Dendi, who is the General Manager of Growth Initiatives and Commercialization at AppDynamics. Prathap, thank you for being with us. >> Oh, great to be here. >> And Emmanuel Offiong, who is Vice President of Enterprise at Wyndham Hotels. Emmanuel, now usually the conversation in here is, hey, how ya doin', where are you staying? We don't have to ask you that. (group chuckles) We know, right. >> Right. >> So you're good to go at Wyndham. So, first off, let's just talk about, I'd like to get your ideas, we've talked about the show, I mean, how do you feel? You're probably around here quite a bit, Prathap, at various shows and what have ya, your thoughts about what you're seeing here at AWS re:Invent 2018? >> For starters, I think you guys need at least 10 more Cubes because I've been watching the activity here. It's just, you know, crazy, right? A lot of high energy here, a lot of cloud stories, multi-cloud stories, really feed on that, a lot of innovation that's being announced here. >> Alright, and Emmanuel, we hear this a lot, right, customers who are making that big digital jump, you're making that leap, and, in some cases, it's a bit of a leap of faith, right, in some respects. Let's go back to before that, the genesis of your decision, what was the impetus and what were your reservations, and what are your reservations still, for that matter, going forward? >> Sure, so I actually joined Wyndham about three years ago when we were trying to undertake this digital journey, and what we realized was that there was a lot of competition with our online travel agents, and we weren't really bringing in customers the way we thought we could, and so we realized that our digital platforms were antiquated. They weren't speaking to our customers in terms of increased loyalty and such, and so we knew that we had to make a change. We knew that in today's economy, in order to attract customers, we had to be more digital friendly. We had to provide a seamless experience, and we had to make sure that, on all of our platforms, that customers were able to check-in and check-out on their mobile platforms very easily. >> You mentioned online travel agents, but just talk a little bit about this era of hoteling. Has it become so much more competitive, particularly with the rise of Airbnb and other VRBOs? >> It has, it really has, so the Expedias, the Airbnbs of the world, they've really embraced technology, more so than maybe the traditional hospitality companies have, and so that's why you'll see companies like ourselves starting to make investments in technology, making investments into digital transformation. >> So you have your aha moment, we need to move forward, we need a digital transformation so you begin to look for partners. What were you looking for? >> Couple of things, so we were looking at transformation on three levels, for digital, infrastructure management, and data, and so, in terms of a partner, what we wanted to do is we were looking for someone to help us ease that journey. We knew the journey was going to be rough, especially from where we started, so we were looking for a partner like AWS that was going to help us sort of make that scale into modern-day technology very quickly. >> Alright, so when you talk about a digital journey, I just want to back up a little bit. What exactly does that encompass in your case? I mean, I'm thinking you've got your website, you've got your reservation, you know, you've got all these microservices running on your site, you know, it's all good, it's all fine. What weren't you doing specifically germane to your business that AppDynamics is now getting you back up to speed and getting you into the 21st century, if you will? >> Sure, so let me give you some context then. When we talk about customers, we talk about two sets of customers. There are guests who walk in through the door, and then there are franchisees. We're a franchise-based company so let's speak to our guests. In regards to our guests, our check-in/check-out process wasn't as seamless as it could be, right. It wasn't very mobile friendly at the time so those were the things that we were looking to change, and in regards to our franchisees, their ultimate goal is they want to be able to check revenue. They want to be able to check rates, change rates. They want to be able to see what their competitors are doing, and they want to be able to do that very seamlessly and on a mobile platform, and we didn't have those capabilities available to them at the time. >> If I may say something? >> Please. >> It's interesting when we see leaders like Emmanuel talk about digital transformation, they're not talking about I.T. transformation, they're not talking about servers going away, infrastructure. It's really refreshing to see customers talk about business model changes. What I see, you know, Scott and Emmanuel, their team has done a great job about focusing on what is it about the business model that needs to change, and really getting that end-user experience journey, like you asked, right from the time they log-in to requesting a service or changing some reservation, all of that is what they're capturing, and it's really complex, and I know he's quite humble to say, oh, we've done it at scale, but this is hard stuff, to make it simple for the end-user passes the complexity down to the systems, and that's what the team at Wyndham was able to do and we're lucky, AppDynamics, to be part of that journey that monitors the end-to-end performance of the end-user journeys, and then importantly correlate that to business outcomes. You know, do we actually have more partners coming in? Is the full journey faster now, now that we've gone to AWS, is it really impacting the business or is it just I.T. spin? So that's really a good caller to see that digital transformation is really a business model change not just an I.T. change. >> So the business model, so walk us through exactly what you did for this transformation and this cloud migration too. >> Sure, so the first step was realizing that we had to start to migrate some workloads to the cloud, and the reason why we knew we had to go to the cloud was, like I said before, we wanted to get out of the business of managing infrastructure, right, so we said we're going to take our workloads to the cloud. Well, going to the cloud, especially with the type of workloads we were looking at, is often a very complicated and complex adventure, and that's where AppDynamics came in for us, right. We knew we needed something that was going to allow us to see end to end where we started from, and when we migrate to the cloud, have that same level of visibility to ensure that we didn't do two things, right. We're protecting the brand, and we want to make sure we protect our customer experience. Those are the two things that were most important to us as a part of this journey. >> From a security standpoint, huge concern, right? I mean, it has been for a while, but when you go public and what exposure there might be, how have you two kind of dealt with that because, obviously, you're dealing with financial information, with customer information, there's a lot of proprietary stuff that you're getting from your folks that you have to protect, and, obviously, internally as well. So talk about the security component. >> Yeah, happy to go first. It used to be just about five, six years ago, application was seen as a separate silo or a separate layer, and security was different and experience was different. What we're now seeing is every business function is getting really melded into that one concept of end-user experience so security becomes, not an afterthought, but actually is part of the design construct, right, and what we've seen with customers like Wyndham is they have gotten so much better at measuring right from the click stream of from reservation to fulfillment, and looking for anomalies in that data, right, so security correlation to the application data is out of the box now so that's the pre-design for architecture groups like Emmanuel's. >> Sure, yeah, so I (chuckles) I think you said it very well. >> I'll say what he said, right? (group chuckles) >> Well, when you're thinking about this migration, which began in, when did this journey begin? >> Couple years ago. >> Couple of years ago. So, now, was there resistance to it? As you said, you were really at this tipping point where you said we got to do something different here. We've got a lot of different competition coming at us from different angles. >> Yeah, so there was some level of internal concern, I would say, but we worked through that, right. It's really about, at the end of the day, we migrated 8,400 hotels across 18 brands onto this new platform, right, so it's not insignificant so you can imagine, right, the amount of internal conversations that needed to happen to get something like that accomplished. >> And what haven't you done? Obviously, this is a multi-year process. You can't snap your fingers and it's going to be done. I assume you're in a still a nascent stage of this, and you have much more work to do. >> Yep, now we're focused on data, right. Now, we're focused on grabbing insights from the data that we've put into the cloud. We've migrated most of what we were looking to migrate over the last two years, if you will, and now we're lookin' at how do we get more insights from the data that's available to us? >> Alright, and is that something that your company can play with as well? >> And Amazon and AWS themselves so I think over the years what I've seen, you know, I've been an engineer in this career, now in the business side, you co-system around application stack has gotten so transparent, right, so customers like Wyndham are able to purchase best of breed solutions like AppDynamics on AWS marketplace, click of a button. There's no long cycles of value so you quickly get to the value, and then once the journey starts, it's really all about the customer. They're generating trillions of data set every day across their business. Our goal is to see how can we bubble up the impact of that investment to their line of business? How quickly are the customers getting on board, making their decisions versus having to worry about the servers and the infrastructure. That's what we're seeing in a big way. >> Well, and as you said before, this is a business model change. It wasn't just a technology change so how have your customers seen this? How are they reacting? What are your franchisees seeing? How has the business changed? >> From our perspective, the customers love it, and we can measure that in terms of our bookings. We're up 75% in terms of mobile bookings as a result of some of these changes that we've made. Our customers have given us feedback that the experience is much more seamless. Our franchisees have given us feedback that, you know what, it's easier to use our services. >> Yeah, all I want is the best rate. (group laughs) Just give me the best rate, Emmanuel, alright, and I'm a happy camper. >> The statistic that he shared is phenomenal, right, being able to see 75% jump in mobile booking is significant. >> That's extraordinary. >> That's real ROI. >> Yeah, and there are others too. Scott, their CIO, recently wrote in a blog about how and why the CIOs are sleeping better, right. They're actually getting sleep back, and I think that's really the result of the transformation where systems like AppDynamics, systems like applications they wrote, they'll become a lot more seamless now, and being able to show, when I invest a dollar into an application, how is that yielding to line of business, real time is what they have as power now. >> The boss is happy. >> Yeah. >> Yes. >> Well, if they're sleeping well, we're all sleeping well. I know how that goes. Gentlemen, thanks for sharing this story. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you for having us. >> Appreciate your time here. >> Appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. >> You bet, back with more here from AWS re:Invent. You're watching this live from Las Vegas, and we're on theCUBE. (techno music)