(Upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE got two great guests from Deloitte Consulting Dave Knight who manages the Red Hat Relationship, Lee he's the lead there, and Mike Bourgeois who's the Public Sector Managing Director both from Deloitte Consulting LLP official name. Guys, great to come on, and we were just talking before camera about all the stories. Great to have you on theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Like I said we were just talking about all the stories from the transition from pre-COVID, COVID. Now we've got a view into post-COVID. I want to dig into that 'cause there's a lot of things happening. You guys have been in the trenches, front lines bringing solutions, but before we get into that, can you guys just introduce yourself share your roles at Deloitte and give us a quick overview of what you work on. >> Yeah, so again, thanks for having us John Dave Knight I'm a solution architect and Global Red Hat Alliance Manager for Deloitte. I've got responsibility for making sure that play nicely in the sandbox together or we've got a joint customer and solutions to deliver to those customers. >> Hi everyone, thanks for having us John, I'm a Managing Director Mike Bushwa out of Boston Texas. I am coming up on year 20 and Public Sector Consulting. My area of expertise is large state government systems that serve the needs of millions of citizens and thousands of state workers, good to be here. >> Yeah. Great to have you. And I wanted to chime in with you right away because Mike you are living in probably one of the hottest markets Public Sector. I've been following that for many, many years, generations actually from the early computer industry GSA contracts, all these contracts you've got all the Public Sector, they move very slowly but now the pandemic, there was no place to hide. Everything got pulled back, disruption, you can't just shut down critical infrastructure and critical services. People had to move fast. What was your experience and how is it now give us a taste of some of the challenges and the landscape. >> You bet John, so we talked a little bit before we started this, but my 20 year consulting career, I can't think of anything really in close to this, other than maybe Y2K and as Dave mentioned the Affordable Care Act Legislation in 2009, though that was a much smaller scale as it turned out to be. So I would be remiss not to share examples of extraordinary challenges our clients have had related to the pandemic. Department of Labor and Health and Human Service Agencies for example, responded to the pandemic in rapid timeframe that were rarely seen in government. Citizens that were used to coming in appealed offices, We're now required to do most things virtually. Deloitte has been privileged to assist clients with digital solutions across the country in response to this unprecedented event. And so I'd like to share just a couple of examples. The first is for Department of Labor, the pandemic contributed to millions of layoffs throughout the country Department of Labor workers found called volumes increasing by a 1000% in some cases, the amount of increased volume required agencies across the country hire temporary workers to help out. Millions of new unemployment claims needed to be filed in benefits rapidly provided to citizens of name. So the big challenge was the agency had to figure out how to rapidly file claims into the unemployment system, rather than requiring new citizens to use an external web application they were really unfamiliar, the agency needed more efficient approach. The approach we used was to create an internal web application that enabled workers to file unemployment insurance claims on behalf of citizens. Workers collected the necessary data from citizens and claims were filed into the system. The application enabled workers to focus on filing claims rather than sort of a technical support role showing how to people use an external web application. More citizen were served in much less time, claims are filed efficiently by train workers which resulted in benefits being received in a much more timely fashion. And so a second example is, with Department of Human Services. So one stay as mentioned Citizens were used to going into field offices but suddenly they were told you can't come into the field office. So once they provided a 100% virtual application and the important part here is certification solution for the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or DSNAP for short. this application was stood up in two weeks, families who needed food assistance can now apply and be certified for benefits remotely. Today over 50,000 cases have certified and citizens receiving food nutrition assistance. Back to you John. >> So, I mean obviously there's some great use cases you got, basically I got to work at home, new architecture there you got to have a new workflows. I mean, this poses some real challenges. How did you guys put it together? I mean, Dave take us through where this all fits in with the Red Hat, because obviously now it's new deployment new capabilities have to be deployed for the pandemic. How does this bring together the partnership with Red Hat? >> Yeah, so great question and it really plays to the strength of both Deloitte and Red Hat, right? The success stories that Mike has illustrated show how we can quickly pivot as a firm to delivering these types of solutions and help our customers think through innovative ways to solve the problems. So, I mean the prime example that Mike just gave, everything used to be done in offices. Now it's all done remotely cause you can't go to the office even if you want to. And that is very much aligned with the innovation we get with our partnership with Red Hat, right? They've led the way in open source and some of the technologies that we've leveraged that our solutions include, answerable for automation, some of the middleware products, and I would say one of the cornerstones is the OpenShift Platform. Now that allows us to greatly accelerate the development and delivery of those solutions to our customers. Sort of again, aligning our innovative thinking with Red Hats Innovative Technologies. >> What would you say if someone said, "what's the partnership strengths and what needs specifically are you addressing with customers and customer needs?" >> So I, again, I think our lean towards innovation is a common thread across both firms and where we have our greatest strength. We like to take our customers on a journey but it's not our journey, it's their journey, right? So we help them figure out where they want to go and how they want to get there in a way that aligns with their business goals, their budgets all the sort of factors that drive those things and Red Hat is very open to that approach. They sort of invented the crowdsourcing of open source they made it into a business model. They've developed that from literally nothing. And that aligns very nicely with us. That's one of the key strengths. We also are firm believers in open source again to the degree that our customers like the leverage that to drive their journeys. And we're seeing that, especially in the Public Sector Space as being a key driver of the technologies they employ. >> Mike, I want to come back to you on this open ma component open question, open source, open to technology open innovation out in the open as Red Hat calls it. How does Red Hat open source software, address the needs for your customers for security and on-premise considerations. >> I'll talk a little bit about open source principles in general still the open source principles of transparency meritocracy community problem solving and collaboration. These are on its of both software innovation as well as organizational transformation. One of the highest demand transformation needs that I'm seeing in the market is the desire to adopt innovative technology, and most importantly, moving workloads to the cloud. It's no longer a thought, it is an imperative moving workloads to the cloud, on new deals hosted in the cloud, on an existing, is it large systems let Deloitte help us get to the cloud. So I believe the key to success embracing the cloud is recognizing first the need for change in people, processes and technology. The vehicle for this transformation is DevSecOps and innovative open source platforms, such as the OpenShift platform that Dave mentioned. OpenShift focuses on people, processes and technology and the security conversation becomes even easier. I mean, I see Linux was around for years, and we've always used Linux on our Java based workloads now we can have the conversation about saying, Hey, well that se Linux operating system we've been using for years now, there's this really cool Container Management Platform that we can solve real problems like auto scaling, in my Health and Human Services career, I can remember every year when open enrollment comes around systems engineers are teed up, and ready to manually add those to a BMR cluster or something like that. Well, now we don't have to do these things. We can rely on Kubernetes so auto scale, and then and get rid of those instances when workload demands seven resolved. So it's a really cool technology kind of behind the scenes. It's not the dog and pony show sometimes but in the end it helps the clients and Deloitte remain consistent with those service level agreements. >> That's a great example about the open enrollment illustrates the fact that, you got to provision more stuff to take that load on it. It's always hard in Public Sector you might not have the speed. So I got to follow up and ask you, you guys have had wins in the Public Sector lately with Red Hat, you guys Deloitte and Red Hat working together and get some wins under your belt, on around cloud and cloud and technology obviously with the pandemic has needs there. Are you guys seeing any particular sector challenges specifically around Public Sector as it goes this next level a lot of modernization happening we're seeing that, but any challenges that you're seeing, can you give some examples of how these challenges are being addressed? First talk about the challenges and then give some examples of how they're overcoming them. >> So I can jump in here with this one then, and Mike I think you probably have some maybe Public Sector specific examples, but one of the things that I think is common across all industries is resource constraints, right? And particularly as we look for human resources and not in the HR sense, but developers, CIS admins those types of resources as Mike said, the cloud is here to stay, right? And it's not something that people are thinking about it's de facto part of the conversation. And that's great, but it leads to silos of skills which puts further sort of strain on a limited pool of resources within most sites IT organization. So something like an OpenShift, something like an Ansible solves problems related to resource constraints, because they're skills that are portable across cloud environments, right? If you can manage OpenShift you can manage OpenShift on-prem, you can manage it recently released AWS version of that ROSA on the Azure version of that. So it's no matter where you're running it you've got a common set of skills and access sort of a force multiplier, same thing with Ansible automation, right? If you can write scripts, with an Ansible you can do those repeatable tasks in a much more efficient fashion. And again sort of multiplying the capacity of your existing workforce. >> So you've got an operating leverage there. I mean, this is what you're getting at is that, Public Sector and other commercial areas they kind of got to get used to this fact that, you get some leverage here, you get some operating leverage. >> More or less has always been a thing in IT. And it's not relenting that's for sure. >> It's been more at the more, with less has always been kind of a tagline for budget cuts, right? You can squeeze more out of the investment. Here it's kind of like do more with less than the sense of there's more net new things happening with leverage. So, I mean, do you agree with that? What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's more with less from a resource perspective, right? Typically it was budget, but no money is just another resource. Now we're getting into the personnel side of it. The other thing I would say is, something like an OpenShift Platform allows the Mike's point around DevOps, it allows the developers to develop, right? I have an article in wired.com about this, where developers are saddled with meetings and they have to become concerned with infrastructure and they have traditionally and security. And I am I doing all these things that aren't related to development. If you have a good DevOps Platform in place the security folks can build guard rails into the platform and the developers can just go develop which is what they want to do in the first place. Yeah exactly, that's another riff on the more, with less, again in a resource, the human resource way versus the budget way. >> Yeah, and that really is where OpenShift ties in. Mike what's your take on this? Because with this kind of program ability infrastructure as code DevSecOps kind of modern developers, Public Sector loves that, because they just want to build the new apps. They got to modernize. So change the infrastructure once. And then a lot of ma many benefits on top of it. It's almost like, it sounds like an operating system to me. >> Yeah, lots of thoughts going around my head right now but I'll say the more with less to me when I'm having client conversations is imagine a world of higher innovation, more technology at lower costs, right? I mean, so CIO is light up when I explained to them the orders of magnitude cost savings on top of the innovation introduced to their environment. So when moving workloads to the cloud is not as easy as just packaging up a binary and dropping in on a name, your cloud provider, right? There's an entire, a blueprinting strategy. There's a Cloud Native Architecture, modernization discussion, so we do those sorts of things, at Deloitte and we work with clients very closely to do that. I want to say teaming with Red Hat allows us to be proactive with our design and reference architecture validation. The Collaborative Partnership in Relationship allows us to connect senior engineers from Deloitte and Red Hat. So we have low level strategic discussions, we validate our assumptions and optimize to use a Red Hat technology. What we're doing in Public Sector is separating the monolithic application into layers. And whenever it comes to technologies like Ansible, like OpenShift, like Jenkins, all of these things that any application needs and Public Sector, we're saying out to the account teams across the country, look this is a slower layer DevOps Platform. And by the way, you can run any .Net or Java based workload on it. So we're trying to make opinionated reference architecture so that regardless of the solution, we can just go to market with that platform that tried and true production application. So I'll give a quick example John, if now's a convenient time regarding, well, one of the things that we've done for particular state client. >> Definitely yeah, give the use cases we love those. >> Yes so one of the impactful modernization that struck my mind was the State of Washington. They've mentioned the affordable care act earlier, there are two major things that came out of that. One was the eligibility and enrollment systems had to be modified across all 50 states. But the second thing and the primary driver behind the affordable care act was health insurance exchange. A way for millions of citizens to have access to healthcare using Subsidized Health Insurance Plans. So in Washington and health benefits exchange is that health insurance exchange, State of Washington has been a client of Deloitte since 2012. The solution was originally designed using closed source proprietary products. There are three drivers for change. The first is the API gateway was end of life and needed to be replaced. Number two was the client wanted it to move health benefit exchange to the cloud from an on-premise hosting arrangement. And third is reducing cost of those solution with innovative products. So the agency was looking for a platform that provided flexibility, auto-scaling and performance and lower cost of ownership. So we worked with the agency and we evaluated a variety of API Management and Integration Platforms after reviewing the outcomes for each proof of concept the agency decided to move forward with Red Hats, three skill API Management Platform, Red Hat Fuse for Integration and OpenShift Container Platform that offered the auto-scaling continuous integration tools and out of the box monitoring and reporting capabilities proactively monitor the health of the solution. I often describe a little bit of OpenShift as a data center or DevSecOps in the box. It just is all there. You don't need to add layers on top of OpenShift install and configure it, tune it and just you're off and running in a short amount of time. So three outcomes I'll mention, go ahead, John. >> NO continue, I thought you were finished. So on the outcomes side, the first outcome the agency substantially lower the cost of ownership using commercially supported open source while increasing access to innovative emerging technology. So the agency wanted a solution not only to meet their current needs, but extend the solution going forward. The beautiful thing about OpenShift is you can drop a container images into the platform without installing an operating system. It's all just there and it's spreading to be extended. The number two outcome cloud migration. Deloitte work collaboratively with the agencies and infrastructure and managed services team to successfully migrate the health benefit exchange to the cloud. And the last thing a bit obvious, but that's successful release, working collaboratively with our client. We were able to migrate the solution within 100 days from making the products decision. The cut over to the new solution was seamless with minimal downtime and zero production issues or exceptionally proud of that. >> Great stuff, great use case. And again, those are great business examples. Dave, I want to get this last question to you and Mike can chime in too. As Red Hat Summit evolves, and we're hearing the theme here at the event about transformation is the innovation, Innovation is about scale. When you hear the words like in a box or Hybrid Cloud you hear about an operating environment. So it's an opportunity to set the table for the next generation, this is what I see. What do you guys see as people talk about Hybrid Cloud and soon to be Multiple Cloud? Because you guys you said have tough relationships. You deal with IBM and Red Hat and you probably deal with other people. Clients want, from what we hear they want back to the Multi Vendor Open Connection Distributed Environment. That's what they want. So how does your relationship evolve, given all this is happening? How do you see the future, please chime in. >> Thanks, that's a fantastic question. I actually think the market is coming catching up to where I've been thinking for quite a while. And that is the Hybrid is kind of where it's at. A lot of customers have been in some sort of Hybrid mode as part of the step or a journey to the cloud, getting all the way to the cloud. But I think we're seeing some transition. I know customers are starting to ask me more and more about Hybrid solutions for a variety of reasons, right? The easy workloads for the most part have either been moved or be are being moved, or at least there's a strategy and a plan to get them moved. And now we're starting to be asked about some of the more difficult architecture type questions, right? The workloads that are a little bit more sticky to the on-premise model. And so Hybrid becoming more of the endpoint as opposed to a step along the journey. The other big thing is some repatriation, right? Workloads coming off of cloud. Maybe they seem like good candidates but for whatever reason, the cost drivers or other things weren't realized, let's get them back on premise. Maybe it's a regulatory thing and new regulations are making folks uncomfortable. So I see Hybrid as a pretty interesting next wave of cloud, Deloitte as a far or we're skilling up or tooling up in order to address the needs of our customers, again are starting to ask us these really challenging questions about Hybrid Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Architectures. >> Yeah and just the key point there is that you think about it like with the way you're discussing it, it's a platform, not a tool, right? So if you think about it like a platform then you can move things around and look at architectures and changes of how resources and workloads are deployed and then what data you're getting from it. Whether you bring it to a factory, for instance you say, Hey, okay, we're going to put it on prem because it's a factory or whatever, and you need more data. What was the changeover? This is like a day to operations kind of mindset. What's your comment on that? >> Well I mean I have actually going back three years now, one of the marketing lines that we developed internally, was moved to a platform, not a provider. But because you get that flexibility, now, the reality is what works stay where they're put for a variety of reasons. But I think one of those reasons could be, because they're put in places where they tend to not want to move, right? So if we could put them into a platform where, there is some portability built into the platform, I think we might have a different sort of outcomes for customers. And I think architecture is absolutely the key, right? That to me is the secret sauce here. >> Mike set up for you to close us out here, platform, Public Sector, Hybrid, that's what they want. It's an ideal scenario for anyone in Public Sector and in general, and why wouldn't you want to have a great platform that's it can be programmed, and rearchitected at will for the benefit of the business powered by software. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, all good points and I will agree with Dave that Hybrid is certainly evolving. Eight years ago, Hybrid was consuming and address validation API in the cloud and not custom coding that, but today I do agree that Hybrid Cloud is all about a vehicle a way of moving workloads across data centers. It's an architecture that is encapsulated by something like an OpenShift so that you can federate your workloads across data centers. You can put them in one or easily moved them to the other. Maybe that's for a variety of reasons. It could be compute and storage is being reduced by one provider versus the other. So the solutions were we're designing today, they are data center agnostic, we're not being tied to data centers anymore. The best design solutions, you can just let them move in their easy manner. So that that's my take on Hybrid Cloud. And I would say the and Red Hat are making investments to help us advance that thinking help us advance those solutions. We had Deloitte have created a Red Hat OpenShift lab environment, and we've done this purposely to validate reference architectures to show account teams the way we have delivered the very very large accounts to show them what DevSecOps to means from a product perspective and to give them opinionated processes to be successful in delivering these large type solutions. >> Dave, Mike, thanks for coming on, and I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE and sharing the perspective on the Red Hat Relationship with Deloitte Consulting. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> This is CUBE Coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021, am John for your host, thanks for watching.

>>Hello, and welcome to today's event, dealing government emergency responses beyond the pandemic. This is Bob Wooley, senior fellow for the center for digital government and formerly the chief tech clerk for the state of Utah. I'm excited to serve as moderator for today's event. And just want to say, thank you for joining us. I know we're in for an informative session over the next 60 minutes before we begin a couple of brief housekeeping notes or recording of this presentation will be emailed to all registrants within 48 hours. You can use the recording for your reference or feel free to pass it along to colleagues. This webcast is designed to be interactive and you can participate in Q and a with us by asking questions at any time during the presentation, you should see a Q and a box on the bottom left of the presentation panel. >>Please send in your questions as they come out throughout the presentation, our speakers will address as many of these questions as we can during the Q and a portion of the close of our webinar today, if you would like to download the PDF of the slides for this presentation, you can do so by clicking the webinar resources widget at the bottom of the console. Also during today's webinar, you'll be able to connect with your peers by LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Please use the hashtag gov tech live to connect with your peers across the government technology platform, via Twitter. At the close of the webinar, we encourage you to complete a brief survey about the presentation. We would like to hear what you think if you're unable to see with us for the entire webinar, but we're just like to complete the survey. As much as you're able, please click the survey widget at the bottom of the screen to launch the survey. Otherwise it will pop up once the webinar concludes at this time, we recommend that you disable your pop-up blockers, and if you experiencing any media player issues or have any other problems, please visit our webcast help guide by clicking on the help button at the bottom of the console. >>Joining me today to discuss this very timely topic are Karen revolt and Tim Burch, Kim Berge currently serves as the administrator of human services for Clark County Nevada. He's invested over 20 years in improving health and human service systems of care or working in the private public and nonprofit sectors. 18 of those years have been in local government in Clark County, Las Vegas, where you served in a variety of capacities, including executive leadership roles as the director of department of social services, as well as the director for the department of family services. He has also served as CEO for provider of innovative hosted software solutions, as well as chief strategy officer for a boutique public sector consulting firm. Karen real-world is the social program management offering lead for government health and human services with IBM Watson health. Karen focuses delivering exciting new offerings by focusing on market opportunities, determining unmet needs and identifying innovative solutions. >>Much of her career has been in health and human services focused on snap, TANIF, Medicaid, affordable care act, and child welfare prior to joining IBM. Karen was the senior director of product management for a systems integrator. She naturally fell in love with being a project manager. She can take her user requirements and deliver offerings. Professionals would use to make their job easier and more productive. Karen has also found fulfillment in working in health and human services on challenges that could possibly impact the outcome of people's lives. Now, before we begin our discussion of the presentation, I want to one, we'd like to learn a little more about you as an audience. So I'm going to ask you a polling question. Please take a look at this. Give us an idea of what is your organization size. I won't bother to read all these to you, but there are other a range of sizes zero to 250 up to 50,000. Please select the one that is most appropriate and then submit. >>It looks like the vast majority are zero to two 50. Don't have too many over 250,000. So this is a very, very interesting piece of information. Now, just to set up our discussion today, what I want to do is just spend just a moment and talk about the issue that we're dealing with. So when you look the COVID-19 pandemic, it's put immense pressure on States. I've been a digital state judge and had been judging a lot of the responses from States around the country. It's been very interesting to me because they bifurcate really into two principle kinds of reactions to the stress providing services that COVID environment present. One is we're in a world of hurt. We don't have enough money. I think I'm going to go home and engage as little as I have to. Those are relatively uncommon. Thankfully, most of them have taken the COVID-19 pandemic has immense opportunity for them to really do a lot more with telework, to do more with getting people, employees, and citizens involved with government services. >>And I've done some really, really creative things along the way. I find that to be a really good thing, but in many States systems have been overloaded as individuals and families throughout the country submitted just an unprecedented number of benefit applications for social services. At the same time, government agencies have had to contend with social distance and the need for a wholly different approach to engage with citizens. Um, overall most public agencies, regardless of how well they've done with technology have certainly felt some strain. Now, today we have the opportunity to go into a discussion with our speakers, have some wonderful experience in these areas, and I'm going to be directing questions to them. And again, we encourage you as you hear what they have to say. Be sure and submit questions that we can pick up later at the time. So Tim, let's start with you. Given that Las Vegas is a hub for hospitality. An industry hit severely as a result of this pandemic. How's the County doing right now and how are you prioritizing the growing needs of the County? >>Thanks Bob. Thanks for having me. Let me start off by giving just a little, maybe context for Clark County too, to our audience today. So, uh, Clark County is, you know, 85% of the state of Nevada if we serve not just as a regional County by way of service provision, but also direct municipal services. Well, if, uh, the famous Las Vegas strip is actually in unincorporated Clark County, and if we were incorporated, we would be the largest city in the state. So I say all of that to kind of help folks understand that we provide a mix of services, not just regional services, like health and human services, the direct and, and missable, uh, services as well as we work with our other five jurisdiction partners, uh, throughout the area. Uh, we are very much, um, I think during the last recession we were called the Detroit of the West. >>And, uh, that was because we're very much seen as a one industry town. Uh, so most like when the car plants, the coal plants closed back East and in the communities fuel that very rapidly, the same thing happens to us when tourism, uh, it's cut. Uh, so of course, when we went into complete shutdown and March, uh, we felt it very rapidly, not just on, uh, uh, tax receipts and collectibles, but the way in which we could deliver services. So of course our first priority was to, uh, like I think you mentioned mobilized staff. We, we mobilized hundreds of staff overnight with laptops and phones and cars and the things they needed to do to get mobile and still provide the priority services that we're mandated to provide from a safety standpoint. Um, and then we got busy working for our clients and that's really where our partnership with IBM and Watson, uh, came in and began planning that in July. And we're able to open that portal up in October to, to really speed up the way in which we're giving assistance to, to our residents. Um, re focus has been on making sure that people stay housed. We have, uh, an estimated, uh, 2.5 million residents and over 150,000 of those households are anticipated to be facing eviction, uh, as of January one. So we, we've got a, a big task ahead of us. >>All of this sounds kind of expensive. Uh, one of the common threads as you know, runs throughout government is, ah, I don't really have the money for that. I think I'd be able to afford that a diaper too, as well. So what types of funding has been made available for counties, a result of a pandemic, >>Primarily our funding stream that we're utilizing to get these services out the door has been the federal cares act. Uh, now we had some jurisdictions regionally around us and even locally that prioritize those funds in a different way. Um, our board of County commissioners, uh, took, um, a sum total of about $85 million of our 240 million that said, this will go directly to residents in the form of rental assistance and basic needs support. No one should lose their home or go hungry during this pandemic. Uh, so we've really been again working through our community partners and through our IBM tools to make sure that happens. >>So how does, how does, how does the cares act funding then support Clark County? Cause it seems to me that the needs would be complex, diverse >>Pretty much so. So as you, as folks may know him a call there's several tronches of the cares act, the original cares act funding that has come down to us again, our board, uh, identified basic needs or rental assistance and, and gave that the department of social service to go to the tunicate, uh, through the community. We then have the cares act, uh, uh, coronavirus relief funds that have, uh, impacted our CDBG and our emergency solutions grants. We've taken those. And that's what we was going to keep a lot of the programs and services, uh, like our IBM Watson portal open past January one when the cares act dollars expire. Uh, our initial response was a very manual one, uh, because even though we have a great home grown homeless management information system, it does not do financials. Uh, so we had 14 local nonprofits adjudicating, uh, this rental assistance program. >>And so we could get our social service visitor portal up, uh, to allow us to take applications digitally and run that through our program. Uh, and, uh, so those partners were obviously very quickly overwhelmed and were able to stand up our portal, uh, which for the reason we were driving so hard, even from, uh, beginning of the conversations where after going into lockdown into contracting in July and getting the portal open in October, which was an amazing turnaround. Uh, so the kudos that IBM team, uh, for getting us up and out the door so quickly, uh, was a tie in, uh, to our, uh, Curam IBM, uh, case management system that we utilize to adjudicate benefits on daily basis in Clark County for all our local indigent population, uh, and high needs folks. Uh, and then that ties into our SAP IBM platform, which gets the checks out the door. >>So what, what we've been able to do with these dollars is created in Lucian, uh, that has allowed us in the last 60 days to get as much money out the door, as our nonprofits were able go out the door in the first six months pandemic. So it really has helped us. Uh, so I'm really grateful to our board of County commissioners for recognizing the investment in technology to, to not only get our teams mobile, but to create ease of access for our constituents and our local residents to give them the help they need quickly and the way that they need it. >>Just to follow up question to that, Tim, that I'm curious about having done a lot of work like this in government, sometimes getting procurement through in a timely way is a bit challenging. How were you able to work through those issues and getting this up and provision so quickly? >>Uh, yeah, so we, we put together a, what we call a pandemic playbook, which is kind of lessons learned. And what we've seen is the folks who were essential workers in the first 60 days of the, uh, pandemic. We were able to get a lot done quickly because we were taking full advantage of the emergency. Uh, it may sound a little crass to folks not inside the service world, but it was, uh, you know, don't want you to crisis. It was things we've been planning or trying to do for years. We need them yesterday. We should have had them yesterday, but let's get them tomorrow and get it moving very quickly. Uh, this IBM procurement was something we were able to step through very quickly because of our longstanding relationship. Our countywide, uh, system of record for our financials is SAP. Uh, we've worked with Curam, uh, solution, uh, for years. >>So we've got this long standing relationship and trust in the product and the teams, which helped us build the business case of why we did it, no need to go out for competitive procurement that we didn't have time. And we needed something that would integrate very quickly into our existing systems. Uh, so that part was there. Now when the folks who were non essential came back in June and the reopening, it was whiplash, uh, the speed at which we were moving, went back to the pace of normal business, uh, which feels like hitting a wall, doing a hundred miles an hour when you're used to having that, uh, mode of doing business. Uh, so that's certainly been a struggle, uh, for all of those involved, uh, in trying to continue to get things up. Um, but, uh, once again, the teams have been great because we've probably tripled our licensure on this portal since we opened it, uh, because of working with outside vendors, uh, to, uh, literally triple the size of our staff that are processing these applications by bringing on temporary staff, uh, and short-term professionals. Uh, and so we've been able to get those things through, uh, because we'd already built the purchasing vehicle during the early onset of the crisis. >>That's very helpful. Karen, IBM has played a really pivotal role in all of this. Uh, IBM Watson health works with a number of global government agencies, raging from counties like Clark County to federal governments. What are some of the major challenges you've seen with your clients as a result of the pandemic and how is technology supporting them in a time of need and give us some background Watson health too. So we kind of know a little more about it because this is really a fascinating area. >>Yeah. Thank you, Bob. And thanks Tim for the background on Clark County, because I think Clark County is definitely also an example of what federal governments and global governments are doing worldwide today. So, um, Watson health is our division within IBM where we really focus on health and human services. And our goal is to really focus in on, um, the outcomes that we're providing to individuals and families and looking at how we use data and insights to really make that impact and that change. And within that division, we have our government health and human services area, which is the focus of where we are with our clients around social program. But it also allows us to work with, um, different agencies and really look at how we can really move the ball in terms of, um, effecting change and outcomes for, um, really moving the needle of how we can, uh, make an impact on individuals and families. >>So as we look at the globe globally as well, you know, everything that Tim had mentioned about how the pandemic has really changed the way that government agencies operate and how they do services, I think it's amazing that you have that pandemic playbook because a lot of agencies in the same way also had these set of activities that they always wanted to go and take part on, but there was no impetus to really allow for that to happen. And with the pandemic, it allowed that to kind of open and say, okay, we can try this. And unfortunately I'm in a very partial house way to do that. And, um, what Tim has mentioned about the new program that they set up for the housing, some of those programs could take a number of years to really get a program online and get through and allowing, uh, the agencies to be able to do that in a matter of weeks is amazing. >>And I think that's really gonna set a precedent as we go forward and how you can bring on programs such as the housing and capability in Canada with the economic, uh, social, um, uh, development and, and Canada need that the same thing. They actually had a multi benefit delivery system that was designed to deliver benefits for three programs. And as part of the department of fisheries and oceans Canada, the, um, the state had an emergency and they really need to set up on how they could provide benefits to the fishermen who had been at that impacted, um, from that. And they also did set up a digital front-end using IBM citizen engagement to start to allow the applications that benefits, um, and they set it up in a matter of weeks. And as I mentioned, we, uh, Clark County had a backend legacy system where they could connect to and process those applications. And this case, this is a brand new program and the case management system that they brought up was on cloud. And they had to set up a new one, but allow them to set up a, what we used to call straight through processing, I think has been now turned, turned or coined contact less, uh, processing and allowing us to really start to move those benefits and get those capabilities out to the citizens in even a faster way than has been imagined. Uh, pre pandemic. >>Karen, I have one follow-up question. I want to ask you, having had a lot of experience with large projects in government. Sometimes there's a real gap between getting to identified real requirements and then actions. How do you, how do you work with clients to make sure that process time to benefit is shortened? >>So we really focus on the user themselves and we take a human centered design focus and really prioritizing what those needs are. Um, so working with the clients, uh, effectively, and then going through agile iterations of brain, that capability out as, um, in, in a phased approach to, so the idea of getting what we can bring out that provides quality and capability to the users, and then over time starting to really roll out additional functions and, um, other, uh, things that citizens or individuals and families would need >>Very helpful. Tim, this is an interesting partnership. It's always good to see partnerships between private sector and government. Tell us a little bit about how the partnership with IBM Watson health was established and what challenges or they were brought into assist, where they brought into assist with back to requirements. Again, within the requirements definitely shifted on us. You know, we had the con looking at, uh, Watson on our child welfare, uh, side of the house that I'm responsible for and how that we could, uh, increase access to everything from tele-health to, to, uh, foster parent benefit, uh, kinship, placement benefits, all those types of things that, that right now are very manual, uh, on the child welfare side. Uh, and then the pandemic kid. And we very quickly realized that we needed, uh, to stand up a, um, a new program because, uh, a little bit for context, uh, the park County, we don't administer TANIF or Medicaid at the County level. >>It is done at the state level. So we don't have, uh, unemployment systems or Medicaid, 10 of snap benefits systems to be able to augment and enroll out. We provide, uh, the indigent supports the, the homelessness prevention, referee housing continuum of care, long-term care, really deep emergency safety net services for our County, which is a little bit different and how those are done. So that was really our focus, which took a lot of in-person investigation. We're helping people qualify for disability benefits so they can get into permanent supportive housing, uh, things that are very intensive. And yet now we have a pandemic where we need things to happen quickly because the cares act money expires at the end of December. And people were facing eviction and eviction can help spread exposure to, to COVID. Uh, so, uh, be able to get in and very rapidly, think about what is the minimal pelvis to MVP. >>What's the minimum viable product that we can get out the door that will help people, uh, entrance to a system as contactless as possible, which again was a complete one 80 from how we had been doing business. Um, and, uh, so the idea that you could get on and you have this intelligent chat bot that can walk you through questions, help you figure out if you look like you might be eligible, roll you right into an application where you can upload the few documents that we're going to require to help verify your coat would impact and do that from a smartphone and under, you know, 20 minutes. Um, it, it, it is amazing. And the fact that we've stood that up and got it out the door in 90 days, it's just amazing to me, uh, when it shows the, uh, strength of partnership. Um, I think we can, we have some shared language because we had that ongoing partnership, but we were able to actually leverage some system architects that we had that were familiar with our community and our other products. So it really helped expedite, uh, getting this, uh, getting this out to the citizens. >>So, uh, I assume that there are some complexities in doing this. So overall, how has this deployment of citizen engagement with Watson gone and how do you measure success other than you got it out quick? How do you know if it's working? >>Yeah. Right. So it's the adage of, you know, quick, fast and good, right. Um, or fast, good and cheap. So, uh, we measure success in this way. Um, how are we getting access as our number one quality measurement here? So we were able to collect, uh, about 13,000 applications, uh, manual NRC, manually folks had to go onto our website, download a PDF, fill it out, email it, or physically drop it off along with their backup. One of their choice of 14 non-profits in town, whichever is closest to them. Um, and, uh, and then wait for that process. And they were able to get 13,000 of those, uh, process for the last six months. Uh, we have, I think we had about 8,000 applications the first month come into the portal and about an equal amount of folks who could not provide the same documentation that it was needed. >>And self-selected out. If we had not had the, the tool in place, we would have had 16,000 applications, half of which would have been non-eligible would have been jamming up the system, uh, when we don't have the bandwidth to deal to deal with that, we, we need to be able to focus in on, uh, Judy Kenny applications that we believe are like a 95% success rate from the moment our staff gets them, but because we have the complex and he was on already being dependent upon the landlord, having to verify the rent amount and be willing to work with us, um, which is a major hurdle. Um, but, uh, so w we knew we could not do is go, just reinvent the manual process digitally that that would have been an abject failure on our behalf. So, uh, the ideas that, uh, folks had can go on a very, had this very intuitive conversation to the chat bot, answer some questions and find out if they're eligible. >>And then self-select out was critical for us to not only make sure that the citizens got the help they needed, but not so burnt out and overload our workforce, which is already feeling the strain of the COVID pandemic on their own personal lives and in their homes and in the workplace. Um, so that was really critical for us. So it's not just about speed, ease of access was important. Uh, the ability to quickly automate things on the fly, uh, we have since changed, uh, the area median income, a qualifier for the rental assistance, because we were able to reallocate more money, uh, to the program. So we were able to open it up to more people. We were able to make that, uh, change to the system very quickly. Uh, the idea that we can go on the home page and put updates, uh, we recognized that, uh, some of our monolingual Hispanic residents were having difficulty even with some guidance getting through the system. >>So we're able to record a, a Spanish language walkthrough and get done on the home page the next day, right into the fordable, there'll be a fine, so they could literally run the YouTube video while they're walking through their application. Side-by-side so things like that, that those are how we are able to, for us measured success, not just in the raw dollars out the door, not just in the number of applications that have come in, but our ability to be responsive when we hear from our constituents and our elected officials that, Hey, I want, I appreciate the 15,000 applications as you all, a process and record time, I've got three, four, five, six, 10 constituents that having this type of problem and be able to go back and retool our systems to make them more intuitive, to do, be able to keep them responsive for us is definitely a measure of success and all of this, probably more qualitative than here we're looking >>For, but, uh, that's for us, that's important. Actually the qualitative side is what usually gets ignored. Uh, Karen, I've got a question that's a follow up for you on the same topic. How does IBM facilitate reporting within this kind of an environment given the different needs of stakeholders, online managers and citizens? What kinds of things do you, are you able to do >>So with, um, the influx of digitalization? I think it allows us to really take a more data-driven approach to start looking at that. So, as, as Tim was mentioning, you can see where potentially users are spending more time on certain questions, or if they're stuck on a question, you can see where the abandoned rate is. So using a more data-driven approach to go in to identify, you know, how do we actually go and, um, continue to drive that user experience that may not be something that we drive directly from the users. So I would say that analytics is really, uh, I think going to continue to be a driving force as government agencies go forward, because now they are capturing the data. But one thing that they have to be careful of is making sure that the data that they're getting is the right data to give them the information, to make the right next steps and decisions. >>And Tim, you know, use a really good example with, um, the chatbot in terms of, you know, with the influx of everything going on with COVID, the citizens are completely flooded with information and how do they get the right information to actually help them decide, can I apply for this chap program? Or should I, you know, not even try and what Tim mentioned just saved the citizens, you know, the people that may not be eligible a lot of time and going through and applying, and then getting denied by having that upfront, I have questions and I need answers. Um, so again, more data-driven of how do we provide that information? And, you know, we've seen traditionally citizens having to go on multiple website, web pages to get an answer to the question, because they're like, I think I have a question in this area, but I'm not exactly sure. And they, then they're starting to hunt and hunt and hunt and not even potentially get an answer. So the chocolate really like technology-wise helps to drive, you know, more data-driven answers to what, um, whether it's a citizen, whether it's, um, Tim who needs to understand how and where my citizens getting stuck, are they able to complete the application where they are? Can we really get the benefits to, um, this individual family for the housing needs >>Too many comments on the same thing. I know you have to communicate measures of success to County executives and others. How do you do that? I mean, are you, do you have enough information to do it? Yeah, we're able to, we actually have a standup meeting every morning where the first thing I learn is how many new applications came in overnight. How many of those were completed with full documentation? How many will be ported over into our system, assigned the staff to work, where they're waiting >>On landlord verification. So I can see the entire pipeline of applications, which helps us then determine, um, Oh, it's, it's not, you know, maybe urban legend is that folks are having difficulty accessing the system. When I see really the bottleneck there, it got gotten the system fine, the bottlenecks laying with our landlord. So let's do a landlord, a town hall and iterate and reeducate them about what their responsibilities are and how easy it is for them to respond with the form they need to attest to. And so it lets us see in real time where we're having difficulties, uh, because, uh, there's a constant pressure on this system. Not just that, uh, we don't want anyone to lose their home, uh, but these dollars also go away within a December. So we've got this dual pressure of get it right and get it right now. >>Uh, and so th the ability to see these data and these metrics on, on a daily basis is critical for us to, to continue to, uh, ModuLite our response. Um, and, and not just get comfortable are baked into well, that's why we developed the flowchart during requirements, and that's just the way things are gonna stay. Uh, that's not how you respond to a pandemic. Uh, and so having a tool and a partner that helps us, uh, stay flexible, state agile, I guess, to, to, to leverage some terminology, uh, is important. And, and it's, it's paid dividends for our citizens. Karen, again, is another up to the same thing. I'm kind of curious about one of the problems of government from time to time. And Tim, I think attest to this is how do you know when Dunn has been reached? How did you go about defining what done would look like for the initial rollout with this kind of a customer? >>So I think Doug, I guess in this case, um, is, is this, isn't able to get the benefits that they're looking for and how do we, uh, you know, starting from, I think what we were talking about earlier, like in terms of requirements and what is the minimum viable, um, part of that, and then you start to add on the bells and whistles that we're really looking to do. So, um, you know, our team worked with him to really define what are those requirements. I know it's a new program. So some of those policy decisions were still also being worked out as the requirements were being defined as well. So making sure that you are staying on top of, okay, what are the key things and what do we really need to do from a compliance standpoint, from a functionality, and obviously, um, the usability of how, uh, an assistant can come on and apply and, um, have those, uh, requirements, make sure that you can meet that, that version before you start adding on additional scope. >>Very helpful. Jim, what's your comment on this since I know done matters to you? Yeah. And look, I I've lived through a, again, multiple, uh, county-wide it implementations and some department wide initiatives as well. So I think we know that our staff always want more so nothing's ever done, uh, which is a challenge and that's on our side of the customer. Um, but, uh, for this, it really was our, our experience of recognizing the, the time was an essence. We didn't have a chance. We didn't have, uh, the space to get into these endless, uh, conversations, uh, the agile approach, rather than doing the traditional waterfall, where we would have been doing requirements tracking for months before we ever started coding, it was what do we need minimally to get a check in the hands of a landlord on behalf of a client, so they don't get evicted. >>And we kept just re honing on that. That's nice. Let's put that in the parking lot. We'll come back to it because again, we want to leverage this investment long term, uh, because we've got a we, and we've got the emergency solutions and CDBG, and then our, uh, mainstream, uh, services we brought on daily basis, but we will come back to those things speed and time are of the essence. So what do we need, uh, to, to get this? So a chance to really, um, educate our staff about the concepts of agile iteration, um, and say, look, this is not just on the it side. We're gonna roll a policy out today around how you're doing things. And we may figure out through data and metrics that it's not working next week, and we'll have to have that. You want it. And you're going to get the same way. >>You're getting updated guidance from the CDC on what to do and what not to do. Uh, health wise, you're getting the same from us, uh, and really to helping the staff understand that process from the beginning was key. And, uh, so, and, and that's, again, partnering with, with our development team in that way was helpful. Um, because once we gave them that kind of charter as I am project champion, this is what we're saying. They did an equally good job of staying on task and getting to the point of is this necessary or nice. And if it wasn't necessary, we put it in the nice category and we'll come back to it. So I think that's really helpful. My experience having done several hundred sheet applications also suggest the need for MBP matters, future stages really matter and not getting caught. My flying squirrels really matters. So you don't get distracted. So let's move on to, let's do a polling question before we go on to some of our other questions. So for our audience, do you have a digital front ends for your benefit delivery? Yes, no. Or we're planning to a lot of response here yet. There we go. Looks like about half, have one and half note. So that's an interesting question. What's going to one more polling question, learn a little more here. Has COVID-19 >>Accelerated or moved cloud. Yes, no. We already run a majority of applications on cloud. Take a moment and respond if you would, please. So this is interesting. No real acceleration was taken place and in terms of moving to cloud is not what I was expecting, but that's interesting. So let's go onto another question then. And Karen, let me direct this one to you, given that feedback, how do you envision technologies such as citizen engagement and watching the system will be used, respond to emergency situations like the pandemic moving forward? I mean, what should government agencies consider given the challenges? This kind of a pandemic is brought upon government and try to tie this in, if you would, what, what is the role of cloud in all of this for making this happen in a timely way? Karen, take it away. >>Okay. Thanks Bob. So as we started the discussion around the digital expansion, you know, we definitely see additional programs and additional capabilities coming online as we continue on. Um, I think, uh, agencies have really seen a way to connect with their citizens and families and landlords, um, in this case an additional way. And he prepared them like there were, uh, presuppose assumptions that the, um, the citizens or landlords really wanted to interact with agency face-to-face and have that high touch part. And I think, um, through this, the governments have really learned that there is a way to still have an impact on the citizen without having a slow, do a face to face. And so I think that's a big realization for them to now really explore other ways to digitally explain, expand their programs and capabilities. Another area that we touched on was around the AI and chat bot piece. >>So as we start to see capabilities like this, the reason why Clark County was able to bring it up quickly and everything was because it was housed on cloud, we are seeing the push of starting to move some of the workloads. I know from a polling question perspective that it's been, um, lighter in terms of getting, uh, moving to the cloud. But we have seen the surge of really chatbots. I think we've been talking about chatbots for a while now. And, um, agencies hadn't really had the ability to start to implement that and really put it into effect. But with the pandemic, they were able to bring things up and, you know, very short amount of time to solve, um, a big challenge of not having the call center be flooded and have a different way to direct that engagement between the citizen and the government. >>So really building a different type of channel for them to engage rather than having to call or to come into an office, which wasn't really allowed in terms of, um, the pandemic. Um, the other thing I'll touch on is, um, 10 mentioned, you know, the backlog of applications that are coming in and we're starting to see the, um, the increase in automation. How do we automate areas where it's administratively highly burdened, but it's really a way that we can start to automate those processes, to give our workers the ability to focus on more of those complex situations that really need attention. So we're starting to see where the trends of trying to push there of can we automate some of those processes, um, uh, uploading documents and verification documents is another way of like, trying to look at, is there a way that we can make that easier? >>Not only for the applicant that's applying, but also for the caseworker. So there's not having to go through that. Um, does the name match, um, the applicant, uh, information and what we're looking on here, and Bob, you mentioned cloud. So behind the scenes of, you know, why, uh, government agencies are really pushing the cloud is, um, you heard about, I mean, with the pandemic, you see a surge of applicants coming in for those benefits and how do we scale for that kind of demand and how do you do that in an inappropriate way, without the huge pressures that you put on to your data center or your staff who's already trying to help our citizens and applicants, applicants, and families get the benefits they need. And so the cloud, um, you know, proposition of trying, being able to be scalable and elastic is really a key driver that we've seen in terms of, uh, uh, government agencies going to cloud. >>We haven't really seen during a pandemic, the core competencies, some of them moving those to cloud, it's really been around that digital front end, the chat bot area of how do we start to really start with that from a cloud perspective and cloud journey, and then start to work in the other processes and other areas. Um, security is also huge, uh, focus right now with the pandemic and everything going online. And with cloud allows you to be able to make sure that you're secure and be able to apply the right security so that you're always covered in terms of the type of demand and, um, impact, uh, that is coming through >>Very helpful. Tim, I'm going to ask to follow up on this of a practical nature. So you brought this up very quickly. Uh, there's a certain amount of suspicion around state government County government about chatbots. How did you get a chat much and be functional so quickly? And were you able to leverage the cloud in this process? Yeah, so on the trust is important. Uh, and I'll go back to my previous statement about individuals being able to see upfront whether they believe they're eligible or not, because nothing will erode trust more than having someone in hours applying and weeks waiting to find out they were denied because they weren't eligible to begin with, uh, that erodes trust. So being able to let folks know right up front, here's what it looks like to be eligible, actually help us build some of that, uh, cause they don't feel like, uh, someone in the bureaucracy is just putting them through the ringer for no reason. >>Um, now in regard to how do we get the chat bot out? I will say, uh, we have a, uh, dynamic it and leadership, uh, team at the highest level of County government who we have been already having conversations over the last year about what it meant to be smart government, uh, the department of social service and family services that I'm responsible for. We're already, uh, hands up first in line, you know, Guinea pigs volunteering to be on the front end of, uh, certain projects. So w we have primed ourselves for, for some of this readiness in that aspect. Um, but for citizen trust, um, the timeliness of application right now is the biggest element of trust. Uh, so I've applied I've I feel like I put my housing future in your hands. Are you going to deliver and having the ability for us to rapidly scale up? >>Uh, we typically have 120 staff in the department of social service that, that are adjudicating benefits for programs on daily basis. We've doubled that with temporary staff, uh, through some partnerships, uh, we're, we're gonna, as of next week, probably have more temporary per professional staff helping an adjudicator applications. No, do full-time County staff, because again, this rush to get the dollars out, out the door. So having a system where I can easily, uh, ramp on new users and manage them without having to be solely dependent upon an already, uh, overworked it staff who were trying to support 37 other departments in the County, um, around infrastructure needs has been greatly helpful. Sounds to me like a strong outcome focus and one that seems to work. Let's move on now to our audience questions. We're getting close to the end of our time. So let's jump into some questions from the audience. A number of you have been asking about getting copies of today's presentation within the next 48 hours. Government technology will provide all attendees with the link to the recording for your reference, or to share with colleagues. Well, let's go to our first question. So this is an interesting one. And Karen, this is for you did IBM work with other counties and States to provide digital engagement portals. >>We did Bob, uh, we've worked, um, so globally we've provided guidance on this. We work closely with New York city. They've been the integral part of the development also with our citizen engagement offering. Um, we work closely with the States. So we worked with New York city. Um, North Carolina was also another state who, um, improved their, uh, citizen engagement piece, bring up their Medicaid and snap, um, applications along with Medicaid. COVID testing along that. And I mentioned, um, the economic and social development in Canada as well. And we also work with the ministry of social development in Singapore. So a number of our customers had put up, uh, a global, uh, or sorry, a citizen engagement frontend. And during this timeframe, >>Very helpful. I don't know how much did you hear your mom provide you, but how much did it cost for initial deployment and what are the ongoing costs in other words, is this thing going to be sustainable over time? >>Yeah, absolutely. So total, uh, to date, we've spent about a $1.8 million on development implementations and licensure. A big chunk of that again has been the rapid extended of licensure, uh, for this program. Um, I think over a third of that is probably licensing because again, we need to get the dollars out and we need staff to do that and making the short term several hundred thousand dollar investment in a professional support staff and having them be able to work this portal is much cheaper than the long-term investment of bringing on a staff, printing a job, uh, during a financial difficulty that we're facing, uh, the single largest fiscal cliff let's get into that us history. Um, so it's not smart to create jobs that have a 30 year, one way to retirement, uh, inside our in unionized government environment here. So having this, the staff that would come on and do this and get out the door on these federal dollars was critical for us. Um, and there is a $800,000 a year, I believe so ongoing costs associated with licensure and, and the programming support. Uh, but once again, we're going to be moving, um, our traditional services into this digital front end. We'll be continuing this because we're, we're, we're facing, it took us, I think, six and a half, seven years to come back from the previous recession. Undoubtedly, take a little longer to get back >>From this one. Here's another interesting question, I guess really primarily Tim Tim was the solution on primarily on premise or in the cloud. >>So we'll, we've done a mix. Uh, the, and I'm starting a lot of feedbacks. I don't know if you all can hear that or not, but the, uh, I think we went on prem for, uh, some people because of the, uh, bridge into our service case manager system, which is on prem. So we did some management there. I do believe the chat bot piece of it though is in the cloud. So we're bringing it down to, from one system to the other. Uh, and, and part of that was a student negotiations and costs and worrying about what long-term is that we have a very stated goal of moving, uh, our Curam platform, which is on-prem, this is the backend. So how are we? We, we set our IBM Watson, uh, portal up, uh, and moving all of that on cloud, uh, because I mean, we've got, uh, a workforce who, uh, has the ability to retire at a very high rate over the next five years. >>And, uh, having 24 seven support in the cloud is, is as a, someone who would be called to respond to emergency situations like the is, is a much better Cod deal for, for myself and the citizen. So migrating, uh, and, um, our typical on-prem stuff up into the cloud, uh, as we continue on this, uh, evolution of what IBM Watson, uh, and the plug into our Curam, uh, system looks like Karen related question for another user is the portal provided with Clara County and others linked to other third-party backend office apps, or can it be, >>Yeah, the answer is it can be it's interoperable. So through APIs, uh, rest, uh, however, um, assistance that they need to be integrated with can definitely be integrated with, uh, like, uh, Tim mentioned, we, we went to the case management solution, but it can be integrated with other applications as well. >>Tim, did you use some other backend third party apps with yours? Uh, we did not. Uh, again, just for speed of getting, uh, this MVP solution out the door. Uh, now what we do with that on the go forward, it is going to look different and probably will include some, another practical question. Given the cares funding should be expended by December. Can this application even be employed at this late date? And you want to take a cut at that? Yeah, for us, uh, once again, we brought up earlier, um, the emergency solutions grants and the community development block grants, which have a Corona virus, uh, CV traunch, each one of those, and those have two to three year expenditure timeframes on them. Uh, so we were going to leverage those to keep this system and some of these programs going once again, that the housing needs, uh, will outstrip our capacity for years to come. >>I guess probably I should have said upfront Las Vegas has one of the worst affordable housing inventories in the nation. Uh, so we know we're going to be facing a housing issue, um, because of this for, for a long time. So we'll be using those two traunches of dollars, ESE, ESPs, uh, CV CDBG, CB funds, uh, in addition to dollars earmarked through some, uh, recreational marijuana license fees that have been dedicated to our homelessness. And when you consider this housing, uh, stability program was part of that homelessness prevention. That's our funding mix locally. Very helpful. So questions maybe for bolts for you on this one, you can probably also teach respond is the system has been set up helping the small business community. Um, this user's been canvassing and the general feeling is that small businesses have been left behind and they've been unable to access funds. What's your response on that? Karen, do you want to take that first? >>Um, yes. So in terms of, uh, the security and sorry. Um, but, uh, can you repeat the last part of that? I just missed the last part when you >>Behind it, but unable to access funds. >>Uh, yeah, so I think from a funding perspective, there's different types of, I think what Tim mentioned in terms of the cares funding, there was different types of funding that came out from a government perspective. Uh, I think there were also other grants and things that are coming out one, uh, that we're still looking at. And I think as we go into the new year, it'll be interesting to see, you know, what additional funding, um, hopefully is, is provided. Uh, but in terms of creativity, we've seen other creative ways that organizations come together to kind of, uh, help with the different agencies, to provide some, some guidance to the community, um, and helping to, uh, provide efforts and, uh, maybe looking at different ways of, um, providing, uh, some of the capabilities that the, either at the County or at the state level that they're able to leverage. But Tim happy to maybe have you chime in here too. >>Yeah. So I'll first start with my wheelhouse and I'll expand out to, to some of my partners. Uh, so the primary, small business, we knew the idea was a daily basis inside this realm is going to be landlords. Uh, so actually this afternoon, we're doing a town hall with folks to be able to roll out, uh, which they will go to our portal to find a corporate landlord program. Uh, so that I seem a landlord for Camille the application pack and on behalf of a hundred residents, rather than us having to adjudicate a hundred individual applications and melon a hundred checks. Uh, so that is because we were listening to that particular segment of the, uh, the business community. Now I know early on, we were, we were really hoping that the, the paycheck protection program federally would have, uh, been dispersed in a way that helped our local small businesses. >>Uh, more we did a, our economic development team did a round of small business supports through our cares act. Uh, our quarterly unfortunate was not open yet. It was just about 15, 20 days shy. So we use, uh, another traditional grant mechanism that we have in place to dedicate that. Uh, but on a go forward board, willing to Congress passes something over the next 30 days, um, that if there's a round two of cares or some other programs, we absolutely now have a tool that we know we can create a digital opening for individuals to come figure out if they're eligible or not for whatever program it is, the it housing, the it, uh, small business operations supports, uh, and it would apply through that process and in a very lightweight, so we're looking forward to how we can expand our footprint to help all of the needs that are present in our community. This leads to another question which may be our last one, but this is an interesting question. How can agencies use COVID-19 as a proof point providing a low cost configurable solutions that can scale across government. Karen, do you want to respond to that? And then Tim also, >>Thanks, Bob. So I believe like, you know, some of the things that we've said in terms of examples of how we were able to bring up the solution quicker, I definitely see that scaling as you go forward and trying to really, um, focus in on the needs and getting that MVP out the door. Uh, and then Tim alluded to this as well. A lot of the change management processes that went into re-imagining what these processes look like. I definitely see a additional, you know, growth mindset of how do we get better processes in place, or really focusing on the core processes so that we can really move the ball forward and continuing to go that path of delivering on a quicker path, uh, leveraging cloud, as we mentioned of, um, some, some of the capabilities around the chat bot and other things to really start to push, um, uh, the capabilities out to those citizens quicker and really reduce that timeline that we have to take on the backend side, um, that that would be our hope and goal, um, given, you know, sort of what we've been able to accomplish and hoping using that as a proof point of how we can do this for other types of, uh, either programs or other processes. >>Yeah, I think, um, the, you know, the tool has given us capability now there, whether we use local leaders leverage that to the fullest really becomes a coming upon us. So do we take a beat, uh, when we can catch our breath and then, you know, work through our executive leadership to say, look, here's all the ways you can use this tool. You've made an enterprise investment in. Um, and I know for us, uh, at Clark County, we've stood up, uh, enterprise, uh, kind of governance team where we can come and talk through all of our enterprise solutions, uh, encourage our other department head peers, uh, to, to examine how you might be able to use this. Is there a way that, um, you know, parks and rec might use this to better access their scholarship programs to make sure that children get into youth sports leagues and don't get left out, uh, because we know youth suicide on the rise and they need something positive to do when this pandemic is clear, I'm there for them to get out and do those things. >>So the possibilities really are out there. It really becomes, um, how do we mind those internally? And I know that being a part of listservs and, uh, you know, gov tech and all the magazines and things are out there to help us think about how do we better use our solutions, um, as well as our IBM partners who are always eager to say, Hey, have you seen how they're using this? Um, it is important for us to continue to keep our imaginations open, um, so that we continue to iterate through this process. Um, cause I, I would hate to see the culture of, um, iteration go away with this pandemic. >>Okay. We have time for one final question. We've already addressed this in part two, and this one is probably for you and that you've used the cares act to eliminate some of the procurement red tape that's shown up. Well, how do you somehow that's been very positive. How do you see that impacting you going forward? What happens when the red tape all comes back? >>Yeah, so I think I mentioned a little bit, uh, about that when some of the folks who are deemed non essential came back during our reopening phases and they're operating at the speed of prior business and red tape where we had all been on this, these green tape, fast tracks, uh, it, it was a bit of a organizational whiplash. Uh, but it, for us, we've had the conversation with executive management of like, we cannot let this get in the way of what our citizens need. So like keep that pressure on our folks to think differently. Don't and, uh, we've gone so far as to, uh, even, uh, maybe take it a step further and investigate what had been done in, in, in Canada. Some other places around, um, like, like going right from in a 48 hour period, going from a procurement statement through a proof of concept and doing purchasing on the backside, like how can we even get this even more streamlined so that we can get the things we need quickly, uh, because the citizens don't understand, wait, we're doing our best, uh, your number 3000 and queue on the phone line that that's not what they need to hear or want to hear during times of crisis. >>Very helpful. Well, I want to be respectful of our one hour commitment, so we'll have to wrap it up here in closing. I want to thank everyone for joining us for today's event and especially a big, thank you goes to Karen and Tim. You've done a really great job of answering a lot of questions and laying this out for us and a special thanks to our partners at IBM for enabling us to bring this worthwhile discussion to our audience. Thanks once again, and we look forward to seeing you at another government technology event,

(gentle electronic music) >> Hello, everybody, welcome back to the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in digital coverage. This is the Virtual BDC, as I said, theCUBE has covered every Big Data Conference from the inception, and we're pleased to be a part of this, even though it's challenging times. I'm here with Dan Woicke, the senior director of CernerWorks Engineering. Dan, good to see ya, how are things where you are in the middle of the country? >> Good morning, challenging times, as usual. We're trying to adapt to having the kids at home, out of school, trying to figure out how they're supposed to get on their laptop and do virtual learning. We all have to adapt to it and figure out how to get by. >> Well, it sure would've been my pleasure to meet you face to face in Boston at the Encore Casino, hopefully next year we'll be able to make that happen. But let's talk about Cerner and CernerWorks Engineering, what is that all about? >> So, CernerWorks Engineering, we used to be part of what's called IP, or Intellectual Property, which is basically the organization at Cerner that does all of our software development. But what we did was we made a decision about five years ago to organize my team with CernerWorks which is the hosting side of Cerner. So, about 80% of our clients choose to have their domains hosted within one of the two Kansas City data centers. We have one in Lee's Summit, in south Kansas City, and then we have one on our main campus that's a brand new one in downtown, north Kansas City. About 80, so we have about 27,000 environments that we manage in the Kansas City data centers. So, what my team does is we develop software in order to make it easier for us to monitor, manage, and keep those clients healthy within our data centers. >> Got it. I mean, I think of Cerner as a real advanced health tech company. It's the combination of healthcare and technology, the collision of those two. But maybe describe a little bit more about Cerner's business. >> So we have, like I said, 27,000 facilities across the world. Growing each day, thank goodness. And, our goal is to ensure that we reduce errors and we digitize the entire medical records for all of our clients. And we do that by having a consulting practice, we do that by having engineering, and then we do that with my team, which manages those particular clients. And that's how we got introduced to the Vertica side as well, when we introduced them about seven years ago. We were actually able to take a tremendous leap forward in how we manage our clients. And I'd be more than happy to talk deeper about how we do that. >> Yeah, and as we get into it, I want to understand, healthcare is all about outcomes, about patient outcomes and you work back from there. IT, for years, has obviously been a contributor but removed, and somewhat indirect from those outcomes. But, in this day and age, especially in an organization like yours, it really starts with the outcomes. I wonder if you could ratify that and talk about what that means for Cerner. >> Sorry, are you talking about medical outcomes? >> Yeah, outcomes of your business. >> So, there's two different sides to Cerner, right? There's the medical side, the clinical side, which is obviously our main practice, and then there's the side that I manage, which is more of the operational side. Both are very important, but they go hand in hand together. On the operational side, the goal is to ensure that our clinicians are on the system, and they don't know they're on the system, right? Things are progressing, doctors don't want to be on the system, trust me. My job is to ensure they're having the most seamless experience possible while they're on the EMR and have it just be one of their side jobs as opposed to taking their attention away from the patients. That make sense? >> Yeah it does, I mean, EMR and meaningful use, around the Affordable Care Act, really dramatically changed the unit. I mean, people had to demonstrate in order to get paid, and so that became sort of an unfunded mandate for folks and you really had to respond to that, didn't you? >> We did, we did that about three to four years ago. And we had to help our clients get through what's called meaningful use, there was different stages of meaningful use. And what we did, is we have the website called the Lights On Network which is free to all of our clients. Once you get onto the website the Lights On Network, you can actually show how you're measured and whether or not you're actually completing the different necessary tasks in order to get those payments for meaningful use. And it also allows you to see what your performance is on your domain, how the clinicians are doing on the system, how many hours they're spending on the system, how many orders they're executing. All of that is completely free and visible to our clients on the Lights On Network. And that's actually backed by some of the Vertica software that we've invested in. >> Yeah, so before we get into that, it sounds like your mission, really, is just great user experiences for the people that are on the network. Full stop. >> We do. So, one of the things that we invented about 10 years ago is called RTMS Timers. They're called Response Time Measurement System. And it started off as a way of us proving that clients are actually using the system, and now it's turned into more of a user outcomes. What we do is we collect 2.5 billion timers per day across all of our clients across the world. And every single one of those records goes to the Vertica platform. And then we've also developed a system on that which allows us in real time to go and see whether or not they're deviating from their normal. So we do baselines every hour of the week and then if they're deviating from those baselines, we can immediately call a service center and have them engage the client before they call in. >> So, Dan, I wonder if you could paint a picture. By the way, that's awesome. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your analytics environment. What does it look like? Maybe give us a sense of the scale. >> Okay. So, I've been describing how we operate, our remote hosted clients in the two Kansas City data centers, but all the software that we write, we also help our client hosted agents as well. Not only do we take care of what's going on at the Kansas City data center, but we do write software to ensure that all of clients are treated the same and we provide the same level of care and performance management across all those clients. So what we do is we have 90,000 agents that we have split across all these clients across the world. And every single hour, we're committing a billion rows to Vertica of operational data. So I talked a little bit about the RTMS timers, but we do things just like everyone else does for CPU, memory, Java Heap Stack. We can tell you how many concurrent users are on the system, I can tell you if there's an application that goes down unexpected, like a crash. I can tell you the response time from the network as most of us use Citrix at Cerner. And so what we do is we measure the amount of time it takes from the client side to PCs, it's sitting in the virtual data centers, sorry, in the hospitals, and then round trip to the Citrix servers that are sitting in the Kansas City data center. That's called the RTT, our round trip transactions. And what we've done is, over the last couple of years, what we've done is we've switched from just summarizing CPU and memory and all that high-level stuff, in order to go down to a user level. So, what are you doing, Dr. Smith, today? How many hours are you using the EMR? Have you experienced any slowness? Have you experienced any hourglass holding within your application? Have you experienced, unfortunately, maybe a crash? Have you experienced any slowness compared to your normal use case? And that's the step we've taken over the last few years, to go from summarization of high-level CPU memory, over to outcome metrics, which are what is really happening with a particular user. >> So, really granular views of how the system is being used and deep analytics on that. I wonder, go ahead, please. >> And, we weren't able to do that by summarizing things in traditional databases. You have to actually have the individual rows and you can't summarize information, you have to have individual metrics that point to exactly what's going on with a particular clinician. >> So, okay, the MPP architecture, the columnar store, the scalability of Vertica, that's what's key. That was my next question, let me take us back to the days of traditional RDBMS and then you brought in Vertica. Maybe you could give us a sense as to why, what that did for you, the before and after. >> Right. So, I'd been painting a picture going forward here about how traditionally, eight years ago, all we could do was summarize information. If CPU was going to go and jump up 8%, I could alarm the data center and say, hey, listen, CPU looks like it's higher, maybe an application's hanging more than it has been in the past. Things are a little slower, but I wouldn't be able to tell you who's affected. And that's where the whole thing has changed, when we brought Vertica in six years ago is that, we're able to take those 90,000 agents and commit a billion rows per hour operational data, and I can tell you exactly what's going on with each of our clinicians. Because you know, it's important for an entire domain to be healthy. But what about the 10 doctors that are experiencing frustration right now? If you're going to summarize that information and roll it up, you'll never know what those 10 doctors are experiencing and then guess what happens? They call the data center and complain, right? The squeaky wheels? We don't want that, we want to be able to show exactly who's experiencing a bad performance right now and be able to reach out to them before they call the help desk. >> So you're able to be proactive there, so you've gone from, Houston, we have a problem, we really can't tell you what it is, go figure it out, to, we see that there's an issue with these docs, or these users, and go figure that out and focus narrowly on where the problem is as opposed to trying to whack-a-mole. >> Exactly. And the other big thing that we've been able to do is corelation. So, we operate two gigantic data centers. And there's things that are shared, switches, network, shared storage, those things are shared. So if there is an issue that goes on with one of those pieces of equipment, it could affect multiple clients. Now that we have every row in Vertica, we have a new program in place called performance abnormality flags. And what we're able to do is provide a website in real time that goes through the entire stack from Citrix to network to database to back-end tier, all the way to the end-user desktop. And so if something was going to be related because we have a network switch going out of the data center or something's backing up slow, you can actually see which clients are on that switch, and, what we did five years ago before this, is we would deploy out five different teams to troubleshoot, right? Because five clients would call in, and they would all have the same problem. So, here you are having to spare teams trying to investigate why the same problem is happening. And now that we have all of the data within Vertica, we're able to show that in a real time fashion, through a very transparent dashboard. >> And so operational metrics throughout the stack, right? A game changer. >> It's very compact, right? I just label five different things, the stack from your end-user device all the way through the back-end to your database and all the way back. All that has to work properly, right? Including the network. >> How big is this, what are we talking about? However you measure it, terabytes, clusters. What can you share there? >> Sorry, you mean, the amount of data that we process within our data centers? >> Give us a fun fact. >> Absolute petabytes, yeah, for sure. And in Vertica right now we have two petabytes of data, and I purge it out every year, one year's worth of data within two different clusters. So we have to two different data centers I've been describing, what we've done is we've set Vertica up to be in both data centers, to be highly redundant, and then one of those is configured to do real-time analysis and corelation research, and then the other one is to provide service towards what I described earlier as our Lights On Network, so it's a very dedicated hardened cluster in one of our data centers to allow the Lights On Network to provide the transparency directly to our clients. So we want that one to be pristine, fast, and nobody touch it. As opposed to the other one, where, people are doing real-time, ad hoc queries, which sometimes aren't the best thing in the world. No matter what kind of database or how fast it is, people do bad things in databases and we just don't want that to affect what we show our clients in a transparent fashion. >> Yeah, I mean, for our audience, Vertica has always been aimed at these big, hairy, analytic problems, it's not for a tiny little data mart in a department, it's really the big scale problems. I wonder if I could ask you, so you guys, obviously, healthcare, with HIPAA and privacy, are you doing anything in the cloud, or is it all on-prem today? >> So, in the operational space that I manage, it's all on-premises, and that is changing. As I was describing earlier, we have an initiative to go to AWS and provide levels of service to countries like Sweden which does not want any operational data to leave that country's walls, whether it be operational data or whether it be PHI. And so, we have to be able to adapt into Vertia Eon Mode in order to provide the same services within Sweden. So obviously, Cerner's not going to go up and build a data center in every single country that requires us, so we're going to leverage our partnership with AWS to make this happen. >> Okay, so, I was going to ask you, so you're not running Eon Mode today, it's something that you're obviously interested in. AWS will allow you to keep the data locally in that region. In talking to a lot of practitioners, they're intrigued by this notion of being able to scale independently, storage from compute. They've said they wished that's a much more efficient way, I don't have to buy in chunks, if I'm out of storage, I don't have to buy compute, and vice-versa. So, maybe you could share with us what you're thinking, I know it's early days, but what's the logic behind the business case there? >> I think you're 100% correct in your assessment of taking compute away from storage. And, we do exactly what you say, we buy a server. And it has so much compute on it, and so much storage. And obviously, it's not scaled properly, right? Either storage runs out first or compute runs out first, but you're still paying big bucks for the entire server itself. So that's exactly why we're doing the POC right now for Eon Mode. And I sit on Vertica's TAB, the advisory board, and they've been doing a really good job of taking our requirements and listening to us, as to what we need. And that was probably number one or two on everybody's lists, was to separate storage from compute. And that's exactly what we're trying to do right now. >> Yeah, it's interesting, I've talked to some other customers that are on the customer advisory board. And Vertica is one of these companies that're pretty transparent about what goes on there. And I think that for the early adopters of Eon Mode there were some challenges with getting data into the new system, I know Vertica has been working on that very hard but you guys push Vertica pretty hard and from what I can tell, they listen. Your thoughts. >> They do listen, they do a great job. And even though the Big Data Conference is canceled, they're committed to having us go virtually to the CAD meeting on Monday, so I'm looking forward to that. They do listen to our requirements and they've been very very responsive. >> Nice. So, I wonder if you could give us some final thoughts as to where you want to take this thing. If you look down the road a year or two, what does success look like, Dan? >> That's a good question. Success means that we're a little bit more nimble as far as the different regions across the world that we can provide our services to. I want to do more corelation. I want to gather more information about what users are actually experiencing. I want to be able to have our phone never ring in our data center, I know that's a grand thought there. But I want to be able to look forward to measuring the data internally and reaching out to our clients when they have issues and then doing the proper corelation so that I can understand how things are intertwining if multiple clients are having an issue. That's the goal going forward. >> Well, in these trying times, during this crisis, it's critical that your operations are running smoothly. The last thing that organizations need right now, especially in healthcare, is disruption. So thank you for all the hard work that you and your teams are doing. I wish you and your family all the best. Stay safe, stay healthy, and thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> I really appreciate it, thanks for the opportunity. >> You're very welcome, and thank you, everybody, for watching, keep it right there, we'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Covering Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services Intel and their ecosystem partners hey welcome back everyone we're live here in Las Vegas with AWS Amazon webster's reinvent our 6th year I'm Jeff our table what they did six years two sets people rolling out of the keynote so much action we got another day coming tomorrow they're two great guests here we got dr. feci philomon is the general manager the machine learning and AI at Amazon Web Services and dr. Taha costs senior leader at healthcare and AI at Amazon guys welcome to the cube Thank You thanks itíd that you're here because I've been waiting to have this conversation Dave and I have been we just had an analysis of the distractions and glued up the stack around machine learning so much value now coming online that's been in the works around AI are really mainly machine learning that's creating a I like benefits and II just had to spend a lot of time with key nuts they almost a third of it around a I like capabilities and how Amazon integrates in from you know chipsets with elastic inference beautiful it's just good stuff so congratulations so what does it mean what does it mean for customers right now who want to kind of grok what's going on with Amazon and AI is that new sense the services coming online is that how long has been the works explaining yeah our mission at AWS has always been to take technologies that have been traditionally available for a few special technology companies and take that and make it available to all developers and we've done that I should say that we've done that fairly well when it comes to compute when it comes to storage when it comes to databases the analytics and we're doing the same thing for machine learning and AI and what we're doing because it's a new field is we've got to innovate at three layers of our stack to the bottom most layer as you saw in the keynote earlier has to do with frameworks and infrastructure so this is more for the people that fully understand how to deal with machine learning models and like to go in and tweak these models the middle layer then is for everyday developers and the data scientists and that's sort of where sage maker fits in and finally at the top layer of the stack is where we have our application services and this is meant for developers that don't want to get into the weeds of machine learning but they still want to use make use of all of these technologies to make their applications more smarter so they get the insight benefits get the insights have the day that without getting in town on the weeds exactly who want to get down in the weeds you can get down and dirty with all this other stuff yeah look at that right yeah and typically what we do with the top layer of the stack as we try and solve really hard problems and so customers can now take advantage of it because we've solved it for them and they can just take that and integrate it into their Apple quick what what's the hardest problem that you guys solve I mean traditionally speech recognition is a very hard problem that's one of the hard problems the other one is NLP natural language processing but I would say speech recognition is probably a hard problem and we just launched streaming transcription so you can now transcribe live as somebody speaks and of course you can connect it to translate and translate it as well live so great for our cute beers looking forward to having that on as a health care practitioner how does this all apply to that industry what kind of projects are you guys working on in that regard of course yeah so I mean to to posses point is want to continue to innovate on behalf of the customers across all layers of the stack machine learning in particular this week we launched Amazon comprehend medical particularly in a hardier heart problem where the majority of healthcare data is captured conversation and observations and unstructured formality so petabytes of data is stored across entire healthcare system that's a nun structure for form so to drive actionable insights and to be able to find the right elements to treat patients or to manage a population or even to do accurate billing it's been really an important that we can empower our customers with building blocks for them to build the right solutions to take advantage of that so Amazon comprehend Medical is able to understand the medical language and the context similar how clinicians understand the medical language and context for example if you're looking at a patient medical note Amazon campaign medicals able to with high accuracy extract medical conditions medications tests procedures being done on the patients as well as the relationship between those and understanding that context at this condition and this treatment go together as well as the nuances for example you know a patient has no family history of X or there's no smoking history all those are things in relation in the past or in the future or other members and this is really what we're really proud about launched an Amazon comprehend medical talk about how it works because you know I Healthcare has been a great field around where a is old-fashioned a is a queer when I wasn't doing it in the 80s early 90s ontologies were really popular and it's linguistics is kind of known but now that but you need that linguistics guru to do that he mentioned streaming the transcribed got metadata how do you guys get this kind of benefit when the balls moving so fast around these rapidly changing and verticals like healthcare because healthcare is got a big problem like other verticals where it's too many notifications what I pay attention to so much data how do you put the puzzle together let me first give you some context here as you probably we're at last reinvent we launched Amazon comprehend right comprehend is a text analytics service it helps you look into text and understand what's in there right we started out with general things that we could detect like people places things sentiment the language the text is written in and so on but when we started customers are picked on it and they're using it a lot but as they keep using it they came back to us and said hey it's great that you guys have this this you're giving us the capability to understand general language but some of our domains have some special language like jargon like yeah like take the legal domain for example right it's got charges and defendants and very particular things that are very relevant to the legal domain so they were asking us for a capability to sort of extend the comprehend to include their custom domain terms and phrases as well right so last week we actually launched a custom custom entities feature that allows them to bring in their custom domain into comprehend so the comprehend be extended to include their domain the so legal language is difficult to understand but medical language on the other hand is even more harder to understand that quick right acronyms jargon absolutely what is an entity looks like extracting that and extracting it uses alone yeah miss spells right but relating those entities together is super important because you could in one clinical note you could have multiple drugs in there with different dosages different frequencies and so you need to be able to relate those entities together right and that's the sort of thing that comprehend Medical allows our customers to do to solve some really so you're doing one of that entity extraction is under the covers is that right has it were I mean how does comprehending the medical work I mean just out of the box you have to train it there's no training meet needed know machine learning expertise needed so the algorithm extract these entities as well as the relationship between those entities and then also extracts any attributes that might be related such as negation or past and future or what's anatomy of the body relates one now all that is done out of the box and that's super important you want to know whether the patient's stopped taking a medication right yeah so negation things like that you want to know because that gives you the context just getting the terms alone doesn't really tell you much it each has had a great video about the f1 point of ethics imagine that for personal that's right you're not doing good right now take a break yeah so I feel like we're kind of now scratching the service of stress in the surface of health care yeah information yeah think about the health care industry for years it's been compliance-driven yeah whether it's hip Affordable Care Act yeah EMR and meaningful use right but the industry hasn't been you know dramatically transformed and disrupted and it kind of needs to be yeah how do you guys see that evolving I feel like you're now beginning to see that see change and that's going to take a while it's a high-risk business obviously but what's your sort of prognosis for that transformation and what's the vision as to the outcome yes now that's a really great question I mean one thing I mean one great things happen over the last decade is the digitization of your medical record so and that's really wonderful because before was all paper-based primarily unless you were an acute setting so now the majority of the US for example and globally there's this huge adopt adoption and propagation of these electronic medical records the issue there remains now when the majority of that data is observations and conversations as well as unstructured that that creates a different kind of roadblock for our customers and this is what we're hoping for service like Amazon comprehend medical that's HIPPA eligible means a lot of the early the compliance or help our customer meet their compliance needs that we'll be able to remove the heavy lifting of this undepreciated task about you know having in a large amount of time being spent on analyzing this text and extracting very low we're now with Amazon company and medical be able to really fast track that and be able to elevate it hit the nail on the head of the undifferentiated heavy lifting right that's the ethos of DevOps is that yeah let me give you some stats actually there are one point two billion medical documents that are generated every year in the US and 80% of them it's unstructured text so to make sense of that it's going to enable our customers to do some really amazing things one of the things one of the use cases that we see is its clinical trial recruitment so Fred Hutchinson which is one of the yeah the nation's top cancer research centers they recruit patients for clinical trials if you go to clinical trials.gov you'll see like 290 thousand four and 50 clinical trials open and typically from history we know that most of these clinical trials don't end up recruiting they don't end up meeting their recruiting goals because it's very hard to figure out which patients fit the clinical trial that you're actually trying to perform so comprehend medical helps these customers to very quickly narrow it down expand on the involvement of people in the community mentioned Fred hutch Roach has also been involved what I heard yeah what who was involved in this project sound it was a collaboration take a minute to explain that right I mean it's very similar to a lot of other services that we put it into the market we collaborate a lot with customers 90% of what we do is really coming from customers so we've collaborated with people like Fred hutch and some of the nation's top institutions to help us validate the service that we've built to actually make sure that its meeting sort of the requirements for those use cases that they are thinking of so we collaborate closely with them to get the service to where this today and we announced it as generally available yesterday ok so what's the use case I'll go ahead yeah I can expand a little bit some of the customers as well their use cases we're talking anywhere from hospital systems that when I use or take advantage of their unstructured text for things such as identify people who are for their follow-up appointments or stopping treatments or find an alternative routes to billers we're trying to identify it is accurate procedures were done if we account for all the procedures or care for all the billing which often time is hidden in those unstructured text and require a lot of manual process and often time the rules that can't really scale to things such as clinical trials recruitment how can you if example in Fred Hutchinson Cancer Institute use case for identify a patient and match them to the right clinical trial these patients often time have Harry Potter's worth of clinical notes down on the minute their longitudinal journey and to go from one institution another another and be able to really find it's no longer needed a haystack it's like a needle in the bottom of Atlantic Ocean and then be able to really do that match from hours and months down to a few seconds and that's really the beauty about the service John likes to talk about the 20 mile stare and I wonder if we could just look ahead how far can we take AI and machine learning in in healthcare and how far should we take it and maybe a more specific question as as a practitioner you know when do you think machines might make better diagnosis than doctors if ever how do you feel about that where do you see this all going I think I mean the whole idea about machine learning the beauty about it I mean the seta scope was introduced or how the thermometer was introduced in medicine and these are tools that we use to our advantage to really provide better care and and better outcomes and that's really what we're that's the mission that our health IT and customers and wanna are really driving tower's machine learning can do a lot of great things for routine things that human being can't can go and focus their attention to other things such as the Fred Hutchinson instead of going and mining these diagnoses in mountain amounts of data a machine learning will be able to identify that with a clinical staff can focus on care and that's really where I think I mean over the next decade and so we can see a lot of this advancement in in these building blocks as well as what Amazon's offering from forecasting and prediction algorithms Rana will be able to find you know fine-tune our capabilities to help customers achieve even precision medicine real-world impact because you're changing the workflow I mean someone's within the wrong line or the wrong process based upon their history yeah HIPPA HIPPA requirements really cause a lot of this record sharing thing to be a problem from what we've been reporting over the years it's kind of a solution to that so if I move to a service medical service I get all that records with me it's just kind of how you see going and how does other regulations that are holding you back that are blockers is that clear now how does that solve the industry challenge it's of privacy and if you look at the healthcare system today there are lots of inefficiencies in there right in the end this is all about improving patient outcomes and making sure that we reduce costs and that's what this boils down to and these are tools that allow our customers to do exactly that well guys thanks for sharing this insight comprehend medicals really awesome opportunities I think it's early days day one is you guys think right I think there's so much more that could be there I'd love to see the industry just from the personal is decided change it's just get out of the way of all these pretty broad hurdles get the data out there expose the data check the privacy box would be good right this is gonna change the game yeah maybe we should say a little bit about the how we built the service in terms of that right as you know at AWS security and privacy is number one for us right so this service is HIPAA eligible it's a stateless service what that means is nothing gets stored this is not the data is not used to improve the models or anything like that the only person that can actually see the data is the customer he's got the keys he's the only one that's sending the data to the endpoint and whatever he gets back only he can decrypt it so we've taken care to make sure that we can remove some of those hurdles that people have always been worried about well doctors take you so much for sharing thank you so much for having us here we are bringing you all the action here from 80s reinvent again as the compute power is increased as software is written with new apps a eyes changing the game of course the cube a lot of video we don't need some of these services to make these transcribes on the fly they succumb and I really appreciate it you think back on the more after this short break [Music]

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're in Washington D.C., the nation's capital of course, as we continue our coverage here on theCUBE of Inforum 2018. Along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, it's a pleasure welcoming Dhiraj Shah in with us, the CEO of Avaap. Dhiraj, thanks for joining us this afternoon! >> Good to see you again! >> Absolutely, big pleasure, it was great talking to you for the last two years, and a pleasure to be back here. >> Yeah, I'm always curious, I mean Avaap, I've read a little bit, I mean the five letters of Sanskrit language, what do the five letters represent? I mean how did you come up with the title? >> You know, that's the first question that gets asked, the two questions I get. >> Sorry to be cliche, but I'm just really curious! >> No, no, the two questions is, "Why did you start Avaap?" and the other question is, "What is Avaap?" and it's actually five elements in Sanskrit and each of them are tied to a cultural value that we hold at Avaap, so, Agni, which is fire stands for passion, 'cause I'm a deep believer of being very passionate in what you do; if you're passionate, you'll follow through and it won't feel like work. Water is tied to innovation, sky is tied to goals, we're very ambitious. We've been able to have a rocket ship type of growth, so far, and we continue to aspire to do more. We have Earth, which is tied to eco conscience, cause we like to be globally eco conscious and genuine in what we're doing. And then air, which is transparency. I think we live in a world that, you really don't need a lot of bureaucracy, and the more there is transparency, the better there is organizational development. >> Gotcha, well thank you, I appreciate the rundown. So services and solutions, and the relationship with Infor, walk us through that a little bit, of why you're here. >> Absolutely, so, we are Infor's most decorated partner, so I'd like to say that, because we just came off the stage getting four awards with Infor this year. >> Congratulations! Fantastic. >> Yeah, thank you very much. They were overall partner of the year five years in a row. Our partnership with Infor, started five years ago, before that it was with Lawson. So when Charles Phillips and the team came on board, I was in the back of the room, and I heard Charles kind of lay out his vision in 2012. And he said "I want to do two things, I want to make software that is industry specific." And this is coming at a time where everything was one size fits all. And he said "We want to reinvent the software that's driven for future technologies. Cloud, mobile, big data." Right? So I had a great opportunity, and we made a momentous decision of parking all our eggs in the Infor basket, and just doing Infor. And that served us well of going from 20, at that point we were like 25 employees, to having over 450 today. >> Wow! And we've talked about this in the past is you got in early, and now you're seeing some of the big guys come in, so you have to stay ahead of them. How are you doing that, and why are you succeeding? >> You know it's not necessarily always being ahead, so that actually, that's a question I got, is that Deloitte's here, Accenture's here, Capgemini is here, do you feel threatened? We actually don't, because it's a validation of what's occurring in this eco system with the big system integrators coming in. And with a rising tide, all boats rise. So we've actually partnered with some of these large SIs, because there's roles that they play and we let them do a lot of business transformation, change management, program management, and we do what we do best, which is Infor knowledge, and consulting services. >> The deep, deep Infor, that's kind of, it's ironic, right? Infor's specialty is the last mile, micro-industry capabilities, and that's really kind of how you specialize is deep Infor expertise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> So give us an example of, you go through an engagement, you got one of the big SIs and they're going to do their big global thing, business process change, they really are global in scale, et cetera. Where do you come in? where does Infor sort of, where does their micro services, or micro-function leave off, and where do you pick up? >> So yeah, I'll give you a real world example, in fact, I was just with this customer earlier this morning, Christus Health, they are one of the largest health systems in the country, 60 hospitals, close to 60 thousand employees. They're looking for transformation on their ERP, full suite, HCM, Supply Chain, Financial. Went through a large system selection process the usual competitive race with Oracle, Workday, Infor, kind of being in that race. It was down selected to Infor and Oracle as the two lenders that had full capabilities that they were looking for. And then once they made their decision on Infor as their vendor of choice, they did a services RFP, which we partnered with Deloitte, because the scope of that was, as I said earlier, around business transformation services, that we didn't have in our bag. And Deloitte does not have the 20 years of expertise, the deep Infor knowledge around the solutions of Infor, that we have within our healthcare team. So, we bridged and built an alliance, that, today is starting the project journey in Infor, Deloitte, Avaap, Christus, to make that project a success. >> In the capabilities that you, that they were looking for, that you said that Infor and Oracle had, were what? the coverage of the functionality across the suites, was it the cloud capabilities? What's the high level of that? >> So the one thing that I will tell you, is the consumer, in this case the healthcare market, if we talk about them, is getting extremely knowledgeable, so the way it's starting is around cloud. So gone are the days, I see a lot of commercials out there about real cloud, artificial cloud, private cloud, public cloud, there's a lot of education already around single tenant, and multi-tenant, and they understand. So it starts with the cloud platform, that is the software provider on a stable, secure cloud platform, and are the applications hosted on a multi-tenant, as opposed to individually hosted for each customer. And then they break it down into the different buckets of the applications, within HCM, within Supply Chain, within Financials to see what not a product features. So gone are the days of looking at feature functionality, but their business processes, and best practices. And that's really, in my opinion, where Infor really came ahead at Christus. >> In the multi-tenant verses hosted, I mean, Vodka would say, "Well why would a customer care?" I'm presuming the customer cares because when you do a software release, it's just seamless, right? Verses okay, we got to freeze the code, and do an upgrade, it's more disruptive. Is that why? >> Yes, that's definitely a large portion because over the period of time, every time there is a manufactured change on the software side, development chain, you're adding code that impacts a customer to have to take their system down, and then bring it back up, and here it's done without the customer even finding out, so it's a huge advantage. The second advantage is a cost, which in today's world not as much, because hardware's become very cheap. But it's still conquered hardware that's sitting on the premise, as opposed to individually putting it out there, as opposed to having one system that's scalable. And then your third is security, on multi-tenant capable software, it's more secure than your single tenant capability. >> And Avaap brings that to the table. So it's not, I mean Infor has the micro-vertical function, so yours is what? Onboarding, implementation, training, those kinds of things? >> Yeah, so it starts with helping them align, and educate on the system selection on what it does. So we have a offering called Align and Define that allows customers to prepare for the cloud, to take steps today, and educate them on what needs to be done. Once they do that, then it's going through the implementation process, and post-implementation is optimization. So on the optimization side, Avaap also has capabilities on our EHR side. So one of the big challenge in healthcare, is a wall that exists between the ERP and the EHR, you have your Oracle and Infor on the ERP side, and then you have Epic and Cerner on the EHR, and there's a wall there, one doesn't talk to the other. And the systems need to be really integrated, to be able to drive efficiency and cost benefits for that, so that's one of the things that we're heavily invested in. >> Well healthcare is your biggest business, right? >> Right. >> So what's goin on these days? You obviously, last sort of wave was Obamacare, Affordable Care Act, there's some uncertainty around that, certainly meaningful use is still a big deal for a lot of healthcare providers, EMR is still you know, a big deal. What are the hot trends, what are the drivers, and how are you guys responding? >> ERP. ERP is the hottest trend right now in the healthcare market, so there's a lot of fatigue with healthcare having gone through meaningful use over the last decade of spending hundreds of millions of dollars, of putting in the EHR platforms. So that fatigue, and that focus on EHR has led to no real advancement on the ERP side. And that's why we're in a midst of what I think, is one of the largest wave in the healthcare industry are on ERP platforms that we're seeing, there were 55 system selections done, just in the last 12 months. My personal view is that over the next three to five years, we're going to see 80% of healthcare systems swap or upgrade their ERP platforms. >> Wow. Okay, please, go ahead. >> So swap-- what's... the fundamental of that decision? >> So there are a lot of legacy providers, so the market is going to get consolidated, so we, I know we always talk about Oracle, Infor, Workday, but there is a lot of other providers, there's, if you count mid market and up, there's 5,000 health systems out there that's customer base. >> Very fragmented, isn't it? >> Very fragmented. >> Okay, alright. >> So there's McKesson as an example. McKesson had a big ERP platform, officially said that they are stopping development on it. And that's going to create a void that needs to be filled. There's Meditech on the lower end of the spectrum that serves these regional, individual health system that exist in rural areas. So those systems are, need to be upgraded, because the rural systems of most of anywhere else that have connectivity issues need the cloud platforms to kind of go through. >> Yeah I mean a lot of these, a lot of these healthcare platforms were, they were literally, they were born in the mini-computer era it was a mantra, let's buy a VAX, and we'll become a valuated re-seller, and healthcare was such a huge opportunity, and so under technologized, not a word but, and then over the years, these systems just kept getting updated, now they're just left with this fossilized mess, right? >> Absolutely >> And the cloud comes in and that's really driving a lot of the change. >> Yeah, and Infor couldn't be positioning itself in a better time, to make the change. I think Charles was very visionary, and kind of reinventing the old Lawson platform, and making it multi-tenant, cloud enabled, for the healthcare industry, specifically written. So the last mile functionality that we talk about in supply chain that Infor has is unmatched, in our opinion, in the field today. >> Who does that last mile functionality, if it's not embedded in the applications like Infor, is it the SI, is it some other internal software developer? >> So, the software developers as Infor is, trying to build that as much in the software as they can. But there's always extensions, which is where tools from the Infor OS, as an example come in, to allow to build the extensions that allow us to then have that capability. >> You do that work, is that right? >> We do that work, absolutely. >> Okay, and then, how do you deal with Infor in terms of just not getting in the way of their road map? Soma's got his ERD pipeline, and you don't want to just do something that he's going to do in week, a month or a year. How do you communicate with those guys, and how do you find the white space? And then does it somehow get back into the platform and become advantageous for others? >> So Soma has spent 4 billion dollars on product, that's the budget his board gave. I can't go in front of my board, ask for that kind of budget, then I'd be out. >> Well you could. >> I could, yeah >> It could be some good laughs >> Yeah, so we are realistic in what we can do. So the extensions we build are very specific, and not necessarily product centric. We have a good relationship with the product development team, that allows us to see their road map and make sure. So an example I'll give you is test automation. So we've built an automation framework using an industry recognized platform, and customized it for the ERP, for healthcare. So, regression testing is one of the largest pin point, manual, laborious, takes a business uses away. So this tool, called Avaap Test Automation, which has been in the field, we have, close to 100 customers using it, allows us to automate that entire regression testing sidle, and is an accelerator that condenses the entire implementation life cycle. >> You've got, we've talked a lot about healthcare, you have another interest inside of your business, with a little Beatles connection. So fill us in on that a little bit. >> Yeah, so two of the four awards we got, one, and I definitely want to talk on both of them, because those are important parts of our business, One is retail, we did get retail partner of the year award, and Stella McCartney, is our project that we're actively working on in UK. She, Stella McCartney, is Paul McCartney's daughter, and has built a very reputable shoe company, that's a brand highly sought after, and we're working on modernizing their ERP applications, using cloud suite fashion, which has the underlying technology base on M3 platform. >> She loves you, yeah, yeah, right? >> That's cool, that is cool! >> Absolutely! >> That's great, well Dhiraj, thanks for being here, thanks for sharing the story! >> Absolutely, thank you very much. >> Congratulations on all the progress! >> It's always good to be here! >> It is full speed ahead. Good for you. Dhiraj Shah from Avaap >> Thank you! >> Back with more on theCUBE. We're at in Informen, Informer rather, (laughs) I did it again, didn't I? >> Inforum! >> Inforum! >> I'll step in when you need me! (laughing) >> 2018, D.C. Did it again. >> Excellent! (bubbly music)

>> Live, from Washington D., it's the Cube. Covering Inforum DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> And welcome back to Inforum '18. We're live here in Washington DC as Inforum has brought its show to our nation's capital. I'm John Walls along with Dave Vellante. It's now a pleasure to welcome Vice President of corporate communications Dan Barnhardt. >> Thank you. >> Hey Dan, good morning to you. >> Good morning to you. Good to see you again. >> We were kidding before we got started about why you're here in Washington. We think it's for the weather, right, because it's so nice. >> It's gorgeous. >> But there is a reason. I mean, you've released a federal product today, have an announcement we'll get to in just a moment. But about coming to Washington. You've been in New York before, you've been in New Orleans. Why DC, why now? >> Well, it's important for us to make sure that our customers can access the event. We've got more customers that came this year than came previous years, certainly, than last year. And it's important to be in a city where it's accessible for our customers not just in the US, but also from Europe and Asia Pacific, Latin America and Washington DC's very accessible. We also are one of the largest suppliers to public sector organizations. That's, uh, local, state, and federal government. We've got a particular focus on federal government and fed ramp compliance this year, which we achieved. And, so, we're here so that we can show off some of that new technology that you just mentioned. >> Yeah, what about the significance of that? Of reaching the compliance goal. And what does that mean to the business going forward? >> Well, it's yet another example of the benefits of our cloud strategy and working with the AWS beginning in 2014. Infor was the first large ISV to embrace a public cloud. And Amazon and Amazon web services in particular has been very helpful in achieving fed ramp. They have a lot of federal customers. They've got a very large federal agency with three initials that is a customer and they require compliance with all of the federal regulations that continually change and the utmost security for customers and we're able to offer that to our customers as well. >> Yeah, we were talking on the kick off about that - how you guys can draft the AWS innovations and things like fed ramp and other compliance. They were first, they were way ahead of anybody. You as an ISV, you don't have to worry about all that stuff. I mean, you've still got to connect to it, but they do a lot of the heavy lifting, so that's cool. You got some other hard news. >> Well we also are able to focus on our products by doing that. We don't have to invest in proprietary cloud infrastructure or data centers or databases. We can focus on delivering innovation in our products and functionality that makes a difference for our customers. Their business is not - their customers don't care what infrastructure they're running on, they care how they're able to provide goods and services. So Infor focuses just on delivering better goods and services for our customers. >> What Charles said at the keynote this morning - our strategy, we didn't want to compete with Google and Amazon and Microsoft for scale of cloud. That made no sense. It also made the point that when we were an on prem - exclusively on prem software company, we didn't go out and manage servers for our clients. So we don't want to do that. So, big differentiator for sure, from some of the other SAS players. >> And it's paying off now in a way that our competitors are starting to come after us when they used to not want to acknowledge us. One of our larger competitors - on premise legacy vendor - had an anti-Infor ad on their homepage. They've got cabs outside of here. >> We're talking about- - Yeah >> And then Charles said, ya know if you're - we're welcome the competition here if you'd like to see innovation in enterprise software, this is the place to be. >> Well, congratulations, right, 'cause, well, you know, when Oracle's coming at you, it means you succeeded - that's good. Um, other hard news that you guys had this week - you got true cost accounting in healthcare and some other things, take us through those. >> Well health care has been a major focus industry for us, just along with government, which we mentioned. Um, seventy plus percent of large hospitals in the United States are automated using an Infor software. And healthcare has been an industry that's undergone a lot of disruption, obviously, for the last ten, twelve years, with the Affordable Care Act and others. And we're trying to figure out - we as a society are trying to figure out - how to deliver better care to patients, that's the goal for healthcare organizations. And to do that, they need to better understand what's the cost of care. So the Infor true cost, which we announced in January and have now delivered and have customers implementing, will help our customers understand better what is the cost of the care that they're giving so that they can give better care to their patients and allocate their resources in a way that will help more people heal better and feel better. >> We heard on the intro to the keynotes today, Turing, Edison, and Coleman. It sounded like it was Charles' voiceover. I don't know if it was or not, but >> It was. >> It was. He's got the smooth, mellifluous voice. Um, last year Coleman, Catherine, Coleman, Johnson - you named your AI offering platform after her. Give us the update where you're at today, you've got some other announcements around that as well. >> We do. It's a big announcement for Coleman here. We've got the GA of Coleman digital assistant, which is - enables humans to have - everyone to have an assistant at work with them to help automate certain functions such as search and gather, which can take twenty percent of people's time just collecting the information to make a decision. But now with Coleman digital assistant being live and customers implementing and going live on it right now, they're able - users are able to ask Coleman to fetch information and deliver not only the information but predictions and smart intelligence that helps people make better decisions and be more productive. >> So we had a lot of conversation this morning about robotic process automation, which is really interesting. I mean, essentially, we're talking about software robots taking over mundane tasks to humans. Now a lot of people like to talk about how - and we talked about this in the Cube all the time - how, oh, the machines are taking away jobs, but in speaking to numerous customers about RPA, they're thrilled that they don't have to do these mundane tasks because it makes them more valuable, they're doing more interesting things, and they're getting offers from others that are asking them to do this type of automation for their company. So they're more valuable to their existing company and outside companies. So, RPA - hot topic. You guys are leaning in hard. >> We definitely are. We definitely believe that there are jobs that - there are functions that can be better served by automation, particularly search and gather that we mentioned. There are multiple functions that will always be done by people. Human interaction is not going to change so we are looking to have a digital assistant make productivity better. Productivity is a function of being able to do more, having more workers, and we'd like to do both with this. We'd like people to be more productive using artificial intelligence assistance. And, also, a conversational user experience with software will make it easier and less intimidating for a lot of people to interact with technology at work. And we think that will also help people be able to be more productive in their jobs and have more people able to take more jobs that right now or in the past have required a level of technical expertise that you won't need when you can simply ask the computer to do something for you using your own conversational language. >> Some major data points - excuse me - >> That's okay. that came out of the keynote this morning - one is that there are now more job openings than there are unemployed individuals and productivity, even though the tech spending is booming, it doesn't show up in the productivity numbers. We saw this actually, you know, a couple decades ago in the nineties. And all of a sudden you saw this massive productivity boom. I've predicted that with automation and artificial intelligence you're going to see something similar. It seems like Infor's on a mission - that human potential tagline - on a mission to really drive that productivity and help close those gaps. >> We definitely are. Our tagline is "design for progress" and we are looking to promote progress around the world and do what we can in order to help human progress and the theme at Inforum is human potential and that's what we're looking to do here. We have seen a lot of productivity growth in people's personal lives. I now - I don't know how to set a timer to cook anymore, I just ask Alexa to do it, but we haven't seen that at enterprise yet. So we're bringing consumer grade technology that people have gotten used to in their everyday lives but they don't see at the office. We're bringing it to the office to help make them equally as productive as they are in their personal lives. >> Yeah, that's what I wanted to hit on, actually, was the theme of the show. We're talking about human potential and which Hervan Jones talking about that, you know, from a personal mission statement if you want - that's the way he worded it. But, what's the broad scope of that in terms of how you apply that thematically throughout the company when you talk about human potential, because it's just not you, obviously you're trying to do that for your clients, you're trying to do that for the people they serve, do it for taxpayers, right, through the federal sector. But talk about that from the thirty thousand foot level about human potential - unlocking that and how Infor totally is, I guess, trying to illustrate that or put that in place. >> Certainly. The first thing I would mention is our human capital management. Infor is a very large provider of HR software - there's others that are perhaps better known, but Infor has many customers that are using our HR software, but they're also using our software for other key functions. And by integrating those two things, we're able to help people be their best self at work. Because it's not just the HR management, but the HR system knows what you're working on, they can help with professional development, and talent management, and align that to the business processes that the company has. We're also looking to engage workers. As you mentioned, there are more job openings than there are unemployed people that we believe seeking employment right now, but they're not very engaged. So we're hoping to have technology and learning management to help engage more workers. And then we'd also like to increase new business creation. One of the things that Charles mentioned that slowed down is the introduction of new businesses and small businesses. We believe one of the reasons for that is that there is so much business automation that goes on that in order to achieve that to be competitive requires so much capital investment that it makes it difficult to start a new business. But if we're able to automate a lot of that business, we're able to make it really easy through Infor cloud suite for new business starting, we feel like we'll be able to help entrepreneurs generate new businesses which will employ more people and offer more engaging and rewarding jobs and help fill some of those gaps that we have. >> We've talked a lot about AI - not just some magic thing that you throw at your business - it has to be operationalized and the likely way in which organizations are going to consume AI is it's going to be infused in applications. And this is exactly what your strategy it, isn't it? >> It is. The artificial intelligence is only going to be as smart as the amount of data that it can access and that it can analyze. It doesn't have a brain, it looks at data and learns from that data and where it tells you. And Infor has access to data that very few companies have - mission critical data, ERP, data manufacturing, distribution - core processes that we're able to put in the cloud, and not just in the cloud, but in a multi-tenant cloud environment where it can be drawn from analytics, from our burst analytics engine. And then, Coleman can make decisions based on that data - not only from within the enterprise but across the network using GT Nexus commerce network. >> Yeah, so we're hearing a lot about HCM, of course, at this show, you know, human potential, fits into talent management, HCM. You guys have a very competitive product there, it's sort of a knife fight with some of the large SAS players, but I was excited to see so much attention paid to HCM as a key part of your SAS portfolio - your thoughts? >> I do, I agree with you and I think one of the differentiating points that we just mentioned was that Infor HCM also connects to Infor systems that automate core business processes. So it's not just about those business processes, but also knowing who the people are that work on them and helping companies navigate. So much time is wasted from what we would call tribal knowledge - an employee getting up to speed or figuring out how to navigate inside an organization, particularly a large enterprise. And Infor HCM can help make that easier, but they can do that while attached to a business process so that everything can move faster and more efficiently for the customer. >> I wonder if you could comment, Dan, on this notion of best of breed versus a full suite. It seems like - so for decades, there's been this argument of oh, best of breed point products will sometimes win but full suite, people want a single throat to choke and that integration - It seems like with your micro-vertical strategy you're trying to do both - be both best of breed and have a full suite across the enterprise application portfolio. Is that right, you know, do you feel like you guys are succeeding at that, uh where do you think you fit in that whole spectrum? >> That is correct, and it's one of the things that we're able to do because of our cloud strategy - is to offer the complete suite and the artificial intelligence that comes on top of it. In the past, when there wasn't an artificial intelligence layer, there wasn't the machine learning that needed to draw from all of that data, best of breed individual applications would work. But now that we're trying to pull data together so that you can make more intelligent and you get actionable insights that let you make more intelligent decisions, that requires an integrated suite. And that can be done now in a multi-tenant cloud environment that couldn't be done before. >> The other thing I would observe - we talked about this, John - is - >> I'd also really quick just add that I think that that's proving to be correct in the amount of growth that we're seeing. Infor is significantly outgrowing from a revenue perspective. Oracle, more than forty percent last year, more than double the rate of growth of SAP and our growth rate for cloud applications is up there with work day which is setting the bar for cloud software companies. >> Yeah, that's true, that's a great point. I mean work day has set the bar and this is an example of what was essentially a narrow point product there to, of course, trying to get into other spaces. Of course, SAP and Oracle always have had a large suite. Your strategy has seemed to be working in terms of being a place where a customer can come in and access a lot of different functionality. The other thing that we heard today - a year in - is the Koch Industries investment. I was noticing that you now see Accenture here, you see Grant Thorton, Deloitte- >> Capgemini >> Yeah, Capgemini - these people are taking notice of - I would imagine Koch Industries does a lot of business with those guys and one of the gentlemen from Koch told me last year - said "Hey, we're going to expose these SI's to the Infor opportunity." It seems like it started to happen and I've heard that there's been several large deals that they've helped to catalyze, so it's great to see that presence here. Talk a little bit about the Koch Industries dynamic and what that's brought to the table. >> Well, the Koch relationship for Infor has been so helpful. First, obviously, there's a large infusion of cash from the investment. It was 2.5 billion dollars - one of the largest tech investments that wasn't an acquisition in history. And we're able to use that capital to increase more functionality. Not only that, but Infor has an industrial background. The majority of our customers are in manufacturing or distribution - industries that Koch Industries is a big player in. So not only do we have a great partner, but we have a living lab in one of the world's best and most efficient companies with which to develop our software, implement our software, and test our software. And we've got a willing partner in Koch that can do that and provide a lot of that expertise. >> I was telling Dave that that's what really struck me listening to the keynote was that - yeah - it's this wonderful symbiotic relationship and they gave you money - that's nice, right - but you have an opportunity now to roll out services, products, experiment a little bit. >> We do. >> See how it works within the Koch family, if you will, before you take it out further and so you've got this great test lab at your disposal that you didn't have before. >> And like Infor, Koch is a private company, so we don't feel the same pressure to provide quarterly return to shareholders that public companies do. So we're able to invest more of our revenue in development and R and D in ensuring that our products are going to deliver the best experience and the best functionality for our customers. >> Well, to me, the key for Infor - a key - is you've got a large install base and you're trying to get that install base to come to a more modern, SAS-like, cloud-like platform. To do that, you got to be relevant. So, the stuff like Coleman, the burst acquisition, your micro-verticals - those are all highly relevant. You know, your ability eliminate custom mods because you go that last mile. Highly relevant to companies that have to place a bet. Now, when they have to move to this new world, you know, others are going to try to grab them, so you got to hang on to them. To me, relevance, and showing a road map, and showing an investment, and things like R and D, is critical - your thoughts? >> I agree with you, I think that's the reason that we're seeing those large global system integrators partner with Infor now and develop practices that Accenture and Deloitte, Grant Thornton, and Capgemini, that will implement Infor software at their customers. They're having the demand from the customers that they're working with, including up to the largest of enterprises, for Infor software, just simply because we are able to automate processes and help them get to a level of automation that will let them compete in the digital era. There are companies all over are fearing that they're going to be disrupted by a digital, native competitor or a digitally enabled competitor. And we're looking to help Infor customers become digitally enabled themselves and to be that disruptive competitor in their field. >> Well, Dan, we appreciate the time >> Thank you very much. >> Good seeing you, thanks for having us here. >> Thanks for coming back again. >> Overlooking the show floor, got a great seat - >> Yeah, a lot of activity down there. >> And, uh, good luck with the rest of the show. >> Thank you very much. >> Dan Barnhardt, from Infor back with more. Live on the Cube here from Washington DC at Inforum '18. (bright, electric music)

>> Live from Time Square in New York City, it's theCUBE, covering IBM's Change the Game, Winning with AI. (theCUBE theme music) Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation. We're covering IBM's announcement. Changing the Game, Winning with AI is the theme of IBM. And IBM has these customer meet-ups, analyst meet-ups, partner meet-ups and they do this in conjunction with Strata every year. And theCUBE has been there covering 'em. I'm Dave Vellante with us is James Wade, who's the Director of Application Hosting at Guidewell, and Hemanth Manda, who's the Director of Platform Offerings at IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Hemanth, let's start with you. Platform offerings. A lot of platforms inside of IBM. What do you mean platform offerings? Which one are you responsible for? >> Yeah, so IBM's data and analytics portfolio is pretty wide. It's close to six billion dollar business. And we have hundred plus products. What we are trying to do, is we're trying to basically build a platform through IBM Cloud Private for Data. Bring capabilities that cuts across our portfolio and build upon it. We also make it open. Support multiple clouds and support other partners who wants to run on the platform. So that's what I'm leading. >> Okay, great and we'll come back and talk about that. But James, tell us more about Guidewell. Where are you guys based? What'd you do and what's your role? >> Guidewell is the largest insurer in the sate of Florida. We have about six and a half million members. We also do about 38, 39% of the government processing for MediCare, MediCaid claims. Very large payer. We've also recently moved in over the provider space. We actually have clinics throughout the state of Florida where our members can go in and actually get services there. So we're actually morphing as a company, away from just an insurance company, really to a healthcare company. Very exciting time to be there. We've doubled in size in the last six years from a six billion dollar company to a, I mean from an eight billion dollar company to an 18 billion dollar company. >> So both health insurer and provider, bringing those two worlds together. And the thinking there is just more efficient, you'd be able to drive efficiencies obviously out of your business, right? >> Yup, yes. I mean, the ultimate goal for us is just to have better health outcomes for our members. And the way you deliver that is, one, you do the insurance right, you do it well. You make sure that their processed and handled properly, that they're getting all the services that they need. But two, from a provider space, how do you take the information that you have about your members and use them in a provider space to make sure they're getting the right prescriptions at the right time, for the right situations that they're having, whatever's going on in their life. >> And keeping cost down. I mean, there's a lot of finger pointing in the industry. If you bring those two areas together, you know, now they got a single throat to choke, >> That's right, we get that too. (laughing) >> Buck stops with you. Okay, and you're responsible for the entire application portfolio across the insurance and the clinical side? >> Yes, I have, you know, be it both sides, we have Guidewell as the holding company, we have multiple companies underneath it. So all of those companies roll up into a single kind of IT infrastructure. And I manage that for them, for the entire company. >> Okay. Talk about the big drivers in you business. Obviously on the insurance side, it's the claims system is the life blood, the agency system to deal with, the channel. And now of course, you've got the clinical thing to worry about, but so, talk about sort of the drivers of your business and what's changing. >> Right, I mean, the biggest change we've had, obviously in last few years, has been the Affordable Care Act. It changed the way that, you know, from a group policy where if you're a big corporation and you work for a big corporation, that company actually buys insurance for you and provides it to their employees. Well now the individual market has grown significantly. We're still a group policy insurance company, don't get me wrong, we have a great portfolio of companies that we work with, but we also now sell directly to individuals. So they're in the consumer space directly. And that's just a different way of interacting with folks. You have to have sales sites. You have to have websites that are up, where folks can come and browse your products. You have to interface with government websites. Like CMS has their site where they set up and you're able to buy products through that. So it's really changed our marketing and sales channels completely. And on the back side, the volume of growth, I mean, with the new individual insurance market we've grown in size significantly in our number of members. And that's really stressed our IT systems, it's stressed our database environment. And it's really stressed our ability to kind of analyze the thing that we're doing. And make sure that we're processing claims efficiently and making sure that the members are getting what they expect from us. So, the velocity and change in size has really stressed us. >> Yeah, so you got the Affordable Care Act and some uncertainties around that, the regulations around that. You've got things like EMR and meaningful use that you got to worry about. So a lot of complexity in the application portfolio. And Hemanth, I imagine this is not a unique discussion that you have with some of your insurance clients and healthcare folks, although, you guys are a little different in that you're bringing those two worlds together. But your thoughts on what you're seeing the marketplace. >> Yeah, so I mean, this is not unique because the data is exploding and there are multiple data sources spread across multiple clouds. So in terms of trying to get a sense of where the data is, how to actually start leveraging it, how to govern it, how to analyze it, is a problem that is across all industry verticals. And especially as we are going through digital transformation right, trying to leverage and monetize your data becomes even more important. So. >> Yeah, so, well let's talk a little bit about the data. So your data, like a lot of companies, you must have a lot of data silos. And we have said on theCUBE a lot, that the innovation engine in the future is data. Applying machine intelligence to that data. Using cloud models, whether that cloud is in a private cloud or a public cloud or now even at the edge. But having a cloud-like experience for scale and agility is critical. So, that seems to be the innovation, whereas, last 20, 30 years the innovation has been you know kind of Moore's Law and being able to get the latest and greatest systems, so I can get data out of my data warehouse faster. So change in the innovation engine driven by data what are you seeing James? >> I mean, absolutely. Again, we go back to the mission of the company. It's to provide better health outcomes for our members, right. And IT, and using the data that we collect more effectively and efficiently, allows us to do that. I mean we, if you take, you know, across the board, you may have four or five doctors that you're working with and they've prescribed multiple things to you, but they're not talking. They have no idea what your other doctor is doing with you, unless you tell 'em and a lot of people forget. So just as an example, we would know as the payer, what you've been prescribed, what you've been using for multiple years. If we see something, using AI, machine learning, that you've just been prescribed is going to have a detrimental impact to something else that you're doing, we can alert you. We can send you SMS messages, we can send you emails, we could alert your doctors. Just to say, hey this could be a problem and it could cause a prescription collision and you can end up in the hospital or worse. And that's just one example of the things that we look at everyday to try to better the outcome for our members. But, you know, that's just the first layer. What else can you do with that? Are there predictive medicines? Are there things we could alert your doctors to, that we're seeing from other places, or populations, that kind of match, you know, your current, you know, kind of what you look like, what you do, what you think, what you're using. All the information we have about you, can we predict health outcomes down the future and let your doctors know? So, exciting time to be in this industry. >> Let's talk about the application architecture to support that outcome, because you know, you're not starting from a green field. You probably got some Cobalt running and it works, you can't mess with that stuff. And traditionally you built, especially in a regulated industry, you're building applications that are hardened. And as I said you have this data silo that really, you know, it's like, it works, don't touch it. How much of a challenge is it for you to enter this sort of new era? And how are you getting there? I'd like to understand, IBM's role as well. >> Well we, it's very challenging, number one. You have your, I don't want to call it legacy 'cause that makes it sound bad, but you do have kind of your legacy environments where we're collecting the information. It's kind of like the silos that have gathered the information, the sales information, the claims information, that type of stuff. But those may not be the best systems currently, to actually do the processing and the data analysis and having the machine learning run against it. So we have, you know, really complex ETL, you know, moving data from our kind of legacy environments in to these newer open source models that you guys support with, you know, IBM Cloud Private for Data. But basically, moving into these open source areas where we can kind of focus our tools on it and learn from that data. So that, you know, having your legacy environment and moving it to the new environment where you can do this processing, has been a challenge. I mean the velocity of change in the new environment, the types of databases that are out there Hadoop and then the products that you guys have that run through the information, that's one of the bigger challenges that we have. Our company is very supportive of IT, they give us plenty of budget, they give us plenty of resources. But even with all of the support that we get, the velocity of change in the new environment, in the AI space and the machine learning, is very difficult to keep up with. >> Yeah and you can't just stop doing what your doing in the existing environment, you still got to make changes to it. You got regulatory, you got hippo stuff that you've got to deal with. So you can't just freeze your code there. So, are things like containers and, you know, cloud native techniques coming into play? >> Absolutely, absolutely. We're developing all, you know, we kind of drew a line in the sand, our CIO about two years ago, line in the sand, everything that we develop now is in our cloud-first strategy. That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to go into the external cloud. We have an internal cloud that we have. And we have a very large power environment at Guidewell. Our mainframe is still sort of a cloud-like infrastructure. So, we developed it to be cloud native, cloud-first. And then if it, you know, more than likely stays in our four walls, but there's also the option that we can move it out. Move it to various clouds that are out there. As an IBM Cloud, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, any of those clouds. So we're developing with a cloud-first strategy all of the new things. Now, like you said, the legacy side, we have to maintain. I mean, still the majority of our business is processing claims for our members, right, and that's still in that kind of legacy environment. Runs on a mainframe in the power environment today. So we have to keep it up and running as well. >> How large of organization are you, head count wise? >> We have about 2,100 IT people at Guidewell. Probably a 17,000 person organization. So there is a significant percentage of the population of our employees that are IT directly. >> I was at a, right 'cause it is a IT heavy business, always has been. I was at a conference recently and they threw out a stat that the average organization has eight clouds. And I said, "we're like a 60 person company "and we have eight clouds." I mean you must have 8,000 clouds. (laughing) Imagine when you through in the SAS and so forth. But, you mentioned a number of other clouds. You mentioned IBM Cloud and some others. So, it's a multi-cloud world. >> Yes, yes. >> Okay, so I'm interested in how IBM is approaching that, right. You're not just saying, okay, IBM Cloud or nothing, I think, you know. And cloud is defined on-prem, off-prem, maybe now at the edge, your thoughts. >> Yeah, so, absolutely, I think that is our strategy. We would like to support all the clouds out there, we don't want to discriminate one versus the other. We do have our own public cloud, but what our strategy is, to support our products and platforms on any cloud. For example, IBM Cloud Private for Data, it can run in the data center, it can provide the benefits of the cloud within your firewall. But if you want to deploy it on any other public cloud infrastructures, such as Amazon or Red Hat OpenStack, we do support it. We are also looking to expand that support to Microsoft and Google in the future. So we are going forward with the multi-cloud strategy. Also, if you look at IBM's strength, right, we have significant on-premise business, right, that's our strength. So we want to basically start with enterprise-out. So by focusing on private cloud, and making sure that customers can actually move their offerings and products to private cloud, we are essentially providing a path for our customers and clients to move cloud, embrace cloud. So that's been our approach. >> So James, I'm interested in how you guys look at cloud-first. When you say cloud-first, first of all, I'm hearing, it's not about where it goes, it's about the experience. So we're going to bring the cloud model to the data, wherever the data lives. It's in the public cloud, of course it's cloud. If we bring it on-prem, we want a cloud-like experience. How do you guys looks at that cloud-like experience? Is it utility pricing, is it defined in sort of agility terms? Maybe you could elaborate. >> Actually, we're trying to go with the agility piece first, right. The hardest thing right now is to keep up with the pace that customers demand. I mean, you know, my boss Paul Stallings always talks about, you know, consumer-grade is now the industrial strength. Now you go home at night, your network at home is very fast to your PC. Your phone, you just hit an app, you always expect it to work. Well, we have to be able to provide that same level of support and reliability in the applications we're deploying inside of our infrastructure. So, to do that, you have to be fast, you have to be agile. And our cloud-first being, how do you get things to market faster, right. So you can build service faster build out your networks faster and build you databases faster. Already have like defined sizes, click a button and it's there. On-demand infrastructure, much like they do in the public loud, We want to have that internally. But second, and our finance department would tell you, is that, you know, most important is the utility piece. So once you can define these individuals modules that you can hit a button and immediately spin up and instantiate, you should be able to figure out what that cost the company. How do you define what a server cost? Total cost of ownership through the lifetime that server is for the company. Because if we can lower thar cost, if we can do these things very well, automate 'em, get the data where it needs to be, spin up quickly, we can reduce our administrative cost and then pass those savings right back to our members. You know, if we can find a way to save your grandmother $20 a month off her health insurance, that can make a lot of difference in a person's life, right. Just by cutting our cost on the IT side, we can deliver savings back to the company. And that's very key to us. >> And in terms of sort of what goes where, I guess it's a function of the physics, right, if there's latencies involved, the economics, which you mentioned are critical obviously in your business. And I guess the laws, you know, the edicts of the government-- >> Yes and the various contracts that you sign with companies. I mean, there's some companies that we deal with it in the state of Florida that want their data to stay in that sate of Florida. Well if you move it out to a various cloud provider, you don't know which data center that it's in. So you have to go, there's the laws and regulations based on your contracts. But you're exactly right. It's what have you signed up for, what've you agreed to, what are your member comfortable with as to where the data can actually go? >> How does IBM help Guidewell and other companies sort of mange through that complexity? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think, in addition to what James mentioned, right, it's also about agility. Because for example, if you look at insurance applications, there's a specific time period where you probably would expect 10x of load, right. So you should be able to easily scale up and down. And also, as you're changing your business model, if you have new laws, or if you want to go after new businesses, you should be able to easily embrace that, right. So cloud provides sort of flexibility and elasticity and also the agility. So that's one. The other thing that you mentioned around regulation, especially in healthcare and also too with financial services industry. So what we're trying to do is, on our platform, we would like to actually have industry-specific accelerators. We've been working with fortune 500 companies for the last 30, 40 years. So we've gained a depth of knowledge that we currently have within our company. So we want to basically start exposing the accelerators. And this is on our roadmap and will be available fairly quickly. So that's one approach we're taking. The other approach we're taking is, we're also working with our business partners and technology partners because we do believe, in today's world, you cannot go after an opportunity all by yourself. You need to build an ecosystem and that's what we're doing. We're trying to work with, basically, specialty vendors who might be focused on that particular vertical, who can bring the depth in knowledge that we might not be having. And work with them and team up, so that they can build their solutions on top of the platform. So that's another approach that we're taking. >> So I got to ask you, I always ask this question of customers. Why IBM? >> I mean, this, you guys have been a part of our business for so long. You have very detailed sales guys that are embed really with our IT folks. You understand our systems. You understand what we do, when we do it, why we do it. You understand our business cycle. IBM really invests in their customers and understanding what they're doing, what they need to be done. And quite honestly, you guys bring some ideas to the table we haven't even thought of. You have such a breadth of understanding, and you're dealing with so many other companies, you'll see things out there that could be a nugget that we could use. And IBM's never shied of bringing that to us. Just a history and a legacy of really bringing innovative solutions to us to really help our business. And very companies out there really get to know a company's business, as well as IBM does. >> Hemanth I'll give you the last word. We got Change the Game, Winning with AI tonight You go to IBM.com/winwithAI and register there. I just did, I'm part of the analyst program. So, Hemanth, last word for you. >> Yeah, so, I think the world is changing really fast and unless enterprises embrace cloud and embrace artificial intelligence and cloud base their data to monetize new business models, it very hard to compete. Like, digital transformation is impacting every industry vertical, including IBM. So, I think going after this opportunistically is critical. And IBM Cloud Private for Data, the platform provides this. And please join us today, it's going to be a great event. And I look forward to meeting you guys, thank you. >> Awesome, and definitely agree. It's all about your digital meets data, applying machine intelligence, machine learning, AI, to that data. Being able to run it in a cloud-like model so you can scale, you can be fast. That's the innovation sandwich for the future. It's not just about the speed of the processor, or the size of the disk drive, or the flash or whatever is. It's really about that combination. theCUBE bringing you all the intelligence we can find. You're watching CUBE NYC. We'll be right back right after this short break. (theCUBE theme music)

>> Man: Live from Washington DC it's the Cube. Covering .conf2017, brought to you by splunk. >> Welcome back to Washington DC, Nations capital. Here for dotconf2017 as the Cube continues our coverage. The flagship broadcast of silicon idol tv. Along with Dave Alonte, I am John Walls. Glad to have you with us after we've had a little lunch break. Feeling good? >> Feel great, good conversation with customers, dug into the pricing model, got some good information. >> What did you learn at lunch? >> Well talk about it at the end of the day. >> Alright, good, look forward to it. Let's talk healthcare right now. Derek Merck is with us right now. He is the director of computer vision and imaging analytics at the Rhode Island Hospital. Which is the teaching hospital for Brown University. Derek thanks for joining us here on the Cube. Good to see ya. >> Absolutely, very excited to be here. >> So, well and as are we to have you. Director of computer vision and image analytics, so let's talk about that. What falls under your portfolio, and tell us where does Splunk come into that picture? >> It's been an interesting journey, Rhode Island hospital is a huge clinical service. Takes really good care of the people of Rhode Island. I'm in diagnostic imaging, so I work with all the CT scans, the MR's, radiography, ultrasonography, and what I try to do is automate the data that is coming off all of these machines as much as possible. So, you know typically the patient will come in, they'll get imaged for some reason, the physician will take a look at that image and make a diagnosis, and then that image goes into an archive. It may be used again later if the patient comes back but other than that it is not really used at all. With these sort of emergence of computer vision access to training images, sets of data, has become really critical. Diagnostic imaging has become really interested in taking better account of what imaging they have so that they can try to answer questions like what's alike about these images. What is different about these images, and automate diagnosis. What's similar about all the images of patients who have cancer, versus patients who don't have cancer. Which is basically what a radiologist job is, is to go and look at this patients image and figure out does this patient have cancer or not. SO that is the way you would teach a computer how to do it in an automated fashion. SO I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how do you keep, how do you take, keep better track of what is available and be able to ask these sort of population based questions about what we have in our portfolio of data, our data portfolio. I spent a lot of time writing systems by hand in python, or other kinds of scripting tools. I spent a lot of time trying to interface with the hospital informatics systems, the electronic medical record. The electronic medical record again really meant for taking care of patients it is not meant for population analytics. We ended up basically building our own health care analytic system just to keep track of what we had. What were the doctors saying about different cases. Show me all the cases where the doctors think that some particular thing happened. And be able to ask these questions in real time, generate huge data sets, anonymize them, run them through computer vision algorithms, train classifiers. Diagnostic imaging is really excited about this kind of technology. There has been a lot of interesting side projects as well. One of the most, one of the things that administration is the most interested is because of these kinds of systems we are keeping a lot better track of radiation exposure, per image, so the CT scanners will tell you how much radiation was used for an individual study. But again our analytic systems historically you have no way of saying what's the average? What's high, what's low? Its months of latency, six months of latency between when you run a scan and when American College of Radiology comes back and says some of your scans were a little high in radiation exposure. Whereas now because we keep track of all this data we have this real time dashboards and that is the kind of thing we use Splunk for. WE keep track of all the data we are collecting and then we create these dashboards and give them to people who haven't had access to this kind of analytics before. For looking at utilization, optimizing work flow, things like that. >> I am just kind of curious when you mention like x-rays and maybe Dave you know more about this than I do. But it seems like it is kind of a standard practice you have a certain amount of exposure for a certain amount of test, and that data I don't know how but it sounds like it is more critical to have that kind of data than someone a layman might think. I was curious of the analytics of that. What are you using to determine there in terms of that exposure? >> There's always a trade off with radiation based imaging. There is a lot of non radiation based imaging. Like you may have heard of magnetic resonance imaging, or MR. Those are thought to be perfectly safe. You can get MR's all day long. If fact they do give MR's to people all day long for research purposes sometimes. >> You climb in the tube, I don't want to climb in the tube. >> You get a little claustrophobic >> They are expensive >> That is the thing, we don't have very many of them. They are very slow but they're safe. Ultrasounds very safe, we give ultrasounds to pregnant women all the time very safe, but they don't give you very quality images back. They give you a very small field of view and things are wiggling around. A CT scan is super fast and it gives a physician all the information they need in a snap shot. CT scanners are so fast now they can freeze your beating heart. They can make a revolution around your body of thickness so they can capture your heart while it is in motion. You know like with anything if you have a camera and you take a picture of someone running across the screen you don't see the person you just see this sort of blur, right? Now with modern fast aperture cameras you can take a picture of nutrinos and things that are impossibly fast. I don't know that that's actually true. You might wand to edit that out. (laughing) >> But conceptually >> A CT scan is the same sort of thing. Your heart is beat all the time, your lungs are moving all the time. Your bowls are moving all the time. Your blood is coursing through your veins all the time. It is so fast it can freeze it and give you this volumetric data back. They use that for all kinds of different things. They're not able to do with other kinds of imaging modalities The downside is that they're potentially somewhat dangerous, right? People have known since the 1890's when x-rays were first discovered by Wilhome Rankin that if you put somebody under an x-ray beam for too long, your hair will fall out, you'll get skin burns, all kinds of things that these early pioneers of x-ray did to themselves without realizing it. Documenting all of these problems that can happen, and a CT can uses ionizing radiation if you get too many CT scans you'll get skin reactions, or other kinds of things. It is really important to keep track of the risk to benefit ratio there. People give you a CT scan if you fall down and you hurt your head. They give you a CT scan cause they're worried that you are going to die if you don't get the CT scan. Along with that is this idea of how do you track how many CT scans an individual patient gets in a year. Right now the hospital has a hard time keeping track if somebody comes into the emergency room of automatically identifying oh this patients already had six CT's should we put them in line for a MR instead of another CT. Again these are the kinds of things that we are able to get at through using, through better management of our data and organization of our data. >> You mentioned that you're doing more of this real time analysis, Splunk is obviously a tool that helps do that. Other tooling, are you using cloud based tools? >> We have to be really careful about cloud based stuff. There is this protected health information that everyone's really concerned about. Working with data at the hospital is really walking a fine line you need to be very conscious of security. There really reluctant to let non anonymized data out to cloud sources for storage. There are some ways of getting around that, but basically we run all of our servers in house. There's a couple of big data centers down in the basement of the hospital. Mostly they have clinical duties but we have a number of research servers that are installed down there as well. They're managed by the same IT staff in this sort of hardened architecture. I actually can't do any work from home which is an unusual kind of experience, I am used to being able to log in remotely. >> Oh darn (laughing) >> Or you spend too much time on the job. >> Some times you'd like to >> I'm ambivalent about it, there's goods and bads about it. >> So how do you deal with that streaming infrastructure and real time analysis. Do you guys sort of build your own? Any kind of resource tools, or >> I use a lot of open source tools. Traditionally the hospital wants to pay for everything. They feel like if they pay for things then it comes with uptime guarantees. When I build my systems though, because I'm working on shoestring budgets, And because I believe in open source. I use open source where ever I can. I wanted to mention we're actually for a lot of the work that we do supported through Splunk for good. So I don't pay for a full Splunk license, Cory Marshal who runs Splunk for good, has sort of recognized the value of some of the stuff that we're doing with dealing with non traditional data. It's not the sort of standard things that the other people who are working in the healthcare space with splunk are working with. We are working with imaging data. We are working with patient bedside telemetry data, you know the EKG signals and the heart rate signals. And aggregating all this stuff in to one place to make more sensible alerts and alarms. Oh this patient set off an alarm three times in the last hour I should send a page to the nurse who is taking care of this person. It's different that the kind of business optimism that I think a lot of people in the healthcare space are using splunk for. >> SO you have your core mission around diagnostic imaging. As we sort of touched on you have all these other peripheral factors in your industry. The affordable care act, obviously there's HIPPA, there's EMR, there's meaningful use. How much does that affect your mission? Does it get in the way? Is it something you have to be cognizant of like constantly, obviously HIPPA. Other factors? >> I try to just be cognoscente, I try not to let anything get in my way. Almost all of these things that you talk about they're really meant to protect the patient. I make sure that everything that I do is working with data is that we are anonymizing things, were using data securely, and we are trying to help the patients. I think I just have this moral check in my head of what is what I am doing right now good for my department, good for my institution, good for my patient. Then because I am aware of all these other rules they are very complicated and hard to navigate. At the end of the day I can say I understood that rule, I followed that rule, and what I did was the appropriate thing to do. >> It's like house rules. >> Yeah >> Okay, talk a little bit more about splunk, how are you using it, what it does for your mission, for your operation. >> What I came to the conference this year to talk about is this dose management system that we built that I think is really important. We've had vendors coming in and telling us that medicare isn't going to pay hospitals, or is going to reduce reimbursement to hospitals who can't prove that they're using ionizing radiation imaging appropriately. So what does that mean? No body quite knows exactly what that means. How do I tell whether my hospital is adhering to these rules that are ill defined and these vendors are coming in and they're trying to sell us solutions that are like a hundred thousand dollar a year licenses. Administration is taking this seriously, they're trying to figure out which of these vendors are we going to give money to. In the mean time a bunch of the CT technology staff and I basically put together a system that answers all these questions for them using Splunk. We use splunk to collect meta information about how all the scanners system wide are being use. We have 12 CT scanners, they shoot 90,000 different studies every year. Each one of those studies may be hundreds or even thousands of slices of data in these volumetric data sets. It's a huge amount of data to keep track of. Your not using Splunk to keep track of the imaging per se. Your using splunk to keep track of what imaging you collected. So it is a small fraction, it is just the metadata about each one of the studies. That metadata comes with a bunch of interesting information about what the radiation exposure for each one of those studies was. Splunk has these wonderfully adaptable easy to use tools. That once we covert our strange dicom, device independent communications in medicine data, we flatten it, normalize it, turn it into generic data, it is Json, it's dictionary files. Then splunk has these great tools that can be applied instead of to business analytics and optimization to image analytics and optimization. We build our dashboards on top of splunk to show per institution what was the average dose? Per protocol, per body type, you can track which technologist have the lower doses and higher doses. We found all kinds of interesting things. My favorite story the chief technologist was just telling me. I was putting together my slides for this presentation that I did here about this. I said we need an example of a does outlier. Some time when we had a higher than expected radiation event. We never have dangerously high radiation events. >> Good caveat, thank you. >> All the machines care about is whether you're harming some one and we never harm anyone. The machines don't track, this one is a little higher than you would expect it so that you can say why is that, what happened there? But now we do using our splunk dashboards. So I asked him can you get me an example for my slide deck. He literally just looked over to the monitor that he had open and he says oh right here. Here is a patient who had a 69. These numbers are irrelevant, they're supposed to be 50. He knows what the numbers are supposed to be, to me numbers are just numbers. This patient had a 69 and he picks up the phone, this was 5 minutes ago, he calls down to the control room. He says I'm not blaming anyone but why did Mrs So and So have a little bit higher radiation dose? 69 is not dangerous by the way, alarms don't go off until like 75 or 80 or something like that. So he just called and he asked what was going on with this patient. She had a dislocated arm. Okay I understand. This was a head scan, I was like Scott what does a dislocated arm have to do with a head scan? He said well she went through the CT bore with her arm up over her head which is not the way but it was the only way she would tolerate. So the CT thought she was this big and it had to raise the amount of radiation that it was putting into her to go through a larger object. So he documented that, he put it down, and again we used splunk for ticketing for outlier identification. So he put this one into the outlier identification database that we have, he picked other for the reason because we don't have a drop down menu with dislocated arm. Marked it as closed and it is justified, so when the JCO Joint commission on hospital accreditation comes trough and they say well what do you do to manage your higher than expected radiation exposures? We can both say well we never have unsafe radiation exposures it is all documented right here. When it is higher than usual this is the way we document it, and here are examples of ten or twenty of these odd instances where something happened. Either it was completely justified like this lady where the machines were used appropriately, that was appropriate. Or very occasionally we'll find something strange like an improper head holder was being used at one site for a while. It was resulting in these head CT's should usually be around 45 or 50 and instead they were 55 or 60. They went and they took the metal head holder and replaced it with a carbon fiber head holder that they should have been using and then all of a sudden our doses came down, and we documented it. >> It was a dislocated arm, let's leave it at that alright and we are happy with that. Derek thanks for being with us >> Oh absolutely >> Appreciate the time here on the cube and glad to have you here. Continued good luck with your work at Rhode Island. >> Thank you very much, you guys have a good day. >> Very good thank you. Derek Merck joining us here on the cube. We'll continue live from Washington DC right after this. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, DC, it's The Cube covering .NEXT conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back at Nutanix .NEXT. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my longtime co-host Stu Miniman. Don Mims is here as the director of infrastructure and virtualization at Baylor, Scott, & White Health. Don, great to see you. Thanks for comin' on The Cube. >> Thanks for havin' me. I appreciate it bein' here, it's very nice. >> Yeah, so Baylor, Scott, & White Health, we weren't familiar with that before we met you. Tell us a little bit about the organization. >> Sure. So, Baylor, Scott & White Health is based in Dallas, Texas. We've recently had, over the last couple of years, a merger opportunity. We merged with Scott & White that is down in Temple, Texas which is a little farther east, or west and south of Dallas. And we've grown our organization to around 40 hospitals, over 500 clinics and we continue to grow and make strives in the healthcare space. >> Dallas is booming. I mean, obviously-- >> It is. World-class city with world-class healthcare. Talk about some of the things that are happening in healthcare that are sort of driving your strategy, the challenges that you guys are having. I mean, obviously, there's, there's EMR, there's meaningful use, there's, you know, changes in the Affordable Care Act, all that stuff. That and or other things that are really driving strategy and creating challenges for you. >> Yeah, one of the biggest things that we're doin' right now is movin' into the digital space. So, the patient, centered focus being in a traditional brick and mortar facility, is shifting. Patients wants quicker access to data, quicker access to physicians. So, bein' able to create solutions that can deliver a physician and patient experience, possibly from a mobile device, a phone, a tablet, a PC, is where we're movin' the market towards. So, some of the solutions that we're building and delivering are enabling a faster delivery of technology for healthcare. >> You know, sort of, when you think about last decade, docs were, sort of, averse, somewhat to technology. >> You're right. >> And mobile really changed that, hasn't it? >> It has. >> How has that affected your, the backend infrastructures? >> So, it definitely has to be more robust. As you're delivering content now, video, web chats, things like that that have to be reliable because now patient outcomes depend on that type of data delivery, the backend has to be available more than ever at this time. >> So it's kind, you actually kind of have an IOT use case in the hospitals, right? >> We're gettin' there. >> And then when you start pushin' video around it's got to be very challenging. Now you're also doing some projects around DNA sequencing. Is that right? >> We are. It's very exciting space. We recently delivered a solution on Nutanix to create a DNA sequencing platform that hasn't been done before as we know it. The vendor, this was the first time for the vendor, a first time for Baylor, and it has been very successful implantation and it's, it's a very robust system today. >> Don, can you bring us inside a little bit? What were the requirements you were lookin' for? What led you down the path to Nutanix? Had you been usin' them before or was this the first-use case? >> It's actually not the first-use case. The project actually started out as a, it was a migration. The customer was using a hosted solution. It was slow. Their sequencing data was taking a long time. Their results were being held up because of the way their architecture was set up. So, we decided to bring it in-house and put it on a platform that was kind of new to us and try to deliver it with better speed and it definitely has done that. >> And does that trickle down to, you know, what does that mean to the cost of solutions? I mean, I think we all know it, you know, DNA sequencing used to take a long time and a lot of money and it's now, you know, kind of, do a swab type things and it's done a lot less. >> Yeah, so with this platform, the customer, the physician is now not only going to use this platform to get results quicker, we're also going to start potentially offering this as a service to others and help other physicians and other clinics also get their results quicker as well. So, it's going to grow over time to just an in-house solution to maybe something more broad-scale. >> So you saw the keynotes this morning. They're pushin' a lot of information at us. Obviously, we, Stew and I talked about it in our open. Nutanix, a couple years ago, sort of pivoted beyond hyper-coverged infrastructure, tryin' to position as cloud even though they still a lot of hyper-converged infrastructure, let's face it. But, as a consumer, as a practitioner, how does that message relate to you? You have a lot of vendors tryin' to sell to you. You got cloud, different cloud strategies, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. Dev-ops, containters. So, do you, what do you want to see from a company like Nutanix? Do you want them to, like, stick to their knitting, hey just give me hyper-converged infrastructure, or do you want them to take you on, on a journey? I wonder if you could add some color to that. >> Sure, and where you're goin' with that question is exactly the reason we chose this solution because it's way bigger than just a hyper-converge, you know, solution. That was, for me, that was kind of the first thing. That's what got us hooked and then the innovation that's come, you know, since then, and things that we've learned about the product and where they're goin' with automation, migration strategies of current workloads, the ease of management, the cloud strategy, the partnerships that they're makin' now with other, with other partners. That's really what I like to see and that continued growth is why we chose this product 'cause they have that vision and it's really appealing. >> And so, do you, are you using public cloud today? >> We are in a very limited manner. As you can imagine, health care and personal health information in the cloud can be kind of scary to some people so we have started that roadmap and we continue to try to expand that as we go. >> Is it fair to say that as an infrastructure professional that you're, you're, can I summarize your infrastructure strategy is you want, like, to, substantially mimic the attributes of a public cloud where it makes sense on prem. Is that fair? >> That's exactly what we're tryin' to do. Speed to delivery, server provisioning, resiliency of the infrastructure, invisible infrastructure, you might have heard that term today or over the past few days. That's what we're tryin' to accomplish. >> Self-service or no? >> Self-service internally right now. So, my own staff are going to use the automation internally to deliver quicker and then eventually as we perfect that, we'll let our customers self-service. >> So be as cloud-like as possible but not too cloud-like too soon? >> Exactly. >> So do you feel as though, as an IT pro, that you are on the path to achieving that vision? >> I do. We are, at Baylor, we're breaking new grounds with what we've done recently and I think the longterm vision to where we want to be is going to be, is going to be big over the next few years. >> So we get, we get into a lot of discussions with folks in our community that are, you know, kind of, cloud bigots, I'll call them and they say, "Hey, the vendors like Nutanix "and even more so vendors like IBM and HPE "and, you know, EMC, and their customers "will never be able to achieve what Amazon achieves." My question to you is, and you probably agree with that, I mean, Amazon's ahead of you, I bet. But, I would hope. But, how do you feel about that? Is that okay? Do you lose sleep over that or do you feel as though, "Hey, we've made so much progress." I wonder if you could comment on that as an IT pro. >> Yeah, sure. So, briefly on that topic, Amazon's business model is a little different than the industry that we're in, right? >> Yeah, sure. >> And, we're not really in the technology delivery business, right? We're in healthcare and patient servicing but what we do behind the scenes to enable the patient satisfaction and patient outcomes using this web-scale technology or this Amazon-like infrastructure is something that we're going to continue to build and grow on. We'll never be in that position, like Amazon is. But behind the scenes with automation and the infrastructure resiliency, using that same technology is what we're going to, how we're going to accomplish that. >> So a big part of that, 'cause you mentioned some of the digital transformation you're doin' up front, a big part of that cloud-like on prem, is makin' your people more productive and not, you know, focused on provisioning LUNs and servers and-- >> That's right. >> You know, pluggin' in cables. It's really automating as much as possible. So, have you seen the affect on non-differentiated IT labor in your shop? >> We have. So, just within our team, the amount of time the engineers have to spend on just this specific infrastructure has been greatly reduced so we get to spend more time doin' things like protectin' our environment. You know, a lot of these, these viruses have been comin' out lately. These, these exploits. So, we've been able to patch more diligently, remediate issues, and then we've seen other reduction in time for other teams. Storage team, they don't have to deal with our stuff anymore. They can focus in other areas. So it's really been a shift in the way we do business. >> So just one more followup, I know that Stu wants to jump in. So, and this is a hard question to be precise on, but, in rough terms, if you think in, you know, rough percentage terms, how much, you know, sort of, of the labor effort you've been able to shift to more interesting, the fun stuff, as Stu calls it. Is it a 5% factor or a 20%, 50%, you know, 100% factor? I wonder if you could just give us some anecdotal-- >> Right now the impact has been pretty small. If you look at the, our Nutanix infrastructure today, it's a very small portion of our overall infrastructure since it's fairly new. >> Right. >> But, I can tell you, the time that we spend on that right now is very minimal. I have one engineer that oversees the entire infrastructure at this point. I'm freein' up multiple other resources to do other things, so it's been an improvement. >> And so, and so pre-, pre-hyper-converged, if you didn't go that direction you'd have more than one engineer or? >> Oh, I'd have, I'd probably have at least three times as many. >> So three x factor, wow. >> Just because there's so many other components that you have to manage that aren't just specific to that one stack. >> David: Mhm, right. >> Don, you've got virtualization in your title, how do you look at virtualization today? Where are you in that journey? We've been hearin' at a lot of these shows that we've been at that, you know, virtualization feels like it's played out for the most part. We know where it is. Cloud has been the big discussion. Where is it in your job? >> So, kind of two paths in my infrastructure. We have server virtualization which is traditional, you know, virtualizing the compute workload. And then also on application virtualization, so app delivery. And I think there's still a lot of room for growth in both of those aspects. Application delivery is going to continue to morph and it can be delivered from multiple different platforms and I can see it doin' that over time. Server virtualization is a way to go and what we're doin' there is tryin' to continue to deliver the capacity, you know, that we're at or continue to grow it but at the same time shrinking that hardware footprint and relieving some of the stress in the data center and that's what we're lookin' for. >> On server virtualization what are you usin' today? >> For server virtualization we use VM ware, ESX. >> And have you looked at the HV stuff at all? >> We have and I'm very excited about that and it's kind of one of those things where you can't jump in with two feet right off the bat just because it is a little new and you feel like you need to really look at it really closely but at the same time, I'm pretty confident that it's going to be a good, longterm replacement as we continue to look at it. >> One of the, Nutanix has really been looking out for their future plans. One, share, you know, what resonates with you, and what about yourself? What kind of future strategy do you have? What are you looking for from the vendor community to help you do even more with your resources? >> So, the vendor community definitely, this is kind of a new area for them. A lot of the application vendors we talked to aren't really familiar with this platform so I think as this product grows and as this space grows, I think more vendor awareness is going to come about and they're going to be more comfortable with this as a solution. >> Okay, yeah, especially healthcare. It's all those ISVs that need to integrate and support and say, "Yes, I'm okay with it." >> Exactly. >> We saw that with virtualization at first and... >> Yup. And health care is always traditionally a little bit behind 'cause it's a little more conservative space. So, I think it'll take a little bit of time for them to feel comfortable there, as well. >> So what are the big problems you're tryin' to solve today from an infrastructure standpoint? >> Well, you know, financial issues are always a topic, right? So, what we're tryin' to do is deliver infrastructure to support our patients in a cost-effective way. So bein' as frugal with the money that we do have and buyin' the right technology and not spendin' a lot of money on a diverse stack and wasting financials. >> I mean, you just basically, you know, reduced your IT labor in that little part of the world by, you know, a factor of, you know, 3x as we talked about. Is there a gain-sharing philosophy where some of that reduction comes back to you for innovation or is it just, sort of, go back to other parts of the hospital? >> It will go back, probably, just to the bigger, to the bigger team. I mean, there are benefits to us, you know, specifically that we're going to achieve, but overall, that time-saving goes back and allows, you know, different teams to do other things which overall will help improve our whole environment. >> So in the keynotes today, and I was talking to you off-camera about one-click migration, there was a database migration and, I think it was one-click DR as well, but I'm interested in the database stuff. You've got some experience with databases. Actually, let me ask you, is that part of the infrastructure definition is database on down? >> It is. >> Yeah, okay. So what was your reaction to the sort of one-click database migration? >> It's very exciting. I think that's going to help in the aspect of migrating workloads from, from Legacy or traditional to this new platform. There's, I think there's still some components that you have to consider. The migration is very nice but, you know, validation, testing, all those kind of components also have to be part of that whole plan. >> So if I looked at the, I mean, database migrations can sometimes be real hard balls. So if I, if I look at the cycle, you know, the anatomy of a migration, let's say it takes, you know, n amount of time, what is that amount of time, you know, on average, and I know it's a hard, it's one of those stupid average questions. >> It can vary based on size. >> Yeah, I know it's a big it depends. But what percent of that, that, that value chain, if you will, that sequence chain is Nutanix attacking with what you saw today in your view? >> So, what you do is reduce the execution part of that migration and you probably reduce a lot of the planning phase of that because in any kind of a database migration, there are so many factors that go into that and a lot of the discussion is around how are we going to move this workload to this new space? And Nutanix has solved that by taking care of the how and then, you know, you just need to figure out how you're going to validate, test it, and confirm that once it's there, everything continues to work as expected. So I think you've reduced the time of planning and execution both with that strategy. >> I mean, the planning piece has actually got to be a huge portion-- >> Huge. >> Is it half of the total? >> It's probably at least half. >> Yeah, I would think so. >> Because the better you plan, the better you're going to execute, right, so. >> Yeah, yeah, right, right. Okay, good. Well, Don, I'll give you a last word on futures. What kinds of things are you workin' on that, you know, you can share with us? >> So for us, the future is going to be to, to continue to converge this stack. We're going to continue to move forward with automation. Try to reduce the delivery time for applications and servers and infrastructure and eventually simplify our management layer and spend more time doin' other things, doin' more fun stuff. And that's what we're lookin' to do. >> Love it. As I always say, love havin' the practitioners on we get to pepper questions and get the real story. So Don, thanks very much for comin' on The Cube. >> Thank you for havin' me, I appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from San Fransisco It's theCUBE Covering PURE Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by PURESTORAGE. >> Welcome back to PURE Accelerate. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. This is PURE Accelerate. We're here at Pier 70. Brian McDaniel is here he's an infrastructure architect at the Baylor College of Medicine, not to be confused with Baylor University in Waco Texas, anymore. Brian Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Tell us about the Baylor College of Medicine. >> So, Baylor College of Medicine is a, first and foremost, a teaching facility but also the leader in research and development for healthcare in the Texas Medical Center in Houston Texas. We currently employ roughly 1,500 physicians and so they occupy a multitude of institutions, not only at Baylor but other facilities and hospitals in and around the Texas Medical Center. >> So, it's kind of' healthcare morning here Stu. We've been talking about electronic medical records, meaningful use, the Affordable Care Act, potential changes there, HIPAA, saving lives. These are big issues. >> We're not at the HIMSS Conference Dave? >> We should be at HIMMS. So these are big issues for any organization in healthcare. It's just exacerbates the challenges on IT. So, I wonder if you can talk about some of the drivers in your business, compliance, and in new tech and maybe share with us some of the things that you're seeing. >> Absolutely so first and foremost, we are an Epic system shop. That's our EMR. So, from a enterprise and clinical operation, that is our number one mission critical application. It provides your electronic medical records to our staff, regardless of where they're physically located at. So that alone is a demanding type of solution if you will, the mobility aspect of it. Delivering that in a fast manner and a repeatable manner is upmost important to our physicians because they're actually seeing patients and getting to your records and being able to add notes and collaborate with other institutions if necessary. So, time to market is very important and accessibility is also up there. >> Right so, you mentioned that collaboration and part of that collaboration is so much data now, being able to harness that data and share it. Data explodes everywhere but in healthcare, there's so much data to the extent we start instrumenting things. What are you guys doing with all that data? >> Right now, it lives within the clinical application, right in Epic, but as you pointed out that is where the value is. that is where your crown jewels so to speak are at. That data is now being looked at as a possible access point outside of the clinical operation. So, it's environment is going to be even more important going forward, when you look to branch out into some of the basic sides in more of a research, to gain access to that clinical data. That historically has been problematic for the research to be done accessing that information. >> So, in the corporate we like to think of, from an IT perspective, you got to run the business, you got to grow the business, you got to transform the business. It's a little different in healthcare. You kind of got to comply. A lot of your time is spent on compliance and regulation changes and keeping up with that. And then there's got to be a fair amount that's at least attempting to do transformation and in kind of keeping up with the innovations. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely, particularly on the innovation side, we work closely with out partners at Epic and we work to decide roadmaps and how that fits into the Baylor world. Case in point, a year ago we were set to go to the new version of Epic, which was 2015. And Epic is nice enough to lay out requirements for you and say, here's what your system needs to meet in order to comply with Epic standards. So, they give you a seal of approval, so to speak. And there's monetary implications for not meeting those requirements. So it's actually dollars and cents. It's not just , we want you to meet this. If you do then there's advantages to meeting it. So, they provided that to us and went though the normal testing phases and evaluations of our current platform, both from compute and storage. And honestly we struggled to meet their requirements with our legacy systems. So the team was challenged to say well, what can we do to meet this? We have our historical infrastructures, so if we're going to deviate from that, let's really deviate and look at what's available to the market. So, Flash comes to mind immediately. So, there's a multitude of vendors that make Flash storage products. So we started meeting with all of 'em, doing our fact finding and our data gathering, meeting with all of 'em. First and foremost, they have to be Epic certified. That eliminated a couple of contenders right off the bat. Right? You're not certified. >> I would expect some of the startups especially. >> It did. Some of the smaller, Flash vendors, for example, one of 'em came in and we said, well, what do you do with Epic? And they said what's Epic. And you kind of scratch your head and say thank you. >> Thank you for playing. >> Here's the door. So, it eliminates people but then when we meet with PURE, and we talked to them and we meet 'em and you get to really know that the family and the culture that they bring with the technology. Yes it's got to be fast but Flash is going to be fast. What else can you do? And that's where you start learning about how it was born on Flash, how it was native to Flash and so you get added benefits to the infrastructure by looking at that type of technology, which ultimately led us there, where we're at running Epic on our Flash arrays. >> And Brian, you're using the Flash stack configuration of converge infrastructure. It sounds like it was PURE that lead you that way as opposed to Cisco? Could you maybe walk us through that? >> That's very interesting, so we're a UCS shop. We were before PURE. So when PURE came in, the fact that they had a validated design with the Flash stack infrastructure, made it all that more easier to implement the PURE solution because it just is modular enough to fit in with our current infrastructure. That made it very appealing that we didn't have to change or alter much. We just looked at the validated design that says, here's your reference architecture, how it applies to the Flash stack. You already have UCS. We love it, we're a big fan. And here's how to implement it. And it made the time to market, to get production work loads on it, very quick. >> And the CVD that you got from Cisco, that's Cisco plus PURE but was it healthcare Epic specific or was that the PURE had some knowledge for that that they pulled in? >> So, that was one of the value adds that we feel PURE brought was the Epic experience. And whether that's scripting, the backups, and if you're familiar with Epic, the environmental refreshes that they have to do. There's seven Epic environments. And they all have to refresh off of each other and play off of each other so, >> So you have a window that you have to hit right. >> And you do right? And historically that window's been quite large. And now, not so much which makes everybody happy. >> Hey, that's what weekends are for. >> Absolutely, yeah, our DBAs attest to that right? So, we would like to think we've made their world and life a little bit more enjoyable 'cause those weekends now, they're not having to babysit the Epic refreshes. Back to the point of Epic experience, that was instrumental in the decision makings from a support with the PURESTORAGE help desk, awareness of what it takes to run Epic on PURE, and then going forward knowing that there's a partnership behind Epic and PURE and certainly Baylor College of Medicine as we continue to look at the next versions of Epic, whether that's 2018 and on to 2020, whatever that decision is, we know that we have a solid foundation now to grow. >> And Brian I'm curious, you've been a Cisco shop for a while, Cisco has lots of partnerships as well as, they've got a hyper-converged offering that they sell themselves. What was your experience working with Cisco and do they just let you choose and you said, I want PURE and they're like, great? Do you know? What was that like? >> To your point, there's validated designs for many customers and Cisco is kind of at the hub of that, that core with the compute and memory of the blade systems, the UCS. They liked the fact that we went with PURE 'cause it does me a validated design. And they have others with other vendors. The challenge there is how do they really integrate with each other from tools to possibly automation down the road, and how do they truly integrate with each other. 'Cause we did bring in some of the other validated design architecture organizations and I think we did our due diligence and looked at 'em to see how they differentiate between each other. And ultimately, we wanted something that was new and different approach to storage. It wasn't just layering your legacy OS on a bunch of Flash drives and call it good. Something that was natively born to take advantage of that technology. And that's what ultimately led us to PURE. >> Well, PURE has a point of view on the so called hyper-converged space. You heard Scott Dietzen talking this morning. What's your perspective on hyper-convergence? >> Hyper-converge is one of those buzz words that I think gets thrown out of there kind of off the cuff if you will. But people hear it and get excited about it. But what type of workloads are you looking to take advantage of it? Is it truly hyper-converged or is it just something that you can say you're doing because it sounds cool? I think to some degree, people are led astray on the buzzwords of the technology where they get down to say, what's going to take advantage of it? What kind of application are you putting on it? If your application, in our case, can be written by a grad student 20 years ago that a lab is still using, it does it make sense to put it on hyper-converged? No, because it can't take advantage of the architecture or the design. So, in a lot of ways, we're waiting and seeing. And the reason we didn't go to a hyper-converged platform is a, Epic support and b, we were already changing enough to stay comfortable with the environment and knowing that come Monday morning, doctors will be seeing patients and we're already changing enough, that was another layer that we chose not to change. We went with a standard UCS configuration that everyone was already happy with. That made a significant difference from an operational perspective. >> Essentially, your processes are tightly tied to Epic and the workflow associated with that. So from an infrastructure perspective, it sounds like you just don't want it to be in the way. >> We don't. The last thing we want in infrastructure getting in the way. And quite frankly, it was in the way. Whether that was meeting latency requirements or IOPS requirements from the Cache database or the Clarity database within the Epic system, or if was just all of are just taking a little bit longer than they expect. We don't want to be that bottleneck, if you will, we want them to be able to see patients faster, run reports faster, gain access to that valuable data in a much faster way to enable them to go about their business and not have to worry about infrastructure. >> Brian, PURE said that they had, I believe it's like 25 new announcements made this morning, a lot of software features. Curious, is there anything that jumped out at you, that you've been waiting for and anything still on your to do list that you're hoping for PURE or PURE and it's extended ecosystem to deliver for you? >> Great question, so at the top of that list is the replication of the arrays, whether that's in an offsite data center or a colo and how that applies to an Epic environment that has to go through this flux of refreshes, and from a disaster or business continuity standpoint, we're actively pursuing that, and how that's going to fit with Baylor. So, we're very excited to see what our current investment, free of charge by the way, once you do the upgrade to 5.0, is to take advantage of those features, with replication being one of 'em. >> And then, I thought I heard today, Third Sight is a service. Right? So you don't have to install your own infrastructure. So, I'm not sure exactly what that's all about. I got to peel the onion on that one. >> To be determined right? When we look at things like that, particularly with Epic, we have to be careful because that is the HIPAA, PHI, that's your records, yours and mine, medical records right? You just don't want that, if I told you it's going to be hosted in a public cloud. Wait a minute. Where? No it's not. We don't want to be on the 10 o'clock news right? However, there's things like SAP HANA and other enterprise applications that we certainly could look at leveraging that technology. >> Excellent, we listen, thank you very much Brian for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate your perspectives and sort of educating us a little bit on your business and your industry anyway. And have a great rest of the show. >> Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. This is theCUBE. We're back live right after this short break from PURE Accelerate 2017. Be right back.

>> Voiceover: Live from Orlando, Florida. It's The Cube. Covering ServiceNow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here in Orlando at the Knowledge conference. Knowledge 17, ServiceNow's big customer show, and that's one of the things Jeff and I, Jeff Frick my co-host and I'm Dave Vellante like about Knowledge is we get to talk to the practitioners, the customers, the doers Naresh Samlal is here, he's the director of mobility and process automation at VITAS Healthcare. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Ah, I am glad to be here thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Tell us about VITAS. What's the organization about >> So VITAS is the largest hospice and palliative care provider in the country. What's unique about our business is that our patient care staff is really in the field. They're not bounded by four walls as compared to a typical healthcare provider. So our nurses, our chaplains, physicians and so forth go to the homes of our patients and being in hospice that, you know, our... We truly believe that Your best care is delivered in your own home, and so that's VITAS's directive is to really deliver that care in their home. Which really creates for a unique setting in managing you know, logistics and the staffing around that whole solution. But we've done it really well for 30 years and, you know we're looking forward to a great future with that. >> Well it's a really important service. Obviously, you know, families and loved ones can be together, and gather in very difficult times. Now in the past 30 years technology has changed quite a bit. How has that affected your business? >> Yes, that's a great question. In many ways, technology at VITAS has not changed. And so a lot of things that we have done historically have been... And still today there's many things that are still the same because that's what works and at the end of the day this fight, leveraging technology, the sensitive time in someone's life really needs that personal interaction and technology can't substitute that. However, we always are challenging ourselves to make that interaction more efficient with technology. So most recently, actually last year, we completed a deployment of 8,000 mobile devices to our patient care staff. So our nurses prior to this rollout walked around with 25 pounds of paper. They were traveling from their homes to our patients' homes, to our offices back and forth with paper, they didn't have access, real time access, to patient records like they do today. We replaced an entire binder with a mobile device. >> Dave: I was going to say these things change the world right? >> With an iPhone. Absolutely. >> So how many how many stops did it, you know, just a little bit of that kind of, their workflow how many stops a day do they make, kind of, what's kind of the scope of that? >> So that's a great question Um, they may, they'll have a starting point in a day, they know where their first patient they don't know where their last patient or how many they're going to see that day. So it could vary. It could be, you know five, it could be up to ten. And it varies based on the need, based on what that visit calls for. So it really varies and being able to have realtime information now and be more flexible and more efficient with these devices we're really able to allow them to give better care and more care quite frankly. >> Jeff: Right. >> So take us through the sort of case example of how you brought in ServiceNow Where's the driver and how did it change your organization. >> So there's quite a bit of efficiency and I talked about how the business has not changed very much over the course of time. But mobile devices as it relates to mobility and VITAS we really saw an opportunity to leverage the staff that we have to do more with them and give them the ability to give better care and not have to worry about the administrative aspects that come with that. For example, today they're able to access our EMR so they patient data right on their mobile device they can order drugs for our patients right on their mobile device. They can enter their time, their traveling, all these logistics that they weren't able to do they had to literally leave their home, go to a patient, go back to our main office or program office in that location, scan any documents they need to scan, enter any time, do some administrative stuff, go back out, that's kind of what the day looked like and so now with these devices we're able to free them up from having that extra travel. There's obviously a lot of cost saving opportunities around that, but it really allowed for, it allows for a nurse and a patient caregiver to maybe be able to see a patient, one patient more, two patients more in a day so that really transforms our business and really at the end of the day it's really going to allow VITAS to provide care because we believe we provide the best care in hospice and palliative care. You know, we feel that if you're not with VITAS you're not getting the best care and this really allows us to really see that through and position ourselves to deliver more. >> So where did you start with ServiceNow? >> So ServiceNow was actually introduced on the ITSM side so we brought it in to really fix our ticketing system get it up to, you know where it needed to be at the very least and out of that there was a parallel opportunity for us at management. So mobility was in its very infancy at the time. We knew we wanted to do it, we knew it could happen, we knew the benefits of it, but the reality of it was a little bit farfetched. Right? And so ServiceNow combined with a few other partners that we work with, really bringing that together and finding that secret sauce, and finding the right recipe for making that work allowed us to do this. One of the biggest things with managing so many devices and them being mobile, you know, physically off our premises is not knowing where they are, right? You know they don't actually hold patient data but there's some risk around security and exposing that so losing these devices, them getting in the wrong hands, was really important for us. So we really needed to first and foremost know where all our devices are at any given moment. Coupled with a few other pieces that work well with ServiceNow we now have that single pane of glass that we can really know exactly where the devices are, manage them in real time, we are able to tie our financial data right back to them so we're able to really get the full visibility of what mobility looks like and ServiceNow is at the core of that. They're at the center, we bring everything back into ServiceNow so we have one place to go manage our data, share and really, you know, be effective with it. >> So the data, the patient data, lives in the cloud? Is that right? >> So, essentially yes. So no data actually lives on the device, it's all a matter of the device being able to access the cloud. So through wifi, if they're at a hospital or if they're at a patient's home, or LTE coverage. >> And it used to live in paper that somehow got scanned, right? Which... >> I can't imagine, 'cause they don't know what the route is so now I assume they go to their first stop, it's got all that patient ABC, they finish, check in, I'm done, and then, where am I going next, get the data. >> I'm glad you brought that up, and so today they're able to access that information and I think part of the next step as to where VITAS is going is to really systematically tell them okay this is probably your next stop and not with a phone call to find out if they're available to do that but systematically know that they're available, when they're going to be available, and set them up with that information. And so that's really where we're looking to next. For mobility and technology at VITAS. >> What about all the, the compliance, the Affordable Care Act, EM, you had mentioned EMR, meaningful use, I mean all these things that you have to worry, HIPAA, maybe the potential unwinding of the Affordable Care Act, or maybe the evolution of it, I mean all these things you got to keep track of, where does that fit? >> So another great point, you know, one of the things, one of the things is, hospice is or end of life care really consumes about 30% of one's cost throughout their life. Most people don't realize that. That's your most expensive time in your life, in your cycle, that's going to go to what's healthcare. And that's where VITAS is very sensitive. And the other thing to note is that the average patient with VITAS is with us for two weeks. So timing is everything. >> Jeff: Two weeks. >> Yes. >> Dave: Yeah, short time. >> Right, so it gives... >> Jeff: And how many visits? What's the average number of visits in that two weeks? >> So we have 16,000 patients on our uh... >> No I mean for that particular, I mean what's kind of your average visits per patient over that two weeks? >> That may vary, depends on the patient, and this is average, right? So that may vary, sometimes it's 24/7 care other times it may be a couple times a day other times maybe once a day. And it really depends >> Dave: Okay, and so it's typically at least once a day, right? >> At least once a day, right. So that's not uncommon. So going back to your question, these things all come into play where as an organization, we feel the effects of regulation changes, right and that impacts our financials as well, so mobility, bringing mobility to the table with the help of ServiceNow and these other players that we make this work really helps us realize these efficiencies. Which at the end of the day, this is how we're able to really stay afloat in those areas and really not feel the impacts quite frankly. And if you look at our last quarter, we thrive. >> Yeah I mean and get paid on time, and not have to go back and forth, back and forth >> Well even like audit I would imagine I mean does the GPS data that demonstrates that your people were there, you know figure back into audits and all kinds of stuff I would imagine >> Right, and we are heavily audited with our devices as well. I mean they're very sensitive You got to think about it too, mobility and such a paradigm shift for a company like VITAS was and is very scrutinized, right? We spend a considerable amount of money in this program. We also see a lot of returns on it. But, it's a very different approach for folks that have done things a certain way for a really long time, right, so you talk about audits, going back to financials ServiceNow really allows us to stay really close to that. Be really tight, and speak with confidence when we provide our data, right, so our CFO is very sensitive to that and in a moment's notice we are able to respond to his request for last week's financials, last month's, what is our loss rate? You know, things like that just wasn't, we didn't have access to that type of date before. And quite frankly it's not something that's very common So most organizations see mobility I would have to say more as a luxury compared to how VITAS uses it today Today, this device is the clinical workstation at VITAS This is how our patient care staff works. This allows them to be productive. It's not a luxury. >> And how often do they come back to the barn, just to come back to the barn so they can get, they're you know, in the field most of the time actually working. >> So at the very least they may come back, they'll come back once a week now for a team meeting versus much more frequent for administrative work. Right? So that's had a tremendous impact on them. >> And how long ago again did you kind of roll out the solution? >> So we completed the rollout to the full audience at the end of last year so Q4 of last year so we've been at full feet for two quarters now and we're, and that really was setting the stage for what's to come next, right, so we're in the middle of rolling out an application right now which is going to allow our patient care staff to order drugs so our physicians and nurses can submit the request for drugs, and like items to treat our patients where as before, what that looked like was them having to leave the patient's house, run to the store, come back, or do a mail order request for drugs. So today... >> And will that be in the ServiceNow app or are you using ServiceNow to kind of manage everything and that's a separate kind of an app? >> Did you guys develop that app on top of ServiceNow or... >> We, so that is isolated from ServiceNow today, but we're standing it up as is, however that's something that we're actually considering looking at ServiceNow to see how we can play in that space as well because ServiceNow has done a lot for us, right we know it's a fantastic tool. We've used it in ways that are unconventional and we continue to do that. So part of, a lot of why we're here this week is to really capitalize on how they help us too. And so we're embarking on the journey program with ServiceNow to really look at how we can transform our business even further and opportunities like this really play a role into that. >> And so are you developing apps on ServiceNow or >> So we do have custom apps on ServiceNow, today they're very, you know, they're quick wins internally they really don't extend towards business they're more internal to IT, but that's really what the next phase of what we're looking at is how does ServiceNow really impact our business and our business processes, right, that's really our next step. >> And we can, can we differentiate just for my own edification, custom apps versus custom modifications, right? Those are two different things right? >> Configurations, right? >> Custom apps, you're building an app on top of the platform, what about custom mods, are you avoiding those at all costs? >> So, I can't say we're avoiding them at all costs and you really can't. You have to have some customization. We try to limit those so we can take on upgrades and take on, and be swift with all the new features that they bring on. So we're one version behind by, you know by design, and so, we're able to consume that as fast as they are able to release it because of our light customization. We try to stay out of the box. >> When you upgrade, do you test... So you're what in -1? >> Right. >> Okay, do you always upgrade to the next version, do you sometimes leapfrog? >> I have not had to leapfrog yet, so we've been pretty good about that and I plan to stick hard into that. >> So help us understand some maybe advice for other customers is you don't really want to leapfrog if you don't have to but sometimes you have to because you're too late in the upgrade cycle, is that right? >> Yeah. >> Okay, so. >> I mean, it's not ideal because you introduce a lot of unknowns if you have to leapfrog, right and ServiceNow, let me say this to your service, the upgrade process with ServiceNow has been unlike anything, any other upgrade process I've been through of any software. >> Dave: In what sense? >> It's been smooth, we've had very little issues coming out of it, we do full regression testing, but our findings are always very minimal, but the actual upgrade process is short, it's effective, it works, it's very informative, and they're getting even better at that, so for, you know that gives us a lot of peace of mind that we have a stable platform that we can really build and thrive on. >> How many upgrades have you gone through? >> We've done three so far? >> Okay >> What is short, Naresh with how long... >> I'm, you know I've done, I've seen inside of an hour at times, so our instance, we're two years into ServiceNow so we don't have you know, massive amount of data like maybe other companies do. We have substantial data there, but they're pretty quick I've seen an hour to do an upgrade. >> And how disruptive is an upgrade? >> Not at all. Here's one of my favorite parts about the upgrade is I don't have to announce that we're doing an upgrade to the general population. >> (laughs) >> Okay, they don't even know. >> That's a good indicator. >> They don't know. They're actually working in it while it's being upgraded. They log off, log back on, new version. Right? So I've been able to consume these upgrades as fast and as easily as I'm talking about. So I did one thing that was probably different than most people are doing. I'm suppressing the UI upgrade, and taking the platform upgrade, so the look and feel stays the same, and so we're in the middle of a program right now to relaunch ServiceNow with a new look and feel, new branding, just give it a whole new facelift, that's when I'm going to release the new UI. That's when we're going to give it... >> Jeff: But you really separate the skinning and the UI from the underlying platform. >> Yeah and you're allowed to do that, right? That's one of the points about it. >> And the UI changes, not on every cycle, is that correct? I mean it just changes periodically right? >> It's periodically. There's been subtle changes, and then there's been you know, full revamp for the better, but for the most part we're able to consume it and stay current with it because, you know, we can contain it that much. >> Yeah but it's different and then the user says oh, you know even like you know, crappy Gmail when they changed the, like oh it's new. >> You got to learn it all over again, you don't like it, it grows on you, well, you know we can control that now. We don't have to like, react to it every time. >> And the strategy to be in -1 is, can you explain that? What's the logic behind that? >> Yeah absolutely, so there's constantly a ton of new features. ServiceNow is learning from us and from many customers and really being reactive to that. And so I want that whatever we have and we're trying to do we're getting, we have access to the latest and greatest, and we don't have to go build something if I know it's there It also helps us identify and plug gaps in our system, so, in our processes. So, for example, we may know we have a host of different things that we need to regularly work on. Consuming an upgrade and it being so simple as just turning something on or just start using it means I can get to be more efficient quicker rather than having to put that on a priority list and get focused, and get a project going, and get a team behind it, it's just more consumable that way and we're able to be more agile, and improve quicker as well. So that's one of the reasons I like doing upgrades and staying current with it. >> Alright Naresh, thanks very much for coming onto The Cube, I appreciate you sharing >> I appreciate it, thank you so much for having me. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright keep it right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest... (applause) Thank you! Right after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> (Narrator) Live, from Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to Boston everybody, this is Red Hat Summit, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, with my cohost Stu Miniman, and John Hodgson is here, he's the Senior Director of IT Program Management at Optum technology. John good to see ya. >> Good, it's good to be here. >> Fresh off the keynote, we were just talking about the large audience, a very large audience here. And Optum, you described a little bit at the keynote what Optum is with healthcare, sort of technology arm. Which is not super common but not uncommon in your world. But describe Optum and where it fits. >> So in the grand scheme of things within UnitedHealth Group you know, we have the parent company, of course, you know the Health Group, our insurance side, that does insurance, whether it's public sector for large corporations, as well as community and state government type work as UnitedHealthcare. They do all that, and then Optum is our technology side. We do really all the development, both for supporting UHC as our main customer, you know, they're truly our focus, but we also do a lot of commercial development as well for UnitedHealthcare's competitors. So big, big group, as I mentioned in the keynote. Over 10,000 developers in the company, lots of spend, I think in the last year our, just internal IT budget was like $1.2 billion in just IT development capital. So it's huge. >> Dave: Mind-boggling. >> John, you've got that internal Optum Cloud, Can you give us just kind of the breadth and depth, you said 1.2 billion, there. What is that make up, what geographies does that span, how many people support that kind of environment? >> As far as numbers of people supporting it, I think we've got a few hundred in our Enterprise Technology Services Group, that supports Optum Cloud. We started Optum Cloud probably a half a dozen years ago, and it's gone through its different iterations. And part of my job right now is all about Enterprise Cloud adoption and migration. So, we started with our own environment, we call it UCI, United, it was supposed to be Converged Infrastructure, but I call it our Cloud Infrastructure, that's really what it is. And we've continued to enhance that. So over the last few years, I think about 3.5, four years ago, we brought in Red Hat and OpenShift. We're on our third iteration of OpenShift. Very, very stable platform for us now. But we also have Azure Stack in there as well, I think even as Paul and those guys mentioned in the keynote there's a lot of different things that you can kind of pull from each one of the technology providers to help support what we're doing, kind of take the best of breed from each one of them, and use them in each solution. >> Organizations are always complaining that they spend all this money on keeping the lights on, and they're trying to make the shift, and obviously Cloud helps them do that, and things like OpenShift, etc. What's that like in your world? How much of your effort is spent on maintenance and keeping the lights on? Sounds like you got a lot of cool, new development activity. Can you describe that dynamic for us? >> Yeah, we've got a really good support staff. Our group, SSMO, when we build an application, they kind of take it back over and run everything. We've got a fabulous support team in the background. And to that end, and it's on both sides, right? We have our UnitedHealthcare applications that we build that have kind of their own feature set, because of what it's doing internally for us, versus what we do on the OptumInsight side, where it's more commercial in nature. So they have some different needs. Some of the things that we're developing, even for Cloud Scaffolding that I mentioned in the keynote. We're kind of working on both sides of the fence, there, to hit the different technologies that each one of them really need to be successful, but doing it in a way that it doesn't if you're on one side of the fence or the other, it's a capability that everybody will be able to use. So if there's a pattern on one side that you want to be able to use for a UHC application, by all means, go ahead and grab it, take it. And a lot of what we're doing now is even kind of crowdsourcing things, and utilizing the really super intelligent people that we have, over 10,000 developers. And so many of them, we've got a lot of legacy stuff. So there's some old-school guys that are still doing their thing, but we've got a lot of new people. And they want to get their hands on the new fresh stuff, and experience that. So there's really a good vibe going on right now, with how things are changing, all the TDP folks that we're bringing in. A lot of fresh college grads and things. And they love to see the new technologies, whether it's OpenShift or whatever. Lot are really getting into DevOps, trying to make that change in a big organization is difficult, we got a little ways to go with that. But that's kind of next up. >> You're an interesting case study, because you've got a lot of the old and a lot of cool innovation going on. And is it, how do you decide when to go, because DevOps is not always the answer. Sometimes waterfall is okay, you know. So, how do you make that determination, and where do you see that going? >> That's a great question, that's actually part of what my team does. So my specific team is all about Cloud adoption and migration, so our charter is really to work across the enterprise. So whether it's OptumInsight, OptumRx, UnitedHealthcare, we are working with them to evaluate their portfolios of applications to figure out legacy applications that we have that are still strategic. They've got life in them, they've got business benefit. And we want to be able to take advantage of that, but at the same time there's some of these monolithic applications that we look at how can we take that application, decompose it down into microservices and APIs, things like that, to make it available to other applications that maybe are just greenfield, are coming out now, but still need that same technology and information. So that's really what my team is doing right now. So we sit down with those teams and go through an analysis, help them develop a road map. And sometimes that road map is two or three years long. Getting to fully cloud from where they're at right now in some of these legacy applications is a journey. And it costs money, right? There's a lot of budget concerns and things like that that go with it. So that's part of what we helped develop is a business case for each one of those applications that we can help support them going back, and getting the necessary capital to do the cloud migrations and the improvements, and really the modernization of their applications. We started the program a couple of years ago and found that if you want to hang your hat on just going from old physical infrastructure, some of the original VMs that we had. And just moving over to cloud infrastructure, and whether that's UCI, OpenShift, Azure, whatever. If you're going to do your business case on that, you're going to be writing a lot of business cases before you get one approved. It's all about modernizing the applications. So if you fold in the move to new infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, along with the ability to modernize that application, get them doing agile development, getting down the DevOps path, looking at automated testing, automated deployment, zero downtime deployments. All of those things, when you add them up together and say, okay, here's what your real benefit looks like. And you're able to present that back to the business, and show them speed to market, speed to value is a new metric that we have. Getting things out there quickly. We used to do quarterly releases, or even biannual releases. And now we're at monthly, weekly, some of our applications that are more relatively new, Health4Me, if you go to the App Store, that's kind of our big app on the App Store. There's updates on a very frequent basis. >> So that's the operating model, really, that you're talking about, essentially, driving business value. We had a practitioner on a couple weeks ago, and he said, "If you just lift and shift to the cloud, "and you don't change your operating model, "you won't get a dime." >> Stu: You're missing the boat. >> Maybe there's something, some value there, a little faster, but you're talking about serious dollars, if you can change the operating model. And that's what you've found? >> Yeah absolutely, and that's the, it's a shift, and you've got to be able to prove it to the business that's there's benefit there, and sometimes that's hard. Some of these cloud concepts and things are a little nebulous, so-- >> It's hard 'cause it's soft. >> It's soft, right, yeah, I mean, you're putting the business case together, the hard stuff is easy to document, but when you're talking about the soft benefits, and you're trying to explain to them the value that they're going to get out of their team switching from a waterfall development over to agile and DevOps, and automated testing and things like that, where I can say, "Hey listen, "you know your team over here that has been, "you know we took them out of the pocket, "from actually doing their day jobs for the last week, "because they needed to test this new version? "If I can take that out of the mix, "and they don't have to do that anymore, "and they can keep on doing what they're doing "and not get a week behind, what value is that for you?" And all of a sudden they're like, "Oh really? "We don't have to do that anymore?" I'm like, "No, we can create test scripts and stuff. "We can automate your deployment. "We can make it zero downtime. "We have," there's an application that we're working on now that has 19,000 individual desktop deployments. And we're going to automate that, turn it into a software as a service application, host it on OpenShift, and completely knock that out. I mean deployments out to 19,000 people take weeks to get done. We only do a couple thousand a week, because there's obviously going to be issues. So now you've got helpdesk tickets, you've got desktop technicians that are going round, trying to fix things, or dialing in, remoting into somebody's desktop to try to help figure that all out. We can do the whole deployment in a day, and everybody logs in the next day, and they've got the new version. That kind of value in creating real cloud-based applications is what's driving the benefit for us. And they're finally starting to really see that. And as we're doing it, more application product owners are going, "Okay, now we're getting some traction. "We heard what you did over here. "Come talk to us, and let's talk "about building a road map and figuring out what we can do." >> John, one of the questions I got from the community after watching you keynote was, they want to understand how you handle security and enforce compliance in this new cloud development model. (laughs) >> That's beyond me, all I can tell you is that we have one of the most secure clouds out there. Our private cloud is beyond secure. We're working right now to try to get the public hybrid cloud space with both AWS and Azure, and working through contracts and stuff right now. But one of the sticking points is our security has to be absolutely top notch, if we're going to do anything that has HIPAA-related data, PHI, PII, PCI, any of that, it has got to be lock-solid secure. And we have a tremendous team led by Robert Booker, he's absolutely fabulous, I mean we're, our whole goal, security-wise, is don't be the next guy on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. >> You mentioned public cloud, how do you make your decisions as to what application, what data can live in which public cloud? You said you've got Azure Stack, and you've got OpenShift. How do you make those platform decisions? >> Well right now, both OpenShift and Azure Stack are on our internal private cloud. So we're in the process of kind of making that shift to move over towards public and hybrid cloud. So I'm working with folks on our team to help develop some of those processes and determine what's actually going to be allowed. And I think in a lot of cases the PHI and protected data is going to stay internal. And we'll be able to take advantage of hosting certain parts of an application on public cloud while keeping other parts of the data really secure and protected behind our private cloud. >> Red Hat made an announcement this morning with AWS, with OpenShift. >> Sounds like that might be of interest to you, would that impact what your doing? >> Absolutely, yeah, in fact I was talking with Jim and Paul back behind the screen this morning. And we were talking about that and I was like wow that is a game changer. With what we're thinking about doing in the hybrid cloud space, having all of the AWS APIs and services and stuff available to us. Part of the objection that I get from some folks now is knowing that we have this move toward public and hybrid cloud internally, and the limitations of our cloud. We're never going to be, our private Optum Cloud is never going to be AWS or Azure, it's just not. I mean they've spent billions of dollars getting those services and stuff in place. Why would we even bother to compete with that? So we do what we do well, and a big portion of that is security. But we want to be able to expand, and take advantage of the things that they have. So that's, this whole announcement of being able to take advantage of those services natively within OpenShift? If we're able to expose that, even internally, on our own private cloud? That's going to take away a lot of the objections, I think, from even our own folks, who are waiting to do the public hybrid cloud piece. >> When the Affordable Care Act hit, did your volume spike? And as things, there's a tug of war now in Washington, it could change again, does that drive changes in your application development in terms of the volume of requests that come in, and compliance things that you have to adhere to? And if so, does having a platform that's more agile, how does that affect your ability to respond? >> Yeah it does, I mean when we first got into the ACA, there was a number of markets that we got into. And there was definitely a ramp-up in development, new things that we had to do on the exchanges. Stuff like that. I mean we even had groups from Optum that were participating directly with the federal government, because some of their exchanges were having issues, and they needed some help from us. So we had a whole team that was kind of embedded with the federal government, helping them out, just based on our experience doing it. And, yeah, having the flexibility, in our own cloud, to be able to able to spin up environments quickly, shut them down, all that, really it's invaluable. >> So the technology business moves so fast, I mean it wasn't that long ago when people saw the first virtualized servers and went Oh my gosh, this is going to change the world. And now it's like, wow we got to do better, and containers. And so you've gone for this amazing transformation, I mean, I think it was 17 developers to 1,600, which is just mind-boggling. Okay, and that's, and you've got technologies that have helped you do that, but five years down the road there's going to be a what's next. So what is next for you? As you break out your telescope, what do you see? >> God, I don't know, I mean I never would have predicted containers. >> Even though they've been around forever, we-- >> Yeah I mean when we first went to VMs, you know back in the day I was a guy in the server room, racking and stacking servers and running cables, and doing all that, so I've seen it go from one extreme to the next. And going from VMs was a huge switch. Building our own private cloud was amazing to be a part of, and now getting into the container side of things, hybrid cloud, I think for us, really, the next big step for us is the hybrid cloud. So we're in the process of getting that, I assume by the end of this year, early next, we'll be a few steps into the hybrid cloud space. And then beyond that, gosh I don't know. >> So that's really extending the operating model into that hybrid cloud notion, bringing that security that you talked about, and that's, you got a lot of work to do. >> John: That's a big task in itself. >> Let's not go too far beyond that, John. Alright well listen, thanks for coming on theCUBE, it was really a pleasure having you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me guys, appreciate it. >> You're welcome, alright keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

but cube at servicenow knowledge 14 is sponsored by service now here are your hosts Dave vellante and Jeff trick here we go hi buddy we're back this is Dave vellante with Jeff freak this is the cube we go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise we have a crowd chatting on its crowd chat / no 14 so check that out put your tweets in crouch at awesome engagement app Frank's Lupin is here president CEO of service now Frank it's it's a pleasure to have you back on the cube great to see again great to be here thanks things how you feeling I'm feeling great no I got that keynote got the keynote out this morning you had the financial analyst in yesterday had the industry analyst and they're working you hard absolutely it's a circus yeah so your keynote this morning was great I was right up front they have a nice spot for the industry analyst so appreciate that take good notes but one of the themes that you struck was really hit home to me because you talked about transforming IT from essentially a cost center into a value producer and how service now is at the heart of that and and how the role of the CIO is changing so one of you could sort of summarize and talk a little bit about how you see the role of IT and generally in the CIO specifically changing and what role service now plays in that transformation yeah just just to give a little bit on macro context right that's sort of the worst of all scenarios that we see out there where I t is essentially viewed as as a commodity as a utility and as a result you know people don't see much impact I just want to get a cheaper cheaper cheaper and they want to cut more costs out of the infrastructure and staffing levels and so on and actually is just an organization that we're tolerating because I guess we have to have email and Internet access and all that sort of thing now you go looking into broader world around what technology has done to change business right what amazon has done based on their technology platform what we've seen an online banking you know what we're seeing an online education there's just just incredible examples of innovation using technologies now aighty hasn't done that for their own enterprises they happen in some instances are some some really great examples out there where I t did impacted business but by and large IT is not viewed as to go to people that know how to bring technology into business you know in a way that that really turns the tables on the competition do some mind-blowing things i always ask CIOs when i when i meet him and says what have you done in the last 12 months that really blew people's minds or in terms of applying technology to business problems right and they start sort of thinking like i'll actually it is surely nothing i can think of well that's probably you know a question you should be asking yourself all the time right if it's not when lightning in a bottle when it's not the sort of thing that sort of lights up the whole enterprise like we won't do it is we have to do this that excitement then you're shooting too low and you know in general I find the the cost obsession and IT is an indication that we're not looking for the opportunity and I think that's that that's it that's a damn shame or we're here to change that well you talked about panning for gold was that proposed here in California and it's also a propellant you your company is smoking hot and you know your your commonly associated with the likes of workday and Salesforce and sponsor must be very very proud of that but also there's gold and then RIT shops right there's goal than those organizations that's not being being mined and and you know I think you talk about your penetration is what twenty percent of your your target your global 2000 where we have footprint in about eighteen percent of the enterprises that we think are relevant and appropriate to us but within those eighteen percent you know we were probably a third saturated so so very early innings for service now even though we've achieved considerable scale and very high growth at that scale so when you go into one of your accounts can you discern actual that actual value production vision that you set forth can you see it can you touch it can you you know to this to a skeptic a prospectus yeah Frank that sounds good but can you actually sort of provide proof points yeah managing surface is just essential in terms of economizing and saving money and here's why no I'll give you some some very pedestrian examples that we've seen in real life and the human resources department and probably get the example because I t everybody sort understands how to how the game works right HR organizations historically have not had service models they have that email and phones and so on the problem just called somebody as a result that was a huge amount of work that preoccupied the HR organization that nobody knew what people were working on and the staffing grew and grew and grew to deal with the growing volume of ink wires and problems and changes and so on until they have systems service models and they have reporting and analytics that showed them what was consuming their time once you know that you can put initiatives in place to start dealing with the underlying causes that are driving that work I have seen HR organizations dwindle their staffing by 50% just by understanding what of this day we're working on right that's what service management is all about instead of just delivering service you're managing and once that quarter drops by the way IT organizations they get this in space right because you know large enterprises they got fifty hundred thousand one hundred fifty thousand instance flowing to their organization a month it's a huge consumer of resource right if you go to these other service domains and you see very similar things this layer of software really optimizes that resource well the way they attack it oftentimes is human resource doesn't that scare a lot of prospects away when they hear oh wow near cup service now and they're going to replace all these these people it's a it's a good question actually wrote a blog post about it recently as well there is no doubt that in the economy at large we're going to see massive substitution from people to systems why because the technology is here and the economic imperative is here it's very much a societal and social question but you know here's the thing see alternative you know are we going to try and stop it and not do it it's going to happen the markets are going to run their course what needs to happen is that we adjust you know for example you know in education we have a lot of teachers right what's going to happen to teachers when education is delivered through online streaming well teachers gobble you want to become crooklyn developers in other words evolve and change in their roles because education is going online slowly but let's go into why because the format the service experience is that much better it scales that much better in step much more economical than what we currently have well you said today in your key note that the system is broken you know I'm having to put four kids through school I appreciate a nudge there to the educational system why did it take so long I mean these are the IT guys ease of the technology guys in the organization they're there to deliver value why did it take so long for this kind of transformational yeah wave Steve Jobs has been the late Steve Jobs been quoted many times people don't know what they want until I show it to him and that's sort of what we're doing we're showing it to him that's what we did this morning we're showing people what they can aspire to that's what we're here for we're trying to stimulate inspire motivate give people a sense of mission right as opposed to keeping the lights on managing crises running around with your hair on fire that's not a very attractive you know a view to half of your organization and what you do all day right yeah so I have it struck again by your keynote the Affordable Care Act affectionately known as Obamacare they not the government not a customer of yours or what's the scoop oh no they could you have helped with had problem we could have for sure but then again many people cook that for the foot of people then software and technology they look at something like that yeah last night I set a dinner with Adam infrastructure for Kaiser Permanente and they had a certainly know the problems of open enrollment that a massive scale and certainly we didn't want to trivialize the problem it is really really hard to need to operate the service like that at the scale that that they need to but there is no doubt that you know we don't need any new core technology to build systems like that I mean the technology exists the skills exists sure that I want to walk better than so let's talk about your business a little bit this year third year now right since you've joined service now exactly three years this week yeah so let's sort of break that down but when you when you join service now that the discussion was around and you talked about this yesterday the the whole team and everybody was looking at help desk saying wow how can these these these values be justified and of course you blew that away and now people are beginning to understand that it's interesting to note that data domain you sold the company i think for what 2.5 billion the entire market is is now greater than the market that it replaced interesting that's right the market was three billion it's now I according obviously bigger than three billion and growing yeah you know so that's kind of interesting now that's a much more confined market you know you talked about the tons of the team they're being finite you always knew it was finite here it's different you guys have started to sort of fine tune your tam analysis and communicate that it's still hard because you just don't know the how people are going to use your software they're finding new ways but the team and I took a stab and I came up with 30 billion but it was a top-down it wasn't a bottom up and it was I had to get the blog post out so it's kind of a back of the napkin but still it's very very large clearly a multiple of the IT service management market so I wonder if you could talk about sort of the the evolution of your thinking in terms of the market opportunity with service now were you always sort of where we are today or that have to evolve over time now it has evolved I'd say dramatically obviously the expansion from what used to be called help desk management to IT service management basically you know exploded the market at least 5-fold and they were licensing five to ten times as many people on our system now for itsm purposes then we used to and in the mid 90s during to help desk area because back then all we did was licensed people ever physically on the help desk right people that would take phone calls and emails and so on now really everybody in the IT organization is an actor and a participant in the workflow of service management you may be a DBA maybe a network engineer you're going to get when an incident comes in or a problem is defined you're going to be part of that workflow right so that Dad expansion was not understood early on but beyond that services is everything is everywhere and services everything and every physical and even non physical assets have service models around them so once you start looking forward you see it absolutely everywhere you know I don't know what's a few billion among friends you know I know all that the numbers are but this is heavily transformational I think one of the things that people struggle with they're looking for a line of sight right in our company like workday is viewed very possibly why because they're seeing them take dollar for dollar market evaluation away from companies that they can identify recipe in Oracle and so on feels very credible to gamma that's 250 billion dollars or mark oh I can see those guys from work the Oracle Sapa okay take a chunk out of their eyes I know you go look at service now you need to have more imagination there's this great court from Arthur Schopenhauer that I showed you yesterday which said you know you know takedowns to hit a target that nobody else can hit but it takes genius to hit a target on nobody else can see right it's transformational right what worked it does is modern with what service now does this transformation is fundamentally different so when you came on to service now I presume your focus was putting in the infrastructure and the process is to make sure that you could scale just having watched you in your career you're you're big on growth and yeah you're pretty aggressive so so take us through sort of you know where you sort of started and what the emphasis was and and where it is now be clearly you're investing in sales and marketing you're investing in AP I didn't know this the substantial number of global 2000 companies in asia-pacific so that's another so how is that I mean break that down into maybe one or two or three sort of segments of your attention and effort there there's sort of you can sort of split up in two major stages or phases the first phase you know when when I took over the helm of the company was very much focused on operationalizing stabilizing scale being able to deliver what we're already doing in a consistent and predictable manner and that was not a minor task because because the company had grown so fast but hadn't been able to basically catch itself in terms of bill into business building the organization underneath its business so that preoccupied us tremendously the whole thing about cloud is is not like there's a lot of people you know running around out there to actually no clout that understand clot that can build clouds and how many people do you know that I've actually done this because there's you know three years ago I mean they were far and few we actually recruited people that have built the original cloud of ebay because those guys were pioneers they have solved a lot of the problems associated with cloud early on we saw a lot of people that understood data centers the cloud this is almost in verse two data centers the mentality that you need to to run them davos phase one before us and we sort of got through that you know about you know a year and a half ago for sure about a year ago and we started to shift gears you know really from the operational infrastructure concentration that we've had to really trying to drive strategically the business towards enterprise service management they're really expanding the addressable market way beyond where we had been before we were going to market until i see i l-look itsm replacement you have to do it you're sitting on 10 15 20 year old software it's crappy it's got to go fine we're going to do that right but we want to give you this much bigger perspective managing service in the enterprise and you know make that a mission that you can own as a CEO and drive throughout your organization over a period of years and a lot of our customers have road maps that are 24 36 months and it shows you all the things they're going to knock off over that period of time and all the different you know parksley enterprises to sell is its engineering its market yourself so on yes okay so Tam expansion and now obviously accessing that to him we hire in a lot of sales people and go to market I was struck walking around the exhibit hall last night because you just announced app creator I think last year yep knowledge I was struck by you know that the booth down there with the number of apps I mean it's just astounding where that's going wouldn't have predicted you know some of them that I that I saw so that's obviously part of the the tam expansion as well I wonder if we could talk about the importance of a single system of record in order to achieve that vision because it's not always easy right politically people want to keep data in their own little silos so how does that work you can't force it in because it sort of just happen organically how critical is that to your success I mean when you have applications or services that relate to each other like for example you know this morning we showed in a demo I think we're sure like seven or eight different applications in the course of one demonstration the reason that is a single system of record matters so much when you do that is all these apps need to be aware of each other right when your when your staff in the projects you need to look at the resource management well that resource management relates to the skill requirements as well the skills that are available right what you don't want is these apps living in their own universes with their own data moss your own database because now you have to start the hack integrations between them to make any sense out of that and that's the world we lived and that's been the bane of software existence for for so long the ServiceNow said I'm not going to do that okay every application that relates to any other application they're going to be operating on exactly the same data model and by the way you see that throughout our platform right when you bring up an asset in the CMDB like a server or a rather or Santa whatever it is you'll be able to see all the other data artifacts throughout the platform like instantly problem of changes in projects and tasks that relate to that particular asset there's nobody else that can do that right and we provide the 360-degree visibility that makes application development so compelling because you know all the users are already defined the system you don't even have to get started with that you only define users once right you reuse all that and all the other artifacts already exists so you get this data gravitas that the more data that is there to richer the application with almond environment becomes yeah we talked about this too at the analyst meeting about the relationship to your M&A strategy you've got to be selective it's got to fit in to that single system of record does that however limit your choices in rule absolute limit our choices but you know this is the commitment from an architectural standpoint that we make us that we're not going to repeat what legacy vendors have done is I mean you know 50 apps whole stand along to hack integrations between them as I said that's the world our customers want to leave behind because it was just horrible former from an efficiency standpoint after a while all you people do is managing the operability of the patchwork plethora of assets that they have they're not doing anything productive and in our world they don't they do none of that right they're not upgrading software because it's the clouds you know we do that and they're not hacking integrations between apps because there is no constant of integration on service not with all the apps are aware through a shared data model so is there still plenty of M&A opportunity for you out there though I mean your stocks up I know it's off a little bit lately which I think it's really healthy I'm happy about that nice little breather but still you know you've made great progress adding value you can obviously use your stock as acquisition card co there's still plenty of opportunities for you notice there's absolutely tons of opportunities again in a day you know software infrastructure is it's very similar and very common between application itself for us to bring an application into our user interface framework I mean they have to have a user interface framework of some sort right so whether we replace what they have with ours with a replace the data structure we replace the underlying cloud we can do all those things right the question is is there going to be hard is it going to be expensive is it going to be time-consuming or maybe not as much and that will influence how attractive we are to the asset all right Frank we're way over on time but I could go forever i mean really appreciate you coming on CX for having us here it's really fantastic event all right keep it right to everybody we're back with our next guest this is the cube we're live from moscone right back