>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering get lab commit 2020 Rocky you buy get lab. >>Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the cubes coverage of get lab commit 2020 here in San Francisco. Kicking off our coverage of 2020 a great developers show talking about the, the platform they get. Lab is building and have one of the keynote presenters from this morning. Christy Lineville who is the user experience director at get lab. Thanks so much for joining us. My pleasure. All right, so th one of the things that uh, you know you and was talking, talking in the keynote this morning was we have the scroll of tools and of course one of the challenges people know is if you're talking different tools in different environments, the user interface is going to be different. And therefore the stat I heard in the keynote was over 50% of dev ops time is wasted on logistics and repetitive tasks and all these environments. Before we dig into it. Christie, I'd love just a little bit about your background because you hinted at it a little bit in your keynote that some past experiences you've had. So what, what led you to this role at get lab? >>Yeah, so I've been in tech for about 20 years. Um, didn't go to school thinking that I would be a UX or one day because 20 years ago, frankly it wasn't even a thing. Um, but over the years I've gotten to work at Dell and general motors, Rackspace and then a regional company that's still huge called HEB. So lots of enterprise, lots of tech, um, which is areas that I'm just really passionate about. UX and, >>yeah, well we, we, we talk so much about Keck. Um, I love, one of the things I've looked at my career is there's the cool tech button, you know, what is, how does design fit into these, you know, there's of course the easy examples of Apple, but you know, so many of the products, when you talk about the difference between it being a utility, and I love this thing often is the design. And that, that, that user experience piece of it, um, in the dev ops software world, give us a little bit of your world challenges that you're seeing. What differentiates a, you know, an okay product versus something that customers are going to be like, you know, I love this. I want everybody to use it and, you know, want to spread, spread the gospel. >>Yeah. Um, so building the types of tools that we are building at get lab isn't sexy or like working at Apple. Um, but I'll tell you this, the designers who work on these types of tools are really deeply passionate about creating great experiences for people to do their jobs every day. Um, which is actually really exciting work. So what's interesting though is oftentimes people are coming from using these very outdated legacy tools. Oftentimes their internal tools, uh, they just don't have a great experience. So we get really excited about being able to take the type of tool that someone is kind of like, these folks don't have a choice. They're not getting to decide which tool they get to use to do their job. They have to use it. And we're really respectful of that. Just because they have to use it doesn't mean that we want to take advantage of that. Uh, we want it to be a really excellent experience. >>All right, so Christie, I had heard before when you talk about get lab there, there's dev, there's sec, there's ops in the keynote, you talked, even groups like finance and marketing need to get involved. There's very different expectations and skill set when you talk about those roles. So it helped me understand a little bit, are there different interfaces based on my roles? Is it just so simple that anybody should be able to understand it? Help us understand. >>Yeah. So that's the goal. I'm not going to tell you that they're there yet today, but that's the idea. So yeah, having worked in tech for such a long time, um, it's, I've got a lot of, uh, experience with watching different roles, try to interact with these technical teams that need the tech teams for them. This is, this is bread and butter stuff. They know exactly what's going on. And, uh, other roles really try to kind of bring themselves to the developers and that's what we're trying to make easy. So things like taxonomy play a huge role in that. The way that, uh, deeply technical people talk about the work that they do is very different from how people in other roles do. And we're starting to think about how we can converge those two things just to make it easy for everyone. >>No, I love that because a few years ago there was Oh, developers and the new kingmakers and they're going to do off their thing, but it kind of seemed like the developers were off on the side and they were going to choose their tools and figure things out and then somebody eventually needed to pay for something and figure out how it works in the environment. The story I'm hearing and the maturation of that is developers are closer to the business and these roles need to talk and communicate and fit together. Is that what you're seeing? >>Yeah, that's absolutely right. >>All right, so get lab also your, your product line spans of just a broad spectrum. There's, yeah, I don't have memorize the 10 categories that you need to fit. Um, I believe there was a couple of acquisitions, uh, that helped grow here. But you start with SCM and CII. Those alone, making sure that those work together is a certain bit of work. But how do you, how do you span the gamut and make sure that all these various pieces, uh, I'm going to have some kind of coherent experience. >>Yeah. So we're also thinking about project planning that happens before SCM NCI ever starts. Um, and so we're thinking about how do we make it easy to take something from an idea, an issue directly into that build process. Um, and then after that it's like, okay, so then what happens next? Keeping it secure, um, and then watching it to see what's going on it and then just getting it out onto infrastructure through our ops features. Okay. >>Talk a little bit about how you interact with the ecosystem in the community. Also, it's everything is open to, you know, understand, you know, I want them to see the meeting minutes. I can dive right in and do it. And we heard lots of examples in the presentations about, Oh, some change has been made or you know, your CEO joke to somebody corrects my grammar. And that not necessarily, Oh, maybe it is someone inside the company, but uh, you know, that dynamic is to make sure you have something that is coherent when you have so many different internal and external constituencies that will be opinionated as how things should go. >>Yeah. Um, so let's see here. Um, ask me again. Sorry. >>Yeah. So you get all these other constituents that, that want to kind of have a stake and probably have an opinion as to how things should go. How do you make sure it works, not just forget lab but all of your customers and the partner ecosystem that you're building around it. >>Thank you. And so we do take the comments that come in on issues very seriously. Uh, my team is looking at that. Our product managers are certainly looking at that. Um, and we look at that as directional information. Where my team really takes that though is then we dive in and we do UX research. Um, so we are very mindful of the fact that the comments that are coming in, um, we don't take them literally, uh, we take them as kind of advice about where do you dig in next? And so what my team is doing is figuring out, uh, what roles are really interested in this future going out and either doing surveys or talking directly to customers doing qualitative interviews, or we're sitting down and saying, okay, so we get it. You have some feedback here and that's wonderful, but what were you trying to do? How did you even get here? Where did you want to go next? What things are working well for you? What things aren't working as well? And then that's a lot of what we do. >>Um, you've got a global environment that this is going into. What, what challenges does that put on what you're doing? >>Yeah, it brings a lot of challenges. Uh, one of the bigger challenges that it brings is in our UI copy, right? Um, so field labels, things like that. We really try to be mindful about that. Uh, so in a couple of different ways. So, um, the way that people talk about things a is different throughout the world. We try to be mindful about not using things like jargon. Um, so that everything is clear and easy to understand no matter where you are. We also think about things though like length of text, which can have a really big impact. So we know German tends to have some long words. We have to be mindful of that as we're writing UX copy. Cause in the end we want this to be as easy for everyone to understand as possible the moment that they look at it. All right. >>Uh, how about announcements? Uh, we, I understand the 22nd of every month is when a code drops. So just bring us up to speed as to what people should know about boat get lab product today. >>Yeah. So we, we released features at an industry changing velocity. I have never seen anything like it. Um, and from a, I'm always gonna think from a UX perspective, UX is deeply involved in that. So there is not a release that goes by where you as a customer or a user can't actually see the impact of the release. Yeah. Things are happening behind the scenes and we're shoring things up and strengthening the backend, but we're doing things on the front end constantly. Um, and my designers and researchers know that that's like they're on the hook for that. And so they're always thinking about like, what's that next thing that we can deliver? >>All right, so Kristi, dark mode for everything. >>dark mode has definitely been something that we have heard from our user base that they really want. Um, something that we're working on is a good design system so that we have single source of truth components we'll make that'll make it much easier for us to do the dark mode that we know is a legitimate ask from our user base. >>Yeah, absolutely. Anything else? Uh, just trends or things that you're looking at for 2020 >>trends that we're looking at? No, it's interesting. I'll be honest, I don't think that we think a lot about trends. What we're really doing is we're looking at the feedback that's coming in directly from our user base and then we're trying to make decisions based on that. Um, so actually I don't, I couldn't say that we have any trends. >>Well, you know, mobile drove a lot of the last decade or so. Are any of the voice or interactive, you know, type of platforms have any impact on what you're doing yet? >>Yeah, so we, uh, we are thinking about mobile. We're not thinking about in the term about it in terms of, uh, native mobile apps. We're really trying to think about it in terms of just making a really good responsive experience. Uh, we're trying to get a better sense of which jobs, um, are most commonly done on mobile devices so that we can focus first on making those better. Um, but that's also something we're trying to think about with every design. So I see my designers doing a really good job these days. So they, you know, they put together a design, they're thinking about it in terms of desktop, and then I see them pivot and think, okay, so what does this now look like on a mobile device? So we have a lot of work to do in this area. I'm not going to tell you that we don't, but I see us getting better and better all the time. >>All right, Christie, thanks so much for giving us all the updates. Really great to dig into it. It's been my pleasure. Alright, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube.

>>Hi. Welcome to the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin on the ground at the Computer History Museum with the Association for Corporate Go Silicon Valley. Tonight is their 13th annual grow worth, and we're very excited to be with one of their pick sponsors. Deloitte Christie. Simon's from Deloitte. Welcome. Thank you. Great to have you here. So you are a veteran and technology. You've been in the tech industry over 25 years. You've probably seen incredible transformation. Tell us about what you're doing with Deloitte and the advisory service is not you. Offer way. Offer a number of service is advisory audit tax too in Silicon Valley to a lot of these emerging growth companies. So it's been very exciting >>in my >>career to see the evolution of what I call old technology right where we kind of got the traditional software semiconductor box companies to what is now digitally what I call a new technology and what is propelling the economy in the throat that we're seeing. Not only in Bali. Exactly. So right now you are working, leading hurt and development of Deloitte's technology practice up in San Francisco. You're working with clients and you mentioned digital and clown Internet media sectors tell us about that, especially as you mentioned new technology. So a lot of them are startup companies, which is really sweet spotted, A C G. And that's why we're so involved with a G. But a lot of these new technology companies that you mentioned, you know, cloud software service, Internet media, data security, those types of companies, eyes really propelling the digital economy. So we see a lot of growth in that sector, primarily in San Francisco but also in the broader Bay Area. Silicon being checked better and as you are you mentioned out of what's going on domestically but also internationally. How do you see the influence of Silicon Valley here in Silicon Valley as well as across the globe? You know, there's a lot of factors weigh serve companies all over the globe. So primarily, Silicon Valley is propelling a lot of those. And to the extent that companies here are international, most of a lot of multinational companies and do sell their products lovely there, developed here with products are actually sold. Are you seeing kind of the inverse where companies may be headquartered in in Europe or Asia? are influencing and bringing technology over to the Silicon Valley. Next thing, let us here. Yeah, some of that, especially as we think about, uh, engineers and the aspects and some of that development that happens there, obviously sourcing that from around interest of an industry perspective in 2017. It's like every company's tech way. Look at tests around the street. Look at Walmart Labs and what they're doing there. How are you seeing some of the clients you advise for? What are some of the industries that you're seeing are now technology? There's definitely a convergence says you mentioned Too many industries, actually, all industries. So when we think about financial service is no fintech. When you think about life sciences, health, when you think about retail, right, you got Internet. So definitely saying convergence and technology is impacting our daily lives and almost everything that we d'oh and in almost every product and service that we buy, there's some form or elements of technology. Exactly. It's really remarkable. Speaking of remarkable, tonight we're here with a C G to recognize two Fantastic Cos Twilio is the emerging growth winner, 2017 and video the Outstanding Growth Award winner. If you look at and video, for example, inventor of the GPS, which is really catalyzed a tremendous amount of technology across industries. If we were just talking about you, look at their market kind of what you see them over the next couple of years. The market drivers you think they're gonna impact mentioned and video write graphic way historically have been known for games and films and virtual reality kind of thing. Now they're actually moving more into artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence? A. I knew Buzz Word, right? So there's probably a lot of opportunities for a video that technology evolves and develops over the next. Several questions for Twilio. Who's winning the emerging world? What would you do for them? So they're, you know, cloud platform company for software developers. So you think that part of the new technology is and a cloud, so providing an opportunity for engineers to develop software and software is involved in almost everything that we do as well in our daily lives. So you know that convergence of all the industries that's happening, a lot of that is a result of software and the developers who are creating that software Twilio is providing a platform for that communicated a tremendous opportunity. Companies in this new technology. Christy, thank you so much for joining us on the Cuban. Sharing your insight. Have a great evening tonight. Yes, it's, uh, it's a great turn out Isn't a lot of fun. It is. I want to thank you for watching way around the museum with a c D E f G. I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks.

well you're watching the cube and I knew that you knew that I'm John Walls we're here in Las Vegas it's re invent 22. Big Show AWS putting it on the Big Show here late in 2022 that's going really well we're at the executive Summit right now sponsored by Accenture and we're going to talk about that relationship between Accenture and AWS um kind of where it is now and where it's going you know even bigger things down the road to help us do that two guests Andy Tay who's a senior managing director and the Accenture AWS business group lead at Accenture Andy thanks for being with us thanks for having me and Sarah whose last name was one of my all-time favorites all good because it is it's all good right okay it's all good Sarah all good worldwide leader of accenture's AWS business group for AWS and thank you both again for being here so let's talk about the relationship just in general high level here 30 000 feet a lot of great things have been happening we know a lot of great things are happening but how's this all you think evolved how did how has this come about that you two are just inextricably linked almost here in the cloud space Sarah why don't you jump on that yeah I'd love to um I think one of the the strongest factors that causes that Synergy for us is we both work backwards from our customer outcomes and so just by consistently doing that taking those customer signals um really obsessing over our customers success we know what we're marching towards and so then we kind of extract those themes and really work together to think about okay when we look at this holistically how do we go bigger better faster together and accomplish and solve those customer problems yeah Andy yeah John let me just maybe add and you know to amplify you know what Sarah just touched on um we both have common to our culture this notion of working from the client's perspective first so really delivering to the clients values or um you know in aws's parlance it's you know customer and so that's at the core and when we keep that at the core everything else becomes really easy where we invest what we build key clients we focus on what our team structure is et cetera Etc that's really easy so that sort of core core pillar number one in terms of our sort of you know success factors the second thing that I think really helps us is our sort of scale geographically you know certainly from an Accenture standpoint as you know John we're north of 800 000 people globally um couple that with aws's strength we really do have you know a field depth and breadth across the board that allows us to sort of see and feel what's happening in the market and allows us really to see around the corners as we like to think and say um and and that helps us be intentional on what we do um and then the third thing is really us we might know what we do but we sort of need to then play to our strengths and as you know we're two very different companies one focus on the technology side the other you know focus on the technology Services although we'll touch on you know some of the changes we're looking at as we go forward but that sort of playing to strength is key as well for us as a third pillar of success and so keeping those three things at the core really helps us move you know day to day and year by year and that's what you see in this continued partnership so what are you hearing from your customers these days we've talked a lot already today and it's kind of the buzzword you know modernization right everybody's talking about this transformation I don't care if you're in Mainframe or where you are everybody wants a modernized right now um you know what are you hearing from customers in that regard and I'm sure everybody's in a different state different yeah frame of mind you know some are embracing some are dragging uh what what's your take on the state of play right now well and I think it's like especially in these macroeconomic moments that we're in um time to value is critical for our customers um and then we have the talent shortage but even with those our customers still need us to solve for sustainability and still focus on inclusion diversity and equity and so we can't lower the bar in anything that we've already been doing we need to just keep doing more and building with them and so I think um for us really getting to the to the meat of what our customers need modernization is a big one but we're still seeing just so many of our customers look at basic transformation right how how do I dip in how do I start to move my environment move my people and get ready for what I need to do next for my business and so that that is a challenge and like we said with with the markets as volatile as they are right now I think a lot of customers are just trying to work with us to figure out how to do that in the most optimized and efficient way I just want to kind of rub people on the head and say it's going to be all right I mean it's so volatile as you pointed out Sarah right yeah I mean the market up and down and we're worried about a recession and companies and their plans they want to be Forward Thinking yeah but they've got to you know keep their powder dry too in some respects and get ready for that rainy day you know John it's funny um because you would think you know you've got the one hand you know rub that you know it's gonna be all right and and then on the other end you'll you know maybe clients should sort of hold temper and you know sort of just pause but I think clients get it they see it they feel it they understand the need to invest and I think you know there's a recent study back in 2008 those clients you know Sarah and I were reading the other day those clients who didn't invest ahead of those you know major if you remember those macroeconomic downturn times they came out really on the bad side um and so clients now are realizing that in these times these are the moments to invest and so they get it but they're faced with a couple of challenges one is time Sarah touched on you just don't have time and the second is Talent so we're working in a very intentional way on what we can do to help them there and and as you'll hear later on from Chris Wegman and Eric Farr um we're launching our velocity platform which really helps to compress that type and and get them faster you know time to Value we're also being very intentional on talent and how we help their talent so you know rotate so that we're not just taking the technology Journey but we're also having the people journey and then the third thing Sarah and I really focus on with our teams is figuring out new ways new sources of value for our clients and that's not just cost that's value the broader set and so we find that in moments like this it's actually an opportunity for us to really bring the best of AWS and Accenture to our clients well you hit value and I always find this one kind of tough because there is a big difference between cost and value my cost is X right whatever I write on my chat that's my cost so but but how do you help clients identify that value so that because it's you know it can be a little nebulous right can it not I mean it's uh but you have to validate you got to quantify at the end of the day because that's what the CEO wants to see it's what the CIO wants to see yeah you've got to identify values so how many how do you do that yeah yeah I mean we we have many different ways right velocity which Andy kind of touched on I think is is really um it's our foundational approach to help customers really kind of enter into their Cloud journey and focus on those key factors for Success right so we've got ISB Solutions built in there We've Got Talent and change built in we've got kind of what we're calling the fabric right that foundational technology layer and giving our customers all of that in a way that they can consume in a way that they can control and you know different modules essentially that they can leverage to move it's going to be tangible right they're going to be able to see I've now got access to all these things that I need I can move as I need to move and I'm not constantly you know looking around figuring out how to lock it all together we've given them that picture and that road map on how to really leverage this because we we need to be able to point to tangible outcomes and so that's critical yeah proof's got to be in the pudding and and you know to Sarah's point I think sort of we're entering into this sort of new dare I say new chapter of cloud and then you know sort of the first chapter was sort of those outcomes were around cost you know I've moved you into the cloud you can shut down your data center but now we've sort of got other sources of value now Beyond costs there's news new sources of revenue how do I become a platform company on top of the AWS cloud and then you know eke out new Revenue sources for myself how do I drive new experiences for my customers yeah um how do I maybe tap into the sustainability angle of things and how do I get greater Innovation from my talent how do I operate better in a Sarah said how do I become more Nimble more agile and more responsive to Market demands and so all those areas all those Dynamics all those outcomes are sources of value that were sort of really laser focused on and just ensuring that as a partnership we we help our clients on that Journey so what do you do about talent I mean you brought it up a couple of times UTP has um in terms of of training retaining recruiting all those key elements right now it's an ultra competitive environment right now yeah and there might be a little bit of a talent Gap in terms of what we're producing right so um you know how do you I guess make the most out of that and and make sure you keep the good people around yeah Talent is an interesting one John um and we were just touching on this uh before we got here um you know sort of from an Accenture standpoint um we're obviously focused on growing our AWS Talent um we've now got I think it's north of 27 000 people in Accenture with AWS certifications north of 34 000 certificates you know which is absolutely fantastic a small City it's just I mean it is very intentional in building that um as AWS rolls out new Services Adam touched on a whole bunch of them today we're at the core of that and ramping and building our talent so that we can drive and get our clients quicker to their value and then the second area of focus is what do we do to help our clients Talent how do we train them how do we enable them how do we you know get them to be more agile and you know being able to sort of operate in what we call that digital core operate in the cloud how do we do that and so we're focused um in in capabilities in fact our Accenture head of talent and people and change Christie Smith John is is here this week just for that and we're exploring ways in which we can get tighter and even more Innovative Around Talent and so I ultimately that that bleeds over to where the partnership goes right because if you can enhance that side of it then then everybody wins on that in terms of what you think you know where this is going yeah yeah it's already you know pretty good setup uh things are working pretty well but as the industry changes so rapidly and and you have to meet those needs how do you see the partnership evolving as well to meet those needs down the road we we have a very fortunate position in that our CEOs are both very engaged in this partnership and they push us think bigger go faster figure it out let's ride and there are definite pros and cons and some days I'm flying this close to the Sun but um it isn't a it's an absolute privilege to work with them the way that we get to and so we're always looking I mean Auntie said it earlier this is the relationship that helps us look around corners we've raised the bar and so we're constantly pushing each other pushing our teams just innovating together thinking it all through on where are we going and like I said reading those tea leaves reading those themes from our customers like hey we've just had five customers with the same similar feeling problem that we're trying to solve or we ran into the same issue in the field and how do we put that together and solve for it because we know it's not just five right we know they're more out there and so um I think you know it's it's leadership principles for us right at Amazon that guiding think big um you know insist on high standards that that'll always be core and Central to who we are and then you know fortunately Accenture has a really similar ethos yeah quick take on that Andy yeah I think as we look out you know I think um we're going to we've already seen but we're going to see this continued blurring of Industries um of um you know sort of clients moving into other Industries and yeah sort of this sort of agitation Market agitation um and so I think disruption you know disruption and and we're being you know focused on what do we need to be to do in order to help our clients on those Journeys and and to continue to you know get them you know faster Solutions is an area that we you know we are um really looking at and these are solutions that are either industry Solutions you'll hear a couple of them this week um you know we've got our insurance solution that we're we've developed as an intelligent underwriting capability leveraging AWS AIML to sort of be intelligent and cognitive um you know we've got other Solutions around the around Industries energy and Life Sciences but then also intelligent applications that might be touching you know areas I think earlier today Adam talked about AWS supply chain and that's an area that we are focused on and and proud to be a part of that and we're working very very closely with with Amazon on that uh to help you know our clients move ahead so I think we're going to see this continued blurring and we're going to obviously you know keep addressing that and just keep iterating well it looks like a relationship of trust and expertise right and it's worked out extremely well and uh if this is any indication where the interview went uh even better things are ahead for the partnership so thank you thank you for chiming in I appreciate your perspectives yeah thank you it's been great we continue our coverage here on thecube we're at re invent 22 we're in Las Vegas and you're watching thecube the leader in technical coverage foreign

>>Yeah, it's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by vertical. >>Hi, everybody. And welcome to this cube special presentation of the vertical virtual Big Data conference. The Cube is running in parallel with Day One and day two of the vertical of Big Data event. By the way, the Cube has been every single big data event in It's our pleasure to be here in the virtual slash digital event as well. Gabriel Chapman is here. He's the director of Flash Blade Products Solutions Marketing at Pure Storage. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you too. How's it going? >>It's going very well. I mean, I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel, but, uh, you know, and hopefully we'll be able to meet it, accelerate at some point, future or one of the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows, but because we've been covering that show as well. But I really want to get into it. And the last accelerate September 2019 pure and vertical announced. Ah, partnership. I remember a joint being ran up to me and said, Hey, you got to check this out. The separation of compute and storage by EON mode now available on Flash Blade. So, uh and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on Prem and in the cloud. So I want to ask, what were the trends and analytical database and cloud led to this partnership? You know, >>realistically, I think what we're seeing is that there's been a kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the traditional, you know, Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of directors that storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected. When we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises, they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore, you know, the flash blade platform ended up being a great solution to support America in their transition Tian mode. Leveraging essentially is an S three object store. >>Okay, so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of the flash blade, you make the claim that Flash Blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever. That's a bold statement. So defend that What? >>I would like to go beyond that and just say, you know, So we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of, you know, as as we've developed Flash Blade as a platform and keep in mind, it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has been very successful for pure storage. The reality is, is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go, and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object best file storage place in realistically, which we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics. But doing so on Prem for a multitude of different reasons. We've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around, you know, making things this year that you know, fast matters for us. Ah, simple is smart. Um we can provide, you know, cloud integrations across the spectrum. And, you know, there's a subscription model that fits into that as well. We fall that that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern day takes variance. And it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio. >>Okay, so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of flash blade and then understand the fit for, uh, analytic databases generally, but specifically for vertical. So it is a blade, so you got compute and network included. It's a key value store based system. So you're talking about scale out. Unlike, unlike, uh, pure is sort of, you know, initial products which were scale up, Um, and so I want on It is a fabric based system. I want to understand what that all means to take us through the architecture. You know, some of the quote unquote firsts that you guys talk about. So let's start with sort of the blade >>aspect. Yeah, the blade aspect of what we call the flash blade. Because if you look at the actual platform, you have, ah, primarily a chassis with built in networking components, right? So there's ah, fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades. Individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside. It's not like we're just taking SSD is and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off the shelf hardware design. This is very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast filing past object scalability, massive parallel ization. When it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to 150 that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for, especially as we start to address these larger analytics pools. They are multi petabytes data sets, you know that single addressable object space and, you know, file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale up storage platforms are able to deliver. >>Yes, I interviewed cause last September and accelerate, and Christie Pure has been attacked by some of the competitors. There's not having scale out. I asked him his thoughts on that, he said Well, first of all, our flash blade is scale out. He said, Look, anything that adds complexity, you know we avoid. But for the workloads that are associated with flash blade scale out is the right sort of approach. Maybe you could talk about why that is. Well, >>realistically, I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to work with large, unstructured data sets. I mean, flash blade is unique. The architected to allow customers to achieve superior resource utilization for compute and storage, while at the same time, you know, reducing significantly the complexity that has arisen around this kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytics solutions. I mean, we're really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered are created applications in the public cloud space of dress, you know, object storage and an unstructured data. And for some organizations, the importance is bringing that on Prem. I mean, we do see about repatriation coming on a lot of organizations as these data egress, charges continue to expand and grow, um, and then organizations that want even higher performance and what we're able to get into the public cloud space. They are bringing that data back on Prem They are looking at from a stamp. We still want to be able to scale the way we scale in the cloud. We still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud, but we want to do it within control of our own, our own borders. And so that's, you know, that's one of the bigger pieces to that. And we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models? A zealous the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers to do that with inside their own data center. >>So you're talking about the trends earlier. You have these cloud native databases that allowed of the scaling of compute and storage independently. Vertical comes in with eon of a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you, You love me. Here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight, you know, go to market. Are there other aspects of this partnership that they're non Barney deal like, in other words, any specific engineering. Um, you know other go to market programs? Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, >>it's it's It's more than just that what we consider a channel meet in the middle or, you know, that Barney type of deal. It's realistically, you know, we've done some first with Veronica that I think, really Courtney, if they think you look at the architecture and how we did, we've brought to market together. Ah, we have solutions. Teams in the back end who are, you know, subject matter experts. In this space, if you talk to joy and the people from vertical, they're very high on our very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to leverage on mode and get into some of the the nuance task specs of how they leverage the depot depot with inside each individual. Compute node in adjustments with inside their reach. Additional performance gains for customers on Prem and at the same time, for them, that's still tough. The ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to. And so I think a lot of it is around. How do we partner is to companies? How do we do a joint selling motions? How do we show up in and do white papers and all of the traditional marketing aspects that we bring to the market? And then, you know, joint selling opportunities exist where they are, and so that's realistically. I think, like any other organization that's going to market with a partner on MSP that they have, ah, strong partnership with. You'll continue to see us, you know, talking about are those mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market. >>Okay, you know, of course, he used to be a Gartner analyst, and you go to the vendor side now, but it's but it's, but it's a Gartner analyst. You're obviously objective. You see it on, you know well, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat There, there their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, etcetera for every vendor. So you have you have vertical who's got a very mature stack and talking to a number of the customers out there who are using EON mode. You know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases makes sense. It's not just the economics of scaling and storage independently. I want to talk more about that. There's flexibility aspect as well. But Vertical really has to play its its trump card, which is Look, we've got a big on premise state, and we're gonna bring that eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now. There obviously have been there to play catch up in the cloud, but at the same time, they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago. So you know, so there's trade offs that customers have to make. How do you sort through that? Where do you see the interest in this? And and what's the sweet spot for this partnership? You know, we've >>been really excited to build the partnership with vertical A and provide, you know, we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the yang mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together. You know, it's ah, it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space, where I think that there's still not to say that not everybody wants to go there, but I think there's aspects and solutions that worked very well there. But for the vast majority, I still think that there's, you know, the your data center is not going away. And you do want to have control over some of the many of the assets with inside of the operational confines. So therefore, we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on prim. And that's realistically, where we start to see the stronger push for those customers. You still want to manage their data locally. A swell as maybe even worked around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring. You know, the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring applications purely cloud native. It's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with. And realistically, I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons, and we've been doing cloud long enough where people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center. So I mean, realistically, as we move forward, that's, Ah, that better option when it comes to a modern architecture that can do, you know, we can deliver an address, a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data, you know, based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage. And that's really what Flash was built for. It was built for a platform that could address small files or large files or high throughput, high throughput, low latency scale of petabytes in a single name. Space in a single rack is we like to put it in there. I mean, we see customers that have put 150 flash blades into production as a single name space. It's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms. Pure and Veronica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing uh, you know, particularly on technology. >>I'm interested in exploring the use case. A little bit further. You just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have, um, and take us through kind of what the customer discussions are like. Obviously you've got a big customer base, you and vertical that that's on Prem. That's the the unique advantage of this. But there are others. It's not just the economics of the granular scaling of compute and storage independently. There are other aspects of take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases. Yeah, you >>know, I mean, I could give you a couple customer examples, and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses vertical on last way to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time, You know, then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing their streaming and whatnot that they can. They can fine tune the grand we control that. So that's one aspect that that we address. We have a multinational car car company, which uses vertical on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision making trees. You know, that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built for, um, there's another healthcare organization that uses vertical on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time. The impact lives, especially when we start to look at and, you know, the current state of affairs with code in the Corona virus. You know, those types of technologies, we're really going to help us kind of get of and help lower invent, bend that curve downward. So, you know, there's all these different areas where we can address that the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real time analytics decision making tools like and you know, realistically is we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just, you know, a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of driving information >>that we're talking about Hadoop earlier. We're kind of going well beyond that now. And I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud, it was all about infrastructure. It was about, you know, uh, spin it up. You know, compute and storage is a little bit of networking in there. >>It >>seems like the next new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got. And it started with the cloud native databases. But then bringing in, you know, AI and machine learning tooling on top of that Ah, and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bog this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years. A lot of that is driven by a dupe bringing machine intelligence into the equation, scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on Prem scale. You know, across organizations and across your partner network, that really is a new emerging workloads. You see that? And maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing with customers. >>Yeah. I mean, it really is. We see several trends. You know, one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab, but into production. Um, you know, especially when it comes to data science projects, machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept, easy to spin up in the cloud. But when a customer wants to scale and move towards a riel you know, derived a significant value from that. They do want to be able to control more characteristic site, and we know machine learning, you know, needs toe needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy. There's just too much data retrieving the cloud for every training job. Same time Predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking. You know, we see this. Ah, the visualization of Data Analytics is Tricia deployed is being on a continuum with, you know, the things that we've been doing in the long in the past with data warehousing, data Lakes, ai on the other end. But this way, we're starting to manifest it and organizations that are looking towards getting more utility and better elasticity out of the data that they are working for. So they're not looking to just build apps, silos of bespoke ai environments. They're looking to leverage. Ah, you know, ah, platform that can allow them to, you know, do ai, for one thing, machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much Jeff um, you know, it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environment. >>I think it's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years. Gable. I wish we were in Boston together. You would have painted your little corner of Boston orange. I know that you guys have but really appreciate you coming on the cube wall to wall coverage. Two days of the vertical vertical virtual big data conference. Keep it right there. Right back. Right after this short break, Yeah.

thanks Peter I'm here with James kabila Sawicki bonds lead analyst for data science Jim been hearing a lot about data science and how machine learning is coming into this environment give it give us a little bit of a guidance as to how that this this whole space fits into data science you know how does that that infrastructure fit in with data science today yeah well stew data science is a set of practices for building and training statistical models often known as machine learning models to be deployed into applications to do things like predictive analysis automating next best offers and marketing and so forth so what machine learning is all about is the statistical model and those are built by a category of professionals known as data scientists but data scientists operated in teams there are data engineers who manage your data lake there are data modelers who build the models themselves there are there are professionals who specialize in training the models and deploying them trainings like Quality Assurance so what it's all about is really these part these functions are increasingly being combined into workflows they have to conform with DevOps practices because this is an important set of application development capabilities that are absolutely essential to deploy machine learning into AI in AI is really the secret sauce of so many apps nowadays all right Jim is we've looked at data center Ops walk us through the tech the process and the people okay data center else really is data science ops or often well wiki bomb we've referred to as DevOps for data science and really what we start with the the start with the people I've already been to sketch those up so in terms of the people the professionals involved in building and training and deploying and evaluating and iterating machine learning models there are the data scientists who are this justjust iskele modelers you might call them the algorithm jockeys though that may be regarded as a pejorative but nonetheless these are the high-powered professionals who who build who know which algorithm is correct for what the challenge they build the models on there are the data engineers who not only manage your data lakes the data lakes is where the training data is maintained the data for building the model and for training the models are maintained in data lakes the data engineers manage that they also manage data preparation data transformation data cleansing to get the data clean and correct so that it can be used to build high quality models there are other functions that are absolutely essential there are as what some call ml architour machine learning architects I like to think of them as subject-matter experts who work with the data scientist to build what are called the feature sets the predictors that need to be built into machine learning models for those models to do therefore perform their function correctly whether it be a prediction or like face recognition or natural language processing for your ear your chat BOTS and so forth you need the subject matter experts with you to provide guidance to the data scientists as to what variables to build into these models there was also coders there's a lot of coding that's done in data science and ml ops that's done in Python and Java and Scala and a variety of other languages and there's other functions as well but these are the core functions that need to be performed in a team environment really in a workflow and that is where the process comes in the workflow for data science in teams is DevOps it's really the continuous integration of different data sets as well as different models as well as different features into the building and training of AI so these need to be pretty nice functions need to be performed in a workflow that's highly structured where there's checkpoints and there's governance and there's a transparency and auditability so it really all this needs to be performed in a DevOps environment where you have the data lake which is the source of the the data of course we also have a source repository for managing the current and past versions of the models themselves where you also do governance on the code builds that are with each of the models that are deployed into your application environment so that's the process site at all and then the platform our tech side is really revolves around with some colleague data science workbench or a data science platform there's a variety of terms for it but essentially it is a development environment that enables a high degree of automation and all across all these functions because automation is absolutely essential for speed and consistency in terms of how models are built and entrained there's also a need for our collaboration capability strong ones within these platforms so these different human roles can work together in a cohesive fashion and really like a well-oiled machine screaming there's a need for repositories - like I said managed in govern the current versions of all the artifacts be they data be they models be they code bills and so forth that are essential so all of these people processes and Texas and there is building high-quality AI yeah so Jim I noticed you call it DevOps for data science so yes there's a real emphasis there on how we get all of these new things aligned with the process for DevOps and maybe help us put a point on you know why that's so important well because DevOps is how applications are built and deployed now everywhere which is essentially it so it's a workflow it's a standard workflow that involves a scaleable organization where you have code that is built and managed and governed according to a standard workflow standard repositories with checkpoints and transparency as a way of consensual e ensuring that high quality code is deployed into working applications according to essentially a factory-style automation or an industrialized workflow so data science is a development discipline data science needs to as a as a workflow needs to conform with the established DevOps practices that your application developers your coders have already established in fact most AI applications most machine learning applications involve code involved machine learning models but also involve containers and kubernetes and increasingly serverless interfaces and so forth so data science is not separated from the other aspects of the DevOps workflow itting and christie is a unified and integrated piece of your operations and they needs to be managed as such all right well Jim appreciate you going through the evolution on that I know you've written quite a bit about this topic on the wiki bond website and Peter will send it back to you

>> from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering Cooper inspired 2019. Brought to you by Cooper. >> Hey, welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin on the ground in Las Vegas at Cooper Inspired 19. Excited to welcome to the program. And gentlemen from Staples, a place I go to all the time we have Christy Oreo, VP of strategic sourcing. Hey, Chris, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. Glad to be here, >> So I was just a staples the other day getting office supplies. It's a go to Penn's files Folders, Inc et cetera. You name it. That is a place I think everybody on the planet knows. But I >> want to >> talk to you about the Staples business and how you guys now have control over 8000 suppliers. You've got this visibility in control, which I think every human wants and every element of life you know of 100% of your indirect spend under management. So given those big business outcomes, let's dissect that. Obviously, you're a cool customer. That's why you're here. Talk to us about a little bit about Staples. All the different suppliers you guys have, and some of the challenges that you came to Cooper to help erase >> Well, we had a lot of issues with Roque spend. Everybody was doing what they wanted in every location. We had no verification. We weren't consolidating our spend to get the best deals and get the best outcomes, lack of consistency, all the stuff you hear about. And since we've ruled out Cooper, we've got a lot of structure in place now, and we've got much better uniformity, much better consistency. We've dramatically lowered our costs through the use of the tool and some of the some of the rules that we've put in place as a result of of launching Cooper a couple years ago now. So we're really pleased with how it's helped us organize our business and really bring visibility to where we're spending money and showing us the opportunities and where we could go after her and save even more money. >> You know, you talk about rogue spending. >> One of >> the interesting disrupters of procurement and finance is consumer ization we all have. Whether we're going on staples dot com or something else, we're on Amazon. I need to buy this. We have this expectation as consumers in our private lives that we can get anything we want. We have to check with anybody. I one click. So then when we go in as business buyers, we sort of have the same mentality. But obviously the challenge there is, a lot of organizations don't have visibility into. Where has every single dollar going? How many different suppliers are we working with? Do we have duplicates triple kits everywhere to talk to me >> a little >> bit about the with a kind of cultural strategic shift that you guys are making now that you have this visibility? Well, >> everybody's happy with the results. That's >> always good right >> when he had his. When you have some success and you start to tell the story, then all of a sudden people's eyes get opened, and what's interesting is I don't think anyone does anything with malice. But if you have a general manager of a warehouse who believes that ex widget is what he needs to really Pel perform and do better, he's doing that with the right intentions. What he doesn't understand is everything else that's going on behind the scenes, and we have deals in place with suppliers and there's a level of consistency that we expect that our suppliers expecting that our customers expect and we can't have that experience be different. So once we can't explain that story and the tool helps us see where that spend is coming from, we go back. We have a conversation, and all of a sudden it's enlightening like, Oh, I didn't know. Now that I know Okay, I get it. Let me do what you want me to do or what you need me to do. So that's been the biggest shift I think is just sharing information and putting a spotlight on things when they come up and it happens even still. You know, we've rolled out now a little over two and 1/2 years ago, and we still have these things come up because you get new people and people change roles and, you know, as a business person there's folks I've done business with in the past that have earned my trust, and I want to do business with them again because I know what. When people get new roles, they do the same thing, and sometimes that's not what we need them to do. So once you explain the story and you tell them about it and you show him the results, they come onboard. It's phenomenal. >> Everything goes back to the user experience with customer, whether your customer is an individual buyer or a business of 20 people to a Fortune 500. Everybody in an organization is ultimately, in some form or fashion touching the customer. The customer experience is critical to delight the customer to drive higher customer lifetime value from that customer. Um, so having the employees onboard understanding we still want you to be able to manage your Ware house even more efficiently. But we need you to understand how we're gonna give you the tools to do it better. Ultimately, the end of the day, it's goes back to that customer and making sure you can keep extracting value from them. >> One of our core values is put the customer first, always, and that's at the heart of everything we do. It's not about buying things cheap. It's about buying things at the right value and giving the customer the best possible experience they can, so there may be less expensive ways to do it, but it may not deliver the outcomes we want, so it's not always about buying cheap. It's about buying and getting the best value for us so that we can deliver the right experience to our customers. >> Was that a >> mentality that staples had prior to bringing on Cooper? Or now? Because suddenly you're starting to You have visibility into everything you're going? Oh, cheaper isn't necessarily better in some of these areas. I think it's >> a It's a corporate philosophy that we've had. I think we we realize that people can shop anywhere for anything they wanted. Anytime. Cooper has helped highlight some some discrepancies that we've been able to kind of take out. I would say that Cooper's help with that, but it's also been just a core philosophy of the company for a long time. Cooper's helping us execute against >> that now, but you're right. Consumers can buy >> whatever it >> is. If it's a product like something you want to buy on Amazon or service. Maybe it's your Internet service provider. We have so much choice. Think vendors of any product testers that recognize that and sounds like Staples does. From a core cultural perspective. You're already in a better position to understand. I really need to find Tune everything under the hood here because they could go somewhere else like that. They can't. It's good to >> understand that. But Cooper gives us the data and the facts and the analytics to help prove out where we can make a change and where we can help the company and help our customers. So it's a combination of both. >> Let's Dig into that data was in one of the things that Robert seemed shared this morning was about. Since Cooper's been public, which was 2016 they have a five x increase in the amount of spend that is being managed in the Cooper platform. I think the number was is now 1.2 trillion dollars, a tremendous amount of data in this group of community that everybody can leverage and share. We often hear data is gold. It's the new oil it is and you're smiling if you can actually see it, right extracted value, Yes, talk to us about the amount of value that Staples is getting by this group of community with a ton of valuable data. >> I would say we're at the infancy of going into the Cooper community in terms of sharing information and gaining information. I'm excited about the little bit that I've seen, and I'm one of things I want to learn. Here is more about how it will work and how it can help us. What Rob shared this morning was very interesting to me, and I'm very excited to learn more about >> it. Sounds and you're right And even Cooper says, they're at the infancy of it. I think they have. A couple of 100 customers are starting to use the community to share intelligence. Eso It is early days, but it's also something that I think of when I go to events and we talk about, you know, devil's Community. It's a very collaborative that not only is it customer centric, also, supplier centric Staples is a supplier of a lot of other businesses. So imagine there's kind of double and did benefit. It's that could be gleaned by you guys from them. We hope so. >> I think we're you know, we're probably a more unique customer than many that Cooper has and that we are. We are a customer. We use the tools, we love the tool, but we're also a cellar to you guys and two other Cooper uses in the community. So we see both sides of the equation with Cooper, and it is interesting. T gain those insights and see how we can help both sides of the company. Help group is customers and our customers more >> if you look at >> the platform for procurement invoices, expenses. Heymans, where did you start a few years ago with Cooper and where are you now? In terms of all the different elements that are running through it? >> We started with a simple PIO management secure to pay. Then we instituted a no P o no pay policy, and everyone started using the tools. It really helped us change things We don't use it for. Expenses wear starting like, as I said, to start to use some of the analytics. I'm very interested in learning more about Cooper pay or out here virtual card usage. That's very interesting to me, so I'm curious to learn about that on. We'll see where we go from there. >> Cooper Pay was, I think I know it's just a few months ago in London, and we are excited to hear some more news about that tomorrow, how they're expanding that. But there's this visibility and control idea is so critical because of any type of organization. Whether it's a retailer manufacturer, it's a hospital. There's so much shatter, weighty going. But I t is really big challenge of reining in the cats, if you will in all these cats. Because we all know now that Robert likes cats. But it's one of the things that they're announced with Amazon is wow. I t can have access to buy all of this software, control it, deploy it, manage it through the Amazon marketplace. And you suddenly think, Wow, how procurement and t are gonna be aligning, joining forces and really affecting top line of of any industry. >> Yeah, I think in Staples are our relationship between procurement and our i t S t s department has been strong from day one. They were the biggest advocates of us getting the tool to help them gain control and kind of eliminates a lot of the shadow I t organizations issue. Does you mentioned so in our environment, we are excited about that. We embrace that we're trying. Thio forced that out. So we've always had that sort of very strong partnership with our I T team, and that's really what's helped progress the tool through the company with great success with them in the beginning. And then you start to tell the story, and more and more people are interested in. Wait a minute. You can help them save how much into the budget and where we can reallocate that money and what can I do with it? So it's been really exciting and sort of fun to be part of the transformation. >> And you guys have, what north of 17,000 users on the platform, >> today's wave? A lot, A lot. >> That's pretty quick >> adoption in a few years, a lot of people to train, to educate and and to have it become part of their normal everyday activities. >> Well, we're going through a relaunch now, and the Cooper team has been phenomenal in terms of training and helping my team with all the work that goes on behind the scenes that nobody sees and helping us develop training for all of our associates as we relaunch it, because we're really gonna change the tool. We were a couple of revisions behind Ah, now we're getting caught up. So there's a lot of change coming in September to my company and to Cooper and thrilled with the help that the Cooper team has given us the launch. This >> last question for you. Chris Staples, a 34 year young business. I was just talking with a gentleman from procurement and Lulu Lemon and much younger business. And you >> kind of think, Well, a younger business Have more nimble mind sets. Give your advice your best lessons learned to your peers >> at older, more established organizations, going through a change of really looking at getting complete visibility and all your spent advice to them. >> It's a bit of a cliche, but don't do what you did yesterday. You know, you've got to be open to change. You've got to let the you know, I always say, the month the numbers tell the story, and where is where you're spending too much and how do you fix that? And just because you love a supplier today doesn't mean you can't love somebody else just as much tomorrow. If they can deliver a better value, and a lot of times you can find out that your current supplier can give you a better value than you. Then you had before if you just start poking around a little bit. So my advice would be not to stick with the status quo. Just cause it's easy. Challenge yourself. Challenger team. Challenge the people you work with. Change is good. >> Change is good. Chorus. What a pleasure to have you on the Cube. Big. Thanks. So much for joining me. >> Thank you. Very nice. I appreciate it. >> All right. For Christie. Oreo. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Kucha. Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.

(electronic music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2018, happy to be welcoming one of the users at this show, Jerry Flick, who's with Belmond. He's the Divisional Director of I.T. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, and welcome to the Boston area. You're from Charleston, South Carolina. >> I live in Charleston now, yeah. But I'm familiar with the area. I'm from the Northeast, but I love being here. Boston's a great town. >> Yeah, we had a lovely weather. It's in the low '70s, you know, the Sox should have a nice game here, so. Have you been to this event before? >> I have, this is my third year. >> Okay, excellent. You've been to more of 'em than me. >> Okay. >> So, let's start with Belmond. Tell us a little bit about the organization, for those that don't know. >> Absolutely, so Belmond is a worldwide luxury hotel experience, hospitality industry. So we have hotels, we have restaurants, there's train excursions, river cruises, and really, the focus on Belmond is providing a superior level of service to the guests that take part in our experiences. >> Well Jerry, the great thing I love talking about users is, their lives are pretty stable. There's not these things like Airbnb, and you know, other technologies left that are just saying oh yeah, we'll spin up an app and just put your company that's been around for decades out of business, right? It's nice and stable. >> Yeah, that sounds like a little sarcasm, but. (laughs) >> I've been known to be a little sarcastic. So yeah, Jerry, tell us how long has Belmond been in business? You said it's worldwide, how many employees, and how does Belmond deal with the digital transformation? >> Oh, absolutely. >> That's, you know, coming down? >> Well, they took the name five years ago. They used to be Orient Express prior to that, and many people know the Orient Express from the Agatha Christie novels. >> My wife loved the new movie, so. >> Yes, so did mine actually. But what they do is, we have over 50 properties worldwide. I joined about seven months ago, and one of the initiatives they have now is to double the amount of properties and experiences they have by 2020. So, as part of what I do in the division I manage, I have North America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and I have about eight properties under my belt, and we have to make sure that we coordinate with corporate for our company policies, our I.T. structure, which is kind of complicated because you're dealing with multiple countries, and different technologies that people like, different flavors, so it certainly presents its own challenges. >> All right, so Jerry, when you say you've got those properties, and really the I.T., what does that mean? What's under your purview from an I.T. perspective? >> Sure, so each property has either an I.T. director or a manager, and then depending on the size of the property they have different I.T. personnel that handle everything from the infrastructure, the servers, as well as through user support and even interfacing with the clients. Guest wifi is a big thing, so people want to come to our properties and make sure that they can get on the internet well, they can watch T.V., and they can do that, and that all comes down to what we have to provide them. >> Yeah, I love that. Yeah, help connect us a little bit, you know, the role of I.T. and the pressures put on you, versus wow, we've got lots of challenges from the business side these days. I'm sure cost pressure are there, you need to able to know when things are available, know that the client is getting great service when they're at your facilities. >> Yeah, actually they like to use the term, we need to be cost neutral. >> Okay. >> So everything that we do, of course I.T. is a cost within itself, but when the clients come in, and again, they expect that high quality of service, that internet connectivity, and really just whatever it is that the technology can drive to make their experience better, they look to us. But from a standpoint of support, we're 24/7. We have to keep the systems running, we have to make sure that everything from property management is going, and that we keep them moving, we keep business running. >> Yeah, so in my career in I.T., I've gotten to get under the covers sometimes in hospitality. When you've got hundreds or thousands of rooms, just even the basic phone system, let alone the internet and everything, there's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of gear, maintaining. People talk about their data centers, but boy, you've got so many properties to deal with. What are some of the challenges there, and you know, bring us inside that infrastructure as to, how you have to build and architect it to fit that cost neutral mandate that you have. >> Yeah, we definitely want to be innovative, so for example with our Charleston facility, we recently deployed a Nutanix cluster on a Dell XC series, and we did that through Winslow Technology. And some of the things that we look to that for is, we don't have a lot of data, we don't have big data. And recently, we had to implement a GDPR policy, because we are worldwide, so that really kind of limits, you know, we're going to have even less data within our system. So having an implementation of Nutanix is really a great way to provision the service we need. We do have a mix of Cloud systems, as well as on-prem, so definitely a hybrid Cloud model would be something that I would like to see moving forward, as well as within the division, try to synchronize everything. Make everybody synergized, so that we can try to be like a flagship to the brand, and really set the standard for what is the best in technology. >> Yeah, so a lot of conversation in the keynote this morning about hybrid cloud. Want to get your reaction as to what you heard, as well as, you know, the big question is, how do you figure out what to put where? >> Yeah, that's a good question, and I've had a lot of sessions with Rick. I think he's really in tune with what's going on, so, pretty much the whole Winslow staff. You can reach out to them, and if you don't specialize in something, you know, you're not going to know everything in I.T., especially when you're dealing with as you mentioned, what's underneath. But to be able to reach out to a partner like that and say hey, do you have a subject matter expert in this? It really gives you a good idea of where the industry's going, and that's my goal is to make sure we stay ahead of that, so that we can provide the business what's a cost neutral way to make it better, and continue to provide that superior service. >> Okay. You said that you've deployed the OEM Nutanix solution with Dell. Can you give us a little bit of insight, you know, what applications sit there? What kind of scale do you go to with that? Is it something that mostly just runs, and you don't need to touch it, or is it something that's growing over time? >> Yeah, I mean, we recently did it within the last month. So what we did, fortunately we were able to just build it, and not initially have to migrate anything over. But for our use, property management, we have an Opera property management system, and that's going to be key to keeping that running, and we are looking to keep that on-prem. Everything else, like our point of sale service, they do need a cached systems within the infrastructure. And then we're looking to upgrade our phone system which depending on if we do that Cloud based or not, having a Nutanix cluster in play like that, and really just the reactions I'm getting from my team that's working with it, they've used other systems. They've used the huge SAN systems of the past, and to be able to spin up a Windows server in less than six minutes, you know, they really love it. We're using the Acropolis Hypervisor, and the simplivity of it, it's easy to use. The buttons, it's real, it's just very simple. It's not as layered as a lot of the systems, so I think as we move forward the performance of it, we're really going to see a quick turnaround, and it's going to make the employees happy working with it, as well. >> Awesome, Jerry. Last thing I want to ask you, you've been to this show for three years. What bring you up besides, you know, the beautiful Boston weather. You mentioned talking to Rick and the team, maybe checking out the Red Sox. What's the value of coming to events like this? >> Well, you know, and again, Winslow's a unique company. They're smaller, and they have a certain niche in an area, but you know, I've worked with several of the account reps, I've worked with the engineers, and they really have a good foothold on technology, but their process of getting to know the customers, and being able to really anticipate what they need, as well as they're not going to oversell you. They're not going to sell you something you don't need, and even if they present something and you're not interested, there's no pressure there. So, they really make it easy to work with them. And so, aside from being here in Boston and loving it, I do enjoy being with the Winslow team, and being treated so nicely by them. >> All right. Jerry, pleasure meeting you. Thanks so much, and congrats on the progress with Belmond. >> Awesome, thank you. >> All right, always love talking to the users, and we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)