(soft music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas Navada, it's theCUBE, covering Accelerate 2017, brought to you by Fortinet. Now here are your hosts, Lisa Martin, and Peter Burris. (soft music) >> Hey welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Peter Burris. We're coming to you live from Las Vegas, we're with Fortinet today, at their Accelerate 2017 event, which brings together end-users, over 700 partners from 93 countries, great buzz today, very excited to be joined by Richard Hannah, who is the VP of information services at Gibson Energy. Richard, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> Great to have you here, first and foremost, Richard, help us understand, what is VP of information services? >> So maybe first off, I'll just explain Gibson Energy. >> Yes, that was probably my first question. (laughs) >> So Gibson Energy is a Calgary Canada based midstream oil and gas company. But we do have locations throughout North America. In all the major oil base in throughout North America. We're considered a mid-stream oil and gas company, which if you, the categories of the, of the Energy industry is really, upstream would be the companies, that are taking the product under the ground. Downstream would be closer to retail, and we're in the middle, so midstream side, so basically that entails, logistics, so, think trucking, train, some moving of the oil and gas, um, infrastructure, around storage, um >> You're getting into refinery >> Pipelines that kind of stuff, yeah, and then the marketing side, would be, the actual going to the end customers, so our marketing group would be looking for the end customer, like refineries et cetera. So that's kind of what makes up, makes up our company. About two, over 200 locations, pretty complex business. So to your question, Gibson is a 60 year old company never had a kind of a senior IT leader in its history, but through a number of acquisitions, we had doubled in size, kind of coming into, 2013, and so I was hired as their first VP of IT, and basically look after all of the strategy around technology, the operations around technology, security of technology for the company. >> So a lot of companies are now looking at IT as not just handling the operations of known processes and by known processes, I mean accounting, HR et cetera, >> Right. >> But they're actually looking at IT to be a partner in going after opportunities, that may not be so well formed. >> Right. >> That may require analytics or be dependent upon analytics, is Gibson starting to think in those terms? Is that a part of your remit as an executive within Gibson, is to help think that process through? >> Definitely yeah, I think you know, there's obviously the normal day to day keep the lights on, of IT, and there were some, major investments, and transformations if you will, that needed to happen on the technology side, and that's kind of what went on in the, say the 2015 to 2016 range, but now we are actually, you know as you discussed, we're actually now looking at ways of using technology to add value to the company, I think, you know IoT, is a great example of that, we're doing some interesting things with IoT, doing some interesting things with HoloLens, so we're actually starting to, you know, be that true, kind of, strategic enabler for the company. >> Well talk about some of those IoT opportunities, I mean, certainly, in the midstream oil and gas universe, there's a lot of very, very expensive equipment >> Right. >> But it has to be maintained and taken care of. So how is IoT starting to impact the way, the business operates >> [Right. So yeah, as you mentioned, we have, you know, thousands and thousands of devices in the field. >> Peter: Not little tiny things. >> Not little tiny things >> No. >> These are big things. >> Yeah. >> Bigger than a bread box kind of stuff. >> Exactly. So, um, you know, before the concept of IoT, um, any monitoring, or data that you had to get off any of those devices, was largely manual, or didn't exist at all. So a great example of our first, interest in IT was with one of our disposal wells, well sites, in the middle of Alberta, and, basically, you know, it disposes of things that can't be used within the, you know, within the downstream side of the business, so it environmentally safely disposes of dirt and mud and those types of things, water, a lot of water that obviusly comes out of the production side. So that disposal well, think of it as a large heater that, heats up to you known large, you know, temperatures and as part of the disposal process. So prior to IoT, there was no way to really have any data on how that well was functioning, and when was the proper time to actually do preventative maintenance on the well. So we connected the well to you know, using IoT technology, through to the Cloud, and then, and then provide an analytics on the back end, to actually provide information on how that well was actually performing, from a heating standpoint, et cetera. So the operation team can actually, now real time, look at how that well is performing, and then perform maintenance when it's actually time to do it versus just doing it, you know based on gut feel. So save you know, thousands of hours of maintenance, thousands of man time, et cetera, so that's just one example of how we're connecting, you know, some of our devices. We are actually now starting to connect our our weight scale, which is part of our our logistic side of things. So again, prior to connecting those, the weight scale, somebody actually had to go out and take the measurements, write them down, take them back and put them into the operational system. Now, we can do that real time as well. So considerable efficiencies gained at the same time, you mentioned the word transformation before, I think you both did, you also talked about this growth there, so from a Cloud journey perspective, as we think of transformation in that sense, what is what's been the strategy that you've been employing as your generating, bringing more IoT devices online, to support the business, make it more efficient. What has your journey to the Cloud been, especially related to the growth that's happened in such a quick pace? >> Right. So, when I arrived back in 2013, as I mentioned, there was a fair bit of transformation that had to happen, on the IT side, and we're talking, you know, new ERP, new, so a lot on the application side including, new ERP et cetera, but on the infrastructure side, we required, again, a lot of transformations, sorry to keep using that word, but I think it's overused a lot, but it's the best way to describe what was happening. >> Evolution, transformation >> But, everything from our network, to our data centers, to security et cetera. So on the data center side, because of, the number of acquisitions the company went through, we actually, were sitting with seven data centers, and for a company our size, I mean way too many data centers a lot of cost, a lot of, you know, man power, to maintain those data centers, four of them in the US, three of them in Canada. So part of our strategy as a pertain to data center, was to consolidate, and you know I remember the kind of as we spoke about the strategy, was we need to move from somewhere from seven to less than seven, and zero was the right answer. (laughs) So meaning, wanted to get out of the data center business, and wanted to to go to the Cloud as much as possible. So we're now on that journey, we have, by the end of 2017, we'll have one physical data center, and the rest will be in the Cloud with Azure. >> And you're on that journey with Microsoft Azure, which is a big technology, alliance partner with Fortinet. Talk to us about the consolidation of data centers, and where does the security angle enter the picture, is it there from the beginning or is it something that has evolved as you transformed? >> I would say, largely evolved, so as we started architecting our, our cloud strategy with Azure, I mean Azure comes with, you know, a lot of security components, but at the same time we wanted to be in control of our own destiny as it were, as it pertains a security, so we wanted to have access to the firewall side of things, so that's how we got into working with Fortinet. And it was, we had never been a Fortinet customer prior to that, but as we looked at how to we secure Azure and how do we provide access to our network team, as it pertains to our connectivity to the cloud. Fortinet kind of, came out as the clear winner, through our due diligence, and we've been quite impressed with their capabilities, their partnership with Microsoft and Azure and their, you know, their ability that helped us architect a real secure solution as pertains to our cloud connectivity. So over the next couple of years, you're going to see more IoT? >> Definitely, that's 2017, I's say you know, two main strategies for 2017, security and IoT. >> So are you going to be seeing more edge oriented IoT >> Yes. >> So you're going to be, doing a fair amount of processing close to the end because of physics, so one of the things that we say, is we think that there's going to be less data move back to the Cloud, and more Cloud move to the edge. >> Right. >> How are, how do you see the relationship between, midstream oil and gas, being, processing at the edge, doing, running models at the edge, and making sure that the data that's in flight, which can be very strategic and very valuable, a lot of different dimensions remains secure. >> So you know as I mentioned at the outset, very complex company, and moving a lot you know, a lot of might, you know, what we call, oil and gas, and the other products that go with that. And I think, so if, as we look at IT, similar, right, very complex, network, very complex system that we have in place. And so, analytics is becoming, you know, quite important, to our whole running of the business, and obviously IT being the enabler of analytics, so, that is, you know, that's really what's moving us towards, and to do that, sorry, and to do that with, devices in the field, thinking your network is becoming very complex. So, not just wired devices any longer, wireless is a huge part of our network now, and keeping those things secure, and the fact that we're actually connecting to things that run, you know, the crown jewel, so to speak, makes it even more imperative that we have, you know, very, focus on security, and obviously great partners like Fortinet to help us keep those assets secure. >> From a security perspective, just curious from your standpoint, are you kind of the, the leader of that digital army, within Gibson or with your other peers on that c-suite to facilitate not only this journey to cloud, and I really liked how you about it Peter with the cloud moving out to the end points, what's your role in sort of, and how is it measured, facilitating security from, from that, eventually one data center out to those mobile IoT devices in the field. >> Right. So, I mean you know, as I mentioned, security is kind of one of our top strategies, unfortunately, I guess it has to be. But it's not hard to sell the importance of security, with, you know, the other senior leaders of the team. I think, the you know, the incidence that are happening in the world and the media, attention on security, makes it, makes >> Even in Canada. >> Even in Canada, yeah. (laughs) Makes it, you know, apparent that, that is kind of one of the questions that everybody's asking, >> Right. >> And in our business energy business as well, I mean, health, you know HSS and eHealth, security is paramount to what we do, you know, physically in the field, so security, from a digital standpoint is, I guess an easy sell. To your question, it's very top-of-mind everybody and IT kind of holds that banner as it, as it pertains to um, you know, the security of our digital assets. >> In some, in some senses, you might be able to say that some of the recent breaches, and we know that now they happen daily, but some of the ones that have been, in the media that you mentioned, could in some cases, in your role, maybe even be an advocate or an advantage for, you were saying it's kind of an easy sell, we understand the importance here. We want to get out ahead of it. Understanding, at some point, we're probably go into, get to the point of really being able to limit damage, that it's not a challenge in terms of the buy-in from your executive management. >> Right, and you know, the risk I think for us is disruption, um, and you see, you know, there's incidences around the globe, where, whether it's, you know, other utilities have been disrupted, you know, through breaches, so you know, that is our focus is, how do we ensure that our day to day operations are not disrupted by you know something that could have happened to from a, you know, from a digital security standpoint. >> Got it. Well it sounds like you have a quite a big 2017 ahead, continued success in the big data center, from seven to eventually zero with Microsoft Azure, that you're going to do. We thank you Richard Hannah, VP of information services, at Gibson Energy, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Alright, thank you for having me. >> And on behalf of Peter Burris my co-host, and myself Lisa Martin, thank you so much for watching theCUBE, stick around and we'll be right back. (upbeat music)