>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We are live here in Las Vegas at the Sands, along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE, of course, Dell Technologies World 2018. It's now a pleasure to welcome to the set, we have Bryan Bond, director of IT Infrastructure at Siemens eMeter. Bryan, thank you for being with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> John: And Andre Leibovici, who is the Vice President of Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Andre, good afternoon to you. Good to see you. >> Great to see you. >> Alright, Bryan, tell us about Siemens eMeter, first, just for viewers who might not be familiar with the company and your mission. >> eMeter, basically, is a software development company. We do enterprise-level software for utilities, so gas, power, water, just about anything that has a meter. We do not make meters, but we deal with all the data that comes from those meters. So, data acquisition, meter data management, loss prevention, all those types of things that come from that data that's leaving your house or your business. We deal with that for the utilities. So, back-in billing systems, longterm data analytics, all of those types of things, that's what we do. >> Yeah, so, Bryan, most companies I talk to, it's like your industry's changing so fast, digital transformation, software, everything. Utilities are considered by most to be one of the slower moving pieces, so what's the reality in your world? >> It's like selling to a rock. (Stu laughs) A rock, right? It's tough, historically, it is very tough. Especially in the United States, with PUC regulations, with the way you can charge customers and can't, it makes it very hard. And I wish I was a real expert at that type of stuff, but... It's a slow-moving process. The good news is most countries in the planet have decided that they need to go full-on smart grid and they need to do it fast. So, in a lot of countries in Europe, there's an edict out, we're going to do this and that has helped move this along. So it's very helpful to us, as a business. I also think it's very helpful to us in general, you know, on the planet, being able to manage grids better and more efficiently. >> Okay, so we're not going to be talking about power grids and all the things on the utility. You're an IT guy. And that's what we love talking about on theCUBE here. So, give us a thumbnail sketch of your environment, your purview. What's going on? >> All right. So, like I said, so we're a software development house. It's all developers: dev test QA, sales, support, you know, all that type of stuff. I'm fortunate to be part of a very large company, so I don't have to worry about e-mail, SharePoint sites, or any of that stuff. I get to deal with the real fun stuff, which is our product, how it's deployed, how it's developed and tested. We're a pretty much a 100% virtualized. VMware shop. We use VMware-based cloud services for the appropriate things for that. And we do all of that work ourself with our own team. So we have a small team in the U.S., we have a small team in India, and we handle all of that ourselves, we don't really outsource any of that. >> Alright, so Andre, I want to pull you in here. You're software development in VMware environment. Brings me back; I remember early days of VMware was always only for test dev. Today, I hear developers, I hear this stuff, and it's like, "Oh, isn't that kind of public cloud "and some of those things?" So, give us your viewpoint on customers like Bryan and what kind of things Datrium brings to that environment, obviously virtualized and all that. >> Yeah, no, that's a good point. So... All types of customers know suddenly looking at how they can leverage private cloud, but also public cloud. Create the ideal, hybrid cloud. What does that mean, right? So we have Fortune 100 companies like Siemens who are leveraging our technology to deploy the private cloud, run the VMware infrastructure on us. At the same time, create, you know, DR strategies to their secondary sites. But there is also those customers who are looking to, "How can I actually push workloads to the cloud? "How can I create a strategy around disaster recovery "to the cloud?" And I believe that, as part of our journey as a company, embracing private data centers, we got to embrace, also, the cloud. And this is the next big thing for us at Datrium. Where are we going to help customers on the journey to take their workloads running on-premise to the cloud, but at the same time enabling them to use as as DR and also move back when needed. I may as well just spill the beans here. I'm not sure if I'm getting trouble with marketing or not. >> John: I'm sure you're not. >> So we actually releasing very soon a fully orchestrated DR from our platform to the VMware cloud, to VMC. Fully orchestrated and enables you to fire over environment to the cloud and back, once your DR site or your primary site is actually back. There's a lot of promise on this market. There's a lot of companies doing, saying that they would do, but, you know, I see that's something that customers are really excited... >> You know, how does it work when you're dealing with a customer who is dealing with a customer, who's dealing with customers who... You know, privacy's essential, right? And there's a lot of concern... They have to be the customer of a utility. So how do you treat them, you know, because they have very unique needs, I would assume and that's a major consideration, because of their position with their customer. I mean, that's got to create a new dynamic, or an interesting dynamic, for both of you to handle. >> Yeah, it does. You know, from a development standpoint, you know, you may not be actually dealing with that particular customer's data, but you're helping that customer deal with that data. So, we're having to go through and make sure that our software doesn't have any holes in it and it's patchable, and that it follows, you know, simple guidelines. But, at the same time, we make recommendations to customers all the time, you know. "Well, how are you guys doing X, Y, Z in-house, "because you seem to be doing okay." And we say, "Well, we're using this particular platform." And, their encryption is probably the best there is right now out there. De-duped encryption, it's just fantastic. And across different storage arrays. And being able to that to the cloud and be encrypted there, and not have to worry about that is a big bonus. And that's definitely something that we look at. Obviously, we don't encrypt all of our data, because a lot of it's just nonsense. But, we do have stuff that we do that with. And we do it both for testing purposes and to prove that this meets the requirements of the customer. Because those requirements are different, not just in different countries, but in every state you go to. So, being able to provide that level of assurance of yeah you can meet your requirements with our software regardless of what platform you're running on. >> Bryan, you mentioned a couple of features there. But I wonder if you could back us up a second. You've got a virtualized environment. There's, you know, so many options that you can choose on there. Walk us a little bit through the problems that you were having, the decision process, and ultimately what led to Datrium. >> So... The set of primary goals for us was the typical thing you see in IT is you're doing the same thing for a long period of time. You're buying the same stuff, you buy more of it, you renew, and then they tell you that the price is going to go way up on support. So you buy a new one and start over again, right? The hockey stick approach. And so that's the time I like to actually stop and say, "Hey, am I doing this right, still?" Because what I did five years ago may not be right, you know, going forward, knowing what the changes are in the business. We were looking for great cost to capacity. Right? And ease of management and overall cost of the deployment. And when we started looking at all the different players in the space... For us, the big thing was going to NFS. So, single file system for management. Prior to that, we were either fibre channel on or iSCSCI. So, mini management points. Hundreds of LUNs. Hundreds of LUNs. We're managing storage, right? A small group of people, three, four guys? You're spending 20 hours a week managing storage? That's nuts, right? So, day one, we put these guys in in a POC. And my guys are like, "This stuff's never leaving." Because now I'm down to one management point, right? Six months, seven months later, I'm down six hundred LUNs from where I was with three management points. I don't manage storage anymore. None of my guys manage storage anymore. That's a hidden cost, you know? And I'm not suggesting reduction in FTE or anything like that. I'm saying, "Oh, now those guys can go work "on operating system patching." You know, the other paying points that you've got in the business, rather than managing, you know, that platform. So, all of those things rolled in together. And when we tried to compare them to other vendors, we couldn't get an apples to apples comparison. We had to go with multiple vendors to get the same performance, to get the same capacity, and we could never get the pricing. The best-case scenario we got for capacity and performance was three times the cost. Best-case scenario. And I still had to manage LUNs. >> Yeah, Andre, I used to always joke simplicity in the enterprise was an oxymoron, because there's so much happening. You hear, "Okay, get rid of one thing, I got to patch the other thing." There's no such thing as eliminating bottlenecks, you just move them. But, you know, sounds like some common problems we've been hearing out there. What's typical about his environment? What are you hearing from customers in general that Datrium's helping? >> So, I think the first point is simplicity. And it's something that I know we've been evolving, it's a journey not only for Datrium, but the whole data center industry, right? Went through ACI and now it's open conversions. So the whole simplification of the data center and make sure that most of the task can be automated. So some of the things that we do, that we simplify from a management perspective: we have no knobs, you don't decide if it's compression, the de-duplication enable, the erasure codings. Everything is owned by default and that's the way it's going to be because it doesn't make sense for an organization with thousands of virtual machines and applications to start tweaking every single knob to make sure they're going to get the best possible performance. Across the board, once we've actually verified, you might get like one or 2% CPU back. So, simplicity's a big point. Also, the other point that we mitigate in the organization, especially compared to ACI's solutions, is the data resiliency. So we actually offer enterprise-grade data resiliency that for ACI... And when talking about evolution with data center, you know, taking like putting SSDs into the servers, ACI clusters, and moving forward. So we actually make all the management of this SSDs much simpler. I forgot the line, where I was going to, but I... (laughs) I think the message is simplicity, skill ability, back data resiliency. Making sure you get enterprise-greater data resiliency in the data center. And you don't compromise on that. You get capacity, data resiliency, simplicity at the same time. >> Keep it simple, make it work. >> Andre: Exactly. >> Right. Faster. Gentleman, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time. Thanks for telling the Siemens eMeter story. We look forward to seeing you down the road. And good luck, continue success at Datrium, as well. Thanks, Andre. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, thanks for having us. >> Back with more. You're watching Dell Technologies World 2018 right here on theCUBE. (techno music)

(light music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. This one is part of a very, very special digital community event sponsored by Datrium. What are we gonna be talking about today? Well, Datrium's here with a special product announcement that's intended to help customers do a better job at matching their technology needs with the speed and opportunities to use their data differently within their business. This is a problem that every single customer faces, every single enterprise faces and it's one that's become especially acute as those digital natives increasingly hunt down and take out some of those traditional businesses that are trying to better understand how to use their data. Now, as we have with all digital community events, at the end of this one, we're gonna be running a crowd chat, so stay with us. We'll go through a couple of Datrium and Datrium customer conversations and then it'll be your turn to weigh in on what you think is important, ask the questions of Datrium and others in the community that you think need to be addressed. Let's hear what you have to say about this increasingly special relationship between data, technology and storage services. So, without further ado, let's get it kicked off. Tim Page is the CEO of Datrium. Tim, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> So, Datrium, give us a quick take on where you guys are. >> Yeah, Datrium's formulated as a software defined converged infrastructure company that takes that convergence to the next level, and the purpose of us is to give the user the same experience whether you're working on-prem or across multicloud. >> Great, so let's start by saying that's the vision, but you've been talking to a lot of customers. What's the problem that you keep hearing over and over that you're pointing towards? >> Yeah, it's funny, meeting with a number of CIOs over the years and specifically as related to Datrium, they'll tell you we're on an on-demand economy that expects instant outcomes, which means you have to digitally transform and to do that, you've gotta transform IT, which means it's gotta be easy, it's gotta be consistent. You've gotta get rid of a lot of the management issues and it's gotta feel or take advantage of the services that cloud has to offer. >> All right, so that's the nature of the problem. You've also done a fair amount of research looking into the specifics of what they're asking for. Give us some insight into what Datrium's discovering as you talk to customers about what the solutions are gonna look like. >> It's interesting, if you look at how to resolve that, you've gotta converge to transform in some form or fashion. If you look at the first level of convergence a lot of people have done, it's been directly as it relates to hardware architecture. We've taken that to a whole new level to a point where we're saying how do you actually automate those mundane tasks that take multiple groups to solve. Specifically, primary, backup, disaster recovery, all the policies involved in that. There's a lot of work that goes into that across multiple groups and we set out to solve those issues. >> So, there's still a need for performance, there's still the need for capacity, to reduce management time and overhead, et cetera, but, Tim, as we move forward, how are customers responding to this? Are you getting some sense of what percentage of them are going to say, yeah, that's it? >> Yeah, so interesting, we just ran a survey and got over 500 people, IT leaders to respond to it and it's interesting 'cause they talk about performance, management, security, but they're also talking about consistency of that experience. Specifically, we asked how many of you is it important to have your platform have built-in backup and policy services with encryption built-in, et cetera and we got a 70% rate of those applicants, of those people interviewed saying it's really important for that to be part of a platform. >> Now, it sounds like you're really talking about something more than just a couple of products. You're really talking about forcing customers or you're not forcing, but customers are starting the process of rethinking their data infrastructure. Have I got that right? >> That's right. If you look at how infrastructure's grown over the last 20 years, 20 years ago, SAN technology was related and every time you threw up an app, you had to put different policies to that app or put different LUN type management to how much of my resources can go to certain things. We set out to actually automate that, which is why it took us four years to build this platform with 100 programmers is, well, how do we actually make you not think about how you're gonna back up. How do you set a policy and know disaster recovery is gonna run? And to do that, you gotta have it in one code base. And we know we're on to something even based on our survey because the old array vendors are all buying bolt-ons because they know users want an experience, but you can't have that experience with a bolt-on. You have to have it in your fundamental platform. >> Well, let me step in here. I've been around for a long time, Tim and heard a lot of people talk about platforms and if I have one rule, companies that introduce platforms that just expand typically fail. Companies that bring an opinion and converge more things so it's simpler, tend to be more successful. Which direction is Datrium going? >> Yeah, definitely, that's why we took time. If you wanna be an enterprise class company, you can't build a cheap platform in 18 months and hit the market, 'cause where you architect, you stay. Our purpose from the beginning was purposefully to spend four years building an enterprise platform that did away with a lot of the mundane tasks, SAN management. That's 20 years old technology, LUN management. If you're buying your multi-cloud type technology experience in cages, you're just buying old stuff. We took an approach saying we want that consistent approach that whether you're running your services on prem or in any type of cloud, you could instantly take advantage of that and it feels the same. That's a big task 'cause you're looking to run the speed of storage with the resiliency of backup, which is a whole different type of technology, which is how our founders who have built the first version of this went to the second and almost third version of that type of instantiation of a platform. >> All right, so we know what the solution's gonna look like. It's gonna look like a data platform that's rethought to support the needs of data assets and introduces a set of converged services that really focus the value proposition to what the enterprise needs. So, what are you guys announcing? >> That's exactly right. So, we've finalized what we call our AutoMatrix platform. AutoMatrix inherently in it will have primary backup, disaster recovery, DR solution, all the policies within that and encryption built-in from the very beginning. To have those five things, we believe to actually have the next generation experience across true multicloud, you're not bolting on hardware technologies, you're bolting on software technologies that operate in the same manner. Those five things have to be inherent or you're a bolt-on type company. >> So, you're not building a platform out by acquisition. You're building a platform out by architecture and development. >> That's right and we took four years to do it with 100 guys building this thing out. It's released, it's out and it's ready to go. So our first we're announcing is that first instantiation of that is a product we're calling Control Shift, which is really a data mobility orchestrator, true SaaS based. You can orchestrate prem to prem, prem to cloud, cloud to cloud and our first iteration of that is disaster recovery. So, truly, to be able to set up your policies, check those policies and make sure you're gonna have true disaster recovery with an RTO of zero. It's a tough thing. We've done it. >> That's outstanding. Great to hear, Tim Page, CEO Datrium talking about some of the announcements that we're gonna hear more about in a second. Let's now turn our attention to a short video. Let's hear more about it. (light music) >> Lead Bank is focused on small businesses and helping them achieve their success. We want through and redesigned the customer engagement in defining the bank in the future. This office is our first implementation of that concept. As you can see, it's a much more open floor plan design that increases the interaction between our Lead Bank associates and our clients. With Datrium's split provisioning, all of our data is now on the host. So, we have seen 80 times lower application latency. This gives our associates instant responses to their queries, so they can answer client questions in real-time. Down time is always expensive in our business. In the past, we had a 48 hour recovery plan, but with Datrium, we were able to far exceed that plan. We've been able to recover systems in minutes now. Instead of backing up once per day, with that backup time taking 18 hours, now we're doing full system snapshots hourly and we're replicating those offsite. Datrium is the only vendor I know of that can provide this end-to-end encryption. So, any cyber attacks that get into our system are neutralized. With the Datrium solution, we don't have to have storage consultants anymore. We don't have to be storage experts. We're able to manage everything from a storage perspective through vCenter, obviously spending less time and money on infrastructure. We continue to leverage new technologies to improve application performance and lower costs. We also wanna automate our DR failover, so we're looking forward to implementing Datrium's product that'll allow us to orchestrate and automate our DR failover process. (light music) >> It is always great to hear from a customer. Once again, I'm Peter Burris, this a CUBE Conversation, part of a digital community event sponsored by Datrium. We've been talking about how the relationship between the new digital business outcomes highly dependent upon data and the mismatch of technology to be able to support those new classes of outcomes. It's causing problems in so many different enterprises. So, let's dig a little bit more deeply into some of Datrium's announcements to try to find ways to close those gaps. We've got Sazzala Reddy, who's the CTO of Datrium with us today. Sazzala, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey Peter, good to see you again. >> So, AutoMatrix, give us a little bit more detail and how it's creating value for customers. >> Yeah, if you go to any data center today, you notice that for the amount of data they have, they have five different vendors and five different products to manage that data. There is the primary storage, there is the backup and there is the DR and then there's mobility and then there is the security you have to think about. So, these five different products are causing friction for you. If you wanna be in the on-demand economy and move fast in your business, these things are causing friction. You cannot move that fast. What we have done is we took a step back and we built this Automatrix platform. It has this data services which is gonna provide autonomous data services. The idea is that you don't have to do much for it. By converging all these functions into one simple platform will remove all the friction you need to manage all your data and that's what we call Automatrix platform. >> As a consequence, I gotta believe then, your customers are discovering that not only is it super easy to use, perhaps a little bit less expertise required, but they also are more likely to be operationally successful with some of the core functions like DR that they have to work with. >> Yeah, so the other thing about these five different functions and products you need is that if you wanna imagine a future where you're gonna leverage the cloud for a simple thing like DR for example, the thing is that if you wanna move this data to a different place, with five different products, how does it move? 'Cause all these five products must move together to some other place. That's not how it's gonna operate for you. So, by having these five different functions converged into one platform is that when the data moves to any other place, the functions move with it giving you the same exact consistent view for your data. That's what we have built and on top of all this stuff is something we have, this global data management applications to control all the data you have in your enterprise. >> So, how are customers responding to this new architecture of AutoMatrix, converged services and a platform for building data applications? >> Yeah, so our customers consistently tell us one simple thing is that it's the most easiest platform they ever used in their entire enterprise life. So, that's what we aimed for simplicity of the customer experience. Autonomous data services give you exactly that experience. So, as an example, last quarter, we had about 40 proof of concepts out in the field. Out of them, about 30 have adopted it already and we're waiting for the 10 of them for results to come out in this quarter. So, generally we found that our proof of concepts don't come back because once you touch it, you experience the simplicity of it and how you get all these service and support, then people don't tend to send it back. They like to keep it and operate it that way. >> So, you mentioned earlier and I summarized the notion of applications, data services applications. Tell us a little bit about those and how they relate to AutoMatrix. >> Right, so once you have data in multiple places, people are adopt multi-cloud and we are going to also be in all these different clouds and we provide that uniform experience, you need this global data management applications to extract value out of your data and that's the reason why we built some global data management applications as SAAS products. Nothing to install, nothing to manage them, then they sit outside and then they help you manage globally all the data you have. >> So, as a result, the I&O people, the infrastructure and operations administrators, do things in terms of AutoMatrix's platform, the rest of the business can look at it in terms of services and applications that you're using in support. >> That's exactly right, so you get the single dashboard to manage all the data you have in your enterprise. >> Now, I know you're introducing some of these applications today. Can you give us a little peek into those? >> Yeah, firstly, our AutoMatrix platform is available on prem as a software defined converged infrastructure and you can get that. We call it DVX. And then we also offer in the cloud our services. It's called Cloud DVX. You can get these. And we're also announcing the release of Control Shift. It's one of our first data management applications, which helps you manage data in two different locations. >> So, go a little bit more specific into or detail into Control Shift. Specifically, which of those five data services you talk about is Control Shift most clearly associated with? >> Right, so to go to again back to this question about if you have five different services, if you have to think about DR. DR is a necessity for every business. It's digital protection, you need it, but the challenge is that there are three or four challenges you generally run into with most common people talk about is that one is that you have to plan. You have to have a proper plan. It's challenging to plan something and then you have to think about the file drill we have to run when there's a problem. And then lastly, when you eventually push the button to fail over, does it really work for you. How fast is it gonna come up? Those are three problems we wanted to solve really solidly, so we call our services, our DR services as failproof DR. That's actually takes a little courage to say failproof. ControlShift is our service which actually does this DR orchestration. It does mobility across two different places. It could be on-prem to on-prem, on-prem to the cloud and because we have this end-to-end data services ourselves, it's easy to then do compliance checks all the time. So, we do compliance checks every few minutes. What that gives you, that gives you the confidence that your DR plan's gonna work for you when you need it. And then secondly, when you push the button because you want some primary storage and backup, it's then easy to bring up all your services at once like that. And the last one is that because we are able to then work across the clouds and provide a seamless experience, so when you move the data to the cloud and have some backups there, you're gonna push a button to fail over, we'll bring up your services in VMware cloud, so that the idea is that it look exactly the same no matter where you are, in DR or not in DR and then watch the video, watch some demos. I think that you can see that you can't tell the difference. >> Well, that's great, so give us a little bit of visibility into how Datrium intends to extend these capabilities, give us a little visibility on your road map. What's up next? >> We are already on Amazon with the cloud. The next thing we're gonna be delivering is Azure, that's the next step, but if you step back a little bit and how do we think about ourselves? If you look at as an example Google, Google federates all the data, the internet data and processes an instant search, provides that instant click and access to all the data at your fingertips. So, we wanna do something similar for enterprise data. How do we federate, how do we aggregate data and provide the customer that instant management they can get from all the data they have. How do you extract value from the data? These set of applications are building towards some examples are we're building deep search. How do you find the things you want to find in a very nice intuitive way? And how do you do compliance, GDPR and also how do you think about some deep analytics on your data? So, we also wanna extend our Control Shift not to just manage the data on our platform, but also to manage data across different platforms. So, those are the kind of things we're thinking about as a future. >> Excellent stuff. Sazzala Reddy, CTO of Datrium, thanks so much for talking with us about AutoMatrix, Control Shift and the direction that you're taking with this. Very, very interesting new vision about how data and business can more easily be brought together. You know, I'll tell you what, let's take a look at a demo. Hi and welcome back to another CUBE Conversation. Once again, I'm Peter Burris and one of the biggest challenges that every user faces is how do they get more out of their technology suppliers, especially during periods of significant transformation. So, to have that conversation, we've got Bryan Bond who is Director of IT Infrastructure at eMeter, A Siemens Business. Bryan, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, tell us a little bit about eMeter and what you do there. >> So, eMeter is a developer and supplier of smart grid infrastructure software for enterprise level clients, utilities, water, power, energy. My team is charged with managing infrastructure for that entire business units, everything from dev tests, QA and sales. >> Well, the intelligent infrastructure as it pertains to the electronic grid, that's not a small set of applications, a small set of use cases. What kinds of pressure is that putting on your IT infrastructure? >> A lot of it is the typical pressures that you would see with do more with less, do more faster. But a lot of it is wrapped around our customers and our other end users in needing more storage, needing more app performance and needing things delivered faster. On a daily basis, things change and keeping up with the Jones' gets harder and harder to do as time moves on. >> So, as you think about Datrium's AutoMatrix, how is it creating value for you today? Give us a peek into what it's doing to alleviate some of these scaling and other sorts of pressures. >> So, the first thing it does is it does allow us to do a lot more with less. We get two times the performance, five times the capacity and we spend zero time managing our storage infrastructure. And when I say zero time, I mean zero time. We do not manage storage anymore with the Datrium product. We can deploy things faster, we can recover things faster. Our RTO and our RPO matrix is down to seconds instead of minutes or hours. And those types of things really allow us to provide a much better level of service to our customers. >> And it's especially for infrastructure like the electronic grid, it's good to hear that the RTO, RPO is getting as close to zero as possible, but that's the baseline today. Look out and as you envision where the needs are of these technologies are going for improving protection, consolidating, converging data services and overall providing a better experience for how a business uses data, how do you anticipate that you're going to evolve your use of AutoMatrix and relate it to Datrium technologies? >> Well, we fully intend to expand our use of the existing piece that we have, but then this new AutoMatrix piece is going to help us not with just deployments, but it's also gonna help us with compliance testing, data recovery, disaster recovery and also being able to deploy into any type of cloud or any type of location without having to change what we do in the back end, being able to use one tool across the entire set of the infrastructure that we're using. >> So, what about the tool set, you're using the whole thing consistently, but what about the tool set went in easiest for you within your shop? >> Installing the infrastructure pieces themselves in its entirety were very, very easy. So, putting that into what we had already and where we were headed was very, very simple. We were able to do that on the fly in production and not have to do a whole lot of changes with the environments that we were doing at the time. The operational pieces within the DVX, which is the storage part of the platform, were seamless as far as vCenter and other tools that we were using went and allowed us to just extend what we were doing already and be able to just apply that as we went forward. And we immediately found that again, we just didn't manage storage anymore and that wasn't something we were intending and that made our ROI just go through the roof. >> So, it sounds like time value for the platform was very, very quick and also it fit into your overall operational practices. You didn't have to do a whole bunch of unnatural acts to get there. >> Right, we did not have to change a lot of policies, we did not have to change a lot of procedures. A lot of times, we just shortened them, we took a few steps out in a lot of cases. >> So, how is it changing, being able to do things like that, changing your conversation with your communities that you're serving as they ask for more capabilities? >> First off, it's making me say no a lot less and that makes them very, very happy. The answer usually is less and the answer to the question of how long will it take changes from oh, we can get that done in a couple of days or oh, we can get that done in a couple hours to I did that while I was sitting here in the meeting with you and it's been handled and you're off to the races. >> So, it sounds like you're placing a pretty big bet on Datrium. What's it like working with them as a company? >> It's been a great experience. From the start in the initial piece of talking to them and going through the POC process, they were very helpful, very knowledgeable SCs and since then, they've been very, very helpful in allowing us to tell them what our needs are rather than them telling us what our needs are and going through and working through the new processes and the new procedures within our own environments. They've been very instrumental in performance testing and deployment testing with things that a lot of other storage providers didn't have any interest in talking with us about, so they've been very, very helpful with that and very, very knowledgeable. The people that are there are actually really smart, which is not surprising, but the fact that they can relay that into solutions to what my actual problems are and give me something that I can push forward onto my business and have a positive impact from day one has been absolutely without question one of the better things. >> Well, that's always one of the biggest challenge when working with a company that's just getting going is how do you get the smarts of that organization into the business outcomes and really succeed. It sounds like it's working well. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Bryan Bond, Director of IT Infrastructure at eMeter, A Siemens Business. Thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> Bryan: It's been great. >> And once again, this has been a CUBE Conversation. Now, what we'd like to do is don't forget this is your opportunity to participate in the crowd chat immediately after this video ends and let's hear your thoughts. What's important in your world as you think about new classes of data platforms, new roles of data, new approaches to taking greater advantage of the data assets that are differentiating your business. Have those conversations, make those comments, ask those questions. We're here to help. Once again, Peter Burris, let's crowd chat. (light music)