 Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome back to HPE Discover Madrid 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris, Jesse St. Laurent is here, he's the CTO of Hyperconverged at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and he's joined by Jacobus Stein, who is the GM of IT Operations at Key Price Insurance, in South Africa. King Price Insurance, yeah. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Jesse, good to see you again. Yeah, great to be here. What's happening at Discover? Hyperconverged all the rage, taking over the world. Yeah, Hyperconverged taking over the world. I think virtual machines continue to be a big challenge for customers, right? They're still exploding as much as we talk about all the other cool things that are happening in the industry. A lot of times it's the old unsolved problems that just won't go away, right? It's funny to call VMs the old problem, but in some ways they've kind of forgotten at times as we talk about next generation stuff, but the reality is Hyperconverged is still growing like crazy, still helping customers simplify that management experience. So for us that's running on the Gen 10 platform from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, just rock solid server platform, and in terms of delivering customers the same thing we've been delivering, right? Which is that predictable performance and simple management experience to provide a T for them. Yeah, VMware is the new legacy, and we should all have such a legacy. Okay, your comments, let's get into it. First, tell us about your organization, Key Price. Yeah, so King Price is a short-term insurance company in South Africa. Started about five years ago by a very innovative CIO. So he's been in the insurance industry most of his life. But he didn't like what he was doing in the insurance industry, so he kind of like wanted to reinvent the whole insurance industry. So he came up with this one-of-a-kind business model. And our biggest selling point there is that as your core value depreciates on a monthly basis, so does your insurance premium. And that is our biggest selling point in the short-term industry when it comes to vehicles. And it's really been taking off in South Africa. And I was telling some other guys this morning, it's actually surprising that nobody else in South Africa has tried to copy that because it's a winning model for us. Sorry, that happens monthly? Monthly, yeah. We decrease your premium on a monthly basis. You guys sell it to the US? Yeah. Not yet, but yeah, definitely on the maps. I mean, it's so logical, right? The replacement costs are going down. But why wouldn't your premiums go down? Yeah, one thing it is quite logical. So it is, there's obviously a lot of questions, but your repair cost goes up on a monthly basis on a yearly basis and the rent dollar is not always very healthy for us. But I mean, we do all the math in the background and it makes sense. It's more valuable to retain a customer on a book than having to replace a customer every five or six months. So keeping a customer on the books while decreasing its premium in the long run, it makes a lot more sense. So you keep churn below a threshold and maintain that customer relationship for a long enough period of time, you get profitable. Yeah, because I mean, in South Africa, especially the short term insurance industry is extremely competitive. So the acquisition cost of a customer is very high. We've got various forms of leads coming in via websites and partners and things like that. But the price just to get a customer on the books is extremely high. So the longer a customer stays on the book, the sooner he pays off for his acquisition. And that's where we actually return that into the customer. Radio ads are the big thing in the U.S. I don't know if that's the case in South Africa. I mean, we've tried a few radio ads. It's not the main technique. No, definitely not. What is the main channel on? So we are very big on social media. So the one thing that we've adopted from the gate code was definitive technology. And that is evident in every aspect of our business. So we really push social media. We've got a whole team looking off the social media. We've got brand ambassadors working at our business. We do some TV ads, but again, that's quite pricey. Some billboards still, yeah, little radio ads, but predominantly socials productive then. It is, all right, let's get it. I love talking about your business, especially disruptors to the insurance business. I mean, it's just sitting there waiting to get disrupted. Let's get into the infrastructure. So maybe paint a picture for us. What's that look like? Yeah, so when I joined the company about two and a half years ago, they were just starting with this whole virtualization thing. So it was kind of like new to them. Having started up just five years ago, there was like a hundred IT guys working there, but some of them were working in marketing and some of them were working in management. It was all over the show. And my main job was actually just to consolidate that entire environment and get them on this journey. Worth the competitive of the market. It's really important for us to get proper product to market quickly. And that's the one of the challenges I faced from day one is that our inability to actually get product to market because of a lack of proper infrastructure to turn around times and getting environments up and running. And it was literally to the point where we were detrimental to the business. We were causing serious down time. Business were running major losses almost on a monthly basis because systems were down. They were ill managed. And then luckily for us, we came across the guys from HPE SimpliVity and they came in there. We deployed some of their technology on a proof of concept basis in our development space because that was our biggest burning challenge at that point. The developer is shouting for environments and we just couldn't provide that. So we thought, you know what? Let's invest this in a development space and see how it goes and if it works. We'll see how it goes from there. I think they dropped three cubes there, commissioned them, started moving the development teams across. And two months, three months later when the guys from HPE were there to pick up the POC cubes, we just said, hey, guys, where do we sign for this? You're not taking this out of my server room. And from there, just the adoption into the production environment was so quick. We instantly ordered three more cubes for the production environment. So there's still that definite split between production and development. And that just allowed us to actually allow the developers again to get almost fresh daily copies of the production environment to allow them to develop products, to do some modeling against the production environment in their own spaces. And that's really lifted their performance to such an extent that we now got that whole agile sprint running in two week cycles. So we've done some research. It suggests that when you bring this kind of infrastructure into the development world, you can actually get as high as 7X productivity improvement in developers. Have you seen those kinds of jumps? Yeah, definitely. The one challenge that we had, so the guys from development, we're really trying to adopt the whole agile development methodology. But again, the infrastructure was a detriment to them because they were hoping to have the environments up and running by a Tuesday morning when their sprint would start. But then two, three days later, we were still trying to restore copies of the databases onto their environment. So they ended up with three days left of their two week sprint. So I mean, that alone, the fact that we can have the environments up and running within hours, that's definitely the major improvement for them. And with a sprint, we can actually just decommission their environment, restore it back for them. So infrastructure is no longer the showstop in the development team and it's definitely just taken off with them. Common story, the land that expands, dev impact, productivity impact, how does that compare? I think it is a common thread. And I think one of the other things that happens typically is from a land and expand perspective, those first systems go in, they're for a POC, they're for a development environment and the theory is they're isolated. And then what happens is everybody realizes that it's easier to provision, it's more agile for the development team, it's easier for IT. And then suddenly the old environment just kind of atrophies and the new environment keeps growing. So if you look at your environment, you had some traditional infrastructure within your environment. How much has that expanded versus the simplicity environment since you went live with simplicity? Yeah, we have actually, we no longer are investing in that portion of our infrastructure because it's still, I mean, it's good technology and it's still valuable to us, but we'll just put that on a normal run out. Things that we cannot get value from a simplicity perspective, like I think I was telling Jesse this morning, we've got our method of contracting because we are entirely paperless, our method of contracting is literally the call that you make to the clients to close this policy deal. So that is our proof if there's a claim or whatever the case might be. So all those recordings we need to keep for seven years. So those are the type of things that we saw in an old traditional infrastructure currently because there's no deduplication there, there's no compression of any value there. So we're just shipping all that old kind of like... Pure archive. Yeah, pure archive type of approach to that environment. Did you feel like you've achieved a substantially similar operating model to what people talk about with the public cloud on-prem? I think the ease of deployment and the fact that it is so simple. I mean, the guy that's currently doing it, it's one guy. Again, our team is not very big. We've got the one guy looking off to the entire server infrastructure environment. But the ease of deploying that and the fact that it's so simple, you can do it from any way. And it's literally one or two clicks and he's got it up and running. For us, it's definitely very similar. I mean, that's the goal, right? I mean, it's kind of why you got into this business. So before the acquisition, the SimpliVy steam was to simplify IT. With HUE Packard Enterprise, it's to simplify hybrid IT. But the message and the approach hasn't changed. If we can give IT cycles back to focus on things that return value to the business, that's the goal in the end of the day, right? It's taking time away back from all those tasks that are the classic keeping the lights on tasks. Allow the business to do something productive. But it's also to make the cycles that remain that much more valuable as well. Yeah, absolutely. And anything we can do that takes day to day management tasks off the plate of the IT organization allows them to be that much more productive. Developers having their whole sprints. I mean, that's night and day in terms of productivity back to the business. In terms of the performance that customers see in their environment. And you have a critical night and day batch job in your environment, right? Yeah. What was your pre and post experience there? So the one thing that we do, I mean, the monthly decrease, that's a big sequel job that runs very often in our environment. So it's all part of the financial billing cycles that run. So we've got this one job that runs, I think it's actually on a weekly basis. And that would kick off on a Sunday evening. And we would literally have the guys from the finance team getting up, starting a job and sitting there waiting for 14 hours for this job to complete. Number one, the environment was not very trustworthy. So they had to be up to make sure it actually completes and post or actually migrate us, migrating them onto the simplified environment. The guy phoned me up the next morning and said, so you got up at one, kicked off the job, and two hours later it was done. He said, something must be wrong. This can't be happening. So that's literally that's 12 hours safe time. The challenge we had there that job actually ran into a production environment or office hours. So the effect that had on our entire business was just bad for IT, bad rep for IT. Our last question. When it failed. Sorry? Well, even if it ran, it ran for 14 hours. So that ran into business hours. But it wasn't bad for the business after you got to two hours. No, no, no. I mean, that was like part three in the morning. It's all sorted. And even if you had the failure on the job itself, you could just re-run it like once or twice and it would still be outside business hours. All right, last question for each of you. Your respective to-dos. Jakob, what's on your to-do list? And then Jesse, what's on HPE's HCI to-do list? Yeah, so KingPrice is definitely seriously looking at expanding internationally. So what we are busy doing is to actually redesign our entire architecture, structure of our infrastructure and our network and our security. So we are busy planning to deploy another active data center, will probably be in South Africa still. But to get that full value of the WAN optimization, the disability of the compression that we can see to actually have a proper duplicate data center up and running to ensure business continuity. Yeah, for us, the market knows us for our product in the VCR market, in the VMWAR market. And the real next growth area for us is around hyper-view. So big excitement there around seeing that market expand. We've seen a lot of excitement from customers around multi-hypervisor. That's an area both with what's happening with some activity from a platform perspective as well as the other technologies from Hewlett Packard Enterprise really coming together to offer that multi-cloud experience for customers. Excellent, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to see you again, Jesse. Thank you so much for having us. Good luck going forward. Yeah, great stuff. Okay, keep it right there, everybody. Peter and I will be back at Discover Madrid to wrap right after this short break.