 Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, but a company we've had on the program before. Brian Gregory is the Director of Cloud Strategy and Engineering at Express GRIPS. Hey, sorry, Express GRIPS, and Express GRIPS. Booth is actually right behind us on the stage. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, you were giving us a little bit of background about, I believe it's a little about three years you've been with a company. Why don't you share with our audience Express GRIPS company that many of us have probably used, less likely that everybody knows who you are in your role there. Yeah, so my role today, again, is a Cloud Strategy and Engineering Director, but it's really kind of focused on building out the next-gen platform, making infrastructure kind of irrelevant, if you will, and making our developers go faster and making everything as seamless as possible. And Brian, just for our audience that doesn't know Express GRIPS, give us, what's the brand of the company and what are they known for? We serve 85 million patients today, 3,000 contractors. We have, if you go look at what we do as a business, the pharmacy benefit management side, our goal is to basically make prescriptions safer and more affordable for all of our patients. So if you think about what we're doing, that's really what we're doing. And we like to say pharmacy smarter. And for us, that's our major goal and everything we do. So my team, anybody's team, doesn't matter what you're doing in technology, that's your end goal to deliver value to those patients and your clients. And so that's kind of what we focus on. Yeah, well Brian, it's a good thing. I mean, IT's changing all the time, at least healthcare, nothing's been changing, radically changing all the time. So bring this inside, what you did when you came inside the company, your role as you said, infrastructure, want to worry about that less, that's something we hear a lot. Right, and one thing I should clarify is that Expresscript has always been a technology company. If you look at their grassroots and what they were built upon in 30 years, they grew to $100 billion business really by utilizing technology at the end of the day. When I came in, I was managing some infrastructure teams and database organizations, and we decided that this was the whole digital transformation or cloud strategy was like a real thing. So my leadership asked me to kind of take this on as an initiative, that was my background, that's where I kind of came from, my grassroots, if you will, from SAVS and CenturyLink. And that became a full-time role. It came to one point where like, you can't do both, like this has taken off and this has been a real thing. Our major, like our main goal was to say, how are we going to step outside the box? We still have to run 100 billion dollar organization, but we got to figure out what the new is, right? You're going to invent that next light bulb and we got to maintain the current one. And so for us, we wanted a full-fledged platform. It wasn't about just spinning up VMs and delivering those. I think we had that kind of covered. It was really about figuring out how are we going to figure out cloud, right? Cloud in general, and then what about multi-cloud and how do we get a platform that could seamlessly integrate with all of those? And Brian, what was the underlying driver there in the business? Is it you needed to develop more software? You needed to move faster? What's the why? Was it cost savings and things getting out of hand? All of the above, I think specifically, it's about delivering value, right? Delivering value to patients as fast and seamless as possible. And so we wanted to figure that out, right? The old ways, if we all go back in our years there was days that I would get hardware and physically, like I'm going to figure out how to put the drive so that they're getting more IO or whatever. Those problems have been solved, right? And if you look at companies 10 years ago, they were like virtualization scary. I can't do that. I have production workload. So the trend in the market is to keep moving up the stack, right? And so ultimately, that's where you end up focus on. Where do we deliver value as an IT organization? That's not for us to go build a home-brewed system that does any of those things, right? You can go buy those things, integrate them and figure out how they can drive value in your business. So that's what we wanted to do. Get a platform, the first goal we had was actually a really interesting story. We wanted to build a new mobile application that would allow consumers to go on and make a user experience like much better than it had previously been, right? If you wanted to order prescriptions, you could go into this app and say, not just can I order that, but I can also see what the prices are at different places local to you, the distance to those. And then what would it take if you did a 90-day fill for our home delivery program and you could sign up via that method. And that was really what we were going after that end user experience to say, how do we change the experience for our consumers? Not necessarily the back-end stuff that the day-to-day batch processing that they don't really care about how that's done as long as it's done within the time threshold that's supposed to be done. Brian, can you talk a little bit about the process of getting to where we are in terms of, you talked about trying to figure out cloud. Part of that is figuring out which platform to go with and part of it is finding the people with the skills to kind of, once you've decided on a direction to kind of help you figure it out. Can you talk just a little bit about maybe that learning journey for you? Sure, sure. Yeah, it's really interesting, because when I talk I feel like this was five years that I've been doing this specifically at Express Scripts, right? When really it's like 18 months that we really stood up our internal hybrid cloud and got our platform installed. So yeah, it's learning by doing, but the nice thing about everything we're doing and you hear this all the time is that we can iterate, right? You can make changes. It's not like you have to wait three months and then you can't shift or can't course correct. Learning, the team's been amazing. So I grabbed some people within. They got retrained on, this is the new stack I also brought in some people that had previously worked with me that had kind of some of the skill sets. Really people that are curious in nature and want to learn, but then you go, that's a neat story, right? We can stand up a cloud or use an external one, you can stand up your paths, but at the end of the day, what do you do next? How do you start to engage developers? Because when we opened the doors for business, it wasn't like we had everybody standing there waiting to get in. You had to kind of convince them of like, hey, these are the features and not convince them. Show them the features and the functionality and why it mattered to them. Why does it matter now? Then you go, okay, that's great. And you start to kind of, I would say, my team focuses probably 80% of their time on teaching people how to fish, hoping that the developers get better and consuming the platform, they help each other. And we see a lot of that happening, right? In our Slack channels and HipChat, different things, communication tools where they're helping each other. So we're not even having to answer all the questions. But then you get the whole problem of like, all right, well, now we've got release management we're going to start working with. And that opens a whole new can. And they're transforming as well. And they're definitely changing their processes. But it gets kind of hairy when you start looking at, you know, like, well, we got to keep the tourniquet over here because we can't afford any disruption or outages for our patients. But these new guys, if they check all these boxes, they should be able to deploy whenever they feel like in the middle of the day and we should feel comfortable doing that because it's now microservice, it's not some monolithic thing that they don't understand. So. Brian, can you give us a little insight on the kind of the state of your applications? So I think most people understand something like Cloud Foundry, oh, I wanted to build that new app. You know, that's a great use case. How many applications have you moved over? Do you have a percentage you measure? I heard like Deliberty Mutual Keynote was like, you know, what percentage of workloads they have there? What percentage of people code? How fast they release code on this thing? What metrics do you use? Yeah, so I had this conversation last night. We don't have, I can tell you that we have over 1,100 applications that have moved in 18 months. So I would tell you that when it started out we had specific goals of migrating existing, lift and shift and refactoring and things like that. What we found was that there's all this net new coming in. Not just, you know, what we're doing is blowing up within the company but they're also doing that on the developer side and they're doing some, a lot of new things. So those new projects clearly migrate over or come in the door starting out with Cloud First Strategy. Then you start to lift and shift and you really kind of have to start cherry picking like what makes sense, right? Some things you go, there's not really the value. There's no user experience behind this. There's no, it's literally just a monetary thing maybe or maybe not but you start taking the dollars that you're going to put towards migrating this and then you're like, well, it's not really a win-win. So what we found was that all net news coming this direction on the Cloud Foundry platform and the workload that makes sense and then we started cherry picking things that we rewrote in spring and they're slowly migrating but today we're at 1,100, we just hit 1,100 apps. Which is pretty good for 18 months. It's really impressive in 18 months. Any lessons learned there as to things you could do to move faster or mistakes that were made that you tell your peers, hey, watch out for this? Yeah, I definitely have a lot of those but at the same time, I feel like lessons learned are like the best thing you could, the best thing we do is fail. Like literally, because then you learn something from it and then you move forward. I think the one advice, some advice I would give to people is that don't get hung up on trying to be perfect. If there's a lift and shift opportunity and you only get 60 to 70% of the goodness of moving this thing, then just go ahead and do it. Don't say, well, but it's not perfect and we want to make this app completely different because that's where people get stuck on. I think once they realize they just try some things and then you can get over there and change it and make it perfect down the road. But some people were like, why would I move one to one? I should refactor this app and maybe have it multiple per one. And those are great conversations but I think it keeps people, the whole analysis, paralysis conversation and it's like just try it, just go. I would say another good story we had is we have an outcomes conference that we host Express Scripts. They were trying to come up with a new way to do like a basic content management solution, show the digital benefit guide and they came in and they wanted to try one technology. Didn't work out, two weeks later they came back like, well it doesn't deliver that. So we tried something else and we ultimately tried four different things for this person and they got to where they wanted to be but the important part was that we could change on the fly. In the old days it was like you ordered hardware or you ordered VMs, you were stuck because he had dates to deliver and we basically can change things. If it doesn't work we'll try something else and you can kind of move around and do things at scale where you couldn't be for. That sounds like a set of outcomes that the business side, the executive side and leadership can actually point to and recognize as helping transform the business. You're here at the conference, a sponsor of the conference, participating at the conference. And you're a pharmacy benefits company. So I mean that's an interesting position to be in. But it sounds like the business and management supports you and recognizes that this is helping move with velocity. Yes, so from the top down we are a technology company at heart. I mean this is what we do and the company's come a long way with where, and when I got there the fact that we're here sponsoring that means a great deal to me because this isn't after all an open source tech conference which is amazing. It's nice to talk about, get some branding out there and talk about what we're doing so people know that, hey there's a lot of really cool things happening. Maybe we recruit some people at the end of the day as a result, you never know. But yeah, it's really about just branding and then supporting the community and getting out the word of what we're doing and why it matters. Last question I have for you Brian is a lot of discussion about multi-cloud and things like Kubernetes, enable that. Can you share what public cloud or public cloud you use, how you look at that dynamic? Yeah, so we've got a few things in the works. So there's a few POCs happening. I would tell you that our internal cloud is where we have everything hosted today. We've built an internal hybrid cloud. So you have the data centers or? Yes, yeah, we have multiple data centers and we have our internal hybrid clouds built out. We are evaluating some external capabilities. We are also doing some partnerships. You can actually go read about our CIO just release a story about that. But yeah, we're definitely looking for that. Where's our burstable capacity? With our data and with what we have going on, going external is a much different conversation than where like my previous company, like we're talking about HIPAA compliance and a lot of different data issues that we've got to make sure we're protecting and our most important thing to do is protect that data from our patients. So there's no reason for us to go, we have to get out external at this point. But we do see that as an important part of our key going forward to say this is part of our strategy to say we got to get an external solution as well. Brian Gregory always loved the stories of how digital transformation are helping to impact everyone who uses prescriptions. I mean, no better way of helping people. So we'll be back with lots more coverage here of Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Thanks for watching theCUBE. 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