 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back everybody. This is theCUBE. We're here at IBM Edge 2015. Larry Hess is here. He's the CTO of Steel Orca, a service provider out of New Jersey. Larry, welcome to theCUBE. It's good to see you. Thank you for having me here. So you got your Z pin on. I presume, you know, you do a lot with a Z group. I'm very happy to be a part of it as our platform and we're excited about the growth that we see on our platform. Well, it's interesting. Edge used to be just a pure, almost pure storage show that's expanded now, a lot of Z content, a lot of power, middleware, and a lot of thought leadership. So talk about Steel Orca. What's the company all about? Well, Steel Orca is a managed service provider that's emphasis on the customer experience. Not just how they're going to come into our organization and represent us as a provider for them, but what happens once they're in the organization? What can we add to their experience? How do they look at their products from an external through the network? Is it quick provisioning for their product? Steel Orca has an emphasis from the customer's perspective, not from what we want out of the customer. And the platform of the Z and some of the software packages that support it, incredible experience for the customer. So talk to customers, if you're servicing in the Z, you've got some of the most demanding customers in the world, what are they doing? What are they asking you for? What are the use cases, applications that they're running? That's a good question. As a basic service, we're looking at Linux and Oracle as a service, but not as that, there's a lot of legacy systems that IBM has done great service to over the years, but as they move on to new platforms, they were the like to have their clientele to move on to new platforms. We would like to make sure that there's a good swift transition that's easy for them, easy to maintain, easy to continue to grow if they want to stay on the same platform. But as being a MSP for an X in the power and the mainframe experience for them, we give them the option to transition at their will and at their need, or grow at their will and their need. How popular in your client base is Linux? What are people doing with Linux on Z? They're growing fast. It's the acceptance of moving off of their on-site premise of product offering to their internal clients, to someone else having to service their product on a mainframe. Everybody went to the platform of the X, thought that was a great platform, the world was going to transition to that. We don't see it that way. We see it as a choice. You can move to that, or you can stay on the mainframe where you have better control and access and serviceability. Well, a lot of homegrown apps as well on the mainframe that are working just fine, you don't want to mess with. Yes, that was Larry. I talked to Walmart earlier and they're a Z client and they talked to really two things for them. It was performance and uptime with the two reasons why they really saw Z as a leader for their environment. Is that similar for you? It is. As myself being a provider, I look at more of the customer experience. Yes, in the background those things are absolutely expected and that's what I'm providing, but I don't look that as the most important thing. It's the experience. You look at the millennium crowd that we deal with on a daily basis. They're becoming our forefront leaders in this industry. They want to ease the experience of that. And as you looked at some of the software package that they talk about the hotel industry, that product where it's the experience. It's how they interact with their organization, with their supplier, whether it's a hotel, whether it's the airlines, whether it's their business or their payroll, ADP. You look at that, you expect your paycheck, it's there. But you don't look at that as the most important thing. You look at your experience of being able to get access to that. Not that it's always gonna be there. You're upset if it's not there, but that's not what you look at. So, I mean, big mainframe announcement in January, C13. The focus of that announcement was on several things which you wouldn't normally think about in a mainframe world, mobile, and then bringing analytics and transaction data together. How much of that are you seeing in your client base? How much do you expect to see going forward? One of our anchor tenants is going to, or is doing the analytics for banking, all right? Which is very intensive in short periods of time. And then a storage moves from online storage to immediate access to more reserve storage, if you want to call it that. But it has to maintain there for two years. So, the instantaneous ability to get on there, the quick provisioning, he loves what we're doing for him. Okay, and everybody's talking about digital transformation at this conference and other conferences. What does that mean to you, to your customer base, specifically to Z? We're in the infancy of building out what our mobile platform would be. So, not a lot of depth in the experience in yet, but it's a demand that keeps coming up repeatedly. And as they've mentioned in the conference, they don't want to have to wait more than half a second that that app comes up. If it doesn't, they're going to go elsewhere. So, the size of our network, the pipes, the experience that the customer has has to be instantaneous. And that's what we're going to provide. What are you seeing for the economics of the mainframe and Z platform? Comparative to other platforms, everybody thinks, okay, Z, it's got to be expensive. Other clients are telling us, hey, actually, in the right use cases, it's far less expensive. What are you seeing? Well, as a business unit of Steel Orca, which is the cloud computing platform, for me to look at real estate, the number of VMs that can be incorporated into Z for 500 VMs is taken up in that unit. And my economics are showing very much a positive cash flow for a reason. And it's those two primary things, power and space. So, Larry, it's interesting. We really, for most people, they really disaggregated their IT. Talked about compute, storage, network, and everything got pulled out of the mainframe. And one of the things we spent a lot of time at Wikibon looking at is some of those hyperscale players out there that have tried to make the infrastructure invisible. I'm curious, your experience on the Z is how much time do your people spend touching the box and dealing with the box? Or can you really spend much more time on the application space, which is where we talk about things like containerization and cloud-native applications. Do you want to spend that time on the apps, not the infrastructure? Well, uptime is of major importance to any of the network applications today. So, the mainframe with the capabilities have brought in a desire to come back. And people went away thinking that the separation of the X environment is the best way to go. They can be spread across multiple locations, multiple boxes within the organization. And they feel like they've lost control. And by bringing it back into the mainframe, they're regaining that control. Or they're being able to extend the life of some of their applications and ensure that it's up there. Yeah, so we talked a little bit about some of the applications. Are you looking at the containerization? How do you build more apps faster for your environment? We're, again, on the infancy of that part of the business. Containerization is an absolute must from a data center in a box all the way to a large drive-in type container. That is probably phase three of our build-out as well as our platform of alternate energies. We want to build solar fields as part of our implementation to understand the best experience for the customers and people believe that is an important add-on. So what about, as you look forward, Larry, your perspective technologist, what excites you? What are you looking at to bend the innovation curve, so to speak? Not just the mainframe as a service, which we are providing out to those legacy customers, but the integration across multiple platforms and the ease of that. Again, it's the customer experience of how they provision, how they ramp up their storage. How can they add that without painfully going throughout a paperwork process to do that? So technology and the speed to market, there were some very interesting statistics in timeframe of microseconds to nanoseconds and how information is disseminated and accessed and that is the key factor. I have a son and he gets very upset if he doesn't have his gaming or his information immediately off of it and that's when we have to provision our organizations to meet. And last question, from your perspective, what do you want IBM to do to help you meet that vision, that goal? We've worked with one of the IBM business partners and they've done an exceptional job of bringing the entire platform. It's just not the mainframe, it's how you service the mainframe, it's how the umbrella software allows for the ease of provisioning how I do my billing out of that, so it's the experience of IBM and that forward thinking beyond just selling widgets, it's a solution sell and it's helped me make it develop an organization and they're going to take me to the next level. So I said last question, but so tell us about your experience at Edge. How's that been, I mean we sort of led there, let's end there. It's a wow, it is, the people have been fantastic, the organization, the presentations and the technical knowledge that they've shown upon me has been just in a wow state. It's good to meet the people and it's good to see an IBM being in a large organization, be able to be adaptive and move forward with what's happening today at the speed of what things are happening today. Well Larry, yes, it was great to meet you, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, we appreciate it. Thank you very much, enjoy the time. All right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live at IBM Edge 2015, we'll be right back.