 theCUBE presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. Welcome back to Vegas, guys and girls. It's great to have you with us. theCUBE live, finishing our second day of coverage of Palo Alto Ignite 22 from MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. Dave, cybersecurity is one of my favorite topics to talk about because it is so interesting. It is so dynamic. My other favorite thing is to hear the voice of our vendors' customers and we could to do that. I always love to have the customer on. You get right to the heart of the matter. Really understand. You know what I like to do is when I listen to the keynotes, try to see how well it aligns with what the customers are actually doing. So let's do it. We're going to unpack that now. Michael Fagan joins us, the Chief Transformation Officer at Village Road Show. Welcome Michael, it's great to have you. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. So this is a really interesting entertainment company. I find the name interesting. But talk to us a little bit about Village Road Show so the audience gets an understanding of all of the things that you guys do because Theme Parks is part of this. Yeah, so Village Road Show is Australia's largest cinema exhibitor and conjunction with our partners at events. We also own and operate Australia's largest theme parks. We have Warner Brothers Movie World, Wet and Wild, Sea World, Topgolf in Australia is operated by us plus more. We also do studio, we also own movie studios. So Aquaman, Parts of the Caribbean, we're filming our movie studios, Elvis last year. And we also distribute and produce movies and TV shows. So quite a diverse group. You guys won a lot of awards, I mean, I don't know, Academy Awards, Golden Awards, all that stuff. And so it's good, congratulations. Thank you. Cool stuff. I want to also, before we dig into the use case here, talk to us about the role of a Chief Transformation Officer. How long have you been in that role? What is it encompassed and what do you get to drive from a transformation perspective? Yeah. So the nature and pace of disruption is accelerating and on one side and then on the other side, the running business as usual is becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to do. So running both simultaneously and at pace can put organizations at risk both financially and in other ways. So in my role as Chief Transformation Officer, I support the rest of the executive team by giving them additional capacity and also bring capability to the team that wasn't there before. So I do a lot of strategic and thought leadership. There's some executive coaching in there, a lot of financial modeling and analysis. And I believe that when a transformation role, particularly a Chief Transformation role is done correctly, it's a very hands-on role. So there's certain things where I dive right down and I'm actually hands-on leading teams or leading pieces of work. So I might be leading particular projects. I try to drive revenue and profitability across the divisions. And does any multi or cross-divisional opportunities or initiatives that I will lead those? The transformation a while ago was cloud, right? Okay, hey, cloud. And transformation officers, whether or not they had that title, would tell you, look, you got to change the operating model. You can't just lift and shift from the cloud. That's pennies. We want, you know, big bucks. That's the operating. Now, it's, my question is, did the pandemic just accelerate your transformation or was it, you know, deeper than that? Yeah, so within my role, I have both digital and business transformation. Some of it has been organizational. I think the pandemic has had a significant and long-lasting effect on society, not just on business. So I think if you think about how work used to be a place you went to and how it was done beforehand, before COVID versus now where previously, within the enterprise, you had all of the users, you had all of the applications, you had all of the data, you had all of the people. And then since March 2020, just overnight, that kind of inverted. And you had people working from home and a person working from home is a branch office of one. So we ended up with another 1,000 branches, literally overnight. A lot of the applications that we use are now SaaS or cloud-based, whether that's timekeeping with Kronos or employee communication with WorkJam. So they're not sitting within our data center, they're not sitting within our enterprise. It's all external. So from a security perspective, you obviously had a respond to that. We heard a lot about Endpoint and cloud security and refactoring the network and identity. These guys aren't really an identity. They partner for that. Still, a lot of change in focus that the CISO had to deal with. How did you guys respond to that? And you had a rush to do it. Yeah, so as you sit back now, where do you go from here? Well, we had two major triggers for our network and security transformation. The first being COVID itself. And then the second being, we had a major MPLS telco renewal that came up. So that gave us an opportunity to look at what we were doing. And essentially our network was designed for an era that no longer exists. For when people, like I said, when people were from home, all the applications were inside. And we had aging infrastructure, our firewalls were end-of-life. So initially we started off with an SD1 layer and an SD1 implementation. But when we investigated and saw the security capabilities that are available now, we expand that to a full SASE SD1 implementation. Why Palo Alto Networks? Because you said you had an aging infrastructure designed for an era that doesn't exist anymore. But you also had a number of tools. We've been talking about consolidation a lot in the last couple of days. What did you consolidate and why with Palo Alto? So we had a great partner in Australia, incidentally also called Cube, Cube Networks, that we worked with. What a great name. Yeah, right? So we worked with Cube. We ran a form of tender process. And Palo Alto with Prisma Access and Global Protect was the only solution that gave us everything that we needed in terms of network modernization, the agility that we required. So for example, in our theme park, if we want to send out a hot dog cart or an ice cream cart and that becomes, all of a sudden you've got a new branch that I want to spin up this branch in 10 minutes and then I want to spin it back down again. So from agility perspective, from a flexibility perspective, the security that we wanted, you know from a zero trust perspective, and certainly from a zero trust perspective, they're probably the only vendor that exists that actually provide all those capabilities. And did you consolidate tools or you were in the process of consolidating tools now? Yeah, so we actually consolidated down to a single vendor and in my previous role I had implemented SD-WAN before. And interoperability is a major issue in the IT industry. I think it's probably the only industry in the, the only industry I can think of, certainly that where we ship products that aren't ready. They're not full, they don't have all the features they, they don't have all the features that they should have. They're not our plans. They were releasing patches, we're releasing additional features every couple of months. So, you know, if you afford sold the cart, I said, hey, we're going to give you back seats in a couple of months to be uproar. But we do that all the time in IT. So I had, when I previously implemented an SD-WAN transformation, I had products from two tier one vendors that just didn't talk to one another. And so when I went and spoke to those vendors they just went, well, it's not me. It's clearly those guys. So there's a lot to be said for having a champion team rather than a team of champions. And Palo Alto have got that full stack, fully integrated that was, you know, exactly met what we were looking for. They've been talking a lot the last couple of days about integration. And I've talked with some of their executives and some analysts as well, including Dave, about that seems to be a differentiator for them because they really focus on that. Their M&A strategy is very, it seems to be very clear. And there's purpose on that back end integration instead of leaving it to the customer like Village Roadshow to do it. They also talked a lot about the consolidation. I'm just curious, Michael, in terms of like what you've heard at the show in the last couple of days. Yeah, I've been hearing the same message, but actually we've lived it a bit. You're living it, that's what I wanted to know. So, you know, we had the choice of, do you try and purchase so-called best-of-breed products and then put a lot of effort into integrating them and trying to get them to work, which is not really what we want to spend time doing. I don't want to be famous for, you know, integration and, you know, great infrastructure. I want to be, I want Village to be famous for delivering great experiences to our customers, memories that last a lifetime. And, you know, when kids grow up in Australia, everybody remembers going to the theme parks. That's what I want our team to be doing and to be delivering those great experiences, not to be trying to plug together bits of software that may or may not work and have vendors pointing at one another and then we're left carrying the can and holding the baby. So what was the before and after? Can you give us a sense as to how life changed, you know, pre, that consolidation versus post? Yeah, so our infrastructure was designed for, you know, old ways of working where we had, you know, routers that were not designed for modern traffic, including cloud-destined traffic, an old MPLS network. We used to backhaul all the traffic from our branches back to central location, right where we've got, you know, firewalls, we've got a DMZ, we can run advanced inspection services on that, so if you had a branch that wanted to access a website that was housed next door, even if it was across the country, and we would pull that all the way back to Melbourne, we would probably advance inspection services to it, send it up to the cloud, out back across the country, traffic will come back, come down to us, back out to our branch, so you talk about crossing the country four times even if the website is situated next door. Now with our SASE SD1 transformation, it just pops out to the cloud now straight away and the difference in performance for our team and for our customers is phenomenal. So you talk about saving minutes, you know, on a logon and seconds then on an average transaction, and seconds don't sound like a lot, but when you, it's every click you're saving a second, and you're talking about thousands of man hours every month that we've saved. If near Zook were sitting right here and said, what could we do better? You know, what do you need from us that we're not delivering today that you want us to deliver that would change your life? Yeah. There's two things, one of which I think they're already doing, but I actually haven't experienced myself, it's around the autonomous digital experience management, so I've now got a thousand users who are sitting at home and they've got a problem, I don't know, is it my problem or is it their problem? So I know that Palo were working on an AEDM solution, that digital experience solution, which can actually tell, well actually, you're sitting in your kitchen and your reader's in your front room, maybe you should move closer to the reader. So that's one thing, and the second thing is using AI to tell me things that I wouldn't be able to figure out with a human, spending a lot of time sifting through data. So things like where I've potentially overcompensated and now over-delivered on a network and security side or I've potentially under-delivered on a security side. So having AI to assess all of those millions and probably billions of transactions and packets that are moving around our network and say, hey, you could optimize it more if you dial this down or dial this up. So you said earlier, this industry has a habit of shipping products before they're ready, so based on your experience, seems like, first of all, it sounds like you've got a decent technical background as well. When do you expect to have that capability realistically? When can we expect that as an industry? I think, like I said, the rate and nature of change is, I think it's accelerating. The half-life of a degree is short. I think when I left university, what I learned in first year was obsolete within five years. I'd say now it's probably obsolete. What you learned in first year is probably obsolete by the time you finish your degree. Six months. That's true. So I think the rate of change and the partnerships that I see Palo building with the likes of AWS and Google and how they're coming together to jointly solve these problems. I think we will see this within 12 months. Who are your clouds? You got multiple clouds? We got multiple clouds, mostly AWS, but there are certain things that we run in Azure as well. We don't really have much in GCP or some of the other. Azure for collaboration and teams, stuff like that. We run SAP, that's hosted in Azure and our cinema ticketing system was only available in Azure at the time. We are mostly in AWS shop. And what do you do with AWS? I mean, pretty much everything else is, yeah. Anything that's customer facing our websites and they give us great stability, great availability, great performance we've had and very variable as well. So we'll, our pattern of selling movie tickets is typically fairly flat except when there's a launch of a new movie. So all of a sudden you might sell at 9 a.m. when Spider-Man went on sale last year. I think we sold 100 times the amount of tickets in the first 10 minutes. So our website didn't just scale up beautifully, just took in all of that extra traffic, scale up without any intervention and then scale back down. Taylor Swift needs that. She does need that. And so is your vision to have Palo Alto network security infrastructure be a common sort of layer across those clouds and maybe even some on-prem? Is it, are you working toward that? Yeah, we'd love to have, our end customers don't really care about the infrastructure that we run. Unless it breaks. Unless it breaks, yeah. They want to be able to go to see a movie. They want to be able to get on a roller coaster. They want to be able to go play around a top golf. So having that convergence and that seamless integration and working across cloud and network security. Now for most of our team, they don't know and they don't need to know. In fact, I'm afraid you don't want them to know and be thinking about networks and clouds. I kind of want them thinking about how do we sell more cinema tickets? How do we give a great experience? Or I guess how do we give long lasting lifetime memories to the people who come visit our parks? That's what they want. They want that experience, right? I'd love to get your final thoughts on we had you give a great overview of the role that you play as Chief Transformation Officer. You own digital transformation. You own business transformation. What advice would you give to either other Chief Transformation Officers, CSOs, CSOs, COOs about partnering, the right partner to really improve your security posture? I think there's two things. One is if you haven't looked at this in the last two years and made some changes, you're out of date. Because the world has changed. We've seen, I mean I've heard somebody say it was two decades worth of change. I actually think it's probably 50 years worth of change in Australia in terms of working habits. One, you need to do something. You need to have a look at this. The second thing I think is to try and partner with someone that has similar values to your organization. So Village is a wonderful, innovative company, very agile. So the concept of Gold Class Cinema, so big proceeds, recliners, waiter service, elevated foods concept, that was invented by Village in 1997. Thank you. And we finally came to the States, so a decade earlier. We would have had to see of every major cinema chain in the world come to Melbourne, have a look at what Village is doing and go, yeah we're going to export that back around the world. It's probably one of Australia's unknown exports. Yeah, so partnering with, so we've got a great innovation in history and we'd like to think of ourselves as pretty agile. So working with partners who have a similar thought process and manage to an outcome not to a contract is important for us. It's all about outcomes and you've had some great outcomes. Michael, thank you for joining us on the program, walking us through Village Roadshow, the challenges that you had, how you tackled them and next time I think I'm in a movie theater and I'm in a reclining chair, I'm going to think about you and Village. So thank you. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thanks Michael. For Michael Fagan and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE, our live coverage of Palo Alto Networks at night comes to an end. We thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. Next year. Yeah.