 Live from the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at AWS ReInvent 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsors, Amazon and Trend Micro. Welcome back everyone, you're watching theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. We are here live in Las Vegas for Amazon ReInvent Conference. I'm John Furrier, here with my co-host, Jeff Kelly from mukibon.org. Our next guest is just incredible. A AP of information systems at Wilbro's Group, Inc. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks John. So Trend Micro, great sponsor for us. We really had Mark on earlier. We love having you on, having him on and you're their guest. And Jeff and I love talking to folks in the trenches because at the end of the day, the shows are great, there's good networking, the amenities are good, there's parties going on, but if you go back to work, you got to implement stuff. At the end of the day, that's when the rubber hits the road. So share with us what's going on in your environment, challenges you have, what technology things are now available to you with the cloud and what were you dealing with? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, we're a 100 year old company. Been around since 1907. We've done engineering and pipeline construction for a long, long time. And what they will tell you, the guys in the field, the welders out there, you don't need a computer to build a pipeline and you don't need a computer or servers or cloud to do anything with what you use. And what we're trying to say at Wilbur's is, you know what, that's just not right. There's a lot of contextual information that we can gather and it'll make the whole life cycle of the pipeline or whatever asset we're building, that much richer. So we're right now in that phase of getting away from this legacy on-premise monolithic environment and pushing it as much as we can into the cloud, right? I'm faced with that problem of, do I want to build data centers? I don't want to build data centers. We want to build pipelines. We want to build oil and gas assets or any energy infrastructure asset, not data centers. And you also want to be highly valuable in terms of being productive to driving revenue. Oh, right, right. So like, internet of things, maybe in your wheelhouse, right? It is, it absolutely is. We don't like that whole idea of focusing on things that are not core to our business. So we're pushing all that to somebody else who does care about it so that we can focus on things that are interesting to us and that matter to us as a core business. All right, so I got to ask the question. What does data-driven pipeline construction mean to you? Right, no, that's exactly right. My president, his name's Ed Weigel, he came to me one day and he set his phone on my desk and he said, you know what, Jason? There are nine Starbucks within two city blocks from here. And I said, dude, why do I care, right? I went to Starbucks like, I'm good. And he said, you know what? We want to ask, we want our pipeline companies to ask the same question. How many valves do we have in a square block, in a square mile? In the next, you know, in the next three miles, how many valves, how many compressor stations, how many meter stations, what do we have? How can I see that? It's right now in oil and gas and in any energy sector, it's all locked into these GIS systems that are hard to use. They take specialized, you know, knowledge to operate. But yet we can find how many Starbucks or how many Chinese restaurants and which one's good, which one's bad. We can do that right now on our smart phone. So is there a Yelp for valves? Right, that's what we're building, absolutely. We're building, it's a product called IntegraLink that we've built to do just that, a Yelp for valves. When is the last inspected? What else is interesting about it? When does it need to be replaced? That's exactly where we're going. Well in the old days, before Jeff jumps in, I want to just get this on the table because you said you're not in the business of building data centers. In the old days, you used to do that. But now you also pull a T1 out to locations, back on the day. People might even not know what a T1 is. Now you got over the year radio frequency with cell phones. So the connectivity backhaul problem goes away. What does that do for your IT opportunity? Well, you know what's interesting is it doesn't go away. There's a new challenge there because, you know, pipelines aren't built always in the middle of a metropolitan area. In fact, they often are not. They're through the desert, through the plains of Kansas or Nebraska, right? So connectivity matters. So if you can't have connectivity to the cloud, the cloud's irrelevant. It's just not a thing. So that's one of the primary challenges we see is that offline capability, offline online, to make sure you can still sync back up and have that repository still available. So if you can't shoot a microwave link to an area, then you're going to have to have store it, upload it, sync. Right, right. It's the same idea. I mean, this is a new challenge, right, John? I mean, it's one of those things that, it's been around forever, but we in the pipeline industry or any energy infrastructure asset, we just, we think it's a new problem. This is not- It's not on Verizon's top list of metro areas of total available revenue per customer. No. How the Interlands, wow, two workers on the pipeline. Sorry, Jeff. No, so let's take it a step further. So you've got data now. You want to make data available to your customers so they can see, you know, what does the environment look like around them? Can you elaborate a little bit more on some of the value-add services you can now provide potentially to customers related to data and analysis of that data? Right, there's a lot of data analytical problems that we see. You know, one of those is like risk algorithms. You know, these pipelines, you're going to put something in the ground, it is going to degrade over time. It's just a matter of fact, right? God made it that way and we're just going to have to deal with that. So what we want to, what we do is help our customers visualize those problems, where they are, when they are, when does that asset need to be replaced, right? And those processes have been around for a long, long time, right? I mean, in the late 80s, we started developing those integrity management programs and those work really, really well. But the problem is they take so much time to deliver that. You know, you throw a bunch of data at it and you wait a couple of days and you get the data back and what we're saying is why can't you just know that all the time? You just ask the question, get the result. That tends to be more of what the internet, or what you expect from the internet, right? You just expect, I want an answer. I want to Google that and I get an answer. And that's more of what we want to do. So now we can drive analytics into our pipeline models to say, look, you need to replace that pipe segment because of corrosion, cracks, dents, whatever it is. And that's the real value and it's interesting. You know, you listened to the keynote this morning and they talked about driving value minute by minute or hour by hour, I think is what they said. We're in the same boat, right? Our customers, we don't want to dig up a pipeline if we don't have to, right? So it costs a lot more to do that than to fix it before you have to. Right, right. So that there's a lot of mitigating controls we can put around it for maximal allowing, operating pressure, whatever that is. So we can help them extend the life of their asset versus just dig it and replace it with a lot of money. Absolutely. You know, a number of industrial sectors, if you can, you know, one of the examples I love is the, you know, an aircraft engine. If you can predict when that is left with a fail, fix it ahead of time rather than waiting for it to break, have to take it offline. Exactly. Maybe replace it. I mean, worst case scenario, it breaks mid-air, obviously, that's not a good thing either. So that's a whole, that's a whole another set of risks. But now, so presumably though, you know, pipes don't generally, at least not in the past, didn't come with data generating sensors on them. I'm guessing that that is something you're working on as well to create all this data. Talk a little bit about kind of data-fying assets like pipes. There's all sorts of, yeah, you're very well put, right? I mean, the data just didn't always exist, right? There's certain aspects of the data that did, you know, as you put it in, there's a process called as-building. When you go and you get geolocation of everything, what is it, where is it, all those things, right? But that's only relevant for a little bit, right? Once it's in the ground, it's in the ground. So there's all sorts of other sensors you want to bring in and ask questions of that, whether it be inline inspection or SCADA information where you can predictably look at and say, hey, we can do something about this problem. Or even just, even if you can't do something about it, knowing there's a problem in degrading the service versus just shutting it off, it's a totally different measure for the pipeline operators, right? Now they can actually look and say, let's just lower the pressure because we see in a SCADA information, we probably should. Or they see it in the pipeline integrity report, wow, there's an anomaly there, let's go dig it up, let's see what it is, versus just shut it off, right? So there's a little bit of gray area there, where they're able to look at the data and do something about it. Like contextual awareness is what we're driving through. Well, another related issue that I'm always interested to talk about with companies that have been around a long time is how you made this transition from a company that was the very traditional business, I mean, you're building pipelines to this new world where you're ingesting data, you're creating data services for customers. What was that transition like internally? Was there a lot of friction? I mean, you've got people who've probably been working there for years and years and are reluctant to maybe change the way they work. I mean, that's something we hear from other practitioners. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm curious. What was that transition like? Well, let's be clear, the transition's not done. Right? It's one of those things, I mean, it takes a long time to, and I hate to throw a pun out there, but to reinvent yourself, I mean, we're in that mode. We understand that, you know, building pipeline assets or any energy infrastructure asset, that's not the end all, right? I mean, those projects eventually are going to go away, right? And we see that, we're probably 50 years away from that. You know, I'll be retired by then, but what we do see is that the need for information and contextual awareness about that is not going away. So our leadership said, you know what? We need to start thinking more about that and become this engineering and technology company that also builds pipelines, that also, you know, goes out and builds these assets. So it was a conscious decision by our leadership, you know, let's think about really this trend, where we're going, what we're doing, instead of like, let's just keep, you know, looking for the bigger and badder pipeline opportunities. Well, you know, it's really interesting when you think about the companies that physically make things and how that's going to be impacted by data. You kind of understand, you know, a Facebook, a LinkedIn, you get that, you start there. Right. But then when you start applying it to companies that you don't think of as data driven or in the data business, that's where it really gets interesting and that's where you start to impact, I mean, you're impacting energy. You could see use cases in healthcare we saw, I think it was Phillips and Johnson and Johnson this morning on the keynote. So it really gets interesting in these other industries that you don't necessarily think of as being data driven, at least inherently. No, I totally agree. I saw the Johnson and Johnson keynote as well and I draw a lot of correlators to our business. They're an old business. It's not data isn't really part of their life. What we've said is it is, right? It's got to be and we've been building pipeline data models and looking at that for years. What the cloud's enabled us to do is just look at the problem and have more agility and elasticity and to answer those questions more than we could have before. Right. So we've always known we needed the data and we wanted to ask questions about it but now we're able to consume it and actually ask questions about it and contextualize that information. Right. And then of course the next step is it's one thing to collect the data, analyze it, get some insights but then you got to act on those insights. Right. That's kind of the last mile, right? It's a really well place because we like to act on the data on behalf of our customers as well. So shameless plug. We're getting the hook here but Jason, I really appreciate you coming on. I want to just share the folks that, you know, Trend Micro is an awesome sponsor of theCUBE. Really appreciate those guys. Shout out to Trend Micro. Really awesome. Thanks for supporting our mission. We're passionate. We'd love doing this and without your help, it wouldn't be here. So you guys are big customers so get the plug in for Trend Micro. What do you guys do with them? Trend's great. You know, we're using their deep security as a service product. You know, the reason we liked it, same reason, we don't want to build data centers. We also don't want to manage a lot of the transactional security related stuff. We want experts to manage that for us. We don't want to be that but we care so much about the security of our customers data because of their critical infrastructures. We want to secure them. So Trends helped us to secure those and get relevant information. We knew cloud. We knew that. But one of the problems with cloud is just like in virtualization that we saw in the early 2000s, there's this amazing amount of sprawl, right? What deep security as a service has done for us is be able to detect that sprawl, see it and make sure we're protecting it. So it gave us just the ability for one pane of glass. Here's our security posture. Here's what we're looking at. And I don't even have to go to the pane of glass. It lets me know ahead of time, right? So I sleep so much better at night. Well, Trend Micro is awesome. And again, your job is to be in the business of doing what you got to do. And you got great partners. Trend Micro is one of them. Of course, they support theCUBE. We love them. Guys, thanks for watching this segment. We are live here in Las Vegas for Amazon re-invent. Their premiere show second year here grows every year. Big force. Amazon is going to be written in the history books in my opinion. It's probably the moment in time where things got modernized and IT became just like a utility. Again, this is theCUBE. We got it all here live, wall-to-wall coverage. We'll be right back after this short break.