 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .conf 2017, brought to you by Splunk. Welcome back to the nation's capital, theCUBE, coming to you here from the Walter Washington Convention Center at .conf 2017. Spunks annual get together, along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls, good to have you with us here on theCUBE and how's your flying experience these days here in the States? Baggage, security, you happy? Well, we're going to make you a little less so evens. Dubai Airports has just an exceptional network of operations that are going on right now. From Souk to Nuts, and Michael Ibbitson is the VP of Technology and Infrastructure at Dubai. He joins us now here on theCUBE and Michael first off, glad to have you here in the States. Good to see you, sir. Yeah, you ran through on the keynote stage a litany of checks that we all go through here in the States of, yes, we'd love to be that, better security, better baggage. Even the golden bathroom, which I can't wait to hear about. But tell me about your focus with technology and Dubai and what you are bringing to the job and how you're trying to revolutionize the travel experience. Yeah, so in Dubai we're really pushing the envelope in terms of volume, numbers of people going through the airport, but also we want to make it the best passenger experience we possibly can. We're already the biggest international airport in the world, going to be doing nearly 90 million passengers this year, growing to 100 million by the end of the decade. But we want to drive experience as well. And the airport is constrained, so we've got a limited site. So we now have to figure out how to do it to greater efficiency, automation, making the passenger experience better. And you can get much better throughput in an airport if you take out all the queues. So, and that's a better experience. So you get both at the same time. Well, tell us about the security lines then, because Dave and I both related this here in the States. Sometimes they can be tedious to work through. So how are you addressing that through technology? Well, through lots of different ways. I mean, we've put sensors all over the airport for lots of different things. And one of the key areas we've done it is insecurity. So we have some sensors that measure the queue length for us, which is really important, allows us to understand what's happening now in real time, deploy additional staff to support that, but also predict what's happening over the next few hours so we can be ready for whatever's coming next. On top of that, we then take data out of the lane itself in real time so we can see how many people are passing through, how many alarms they're setting off. And then we can use that data over time to understand the behavior of passengers. You know, certain destinations drive more security alarms. So we can now understand that and then try and pre-inform those passengers about what to do so everybody gets through faster. So kind of like a ways in reverse for the security line. Yeah, I kind of love it. That's great. So you mentioned the golden bathroom. I got to ask you. We saw some data that only 10% of the people admit that they don't wash their hands when they leave the bathroom but your data suggests that 25% of the people do not. I wonder if part of that reason is the reason that I often get frustrated is when you put your hands underneath, they don't, nothing comes out. Maybe your bathroom's right. You're waving underneath, right? You're bothering to buy airport bathrooms. Must actually give me water when I ask for it. Is that right? Yeah, well, we like to think we've got pretty efficiently working bathrooms, that's for sure, but I think the challenge with the bathroom one, we wanted to understand how to make bathrooms cleaner and a nicer environment for everybody. And when you're doing 90 million passengers a year, that's a lot of people going to the bathroom. So we put sensors all over the bathrooms, not CCTV, want to make sure that's clear. Right, yeah. It's all like presence sensors, door lock sensors. You know, when the faucets are on or off, people stood at basins and that's just given us so much insight into how people actually use the bathroom. So we know that at peak hours, the numbers are quite low in terms of people who wash their hands after using the bathroom, but off peak when it's quiet, the number goes right up to 100%. So we think we've got some work to do on capacity and understanding how people use the bathroom and also maybe on the cleanliness. Maybe people are leaving because it's the lesser of two evils. Do I wash my hands, which doesn't look like a nice environment to wash my hands or do I just walk out? Right. So some of the stats, 90 million passengers a year go through your airport, that'll be 100 million, over 100 million by 2020, is that right? On current growth, yeah. And then 150 million bags you handle each year. That's correct. So there's a lot of data that you're collecting. So that, hence, we're here at.com. How do you use Splunk to sort of manage all this data? Yeah, so we have two Splunk instances. We have one that does all of our IT stuff and then we have one that's focused on all the business services, operations, if you like. And it's the business one that is kind of the most interesting because it drives the most debate and discussions about the future and how we should plan the airport and how we should drive performance. We have about four and a half billion data points in our business Splunk instance and it grows by somewhere around about 12 to 14 million data points a day. Just baggage alone, every bag generates about 200 data points. Now people don't probably think that from the outside when you put the bag in, you drop the bag at the check-in desk and then you don't see it again until you get to the end. But there's so many checkpoints that it passes, security screening that it goes through. It gets transferred in terms of jurisdiction between airline, airport, ground handler. And then it gets loaded onto the aircraft and all of these things, we create data points for all of those so we can track it through your whole journey. I think these are fantastic opportunities for us to start thinking about how we might share that data with a consumer in the future. We'd like to get to a point where your bag journey is just as well-informed as your own journey. Yeah, so a little bit more on that then, I mean, just in terms of what your real life experience, what you hope it will be in terms of your baggage, you were talking about taking down baggage arrival to a matter of seconds? Yeah, so you as a passenger, you arrive at the airport, you've got a process to go through before you're going to get reunited with your baggage and that might be 10 minutes or 30 minutes depending on the size and the nature of the airport that you arrive at. But as we know now, based on the data we have in Splunk and we've been analyzing this data over the last four or five months, we know exactly how long it takes to get a bag from any aircraft stand to any point where you pick it up. And we can average that over a serious period of time. So if we can do that historically, we can start to predict that into the future. Based on the current conditions at the airport, we should be able to give you an exact time that your bag's going to arrive on that carousel. Maybe it'll be down to a few seconds. Maybe it'll be in the next 30 seconds, your bag will arrive type of message, but we want to give you that message to your phone. Think how nice that would be, Dave. If you're waiting at the baggage carousel with another 150 of your best friends and everybody's crowding around, watching for their bag to come out, but you know your bag's about to come out in 20 seconds. Well, I always say it's one of my pet peeves. Everybody crowds around right and you can't see it. They take three steps back and roll a little bit off. I wanted to ask you, Michael, though, as a consumer of airline products and services, there seems to be a difference between the airport and the airline in terms of their data. You have a lot of data. The airlines obviously have a lot of data. Of course, they're competitive with each other. What kind of collaboration do you have with the airline? What kind of data do you share? So I mean, it really depends on the nature of your airport. Are you a hub for a big carrier or do you have lots of small airlines all operating there to how you might go about doing that? In both the airports that I've worked at recently, we've run projects to integrate the airline data into our systems, because we're just so much more well-informed about what's happening and what's going to happen in the future when we do that. And we've spent the last couple of years working with Emirates, who's our biggest airline, to integrate their data, but we also fly Dubai, who've got a huge flying program with us as well, and integrate their data so that we can start to combine the two data sets, and we do that within Splunk, so we know what's going on. The baggage data that I talked about, the 200 data points, that comes from three different entities in reality. It's the airline at check-in and the passengers' data about their booking and everything else. The baggage system itself and the security process that goes through, which is our data, and then the ground handler, which again is another set of data, because they transport that bag then onto the aircraft and inform the airline of where it is, and then that all gets combined back again at the point where you bought the aircraft to make sure that the passenger and the bag are all on the same flight. So we've been pulling all of that data into our systems and then sharing that back across the teams to provide people with a lot more insight. So the airline wants to know the bags are going through successfully. The ground handler wants to know how many more they've got to come. So by sharing that data through a platform like Splunk, we've been, you know, we're hopefully making a lot of breakthroughs. I think that's huge, because the mobile app is a game changer for an airline passenger, but the diversity of mobile apps and the quality of the mobile apps is the function of the data model that each airline and their backend processes, you can tell some of the airlines that have sort of antiquated backend processes and those that don't have as much baggage, right? No pun intended. And so my question is with things, the tools like Splunk and some innovation on your end, are you able to sort of unify those disparities? Yeah, and you've also got to remember something about the passenger, right? No passenger comes to an airport for an airport tour. They're coming because they're going to fly somewhere, right? Yeah, right, and this is important. So they book a ticket to an airline. We might be able to integrate that data from all these different organizations at the airport, but who are you as the passenger really going to get that information from at the last moment? Probably from the airline because you're going to use their app, because you book your ticket through it and you're going to check in through it and you maybe have a, you know, a car service booked through it. So we would rather, we can be the combiner of that data, but then pass it back to the airline to display to you as the passenger, because that makes more sense. But what's important for the passengers is the data is consistent at every point in the journey. Whether you find it out from the airport or whether you find it out from the airline, you want it to be the same. You don't want conflicting information. So that's what we can do by starting to join these things together, but make sure that the consumer interface is the right one for the right time. Now, that would work for us with Emirates because they're so huge and they have so many passengers for us, but for some of the smaller airlines like British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, you know, they have two, three flights a day with us, it might make more sense for their passengers to use our app in that situation. So it really depends, you know, who you are and what you're flying for, but we see that there's opportunity across that space. But what would be important is that every app tells the same story, right? And has the same data. And that would- So uniformity. Yeah, because that gives you so much confidence as a customer. If that flight screen changes at the same time that your app pushes a notification to you, and it's exactly the same data, that's a huge amount of confidence that this is all really accurate and timely and you can take decisions of that. I was struck by the comment that you guys are out of space. And I think the way you phrased it is the city grew up around the airport. Yeah. You know, you think Dubai, I've not been, but you think Dubai, planning ahead, has lots of resources, but they're subject to the whims of metropolitan growth. So your challenge then is to use efficiency to squeeze more out of that fixed space. What are you doing in that regard? I mean, that's a major CIO challenge. How do you deal with that? I have to admit, that was the challenge that attracted me to the role. Like, you know, how do you take this airport? When I joined, it was about 78 million a couple of years back and now pushing 90, pushing 100 by the end of the decade. That was the challenge for me. And that was the focus of the CEO. He said, you know, the only way we're going to grow this business is to figure out how to do more people or more planes through the same space. And that's really exciting. And the only way to do that is looking at cutting out the waste wherever you can. Redefining the processes in areas and removing all of the queues and all the bottlenecks in the airport. Whether that be in the airspace, on the airfield, in the terminal buildings for the passengers, in the baggage area for the bags, you've got to remove all those bottlenecks. And I think as a passenger, queuing up just waste time and space. If we can make sure nobody ever queues, then everybody will get through the airport faster, which means we can do more people. We can take more people through the airport. So that's where the focus is. And we have an internal project that we call quebusting. And it's literally just about busting the queues, busting the lines as you call them here. And getting rid of them, because that's the thing that creates a capacity constraint. Yeah, you talk about all these sensors you have around the airport. You talk about all the data that you're gathering, billions and billions of data points. So what don't you know that you wish you did or that you hope you can relatively soon? Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've, so we know like the queuing time at all the major touchpoints. And that's been fantastic. And we've in our transfer security areas in the last two years, we've lowered transfer security queuing from over eight minutes to an average of four minutes and 47 seconds, right? So, I mean, we're really precise on this stuff now and it's great. But what we don't know is the people's entire journey. So we know that you queued in a certain place for four minutes and you might have queued up at check-in for maybe 10 minutes as well. But what we don't know is how long it took you to get between those points, which route you took, what's the most efficient, how to get you to spend more money in the airport because we make, that's our business model, right? So that's where we need to learn a lot more. And I think there's a lot of work going on in that space and we're doing some trials of some cool technology to figure out how to help you plan your journey, make the most efficient overall journey through the airport, not just at the key checkpoints. And obviously give you more time to enjoy the experience. We have shops and restaurants. We've got fantastic. We've got spas and swimming pools and the hotels inside our airport, which we'd love for people to use more of. And I think we can do that if we can help them plan their journey better. So I think there's still a lot of data out there. Well, and when you look at your strategic planning roadmap, how much runway do you have? I mean, you're using efficiency to utilize your space better, drive more revenue, customer satisfaction, avoiding the huge capex of building another airport, which is not going to be as convenient. How much, again, no pun intended, how much runway do you have in terms of that strategic plan? Well, based on our current expectations, predictions that we have, we're looking at this site being able to do about 120 million. Maybe we can squeeze a bit more out of it. Decade plus? Yeah, I mean, there's lots of exciting things we might have to do with the airfield to try and land more planes. We do about 65 flights an hour off our two runways. We don't have the luxury of really wide space runways. So we might have to come up with some new ideas on that front. But about 120 million, we think, which would be easily the biggest airport in the world. It's helped by the enormous fleet of A380s that Emirates uses. Of course, we get a lot more passengers for every flight. But that's probably as far as we can go. But the airport was designed for 90 to 95 million. So we're already going to bust that by about 30 million. So yeah, hopefully we can extract that. And then you never know what we might be able to do. Hopefully go further. Well, it's fascinating. It really was a great job on the keynote stage today. And certainly wish you continued success down the road here. You certainly, I think we run out of puns. So I'll leave it at that. But safe travels if you will, home. And thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. Thanks very much. Good, Michael Ibbitson from Dubai Airports. Back with more from theCUBE here in just a bit. Washington, DC coming to you live. Back with more in a bit.