 Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are covering day one of Commvault Go 19 from Colorado. Stu and I are pleased to welcome to theCUBE one of Commvault's longtime customers from AstraZeneca. We have Scott Hunter, Global Infrastructure Services Director. Hey, Scott. Hey, good afternoon. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. So, AstraZeneca is a name that probably a lot of folks know in the biomedical pharmaceutical space. But for those that don't, give us an overview of AstraZeneca, what you guys are, what you do. So, obviously we're a bio pharmaceutical company with our global presence. We use three primary care and types of medicines that we sell throughout the world. So, everything from corny care to oncology and also a massive diabetes franchise as well as other core therapies that are used by our patients worldwide. All right, so Scott, maybe bring us inside. What does data mean to your organization? It means lots of things to AstraZeneca throughout our organization from how we go about finding that next molecule to discover bleeding-edge medicines for our patients all the way to how our salespeople and commercial use data to identify the right patients for the right care as well. And of course, back office through IT, enabling functions like HHR and finance as well. So, data for us is paramount to our business. All right, you've got global infrastructure service. Could you just lay out a little bit what that entails and how data fits into the picture, what's in your purview and what you have to work with other groups on? So, my area looks after architecture, design and governance for cybersecurity and infrastructure services at AstraZeneca. So, we look after within either on-premise within our own data centers or in the public cloud as well. So, as you can imagine, data movement in their own realms and that kind of environment is pivotal to the company being successful going forward. Well, every time you talk about data being the lifeblood of an organization or the new oil, when we're talking about patient information and the information that can be used to find the next cure for a particular disease, this is literally life and death data and the ability to have access to it but also to make sure that it's protected and secure table stakes, right? So, talk to us about when you came on board you said around six years ago before we went live. Knowing how critical data is to AstraZeneca's business, what was the data strategy like a few years ago? It was pretty convoluted six years ago when I first joined AstraZeneca, we were largely outsourced to various companies. So, our data strategy, we basically didn't have one. We didn't really have much of a strategy for looking after our data with five or six different backup products with the same amount of online data storage products as well. So, over the last five, six years, we've kind of streamlined that down to one key data storage provider, NetApp, and also for backup and restore convoc. We do still have some legacy veritas environments but they're being decommissioned and moved over to convol as we speak. From a, what could I.T. initiative perspective, you said a few years ago, six years ago, we didn't have a data strategy. What was some of the, from the top down, from the C-suite down, maybe from the board down, saying, hey guys, we have to get our hands around it. I mean, this is before GDPR but in terms of the opportunities that have provided the company, where did that initiative come from? And I know you're all in convoc now but you guys went a couple of different routes. Talk to us a little bit about that initiative and the initial directions to where you are now. Yes, so our XCIO, Dave Smolley, obviously had a vision for how the company was going to progress, certainly in his tenure. And a massive part of that was understanding where our data was, how it was used, and most importantly, how it was protected as well. So that kind of drove the insertion from likes of HCL, cognizant emphasis into looking after our own environments, looking after our own data approaches and strategies as well, so that organically the company could grow based on the best directions for using that data that we could meet from what we had already through collaboration with other biopharmers as well. Again, just for the greater good of finding that next magical molecule to help our patients. All right. Scott, have you been to the Convolco shows before? Second time. Second time. Great, tell us a little bit about, you know, what brings you to the show, a lot of announcements here, anything jump out so far? Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was interesting to see some of the new collaborations that are, sorry, purchases that Convolco will be making over the last little while. The Hedwig acquisition looks pretty exciting. And the metallic venture that they're doing for public SaaS as well looks equally as exciting and pretty niche in the kind of environments that Convolco play on. So I think that's two very good moves. Yeah, so you're leveraging public cloud. How does Convolco fit into your discussion? So we use Convolco for backing up and restoring our public cloud environments, whether it be an AWS, we're about to start launching in Azure as well with both Azure in the cloud, but Azure Stack as well. And then we're in the process of bringing online production environments and Google Cloud Platform as well. So having that one backup and restore strategy is pivotal as well as enabling us to move our data using the visibility solutions you get with Convolco as well which is obviously going to be very powerful as well. One of the things I noticed when I watched the video that Convolco has done with you and they actually shared a quote from you during the keynote actually before everyone walked in is you said this constant evolution that Convolco is delivering was one of the things that you really like from a business perspective. Convolco has done a lot of evolving in the last nine months with the new leadership as Stu and you were talking about some of the new technology, some of the new announcements. From that evolutionary perspective and what you guys like about it, what are you seeing in terms of them going forward? Are you saying, hey, they're really listening, they're looking at use cases like ours, learning from it to not only make the technologies better but to expand their portfolio? Yeah, I mean, for us, a lot of it's based in the constant evolution of the APIs that Convolco used for accessing the various niche parts of their technology whether it be backing up a VM to backing up Kubernetes containers and using that in a microservices environment as well to allow us to ensure that all our outcomes that we get from those kind of, if you like, serverless computing environments that we understand what the output was so that we can either reuse it, destroy it or use it in a different manner. So that, for us, that's great because obviously for our own CI CD pipelines, they're all API driven and to be able to use the Convolco production in the same kind of fashion is good. So Scott, do you keep up on the quarterly cadence that Convolco's doing and is there anything kind of either on the roadmap or things that you're asking for that would make your environment even better? Well, no, we kind of use the 90 day cadences for ourselves to ensure that our own strategies are kept in check and we can take advantage of new nuances that are coming out not only from Convolco but from other parts of our data infrastructure where they've been at for our online storage or various other niche providers that we use for ensuring that our data is addressable and used in a proper fashion. I want to kind of get into a little bit of the use case. I know that you had a number of different competing backup solutions in place. Did you start from a data strategy perspective like within one division or one part of the company to maybe pilot, because you ended up with a whole bunch of different software solutions in there and now you standardize on Convolco and then just through that process, those decisions and what you're getting by having this now single pane of glass. So, some of the, if you like, the backup and restore sprawl was caused by individual parts of AZ being able to do their own thing, having their own IT budget. So, you would have some parts of the business want to use net backup from Veritas or the EMC products that were in play at the time. When we outsourced between IBM and HTL they chose HPDP for our primary data centers. So, that decided another backup and restore product into the mix. So, for us, it just became untenable when we started outsourcing, you know, to build a support team and support organization two week after that many technologies was pretty difficult. Hence why we decided to go for a one stop strategy. You said in the video that Convolco had a pretty significantly higher success rate compared to some of the other solutions. So, that must have kind of made out of no brainer. Yeah. So, I think they're back up for our critical set applications. It's 99.8% successful just now. And that's better what Convolco get themselves. So, that's quite comforting. As I say, it's more and more of our applications move over on the Convolco platform then we'll have a more rounded approach to not only backup success but success in the restore side of things as well as well as using the data analytics in a more timely fashion again for drug and manufacturing research. So, I know that you guys spoke with a number of Convolc customers before you made this decision and now here you are on the other side of the coin talking to a lot of Convolc customers. What advice would you give companies in any industry who in almost 2020 may not have a really robust data strategy? Yeah. What's your recommendations? They should look at Convolc not just being a backup and restore solution. You know, the code base which is put together for Convolc is very powerful. From the way that indexes the information going through the product to how you can use that for things like DRHA and also migration of workloads to different data centers or different parts of a public cloud remit, you know and the new vision that they have for data analytics is very powerful as well. Forget the name of the tool. Activate? That's the one, activate. So, you know, we've started to use that ourselves in a big way. We've got a little data science team within my operation which is minding that data or starting to mind that data in a more efficient manner and feed that into our enterprise data architecture so that they can take advantage of what we've already got within their own confines and mix that with what they need to do for new discoveries. Well, Scott, thank you for joining Stu and me on theCUBE today, sharing with us what you're doing at AstraZeneca and looking forward to hearing the next molecule that discovers some great breakthrough. Anyways, thank you. Thanks for inviting me, cheers. First Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Convolc Go, 19.