 Thanks for coming on. So, Mike, welcome to theCUBE. So were you prepared for a live interview? Were you told no? No, no, this is brand new to me. Brand new? Okay, welcome to theCUBE. So we get the briefing sheet with siliconangle.com. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is our live studio, mobile studio. We get all the information coverage here at SAP. And we want to just share with the audience out there, we're live. And we have, just to tell you right now, 1,900 viewers watching live. And so tell us one, who you are, what your company does, and we'll just jump right into a conversation. I'm Michael Dell. I'm the CIO of Pacific Coast Building Products. Our company is manufacturers, distributors, and contractors, all about building materials. We distribute or manufacture everything for a house except for plumbing and electrical. And obviously being a CIO, you're in the midst of all the massive change going on at the enterprise. We have been talking about it all morning. EMC was here, SAP's been talking about it. We've been covering other tech shows like EMC World. And we have some other shows coming up with Citrix Synergy. So all the big vendors are flexing their muscle. We got HP Discover coming up as well. What's changed in the past 10 years, in IT in particular? And kind of where are we today? Well, I've only been in IT 14 years. Since 1996, I'm an electrical engineer by trade. I've had a chemical plant. So it has been interesting. And I think the biggest thing that's changed from my perspective is not really technology. It's around the business focus. It's less about the isolated IT shop and more about the business. So what that means for the vendors is they need to make it less complex for us. They need to let us focus on that business side and not pay attention to the technology. So anything they can do to that end, make our lives easier, let us focus. Life is good. So in the ERP, in this software business that SAP competes in Mao Zed, Oracle and others, is that it hasn't been simple. It's been complex. With the cloud now, in the past five years or so, we're seeing more transformations. Well, how would you put the simplicity on a scale of 1 to 1010 being we're almost there, one being we're not even close to being simple? When I first started my first SAP project in 96, it was very hard. It was very complex. At least I thought it was harder than it needed to be. Today, it's still harder than it needs to be. But I think for the defer, I mean, it's became easier around best practices, around agile methodologies, and around some of the things that can have a big impact, but a limited impact, I think until the underlying architecture simplified a little bit, that it's simply not going to get easier. So if you think about the cloud for things that, certain things go into cloud, interoperability is still an issue around the cloud. And if you think about what can be the promise of the in-memory, as far as collapsing the number of databases I have, really having one fast in-memory database, that promise, if that can come to fruition, I think that we're going to be where we need to be. But right now, we're on our way, but it's still a promise. We still have a destination rather than some place we're at. What's your focus here at the show? Obviously, you're talking to the press with SAP. What particular things are you speaking about the most here? What comes up on your radar the most? When you talk to press and... Well, so far, and I just got here last night, but so far it really has been around new customers and what do they need to be, what do they need to do? What do they need to think about to be successful on implementation? So the first part, how do I get there? And the second part is how do I make sure I get the value as a result of it? And I do it in a way that it doesn't cost that much to run when I'm done. So the low total cost of ownership in the end. So I think long-term though, what's interesting to me is, when is my architecture going to collapse? When is it going to get simple for us? I want to be able to ask a question on Monday and have an answer on Monday afternoon. And with BI in one database and ERP in another, unless the world is just perfect, I can't do that. And until I can, I don't think we're going to... What's your response times now when you talk about that kind of query? That's a good question. I mean, we have about the real-time web here or somewhat real-time. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the question. If it's weeks, if it's something really out of the blue and no one's thought of it and it's not part of the standard cubes or it's not part of cubes we built in BI, it's probably two weeks by the time that you've extracted the data. I mean, you have a lot of data. So it takes, I mean, there's just a amount of time. So by the time you've extracted it, transformed it, written queries around it, put it in a usable format so I can start doing analysis. It's anywhere from one to two weeks. I want it to be one to two hours. Yeah, I mean, with the real-time analytics, I think it's a phenomenal story for SAP. It's the sizzle and the steak, right? The sizzle is the analytics. We got to have that. Give me the information on my dashboard, run your business. The steak is the meat and potatoes that makes that happen. I mean, can you get there? And today in the era of big data, the big focus has been hyped up big time is that things like Hadoop on the open source side to other things, there's a big movement towards taking that data warehouse business intelligence market and moving it from the closed, fenced off organizations to right in the middle of the organization. How are you looking at that? Because that really is fundamentally one common question that everyone's asking themselves is, I want to one, have answers to questions faster and then I want some insight into what questions to ask. So there's two biggest things and that involves making the data warehouse faster. It does. It's always smaller, but like leaner. And getting rid of the data warehouse, using the tools, the data warehousing tools, you have to look at that. If I can look at just one database, which happens to be the same one because it's fast enough that I can query my transactional store. So now it's real time, now it's up to date, it's changing. If I don't have a particular field that I need and all I have to do is modify a query to bring it in and it only takes a few minutes, now I can start to dream a little better. And now perhaps I can also, when it comes to knowing which questions to ask, that's a much tougher question than doing it faster. Taking Google or whatever that search engine that you happen to want to use, taking that to the next level where you can eliminate some answers right out of the gate and dream up new questions or at least focus yourself on what questions I should be asking. That's possible if all the data is available to you and not just select parts of the data. You've kind of limited. Or if it can't be queried, I mean we're talking about all new data types and unstructured data coming into the business now and it's like it's just hanging around, you've got to be able to recall it and ingest it, store it, and then manage it and apply it to it. So that's a big issue. Yeah, I don't know that you're ever going to get rid of the human element that makes that quantum leap between two disparate ideas, but if you can isolate it so that that's all you need and a lot of the routine, the Mondanes all taken care of by something else, ideally software and that comes down to speed. You mentioned business mindset in terms of IT's change and that's really kind of a business philosophy. We're hearing that across the board and that requires new disciplines, new mindset. The CIO is in charge of all the information infrastructure, but as we get more automated and bigger operations, what is the role of the operations person? I mean, because normally the operations guy has to run everything, right? So the CIO has to oversee operations. That's similar in your organization. It is. Are you becoming more of a CFO-like type? Because if the business is driving it, the dollars have to be funded, this ROI comes in. So is the role of the CIO changing? Have you seen that? Then do you see your role changing? Well, I think the role of the CIO is going to continue to change and it should. At one time, we're responsible for all the hardware, the air conditioning. I mean, we may as well be facility managers, but when I think about what our real goal is and that's leveraging technology for business value, that doesn't add value to me. That's something that should just happen. And if I can get someone else to pool the resources and take care of the air conditioning, the electricity, take care of as far as I'm concerned, mail, the utility, a lot of those things. If I can get those moved off and let someone else focus on it, I'm still the guardian of that data. I still have responsibility for it. I can't give that away. So that operations roles may change more towards that part to make sure that what happened with Amazon doesn't happen to us. We don't lose data. How much of your budget is for operating the business versus transforming the business? We've been talking on theCUBE here about- We're probably 40%, 35 is budgeted for this year and we're probably going to be able to hit that. For transforming or operations? Operations. Well, that's low, that's strong. We try to keep it as low as possible because that's not where the value is. Our focus- That's well on the top tier elite categories. We're hearing people up well over 50% on just managing the facilities and managing the costs. This is the operations, just to keep the lights on. And maybe we run too lean. That may be part of the problem. We haven't had a day to loss yet. So maybe so, but our goal really is to keep it as small as possible. And part of the reason we're that low, if anything, unlike a lot of companies, we're very homogeneous around applications. We run SAP at the core. We run Microsoft non-core and we have a few niche applications but they're few and far between. Unless you have a good reason in our organization, you use SAP. I mean, it works for us- How's virtualization impacting you? I mean, you- We're about 96% virtual now, which is where a lot of our cost reductions come from. We virtualize not only with the ESX on the VMware side, the Windows Linux side, but we also have our AIX systems completely virtual. So we have two AIX boxes that run our entire SAP environment. The not counting the app servers, but the CI, the DB, and those types of things. So I think we've come a long ways. That's a real success story. We're with Michael O'Dell with Pacific- Pacific Coast companies. Pacific Coast companies and you handle building. So building materials. Building materials and really lean IT organization, very efficient, almost 100% virtualized, 4% kind of hanging out there. That's okay. That's a good number. Very lean. Well, well on the elite category, in my opinion. Been in IT for 14 years. Seen the changes on the cutting edge with SAP. Final question for you. What do you think's around the corner? Obviously analytics, mobility is hot. What do you think's around the corner that people aren't talking about right now? The gut feeling. Could be, that's not to be something. It could be just a gut feeling, it could be intuition. I think we're going to see a, between the cloud, between in memory, between mobility, we're going to see a more, one, a more consumerization. And to a sharp decrease in the complexity of IT. That's going to allow us to focus more on the business. But from a business perspective, mobility has an interesting promise that it'll let us untether our employees from their desktops. I mean, if you think about the standard, if you go into herb lumber, 84 lumber, any of those lumber yards, the common home depots, there's no reason that that guy checking you out has to, in a regular smaller lumber shop like ours, waiting on a customer doesn't mean sitting behind a counter. It means going out in the building materials and working with them and getting them what they want. So if I can untether those folks from the desktop computers, now I have something that's useful. Yeah. Now we can double our size and not double our head count. Wow. Now that's radical scale. Yeah, well desktop acquisition might help. Let's hope that happens. Software is on the Cusp of Change SAP, pushing the envelope here at Sapphire, Michael Dell, CIO. He's out in the trenches, rolling the sleeves up, trying to keep his cost down, trying to keep his material costs down, operations, getting out of the facilities business as a goal or actually handing that off to someone to run so you can focus on the transformation. Thanks for coming in theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. Thank you.