 Live from the Frederick P. Rose Hall, home of jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, New York. It's theCUBE at IBM Z Next. Redefining digital business. Brought to you by headline sponsor IBM. This is Dave Vellante, we're with theCUBE here, CUBE After Dark at the IBM Z event. I'm here with Ron Perry, the CEO of Radix. Ron, thanks for coming on. Hey, it's a pleasure. Glad to be here. Tell me a little, we had a great dinner last night. It was awesome. I love this story. Tell us a little bit about Radix. Yeah, Radix has about 40 airlines around the world. We provide reservation systems for them. So if somebody calls a call center, or checks in online, or makes a booking online, it's one of our airlines. It'll come back into Orlando to our data center. We handle all the processing, the whole distribution side for the airline. Okay, so you compete with the likes of, say, Burr and others. Exactly, exactly. But we're using very modern technology, huge server farms, and everything's over the internet. So okay, so huge server farms, you're at the Z event, what's the connection? We are replacing a good percentage of our servers with an IBM Z mainframe. So can you help us understand the scale, the scope, the big consolidation effort, and what's driving that? Sure, yeah. The first Z mainframe we're putting in, we're going to replace the Hunter Z, and we're going to replace 172 cores on the servers with 10 cores on the IBM Z. Okay, so pretty significant. So you're going from an X86 environment to a Z environment? Exactly. So what drove that? Well, I mean, there's a variety of different things. The first thing is, as a server farm begins to expand, the orchestration and management of that farm becomes virtually impossible. You have so many different vendors that you're trying to deal with. It's almost like you're your own general contractor and you keep getting more and more and more subcontractors. All these different vendors, you have to make them all work together. Plus you have to deal with the potential for hacking and the more diverse systems you have, the more likelihood that you have that somebody has an entry point. Plus you have to make sure that everything is working together. Nobody tests out the entire environment as a unit. The vendors will test out individually and maybe they'll test with one or two of the other items of equipment. And so what we've seen is the mainframe is far more reliable, more scalable. And what surprised me was the total cost of ownership for us is going to go down rather than up. So that's an interesting story. To me, the even more interesting part of your story is the way the airline business is transforming and the role you're playing. So I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. You see the price of oil dropping, intense competition, very high-profile industry. How is it transforming and what role is your firm playing? Okay, well we basically have gone through and rethought the airline distribution side of things. The way airlines distribute is somewhat irrational. In a typical traditional system, within five days after you've flown the last leg of your itinerary, all your data is pulled off of the system. It's not online any longer. It's on some subsidiary database. If you can think about any of the major e-commerce systems, they couldn't operate that way. They want the customer data online. The way the money flows is very strange. A traditional system only wants a ticket number. That's it. They don't handle any of the money. The money goes through separate channels and sometime later has to be reconciled. So an airline running in a traditional environment has no idea what their true revenues are on a flight until anywhere between 15 and 30 days after it's flown. So you're saying there's a big value chain and the revenue is flowing in a manner that the airline can't really even tell. They really can't analyze it. So how do you solve that problem? Well, a key thing is providing a way to control the revenue and identify what it is at all times. And so we really started writing our systems from the ground up. Most of the industry has taken systems that were developed in the 60s and early 70s, and they have continued to adapt and modify them but use the same basic design principles with regards to the business flow. We basically started from the beginning. It's taken us 22 years. It's taken a long time. And our goal is to be a 22-year overnight success. And this is all custom code, right? It's all custom, but what we're doing different from others is that we have one code base for our 40 airlines. So if one airline wants a modification, it then can become available to them. And you're running this on Linux? We're running it on Linux, yeah. So you'll be porting that to Linux on Z? Yeah, it's not much of a port. It's basically just moving it over. Now, what's the time frame for this all happening? The system is in place right now. We're building out a little bit of the power and some of the cage, and I would expect within about three to four weeks it will be up and live. Awesome story. A long-time entrepreneur. Really appreciate you coming on. Really a pleasure. All right, keep right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE.