 Hi, this is theCUBE's SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program at a special presentation here in Boston at 60 South Street here for BMC Day. I'm Stu Miniman joined by Brian Graceley. Happy to have on the program Joe Goldberg who's the Solutions Marketing Manager with BMC. Joe, thanks for joining us. Pleasure to be here. All right, so Joe, give us a little bit, you know, what's your role at the company and what's going on here at BMC Day today for you? Okay, so I'm a member of ControlM Solutions Marketing. ControlM is a workload automation solution, which is the way we've been describing it in the past. But as we are beginning to reach out and connect more with developers and the work that's being done by not just development teams, but DevOps engineers, we're more and more beginning to refer to this as workflow automation. You know, fundamentally, our solution manages the process of running what are the batch components of business applications. And, you know, today, as the pace of building and delivering new applications is increasing, even though this is a very much sort of a foundational infrastructure kind of a management discipline, it has more relevance than it ever has had before. So that's what we're talking about. I mean, Joe, so we were talking a little bit before that the application portfolio that customers are dealing with has changed greatly. Analytics is having a big piece of it. And, you know, analytics is a big piece of what your solution is working on. How does that fit in? So ControlM has been used for, you know, enterprise data warehouses, business analytics and intelligence for a very long time. You know, part of that are, you know, ETL workflows that are being managed, you know, tools like Teradata and the TISA, you know, the ability to manage the movement of that data, making sure that you have the right data that's available for the processing, you know. And so data manipulation has been a part of what our solution has been doing for a long time. You know, with the advent of sort of very broadly big data and the introduction of technologies like Hadoop, we actually have found that our solution has even greater relevance than it ever has before. You know, Hadoop for many companies starts off as, you know, either sort of a science project or some kind of a proof of concept. And almost from inception, they immediately have to pull data from their traditional sources, interact with existing traditional tools like ETLs and pull data out of relational databases. And, you know, that's exactly what our solution does and lets them automate that and to do that much more quickly and easily and to be able to manage the process so that they have better insight into the entire, you know, sort of flow of that process. Yeah, so we were talking a little earlier about, you know, nowadays around automation, GUIs are gone, everything's API driven, people just want to consume services. We're seeing more, you know, talk this morning, talk about things being self-service. Did the types of applications that you automate, are they in the service catalog or are they called from the service catalog as part of something bigger? What are you seeing in that trend around self-service and automation? So, you're absolutely right. I mean, everything, you know, whether it's expressed as self-service or part of the API economy, different people use different words, but that absolutely is the focus. For us, the applications that we're automating are all over the place. I mean, many of them are standard applications that are in a service catalog and organizations are having multiples these days. But from our perspective, the big news for us, and you know, really, we're kind of a very traditional management discipline. And traditionally, we have been part of the tool set that was owned and operated primarily by IT operations and the data center. And what we are doing now, and really kind of the focus for all of our activity, is moving outside of the data center. And if you kind of think of the sort of software development lifecycle as moving from left to right, where then left you have developers and on the right you have IT, you know, that chasm, if you will, which previously really didn't have a lot of, you know, IT type tooling, is where we are spending all of our time. We're delivering capabilities that let developers consume our applications and our functionality in a way that they want to be able to consume it, right from inception, you know, generally with this kind of code as everything trend, we're talking about workflow as code, participating right from the development cycle through the entire DevOps system integration, delivery pipeline, right through the production. Yeah, so we see on the infrastructure as code side of things, you know, people are building marketplaces, I can go to the puppet forge, I can go to the chef, get chef recipes, and so it's the same sort of thing happening around application automation where you want to have community sharing even within a company that says, hey, I've solved this problem before, here's a way to do it, maybe add to it, is that same mentality apply at the application level? I think it does, and certainly it was towards filling that kind of a void from managing Bash that we created a component we call application integrator and it comes with something called the application hub. And the intent is exactly this, that there is functionality that we provide for the integration of our solution with, let's say common applications, like ERPs and file transfer solutions, but clearly as a vendor, we could never deliver anywhere near the number of direct application integration for the variety of applications that exist in the marketplace, never mind the ones that companies are creating on their own. And so we created this component called application integrator which allows customers with a simple web designer to actually teach control and in effect how to integrate with their application and then they can publish that integration in the application hub to provide exactly the kind of functionality you're describing and it's available to the control and music community at large, certainly within organizations and across organizations too. So, Joe, can you give us a little insight to customers that are here at the event? What are some of the big questions they're asking and how's BMC helping them? So, there's a variety of, I think, constituents from customers, both in the traditional space that we've been in and some of the newer spaces that we're entering in terms of new personas that we're interacting with. So, for the traditional folks, sometimes they're not necessarily as knowledgeable about what is the impact of DevOps and the new kind of tooling and new kind of approach that's being taken by our organizations and how it's going to be impacting them. So they're kind of researching that and for them, they really want to know that we are participating in that trend and we're going to be supporting them. That as their organizations transform and adopt some of these new methodologies that the way they interact with our solution or that the way that they'll be able to interact with our solution in the future is going to be something that we're going to be providing and continuing to sort of stay on top of that requirement. For some of the people that are coming at it from the other side, they're asking about exactly what are the APIs? What are the choices for how they can consume control and functionality? And so we're talking with them about some of the new capabilities that we've been delivering over time in terms of automated promotion, how to get things into the production environment from a more traditional sort of promotion methodology as well as to support some of the new sort of more agile and nimble sort of continuous delivery kind of mechanisms that they're using. So it's kind of that same spectrum that we like to think we're delivering the functionality based on previous discussions we've had. So it kind of aligns pretty well with what people are asking about at this event. Yeah, yeah. So a lot of times with automation, it sounds great. And then the people that have to implement it kind of go, well, I got to learn it. I got to implement it. Give us an example, give us a customer example that sort of shows the savings to the business, the new value to the business that comes from making that investment in automation and really making that part of their DNA. So one of the examples that we talk about frequently is a large retailer in North America who have been a control end user for quite a long time. Very traditional organization, very, very large traditional IT infrastructure. They are really kind of transitioning to moving away from that towards a more agile, sort of continuous kind of a path where continuous everything. And their old process for getting workload into the production environment consisted of, you kind of listen to it and it's almost laughable, that the people submitting a request had to use some other tool, typically it was Visio to draw a diagram of what they wanted. Completely of course disconnected from the way the solution actually operated. They then had to, and they didn't have any insight into what the flow currently was. They had to kind of divine it on their own from their code, draw this diagram, associated with a change request that also was part of their change management system but typically used language that they were familiar with and most of the time collided with or conflicted with the language that IT was expecting and so there was this back and forth, while you said this, we don't know that kind of application, what does that mean? There was research that was required. The actual work that needed to be done to get this into production was probably no more than in the order of minutes or maybe an hour or so, but the process took sometimes as many as several weeks. Now, you can imagine nowadays in an environment that this was a retailer, we're getting a new service into operation and beginning to expose it to customers and gain business value. Weeks is a massive amount of time. So they began, they looked at their methodology and they adopted a number of the components that we have added recently. We have a component called Worko Change Manager which is directly aimed at improving this entire process, making it work a lot more smoothly. They told us that they saved about 80% of the time and they were able to achieve a higher quality deliverable because one of the other components was that it gives you a mechanism to expose what are your IT standards to the people who are submitting the request, which you may think is like- Take all that language transition out of the middle of it. Yeah, you would have thought it was a no brainer, they should have done it before but they never actually did. And so there are several other details like you can customize it so that you don't have to become an expert in control M, you can only submit as much information as you know, submit the request to somebody who knows more and they could either enrich it and it has built in collaboration capability. So that entire capability of being able to automate the submission process and then being able to actually move from what was an integration environment directly into production through another set of capabilities would allow you to automate the promotion. You know, when you're talking about 80% or it was actually a little bit higher than 80% of that process time, that translated per request of which they have something like 15,000 a year. Oh wow. You know, into huge, huge financial savings but more importantly in getting services out to the business that the business was waiting for to be able to, you know, offer to customers, gain value, sometimes competitive advantage or response. So, you know, hugely important. Fantastic. And that's the kind of story you want to hear. It's not, I save 30% in storage cost. I want to save direct business time to market, those types of things. Yeah, I would say even more that nowadays those kinds of sort of pure technology savings are, I won't say irrelevant but are definitely secondary and they're not the reason people either change or adopt new technology anymore. It is for business savings, business advantage. So, those are the outcomes that we try to achieve for our customers. Excellent. All right, sounds like a great place to end that, Joe, thank you so much for joining us. We'll be back with more coverage here from BMC Day in Boston.