 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Hello, welcome back. We are on the Cube. We're at EMC World 2014 in lovely Las Vegas. We've got two Cubes at EMC World this year. So we've got double the pleasure, double the fun, double the insight, double the guests. So we're excited to be here for our fifth year talking to EMC execs and partners. But really what we get most excited about is talking to the customers, talking to the practitioners who are taking all this technology that everybody's talking about in the keynotes and implementing it on the ground with their companies delivering value for their teams, delivering value for their company. So we're joined by our next guest here, Dan Allensworth, Coach Technology Services, Johnstonville Sausage. So Dan, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, love to have you. So I don't know if anyone noticed we were joking before we came online that Dan was right next to our guest from the Vatican. So I think we covered the bases here at the show from the Vatican to Sheboygan, right? Close to Sheboygan. So it's terrific. So let's jump into it. So tell us a little bit about, I think we probably all know what Johnstonville Sausage is, give us a little background on the company, size of the company, history. Sure, sure. Johnstonville is a privately held company. We've been around since 1945. We have six major operating facilities in the US. We're all 50 states and 30 countries around the world for distribution. So four out of every five broths you buy in the US are a Johnstonville broth. So we're pretty proud of that. Excellent. And so how long have you been with them? I've been with them 15 years. 15 years. So the first thing that struck me when I was putting the schedule together is your title. Yeah, the coach. The coach. So talk a little bit about that title. It's a unique title. Obviously there's a story there. Oh, absolutely. At our company, it's a very teams-based approach. So other companies, you have managers or directors and employees. At Johnstonville, it's a little bit different. So I coach a team of members. And those members include our service desk, PC support, networking, servers, et cetera. All the sort of technical things you can break with a hammer, but we're coaches and members, not managers and employees. And is that a historical precedent that comes down from the company? Oh, yeah. That comes down right from the top from the owner. That's definitely his approach and philosophy, yes. Okay, so let's jump into the IT shop that you're running or coaching. So how big is it? What type of systems do you have in place? Why are you here at EMC World? We're here at EMC World because obviously we run a lot of EMC products. Specifically, very recently, we've started doing SAP HANA products on EMC VNX Storage and Cisco UCS. That's really the reason we came out here is to get me personally to get more information on where those products are going. There was actually a great presentation today where they're going to start doing virtualization on top of the HANA appliances. So we're really excited about that. That's definitely going to give us some future directions for growth at Johnsonville. Because you're running what, six plants? Yes, six facilities. And obviously, you've got all the other things that are related to reporting and pricing and analytics and so forth that HANA is very important to for our future. And really, we're an SAP shop. We've always been running SAP, and that's kind of SAP's direction for HANA is their future. So we're kind of bought all in at this point. Did you talk to any other practitioners, too, while you've been here at the show? Absolutely. We've looked at all kinds of stuff. We use data domain extensively in our environment. We use the new Xtreme IO for our VDI environment, which we just love, by the way. It's a fantastic product. And we've been getting a lot more information about the NetWorker, the Avamar setups, things like that, that we really haven't jumped into those yet. But EMC's got a very broad swath of products. And it takes a lot of education to really understand how we can take our business goals and make those acceptable by EMC products. So it's been a real learning experience this week for me. But a relatively small team. Yeah, absolutely. We're around 14 for the whole team. And I brought two other folks out here with me to this conference. So talk a little bit about your move to virtualization and virtualized environments and why virtualized HANA is important and what that's going to enable you to do that you can't do now. Oh, sure. So the real essence of HANA prior to today was you bought an appliance. We bought the starter appliance, what's they call, I got two plus one, so two blades plus a standby. And that's a pretty rigid environment. And I understand why SAP did it. They wanted to make sure that when you run the environment, it's going to be a controlled, good experience for the customer. But the problem with that is, as you scale into more modules and we wanted to add all kinds of new modules and features, then you have to keep adding blades and you have to keep scaling it out. And the price gets pretty significant. Well, when you go to virtualize that scenario, then you're running multiple guests on the same hardware. You can size them down to what your actual database sizes are, not to what your blades are. And you can cut costs significantly. On top of that, you start to do things like SRM or replication to a cold side and can bring the system back up. In a DR scenario, VMR really adds to the value of, or lowers the cost, I would say, of running HANA. And are you moving more and more of your apps to the virtualized environment? Yes. Actually, prior to going to HANA, we were all SAP, both application servers and SQL database servers, all running virtualized under VMware. Excellent. And do you do a lot of your own in-house application development? That we don't do a lot of. We're mostly SAP implement the modules. If you can put three letters together, it's probably an SAP module and we're probably running it. When you look even just at the HANA modules, we're looking at business warehouse, business planning and control, DSM or running scan data, things like that. It's even just in the HANA appliance itself. It's a lot of reporting and data. OK. So we go to a lot of shows, a lot of big megatrends and I'm curious how they're affecting you. Big megatrends, obviously, virtualization in cloud. We already talked about that. The other one is big data. How's that impacting your business? Are you collecting new sources of data? Are you leveraging data in new ways? Can you take on that? And then the other one obviously is BYOD and mobile and moving applications from dedicated specialized devices to iOS devices or Android devices and or supporting other types of applications in the field. I wonder if you could touch base both on the big data trend and how that's impacting your business and what you're up to, as well as potentially IOD. Sure, so. Big IOD, excuse me. No problem. So from a big data standpoint, that's really the idea behind HANA. That's like I said maybe earlier is that SAP's direction is to put everything under HANA long term. So then that pretty much makes it our direction as well. But in the short term, our quick wins are all around big data solutions. So for a DSM, for example, we're taking our scan data from customers. We're tying that in to price and promotions and we're actually going to be able to get predictive on what are the best promotions, things like price elasticity. And instead of taking history data and reports from the past and trying to guess at the future, we're actually going to have almost real time data and in essence, be much better at predicting what future outcomes will be. On the BYO front, HANA also helps us out there quite a bit because I would say a shortcoming of traditional SAP is the ability to take and embed analytics into the various modules and applications. But when you add HANA on top of it, now you can start embedding real time into these applications, analytical functionality for the end user, which that translates right away to iPads running dashboards with all of this reporting information for whoever needs it. And that's one of our big initiatives right now is the whole BYOD, bring your own device, be that a PC, be that a tablet, be that a phone, load your SAP applications, pull down your analytical data, pull down your dashboards. Make decisions faster, make decisions better. That's our way of trying to support the business goals. Right, right. And how much of that's kind of on the factory floor versus kind of in the management suite in terms of that kind of dashboarding and access? That's an interesting question. There's a lot of it actually in both. So there's a lot of it on the factory floor. There's also a lot of it in what we're doing more like predictive sales and promotions. We're doing all of the sort of sales, promotions, and the financial sides now. That factory floor piece, we really want to get to. And that's why the virtualization piece is so exciting, because until we have a good ability to recover and a true disaster, things like the main ECC or plant PM, things that keep the plant floor running, they're going to be a little cautious about putting those on HANA. Yeah, interesting. So I'm jumping all over the place. I'm curious, you said on your connection with getting data from the grocery stores and other customers, how tightly integrated are your systems with their systems? And how tight are you in terms of a direct relationship with the people that eat the sausages versus the grocery stores and the retail chains? So you go through intermediaries to get that information. So like Nielsen, scan data, then we reach agreements with them to load that data into our system. OK, so you're going to do the part. So it's very close. Yeah, it's very close in that sense. And then are you trying to establish a more direct relationship with clients as well, in terms of just your own branding and marketing types of promotions? Absolutely. On the promotion side, we are. But when you talk about predictive analytics, that's getting real-time data on the customers as they buy the products. And we pull all of that data in through third party. OK, so what's next for you? What's next on the horizon? Next mound? He'll decline. We kind of already talked about it a little bit. It's really the whole virtualization piece, right? We continue with that piece. Because if we can do the virtualization piece and we can get to where we have a good scenario for quickly recovering from things like a disaster, then you get to where you're doing more on the production floor. And you're doing more of those critical applications to manufacturing. And you get to where you do things like your main ECC database. Put that on HANA as well. What's ECC? That's our main production SAP. So that's the full functional primary module of SAP. Keeps everything moving. Yes, so there are certain pieces that you can run that are reporting-based that essentially don't cause you issues if they're down, right? It's nice to have them running and available, but we're still making brats if that disappears. So that's a key component of our solution. So you brought your favorite sausage? Oh, you know, I like the Arsio garlic. OK, I'm kind of an Italian guy. I never liked the apple chicken thing. That was not my favorite. Well, we're one in every three Italian in the US. Is that right? Big Italian. Awesome. Well, Dan, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Appreciate you joining theCUBE. So again, we like to go out. We like to get the guys on that are down in the trenches that are implementing this technology that are trying to change the world and deliver a better broad. We talk to people at the hospitals. We've talked to people flying jet planes. So this stuff is real. It's being used. And we're excited to talk to practitioners you can learn from one another and really share best practices. So again, we're at EMC World 2014. You're on theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick. We'll be right back after the short break. Thanks for watching.