 Live from Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Juniper Nextwork 2016. Brought to you by Juniper. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Hey, welcome back and we're live in Silicon Valley for theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-student Miniman. Our next guest is Doug McCullough, who's the CIO of the City of Dublin in Ohio, not in Ireland. So, it's not going to be a beer conversation. Of course, theCUBE was in Dublin in the past year for Hortonworks. We had a lot of fun there. Doug, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, great to be here. So, tell us what do you do, first of all, what does the CIO do in the City of Dublin? What is your role and what are the things you work on? What are the things you're passionate about? Sure, well, I'm the first CIO for the City of Dublin. Previously, we had an IT director. There are subtle differences. So, larger than dealing only with the technology of the city, which we call keeping the trains running and the lights on, we deal with the larger strategy of technology in the city. I do a lot more with economic development. Concerned myself with making the City of Dublin a digital hub and attractive place for other technology companies, building a community for technologists. So, I'm doing my part as a member of senior staff for the general strategy. And even IT background, you've done all that IT stuff, been there, done that on the IT side. Yes. So, my question for love this conversation is now that we love theCUBE's social impact, right? Whether we're talking about women in tech and education, there's a lot of new technology impacts with digital transformation around social impact. Certainly cities and public sector, towns and cities, what not, are impacted by digital transformation. So, what is that all about? People perceive it as a slow moving government, but yet, IOG hits the government. IT is part of the transformation in these cities because a digital fabric is a competitive advantage not only for the, how to run the city, but for their citizens and the community. So, it's all a melting pot now. What is this new fabric about? Share with your thoughts on this new environment. I really appreciate that question. It's a good question because what I find is, as citizens, as members of a community, we have a certain level of demand for the companies around us, whether it be Facebook Messenger or Google or the services that we use. And we just expect it to be great and be there and always advance constantly. And we've given the public sector a pass or have written it off in some senses. I don't know how long that's going to be able to last. Public sector is going to be expected to innovate with at least excellent cycles like the private sector is. And that means more push technologies, that means more IoT, that means strong networks, better services, e-services, those kinds of things. So, I think we're finding that the impact to us is that we've got to innovate as fast as the private sector. You know, it's interesting about this conversation. I love it too, by the way, because it's not only provocative, but it's very relevant. In the analog world that we live in, the role of the city and the town and governments is strategically important to everyone's life. They have a hat down. They want safety. They want roads to drive on. They want things to be there that have been working for generations for them in an analog world. Okay, now I'll go to digitization. They're going to, I think, expect what you're saying is expect similar betterment and for their lives that they currently have in the analog. So, this brings up the IoT question, the Internet of Things. This is certainly going to be an impact. And we were talking before we came on how big the T is in IoT. So, just from a value proposition standpoint, the user, the citizen, has a great value relationship with the city and town. But they kind of take advantage to maybe, they think about it that way, but digital, you can't, it's always connected. So, talk about that gap between analog and digital, government, city, services, community. It's comfortable for us to forget about the government. And it's interesting you brought up roads and police and those kinds of things. Sometimes we go to the lowest common denominator. But we can talk about that. Well, what is police in a digital environment? What is a road? And we're dealing with connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles research. What is a road anymore? It used to be pavement. And cities were responsible for setting the laws, the speed limit, painting them, maintaining them, those kinds of things. Well, when you're no longer driving and when you are being led along, according to a different rule set and there's all sorts of data, who's going to manage that? Well, it's still going to be a city. We're responsible for the infrastructure that moves people, the public safety, all sorts of things. So, we find ourselves shifting into more cameras, more sensors, more intelligence that allows speeds to be changed. When we dream about the traffic controls and the platooning of trucks and all of those things, who's going to do that? Well, a government is going to have to be enlightened enough to be in. There's no pixie dust out there. There's no magic elves out there doing it. No, we've got to advance ourselves to another level of function. Doug, for so long we've talked about enterprises that want to create change. For the government, people often have the misperception that it's like, oh well, they've got no budget, they can't do things, and oh, they're bureaucracy. So, therefore, change isn't something that government is usually known for doing. So, when you hear the discussion here about kind of, Rami talked about beyond digital transformation, what sort of things are you doing in your job to help drive innovation and create some of that digital transformation? Yeah, I'm fortunate to work for Dublin, Ohio. I've worked for more than one city, and it is expected and appreciated by our residents to be a changing place, an innovative place. And so, first of all, we're building a community of technology professionals. Second of all, we communicate with our residents a lot more readily and speedily, and they are open to certain amounts of change. So, we've created the double-linked fiber conduit system, which is something that a lot of other communities were not prepared to do. Our community is comfortable with the investments that we want to make. So, I think also, I could talk to you about our 100 gigabit project in which we are investing in our fiber optics network for the transport layer to get businesses to carriers. We subsidize that. That's a significant business model change that our business community can take advantage of. So, those are the kinds of things that we do in order to accomplish innovation. Yeah, Doug, if you wouldn't mind, unpack for our audience a little bit. What is the impact of that optical network and the 100 gig? I mean, that's kind of cutting edge. It's interesting. We are targeting a legacy office park. I'm looking at 13 different buildings for which we're concerned and interested about the number of tenants in those. More businesses you move into a community, the more jobs you have, the better your revenue is. So, instead of having a tax abatement model, City of Dublin has a, let us lower your costs as a business. Broadband is now one of the, and digital services are one of the biggest costs for businesses, particularly smaller ones, that don't have large staffs. You've got to lower their costs. And so, we've targeted a legacy office park. We've put in Juniper equipment of up to 100 gigabits per second, edge equipment and a core carrier grade network in our Metro Data Center. And we are attracting businesses to the area. This is our first year, and we're looking at other legacy office parks in the area as well. Be careful what you create. There's a monster in there. 100 gig, that's going to attract a lot of people who love the bandwidth. Well, it's interesting. People say, well, I could never use 100 gigabits. But the moment you give people a gig, they start using a gig. When you give them 10 gigs, they do that. And we have a R&D specialist that's doing an analysis, and their business was able to grow to 10 gigs of capacity because they had it. It opens up creativity for entrepreneurs. Knowing they have more headroom on the connectivity, more servers can be deployed, more things can be built. Absolutely. Yeah, to Jevyn's paradox, I always say, from a power standpoint, if I save a little bit of power, I'm always going to use it up. If you give people bandwidth, people are going to use it. How do you have to look at security though? Are you just providing the platform and the end users responsible for the security or how does security play into it? We work with a third party to secure that part of our network. Our double-link conduit system, we do use it in the city for our own uses. We run our phone systems on it, all of our internet. We do shared services with other public entities in the area. We secure that. So we're running some pretty high-powered security stuff. I was glad with the presentation this morning that we are right in line with what's happening there. Our city network is my greatest concern though. Okay, and how do you, as a city organization, tie in with not only the businesses, but surrounding organizations? Are there any kind of consortiums or how do you make sure that this kind of activity proliferates? Well, we work very closely, I work closely with our economic development folks. As an IT professional, typically I've worked with IT for my whole career. I'm now working with economic development. City of Columbus in our region has a second to none economic development organization that's Columbus 2020, and we do a lot of coordination between business universities. We have strategic relationships with Ohio University as well as Ohio State University Center for Automotive Research. Battelle is a premier research firm in the area. So we have established these relationships in a lot of public-private partnerships, and that keeps us on top of that. So what's the philosophy of, I'll give you a step back. Other folks out there have been trying to crack this nut, bridging digitization with the analog world. What are some of the best practices that you've learned that you'd like to share with folks around? You know, how to foster that collaboration because there's a lot of moving parts. You have the modernization of the actual government city or town, and you get some state federal stuff to deal with too, so the normal regulations. But you have the community as well. How do you balance that innovation because you could be a fish swimming upstream on one side with the government side, public sector side, you get the pace of innovation that the users expect. The consumerization might be very rapid. How are you guys doing that, and what would you share for folks who are looking for advice? Sure, well what I recommend to other communities is that you need certain components. You need a relationship with higher education universities. You need a relationship with healthcare in some way. Healthcare systems, large ones are really great. Your business community, which you can typically get access to through your chamber or direct relationships, and other governments, sister governments in the area, a lot of collaboration there. Our region also benefits from having a major manufacturer in the area that's Honda Manufacturing of America and Honda R&D. So some of the big suppliers, if they are meeting with you and having conversations, and we also meet quite frequently with our residents that give us plenty of feedback. We're blessed with a number of executives in the area who are CEOs of a number of headquarters. Wendy's is there, Cardinal Health, a lot of Fortune 100, Fortune 50 companies. So these are the folks who help advise us. The government sometimes has to get out of its own way. Don't get too big, disappear if you can, be small, efficient, and innovative. What's the number one thing that you work on in terms of stack ranking the demand from the residents and the demands of the city? Have you had to kind of blend them and converge them together? What would be the list of the top three or a couple of things you'd work on, how do you work on? Well, there's a quality of place that needs to be there. And so you do focus on your residents and what their comments are. If you lose your resident's opinion that you're in a real trouble. There's also a quality of space for your business community. If they're not coming to you and find you an attractive place to locate, you're in a lot of trouble. And then there are visitors, people who are going to come for your public art, your festivals. There's a lot of money that comes into a community through that. So I would say that none of those are in conflict with each other. And if you're small enough and fast enough, you can respond to problems that you may have in one particular area and innovate them in all three of them. And so you see that having businesses lower their cost of operating in the area helps the economic situation? It's one of many things, but it's more efficient than the traditional ways of attracting businesses to your community. I'll tell you, things like parks, running trails, bike lanes. There are so many different economic development aspects to it, but then you need high broadband, you need reliable internet in your community. The new roads, I used to call it the information super highway. Now they call it the web and the internet back in the, so I'm dating myself back in the 90s, but this is, these are the new perks and requirements now. Right, no longer a perk. It is now table stakes to have stable internet not only in your neighborhoods, but for your businesses. And that's why we invested in our 100 gig network because having stable, reliable internet with competition amongst carriers. If you've got two carriers or three carriers, that's not enough. We've got a dozen. And having some good bike trails give some good Snapchat creative capabilities. Snapchat aside, just joking, of course, is this is the analog side of it, right? So you mentioned the economic development. It's not just digital. It's the analog world converging in. The bike paths, the environment for the comfort of the. Yeah, I don't know about analog anymore. I'll tell you, since Pokemon Go, you know, we've got people running around our parks, looking at our public art, looking at our historic buildings. So we really do see analog and digital have come from. I mean, in reality, certainly on your radar, big time. Sure thing. And the cameras, you see a totally digitized camera system? We do, and we're continuing to invest. There's a build out in cameras and sensors that is comparable to where fiber was years ago. I mean, bike sharing stuff, you've seen stuff in the big cities. The bike sharing has been great. I've seen Europe. Absolutely, and the digital services are key to being able to maintain those programs. And they should be invisible. You shouldn't have to think about, this is what the private companies do. You don't think about, how do I engage that service? It just appears when you need it. Obviously, security is important. Obviously, being a public sector area could be a targeted attack. A lot of value there, who knows? I mean, it's attackers are doing drive-bys, right? Yeah, we are constantly under attack by foreign governments and different actors. All governments are. And we've got some pretty good strategies to keep us safe. All right, well, thanks so much for sharing your insight on theCUBE. We appreciate it. Thank you. We're live here in Silicon Valley. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Networks 2016, Juniper Networks user conference, annual user conference. This is theCUBE back for the second year of coverage of the event. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.