 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. Lisa Martin here with one of Dell Technologies customers. What a great time to be talking about a candy company. Clifton Dorsey joins me, the VP at World Corporation. Clifton, welcome to theCUBE. Hi, thank you. I appreciate being here. So I know World Corporation does more than candy, but you know, here we are approaching the holidays and I think all of us could just use a feel-good story about candy. But I know you do more. Tell our audience a little bit more about World from a corporation standpoint. Sure, World Corporation's been in family, or it's a family owned business for 50 plus years. We're a co-packer, co-manufacturer. So you won't really see a World Candy Bar out there, but we really helped bring to life a lot of innovative ideas around the candy and the good for you products for a lot of our partners. So talk to us about, you're obviously working with Dell Technologies. Give us an insight into your data center operations, your IT environment before the solution that we're going to be talking about. What was that like physical on-prem cloud? Well, our data center kind of falls right in line with the same time of year as a horror story. When I first came here and got on board, a lot of outdated equipment, despair and equipment separated, our backups were, they were few and far between. The equipment was so old that some of it wasn't even supported anymore. We had antiquated systems, but the biggest thing is the confidence level. You have zero confidence that your systems stay running. Your backup, it was an everyday occurrence just to try to get a reliable backup for just a piece of the data, let alone all of our data and information that we had. That confidence factor is table stakes. And especially now it's, if a company can't have confidence that their data is secure and protected, that's, you know, folks that can't might not be around tomorrow. But talk to me a little bit about from a workload's perspective, what were you protecting VMs, ERP systems? Give us a slice of that data in terms of its impact on the business. Sure, and you're correct. You know, having that confidence level in the systems is what you need. Our SQL databases are in there, our ERP systems in there, our file servers. And at the time, even our email server was in there. So any one of those goes down, it's a business impact. You know, you have to look at what can't you do when that happens. On our manufacturing floor, we're collecting a lot of data coming back off the floor for all of our folks in purchasing and procurement and our run times to make sure that we're hitting our dates on time. So even our shipping and receiving team needs to know how the floor is running to know if we're going to hit those ship dates and when to schedule the truck. So it literally all correlates and all comes together. And I imagine also, not just does that involve every aspect of world's business internally, but relationships with the partners that you are helping fulfill, right? That's correct, because we're making their product. If they can't have the product on the shelves, that impacts them. You know, so we really have to do everything that we can to make sure our systems are up, make sure everything is running and really fulfill their order and get it out there. So you can have that product. Yeah, that's why often we talk about data protection and brand reputation go hand in hand. So talk to me, when you came into Worrell, you must have seen nowhere to go but up. Talk to me about some of the things that you said we have got to, for example, aging physical infrastructure. We've got to replace that. We obviously have to be able to have reliable data protection because we have to have the confidence that we can enable our teams and our partners. But what were some of the things that you said, all right, let me kind of get a phased approach here. What are we going to change and why are we going to do it with Dell Technologies? Sure, so looking at our business continuity plan, you don't have a good DR. So you have to start looking backwards of where do you start? So we have zero backups, our data is not protected. We have zero confidence in it. We go back a little farther. Our systems aren't really there for us to back up. So it really started at the appliance level and our server level to get rid of all of the old information, get a new subset of servers in. So we have a new VxRail environment in. It integrates great with the integrated appliance, ties directly into it. So we have backups, we have everyday backups. We have fast and speedy backups. Then we can offload those to an offsite. So we now truly have a full business continuity plan on a DR disaster recovery situation. That's critical because I was reading your case study and where there was no DR before, talk to me about the ability to leverage the clouds of now with what you've implemented and the PowerProtect series. You've now got the ability to, from a DR perspective, I just want to understand that, especially here we are, you know, towards the end of 2020 when there's been such a shift to remote operations, what's that cloud benefit like from a DR standpoint? It's been great. You know, we were old tape backups. So someone had to be here to switch out the old tapes, you know, and hope that, how do we get them offsite? Who's taking them home? What vault are they living in? You know, with the remote aspect, all of that worry goes away. Everything is offloaded. Everything goes into a cloud. If there is a situation, we just work through our cloud environment. We can reinstate business, literally a click of a switch. Yeah, I was looking at some of your statistics and it looks like about a six-sector reduction in your backup windows and a huge reduction in your physical footprint. The data center also, I imagine, more green. Tell us a little bit about it from that perspective. Sure. Hey, a couple of points you hit there. I mean, our deduplication and compression rates are higher than what we're expected by far. So that's been a great spot as far as we don't need as much physical storage to hold all of that. Well, with that, we were able to take our racks. We had three server racks. We went down to half of one server rack. So you're heating and air conditioning, you're heating and cooling costs comes down. Your power cost comes down. All of that soft cost that stretches around this environment really has a benefit for us. I'm also thinking too, in this time of everything shifting and data protection becoming business critical, your team's productivity, one, we talked about the backup, big reduction in backup windows, but your team must be much more productive. And also I imagine for confidence from a reputation standpoint, your executives, your senior management probably now has the confidence because you have the confidence and the data is secure. Yeah, Lisa, that's true. And even down to our user level, when I first got here, I mean, our users were complaining about not being able to print a Word document. I mean, not being able to print a document, that's fundamental stuff. Started diving into it and our systems are just old and disparate and weren't configured the best. So our team's really been able to revamp all of that, redo all of that. And the confidence level around the organization has just really improved. And it's great to see we now have a lot more time to work on tomorrow than living in the trenches of today. Which everyone needs right now since it's pivot after pivot after pivot. I'm curious, how long ago did you come in? Like how many years ago did you find this antiquated system? Yeah, I've been here a little over two years now. Okay, so fairly recently, what were some of the things that you think where I was stuck in? Was it cultural? Was it operational? What was it that you helped influence in terms of we have to make a change now? One of the things for me is one of the old phrases I think is the worst phrase is, well, because we've always done it that way. So getting a fresh line and a fresh look on something was able to really help out. The innovation that Dell brings to the table falls in line with the innovation that we bring for candy. So let's look at what they have, let's look at how they tie together. But when we had to do a full forklift of our infrastructure and our data center, you want to look at the integrated systems and how you get that best performance and at the best bang for the buck when it comes to the budget. Because if they're unbudgeted dollars, you really got to get every dollar to stretch farther. And looking at the VX real with the integrated appliance and with the CDRA to offload to a cloud site, it was a perfect package. It was the perfect pairing for what we needed. But going from, you talk about, we've always done it this way and you're right, we hear that a lot and it's, well, why, you can do it so much differently. Can you imagine if they were still doing it that way in the era of COVID? But thinking about this big switch from a big physical footprint to going to hyperconverged infrastructure, how was that transition that you helped drive, how did it shift the culture out world? Because imagine it, 50-year-old company it must have, right? Yeah, I believe it did. I believe it helped everyone kind of just look at everything and say, just because it worked to get us here is it's going to work with to get us to tomorrow. So everybody really started looking at different situations and different things. When we sat down with our users, we changed the entire desktop experience. We have new laptops, we have new operating systems, we have the way things are working better. So it really changed the culture through and through. So when you go to work, you want systems to work. When you come in, the last thing you want to deal with is, oh, is computers going to be down? Do I have to call IT today? So getting that scalability was great, but getting that reliance from the user and from the keyboard the whole way back to your Edge was a huge win for us. And let's look at your team now having more time to be innovative, especially I'm curious what you've been able to do the last six, seven months that you now have this reliable infrastructure, data secure internally, people can print things and check their emails without having to bother IT. What are some of the new maybe strategic areas that you've been able to get involved in because you have the time to focus on them? We're really getting involved with more of the plant, all the equipment on the floor, trying to collect that data and correlate all that data coming off the floor. And now we're able to have a little fun of how do we get the data on the floor real-time collection back into the system and how can we have technology help drive that innovation on the floor. When our R&D department comes to us about we have a new product that needs to run, where do we run it? I'm now able to work with the manufacturing manager and say that type of product runs best on this machine and here's the data to support that. That's really the fun of what we can do for tomorrow. So is this now enabled you to become data-driven whereas before maybe not so much? I agree, yes, very much so. And it's good data. It's not hypothetical data that someone put on a piece of paper and thought through it. It's really good data that we can correlate and collect. And that's critical, especially right now is everybody wants everything real-time and the consumer demand has changed as every industry and I think it's probably gonna be a pretty big demand still this year for candy. I know that sounds pretty good right about now. I'd love to get your advice for men and women in your position coming into maybe a legacy business that has an antiquated infrastructure. How do you recommend, how do you advise that they go about approaching leadership and their teams to do a complete transformation? I think it starts with a good partner. You gotta have a good partner and able to put things in order. I like to call it one hand to high five. You have to have that good partner to fall back on. You build a good solid solution and then you look at what your budget can do but it's all about the culture. If you can find out where your culture is suffering because people are upset when they come in because something doesn't work. Well, what's the root cause of that? How do you get that out of play? Work with your folks. I always say I want people to drive in happy I want people to drive home happy. How do we make sure that is? And I know it sounds weird coming from the IT guy but you have a huge impact. So when you can look at everyday experience of sitting down, coming into your office and sitting down at your technology and it works. It's just one level of stress that we no longer have. I said it's a huge level of stress that you don't have. And I think that's an important point that you bring up. You want people to come in happy and leave happy but you also really challenge them to get out of your comfort zone just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean we still should. And actually if we do there might be a competitor right behind us that's ready to come in and take over. This is a competitive differentiator and especially in the time of this dynamic environment in which we live the status quo, the comfort zone probably going to be a factor in determining I think the winners of tomorrow. Do you agree with that? I do agree with that. And what we actually found is when we asked people to kind of think outside of their box and step back a minute we found that they were doing something as a bandaid. Well, I have to now do it this way and it just became status quo. When we pulled that bandaid off we kept going back, kept going back, kept going back and found out you're doing something because it wasn't fixed four processes ago. Let's fix that. Now it's not even a thing. So it just leverages a more time to think more outside of the box. So how do I better the situation? And they can really look at everything they do how do I make it better? Down to how the orders come in how we process the orders to even how we ship them out and how we package them up in the truck. Well, when you were talking about bandaid is a bandaid on bandaid on bandaid I just think inherently complexity. Yes. So talk to me in last question here as we wrap up here from a simplification perspective how has Dell Technologies helped transform and simplify the environment? I don't know that I have the word and I've been thinking for that how is that because it's been so monumental that they've done for us? I mean, down to we've been able to revamp our data center and I know that that sounds odd. Well, it's just a VX-Roller, it's just that it's not it's being able to simplify all of the stuff we had down into five U of rack space allowed us to clean up our data center clean up that complexity everything's running inside of there. We no longer have a tape drive sitting somewhere else. We now have more man hours and the soft costs we have more man hours to do a lot more of the tomorrow world. So the complexity we can add our own level of complexity when we want for security or anything else but we're not, we don't have a whole spider web of stuff going on that we have to work through just to see where we need to start. And that's really, as you said, what's the word it's transformative but it sounds to you like what you're doing as a leader yourself and with Dell Technologies is really enabling the organization or has enabled it to get out of its comfort zone embrace modernizing, take out complexity where it's not needed and focus on business outcomes which at the end of the day is the most important thing. It is and we have our own research and development team here for what's the next candy you're gonna see on the market, we have our own innovation team. I challenged every one of the departments that I work with to think the same thing. What's next in your world? How can you re-innovate what you have? What haven't we thought of? You know, and the old thing is no idea is a bad idea. Let's put it on the table, let's bet it out, let's see if it works. But then also working with the other departments. The other departments are now able to collaborate why didn't know that you needed that? Yep, that's the data I need. Oh, that's easy, here you go. And it has really streamlined processes from start to finish. My collaboration is essential. Well, Clifton, thanks for sharing what you're doing with Dell Technologies, the new DP series. Great work there, we look forward to hearing more of what's to come from Wuro. I do appreciate, thank you so much for your time, Lisa and the Dell team. The appliances and everything has been great for us. So we appreciate everything Dell's done, thank you. Excellent, I know you have that confidence because you talked about it. All right guys, for Clifton Dorsey, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching this CUBE conversation.