 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Michael Smith. He is the director of infrastructure at HKS. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Hey, thanks for having me, excited to be here. So Mike, HKS, tell us, you're based in Dallas, you're an architecture firm. Tell us about some of the big projects that you have worked on. Sure, yeah, so I've been with the firm since April, really excited to get on board and really kind of understand the rich history. We actually turned 80 this year, so we'll have a really big celebration of the company. So yeah, so HKS, we do a lot of sports entertainment, so Dallas Cowboys, AT&T Stadium, the Vikings home, LA Rams, so about 30% of our mix is sports entertainment. So you may not know the company, but you certainly know the buildings we design. Actually, when you talk an 80-year-old firm, and I think of those two buildings, well, I'm a techie, I'm a geek. There's a lot of technology that goes into that. I love just the viewpoint as to how the company looks because 80 years ago, I'm sure they didn't have the tech people in there. Design is very much what they're, how does that, you know, the culture and inside the company a little bit? Sure, yeah, so that's really the neat thing, right? So everyone thinks that it's a company full of architects, right? And for the most part it is, so we have nurses on staff, right? Why? Because we build hospitals. We have people that understand how buildings work. So part of our five stakeholders, the community is actually one of those stakeholders. So we're not just listening to the client who's asking us how to build it, we're seeing how that building is going to fit into the community and do its surroundings and how it's really going to inter-operate because these buildings are going to be around for what, 10, 15, 20 years until the next one gets built. So what are you doing here at this conference? What are the kinds of people you want to meet, the kind of connections you want to make? Sure, yeah, so first off I've made some great connections and that's one of the things I love about coming to things like Ignite. This is my first time here, but I just, I've loved it. I tell you, I've really enjoyed hearing people and hearing about the same challenges that I'm facing and then understanding how they're using the various pieces of technology to kind of piece that together. So Mike, you're director of Infrastructure. So we know Infrastructure well. It is our first time at this show, but we've been doing infrastructure shows for many years. Maybe it gives a little bit about your background and what's under your domain at HKS. Sure, yeah, so I've worked for the last 20 years in mainly for architectural engineering firms, right? And there's a lot to be said for understanding the specific industry that you're working in, right? So obviously it's not just about word documents and Excel files, right? We're talking about very large CAD files and having to traverse from office to office, right? And so you have to have a very robust infrastructure. So yeah, so I've got basically the entire networking servers, WAN, LAN, Internet, VoIP. Oh yeah, and I've got cybersecurity under my profile as well. So we run a small shop at HKS, but yeah, so the company's doing really, really well. And we've got 24 offices globally, 19 here in the US. And like I said, we manage that really at 24 seven shop. All right, so you've got a number of locations. When we talk to infrastructure people, the role of data and how do I manage it? How do I do things like disaster recovery and the like usually are pretty important. How is it in your world? Yeah, so obviously disaster recovery, to me that's the backbone of IT, right? It's specifically of my group. And if we can't do that right, if we can't do data protection correctly, then to me we really shouldn't be working on any other project. And that's really where Cohesity comes into the equation, right? So when I came on board, we had a legacy solution. It was working, right? It just talking with the business, really partnering and understanding what their expectations were. We realized that there were some gaps and ended up talking to Cohesity through a vendor. Did an amazing whiteboarding session with just some folks that I really felt like cared about and understood our business. And then, yeah, so we've been, I guess since about mid-July, we've been implemented on our Cohesity solution for data protection globally. We're about 75% of the way there in what, just a month and a half? So from a speed of implementation standpoint, right? But we've really made some leaps and bounds gains and kind of those requirements that our customers are asking of us and kind of returning, basically returning them back to work. Can you paint a little picture of kind of the before and after for us? Sure, yeah, so we've always had a cloud strategy, right? So we've been partnered with Microsoft for several years. Great, Office 365, we've used Azure for backup. But I wouldn't say that it was really an optimized, it was an optimized solution. And so if we had an actual outage, what we were talking about is a fairly long time to pull those resources back down to on-prem. And so what we've implemented with our Cohesity solution is basically a system now where when our customers come in in 95% of the time, they can get their files back on the phone with the first level technician. So before I was going to a third level sysadmin, basically requiring them to stop what they're doing, work on their restore, right? And in some instances, it may have been a day before we returned that customer back to work. So if you can think about the ability to really just return them back into their normal work process, almost instantaneously, right? I mean, the RTO is, it's really incalculable when you talk about soft dollars like that. To talk about, you mentioned how coming here you talk with a lot of people in your industry, or people, but maybe not even in your industry, but you realize you all share similar challenges. And you just talked about the disaster recovery and how that can really keep you up at night. Can you talk about a few of the other problems and challenges that you encounter and how Cohesity has helped you? Sure, yeah. So I think obviously in the forefront of everybody's mind is security, right? And the fact that I have security within my group. So understanding that in the topics of, data in motion, data at rest, right? Topics of encryption. So, you know, all of our data, as it's pulled into Cohesity is encrypted. And so obviously then as that sits in Azure, that's encrypted. So that transaction is secure. You know, I think the overall management of the infrastructure, so really having that single pane of glass that Cohesity can offer, that was a huge challenge when I came on board because the solution that we were using was really meant for file replication. And so in order to find out if something worked, we had to go to 81 disparate sources to see if that worked, right? And so, you know, today I can come in the morning. I got a guy that starts at 6 a.m., God bless him. And, you know, by the time I get in, anything that happened overnight is completely remediated. I can look at one single pane of glass. I can see a bunch of green. And honestly, if there's red, I can see it. And I know that something failed and I can pinpoint exactly what we need to do to fix it. So, okay. Like you said, you're about 75% on the way deployed. Walk us through where you're going with it, what you've been learning along the way and any lessons learned along the way that you could share with your peers as to how the experience has been, what they might want to do to optimize things. Sure. Yeah, so I think, like I said, we're about 75% of the way. We've got a lot of our international sites that are coming on board now. We're learning a lot about our network, right? We're learning a lot about different things. And so I would say, before you do an implementation of this size, really make sure that you have a good handle on patching, right? Making sure that all of your resources are patched, right? The last thing you want to do is find out you have a resource problem with slow latency and it's due to a patch not being applied, right? And then just understanding the time frames involved, right? So, we've targeted about 75 days to get fully on board, but we're talking almost a petabyte of data across one gigabit connectivity, right? And so when you start talking about that, there's a lot of, we're doing a lot of mix and mashing and bandwidth throttling and all that kind of fun stuff in order to get up and running. Yeah, so I'm kind of laughing a little bit over here because it's been a punchline in the Microsoft community. It's like, oh well, is it Patch Tuesday yet or things like that? We've come so far yet, there's still some things that hold us back. And that leads me to my next question is, what's exciting you in the industry and tech and your job, what's working great and on the other hand, are you asking your vendors, what would make your job and your group's job even better, whether that be Cohesity, Microsoft or others? Yeah, so I think as a company that, so we have a lot of data, right? And at first, as the role of the person responsible for that data, it was, oh my gosh, we have a lot of data. And it was actually a couple of months ago, something clicked in my head and I said, we have a lot of data, right? And guess what? We can do analytics on that data. And so I think machine learning is going to be huge, right? I think being able to do a lot of those tasks that we count on, I have people that are doing things two to three times a week, maybe between eight and five. Well, those are things that with machine learning, we can have those algorithms basically running 24 seven. And so we can start making leaps and bounds progress over what we're doing today. HKS is really big into understanding what the value at is in building a building, right? It's not just about the architecture. There's value to that. And so what other value items can we provide to our customers, right? That because, you know, to be honest, technology is becoming a commodity, right? Well, how much longer before core services like your architecture and your engineering start to become commodities? And so that's really where I think analyzing that data. And so I was at VMworld a few weeks ago and I was talking to a cohesity engineer and I really expected him. I said, what's next on the roadmap from data analytics? And I expected to hear X, Y and Z. And he looked at me and he goes, what do you want to see what's next? What do you want to do with your data? Let's partner with you and make that happen, right? Now I'm smart enough to go, I don't know what that next thing is, but we have really smart, you know, PhD type people that do. So we're really looking forward to that next phase. I'm interested in teams because you talked about the very diverse employee base at HKS. You said you've got nurses on the team. I'm imagining you have hospitality experts, you've got the PhD types, you've got the science people and the architects. So how do you get all these people with very different functional expertise to work together and pull together and all be on the same page? That's actually a great question. So interestingly enough, I sit right next to a librarian and she's an IT, right? And they work in our global knowledge management group which does SharePoint, right? So who better to understand how to start to classify and organize information than someone who's a trained librarian, right? So I think what we're really excited about is our IT team has really been really rebuilt, say over the last two years, and it's been rebuilt with people who have a real passion for their industry, but also kind of a broad understanding of how everything interconnects. And so we're really kind of building a culture that says if there's information there, it's shareable, right? We're not holding anything close to the vest. If you want to understand, if I use too many acronyms when I talk, then ask me what they are, right? And so I think that right there, that fosters a lot more involvement and people give more of themselves incrementally when they understand that, hey, there's skin in the game and yes, I'm a librarian and I may not know the technological things that you do, but if I say, well, hey, what if we do it this way? We're not just going to blow that idea off and we're going to actually incorporate that into the greater solution. Great, Mike, talk a lot about AI at the show and IOT as you're doing buildings. I'm curious how things like all the sensors and everything impact what you're doing, how you partner with your clients on there. Yeah, so we've got a great team that really focuses on that entire extended set of technologies. So, you know, obviously drone technology, sensor technologies. And so I think a lot of those, you know, those are, I won't even say that they are even forward-looking anymore, right? Those are especially sensor technology, right? So I mean, you know, I've worked in environments where we had, you know, 24 by seven cameras on a job site, right? So General Contractor probably hates it, but a PM from anywhere in the world can look at his project, his or her project, and they can see their progress, right? Well, you know, then at what point does that extend to, well, I'm going to launch a drone here and I'm going to go look at a very specific piece and a very part of that technology. And so, yeah, I think, I think, you know, it's one of those things, if you ever start sitting on your laurels and IT, if your feet ever get off of the toes, right, moving forward, you're already behind. So, you know, I think things like AI and machine learning, you know, I've talked to some people that are like, well, we're two to three years away from that. And I said, in two to three years, those will be things of the past, right? You have to, you know, you don't want to be bleeding edge, but you have to understand where you can leverage those technologies for your business. Give us a little candy here. What, paint a picture of what the building of the future is, whether it's the stadium of the future, the hotel of the future, just get us excited here. What are some of the things that you're looking at? Yeah, so I actually talked to a gentleman a couple of weeks back and they're building a hotel and this hotel has Bluetooth sensors in the room, right? Can't do any kind of cameras or anything like that, but basically what it can do is based upon the signal saturation of the Bluetooth, it can tell you how many people are in that room because it understands the dissipation of the signal through the normal human body, right? So take that down to like your typical occupancy sensor, right, that so you leave the room, maybe you're sleeping late, right? Well, the room doesn't think anybody's in there, so it turns the temperature up, turns the lights on, does whatever it does, right? Well, with this new technology, right, it can't do that. So fast forward on and maybe it's a little more scary, so now you go from your room and you walk down to the lobby bar, you walk past the lobby bar. Well, the wireless devices know the MAC address of your phone because you use that number when you checked in, so as you get close, it pops you a, hey, you want a 15% or how about you want a free drink at the bar if you come in here, right? So I think understanding the connectedness of everything, right? And then really not being afraid of it. I mean, there is a big brother aspect to all of this, but just kind of understanding that, you know, kind of in the Elon Musk vein, right, is that we have to understand and we have to control where that technology is going. But I think if you're afraid of it like that, right, and you, well, I'm never going to stay at that hotel because of the things that they do, then I think you're missing out, so. Right, exactly. Well, thank you so much, Mike. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida coming up just after this.