 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we are live here in Las Vegas at the Sands along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls, you're watching theCUBE of course Dell Technologies World 2018. It's now a pleasure to welcome to the set we have Brian Bond, Director of IT Infrastructure at Siemens E Meter. Brian, thank you for being with us. And Andre Libovici, who was the Vice President of Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Andre, good afternoon to you. Good to see you. Great to see you. All right, Brian, tell us about Siemens E Meter first, just for our viewers who might not be familiar with the company and your mission. E Meter basically is a software development company. We do enterprise level software for utilities, so gas, power, water, just about anything that has a meter. We do not make meters, but we deal with all the data that comes from those meters. So data acquisition, meter data management, loss prevention, all those types of things that come from that data that's leaving your house or your business, we deal with that for the utilities. So back in billing systems, long-term data analytics, all of those types of things, that's what we do. Yeah, so Brian, most companies I talk to, it's like your industry is changing so fast, digital transformation, software, everything. Utilities are considered by most to be one of the slower moving pieces. So what's the reality in your world? It's like selling to a rock. A rock, right? It's tough. Historically, it is very tough, especially in the United States with PUC regulations, with the way you can charge customers and can't, it makes it very hard. And I wish I was a real expert at that type of stuff, but it's a slow moving process. The good news is most countries on the planet have decided that they need to go full-on smart grid and they need to do it fast. So in a lot of countries in Europe, there's an edict out that we're going to do this and that has helped move this along. So it's very helpful to us as a business. I also think it's very helpful to us in general, you know, on the planet, being able to manage grids better and more efficiently. Okay, so we're not going to be talking about power grids and all the things on the utility. You're an IT guy. I'm an IT guy. That's what we love talking about on theCUBE here. Give us a thumbnail sketch of your environment, your purview, what's going on. All right, so like I said, so we're a software development house. It's all developers, DevTest, QA, sales support, you know, all that type of stuff. I'm fortunate to be part of a very large company, so I don't have to worry about email, SharePoint sites or any of that stuff. I get to deal with the real fun stuff, which is our product, how it's deployed, how it's developed and tested. We're a pretty much 100% virtualized VMware shop. We use VMware-based cloud services for the appropriate things for that. And we do all of that work ourselves with our own team. So we have a small team in the U.S., we have a small team in India and we handle all of that ourselves. We don't really outsource any of that. All right, so Andre, I want to pull you in here. I hear software development and VMware environment brings me back. I remember it really is VMware. It was only for test dev. Today I hear developers. I hear this stuff. I was like, oh, isn't that kind of public cloud and some of those things? So give us your viewpoint on customers like Brian and what kind of things Datrium brings to that environment, obviously virtualized and all that. Yeah, no, that's a good point. So all types of customers now suddenly looking at how they can leverage private cloud, but also public cloud, create the ideal hybrid cloud. What does that mean, right? So we have 1,200 companies like Siemens who are leveraging our technology to deploy their private cloud, run their VMware infrastructure on us. At the same time, create DR strategies to their secondary sites, but there's also those customers who are looking to how can I actually push workloads to the cloud? How can I create a strategy around disaster recovery to the cloud? And I believe that as part of our journey as a company on embracing private data centers, we got to embrace also the cloud. And this is the next big thing for us at Datrium where we're going to help customers on the journey to take their workloads running on-premise to the cloud, but at the same time enabling them to use as a DR and also move back when needed. I may as well just spill the beans here. I'm not sure if I'm getting trouble with marketing or not. I'm sure. So we actually releasing very soon a fully orchestrated DR from our platform to the VMware cloud, to VMC, fully orchestrated that enables you to fail over environments to the cloud and back once your DR site or your primary site is actually back. There's a lot of promise on this market. There's a lot of companies doing saying that they would do, but I see that something that customers are really excited. You know, how does it work when you're dealing with a customer who is dealing with a customer who's dealing with customers who, your privacy is essential, right? And there's a lot of concern. They have to be the customer of a utility. So how do you treat them, because they have very unique needs, I would assume, and that's a major consideration because of their position with their customer. I mean, it's got to create a new dynamic or an interesting dynamic for both of you to handle. Yeah, it does. You know, from a development standpoint, you know, you may not be actually dealing with that particular customer's data, but you're helping that customer deal with that data. So we're having to go through and make sure that our software doesn't have any holes in it and that's patchable and that it follows, you know, simple guidelines. But at the same time, we make recommendations to customers all the time. Well, how are you guys doing XYZ in-house? Because you seem to be doing okay and we say, well, we're using this particular platform and their encryption is probably the best there is right now out there, dedupt encryption. It's just, it's fantastic. And across different storage arrays and being able to do that to the cloud and be encrypted there and not have to worry about that is a big bonus. And that's definitely something that we look at. Obviously we don't encrypt all of our data because a lot of it's just nonsense, but we do have stuff that we do that with and we do it both for testing purposes and to prove that this meets the requirements of the customer because those requirements are different, not just in different countries, but in every state you go to. So being able to provide that level of assurance of, yeah, you can meet your requirements with our software, regardless of what platform you're running on. Yeah, Brian, you mentioned a couple of features there, but I wonder if you can back us up a second. You've got a virtualized environment. There's so many options that you could choose on there. Walk us a little bit through the problems that you were having, the decision process and ultimately what led to Daytrium. So the set of primary goals for us was the typical thing you see in IT is you're doing the same thing for a long period of time. You're buying the same stuff, you buy more of it, you renew, and then they tell you that the price is going to go way up on support, so you buy a new one and start over again, right? That the hockey stick approach. And so that's the time I like to actually stop and say, hey, am I doing this right still? Because what I did five years ago may not be right going forward, knowing what the changes are in the business. So we were looking for great cost to capacity, right? And ease of management, and overall cost of the deployment. And when we started looking at all the different players in the space, for us, the big thing was going to NFS. So single file system for management. Prior to that, we were either fiber channel on or ice guzzie, so many management points. Hundreds of lunch, hundreds of lunch. We're managing storage, right? A small group of people, three, four guys. You're spending 20 hours a week managing storage. That's nuts, right? So day one, we put these guys in in a POC and my guys are like, this stuff's never leaving because now I'm down to one management point, right? Six months, seven months later, I'm down 600 lunch from where I was. With three management points, I don't manage storage anymore. None of my guys manage storage anymore. That's a hidden cost. And I'm not suggesting reduction in FTE or anything like that. I'm saying, oh, now those guys can go work on operating system patching. The other pain points that you've got in the business rather than managing that platform. So all of those things rolled in together and when we tried to compare them to other vendors, we couldn't get an apples to apples comparison. We had to go with multiple vendors to get the same performance, to get the same capacity, and we could never get the pricing. The best case scenario we got for capacity and performance was three times the cost. Best case scenario. And I still had to manage lens. Yeah, Andre, I used to always joke, simplicity in the enterprise was an oxymoron because there's so much happening. You hear, okay, I get rid of one thing, I got to patch the other thing. There's no such thing as eliminating bottlenecks. You just moved them. But it sounds like some common problems we've been hearing out there. What's typical about this environment? What are you hearing from customers in general that Datrium's helping? So I think the first point is simplicity. And then something that we've been evolving, that it's a journey not only for Datrium, but the whole data center industry, right? Went through HCI and now it's open conversions. So the whole simplification of the data center to make sure that most of the tasks can be automated. So some of the things that we do that we simplify from a management perspective, we have no knobs. You don't decide if it's compression, the duplication enabled, if a ratio coding is enabled, everything is on by default. And that's the way it's going to be because it doesn't make sense for an organization with thousands of virtual machines and applications to start tweaking every single knob to make sure they're going to get the best possible performance across the board once we've actually verified you might get like one or two percent CPU back. So simplicity is a big point. Also the other point that we mitigate in the organization, especially compared to HCI solutions, is the data resiliency. So we actually offer enterprise-grade their resiliency that for HCI, and I'm going to talk about evolution of data center that will take like putting SSDs into the servers, HCI clusters, and then moving forward. So we actually make all the management of these SSDs much simpler. I forgot the line that I was going to. But I think the message is simplicity, scalability, back data resiliency, making sure you get enterprise-grade data resiliency in the data center. And you don't compromise on that. You get capacity, data resiliency, simplicity at the same time. Keep it simple and make it work. Right? Faster. All right. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time. Thanks for telling the Siemens E-meter story. Look forward to seeing you down the road and good luck to continue success at Daytream as well. Thanks, Andre. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Back with more. You're watching Dell Technologies World 2018 right here on the Q.