 Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Hi Grace. Welcome back to EMC World 2016. This is theCUBE from EMC World 2016. I'm Stu Miniman joined by Brian Graceley and we love those success stories we can talk about theCUBE. So I'm really happy to welcome back to the program. I guess we had on from last year, Rama Dewaraha. Dewaraha. Yeah, that's fine. Sorry about that Rama. No problem. But what I'm excited is last year, right before EMC World, the EMC World, the CIO, had left, you were the interim CIO. We had a great discussion about how you were transforming the business of cloud and we predicted that you would be the CIO and here you are back, University of North Texas. You are the CIO. So first of all, congratulations and welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me, Stu. And yeah, you predicted it. So you're one for one. I should come back to you for predictions. All right. I just apologize for the name. No, not a problem. Just call me Rama. So Rama, give us the quick update. What have you been up to the last year? I'm sure, you know, you've mostly been down playing golf, you know, relaxing. No changes, you know, in IT, because things move really slow. Yeah, as you can tell, I mean, a lot has changed in IT. We've been extremely busy. Last year, we went live during May when we were talking about the enterprise hybrid cloud. Amazing thing is it's evolved a lot since then where we've added software defined networking to it and increased the stack of virtual desktop interface projects going to be part of it. We've added extreme IO, part of the storage line. The proof of concept is going very well. And there are lots of new projects that are coming on. So, you know, we were talking about frameworks last time when we were here. Now it's all real. And we need to move up the stack in terms of platform as a service and software as a service. Yeah, can you walk us through some of, you know, how you determine, you know, which technology to bring in, how fast you roll things out? You know, it sounds like you've got a lot of the stack that you're making some big changes in. So walk us through some of that process. So in the beginning, it's copious amount of details you go through. And there are not too many of them who can really go down the path of doing a hybrid cloud. So that shortens the list. Beyond that, the changes from the personnel side, how are teams going to work? I mean, you've got traditional networking teams that now have to understand software side of business. So you got to get them ready. So we put a training plan together that was implemented in a detailed manner in the last few months. So that's extremely important. We talked about costing our activities because at the end of the day, what we want to do is look at projects that have a net present value that's positive and really bring some details to the science of why we're choosing these projects. So infrastructure as a service was going to be the foundation at that point. It still is. And I'm happy to say that one year into it, it's much stronger and better than where we started. I always alluded to this as a journey. And part of the journey is you have a lot of learning going on. And we've had a lot of stumbles along the way, but we've had great partners and EMC has supported us along the way and it's worked out well. Yeah, talk a little bit. It's amazing what happens when you can start going faster, right? Whether you're on the IT side of things and you're able to deliver things faster or on the business side, give us a little sense a year later what being able to go faster, being able to sort of be more responsive means, translated into the university and business side of things. Sure, that's a great question. Since we did this, we've now undertaken projects and data warehousing, analytics, dashboarding. All of this was impossible before. Mobile applications are getting accelerated. So deployments for that are in the horizon. I'm talking within the next three months. So you can see how fast we're able to move on some of these. And now we're getting more towards where we want to go, which is evidence-based decision making, whether it's for higher education in terms of what students need to be taking in class, what can we do to help them graduate faster. Those are the things we wanted to work on initially, but we weren't able to do that. And when you're talking about hiring data scientists, well, they have to have platforms to work in and we have to be able to provision these faster. So since that you can see our high performance computing is the next area we want to improve and a lot has happened in the last year. DSSD has come on board. So in the arena of integrating new technology, we're able to do that much faster. Yeah, and all these under, I mean, we've been talking about Flash all day, all week, you know, Flash is part of the things that makes it goes fast. Automations also, I'm assuming a very big part of that. It's interesting that you're now able, just even a year in, and a lot of people take a long time to build out their cloud. A year in, you're seeing things that are making distinct, you know, impact on students' lives in terms of education, in terms of the classroom. How much of that did you think you'd expect and how much of this has been sort of a surprise, you know, just byproduct? Well, you do plan to a certain extent because CRM projects, they were all in the works. So you knew what the next two years were going to look like. What you couldn't predict is the length of time some of these would take or all the unknown unknowns. I mean, personnel changes, people moving around, talent leaving the door. As you can tell in Texas, the economy is booming, so we're finding it hard to compete at certain levels. That's why automation is key. You're talking about many of the manual processes that we're now moving towards a process where you go to the portal, you order your service, and we're able to provide that service through a catalog of offerings. And that's where we want to go, and that's the exciting part of it. And the automation stack also extends into platforms and software. And we haven't gotten there yet, and we're looking to get that done. Excellent, excellent. Rahma, can you talk about the personnel? You mentioned training up front, but are there roll shifts? Are there headcount changes? What's the people side of the equation? Well, the people side of the equation sometimes tends to be harder after the implementation because now the changes have to happen. You're going to find some people who are going to embrace it. The others are going to be somewhere in the middle of the pack. And in every business, you're going to have people who are lagging behind. I'm sure you can find it in every Fortune 500 to the public sector. What we do is through an analysis of who's interested, I mean, you're talking at a skill level, they ought to be able to overcome the challenges. So that has to be factored in. We hire for the cultural fit. That's important. We want a diversified employee workforce. I mean, whether it's arts background, science background, engineering, all of those. And together we're molding a team where we can leverage our strengths and minimize our weaknesses. That's what we're doing when we look at our teams currently. And it's really helped us. These changes sometimes take longer than we expect. Now, I've been impatient on that side and you talk about surprises. It has taken longer than we expected. Yeah. Any particulars, things that you've gone through that you said, oh, I wish if I'd planned for this, it could have gone faster? Or what were some of the impediments from not meeting your expectations for kind of a speed to change? I think enterprise architecture is the key to some of these systems where when you're bringing in different ecosystems and you're architecting them, we could have done that a little bit differently because we had service management side. So we're working on IT, service management portfolio, transitioning that project management software tools are being transitioned. If we could sequence these a little better, I think we would have achieved a more optimal rate of adoption. I'm not too concerned about it at this point because there are decisions you have to make at the time you have to make based on the money you have and the people you have. And then we'll make the adjustments along the way. Yeah, but the guest that was on just before you was the team that essentially built the enterprise hybrid cloud now building what's called the native hybrid cloud. So very focused on platform as a service. You said platform as a service is on your radar. What's the thought process that you have around platform as a service? What are you trying to accomplish? What are some of the checklists in your mind that you want to be able to do? I think we want to take simple steps first. In increasing the complexity, what you're going to do is decrease the adoption. But what happens when you simplify it, well somebody else is taking on the complexity. That's where we're hoping to work with companies like Pivotal and Enhanced the use of Cloud Foundry and technologies that are already out there and proven. So I'm hoping in the next year, a team of folks from my team will be working closely with the emcee to evaluate that a little more. So I'm looking forward to what comes out of that. Yeah, that's great. What's the demand from the university today? What's the real hot thing? You talked about high performance computing. Obviously, every student's walking around with mobile devices, that's their default sort of mode. But what are the things that you're being asked for that are coming faster and faster these days? Faster and faster I would probably go towards data analytics. I think there is an increased demand for it just to help people make better decisions. Buzzwords such as big data, data lakes, they've always been there, but to the business, all of that means nothing. At the end of the day, the very unique process that they're going to manage, how can I do that better? Or in some cases, it's multiple processes, whether it's admissions, the registrar's team, athletics, what we're trying to do is have the most simplified way for them to do the analysis. And that's the challenge going forward. So there's a great demand for that. Mobile applications, as you said, most of the students over 93% of them now have mobile devices. So that's a huge challenge. And just providing the infrastructure to connect, that's the next challenge. Beyond that, our goal is to increase the VDI side of it so we can actually get more adoption on the virtual side. Yeah, all right. So Rama, I want to give you the last word. You were actually up on the keynote stage this morning. Explain to our audience what you were up there and what that means to you personally in the business. It was a great moment and I was accepting an award on behalf of our team. We were recognized for our enterprise hybrid cloud achievements. Six awards were given by EMC and we're very honored, humbled to be one of the six winners. It's been great teamwork. And I think ours is a story of how small teams can achieve big things. And people often think that they can do it, but when you push yourself to a certain limit, things are possible. So it was great, very humbling. Well, Rama Jawarraha really appreciate coming to give us the update. Congratulations on being the CIO. We say not everybody gets a promotion immediately when they come on theCUBE, but we do have a good track record and love to have you back talking about the story. So we'll be back with lots more coverage here from EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE.