 Live from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamON 2017, brought to you by Veeam. We're back, welcome to theCUBE and VeeamON 2017. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Vladimir Val Taft is here. He's the principal infrastructure architect at Granite Construction. Val, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Pleasure. So tell us about Granite Construction. What do you guys do? Well, Granite is one of the largest public construction companies in U.S. It's a publicly traded company. It's actually one of the S&P 500 with the annual revenues of two and a half billion dollars. And if you see on the East Coast, if you see Tappin's Bridge, that's one of the flagship projects of Granite Construction, as an example. Oster roads, tunnels, airports, heavy construction. So was that the old Tappin's Z, the new one that's been going up? Venue. Oh yeah, yeah, it looks great. Yeah, I flew over last week on my way to Orlando. I said, ah, that's the new Tappin's Z. Looking forward to making it easier to get down to New York City, New Jersey area. So yeah, it's one of the flagship projects where we're proud of. And in your role as a principal architect, tell us about that and your background there. Well, construction industry is not known for over-investing in IT. You know, if you look at Gartner's reports, construction industry typically is around one plus percent of the revenue. And that's where Granite is. So when the new team took over IT, there was an org change, we inherited a lot of technical debt. And that was plus exploring lease on the data center, which was actually going to be closed down by a major vendor and we had to move it very quickly. Okay, so you come to a show like Veeamon to learn from your peers, figure out best practices. I mean, that's what you hear from people, but what's the event been like for you? What's the conversation been like? And where are you focused? We chose Veeamon as a partner, a technology partner for a number of, I believe, good reasons. So one of the motivations for me to come here was to establish better contacts with the Veeam organization. Also, I realized that the technical depth here is, I would say, superior to many other events I had attended. So I was really searching for that depth, as well as the right contacts, because we are right outside of the Silicon Valley. So we're actually doing forward-looking things. I can give you some examples. Please, yeah. We were site number 141 for the SDN implementation using Cisco ACI, as an example. We are a proud customer of ServiceNow. Was there last week at ServiceNow Knowledge? That's right. Actually, I did go to Rwanda. And well, we also have HP as our preferred vendor. So all of them are present in this forum. And some of the announcements, I really had a good fortune to hear firsthand actually make our life easier now. So anytime I hear of ServiceNow customer, I know they've been through some kind of transformation. And when you talked about technical debt, and I'm inferring that you've modernized some of your infrastructure, that's a big part of what you have to do as IT architect. Can you talk about that? Is that, first of all, is that correct? And what did you have to do to achieve that? Well, as a team, we had to, as I mentioned, repay a lot of technical debt in a short period of time, and move our data center. But our main data center is just one data center. Granite is operational from coast to coast. We have more than 40 regional and branch sites. They have their own computer installations, computer rooms or mini data centers. We have 120, depending on the time of the year and the volume of business of construction sites, which are also IT sites. So even the scale of that operation is a challenge. Well, with so many locations, can you speak to the impact that Veeam has with what you're doing both operationally and just in general? Again, in this reasonably short period of time, Veeam helped us, again, as a tool, to enable VM-level backups because we had to virtualize very quickly and then move over the wire from the old data center with the expiring lease. Lease expiration was really surprised for the new team to the new data center at AT&T in Redwood City, California. Veeam was there as a backup tool to secure the baseline for the main data center. The main data center is VMware. So Veeam apparently has a great name in the VMware community. But then the field is pure Microsoft. And with Hyper-V, Veeam was there right on time with support for pure Microsoft environment. So that's what enabled our field securing the basis for the field, which we didn't have any backup standards. We couldn't get full control of our data. The ownership, the governance was not there. The backups were disjointed. So at this point, when we nailed what I just started referring to as Veeam on the ground, we have that baseline. And here on the show floor, I made the contacts with the Veeam partner who actually can look at the Veeam backups, analyze them, and it's a low-cost entry for us to really better understand the dark data we inherited. Some of that might be backups of the old backups of the old backups. Some of it may have PII. So again, it's one extra benefit of attending the show was establishing contacts with the partners who actually complement the Veeam solution. Frankly, getting this information in the field is more of a challenge, especially if or when we deal with very good resellers or partners Veeam has. But there is always a delay getting this information first-hand expedites things. All right, Val, we're out of time. So thank you very much for coming to theCUBE. I appreciate it. Good to meet you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, live from Veeamon 2017. We'll be right back.