 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at AWS re-invent 2018 at the Stance Convention Center and all over Vegas. I don't know how many people are here. We haven't got the official word, 60,000, 70,000, I don't know. There's a lot of people. And we're excited to have our next guest before we get in. Happy to be joined by Lauren Cooney. Lauren, great to see you as always. Great to see you as well. And you know, one of my favorite things about doing CUBE interviews is we learn about new industries that we didn't even know about. So while we're here talking about IT, it's really the application of IT that I think is really more interesting, more fun, and a great learning experience. So we're really excited to have our next guest on. He is Kevin Smith, the director of MIS for Transport. Kevin, great to see you. Hello. And many time, CUBE alumni, this is all ready. He is the CTO and co-founder of Daytrim. This is all great to see you. Happy to be here. Yeah, so Kevin, before we get into it, tell us a little bit about transport. What are you guys all about? Basically, we are the leading toll authority for kind of the county of the United States, and we're trying to expand that throughout the world. We do the whole engineer all the way through manufacturing of toll systems for vehicles and cars throughout the U.S. So the little stickers in your car all the way up to the readers that read them, they're coming through my place somehow or some other. So everything from the reader in the car and programming. Little sticker tag that sticks in your window or suction cups in, wherever you are. Yes, you may hate us, but I'm not the one collecting the tolls. Well, no, as long as you do. I don't like it when you miss the picture. That's where it doesn't pick up. Well, no, no, no. I mean, let's input some design here. No, there we go. Trust me, I've tried. And then again, then the huge back-in process to pull that up, get it into the systems, building systems, integration to all kinds of government systems. And how big is the company? How long has it been around? Who? We were acquired by Roper. We've been many divisions, but Los Alamos was technically founding followers in 1954. Oh, 54s, you've been around a long time. Oh yeah, yes. They started with cows. RFIDs on cows? Yes, trekking cows in the pastures of New Mexico. Put the little tags in the rear as I imagine. All right, great. Well, we could talk about traffic probably all day long, but that's not what we're here. That's not your day job. You're not out there with the little RFID scanners. Not anymore, thank God. Let's talk about some of the challenges, because obviously the toll business has been around for a long time, but the automation of tolls has really changed a lot over the last five years. You probably know better than me from somebody in a booth taking my money and giving me a receipt to some places that's almost exclusively electronic. So how has that business grown and what have been some of the accompanying challenges that you've seen that thing grow? Part of the performance issues we were running into was the quantity that we were having to, because the man is gone from the booth, we have to produce more tags that have become more readable. So that creates more back in work, more transactions. And in the long run, producing more tags. We've gone to millions and millions of tags being produced in a quarter to where it was just hundreds of thousands. So with that requires scalability that we can grow with our systems. And our systems we had just wasn't doing it. So you got the manufacturing of the tags as well. I didn't even think of the manufacturing. You got to make them in the first place too. That is our bread and butter, is manufacturing those tags and the millions and millions of transactions that we test, because we have to test every tag that goes out the door. Every tag gets tested. How far away do they work on those readers? I'm just curious. Depends on your speed. We've tested up to 200 miles an hour and I think it's like 40, 50 feet. So, as long as you're going under 200 miles an hour, we can get you. Okay, so how did you get, how did you meet Zazala and Datrium? How did that come about? We went looking for a product that could give us a one stop solution. We wanted something that was basically, I wanted to get out of the storage business. I wanted to get out of the management business. I didn't want to be having to worry about all these different vendors, all these different solutions and Datrium was able to provide that, compared to some of the other products that we were looking at. We did test with other products and Datrium came out on top saying, they gave us the total package. Right. So Zazala, when you looked at this opportunity, kind of what did you see? Anything unique and different? What were some of the challenges that you tried to figure out how to help Kevin? So what we're finding is more and more companies, every company is a software company. Every company is a data company. Everybody wants to move faster. Everybody wants things faster. Like I can't wait for my movie to start in two seconds. I'm like, why is it taking two seconds? So everybody wants things faster. We're living in this instant economy where everything needs to be, either you transform or you die. So how do we make that transition into the speed? How do you build your data centers, whatever you're doing to match that speed of innovation? And any system you're going to deploy in a data center has to be not in the way. It has to be less management, less overhead. Just look at the Amazon, right? Why is it successful? Because there's less to manage and you mostly manage your application. That's what the business model is going to be going forward. That's why people like the cloud. Why don't you see how you like the cloud? Not because it's cooler, whatever, because it makes things faster and it's expensive, yeah, but it makes things faster in some ways. Right, so go ahead. I was going to say, one issue we ran into, we came to them with was our CAD designers because we designed the product and the rendering was just dragging on our old systems. And we went from two to three minutes rendering to seconds, rendering new graphics. And so before they would hit, they were like, I'm not going to save you, I'm not going to re-render it. Now they're re-rendering every time they're making a change, which helps them performance, helps the application and increase the productivity of my CAD designers. Right, I was going to say that it was probably the customer service pretty significant as well so they can get the version that they want. Definitely, definitely, and you know, the nice thing is Datrium allowed us to scale. You know, we couldn't go out and just, okay, revamp everything. It's like you got to do baby steps. Right. And Datrium gave us that, you know, scalability to where I could add anything from one to 128 nodes, you know. I was able to, you know, increase performance by just adding a server node or increase, you know, the rights by adding the data node. That's the flexibility that I needed from a vendor. So when you said that Datrium had the whole package, you looked at some other solutions out there. When you were trying to define the whole package at the beginning of the process, what were the key attributes that you said, and I need, I'd love to get all these from one place. I was looking for performance and scale, which I got. I was looking for backup. You know, I wanted, God, I wanted to get out of the backup business. I was tired of tapes. I was tired of third party solutions. Tired of tapes? Trust me. Yeah. Don't tell the tape vendors here. I won't tell them. You know, but I ran out of that, you know. Security, I stay awake at night. You know, I lead our security teams. I stay awake, worrying about, is my data, you know, protected? You know, with their encryption, that, you know, gave me that whole protection. And the last thing was DR. DR is a thorn in every IT manager, every IT director, every, you know, CTO. And with their whole cloud shift, that DR, what DR, it's done. You know, it's just, it just happens. Right. And those four things is kind of what led us to finding data. And because some of them gave us, you know, one or two, but not everyone can give us all four of the options that we were looking for. Well, what I love about the story is those are, those are kind of concrete savings and, you know, doing your job easier. What you're excited about is enabling your CAD designer, you know, your kind of proactive sales process, your proactive design, your proactive innovation to actually move faster. That's not a cost-saving mechanism. You know, that's really a transformational kind of positive revenue side of the tale. I don't think it's told enough, really, you know. People focus on the cost savings and execution. That's not what it's about. It's really about innovating and growing your business faster. Do you think, oh no, our ROI, that we calculated in was just on hardware? Just on, you know, my cost savings that I could put a penny to. The time, we, I can't, it's so great. I mean, my CAD designers producing product faster, my developers are asking for more VMs, you know, for me to spin up, because the speed is so much faster. Where it used to be like, oh, don't touch it. I got this guy tuned exactly where I wanted. We got the memory, I'm like, nah, but now they're asking for more and more. And it's my end users who are really the engineers, my manufacturing people, you know, they're wanting more and more out of the product, and Datrium's delivering. I don't, I mean, I don't go to a dashboard and look and try to figure out how to tweak it anymore, because it's like, I don't have any complaints. And if I don't have any complaints, we're doing something right, good thing. So it just works. Oh, it was beyond just worth, trust me. I was ready when we bought the product to bring in a whole team, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to hire all these people. And the guy came in, he goes, okay, turn it on. Okay, we're done. I was like, nah, he goes, oh yeah, you got to plug that cord in back there. And I was like, wow. You know, because usually it's. I'm looking at a number right now, and that is 617% three year ROI. It's across many customers. We can have IDC event and talk to a lot of customers. I totally believe you with what, you know. So we are aiming for, like, our UX designer came and asked me one day, what should I aim for as a design principal? I said we should aim for zero UI. Yes. That's what we should do. It should be transparent to just work. That's what we really aim for. I'm not saying we have zero UI today, but that's our goal. You didn't have lofty goals, though. Yeah, just like, just don't, just not, let's just make it work automatically, right? That's kind of the goal. Well, and that was one thing. We wanted something integrated, so we didn't have to go looking. And that's one thing that, you know, I tell the engineers all the time. I'm like, I go into the UI just to kind of see how cool the system's running, you know, because there is no issues. You know, it just works. Everything's integrated. I don't have to go in and click and click and click and click to get through stuff. It just works. It integrates well. You know, we're a big VMware shop. We're a big Dell server shop. All of that one-stop shop, you know, I was telling, I was telling, this is all, you know, it's great when I get the email that there's a problem with my, you know, datrium system before my help desk is getting the notification. I can't buy that service, you know. So Kevin, there's a lot of peers that'll be watching this show. Peers of you, you know, having kind of gone through this process, now you're kind of on the other side and you're onto some new things in terms of innovation. What would you share with a peer who's trying to sort some of this out? I mean, it's a confusing landscape. There's so many options and you got to do your day job too, besides putting in new technology. What would you share with a peer who's sitting down over a beverage on a Friday afternoon? You know, I would talk to them about, you know, having that capability, really a performance scale, you know, being able to not worrying about controllers, not worrying about what SSDs you got to put into something to make it work, pop them in, you know, SSDs are cheap nowadays, you know, pop them in, it increases, you know, your reads, you know, going back to the whole no more third party solutions for backups. I mean, every sysadmin, every manager knows backups are only good for restores. That's the only reason you do a backup is because you got to do that restore. And it becomes invisible. It's all running in the background. I don't even think about it anymore. You know, my old systems, we still think about, you know, that aren't on the Datrium product yet, you know, but all our production, you know, when I'm backing up every hour, and I, you know, my RTO almost becomes zero if something happens, you can't ask for that. And that's critical, I think, for every manager, every director, even the sysadmins, no one wants to really think about backups. And when you're comparing your products, take a look at that, you know, how quick can you get something back up when that hard drive went out, you know? That's critical. And of course, DRs, you know, everyone needs that checkbox checked, you know, for disaster recovery, and it just comes right away with that. So, run out of time, I've got to ask you the big question. Do you sleep better? Oh, much better, easily now. Yes, now I get to worry about other things, like keeping my CFO happy about something else, not this. And I've got a list of people we need to introduce to you, definitely. Unfortunately, you always move here next to a failure once you fix one spot. Exactly. If you watch Lucy, you know, check out the chocolate, the chocolate. Hey, but if I can have this one off my plate, that's one better for me. Well, Kevin, thanks a lot for telling your story. It's a really impressive story, and I'll think of you as I go across a Dunbarton bridge sometime. Think about that next week, absolutely. Thank you for having me. It's all great to see you, as always. Lauren, lots of fun. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We're at AWS ReInvit 2018. Thanks for watching.