 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMC World 2015 brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Hey, welcome back everybody. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE and we're at EMC World 2015. I think it's our six-tripped EMC World. I think it's where theCUBE actually got started many, many moons ago. So we're always excited to come here. Great show, super demand, high energy. We actually have two cubes going side-by-side, which is pretty unique. And I'm joined here in my next segment in my co-host, Steve Chambers. Hi, Steve. Hey, how are you doing? I'm Steve Chambers. I'm an analyst with Wikibon, and it gives me great pleasure to extend a warm welcome to Morgan Harris, who's the director of Enterprise Solutions and Protection One. Morgan, you've been going through, apparently, a bit of an IT transformation. Could you tell us a bit about your role and your enterprise and what's going on in your landscape? Absolutely. So our enterprise, we've been trying to become a more stable environment. And a big chunk of that has to do with the fact that we had to cut back on our total number of staff a few years ago. So with a reduced head count, we wanted to increase the services we give to our customers, increase the stability and the reliability. So we needed to try to build a better environment that we could focus less time on. You had to do more with less, that classic that we've been hearing. The classic do more with less, but also at the same time try to take it out of your mind so that you can not be so distracted by your environment and start focusing on what you can do with the customer. Could you tell us a little bit about your applications that you use? So let's get a top-down view, right? So top-down view of Mastermind is our business-critical application that runs all of our alarm monitoring. Exchange ranks up there probably as number two. A large chunk of our alarm monitoring is run through email and a large chunk of what we do, how we interact with customers, how we interact with each other throughout the organization is dependent on exchange. The next portion under that, I'd probably say SharePoint. We rely heavily on SharePoint. We've done a lot of development of custom dashboards and information metrics into our organization. So it's a quick and simple way for our employees, our managers to be able to get in, get the information about their location and their business. You mentioned mission-critical. I always like to ask customers, what does it mean when it stops working? How would you feel? What happens to the business if your email or yours? Yeah, not having email would be a life-altering experience for us to say the least. Do you remember when it wasn't business-critical? Do you remember those days? Yeah. You checked your email like every four hours and you got a couple. If I leave my email now for over four hours, I can't find the bottom of my inbox. So it has definitely changed our environment. A lot of our monitoring, like I said, goes through that. So a lot of rules in that outlook to move that email around too. But it's one of those things that as an alarm monitoring company, we are dedicated to the customer and we can't stop processing information. Everybody says in their business it impacts the business. Well, this not only impacts the business, this could potentially impact people's lives. So alarm monitoring can't stop. It's beyond mission-critical. Mission-critical 2.0. So let's take another step up actually. Give everyone kind of an overview of protection one, kind of size of the company, customer base. You mentioned some numbers before we went on air in terms of call volumes and just give everybody kind of a scale. And then the second question is I'd love to write off the front of your website. It says, right, when you call a real person answer, and then talk about the challenge of what that actually means to fulfill what is obviously a really important problem for your customers and your by-proper. Yeah, absolutely. Protection one, like I've said, is extremely customer-focused. And that has been the key to our success. We're the nation's largest full-service security company with over two million residential and commercial customers. Two million. Two million. Right. And we're spread across the country. We have over 70 branch locations. And we have over 3,500 employees that maintain that. We have five UL listed call center, data centers across the country where we actually do all of our alarm monitoring in-house. And that right there is part of our commitment is making sure that it's easy for the customer to get information. So we got rid of the auto attendant. We go directly to an employee. Somebody answers your call. We take usually over 3.5 million calls a year. And out of those 3.5 million, the longest call waited on hold 90 seconds before talking to a person. 3.5 million calls for two million customers and your longest call hold was 90 seconds? Yeah. We've won a ton of awards for our call center excellence. And it's one of our definite pride points. We really love that commitment to the customer. And over 90% of our calls, or let me rephrase that, less than 10% of our calls are transferred to resolution. So the person you talk to, not only can handle your alarm at that moment or an issue you have with your system, they can also help you with a billing question, get you updated information. It's kind of a one-stop shop. Got you. So we've got mission critical, volume. You know, I mean, as you say, people are impacted if things don't work for you. You've clearly got a business focus, talks about right, top-down focus. So what about the infrastructure? I can't imagine you want to be spending 80% of your time digging around in the back of a rock. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And we need to be able to scale up resources quickly. So we use the VCE V-Block. We have V-Blocks in most of our data centers. And it's been an incredible story for us because we have such great success with them. Again, you know, by taking a step back and not having to worry so much about your infrastructure, it then lets you free your mind to focus on new and exciting things you can do. We generated a new application last year called Signal Chat, which has been a revolutionary next generation, you know, information generation kind of application where we're texting our customers to make sure to get them the information faster. And it's those sort of things that you can't really focus on if you're spending all your time in the back of a rock making sure everything works together. We actually recently deployed last year of the V-Block 100 into one of our facilities. And 28 days after receipt of order, it was on our loading dock at four o'clock in the afternoon. By 6.15 that night, I had already provisioned 25 VMs on it in our full production environment. That's impressive. And then talk about the impact that on the business when you can launch an application that gives you a completely different channel to operate with your customers. A, how's that change your business? How does that then free you up to think about the next one and the next one and the next one in terms of your team? Well, absolutely. By being able to quickly access all the data and being able to maintain all of that data, you know, it's one thing to keep dumping data into that black hole in the back of your data center. It just keeps getting stored somewhere. Being able to maintain it and access it quickly really then gives you that next opportunity to do something with the data. Everybody's got a ton of data, but do you actually do something with it? So we're using that data to help our customers realize returns on their investment. For our customers that have chains and hundreds or thousands of locations nationwide, they have a hard time keeping track of all their security systems, what equipment's going out of warranty, and runaway alarms. Equipment that's been faulty, that nobody at the local level has notified anyone, so we're dealing with a ton of false alarms. They haven't armed the system in the last week. So we've helped create dashboards for our customers to get them the insights that we get and make them more successful. In some instances, for one case, one of our national customers realized a false alarm reduction of over 50%. This is a national chain that had thousands of locations and went through thousands of alarms a day. So realizing a 50% savings on that not only helps the profitability of our business, but is extremely beneficial to our customers because they're no longer getting the bills for false alarms from the local jurisdictions. So when you came to decide on doing a VBlock, we heard this morning from another customer that they put off that decision quite a while. They didn't want to be locked in, the famous locking thing. But then they added up the cost and they were spending more than a million dollars on gluing stuff together. We couldn't believe it was that much money. Did you go through a similar process? There was a similar process with that. There was a few things that we looked at for that. We wanted the best agreed architecture so we wanted to make sure it was something that was tested. Everybody has their own, even inside of most groups. Your storage guy has his ideas of how to be hooked up. Your server guys have a slightly different guy and the network guy comes in and goes, you're both wrong. So we wanted something that kind of neutralized all that from the start. And it was not only that, I think it was something that we wanted to make sure really reliable and dependable and really predictable. So that predictability of the converged infrastructure being delivered in one piece, fully tested and burned in already. A lot of people skip that burn in process because we're already, we should have racked it last week, we need to have it on this week. So we're just going to throw it in there and quick ramp it up. And that right there leads a lot of people to immediate failures. Look at what you've already talked about. You've got this business with the volume of the importance of mission critical. Burning in servers is not that interesting, right? It's certainly not glamorous, but it's that stuff that can save you further down the road, right? Oh, absolutely. Was it Pennywise Pound Foolish or Pound... Absolutely. Yeah, and I don't think that there's a way you can assemble a rack faster than two hours. So, you know, if we got something at four o'clock in the afternoon and we were provisioning by six, I can't even unpackage the cardboard that quick. Guys, just one more question about your application. So, obviously operationally, it sounds like it's done you a good job, right? You can rely on it, which is great. And you can focus on different problems. But the applications themselves, are they running faster, slower? Are they more uptime? Any kind of miserable... Yeah, they're absolutely running faster. And I think, you know, your applications running faster is always critically important. You want to get to everything faster. But a lot of people sacrifice stability and predictability when trying to make things run faster. You know, it's when I grew up and I first started assembling computers, you always wanted it faster so you overclock the processor as much as you could, right? And you never really had enough pooling with that. So then all of a sudden, you started to run into issues down the road. And that's the sort of thing is that we know the workload we need to run. We know how much we need to run of that workload. So having that predictability to make sure that we're not taxing resources, maxing out resources has made it a much better environment for us and a much easier environment. You know, it really, when it comes together, it just works. Just getting the hook for shortly here. But I'm just curious from kind of your perspective, you've been doing this for a while. You see a lot of applications. You mentioned at the beginning of the interview that the impetus for some of this transformation was having to do less with more. At the same time, you got to deliver more applications. You probably got higher SLA demands and customer expectations. Now that you have big data, you got more sources of more data than you ever had before that you now are expected to mine and gain inside and change your business. Talk a bit about how this is impacting you and how you're embracing these challenges to really be more of a business partner with the rest of the company as opposed to a plumber and kind of a systems deliverer. Yeah, kind of the guy in the basement. That's keeping the lights on, right? If he fixes your computer, everybody likes it. Otherwise, he's not fun. Yeah, we spent a long time being that. And I think now that we're empowering our other groups to be more successful, to get the insights out to their customers, they start to realize the value of the infrastructure and what it is that we do in the back office. Their interactions with the customers really help dictate where we drive the next train or the next industry. And we've been able to kind of disrupt some different parts of our industry with some really great insights from our customers. And by having an environment that we can quickly scale up, scale out, scale down, if it's maybe an opportunity that didn't quite work out how we thought, it gives us that flexibility to empower everyone to be their own thought leader and thought driver. It's really agility in business execution, not just agility in software development. I just love how the agile software development method has gone so far beyond software development, but really a way you conduct your business, right? I'm trying to figure it all out for the next forever and ever. Where do they need tomorrow? Let's get it out there. And you look at some of the older applications, they were kind of loaded, and a lot of times, most organizations don't want to go back and completely rewrite the application, so you end up having to build a faster and stronger environment to sometimes pick up the performance issues of a weaker application. Well, you know, Morgan, I think we're out of time now, unfortunately, but it's a great story. Sounds like you've got a tough job, but you find new ways to help yourself out, right? Absolutely, we love it. Well, thanks for stopping by, sharing your tale, I love it. Morgan Harris, Director of Enterprise Solutions, Protection One, when you call, they answer the phone. I'm Jeff Frick with Steve Chambers. You're watching theCUBE. We're at EMC World. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.