 Live from Las Vegas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering IBM Insight 2015. Brought to you by IBM. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillin. Welcome back to IBM Insight, everybody. This is theCUBE. We're wrapping up day two. I love the fact that we're ending with a practitioner. Andrew Juarez is here. He's an enterprise architect at Coca-Cola Bottling, company consolidated. Andrew, thanks very much for helping us close out theCUBE, two days of IBM Insight. Appreciate you being here. You're welcome, you're welcome. So how's the event been for you? I mean, you come to events like this, you talk to peers, you learn things, what have you taken away? So a lot of times when I come to these events, I spend a lot of time with doing actually speaking. So I had a session yesterday that I did, dealing with SAP and DB2. And then I talk a lot to customers. I work with the IBM folks and I give my reference information about how we're doing on DB2. So I spent a lot of time talking to different companies. So talk about your role as an enterprise architect. What does that entail? So right now it's a new role that I just took on. Prior to that I got 17 years experience SAP, database administration basis. So as the new role, I'm taking a step higher up and taking a look at all the applications that the company is running. So as Coca-Cola Bottling Company, we're in charge of making the product, delivering the product and making the sales. So all the technology that goes into the people that are out there selling, taking the orders, the truck drivers, making sure they're in the right place, packaging, the warehouses. So all that technology now is kind of my realm now. So I've kind of taken a bigger step up. Yeah, are you looking to simplify that technology stack? A lot of companies now are looking at re-architecting, moving some stuff to the cloud, reducing the number of applications they use. You have campaigns like that? We do. As a matter of fact, I just spent last week in meetings talking about enterprise content management. So we have dispersed solutions. We have solutions that are actually no longer going to be supported here by the end of the year. We have, our business has been growing, so our buildings, they've been kind of moving people around, so we still have stuff that's in files looking on paper. So we are trying to synergize on an enterprise content management system, and that's what exactly we're doing. We want to retire a bunch of stuff and replace it with maybe one or two core pieces, and we're looking at utilizing the cloud for some of that stuff. So I'm not qualified to do your job, but if I were suddenly qualified to do your job, first thing I would want to do is really understand the business. You were sort of describing the different parts of the business, and then one of the other things I'd want to do is understand the application portfolio that support those business processes. So I'm sure, taking a look at that, you probably had some familiarity with it before this role, that's probably why they put you in this job. Can you describe the application portfolio that you're sort of helping, you know, continue to evolve? And that's going to be part of my job. A big part of my job, right, is to delve into the portfolio. So I'm coming into it with, how can I say this politely? So the person before really wasn't doing maybe what they should have, and so I'm kind of having to start from ground. There's some stuff that has not been looked at for quite a while. Our portfolio, I mean, our portfolio, like for example, on the hardware side, we're pretty much an IBM shop, hardware-wise. We also run Intel, so we've got, we run a lot, we've got a mainframe, we've got AIX, we've got Intel, VMWare, so we're pretty much 98% virtualized. AIX is our core operating system for our UNIX stuff. We run a lot of Microsoft stuff. We run a lot of IBM software, but then we also have a lot of dispersed things, things that are homegrown. Our big applications, our SAP applications, and we run our manugistics for our demand planning. That's one of our bread and butter. Is the objective to, well, you've got a lot of objectives, I'm sure, you want to get maximum value out of that application portfolio, and the way you do that is you support the business processes and, but you want to be efficient as well. So is there, or have you in the past gone through a rationalization exercise? Is that something that's on your plate? We are actually going through that right now. So one of the things that the Coca-Cola industry as a whole is going through in North America is a consolidation across the US. And that consolidation is looking at standardizing an IT platform. So the main Coca-Cola company in Atlanta has come up with one platform that they'd like the potlors to come on to. So it provides us for economy of scale. It provides us with common metrics across all the bottleers. It'll help streamline our supply chain. So us included, all the bottleers have been migrating to that system. So that system will probably run about 70% of our business. So we're taking a lot of dispersed systems, moving them into that. So like I said, we've been doing that now maybe a year and a half to two years. The project will probably go on for another two years to get us completely on it. And then at the end, we'll probably have about 20% to 30% of the systems that we need to figure out, what are we going to do with these? Yeah, do you let them just die as low lives? Here's the kind of story we don't hear a lot about at a conference like this because people have come and talk about the big picture, the big opportunities. But really, I mean, you are so representative of big companies, big legacy infrastructure, deal with a lot of simplification problems that you're wrestling with. What kind of discussions do you have with IBMers when you're here? You're a big DB2 shop. You have a lot of different IBM hardware. What kind of meetings do you have with IBMers when you're here? What do you talk about? Well, for example, I am the president of what's called an SAP DB2 technical leadership exchange. We meet once a year in Toronto at the labs. And we also meet here at Insight. We'll have you tomorrow. Where DB2 is developed at the Toronto labs. Right. And so what we do is we bring in customers from all SAP DB2 customers, whether I was going to say across the US, but also we've got some international ones that participate. And we sit down with the chief architect and a lot of the IBMers. And we bring in SAP and their chief architect. And we say, what is your future roadmap for SAP? Here's our problems. Here's the things that we're running into that we really need solved. And we give them feedback. And they give us their future direction. And a lot of times what we talk about one year we'll see solved the next year, or maybe on another fixed back that comes out. So we feel as not only our company Coca-Cola that we have a really good input into that, along with a lot of other companies. I mean, we're going there with the Bank of America's Pepsi's there, Harley-Davidson. We've got a lot of big companies that are there giving their feedback directly to the people that are making the agenda with what's going to be worked on and patched going forward. And do you feel like as these companies are so focused on moving to the cloud right now, and they're trying to change their business models, do you feel like they're paying adequate attention to the issues that you guys have to deal with with your legacy infrastructure that has to be maintained for years going forward? I think they do. One of the things that we've really had a good relationship with IBM. We consider IBM a partner, even though they're a customer. They come in, they take the time to find out what we're going through, and come with solutions. And so it's one of these, we help them out, they help us out. So we talk to their customers, but they come in, and they make sure that they're listening to us. And honestly, I do feel that they do listen to us. And we've had, not only are we beta customers for their DB2 product, we're also beta testers for their storage line. So they're new V9000s that they rolled out, they're flash units. So we were one of the first customers to get those things before they even won on the market. And we go out, and we help them say, hey, this is what we see, this is what's working. And we let them know when something's not working. Go ahead. You've been a beta tester for DB2 Blue, the in-memory database. What are you, how are you applying that high speed technology? So right now, what we're doing is we've been just evaluating it, putting it through its paces. Because the Koch industry has been in this flux and where we know we're moving a lot of this SAP stuff to Atlanta, now as my new architect role, I'm spending a lot of time in Atlanta. So I'm actually now able to help influence some of those decisions where they're making the decisions on the big platform. So I have now something that says, hey, you know what? I've played with this, I know it works. I think we really need to look at this. And so I can take it outside of my own company to the bigger Koch industry. And would you see, do you think the company will be using it in an analytics capacity, or more to speed up your production systems? Right now, the Blue is only available for the analytics side, which is SAPBW. But IBM is looking and talking to customers as far as, hey, what systems do you want us to go after next? And so the group that I was telling you that meets in Toronto, we've had a lot of suggestions, a lot of conversations around target this system, target this system. We want to see it hit the OLTP side of the house, where we can actually leverage it more on a day-to-day basis. You are also, we were talking earlier about your using analytics for performance improvement actually, the infrastructure performance improvement. Suddenly we've not, again, not discussed here the last two days. How are you applying analytics to making your data center more efficient? Well, one of the things that I do is I try to keep history. So part of our systems actually, what we call is a performance warehouse. So you've heard of data warehouse, performance warehouse keeps all the metrics on how the databases are doing, how the SQL statements are doing, how the locking of records or something, maybe when records get locked. So I can see over time, over years, I can query how did I do last year compared to this year? How did I do last month compared to this month? And so as my developers are changing code or by hardware guys are changing out hardware, I can see whether the differences that they're making are actually helping. And if they're not, I can go to them and say, hey look, this is not working, something changed. So like I've been able to see, like when I see a spike on SQL statements, all of a sudden there was a particular case where all of a sudden we were getting over a billion reads in one particular hour for something and we would see it in a spike. And so I was quickly able to take that data, correlate it back into programs that changed and actually pinpoint them back if like you need to fix this code. So it seems like, we were talking about the application portfolio before, it seems like you're taking a pragmatic approach toward value, you're tying pieces to revenue. This is a cons for 70% of our business, so you've got a sense of that so you can understand how changes in infrastructure support the application, support the business process, ultimately support the revenue. You talked about DB2 blue acceleration, I'm sorry, that's running on mainframe? On AIX, we're running it on AIX, so power, power seven and power eight. And you've run a lot of Intel, have you played around with a little Indian? We have, when we first, actually let me clarify, when you say little Indian, are you talking about on power? On power, yes. Yeah, no, not on the power side. Yeah, because they've announced blue acceleration, they've run DB2 blue on power, run a little Indian. And that was one of the comments I made to the IBM guys, I said, because I talked to a lot of the guys that are on sales and marketing, and I said that's really one of the features you really need to sell. The fact, you're probably the only box on the market that can support both. And you're, I'm a customer and I want to spend money on hardware, if I can buy one piece of hardware, they can satisfy both. And you're a Microsoft shop, right? So you can run those apps, and especially in analytics workloads, you would think that that's going to, the power's going to have an advantage over Intel X86, but so okay, that's sort of roadmap stuff. And then the flash piece, how are you using flash? So flash is an interesting thing. We decided to bring in flash, just as a proof of concept, we had some performance issues on some Oracle databases for our Manugistics software. So that demand and fulfillment piece is really important. I mean, if that thing slows down, our trucks don't move. And so we brought that in and immediately, just by plugging that stuff in, I mean it just immediately took our response times way down. And it was a proof of concept. We went to the business and we said, well, we got to give that box back because they let us borrow it. And they're like, yeah, you're not sending that back. How much is it going to cost us? I mean, and they literally gave up the money and they said, well, we really need two because we need one for our disaster recovery. I threw the money right out. Well, that confirms something that we've been saying for a while now that flash is really going to come back to that application portfolio, supporting the business. It's going to, flash is going to drive business value. It's going to drop toward to the bottom line and it's going to actually create interest from the lines of business. It's exactly what has happened. And as a matter of fact, you know, when we started doing the proof of concepts on the new versions that were coming out and we went to the business and said, hey, they're going to be giving us these new ones. Do you want to try your software on the newer ones to see if it makes even a bigger improvement? I mean, they threw the money out for that stuff too. I mean, it's just like, it sells it soft. All right, Andrew, I'm sorry we're out of time. Love to keep going here. But thanks for helping us close out IBM Insight 2015. Really appreciate the practitioner perspective and congratulations on your promotion. All right, thank you very much. All right, come on theCUBE, get promoted. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. Actually, we'll be back to wrap IBM Insight 2015 right after this.