 Okay, we're back live here at VMworld 2013. This is Silicon Angles, the cube, our flagship program. We go out to the advance, extract the signal from the noise. This is day two live in San Francisco, Musconi, lobby, south. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm joined by my co-host Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. Hi, everybody. Jim McBride is here. He's the chief cloud architect at Express Scripts. Express Scripts is a very interesting company. We're talking about billions of prescriptions, millions of customers. A company that's growing, large market cap, made some big moves and acquisitions. Jim, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, so the Express Scripts model is pretty interesting, and you obviously have built the cloud to support the growth of the business. But talk about the company. It's interesting. You've got a holding company. You've made some acquisitions. Talk about the organization. Ultimately, Express Scripts is a pharmacy benefit manager. We're about making the use of prescription drugs safer and more affordable for over 100 million Americans. As you said earlier, last year alone, we managed over 1.4 billion scripts. So under the hood, we're an IT company, and we're using data to drive decisions that ultimately provide the most optimal and cost-effective health outcomes. Yeah, and the business is growing very rapidly, right? You've made some big acquisitions, some other tuck-ins as well, which obviously always adds to the complexity of your infrastructure. So talk a little bit about that infrastructure and how you service a billion-plus prescriptions. It's a rapidly moving and changing target, and as the business demand comes in for whatever the needs of the day are, we have to be able to rapidly respond to that, and we have to be able to rapidly respond to that in a very consistent, stable, scalable and secure manner. So for us, our journey to cloud was about providing that capability rapidly and being able to reduce time to market at the same time. So you've got integrations happening, we've got new product rollouts, and being able to consistently deliver that infrastructure at speed and quality was our challenge, and that's what we're doing today. Jim, people are always talking about the cloud for decades, and we've got cloud washing back in the day, but there are a lot of people who did do a lot of cloud architecting, and I was going to look at Facebook and then look at these modern apps, and they say, oh, apps, new modern app scale, cloud-style. Modern-style meaning, you know, on demand, all this lot of nature, and legacy apps don't scale cloud-style. So what does that mean to you? I mean, as a cloud architect, you had to look at the infrastructure and deal with legacy, look at kind of a clean sheet of paper on one end, but you had to look back at pre-existing conditions of the enterprise. What does cloud-style mean to you as a cloud architect, and what are you trying to accomplish to get apps to scale cloud-style? I think it's being able to scale at will horizontally at the different tiers, and your point, for legacy applications, you have to provide a bridge to the future. It's easy to do green field design. It's hard to provide a bridge for your legacy applications to get to that horizontal scale capability, so it's about looking for wins in the infrastructure, working with your application development partners, figure out where you can leverage those technologies and build those into the roadmaps and get those incremental wins towards your ultimate goal. How hard is it? I mean, give a scale one to ten. How painful is it, both in terms of pulling it off with the tech, the personnel, and also selling the vision to management? I think the good news is the technology is good, right? It's not typically a technology problem. It's typically a people-in-process problem, and getting people to buy in and understand the vision and where you're going and what's possible, and for them to kind of get on board with that. So from a technology standpoint, it's not super difficult. From a people-in-process standpoint, it can be very challenging. You've got to have that executive sponsorship early, and you've got to find your partners in the enterprise that you can work with to deliver that value. Practitioners, like yourself, always say that technology comes and it goes. That's the easy part, and it's really not that easy. But relative to the people-in-process, those are much harder. So let's talk a little bit about, everybody talks about IT transformation. You guys have clearly transformed. So did you go through a sort of formal, was your CIO, hey, we have this transformation project, did it just happen? Talk about that, because CIOs today, the discourse is transformation. Did you guys explicitly and deliberately talk about that and transform, or was it just part of your strategic plan? We talk about transformation often in Express Scripts, and I think it's kind of a corridor of culture. What we were trying to do is what I think most organizations are doing, which is more with less, and being able to scale efficiently. So it wasn't an outright goal to transform. It was a goal that we have to be more efficient with the resources that we do have. So for us, Cloud was about looking at the upcoming business demands and the capabilities that we're going to have to bring forth as IT, and figuring out how are we going to do that in a consistent, scalable, secure manner, and Cloud's how we got there. So what does your Cloud look like? Take the covers off a little bit. Sure. Paint a picture. At its base, it's a VMware ESX hypervisor running on top of Cisco UCS hardware and a EMC storage back in. So it's pretty classic Cloud, what people would expect Cloud as an infrastructure today. And then we've wrapped our custom development around it that provides our elastic scale and the ability to deploy our development patterns that are specific to ESI on top of that hardware stack. So you kind of build your own little reference architecture there. It's not a converged out-of-the-box, single skew type of deal. You went with sort of a roll your own approach, right? We went to the market at the time and came back and kind of used the best of what was available and mixed that with the things that allow us to use our proprietary technology to its fullest extent. So when you set out on this, I mean, obviously you're in an industry that's going to be careful, sensitive, you've got HIPAA, and so forth. So how did you architect, you know, the Cloud architect, how did you architect, what were the elements of the architecture and how did you architect security and other governance factors in? You have to start from the very beginning, right? And we have very strict controls in place today. So it was about figuring out how to model what we do today inside that cloud architecture. And it's not terribly different from what we do today. It's just a lot faster and a lot more consistent as we remove humans from the process. Okay. Now, so did you kind of do this yourself? Did you enlist outside services? Talk about that a little bit. So we did a lot of it ourselves. We also partner heavily with different technology partners, including EMC from a consulting standpoint, to help us understand how to best maximize the investment we have in their equipment. Okay, so their role was really to help you figure out how to best deploy their hardware and software. To meet our needs in our cloud structure. And then did you use other consultants to, you know? We certainly augment our core competencies with different, you know, skill providers, but by and large it was an ESI-driven effort. Yeah, okay. Jim, what about automation? I love, first of all, I just tweeted it. I couldn't resist tweeting your comments. Scaling at will horizontally is really cloud style. I totally agree. Automation is another one, right? Well, API-centric data center is one, but automation is really important. Can you talk about how you look at that and how you tackle that problem? Yeah, for us, you know, you can't automate it if you can't document the process. So for us, getting the organization to go through the rigor of defining the process of what they're trying to do today, so we can talk about that commonly, and then automating it with the goal of reducing the handoffs and reducing the human interaction. That's where we find the most value. So, you know, there's a lot of non-glamorous work to go through and understand the legacy processes as they exist today, analyzing those processes and figuring out how to best automate those for the best result. And it's different by company, so it's really challenging, right? It's like, you can't just boil a plate process and say this is the automation software. That's right. Got the agile. And iterative, right? So we don't try to bite off too much at once, and you do come at it from an iterative process constantly refining and working with those stakeholders to make sure things are relevant. You know, Dave and I always talk about tech athletes and we like to talk to guys like you who are actually tech athletes. You do stuff that's really cool and hard and interesting. So I want to ask you, a lot of folks are going through this process for the first time. What makes a winner in this area? Because a lot of people are coming in and being forced in, top-line growth pressure, and re-architecting their architectures for cloud style and mobile style and big data style, security style, kind of a new way. What's a winner look like in your mind? What's a winning approach? What's a winning personality? What's a winning persona? I think that winning persona is about taking the best of what's available from the technology in the market and figuring out how to make it relevant and consumable inside of your enterprise. Cloud is a big step, it's a big journey, and it's not something that you can enter in too lightly, and it's also not something to your point earlier that boilerplate always works. You've got to figure out how to customize it for what you do in your industry, your vertical, and then more specifically for your culture and how you can adopt that method of work. When vendors come in and knock on your door, say, hey, I got some stuff to sell you because that's what they do, right? What makes you go, I like you, I don't like you? What's the wrap that gets your attention? Transparency, open, the ability to orchestrate their capabilities via a coherent set of APIs that allow us to put it to work for us versus how they're typically trying to sell it on. Do you guys, I mean, in the old days, remember old days, 10, 15 years ago, startups usually couldn't get that enterprise customer because they didn't have a track record. Now startups can bolt on cloud. A lot of enterprise startups, we were just talking the other day, young kids under 30, starting up cloud-based services companies and tech companies. Do you look at startups and how do you evaluate a startup? If you look at startups, do you buy from startups? Do you look at startups or is there a threshold hurdle? We certainly don't rule them out. I think we're very interested in the leading technology, what's the best solution? Who's got the better mousetrap? There's certainly concerns at enterprise of our size that have stability and the ability for them to be around when we call and do need some help. But we certainly will include them in the survey when we're looking for a technology solution. So what do you think of the whole VMware transformation here, speaking of transformation here, you got a company that really changed the way in which IT infrastructure is managed and now it's going after the cloud, the hybrid cloud. What does that mean for you guys? Is that an imperative for you to get to hybrid cloud? And I want to ask about end user computing as well. Yeah, I think so, hybrid cloud and having choice, and the ability to deploy your business patterns on top of a variety of topology providers or cloud providers and being able to figure out what the best fit is for your use case, whether that's based strictly on price or capability, government certification, physical distance. There's a lot of different things that you would use to describe who the optimal provider might be. And VMware providing the tools to help companies and enable enterprises to make that choice and leverage those providers I think is an important move. Okay, so is hybrid cloud in your future or is it in your present? And it's definitely on our roadmap. We're doing POC work right now with a number of different providers to kind of create a normalized set of patterns that we can deploy on top of multiple different topology providers. What's the driver there, Jenny? It's about flexibility, agility, again, further reducing time to market, not having to deal with the replenishment cycle that we talked about. There's been a lot of talk about here at VMworld. That true horizontal scale at will includes the ability to have the infrastructure present to service that demand and having the ability to choose from several different providers gives you the optimal cost point. Okay, so you've got your core apps running in your cloud, that's stable. So you're going to use the hybrid cloud for additional growth, new projects, new test and dev stuff. All of the above, and we're currently evaluating what is the best fit and what that specific roadmap looks like. Right now we're baking up the technology. So there's this vision that you guys like VMware, obviously EMC putting forth as well, that I'm going to have common governance policies, compliance, GRC, et cetera, and essentially be able to move apps and maybe even move data from my on-premise to off-premise. How real is that? Particularly the data piece. You don't really want to move data around. And I just want to get a practitioner's viewpoint on that. It's very challenging, right? For the very reasons you laid out, the laws of physics that dictate how fast we can move those large data sets between those sites. I think it can be real. I don't know that there is a wrap solution that's ready today. We're certainly interested in that, and that would be a key part of our future hybrid strategy. But until you're able to effectively move large data sets into a provider, and I don't think it's real yet. And how appealing is that sort of homogeneity, if you will, of the hypervisor and the surrounding management tools, versus, say, the simplicity and the flexibility of swiping a credit card on Amazon. I think for us, it's extremely interesting. For me, I want us to get up the stack. I want the industry to get up the stack and normalize out the infrastructure. The machines aren't important, right? What's important is the business value that's being delivered. And the more, if you will, opaque, we can make that solution so that we stop caring about the individual piece parts that create the support and infrastructure. The more we're focusing on delivering the business value, the better off we all are. And of course, you hear a lot about virtualizing the network, virtualizing storage. It's non-trivial. I mean, compute wasn't trivial. Storage and networking are much harder. So again, from a practitioner's perspective, you hear the messaging. Obviously, it resonates. What are your thoughts in terms of when you expect to be able to implement something like that? Certainly things that we're looking at now. And it'll follow a similar curve, I would imagine, to what we did in server virtualization. It will take us a couple years to get really comfortable with that at a generalized enterprise level. But I'm expecting for that to become much more mainstream in the next 12 months. John was asking about startups before. And one of the things that's hard for startups is the services piece. Sure. Talk about services and the role it plays in your sort of decision-making. It can be critical. It depends on what you determine your core competencies are and the ability to go to the market and get effective partners that can help you deliver on that cloud strategy is really critical. Awesome. All right, Jim, well, listen, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE, John. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. I'd like to hear you in the trenches and the practitioner view. We hear from the folks that are building the technology. It's always great to hear from the folks who are implementing cloud. This is theCUBE, day two live in San Francisco for VMworld 2013. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE, Wikibon. I'm John Furrier with Dave Laundrie. Right back with Chuck Hollis from VMware. Chief strategist, not EMC, although that's what it says on his badge. We're going to talk to Chuck. Always a great guest. I'm going to hear his angle on what's going on in VMware and in the ecosystem right after the short break.