 From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Veeamon 2019, brought to you by Veeam. Welcome back to Veeamon 2019 in Miami, everybody. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. This is day two of our coverage of theCUBE, the leader in live tech. And I'm Dave Vellante with Peter Burris. Bippin Jayraj is here. He's the vice president and CIO of Make-A-Wish America, just an awesome foundation, nonprofit. Bippo, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Well, thank you for having me, I appreciate it. So, Make-A-Wish, children with wishes and that have terminal illnesses, you guys make them come true. It's just a great organization. It's been around for a long time. I think since the early 80s, right? 39 years and going. 39 years and hundreds of thousands of wishes made. So just, how did you get to Make-A-Wish? How did that all come about? Yeah, it was an interesting journey. I was consulting in IT for multiple big companies and two years back, it was through a recruiting channel that I got an opportunity to start some conversations as a CIO at Make-A-Wish. The thing that got me and the opportunity was predominantly about enterprise IT. And just to give you a little bit of Make-A-Wish operations, Make-A-Wish was founded in Phoenix, Arizona. But we also operate as 60 chapters across the United States. When I say 60 chapters, each of the chapter, they are 501 C3 companies themselves with a CEO and a board. So essentially it is 60 plus one, the national team kind of managing all of the chapters or helping the chapters. National does not do any wish granting. All the wish granting happens with the chapters but National helps the chapters with the distribution of funding models, brand and things like that. So a couple of years back when the national board talked about our dream and mission, which is granting every eligible child, the notion of enterprise, working as an enterprise came into fore and IT being a great piece of providing shared services and things like that. So I was brought on board and we took on an, I would call as the leader today said and Adoshi's dream of bringing together all the 60 chapters and the 60 chapters essentially are split across 120 locations. So we took on a project of combining or integrating all of their infrastructure needs into one place in Phoenix with our data center provider. We worked with a partner, Phoenix Snap, one of fantastic partners. Yeah, we had them on the other day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ian McCleary and their team, they did a great job. And when we had to move all of the data, everything from the 60 chapters, applications, everything into a centralized data center locations that we manage right now from Make-A-Wish National Office and provide as a service back to the chapter. So that's, that gives you a little bit of, you know, from behind the scenes, what happens to 90. So you provide the technical overview framework for all the 60 chapters of that, right? Yeah, yep, yep. It almost sounds like a franchise model. It's what we call a federated model in the nonprofit, yep. But because Make-A-Wish is so driven by information, yep. Both in the application as well as the programs to deliver, the brand promise and the brand execution is got to be very, very closely tied to the quality of those shared services that you're providing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And like I said, the reason I talked about them being separate companies themselves is, you know, as I always say to my 60 CEOs, I should be able to provide the services because they want it, because they have a choice to go outside and, you know, have their own partners and think for that, which they can. But they would want to work with the national team and get my, you know, work through our services rather than having have to because of the federated. It's a big difference when it comes to, but you know, I've been lucky and privileged to, you know, have these conversations with the CEOs when I start talking to them about the need for centralization, the enterprise IT, you know, as much as there are questions, when you start leading with the mission and the business notion of why we need to do that, it's fantastic. Everybody is in line with that. I mean, there's no question then as to, hey guys, let me do all the operational minutiae of IT and leave it to me and I'll handle it for you and I'll let you guys go do what you do best, which is granting wishes. So then it becomes, it doesn't become a question of, you know, should we or shouldn't we? And of course, to back that up as I was talking to the Veeam folks, it just, you know, solutions like VMware, Veeam, it makes it much simpler, even from a cost perspective, not for me to manage a bigger team so that I can take those dollars and give it back to the business to grant another wish. So it's pretty exciting that way. So you set the standards and say, okay, here's what, you know, we recommend. And then you're saying that adoption has been quite strong. I remember, Peter, I used to- I wouldn't say easy, that's fine. I used to run kiddie sports in my local town, which is a small town. And there was, you know, five or six or seven sports and I was the sort of central organization. I couldn't get six sports to agree, but I don't know how you manage 60 different CEOs, but it's okay, so not easy, but how were you able to just talk leadership or leading, as we heard from the keynote speaker today? How were you able to get those guys, you know, aligned with your vision? It's been fantastic. I've had a lot of good support from our executive team, from our leadership team, because leadership is always very important to these big initiatives. Our national board, which comprises of some of the best leaders in America. And I had the fortune to, you know, be mentored by Randy Sloan, who used to be the CIO Southwest. And before that, you know, CIO, Global CIO for, you know, PepsiCo, you know, he always told me, Beppen, I mean, CIO job, one thing is to know the technology, but completely another thing to build the relationships and lead with the business conversation. And so, a typical conversation with the CEO about, hey, I need to take the data that you have, all the IT things that you have, and then me doing it. And then there are questions about, what about my staff? And you know, these conversations, because, you know, it's a nonprofit, it's a very noble, nice feeling, and you wouldn't want the conversations about, you know, being ripped and things like that, or being reduced, reducing the staff and things like that. But, you know, as you walk through that and show the benefits of why we're doing it, they get it, and they've been able to repurpose many of the IT functions back into a revenue generation model or a wish granting, you know, team. And in many cases, I've been able to absorb some of their IT folks from different places, which has worked out fine for me too, because now I have kind of a power user model across the United States, through which I can manage all these 120 locations. So, it's pretty interesting. You know, site reliability engineering, DevOps talks about the error budget, or, which is this notion of, you're going to have errors, you're going to have challenges. Do you want it in the infrastructure? Do you want it in the functions, actually generating value for the business? I don't know much about Make-A-Wish. I presume, however, that the mission of helping really sick kids achieve a wish, is both very rewarding, but very stressful. I mean, it's got to be in a very emotional undertaking. And I imagine that part of your message to them is got to be, let's have the stress with that emotional budget be dedicated to the kids and not to the technology. True, completely agree. That's been one of my successes as you asked, Dave, about how is it gone about? It's about having the conversation within the context of what you talked about, business and true business, availability of data. You know, before this enterprise project, data was probably not secure enough, which is a big undertaking that we're going down the path with cybersecurity. And, you know, there is a big notion, misplaced notion out there that, you know, nonprofits are less vulnerable. Nobody, but that's completely untrue. Because people have found out that nonprofits do not probably have the secure enough walls. And, you know, we are much more, we've been targeted, nonprofits as a whole, targeted for cybersecurity crimes and so on and so forth. So, some of these that I used to, you know, quote unquote, help the business leaders understand it. And once they understand it, get it, you know, they're able to, you know, appreciate why we're doing it. You know, it becomes the conversation gets much more easier at the part of time. What's the scope of the size of the chapters? Is it, is it, is it highly variable? Or are they relatively? It is, it is highly variable. And I should have probably said that. So, these 60 chapters, we look at it as four categories. So, the cap ones are what we call the big guys, the Metro, New York, San Francisco, Bay Area. They're called category one chapters, anywhere between 60 to 70 staff, grants close to around 700 wishes a year. So, as Make-A-Wish America, we grant close to 15,600 wishes a year. And the cap ones do kind of close to 400 to 700. And then you get into cap twos, cap threes and cap fours. Cap fours are anywhere between, you know, give an example, Puerto Rico or a Guam territory. They are cap fours, New Mexico is a cap four. Three staff members, Guam is operated by two staff members and 20 volunteers. They do grant about 12 to 15 wishes a year. So, it's kind of highly variable. And then, you know, we talk about Hawaii chapter. It's a great example. They are cap ones predominantly because of the fact that, you know, they do, there's not a lot of wishes getting originated from Hawaii. But, you know, Florida, California and Hawaii are three big chapters where they grant or they wish assist with a lot of grant, you know, wish granting. So, there's a lot of, you know, traffic through those chapters. So, very distributed and diverse. What's the relationship between data and the granting of wishes? Talk about the role of data. Sure. I would say this, that, you know, and I probably raised a lot of eyebrows in my first introductory session a couple of years back when I joined Make-A-Wish with the CEOs and we had the CEO meeting and talked to them about leaders, the days of making decisions based on guts are gone. It has to be a data-driven decision because that's where the world is leading to, you know, take anything for that matter. So, when we talk about that, it was very imperative going back to my project that we had all of the data in one place or a semblance of one single place as opposed to 60 different, you know, places to make decisions based on wish forecast. For example, how many wishes are we going to do? How many wishes are coming in? How is the demand versus supply matching up? You know, what are the things that we need to do? Budget purposes, going after revenue and things like that. So, data becomes very important for us. The other thing we use data for is the wish journeys. Essentially, that's our storytelling. You know, when I, you know, it was my first foray into, for profit, sorry, nonprofit and me coming from a for-profit is definitely a big culture shock and one of the things I ask is, what are we selling? It's emotions and story and that's our data. That is what, you know, that's huge for us. We use it for branding and marketing purposes. So, having a good semblance of data being able to access it quickly and being available all the time is huge for us. Yeah, and you've got videos on the site and that's another form of data, obviously, as we know here. Okay, and then, from a data protection standpoint, how do you approach that? I presume you're trying to standardize on Veeam, maybe, is why we're here, but... So, we are actually invested in Veeam. We've been with them for a couple of years right now as we did the consolidation of infrastructure pieces. Veeam supports us with all of the backup and storage replication models. We are thinking, like Ratme talked about Act One. We are part of that journey right now and we're looking at Act Two, what that brings to us. One of the things that Veeam does for us is we have close to 60 terabytes of data in production and close to another 400 terabytes in the backup and things. And it's interesting when you look at Make-A-Vision, you think about disaster recovery, backup, why do you need it, what are the business use cases. Case in point is a classic case where we recently celebrated the 10th anniversary of BatKid in San Francisco. We had to go back and get all the archives in a quick fashion because there are always often requests from media folks to access some of those. They don't necessarily come in a planned manner. We do a lot of things, a lot of planning around it, but still there are, how did they come about? What's the story behind? So, there are times where you have to quickly go back. That's one. Second thing is having to replicate our data immediately. Another classic case was when Puerto Rico, there was a natural disaster happen, completely shut off, all the offices were down. We had to replicate everything what they had into a completely different place so that they could VPN into and access it. Other chapters pulled in to help. There were close to 10 Wish families, close to 10 Wish families were stranded because of that. So, gaining that data knowledge of where the family is because the minute a Wish journey starts, everything is on us till the Wish journey ends. So, we need to make sure everything is proper, everything goes, so data becomes very crucial from those families. Are you tracking this? I mean, if you haven't been on the Make-A-Wish site, there's some amazing stories there. I went on the other day. There's a story of a 13-year-old girl who's got a heart condition, who wanted to be a ballerina, a kid with leukemia, five years old, wants to be a, wanted to be a chef. My two favorites, I'll share with you, was this kid Brandon, a 15-year-old with cystic fibrosis, wanted to be a Navy SEAL. You guys made that happen, and then there was this child, Colby, who was 12 years old, had a spinal muscular issue. Wanted to be a secret agent. So, very creative wishes that you grant, you know. It's amazing. We had another wish a couple of years, last year in Georgia, where the wish kid wanted to go to Saturn. Yes, he was huge. I mean, and the best part about us, once we start creating those ideas, it's amazing how much public support we get. The community comes together to make that wish granting process great. NASA got involved in that. They gave the wish kid training sessions to make sure that he is equipped when he goes into, and we had a virtual reality company create the entire scene, it was fabulous. So, when you talk about data and the technologies, you know, some of the things I'm very excited about is usage of these next gen technologies like augmented reality to grant a wish. I mean, how cool would that be for granting a wish kid who is not able to get out of the bed, but having able to experience either Hawaii swimming or being in Disney World, you know, for a couple of days. That's another use case that we talked about. The other one is to put the donors, you know, who pay the money in that moment of wish granting. You know, they're a big major gift donors for Make-A-Wish, sometimes who are not able to be part of a wish, but that'd be pretty cool if you can bring the technology back to them. And, you know, not only for them, you know, for pretty much everybody and make the ass through that rather than a PowerPoint or a storytelling. I mean, the storytelling has to evolve to incorporate all of that. So pretty excited. And potentially make a participatory, like say the virtual reality and then even getting in more into the senses and the smells. I mean, this is the world that we're entering with machine intelligence. But you still have to have, but you still have to be a functioning, competent, operationally sound organization. There have been a number of charities, Make-A-Wish, often at the top of the list of good charities, but there have been a number of charities where the amount of money that's dedicated to the mission is a lot less the amount of money dedicated to administration and fundraising, and they always blame IT systems for not being able to track things. So, you know, it's become part of the mission to stay on top of how information's flowing because it's not your normal business model, but the services you provide is really useful and important. Sure, so let me present to you the business conundrum that I have personally as an IT leader. It takes close to $10,400 on an average to grant a wish. And partly because of me being part of the mission plus me as an IT leader wanting to understand the business more. I mean, I signed up. I'm a volunteer at the local Arizona chapter. I've done a couple of wish granting myself. And the conundrum is if asked, if you want to go, you know, do the latest and greatest network upgrade for $10,400, or would you want to, you know, and make the network more resilient, cybersecurity and all that stuff, or would you want to go grant another wish? As an IT leader, I'll probably pick the former, but as a volunteer, I'll be like, no, it needs to go to the kid. It's an interesting conundrum, but you know, you have to find the right balance. I mean, you cannot be left behind in that journey because at many points of time, and as I talked about IT being a cost center, IT being a back office, I think those days have clearly gone. I mean, we've evolved to the point where IT is making huge steps to, you know, be a participant, be a enabler for the top line to bring in more revenues, to, you know, augment solutions for revenue and things like that. So for that perspective. Or improve the experience, or whatever else it is. And in your case, the experience is what's being delivered. Exactly. And to the degree that you can improve the experience administratively, you know, by making operations cheaper, great, but as you said, new digital technologies are going to make it possible to do things with the experience that we couldn't even conceive of five or six years ago. Your outcomes, yep. Absolutely. VMware is a classic example, VMs and Veeam. I couldn't have taken the data from 60 chapters, 120 locations, into one single location, manageable, and it reduced the cost, literally reduced the cost of these 60 instances in one place without technologies like, you know, virtual machines. And then to have a backup, robust backup solution and a replication of it, it's fantastic. It's amazing. And that's a gain share you can give back to the chapters. Exactly. Well, Bippin, thanks so much for sharing your story. It was really fabulous to have you on theCUBE. All right, thank you. All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. Peter and I will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Veeamon, from Miami, 2019. We're right back. Thanks.