 inside the hang space of VMware, VMworld 2012. VMware 2012 is getting late in the early in the day-day. So. 20 day two, John. We are Marathon coverage, Wall to Wall coverage, Siliconangle.com's exclusive and continuous coverage, three days of Wall to Wall VMware, VMworld 2012 coverage. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Siliconangle.com and I'm joined by co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we're here with Cynthia Stoddard, who's the CIO of NetApp. Cynthia, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you. We first met in June. You were relatively new to NetApp at that time or at an analyst event. And you were talking to a number of us and we had a great conversation and I wonder if we could explore some of those things here. But first of all, we're here at VMworld. What do you think? I think it's great. It's just a wonderful place to be. Virtualization is a real building block future for IT. So seeing all the excitement, all the products, wonderful. NetApp won the demo. That was big news, right? Dave hits, you know. Dave is wonderful. He's great. He definitely helps the ballot box and yeah, so tell us a little bit about NetApp's IT operations and what you're doing and where you're taking it. Yeah, operations, IT operations, the IT organization at NetApp, I view as being very strategic. You know, we look a lot to add value to the organization and one of the key ways that an organization can do that is really to position themselves to be agile. And you hear a lot about agile these days and I think it's a word that can be used in a lot of different ways, different elements and you hear about agile development which we've been doing. I mean, we looked at our Salesforce implementation and we did that in agile format. So we had scrum teams and all this other stuff but the important thing to consider when you look at an agile organization is it only can be as agile as your weakest link. So if you have infrastructure that is extremely rigid, you're gonna sub-optimize your processes. If you set up your infrastructure in an agile format so that it can expand, contract, you have the efficiencies, then you're gonna enable your development organization, you're gonna enable your business users to do things a lot quicker which means you're delivering that value to the business quicker and you can respond to market demands in a better manner. So it's like a caravan, going down the road, the slowest truck is what slows the whole convoy down. Right, so if you think about it, you have these wonderful scrum teams who are doing all this work but if you can't spin up an environment in a quick enough manner, they're gonna stall and have to wait or if you need to do some testing in a special manner and you need some special equipment or something or a virtualized environment and you can't do it, you have to wait a traditional way to do it, it's gonna slow things down. So the quicker that you can enable your infrastructure to handle those sorts of situations, you're gonna enable the whole organization to deliver the value quicker. So how do you deal with that? I mean, you don't get free infrastructure, I don't even know you're an infrastructure company, you still got a capital budget and you have to deal with that. So how do you resolve that? How do you go from point A to point B without ripping and replacing your old stuff? Well, you're absolutely right, we don't get free infrastructure. So we have budgets and everything just like all the other IT organizations. We make use of our products very extensively. We've actually have implemented what we call a program NetApp on NetApp which really highlights the use of our products internally and also another program that we call customer one where we are the first user of our products internally. So they kind of work hand in hand. One is really to demonstrate the long-term use of our product and the other one is to be that first user of the product. On the long-term use we use the products in order to make quick replicas of our environment. So if you think about, or I can give you a few examples of what we've done is an environment that if you look at our business intelligence environment, we needed really to have a series of about eight different environments in order to really do the work at the pace that we needed to support the business. Using our technology, we were able to really have two physical environments and then up to 24 virtual environments. So we already originally had a goal to say, hey, eight would suffice, but when we started to expand and use our own technology and adjust our processes, we found that we could really expand and support the business that much quicker. So there's a lot of benefits that come out from looking at your infrastructure and making sure that it is agile and can support your development. So you guys, the industry, we talk about big data all the time and sounds like you guys are big data practitioners. We talked in June about what you're doing with data analytics. Why don't you share with our audience some of the things that you're doing and we'll get into it a little bit. Sure, we are doing a lot with big data. Actually, we have a implementation that we've been doing with our own technology, the E2600 and Hadoop. And what we have is we have a tremendous amount of data that is generated by our product. And this data that comes in on a cycle, it tells us alerts, it tells us different statistics about what is actually going on within the NetApp environments. It's called our auto support. You can call it a home phone feature, but it's actually much richer with the statistics and the information that it passes back to us. It's much richer than a home phone. So what we do is all this information comes back in. If the customer has it turned down, it comes back in. It's all metadata. It's all metadata. It comes back in. It populates the Hadoop data structure. And then we can use it to create analytics, predictive analytics. So we can look at different types of trends and issues that might be going on or different ways that people are using some of the features of our product and be able to package that up internally for use so that we can better support our customers. And then also we have the ability to package it up for the customers so they can understand what systems they might have at risk, where they can make better use of some of our techniques and tools and features and where they might not be as storage efficient as they could be in certain areas. And this is all packaged up and you can take our big data concept and take it all the way to mobility because it's all packaged up and it's used internally on our website and we even have mobile applications where you as a customer can look at my ASAP, my auto support and get that information right at your fingertips. Okay, so you're not just shipping PowerPoints and Excel spreadsheets to people and your partners can take advantage of this as well? The partners, yes, absolutely. So you set up a portal? We have a portal, you can actually download the mobile app, yes. When did you go live with this? When did we go live? Maybe about six months ago? So, talk about it. Six months ago on some of the mobile app but the Hadoop journey has been iterative. So, again, employing some of the agile techniques. We actually started that maybe about nine months ago and we've had about three releases this year. So how has it affected the business? Your customers' businesses or your partners' businesses? What are some of the learnings and impacts that you could share with us? Well, the impact is, I think is huge. If you can think about, before you had to analyze a subset of information because perhaps you didn't have the processing power to analyze the whole population, whereas now we're capturing much more and we can take that whole population and analyze it, your result is going to be that much richer. So you're not constraining your result by the size of what you're analyzing. Yeah, so I have to ask you, do you virtualize the Hadoop application? Do you know? Portions of it, yes, are virtualized, yeah. I saw VMware putting a big emphasis on bringing that Hadoop silo into the virtual platform. There's always some concern about doing that with analytics, you know? Yes, yes, yeah. Some of the application heads don't want to do that, so it's a practitioner. Well, you know, that's an interesting point that you make about application heads not wanting to do that because I think there's a little bit of a fear that if you mix different types of workloads that your particular workload that you're responsible for may suffer. So I think that that's part of the education process that both infrastructure people and the education that happens at conferences like this where that people can get comfortable that you can coexist in a virtualized environment. Yeah, that's not in my backyard syndrome. That's right, that's right. That's right, you can do it but not me. So how aggressively are you? I mean, NetApps bet the farm on virtualization generally and VMware specifically. I mean, how aggressive are you virtualizing your applications? We are very aggressively virtualizing our applications overall as an organization. We're about, I would say, 70% rough numbers virtualized. If you look at our dev test versus our production environment, our dev test is actually virtualized more than the production. And the reason for that is, is we have actually built a new data center up in Hillsborough, Oregon and we're gonna be taking our production applications from our two data centers in California moving them up to Oregon. We will expand our production virtualization footprint while we do that. Actually, we've called our Oregon data center the home of the agile data infrastructure. So we'll be deploying our cluster mode and FlexPod and ensuring that whatever we put into that data center is built to a certain set of standards. We're actually also viewing it as kind of a blueprint in a case study so that when we work with our customers to move to cluster mode in an agile data infrastructure, we can take them through the learnings and the practices that we have encountered as we move our production applications up to Oregon. I wonder if I could ask you about the CIO's role. It's always an interesting topic that I'd like to discuss with particular, where are we today? Where do we come from? Obviously, the lead technology officer is not typically a geek, you know? I mean, I mean that in a good way. It's all you geeks out there. But seriously, you're not. I mean, maybe you've got some folks with programming backgrounds, but generally speaking, your CIO today is a business person. And that's not always been the case, but I guess in the last five, 10 years, that is the case. Where do you see that role today and where do you see it going? Yeah, I think that the CIO role today is very much business focus and I would expand the business focus to say that the business focus is really to enable the internal business to operate efficiently, with really the goal of driving those efficiencies to the external customer. Also, when you look at the external role, making sure that you understand what the customer pain is, so that you can structure your processes and your products and everything to fit that external need. So I see it really as a CIO role today is really in three different components. The first is meeting the needs of the business and being that business person, bringing solutions to the table and saying, okay, here are ways that you can apply technology or change what you're doing on the business process side. Also being an advocate for the external customer, whatever business that you're in, whether you're in high tech as we are and being the advocate for customers using NetApp product, but if you're in retail, actually being the advocate for those customers either using your website or shopping in your stores or whatever. The third component is really being that internal visionary and leader to the IT organization. So really splitting it into those three components because the IT organization needs that leader and vision of where's the roadmap, where are we going? How do we support the business? The business needs the CIO to really be that partner and bring ideas to the table and then the external world really needs the CIO to be an advocate for them so the technology fits. And as the CIO and a technology company, you've got another role. You've got demands on your time. I mean, there's a sales force calling you and saying, hey, can you come and go on a call with me? And we have a great sales force. Some points and so that pulls into time. And I suppose, I don't know, I guess the CIO of FedEx probably goes and visits a lot of customers too, but is it different in the role of a technology company, a technology driven business where you're selling technology? Is it more demand on your time and how do you manage all that? You know, I came out of the logistics business. So actually you talk about the CIO of FedEx calling on customers, yeah, he probably would. Actually I did when I was in my old role and I would say that from that perspective, it's similar. I think there's a slight difference and I would say that in the logistics world, you're really crafting solutions for the supply chain where in the technology world, you're really sharing best practices and how you use the product, right, and you're sharing best practices and other components of IT. You might have a conversation about big data, but you also might have a conversation about how are you rolling out agile infrastructure or how do you set up an enterprise architecture group where it has credibility in the organization. So you get into a lot of different topics being in a technology company that are really just top of mind and best practice. And more of a catalyst in some cases as well for a knowledge transfer. Exactly. Cynthia Stoddard, thank you very much for coming inside theCUBE. Great story, steady hand at the helm of NetApp's technology business. Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you, it's great to see you again. All right, keep it right there. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.TV's continuous coverage of VMworld 2012 from San Francisco. We'll be right back.