 Welcome back to this special presentation of the Cube here from the top of 60th Street. I'm Stu Miniman joined by Brian Glacier and we're with Wikibon. Happy to have on the program, Herban Hook, who's a deputy CTO with BMC. Herb, welcome to the program. Oh, thanks so much, really great to be here. All right, so Herb, we were talking before the interview. You've been with the company 11 years and change is really something that's going on and accelerating, so maybe you could give us a little bit of the insider view as to some of the big changes and how's that impacted in a life on the inside of BMC? You know, actually, just in the last two, three years, BMC has radically changed inside and outside. We've had a massive injection of new talent at BMC at all levels, brought in some really, really stellar executives and a lot of great technical talent down in the ranks. We've really altered our portfolio process and altered our portfolio emphasis in terms of what we're going after. We have greatly increased the cadence of product releases, more than double them in terms of the pace of releases. The level of investment in that world is something I've really not seen before at BMC. We've completely remade the brand, remade the marketing message from the top down. I've just never seen anything like it. I'm probably one of the longer time folks at BMC being there 11 years now. And it's really, really exciting time to be there. And honestly, I think BMC's changes echo the changes that's going on in the technology market and especially in the markets that BMC has traditionally played in. The imperative for enterprise management, management of digital services is greater than ever before. And so one of our reasons for all the change is to make sure that we're pointing in the right direction for the future. Yeah, so we talked to Bill Buruti earlier about what it meant to go private and some of those changes. I wonder, can you give us a little insight when it comes to trying new things, innovation, failure? How things look differently inside from the technology community inside? It actually does, it actually does. We organized internally around five different basic innovation pillars, innovation areas. And we measure those five different teams on how well they execute on their innovation agenda, on their particular strategy agenda. And I've seen things happen in the last couple of years that I would have never seen before at BMC where people were willing to take a risk and perhaps pursue some path of new technology that may or may not come out as a product right away or may come out as a product, something completely different than the way they envisioned it. We've got to be much more adaptable to change, much more flexible in terms of what we pursue there. And we really do that in spades at BMC now. So you gave the keynote this morning, you did an excellent job. Thank you. Big theme was really the digital economy, digital transformation of businesses. Used to be a couple of years ago, everybody would talk about Netflix. Now, everybody's going to make an Uber or an Airbnb. What I really liked about your talk was you talked about the non-greenfield companies. You were talking about the banks that had to do something different. You talked about some of those industries. Talk about, how does that resonate with customers? Because sometimes you'll talk to customers and you'll go, well, let's talk about how Airbnb or Uber disrupted their industry and they'll go, well, that's not like us. But they want to feel relevant going forward. Talk about some of those customers you talk to that you use as examples that are becoming relevant from an established business. Well, it's interesting, you bring up companies like Netflix or Uber or whatever. They've kind of shown the way in terms of new ways to leverage technology, new ways to pursue a digital agenda. But a lot of the enterprises that are traditional BMC customers, they have a tremendous amount of incumbency in terms of existing capital assets for IT, existing application workloads. I mean, for example, if you look at Netflix, Netflix has basically about five different applications and they've got to optimize and keep those running. Somebody like FedEx has 2,000 applications. A lot of banks we know have seven, eight, 10,000 applications. So they have a bigger application portfolio, they've got a lot of existing skill sets and so their transformation journey and their agenda is a little bit different but they want to take concepts and characteristics and models and ideas that can get from sort of the digital unicorns of the world and adopt them. So for example, one of the big things we talk to customers about today is DevOps, the phenomenon around DevOps. And some of the analysts say, well, that's not really a market, that's kind of a state of mind and a culture and all this stuff. However, they do handicap the market, the analysts do. They say, okay, it's growing this fast, it's this big. But there's sort of a difference between pure DevOps is practiced by, let's say, the Facebooks of the world or the Amazon Web Services of the world and the kind of enterprise DevOps that a lot of our customers really have access to, that they can do. So for example, I recently met with the chief architect for one of the largest banks in Canada, it's the eighth largest bank in North America actually. And they have a huge DevOps agenda but he's also realistic about what is doable within the context of his current environment. Security, compliance, security, approval structures, governance models as to who owns what in the process, segregation of duties between development and operations, all these kinds of things. So we see a tremendous amount of hunger and urgency and enterprises. A lot of them are still trying to figure out how to get there. But I'll tell you, it is still happening faster than I think any aspect of IT we've ever seen in the past. All right, so Herb, you talked about some of the big challenges your customers are having, is security seems to be one of the top items. I think in your talk you said 30% of IT budgets are being spent on security. What are those conversations you're having and how's BMC's helping there? So the conversations are pretty interesting. In fact, tomorrow afternoon, I have a meeting with the CIO of one of the civilian government agencies in Washington to talk about this exact problem. In the US federal government, because of things like the OPM data breach, all the other agencies are like on high alert to say, you know, is our security posture at the level it should be. I had dinner with a guy that owns security and infrastructure for a large bank in Asia and he said, he goes, Herb, he goes, sometimes I feel like we're losing the battle. He said, for every good security professional I can stand up. He said, there's 10 bad guys coming after me. And actually, in the US last year, I don't know if you know this, the colleges, universities, the security certification courses and things like that produced about 10,000 security professionals, people that could take information security jobs, but enterprises last year hired 40,000 people into those roles. So we've got a huge gap between skills and capability and the need in the market. So what we're seeing actually is a place where the security organization is becoming less and less of a siloed organization and more integrated into the other IT functions, such as service management or day to day operations, et cetera, to be able to tackle these problems jointly. And so we're seeing things like technology integration, extreme levels of automation, you know, really focused on this area. It's really, it's almost at the highest point of awareness you've ever seen in the markets because of things like public data breaches, because of things like the huge transparency and vulnerabilities that get announced. And so everyone's trying to figure out, okay, how do we tackle that? And it tends to be a big agenda for most enterprises, especially in financial sector and in retail sector. Those are really, really big. Yeah. You know, one of the things that you talked about today was there really are no more pure IT projects. They're all business projects. But this is an IT audience, right? I mean, IT service management and ITIL, and IT is embedded into every word we talk about. IT people like to talk about the technology. How do you advise them to say, how do you have that conversation with the business so that it doesn't come across as Java and ports and releases, it comes across as business terminology that they go, yes, I think you guys can be the right partner for me. So there's a fellow by the name of Aaron Levy, who was the founder of Box, okay, if you know Aaron. And he tweeted something last spring, which I really like. And he said, technology used to be about making the current work we do better. He goes, now technology has the ability to completely redefine how we do the work. You know, that it's really shifted. So if you think about the folks that have been in IT a long time, the use of technology to get a business function done was often a second or third order kind of derivative decision. They would focus on the business process. They would focus on the people involved. Then later they would say, well, is there an application we could buy to do that? You know, all this kind of stuff. Any more, technology is the very first step in many cases. So technology that they think of is, okay, how do we use technology to do something better or different or whatever? They just really have pivoted in terms of prioritization where technology comes into the conversation. And so IT organizations today have to be able to step up their game and be part of that conversation as opposed to setting back and wait for that business request to sort of come into them and filter into them. They've actually got to be up there talking about, well, here's some things we can do. And they've got to really take the lead in that many cases. You've got to get them comfortable sitting with the suits and the hoodies and figuring out that common intersection point. Everybody's on the same team. Yeah, yeah. So Herb, unfortunately we're going to have to leave it there. Look forward to catching up with you at a future event. Definitely great opportunities for business technology to come together and offer new solutions. We'll be back with much more coverage, this special coverage from BMC Day in Boston, Massachusetts.