 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Walz. You're on. Okay, welcome back. And we are here live in VMworld 2016. This is theCUBE's SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signals of noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host. John Walz is segmented as the host. We're here with Michael Anderson, director of IT at PGA Tour. Superstore, if you've ever seen them, they're huge, they're great destinations. And Michael Boone, vice president, general manager of IT, serves at Compliance Point of R for the solution with Veeam. Welcome to theCUBE, guys. Thank you. Thank you. So, first of all, I'm a golf fan. Love golf, as I know John is, too. The superstores are, you know, in my town in Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, there's a big Best Buy, it's a destination. These stores are very popular, and they're very big, they're a destination base. How many stores do you have? Give us a quick overview of the operation. Sure. How big, how many people, what's it look like, and what's the IT makeup of it? What goes on? Sure. So, we've got 26 stores, all the way from the east coast to the west coast, all the way from the down south, all the way up north, even in markets like Minnetonka and Minnesota that you might not think of, but it's a big golf market. So, big thing for our stores is we've got, each store has 45 or 50,000 square feet. A few that are a little bit smaller, but from a technology standpoint, kind of do the same thing in every store with custom fitting is a big thing for us. So, we have between six and eight golf simulators and then another, you know, five or six practice base so customers can come in and actually hit golf balls like they would on a driving range, but they can do it using technology and, you know, record their swings and all that kind of good stuff. So, it's a total immersion though. You have club, grip repair, all kinds of apparel. So, it's like basically it's a golfers destination, right? That's what we try to make it the mecca for golfers, right? You got a hook proof driver, I assume. I wish, I do too, I do too. It's in the works. So, 26 stores and big e-commerce site as well. So, you got that, you know, there's a challenge there and then your expansion plans, trying to grow problems there. I mean, the house compliance point trying to help you address that so that you can grow and then be online 24 seven, 365 days a year. So, the great thing for us is having partners like these guys is when we're trying to grow the way we are, we're trying to keep, you know, a relatively small IT staff to keep up with everything that's going on in the IT world and trying to keep pace as we need guys like them that can, you know, do a lot of the legwork for us and we can go to them and say, hey, here's a challenge that we have. We need a solution for it and they can help us either recommend one that already is out there that we just haven't seen yet or they can help us kind of go through the process of finding what would be the best like we did here with Veeam and kind of, you know, do the whole RFP process and, you know, find the best solution. So, what is the problem? I mean, what are the challenges that you're facing? Trying to grow your business, you know, take it from medium to bigger, if you will. Is it about protecting, you know, identity verification or data protection or financial transactions or what is it? It's all of those things. I mean, as you've seen in the news with, you know, some other retailers who have lost millions and millions of dollars with, you know, having credit card numbers stolen, so we've got compliance things we have to deal with there. We've got, you know, we always want to make sure we can, you know, help our customers and, you know, take payment at the point of sale system. We can, you know, fit our customers. We can, you know, we do a special order process. We got to be able to transmit all those orders out to our vendors so the clubs can get ordered. We've got inventory that we've got to keep up with all the time. So as we grow, then on top of that, you still have the e-commerce site that's international, so it's got to be a, you know, a 24-7 thing. It's got to be up all the time. We've got, you know, our customers at the office. We've got, you know, finance and operations and merchandising. All of them expect, you know, close to 24-7 uptime of all the systems so that they can access at any time that they need it. So it's, I mean, everything you can think of. Get your hands full with the business. You've got to have a great store and then the consumer expectations are much higher now. I mean, you mentioned the stores are well-equipped with that kind of, you know, consumer focus. But now, if you look at things like the Levi Stadium app at in San Francisco, the fan experience, the consumer experience, goes beyond the store. So you guys got to start thinking about that. Any thoughts there? Well, that's, you know, we actually, a few of the things we've seen here at, you know, VMworld, we've been looking at where things that kind of go to that. The whole customer experience thing for us is a big thing, being able to take, you go into our store, you take a golf lesson, being able to go pull that lesson up on your phone, right? Being able to go pull all your fitting specs up on your phone. Hey, you come in one spring and you know, you don't remember how you re-gripped your clubs last spring, being able to go pull that data up and say, hey, I did it last year. I had success that way. I need to redo it. Here's exactly what I want to be able to do. So all those things are very important for our future. Personalization. Exactly. That kind of thing. So Michael Boone, first off, how much better is your game now than it was before you started working with these guys? Well, they work us pretty hard. So I think my game's gotten worse. Well, that's probably a good sign for them now. You can't be good. That means you're not working. That's the old trick. If it got better, I wouldn't admit to it. So what are the pain points? Just tank the 17th hole. That's what I do. Yeah, right. Exactly. So what are you looking at in terms of, when you evaluate their processes and you're looking at their plans, what are you looking at? Because you guys look through different prisms, I assume. Yes, we do. You're evaluating your offering and so somewhere you've got to crunch that data. And I think what's worked very successfully in our relationship is we don't just work in those silos that you just described. So when there is a technical need from the PGA Tour Superstore, we really work on that need jointly. So it's not a case of they have a problem, we present three solutions and they pick one. We actually go in together, jointly identify what the objectives are, what are the business requirements, and we go at it together. And honestly, I wish that all of my customer relationships were this way because I think the end result comes out a lot better. So it is a true partnership, when they have a need, we attack it together. Well, they're giving you guys the keys to the kingdom, basically. Exactly. We're giving their e-waves to do that. They're operationally tied in with their... Yes. You've got a vested interest if they... Absolutely. It's not as bad. And it boils down to trust, right? Can you trust your partner? Can you trust your customer? And do we have each other's, you know, the outcome in mind? Well, it's in a way, it's a perfect situation. You guys need help. You can provide not only that trust and operational partnership, but agility because the landscape of vendors and things that are going on are so crazy, you know, just to kind of survey the landscape of what launch this week is going to be, make some work. So like, you got to run the business on your end. And what we try to bring to the table is the fact that we just, we don't only work with golf-related retailers. How many are there, right? So we work in other verticals. We do a lot with healthcare and some other verticals. And, you know, we're exposed to a lot of technology and a lot of solutions that fit similar problems. So we try to bring that experience to the table and really help these guys in their growth trajectory. So talk about the IT transformation at PGA stores, super stores because, you know, the IT guys are taking a much more prominent role. You have a great partnership on the back end with the compliance point to make sure that all the teasers cross and eyes dotted and all things with IT in terms of the tech acquisition and deployment. But there's a whole nother level of thinking that's going on in the IT world. It's like, you're in a lot of pressure to drive the business outcome, not just run stuff, but you have to think about revenue. What kind of conversations do you guys have with that, you know, go out to the courses more, get tied into the events? Does the PGA help you guys out on the other side? Can you share some insight into what goes on in the PGA sausage factory, as we say? Yeah, I mean, for us, I mean, it's most everything's driven by what our customers are demanding. And as I like to say, as our customers are twofold, I mean, there's the paying customers in the store, there's the customers in the office, right? There's the store associates in our stores, but we listen to what they say. And with the big drive now with personalizations being the big thing is that's what we want. So now it's not just, how do we maintain the systems that we have? It's how do we have the infrastructure in place that lets us from a bandwidth standpoint from just a servers and storage and all those things. How do we have all those things in place to meet the growing demands, but also meet the demands that we maybe don't even know about yet, right? Because we have to put things in now. I can't go and rip everything out and put new stuff in every year. So it has to be, how do I build now for what I may need for our future? You got a future free fit, as they say. Well, what kind of storage do you guys have? Give us a little lay of the land. People peek inside the IT environment. You have storage, what kind of storage do you guys have? So we have, this year, we put in the HP three par sand, which we kind of replaced our old EVA. So that's what we put in this year that most of our infrastructure is HP stuff. We use their blade systems and then we have the three par on the back end. Then we use VMware for the vast majority of our servers. So we basically take, I think we've got what, 16 blades that we've turned into a little over a hundred servers at our data center. Then we now use Veeam as what we use for all our backup and replication stuff. So that's kind of the data center infrastructure we have. So the compliance stuff really comes down to it, right? Yeah. Having stuff available. And how does Veeam fit in there just on the backup replication? So we had some great success. Like Michael mentioned, it was an HP three par storage replacement project. We also came in and made the decision to integrate HP store once, storage appliance. And in speaking with HP and Veeam and the two of us, we really determined there was some special sauce that Veeam brought to the table with that combination of hardware in place. And after having done that, Veeam really was able to prove that we can get tremendous performance, ridiculous de-duplication ratios, like they're getting 25 to one on de-duplication. So you talk about being efficient. Well, three parts got some good scales. So is this a success story of Veeam, HPE and VMware? Yes. So three of those guys? Yes. And well, yeah, Veeam and HPE and VMware. It's a great success story. What's been the big aha for you in terms of what's happened over the past couple of years and think when was it that maybe you hit something that it were hit and it turned the corner and you said, wow, this is a big find. This was worth our time and our investment. Well, if you just take this project alone, right? I mean, you start looking at, we're looking at backup windows where it's taking us in a day plus to get all of our backups done. If you just use backups as the example where we put this solution in and backup windows take one particular server, take our email backups. If I wanted to run a full backup of my email systems, it was taking 24, 30 hours, something like that at times where now it's down to within an hour or two. So it's, believe it or not, I mean, the last week you kind of have aha moments of some things that we can do now that we couldn't do in the past with we were just discussing it today was taking backing up file shares for our finance group. They're making changes to files all the time. Well, now we can back up that stuff on hourly if not less time. So if they say, hey, I need to recover a file. Okay, well, in the past we'd have to go a day, two, three days, maybe even a week back. Now I can go back to, oh, well, you made the change at 9.45, here I can give you nine AMs file and they're losing so little work. So those kind of things are really big wins for us. So what is it for me, if I come online and I'm going to buy a couple of dozen golf balls and maybe a new driver, whatever I'm going to buy. I mean, how is this affecting my experience and making it better for me in the shopping area and the transaction area and what if I don't buy and I come back and I mean, how much better off am I at the end of the day than I would have been before? So our website alone has seen a lot of improvement. The majority of it is because of the new three par sand. The performance we get out of it is tremendous but the other thing it gives us is it really gives us a lot of ability to be dynamic and that we can make changes to the website and with a little bit less risk in that if we have to roll something back if we have to heaven forbid something really, really bad happens we can recover really, really quickly so our uptime is much better. But again, the performance on the site take a simple thing like searching on the website. If you went and searched on our website today versus six months ago, it's a drastic improvement and how quick the search returns happen which only increases conversion rate which increases sales obviously. So that's how it's like. As fast as the search is, as Google says, best of the money gets printed. All right, so I got to ask you guys assuming you're both golfers. Yes. All right, so here's the question. Where's the craziest place you've played golf? Crazy, this is the trick question because the word crazy isn't it? It could be anyone's definition of crazy. I'll say for me it was Brussels, Belgium. And describe what was crazy about it. The courses are a lot tighter there. They don't have the kind of real estate we have here in the United States and I'll say that the Belgian people are a lot more wild on the course than we are. Wild as in like down back to Bruce Kees or... Wild and other imbibements and it's a totally different experience. And those Europeans actually play music on the cart. Yes, it's not as reserved as we like to do it here in the United States. So when you go out of bounds, you actually hit a tree in your house. Not a tree at a house. You go out of bounds quite often. It was 15 yard fairways, it was okay. Michael, what about you? For me, I don't know if it's really anywhere that crazy but down in Statesboro, Georgia where I went to college, the old goat track we used to play on out there that I don't know, I mean, it's not that expensive. So you've got every Tom, Dick and Harry's out there playing golf with his cooler full of beer and you never know what you're gonna find. The guy's gonna be passed out on the third or fourth green. Who knows what's gonna happen. He's playing with three clubs. A brawl on the fifth bowl on the back up tee. That's right. Who's gonna steal who's golf ball? Who knows? That's right. A lot of great stuff. John, what's yours? You know, it's hard to say. I mean, I love Pebble Beach. The craziest time I ever golf was I was golfing at Pebble Beach and I just got this new camera with the SD card in it and I gave the guy a hundred dollar caddy to film my round but you had to shoot it like in shots. And I didn't know what to do with the video so I uploaded this new site called YouTube. No one's ever heard of YouTube. They just got launched so I just uploaded all the video. Turns out that YouTube became YouTube and I have zillions of views of me on the 18th bowl. I keep shaking. Well, I hope you're part of it. I mean, I hope you're part. Well, no, I had a nice drive right next to the tree in the middle there. It was a beautiful day. It was a crazy day but the fact that the upload got all the traffic and the comments on YouTube. Oh, brutal, probably. Yeah, brutal. Don't subject yourself to that. Oh, the comments are entertaining in and of itself. It's great for your ego. No, it's not. When you read the comments, you're kidding me. How about you? Well, you talk about Goat Ranch. There's one in Tulsa, Oklahoma that we call the Goat Ranch. But I love Haines Point in Washington, DC because you go down there. It's not crazy, but it's just a cross-section of Americana. You go out there to the driving range and everybody's knocking back beers and you see lawyers next to custodians, next to teachers, next to whomever. And it's just a great cross-section of America. You go down there any night of the week and it's a little slice of America. I love it. So anyway. Dave Vellante's course, one of the guys on the course has a house and he actually put his kid through college this way and it's a refrigerator that's always full of cold beer and he leaves it as an open to the tip jar. And it's like on the back nine and it's like way out like the 12th hole and he just gets cash stuffed into the tip jar. Well, in a way, the PGA Superstore is just like Dave's refrigerator. It is always open 24 seven, round the clock. So be sure to give him all the business you possibly can. Fellas, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. Thank you. Thank you. We continue here on theCUBE from VMworld right after this.