 It's theCUBE covering HPE Big Data Conference 2016. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillan. Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is theCUBE and we are here live at the HPE Big Data Conference. Stephen John is here. He's the CIO and Tony Ordner, the Director of Information Architecture at MeriPride Services, not the financial company, but the lending company out of Minnetonka, Minnesota. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thank you, it's great to be here. So, Big Data Conference, is this your first time here, or have you been? First time for me, yeah. I was here last year as well, so it's my second time. Anything you've seen that's exciting you, or? Well, it's always great to get together with people that are doing similar work, so there's that sharing. I sometimes say I come to these types of events for lunch, because you can sit with your peers and you can learn what they're doing and the mistakes they've made and the successes they've had and make sure you do the one and not the other. Right, I would echo the same thing. I mean that's the value I've seen both last year and this year, is that you come here and you can see both at the high level and at the low level and talk to people both in the trenches working on getting it to work day to day, as well as more of the strategy about where things are going and where we might be able to leverage that going forward, right? So it's a really great conference. It's one of the better ones I've attended. I was in the lunch line today and I heard the two gentlemen behind me talking about, no, the problem you do at applying that algorithm was you made, this is the mistake you made. That's exactly it. Really? Usually a lot of times in these conversations you say, okay, I got to sell more stuff. Right, right, I got to go to my room. No, you hear a lot of hallway conversations, right? Table conversations. It's really the casual acquaintances you make here and the networking, that's really what comes out of it and that I find of great value and that makes this different from other conferences I've been at. I think some of it's some of the tool sets. So for example, Vertica is such a unique and exciting tool that I'm not even sure HP fully understands its full capability and so talking to other people and seeing what they're trying with and you're doing that with it, that's really intriguing. We haven't even tried that. So there's that learning that I think everybody including the vendor is going through around that product. Well, I've always said that Vertica's a sort of diamond inside of HP and I think you're right. HP, he really is still trying to figure out how to fully maximize. Meanwhile, Vertica just keeps chugging along. But so, well, let's talk about Ameripride. Talk about your business a little bit. Sure. And a company with a long history, probably everybody has some way, shape, reform, touch till you've touched them. So tell us about your business. So I've been there two years and it's kind of like you said. It's a company you don't notice until you're part of it. But now, as I'm driving around, we have a large fleet of trucks across all of North America and I see our trucks. When I walk into a restaurant, I look down at the mat that's at the front door and I see our little symbol on it. Whereas I've been to a lot of restaurants before I joined Ameripride and never even noticed that there was a logo on those. It's always interesting to go into a restaurant you love and see the competitions and to then go mention to the manager, you probably should do business with us instead of them. But it's a great business. As you mentioned, a family-owned business that's over 125 years old. We work with hospitals, with the food and beverage industry. We work with oil and gas and providing garments and linens and textiles across the US and Canada. We're actually the largest provider in Canada and we're probably about fourth in size in the US. Okay, and you are the, Steven, the CIO, Antonio, director of information architecture. What does that entail? I mean, talk about your information architecture. So, I lead an information team and that takes information from what I call cradle to grave, right? So we do information acquisition, transformation, getting it ready and deploying it or deploying it to business. So that includes everything from the cradle to grave of information. So we touch it not only from where we get it through but also to the end user who will do the analytics for them and we can do that visual display, right? So we try to provide all that glue in between. And you don't have a chief data officer. Is that correct or? We don't. Are you essentially the de facto chief data officer or you too or? I guess that would be true, right? I think that's you. They won't allow me to give them that type. Right, right. Is information a strategic advantage in your business or is your business more solidified and you're looking to bring more efficiency out of it? We're actually looking to differentiate ourselves from our competition by focusing on analytics and data. My feeling is kind of watching the industry that in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s people thought they differentiated on customized processes. And I think as we move into software as a service model where you can really, it's more about configuration as opposed to customization that we're now focusing on analytics. And that's how we'll differentiate ourselves from our competition is the quality of our data, the quality of the analytics around that data. And so I think it will, is and will differentiate us in the marketplace. Right. Go ahead. And I would say adding to that is a 125 year old company. I think we have a lot of that stability built in. So we've got a nice stable base that gives us a great starting point to launch into some of these newer endeavors, newer analytics to help us better understand and relate with our customer, right? So before we might have two or three touch points with the customer. Now what we're trying to do is add more tools. So maybe we'll have 15 or 20 different touch points in the data collection that we can then analyze and really understand our customer better and partner more closely with them. And that allows you to go beyond the analytics that increases the stickiness with your customers because you're providing them something that they won't get from the competition even at a lower price. And so that's really what we're trying to do. We're trying to get instead of be reactive to our customer, proactive to understand that Mother's Day is coming up and they probably need more linens, more tablecloths, more napkins than they usually do in their usual order. So we're trying to be much more predictive with our analytics. Does that change your customer relationship focus? I mean, in your business, I imagine that a lot of your customers, the most common contact they have with you is through your delivery people, your truck drivers. Are the things you can do to empower them with more information and improve that experience? There actually is, and we've had a major program that's not only about the analytics but the tools that carry the analytics forward. So we've put a large emphasis on mobile capability and putting that mobile capability in the hands of our customer-facing employees. And so they'll go out and the tool will tell them what their route is and it'll have a tile on a screen that will tell them each customer. They'll tap on that and they'll tell them specific things about the customer. Their contract is coming due in a few months or they had an issue with the last delivery and that hasn't been taken care of yet. Or feedback is that they aren't particularly happy about this or that or that. Have the manager stop by on this route and have a conversation with them. Or any number of things. But the idea is to get visibility and transparency with the customer. The next step is then actually to start putting those devices in the hands of the customer so that they can be proactive. So they can use their smart phone to order additional service or additional product. So we have a customer portal as well. It's another touch point we've added. So they can go log in, manage their account and we continue to add more management capability into that so they can do more self-service. And we're driving to the different devices. So it's not just our CSR touch point but now we actually have a web presence for them to go to as a kind of portal that they can go in and see where they're at and make changes. And the platform behind this is a commercial off the shelf SaaS platform or is it something that you've actually developed? So there's several layers. We have our ERP as an industry specific product. We have worked with Microsoft on the mobility and developing those tools. The backend of it, the analytics have been built on a stack that includes Tableau, Vertica, and Informatica. I mean, so you're a large part of an integrator of these technologies. Benioff said more SaaS companies are going to come out of non-technology companies than technology companies. You're sort of headed in that direction. Granted, you're using off the shelf technology to do that but you're customizing it in a way for your business. Is that fair? I think that's a fair statement. Yeah, absolutely. And our business is unique and there aren't a lot of software packages out there for us that kind of go beyond the core processing. And so that gives us an advantage at every turn. What about efficiencies in your own operation? You have a lot of logistics, a lot of assets out there in the field. What kind of efficiencies have you been able to realize through analytics? It helps us be more green. And so, you know, with the route assistance and the telematics around our drivers, it helps us be more safe, more green. In our plants, it helps us use the right levels of chemicals, helps us conserve water. And so we're taking all of those data points around the machines, making them more efficient, around the drivers, making them more efficient, and just kind of, you know, it's a continuous feedback loop. You know, hey, you know, the telematics are telling us this about your performance. Here's what you need to do. And we have the same thing with the machines. Right, and even job roles, right? So as we look at who's doing what role, you know, the driver, how much time does the driver spend loading a truck versus delivering, right? So we're trying to understand that and maybe change what the roles might be using this technology to tell us how long are you in the, in the yard, how long are you spending loading or unloading when we really want those drivers interacting with the customer and delivering product, right? So it's changing some of those mixes. Raises some interesting human issues, of course, human management issues too, the perspective of being watched and big brother and technology used for bad. And particularly with the company that's been around a long time, really have a lot of long time employees. How do you broach that topic of intrusion? Well, especially when, you know, we deal with unions as well. And so that becomes a change management conversation. That becomes a negotiation. And again, that's where analytics can help, you know, because if we can go to the unions and say we're trying to make the environment more safe, we're trying to look at ways to make the job more appealing. If you, you know, if your folks prefer to drive the truck as opposed to unload soiled laundry, you know, we can look at that. And so it gives us kind of a different way to look at it. It gives us the analytics to helping the negotiation process. It gives us analytics that help make the job better to decrease turnover. But as you said, some of it will be, people will opt out and others will find it to be the best thing that they, you know, the best change they've run into. Right, and I think some of it is helpful too when it comes to negotiations and talking to people is when you're able to present facts as opposed to feelings, a lot of times you can kind of bypass some of those, oh my gosh, what are you doing with that? When you can demonstrate, hey, look at what you're getting out of this. We're making you a safer driver. We're getting you home safely for your family, right? We're cutting your hours down, providing the same amount of benefit, allowing you to be home sooner. So there are different advantages. And I think it's all how you communicate those advantages through the data, right? And it's really driving your business with that data that you're discovering. And the role Vertica plays is it sit in between sort of, well, do you have it, presumably, you have a traditional enterprise data warehouse that's been there for a while and then the Vertica relatively new company came in. Exactly, so we have a traditional warehouse that we built a few years back. Unfortunately, it was built on an older platform from, and it was very customized to the data we had at the time. So when we centralized everything on our new route accounting software, that ERP, you know, essentially, we were left with some of these pieces we couldn't get to. So we've embarked on a new or creating new, we blew it all up, we're starting new with the Vertica Informatica Tableau Stack, as Stephen talked about earlier. And we're really taking advantage of these changes to drive change in how we process our data and how we can provide it. So, formally, we had to do a lot of stitching together, a lot of aggregation, and now we're able to query larger sets of data to really analyze across time what's going on. So essentially, this is a replacement for your traditional enterprise data warehouse. That is exactly right. Yes, it is. And we are building into it in a similar fashion, but we're learning different things that we have to do to be successful in Vertica. And where, does open source and Hadoop and all that stuff fit in here, or is it not? We're still kind of evaluating that, right? We're looking at that. It doesn't today, but that's what a lot of the conversations we're having here about how are you leveraging this? How are you leveraging Kafka or? Spark, Kafka, we've heard a lot of chatter about that and how we might integrate that into our overall stack and be more effective. Especially when we bring on some of the washile data and the other telemetry from our routes, how do we get that streaming data and push it through to Vertica in an effective manner? And that may be a really great way to do it, is utilizing Kafka as kind of that messaging service to bring those to a common communication place where we can then... Well, the nice thing you heard today is that, Vertica's agnostic to a lot of the different tooling out there, and they didn't try to go build, vertically integrate into that world and build its own stack. How about the cloud? Kind of interesting, because you see the cloud guys actually building analytic pipelines. Now, granted, there's choice there as well, but you see what Amazon and others are doing. Yeah, and we're having discussions. We've moved one of our main applications to the cloud, so we're definitely having discussions around the cloud. We're not quite sure how we fit into that world yet, but we're definitely open to those discussions and exploring how we might more fully utilize that. Yeah, right. If you're familiar with Workday, I was actually their CIO. I was actually their 33rd customer in a different role and then joined Workday and worked there for several years as their strategic CIO and as their VP of Mid-Market Services. So I come to AmeriPride with a heavy SaaS bias, with a heavy cloud bias. Yeah, and you know, Bushree likes cloud. How about internet of things? You've got a lot of equipment to monitor. You've got trucks to track. Are you looking? You've got the possibility of autonomous vehicles affecting your business. Are you looking at any of these hard right now? Or are they worried? We consider some of the feeds from our washers would kind of like internet of things, right? So we're definitely looking at some of that and where is it going to take us in the future? I don't know that we've looked hard at the fleet and what that potential is for the autonomous piece of it, but we're definitely looking at getting those live feeds from our equipment to potentially monitor for downtime or start predicting failures in laundry or low loads, those types of things. So definitely that's something we've been chatting about is the internet of things and how all those small sensors and all that data feeding in might affect us and how we might capture that and really utilize that. Other projects you're excited about, sort of initiatives? Well, as part of that we have RFID chips and all of our garments, our mats and those types of things and so we're looking at how we can leverage that ability to collect data and all the ways that we can then look to improve our business and our processes. Yeah, one of the newer things with RFID is the UFID, the ultra high frequency where we can do bulk reads. So currently in our current world is one at a time, we can pass a pass right in front of the panel and now with the new UHF we can pass a bucket of things and read everything in there all at once. So that's kind of a big change technology-wise and then you're going to get all those data points at a much faster rate, right? So you're able to do a read of 50 or 100 at a time versus a one at a time that we do today. Love the story, it's a 100 plus year old company that's constantly innovating. You don't think of a company like yours as on the cusp of constantly innovating but that's probably why you've been around so long. That's right, that's right. Well gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time, great segment. All right, keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back. This is day one of the HPE big data conference. We'll be right back after this short break. We are here to win.