 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE at the HP Vertica Big Data Conference 2014. Brought to you by HP, with your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back when we're here live inside theCUBE in Boston, Massachusetts for HP's Vertica Conference. For Big Data, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jim Cochran, CIO, executive VP of the United States Postal Service. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. A lot of disruption going on in a lot of industries. You know, one of the things that Dave and I always talk about certainly in the, you know, the cloud, born on the cloud is things like Uber. You know, it's completely changing the whole business of transportation with taxing, with joking when I got into Logan, hey, is there Uber and they get the dirty looks from the taxi driver? It's like, you know, very disruptive, that kind of trend. Shipping and transportation obviously has a lot of impact, a lot of disruption. What's the state of disruption in the delivery and the aspects of things in your industry? Well, I think Uber is a good example of it. I mean, so, you know, big players like UPS, the FedEx, the Postal Service, are all very active in that space, but as this whole crowdsourcing of delivery and these small carrier companies are a real challenge for us, because it's a different entry, it's different price points. We all have a pretty good sense of what it costs to deliver things around the world, so they're part of the disruption that concerns us, I think, in many ways. I mean, where the Postal Service is a big paper-based company. So digital in general is disruptive to our business model. What's the biggest change that you've seen in the past five years that's kind of hit the shores of your organization and the teams? That's given you, getting you guys excited, as well as nervous. You know, some of the times that's the best technology. It's like, what have you seen that's kind of floated inside? Just the state of retail in the U.S. E-commerce has been a, you know, I think back seven years ago, I was in marketing at the time, and the internet was gonna kill the Postal Service, and it has had an effect on our business model, but the E-commerce and the proliferation of how people have changed how they shop has been a tremendous boom for our business. We are actively growing our shipping business about this year, we're up about 9% on revenue, so it has really helped us in many ways as we kind of convert from more of delivering mail and packages to more packages and a little less mail. And the timing is compressing too. I mean, you're talking about same day delivery. I mean, how are you guys responding to those types of pressures? So we've got a product that we've had in the marketplace that UPS and FedEx, in a very interesting way, is a world of co-op petition that we actually deliver packages for them, but even Amazon and companies like that are now coming to us at, as late as like seven, eight o'clock in the morning, we're delivering them that day, so you can shop it up until midnight, get, order something, get it fulfilled, brought to a post office and we deliver it that day. You know, it's interesting, everyone talks about privatization, but sometimes it's all about speed, right? So the value here, the value purpose just seems to be real time, and obviously we're at a big data conference. You can't swing a stick without hitting the word big data and real time kind of together with cloud and mobile as a new user experience. So you're seeing mobile, I want things delivered to my house. There's a service called Deliv, which brings stuff in. And also Amazon wants things that drones will deliver packages. So are drones in your future? Are you gonna, we like sending drones out? Drones always come up. You know, army of drones. Who knows with them? I mean, the pace of technology changed in five years, who knows? I don't think drones are in any immediate future for delivering packages. Good marketing stuff by Amazon. But it was a brilliant timing to be on, I think it was like the Sunday before Cyber Monday that aired, so great marketing. But once again, they are looking at it. They are actively looking at it, and we've had engineers look at it, and I think that technology has to come a long way. But that said, we do manage 300,000 mobile devices, and I think customers are doing more and more. That's one of the changes in commerce that's affected, is this whole mobile shopping and the ability to understand where things are. And people track pizzas nowadays, so you know they want to track packages and constant updates on where they are. Do you see your retail base changing? Because if the trend continues, where big data as Colin Mahoney was talking about and the industry's top analyst, Jeff Kelly was talking about, where practitioners are adding value using data, you in a way are being, you could wholesale your service because you have the data. So there's a lot of technology involved in your system already, and then potentially you could essentially expose an application to have an API, JSON feeds or whatever you guys would do. Do you see that evolving that kind of direction, and do you guys have enough in-house foundation to potentially do things like that? So we're a bit of a hybrid. We have some cloud opportunities out there, but we're a pretty large data center. We are capturing over a billion tracking events on mail-in packages a day right now, and it tells us a lot about where things go in the United States. We go to 151 million doors today. We're on every street in the United States, and all those, that network I think creates some real interesting opportunities for the business going forward. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Everybody's re-looking at their business saying, okay, what are my assets and how can I digitize them? I mean, you just talked about this amazing network, 151 million doors, you've got vehicles, you've got point of presence and post offices all over the world. So how are you thinking about digitizing those, or are you thinking about digitizing those assets, and in what form? Well, the one, I mean, mail is still our core business, and we've been on a journey in light of the conversation today, but we really have been on a journey to create a digital reflection for all mail-in packages. That's those billion tracking events per day. So every piece of mail, every catalog, an LL bean catalog going to the mailbox is being tracked all the way to the mailbox, and we confirm to LL bean that it's been in the mailbox, because that creates an opportunity to bundle that with other media. They can then send a text message and email, align it with other forms of media. So I think media in general, and how to reach customers is challenged by digital. Traditional TV is challenged. You have DVR technology, whether you're on radio, you have the SiriusXM. So I think all media is facing some challenges because digital and mail-like is one of those, but I think mail has got a real opportunity to be more relevant. Using this information to what goes in each of your mailbox is important to you as an individual. So tracking is a core competency for you guys. You'd say tracking is a big time core competency. Absolutely. And what does digital do for you? How do you see that changing and adding to that core competency? Well, we're a delivery company, and it actually helped us understand a lot more about our network and really gave us some diagnostics on cycle time and how things were moving and pair analysis. So the data that we did to satisfy customers, tracking was a customer requirement, but along that journey, we found ways to use it to make our operations a lot more efficient. So you create business value and we can drive cost out. We're a very labor-intense organization. We have almost a half a million employees. But on the customer side, the customer value and how you use this data to understand more about their customers to drive the behavior, to make doors swing in retail, to make people buy has been a real interesting collaboration, I'll say, with the industry. What's it like to be a CIO of such a dynamic organization? I mean, the legacy in terms of history, obviously, everyone's well-documented, but now you're in a modern era, a huge transformation going on. What's it like? What are your top three things that you think about every day? Is it transformation? Is it culture? What are some of the things that, what's it like being CIO? Well, we're a, you know, our organization, we're broken up into really four sections. So one, we have a huge mail processing environment with automation and technology, robotics, and all those. So my VP of engineering manages that. Our information technology is a world-class organization that our Vice President John Edgar manages. We have the payment technology and my old job before I became CIO was the analytics side. And so security, big issue. You got a .gov at the end of your web name. People are trying to get to you, even though we're not the Department of Defense. And so cyber security is one of the things that keeps you up at night and keeps you nervous. Well, you're at scale too. So you have massive scale going on. Massive amounts and a lot of systems. So, but I think even, you know, once again, we're at a data conference. The opportunities for data is the thing that maybe might wake me up the most in the middle of the night. So we were at MIT a couple of weeks ago at the Chief Data Officer Conference and you had mentioned off camera you don't have a CDO. And I asked you, are you the Chief Data Officer? And John Holomka, who's the CIO partners and a couple of other CIOs put forth the notion that the CIO role is going to evolve. And the CIO is going to have to make a career path choice. Either become the COO, there's really an operating role, or the CTO, technical guy, or the CDO, the Chief Data Officer. That's where they saw that role evolving. I wonder if you could comment on that. Well, so I don't come from an IT background. I've spent most of my career in marketing and operations. And so I think that's a new phenomenon where you're seeing CIOs come from different disciplines within the organization. I think that background and knowledge of our business is a very strong element to the challenge that a CIO faces. So it's not just making sure that you have robust systems and they're working. You need to understand how you're using those systems to create business value and customer value. So I do think that's gonna be a continued trend in the marketplace that CIOs are gonna come from the marketing side of the house or maybe go into the marketing side of the house from the CIO. But I think the knowledge of the business and what you do every day helps you be effective as a CIO. So you talked a little bit about your journey. What kind of projects in the big data space are you guys doing and what's exciting you? I think the one that's most exciting is we're gathering these billion tracking events that we have a day right now over a billion a day. And we're building new systems and the real challenge is speed and velocity because I think we're a complex organization and sometimes what happened yesterday is fine but more and more what happened, we need to turn them around on data that's in milliseconds. So we're actually looking at some interesting technology to allow us to scan a barcoding Guam and get a response back that tells me the dynamic route that it's gonna go to in this sequence of that delivery. So I think some of the general purpose GPU technology is kind of interesting right now and how it helps you ingest data and move data around. We're just getting into that and I think that's very interesting as on how it can help us really move data around in a modern way. So turning data around in milliseconds, that sounds like a new mandate, that is real time. You can't have any lag and what kind of pressure is that gonna put on existing data warehouses that are out there? I mean what's the lag time on those current things? If you know the query, even if you know what you want. So I mean we have a pretty robust warehouse, enterprise data warehouse and it's more changing process. So we manage the data mostly on what happened yesterday mode in the warehouse but we could change that to manage it where it's pushing data every 15 minutes and every five minutes. But I think there are some in-memory systems that are necessary when you're really trying to turn data analytics around pretty quickly so we really have a hybrid of traditional, I'll say IT architecture to manage data in warehouses and more in some cases, emerging technology when we really need to turn data around very quickly. Massive amounts of data. Are you shifting resources? Do you anticipate shifting resources or are you already from that traditional infrastructure toward sort of these newer, modern, Hadoop or where does Vertica fit becoming interested in that? Are you pulling resources away or do you expect to? We are, it's not as much pulling resources. I think you still need to, we have over 500 different application systems. So I think they still exist. It's how you pull data out of those systems is where there's been a lot of focus right now. So Hadoop obviously and having a good data lake to really do some multivariate analysis is an important part of what we're doing. It really is kind of a complex challenge that creates diverse solutions if that makes sense. So that's incremental investment certainly within the last five years, right? Oh, sure. And where does Vertica fit in all that? Well, Vertica I think is going to be a big part of the whole haven process that HP has is where autonomy helps us and obviously security is a big piece. So they're just one of the tools that we're going to have that help us understand data and we have to give the organization the tools. As an example, we run SAP over on the HR side. We run SAS in the operations side. So you got to have diverse solutions for the complexity of the organization's IT systems that I'll say I inherited. Just wrapping up here, I want to kind of drill down on one comment you mentioned. CIOs will come from a marketing background and we're talking about operations. If you look at what data is doing to organizations from a value chain perspective, if everything is instrumentable, that means technically everything's IT. So you turn on Internet of Things concepts and you essentially, everything's connected. There is a kind of transcendence kind of vibe going on here where it's like, okay, that's not an IT thing. Everything's IT. So it's more of an ops question. So do you see that role more ops as well? I mean, how do you see the CIO role in general? I think ops, we're a large operations of sorting and routing and distributing mail and packages. So probably my number one customer right now is the Chief Operating Officer and we are very integrated. I agree with you. I think that we have 8,500 pieces of sortation and robotics in the role. You know, the Internet of Things, they've been connected for years. We can sit in a centralized maintenance shop and look at performance of machines in Alaska relative to their distribution quality, some of the wearables, some of the maintenance issues. So I think more and more you get closer to those organizations where we, five years ago, the IT function was more of an enabling function. Now it's core to the business. You can't survive without the IT functions. I think you have a really impressive environment. Jim, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. I think you really have all the elements out of there. It sounds like a really great job. Probably a lot of stress. Probably 100 million miles an hour. You got the Internet of Things, you got legacy, you got modernization, you got real-time customers. A lot of pressure and a great upgrade environment. Thanks for sharing your stories here in theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're live in Boston, Massachusetts for HP Vertica Big Data Conference. We'll be right back after this short break.