 From Austin, Texas, it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to Austin. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're at Pure Accelerate 2019, the fourth annual event, getting bigger and bigger and more customers on theCube. Very excited to welcome the CIO of Kensington Swan, Nigel Stephenson. Nigel, welcome to theCube. Thank you, thanks. Thanks for coming all the way up here or down here up here from New Zealand. Give us, our audience, a little bit of an overview of Kensington Swan and specifically about your role as CIO. Sure, Kensington Swan's a top tier law firm in New Zealand. And actually, we've got a bit of an announcement from last month. We're about to combine with Dentons, which you might know more familiar from a brand kind of perspective, slightly larger than what we are at the moment. We're a few hundred staff split between two officers in Auckland and Wellington with a focus on corporate commercial legal practices. So, top tier or high end law expertise. So you've been there about three years. Give us a little bit of a picture of Kensington's IT department applications, workloads. What's going on there? I guess we're pretty similar to most law firms or professional services firms, which are similar with their accounting firms as well. The most common tools we use around the ERP or the practice management systems that we have. And then production of documents for the work that we provide to our clients. Maintaining those, keeping them, searching for them. And all the emails and everything else that goes along every single matter that we do. From a compliance perspective, we need to keep all of that and make sure it's safe and sound and easily searchable. So big drivers, you got the clients, you got the lawyers, you got the paralegals, it's this machine running. You got, like you say, confidentiality, compliance. What are the big drivers in the business that are affecting IT strategy? I think, especially in the professional services sector, just to continue to modernize, we've had systems and after the last recession, things tightened up a bit for a while and then we've had a large push over the last few years to really bring things up to date, bring it, make it more current and relevant to what's out there. With that, we can then bring on other applications and AI and other tools that will really help us to drive the business in different directions. Is the first time you're at Accelerator? Yeah, yeah. So let's talk infrastructure. So paint a picture. What's it look like? You're here, obviously you're a pure customer, right? So what's the storage infrastructure look like? We've had, I guess, what you'd be a pretty typical infrastructure for many, many years with the two data center model, VMware storage servers and so on and then replicated across from a DR perspective to the other data center. We've gone through a big decision around where do we go with it? Do we take that out to the cloud? Do we keep it on-prem? Do we keep the two data centers one? We've ended up deciding this to go with the single production data center based in Auckland, where we've got some DR capability in their Wellington office, but then plan to scale up to the cloud. So we've got enough compute to keep us going, the systems that we've got as we grow will move. So you had two replicated data centers essentially, is that right, so expensive? Yeah. And then you've essentially now got a main data center, you got some, a little bit of lightweight infrastructure for DR purposes, is that right? Yeah, we previously essentially had two of everything, well more than two of everything, but everything we had at the production, we had at the secondary data center, a lot of it sat there semi idle for quite a lot of the time. And as you say, it's quite expensive to have a lot of equipment sitting there, not really being used. So moving more to single data center model, replicating some of the infrastructure, but then not the full set as we've ended up. So the decision to stay on-prem versus go all in the cloud, talk to us about some of the business drivers that led you to say we're going to stay on-prem and within that, what elevated pure storage to the obvious choice? Yeah, sure, there's a lot of benefits of cloud model. And I think that's really helped, I guess, influence where the on-prem hardware's gone as well, and we'll get to that in a second. With things like the scalability of it, the simplicity, not having to have very experienced storage technicians and so on. And I think back to my days when I was first in IT and putting together other brands of storage, and it was a multi-month process, certifications after certifications, just to be able to plug it together and then configure and code the storage array. With the cloud, and what we found with pure storage, that's just become really simple. Now within a couple of hours of the array arriving that was wrecked, it was turned on, it was cut into the pool and presented through to VMware. So just really, really simple. Oh, the bit twiddling of the past really didn't do much for your business, obviously. But then you chose to stay on-prem. Many law firms do, just because of the privacy and the confidentiality and... Yeah, but... Add some color to that decision. There's a couple of angles to it. The first one being performance. We don't need to make sure that the lawyers get the performance that they need. They charge in six minute increments, like most. And if they can't work, then they're not billing, they're not working, they're not providing to their clients and their clients also want that work done at a good speed and return to them as quickly as possible. And as the world has moved more to that client-centric approach, delivering to the clients becomes ultimate impairment to what we do. So performance was definitely key. The economics of it as well. When we looked at cloud and on a price per gig per month with Pure, it worked out very competitive. So it wasn't quite there to move into the cloud. New Zealand, we don't have the AWS or Azure data centers based in New Zealand. They're all in Australia. So there's a latency aspect of going many thousands of miles across the undersea cables to get to that data. On-prem it's right there, it's fast, it's connected. And we can definitely perform it. So you've essentially replaced your spinning disk with flash, is that correct? Yeah, so that was one of the other parts of it. Wanted to get something that was definitely modern and set us for the future for quite a number of years. We didn't look at spinning disk at all. We just went and looked at what flash arrays were available. We have had spinning disk prior, but definitely wanted to go all flash. How important was the Evergreen model to you? Is it, how much of it is marketing and how much is it big business impact for you? Quite a few other places I've worked. We've hit that three-year or five-year support model challenge where all of a sudden the support can hockey stick up and become really, really expensive to carry on the arrays. So one of the other drivers was from an environmental perspective of, if you've got to throw that equipment out after five years but it's still working fine, that's not really great on the environment. So with the, from the flash perspective as well as the Evergreen, being able to maintain and keep that equipment running and going for longer than five years without a sharp uplift in the cost was really, really important. That sustainability was important to you guys. So you, before we went live, you mentioned that you guys have been a pure customer since about December of 2018. So about 10 months or so, so those lawyers that are billing every few minutes have to get access to data because the clients are demanding, what's been their reaction to the performance that you're delivering to them and any correlation with revenue that the business has made because of the decision to stay on-prem? I'll tell you what, the best thing about it is they don't complain that things are slow anymore. You know, so they always say in IT, if you're not hearing any issues, then you're doing a good job. And we're definitely in that camp. The systems run significantly faster than what they were previously. And that was on a five-year-old array that was reasonable at the start as well. So the leap forward has been really recognisable from a performance perspective. So you don't get the outer boy, but you just don't get the grief. Yeah, yeah, it's not very often that people come and say that, you know, with accolations in that sense in IT. But it sounds like it also simplified your management. You described it used to take a long time to provision an array before and now it's sort of same day or part of a portion of a day. What have you done with that additional resource? Did you riff people? Did you redeploy them? What did you do? I guess you take the same style of, if you do move things to the cloud, you know, or any type of outsourcing model, you essentially just freeing up time. And the staff have got now work on other things, you know, we're slowly moving up the stack on a value add perspective of what we deliver. Delving more into automation, integration, you know, digital contract processing. The area that I think we should be working in rather than, you know, tweaking the nuts and bolts. Although that's where I started, so it was a good career path at the time. Okay, please. Okay, being able to get to that value add is something that we talk with a lot of customers about. And that's absolutely critical about not spending so much time at managing something. I want to get my job done. So a number of announcements came out today. I'm just curious to get your take on, for example, this kind of customer force that Dave and I were talking about with Charlie Giancarlo, their CEO just a minute ago, about this bridge to hybrid cloud. You mentioned an acquisition or a merger coming with Dentons. How would something like this hybrid bridge that Pierre announced with AWS, how might that be a facilitator of the merger or maybe even, it's the IT foundation that you've established with Pierre that's going to be a great facilitator of that pending aqua merger? I think one of the slides in the keynote this morning talked about the on-prem and the cloud world being quite separate. And we found that and as we've looked, whenever we go out to market, we'll look at both options and take a best of breed approach to what we then cure or subscribe to. We've got into some cloud solutions. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to mention brands at all, but so we have got cloud. You are from our standpoint, but maybe you're from your corporate standpoint. Be careful. So we've got a bit of both, but it has been a bit hard to bridge the two, even from a backup DR perspective, and then also from scaling the on-prem applications into the cloud, some things just work better in the cloud or better architected in the clouds, especially some remote access solutions where if we've got issues, we want that separate or that air gap between our systems and the access for the staff. And that's kind of the space that we've delved into for that. So being able to join those worlds a lot more seamlessly and through the same management consoles, and it's just going to make life a lot easier. We'll be able to scale back and forward so we can move the data. I mean, actually, I remember years and years ago talking to storage vendors and saying, well, how can we can't replicate our data up to a different brand or a different service, in this case, with the adoption on cloud that's still very prevalent. Yeah, so ideally you'd like a common management framework, control plane, data plane, backup framework. Is that right? Is that an objective between cloud and on-prem? I mean, it definitely helps. One of the other things that was mentioned in the keynote is around the availability of skilled people. I think with my generation, I started off in desktop support and then worked my way through infrastructure and project management and team management and so on. The people coming out of university now don't really have that same career path. They're trying to slide in, somewhere up the stack. And very... And they started Python and worked their way up. And they're more in the development space rather than the infrastructure space. So the ability to find staff that have the knowledge of those systems is getting harder and harder. So the cloud model, almost storage as a service on the on-prem sense cuts through that and it means that you don't need those staff. With the commonality of the tools, that also helps as well. You don't have to serve someone who's spent years and years training in a new solution to be able to then have the confidence to move into it. What are you actually installing from Pure? Is it vile storage, block storage, combination? We've got the X-Series Array. Yeah, okay, yeah. They're going for performance, obviously. Because I was thinking in the cloud, you might be more interested in an object store because of your document heaviness. But it kind of depends on the merger, I guess, and where you guys go. Yeah, you mentioned before, there's some data sovereignty concerns around where that data stays. And that's why I think a lot of the law firms probably are keeping some of their infrastructure on-prem. So for sovereignty aspects and performance, if it is there, it is performing. The cloud can perform in different ways. But having a bit of both gives you really a good choice. That best of breed model. So you feel with Pure Storage, you've got the foundation as this acquisition and this merger comes forward that everything's in place. Feel pretty confident about that? Yeah, we've got a lot of work to do over the next few months while we adjust what we've got from a software perspective to align with the Denton's global software suite. But I'm pretty confident that it can be delivered really well. So what's in the CIO's mind these days? Security, cloud, hybrid strategies, alignment with the business, what are your top three? I think, like I mentioned before, I'm really trying to kind of lift what we do to deliver value to the business. It depends on what type of business it is, but IT can be seen as a cost center. We really want to be able to be more involved in what, in our case, the lawyers are doing. The main project that we've got on at the moment is automating legal processes. Not to replace any people, but to augment what they do and to provide them better tools, more efficient tools. Tools that the younger lawyers, when they come in, can follow their way through and learn what that process is. We're also overlaying the legal aspects around that as well. It's not just an online form. It's a training guide. It's everything for each of those processes that we do. Are you deploying any machine learning, artificial intelligence, machine intelligence in that regard yet? Is it... We haven't quite got there. It's definitely on the list. Some of the things that we'd like to look at is things like machine readable software to go through documents, pull out snippets. A lot of the time lawyers will spend, they have to read through a lot of material, find key bits of information, and extract that to their news within the documents that we produce. Even in simpler processes, they're still doing that. They're loaned from the real complex, five, 600 page construction contracts. There's a lot that we could potentially help to find that information for them. When it comes into things like e-discovery for litigation, in the old days, they'd wheel in a truckload of paper file boxes. Guys must have loved that. You're billing at six minute increments. Now we get a hard drive with terabytes of data. We've got to troll through all of that. There's some real space that good AI tools can help cut through that significantly faster than your standard funnel-based search tools. Do you think software robots have a place, like robotic process automation, or is it... I think where we're going with it is the RPA will fit in between the human process. We're mapping out it more from a business process perspective where there's going to be some educational steps, some human steps, some RPA steps, and eventually get through to an outcome of delivering what the lawyers need for their clients. So last question that I have is, you know, when we do all these shows, we do like 100 events a year, everybody, you know, the vendors tell you how great they are, and so we always like to ask the practitioners, your experience with Pure, relative to other stores, you don't have to name names, but just, is it substantively different? How much, I guess, I ask you again, how much is marketing versus substantive business value for you as a practitioner? Yeah, so we've only had the array since December. One of the things I did a case study for Pure just recently, and one of the things I highlighted in there was the support. When you go on to a new vendor, or choose any different path, you're taking that kind of risk and the step into the unknown. We did have an issue a few weeks after we put the first array in, and they came in during Christmas break where we were all off, and in our case at the beach, which is a bit different in the Southern Hemisphere, but they came in flawlessly, sorted the issue out, got it back, working without us really having to do anything apart from letting them in the building. And that really gives us confidence in what they do, how they can deliver going forward, you know? And I think there's a lot of value in sharing that. These things don't always go very smoothly, but you need to have established that relationship with that partner that can be rapidly deployed to help, because ultimately I'm sure those lawyers either want to start billing every three minutes, or they want to be able to bill more every six minutes. So never a dull moment, Nigel, and you're well, but we thank you so much for joining David and me on The Kidman. Maybe next year we'll be talking about how AI is helping, hopefully, clients achieve better results. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE.