 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Discover 2016, Las Vegas. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Discover 2016 everybody, HPE's big customer event. This is theCUBE, we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Kyle Green is back, he's the director of Enterprise Storage Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and he's joined by Jim Thomas, the director of IT operations at Pella Windows. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Kyle, welcome back. Good to see you. Thank you. So Pella Windows, tell us, what's the company all about? All right, Pella is actually a privately owned window door company, headquartered in Pella, Iowa. One of the leading manufacturers of windows and doors in North America. Strong, strong heritage, we just celebrated 90 years in business, making an incredibly good product. Great people at the company, small town environment, so just a great company to work with. I think I have a Pella door. Well, I think we can sign you up for more. But I don't have Pella windows and I'm sorry about that, I'm not happy with my windows. Well, we can take care of that. Yeah, well, I'm not sure I can take care of that, but that was a big project. Okay, so your role as director of IT ops, maybe describe that a little bit. Sure, I have responsibility for IT operations, infrastructure and information security. So we have a unique situation. I think Pella will define strategic relationships differently than what you would historically. So the way we go to market and the way we attack IT is through strategic partners, HP being one of them. We are pretty much all in as long as it can meet our core fundamentals, we would rather commit to a partner in a relationship. And we get back to that relationship and folks, that's why we do this. And in reality is we get so much more out of it. But as we talk through this, we have several things over the years where we've been actively engaged with HP or another partner as well. This is an interesting topic because there's an age old discussion within the IT world is do you just sort of beat your supplier down for the best price or do you try to partner and get more value? Kyle, I mean, you must have this discussion with customers all the time. And of course, we live in this world where prices are always dropping. Everybody's doing trying to do more with less so you can understand that. But how does this conversation go? Jim's a great example of how we'd like it to go. And that is, we get to customers regardless. You may not, Jim's not the largest customer we have. But Jim is strategic to us because he uses many of the things we do strategically and he counts on us to help him with his business. He's like many customers though. He can't resist or turn down an opportunity to explore a cost effective solution from other vendors. But he weighs that against the relationship which is what we'd love people to do as they imagine. Jim sits on many of our advisory councils and again, plays an important role in our strategy and what we're trying to do to solve other customers like Jim, big or small. And he plays a very important role there. But it's human nature, right? We all want a deal, right? Sure. You want the best deal, the best discount. So how do you get through that and how do you quantify the value to your business of a partnership where you may not always have the lowest price but there's other value? The good news about Pella is being around 90 years, we're not worried about next quarter. We're doing things to the family that's engaged in the business, they weren't around for another 90 years. So how do you do that? You make long-term investments. So my investments with my partners, although they'll view it the other way round, they pay back greater than the better price I'll get. My team is extremely good at delivering and executing. So when we sign up with a promotion, we have delivered. And so the reality is over time, I get far more back than we put in. And whether it is through professional services, relationships, when I'm in a bind, I can call folks in the organization that I have deeper contacts that could help me out. So it's astounding how much we get back and it's so hard for me sometimes to understand why people don't choose to invest that. I could go buy the cheapest and fight for the cheapest price every time but the value is the long-term approach. Talk some more about that. So I'm inferring when something goes wrong, you know who to call, that person knows you, they're going to respond to you, they know your situation, you're going to remediate more quickly. Is that an example and other others that you can share? It's not just that, it's also an engagement at another level. I mean, whether if it happens to be storage and we're talking about three par, we can talk about what are we trying to solve as a business? I rate somewhere down here on the dollars I spend as the top customers at HP. But I rate up here as am I willing to talk about where we've had success. So we'll talk about the issues we're seeing, we'll talk about the challenges in our business and we'll talk about how that matters and where we go forward. So it's really about, I'll say, paying it forward. So sort of you're in a situation where you're creating more value than you're extracting. Absolutely. And you're getting the benefit of that. So we'll talk about what's driving your business, what's going on in the window? Well the good news is the housing market's back. There was a five year period there that if you can ever want to watch new housing starts go from roughly 2 million down to 300,000, not the most comfortable time. Now we have a replacement, we have commercials, so we stayed strong and being privately held, it is a strong company on core foundation. So really there. But the housing market's coming back, we're strong in the commercial space, continuing to grow that area, looking at things like home automation. So shades in your home, you start talking about automation around doors, locked, unlocked, windows, open, closed. So a lot of things that are really happening there. Our goal is we've historically been an innovator in our industry when it continued to be there. So we're continuing to find ways to deliver both to our traditional products and how we enhance those forward. So is there smartness coming into the home, data coming into your business in a big way? It will be. The challenge is trying to work through the landscape in the maturing markets of home automation. You have security companies, home automation services, how do you fit and meld within the ecosystems, but still provide the unique value of your product in those solutions. You seem to be very in tune with your business, maybe more so than most, you know, smaller, relatively smaller IT shops. Is that the cultural thing? Is that the nature of the privately held company? Part of it's I'm old. You've been around for a while. Okay, I've been with the company 18 years and have enjoyed every minute, but the reality is I have an opportunity to engage throughout the business. I have an opportunity to engage with my partners. And so numerous teams I set in across the business has really enabled me to have a lot of insight. It's just been a great ride. Yeah, so you're looking to the future, your company's looking to the future. I mean, today I presume pretty small is the percentage of homes that are actually instrumented, but when do you guys sit back and look at the sort of your strategic plans? Do you see that as a real tailwind for you going forward? We think it's going to grow slowly. I mean, home automation is it's, you've got that do it for me group and the do it yourself group. And they're just kind of picking up at different paces. New construction, do it for me, put it in when it's in place. For us, it's learning how to behave. We're a traditional manufacturer. Now we're talking about consumer electronics when you're talking some of this. So it's a different game. So we're being very cautious because our brand is critical to us. We've built a reputation around our brand and we want to make sure that we protect, guard and deliver on that brand promise. So there's a lot of going into it. Kyle, from HPE's perspective, how did the relationship with Pella Window evolve? I mean, it's interesting. It's a relatively small company, Jim was saying. Well, we're down here on the spend, but we're up here on the service levels that we're getting and the value that we're getting. How's that all work? Well, I think it goes back to the things Meg talks about. It's this idea economy today, right? It started traditional IT's purchase, right? There was a need for storage, right? There's a need for servers and we courted Jim like many other vendors would. But as that relationship grew, now you're back to what's next. And Jim has ideas, but he's got a strong brand and we feel like that's something HPE can bring to the table is looking out for your brand or helping you protect against that unpredictability, if you will, in the market. But you're leading that charge as well and dragging us with you and that's where the synergy comes into play. It's not about the servers or the storage anymore. Although those are things he buys and uses in the business. It's about how to protect his brand, how to help him grow the business as to what's next. And we don't understand his business, he does. So collaboratively, we really get a lot out of the partnership there. So what does the plumbing look like? Take us inside, paint a picture of what's underneath. Well, actually, the core, the heart of what we're running is HPE's Superdome X. We actually, although my team refuses to call that, we still call it by the code named Dragonhawk. We had shirts done. We actually had them on last year. Nice Hawaiian shirts. So very unique. We had one of the first 100 units that came out of production actually said in our data centers, we tested and evaluated it. It runs the core of our ERP database. And our product, you would think windows and doors are not incredibly complex, but when you consider the fact that you can order any window on any quarter size increment, different glass options, different colors, different, we estimate somewhere in a combination of eight octillion. So incredibly, we have to generate a bill of material for every window ordered. We don't pull from bill of materials, we create one. So the demand on the processing, the storage. So we've got the HPE Superdome X. We're now back ending it. Currently, I'm back ending it with actually a competitor's flash storage. But we are now looking very aggressively at three-par. We have a three-par in our test dev environment. Four years ago, it was the right decision for us. We needed the speed, we needed the performance. We just couldn't get what we needed four years ago. That landscape has radically changed. I think the HP storage has come along. Their leading performance is there. The software has matured significantly. They're obviously leading in that space. We've got one unit in our test dev environment. We're looking at replacing our production environment with three-par sometime in the next six months. You're talking about an all-flash system or a head-flash. We are all-flash today. And actually, I was one of the folks that would really talk about all-flash, at least for my critical databases, four years ago. That was very unique four years ago. It was. Well, I'll tell you, we were right there. Whether we predicted back in 2009, that by 2014, the high spin-speed disks would be dead. Now, we were a little early, but back then, that was pretty bold. People tip that we were crazy. Sounds like you were crazy, too. Oh, I'm still crazy. We're good there. Okay, so what else is going on in your infrastructure? So Oracle Database, is that what you're running? We run Oracle's ERP Suite on HP hardware. I think our challenge is continuing to go forward is how do we consolidate and pull? I've got what will eventually face us around consumer data. What do we do? How do we handle that? Where are we going to store it? If we store it, obviously folks are very concerned about their privacy and making sure that we handle that. We've got things around shop floor automation as we continue to get smarter factories that will generate far more of their video. We're looking at solutions right now that would, how do we facilitate our in-field service? So how do we make things in the field easier if a consumer is calling us with a service issue? How do we solve it quicker? Better information. If we have to make a call, we have to be there with the right parts, the right time with them. So how do we get that? So we're looking at how do we even leverage video from that capability? So rapidly changing a lot of fronts. Interesting, a lot going on. And you run security as well? Are you the CISO or the factory of the CISO? Yeah, we have smaller titles than that, so yes. How big is the IT organization? How many people? We have a couple hundred IT folks. Okay, so it's substantial and it's not a tiny shop, but you're in charge of security. Do you, what's the conversation with the board about security or the owners? You know, we've had a very good, our board is extremely strong. It's about a risk management platform though. It's about understanding your risk portfolio. So when we look at who we are, we do know that I don't have a ton of credit card information. So we're on the lowest level of PCI compliance because most of our transactions are not handled and we handle that very clearly. We are privately held, so I don't have a lot of government assistance or SEC assistance, those types of things, and I have very little healthcare, okay? And not surprisingly, not a huge amount of trade secrets, but we still have the responsibility that the business has to run. So we take our risk base and we've actually followed the SANS model and we're really attacking it at the right level of investment for what we're doing. So we're picking and choosing partners. We've leveraged a couple of other partners. We work closely with Verizon on making sure that we're doing the right things. We're talking a little bit with the HP security team, but really trying to make the right investments for our risk portfolio. Right, I love that answer. I mean, because a guy in your position has got to talk to the board or at least communicate what you did. Sounds like you got a pretty clear perspective on that. Last question, what are you going to take away from HPE Discover 2016? What are you going to bring back to Pella? You know, it was a great trip out here. For me, it was fun, but the reality is, it's relationships. With what we do, I have folks that are far smarter than I am that work for me, and that's a really good thing. But for me, it's about building the relationships. So I had not had a strong relationships over the last couple of years with the storage team that I wanted to. Had some great opportunities, spent some time with some of the storage team. I really understand where they're going, what they're doing, the product groups, the other area, but also the rest of the organization. So it's just continuing to build our relationship. It's important for me to stay relevant in HP's eyes, and the only way we do that is, we tell them what we need, we tell them what we're doing, and we deliver on what we tell them we're going to do. All right, Kyle, we'll give you the last word. Put the bumper sticker on Discover 2016. Discover 2016's been terrific, and I think it's echoed the market adoption that we're getting. So not only from our customers like Jim, but the market share data that continues to pour out where we're taking market share from our competitors. And it just tells us that we're on the right track. It validates the enthusiasm and our challenges to get that word out and get in front of more and more people. And Jim fortunately plays a big role in that with us. Even though he may not be the biggest one in our, you know, the portfolio, he's extremely valuable in helping us shape our message and get out to folks. All right, Jim and Kyle, thanks very much for coming to the queue. Appreciate it. Thank you. All right, that's a wrap here. Keep it right here, we'll be back after this short break, go to CrowdChat.net slash HPE Discover. You'll see essentially a transcript in the CrowdChat of all the CUBE interviews. Go to siliconangle.tv, siliconangle.com, wikibon.com for all the research. Keep it right there. This is theCUBE, we're live from Las Vegas. We'll be right back.