 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 Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, we're live at HPE Discover 2016. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage. We've been documenting the turnaround, the evolution, the acceleration of HP end-to-end. Really, it's our pleasure to have Jeff Kyle here as the director of product management at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And he's joined by Nina Bailey, who's the head of IT at Maglite. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, thank you for having us. So, Nina, tell us about Maglite. A lot of people might not be familiar with Maglite. Maglite is an American flashlight manufacturer based out of Ontario, California. It's been in business about 35 years. We have an iconic design for durability. So, I love flashlights, but I have so many flashlights. I'm always throwing them away because they don't work. What's special about Maglite? Is it the look, the feel, I mean. Yeah, well, let me explain this. We, our customer base is largely, it's the durability, it's the design. Our customer base is police, firefighters, emergency, military. So, it's that industrial durability, I think that has built a legacy from Mag over the last 35 years. The ones that really feel good. And you know, it feels like, you know. Exactly. An instrument, right? Okay, cool. So, Jeff, let me turn to you for a second. Give us the update on your business. We were talking off camera, director of product management for which products? It's the mission critical solution space at HPE, right? So, it covers some classic traditional stuff like non-stop, which is actually going through a resurgence as we've moved to X86 based technology and really a software stack around non-stop. It includes our UNIX business, which is traditional transaction and batch processing for financial services. And what's really exciting is the in-memory databases that are occurring today. SAP HANA, Microsoft SQL Server, even Oracle 12C and products like Superdome X, which are allowing customers to move from legacy environments into open standards, but get performance, availability and scalability. So, a real resurgence in mission critical. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about what's happening in that market, but I want to come back to Nina. So, you're new to Maglite, relatively new, right? Yes, actually I am new. You're an IT practitioner, you've been running IT organizations for over a decade now, right? Yeah, 15 years. So, what brought you to Maglite? You know, when you make a transition like that, coming in to run a new organization, what was the attraction? Well, it's business stability, of course, and it's an icon manufacturer. They have over a million square feet, so it's a beautiful plant. It's a family-owned business, so the atmosphere, I think, is a big benefit. I personally know people who came from a previous employer at an aerospace manufacturer over to Mag, so it's kind of like an inside thing where I moved over to Mag. And then how about the sort of IT challenges? You know, what about that interested you? Well, the big challenge for Mag is that they're still running on a legacy AS400 OS400 platform, and they are migrating to M4XA, which has a graphical interface for X86. And we're building that platform on the Superdome technology, taking advantage of the MPAR technology. So, help me understand. So, if I correct me if I'm wrong, but if I recall, the AS400 has its own internal database, right? Yes. So, you're going to convert from that to an Infor app? No, no, we're going to... Infor is an ERP system. It's a suite. And so, we'll have all of our modules like shipping, supply chain, sales, orders, CRM, it has a BI tool. So, it's a complete suite. And so, as an organization, we are migrating pieces over into, on our Superdome and Superdome X products, taking advantage of its mission critical availability, scalability, power, increased CPU performance, memory capacity. What was the impetus for the move? I mean, you know, AS400, I know it's not the most modern platform, but it probably runs just fine. Why, why, why move? And you know, that's a good point. I mean, when you're speaking with engineers or programmers who've been doing RGP programming for years, and you're trying to convince them to move over to Windows, you really, that's really why we're looking to Superdome to have that robust solution. But I mean, really it's getting into business analytics, you know, BI tools, getting, you know, just marketing the CRM, the full package that we want to take advantage of. Okay, so functionality, you know, sweet integration. Is this a common theme that you're seeing in the marketplace? It really is, Dave, right? They need to modernize their environment. And that's the renaissance we're seeing in mission critical, modernize. Come up, take advantage of Linux, take advantage of new programming designs, being able to deploy applications in minutes, and not days or weeks, and being able to change more rapidly. So, we're talking about mission critical. What does that mean, right? You think of mission critical to think, mainframe, right? But then you think mainframe, you think, oh, it's not open. Yeah, right. And that's the change that's going on. And mission critical has been thought of, all right, it's the data. I have to protect what's going on in the business. And it's often, you know, associated with legacy. But there are more and more mission critical environments. In fact, it's not just the database, it's the consumer and end user interaction right now that matters, right? In financial services, it's when you put your debit card in to an ATM that matters now. The end user experience is important. So, mission critical's end to end. Data is assumed to be available, and we know how to do that. But we've got to cover the end to end environment of the user and customer experience now. So, Nina, the decision to go with Superdome predated you, correct? You haven't made that decision in the last, yeah, I have not, I did not make that decision. So, maybe you could still help us understand why, why HPE, why Superdome? Well, I'd like to touch back on the business mission critical aspect. And so, MAG is a, being a manufacturing company, it's all about getting product out the door. So, that's where we need that mission critical availability of our ERP system as well as our hardware. And I think, as I stated before, the business analytics, I think, is a compelling factor as well. Okay, so becoming more data driven and using that data to, what, firm up the supply chain? We sales. Yeah, okay. Firm up supply chain, simplify, yeah. Exactly. It's really not that complicated. Have you, where are you in the journey for the transition? We have InformXA live, and we also have the AS100 live, and we're doing like comparative analysis. So, looking at performance factors, and we've seen with our MPAR CPU core count, like in performance and memory, that we've seen about a 45% increase in performance. So, we're still in like testing, and our next phase, we're going to be working on our CRM module. Okay, so talk about that a little bit. So, you're sort of in test now, making sure that you understand the system, QA'ing, making sure the software's going to work, learning, you're coming up that learning curve. Right, and you've got your production and your development environments, and so that's how we work with our programming team and our production and engineers to test and move things into production. Okay, and the timeframe for that is months, is it weeks, is it half a year? I think it's, yeah, probably half a year. Okay, so six months. So, six months you'll now go into production, is that right? Realistically, because we can't impact production. I mean, that's just like I said, we have to have product out the door. Number one priority, we want to get there, we want to be on the Windows platform, we want that business analytics, but we want to do it and maintain our system availability. So, how do you, that's not trivial, what you're describing. So, how do you transition? So, you've got a system running today on the AS400, that's your production system, and then at some point you're going to turn that off. Is it a hard turn off or is it sort of a slow migration? I think it's going to be more by feature or module that we'll move over. Let's probably start with the simple stuff. Yeah, for example, our CRM module, that we don't have a CRM module today that we have to marry. So, that's an easier deploy for us compared to in our AS400, we have tens of thousands of custom programming, and so that we have to test and ensure that it meets our needs inside Inform. So, how does that work? You sort of freeze the current CRM code today? The developers move the databases and make it available to Inform. Okay, and then there's a training and a customer adoption, user adoption. Pilot groups to do testing. So, what do you, when you sit back in your review meetings or whatever and you set expectations for the business impact of this transition, what are those conversations like? What's the expectation? Kind of what's your incentive structure? Not the actual dollars, but the true North, the North Star. What are they, what is MAG asking you to do as the head of IT? And what are you measuring and what do you expect the business impact to be? Our ultimate goal is to leave the AS400 environment and be in a Windows platform. Okay, so that's- And then we, and across multiple and have synergistic applications that boost or provide information to sales to further our product and perhaps development of our product. Not only just sales, but further development. And how, how are you measured? Is it on budget, on time, high quality? Sure, manufacturing is always about on time delivery. I mean, that's one of the driving factors. But I mean, you're always concerned with quality, design. I think MAG can, I mean, 35 years in the business, it's quality and durability, I think is number one. Right, so Jeff, can you talk a little bit about what's going on in your market space? You mentioned in memory. Yeah, and I think that keys off of what Nina said, she really wants to take advantage of analytics, right? And that's what we see customers doing, right? Five, 10 years ago, it was always transactional database, a separate data warehouse. I'd, you know, extract, transload, transform load off to another solution. I'd run some analytics. Now it's becoming real time, right? So the analytics is done in memory and eventually we're going to go to transaction and analytics on the same data set at the same time. So I'm going to get rid of hardware. I'm going to get rid of time. And for us in data, time is money. So analytics is huge. This is a big thing. We talk about this a lot on theCUBE is bringing transaction systems and analytics systems together to really create what we call systems of intelligence, and affect business outcomes in near real time. So those sound like nice buzzwords, but is that reality? Can you actually do that? That's where we have to get to. That's why we have to leave the existing AS 400, which is obsolete technology, and move to this integrated Windows platform that will enable us to get there. But there's also- I believe that we can get there. Isn't there also a cultural aspect of this as well? Because as Jeff, as you were describing, you got these sort of separate systems, you got extract, transform load, go to the decision support expert, build a cube, or whatever it is. It just takes a long time. And now you're talking about operationalizing analytics. So can you talk about that a little bit? I think you really have to stay focused. You have to form projects. You have to have communication. You have to have a stakeholder buy-in in order to be successful at your project and your rollout. I think everyone has to be on the same page. And you are right, especially with an AS 400, and people coming from that programming world for AS 400, there is gonna, and they're green screen, right? They're used to their fast command line, and now they're gonna be moving to like a point and click Windows environment. And that's definitely transitional. You're gonna love it, believe me. Jeff, final thoughts? Yeah, and it's our ISV partners, like SAP and Microsoft, who are making that transition simple for customers. So the analytics software is there, you put it in memory, and you're making real-time business decisions that matter. So we've got customers doing it, and we're awfully glad Meg Light's on board to get it done as well. Excellent, well folks, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Nina and Jeff really appreciate it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. This is theCUBE, we're live from HPE Discover 2016, and we'll be right back after this short break.