 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Edge 2016, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to IBM Edge, everybody. Hashtag IBM Edge, check out ibmgo.com for all the action. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Michael Lawley is here as the Senior Vice President of IT Health Plan Services. Mike, great to see you, welcome to theCUBE. Yes, thank you very much. I am having a blast here with you guys. Enjoyed your keynote this morning. It was pretty insightful. You have done so many different things. What a background, both professionally and personally, which hopefully you have time to get into the personal stuff. But give us the lay of the land of what you're doing now and what your role is at IT Health Plan. Yeah, to oversimplify it right now, we're really just preparing for open enrollment. We've picked up some really large clients. We've got great penetration and when open enrollment occurs, then that's when you start seeing the CPU start to go through the roof. So it's a fun time for us. The less errors, obviously, the smoother the ride, the less compute on demand I have to turn on. But that's the main thing. We're looking at stabilization and getting ready for capacity. The thing that struck me about your conversation this morning was from 2011 to 2014, the organization made a $100 million investment in tech. And the goal, I loved it, was win the business, keep the business, grow the business. It's like right out of Peter Drucker. That's what business is all about, right? And so that's a big bet, $100 million. Take us back to sort of the thinking behind that. Yeah, so you had a group of people, truly, truly gifted individuals in a room who were going through scenario planning. And the concept was, with all the uncertainty, how do you have solutions to uncertainty? And that was our tagline back then. So what they did was they figured out what from a percentage or what an estimate perspective the paths would look like and they put the technology in place, they invested, they prepared, and they also had some agility built in. So if things had shifted, they would have changed the business model a little bit. The thing that was also struck me was the outcome of that. Supposed to be like, okay, you spent $100 million, what'd you get? 480% growth, 300% revenue growth, 350% growth in headcount. So presumably it was success. I think that would be an understatement. When you look at the growth of this particular company and then you go in and you watch them work and you watch the talent, it's just truly impressive. I mean, I joked about it in the presentation, the dog catch in the car, but the truth to it is is they knew exactly what they were doing at that time period. They had a great plan and they knew what the true opportunity was. If you listen to the payers at that time period and you went to the different conferences, they were telling you, we really don't know what to do, we don't know what's next, we don't know what's going to change. Accountable Care Act was sort of shifting back and forth. So again, this smart group of people made the investment and here we are. Michael, there's a lot of buzz talking around digital disruption and kind of digital transformation. Does digital transformation mean something to you? What does it mean to your business? I think it's interesting the word just disruption. So go way, way back and think of how we started off with this thing called a mainframe and everyone said this new disruptive technology is coming along and the mainframe still stayed there but it adapted and it added value and then again, the next disruptive thing came along and I vividly remember having someone sit down with me one day and say, you know this thing called plug and play is going to put you out of business. So I put a lens or a filter on it when I hear disruptive and I try to look at it from a positive perspective. I call it an enabler. So what do we have? What can we add to it? How do we get synergies out of it? All right, the other thing we were talking a lot about especially at an IBM show is kind of the cognitive era. Best definition I've seen so far is really cognitive is a new way of kind of grappling and interacting with your data. How does your business changing the way that it interacts and works with data? So we're looking at, we use the word learning, right? So we look for a repetitive task. We look for ways to signal for unstructured data. We look for ways to structure data and we're sort of lumping that all into cognitive right now. We've done some work, we're in our infancy just being honest but we're definitely pushing down that path. I think we're going to really reap the benefits of that. Might be helpful. Can you help unpack that a little bit? In the early stages, what has kind of met expectations and what is kind of needed to a little bit of more maturity in your mind? Yeah, so I can't let too much of the cat out of the bag but starting off from a very simplistic perspective, if you're able to put a system on a network and let it just watch work activities and you want to take those repetitive work activities and then you want to remove them and automate them and then you want to go for the next set. And at the same time, what you're doing is you're allowing the humans to do the higher order units of work initially. So that's what I'm talking about in the infancy. We're going to start off with blocking and tackling and then you'll see us get much more sophisticated over time. What do you see as the role of IT in your shop? You know, we went through a wave of outsourcing, now it's, you know, what is differentiated in my shop versus, you know, what can I kind of automate? So I think these days there's no room in IT for ego. I think intensity needs to stay there but the ego needs to go out the window. The other thing is inclusion. There's so many people and so much intelligence and I'll call it scar tissue, it's one of my favorite words, that you can get into the room with and as long as you're getting everyone to contribute, you end up in a better place. You know, one of my goals with technology is to make sure that the conversations that occur in the room match the conversations over the water cooler. So inclusion's huge. So you mentioned in your talk today that 50% of the healthcare organizations have been attacked multiple times and I wrote down a note, the other 50% just don't know it. So I wonder if you could talk about security, how that's evolved, how that is a challenge and how you and your colleagues are dealing with it. So defense in depth, which we've heard of for a long time. You know, if you look at every place you can be potentially breached, whether it's a host intrusion prevention perspective, a WAF, a web application firewall, traditional firewalls, IPS, IDS, I mean, I could ramble on with acronyms. You literally have to look all the way through your stack. You need to just secure it, monitor it, you need to make sure that you're looking at the right things. But I will tell you, the single most important thing to do is to secure the human. So we train employees on what to do, what not to do. We look at fishing, we look at spear fishing, we look at wailing. You know, if you look at a lot of the real bad things that have gone on, they've typically involved a human doing something. There's some outliers, but for the most part, that's it. So secure the human. Yeah, we were talking to Jason earlier today and I made the statement, bad human behavior, Trump's great technology every time. But security is used to not really be a board level issue. Is it today and or should it be? It has to be. It has to be at all levels, not just at the board. If you think about the slightest thing that can occur and then ripple out into the news, even if it's not worded properly, it can come across the wrong way. So it's not about covering it up. It's about transparency, but also being safe. So, you know, most of our business is built off of trust. So security gives trust and therefore that helps with the geography of the relationships. So Mike, you've been involved in hundreds of M&A situations over some period of time. How has technology's role in the context of M&A changed? Well, if you go back to when I was doing M&A, the healthy on days back when I was still young and beautiful and had hair, you know, we were really looking at the products and the components around the patient care. So think of a transaction in a doctor's office. And we were trying to put together a portfolio of services around that patient, whether it was phlebotomy, the actual claims, the billing, those types of things. There really wasn't a big emphasis on the technology because what we figured at that time period was you could just go in and stone hinge it or you could migrate it and it wasn't that big of a deal. Now as you get down to the M&A activities that you're seeing today, they're paying a lot of attention to the actual technology. And there's a reason for that. There's a cost in that migration. There's also this interesting component where people have built up years of knowledge that you can't just easily harvest. And unless you transition that entire staff to wherever you're going, you're going to lose a bunch of this. So again, now you're getting stability issues, potential security issues. There's all sorts of things that you can do bad and the customers just won't like it. So you guys support, what is it? $14 billion in production in your network, in policies? Premium's collected. Okay, and so you mentioned today a lot of CRM, billing, premium collections, customer service, systems, and the like. And I presume that part of that $100 million investment was to prepare for what you called spiky demand. How did Obamacare affect that demand and how we were able to handle it? Yeah, so if you look at the exchanges, right? We'll just keep it real simple. People going into the exchanges, they needed a way to enroll. So take something as simple as the form that comes from the enrollment process is called an 834. A lot of the payers, if they received an 834, they were fine. The problem is, let's say on Saturday afternoon you enrolled. Saturday evening you realized, wait a minute, I'm married and have kids. I need to add them too. So they have these things called stacked 834s and the systems just weren't set up for those scenarios. And there's a bunch of other scenarios that are just like this, that HPS was able to solution. Again, go back to solutions for uncertainty, right? It's like a Y2K problem. How about your relationship with IBM over the years? What's it been like and what are you doing here? Yeah, so my relationship with IBM goes back many years. I started off with the AS 400 implementations and JD Edwards One World and World and I just was impressed with the technology and how stable it was and moved forward through my career. It's always been an important staple within my data centers. The reason I came here today is to tell a little bit about the value proposition of the strategic relationship that we have with IBM and they've been a great partner and they've helped us through with solutioning for the spikes that we've had and it is spiky. So I got to ask you the personal question. So you've got a martial arts background. You talked about some of the early UFC guys. You helped train or you fought against them. I'm older than you too. So I grew up in the days of when boxing was in its renaissance with Ali and Frazier and Duran and Leonard and so forth. But now today you see a whole new wave. So what's your background there? Tell us a little bit about that. So I am a certified Muay Thai instructor and I've been doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu for a while. I didn't actually fight in the UFC but I did train with a lot of the UFC champions. I was given a choice many years ago. UFC wasn't always mainstream, right? So to be a mixed martial artist, the back then it was called No Holds Barred and it had all these other different names. Bracket fighting, smokers. But I was pulled to the side early in my career and someone said to me, you know, this is not mainstream and that's a little bit uncivilized to climb into a cage and fight. They said, you might want to tone it down a little bit. So from a brand management perspective, I kind of kept that to myself. It's kind of interesting. Now years later, it's kind of cool that this guy does MMA on the side to stay in shape. I think it's very cool. How have you applied that sort of those learnings, the grit that it takes to be in that world to what you do with technology? Well, a lot of it has to do with, and I'll use one sector, emotional stamina. So you're at work with people working really, really hard and if you've got good emotional stamina and you're able to weather through someone else's bad moment or some tough project, you come out the other end much better and people respect you for it. You know, at the same time, I also have been able to test myself to see what I can truly do between that and six years in the army, right? I know where my outer limits are. It's also taught me a lot about respect and how to treat people and how I want to be treated. So martial arts can be very humbling, by the way. I'll bet. So you keep the intensity, but again, you lose the ego. I'm humbled right now, but so all right, what's next for you? Futures, give us a glimpse. Well, you know, we were obviously acquired a year ago by WIPRO, so we're part of the WIPRO family now. And we're looking to leverage scale and scope of the parent company. We've had some really cool partnerships. We've got some projects underway. We'll talk a little bit later about moving our data centers into their data centers. We're going to look at some consolidation, some synergies. So you'll see it in the news. There's some really cool stuff going on with the parent company. Great. Well, Mike, thanks very much for sharing your insights coming on theCUBE. Thank you. I enjoyed it. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. This is IBM Edge. We're live from Vegas. We'll be right back.