 Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. We're here at the San Diego Convention Center for Cisco Live 2019 and you're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage, helping extract the signal from the noise. I'm Stu Minoon and we've had three days wall-to-wall coverage. My co-host Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin are all in the house. And I'm really excited to actually sit down one-on-one with one of the users at this user conference, the 30th anniversary conference actually for Cisco, with their users and partners over 28,000. So speaking for all of them, right? We have Sebastian Morissette, who's an IT architect specialist at Intac Financial Corporation, coming to us from beautiful Montreal, Canada. Exactly. All right, thank you so much for joining us. So, Sebastian, first of all, is this your, how many Cisco Lives have you been to? Honestly, this is my first. Oh, absolutely, exciting for that. My first one I came to was actually 10 years ago. I joked at the 20th anniversary. They went back 20 years to have some 80s bands. They had the Bengals and Devo on. And now in the 30 year, they moved 10 years forward. They have two great bands from the 90s, Weezer and Foo Fighters. So, your first time at Cisco Live, give us your general impressions of the show. Well, actually, it's been very great. I've had a lot of appearances I had to do as well. So, I got some sessions in. I did some work as well. So, it's amazing to see how these events unfold, right? Like the sheer size of this thing and how many people are involved, how many booths, how many technical sessions you can have. So, I was very pleased. I'm here with a lot of people from my team as well from Intac. So, we get the chance to do stuff outside of the work area as well. So, it's interesting, right? It's giving us this opportunity to really deep dive into what we love, which is technology, but at the same time, spend some time together outside of work. That's awesome. We've had gorgeous weather here in San Diego. Hope you definitely get to see the sights. Before we geek out on some of the technology, just give our audience a little bit about Intac and the insurance business, but give us a little bit about the history of the company and core focus. Okay, well, Intac is a company that was, they grew as acquisitions with acquisitions. We've typically, we were ING Canada back in, before 2010. And afterwards, we were publicly traded now, so we're Intac Financial Corp. Typically, we're the number one PNC insurer in Canada, and we've been working with different partners to build our data center 2.0 initiative, which is kind of a new offering of modern IT services within Intac. Okay, great. And just to, your purview in the company, and just the comment about the company is, you talk about those transformations, M&A is something we see a lot in your industry and put some extra special challenges in place when you're dealing with that. But tell us a little bit about what's under your role and scope as to kind of locations, people, however you measure, what boxes, reports, or whatever. Okay, well, typically my role is lead architect within the infrastructure and security group for North America. Intac, through acquisition, we actually bought one beacon insurance last year. So typically, we now have a US presence as well in specialty insurance, specialty lines. So typically, whenever we're looking at different technologies, we look at the skill sets that we have, we look to see what can be the better half for us to accelerate and be more agile in how we actually consume technology. So in some cases, whatever we're looking at, building up these new features like I was talking for Data Center 2.0, it happens that some of the technologies and the skill sets we have were with Cisco, which is why we are here today with the team. All right, so Sebastian, you talk about Data Center 2.0, a transformation there. At the organizational level, is that what you, is it branded Data Center transformation? Does the word digital transformation come up in your discussions? Yeah, Data Center 2.0 is actually kind of the project name that we've been giving this initiative for the past two years, but it really is at the essence of digital transformation. What we're doing is we're typically taking training wheels to the cloud. So we're building a non-prem private cloud offering with multi sites, but we have three sites in the scope right now. And the goal is really to actually allow our business to expand into the cloud while being in a secure on-prem environment. When we get to that maturity level where we feel we're ready to actually really go into public cloud, our software engineering teams, our development teams will have experienced it on-prem safely and will have a confidence level to bringing them there. So it has been transformational also because we decided to push DevOps culture as far as we can from an infrastructure team. So we were trying to get all the adoption from our software engineering folks to actually structure themselves, bring on DevOps team, and that we can share with them so they could actually be more agile and get a lot more done without having to depend on us and spend a lot of time waiting for VMs or stuff. So we're trying to accelerate that. Awesome, I love that, because sometimes you hear, okay, we're going to 2.0, it's basically a fancy refresh, but we're going to keep things mostly the same. When I hear DevOps, I know that culture and organization is something that is a key piece of that. I have to ask you, without getting down into the pedantics of this, when you say a private cloud that's in your data center, we understand some of the governance and reason what you have, but how do you determine whether, what was your guiding line as to how is this a cloud versus just some new virtualized environment? I've had the chance to have great executive sponsorship from my senior vice president. Typically, we were looking at how can we access the cloud? The way I approached it was overhauling what we do was not the route to go. What I asked him to do is say, trust me, I'll start with a clean slate and we will build a brand new landing area for cloud native applications and new methodologies for modern IT services. So typically in the end, we didn't overhaul anything that we had. We built a brand new sandbox for Intak to be able to work with. So we went from disaster recovery to business continuity in that move. We've built a three-site approach because when I was looking at my CAPEX expenditure, if I was building two sites to be fully resilient and be business continuity, I would be spending 200% of my capital to actually build up that capacity. When you go to three sites, it seems awkward, but you just need 50% on each site of your capacity to ensure 100% of coverage of your requirements. So in the end, you're actually spending 100%, 150% of your capacity or your CAPEX to buy the compute. So there's an incentive there as well. So to answer your question more precisely, it's very easy for us to see how it's a cloud because we're not operating it the same way. We're operating our other environment and since we started from scratch, every process has been revised. We haven't kept everything we had before. So we had the chance to build something brand new for that specific offering that our software and engineering groups were asking us to do. All right, that's exciting stuff there. When you look at these multi-site deployments, I think back in my career and I worked on some of these environments. Management, security, and networking are absolutely critical. I hear, oh, okay, I've got 50% in each. Oh my God, what if a site gets isolated and I can't talk to those other two? So luckily, I'm guessing Cisco has something to do with your Rola. We're obviously here at Cisco Live. So give us a little bit inside the architecture and especially what kind of Cisco pieces are you using? All right, well, you know, typically the way our story started was kind of weird. The first thing we've done is we've actually went to Cisco to redesign a DMZ and we got out from Cisco Montreal team with an idea to not just change and buy ACI switches for the DMZ, but actually rebuild our whole design to integrate ACI into the fabric. And then when you start talking about firewalls or switches, they tell you, well, with ACI, you have contracts. So it really started that way. So we built an ACI fabric with the Cisco Hyperflex Hyperconversion infrastructure as our compute layer. So typically think of it as intact as building our new version of a software defined data center. So with building that, we have all the components. So we have the virtualization like you spoke of earlier, which is running like, you know, VMware onsite on top of the Hyperflex. And then we have the ACI. Since we had three sites, we topped it off with the multi-site orchestrator to be able to manage consistent policies around all of our three sites. And in the end, we needed to have an orchestrator to be able to deploy the content onto that. And when we were looking at it early on, it was Clicker when Cisco purchased Clicker, we were looking at finding a cloud management platform. So we ended up using Cloud Center, which is now Cloud Center Suite. And in the way we were using it, which was a little atypical from the typical way clients are using Cloud Center today, we're taking it into the data center and out to the cloud. Whereas when I was talking with Kip Compton earlier this week, he was saying, you know what, sometimes our clients buy it more for the cloud first. And I was like, well, we have like the inverse story of exactly how we did the opposite, but it works as well. So typically, where we stand today, I have the three sites, we're able to deploy with Cloud Center. We've got multi-site on top of that. And the idea it really is that I spoke about training wheels earlier, but we're taking them off, right? In the next couple of weeks, we're starting to look into negotiations with public cloud providers, trying to move towards the public cloud. And you know, there's exciting news that came out from Cisco this week while I was here about the fact that now, you know, they're forecasting a lot more collaboration with Microsoft and AWS, and now they have all the three major cloud providers covered with ACI anywhere. So that means all of our security that you were talking about earlier will now have a consistent policy model applied all everywhere. So to be honest, I'm not too concerned about if we did a good choice a couple of years back. I think we're in our sweet spot right now. Yeah, and you're right. It's a different story than we've generally heard from Cisco and some customers, which is I have all of these public clouds and I have my data center and I'm looking for some piece to help tie it together and that the Cloud Center suite is there. So you feel you're confident with the platform that you chose and that's going to give you the flexibility as to whichever public cloud or public cloud you choose. Are you at the point there that do you know which public cloud you're going to be on or maybe it's a little too early? Well, to be honest, we're keeping our options open. You know, we have different providers that are offered, you know, the major public when there's Amazon, there's Azure, there's Google Cloud. We're not closing any options. It's really a question of us to do the same secure approach that we've done right now with this offering to really go one at a time, make sure that we're able to nail it down, make it secure, that we get all the information back. So I'm not at a possibility right now to disclose which ones we're dealing with because we're still negotiating, but in the end, we're not limiting ourselves. We just want to be able to scale. Right, you're confident that the Cisco solution that you've choose will give you the flexibility no matter which one you use or if you use multiples or a need to make switches along the way. The question I have for you on that is when you look at multi-cloud, one of the things that are challenging for companies is how do I make sure I've got the skill sets because workloads might be portable, networks might be connected, but understanding how I manage each of those environments. So do you feel Cloud Center Suite is going to help you through that? You know, what do you see as you look out at your roadmap as to what that's going to mean for your DevOps team and the people managing this environment as it spreads out to the public cloud? Actually, I'm feeling really confident because you know, especially after seeing a couple of sessions of what Roland Acra and KIP have announced for the data center and for the cloud piece, we're seeing more and more normalization being done by Cisco to actually allow us to be confident in the fact that on-prem we're doing ACI and that our policies are going to be mapped to the constructs of the different cloud providers. So for me, what it means is I don't necessarily need to become specialized in how we're going to be operating inside of a cloud. We need to make sure that we get the proper policies built into the different products. You know, Cisco's branding it the anywhere, right? They have the A checks anywhere, the ACI anywhere. And typically that's what we like about it is I can have one consistent set of skill sets and allow the people to use it. One thing I found interesting about this week and it's not necessarily to do like more promotion for Cisco is like the cloud first ACI, right? So being able to be starting with ACI in the cloud, I found that was kind of interesting because when you know how the multi-site orchestrator works means apps you build out in the cloud, you're going to be able to pull back in through the MSO and push it back on-prem or anywhere in other clouds afterwards. So I found that was very intuitive of them to go to that route of allowing us to, you know, transparently migrate apps between sites. All right, so Sebastian, you're using a lot of the latest and greatest from Cisco. You talk about the A checks, the ACI, the cloud center suite, what advice do you give to your peers out there? And they say, you know, I've used Cisco products for a long time, Cisco makes great products but, you know, simplicity and management across the product lines was something that, you know, needed some work. What does the Cisco of today look like? You know, what's working well? What still would you like to see them progress on? Well, you know, for us, one of the things that was nice, like I mentioned earlier is we're typically going greenfield. So I didn't have a lot of the issues that other companies might be facing if they're trying to take their brownfield and actually make it into what we've built. So my first advice would be if you're able to get the executive sponsorship to build a greenfield environment, there's nothing in cloud native applications that is, you know, symmetric with the traditional environment of a data center. It's completely different ways of working. We have one week sprints. We patch everything as it comes out. If an application goes into the environment, it needs to be functional with that patching cycle of almost every timer at n or n minus one. So my thing is think about applications as being the center of what you actually need and not the infrastructure. Let the infrastructure be what it is because you're going to be anywhere, right? So that's one of the things I would say from what you said about Cisco and the integration, you're right. We have lived a couple of items like that in the last two years and a half. However, I've noticed that these new software components like clouds and everything, not necessarily the hardware part, Cisco nails hardware, like it works. They've been doing it for years. The thing is with these software teams, they're very customer driven. We have access to the engineers now. I mean, we've had meetings with the Canadian execs, Rola Dagger's team. We were able to get access to the developers and the teams here in the US. So every company has challenges. I would be lying if I told you that even at Intak, we don't have silos and we don't have issues sometimes with different teams managing together. But I feel as if at least for the technologies that we're using, they've done good work for us to actually help us get through that. I'm just interested, Sebastian, you bring that up because I look at, you say, okay, you've got a green field environment. Awesome, we can go do some new tech. Well, let's throw in there the DevOps and let's change all the other pieces. You're like completely overhauling your environment. How much of that were there some new team members that came in as part of that? Or, you know, I look, people, process and technology, sounded like you were taking it all on as once. Did that work well? Would you have, if you look back, would you have changed some of the ordering and maybe, you know, gotten one piece before the other or did it help to kind of, you know, start brand new, start fresh and get everything going? Well, I wouldn't redo the part of starting fresh. However, you know, it helped us get really good pace and work, you know, it's our first agile project as an infrastructure group. So all of that was great learning experience. The only thing I would say is, you need to make sure your organization is ready for that level of change because it's one thing to have one VP sponsorship to actually build out this type of approach. But where we struggled a little bit was afterwards getting the rest of our IT organization to kind of want to get on board. Because we are building something new, the traditional environment is not disappearing and we're telling our software engineering groups, here's a new area where you can play in. But, you know, typically I'd say that it's been well received. We have not had the need to build new skill sets because we're doing infrastructure as code. So typically, a lot of the stuff we're building, we're making sure it's automated. So that way it's very nice and lean and when we build a new site, we have a lot of automation already built in so we can properly just deploy. So lessons learned like you've asked me, I'd say that typically I'd probably do much of what I did the same way, but I would work a little bit more on the people area just to make sure that the message is clearly understood that what we're building is for the future of intact and make sure that we spend a little bit more time managing that aspect because for the technology, it's fine. For the time it took and everything, it's fine. It's really people. The change is significant to most of them and when you've been doing something for a long time and someone comes up and disrupts, it's like if we were disrupting our own company, right? So typically I'd say that would be something that I would say to people, manage that properly or you will have a lot more work to do inside of that initiative to actually gain everybody's momentum and get them to be behind you. Well, Seth Bastian, I really appreciate you walking us through all of your transformation. I wanted to just give you the final word. Sounds like you've got great access to Cisco, really hate or happy what you've done. Final word is to your expectations coming into a show like this and what your takeaways will be from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego. Well, outside from the amazing weather you mean, or yeah? So typically I like the event. I've been to other events before. Like I said, this is my first time at Cisco but what I've seen is that Cisco's really into getting their customers to understand their technology. So they're really present. So I really liked how we were given the opportunity to do hands-on labs and actually learn new technologies. So typically great experience coming here and great opportunities and thanks so much for having us. All right, Bastian Morissette, congratulations to your team at Intact and thank you so much for sharing this story. Thank you so much. All right, we've got a little bit more left here of three days wall-to-wall coverage, Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego for Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE.