 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Paul Hodge, who's the global marketing manager of Honeywell Process Solutions. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu. All right, so Paul, you have to tell us, you know, so Honeywell is a company, I think many people are. The Process Solutions, maybe you tell us a little bit about that part of the organization and what your role there. Sure, sure. So yeah, Honeywell, multinational conglomerate, 130,000 people, sort of $40 billion. Honeywell Process Solutions is then a subdivision within Honeywell that serves the manufacturing industry. So we go through and provide goods and services that allow people to go through and automate their plants, whether those pharmaceuticals or refining and those types of things. Yeah. All right, and your role here coming to the show, you're actually a partner of VMware. Yes, we are. Sometimes we've got tons of practitioners here. So tell us a little bit, you know, manufacturing, I think I know a few places where, you know, that makes a lot of sense for VMware, but tell us a little bit about the history of the partnership and your role there. So we've been partners with VMware since 2010. So it's been a long, long time partnership and we've been bringing virtualization into the manufacturing industry because we're typically quite conservative as a company in terms of adopting technology. So it really takes an automation leader like Honeywell to go through and drive a new technology into the industry. So we've been doing that since, yeah, since 2010. And yeah, this week where we've been going through and talking about our new HCI, hyperconversion infrastructure sort of solution that we've been doing sort of with VMware and along with Dell EMC, yeah, that goes through and takes that a step further into our industry. Wow, so that's pretty interesting. From a, you know, I've worked in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing organization, and automation of IT is pretty difficult because of regulatory issues, et cetera, safety. What are some of the challenges that Honeywell is addressing in automation, specifically around VMware products? Sure, sure. I think the number one thing for our industry is purely simplicity. That people in our industry, they're not IT geeks. They don't have all of this knowledge. They don't have a storage administrator out there. So we have to go through and do all of that for them and take all of the complexity sort of out of the product. So it needs to be simple, but it just needs to be reliable as well. Like, I mean, we're dealing with your refineries and pharmaceutical plants and things like that. So the things just cannot stop. So you need the simplicity with the reliability and availability and have both of them in a sort of a package that's ready to go. And the other complexity is that we need about to deliver this anywhere around the world. And that's the other reason why it needs to be simple because it's not just going to North America. It's going to Europe. It's going to the Middle East. It's going to all different places. Yeah. All right, well, you say simplicity and anytime we've been talking about hyperconverged infrastructure, simplicity is usually the top thing. It's one of the big benefits. It seems like a natural fit there. Maybe take a look, you know, what is the solution? What's made up of it? You said Dell EMC is part of it. Of course, VMware is part of it. How is it different from say, you know, the VX rail that Joe's been offering, you know, VSAN hit 10,000 customers. What differentiates this compared to everything else that's available? So we're taking the VSAN, which is absolutely, as you were saying, 10,000 customers out there, very mature, very reliable. And we're taking it and sort of marrying it with the Dell EMC FX2 solution there, which is an extremely powerful platform and flexible platform for going through and running sort of VSAN on top of it. So we've taken those two best in breed products there and we've gone through and built a reference configuration that's customized and optimized for the manufacturing industry. Yeah, it's interesting. Keith, I mean, I remember in the FX2 launch, everybody's like, wait, is this an HCI solution? Will it be there? Will this be a platform for it? I don't know that, is there anybody else leveraging that for this type of solution yet or? So VSAN is a very, very popular sort of platform for, yes, oh, sorry, FX2, thank you. Yeah, I know VSAN is, but the marrying of those two together, is that a standard offering that was out there or is this something that you thought of? Yeah, it certainly is. I think there might be a VSAN-ready sort of version of that as well. But the reason why it's quite popular is because I can go through and have four VSAN nodes in the one FX2 chassis. So I can have a VSAN in a box with the FX2 solution, which just makes it quite a nice fit. But it's really, the hardware platform aside, the value add that Honeywell's providing is just really the integration of those products, building a reference design that's optimized for our industry and testing out all of the stack and delivering that for our market. So talking about building out the stack specifically for a manufacturing, can you talk through who's the end customer, who's actually buying the solution? As you say, someone may not have a storage administrator, are you guys selling to IT or manufacturing operations? Mainly to the manufacturing part of the business, which is why it needs to be so simple. It's because those IT resources that you would normally have in the IT side of the business, they're just not there. And so we go through and sell to our customers there, refiners, pharmaceutical plants and things like that. And typically Honeywell is the one that's then engineering the overall solution to solve their manufacturing problem. So we deliver it to our own engineers and our own engineers then customize that to go through and solve a manufacturing problem. But in our industry, there's typically quite a big separation between the IT part of the organization and the OT, if you will, part, and which is why the simplicity is such a big part of what we do. Yeah, Paul, can you expand on that at all? Something we've, from the research side, been looking at kind of the IT, OT. Sure. You know, what you're hearing from customers. Sure. So I think the main reason, traditionally why that separation has been there is just on the OT side, there's very, very different needs in terms of reliability and availability and criticality and what happens if certain things just go wrong. And traditionally those skills have been in a separate part of the organization to the IT part of the organization. So in some companies, those two worlds are absolutely converging and IoT is certainly a big thing that's driving that convergence. But in other organizations, they are still remaining separate. It's just the cultural way that that company has gone through and run itself. So I think whether they are merging those worlds or whether they're staying separate is really changes on a corporation by corporation basis. So let's talk a little bit more about that OT customer. One of the things that's been my experience, you walk into a manufacturing floor, you'll see a system that's 15 years old easily. They treat these things, this is a tool. And that tool is just there to do a function within the manufacturing process. But with all of the malware and the encrypted and shutting down entire operations perspective, how are you helping OT get to a point where they accept I guess the flexibility that's needed in operations to support something like a FX2 on their data center floor with running VCN? Sure, sure. I think first of all, it is that simplicity. I mean, if it's too complicated, then it just will not be accepted for something like that. So that simplicity and the reliability as we've already spoken about there. But I think Honeywell there is there as well, helping that OT side of the business to be able to go through and deploy a system of that level of complexity. Because as you're saying there, it is very different in terms of the 15 year old sort of thing that they might be upgrading from. But it delivers just so many benefits from them. I mean, going from a hundred servers, which is what I say some plants typically might go through and have, and you're just going to maybe two FX2-based clusters of our systems there, it's just a massive reduction in terms of hardware. And with each piece of hardware, we remove that space and power and cooling and maintenance and everything like that that goes away with it. All right, Paul, talking about different architectures, you mentioned IoT, so have to imagine that's having significant impact on your industry. It is. Walk us through that. What are you seeing? What's Honeywell's role there? You know, what are your customers doing? It's actually an interesting area for Honeywell process solutions because, I mean, first of all, we've been doing IoT for 30 years in terms of really from a Honeywell process solution. You were the hipster IoT guy. Really? Oh, that's good. That's a compliment. You were doing IoT before it was cool, I guess. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, we've been out there doing that. I mean, our job in Honeywell process solutions is to take field data, marry it with an edge device, create value there, and sometimes just make that available on the internet. Now, but getting back to your question though, is that the IoT wave though is changing how we go through and do things. I mean, first of all, is that there's data that's out there that previously people wouldn't have considered valuable. Okay, so that data, they're trying to extract that data out there, and so we're, I guess there's a wave, if you will, of trying to get that previously non-vailable data out of the field. So that's one part there. Sometimes as well, projects are very, very geographically dispersed. So traditionally you would have had like a plant infrastructure and it would have been a self-contained area, but now it can be over a very wide geographical area. So you've got to have a controller, which potentially is on the internet, and have that be highly secure all the way back to then the sources that need to go through and consume that. So that's a difference and how it's going through and impacting us. But I think as well, there's a, it's I guess building an awareness out there in the market of trying to go through and extract more information and more intelligence out of the data that people are already getting and driving new waves there as well. So what are some of the lessons you're helping, especially OT understand when they move from this isolated manufacturing network to this distributed network that they're extracting value from, but they're also exposing security risks and just, you know, control risks. They're not used to operating at this multi-manufacturing facility perspective from a IT perspective. They're in essence becoming IT. What are some of the pitfalls you're helping them to avoid? Sure. I think security is a great one that you've just gone through and mentioned there is that anything that we're data that's running the plant by first and foremost needs to be secure in terms of going through and doing that. So I think that's one of the first things is how you go through and design that system and make it secure. And so I think that's one of the areas there. But also to extract data and value out of it requires infrastructure to be able to store the data, to be able to go through and allow third parties to do analytics and other types of things on top of that infrastructure. So Honeywell's doing a lot to provide that back-end infrastructure that people can go through and do data mining and do analytics and solving those new problems on that infrastructure. So this power of FX to the Dell EMC reference architecture the VMware vSAN gives a awful lot of compute. I think competitors like AWS will come and say, you know what, AWS snowball edge is designed for this big data use case where we can ingest IoT data at the edge, do some light processing on it. What are you running from a practical perspective that you're seeing users say, you know what, that just isn't enough. We need this power of the FX to this Dell EMC reference architecture and vSAN. Sure, sure. So I think it's serving a different market segment. So absolutely there's a market segment out there that says, I'm prepared to take my data and put it into one edge device and send it to a cloud into AWS or to wherever, okay? And that is absolutely a market segment that's out there. But there's another segment of market and it is quite large for manufacturing that says, no, the data that I'm ingesting needs to stay within my corporate control, okay? Within the boundaries of the corporation, okay? And it's those types of customers there that need that on-premise compute capacity to be able to ingest that data, to be able to display it to operators, to be able to go through and do other, solve other problems sort of with that data. It needs to be local. And that couldn't just be because they just don't trust it, it's sort of, because remember we lag in terms of our adoption. We're sort of laggards as an industry in general. So yeah, so I think it's a lot of those types of reasons there. Yeah. So I'm kind of curious about a practical sales process. You know, again, these OT folks don't look at their traditional 100 racks and say, we need to do something with this. We need to change it. If it works, why change it? There's no need in manufacturing. Sure. What's the catalyst for change? Sure, absolutely. I think in a lot of these industries, they're losing people in terms of the people that sort of run those types of plants there. So I think the first catalyst for change is I had all of this equipment that was taking me all of these people to go through and maintain it. I just don't have those people anymore. I need to do more with less. So by removing those pieces of equipment there, I make myself sort of more efficient, not only in terms of the maintenance, if those pieces of equipment there, but there's always ongoing changes that need to be made to these environments as well. So you need to be able to go through and deploy new virtual machines in a far more agile environment. And when you are dealing with, say, physical pieces of equipment, if I wanted to deploy a new node, I would need to order that node from a supplier. I would then need to go through and commission it, install the software and rack it and then do all that. I mean, that's months and months and months of work and effort. With a virtual machine, I just go through and deploy it and I'm done. Yeah. Paul, just want to get your final take. VMworld, the show itself, kind of the experience as a partner, what's your takeaway from it? It's been fantastic. I mean, for me, VMworld is just always about the relationships and the conversations that go through and take place, whether that be with partners like VMware or whether it be with sort of other suppliers that I go through and do business with. And everyone's here. Okay, I mean, it's just one of the events where it's just you're only limited by your ability to get your calendar organized and see all the people that you want to do. That's the only limit of what you can achieve here. But it's just been a fantastic event this year and Honeywell's been glad to be here. Paul Hodge, Honeywell Process Solutions. Really appreciate you joining us and absolutely agree a thousand percent. I'm sure Keith would attest to this also. If you're not at this show, you need to be here next year. If you're in the European one, you should go over there. So many conversations. We're happy to bring you a number of them, give you just a taste or a flavor of what's been happening at VMworld 2017. Thank you for joining us for three days of program. We're going to be wrapping up shortly, but all that goes on the website and check it all out. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.