 From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. And we always love when we get to talk to the practitioners and not just any practitioner, you know, CIOs obviously under huge pressures in general. But in today's day and age, you know, lots of pressures on the CIO. So happy to welcome to the program Rich Gagnon. He is the CIO from the city of Amarillo in Texas. Rich, thank you so much for joining us. Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. All right. So, you know, CIO in a city in Texas, why don't you give us a little bit of, you know, what your role entails, a little bit of your background and looking forward to your conversation. So my background is actually more from the private sector side of the house. Previous to coming to the city of Amarillo, I was the vice president of systems engineering for Palo Alto Networks for the Americas. For that, the global vice president of systems engineering for at five networks. And before that, the director of global infrastructure for GameStop. So I stepped into government with a very private sector, profit centered mindset, if you will, coming from very high growth companies. My role at the city is really to be an enabler for local government to drive not only IT direction, but as a smaller community, I also have to wear that the CISO hat and the data privacy officer hat. Pretty much anything when it comes to leadership of IT and technology as an enabler to the government, that role falls on me. Wow. So a pretty broad mandate that you have there. Rich, give us a little bit, you know, how does that span, you know, how many constituents do you have and your infrastructure, your IT, maybe you can sketch that out a little bit for us too. Sure. So, you know, I've had peers from the private sector ask me what's it like to actually lead in local government. And the best comparison I can come up with is someone like GE. I have 49 different subsidiaries, different departments that operate as individual business units. Only I don't have GE's money for their staff. We have 200,000 people and the departments we support span everything from the obvious, like public safety, police, fire, we have an airport, a public clinic, water treatment plants, public health, you know, there are streets, all the infrastructure departments. It's very diverse. Well, and with all of those constituents that you have, why don't you give us kind of the free COVID-19 discussion first, which is, you know, what are some of those pressures there, you know, from a budgeting standpoint, are there specific initiatives you've been driving and, you know, how are you responding to, you know, all those barriers? Sure. Well, coming in, it was a little jarring. City leadership was very transparent that the city had sort of stood still for about a decade. You know, I've come from a high growth environment where money was not the precious resource, really. It was always time. It was about speed to market. How do we get competitive advantage and move fast enough to maintain it? That was not the case here. I stepped into an environment where the limitations were CAT3 cable and switches that still ran CATOS, the year before I came in, the big IT accomplishment was finally completing the migration to Windows 7 in Office 2007. That's where we started. So over the past three years, I guess I'm starting my fourth year, we've got undergone massive transformation. I think my staff thinks I'm a bit of a maniac because we've run like we were being chased by a rabid dog. We have updated obviously the layer one infrastructure to replace the entire network. We've rolled out a new data center that's all hyper-converged that enabled us to move our security model from the traditional layer three firewall at the edge to a contextually-based data center with some regulation on east-west traffic and segregation. We have rolled out BDI in Office 2016 and Windows 10. It's been a lot. Yeah, it really sounds like you went through multiple-generation change there. It's almost like going a decade forward, not just one step forward. Bring us through a little bit of that transformation. Obviously there should be some clear efficiencies you had, but give us kind of the before and after as you started to deploy some of these technologies. Was there some re-skilling? Did you hire some new people? How did that all go? Very much so, and like everything, it starts with financials, right? All of the resources at the city with NIT were focused on operations. So there was literally no capital budget. As where typically you would update as you go and update infrastructure, what happened was as the infrastructure aged, the approach was to hire more staff to try to keep aging infrastructure up and running. That's a failing strategy. So by moving to HCI, we've actually recovered about 26% of our operating budget, which allowed us to move that money into innovation and infrastructure updating. It took a tremendous amount of re-skilling. Fortunately, the one thing that's been, I think, most surprising to me coming to local government is the creativity of the staff. They were hungry for change. They were excited by the opportunity to move things forward. So we spent an entire year doing nothing but training. We had a massive amount of budget poured into, let's bring the staff up to speed. Let's get as many vendors in front of them as possible. Let's get them educated on where the trends are going. What is hyper-converged architecture and why does it matter? What is DevOps and why is the industry heading that way? So as we, as I said, we started really layer two, three, established that, built out the new data center, and now our focus is now, we built that platform and our focus is starting to shift onto business relationship management. We've met with all 49 departments. We do that every six months. We're building 49 different roadmaps for every department on what applications are using. How do we help you modernize? How do we help you serve the citizens better? Because that's how IT serves the community. We serve the community by serving the departments that serve them directly and being an innovation engine, if you will, for local government to drive through new applications and ways to serve. So the transition has really started to happen as we've gotten that base platform out of the way and the things that were blocking us from saying yes, and we can do more. Oh, so Rich, it's been an interesting discussion. As the global pandemic has hit, so many people have talked about boy, I think about working from home or managing in this environment. If I was using 10 or 15 year old technology, I don't know how I'd, or if I'd be able to do any of what I had. So, I know Dell brought you over, you're talking HCI, so believe you're talking about VxRail as your HCI platform. Talk to us about what HCI enabled as you needed to shift to remote workforce and support that overall urgent need. It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we matured, I think they embraced the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments, but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so fervently, why it was so urgent to me. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. There wouldn't have been, we wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt with VxRail in place. In a week, we spun up hundreds of instant phones. We spun up a 75 person call center in a day and a half for public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative are understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. All right, so, Rich, you talked a bunch about the efficiencies that HCI put in place. How about that overall just management? You talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. You need to be able to do things much simpler. So how does the overall life cycle management fit into this discussion? It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, it took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive when we did make change. It overburdened. I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff that cost disruption to business. It wasn't cost efficient. And then you simple things like, I've worked for multi-billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production. Simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non-disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on life cycle management because it's greatly simplified and move those resources and reskill them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovated when a hundred percent of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. Well, it's definitely, it's a great proof point. So often you deploy a solution and when push cuts to shove, will it deliver on that value that we're hoping for? HCI has been around for quite a while, but a crisis like this, how can you move fast? How can your team respond? Congratulate your team on that. The Dell team has recently done a number of updates on the VxRail platform. I'm curious as someone that's been using the platform, what particularly is interesting to you and what pieces of that have the most relevance to your organization? There are a few. So we're starting to look at our SCADA environments, industrial controls, and we're looking at some processing at the edge in those environments. So the new D-series, the recognized D-series are interesting. There's some environments where that, some plant environments where that might really make sense to us. We've also partnered with our local counties and we have a DR site where being able to extend the network out to that DR site is going to be very powerful for us. And then there's just some improvements in vSphere that will allow us to do a little QA-ing, if you will, on new code before we roll it out. That I think will have a pretty huge impact for us as well. Excellent. So Rich, when you think about the services that you need to deliver to all of your constituencies, walk us through how the pandemic has affected the team, how you're making sure that your employees are taken care of, but that you can still deliver all of those services. So from an internal perspective, not running a legacy architecture has made that a whole lot easier. We've remoted most of the IT team. Our entire development team is at home. Most of our support team is at home. Most of the city is still at home. So being able to do that, one, just having the capability has been huge for us. But also from a business perspective, it's allowed most of our city functions just to keep running. So, you know, modified services for sure, but we're still functioning. And I just don't think that would have been capable. We wouldn't have been capable of supporting that even two and a half years ago. Yeah, so, Rich, we've talked a bit about your infrastructure. I'm curious, is the city, are you leveraging any public cloud environments or any specific SaaS solutions that are enabling some of what you're doing today also? Yes, and we could probably have a 30 minute discussion on what is hybrid cloud and what is multi-cloud, but in our instance, we are leveraging quite a bit of SaaS. We've migrated a lot of our services to SaaS offerings. We have also, we've spun up several applications in the cloud. I wouldn't call them truly hybrid. In my mind, hybrid is I'm able to take a workload and very seamlessly move it between my private infrastructure and one or more clouds. This is more workloads specifically assigned to public cloud. But yes, we've leveraged that simple things like Office 365 and Outlook, but just as powerful for us has been VDI and being able to offer a horizon to our employees at home and with my other hat on, still maintain the contextual based security, right? So I didn't have to open up the kingdom. I could still maintain the control that I need to to be able to sleep at night. Yeah, it's interesting. One of the questions I'd love to ask someone in your position is the role of data and how you think of security, how you think of the technology and put those together. Does it help that you wear both the ISO hat and the CIO hat? How do you think about leveraging data? Is there anything that you're sharing with other municipalities without giving up personal information? Yeah. It causes a lot of internal arguments, right? Because there's the two halves of my brain that the CIO hat that wants to roll out as much service as I can and be innovative. And the CISO hat of my brain that thinks about the exposure of the service that I'm about to roll out. That's part of where we're migrating now as we start to look into really our whole approach to data. We've got the platform in place where we're now really migrating our thinking into revamping the way we look at data. I have seven sources for the same data. How do I consolidate and have one source of truth? And where does that reside? My development team is really starting to migrate out of plastic development and more into the automation side of the house. And how are we interfacing with all of our vendors that's in review now? And how are we tying to third party apps? Yeah, that's really the point that we're at in our maturity that now the infrastructure is in place we're now migrating to what is our data plan? Excellent. Final question I have for you, Rich. Just love your thoughts on the changing role of CIO. I love the discussion you had at the beginning going from really the private sector, public sector. Obviously, unique pressures on all businesses right now dealing with the global pandemic. But how do you see the role of the CIO today and how's it from changing? I think there's an expectation that you bring value to the business, whether that's local government or retail or banking. I think the expectation is that you're not just managing an infrastructure or managing a team and providing service but how do you bring actual value to the organization that you serve? And that means you have to understand the business and all aspects of the business. I think you have to, at least I do as a CIO I have to spend this tremendous amount of time understanding my internal customer and what are they trying to accomplish and often to show them a new way that they just may not be aware of. So I think there's a little more expectation as a CIO that you're going to drive value to whatever businesses that you're serving. Well, Rich, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on being able to react fast. So glad that you were able to get the transformation project done ahead of this hitting because otherwise it would have been a very different conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay safe and thank you for watching theCUBE.