 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live on day one in Las Vegas of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. And we have a couple guests joining us now. We've got Ria Barrett, the VP of Product Marketing for Data Protection at Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. And we've also got KJ Johnson from FieldCore. You are a senior systems engineer. Welcome, KJ. Thank you very much. So KJ, we'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about FieldCore. I know you're a GE company, but what is it about FieldCore that you guys do that makes you unique and how are you working with Dell EMC? Okay, so FieldCore is a global service provider in the power services sector. Our customers are governments in large countries. We service and build power plants all over the world. We're in the power generation business. So anything that generates power, that could be wind, it could be water, it could be traditional oil and gas, it could be nuclear, anything that generates power. Basically what FieldCore does is we service it and we keep the lights on around the world, especially in, we're 92 countries. So other countries don't have the infrastructure that the United States has and experience outages a little more frequently than us. So our job is to get the power back on as quickly and as efficiently as possible. So last fall in the U.S., we were slammed with very, a lot of natural disasters, including Hurricane Irma. You guys at FieldCore had a critical situation last fall when that hurricane struck. Tell us about that and how working with Dell EMC Technologies, you were able to recover. Okay, so last year they changed the forecast on Hurricane Irma from coming up the east coast of the state to coming up the west coast and they were projecting it to hit the Tampa Bay Area, which put all of our production systems like directly in its path. So with them projecting the storm to hit us within about three to four days, we weren't prepared for it. I was on a call with all of the directors and they asked me what was our level of preparedness for this storm? So I told them that as far as data protection, we had replication, that was fine. We were replicating all of our SAP Oracle databases, all of our email via exchange and file systems to our data recovery center that was in Atlanta via Dell EMC Recovery Point Appliances. So that was fine. We had a recovery point objective of less than two minutes. So we could go back two minutes and be up and running. The problem was, had the storm hit us and we had to then throw over and go live at our DR facility in Atlanta because Tampa was down, we wouldn't have any way to have backups during that time that we were live. So that was a gap that I identified. They subsequently asked me, is there something that could be done in three days? Got any magic beans? Yeah, exactly. So I'm going, hmm, I'll do everything in my power to make something happen. So basically I got on the phone and called my Dell EMC data protection rep, Matthew Sadler, and he was actually at a Dell management bootcamp in Boston, I believe, at the headquarters. And he actually took my call. He snuck out of the meeting and answered the call, which was an all day meeting, which was that enabled us to do what we did. He offered a solution that we could actually use virtual appliances because we had not rolled out our DR equipment yet. Wasn't even scheduled to be delivered for two weeks. So he showed up the licensing. He called a sales engineer who got in touch with me. His name was Dominic Greco. He's based out of Pittsburgh, great guy. He lined up all of the resources. I got my resources together and we put a plan together and we actually had the project started by the end of that first day. Just another day at the factory. That's our customers call us and we answer. That's how it works. So it's common scenario for you guys or I mean? I think we had an exceptional team on the account. So exceptional teams always make a huge difference. And I think in this case, we definitely had a great team. And I think one of the things that KJ talked about is how flexible the software defined data protection approach can be. And I think sometimes people think of us as an infrastructure company, infrastructure meaning hardware predominantly. But our data protection capabilities are just as robust on the software defined data center front. So I think the flexibility of being able to do DR and put in place a DR environment that gave KJ all that flexibility is really a testament to the software capabilities. So can we just kind of review exactly what happened? So if I understood it correctly, you were concerned about the exposure on your remote site. You're going to fail over RPO of only two minutes. So you're going to lose maybe exposed to two minutes of data loss. You can live with that. Business understood that, you communicate it. But then you have no way to back up that fail over site. And so the team came in and what? You accelerated a DR project that was sort of in the pipeline or? Exactly. We had hardware that was scheduled to be delivered to Atlanta and be deployed within two weeks. But we didn't have the two weeks. Three days. So our DR facility was still running on a legacy product. And that wouldn't work for us because all of our production data was backed up to data domain and it's not interoperable. So we went with the virtual appliances and we deployed a virtual data domain or virtual Abelmar appliance running Dell EMC data protection software suite. And an NDP accelerator, I always have trouble with that one for our file systems. And by the end of the day, they were deployed and we were already starting the replication. So in this situation, do you fail over proactively or you just wait for the disaster to hit? What's the? Well, the thing was just to be prepared. So the storm was projected to hit Saturday. Day two was Thursday. And we convened a conference call and an indefinite conference call. That means I was going to be on it, all of Dell EMC's people were going to be on it until either we finished or the storm blew us away. So we monitored the replication all Thursday and by like 6.45 that evening, all of the data had replicated over to the DR. And the next day, the opposite closed early so people could go home and hunker down for the storm, look after their families and their property. And we kept the call going from home, but the data had finished by that evening and the storm hit started coming around midnight that evening on Saturday. So fortunately, the storm only hit us as a weak category one. So we never even had to throw over to it, but had it hit us to the category three, we would have been very much in trouble had we weren't able to accomplish that. So I wanted to get kind of an idea, KJ, in terms of what is the business impact that you've been able to achieve? You've obviously had to accelerate this part of your security transformation, which you were able to do. What's the business impact that your bosses and their bosses in the C-suite at FieldCore have seen as a result of being able to have the agility with Dell EMC to implement this so quickly? Well, some of the things that came into play with the setup that we had with Dell EMC, one was the data protection suite encompasses like everything, hardware, software, licensing, replication, it's all one suite of things. It's not a nickel and dime or add-ons or bolt-ons. It's one full protection suite. So the practice that we had, Matt said, you already have this package, there's nothing to buy. There was no charge for any of the resources rolling it out because we were on what's called a utility mode of billing. And it's basically, it's like instead of a CapEx expenditure where we buy hardware, we don't buy anything. They bring it out for free. They install it for free. As soon as we start backing up, okay, how much D-duplicated data do you have on a data domain? We'll bill you for it. And they send us a bill every month. So that helped us out. And you know the data domain efficiency quotient is just through the roof. It's one of the best platforms for D-dupe. So it really helps our customers, especially when you're talking about a utility-based model as well, that efficiency, that architecture, that really brings that to bear. What do you call this, utility model? This utility, it's the utility model. It's just one of our consumption models. It's the flexible consumption models that we offer across data protection software as well as our platforms. So it's a pay-by-the-drink? Yeah, absolutely. Now, I'm interested in the ripple effects. I don't know your business well enough, but it sounds like not only were you covered but had a category three hit, your customers, there would have been a ripple effect to your customers around the world. 92 countries, I think you said. Is that right or is this not a real-time business? Well, our users, the vast majority of them are field technicians. They're field service guys. They work on turbines. They work on boilers. They work on nuclear plants. They're out in the field. They work on windmills. So they're not very technical people, but all of the laptops that they carry and hook up to this equipment feeds equipment into our systems, and our systems can't go down. So the impact would have been pretty great had our systems been offline for any amount of time because when you're global, there's really no good time to be down. When I'm sleeping, there's people busting their butts in other countries in middle production hours, so. So the last question here, Ria, to you. On this theme of Dell Technologies' world of make it real, K.J., you've been a great job articulating how you've been leveraging your partnership as well as the technology to make your security transformation a reality. Ria, last question to you is there was a recent ESG study on IT maturity. Can you share with us some of the impacts there that you've seen and how it kind of relates to the field core in there? Absolutely, be happy to. So we just recently unveiled a study we did with ESG where we surveyed 4,000 customers, IT professionals over 16 countries, and it really had to do with the IT transformation maturity curve and their adoption. And one of the things that was really interesting is customer feedback or was that transformed companies that have gone through this massive IT transformation are perceived to be 16 times more innovative, be two and a half times more competitive, perceived as being two and a half times more competitive, and six times more apt to have IT as part of the business decision-making process. And data protection was one of the top areas of this transformation as well, because it's so critical. As data is moving out of the data center and becoming more distributed, we talked about the distributed core today, going to the edge with IoT and all of those types of applications, there's this massive amount of data moving out outside of the data center. So data is growing, it's moving out, and it's also becoming more and more critical for customers. So data protection, that recoverability, operational recoverability, disaster recoverability, cyber recovery are becoming more and more critical. And there was three things in the maturity curve on data protection. Transform companies are basically protecting data in five types of different applications. So they're not really looking at just physical protection, which a lot of legacy companies are still kind of stuck at physical and maybe virtual and starting to really do a lot more on virtual. These guys are looking at data protection across distributed environments. They're looking at public cloud. They're looking at hybrid cloud. They're looking at physical, virtual, so very comprehensive, so that was number one. Two is really self-service models. Transformed companies that have gone through IT transformation for their data protection have enabled application owners to be able to do self-service. So that has become a part of how they offer data protection. And the last one was really about automation and automated policies. So when you add a virtual machine, when you bring in a new system, how do you automatically apply policies so protection isn't something that needs to happen as a back-end consideration? And I think KJ talked about some of those things as well. And they're doing a self-service model as part of what they're rolling out as well as the automated protection policies. So I think they're well on their way to transformation and this is what makes it great in terms of the partnership we have with our customers. Well, thank you both so much for stopping by sharing. KJ, the great successes that you've had with that one very potent example. Rhea, thanks for stopping by and sharing with us that data protection continues to be hot, hot hot. And thanks for having us again. Thank you. Nice seeing you guys. Our pleasure. We want to thank you. You're watching theCUBE live at day one, Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. Stick around, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We'll be back after a short break.