 Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2018, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome back to the Music City. This is theCUBE at Commvault Go. I'm Stu Miniman, I'm with my co-host, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program one of the users at the show actually going to get to see her on stage at the keynote tomorrow. Michelle Bushman who's the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, give us a little bit about your company and your roles and responsibility there. Sure, so as you'd mentioned, I'm the Vice President of Information Services at American Pacific Mortgage. I pretty much am responsible in the acting role of CIO, CTO and CISO. So I manage all technology for the company reporting to the COO. Our company is a top 15 independent mortgage bank. We do about $10 billion in mortgages a year and have about a 2,500 employee user base. All right, so you've just got a couple of roles there and luckily you're in an industry not much regulation to worry about. Things aren't changing. Things are kind of static. You just kind of put in a couple hours at the office and go take a nap, right? Yeah, right. Why don't you tell us, what are some of those dynamics that are driving your top level business that are impacting the technology side? Oh, absolutely. So the mortgage industry is somewhat cyclical and we are in that range where interest rates are going up. Margin pressures are high, so it's all about doing more with less and saving money. And traditionally in the mortgage banking world, IT resources, you're always a little bit short. And so that drives me to look for strategies that allow me to leverage my technical resources more for business value operations than managing infrastructure, keeping lights on, which has really motivated us to move to the cloud and adopt platform-type solutions similar to Commvault to be able to be more efficient with our few resources that we do have in our technology team. All right, can you speak a little bit about cloud? What is that driver? What does cloud mean to your organization? And yeah, what is the strategy as it sits today? Absolutely. So we're kind of unique, I guess, to an extent in that when I walked into the organization four and a half years ago, the bulk of our critical business applications were already SaaS-hosted applications. That grew out of the need because they had such a small technical team. For the investments to manage the infrastructure to host applications is very high. So luckily enough, I already had a head start in that the bulk of our critical business applications were SaaS-hosted. So what I've done since then is to look for those solutions that are more commodity. So why manage email on-prem when Microsoft can do a way better job than we could with the small staff we have? So it's slowly been taking each application, pulling it out, putting it into the cloud so that my team can be better leveraged to actually work on security initiatives and business value and transformation type of solutions. So it's part of it is accessibility as well. We are in a changing environment where we want to be able to deliver our employee workforce to be able to work anywhere, any time on any device. And in order to do that, we have to have solutions that are sitting out there and accessible to them and not always just sitting behind the firewall and the data center. So let's talk a little bit about data management, data protection as it pertains to the business. What are some of the drivers, especially if you're in the SaaS world, that make you look at data protection suites as opposed to consuming native solutions within those services? Oh, absolutely. So I'm very much have a strategy around platform services. When I walked into the organization, there's probably 30 different applications that were out in the environment and none of them talk to each other. When you're trying to manage bringing data across the organization to compile it and aggregate it to actually have something useful to the business, you have to have connected systems. But when you have a small team, it's very difficult to do that development work and connect all those systems and manage them. So what I like to look for is a platform solution that will allow me to grow as my budget allows to add on the different modules that that platform solution offers to me. So for example, today's budget, I might have a certain limited amount that I can invest, but if I pick a solution that ultimately might give me 70 to 80% of the needs, then I'm only having to add in maybe a couple of other solutions and that costs to integrate and manage. And so overall, it reduces the overall costs and complexity of the environment. So you're in a mismatch of $10 billion a year and mortgages issued, yet small IT staff, SaaS solutions, when you think of Commvault, 20 years enterprise class solution, you don't think necessarily simple, easy to use initially. So why Commvault? Absolutely, so again, the first year I was there, we went through a huge market share grab and so we grew 75% market share and when I walked in the door, we needed to do investment in infrastructure. So the original forecasts were totally blown out of the water, so the investment we made in small to mid-sized business type of solutions, we outgrew before our contracts were due. So when I went into this, we did about 18 months to take our time to find the right solution. We looked at about six different vendors. We did a little bit of POC work, we did references and basically at the end of the day, I was looking for something that had a really good vision that was platform-driven so I can continue to add additional products as budget allowed, that had the ability to have more of a single pane of glass and very little manpower to manage and then reliability was huge. We had some challenges with our previous solution of feeling comfortable that our backups would work in the event we had an incident. So when we looked at Commvault, it may have been, it's an enterprise solution which is what I wanted. I could scale without rip and replace. The great reputation, great vision, good technology, bones and so when I would go to the board for that I said the investment may be a little bit more than a lower end solution but it's going to give us the capability to grow with the business. Yeah, Michelle it's interesting, if you dialed back and said you were looking at this five years ago, I wonder if the pricing strategy that Commvault had in place would fit what you're looking for. I'm sure you've seen as a customer, when I hear, I kind of want to be able to reach that vision but do it incrementally. Sounds like something you might get more from a startup. Maybe give us a little bit of insight what you've seen, how you look at this relationship and what are some of those things that you're looking to add on in the future? Oh absolutely, so absolutely financials always come into place, right? It's gotta be able to afford what you're putting into place. I will say that their pricing model did change because we had looked at that previously and it was a pretty high price point to get in with the licensing under the perpetual licensing models. So with the change of how Commvault kind of moved with the times, more subscription style made it a little bit more affordable for some of the smaller businesses to take advantage of and so that's kind of how I looked at it. Ford plus, at the end of the day if you're looking for a quality product around security and recovery and backup it's worth the money to invest in something that you feel comfortable that's going to meet that need. And grow with you without again having, who wants to go through a migration every three years when your contract's up, right? And then as far as the other products I'm really looking at some of the new products that they've officially announced. It was really exciting to hear the CEO and COO talk today about the automation that they're building because that plays absolutely into what we're trying to do in our organization is we need stuff, again exception processing is what I always talk about. I only want to have to touch things when it's not working, when there's some sort of an exception. And so I'm really excited about the way that Commvault's headed down that path with the automation and then also the data piece, being able to really categorize the data, know if it's outdated or not. I mean, this is a very well known industry issue that we have is we are data hogs in the mortgage business and our users are as well. And so being able to really identify the data that I have, I mean, I walked into a situation where there's been no purge of data, being able to really identify what is valuable data to not purge versus the data that we want to purge to reduce that footprint, to reduce the risk for any kind of potential breach or security incident. The more you have out there the more chance that you're going to get hit. So you wear a bunch of hats. That seemed kind of in conflict especially seeing that you report up to CEO, security being the most interesting one. How does your role as the system, so in your selection of the data protection suite, data management impact your decision to go with a Commvault? Oh, absolutely. That's huge as well, right? You know, in our industry, we obviously are responsible for being custodians to a lot of personal information to consumers. So we have NPI, PIL, all over. And it's not even just with my critical business system vendors, you know, because I rely on them heavily. They're much larger. They have larger security teams and larger budgets to protect our data. But we also have that data internally into our own data warehouse. So data protection is key. So looking at products that will allow us to simplify that, have visibility into it. You know, that's another area I'm really looking for to expanding my Commvault use into as we start to actually, you know, one of the other projects we're going to be working on potentially is moving our data warehouse to Microsoft Azure. So, you know, really having that security plan figured out before the data's up in the cloud. Michelle, I wonder what your experience has been with recovery. Is that something you test? Have you had to actually do a recovery? What's your experience been? Yeah, so, you know, knock on wood. I'm not sure if there's wood under here, but you know, knock on wood, we haven't had a major incident. However, what we do have done now that we've actually deployed Commvault fully, is, and you know, it's too bad it's not a couple weeks from now because we're actually going to do a full DR exercise with our new backups now that we've are fully deployed with Commvault. And you'll take a vacation the week after. So we're going to actually test that out. That was one of the things that I tasked my team with is once the new backups and everything was in place, that we're going to, you know, do a tabletop exercise, but actually try to do a full recovery of some systems with the new backups and make sure we're all in good shape. But with that being said, I can already tell you just from a, you know, our old system to our new system, you know, with the feature sets that we have available in Commvault compared to what we had in our other solution, the time to recover individual files is exponential. You know, our other solution, we had to recover an entire folder, not just individual files. And then we're really excited also of being able to eventually push out some self-service file restoration capabilities that Commvault allows us to do as well. So as a natural consumer of, as a service offerings mission critical businesses, how important is Commvault's roadmap to as a service for enterprise class solutions? Oh, I think that's great. I actually can't wait to see what they have to offer around that. Again, you know, you know, might be a unique use case, I don't know, because you know, that's really how we manage our business from the IT side because of limited budget, limited resources, is leveraging vendors. So I'm really excited to see how that evolves actually, you know, from a service perspective. Okay, Michelle, it's your second time coming to this event. For our audience, it didn't come. What do you get out of it? What excites you the most coming to an event like this? I think there's two key things that I really enjoy going to conferences about. One, of course, is always the networking opportunities. I always meet other people who have the same challenges that I do. And you know, they're looking at the same products and being able to exchange ideas and how you've solved problems and you know, talking to other people with real life issues is so valuable. The other piece is always getting myself out of the office and getting more education. So you know, really seeing what's evolving, what's changing, you know, what are the partners doing that work with Commvault, what's Commvault doing, really getting out of the office to have a chance to really get educated around that. And what's really unique too about Commvault Go To is a lot of it is customer based. You have customers up talking about their use cases and how they've implemented the product so it's real life education, not just, you know, a vendor up there talking about their product and selling it, right? Absolutely, we appreciate you sharing your story with our audience here and congratulations on all the progress. American Pacific Mortgage and, boy, you know, tired thinking of all the hats you've been wearing. For those of us that wear a few hats, we can definitely, you know, appreciate that. All right. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more programming here at Commvault Go. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Thank you.