 brought from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE here in Las Vegas for EMC World 2016. Always happy when we can dig into the practitioners, understand what's really going on, happy to have on the program for the first time. S.T. Bon Rubens, who's the core IT architect and product manager with Fujifilm Medical Systems USA. Thank you for joining us. Sure, it's good to be here. All right, could you, for our audience, give us a little bit, you know, your role and what your organization does. Sure, so Fujifilm Medical is the U.S. subsidiary of Fujifilm Medical, you know, overall, worldwide, and we deal in medical imaging, software mostly, so what people call PACS, RIS, VNA, vendor neutral archive. So it's all related to acquiring, storing, processing images for, you know, patient images in healthcare. So we deploy our software worldwide and, you know, my role specifically is to architect storage solutions and, you know, I recently acquired also the other pieces of the core IT, so compute, hyperconvergence, software existence, virtualization, et cetera. So basically, everything that goes around, you know, to make a solution. Yeah, so, you know, one of the things we look at and talk to users about is that whole digital transformation. And of course, you know, I think of Fuji, and it was like, well, there's company that understands digitization. I mean, you know, there's no film anymore, you know, everything's online. Tell us, you know, how much is kind of the software and digitization just, you know, the fabric of what your business does? It's the core of what we do. If you compare Kodak and Fuji, which were basically almost the same type of company, and actually Kodak had invented some of the technologies that we use now, and they didn't realize that they had to jump to the digital world in the 80s, well, they're basically not out there anymore. And Fuji embraced digitalization for both consumer products like digital cameras, but also for medical imaging, and Fuji's thriving. So it's really a testament of the vision people had probably, you know, 30 years ago to realize that that was the way to go. All right, could you sketch out for us just kind of the breadth of what you touch, how many locations, you know, what software products, you know, what's under your purview? So I think worldwide we have many thousands of customers in the U.S., probably, I would say over a thousand, I'm not really sure. Our customers are hospitals, hospital groups, with many hospitals. They're also imaging centers. There's a large population of reading groups where hospitals can't afford or don't have radiologists on staff all the time. So they send their images, obviously, all digitally out to be read, interpreted, and they get the reports back. So that's the universe of our customers. And even though I work in the U.S. primarily, we are the global source for all our medical informatics products, which are coded here in the U.S. So I also work globally giving direction to a lot of other Fuji medical companies. Yeah, you talked a little bit. You said, you know, I used to run storage. Now I have everything around storage. That's a complicated set of tasks to take care of. You know, you've got some experience now with some of the converged infrastructure products. Talk about how important that is to you or how has that changed the complexity of having to manage all those things? It's hugely important. It's changed everything. And I think it's going to, first of all, it's going to speed up our business. It's going to make us more efficient. It's going to help us deliver better patient care for our customers, which is ultimately what everything is about, what we do. Hyperconvergence particularly helps us not have to deal with a lot of details when we're deploying. Our customers prefer that too. Not to have to stick build every infrastructure, moving away from islands, even though virtualization had brought about a lot of synergies in terms of using centralized resources. With hyperconvergence, you don't even have to worry about deploying the different pieces because it's all done automatically through orchestration and crucially combining the compute and storage and also virtual networking with NSX, that makes everything a lot simpler to deploy. And so that's what we're looking for, really. Okay, so is this something you're putting in these customer locations or what's the scope? We're both putting it in customer locations and using it internally. So we have validation labs, we have testing labs, so we were actually in the beta program because so we've been doing convergence for a while. We had looked at V-Block initially, but that wasn't perfect for us. So when this came about and the opportunity to look at the VxRail, we jumped at it because it was exactly what we're looking for. So it's kind of interesting that it's not just for customers, but it applies to our internal use cases as well. You talked about medical image sharing, collaboration with doctors. How has that changed over time? Used to be you break an arm, you get a big film, or you did an MRI and you're trying to, like how is all that collaboration sharing and how does that change your world? We're in the middle of a revolution with image sharing, particularly as something called VNA has come along that stands for Vendor Neutral Archive and there are a lot of initiatives out there to make that sharing easier. Even in the US, given that we have a lot of islands because there's a lot of private and public health care organizations supposed to say Europe or Australia where they have more public health care, here we have to bridge those divides between organizations. So we need technology to make that easier. So even now, there's really a big gap between what people would like to do and what they're able to do. So that's where we're driving towards with our VNA in particular so that not only is it easier for a doctor at hospital A to see images acquired at hospital B that is not part of the hospital A's group but also for patients because patients typically don't even have access to their own imaging which is kind of crazy if you think about it but even today, if you go get a CAT scan, it's probably hard to get those images but the people who are currently adopting VNAs see that it's a lot easier to have that done and it creates not only better outcomes for patients but everyone is more satisfied and they're both patients and practitioners. So security and uptime have to be two important pieces. Can you talk about how those fit into the infrastructure that you deploy? So uptime obviously is vitally important, right? A lot of our customers are level one trauma centers or maybe whatever but they need to be constantly up. They don't really have the luxury of having downtime. Down, unplanned downtime can mean shutting down on ER which is huge, diverting ambulances, right? Not being able to accept trauma cases. So hyperconvergence helps us with that as well because it makes everything more tightly integrated and therefore uptime improves and security is sort of a multi-pronged approach, right? So our products have some security then we have some security in the US, we have some security in the networking layer and the virtualization layer as well. Encryption is becoming more and more important for everyone. The DOD for military sites is always at the forefront of technology requirements and they pretty much have decided that everything has to be encrypted now which is the way that all the commercial sites are going to go in the future but it's very important also because there have been very significant breaches and we know that there are some foreign countries that are very interested in acquiring healthcare information so we have to be very vigilant both as an ISV, as a software vendor and also as an integrator essentially of our own products. All right, so you know, you guys are, you said you were in the beta program for this so I mean early adopter, you know, when you think about the medical industry, I mean there's kind of that balance of, you know, there's budgetary issues, there's all the governance compliance, you know, what leads you, you know, how do you have the freedom to, you know, look at these new solutions? It's true that healthcare is very conservative in general but at the same time you have this other drive towards ever greater uptime and, you know, the requirements that not only doctors but patients have put on the system so for us, it's very simple, we are always the leader in IT for medical imaging so even though sometimes it takes a little work to work with our customers and help them along, we are the trust advisors when it comes to technology solutions so we always want to be in the leading edge even if people are not ready to adopt things yet, we want to be ready to talk to them about them as opposed to having customers expect us to be there and us not being there. Yeah, you know, you talked about converged infrastructure, making your life simpler, obviously that's going to reduce some cost around delivering IT, have you been able to figure out how to apply that as cost of patient delivery or sort of business level metrics yet for this change that you're making? Sure, for customers it's immediately obvious, right? Because not only are they able to expend less capital money but also the project timelines shrink so for them it's not just the simple expenditure as a metric but also how long it takes to deploy a new system or how long it takes particularly to upgrade a system so for them a lot of it is more subjective, it's based on customer satisfaction, their own customers who are maybe radiologists or other clinicians and patients so we see that already because it's very clear when we're deploying a project when things can be done much more quickly and they can use our products that much more quickly as well. So that execution time turns into dollars and cents for them obviously, yes. Yeah, how do things like softwares of service or public cloud fit into your IT? We actually have a cloud arm called the Synapse Cloud. We offer several services ranging from cloud DR where we store second copies of images to fully host its solutions to even for some customers we act as their DR site where we do replication so we know that's the future, that's where most health organizations are going to go. We are starting to see a lot of health organizations explicitly say that they have a cloud first strategy which even a year ago didn't happen so we know it's going to be the pace of that requirement and adoption is going to be accelerating so that's why we not only need to work with both public, private and hybrid cloud providers but we build clouds for our customers and we offer cloud service. What's the stack underneath that? Is that, do you go to somebody else's data center and what do you build? We are totally flexible that we don't push anyone to do anything that's really one of our main go to market strategies and value ads where we don't tell people they have to do something specific so we can deploy a gateway so that they can go to an S3 based cloud. We can provide a safe SMB share where they can write images to so we pride ourselves in being open like that. So it sounds like you're getting to the point where you're going to deliver the best technology you're not necessarily trying to lock people in and you have to I would guess competitively to be able to do that. You talked about it in file format but cloud and everything. Well and also because it's a competitive advantage for us. Many of our competitors don't do that. They're very rigid in what customers have to adopt so certainly for us not only do we think it's the best approach but it's also something that makes business sense. Gotcha. All right so it's your first time at EMC World. It's early in the shows. No you've been before? I've been here. Oh okay so maybe you could share what do you get out of coming to these shows? Is it talking with your peers? Is it getting deeper on product? For me it's meeting the people who create the products. Going to sessions and talking to people who are responsible for developing things that I architect and that's huge and being able to have one-on-ones with people who then will go back and make changes to the product or request features that may be taken into consideration. I mean that is impossible to find really anywhere else. Well, Esteban Rubins, Fujifilm Medical. Appreciate you joining us. We'll be back with lots more coverage here at EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE.