 Hi, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation. This time from BMC Helix Immersion Day at Santa Clara Marriott in Santa Clara, California. I'm Peter Burris, your host for today. One of the biggest challenges that every company faces is they try to think about how they're gonna do more with digital services and operation in support of more complex business and the need for greater simplicity is how to extend their ecosystem to include other sources of knowledge, other sources of insight about how a company can accelerate its journey to this new DSOM world. And to have that conversation, we've got a great partner here at BMC's Helix Immersion Days. Rob Graves is the vice president at Data Trend. Rob, welcome to the CUBE. Thank you, Peter. Glad to be here. So tell us a little bit about Data Trend. It's a BMC partner. You've been around for a long time helping customers do some relatively important infrastructure things. Where are you guys today? Yeah, well, I'll go back a little history. We've been in business since 1987. Same two owners, a lot of stability. They continue to drive the business for us. Heavy in the infrastructure space, really got started in the data center and regional multi-site businesses, large enterprises in hospitality, retail, financial services, et cetera, is where we've grown up. Started out like a lot of businesses, selling hardware and pretty quickly as customers asked for higher value, moved into consulting and broader services, really consider ourselves a infrastructure centric systems integrator. If that's a mouthful, that's really who we are and what we do. As we have all those consulting practices, more and more we realize the need to understand our customers' environments better, oftentimes better than they even do. And came across a product called Tideway, which was launching the US, became one of their launch partners here in the US and shortly thereafter, BMC acquired them. So we became a BMC partner in 2009. And it's just been a great journey ever since. At the time they were probably the most robust discovery tool and they've continued to keep that leadership since then. Well, let's pick up on that. So discovery has historically been kind of a domain that was used mainly by an IT group to have some, a little bit better understanding of what types of things they needed to do, what tasks needed to perform. But in a digital business, discovering digital assets becomes absolutely a strategic capability. So how has discovery evolved and then how are you using it to bring these new levels of value to your customers? Well, yeah, it's a great question and it's more and more essential as the world gets more complex and devices get more complex with cloud, with IOT. And transient. The data centers, and transient, right. It's one thing to be able to recognize I have these physical servers here in my data center or maybe even in road offices. Then our friends at VMware came along and made everything virtual. So how do I manage a workload going from this physical device to another physical device? Fantastic. That's one of my favorite CUBE interviews ever of old friend of mine, Pat Gelsinger. I just love watching all his CUBE interviews just came off of VMworld. Very bright guy. Fantastic. Bright guy. But they really got that going. As cloud really started to launch, okay, now I got application workloads, pieces of my IT all over the place. And keeping on top of that is just daunting, right? And so I got to give BMC a lot of credit as they continue to remarket themselves and build capabilities. They're absolutely at the front of the curve. The BMC Helix Discovery product. All sorts of competitors, little startups through some very large players. But whenever we bring it into a customer hands down, we're able to get more done. That comprehensive view of the infrastructure through the applications, through the business services. We constantly come in and replace other products, bring this back in. Well, one of the things that I've observed as a guy who has spent a lot of time watching the industry is technologies like Discovery were especially important at the very largest enterprises. Because they had all these physical assets that people were buying and installing and they never knew quite what was on the network. And it was always like this thing was kind of, maybe it was appropriate for a mid-size enterprise, but it didn't have the same numbers. But when you start introducing, as you said, virtualization or software robots or other transient assets and resources that are going to have a significant impact in how the business operates, the number of things that you have to stay on top of means it's now an appropriate set of technologies for virtually any size organization. Do you see that as well? Absolutely, and especially companies that have lots of locations, lots of sites, complex IT. I love that BMC jumped pretty early into extending the Helix Discovery into the IoT space. We do a lot of multi-site deployments. We're part of several of the large OEMs, IoT systems integration programs. And when you're starting to talk hundreds, thousands, even millions of devices out there, how do these companies, these users keep track of all that, make sure that they're operating properly. The security is a big issue. I mean, one of the best things I like about the Helix Discovery is how can you secure something you don't understand? I mean, I can't tell you how many times we've gone in with Discovery to handle one use case, something as simple as populating a CMDB or making sure a DR plan is solid or relocating a data center, which is kind of the classic use cases of a Discovery product. And you have the security guys coming to the room just because they're everywhere. They have to be watching everything right. And all of a sudden, one of the large stock brokerages, all of a sudden a security guy jumped to the front room and said, stop, stop. What is that? And he points at our application map that came out of Helix Discovery. I said, that should not be talking to that, right? And basically found a big vulnerability just because of an application dependency that the security team wasn't aware of. BMC's got quite a few good examples where almost an accidental big security play happened just from a security guy being in the room and watching the output from Discovery and seeing things that their tools had never shown them. And I do not want to be the guy that agitated the security guy in a meeting like that. No, I was great. What is that? He was standing at the whiteboard, it was pretty funny. So tell us a little bit about your customer base and how they are utilizing some of this new tooling to extend current, but also alter and change future types of business. Now there's a variety of great stories. We typically play in larger enterprises. A lot of Fortune 100s. I'll leave some of the, our good customers nameless, protect the guilty and the innocent, right? But one of the large airlines, went through an exercise of stamp some new DR capability. Still wrapping that up. They've had a number of unplanned outages based on changes. They're doing a lot of change, modernizing applications, moving into new data centers, creating new DR capabilities. They thought they had decent understanding of their environments. Went through their change control process. Whoops, didn't realize that other applications were dependent on this server that we just did an OS upgrade on. Took the airline down for a couple hours. That's not good. Bringing these discovery tools very quickly, they've seen, hey, I can prevent that. I can really understand in real time what's talking to what and make sure I avoid outages. So that's a big one. We mentioned some of the security conversations. Something that we've been doing some innovation with BMC is getting to some of the discovery as a service type of capabilities. And that's allowing us to do some, we're calling micro use cases. Even some simple challenges like network switch maintenance. Everybody wants to reduce the cost of hardware maintenance. What's really hard to discern with hundreds or even thousands of switches, which ones are supporting which workloads. So we can go into an environment and say, hey, you've got a thousands network switches, 500 of them are just supporting tests. You want to take those off 24 by seven, two hour support and really give them a real time mapping. And that's a money saver right there. That's been very difficult for them to figure out on their own, because that connection from the infrastructure to the apps and the services that are being delivered. So there's a variety of different use cases like that. So when you think about where data trends is gonna go and as your business expands in response to the new types of things that customers want to do. Where do you think you're going to be spending your time with customers in say three years? And how is this set of digital services and operations management tooling going to make it possible for you to deliver that service more reliably, more profitably, et cetera? Yeah, no, it's interesting. While we grew up in the data center, we touched a lot of large edge environments as well. And we're seeing more and more innovation coming at the edge. Sanjay from GenPak spoke earlier and used a great phrase again, innovation at the edge, governance at the core. And it's really something that we're seeing a lot. So new workloads out on the edge gotta be able to understand that, see what's out there because more and more compute and analytics are gonna be done at the edge, not in your data center. That's a place we're putting a lot of focus right now. Rob Graves, vice president of Datatrend. Thanks again for being on theCUBE. All right, you got it, thank you. And once again, this is Peter Burris from the Santa Clara Marriott at BMC's Helix Immersion Days. Thanks for watching, until next time.