 Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Big Data Conference 2016. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Paul Gillan. Welcome back to Boston, everybody. We're winding down day two. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Filippo Honorato is here, he's the CIO of lastminute.com. Really interesting website and travel site. Filippo, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for inviting me. Welcome to, it's our pleasure. Welcome to America, we always get envious when our Italian friends come on theCUBE. Can't get enough of Italy, so it's great to see you. We'll reminisce after, but tell us about lastminute.com. Well, lastminute.com is a European-based group. It's a group of company. We have several different brands, but of course, lastminute.com is the best one. It's the most famous. Our markets span across Europe, but in reality, we have presence in 40 different countries, and we have the website that are translated in 17 different languages. We have actually the possibility, actually every year, we make 10 million person travels. So it's quite a big group in Europe and outside Europe as well. Lastminute.com is actually UK, it was a UK business travel company, but the Bravo Fly Roomba group that is where, I mean, our company was coming from, acquired lastminute.com two years ago from Saber, that's actually an American company. And that was actually a pretty big acquisition that make us among the five most used travel company in Europe. And so you're a global company. I mean, you do business globally. And it's not just last minute and great deals. It's special experiences, as I was saying, I went on your website and it was, stay at the palace or some unique location. Explain that strategy. Yeah, and last minute, I mean, given that is a common used word in the travel industry, I mean, meaning that you are booking at the very last minute something that you will use in a next week or next weekend or whatever, is becoming something that is actually an experience. Is the travel experience that will make you surprising yourself for your experience during your holidays? So it's something that will make you experience a specific moment in your life with a very emotional, let's say, travel experience again. Is it, do you have a unique ability to identify inventory that is last minute and perhaps less expensive or not necessarily? Yeah, well, from the very beginning of the company, we were actually growing so fast because we provide a very good service to the customer. I mean, we actually able to compare a no full large amount of inventory from all the airlines, from other OTA, that make the visitor actually compare and find the best solution for him or her. Given the cost and given actually, they mean what is the travel experience. So if you want to go from Milan to Boston, you don't want to go through Reykjavik, let's say. And that's obviously something that we care about and the presentation and the user experience is always our goal. So how does data, how do analytics figure into providing this unique user experience? I think there's so many travel booking sites out there, it's really hard to distinguish one from another. What is, how do you use data in a unique way? Actually it's a massive amount of data. The more data you have, the best experience you can provide to the final user. What we are doing is also measuring, I mean, quite precisely what the visitor are doing on our website, to actually identify what are their needs and to provide the best presentation of what we have on our catalogs. I mean, our search engine that are spanning across all the different standard and lines, the low cost and lines, or even, I mean, car rental or trains because what we do actually is comparing airline that, I mean, trip with trains because sometimes more convenient for the customer to travel by train than using the airline to go to Milan or Milan-Rome is typical, I mean, trip that you can do by train in three hours. There's a cost trade off as well. Of course, but at the end what we are caring about is to present the most convenient option for our visitors and the more data we gather, the more we can offer this option. And you were talking off camera about how you actually, if I heard correctly, can help me with not only the booking, but also the check-in and describe that because we have so many apps, we have a different app for every airline and it's very frustrating, right? Exactly, that's the point. We are in the best position to offer the most useful, I mean, services to our customer because we have a complete visibility on the product offer and complete visibility also on the customer behavior. So we are just the main in the middle. So what we can do is to provide to you a unique experience that actually gathered together all the different user experience that you can have to different airlines. As you said, in your mobile phone, you have 10 different airlines that are providing the web checking, for example, service and every single airline has a different user experience. So you will become mad to actually do that. What we are providing instead is a unique user experience that gathered together all the different offering in the market and the consumer and the customer can actually do that only once with our, I mean, with our app in that case. And it's okay. You're the CIO. You haven't talked about that. So that's a good topic in and of itself though. Let's talk about what are the things that are, drivers in your business that are affecting technology and... Well, by the way, the technology actually, the development is our core business because at the end, building the user experience is strictly related to the technology that sit behind our websites. So whatever we do in our company is data-driven because every single decision that we are doing in the design of the website or in the marketing decision as well or in the sales or in finding the right product for the right audience that is definitely driven by data. So data warehouse, I mean, data-driven processes, huge analytic platform is something that is core for our company. So paint a picture of the architecture, the apps, what does it look like when you peek inside the covers? I think that we can spend hours. Yeah. Are you an on-premise, are you primarily on-premise infrastructure to use cloud extensively? We are using all the cloud services that are available in the market. And by the way, the core website is on-premises. So we are usually all, we are only them all. And actually our plan now is to become cloud and on-premises, let's say transparent. So our microservices are actually a component that are made on purpose to be able to migrate from the cloud to the on-premises platform and to different cloud platform. That is a unique, let's say, characteristic that we want to develop. We are just in the middle of this transformation. They are already part of the system that I have been through this transformation. And we can actually migrate those services from the on-premises platform to, let's say, name it, Google, AWS. Mindful supply. Will you use all of those clouds? Will you migrate? Yeah, we use all. We also. Because the data is there. Because the data are there. The closer you get the algorithm to the data, the faster you can get the response. As opposed to bringing the data to the algorithm. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You can spend quite a lot. And also, by the way, it's not only timing, it's also resources. What role does the bandwidth play in the course? What role does Vertica play or whatever, idle, whatever platform you use? Actually we use Vertica, we use HP Vertica. And it's our core data warehouse platform. Not only for reporting and analytics, we are also using some operational processes that sit on top of the Vertica platform. So, back to what you said about making cloud versus on-prem, transparent. Do you look, it sounds like you look at cloud more as an operating model than a place to put stuff. Is that fair? Sure, sure. So, what does that mean in terms of, from a practical standpoint of, and you're not there today, you admitted that nobody is. But what do you have to do to get to that point? And what does it mean for your organization? How do you rally everybody behind that vision? That is a pretty tricky proposal to the business, actually, because you have to prove that the cloud migration is actually providing a competitive advantage. And it does, by the way, because the scalability and the availability that the cloud platform provided is impossible to match with the on-premises platform. But at the end, some core processes are required to run on-premises because of the performance reasons, or because they are, let's say, owning privacy-related data. So, the sensitive data, that you kind of, I mean, easily move to the cloud, because also for the regulation, when we are in Europe, you know that every single country has a slightly different regulation in terms of privacy. But if you had, let me ask you a question on that. If you had a cloud in each of those countries, could you put it into the cloud? Is that acceptable? Yeah, you can, too, but then you have the cloud provider to certify himself that, actually, he's compliant with the regulation of the country where you are selling the ticket. It's just going to take time to get there. What's the biggest challenge you see as a CIO? Quite a lot of different challenges. Top three. I think one, definitely, the major problem we have is to get the access to the talents. I mean, in order to run the business like ours, with velocity, with agility, you need talent. You need people that actually have the passion for the job, and they know the business, and they are actually very good in technology. And this combination, I mean, is not easy to find. How do you deal with that problem? You just go to war for talent. Yeah, exactly, that's the point. I mean, it's also a question of a brand. You can sell your brand. I mean, if the company overall is attractive, I mean, the talent will come. And again, we have a very long path for the people that are actually hired in order to become really productive. We are spending an awful amount of time and resources in order to get there. Well, you could have a global recruiting program in your head, Destination Italy. I mean, that's a pretty attractive. Yeah, that is a real attractive. Yeah, that's true. Excellent. Well, Philippo, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure to meet you. Thank you. It was a real pleasure. Okay, keep it right there, buddy. Paul and I were back with our last guest, actually, here live from HPE, Big Data Conference. This is theCUBE, right back.