 Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I have two guests with me here today. We're going to be talking to the Walt Disney Company. Jason Abrahamson is here, the Director of Infrastructure Engineering. Jason, welcome to the program. Hi, how are you doing? Doing well, and James Irvine is here as well. Account Chief Technologist at HPE. James, welcome to the program. Yeah, hi Lisa, thank you. Okay, so we're going to be talking about all things the HPE supporting Disney relationship, but things have been changing so much in technology. Things have been very different for technologists in the last few years. Jason, talk to us about how Disney has adapted as business needs have evolved. I think not just Disney, but in general, as we've had to evolve with technologists, right? And one of the ways we've done that is to focus a lot on automation and self-service, enabling developers to move faster, to meet the shift in business demand. Business moves at the speed of light. Anybody that's been in this business long enough knows, you were years ago, you could have email servers down for three hours and nobody would notice. Now if email went down for more than 35 seconds, everybody notices, right? So in order to meet the change in demand, we've had to focus heavily on automation and self-service, which has been a key strategy, a key driver for us as part of Private Cloud. So Jason, with infrastructure as such a large part of your responsibilities and your job title, how has Disney been thinking about Private Cloud in the last few years? So I would say that we were probably one of the, I don't wanna say bleeding edge, but certainly out in front when it came to Private Cloud, we had embarked on a cloud-first strategy overall across the enterprise. The goal there was to figure out how we could do more with less and be more agile and be able to flex for our application developers and meet our shifts in demand. However, there are systems that for whatever reasons, business purpose or otherwise, need to either span hybrid cloud or multi-cloud or stay on premise. So in order to get a cloud-like environment for our application developers and whatnot, we decided to build out a robust Private Cloud environment that allowed all of our application developers to be able to just bring their code or get a server and try to get as much of the public cloud functionality on premise as we possibly could. James, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about the HPE Walt Disney Company relationship and how HPE is supporting Walt Disney. Yeah, HPE and Disney have had a long-standing relationship dating all the way back to HPE and Disney as far as the audio oscillator is concerned. So we've had an extraordinarily long history in technology and co-innovation partnership that we've worked on together through the years. And as Jason mentioned, the journey around Private Cloud and working together in that technology relationship has just been fantastic and we've supported them with all the innovation and technologies needed for them to meet their goals. Excellent. All right, Jason, let's go back to you. I want to dig into this Private Cloud strategy a little bit more. You mentioned this a minute ago, but as we look at and hear so many discussions and strategies revolving around public multi-cloud, why is Private Cloud so important to Disney? Well, we have a tremendous amount of applications. Our application portfolio is massive, as you can imagine. And we find ourselves in unique situations because of all of the different business challenges that we have that are unique to Disney, that we have to develop applications from the ground up far more often than we'd probably like to admit. So Private Cloud allows us to take advantage of the public cloud-like services and technologies, scalability and flexibility and agility, right? And bring those on premise and be close to the business where it's absolutely critical to our business. I don't want to comment on what specific things or services that we have to run close to the business, but you can imagine with the expansive footprint of our business and how we have to interact with guests, whether it's from a movie or at a theme park, we do have to have some services that are close to our business. And so by having Private Cloud, we complement our public cloud strategy and allow us to keep those most critical services very close to the business. Got it. You just mentioned a number of the elements of Disney. There's been a lot going on, so much going on. It's actually kind of easy to forget how new Disney Plus is, but sitting in the center of a company that's doing so much digitally, how does that shared services play a part in the overall digital transformation of the business? That's a great question. So obviously technology is key to our business. If you look at all the different lines of business we have and you look at all the different technology that we have, it's absolutely critical in order for us to continue to invest in technology to meet all of our business demands. Where shared services comes in is we enable the business to focus on what is critical to their business, right? We allow resorts and even the media partners to just focus solely on the technology that is critical to driving those businesses, to enabling the guest experience and keeping it great. We are focused on everything else that is not critical to their business, the underlying infrastructure, the underpaying infrastructure, right? Such as the global network, global servers, emails and so on and so forth. So it's a great compliment where it frees the business up to focus on what's really critical for them. And we can get economies of scale and synergy across our entire enterprise by delivering core services at a much more efficient cost throughout the company. And James, I want to ask you a question. You've been working with the Walt Disney Company for a long time. We've seen the evolution of HPE and we've seen the evolution of Disney. Can we ask you anything about kind of give us your perspectives on how both companies have evolved in this relationship together? I would say that it's been a great relationship. I would say that we have continued to lean on HPE from an investment perspective for our servers in certain areas of storage, but mostly servers. One of the big investments we've made recently is HPE Synergy, which is a composable infrastructure, which has allowed us to continue to invest in our automation strategy and allows us to deliver physical servers much faster. James, did you want to add anything there? Yeah, of course, Jason. It's been great to partner with Jason and the team Walt Disney Company in particular. And through this experience of them trying to achieve their private cloud goals, we've been able to bring the right technology, the right set of services to achieve these technology outcomes that they've been after and the use of automation to improve life cycle management, day two operations, all the goals and aspirations that they need to really automate infrastructure and make it intelligent and start achieving the goal of the Intelligent Data Center. So it's been a great technology partnership and relationship we've had there. Jason, back to you. We've talked about Disney's private cloud strategy. I want to talk a little bit more about how that integrates with the rest of Disney's cloud strategy. What can you share with us? Well, like anything, you want the right tool for the right job. And certainly the multi-cloud strategy and the public cloud strategy is a huge part of our overall strategic roadmap. Where, again, we use the private cloud is to complement that for applications that need to either span or stay on premise. You know, one of the things that we're just getting into now is hybrid cloud, where you have application teams that are like, hey, we really just need to focus on premise. It's where we need to be close to the business. But we have workloads that need to burst to the public cloud or need to scale out to the public cloud. And you really take advantage of that. So again, we don't look at it as it used to be not just with Disney, but in general, in most cloud strategies it was, is kind of like an either or. Now we look at it as the right tool for the right job. What's the right fit for your application? And as we continue to look at how the application stack modernizes, right? Used to be, how do you get servers faster? Well, now it's, I don't want a server, I want a container. Now it's, I just want to bring my code. And I don't even know if I need a container, right? The application developer really wants serverless compute. They really want to just focus on application development. And they want to focus more on what makes their application great, right? We want to focus more on commoditization and blurring the lines between public and private. Really, where does the workload run best? Where is it most efficient? And where's it best for the business? And so when we look at how we built out our private cloud environment, it was really to complement our existing public cloud strategy. Let's talk about people now, Jason, for a second. I know I love that Disney calls their folks cast members. I see the pin on your lapel there. How are the cast members at the center of this technology strategy? And how does the private cloud strategy play into that? Well, it's one of those things where our cast members are the most important aspect of our brand. If you were to look at what is our most valuable asset, it would certainly be our cast members, right? They are the frontline, whether it's helping a guest, whether it's working on a movie. And our overall technology strategy is all about enabling cast members to do their job as most efficiently and effectively as possible. When it comes to how private cloud fits into that, it's again, creating an environment where the application developers and our business partners can accelerate their application growth and the delivery of their services to support our backup house operations for our cast members. So that way it doesn't impact the guest experience. There's nothing more frustrating for a cast member when they're impeded or have issues trying to get to a resource or unable to efficiently do their job. And so by having the private cloud, by having access to resources on premise, at times it gives them the ability to deliver those and consume those applications even faster. Which I'm sure the guests love. One of the things that you mentioned, Jason, and I want to, James, hit your opinion on this too. It's a statement that we hear very often you need to do more with less. In that situation, how does Disney navigate that and a strategy that is cost effective while you're growing your public, your private cloud strategy? Automation, right? Automation and self-service. It really, it's always comes back to, I know it's a buzzword. I know people go, oh, automate this, automate that. You know, what are you automating? If you look at just the investments we're making right now in the HP synergy line and having composable infrastructure combined with pockets of three tier architectures as well as hyperconverged, you are, we're bringing a delivery model to application teams and business teams that they haven't, it's just like public cloud, right? But that they haven't seen before. So in order to manage massive scale, you need to automate more and you need to automate more in order to make sure that you have self-healing, right? So you can look at things and understand things and see where you're having problems and try to predict them before they happen and increase your uptime and availability. I mean, it all comes back to again, automation, automation, automation. James, do you have the similar opinion when you talk with customers similar to the Walt Disney company that are told we've got to do more, but we've got less to work with? Is automation one of your key go-to recommendations? Yeah, automation is at the center of everything that we're trying to achieve today, both on-premise and in the public cloud and hyper-automation is really kind of where everybody is driving to the ability to be incredibly and incredibly efficient using infrastructure as code, API-driven, and using all the tools to really automate that and make the seamless delivery of new products and services just that much quicker. And we've been focused on that both not only from a technology and infrastructure standpoint, but also from a consulting and delivery standpoint. So we're able to really kind of meet all the different needs as it relates to automation, both in a private cloud, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud scenario with all the partnerships that we have across all the hyperscalers. James, sticking with you, with that, looking through that consultant lens, I want to get some thought leadership from you. What are some of the principles that you'd recommend for businesses that really are working hard to make their private cloud investment work as efficiently as possible for them? A lot of that comes down to consulting and understanding. So really kind of driving to what we've referred to as the right mix. What is that right mix of hybrid cloud, private cloud applications that have gravity that need to remain on premise and there's just no reason to move them. So working with somebody and partnering with somebody that has the ability to be able to advise and consult in that capacity across the continuum of private public as well as EDGE is vitally important for people to consider as a part of their strategy. Jason, EDGE is absolutely incredible. We're hearing about it more and more, especially as it's so much more data and machine data is generated there. I want to get your advice for the audience. Same question that I asked James. What principles would you recommend for making the private cloud investment work as hard as possible, as efficiently as possible? I would say that it's going to be a unique journey for every single company, but the number one advice is remember right tool for the right job, right? What is your application stack? What are the types of, and in that, what is the type of needs of the application owners? And when you start thinking about it, you start dissecting it, are you going to be investing more in microservices? Can you go with a more of a serverless container-based type of environment? Are you using shrink wrap software that you're going to need more IaaS, right? It all comes down to either the right tool for the right job. My father was an auto mechanic. And I remember as a kid, he had 8,000 tools. And I used to say to him, dad, why do you have five screwdrivers? And to me, they all looked the same, right? The auto mechanic. But he goes, no, no, no, Jason, you don't understand. It's the right tool for the right job. That was always his mantra. That would be my advice. I like that. I think my dad would have said the same thing, right tool for the right job. Absolutely critically important. So when we think about Disney, we know you generate a ton of data. How does the growth of the private cloud, Jason, support that massive data growth? Well, as you can imagine, we have ebbs and flows in our data. There's times where we're taking a tremendous amount of data in. And there's times where we're purging a tremendous amount of data for various different reasons, right? So one of the beauties of private cloud and how it complements the public cloud is when you go to, you think about data ingestion, right? And then storage and being able to efficiently can get it on-premise and whatnot. Having the private cloud there to do those types of things, to use more of those BI type of workloads that you're just trunching a bunch of data, it's really nice to have the private cloud. So that way the application even can add nodes, add collectors of other log aggregation type tools, right? Whatever the tool is, being able to have the flexibility to add nodes very quickly, just like they can in public cloud, but have it on-premise so that you can do cost control and get the data in a more timely, more efficient manner. Again though, it comes down to the type of workload and what was best for that business. I would be amiss if I tried to sit here and tell you that all of our big data stuff were to only reside or only use on-premise technologies. Of course it spans. Like I said, we've got hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, so. Well, it kind of goes with the right tool for the right job. One more question for both of you and I want to go back to that thought leadership angle. Jason, when you are talking with peers of yours, what do you recommend that technology leaders look for when they're going to be partnering with a company on any type of cloud initiative, management or implementation project? I would say understand the problem you're trying to solve, understand the technologies that you want to use and understand, again, your application portfolio. And perhaps because I'm in Shared Services, a large company, I have a unique perspective of having to deal with very different problems at any given day, on any given week. And sometimes we forget about those, especially as technologists we tend to forget that the decisions we make have wide and far-reaching impact within our application stacks and within the individual businesses. And I think if you look at what is my application stack, what are the types of technologies, how is it going to be? If you're doing just shrink wrap, then you probably shouldn't be investing in cloud technologies that are heavily focused on containerization, right? If you're custom developing applications, then your entire strategy should probably be focused on how do you build container farms? And if you're doing big data, you probably should bring GPUs into the conversation with something nobody's talking about really yet. So, you know. Sounds like collaboration is really key. James, same question. Last question of our conversation. I'd love to get your perspective on what technology leaders should look for when you're talking with prospective customers, when they're looking to partner for cloud implementation growth management, what are some of those things that you say the technology leaders look for this? We really need to be working with people who understand your business that are passionate about your success and really having access to not only the advisory capabilities, but the technology portfolio to help you realize all of your business and technology outcomes. And I think those are super important attributes that we HPE can provide, you know, across the entire portfolio of technologies and services that most customers need to do. And I think that the business outcome, the business transformation is really key to what the future holds for us and having the visionary perspective of not only the customer, but us in joint partnership allows for these great goals to be achieved. It's great goals in those business outcomes. Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me on the program today, talking to me about what Disney is doing with technology, how HPE is supporting the Disney relationship. Jason and James, I appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. For Jason Abrahamson and James Irvine, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2021.