 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 Graceley. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE here in Las Vegas for EMC World 2016. Brian Graceley and I are here, always happy to talk to lots of the practitioners at the show, talking about what they're doing, what they're sharing with their peers. For this segment, we have Paul Reyes who's the VP of Infrastructure and Security Services with Energy Future Holdings. Paul, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, thank you for asking me to come. All right, so first, can you tell us a little bit about your role and your organization, what you guys do? Yeah, in Energy Future Holdings, I run all of the infrastructure services that we provide out to the customer that's compute, network, database, in-user computing, and so forth, and then I also own the security side of the house, so security operations and running everything that secures our infrastructure. All right, and Energy Future Holdings, give us, you know, what that is. Yeah, it's an energy company that has, in the non-regulated space, we have a generation of business unit. Generates power, coal, gas, nuclear. We have some wind and solar that we double into. So you guys are more of a utility, not like so much and wrong, you know, so. That's right, and we have, on the generation side, we also trade, and then we have another business unit that does the retail arm, and so we sell power as well as other services to our in-customer home warranties and other activities for our customers. So, I mean, that's a fast-changing industry. Talk about kind of what your group's asked to do. It's not just keep the lights on, but what kind of things is the business asking you that might require some stress and strains and changes on the IT side? Right, for our business, we got two business units. One business unit is time to market, right? The retail arm is really trying to drive activities that gets us to the customer faster. Our other business unit is complete opposite. They want it to be safe, reliable, and constantly available to our customers as we generate power for the state. And so, there are two different diametrics out there, but both of them have a high availability requirement, us to be able to provide mission-critical services on the time-to-market space. So what they ask for us is to make sure, not only do we provide reliable services as a table steak, but also how do I get it more efficient and drive ultimately our cost down? And so, at the end of the day, of course, my infrastructure services and security services are the majority of our budget. And so, I'm always constantly trying to drive cost down while our services are increasing so that we can reinvest that activity. So it sounds like on the fast-moving part of your business, those sound like cloud requirements to me. Move fast, give me resources, maybe for developers or even just for, is that, are those sort of the demands that you're getting for cloud-like services within your business? Yes, today, when we started driving into the private cloud aspects and then also dabbling into the hypercalf for both public and private, we really found that we had to generate our business as service rather than doing everything manual through a waterfall process. And so it took our customer months to get through our activities, to just provision, just general services. So we had to figure out a way to be nimble and drive agility into our business so that when we provide services back, we can do it with a few amount of resources as well as time to market. Yeah, and how did you go about doing that? Well, it was a journey, it wasn't just tomorrow, but when we started in 2009, we took from a standalone environment, we really, in the first next two years, we drove a virtualization policy, making virtualization first. So as we drove that activity, we drove consolidation of infrastructure, we did standardization of OSs and technology, and then the next two years was round stabilization of processes. How do we stabilize, how do we get our security services under control, and how do we start improving our availability? 14 and 15 is where we did hyper cloud services when we said, all right, now how do we get our V blocks in environment, which is what we settled on for our mission critical. We didn't want to start small, we started with our mission critical systems first. We said, how do we bring every single mission critical environment into a virtual space driving where some business units had only 10% virtualization, we are now a little over 99%. So everything that we run mission critical is in our hyper cloud services. So Paul, how do you guys look at it differently between kind of virtualization and cloud? What were the services or attributes that differentiated those two for you? It's ability for us to be able to use automation and services to our customers. A lot of times somebody will say, do we use self service? And we don't, we use a service to our architects that know how to integrate the systems together. So once we guys really look at how do we provide those services together, then they go through a portal and provision those services dynamically with an end to end process, not only just provisioning a virtual machine, but also how do I ensure security is wrapped around and how do I ensure that scans are done, patches are done, all the way up through CMDB updates and then finally turning over to the application owner. All right, so you've got security as part of your domain. Absolutely. How's that been changing over the last few years and how do you guys think of security holistically? In the security world is one thing, but sitting in within an energy company is a whole different ball of wax. And not only from a critical infrastructure for our state, but also our retail has PCI environment. So it's really a big deal for us. How do we ensure that we stay within our controls? How do we drive those controls down into an automation factor? So we're using several tools to go and make sure those controls are automated where possible. And if not, drive towards that automation, as well as making the provisioning process already baked in with those controls going out the gate. Yeah, I heard you use the term hybrid cloud. Two things, what does that mean to you, hybrid cloud, but more importantly, what types of applications are you thinking about maybe using a public service or some non-on-premises service for? Yeah, hybrid cloud to us means that we will have the capability to be the broker. And I mentioned several times in other conferences where if I don't seem to change the infrastructure security aspects of my job in four or five years, it's going to be obsolete. Because we've got to change to become a broker of services. And that means both locally in our corporate public cloud as well as in our public cloud. And so when I think hybrid, I think how do I manage the difference between the both? And we have software as a service already pervasive in our environment. How do I bring in the infrastructure as a service and the platform as a service to realm? And then how do I make sure I can manage that brokerage of when it's right to go public and when it's right to go private? All right, so you said platform as a service, what are you guys using there? Right now we're just in the thought process of that. We're trying to get our arms wrapped around the infrastructure. Yeah, so I guess, why are you looking at that? What kind of drivers for that? Well, as we start thinking provisioning systems is one thing, but how do I get to be able to offer to my customer the ability to provision an entire landscape? How does I, today we're outsourced, heavily outsourced. So every system that gets provisioned is a cost driver for us. And so if today I have over 13 different environments for one application, how do I take those applications down to two environments and then dynamically provision the entire landscape on demand? Right, that's a game changer for us, right? And so our application team says, yes, I want that. Okay, I can't give it to you yet, but that's where I'm headed, right? That's where that either sometimes it's a platform that we can do that encompasses the entire platform of our application, or it might be just a very orchestrated infrastructure as a service that we will provisioning, or put that all together and deliver that as a service. Yeah, you talked about, as you're rolling out a hybrid cloud or you're trying to leverage those resources, a lot of people would say, well, managing a VMware environment and managing an Amazon or Azure, they're different. What tips might you give to your peers that you're saying, hey, look, as you look at different cloud environments, how do you think about managing them mentally? How do you think about being that broker? Yeah, I think the thing that we're trying to wrap around in our heads is, how do I not only provide the brokerage of just the infrastructure itself or the service itself, but also wrap in my security aspects, the data cloudifications. How do I understand when things need to be export compliant based, and so then I have to exclude that from there? It's figuring out where the controls need to be so that when I provide those services, I provide them in the right means. One of the things you pointed out was, you went after the hard applications first, right? I think, Stu and I have seen this talking to a number of people, the people that tend to be very successful, even though it feels counterproductive, they go after the hard application, they have some skin in the game. I mean, was that sort of what your thinking was, or is it just, hey, our world is, it's all hard applications? Go big or go home, yeah. I think the reasoning that we chose it is, we had to show a dollar value to say, why am I going to invest? Justify the investment. There's a huge investment when you're going to go do that type of a big iron. And so what we thought is, hey, the only way I can get that is reducing maintenance, reducing license counts, reducing infrastructure footprint, data center floor space power, and as well as labor. And so the place where we invest the most of all of that is within our mission critical environment, right? That's almost half of our footprint. So I had to get up, show a cost case where I could actually do all of those and provide that capability to reduce multi-million dollars. We had a business case that said, we're going to invest $20 million worth of our business money, and then guarantee that we would return on investment, $54 million in the next five years. And we were so confident, we took it right out of our budget, day one when we agreed to it. So I had to deliver those things right away. You're a confident man, that's bold. But yeah, the team and our partners that we put together, you know, looked at it and says, yes, we can do that. And so we went, you know, and delivered services. What we didn't realize that when we finished that delivery, which was really, hey, we were going to provide our business with just as good, if not better performance. What we ended up with is a shocking change of our performance metrics, which we're still trying to evaluate all the different benefits. Some environments were 50% better, some of them were 300% better. And so the ability for our business now to say something that took a whole day to process, now it can be processed within 30 minutes, what's the bill's value to that? You know, how much can I send more invoices out? Can I reduce the amount of work that I can shift now people to do other things? Tons of other benefits that we're still trying to comb through. So Paul, you've laid out for us the journey for what you've done over the last seven years. I guess first question is, you know, what's next? Where do you still have to go? We talked a little bit about Paz, but where's the journey taken you next? I believe we're trying to simplify and build on our automation. Our automation, I think, is really our next key environment where we think, hey, how do I automate more and more of our services so that we can take the human element out and let our folks be the thinkers of where we're going to go tomorrow and get the day-to-day redundant things out there. Whether it's in the public cloud or whether it's in private, it's really trying to drive that automation. So when we broker that deal, it's the same service repeated across the board. And it's a hard thing to do because, you know, automating on things and control is one thing. Automating things at the business level is a whole different ball of wax. All right, so you've got the learnings now of all you went through. You said it was a journey. You're talking to your peers. What things do you point out to say, hey, you might want to avoid this road bump or, you know, not go down this path? What would make it easier for your peers? It was really a lot of good learnings. I think don't offload your responsibility. A lot of things that was probably our biggest ticket is we took in on partners. We have, we're outsourced, so we have two big, huge partners that are doing application outsourcing or infrastructure outsourcing, but we also had three or four other partners that came from the outside, VCE, MC, a few others. And so what we ended up is we assumed that this would be a can, third party come in, run the show, and migrate it all over there and hand it over to them and let them drive it. At the end of the day, it wasn't, we know our business better than anybody. Owning that outcome, putting our people in front of this, putting our leaders over responsibility to get this over the goal line was critical. We ended up failing miserably up front. We had to pull back, reset, and figure out, all right, who do we put up in front and drive this? Because we own, we know our customers. We're the ones that have the relationship. And so doing that was probably the most important thing, aspects of it. The second piece is probably identifying where all the gotchas are. Having a good data map of all their applications and where they all talk to, as you peel back that onion, you realize how many things that you didn't know, what talked to what, and being able to understand what needs to be segmented, what can't be segmented, because you have applications talking to areas that you didn't expect to have happen. Customers talking to production where you didn't think that was happening. Peeling all those onions back, identifying the gotchas early was a lot of painstaking effort to get through. Yeah, go ahead, Brian, sorry. Yeah, no, I was going to say, it's great that not only, we talked about earlier, you found the difficult applications, but just as importantly, you got business buy-in, and that's, because again, this is like you said, this is a journey, but it's also a transformation. You know, you're impacting the business, you're changing the business, you're giving the business new opportunities, they need to feel like they're part of it. That's fantastic that you identified that, and that's, are they more involved now that you've given them these great results? I think at our company, our CIO has a seat at the table. He sits, talks, and updates the board. He describes and involves all his peers and senior execs in that realm. So when we sit around the room of what we're trying to achieve, he paints a great picture on being able to do that. So they're involved on, hey, hey, how is that migration going? How's my application going? They're up to date in knowing we have constant feedback in that loop. So when we build a relationship to where they see the investment turning over into some realization and some customer satisfaction, you know, it builds that effort for us to stay at the table. That's great, that's great. So Paul, I want to give you the final word. Which of the energies is the most exciting these days? Which of the energies? Yeah, solar, you know what? I would say exciting is, for us, I mean, for me personally, is nuclear. There's so much things that happen in the nuclear space. The upcoming, I think solar is really cool. I think there's so many things that could probably happen in there, but I think there's really more energy sectors that are popping out, batteries and a few other things that are very smart people in our company are figuring out where to go next. All right, well, Paul Reyes with Energy Future Holdings. Thank you for sharing your story and journey with your peers. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE.