 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Keith Townsend. We are joined by Fernando Thompson. He is the CIO of University of the America's Puebla, Mexico. Thanks so much for joining us, Fernando. Thanks, Rebecca, to you. So I want you to just set the scene a little bit before our viewers and talk a little bit about some of the biggest technology problems you were facing on your campus. Well, Universidad de las Américas Puebla is in the state of Puebla. We have around less than 10,000 students. We have 1,000 employees and we are full dedicated to research and development and also bachelor's degrees. I used to work for the federal government and also for the private sector in Televisa and Entertainment, but I have never been in such a huge challenge like in a university because it is so difficult to implement the governance, but at the same time, the freedom, and if you think, well, for instance, when is the period of time where more malware appears in the world, it's on vacations where the students of the universities have enough time to build that kind of thing, not very creative people. So in the sense that, well, we live in an environment where you have to deal to deliver technology to protect to millennials that doesn't want to be protected and also, you know, they always ask for more services and now it's coming the Generation C, so it's going to be real tough for the next years. So set the scene and talk to us about the kinds of things you were trying to deliver, better products, better speed, better services to both students, prospective students, faculty, and staff. Talk about what some of the needs were. Well, we have to think that actually technology is very important in the university because we have to prepare our students to give them the tools to face the future. The world is changing and Mexico right now have a huge challenge because we're competing against China, Brazil, and India. We used to have an advantage with the price and people that is very well prepared and with the salaries, but not any longer. So we have to give this advantage to our students. So nine years ago, when I arrived to university, for instance, we have the subscription system and it was awful because it was very slow with the performance and not very reliable. So the people was really complaining, because we're a private university. You always expect good performance for a private university, and especially subscription with your main customer that is a student. So we start to work to fix the main system and it takes us years, years. So we pass through availability and reliability but bad performance, now performance, but since we implement Extreme I.O. And we change all the data center with Dell products. This very year in spring, in the spring semester, we make a huge change because the subscription system now became one of the biggest transformation tools in the service for the students. What happened was that during the subscription, we announced a special day and a special hour, 8.30. And if you are okay with your administrative stuff and qualifications, you can get into the system and subscribe. Four years ago, that takes like one hour or 45 minutes. But with the change that we made, now it's a matter of two minutes. So it was a change of 100 degrees. What happened was that, yes, we changed the application, but also with this flash technology, we use it because at the end, what we want to make was to impact to the student, in order that they can receive the schedule, he can take faster decisions. They move very fast with the computers and with the devices. So they just need the application. So we build it, we test it and it work it fantastic. And let me tell you something. How I measure, I don't have a business analytic tool or a business intelligence tool. What I have was access to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, and man, they give us such a compliment. No, like, hey, TI finally did something well for us also. And it was thousands of comments. Memes was waiting, yeah, yeah. Memes was waiting to attack us like you shall not pass and it's not like past years, but not this year. So it was a successful story. And now we are thinking to implement all these changes that we made in another spaces of the university. So let's talk about that a little bit. So I think it is a great example of digital transformation. I don't need to ask you if you believe in digital transformation. That was the digital transformation to your business. Specifically, I'm interested in research. What type of research does the university do and how does your group play a role in enabling that? Yeah, basically, for instance, we have four programs of PSD with specialization in technology and also in environment, no? One of the top challenge that we are facing in Latin America. So we have to supply the technology than our research needs and it has to be at the same level of the United States. We belong to the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools in the United States. So it's not United States soil, but we belong to that association. So you have the same SLAs? Yeah, basically, basically. And we have to supply all the bandwidth and performance because they're discussing at the same time with people in Texas or Wisconsin or Alaska or Brazil. And they need, you know, for instance, high performance computing, storage, cloud tools, and for them have to be, you know, pretty clear and transparent. What I mean is that they don't care. And they don't have to care about where is working if it is expensive or not. No, you have to supply what they need. Let me give an example. For instance, a fractal. If you send the information of a fractal, we don't have a supercomputer in our university, but we have a deal with another university that they have this supercomputer. So what we do is to supply the connection of the computer to send information and to receive the information immediately in order that the graphic can have the information in real time. And people are taking decision in different parts of the country with that information that we're sending. Sometimes it could be, you know, if we are facing a hurricane or we're going to have a problem with water or if we want to avoid, you know, and you know, something then heck happened with an earthquake or something like that. And with that kind of information, now our researchers certainly can know what is happening. So we give the technology for them. We make a mixture between cloud computing services and also our data center. Then I became a wonderful tool because with ExtremeIO and with our new servers, if you can go to our new data center, you will realize that it's only Dell and EMC right there. And something funny is that we have a wonderful data center. But to be honest with you, we only use right now only three racks. So the space that we are using right now with this new disk is, the space that we are saving is amazing, no? Because if you can see our racks, you will see that we have, for instance, Clarion and DMX and another technology. Right now, we shoot down all those racks. And right now we are using just like 40 inches of disk. And then, you know, I have more performance. I have savings on air, savings on electricity. The people think that we are having, you know, more space with more racks and more disks, but not any longer. So I think what is going to happen with Dell and EMC in the future, I think that they are going to deliver, for instance, 100 terabytes in just a USB or something like that. So there's not going to be any need of a data center. Fit ahead of a pin. Yeah. Fernando, thank you so much for joining us. No, thank you to you. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Keith Townsend. We will have more from Dell EMC World after this.