 Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody wrapping up day one of Cisco Live Barcelona, CUBE coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Donnie Williams is IT director at Scott Equipment out of Louisiana, and Eric Herzog is back. He's the CMO of IBM Storage. Gentlemen, good to see you, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having us. You're very welcome. So tell us about Scott Equipment. What do you guys do, and what's the company all about? We're a heavy equipment dealer. So we've been in the business for 80 years, privately owned company. And so we started out in Farm Implement 80 years ago by the founder, Tom Scott, which is where the name Scott Equipment comes from. So we transitioned over the years to construction equipment and we're now, back in 2014, we sold all of our, the farm stores that handled all of that equipment and now we're strictly servicing the construction industry and petrochemical industry. So you're a dealer of large equipment and you service it as well? Yes, we service it, we're primarily a rental company. First, then we also sell what we rent, we service it, and also parts as well. So we're talking massive construction equipment? Yes, big, if you think, one of our main lines is Volvo, which if you've seen the show, Gold Rush, that Volvo equipment that you see there, that's what we sell, so. It's an incredible machine. Yeah, yeah, they are, I had a chance to play with one. I went to Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, where their North America office is and had a chance to play with their largest activator, that was fun. So is a lot of your IT centered on sort of the maintenance business and the service business? Yes, so we're, I guess, mostly mirror as like a car dealership, if you, so we, like I said, we do sale service, parts, all of that. So the business flow starts after the sale is made, obviously. Yes, we sell, yeah, exactly. We get the equipment out there in the territory and then the revenue continues to come in. So what are some of the challenges, the external challenges that are driving your business? So really the whole heavy equipment industry is kind of behind the times in my, from a dealership perspective, from a manufacturer perspective, they're somewhat up with technology, especially Volvo, but from a dealership, they're mainly privately owned, so there's not a whole lot of resources in technology. That's not a focus for them. They're focused on the business side of it. So when I first started the company 10, 11 years ago now, there was one guy servicing 600 employees. And it was one IT person. One IT person. So as you can imagine, it was a nightmare. I mean, it's not the guy's fault, I don't blame him at all, it's just the way that they had done business and not changed. He was one bummed out IT person. Yeah, right, exactly, yeah. How'd you guys find them? So they're a customer of ours for the VersaStack. We have a partner that they've been buying their IBM and their Cisco gear from, and then when they were doing a modernization effort, the reseller talked to Scott and said, Donnie, what do you think? How about doing this converged infrastructure, easier to deploy, et cetera. So it all came through their existing channel partner that they were using for both IBM gear and Cisco gear. Yeah, so you wanted a solution that one guy could run, right? Right. We've now at least grown our company to now, we have six total in our department. So we've changed a lot since I started 11 years ago. And what are they spending their time doing? Primarily, we do a lot of help desk and systems administration. We do mostly, my focus is to make sure that our employees are satisfied so they can take care of the customer. And that's the primary goal. And along with that comes systems administration as well. But a full stack like this, I mean the joke, you need more than one person, but it's going to be simplified. You know what you're buying. It's predictable and therefore you shouldn't need to be seeing it on a day to day basis. Yes, I like keeping things simple, simple as possible. So that makes my job easier, that makes my team's job easier as well. What kind of things are you driving? Is it data protection? Is it, what sort of use cases do you have on your stack? We are, we're servicing on our, with Cisco versus, sorry, versus stack. We are mostly, it's all private cloud. We're servicing applications that supplement our core ERP system. So we have reporting solutions. We were, when we first bought the versus stack, we were considering moving to another ERP system and we would have that infrastructure in place to migrate to that. So we still have that actually on the table as an option for us. But the migration to a new ERP system? Yes. We should talk afterwards. Yeah, yeah. We're avoiding that at all costs. Right, of course. You don't want to convert if you don't have to. Right, right. But sometimes it's a business case. Sometimes it's hard to make. We'll talk. Cloud in your future or present? We're doing some, SAS stuff. Yeah, a little of that. Anything, things that make sense for us to do cloud. Security services, we're doing, of course probably the most common is hosting email. We're doing a lot of that, SharePoint, that type of solution in the cloud. And how long have you been with the company? 11 years. 11 years, okay. So thinking about the last decade, I mean, a lot has changed. Yes. What are you most proud of? What's your biggest success that you can share with us? Oh, really building my, the IT department and bringing our company into the 21st century from a technology perspective. I mean, like I said, we had one person that was handling it, it was really impossible. I mean, you couldn't depend on one person and expect the company to survive longer. Yeah, that one person had to say no a lot. Exactly, right. I mean, he just couldn't get everything done. Right. So that really that modernization and it's kind of where you guys came in, right? Right, IT modernization play, the VersaStack is heavily used for that. And as we said on the earlier interview, we had a CSP in. We've also used it to go to the next level from an IT transformation to the future. Cause in that case, as you know, that was a CSP who uses it to service hundreds of customers all across the UK in a service model. And in this case, this is more of a IT modernization, take the old stuff, upgrade it to what it was. They even had an old IBM Blade servers. That's how old the stuff was. Old X86 Blade servers that must have been 10 years old before they went to the VersaStack. How many people in the company, roughly? Right now, we've actually sold off, since I've been with the company, we sold off some of our non-performing business units. We're probably roughly around 550 now. Okay. So I mean, we're actually more profitable now than we were 11 years ago from a, I mean, we have less employees, but our profitability has actually exceeded. So. Theme of simplification. Exactly, right. What's the biggest challenge you face as the head of IT today? The biggest, probably the biggest challenge would be me wanting to implement technologies that are not ready. I want to have the competitive edge that of the industry. I want to be able to be a head of the curve. And that's probably the biggest challenge. And you're saying you can't because the tech isn't ready or it's a skills issue? It's just the industry just trying to work with vendors and getting them to be ready for, or I say vendors, manufacturers, there are vendors, to get them to, and other dealers as well, to all be acceptable to the technology that's been there 20 years. What would you say is the top, number one or the top things that IBM has done to make your life easier? And what's the one thing that they could do that they're not doing that could make your life easier? What's the first start with what they've done? What are the successes that have helped? Really, I mean, we've been a long time IBM customer. We have not just the versus stack, but we also have the power system which actually runs our core ERP. Okay, so. And so I mean, we've had long standing relationship with IBM and the reliability is there, the trust is there as well. Yeah, long term partnership. What's the one thing they could do? One thing they could, if you could wave a wand and say IBM will do X, what would X be to make your life better? Cut the price. Oh, here we go. I should have referenced that too, besides cut the price. All right, we'll leave it there on that topic. But you know, the power system thing brings up, you know, our friend Bob Pitchiano is running the cognitive systems group now. You guys doing some stuff in AI, maybe talk about that a little bit. So what we've done is two things. First of all, we've imbued inside of our systems AI all over the place. So for example, when we tier data, which we can do not only to our own array, but literally to 440 arrays that have someone else's logo on them, it's all AI done. So when the data's hot, it's on the fastest tier. So if you have 15,000 RPM drives and 7,200 RPM drives, it goes to 15,000. When it cools off, AI automatically moves it. The storage admin does nothing. You don't set policies, AI takes care of it. If you have flash and you have hard drives, same thing, it'll move around. And you could have an IBM array talking to an EMC array. So all sorts of technology that we've implemented that's AI in the box. Then on top of that, what we've done is come up with a series of AI reference architectures for storage as one of the critical elements of the platform. So what we've done is create what we call a data pipeline. It involves not only our storage arrays, but four pieces of our software. Spectrum scale, which is giant scale out file system. In fact, the two fastest supercomputers in the world have almost half an exabyte of that software, storage with that software. Our spectrum discover, which we announced in Q4, which is all about better management of metadata. So for AI workloads, big data analytics workloads, the data scientist doesn't prep the data. They can actually talk to what we do and you can create all these metadata templates and then boom, they run an AI workload on Thursday and then run an analytic workload on Friday, but all automated. Our archive and then our cloud object storage. So all that is really, think about it more as an oval because when you're doing an AI system, you're constantly learning. So the thing you got to do is one, you've got to have high performance and be able to handle the analytics, which we do on Flash. So the Flash is connected. You've got to be able to move the data around and part of the thing with the spectrum discover is that we can talk through an API to a piece of AI software, to a piece of analytics software, to a piece of big data software and they can literally go through that API, create templates for the metadata and then automatically suck what they need into their app and then munch it and then spear it back out. And then obviously on the archive side, you want to be able to quickly recall the data because if you think about an AI system, it's like a human. So it's giving my Russian example. So I'm old enough when I was a kid, there were bomb shelters in my neighborhood that people dug in the backyard. Then we have Nixon lightning up with the Chinese and we have Reagan and Gorbachev. Next thing you know, the wall comes down, right? Then next thing you know, there's no longer a Soviet Union. All of a sudden, the Russians might be getting a little aggressive even though they're no longer a communist and now you see, depending on which political party, either they're totally against us or they're totally helping us, but if they really were hacking systems, whatever political party you're in, they really were hacking our system, trying to manipulate the election pro or con. The point is that's kind of like a cyber attack and that's not a good thing. So we learn and it changes. So an AI system needs to understand and change, constantly learn. If all of a sudden you have flying cars, that's going to be different than a car with tires. Now, a lot of it may be the same, the interior, all the amenities, but the engine's going to be different and there are companies including the big, big three, four, five auto, who are actually working on flying cars. Who knows if it'll happen, but the AI system needs to understand and learn that and constantly learn. And so the foundation has to be heavily resilient, heavily performant, heavily available. Last thing you want is an AI system going down on you, especially if you're in healthcare or big giant manufacturing like Volvo, his customer, when they're building those cranes and things, they must cost $50, $60 million. If that assembly line goes down, it's probably a big deal for them. So you need AI systems that always keep your other systems up and running. So you have to have that solid foundation of storage underneath. Awesome, all right, we got to leave it there. Give the customer the last word, Donnie. First time in Barcelona, right? Yes, it is. How are you finding the show and the city? Oh, this is awesome. This is actually my fifth Cisco Live first time in Europe. So yeah, enjoying it. Good, good. Well, thank you guys for coming to theCUBE. Great, thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one, Cisco Live Barcelona. Thank you for watching theCUBE.