 Hello, I'm C.R. Howdy Schell, president at Visix. Excited to be participating in Green Lake Day. I'm joined by a valued long-term 15-year customer, Sreeni Vanga. He's vice president of information technology at W.R. Grayson Company. Sreeni, thanks for joining me today, especially in light of the $570 million acquisition completed yesterday. Congratulations on that. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your organization, and a bit about the relationship you've had with Visix? Sure. Thank you, Sreeni. Let me start with Grayson. Grayson is a $2 billion global specialty chemical manufacturing company. It's got two main business segments, catalyst technologies and materials technologies. Our FCC catalyst technologies help our petrochemical refining customers in producing mainly transportation fuel and petrochemical feedstocks. And our materials technology business delivers silica-based materials to our customers to improve their products and processes in segments like coatings, consumer, industrial, and pharma businesses. As C.R. as you just mentioned, we recently closed an acquisition and acquired the fine chemicals business of Albemar, which will increase our business share of pharma business. Coming back to me regarding myself, I've been with the Grace for 22 years. It's been a long time, guys. So I've been mainly in the SAP technology area and took over the role of the vice president and head of IT four years back. And I've been working with Visix for almost 15 years now. And it's been an excellent strategic partnership, C.R. Well, thank you. And we definitely appreciate the business and the relationship. So we'll move on to the next question. So what are the most important factors for you to be successful in the business? Obviously growth is going to be key with what you just accomplished with the acquisition, but what are the most important factors for you to be successful as well? Since Grace is a specialty chemical manufacturing company, it's very important for us to understand and sometimes even anticipate exact customer requirements and then quickly create that special material which helps improve our customers' products and processes. That's the most important thing for us. The company depends on me and my team to provide value to our business and helping them make decisions quicker and in real time and adaptable to the ever-changing market and the business needs to C.R. So that's the most important factor for me. Great, IT is obviously playing a bigger role as you move forward. Good. So what are some of the most, I don't like to use the word pain points, but I'll call them business challenges in your industry. So building on my previous point, so chemical manufacturing is not new and it has evolved over the years and with numerous mergers and acquisitions along the way, the systems and processes are not always harmonized or standardized. So keeping it moving together and in the same direction has always been a challenge. And added to that, COVID has affected most of the sector and our industry is no exception, especially in the refining sector. We need to be able to provide rapid customization to our customers, which means our business which needs flexible computing power to process and analyze huge amounts of these material properties data and allow them to come up with products that we can go to market faster than our competitors here. Right, got it. And obviously that's key. Yes. You touched on this briefly but I'd really like to hear more about how your business has changed in the last year. You mentioned COVID. So love to hear how things have changed and what you can share. So specifically about COVID, right? So about 50% of our employees have been working remotely since March of last year. Unlike other industries, we cannot go 100% remote because we have chemical plants to run and chemical labs to operate. So we'll always be at this 50%. So technology has enabled us to do that. We have done a lot of things remotely which we never thought possible. We did virtual factory visits for our pharma customers, remote plant startup for our polypropylene customers. And also did virtual annual customer conferences. In the end, some of this will go back to pre-COVID days but most of this is going to stay and stay here for good. Well, congratulations on that because I think the whole working remote, I think we're all seeing the challenges but obviously it looks like you've seized the challenge and it's gonna be more of business as usual going forward. Yeah. Well, congratulations. That's key obviously to the business. Also going forward with a hybrid model, I mean, many customers, a hybrid cloud journey. Will you share with us a WR, Grace and company journey for the hybrid cloud? Sure, yeah. When I took over this role four years back, I made a decision that I no longer want to be in this data center business. We need to focus on our core strength and core competencies as a chemical company. And I wanted IT to be spending more time helping our business manufacture and sell our products safely and efficiently. So working with our strategic partner, Advisex and HPE, we moved ahead with GreenLake which just solves mainly my problem of this getting out of the data center business. We now have a private on-prem cloud solution that is elastic, fully scalable and is based on the consumption based model, right? So that's very similar to what these hyper scale cloud providers have. And I love it. The consumption based model is what is great about the GreenLake that I have signed up. With GreenLake, I can scale up quickly and I can grow as my business needs grow. And it makes this a perfect cloud solution for Grace. That's great to hear, especially since we are a big part of it, I would have to agree with the words getting out of the data center business, we're hearing it more and more as we here meet with more customers. So with that in a hybrid model, there are a lot of decisions to be made on what goes in the public cloud, what should remain on-prem? And obviously this is the decision you had to make. This can be crucial when it comes down to business critical applications. How did you and your team approach this when you were looking at your SAP environment? Great questions here, but for me the answer is simple. As I told you previously, like I did not want to be in the business of data center, I also did not want to be in the business of developing custom applications. We retired most of our custom built applications in procurement, sales, HR, and replace them with the SaaS providers like Ariba, Conker, Salesforce, and SuccessFactors, which are all hosted in the cloud. These companies spend billions of dollars in R&D and come up with solutions that are state-of-the-art in these processes that I talked to you about. So unless I have a special need, which I don't in the finance procurement and HR, I don't need these custom built applications, which is the reason I went to these SaaS based applications, all of which are hosted in the cloud. That leaves me with my mission critical application, which is SAP and its peripherals, right? For business reasons, I wanted this on-prem. So I chose the HP GreenLake to host this on-prem in my own data center at our headquarters in Columbia, Maryland, but with a DR capability in the cloud so that I don't have to have a colo facility, which I have right now for my DR. So I use both on-prem and cloud, hybrid cloud for myself, for Grace. So I have very few custom built applications on-prem, and as these become more standardized, I'll certainly look at taking them to the cloud or even keeping them on-prem. So we wanted that inherent flexibility here. That's the reason we went to this model. That's great, because that leads in right into the next question I had for you. Many customers in this past year, they're all looking for the flexibility, right? And how important it is. Can you share with us the value you see from HP GreenLake and how that provided flexibility for WR Grace and companies, specifically to workloads that can easily scale up or down? The main thing that helped me make the decision for GreenLake is that GreenLake is sized with this 20% buffer that we can scale to in minutes. That would usually take weeks or even months to deploy. We now have that power and flexibility in mere minutes. When our business comes to us with a new requirement either for a new applications or new data analytics capability that needs computing power, I don't have to wait for two or three months to give them that capability. So it can be done right away with this 20% of flexibility. That's great and agreed. So this is a newer question with the event of your acquisition. How do you see that added flexibility when you're looking to integrate a new company? This is exact, you hit it on the head. So yeah, that's true. If I were to, if I had to bring this on with this additional computing power, I would have had to place an order, wait for the codes, come back in and do all that. With this 20%, I can easily fit in a new acquisition. That's great. And that really helps for the short and long run. I'm sure that helps the business. Yes, absolutely. The last two questions really is, can you talk about what really stood out for Advisix, with Advisix and about Advisix? Basically why Advisix and what you saw the benefit of working with us? Advisix, CR, you have a great team, CR. So I've been working with, I told you, right, for 15 years and I've been working with the same account manager for most of these years and the team as well, right? So the account manager and the team knows how I operate and what I expect of the team, right? So I can call them 24-7 anytime, day or night and they always pick up my phone and assist me in that time of the need. That's the most important thing. That's the reason that I've been working with Advisix and Advisix, I'll always propose good solutions to me either with HP or with other vendors. I can always trust them. We have developed a strong strategic relationship and more importantly, like I told you, there is this trust that is difficult to find and it has continued to endure. And I deal with a lot of IT vendors and I can confidently say that Advisix is at the top of the list from the customer service perspectives here. Thank you and listen, that means a lot. I know we've had some bumps, you know, I've been on the phone for some of the tougher times but you know, you get through those to the good times like now and really, really excited about what we're doing with GreenLake. So and most importantly, appreciate that relationship and I'm sure Marlon Acunha is gonna love the fact that you mentioned the relationship. So thank you for that. You know, finally, you know, any parting words of wisdom for other customers as they consider HPE GreenLake? Like I stated earlier, you must ask yourself, do you really want to be in this data center business? Ask yourself what your core businesses and what your core competencies are and focus your business acumen to deliver those that value to your business. I'm sure you'll come to the same conclusion as we did and take a good look at GreenLake for its flexibility. You'll be very pleased and happy with the value the solution provides to your business. I would have to agree. And what we're seeing with the best of breed solutions you can bring forward with GreenLake, we're excited about it too and look forward to doing more work with you and customers like W.R. Grayson Company. So I wanna say thank you for the time. As importantly, thank you for the business. Really do appreciate it and appreciate the kind words. Thanks and have a great day. Thank you, Ziyar.