 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and SiliconANGLE is here. We are at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, NetApp's amazing customer event at VMworld 2012. This was a spur of the moment. Put this together really quickly and they're expecting 1,200 customers. We're here, we've got the baseball mojo going and we're here with George Reed, the CIO of Seven Corners. George, welcome back to the MobileCube. Well, it's kind of nice to be back on theCUBE. Last time I was just stopping by to take a quick breath after a lot of work. Yeah, so we're back here at VMworld 2012. I mean, obviously you're a VMware customer, you're a NetApp customer. Have you had a chance to check out the show? Absolutely, in between some other events I've been able to get out and see that once again, VMware and NetApp seem to be developing and rolling out what I need next. So Seven Corners is a really amazing company. You're really changing the game and the travel insurance business. Tell the audience a little bit about Seven Corners. Seven Corners was started in 1993 as a managing general underwriter that put out travel insurance, travel medical, and emergency assistance services to travelers from all corners of the globe. Over the years, it's grown to 850 in different unique insurance programs, everything from rescuing people who get lost in Kenya to taking care of visitors from other countries that are studying in the United States. Yeah, and your business is booming. I mean, last time we talked to you we're growing like crazy. That's continued, hasn't it? It has, we've enjoyed our third consecutive month of record retail sales. The company itself has already achieved double last year's goal and it's only August. So how has virtualization allowed you to continue that growth? I mean, could you have done this without a virtualized environment? Had we not virtualized the environment we were in, we wouldn't even be in business anymore. It was an archaic server-based system that frankly was worthy of the Mayans. And we replaced that with cutting-edge servers and data storage and communications equipment. And the word went out, hey, this great, unique product is now powered by a very stable, fast system. What that means to the business is they've been able to implement not one carrier every two years but four in the first six months of 2012, which means we have four times as much business coming through the building. We've heard a lot this week about the software-defined data center and people talking about software-defined storage and talk a little bit about if that means anything to you, what that means and what that means to your storage infrastructure. What that means to me is I used to have six people in infrastructure and desktop by virtualizing the server room and the desktops and the telephone system. I have two and we're more responsive and more effective than we used to be. The ability to now put out a live mirror of our existing system later on this fall so that if I wanna define a data center in Colorado, I just get space and click a button, as you all saw in the demo and five seconds later we have a full copy of our system in Colorado supporting those folks. So you guys are a flex pod customer, obviously that involves Cisco's UCS. Cisco is a brand new server vendor. Talk about the decision to go that direction. That was somewhat risky at the time but take us through your mindset there. Did a lot of studying on them when I was working with a company called Tech Systems Global Services and advising other CIOs what they ought to do to transform their technology. And I saw this outfit that was great at security and networking called Cisco go all in with a new technology. They said we're gonna be the best, we're throwing everything we have at it and we are not walking away from this one. Well that's my philosophy and that's Seven Corners philosophy so it was just a good fit. We've now had almost two years of production and we have yet to have to replace so much as a chip in one of the blades. So time to market's very important in your business. I mean I've seen stats that the guys that are first get more than half of the revenue share. Has that been your experience? The factor's about 70%. We rolled out something that ambushed the travel insurance business that nobody does because it's too high risk because you can't respond fast enough in the form of an acute onset major medical. Someone's had a heart condition in the states, travels to Europe with this insurance. If they have acute onset over there, it's covered and taken care of. They're evacuated back to the states and whatnot. Now naturally a carrier wants to be able to turn that off if it goes south but we were able to turn the product on in two days and it's just been a boom. That's amazing and so now here we are at 2012. I mean the pace has been just outstanding. We heard from Maritz and Gelsinger that on average 60% of the applications that are running on X86 have virtualized. They put forth, Gelsinger in particular, put forth a goal of getting to 90%. And do you think that's achievable? Is that achievable in your environment? This coming Thursday, a week from this Thursday, I get to shut off the last physical server at Seven Corners. Really, you'll be 100%? Correct. Oh, that's phenomenal. Congratulations. Absolutely, do it. Well, you just have to do it. Yeah, well so what advice would you give to people who wanna do it? Virtualization and data centers, they're not a research project, they're not a sandbox. You figure out what you're gonna do and you go all in and use technology to leverage the business's ability to have better performance, better profitability and a more pervasive stance in the global market. So how about NetApp? This is pretty amazing. I mean, I remember NetApp, a little filer company, doing NAS and it really come a long way. I don't know how much history you've had with them, but talk about what they're doing for you. What they're doing is they're continually improving their product, making it faster. When I realize data's growing, business is growing, we've gotten rid of paper. So we're going to Telemedicine, which is a new piece of business that none of our competition is doing. The storage requirements go way up and they have a complete array of products that I can monitor and manage from one screen and by having these virtual data centers, I don't need a host of people to manage a bunch of data controllers that are just gonna be scattered all over the, frankly, North America. So we talked before about some of the metrics, some of the money that you've saved. Maybe share some of that with us. The, if I were to calculate from the day the virtualization project started at $110,000 a month, it's now been 22 months. There's your ROI. I spent $700,000 on the project. Do you have a game, because you're CFO or CEO, do you report this, the CFO or CEO? Chief operating officer. COO, so do you have a deal with him or her where you get to reinvest some of that savings? Well, we reinvested it by going back into IT and inventing a cloud-based insurance servicing product that can handle any possible thing you want to insure. You're insuring cars, you're insuring boats, you're insuring people, you're insuring pets. Not relevant. We have a rules-based engine that's gone live and we're gonna feed it out to everybody on a little piece of the cloud. So you mentioned telemedicine. What can you tell us about that? A case where telemedicine comes in handy is if there's a skilled doctor in the states that wants to provide a consult to someone in Kenya or if a hospital in Atlanta needs to see 16 patients in a prison in Florida, telemedicine allows them to do that live to actually transmit the MRI results, have the consult and do that without having to be on location. And it has to be highly secure and it has to be fast. That's interesting. Well, good luck with that. If you're traveling, traveling overseas like I am soon, hit the Seven Corners website. You won't be sorry. And you'll sleep a little better at night, George. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE again. Great to see you. See you soon. All right, take care. All right, keep it right there. We're right back with our next guest.