 From Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering ScienceLogic Symposium 2019. Brought to you by ScienceLogic. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of ScienceLogic Symposium 2019, here at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington D.C. About 460 people, it's a good mix of enterprise users, of course there's government agencies, as well as a lot of service providers, which is really where ScienceLogic started and has many of their customers are in that space, and happy to welcome to the program, coming to us from Europe, first time guests in the program, Luke Horry, who's our cloud and innovation manager at RealDulman, who's, as I said, a service provider. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you, no problem. So, you're based in Belgium, your service provider, tell us a little bit about RealDulman, a little bit about the size, scope, number of users, and that's good for you. RealDulman is a Belgium company, around 1,500 people, in a country that is small compared to the US, so we have in total 11 million people, one of the biggest service providers in Belgium, but we also do reselling, and we also do service integration. Our customers, it's Belgium, it's what we call SMB market, but we have around, in total, I think 3,000 customers in Belgium. Some only are buying products or licenses, others are in fact in full managed service operations. Okay, great, yeah, three, the SMB market, as you call it, we understand, especially for service providers, really important market, help them, I don't want to have to manage my IT, I want to be able to go do experts that can do this. Our cloud and innovation manager, it's an interesting title, tell us a little bit about your role inside the company. I already work for more than 36 years in the company, so I had a lot of jobs within the company. In the previous job, I was an operations manager, and now I'm our cloud and innovation manager. Our cloud is our private cloud that we are using for hosting customers and serving customers. It's an active, active data center where we can do disaster recovery setup and so on. So for customers that are no longer interested in building their own data centers, that's what we're doing, and it's for some of them also an in-between, between on-premise data center and a public cloud. So we have customers moving to Azure and AWS, and sometimes they just stay for long, for specific reasons in our cloud. The innovation manager is about how do we set up, how do we improve our tooling, and how do we improve our processes in helping and in burdening our customers. You mentioned the public clouds like Azure and AWS, do you have relationships with them? Do you have connections into some of those? We are a Microsoft partner, so most of our customers are going to Azure, but it's also building up into Amazon, and we did receive some questions also about Google. But... Great, so when we talk about operations, service providers, very rapid change environment typically, you have a lot of customers to be able to deal with. Give us a little bit about what's changing in your business? How do you, the infrastructure management and the tooling space? In the tooling space, IT is moving, IT in motion, it's what we heard in the keynote this morning. Customers are expecting a lot about dashboarding, they want to see how their business is behaving, not about what is the device doing. That's, we need to monitor more and more applications and the business lines. So that's why we are implementing ScienceLogic, of HAT implementation of ScienceLogic, and now we're doing the second phase in building more runbook automations, more dashboarding, more experience levels, instead of SLAs, XLAs. Great, I want to get to the automation, but first, if you've only been using ScienceLogic for a couple of years now, bring us back to, was it a bunch of in-house tooling that you had created for managing before? What was there, give us a picture of kind of the before, and how you ended up with ScienceLogic. We had a Microsoft system center operations manager, we had Nagios, we had some plugs in on this tooling, and so it was, I think, in total six or seven tools, and we did some interfacing about it. But seven tools interfacing, not easy to run, a lot of management, a lot of people involved, a lot of skills required, so the reason was simplify it and... So, did you completely eliminate those seven previous tools? As of the first of April this year, they are gone. All right, so that was a little bit of a journey. Can you walk us through a little bit about there? You know, was it prying it away from certain people? Was it maturity from your side or from the product standpoint? What were some of those points that took a little while to get there? It took a while just to convince everybody in the company, set up an organization, it's not only a tooling, it's also the organization need to be involved, a lot of communication, there's a change process going on. So, and we implemented the first users, customers were in November 2017 on the system, and since then every month we added some, some times two, some times five, some times seven, some times one, a customer, and so it's, the people internally and externally need to get used to the product. So that's step by step, keep it simple, do it slowly but do it slowly, but fast and with a deadline. Yeah, so you talk a little bit about kind of your organization operationally, what's the impact been to your ultimate end user? Did they see anything? Has it changed how? Has it improved costs? It's changed certainly for the customers because the old tools, there was no, it was not normal multi-tenancy. There was not easy log on, so they had no access to the dashboards, they were just waiting for the monthly reporting and say, okay, it was up, okay, we were, now they can have access. We use single sign on to that. So the people, the customers are happy that they can see, they can see a line of business dashboarding and so on, and certainly internally it did improve a lot of cost savings because a lot of the things we are doing now is automation and we started the integration with our ITSM tool and that will go live normally next week. Okay, so what ITSM tool are you? It's a German tool, it's from a company, it's called OmniNet and the tool is called OmniTracker. Okay, great, so talk now about that automation. Where have you come so far, where do you see it progressing in the future? We started first with some task automation, we have a 24 by seven operation team first line and they were doing a lot of manual tasks. So where we can and what we first did was automate some manual tasks. And now we are progressing with the ITSM integration to the bidirectional integration and then we will start with removing some old mailboxes where we can do some restart automatically. So we will take a look at the incidents, see what we can do, see if we can do some automation with that and yeah, we will certainly progress very far as far as possible to do more and more automation and less manageable work. Okay, great. Tell us, you've attended this event before, what brings you back to the event? First of all, I want to see a lot of the demos, what's coming because we are today, 8.12 version was announced, we are on 8.9, we will move next week to 8.10. So what is coming? So I have to talk internally to people, okay, what's coming, I need to convince our program managers, service delivery managers, I can talk to customers what is coming, what they can expect. So that's one of the reasons, the other reason is to talk to other customers of science logic. What are you doing, what's helping you, what's not and so on. Yeah, I noticed one of the things they talked about is making it easier to upgrade from versions. When you think about the cloud world as we talk about it is like, well, if your customers are on Azure, you don't ask them what version of Azure they're running. You're running whatever version Microsoft has it, they patch it, they update it, security fix happens, it goes there. When you talk about moving from 8.9 to 10 to 12, that process of when do I do it, how do I do it, how science logic doing it, keeping things easy to upgrade is were there things in the keynote that you heard that you're like ready to jump on? We started with the first version was 8.3 or 4 I think. And we always try to be in good shape in the newer releases. So we all already had some experience with upgrading and it's going smooth. And whatever I heard from the system engineers is going better and better and better. So normally we have only a very small outage to do that and in fact it should be minimal. It's sometimes a switch over or something like that. When the database is changed, but normally operations is always running 24 by seven and there is no interruption for operations. Yes, has there been anything at the show that you've seen so far either through the demos, talking to some of the experts or in the keynote that you want to highlight? One of the things that I've seen is the connection with the application, with the APM tools. That's what our customers also are requesting. More and more the integration of infrastructure and application and the multi-cloud of course. Yeah, that's definitely something we've heard. All right, Luke, what I want to give you the final word, things take away for people that hadn't come to a science logic event, what you think they should take away from an event like this? It's for me the greatest takeaway is come here to learn. Come here to see what is possible, what the future is, what AI ops will mean in the future. Prepare yourself for the next three to five years. That's the main reason. All right, great, well thank you so much. Preparing for the next three to five years, we know the pace of change isn't slowing down at all so it's great to be able to talk to a practitioner that's helping to manage and deal with so many of those environments. Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you. All right, and we'll be back with more coverage here. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all our interviews. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks so much for watching.