 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. And welcome back to theCUBE here in Las Vegas, we're in the Sands Expo here at EMC World 2016, along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we again thank you for joining us here in our day long, actually week long coverage here of EMC's annual Get Together. We're with Paul Sunquist right now, who is the Content Management Director for Paragon Solutions, and Paul, thank you for joining us here on theCUBE, we appreciate the time. It's a pleasure. You're a company, you bring together different solutions, right? Business, technology solutions for other companies, fill in the blanks around that, if you'll a little bit about Paragon and kind of your approach to what you do. Yeah, sure, so we're an EMC partner, we focus a lot on EMC products, whether that's Captiva or Documentum, InfoArchive, our idea is to help customers really get from wherever they are today to the new future, which is very exciting these days because of the opportunities that D2 offers, the InfoArchive solutions, the amount of the ROI that comes along with InfoArchive. So sometimes we will respond to a proposal request and sometimes we work with customers that are already working with us for different areas and we'll give them some opportunities to see a product that they haven't quite seen yet, try to understand how they're operating in the current and try to understand that there's opportunities for them to save some money or to provide greater tools for their users. So the problem that customers had is that they didn't really have a lot of opportunities customers had, we were talking off camera about how this business has changed and you were saying in some ways it hasn't, some ways it hasn't, but if I go back to 2006 when the federal rules of civil procedure changed or came about, the problem everybody had was, oh no, I'm going to have a smoking gun email and I'm going to get slapped because I can't produce an electronic record so I got to put everything in an archive and then the problem became, I got to defensively delete things and legal hold and all this sort of mess and the general council was kind of running the business. Has that not changed? Is that still the case? How has that evolved? Yeah, absolutely, that's changed a lot of the way people look at data overall, the entire lifecycle of data. So when a new record comes into the system, when people work on comments on a document, when people are storing it after they're finished with it, they have to understand what that data is. So whether or not some of that includes training for people working on the data, they need to make sure that that data is being retained in some way. So there's a partnership really between line of business users and the IT users who understand both of those things with retention services coming in to help apply the right kind of retentions and legal holds and that sort of thing on the data. So technically where companies maybe in the past have just either archived data or they've backed it up which in some ways has been an acceptable form of storing data that's no longer used. Now we have to look at the data in a more record level format. So if a legal discovery team comes in and they need to understand what records do I need to put a hold on, the systems have to be able to support those requests. So like retention policies, compliance, all those things, HIPAA, Dodd, Frank, you name it. I mean, you've got, that's your arena. Well, yes, there's a number of things I work with but yes, absolutely, that's part of it. And part of it is that in the past, if someone was afraid that they might have to retain this for some time, they would just retain everything. So because of the way things are now where we really do want to delete stuff when it's in its retention policy, according to our procedures, then we want to make sure that just those records that should be disposed of, the disposition, go through a disposition workflow and they're approved by the right people, signed off, and then deleted. She's talking about defensible deletion. That's right. Is that, what's the problem that InfoArchive 4.0 is solving though, it's more than that, right? Well it is, because it is solving that. You really have, now we're learning with 4.0 with its new release today, that you really have four different types of retention you can apply and you can go down, right down to the record if you needed to. So if we need to retain an entire database for seven years or until, perhaps after a merger, seven years after that merger, we can do that. But at the same time, if there's legal holds on, say three employees in an HR database that we need to retain those three, we can do that and still safely dispose of them. Greater granularity. That's correct. How has the mobile explosion exacerbated that challenge? And how are your client, your customers and how is EMC responding to that? No, that's a great question. So with InfoArchive especially, what I'm really excited about is the new RESTful services because what that provides is access to the data. So we've already gone through an ingestion process and it's in the repository. It's in InfoArchive. Now if I need to get to that, I can use the new user interface, which is fantastic. But if I need to access it from another system, say a mobile application, say an HR system or an ERP system, I have web services in order to access those. One of the areas that Paragon Solutions has worked on is creating microservices in order to create that data, take the data that comes out of InfoArchive, massage it in such a way to make it available to those other applications. In this context, do you feel like your customer's primary sort of business justification is risk mitigation? Is that the case? Well, this is the great thing about InfoArchive is we don't always know that there's risk associated with this data. So we might have an application that we're going to store, we need to archive that, we're going to retain it. And a great ROI is around application decommissioning. And when we try to go into a new customer, we usually start with that because the ROI is so fast. It can be within a matter of a couple of days, really, in order to extract a database that's currently being used, it's using servers, there's a lot of training that's associated with it, there's licenses associated, and it might be on an old system. I mean, we ran into VB6 applications out there. So, and one of our customers has 1,000 applications that they don't currently put new data into. What are they going to do with that? We need to develop some sort of application decommissioning factory for these guys. So there's zombie apps, there's sucking resources that... And they don't even know who's using it. So that's another great feature of InfoArchive is you got these 14 different points of auditing that we can now find out, well, this application really hasn't been used in six months. So we've got to identify the value, or lack thereof. And who's using it and why they're using it, that's correct, the value. And those are the kinds of forensics that you do, I mean, you go in and help them identify, maybe they're blind spots, more or less to find out if they have some legacy stuff they could just lop off and not have to hang on to like a pack rat. Well, yes, yes, but that's some of the value prod that comes with InfoArchive. It's not that hard for us to ingest it, and then you can get rid of your old application. But then, six months later, a year later, you can say, well, we're not really using these applications. You can ask Joe in accounting, are we still using this application? And he'll say, not really, no, and I don't really need it. And you check with legal and then now you can get rid of it. But in the meantime, you have all that other value associated with it, right? You have your compliance associated with it. You have the ability to run analytics if you need to. You have the ability to search at any time. Yeah, and that is really the big change because it used to be you just shove everything into an archive and you really would never be able to go get it. But you could show the court, maybe, that I have a process. I have a policy, right? That's right. But then organizations began to realize, well, we need more. It's the value of that. It's expensive. I'll just drop $30 million on a new system. I'm not getting any value out of it. So how has that evolved? Yeah, so the ability to go in and like I said, quickly store some of that stuff is really where the value is. And so maybe in the past, we didn't know what to do with it so we kept it around. So now we can actually go through and we have a methodology for all of this to try to understand which applications should be archived, which ones should we keep around, what orders should they go in, and which ones do we need to dive in a little bit deeper to really understand what is the meaning of the data that's inside the repository so that we can extract that and create a record that's meaningful such as an invoice. So if I have an invoice, I really need to know all the information that's on that invoice. The company came from the header information, detail information, maybe purchase order information. So all of that might come from three different sources or six different tables within a system. Let's extract that, put that into a record format so that it can live independently of everything else. What do you say to the customer? Well, Paul, this sounds good, but we're sort of comfortable with where we're at. What's the line you use? Get him to pull the ripcord. The parachute will open. How do you push him off the ledge basically? Well, I think now especially with the new system that's fast and it's light and it's scalable, right? We've got an info archive for that does a better job of being installed in 10 minutes. Let's try it. That's what I would say. I'm not a salesperson by trade, so I don't have the way to try to really grip somebody. I'm more in the lines of let's try it, let's give it a shot. I want you to see how easy it is and how user-friendly it is and then you make the decision. Yeah, it's not a gimmick sell, it's what SE does. Yeah, that's right. I'm here to help you and do not be afraid. It's not pulling your own tooth. It's going to be okay. Paul, thanks for joining us. Thank you. We appreciate the time. Good luck at Paragon. Appreciate it. We'll continue here on theCUBE from Las Vegas. We're live at AMC World 2016. See you in a bit. It's always fun to come back to theCUBE because the discussion is always interesting.