 back. This is Dave Vellante. Bruce Chaneli is here. He's the vice president and CIO at TTX. Bruce, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you. Good to see you today. And you're here at this EMC SAP week. Obviously, you know, SAP customer, talk a little bit about why you're here and you know what you're getting out of a forum like this. Well, obviously, we have SAP, like most of the most of the companies around the globe. And we're an EMC customer as well. So we're really here to see how the synergy is is performing between SAP and EMC and how that's going to move into the future. I'm gonna ask you some detail about that. But before we do, talk a little bit about TTX, you guys big in in in rail transportation. Talk about specifically about your business, what's driving your business and kind of the role you play. Well, TTX is all about assets. We're America's largest owner of rail cars and provider of rail car related services. So we support mostly North America. We've got nine owners. We consider ourselves a pool operator. So it's all about the asset and those assets generate a lot of information. And that information comes back to us. And we're always trying to put together a better product and better services for our customers and owners. Talk more about those those assets and those products and connect it to the everyday person who's not as familiar with your business. What are those and help us, you know, understand that in more detail. Well, a rail car, we mostly deal with railroad flat cars and cars that carry finished automobiles. So we're in the consumer market containers. So if it's freight that's moved from say, China, it's probably moved on a rail car. If you've been stuck at a at a siding or you know, you're crossing a road and you see a train going by, if it's a big yellow freight car, it's one of ours. All right, so you're all about asset utilization. You want those containers to be to be filled up. You want them to have the right, you know, pieces of product and you want to be there on time, right? Right. Well, we're we provide the asset on which the containers go. So our value proposition is to provide the equipment on which other transportation companies will pile those those containers. Okay, so that's sort of part of your I guess, you know, supply chain, they're your customers, right? Yes. And they're they're transforming their business. I mean, they must. What are they demanding of you? What kind of pressures are they putting on your organization? I think the pressure mostly on our organization is to continue to provide that that equipment it needs to be well maintained. And we need to provide it at a low cost. So from from an IT senior IT executive standpoint, what are the, what are the pressures that you're getting, you know, specifically in terms of your operation? And how is it causing you to transform? Well, we've just finished actually a six year transformation where we rebuilt all of our technology. So we invested heavily, we completely changed out our infrastructure. We completely changed out our application set. And we literally just finished last summer. And so it was a complete transformation with an idea towards having a foundation to move into the future to be able to provide better mobility, you know, look at analytics, embedded analytics, you know, be able to really ask questions that we don't even know about our equipment so that we can provide a better equipment or better experience for those that use them. Six years, you have a party at the end of that? We actually did have a party at that. You should have a party. And there was beer. So talk a little bit more about the applications that that are really driving your business. And maybe we could talk a little bit about where SAP fits. Well, a large set of applications are dealing with maintaining the rail cars. We spend a lot of money to maintain the rail cars. We want the best rail cars in the industry. So we've actually been putting a fair amount of money into combinations of things. So for asset management, I'll give a shout out to Maximo. We just implemented Maximo. We integrate that with SAP. It's got a lot of nice integration features between those two. They work together. We're using SAP to transform our purchasing supply chain, the parts that we that we order because obviously, we're a large consumer of parts in the rail industry. We're using that data to drive efficiencies, reduce our inventory holding costs. We've got huge applications, very large applications, I should say that deal with where the rail cars are, what status they're in, who has them, what's on them, etc, etc. And we're pulling all that data in and attempting to analyze it to get better information about what types of cars we should be investing in, what markets they're serving. Because without doing that, rail cars are a 50 year asset. When you buy one, you're buying it for 50 years. And there's not a lot else in this world that lasts for 50 years. So you better be sure you know what your market is. Or imagine as a CIO, you'd prefer not to think about the plumbing, the infrastructure, you probably have more important things to do. Is that a fair statement? It is. Yeah, so, so SAP tends to be complicated infrastructure is oftentimes seen as a lot of non differentiated heavy list lifting. How you talk about this six year, you know, project is transformation, how has your infrastructure transformed? And are you able to sleep at night and not have to worry about your infrastructure? And if so, how and why? Well, I think you always have to worry about it. But one of the things that we did early was, and I've worked with EMC and VMware for a long time. We were early adopters of production alizing, using VMware and production. So in all honesty, we were probably one of the first private clouds, we went to full virtualization were, if not 100% virtualized, it's, it's 99 point something percent. I think we got a couple devices that aren't actually virtual, but not many. So and we did that early. So as we built out our new, you know, all of the new applications or new business services, we put them on to this virtualized infrastructure. And and we did that, like I said, before most people were willing to do that. So that was a, it allowed us to provide a huge amount of flexibility in our environment. We were able to stand up environments and drop them down. We received, you know, a lot of total costs of ownership benefits like 1000% reduction in how long it took us to stand up a server, our power consumption dropped in our data centers. I mean, it was a it was a big win and a great story for us. So I'm interested, because you're early pioneer there, your head of applications must have been kicking and screaming when you said, okay, we're going to virtualize our commission critical apps. What was that like? Well, it was it was interesting at first. And but I think that, you know, we just realized that we could not build out a completely new infrastructure. The old way, without building, say, new data centers and other and making even larger investments. And by doing what we did, it was just, you know, we just sucked it up and did it because the even terms of applications, it was realized that there's a lot of money savings involved. And how about speed? Talk about speed of deployment and things like that. Did they have an impact on that regard? Absolutely. Speed of deployment is much faster. I mean, because we're early, you know, we're still looking at things like self provisioning and other other and, you know, based on the size of our environment and issues like that. But I think that the speed that we've experienced is is is dramatic. I know you're really busy and you got to go but I'll rapid fire cloud, public cloud. Yes, no way. Maybe. Well, it's a definite maybe. I think it really depends on your workloads, what types they are, your risk profile, and maybe even the, you know, the size of the company where you're at in your in your company journey. Are you using any public cloud action right now? We use, like most people say, software as a service, but and we do have a small footprint in the in the public cloud for some, you know, for some business elements. But in general, as we've looked at them and they've grown, we've always found it more cost effective to bring it on to our private cloud. But that's us, you know, everybody else has their own story. Big data in Hadoop. Are you using any Hadoop? If you spun up any Hadoop instances, and then I'll ask you the broader big data question. We have not spun up any Hadoop instances yet. Not that you know of. Well, the guys might have some. I don't know. Who knows what they're doing back there. Okay. And so what, you know, big data, we, you know, big is a big topic these days, a hot topic. What are you guys doing in terms of analytics? I mean, you mentioned earlier. So what's your, is it your traditional data warehouse that you're using? And how's that working for you? It, we are using a traditional data warehouse as well as some other specialized data marts to do our analysis. And it's working. It's actually working pretty well for us. But you do see that over time, the data streams are getting larger. And so we're looking to see what the next step for us will be. Bruce, thanks very much. I really appreciate you coming on. I keep right there. This is Dave Vellante. This is the cube. We write back with SAP week here at 42 South Street and Hopkins, Massachusetts at EMC.