 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Welcome back, we're here, EMC World 2014, you're on the Cube, it's our fifth year of coming to EMC World, we're excited to be here, we're so excited that we brought not one but two cubes. First time in the history of the company, double the pleasure, double the fun, double the insight, double the guests. So we're excited and we've got a great guest lined up so we're going to jump into it, but before we do that I'm going to introduce you to my host for this segment. Steve Keniston, the storage alchemist, great to be here, EMC World Live 2014. We have, as Jeff was saying, we've got a great guest, Jeremy Lawrence, director of IT for Eclipse Aerospace, so let's just level set with everybody. Jeremy, first give us a little bit of insight to what Eclipse Aerospace is and does. Eclipse Aerospace, we are manufacturers of the world's first very light jet, the Eclipse 550. It's a twin engine jet, the thing flies at 41,000 feet, sips fuel at about 59 gallons an hour. Sips fuel, I like that expression. It's the world's most fuel efficient jet. Travels at 430 miles per hour and seats about five plus pilot. So it's a business tool, it's a little time machine, but features inside that aircraft are things you won't see anywhere except maybe commercial jets or fighter aircraft, so for general aviation, it's a pretty magical design. And you pretty much created a new category. It's a very revolutionary product. People have been talking about it for a very, very long time. Right. Is there another very light jet or you're the only very light jet? We have our competitors, you know, Embraer, FNOM, but in our particular category there's a really narrow little window for our price point, and we think we're gonna succeed very well in that space. And when did they finally start shipping? It was relatively soon, or re-excuse me. The Eclipse 550s, the first ones have just sold and we've moved several out of production in the last quarter. So, and the order book is still there and still coming in, so we're making airplanes. We bought the assets of Eclipse Aviation, which was a bankrupt firm, and we inherited that design and all of their work. And a lot of that IT transformation that we went through with EMC's products came out of that bankruptcy. So, talk about the role of IT. You've got manufacturing, you've got aerospace engineering, you've got traditional IT tasks and chores that you're responsible for. What's your group look like? Yeah. What do you work on? Well, it's a big mixed bag. You know, we have a very small staff in IT to support a large manufacturing operation, and the complexity is tremendous. You can imagine what it takes to pull all those pieces together. We don't really manufacture so much as we source a large supply chain all over the world. So, getting supply quality, all of the SAP manufacturing operations pulled into one location for final assembly and Albuquerque is really what the company's doing. From an IT perspective, we've virtualized everything that we inherited from the former company. When we bought the assets, I worked for the investors who bought those assets. Everything was as is, where is, and no instruction manual. And, yeah, we had to figure it out. So, as you went through that process, what were some of the challenges that initially challenged you out of the box, and then if you look back now that you've gone through that acquisition process and kind of brought IT together a little bit, looking over your shoulder, what might you do different? What can our practitioners learn from what you guys have done? You know, in our particular situation, we really didn't have a choice, except to fully virtualize the entire company. We started with, I had three computer rooms, 28 rack positions, air conditioners in various stages of functionality in those places, and 200 plus servers, and all of the intellectual property for the entire company hanging by a thread. Things were end of life, end of service, and really no one wanted to talk with us on the phone because they equated us with the former company. But, so we didn't really have much of a choice. We virtualized all of it and put that into one V-block and started backing it up with the Avamar Dispatch-Up Systems. Awesome, and then how many people on your team, did you say? But now we have 12. 12? Right, we're doing the work that a team of 60 used to do. That really comes down to application specialists with product lifecycle management, and we have application specialists around SAP, each of them with their own unique specialty, and two really rock and roll and system administrators who really run the IT infrastructure, and our help desk triage security. It's a really great group. Yeah, we're getting a lot done with minimal stuff. So how recently did you complete that full integration? Actually, we completed this about three years ago. This was, we were an early V-block customer, got things going pretty quickly, and we've been now we're untangling the application infrastructure. Initially it was just let's secure that hardware and intellectual property, let's lifeboat that stuff out of its existing hardware, and now it's untangling the application infrastructure and the process by which you manufacture and restarting an airplane factory. We're talking about tomorrow in manufacturing terms, that's really, it was a big task, and now we're just waiting for that order book to ramp up and go hockey stick, and we can expand right into it. And how long did all that take? When did you take over the assets? This was about, I started after this company took over those assets, so it was about 2010 I began, and the entire virtualization process, from decision to purchase, to actually getting down to the physical to virtual migration, 95% of our servers we migrated in about a month, and then the remaining 5% we did over the next three months, but we were able to virtualize all of SAP, and then we went after our product lifecycle management, and some of our application managers were still waiting to get back to me about whether they thought this would be a good idea or not, and we'd been running for four months solid, it was just no insult to them, but it was a lot of nail-biting, and once we'd virtualized it, we realized it was a snap, and it just runs. So you've done a lot of virtualization, and we've had a few different manufacturing customers on before, have you guys gone to VDI? We're actually, VDI isn't an application that fits our particular business model, we have a lot of very mobile users, they're out managing supply chain, getting on to the shop floor, and it's a lot of pickup and go with laptops. Sure, so you talked about untangling that application, it's kind of the next step that was in that process, and then did you go through a virtualization process of those applications as well? Well, it was physical to virtual migration of the server infrastructure, and those all being served out of the E-block, that was basically the road, otherwise it was a physical to virtual migration, but this was a boot from sand environment, and so we had to pull that storage over as well, and start to look up how do you back up 60 terabytes with those SIF shares, so we had to look into the DMP accelerators, and it's working extremely well. I mean, the quality of life that my system administrators and the rest of the staff get, that's really kind of the big win. I've worked jobs before, it's 24-7 on call all year, and it's awful. It's not happening for what we're doing. We're doing updates in the midday, kind of serious heavy lifting, shut down Labor Day type things, and getting it done. Well, it's funny that you say that. One of the questions we like to ask the practitioners are, is what keeps you up at night, right? And for you to preempt the fact that you actually have raised the quality of life for folks in your shop is a really good thing, but I gotta believe, okay, there is that one little nagging thing, so what would that be? That one nagging thing. It comes down to more of facilities. My actual hardware, IT infrastructure, is in bugging me. The aptitude and attitude of my employees does in bugging me. They're happy with what they've got to work with. They can sandbox environments and SAP super fast. Test things out. Test dev environments, the ability to rapidly provision something without waiting four months while we decide on its IP address and things like that. The thing that are keeping me up at night, probably is that to be a little more secure with different facilities, but the ones we've got are great too. That's, they're well monitored, but it's really, I'd say it was a facility thing. If I was going to be nervous, it isn't the hardware, and it's not the software or the product. Jeff, I have to say that's probably one of the first times, IT isn't keeping IT up at night. Yeah, it's one of the coolest character in IT. I think of that we've ever talked to you on IT. That's true. I guess when you're flying at 500 miles an hour at 41,000 feet, you have other things to worry about, and hopefully the IT is working. Precisely. So you said you had to virtualize really out of necessity to kind of take what was there and put it in a nice functional package. How has that now enabled you to kind of grow the business? You said the order book is full and growing, and how is that helping you to manage your growth? And then what are you looking at to do next, now that you're not kind of mending and fixing, but actually sounds like a relatively stable state? Yeah, what I was really shooting for is that I did not want information technology to eclipse aerospace to be the rate limiting step. I didn't want someone to say, hey, you're the speed bump when something happens and we really have to take off and get going. So stabilizing that infrastructure so we weren't fighting our own tools, getting the engineers working on a reliable platform was my main goal. Yeah. Which is important and that's often described as an unintended benefit, but it sounds like you've executed it pretty well, which is terrific. You know, further to that it's a lot of it's still triage because we took over the assets of a great design by the former company and trying to figure out all of the former processes are not necessarily how we want to do things. So it's a lot of constant triage where you pick up a process or a piece of software and say, you know, is this relevant to us now? The way we want to manufacture jets? Do we keep it? Do we archive it? Do we discard it? Do we modify it? And having everything virtualized gives us a lot of latitude for tests and development environments so we can vet things really quickly. So we've talked about jets. We've talked about IT. Jeremy, what, is this your first EMC world? How many times you've been here? This is my second EMC world. Second EMC world. And give us a little insight. What have you found that you like? What's interesting? Why do you like coming here? Why should someone else come here? Boy, the big kick for me is to see just how broad the, I don't know if they want to say the right word. The environment is for other resellers. It's so many complementary technologies that are out here. That's exciting to me. Things that are happening in a high performance computing, that's one of my old loves. And seeing that start to grow. The Isilon acquisition, that was actually very cool. And getting a closer look at that. It's a storage seems to drive more and more. So for anyone who wants to be at EMC world, it's the place. If you're into that converged technology, it's really starting to happen. So Jeremy, another big thing we've talked to IT executives a lot, and the other big thing that comes up a lot, it's kind of, you said, don't be a speed bump, you know, kind of get out of the way, but also really start to think like, like you've got to seat at the business table, really start to be part of the competitive advantage of the company. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that's worked for you. Something you got a really small staff, so clearly these are not a bunch of fix it guys that like just to run around and fix it and then go hide. You don't have enough of a pump, right? So talk a little bit about how IT in general, and you specifically with your implementation has enabled you to take kind of a seat and contribute to the competitive advantage of the company. You know, the contribution in a lot of ways, if it's not air or water inside of business, it's computers and networks, you know, almost every business now is, we're not going to go to paper, there's no drafting table anywhere, it's an entirely digital design. That stability and uptime gives us, we're not actually fighting our own systems, and so you hire bright people in IT, I like to hire techies who can talk, everybody in the entire organization has got some aptitude in other areas, and whether they're not mired in repetitive tasks or dueling, you know, impossible hardware scenarios, I can use that creativity to assist in other organizations, you know, where it's a service group with a service organization. You know, we'll have our sticking points around security sometimes or style, but it allows us a lot of flexibility. Any new initiatives on the horizon? What's next? It's going to be a lot of refining process, I think, and so you've new initiatives for Eclipse and as a company in general? Yeah, for you. For you and the team, clearly you're moving from, you know, a lot, often talked about company and the press coming, the new category of these jets, now you're starting to ship in production, I assume that there's going to be service and maintenance as, you know, the larger percentage of those things are out in the field, and you know, probably the data requirements, systems requirements, the types of stuff that you're going to have to support, I imagine will change. You know, we've added a lot of features, our engineering and design teams have added features to the aircraft that make it a lot more attractive, things like auto throttles, anti-skid brakes, synthetic vision, enhanced vision. These are things that you're just not going to see in other jets, but due to the next stage, I think once sales begin to move out internationally, as much as I can comment on these things, service centers are going to be part of the Eclipse landscape and how do we get information out to owners and pilots on a timely matter and service their aircraft. And I assume your team or you're supporting the team that's writing a lot of these applications, I've seen a lot of customer application development at house. Yes, there is, yes, we develop our own software, our test pilots fly it and see our engineers also, you know, that they go through the whole cycle again. It's got to work, right? Like I said, 41,000 feet at 500 miles an hour. You don't want the blue screen of death popping up on the console. Absolutely not, and that's a real feather in our cap, is one of the best safety records in the market. I think we've got 200,000 flight hours now with no incidents. So this is a very safe, very fast aircraft and the technology inside there really reduces the pilot workload. Normally you wouldn't want to fly that fast with one person at the helm, but with our jet you can. Fun stuff. Yeah, it's cool. I'm having a blast. Talking jets a little bit later, we're going to be talking sausages. I think we had somebody on from the Vatican in the other queue, so we're all over the bases. Which is really what we love to do. And more and more, Steve, as we go out to these shows, we're getting to talk to the practitioners and we're getting to talk to the people that have their hands on the technology or executing the technology, delivering benefits with the technology, not just talking about speeds and feeds and this and that because let's face it, that gets boring after a while and it doesn't really matter unless it enables guys like you and your team to deliver cool products to the marketplace. So thanks for coming on the queue. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. So we're live at the queue. BM, excuse me, why am I stuck on that? EMC World 2014 will be at BM World later this year. So thanks for tuning in. We've gone wall to wall. This is day two. We've got a lot more guests lined up. So stay with us. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.