 Hi there, how are you doing? Dave Vellante? I'm Peter Nicolettatis. How are you? Hi, Peter Nicolettatis. Nice to see you. So, tell us a little bit about yourself. We got a guest just popped in. We got a guest. Welcome to theCUBE. Who are you? Hi. How'd you get in here? Hi, my name's Peter Nicolettatis. I'm the Chief Information Officer at Curtin University in Australia. Oh, fantastic. With CIOs, we're always welcome in theCUBE. Step up to the microphone a little bit there. Our team knows that that CIOs, we have an open door policy with CIOs here. At theCUBE. Well, so welcome to the States. Thank you. First of all, you know, Las Vegas of all places. Well, we actually refer to it as Nevada because I think it's a pretty hard sell to say I'm going to Las Vegas for a conference. I generally say I'm going to Nevada for a conference. Yeah, no questions. Not a lot of questions. In Vegas, it's like, is that legit? So, let's talk about the challenges for CIOs today, Dave. You and I have been talking about this notion of services angle. And the services business is like the meat and potatoes of the clouds. The cloud is the disruptive force around changing IT. We've been talking earlier this morning about a new breed of IT. And one of the things that in the show is interesting is that Hadoop and Big Data is the sizzle, but the stake is the solutions behind it. And those solutions are being re-architected. There's reference architectures that are emerging, new value chains around IT, new value chains around service provider, solution of providers. What's your angle on this notion of services, both being deployed and then business services on the cloud? There's a couple of opportunities here for us. I guess what's happening in the IT industry is you're seeing a lot of consolidation. And not dissimilar in the higher education space in Australia, what we're actually seeing is basically a very different service delivery model. We call it, I guess I like to refer to as de-duplication. It's basically looking at the way we do things. And if we're doing it more once asking ourselves, well, why is that? And so our focus has been on identifying, where do we want to end up? And one of the things that I'm kind of focused on at the moment is that we can't rely on a capital demand-driven budget. We're shifting towards a utility and consumption-based model. We do that because a lot of our research community, a lot of our teaching learning community have that expectation that they want to pay for what they consume, rather than be charged and overhead on the IT services. Right, so that's the sort of new cloud business model that we're all talking about, which you see with the cloud service providers and then increasingly you're seeing with organizations like your own. You know, were you in Boston last year by any chance? Yes, I was. Yeah, okay, so you remember the journey to the private cloud, right? And I remember after Tucci's discussion around the journey to the private cloud, I talked to a lot of customers, like, where are you in that journey? Like, oh, we're just sort of thinking about it now that I heard this presentation. Where were you a year ago on your journey? Talk about that a little bit. What's interesting, a year ago, I guess the notion of our migration to the private cloud and beyond had already commenced. In some ways, we've begun designing our architecture about provisioning a private cloud, largely for our corporate system data and around structured data. At the same time as a parallel activity and supporting our student experience, we were also embracing some of the public cloud. And by that I mean some of our investment with the types of tools that our students use around iTunes, around the whole email and collaborative type tools. And we're using that in the public cloud, largely because that's the area which our students are already engaged in. And rather than reinvent that, we saw an opportunity to sort of enhance and integrate that into our environment. However, on the private cloud side, this was much more about managing our data governance and ensuring that where we put our information, it's gonna be secure and we had a great understanding of how we're gonna architect it. Our future, of course, is about how we converge both the public and the private cloud together. So how do you measure the progress on that journey? I mean, a lot of people look at, you know, the percent of applications virtualized and but it's sort of a, I mean, that's fine. It's a good metric. But that's not ultimately how an end business or your end customers would look at it. I mean, they don't even know, they don't even care. So how does your quote unquote business, I know you're a university, but how does the business look at that? Okay, so I guess if I went to my vice chancellor and I told her that I'm moving to the private cloud and I think it's a great investment strategy for the university, I get a kind of quizzical look back from her, you know, trying to understand what do you mean by the cloud? You have to, I guess, translate what your direction is in terms of business literacy. And really when we migrate to the cloud, what we're effectively saying to our vice chancellor, your CEO, is that I'm actually gonna change your corporate risk profile. Because moving to the cloud gives me that elasticity that really improves my ability to have effective business continuity and appropriate disaster recovery. I think we underplay that a lot. We seem to talk about cloud as a technology and a bunch of services. Where effectively what you're doing is changing the service delivery model to make sure it's much more reliable, much more resilient. That's the part that you've got to really sell to the business. So a really great KPI for me is to turn around to the board and say that, you know, if I could take one or two of those high risk corporate items off the table or lower them down, I think that's a very good selling point. Okay, so, and they buy into it, they're obviously saying, oh, what's this gonna cost us? I would imagine, right? But okay, so they buy into it. So now we're here at 2011, cloud meets big data. Now we're talking, we're hearing more about hybrid cloud, public cloud and the like. And now, of course, big data. So I want to get to that in a minute. But so you mentioned some of the public cloud apps. You talked about iTunes, maybe an app store. I don't know if you saw Sanjay Murchandani's presentation, he talked about an app store. Is that something you guys are thinking about? Where's the public cloud fit? Yeah, so I absolutely saw some of the, actually I had the opportunity to work with Sanjay a few days ago. I was invited to sit on a panel with him at the CIO forum. There's a lot of work we're doing at the moment around the whole social media area. And the reason for that is that, you know, Curt University has 48,000 students. One of the things that you begin to recognize very quickly is that students have a way of doing things. And what you got to be careful here is about being too prescriptive about the way you want them to change their behaviors. If you look carefully at how they use the whole social experience and the types of tools they use, it's vastly different to perhaps how you may have architected given, you know, a completely different approach. So we're looking at the likes of the Facebooks and the Twitter and the iTunes and you say, well, how do I actually integrate that into our environment to make it useful and practical? I mean, they're going to use those tools anyway. So why redevelop something that's very effective, it's got a high consumption base, and it's actually the way they want to communicate. And we're certainly seeing that with our current cohort, but more importantly, you know, we're architecting an environment for the next cohort of students. The kids that are born in the year 2000, they're kind of 11, 12 years old right now, they'll be at our campuses in five years' time with way different expectations. That's the group we're targeting right now. So it's about blending those social experiences into our business environment to enhance that student experience. So as you move toward the cloud, obviously everybody thinks about security, all the surveys we do talks about, you know, what's on the CIO's mind, the security, security, security, privacy, you in a way have a unique situation as a university. You've got students and we all know students, you know, they want their iPads and mobile devices and they're leading that trend. They're sharing files, music files, some of those might be copyrighted. What role does the university have to play in terms of protecting those students from doing illicit activities? Is that a policy? They used to say, hey, that's, we communicate the guidelines and it's up to them to police and adjudicate or do you actually use technology to police that? Is there an implication on the university's brand if in fact, you know, some breach of that trust occurs? How do you sort all that out? You know, the university brand, I guess like any organization brand is extremely important to us. I guess one of the challenges with policies is and we've all got loads of policies in our organizations, I think you've got to demystify it a little bit and make it plain English that you communicate in a language that appeals to the audience. One of the things that we want to do is obviously encourage the use of the social media type tools. But we also want our users to be mindful of, you know, what they say and what they do in that environment can affect the brand and obviously affect the place they're actually studying. So at the end of the day, they could be doing inadvertently damage to their own, you know, the value of their own degree. So here's a couple of things that we do. The first thing is that we do proactively monitor the way the internet and the way our IT systems are being used. And there of course is the odd breach of copyright and sometimes it's accidental, sometimes it's careless. And what we do is really take a view that we're going to warn you, we're going to be proactive in this space, but we're going to give you one first and final warning that we've obviously identified that you're doing something which I think is a breach of our appropriate use policy and we'd like you to stop, stop, cease and desist as soon as you can. Now repeated offenders of course are dealt with very, very quickly. And we've got to send that strong message because on the one hand we want to make sure we advocate our intention is to make sure that these tools are available to the audience, but we want you to be responsible on how you use them. Okay, so Peter, you're obviously here at EMC World, your EMC's a supplier to you. What's the relationship like? I mean, you know, why EMC? Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, it's interesting. I guess, you know, across the university sector in Australia, there's about 40 universities. We have six and a half thousand IT staff. We spend about $1.8 billion. And I think our, I guess our functional overlap for a better way of describing it is probably close to 100%. So vendor management plays a really key role in how our sector is going to be able to de-duplicate and collaborate in the future. One of the things I've always been really pleased with is that the types of partners that I've been working with have always been really important the way we shape our strategy and the types of architectures and types of solutions that we put on the table. I've been involved with EMC for a very long time. And in fact, when I talked recently to some of the public sector account managers in Australia, I was asked the question, you know, why did you choose Vblock? And it was a very straightforward answer. I think in many ways Vblock chose us. And we were one of the early adopters in Australia. The reason why it chose us is because we had the combative for one of the better way of describing it. We had the next switch in. We had a really strong relationship with EMC and we had Cisco as another key partner. And those pieces of technology fitted really well together. So it was a logical migration for us. EMC has always been a very valued and strategic partner of Curtin University. But we're more interested in not about the bits and bytes but about their roadmap and how that value proposition enhances what we do at the university. So how about this big data theme? What does that mean to you? Is it something that you're actively pursuing? Is it on your roadmap? Talk about that a little bit. You know, Curtin University is a very interesting project right now. In Western Australia, we've got a fairly significant project underway called the Square Kilometer Array Project. This is a project around radio astronomy which is looking at capturing cosmic whispers of the universe. Now there are two countries betting for this. But to give you some sort of context in terms of the data sets they're talking about, in the first three months of operation, the amount of data that's going to be collected by this project will eclipse all the data that's ever been collected online in the history of the internet. This is how big this project is. So when you talk about big data, we're talking some seriously big data. I noticed by Joe Tushy's presentation on the opening keynote, he talked about zettabytes and where he saw zettabytes being consumed by 2020. That certainly resonates very strongly with this type of project for us. So we've got to think very differently about how we actually manage that data, how we run our appropriate applications over it, and the algorithms that we need to compress and analyze that information. And how you manage the metadata around that, I would imagine. Absolutely. All right, Peter Nicolatatos, at CIO at Curtin University. Thanks for popping in. We really appreciate having you on. It was a great interview.