Brendon McCaulley, Heartland Data Systems, with John Furrier and Dave Vellante at IBM Edge 2014 @thecube #ibmedge Excited to speak with a customer, John Furrier and Dave Vellante welcomed Brendon McCaulley, Executive Director of IT Service Operations at Heartland Payment Systems, to theCUBE at the IBMEdge conference in Las Vegas. #IBMEdge Brendon McCaulley Innovation on the rise despite a flat IT budget Furrier began by asking McCaulley how innovation was changing in IT and if he could elaborate on some of the “resets” that many technologists see occurring throughout the IT market. McCaulley noted that in the past five years, his company has maintained the same budget, but experiences “explosive growth.” Outlining the challenges Heartland has been facing, McCaulley described “taking infrastructure that was very siloed […] and building in more flexibility into a true multi-tenancy environment with a real IO blender.” This new environment McCaulley cautioned, “has become a lot more unpredictable.” Another difficulty McCaulley mentioned is the “competing interests” in IT: the “old stodgy way of doing IT” and the “new startup” mentality. Automation encourages innovation and cooperation Furrier delved a little further into the divide, asking “what does the collision course look like?” Acknowledging a lot of companies likely face this issue, McCaulley said implementing automation had bridged the gap at Heartland. “What we’ve found,” he explained, “is immersing newer talent with employees that have been in IT for a long time and building those wins around automation, it gets everybody out of doing the mundane.” McCaulley also touched on how automation has freed employees from humdrum tasks, affording them more time to invest in innovation. The ability to add new business value, McCaulley said, “Keeps IT relevant. It keeps IT part of the solution.” Balancing the budget to increase innovation Vellante asked about the ratio of budget spent on innovation versus that spend on keeping the lights on at Heartland. McCaulley said that his department is moving closer to 50-50 ratio, which is drastic progress from when he first started, when the ratio was 80 percent keeping the lights on and 20 percent on innovation. Infrastructure changes to handle business challenges #IBMEdge Brendon McCaulleyNext, Vellante asked McCaulley to talk about Heartland and “what’s driving things.” Heartland Payment Systems, McCaulley said, “Is the 5th largest credit card processor in the US.” But they also penetrating new and complimentary markets: “debit card processing, gift and loyalty, payroll, school solutions, student loan processing.” The experience of handling a mixed workload and unpredictability, McCaulley said, “Has been eye-opening for IT.” He also mentioned DevOps, where he said his department has taken an integrative approach to development and product offerings. The focus, McCaulley said, is “delivering value to the business and bringing transparency, good monitoring, and rapid infrastructure delivery to market.” Platform infrastructure better supports emerging applications Vellante asked McCaulley to discuss the infrastructure Heartland uses, wondering: “have you been able to build a more horizontal infrastructure platform to support these emerging applications, to support acquisitions and the like?” Describing his department’s move away from a silo infrastructure, McCaulley said, “We now have a platform infrastructure team” and infrastructure engineers focused on integration. The “siloed view” doesn’t function when teams attempt to work towards rapid infrastructure delivery and rapid application delivery.