(upbeat electronic music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation! >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. You know, in this COVID-19 pandemic, we've been reaching out to folks that really have good visibility on what's going on out there. Tim Conley is here, he's a principal with the ATS Group, and partner of IBM. Tim, good to see you again man, thanks for comin' on! >> You got it, Dave, how are you today? >> Not too bad, you hangin' in there with all this craziness? How are things where you are? >> Yeah, we sure are, it's like groundhog day everyday, right? >> I know, the family's goin' crazy. They want to get out, and, well summer's comin', so hopefully the pandemic is going to calm down a little bit here, give us a breather. >> I hear that. >> But so, tell us what's goin' on these days with your company, with the ATS Group, what are you seein' in the marketplace? Give us the update. >> Sure, Dave. We've been in business 19 years now as a IBM systems integrator. Doin' a lot of work around storage. There's a lot of shiny new nickels out there these days that we're trying to make sure that we stay ahead of the game on. You know, our customers demand excellence from us, because that's what we've been giving them the last, you know, 19 years. So, they demand that from us, which is actually a great position for us to be in, but you know, with a lot of the new, shiny new nickels out there today, takes a lot of energy to focus on those, make sure we're talkin' to our customer about the right things, at the right times in the marketplace. >> I had Ed Walsh on the other day, and actually a couple times within the last six months, and he shared with us, actually in studio, when we didn't have to be six feet apart, the new announcements, the simplification of the portfolio. Presumably you've seen that. What was your reaction, how do you think the customer will react? >> That's a good question. Like I said, we're always looking to be bleeding edge, that's actually where we got our name from, Advanced Technology Services Group. So, IBM consistently comes out with some really good products and solutions, and we're constantly vetting that in our innovation center, in beta programs and things like that. A couple key things that are working now with us is Hybrid Multicloud. You know, IBM comes out, like I said, with some good solutions. We vet them out, and we're real excited about Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud. We've been using that for probably the last 12, 14 months, so trying to get the word out our customers on what it means, for partners as well, we can have a simple 10 minute conversation with our customers and our partners, kind of describe it at a high-level, and then they can gain interest at that point. It can be a little tricky, but we try to take that trickiness out of it, and let our customers know what's really goin' on, how it works for disaster recovery, for data protection to the cloud. Customers always want to talk about those things, but a lot of them really don't know those specifics, so we literally in 10 to 15 minutes can simply it to them, let 'em know how it works, and what scenarios it might work for them. Again, doing tests, and PoCs, things like that, it's really easy for us to do. One of our big federal customers want to call today at 12 o'clock, going over that implementation. They're pretty excited about tryin' it out, 'cause everybody thinks they want to move some things to the cloud, so Spectrum Virtualize allows us to do that pretty transparently. In fact, we used it ourselves last year, 'cause we took the journey to the cloud for SaaS offering. Took us over a year to do it, let me tell ya, it's not easy. You know, people make it sound like goin' to cloud is a snap, you know, spin up some OS instances, some EBS storage, and away we go. It's not that easy. >> I was just talkin' to a software executive who started his company 37 years ago, we both agreed, that's kind of when I started in this business, we both agreed that it just keeps getting more and more complicated. So, firms like yours are, but okay, so you talk about Hybrid Multicloud, of course IBM has cloud, but IBM itself says, "Hey, we hope people put their data into our cloud, "but we know there's other clouds out there." Well, hence Multicloud. So, what do you see as going on in the marketplace, specifically as it relates to Multicloud? And I wonder if we could weave in the COVID-19. Are you seeing people more receptive to cloud? >> Yeah, I'll tell ya, with COVID-19 we've had some opportunities delayed, because customers don't quite know where the market's going to go for themselves. We actually had one customer go out of business. So, that ultimately delayed a deal forever, right? But overall, things aren't that bad, but we do see customers, you know, lookin' to make some things easier for themselves. They might have been thinking about the cloud, but COVID's kind of brought it to the forefront, and they want to make things easier right away. Maybe you can save some money, right? So, we have a calculator we created for our customers to really go measure things to see what actually would it cost to go to cloud? You know, a lot of customers have no clue what it is. We could do that in five minutes for them, really interesting so, again we'll give them that information that hey, going to cloud might be an opportunity that they didn't think might be existent 'til now. >> So, Spectrum Virtualize, otherwise known you know, for those who have been around for a while like I have as kind of the roots of the SVC, the SAN Volume Controller, and the history of that product is software that enables you to virtualize, not just IBM storage, but anybody's storage, and of course one of the major use cases has been migration. So, in downturns, people want to get more value out of existing system. You know, maybe they come off lease, or maybe they want to elongate the life, and they may not have all the function so they can plug it into an SVC, and they get all the wonderful new bells and whistles, and the capabilities there. I wonder if we could talk about that, and again, what you're seeing just in terms of the current, you know, economic situation, and then specifically as it relates to cloud? >> That's a really a good point. So, you're tying to key things in today, right? Customers are looking to save money, because they don't want their financial outlook is based on COVID-19, so being able to help customers, and you nailed it, right? SVCs, Spectrum Virtualize has been around for, gosh probably 11 or 12 years now, 13 years actually. Right? So, we pride ourselves on bringing that to customers. Showing them how they can virtualize their environments in the storage arena. And we have some gigantic customers in the federal space, commercial space, so we don't just bring out white paper, say, "Eh, well it kind of looks good." Right? We actually have distinct customers, and talk to them about how they can drive their storage efficiencies up with IBM technologies, especially virtualization. And then, you know, reducing their overall cost. That's key, especially now. Customers are constantly looking to reduce their costs and whatnot with their storage, so that's a perfect inroad to that, and then bringin' in the Multicloud part of it, you're just extending Spectrum Virtualize to the cloud. You know, it was in IBM cloud first, it was in AWS back June of last year, and now we're working at IBM on puttin' that out into Azure. You know, so we can bring those savings to customers in the cloud, which they didn't know they could do that before. >> All right Tim, talk a little bit more about Multicloud, because you know, a joke recently, up until recently anyway, that Multicloud is more of a symptom of multi vendor, as opposed to a strategy, but with shadow IT, and sort of rogue systems, and the marketing department, the sales, everybody doing their own cloud, essentially Multicloud has become a strategy that the CIO has been asked to come in, "Hey, we got all these clouds." Clean up the crime scene I call it! What are you seeing today around Multicloud? >> That's a great point, I like that term, I'm going to steal it if you don't mind. Multicloud's customers are very much interested in, we have several customers doing Multicloud, IBM, Amazon, Azure. We actually did a study for an Azure customer, where we actually projected him to go to AWS with substantial cost savings. Some of that had to do with right-sizing their environment, where they weren't right-size in azure today. But I got to tell ya, you know, Cloud's not simple. It's not easy, again I mentioned earlier, we took that journey ourselves, spent a lot of time and energy with some really smart guys on my team to take that journey. So, Multicloud is a really great idea, and should be looked at, but I'm tellin ya' it's not quite that easy to just shift around, but there are definitely things to move to different cloud vendors. Again, if we bring it back to the storage arena, right? Spectrum Virtualize today's in IBM and Amazon, it's not in other clouds, so if you want to go that route, perfect opportunity to go Multicloud. >> Yeah, I mean I think you're makin' a good point. Let's face it, for our audience, we're in the early days of Multicloud. Yes, everybody has multiple clouds, everybody talks about having multiple clouds, but to be able to run applications natively in all these different clouds, whether it's the control plane, the data plane, the transport plane, all these disparate systems, and really be able to take native advantage of the local cloud services. That's not only very complex, it's really not fully baked out here today, but you know, we heard this week at IBM saying a lot of talk about Red Hat, containers, and Open Shift. So, we're starting on that journey, and that's really the promise of Multicloud, to be able to ultimately run applications anywhere, but as you point out, that's a very complex situation today for customers. >> Yeah, that's a good point. So, I totally would follow up with you on that, that's Multicloud, customers are looking at it, and their are some distinct advantages to the different cloud vendors. One could even say on-prem is a form of cloud, right? That's just your private cloud. So, keeping things on-prem for certain scenarios makes sense, be able to tie that back to the big cloud vendors, IBM, Amazon, Azure, right? Tying them together is the direction people are looking to go, and are kind of, some of them are there and have done it, but I'd say some, or more of them are in the infancy stage of that. >> What are you seeing in terms of, just kind of switching topics on you, in terms of things like governments, compliance, a lot of talk about cyber resiliency, especially given the pandemic. What are you seeing there with customers? >> Wow, that's a big topic. It's interesting, data classification, you think it'd be that easy, especially for some of our fed' customers, it's not that easy, right? Tryin' to classify the data, they just don't know, they might know the applications, but they don't know the content of that data. Is it able to be, what is it, section 126? Something like that. Is it able to go to the cloud? So, customers have a struggle on their hands tryin' to do that, right? The technology, groups within the customers, the storage folks, the OS folks, the Apps folks, they're all about the cloud, move things to cloud, but at the end of the day, it's the security folks that need to be able to do that data classification to see can the data even go there? Let alone the application or whatnot. Fairly easy to do that kind of stuff, but the data classification, we see that's the hard part. >> Okay, so you talked about shiny new toys at the beginning of this conversation. You know, IBM, you're tryin' to be a shiny old toy, (Tim laughing) they've been around you know, a century. >> Yeah. >> Why IBM though? What is it about IBM that you choose to partner with them? Give us the good, the bad, and the what you'd like to see improve. >> I would say, we've been a partner for IBM a long time, I used to work for IBM a million years ago. At the end of the day, our customers demand excellence from us, and they demand things to work, right? So, for me to put my company, and my resources into an opportunity for my customers, we can count on IBM. One, we have a great relationship with them, they have fantastic solutions, and then we vet them out. Our customers demand that of us, and I can give real world examples of one customer to another. So again, it's not like a white paper, I read it from vendor XYZ, at the end of the day we're implementing these solutions at our customers. A lot of times we're doing em in our lab first to make sure it works as designed, figure out with the shiny new nickels, you know, what's broken with that nickel? Why's it not so shiny? Or is it really as shiny as it appears to be, right? So, being able to do that stuff in-house is great, but at the end of the day, our customers demand excellence, and you know, we have to be bringing solutions to our customers, and IBM provides quite a few solutions, especially around the storage arena, where we live and breathe, that instant marketplace. So, we have to use great solutions that we can trust, and know work. >> So, my last question is what have you learned in the last, you know, couple of months with this pandemic. Now that we start to hopefully come out of it, at least for a little while, what are you learning? What's been accelerated, or pulled forward, and we're obviously not just goin' to 2019. So, how are you seeing your business, and your customers responding, what's the sort of mindset going forward? >> I'd say two things, so there's the COVID stuff, and then I talk about ransomware, cyber security, that could be another whole topic, right? But at the end of the day, I've been on a lot of webinars, and things of last three, four weeks, five weeks, listenin' to vendors talk about their shiny new nickels, and it's, quite frankly it's a bunch of mumbo jumbo, and that's not the world we live in, 'cause that's not what our customers are asking from us. But a lot of customers are really concerned about cyber security, ransomware. I have two customers locally that got hit with ransomware last fall, and let me tell ya, it's not a pretty scene, and they were not prepared for it, right? So, one of our jobs is to really help our customers understand where their gaps are within their organization, so that if they do get hit by cyber crime, or ransomware, that they can actually survive that, and not actually have to pay for it, then be up and running in a very small amount of time, which is key. Like I said, two customers got hit, just of mine, within 20 miles of our business, and they weren't prepared for it. >> I can't leave it there Tim, what do I got to do, if I'm an organization that's concerned about ransomware, probably every organization, what are the steps that I should take, like immediately? >> I would say a health assessment, and it doesn't have to be from ATS, it could be from anybody that's got the experience, and whatnot. We do health checks for customers consistently, and they don't have to be expensive, they don't have to be like, months. People always think, "A health check, oh my god, it's going to take so much time." It really doesn't. It's a quick health check, and we can look at those key things within your organization to see where you might not be prepared. And I'm talking like not prepared, like if you get ransomware tomorrow, you very well could be out of business. It's not hard to see those kinds of things. And you can make it more detailed if customers want that, right? But I would definitely have customers, if you're interested in that, call us, call any other vendor out there that's doin' those kinds of things. But it's fairly easy for folks like us and other vendors to be able to do those health checks, just take a quick look in your environment, see where your gaps are that you could literally go out of business tomorrow. >> Okay so, first pass is you're lookin' for open chest wounds that you got to close immediately and stop the bleeding, and then what? You start implementing things, you know, best practices, air gap. >> Air gap, you stole the word right out of my mind, air gap, right? You have to start, you know, look and see where, what's the requirements? First of all, make sure you can survive the event, and get back up and running in a reasonable amount of time, right? That one customer I mentioned was probably four or five weeks before they were able to restore all their servers, and they were fortunate that a lot of those were test thing that they could kind of wait a little bit long, but the other one they nearly went out of business, 'cause they just weren't prepared for it, right? So yeah, air gapping is a key thing, right? You know, where I put my data that it can't be touched, right? That's a fairly easy thing to start off with. >> Yeah, and then the whole process of recovery, who's on deck, you know, et cetera, et cetera. How communications occurs, there's technology, and of course as always, there's people in process. Well, Tim, I'll give you the last word, bring us home! >> Bring us home. Hey, but Dave, thanks very much for your time today. This is was a great time talking to you about some key things that we've worked with day in and day out over the last couple months. Again, bringing our solutions to our customers, that they demand that excellence from us. Bringin' IBM solutions that we natively know and love, and trust, because we've done 'em many, many times with other customers. So, pretty excited about what's goin' on in the industry, lookin' at all those shiny new nickels, and see which ones are actually shiny at the end of the day. >> All right, Tim, well listen, thanks for comin' back on theCUBE, it's great to see ya. I hope we get to see each other face to face. Stay safe. >> Sounds good Dave, thanks for your time, thank you. >> All right, you're welcome, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. Go to http://www.siliconangle.com to check out all the news, for thecube.net, where all these videos live, and http://www.wikibon.com, where I publish weekly. We'll see you next time on theCUBE. (relaxing instrumental music)