(click and snap) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group here in Boston in the shadows of Fenway Park. Happy to have with me Mike Franco, who's the principal solutions architect with Virtustream. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. Thanks for having me, and this is a terrific event. It really is. I mean to be here with one of our first channel partners, and by that I mean Winslow Group has been part of Dell for many, many years. They now sell the whole Dell EMC platform with the acquisition last year. And Virtusteam, we opened up a channel partnership just a few months ago, and they were one of the first to join. And here I am in front of hundreds of clients. This is a great opportunity. >> All right, that's great. So we've talked to Scott Winslow, his organization, some of the partners. So, I understand a lot about the Dell relationship. How WTG has been kind of expanding into cloud. Virtustream. Tell us why there's a channel partner now. What that means, and what you look to for somebody like Winslow Group. >> Well, Winslow Group opens up a lot of clients for us, okay? And we need to sell through those partners. Most of these clients are running operations, maybe in the small midsize business, which are really perfect candidates for what we do. Virtustream provides a managed cloud. So unlike the Amazons, the Googles, and the Azures which are great solutions, we're finding clients and saying, "Hey, that was good." But as we start moving to these mission critical applications. The applications that are running my business. We need a managed service. We need performance. We need IO type of critical workloads to be run in a more secure and performance- laden type of cloud. >> Yeah, Jeremy Burton gave the opening remarks. The CMO of Dell. The Dell family really has a large portfolio. I look at kind of the hybrid and multi-cloud world these days, and from a Dell standpoint, you know, VMware has a number of solutions, including VMware on AWS. Dell was working with Microsoft on the Azure (mumbles) solutions. How does Virtustream fit into the overall portfolio? How do you help position, you know, where that fits, okay? Get the mind share and (stutters) the users? >> Great question. I mean, back in May, we announced a connection, okay? So our Cloud Connect, which is vRealized into our stream based clouds. Extreme is our cloud management platform, and a technology that we use to run our off prem clouds. So clients now have the capability through vRealize automation to recognize our cloud into revision, and to modify and manage their workloads through that. We also announced in May, a partnership with our sister company Pivotal. Okay, on their Cloud Foundry. So we now have in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, the capability to run Cloud Foundry in a managed fashion. Okay, again, Cloud Foundry is a technology that a lot of developers will be using to build applications, but it also runs those applications. And now that those applications are becoming stateful and a critical part of their business, they're looking to somebody to manage that. And now we have the capability. And then we talk about the rest of the EMC portfolio, where Native Hybrid Cloud is a package solution that's built on vRacks or vRails, right? Dell's converged black forms with the Native Hybrid Cloud or Pivotal Cloud Foundry, lay it right on top of it with the tools to be able to manage it. That's sold directly to a client, and we have the capability as Virtustream to manage those. So now the client can have these on-client premise solutions, as well as being able to tether back to our enterprise cloud. Our Virtustream Enterprise Cloud. >> Yep. Mike, we saw in the storage industry, there's lots of different solutions, because there's lots of different needs. I find there is no typical cloud strategy when it comes to most companies. But when you're talking to users, whether it be at this event or you know, out talking to customers, you know, why are they coming to Virtustream? What are the big questions they're asking you? What are the challenges that they see, and how do you help them? >> So, I see most of the time they come to us is because at these types of events, they are clients that are delighted with Dell EMC technologies, right? Dell EMC is a leader in almost every product that they sell, okay? And not only that, but the customer satisfaction, the client care service that Dell EMC provides is second to none. We're an extension of that, okay? We have the ability to manage either on prem, or of prem, and that gray area in between in helping them enable to get to the cloud. So, it really has opened up a lot of doors for Virtustream, and yes the solutions are endless. But we had the capability to manage that for them on their prem, and we've been very successful doing it. >> Great. Mike, we know SAP was one of those solutions that really Virtustream made its name on. Well, I know you continued to work on that. Can you give us, you mentioned Cloud Foundry. What are some of the applications? What are some of the big use cases that your customers are having success with? >> So in June we announced the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud. Okay, so what is that? That's our enterprise cloud, now tailored specifically for the healthcare compliance. So it's HIPAA compliant. And also, we're managing some of the more critical applications. The healthcare environment is not cloud native, okay? It's still based on the platform too, right? They virtualized the client server, the three-tiered architecture database, web and app server type of environments that the systems have reckoned, okay? We're expanding into electronic medical records, EMRs, critical client patient care, some analytics for medication. So we're moving into those other areas that's complimenting the SAP work that we're doing. >> Okay, well Mike, appreciate you giving us the updates on Virtustream. Thanks so much for joining us here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Conference. (click and snap)

>> I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. And we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group and happy to have another user here at the event, Wayne Dunn, who's the SVP and CTO of HarborOne Bank. Wayne's, thanks so much for joining me. >> Happy to be here. >> All right, Wayne, tell us a little bit about HarborOne Bank, your role there, how long you've been there, what you work on. >> Sure, HarborOne Bank is the largest state-chartered cooperative bank in New England. I've been there about ten years in my role as senior vice president and chief technology officer. I'm responsible for all of the on-premise technology, as well as managing our hosted solutions that provide services to our customers. >> Yeah, I think back. I'm not a native New Englander, but when I moved up here, all the banks I belonged to eventually got merged into megabanks and things like that. So talk about yours. >> We actually started as a credit union. We're almost 100 years old, actually. We started as Brockton Credit Union and became HarborOne Credit Union. And then back three years ago, we became a bank. >> Okay. >> And now we're actually publicly traded on the NASDAQ. That happened a couple of years ago. >> Well, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> That's excellent. So the financial industry, undercompliance issues... >> Tremendous. >> Security is a major concern. You've been there ten years. Give us a little look back. What do you think about what you do today versus even five years ago? >> Sure. Going back five years ago, the main mission was really just to deliver those services to our customer. Of course, security was already a big part of what we did in terms of protecting customer information. But given what's happening in the cyber security realm these days, it's become a full-time job just focusing on cyber security, alone, and information security. It's a major part of what we do. >> Yeah, so it's interesting. I've talked to some very large financial institutions and they're like, "We're becoming software companies." And I was at the Amazon Show. There's a very large, well-known bank that gave away the Alexa Dots and they're doing skill sets. What's the role of technology in your company? How does all this digital transformation impact you? >> Really, it's providing a new level of service in the digital domain to customers that aren't traditional go-to-the-branch customers. We do have a large part of our customer base still wants to go into that branch, they have a personal relationship with that banker. But as you can imagine, we have younger customers that, they really just want that same level of service, but they want it provided through mobile banking, online banking. And they expect, as I said, that same level of service. So really the challenge today is to provide that level of service through our mobile application. And one of the nice things about the way technology has evolved is that in the past, only large financial institutions could provide the types of services that you see. Whereas today, because of the way technology's progressed, we've been able to provide that same level of service, those same types of technologies. And again, the examples are mobile banking with mobile deposit, or being able to instant issue a debit card for our customers in any one of our branch locations. >> Yeah, Wayne, can you give us... What's the dynamic between the business and the technology in your organization? >> Before I came to HarborOne Bank, I was in the consulting world in the technology consulting world. And one of the approaches I always took, as many people do in that world, is you need to have the business' stakeholders, they need to have ownership whenever you do any technology project. You can't do technology for technology's sake. It has to serve a business goal, a business mission. And I brought that same approach to HarborOne. So at HarborOne, when we approach technology, it's all of the stakeholders at the table, there's a business purpose for what we do, and the business, as well as the technologists, are driving the implementation, whatever it may be. And again, a good example of that is when we started to introduce our paperless account-opening process. We had people from our operations division, our retail division, as well as my technology division, sitting in a room and really going through what that meant. The interesting thing about the process was it became a process where it wasn't just about online account opening and instant issuing a debit card, it was about, "Hey, now that we look at this technology, we actually can use this technology to do account maintenance. Or we can take the paper processes we used to do, and we can change those over to an electronic process." So it really is always a collaborative effort with the business and with my technology group. >> Yeah Wayne, what brings you to this event? >> Well, first of all, the Winslow Group has been a big partner of HarborOne for many, many years. In fact, we were one of the first organizations that rolled out the Compellent SAN technology with them. One of the things I always try to do, along with my team, is to get out and explore, not only what's happening with technology that we use in terms of the road map, it's also about learning about new technologies and what we might be able to leverage as an organization to improve customer service. Right now, it's about taking a hybrid approach between on-prem and hosted solutions. That's something that we're really exploring in order to become more nimble, in order to be able to provide the support the business needs at any given time without having to ramp up or do a tremendous expenditure in terms of on-premise technology. So really, we're taking a look at how can we blend our solutions with hosted solutions to provide a better level of service. >> Yeah, so Wayne, understand, public cloud sounds like it isn't too much in the picture for you. But the service-provided hosted model, what do you look for? >> Mostly private cloud >> What are the challenges? >> And again, the challenges are really not so much around being able to provide the application or the support that we need. It truly is more around security, information security. As you know, here in Massachusetts, we have the Massachusetts data security laws. And any company that we deal with in terms of being a hosted provider, whether they're in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or somewhere else in the country, they still need to assure us they comply with that same level of security when we deal with them. It's around making sure that they have the same protections, the same level of business continuity and data recovery, things of that nature. So those are the things we have to look for in a cloud provider. >> Yeah Wayne, I'm curious, as a CTO, how do things like, really, the digitization of money impact what you're doing. I think not only things like blockchain, but these days I know I'm using my phone to purchase things more. Cash seems way less in use. So what is that impact? >> And again, we're providing a lot of those technologies that allow you to do that. Our biggest challenge is that a lot of our competitors aren't banks. >> I know. >> They're not regulated the same way we are. So they have more flexibility in terms of, not only how they can market, but how they provide these services. So really it's more, the challenge is really in the competition. And technologies allow that as well, so. >> Alright Wayne, really appreciate you sharing what's happening in your business and how technology is impacting that. Loved digging in with all the practitioners here at the user group where they're learning from their peers. This is a WTG Dell EMC User Group and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group. Happen to have on the program one of the users here at the event, Andrew Baxter, who's the Director of Systems Engineering with Commonwealth Financial Network. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role there. >> Certainly, Commonwealth Financial Network is an independent broker-dealer. We have a network of roughly 2,000 advisors throughout the country, just based in the U.S right now and we, that's what we do. We're a clearing house for them. We provide all their IT infrastructure for them. >> Okay, the good news is that financial, like most industries, isn't going through any change today, right, Andrew? >> Oh, yeah, absolutely no. We've got the Department of Labor is our big bugaboo right now. >> Yep. So what are some of the biggest challenging? Is it regulation? Is it uncertainty? Is it, you know, technology? What are some of the drivers of the business? >> It's a combination of both. We have a lot of issues with regulation because of such people as Enron and whatnot. >> Smartest people in the room, right? >> Exactly. And it's not, the regulation's not a bad thing. It's just, can be problematic to work with. So the most recent one is the Department of Labor where they have decided how your retirement funding can be managed and to make sure that there is no conflict of interest. >> Okay, so. (laughs) It, yeah, we're not going to get political here. >> No, nope, no, absolutely. >> And go into how much government and all everything like that. >> What does that mean to your all? Tell us a little bit about what you manage >> Sure >> and really from that standpoint. >> So my group is responsible for our virtualization, our server platform, all of our storage, our data protection be it back up, antivirus, things like that. So we've got several different systems from a performance standpoint, and then we've got also have things from a compliance standpoint, a lot of WORM drives in the form of Centera or Hitachi Content Platform, and then the storage that goes around it and the applications that go with them. >> Alright. Well, you've got one of the hot button topics, security. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about, you know, there's the compliance and the security, how is that impacting what you're doing these days? >> So they're sort of two different things. Compliance is one thing, >> Yeah. maintaining your compliance with the security level. You know, we have a whole group, two groups actually, independent of each other, that sort of check each other, and then check us to make sure that, one, we're keeping the patch levels up, but also that we're following best practices to try to keep the bad guys out. We, I think everybody knows that you can't keep them out if they really want in. It really comes down to how you're going to react and so we've got to make sure that we have the tools in place to be able to react appropriately. >> Yeah, one of the things we've been looking at is, you know, security used to just be ah let the networking people take care of it. >> Right. >> We put up some firewalls. We do some things. Now, security, a lot of times, getting up to the board level type of discussion. What's the dynamic in your organization? >> Yeah, so, we do have the traditional on the network side. But we have a group within that that is specifically focused on that and it's more than just the network side of it. And then we have the information security group and that's more the board level where they're helping to define what types of data are critical, you know, personally identifiable information. We have HIPAA, other regulations like that, FINRA, the SEC, that we have to make sure we secure your information as well as possible. >> Okay, what brings you to this event? >> So, we've been a customer or partner with Winslow. I like to think of my vendors, for lack of a better word, as partners. I don't want to just use them as somebody I call when I need something. I want them to be somebody who is involved in the process, whatever that may be. And in this case, right now we're currently using them for all of our virtual desktop infrastructure, from the storage, the server standpoint. We're using some Dell products for wireless and things like that. And then, as time goes on, we start to do more refresh of equipment, then we're going to be looking at all of the vendors and not just the traditional ones. So, you know, you got the big three, sort of, HP, Dell and Lenovo in the server market or UCS as well. So we're going to make sure we look at all of them to see who has the best offering for us, for what we need. >> Okay. What about a cloud? How does that fit into your organization? Do you have, you know, cloud means many things to many people. >> Sure. >> But what does it mean to your organization? What's the strategy look like today? >> So we have two situations. One, we are actually a cloud for all of our advisors. We provide them with their exchange, their active directory, their antivirus, their patching, things like that. And then we're also looking at the Azure and the AWS offerings. We had to be very careful as we move to those offerings because we have to make sure that we retain this security level when that data leaves our hands, as it were. The financial markets tend to be a little slow moving to that kind of stuff because we've got very sensitive data that we've got to make sure that doesn't go away, doesn't get breached, and doesn't become generally available to the world. >> Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about what data means to your organization >> Sure. >> Of course, securities piece. How are you, are there initiatives to leverage data more, you know, you look almost like a service provider. >> Sure. >> We've seen many organizations that leverage that kind of technology. >> So, one of the, there's a couple different ways we do that. One of them is the actual software we've written for our advisors to use. So we're providing them with all the information they could ever want about their clients, their performance of the portfolios, things like that. But then there's also, on the other side, we're starting to look more into the power of BI and that kind of information so that we can start leveraging, sort of, paying more attention to how our products are being used in a more proactive manner instead of reactive. >> Okay, Curious how things like Hyperledger and Blockchain, you know, play into, does it play into anything you're doing today? What does your organization look at? >> Not currently. It will be down the road, I'm sure. But at this point it's not something we, because we really just haven't moved anything out to that area yet. >> Okay, great. I want to give you, really, the last word. What do you, kind of, when you come into an event like this, what are you looking for? What do you hope to take away from this? >> I'm looking for what's new, what's coming. I want, I need to make sure that I'm trying to stay ahead of things because part of what we have to do is we have to set the tone for what's going to be coming in the coming years. And so, I don't want to just see the same old thing. And that's one thing I like about Winslow. They do keep on the cutting edge. They do keep on forward. They've got cloud, you know, for lack of a better term, as part of their portfolio. And I feel that they actually know what they're doing. I have worked with some vendors that, they could spell the word, but that was about it. >> Absolutely. The cloud washing if you will. >> Yes. >> Alright, well, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the updates on where all of this technology fits into your environment and you've been watching theCUBE.

>> I'm Stu Miniman With The Cube. Joined here by Ed Palmer who's the COO of Winslow Technology Group. We're at their Dell EMC User Group. Ed Thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you. >> Alright so Ed, we talked to Scott earlier and Scott gave us a lot on the history of the company. You recently joined Winslow Technology Group, >> I did >> but you have history with Scott. So, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you over to WTG. >> Sure, so as Scott may have told you we worked together earlier in our career and I was a System Engineer. He was the Account Exec. We worked very effectively together. And we've reunited later in our careers. >> Alright and tell us a little bit about your role as a COO. You were an SE, I believe that's a part of what you have in your work. >> Yes So, the way we've defined my role. I have responsibility for sales operations, for professional services, solutions architecture, and marketing. >> Alright, so luckily things aren't changin' that much in the industry at all. Wait do you know, do the companies you're working with they haven't open acquired since you came on board right? So what is this, the pace of change and the breadth and depth of what's happening in the industry, how does that impact your organization? >> Great question. So Obviously the industry is changing all the time. It's a very dynamic industry. And obviously that has an impact on our operational effectiveness. So one of the things I'm interested in is how do we streamline operations? How do we work more effectively with our partners? How do we fully maximize the partner programs and fully leverage all of the eccentrics? >> Yeah, gosh, I have to think. We were talking to Jeremy Burton earlier and said you know you don't want to do five year planning. You can maybe do two year planning. And really it needs to be much more on a granular level. Every company they're dealing with they have different financial years. Their incentive plans change all the time. What's kind of the north star for your team? How do they make sure they kind of have a steady push on things but are flexible and can act with the changes that happen? >> Sure. So let me start by saying the Winslow Team has experienced phenomenal growth over the past three to five years. And we're looking to continuing to extend that growth over the next three to five years. What we do is we put together business plans and we put together plans by partner. And to your point, those plans are forward looking, but they're also broken out by quarter. So we're actually quarterly driven and we drive our demand generation activities around those plans. >> Alright Ed, talk about the skill set and how do you keep up with training for the organization? >> That's a great question. So as a Dell EMC Titanium Partner, it is quite a challenge to keep up with all of the training certification requirements. We actually got a jump on it earlier this year and we've defined our entire training plan for the year. In fact, I would say we're about 80% complete with those plans. They do require a lot of time, but they're important to maintaining titanium level. >> Yeah, So, there's the requirements that you have from your partners, but then, Winslow Technology Group usually is pretty early on a lot of technologies. Scott in his opening remarks this morning, talked about Compellent, Hyper-Converged, Hybrid Cloud, being some of the early edges. How does your organization play a part of that and how do you kind of do the communication with the field and the customers to know not only what to jump on but how to get your whole team embracing and pushing those items? >> Sure. So what we like to say is we are not trying to be all things to all customers. And I would say we are differentiated with our approach. So what we look to do is define game-changing technologies. You may have heard Scott talk about that. And what we look to do is provide deep expertise in those technologies. So that drives our training certification plan and we're looking to fully develop our Pre-sales Solution Architects and Post-Sales Professional Services Consultants to be experts in those technologies. >> Alright and I'm curious Ed, What's your hiring plan like? Where do you find good people? How do you maintain and keep some great people? >> Sure. Most of it, quite frankly, is through word of mouth through our employees. And I would say the majority of our employee base are through referrals. So that's typically how we're finding great people. >> Alright. We've talked earlier about how there's no shortage of change going on there. What's exciting you about what's happening in the industry and anything that concerns you about what's happening? >> Well we've talked about the dynamic nature of the industry, the constant change. I think what's really exciting is the whole move to Hyper-Converged. We've seen a lot of interest in Hyper-Converged Solutions. The move to Cloud obviously. We've seen a lot of interest in point technologies like software-defined data center, software-defined networking, and I think what's exciting for us is working with our breadth of partners to really understand how those technologies and solutions address the business needs of our customers. >> Alright, Ed want to give you the final word. What were you hoping to gain and when you come into this event and as you look at the customers, what are you hoping that they take away from this event? >> Sure, for me personally, this is my first Winslow Users Group Event. I think it's phenomenal. And I think for our customers it's an opportunity to be exposed to the technology, to ask questions of our subject matter experts, and I think come away from the event thinking about how the technology can be implemented in their environment to maximize their business. >> Alright, well, Ed Palmer, welcome to your first event. It's our first time here. Thank you so much for having us. We'll be back with more coverage here from the WTG Dell EMC User Group. You're watching The Cube.

(shutter clicking) >> I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. We're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group happy to have one of users here, Brian Anderson, who's the director for the College of Arts and Science Information Technology at Boston University, within a short stone's throw here. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for being here and being here while Scott's doing this because it's kind of a fun event for us. >> Well, that's great. Tell us how many times have you been to this? >> It's my third event. I was actually a speaker last year. >> Excellent. >> This year, I'm just coming as a user, listening to the sessions, and being social with the rest of the people who do business with Winslow. >> Yeah, what do you get out of presenting and then attending an event like this? >> Feedback from my peers. I get to hear about what other people are doing, what their solutions are, how they solve some of the same problems we're trying to solve. And it's just a good networking event. >> That's awesome, Brian. And we love how peers can really share with other practitioners. So, the good news, Boston University, I think, we don't need to explain what the university is. But what are some of the drivers happening at the university level. Changes happening, changes happening in every industry. But what, specifically, is happening there that kind of impacts your world? >> Yeah, there's a huge push right now to look at cloud as a solution for a whole variety of areas, replacing infrastructure that's currently in place, trying to figure out how cloud solutions fit into the academics. We have a lot of faculty that want to use cloud solutions to teach. And we've been playing catch-up for the last few years. And we're really taking it seriously and trying to figure out how to provide those resources in both hybrid environments and cloud-only environments. >> Yeah, can you unpack that a little bit? >> Yeah. >> Where are you with cloud today? What are you looking at? What are the criteria? Obviously, cost is always a concern for everyone. But we know how fast in higher education the fees are going up. And therefore, you've got to be under a lot of pressure there. >> Oh we are, we are. We're already using a lot of cloud-based services for things like email, file storage. We now have a Dropbox implementation that we're pushing out to our faculty this year. So it's a combination of what services can we take from on campus and move them up to the cloud and is that feasible financially? It's a big transition to take the capital expenditure and transition over to OP-X. And it's really just the fine line of what services make sense to do so. >> I've talked to lots of, kind of, K through 12 environments. And the students there, obviously, have a lot of high demands there. I have to think it's even more when we get to higher education. You mentioned a little bit the faculty demands and what they're doing. Maybe expand a little bit, faculty and the students themselves, what are they looking for? What do they come into kind of expecting and how are you helping to deliver that? >> Well, I know a lot of students these days are coming from using services like Blackboard throughout most of their career until they get to university. We also have Blackboard, but it's not as widely distributed as students are expecting. We have about a 50% adoption rate of Blackboard in our courses. So it's an effort to try to get faculty to convert their curriculum for the last 20 years into something that's online and that students today can really relate to and want to learn from. There's a lot of integrations with really cool technologies that students like to use and have used in previous schools that we want to try to get up and running so faculty can take advantage of them. So we're fighting the tide between what faculty want to do and their inertia versus what students are expecting when they walk in the door. Knowing how much the university costs per year. And they get a great experience in the dorms and we want to make sure they get the same experience when they're in the classroom. >> Excellent. We heard in the opening remarks this morning really the kind of digital transformation that's going on. Scott Winslow talked about some of those emerging solutions that they're helping to drive. What solutions do you use from WTG? Where do you look to them as a solution partner? >> Well, they introduced us to the Nutanix platform, the Dell XD series, and we've been using that for the last three years to provide VDI solutions for our students. And that's enabling some of our faculty to be very creative in how they teach. We have one faculty who's trying to transform the chemistry lab experience to give the students hands-on experience without actually having to go to one of their prized rooms where all the research is actually done. So we're virtualizing instrumentation where they're able to play around with it and learn how to do it before they sit in front of it. And we're working with them to try to figure out how to expand that for training opportunities for their graduate students and Ph.D. Students. >> Brian, what's the impact of online education, MOOCs, and the like? Is that impacting your group yet? >> A little bit. BU has about ten MOOCs they host per year. They're widely attended at the beginning, and like every MOOC, it dwindles as the semester goes. But it's been a fine line. We haven't accredited them yet, so they're not really worth anything if students take them. But we want to get to that point where that is the case. We see the value. We see that's what the students want. We want to make sure we have the total MOOC experience available for our students and external students. But it's just a lot of distance between where we are now and getting to that point. >> Okay, I appreciate how you've been sharing how cloud is really developing in your environment. As you look into the partners that you work with, what's on your wish list? What would enable you to be able to move this transition even faster, you know, beyond, I'm sure cost is always a concern, but what would you be looking for? What would help you and your organization move even faster? >> Ease of manageability. Right now, a lot of our partners are all siloed applications. If we had a service that could put a bunch of things under the same umbrella and allow ease of management of a whole variety of services, that would be a huge, huge win for us. That would probably make adoption much easier and would accelerate things a lot quicker than we can now. >> All right, what excites you most in technology space these days, Brian? >> I'm going to say the hyperconvergence and what that means for standard technology and how things have been done for the last 25 years. I think that's the future. That's where we are now and that's kind of the nice bridge between what we used to do to the cloud. And I think it's going to be here for a lot longer than people think. >> And when you rolled out the hyperconvergence, is there any specific metrics? What was the impact on your operations and any specific learnings that you would share with your peers? >> Well for us, it was a new service. It was something brand new we were bringing in. And I was amazed at how quickly my system administrators picked up on it and how quickly the faculty started to understand what it was and adopt it to their classes. >> Brian Anderson, really appreciate you sharing with us >> Thank you. >> the journey that BU and your organization are going through. You're watching theCUBE here at the WTG Dell EMC User Group event. (shutter clicking)

>> I'm Stu Miniman with The Cube and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group, happy to have one of the users at the event, Hasan Barakat, who's the Director of Global IT at Cell Signaling Technology. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Alright, so, Hasan, tell us a little bit about your organization, your role there, and you're local, correct? >> Right, we are out of Danvers and Beverly in Massachusetts. We employ about 450 people. We produce antibodies used in cancer research, they are manufactured here, in Massachusetts, and shipped all over the world. >> Alright, what are the uses for these antibodies? >> Mostly they're used in cancer research at universities, and as well as pharma companies. Organizations that are trying to cure disease, use our antibodies, which have a very good reputation in the industry, to further their research goals. >> Okay so, healthcare is highly regulated, going through massive amounts of change, what are some of the biggest drivers in your company's business today? >> So, speed is one. Quality is another, and we try to embrace change from a technology perspective and enable our users and scientists to be the best that they can be, from an IT perspective. >> Alright, what's the relationship between business and IT? What does that look like today? >> So we have a lot of labs, we generate a lot of data. We trawl through a lot of that data, so our users need robust IT systems and messaging and other sort of technologies to further our business around the world. We cover the globe, we're not just here. We're also in Europe and China and Japan. >> Alright, so we've really been looking at, it's been said probably way too many times, data is the new oil in many ways. Data is the new fly wheel for most businesses, the more you have, the more you can access, the more things you can do with it. What do you have to do from an IT standpoint to make sure you have data available, and can leverage that data, and maybe you can tell me what's kind of interesting how you use data today? >> Sure, we do generate a lot of data. In the old days, we did not probably generate as much data. Our systems do require a constant refresh, and scalability, and agility. So what we are trying to do now, is to embrace that change and be as fast as possible. We are looking to the cloud. We are looking to be as fast and agile as possible with all of our scientific data and also our business data. Our commercial data, our messaging. These are all challenges that create a lot of need for agility and speed. >> Alright, Hasan, connect the dots for us then. We're at this event, I look down to the expo hall, I see things like Dell servers, storage, hyper converge, hybrid cloud. What are you using today? How are things changing in your environment to be able to deliver all of those data solutions that you talked about? >> All of the above. And that's why we're here. We do have a lot of Dell servers on prep. We trying to build a hybrid cloud as much as possible. We leverage AW, starting leverage AWS. We have partners that, where our Enterprise Business Systems are, our commercial systems, our financial systems. We try and leverage these using Dell storage, Dell hardware, and also Dell endpoint products. So our users are now using a mix of Apple systems, Macintosh systems, as well as Dell laptops, monitors, keyboards, mice, and everything else. Winslow helps us connect all of it together. >> How much of that do you architect? How much do you rely on a partner like WTG to help put all those things together? >> That's a good question. We're lucky in a sense that we have a good team, that we sort of know what it is that we're looking for, but whenever we run up against, ya know, some challenges that we don't maybe fully understand, road maps and things like that, what's coming out of Dell. Winslow's been a great partner to help us navigate through that mine field. We have compellent storage on prem, we have Vertech servers that are split into application clusters and database clusters. Currently we're basically looking at expanding our Dell laptop footprint as well. We placed almost 100 lab systems as well from ancient, aging XP machines to state of the art Dell XPS systems that are running Windows 10. >> Alright, Hasan, it sounds like you're going through a lot of change to reinvent a lot of the pieces in your environment. What kind of support do you get from your management? Here in IT, it's like, ugh, ya know, my budget's flat, my head count is flat to negative. To make these changes usually requires some investment. How do you accomplish that inside your firm? >> We have historically not invested as much in IT as maybe we should have over the years. So currently, we now have an IT refresh budget to bring out these systems and replace them with state of the art, ya know, it's all about change. The more static we are, the more aging, my boss calls these aging systems, Jurassic petting zoo. We're trying to basically get to a level of performance and reliability that gets our scientists and our users, and eventually our customers, and people all across the world, a fair shot at doing what they need to do. >> Alright, Hasan, you're working with a number of vendors out there. You have on your wish list, ya know, what would you like to see from those partners that would make your job and your company's business even better? >> Communication's always a good one. We try and make sure that we stay on top of change. Sometimes that's not always possible, we end up with systems that are not scalable. So if there's something I would like to see, everybody please provide scalable systems. As businesses grow, as data grows, scalability is incredibly important. Being static and stuck where we are, and not having to do forklift upgrades, and continuous migrations, if we can continue be, if these vendors could help us be scalable, and these partners could help us scale, that's really what we're looking for. We're growing at a fast clip. There are certain areas of the business, such as China, that are growing at over 30 percent year on year, in some cases. So that scalability requires flexibility from our partners. >> Hasan Barakat, really appreciate you joining, sharing with our community, everything happening in your space. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching The Cube.

(loud click) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this theCUBE and we're here at The Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group. Happen to have with us Rick Gouin, who is the CTO of WTG. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about, as CTO of really a channel partner for a lot of technology vendors, we talked to Scott earlier about the solutions that you help put together, what's your role inside the organization, how long you've been there, what's your background? >> Sure, so I started at the Winslow Technology Group four years ago, at this event, actually. Prior to joining Winslow, I was at Dell, as a Enterprise Technologist. Came to Dell via Compellent, and prior to that, I was on the customer side, a technology director at a large insurance company down in Hartford. >> Okay, so obviously, Winslow Technology Group started very much with Compellent, has gone through the maturations of Compellent into Dell, Dell now into EMC, so, tell us a little bit about your role, what kind of things do you look at to help pick what technologies and expansion that you go into with the organization. >> So, obviously, Dell has a very broad portfolio and there's just not enough technology expertise to know everything about everything, so we have to spend a good amount of time keeping an eye on the market and sort of focusing in our resources on what we want to gain expertise in and what we want to really bring to our customers. So it's a lot about where we feel like these different market spaces are moving and we deal with a relatively specific segment in that our customers fall into a couple of different profiles and we really have that in mind when we're looking at the various technologies. We're really trying to picture this group of people that's here, and what do we think they would get excited about? >> So we're in an interesting state of the industry today. On the one hand, there's no shortage of challenges for storage. Storage is always one of those things that we need expertise, we need to fix things, yet on the other hand, companies want simplicity. They don't want to think about it, I'm deploying hyper-converged or cloud environments where storage is in there, so how do you look at that especially with your background and WTG's background, as it fits in the entire picture? >> Yeah, so coming from Compellent myself, and coming from a strong Compellent reseller, we're obviously a little bit biased when it comes to storage. With that said, as we continue to talk to different customers and they come to these inflection points where they've got to make a decision about refreshing a traditional storage environment versus taking a look at a hyper-converged environment, we're finding more and more customers are willing to take that chance on a hyper-converged environment and like you mentioned, a lot of it comes down to the simplicity. A lot of it comes down to a specific skill set that they see you have to have for a storage environment that you might be able to not worry about anymore when you go to a hyper-converge environment. >> Storage has always been not only complicated at the individual level, but you look at a company like Dell and they've got a portfolio, and it's because no one solution can fit everywhere. There's price points, there's scalability, there's featured functionality. How do you look at where we are in the market today, how do you help simplify that portfolio beyond just kind of HCI? >> Yep, and you've really pinpointed I think a big part of the value we provide to our end customers, cause you see this huge, broad portfolio, lot of different things that do the same thing, and so we really try to guide that decision-making process in a couple of different ways. We think that, like you mentioned, there's a different fit, all of these different technologies have their place, no one is right for everyone, and there's room for all of them. We don't think hyper-converge is going to completely replace midrange storage, we think that there's room for both, different customers are going to want different things. A lot of the decision making comes down to one, where are they in their life cycle of the gear they have? Switching platforms, say, to hyper-converge requires replacing perhaps some storage, perhaps some servers. Where are they in their depreciation cycle? Are those things least assets? All those different things really come into play, so it's not always a purely technical discussion. There's a lot of different things that factor in. But we feel like, every time it makes sense to look at all the options, and a vendor like us, like partnered with Dell, we can provide a solution in the traditional infrastructure, that you're used to using today. We can give you the pricing for it, and what the implementation would look like, and then we can give you the same thing on a hyper-converge infrastructure. Tell you how the implementation would go, let you compare those costs, talk about the pros and the cons, and then you can make a really informed decision. And we feel like, without taking a look at both, and doing some actual metrics-based analysis of the two options, you're not going to be able to make an informed decision. >> Rick, over the last decade or so, virtualization has really been one of those waves that's driven a lot of the technology discussions we have. It feels like, well, of course Vmware and virtualization are by no means going away. The new wave of cloud in all of its forms, there's containerization, all of these new things kind of bringing on this next generation. What's exciting you and what as a CTO do you look at and say, "Oh, boy. Here we go again! "We're going to have to go fix all these problems "like we did last time?" >> So two things you said really jumped out at me. First, I hear from a lot of my customers a push to get everything into the cloud. At the same time, I'm starting to see the other end of that curve with things coming back in. I think a lot of our customers are finding a sweet spot in hybrid cloud solutions, whether we've got an on-prem component coupled with some cloud storage, or some off-prem components. We think that's the sweet spot, and that really allows us to take advantage of the key...really, the key thing for cloud infrastructures is that elasticity, right? It allows us to put our elastic workloads out there, and then once they settle down into a predictable sort of state, we can bring them back on-prem, where we really want them, anyway. So, we think, we see a lot of our customers settling down into a hybrid sort of scenario. Luckily, whether it's Dell Nutanix, VxRail, they've all got great solutions for on-prem coupled with off-prem stuff. The other thing that's really interesting to me is these alternate hypervisors. I love seeing the adoption of options, I think we've seen a marketplace that has been dominated by an 800 pound gorilla for a long time, and it's a great, super powerful portfolio, basically ubiquitous. I love seeing a couple different options that can bring some actual different business value and making customers think about, maybe I don't just go status quo here, here's an opportunity to maybe do something a little different. >> Rick, really appreciate you sharing with us everything going on in your environment and we'll be back with more coverage here from the WTG Dell EMC User Group event. You're watching theCUBE. (loud click)

>> Hi I'm Stu Miniman with The Cube, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Conference here at the Hotel Commonwealth in Boston. Happy to have with me Mike Berthiaume who is the northeast SE manager with Nutanix. Mike it's great to see ya. >> And I'm happy to be here Stu. Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> So Mike, I've actually known you for a bunch of years. We've been in some of the local user groups, actually moderated a panel you were on a couple of years ago. Talk to us a little bit about Nutanix's channel and of course the relationship with Winslow. >> Excellent, I think Nutanix's channel is very strong. As you know, I think a lot of our viewers know, all of our Nutanix sales are done through the channel. So we are a 100% channel focused company. The Winslow Technology Group has been a tremendous channel partner for us in New England and other parts of the country as well growing their business down in the southeast and the New York Metro area. But they've been fantastic. And what makes them a little bit interesting, you know, they are very focused on Dell EMC, right? So being part of the Dell EMC portfolio opens up quite a few opportunities I think for Nutanix. And it really I think helps Dell EMC complete their portfolio with our technology. >> Sure, Mike absolutely. We're going to be talking to Scott Winslow today. You know, been using Dell, and I think was one of the earliest of the Dell XC customers out there. What is it for the customers that they look for, I guess specifically for Dell XC from a partner like Winslow Technology Group? >> I think from, you know, customers are looking for a partner who has their best interest at heart, right? So the value at a reseller as in specifically Winslow is going to their customers as trusted advisors, as consultants, understanding business challenges, and how to they can solve those with technology. And Nutanix is a natural fit, specifically Dell XC, due to the simplicity, you know, the non disruptive operational procedures that we can bring in. And that's some of the new exciting stuff around our enterprise cloud operating system that we recently talked about at our .NEXT conference. I think the vision that Nutanix holds is in lockstep with what Winslow is trying to do for its customer base here in New England. >> Mike, I want you to talk a little bit about your customers that you're meeting with. What do they care about? What are the drivers there? What are things like converged, hyperconverged, and cloud? Does that mean something to them, or how is it, how do they say it in their business terms? >> Yeah I think when we talk to customers, most customers today, almost all customers, know what converged infrastructure is. Hyperconverged I would say is a little bit less than a converged, but most customers are educated and understand the concepts. I think when we start talking to customers and educate them about the XC platform in Nutanix and open their eyes to this concept of enterprise cloud or enterprise cloud operating system, it changes the discussion. We see, typically I'll see a lot of light bulbs go off and a lot of, "I didn't realize that Nutanix could do that," or "I didn't realize you guys had a native integration with public cloud" or we're focused in the application stack which is again some of the announcements that we made last week, or a few weeks ago now, at .NEXT. >> Yeah, specifically around cloud, what's the, I find there is no typical state out there. Companies are all over the map trying to figure out kind of hybrid or multicloud. Give us a couple examples, probably can't give us customer names, but how are they integrating cloud? How are they building their environments to be more cloud-like, what we at Wikibon call true private cloud? What are you seeing out there in the field? >> It's a great question. So I think there is a sort of a misconception from my view that cloud is purely lift and shift. I'm going to take my applications, and I'm going to move them into public cloud or somebody else's environment. In reality, cloud is a way of doing business, right? It's a way, it's a new way of thinking about IT. We talk about mode one and mode two applications are your legacy and your more stateless applications that probably belong in a public cloud environment. And what Nutanix brings is the ability now to manage an environment in that new way, focusing both on your traditional legacy applications, but helping you move to those mode two applications, partnering with public cloud providers, specifically Google. So that's the conversation we're really having is don't think of cloud as lift and shift. Think of it as a new way of doing business. Let's figure out how cloud is going to benefit your business and align to the business style you're looking to achieve. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the lines we've heard many times is, "Cloud is not a destination. Cloud is really an operating model for many of the users." Last thing, just what's kind of the feeling you get from people in IT today? In the keynote this morning, discussion was, "IT kind of went from a call center to supporting the business and now IT is a driver for the business." Is that what you're seeing? Where is kind of the typical IT mindset? What are they thinking about? What's exciting them, and what's worrying them? >> Yeah I think first and foremost, digital transformation has quickly become kind of the cliche term, right? Maybe one of the most hated terms in IT these days. But it's a reality I think for most folks, and understanding what digital transformation means in the business now understanding that, again IT is actually driving business value in every way. And how can they get to the level where IT's no longer in the way, you know. Long duration projects are a thing of the past. It's a move forward mentality now. Continue to push the boundaries, but yet keep, obviously keep the lights on and ensure that we're not going to disrupt existing business processes that are tried and true. So it's kind of a tough paradigm that we're in right now. And again I think Nutanix really helps because we bring that non disruptive perspective to being able to get to that next level. >> Alright, Mike Berthiaume, really appreciate you joining us here. Nutanix been a great role and working with partners like Winslow Technology Group. You're watching The Cube. We've got lots more coverage here from the WTG User Group Event.

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group, and happy to have on the program multi-time guest of theCUBE, Scott Winslow, who is the president and founder of Winslow Technology Group. Scott, thanks so much for having us here. >> Good to be here, Stu, good afternoon. >> Alright, so, you opened up the event here, I think you've said you got between 150 and 175 users, and, if I remember right, your first user event was actually here, and it was like, what, eight users? So, you know, great location here in Boston, you know, Fenway right behind. You're taking your users to the game. Tell us a little bit about the history of the company, and this event. >> Yeah, when we started the user group 13 years ago, it was here at the Hotel Commonwealth, and it's been a great venue for us. Really it started with eight customers around a conference room table, we had Marty Sanders, the CTO from Compellent, Phil Soran, one of my mentors is the CEO of Compellent and founder, and I think we were talking about, how do we improve the GUI on the Enterprise manager for Compellent, and that was how it started, and kind of last minute, we decided to go to a ball game afterwards, and that was kind of the roots of this event, but you know, it's changed over the 13 or 14 years, but we try to provide really good education for our customers, give them some things to think about in their infrastructure and their environments, we try to be a thought-leader, and it's kind of evolved around that theme for the last 13 or 14 years. Obviously a lot bigger now than it was. We've grown up; the challenge for us is how do we continue to have our customers have a white-glove experience, as we continue to grow, but we're really excited about, where Compellent took us to Dell, and Dell led us to Dell EMC, and you know, here we are. >> Yeah, so, Compellent to Dell, Dell to Dell EMC, and we're still talking to the storage industry about making their user interfaces better, right? >> (laughs) We are, we are. Well, I mean, we are in one sense, but in another sense is you move into hyper-converged, you know, that really is kind of the backdrop for that story, right? Because, as you get into hyper-converged infrastructures, you're talking about, you know, one-click upgrades of server storage networking hypervisor, so I think it really is kind of a good backdrop, and we've seen that evolve over the years. >> Yes, Scott, when I look at your portfolio, it started out very much storage, you now have server storage network hyper-converged, the PC and mobile cloud, you know, how many people do you have in the company now, and how do you manage that kind of change and expanse of your portfolio without getting a mild wide and an inch deep? >> Yeah, we've got 37 people in the company now, so we've added six this year already. I think we try not to go too wide in terms of number of vendors. We've tried to focus on a few key strategic partners, so for us that's, you know, Dell EMC, it's Nutanix, it's VMware, and try to really specialize in those areas. We think customers are looking for a partner that's got deep technical expertise, really good sales acumen. I guess a fair criticism of us would be, "you don't go wide enough, you're not partnered "with Cisco or HP," but we'll accept that. We think it's led to 35% growth over the last three years, and we think it's been a good strategy for us. >> Yeah, no, strong growth absolutely. What are you hearing from your users, you know, how much does this digital transformation, pulling them along, and driving them to kind of that breadth of solutions that you're offering? >> Yeah, I mean we're having conversations with them every day, and in the conversation, often times, is do we continue kind of down the path we've been? We're very comfortable with a 3-2-1 solution, for us, a lot of times that's a Dell server, Dell networking, Dell Compellent, we're very comfortable providing that, but you know, as they look and say, "Hey, we built this wonderful car, but it's probably "going to run out of gas at some point," do we move into more of a hyper-converged solution? Do we look at, you know, a cloud solution? And, you know, how do they continue to evolve their environments? And that's provided a great role for us to consult with them, in that regard. >> Yeah, all of your partners, Dell, Nutanix, VMware, all trying to figure out how they live in kind of this hybrid or multi-cloud world. How are your partners doing, what you as kind of the voice of the customer, do you want to see from them to kind of mature these solutions even further? >> Well, I think we've seen it already, if you think about like at .NEXT, you know, Nutanix announces cloud integration with Google, I think we're looking for solutions where we can provide a really good on-prem solution for some of the data, but then you have to have the ability to go off-prem and have cloud integration, and if I look at Nutanix, Dell EMC, VMware, I think they're providing that. If you look at, like, an NSX solution from VMware, for example, you know, we've seen the virtualization of, with VMware we've seen the virtualization of storage with products like Compellent and others, and now you've got a virutalization layer and abstraction layer in the networking with NSX, and that provides some real benefits in terms of what can be done around operating efficiencies of networking, microsegmentation, etc. So, we see those vendors providing those kinds of solutions. >> Yeah, so, NSX is going to be one of the critical components when we get VMware on AWS, I'm curious whether that, Microsoft Azure Stack, or Jeremy Burton was talking this morning about Virtustream being able to go on-premesis. Those solutions, do they excite you, do they excite your customers? You know, what do you say? >> They do, they do excite our customers. I would say right now, I don't think they excite our CFOs much. We're having a lot of conversations with customers about the things like NSX. I wouldn't say it's been a big revenue driver for us. We're still driving a lot of revenue through some of the traditional, you know, server storage networking hyper-converged solutions, but I would say, as it relates to like an NSX for example, it's a topic that customers want to talk about, security's very much top of mind, and it hasn't translated yet into a lot of revenue, but it's definitely a part of the building blocks that our customers are looking at. >> Yeah, you bring up your CFO, and I'm curious, how does the customers looking to kind of change Capex into Opex, how does that affect you, are service providers in the public cloud, are those an opportunity for you, for partnership? Are they a challenge for the kind of the channel's business model? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think we've seen a lot of the partners that we work with try to provide an operating, Opex model, and try to be more cloud-like in their solutions, so if you look at the Nutanix's and VxRail's, you know, having a solution from Dell EMC or from Nutanix where you can present it up almost like a cloud solution where they only have to commit to maybe 40% of the overall payment, or they can grow it very quickly like they would a cloud solution. So we're seeing a lot of that type of activity, I would say, you know, and at the same time, we're reaching out to the cloud providers, the Amazons and the Azures, to figure out, can we be partnered with them, and what does that model look like, and it's certainly not going to be a lot of margin working with those types of providers, but you can build a big consulting practice around it. So we're heavily engaged in those kind of discussions. >> Alright, Scott, last thing is, your users, as they walk away from this year's event, what do you want them to think about, their relationship with you, and kind of their big takeaway from the event? >> Yeah, I mean, for us, we try to be the trusted advisor, right, that's our role. You've got a number of OEMs out there. We're putting solutions together, that's why we call our engineering team the solutions architects, because we're piecing it all together for them. I look at the manufacturers kind of like as a big aircraft carrier, and they're good aircraft carriers, but we're a little speedboat, right? We can go back and forth, we're very nimble, we can demo stuff quickly. So I want them to think about us as a solution provider, as a trusted advisor, and to think about some of the new technologies that we presented up today. They're so busy working through day-to-day problems that, in one afternoon, to be able to come out here and here about, like, a cloud solution, like Virtustream, NSX, to hear about what's going on in hyper-converge, what's going on in managed security market, I'm hoping they'll take away some of those ideas and think about how it might apply in their business. >> Alright, well, Scott, really appreciate you bringing theCUBE here, looking forward to talking to a lot of your customers as well as some of the partners and, you know, everyone here at the show. I've been Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE.

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group User Conference for Dell EMC. Happy to be joined by the keynote speaker for the event, Jeremy Burton, CMO of Dell. Jeremy great to see ya. >> Thanks Stu, always good to be on theCUBE. >> Yeah, so Jeremy, you've been on theCUBE since the inaugural event back at actually EMC World, here in Boston. >> Yeah. >> Just a short drive from where we are today >> I know, seven years. >> Yeah, seven years ago, 2010, wow, pretty amazing. One of the things you talk about Dell and EMC coming together, truly the scale and distribution is a big piece of that. So being here at a user conference for one of the partners of the company that been with Compellent since like the earliest days and with Dell and now with Dell EMC. You know, what is the importance of the channel to Dell and Dell EMC? >> Yeah I think, I mean look at relationships. A company like the Scots, they've been around 15 years. They've had wins with customers, they have trusted relationships there. And sometimes actually, they're better at presenting a solution to the customer than even we are. I mean we've got a lot of capabilities, but they're businesses deliver an outcome for the customer. And so at times they're pretty adept at really understanding you know, in local markets in particular, what that customer's business is and what the best solution for them is and giving them impartial advice. >> Yeah. Jeremy, in a recent interview you did with us, I was struck by, you talked about when we make strategy. We used to put together the five-year plan. These days, two years, things are changing drastically. >> Right. >> Turn back to, you've been with EMC and now Dell, you know, for seven years, you know, two years ago was just when Dell was looking to buy EMC. When you talked to your partners and your end user customers, how are they keeping up with change? What are some of the biggest challenges you're seeing from the user base? >> Yeah I think it's particularly difficult right now because, you know, we've all seen the cloud phenomenon. You've also got the digital thing going on at the same time. There's the big data thing going on at the same and also look, the computing devices that people use are starting to change. So, I think what you've always got to do and what we always try and do, we can't, we don't know exactly what's going to happen in future, but I think we've got a good idea of what the general themes are, and so I think the best thing we can do to help our users along with us is articulate those very clearly. What do we think of the next three, four, five years, the key themes that you should be watching are? And then you're right, like a couple of years you can have a product road map and then some aspirations beyond that what you might want to do, but the reality is if you lock into a three, four year road map and articulate it and get committed to it, I mean it could quite easily change and certainly it's more of the development team's move to like agile methodologies. There's not always really now the need to do that because you kind of build those cost corrections into the development process. >> Yeah, Jeremy, as the CMO I need to ask you about brand. >> Yeah, okay. >> So, you know, we're sitting here in the shadows of Fenway Park, used to be an EMC level, there's now a Dell EMC level. In the keynote you talked about really how Dell is a lot like Alphabet, which is the Google holding company. Dell, Dell EMC, Vergestry, Morrisey, Pivotal, VMware, all these pieces. All of the transformations going on. What do people look to the Dell family? Where do you make your mark in your brand? >> Yeah, I mean all of, the brand campaign that we're in right now, all of the effort is going and all of the money to the point is going to Dell Technologies. That was the new company that we created. And we want to make sure that people understand that Dell Technologies is maybe not what you thought. Dell was evolved. I mean most people think of Dell, they think of the PC. That's what Michael made his name selling. But Dell Technologies it goes a mile wide and a mile deep at this point and so really what we're trying to do with the brand campaign is put everything into Dell Technologies, understand the capabilities of that, and then look, over the next few years we can then reinforce what Dell, the PC business, Dell EMC, the data center business, VMware, Pivotal and so on, how they plug in. So really I think for the next year or so, we're going to kind of keep kind of beating on Dell Technologies and make sure everyone understands that. And then over time, you know, reinforce whether the ingredient brands. It really is, and Dell Technologies is a family of brands. That's the approach we're taking. >> Yeah, last thing I want to ask you, Jeremy. You talked about how we've seen the progression of kind of IT responding to the business and now IT really being a major driver for the business. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk, you know, what are you seeing in customers, you know, how is it, you know, IT is a central point for so many companies? >> Yeah I mean it's exciting times. It's exciting and scary, I think, for the IT teams, because I'd even go further and say IT is the business in many companies now. I've seen many models, some companies have felt that their IT team couldn't adapt to be the new digital team and so they've created a second IT function. You know, sometimes you hear it mode one IT, mode two IT. But look, I've also been in companies where the CIO has really been like on it with the business, and they built out that capability within the existing IT structure, so I think the opportunity for IT folks is being more relevant than they've ever been in the past. And actually, supporting the business, doing real competitive differentiation, which it's maybe been a while since some IT departments landed there. And the threat though is that if you don't get on board, you could find yourself with your nose pressed against the window looking at a different IT operation doing the work that maybe you want to do as an IT pro. So it's exciting times and scary times together. >> Alright, well Jeremy Burton, appreciate you joining us here on theCUBE and we have lots of coverage here from the WTG Dell EMC User Event. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Welcome to our presentation here at VM World 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube, with Dave Vellante who's taking a lunch break. We are at VM World on the ground on the floor where we have Google's vice president of product management developer platforms Sam Ramji. Welcome to The Cube conversation. >> Great, thank you very much John. >> So you had a keynote this morning. You know, came up on stage, big announcement. Let's get right to it. That container as a service from Pivotal, VM Ware, and Google announced kind of a joint announcement. It was kind of weird. It wasn't a fully joint but it really came from Pivotal. Clarify what the announcement was. >> Sure, so what we announced is the result of a bunch of co-engineering that we've been doing in the open source with Pivotal around kubernetes running on bosh. So, if you've been paying attention to cloud foundry, you'd know that cloud foundry is the runtime layer and there's something called bosh sitting underneath it that does the cluster management and cluster operations. Pivotal is bringing that to commercial GA later this year. So what we announced with Pivotal and VMWare is that we're going to have cost incompatibility between Pivotal's kubernetes and Google's kubernetes. Google's kubernetes service is called Google Container Engine Pivotal's offering is called Pivotal Container Service. The big deal here is that PKS is going to be the standard way that you can get kubernetes from any of the Dell Group companies, whether that's VMWare, EMC. That gives us one consistent target for compatibility because one of the things that I pointed out in the keynote was inconsistency is the enemy in the data center. That's what makes operations difficult. >> And Kubo was announced at Cloud Foundry, Stu Miniman covered it, but that wasn't commercially available. That's the nuance, right? >> That's right, and that still is available in the open source. So what we've committed to is, we've said, every time that we update Google Container Engine, Pivotal Container Service is also going to update, so we have constant compatibility, that that's delivered on top of VMWare's infrastructure including NSX for networking and then the final twist is a big reason why people choose Google Cloud is because of our services. So Big Table, Big Query, a dynamically scaling data warehouse that we run an enormous amount of Google workloads on. Spanner, right. Which is why all of your data is consisted globally across Google's planet scaled data centers. And finally, all of our new machine learning and AI investments, those services will be delivered down to Pivotal Container Service, right, that's going to be there out of the box at launch and we'll keep adding to that catalog. >> It's just that Google Next was a lot of conversations, Oh Google's catching up to Amazon, Amazon's done a great job no doubt about it. We love Amazon. Andy Jassy was here as well. >> Super capable very competent engineering team. >> There's a lot of workloads in VMWare community that runs on AWS but it's not the only game in town. Jerry Chen, investor in Docker, friend of ours, we know, called this years ago. It's not going to be a one cloud winner take all game. Clearly. But there's the big three lining up, AWS, Microsoft, Google, you guys are doing great. So I got to ask you, what is the biggest misconception that people have about Google Cloud out in the market? 'Cause a lot of enterprises are used to running ops, maybe not as much dev as there is ops, and dev ops comes in with cloud native, there's a lot of confusion, what is the thing that you'd like to clarify about Google that they may not know about? >> The single most important thing to clarify about Google Cloud is our strategy is open-hybrid cloud. We think that we are in an amazing place to run workloads, we also recognize that compute belongs everywhere. We think that the durable state of computing is more of a mosaic than a uni-directional arrow that says everything goes to cloud. We think you want to run your containers and your VM's in clouds. We think you want to run them in your data centers. We also think you want to move them around. So we've been diehard committed to building out the open-source projects, the protocols to let all of that information flow, and then providing services that can get anywhere. So open-hybrid cloud is the strategy, and that's what we've committed to with kubernetes, with tensorflow, with apache beam, with so much of the open-source that we've contributed to Linux and others, and then maintaining open standards compatibility for our services. >> Well, it's great to see you at Google because I know your history, great open source guy, you know open source, it's been really part of your life, and bringing that to Google's great, so congratulations. >> There's a reason for that though, it's pragmatic. This is not a crazy crusade. The value of open source is giving control to the customer. And I think that the most ethical way that you can build businesses and markets is based on customer choice. Giving them the ability to move to where they want. Reducing their costs of switching. If they stay with you, then you're really producing a value-added service. So I've spent time in the operator shoes, in the developer shoes, and in the vendor shoes. When I've spent time buying and running the software on my own, I really always valued and preferred things that would let me move my stuff around. I preferred open source. So that's really the method to the madness here. It's not about opening everything up insanely, giving everything away. It serves customers better and in the long run, the better you serve customers, you'll build a winning business. >> We're here on the ground floor at VMWorld 2017 in Las Vegas, where behind us is the VM Village. And obviously Sam was on stage with the big announcement with Pivotal VMWare. And this is kind of important now, we got to debate now, usually I'm not the contrarian in the group, I'm usually the guy who's like yeah, rah rah, entrepreneurial, optimistic, yeah we can do that! You know that future's here, go to the future! But I was kind of skeptical and I told VMWare and I saw Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell in the hallways and I'm like, they thought this was going to be the big announcement, and it was their big announcement, but I was kind of like, guys, I mean, it's the long game, these guys in the VMWare community, their operations guys, their not going to connect the dots and there was kind of an applause but not a standing ovation that Google would've gotten at a Google Next conference where the geeks would've been like going crazy. What is the operational dynamic that you're seeing in this market that Google's looking at and bringing value to, so that's the question for you. >> This is what the big change in the industry is is going from only worrying about increasing application velocity to figuring out how to do that with reliability. So there's a whole community of operators that I think many of us have left behind as we've talked about clouds and cloud data. We've done a great job of appealing to developers, enabling them to be more productive, but with operators, we've kind of said, well, your mileage may vary or we don't have time for you, or you have to figure it out yourself. I think the next big phase in adoption of cloud native technology is to say, first of all, open-hybrid, run your stuff wherever you want. >> Well you've got to have experience running cloud. Now you bring that knowledge out here. >> And that's the next piece. How do we offer you the tools and the skills that you need as an operator to have that same consistency, those same guarantees you used to have, and move everything forward in the future? Because if you turn one audience, one community, into the bad people who are holding everything back, that's a losing proposition, you have to give everybody a path to win, right? Everybody wants to be the good guy. So I think, now we need to start paying really close attention to operators and be approachable, right? I would like to see GCP become the most approachable cloud. We're already well known as the most advanced cloud. But can we be the easiest to adopt as well, and that's our challenge, to get the experience. >> You got to get that touch, that these enterprise teams historically have had, but it's interesting I mean, the mosaic you'd mentioned requires some unification, right? You got to be likable. You got to be approachable. And that's where you guys are going, I know you guys are building out for that, but the question is, for you, because Google has a lot of experience, and I know from personal knowledge Google's depth of people and talent, not always the cleanest execution out to the market in terms of the front-facing white glove service that some of these other companies have done, but you guys are certainly strong. >> Well, I think this is where Diane Greene has been driving the transformation, I mean like, she breathes, eats, sleeps, dreams enterprise. So, being both a board member at Google and being the SVP of Google Cloud, she's really bringing the discipline to say, you know, white glove service is mandatory. We have a pretty substantial professional services organization and building out partnerships with Accenture, with PWC, with Deloitte, with everyone to make sure that these things are all serviceable and properly packaged all the way down to the end user. So, no doubt there's more, more room for us to improve, there's miles to go on the journey, but the focus and the drive to make sure that we're delivering the enterprise requirements, Dianne never lets us stop thinking about that. >> It's like math, right, the order of operations is super important, and there's a lot of stuff going on in the cloud right now that's complex. >> Yes. >> Ease of use is the number one thing that we're hearing, because one, it's a moving a train in general, right? But the cloud's growing, a lot of complexity, how do you guys view that? And the question I want to ask you is, we know what cloud looks like today. Amazon, they're doing great. Multi-horse race if you will. But in 2022, the expectations and what it looks like then is going to be completely different, if you just take the trajectory of what's happening. So cleaning up kubernetes, making that a manageable, all the self updates, makes a lot of sense, and I think that's the dots no one's connecting here, I get the long game, but what's the customer's view in your opinion as someone who's sitting back and with the Google perch looking out over the horizon, 2022, what's it like for the customer? >> That's an outstanding question. So I think, 2022, looking back, we've actually absorbed so much of this complexity that we can provide ease of use to every workload and to every segment. Backing into that, ease of use looks different, like, let's think about tooling, ease of use looks different to an electrician verus a carpenter versus a plumber. They're doing different jobs, they need different tools, so I think about those as different audiences and different workloads. So if you're trying to migrate virtual machines to a cloud, ease of use means a thing and it includes taking care of the networking layer, how do we make sure that our cloud network shows up like an on premises network, and you don't have to set up some weird VPC configuration, how can those just look like part of your LAN subject to your same security controls. That's a whole path of engineering for a particular division of the company. For a different division of the company focused on databases ease of use is wow, I've got this enormous database, I'm straining at the edges, how do I move that to the cloud? Well, what kind of database is it, right? Is it a SQL database? Is it a NoSQL database? So engineering that in, that's the key. The other thing that we have to do for ease of use is upscaling. So a lot of things that we talked about before are the need to drive IT efficiency through automation. But who's going to teach people how to do the automation especially while they're being held to a very high SLA standard for their own data center and held to a high standard for velocity movement to the cloud. This is where Google has invented a discipline called SRE or site reliability engineering, and it's basically the meta discipline around what many people call dev ops. We think that this is absolutely teachable, it's learnable, it's becoming a growing community. You can get O'Reilly books on the topics. So I think we have an accountability to the industry to go and teach every operator and every operating group, hey here's what SRE looks like, some of your folks might want to do this, because that will give you the lift to make all of these workloads much easier to manage 'cause it's not just about velocity, it's also about reliability. >> It's interesting, we've got about a minute left or so. I'm just going to get your thoughts on this because you've certainly seen it on the developer side, stack wars, whatever you want to call them, the my stack runs this tech, but last night I heard in the hallway here multiple times the general consensus of two stacks coming together, not just software stacks, hardware stacks, you're seeing things that have never run together or been tested together before. So the site reliability is a very interesting concept and developers get pissed off when stacks don't work, right? So this is a super kind of nuance in this new use case that are emerging because stuff's happened that's never been done before. >> Yeah, so this is where the common tutorials get really interesting, especially as we build out a planetary scale computer at Google. Right, we're no longer thinking about how does the GPU as part of your daughter board, we think about what about racks of GPU's as part of your datacenters using NVDIA K80's, what does it mean to have 180 teraflops of tensor processing capability in a cloud TPU. So getting container centric is crucial and making it really easy to attach to all of those devices by having open source drivers making sure they're all Linux compatible and developers can get to them is going to be part of the substrate to make sure that application developers can target those devices, operators can set a policy that say, yes, I want this to deploy preferentially to environments with a TPU or a GPU and that the whole system can just work and be operable. >> Great, Sam thanks so much for taking the time to stop by. One on one conversation with Sam Ramji who's a Google Cloud, he's a vice president of product management and developer platforms for Google. We'll see you at Google Next. Thanks for spending the time. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. >> Thank you John.