>> 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.

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group hi I'm Stu minimun and this is the second year of the cube at what is now wtg transform 2018 and happy to welcome to the program Scott Winslow who is the president and founder of winslet Technology Group Scott always great to see you good afternoon still happy to be with you hey and Scott thank you so much you you not only brought us back a second year we've got a nice table here but I'm not tripping over myself saying that it's the you know 14th anniversary Winslow technology group Dell EMC user conference and lovely Boston Massachusetts in the background it was like ha it's literally wtg transform rolls off the tongue so thank you you were the inspiration for us to you your comments last year precipitated to change our name III know your team just looked at it and felt sorry for me because it didn't roll off the tongue quite as easily as as the new it was a mouthful yeah so Scott you and I did we bump into each other a bunch we'd say we tend to go to many of the shows the Dell show the Nutanix show let's talk about your show first here you said it is the 14th year its users one of the reasons Idol of coming here besides getting to talk to you and Rick and some of your partner's is users I will speak to more users in one day here than I do it some of the big shows I go to yeah I mean it's it's a great opportunity to thank our existing customer base you know we have a fourfold purpose for this event we like to educate our customers we hope that they can pick up some knowledge and maybe an aha moment that they have with they're looking at a hyper-converged solutions or all-flash solutions we've got a new Dell client display here this year that we've never had in the past so we're looking to educate we love to give them an opportunity to collaborate with other practitioners to compare notes the feedback I get from them is they really enjoy that piece of it we want to have some fun and you know it's a tradition that we want to keep rolling and they're helping you know to make it very successful so it's been a great it's been a great venue for us and a great event for so over 14 years now and Scott you couldn't have ordered a better day I mean New England you know it might change in an hour but right now temperatures in the low 70s it's mostly clear you know gorgeous backdrop here as you mentioned in the you open you know Sox have their ace pitching tonight and there are still in first place so yeah it doesn't doesn't hurt well you know we're in the customer service business right so you have to think of everything temperature starting pitcher and you know we try to make sure we've got a good agenda and there's a lot of good information for them here there to get customers to come out and spend a day with you like this is why there's a great event has going to be so biggest because year after year after year I feel like we've delivered and then we have kind of a continuous improvement process and we try to improve it every year here we are Scott one talk about your business you know first time we met you know winslet technology was one of the it was it was the Dell Partner of the year so you know been a long time dell partner the dell you know acquisition merger with emc it's been interesting to watch i know you've got some viewpoints but before we get into kind of the dell piece of it talk about your business as you know because we call you a channel partner and they're you know what's driving your business how's growth going how are things up here in new england and Beyond because yeah you're much more than New England yeah I mean well we've certainly evolved our business over the years with acquisitions being a big part of that initially we started out as a compelling partner then Compellent was acquired by Dell and then you know five or six years later after that we've the Delhi you see consolidation so I think we've had to learn to be flexible and and one of the things we've seen with that is we just each time there was an acquisition it allowed us to increase the size of our portfolio with more solutions that we can offer our end-users more services that we can provide you know along the way we've added a lot of other solutions too like the Nutanix solution and the hyper-converged space so our business is going great we're you know the highest employee count we've ever had our revenues were as high as they've ever been last year we had a record q3 record q4 in q1 we grew our Dell business by over 30% that makes Dell very happy and makes us very happy as well so you know as as this whole industry evolves and you know the digital economy progresses there continue to be the need for the services that we provide all right so let's talk about Dallas you said you've come from the compelling piece the the delicacy which the Nutanix OEM is something that I know your team is you know very involved with you know how is Dell and LEM see how they do and for the channel these days I think they're doing very well I think they you know tell likes to save they big ears and they listen well I think that they have proven that they put together a very good channel a partner program under the leadership of John Byrne initially and now Joyce Mullen you know I think that they incent you to work with them they try to incent the salespeople and sent the companies but they also put together very good programs for you to run marketing events like this so an event like this we couldn't do it without the support of Dell technologies and they've been you know very supportive of us you know they're providing speakers like Dave singer you've got all kinds of subject matter experts here we've got lots of hardware and software for folks through you know demo so I think I think overall the partner programs been very good great in Nutanix is this a you you get it through the Dell so I'm curious has it has the move as Nutanix is shifting more to really that software model does that have any impact on on your business or are you isolated from that since you've been using the Dell xcs yeah well I mean first of all we've been involved in Nutanix for you know three plus years now right before Dell acquired EMC our hyper-converged solution was Nutanix we've built together you know a very nice base with customers many of whom you know are here today so as they evolve to a software model I do think they're going to be less concerned about what or where platform it goes on because they're truly creating all their revenues you know from the software side so they're very they're they don't care really what you know what hardware platform is being used so you know we feel like we've got the best two solutions in the hyper-converged marketplace between the portfolio of Dell solutions you know visa and VX rail vce and then Nutanix with the Nutanix solution typically with Nutanix we tend to put that on a Dell server platform that's where we lean we think Dells got the best server technology in the industry that's a nice way for us to bridge that gap between the two companies so a lot of times our customers are putting a new tannic solution on a dell platform you know key themes I heard your talk rick's talk david singers talk this morning and what i hear from customers digital transformation and hybrid cloud are those top of mine with your customers today absolutely yeah I think you know Rick alluded to it in his talk a lot of customers are coming to us saying hey help us with our cloud strategy and so we're going in and saying tell us about your applications you know these are applications that we think belong in the public cloud that makes sense and the public cloud and you know that could be disaster recovery could be backup it could be office 365 and these are other applications that we think might be more well suited for an on-premise solution so that could be active file transfer and so you know we think that leads naturally to a hybrid cloud discussion we've got a customer here today a financial customer from New Hampshire and their CIO called me I had known him previously at a famous sneaker company in town he went to a financial institution and he said hey we wanna we want to move everything to the cloud can you come up and consult with us on that and we ended up putting in a hybrid cloud for him you know featuring a hyper-converged solution that had the cloud integration that he needed so I think that's the kind of activity we're involved in today yeah you use the word conversation that and the customers I've talked to they like they they need advice and they want someone that's not just oh well here's the solution that you're going to buy it no no it's a conversation there's lots of decision points and as you build out that hybrid cloud yes it's going to be made of by definition multiple pieces it's not necessarily going to be one company that's going to do it all but you know your team helps them that journey absolutely I mean you can't go in with a cookie cutter approach at sea you know you've got two years in one mouth we tell other salespeople you got to use them in that portion so you really kind of listen to the customer as I said try to understand what their applications are you got to understand what their biases are if it's a Microsoft shop you know as your might be their choice for you know public cloud or they might be interested in AWS so you got to kind of work through those you know scenarios and then build out a solution that's gonna work for them we and we rely on our solutions architects Brian veenu runs our sa team and he's got a group of five essays that we think are very adept at you know putting those solutions together yeah Brian's actually not not far from I said here you've got the new hands-on lab is one of the new things that you added here and anything from that or from other things at the event that you won't want to highlight as we wrap yeah I think I mean the hands-on lab gives you know customers the opportunity to come in and play with kind of structured and scripted demos and I see a number of customers in there using that so I'll talk to our team after the event and find out how it went we always try to look for you know improvements along the way but you know there's opportunity in there to play with those demos in terms of storage in terms of hyper-converged in terms of Dell OpenManage essentials which is the software that manages your entire server farm so I think that's been a good addition I'd say the other addition is this year is we were planning it we said hey our people are really good we need to get our people up in front instead of relying so much on the OEM and they're great and they provide great resources but I know that our people have so much to offer as well particularly because you know we're out there you know you're putting solutions together for customers and I think that breadth and depth you know comes through so that's been a nice addition this year where it's not just been Rick out on myself but we've utilized a number of members on our team Ed Palmer is the moderator for a customer experience as an outcome session this afternoon that we're really excited about because at the end of the day is a solution provider that's our job is to produce results and outcomes for our customers that's how we're going to be judged that's how we want to be judged so I'm really excited about that session because we've got em privada and Boston Architectural College they're going to present up their respective deployments and they were different of hyper-converged technology so I think the voice of the customer we really want to make sure we're continue to bring that back to this event so well Scott always a pleasure to see you thanks so much for taking the cube back to this event and thank you for all the customers we get access to we always loved to talk to the customers by the way if you're looking to get a customer on the cube that's we were always looking for customers so we look at the events or we do have a Boston area studio and a lovely Palo Alto studio so reach out to the team be happy to talk mom's to minimun thanks so much for watching the Q