>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at WTG Transform 2019. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Marty Sanders who's the Chief Security Services Officer at Arctic Wolf. Marty, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right Arctic Wolf's a partner, but before we get there, I have to say welcome back. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Because you're familiar with this event quite well. You have a background at Compellent, which of course we were just talking to Scott Winslow. It's where his company started. Just give our audience a little bit thumbnail of your background. >> Perfect. So yeah, Scott and I go back a long time. We actually started back working together at Zylotech back in the late 90's. After we left Zylotech, we actually went to Compellent. We started building Compellent back in 2002. As a company we wanted to start a new philosophy. Really sit down with customers prior to actually releasing products. So we actually built a customer council. We started that in Minneapolis, and then what we wanted to do is take it to the next level. We wanted to replicate that out to other parts of the country, and the first person we called was Scott. We started to do it with Scott, and started back in 2004. Had the first meeting here at the Commonwealth, actually with a handful of customers, and now it's grown into this. So it's unbelievable what he's done with the company. And when I look at what he does, he provides a tremendous amount of value to the customers and just sells them exactly what they want. But what they need as well. >> Yeah we always know when certain segments of the market that degree of separation, you look on LinkedIn is like, one and a half. >> Absolutely. >> Everybody knows each other. We all run around some of the same circles. So bring us up to speed. Arctic Wolf. I believe you're the first person we've had on from the company. So give us a little bit kind of the who and the what and the why. >> Perfect. ^- [Stu] Of Arctic Wolf. >> And again thank you very much for inviting us out for this as well. Yeah Arctic Wolf has been around since 2012. Started off in the SOC as a service. Obviously, in that small-medium business, they didn't have the capabilities to do a lot of the security work. Actually, Brian NeSmith, our CEO, started the company with his other founder Kim Tremblay. They worked at Blue Coat, they understood the security world. But understood that there was a big hole in that space, in that small-medium enterprise business. So they were actually way ahead of their time. I mean you look at from 2012 to 2015, it was a little bit slow growth. But now you start to look at where we're at, and the adoption of that, having a SOC as a service 7 by 24, hasn't been adopted very well. >> Yeah, I thought it was rather telling, actually in the keynote this morning, some people were asking about security, and they're like, wait, if I do this hybrid cloud stuff, how does that work? And I'm like, yeah I go to too many events. It's like, I have ingrained in my system now security is everyone's problem. There is no such thing as a moat. You assume that they are going to get in, so therefore I need to build at every level of the stack. I need to get in. But I'm an industry watcher. ^- [Marty] Yep. >> The people that are doing, what's their mindset, what's workin' well for them? Is security heightened? How's Arctic Wolf going? >> And you want to take that premise. I mean, one of the things that we do is we actually assign a concierge security team to that customer. So we want to be that extension of their environment. I mean, in fact, as we started to talk to some of the clients that we have here, they're repeating the words, what they feel like. My team is part of their team. And it makes it so much easier. So you're not dealing with somebody fresh every time that you call in. If you have any type of event that validates that there's somebody trying to break in. You want to have that person that understands your environment. Understands exactly where you've been. Making sure that you're up to speed on their network, all their ingress/egress points that they can come into. So it makes it so much easier if you have that consistent face that you're dealing with. >> Okay. Marty, is there a typical customer of Arctic Wolf? Where do you fit in the WTG? Their customer base? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I mean, when you look at where we really fit is, the first questions that we want to ask is do you have a security team? Do you have it 7 by 24? I mean, that's where we really want to make sure that we're augmenting that. I mean, when you look at a lot of the companies they might have that office admin that became the IT person, that became the security person. What we want to do is make sure that we're providing the true level of high security for those companies 7 by 24. Because obviously the bad guys know that there's going to be a hole after hours or whatever it's going to be. So that's when they want to go in. So we want to make sure that we're covering that. So Scott and his clients are kind of in that medium to small-medium business, moving up into the small enterprise, and it fits really well with them. >> Yeah, so you're saying most of them don't have an entire security SWAT team. >> Exactly. ^- Waiting 7 by 24, to do that. Walk us through maybe if you have a customer example or kind of a genericized version that you can share. What does an engagement look like from when they first plug in to when they're fully engaged? >> Perfect. So typically what we do is we actually once the deal is closed what we want to do is sit down with the customer and understand exactly all their different applications, all their environments. Understand all their ingress/egress points that they have coming in. We want to make sure that we're maximizing coverage. And what we want to do is triangulate anything that comes into that. Understand all the attack vectors that the bad guys may try to come in. So it takes us about 30 days to go through all of that. So once we get them onboarded, we assign that concierge security team. Going to be a senior and a less-senior person dedicated to that team. And basically they're going to go through and review that environment, make sure that they understand all the different applications. Is it Office 365? Any cloud apps that we need to hook up to it? All the different servers to make sure we're getting all that information. We want to provide more quiet service. We don't want to be, anytime someone knocks on the door, we don't want to be calling, Little Red Hen-type stories. We want to make sure that anything that we actually report on is going to be actionable for those customers. So that's that trusted confidante, that's where we build that strong relationship rather than sending out a note and retracting it as a false positive or anything like that. >> Okay. And Marty, I heard you mentioned some SAS applications and their infrastructure environment. Is public cloud included in that also? >> Absolutely. And what we want to do is make sure that we understand, like you said. And like Joe and Rick went through and talked about. There's going to be that private and public cloud. We want to make sure that we're capturing everything internally, but also if you're using those SAS applications on the outside, whatever they may be, we want to make sure that we're capturing all that information so that we can help with that. >> Okay. And billing. Is there multi-year commitments? Or how does the financial piece of this work? >> It can be MRR. I mean, we're going to go through on a monthly basis and we'd like to get at least a year commitment. It can be something that they sign up for a couple of months or they sign up for a year and pay monthly whatever they need to do. But typically what we want to do is provide that level of service and when you think about it, if you were to go out and buy a security team to cover 7 by 24, it's at least a minimum of six, seven people to do that. So when you look at the price point, we want to be less than that. We want to provide that high level of value. When you think about a single team going out and trying to do something, the typical threat is it has been in their environment for at least 100 days before they notice it. What we want to do is get it down to minutes. We want to make sure that any threat that's coming in we're notifying on it immediately. We want to make sure that we're going to capture all those things. >> All right. So Marty, when I talk to the big enterprises, security it's not only top of mind it's often a board-level discussion. When you come down to kind of the mid-size to small companies, where does security fit in their overall pictures? What are some of the biggest things on their mind? >> So it's very interesting. When you start to think about it, one of the things that is challenging, you look at some of the places that were having the greatest adoption rates are those companies that have the biggest threats. You look at where the money is. You look in the healthcare environments. The smaller healthcare. Or you look at the legal side of things. I mean, people know where there's money and where they need to have that data. So when you look at it, it's becoming a higher topic and it's becoming every conversation. And we don't like to say that the conversation gets highlighted after a breach or whatever it's going to be, but it does. I mean, and we'll be in the middle of some discussions and you'll hear about somebody that just got hit in a similar environment. And that's how then it gets brought up. >> Oh, boy. Sounds almost all the discussion is data is the new oil. >> Yes. Well those bad actors out there know where the oil is. >> Absolutely >> And therefore that's a security risk for them. >> Absolutely. And I mean the thing that you look at is, you hear about where some of the Atlanta, and some of the other cities that were hit. I mean they go after the localities and the municipalities of making sure that they're going after. And they know that they're going to pay very quickly because of how incredibly important that data is to do that. And even some of the sitting talking to some of the customers here today. Manufacturing, you know? Just the ability to go in and steal the IP that they have to make their business a little bit unique. That's where the people are concentrating because they want to take that and find that uniqueness in that business. >> All right. Marty, want to give you the final word. WTG Transform 2019. Talk about the partnership, talk about the customers and final takeaways. >> So the partnership, I mean, obviously Scott and I have known each other for a long time. The entire sales team and I know Scott. Rick Gowan actually was a customer of ours at Travelers Insurance. Scott hires great people, great employees. They partner. They take care of their customers better than anybody that I know. I mean, I just love the passion. In fact, some of the customers that we started with back in 2004 are still here. Still using the same products. But they continue to look at what provides the most value for them. >> All right. Marty Sanders the CSSO of Arctic Wolf, thanks so much for joining us. ^- Thank you, Stu. >> And appreciate all the updates. >> Thank you. All right. Full day of coverage here in the shadow of Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts. The East Coast team's home game as we like to say. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching the Cube. (gentle techno music)

>> 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.