>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, we're here in New Orleans in the state of Louisiana, and to help Keith Townsend and myself, Stu Miniman, wrap up we're glad to have one more customer. We have the great state of Louisiana here with us, we have Michael Allison, who's the Chief Technology Officer. We also have Derek Williams, who's the Director of Data Center Operations. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so I think we all know what the state of Louisiana is, hopefully most people can find it on a map, it's a nice easy shape to remember from my kids and the like. But, Michael, why don't we start with you? Talk to us first about kind of the purview of your group, your organization, and some of the kind of biggest challenges you've been facing in recent times. Sure, we are part of the Office of Technology Services, which is a consolidated IT organization for the state of Louisiana. We were organized about four years ago. Actually four years ago this July. And that brought in the 16 Federated IT groups into one large organization. And we have the purview of the executive branch, which includes those typical agencies like Children and Family Services, Motor Vehicles, Public Safety, Health and Hospitals, Labor, etc. >> And Derek, you've got the data center operations, so give us a little bit of a scope. We heard how many organizations in there, but what do you all have to get your arms around? >> Sure, so we had, you know, there's often a joke that we make that if they've ever made it we own one of each. So we had a little bit of every type of technology. So what we've really been getting our arms around is trying to standardize technologies, get a standard stack going, an enterprise level thing. And really what we're trying to do is become a service provider to those customers where we have standard lines of service and set enterprise level platforms that we migrate everybody onto. So do you actually have your own data centers? Your own hosting facilities? What's kind of the real estate look like? >> Absolutely, so we have, the state has two primary data centers that we utilize, and then we also use a number of cloud services as well as some third-party providers for offsite services. >> So obviously just like every other state in the union, you guys have plenty of money. >> Always. >> Way too many employees and just no challenges. Let's talk about what are the challenges? You know, coming together, bringing that many organizations together, there's challenges right off the bat. What are some of the challenges as you guys look to provide services to the great people of Louisiana? >> Well as Derek kind of eluded to, technology debt is deep. We have services that are aging at about 40 years old, that are our tier one services. And they were built in silos many, many years ago. So being able to do the application or actualization, being able to identify those services, then when we actually shift to the cultural side, actually bringing 16 different IT organizations into one, having all those individuals now work together instead of apart. And not in silos. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had over the last few years is really breaking down those cultural barriers and really coming together as one organization. >> Yeah I totally agree with that. The cultural aspect has been the biggest piece for us. Really getting in there and saying, you know a lot of small and medium size IT shops could get away without necessarily having the proper governance, structures in place, and a lot of people wore a lot of hats. So now we're about 800 strong in the Office of Technology Services, and that means people are very aligned to what they do operationally. And so that's been a big shift and kind of that cultural shift has really been where we've had to focus on to make that align properly to the business needs. >> Mike, what was the reason that led you down the path towards Nutanix? Maybe set us up with a little bit of the problem statement? We heard some of the heterogeneous nature and standardization which seems to fit into a theme we've heard lots of times with Nutanix. But was there a specific use case or what led you towards that path? Well, about four years ago the Department of Health and Hospitals really had a case where they needed to modernize their Medicaid services, eligibility and enrollment. CMS really challenged them to build an infrastructure that was in line with their MIDAS standards. There was modular, COTS, configuration over customization. Federal government no longer wants to build monolithic systems that don't integrate and are just big silos. So what we did was we gravitated to that project. We went to CMS and said, hey why don't we take what you're asking us to build and build it in a way that we can expand throughout the enterprise to not only affect the Department of Health but also Children of Family Services, and be able to expand it to Department of Corrections, etc. That was our use case, and having an anchor tenent with the Department of Health that has a partner with CMS really became the lynch pin in this journey. That was our first real big win. >> Okay how did you hear first about Nutanix? Was there a bake off you went through? >> It was, yes, very similar. It was the RP process took a year or so and we were actually going down the road of procuring some V blocks, and right before the Christmas vacations our Deputy CIO says hey, why don't you go look to see if there's other solutions that are out there? Challenge Derek, myself, and some others to really expand the horizons. Say, if we're going to kind of do this greenfield, what else is out there? And right before he got on his Christmas cruise he dropped that on our lap and about a month later we were going down the Dell Nutanix route. And to be honest it was very contentious, and it actually took a call from Michael Dell who I sent to voicemail twice before I realized who it was, but you know, those are the kind of decisions and the buy in from Dell executives that really allowed us to comfortably make this decision and move forward. >> So technology doesn't exactly move fast in any government because, you know, people process technology and especially in the government, people and process, as you guys have deployed Nutanix throughout your environment, what are some of the wins and what are some of the challenges? >> That's a funny point because we talk about this a lot. The fact that our choice was really between something like VBlock, which was an established player that had been for a long time, and something a little more bleeding edge. And part of the hesitancy to move to something like Nutanix was the idea that hey, we have a lot of restricted data, CJIS, HIPAA, all those kind of things across the board, RS1075 comes into play, and there was hesitancy to move to something new, but one of the things that we said exactly was we are not as agile as private sector. The procurement process, all the things that we have to do, put us a little further out. So it did come into play that when we look at that timeline the stuff that's bleeding edge now, by the time we have it out there in production it's probably going to be mainstream. So we had to hedge our bets a little. And you know, we really had to do our homework. Nutanix was, you know, kind of head and shoulders above a lot of what we looked at, and I had resiliency to it at first, so credit to the Deputy CIO, he made the right call, we came around on it, it's been awesome ever since you know, one of the driving things for us too was getting out there and really looking at the business case and talking to the customers. One of the huge things we kept hearing over and over was the HA aspect of it. You know, we need the high availability, we need the high availability. The other interesting thing that we have from the cost perspective is we are a cost recovery agency now that we're consolidated. So what you use you get charged for, you get a bill every month just like a commercial provider. You know, use this many servers, this much storage, you get that invoice for it. So we needed a way that we could have an environment that's scaled kind of at a linear cost that we could just kind of add these nodes to without having to go buy a new environment and have this huge kind of CAPX expenditure. And so at the end of the day it lived up to the hype and we went with Nutanix and we haven't regretted it, so. >> How are the vendors doing overall, helping you move to that really OP-X model, you said, love to hear what you're doing with cloud overall. Nutanix is talking about it. Dell's obviously talking about that. How are the vendors doing in general? And we'd love to hear specifically Dell Nutanix. >> We've had the luxury of having exceptionally good business partners. The example I'd like to give is, about four months into this project we realized that we were treated Nutanix as a traditional three-tier architecture. We were sending a lot of traffic more south. When we did the analysis we asked the question, a little cattywampus, it was how do we straighten this out? And so we posed a question on a Tuesday about how do we fix this, how do we drive the network back into the fabric? By Thursday we were on a phone call with VMWare. By the following Monday we had two engineers on site with a local partner with NSX Ninja. And we spent the next two months, with about different iterations of how to re-engineer the solution and really look at the full software-defined data center, not just software-defined storage and compute. It is really how do we then evolve this entire solution building upon Nutanix and then layering upon on top of that the VMWare solutions that kind of took us to that next level. >> Yeah and I think the key term in there is business partner. You know, it sounds a little corny to say, but we don't look at them as just vendors anymore. When we choose a technology or direction or an architecture, that is the direction we go for the entire state for that consolidated IT model. So, we don't just need a vendor. We need someone that has a vested interest in seeing us succeed with the technology, and that's what we've gotten out of Nutanix, out of Dell, and they've been willing to, you know, if there's an issue, they put the experts on site, it's not just we'll get some people on a call. They're going to be there next week, we're going to work with you guys and make it work. And it's been absolutely key in making this whole thing go. >> And as a CTO one of the challenges that we have is, as Derek has executed his cloud vision, is how do we take that and use it as an enabler, an accelerant to how we look at our service design, service architecture, how do we cloud optimize this? So as we're talking about CICD and all these little buzzwords that are out there, is how can we use this infrastructure to be that platform that kind of drives that from kind of a grass root, foundation up, whereas sometimes it's more of a pop down approach, we're taking somewhat of an opposite. And now we're in that position where we can now answer the question of now what, what do we do with it now? >> So sounds like you guys are a mixed VMWare, Nutanix hardware, I mean software, Dell hardware shop, foundation you've built the software-defined data center foundation, something that we've looked at for the past 10 years in IT to try and achieve, which is a precursor, or the foundation, to cloud. Nutanix has made a lot of cloud announcements. How does Nutanix's cloud announcements, your partnership with Dell match with what you guys plan when it comes to cloud? >> That's a perfect lead in for us. So you're absolutely right. We have had an active thought in our head that we need to move toward SDDC, software-defined data center is what we wanted to be at. Now that we've achieved it the next step for us is to say hey, whether it's an AWS or whomever, an Azure type thing, they are essentially an SDDC as well. How do we move workloads seamlessly up and down in a secure fashion? So the way we architected things in our SDDC, we have a lot of customers. We can't have lateral movement. So everything's microsegmentation across the board. What we've been pursuing is a way to move VM workloads essentially seamlessly up to the cloud and back down and have those microsegmentation rules follow whether it goes up or back down. That's kind of the zen state for us. It's been an interesting conference for us, because we've seen some competitors to that model. Some of the things Nutanix is rolling out, we're going to have to go back and take a very serious look at on that roadmap to see how it plays out. But, suddenly multicloud, if we can get to that state we don't care what cloud it's in. We don't have to learn separate stacks for different providers. That is a huge gap for us right now. We have highly available environment between two data centers where we run two setups active active that are load balanced. So the piece we're missing now is really an offsite DR that has that complete integration. So the idea that we could see a hurricane out in the golf, and 36, 48 hours away, and know that we might be having some issues. Being able to shift workloads up to the cloud, that's perfect for us. And you know, then cost comes into play. All that kind of stuff that we might have savings, economy of scale, all plays in perfectly for us. So we are super excited about where that's going and some of the technologies coming up are going to be things we're going to be evaluating very carefully over the next year. >> At the end of the day it's all about our constituents. We have to take data, turn it into information that they can consume at the pace that they want to. Whether it be traditional compute in a desktop or mobile or anywhere in between. It was our job to make sure that these services are available and usable when they need it, especially in the time of a disaster or just in day-to-day life. So that's the challenge that we have when delivering services to our citizens and constituents. >> All right, well Mike and Derek, really appreciate you sharing us the journey you've been on, how you're helping the citizens here in the great state of Louisiana. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching our program. It's been a great two days here. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our programming. Thanks Nutanix and the whole crew here, and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's TheCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. IBM Think, the inaugural IBM Think. This is TheCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Ed Walsh, the general manager of IBM Storage. Ed, always a pleasure, my friend. Good to see you again. >> As always, great. >> Wow, what a show! >> It's amazing, it's fantastic. >> 30,000, 40,000, I don't know. I said to John, too many people to count! >> Hard to get through places, right? Just to get here, it was hard to get here. >> We're going to get into your business. You're not a newbie anymore. >> Ed: 18 months, right? >> Second time at IBM, so you really know the ropes. But let's start off with Ginni's talk. You heard our riff, John and myself at the talk. I really like her style. I was poking at some things, but what was your take on her message to the audience? >> Well, just consistency. As an outsider from IBM, the power of IBM to actually change the environment's pretty good, but putting smarter to work and really focusing on business is where we're core. I think it's powerful, but also it allows you to have the overall message of IBM come in, innovative technology. Now, we're going to talk about data and cloud, but innovative technology, an industry split on things, and then, really, the trust and security piece, that comes together. Now, when we talk about it, how do we in the data area move people forward? I think it's a powerful message of, I heard your earlier statement about that, the power of the incumbent. If you look at this, global 2,000 clients that we deal with are looking to user data and to more aggressively advance themselves, and that's where we're perfectly positioned. Even as storage, and we'll get back to storage in a second. But it all comes back to data, which I can include storage, but it's leveraging the data for the competitive advantage and doing what they maybe were slow to do. The early phase one of the data era was really the consumer companies really taking over. We'll talk about good tech versus bad tech. Really, now, we believe it's the rise of the incumbent, which you messaged pretty well, because they do have all this data. Maybe they're slow to adopt how to use that data. With the right partnership at IBM, we can do that. And that's where we're getting the most traction for the clients is telling them, "How do you actually get data-driven in your business?" "It's not as easy as you want it to be." It is about technology, but it's also about human capital as well. >> You obviously talk to a lot of customers. You have for years on both sides of the fence. You've been talking to customers about disrupting companies like IBM, and now you're a part of IBM, and you're helping the incumbents not get disrupted, and maybe be the disruptors, as Ginni was saying. The reason why I was poking at that a little bit is because it is all about the data, and if you, I mentioned yesterday, look at the five top companies in the US in terms of market cap. $600 billion, $700 billion companies. We know who they are. They're the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Googles, et cetera. The premise that I have is they have data at the core of their business, and they've organized human, human expertise around that data, whereas historically, I was talking to Peter Burris about this the other day, he said, "Historically, people have organized humans "around their assets," which might be plant equipment, it might be the bottling factory or whatever it is. So, how do companies go from that distributed, bespoke, siloed data model into this core data model? That's a cultural change, it's a technology change, it's a people and process change. What are you seeing, now, we saw some examples today. RBC, we saw Maersk, we saw Verizon, I'm a little more skeptical on Verizon. Big telcos have a lot of infrastructure that's unchanged, but what are you seeing with companies, how receptive are they? Are they sort of sidecaring their digital transformation, or are they jamming it right through the center, the heart of the company? >> Everyone's on a different maturity curve for sure. We see the leaders and the laggers, right, and the people in between. But everyone desperately wants to do it, so we spend a lot of time saying with our clients, "Let me show you how others are getting more data-driven." On-prem, we focus a lot on private clouds in my division, but also how that's multi-cloud in nature. Because you do have to look at the overall environment and how to look at it, and everyone has their own vision about how they're going to go from where they are to where they need to get to. To get them there in the right steps takes, actually, the girth of an IBM with our technology, with our consultant, our capability to do that. It does take innovative technology, but to get clients is really sharing, really, we see three patterns on-premises are people leveraging to get to multi-cloud. But really, how do they modernize and transform their current environment to do it? We spend a lot of time explaining what other people are doing so that they're, 'cause some of 'em are laggers. Everyone wants to be data-driven. They've tried different areas, and now, how do we make it easier to do that? We're also making investments to make it easier to do that. Little things like machine learning, deep learning. That can be hard stuff. You can wrestle with a lot of the tools and building models. We're doing simple things like, Power AI would be example, in the environment where we bring these open-source tools and make it very easy for you to get your team to start focusing on business value, not the technology components. That's just making it easier, allowing, maybe you'd say the slower, right? Phase one is largely consumer disruptors disrupting it, 'cause they're moving just much faster than maybe the incumbent was. But we can make the incumbent get nimble, which they can with the right technology, but also, it's human capital as well, we can get there. We're doing a lot, not only in the infrastructure side, but you can do in public cloud, by private cloud, but leveraging that system record data is kind of hard, so it's all about tools and being more agile. But also, it's about making it really simple to do some complex things. I gave you the AI. I'll give you another one. People want to do app modernization there on native cloud apps. They want to refactor applications. They want to go to containers and microservices. Yeah, so, and how's that going? And they'll say it's pretty hard. So what do we do? We come out with IBM Cloud Private. What is that? Well, we've taken the challenge out of putting all these tools together. They said Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, but also our operational layer to make it easy for you to deploy that, and then now you have complete portability between different clouds, multi-clouds, including IBM's cloud. But you can do it on-prem as well. But now what you can do is you're not focusing on getting all the components together. You're driving your value, which is where, typically, all these things, they focus so much on building a data lake and actually getting, how do I get the data lake up and running, compared to, how do I actually make sure I'm doing the right data, the right business? That's where I think you're seeing IBM focus a lot of innovation. It might not seem like, you know, that doesn't sound like storage to me, right? But it allows us to help our clients move forward, and those are the things holding them back. Storage is about having API-based automation, which, you're not thinking about storage that way, but you need to do it to fit in to this new world. You're going to see us do more and more. When you talk about putting smarter to work, we're trying to make it dramatically easier to get value, even for the incumbent. Which, maybe you could say they were slower, they don't have the right skills, or they have to do some things. I think we're going out of our way to build the right things. >> Well, my takeaway is, you're allowing the incumbents to get value out of their existing advantages, and their existing, I've talked about app modernization. They're making a lot of money on those apps, and if they can modernize, they can use that as a competitive weapon. I want to talk about your business. People that don't know you, you've done a bunch of startups, you kind of had the Midas touch. You're a technologist. You really understand deep technology. I'm told you're a tough boss, but a fair boss, so you're demanding. You know what it takes to win. IBM Storage, four consecutive quarters of growth, and not just 0.05 % growth, you're talking about substantial, meaningful, high single digits, mid single digits, and the market's growing at whatever, 2%, 3%. You're gaining share in a very large market. Give us the update on your business. How are you doing it? >> You nailed it. A lot of people highlight after years of not keeping with market, we went for not only growing, but we grow in all four quarters. But more importantly, we grow 7% year to year, which the market's grown about 0.9%. But it's really, it's also broad-based. It wasn't a particular product. If you look at our portfolio, every report segment we have internally, externally, grew for the year. If you look at geographies, six out of seven geographies grew. The only geography that didn't grow for us was China, and it's growing in software, it's just not growing in hardware because of some of the unique instances dealing with business in China. But if you look at broad-based, it's not a particular thing. Our portfolio's doing well. It's really how we're approaching the customer, and it's resonating with clients. Then it pulls together the whole portfolio. We have the broadest portfolio, which, you know, we talked about early on. Are you going to simplify that, or is it too much? I actually think it's an advantage, 'cause if you're trying to help people, and this is where the advantage is. All our clients are challenged. We talk about being data-driven. Now, that's a big challenge. But also, they're challenged with budgets and other things for efficiency. How do you get from where you are, where you need to get to, and then make the right steps? You need a broad portfolio to do that. I think the biggest value is we help people get more data-driven. A lot of that is showing what other people are doing walking forward, and it's very into modernizing and having the right agility in the infrastructure. But that's where it's really resonating with the market. And then we're focusing on offerings. We probably have the most competitive offerings. We have hardware and software, but also, the right go-to-market. How do you have the right messaging? We talked more about modernizing, transforming, helping clients free up critical dollars for resources so they can transform and do that in a concrete way. That's what you need to do so that you connect, you transform. And then we help 'em with the data, how to be truly data-driven. That message really plays because all of our clients, big and small, are just challenged that way. What our competitors are, to be honest, more pure storage players, I think I've told you a couple times, the reason I'm happy to be here is, you think of what IBM, when it shows up, can do to help you. I think storage and helping people into the next data-driven era is a big boy/big girl game. You have to bring a lot to bear. We're going to talk about analytics, machine learning, different tool sets. It's not about the next array, but underneath my portfolio, we'll go toe-to-toe with everyone product by product. That was just a lot of offering-by-offering work that had to be done, but we're in much better shape now, and then you're going to see continued innovation through this year. >> Well, I have to bring in the competition, 'cause you're stealing share from the competition. If I'm hearing you correctly, you're saying, Joe Tucci used to say, "We'd rather have overlap than gaps." That's a philosophy that you seem to be taking. EMC now under Dell's ownership taking a different philosophy. They seem to be consolidating their portfolios, they seem to be going for more volume plays, which is consistent with how Dell would operate. I wonder if you could compare and contrast those two philosophies. Am I right that you'd rather have a broad portfolio with no gaps than have gaps and not being able to meet market demand? Is that fair? >> Yeah, I think you'll see us be disciplined in portfolio. But my point is, someone's really trying to, you're trying to really help someone get from A to B in their environment. One product doesn't do it. A couple products don't do it. You do need the full solution set to do it. I also think it's not only what we can do with storage, what we can do with systems. You talk about data-driven. I bring in the overall group. Analytics, we're number one in analytics, et cetera. That's where you start to get, where we show up, it's a different value proposition. That's where we're winning. Now, we also still get involved with, hey, I'm going to, it's U-verse, EMC, array-by-array, winner takes all. We do that all the time, and we'll stand by every product. But you said it, well, you used Tucci. Conversation with Tucci has been reported, but he said to me, which was, "What do you fear most is, "if IBM ever got their act together," he said, "It'd be scary." All we're basically doing is getting IBM's act together, and then from clients are responding to it because they're actually getting a bigger value. That's changing some of our relationship with the clients because they still want to focus on this product and that product. But I think that's really what's affecting the change and the overall business direction. >> Well, getting your act together involved a lot of blocking and tackling, and still does, I'm sure, but it also involved a focused effort on taking R&D, pinpointing that on what the clients needed, getting products out. I mean, when we first did TheCUBE with you guys years ago, it was hard to see a rapid cycle of new product innovation coming out. My sense is that that's changed. I see more announcements, I see a lot more announcements. That makes products that people can buy, it drives revenue, it drives transactions. It brings partnerships. Is that a fair assessment of what you guys have done? >> It comes back to team. We'll go to the high-level team offering at go-to-market, but if you don't have the right team, so, basically, the first thing you do, you have to get the right team. The right team will make the right call. I built Insight IBM. The team I have now is not the team I started with, but it's really getting the right people that are knowing their business cold, inside, outside, that know storage, that can really drive that. The decisions become pretty easy. You got to have the right vision. The vision's all about having a dynamic vision that people understand and can give feedback to, and it does outside-in. It's what's going on with the customers that really matter to us. But get everyone around that, you have an open culture that that feedback loop down to every IBMer, right? You need to ignite the IBMer, I'm talking about, like, a third party, but it really, it's an amazing culture that if you give them the right direction, they'll drive for walls. It was probably my easiest turnaround I've ever done with the right vision. Also, at this-sized companies, a lot about having very agile operation. I spent a lot of time on things that you're not going to talk about on TheCUBE, but what we're doing with costs and quality, all the different things we're doing in serviceability that really do show up as far as NPS. We do a lot of things on a net promoter score, or every time we sell something or service something, we're getting feedback from clients, and they're filling in these verbatims. Boy, that is rich information that is going directly in a, I can give you a couple examples, goes directly into it. What we did is, one of our products is Spectrum Protect. Again, I'm not going to try to go to, but might as well. One particular offering that I have is a great offering, but it's been around for a long time. TSM turned to Spectrum Protect. Verbatims from clients, "I just need and it was simplicity, agent, listen," and they came up with three or four different things that had to be done on a particular environment. So, guess what? We deliver that, and literally, do this, get that. You listen to clients, we deliver that with quality. You put it as part of the overall Spectrum Protect, all of a sudden, transaction revenue goes up by 6%, which is a big revenue stream to just pop in a very single quarter. We're going to do that, but that's like an offering by offering work that has to be done, and you have to have the right team to do it. I would say the credit goes to the team, and the IBM team that really responded to it and lifted it. >> I mean, 10 years ago, that would've taken a year and a half or more to actually get into the product flow, right? >> It's fast. >> Okay, but the other thing I would observe, I've been hearing from companies like yours for decades that, "Well, we're going to use the adjacencies in our other business "to compete with the leaders." And it's never happened. It's starting to happen now, and presumably because people don't care as much about the speeds and feeds as they do about transforming their business and digital business and all that stuff. It seems like you're able to leverage that, so let's talk about some of those other trends. Cloud, that's the other big competitor, the public cloud. You've got a cloud option, but private cloud, we've talked about true private cloud. I think you're familiar with our research, there. How is that going, is it a tailwind for you guys? Is it working? >> Your research on true private cloud, I use it a lot, by the way. That's the idea, and I'll play it back, is having all the agility, flexibility, but also cost models of in the public cloud, but they want to do it on-premises with any time we don't leverage the public cloud resources, APIs, resources, as business demands. That's where my clients are looking to drive it. They want to have all the flexibility. They want to be able to go to the cloud for particular things. But it's lift and shift. We spend a lot of time, that is where we're getting the most traction. We spend a lot of time saying, "This is what we're seeing on-premises "with true private cloud, "and this is how they're going to "multi-cloud." We do show 'em all of our solution sets are now available in, not only IBM, but some of the other major clouds, because we do believe it's truly multi-cloud. But the biggest thing is helping clients understand what they can do along that maturity curve, and I think that's where clients really get the benefit of engaging. And always, the conversation does always come to something outside just storage. It comes into what you can do with server, or machine learning, deep learning, how to be data-driven, what we're doing as far as containers. We're not just saying our storage works for containers. Hey, are you wrestling with that? Let me give you, I'll give you IBM Cloud Private, which is a distribution that allows you to do, literally, in a matter of 40 minutes, be up and running, and then focus on getting a value. That's my storage message. You're saying it's not storage, but that's exactly how the clients are responding, and they need a partner to help them do that. It's not only having the vision of where they are and where they need to get to, data and cloud vision, but then they need someone to actually help them get there. Some things that don't seem like hard storage things really make a difference if our clients get the value out of the data. >> Infrastructure, as Tom Rosamilia says, "Infrastructure matters." It's interesting to see IBM's financials, the Z, Power and Storage driving a lot of the momentum. >> It's hitting the market where it needs, as far as the capabilities. You think about security and what we're doing the mainframe, it's amazing the capability you can accomplish there. Same thing on Power, the ability to do what we're doing on AI. You can do things on our infrastructure you just simply can't do. And then, analytic speed actually really does matter. Bandwidth does matter. And of course, storage fits in all that. >> Well, for 30 years, I've been hearing how hardware's dead, infrastructure's dead, and it just keeps bumping along. Sometimes you see a little spike. You have to have infrastructure for AI and this cognitive world, as you guys call it. So, Ed, great talking to you. Thanks so much for coming to TheCUBE. I wish you continued success. >> Thank you very much. >> Appreciate the time. >> Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching TheCUBE live from IBM Think 2018. We'll be right back. (fast electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (rippling music) >> Welcome back to The Aria in Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stuart Miniman, who's my cohost for the week. Bob Swanson is here, he's the head of sales for dcVAST out of Chicago. Bob, thanks for coming on theCUBE! >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> So, well first of all, the show, how's it going for you? We've now got enough data, it's been a couple of days, a few days perhaps for you. What's the vibe like, what are the conversations like? >> Yeah, it's been a great week. This is the very tail end of the event, so a little exhausted. But it's been exciting, there's been a good buzz at the event and we get a lot of our customers here, and just kind of seeing the buzz and the pace of innovation that's goin on here with Veritas, you know, it has been exciting. >> Tell us more about dcVAST. You're focused on IT infrastructure services, but dig a little deeper. Right, yep, so we're headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and you're right, we do infrastructure and cloud services. So we do support-type services with a seven by 24 call center, have different managed service offerings, different cloud offerings, and certainly do consulting and project work as well. >> Yeah, and Bob, so what does multi-cloud mean to your customers? (chuckles) >> It's only natural that if they're not there today, then they're going to be multi-cloud at some point. So, Veritas here is pretty uniquely positioned. to be able to get customers there. It's all about flexibility and data portability. So, I think where infrastructure and storage and data protection is sometimes not that exciting of a conversation, now kind of changing the conversation, the data management, 'cause everybody needs their data to become more productive for them. It changes the conversation, has a little more sizzle. >> Okay, but you know, your primary area of focus is infrastructure services, so that means first and foremost, every year you got to help me lower my costs, right, you've been hearing that, I'm sure, for years, and help me improve my operational efficiency. And you do that, and really attack my labor problem, IT labor problem so I can focus on my business, right? Are those still the big overriding themes? Oh, yeah, there's no question. I mean, I think the public cloud has been probably the most disruptive thing in our space since the internet. And it's making customers re-evaluate all cost and really how they're doing things, and different consumption and financial models. So, the technology is cool, and we like that conversation, but it naturally brings a big financial and cost savings, and do-more-with-less element to all the conversations. >> So what are the big trends that you're seeing in marketplace, what are the conversations like with your customers? >> Yeah, and I'll give you an example. I think customers have different approaches to cloud, right, some cloud-first, everything's got to go. Others maybe want to keep more of their workloads on premise. And in one customer example, where they said, hey, we want to move all non-production out to the cloud and it was a single cloud provider. And they got about 40% of what they were looking to move out there and they reached what they thought their estimated budget was going to be. So at that point, having that portability and having the tool sets to be able to move those workloads around becomes very important from a financial standpoint. >> So, I wonder if we can unpack those. Cloud first, and then these other guys on-prem. The motivation for cloud first, and the type of company. Do they tend to be a smaller companies, or do you see larger companies saying hey, we're going all in? I mean, you've seen some stories in the press, you know, large company, GE's going all to the cloud, okay I'm sure there's still a lot of on-prem going on there. What do you see? >> Yeah, you're right. A lot of small business is certainly, it makes sense for them, any startups too are pretty much born in the cloud now. You're not going to have too many financial backers that are going to want a startup to be spending too much money on data center, or buying hardware. But the established large enterprises, too, are kind of all over the map, but there are already some of them that are taking this cloud first approach. But, the large enterprises and companies that have been around, where it's not kind of a clean slate, naturally it's going to be hybrid and ultimately there's probably a lot of predictable static workloads that are, at the end of the day, going to be cheaper to run on-prem than they are out in the public cloud. Public cloud's great for the stuff that's not predictable, or is very dynamic, so we're seeing, and I am from Chicago and so we say the coasts move faster, maybe, than the Midwest does as well, but we're seeing varying degrees of adoption and strategy. >> But the business in the data center's good right now, I mean, the market's sort of booming, but if you roll back a few years, you guys must have thought, and maybe you're still thinking it, okay, see this cloud that's coming. Like you said, it's one of the most disruptive, if not the most disruptive in a while, and it's aiming right at the heart of your business, infrastructure services. So how have you responded to that, you must be riding the wave now of data center growth and investment, but strategically, what are you thinking about in your firm? >> Yeah, I mean, there's no question. We've had to pivot. But it does create opportunity. And we do need to help our customers be able to be most cost-effectively managing their workload, right, helping them with that. So where there's challenge and change, there's certainly inopportunity. And we've seen it. >> So, but my understanding, your firm also offers managed cloud offerings. That's been one of the things we've looked at is the channel, can they get on board, can they offer that, how is it working with the big cloud providers, and yeah, let's start there. >> Yeah, that's a good question, and a lot of people have a misperception that the cloud is kind of the easy button. (laughter) But at the end of the day-- >> Stu: Maybe 10 years ago we thought that-- >> Dave: You have your hoodie. >> Right, but I mean, people need to realize the same architecture and security considerations are there as they are for on-premise, so it's not the easy button, and you can just kind of set it and forget it. So some people that are underestimating that still need help from a third party like ourselves to be able to help them manage it. >> Could you speak about the maturation of your support services? >> Yeah, we started doing a lot of hardware support years ago when the business was founded in 1989. And at that time, it was a lot of Unix-based engineering workstations and kind of morphed into servers and storage and other data center equipment, and then started doing a lot more software support, which all can be delivered remotely, for the most part. From time to time, you may need to be onsite for something, so that kind of changes the logistical model, and now with the cloud as well, we've just kind of evolved in that direction. >> And how about the Veritas relationship? What's that been like, you know, the Symantec sale, any comments on how that's evolved, and where do you see that going? >> Yeah, we've been a long-time Veritas partner, and really the reason why we first got started with them was because they were relatively platform-agnostic, and supported and endorsed heterogeneity. And in the old Foundation Suite days, which now their InfoScale product, it's obviously had some name changes, it didn't matter what operating system, didn't matter which array vendor you used. And it's good to have friends in the industry and alliances, but there's also some benefit of staying relatively agnostic like Veritas has, and that message resonates now more than ever with all the different cloud providers out there, and just being able to be interoperable with a lot of different technologies. >> What's your customer's reaction been to all the announcements that Veritas has been making here? >> Yeah, yeah, everyone's excited. Now it's getting the word out. And I mentioned pace of innovation earlier, and it seems to have gone from zero to 100, really, really fast. So, that's exciting. It shows commitment, I think, from the new executive leadership team at Veritas, and their backers at Carlyle as well. So, you know, I think it's an exciting time for Veritas, and for us as a partner as well, and our customers. >> And anything you want to see out of those guys? From your perspective, in the partner standpoint, in the voice of the customer, what's on their to-do list? >> Yeah, and I mean, the concept of data management, looking at it holistically is important. After people and intellectual property, data's the most valuable asset a company has, and a lot of the intellectual property resides in the form of data as well. So, it's an exciting place to be as we kind of see the industry shift. >> Dave: Cubs or White Sox? >> Bob: Cubbies! >> Hey, well, congratulations on that! >> Yeah, it's been a-- >> Really, really Cubbies, not just White Sox, oh, the Cubbies won it? >> No, Cubbies all the way. >> Hardcore Cubbies fan. >> Diehard, absolutely, yep. >> Well, you're welcome for Theo Epstein. We gave Theo, and Lester, you know. And Lackey. (laughs) >> You know, Theo seems to have the Midas touch, you know, and it's interesting too, you can use sports analogies for a lot of things, and Theo's a guy who was a little disruptive by using data and analytics in his approach to managing a baseball team. >> Right, right, well, good. That's great. It was an exciting World Series last year. Hope it can be as exciting again. Must have been insane in Chicago. >> Absolutely, yep, getting ready for another run this year, hopefully. >> Excellent, well, Bob, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks again, gentlemen. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back to wrap up Vision 2017. This is theCUBE. (rippling music)