>> From Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering WTG Transform 2019 brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2019 here in Boston, Massachusets. Happen to welcome back to the program the CTO of Winslow Technology Group. Rick Gouin spoke to the customers this morning, threw in a bunch of data points, got us all thinking about where we are today and where we're going tomorrow in the cloud. Rick, thanks so much for joining us >> Hey, thanks for having me. >> All right, so rick, you and I, we've known each other for a few years now, we have these great debates as to kind of where we are and where we're going. I attended a Nutanix event a couple years ago, and Nassim Taleb, who is the author of a number of books including Black Swan and Antifragile, he worked on Wall Street and he said look, we all try to make these predictions, but we think it's going to be a line, or maybe they'll be slow adoption, but the black swan that he said is something, just the quick thing is you've never seen a black swan, you'd think that all swans are white, and once you've seen a black swan, you're like, oh my god, everything that I thought I knew I have to think any questions. Predicting the future, especially in a never changing world where we don't have all the facts and when we can't predict, is really challenging. So understanding whether cloud will take 80% of the market or 30% in the next five years is a little bit of a complex thing. It's like trying to predict the weather here in New England where we're watching the clouds and the rain roll in and roll out. Start with us as to Winslow Technology, your customers, where they are with cloud, and how that conversation goes with them today. >> Yeah, so I think you make a great point about these statistics, these assertions, these predictions. We're getting bombarded with them without context, and I think that it leaves a lot of our customers feeling like they're behind the curve a little bit because have bandy about the, you'll hear 80% of cloud, of companies have a cloud strategy, and there's never the follow up to see did it change two weeks later, was it actually implemented. And so, I think what we can all agree on is that one, all of these technologies are going to continue to grow. Their adoption is going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to figure out different ways to extract value from those services, but the other part of this, and I think it's really where Winslow fits in, is that we want to help our customers position themselves to take advantage of that. So I want to help our customers transform what they're doing today. If we look out at that three, at that five year mark, we know that we're going to have a lot of workloads out there. I don't know what the percentage is going to be, I'm not going to throw a fake number out there, but we know that it's going to be bigger than the one today. And we also, I would assert, that there are things we can help you do in your on-prem environment today that will help you make you better prepared for that transition and allow you to attack that, hopefully, in a more strategic and well considered way. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well rick, I am very sure 87% of all statistics lie, and beyond that, I would poke and prod at any numbers that I see there because look, numbers are numbers, and as you said, things do change all the time. >> Context. >> When I look at some of the tailwinds that have been driving your business the last few years, hyper convergent infrastructure, some of the services wrapping around, help customers with their security journey, with their cloud journey. You've got a number of partners that are there. The bombardment that your customers get, it doesn't stop. If they open up, they open up the news today, it's like oh, AWS just unleased their latest on outpost, and VMware is partnering with all the clouds, and therefore you better be ready for it. The thing I'll poke a little bit at, I don't mind that customers think they're a little bit far behind because what they need to be doing is being that change mindset because the worse thing they can do is just say, well, I've got it the way I want it and I'm not going to change. And I think that that's something you would agree with and that Winslow's helping them to try to keep up because nobody can keep up by themselves, so they've got to be able to turn to partners like yourself to keep up. >> Yeah. I think one of the think one of the things that was telling that I touched on earlier today a little bit was the number three reason that we heard from our customers for why they weren't leveraging the public cloud was because they didn't know how. And I think that that's telling, I think that sort of response to the whole notion that they're feeling behind the curve, but I also feel like you mentioned hyper converged, you mentioned some of these other partners we work with. These guys all have some great stories that will allow our customers to take a first step. What we're not talking about is saying hey, customers, you've got to re-platform everything. You've got to re-write everything to leverage all these different cloud services and cloud platform. That's a big lift for a lot of our customers, but what might not be such a huge lift is leveraging some of those cloud services, cloud connectivity capabilities that are built into those platforms from those partners like Nutanix, like VMware, like Dell EMC. >> So rick, I really liked your line that most customers, many customers end up hybrid by accident. And unfortunately, I think that's where we are when you go talk to them, they might not understand hybrid cloud, multi cloud, they're just like oh, that's vendor terminology, but do you have SAS? Oh, absolutely, they've all got O365 and Salesforce, and a whole host of other ones. Three which probably IPO today. And are they using a public cloud? They definitely are. Most of them at least understand they're using it as opposed to five years ago it was like oh, wait, we actually checked all the IPs and we had three groups that we didn't realize that were doing the old stealth IT. So what is the advice, how do we make sure we get everybody talking in, what are some steps to move forward on that strategy to actually have a coherent cloud offering, not just the pieces that I put together because that's what different groups did. >> Sure, yeah. I think the hybrid by accident scenario is one that we're seeing more and more often from our customers and also just from other folks in the industry. And I guess just to kind of expand on that a little bit, what we're talking about there is when somebody that we're working with perhaps goes into a project, goes into a cycle with the notion that they're going to be all of one or all of the other. I'm going to put everything in the cloud or I'm going to put nothing in the cloud. And what happens is you find a workload that doesn't fit where your whatever your direction is. And so all of a sudden, if you're one of those people who say oh the cloud is just somebody else's computer. Next thing you know, you're on O365, next thing you know you're consuming Dropbox or who knows what. You've got all of these different public services and you have no integration between your on-prem environment and all these public services you're leveraging. And so, you find yourself in a scenario where you're in a hybrid by accident, and which means that you didn't build in the sort of management that would be able to consider these different silos of information. And so, what we kind of advocate is that when you're approaching these strategic decisions, recognize upfront that you may very well end up in hybrid scenario, at least in the next few years this is probably what it's going to look like, at least that's what I think. Recognize that upfront and build that into your plan. If you plan to end up in a hybrid end state, you're whole environment is going to be such much more cohesive, you're going to have that app mobility, you're going to have so much more flexibility than if you end up there by accident by moving half your workloads out, lift and shifting some things over here, some stuff gets left behind, different groups are managing different things 'cause they're different skillsets. If you plan to be in that state at the end, you're going to be in much better shape, but you're also going to be well positioned to continue to move things out as those services become more robust and as you can extract more value from those for your business. >> I think if you've looked at the history of IT, it's very rare that we get one thing to rule them all. >> Right. >> And it's like, well, Ethernet's done a good job at networking, and the mainframe had it's time there, but at the end of the day, five years from now, it might just be all my solutions are cloud, but it's just, as you said, that location matters a little bit less because by the way, it's not just public and private, that edge computing thing is a huge draw that most companies I talk to have some kind of IOT and censure strategy that they're picking out. How can users be data driven to get to the right things in the right place and really make smart decisions? >> Yeah. So I think that there's two facets here to being able to make data driven decisions. The first is that you have to collect the data. We have to put in the diligence, so certainly, that's one of the places that we're able to help our customers in collecting and in quantifying it, attaching dollars and cents. Here's what the services will cost, here's what the professional services, the re-platforming will cost. Let's wrap some numbers around this. If you're trying to make those decisions, if you're creating a strategy, and you haven't taken a look at what your costs are going to be, what your level of effort is going to be, that's a super incomplete strategy, and it's one of the frustrating things for me as a customer facing resource to walk into one of those situations where a customer is dead set on their strategy, but really doesn't understand it themselves. We really welcome the opportunity to help those kind of do their diligence to be able to create more informed and data drive strategies. Leveraging information from their own environments. >> All right. Rick, last thing is we know things are changing all the time. What's the last thing you want people to know about Winslow Technology 2019 that they might not have understood if they looked at the company a year or three years ago? >> Yeah, so I think that some of the big changes that have really come to us in the last couple years is we're adding technical firepower at alarming rate. Our growth is really focused on the services delivery, and the engineering talent we've brought in high end security resources, high end VMware resources. We're able to deliver those cloud connectivity capabilities from all those different products that you mentioned. We're able to deliver a fairly robust security portfolio today, not to mention, the highest level of VMware expertise that there is out there. So we put a lot of focus into the services, into professional services, into helping our customers sort of understand and make that journey, straddle that public, private, hybrid, multi sort of thing. And we think that services is going to drive a lot of this for us going forward. And so our capabilities are growing leaps and bounds, year over year in the services and engineering talent perspective. >> All right, well, Rick Gouin, CTO of Winslow Technology. Always a pleasure to catch up. My prediction, next year I think we'll be another five to 10% in our agreement as to what the future looks like. >> I like it. >> Just because it will be today as opposed to tomorrow >> Yes. >> in the viewpoint. Be back with much more here from WTG 2019. I'm Stu Miniman. And thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group you're watching the cubes coverage of wtg transform 2018 happy to welcome back to the program fresh off the keynotes page where he discussed the specter of clouds Rick Cowan who is the chief technology officer of window technology group Rick great to talk to you thanks for having me - all right yeah thank you for having us here so we're talking about this whole cloud thing and you and I've been talking about this for a couple of years gives it gives your viewpoint you talked a lot of customers we can talk about architecture but you know the average customer when they hear you know cloud you know there's some puffy things up in the sky but you know what what does it mean to them sure yeah so I think one of the things that we're advocating as it relates to sort of starting that cloud journey is to do some homework ahead of time make data-driven decisions and we don't want you as our you know customer base to get into a situation where you're kind of backed into a corner right where you move something you decide you need to bring it back or or or anything like that so we're a big advocate of you know running some analytics and making some intelligent decisions you know try and start with that low-hanging fruit where you can kind of ease your way in and and the stuff that doesn't require re-platforming and you know get your toes toes in the sand a little bit before you wade all the way out there yes so if I step back for a second just immersed and point one of the things I liked in your keynote is so many times we think about technology it's like oh well it's a new server or it's you know something I swipe a credit card and I go using the cloud cloud really we need to think about the operating knowledge as it's the policies and the people that are as important if not more important than the okay what's the pipe price per CPU and things like that right right yeah yeah and one of the things that we talk about a lot is that when we're talking about cloud we're not talking about a place we're not talking about who owns it we're not talking about any particular public cloud provider we're talking about a way of doing business a way of bringing your services to your internal customers and a way of kind of transforming your IT infrastructure to more efficiently consume those resources right and that's that's a change in operating model that's a change in sort of way of thinking not just from you know this whole cloud thing but also towards delivering IT more as a service yeah and you spent a lot of time talking about applications which I really like because I'm an infrastructure guy by background when we talked about virtualization when we talked about converge and hyper-converged a lot of times we're talking about you know boxes and cabling and networking and things like that the role of infrastructure is are on my application they're all the applications to run my business right that's the big theme we've been hearing for years is you know IT your role isn't to be this thing off on the side and it's not necessary you know dollars in headcount and all that are important but if you don't serve the ultimate business and what they need to do to keep us running we're all out of business right yeah this whole transformation is all about aligning right those business requirements with IT and starting to deliver services that are tailored towards what the business needs as opposed to what I can offer what my capabilities are right those need to be more in synced and that's what this whole operating model is all about right is aligning those services to the business and and creating the infrastructure so that the business can consume it more easily yeah and you gave some really good pointers I want you to give us the you know your customers because when I heard things like oh well you know let's say I'm using a public cloud well I need to understand how availability zones work and how I spread things out which you know if I'm used to you know H a on VMware or you know your hypervisor Troy some of those things I got used to it because things work they were built for the enterprise now it's you know well it's distributed but you need to think about things from that application level a little bit more right yeah and so that's something that we're trying to educate our customer base on is as we move forward and as we start to move workloads into various you know clouds public/private what-have-you we have to start considering some of those availability aspects that today we don't even think about right almost everybody who is still sitting in that traditional infrastructure they're all having their availability provided probably at the hardware level they have you know multiple controllers and clusters and all this stuff so they put a they drop an application into their environment and it's already gonna have pretty good availability when we as we move forward we have to start pushing that availability up the stack and thinking about it more at the application level and so when we're deploying workloads into different cloud environments we may be sponsible for providing our own high availability and that's something that in some cases requires a fair amount of expertise to to you know get that architecture right so that we do have the same level of high availability out in these cloud environments that we have in our on-prem infrastructure all right so Rick inside your customers you know who are the people you're talking to that kind of get this you know we lived through the transformation of like well you know the storage guy was doing this thing we need to kind of have the virtualization person own more you know cloud architect has been a title that's been you know expanding quite a lot over the last few years who are you getting at the table who's making these architectural decisions when you're working with your users yeah so we feel like it's something that we have to get the entire team on board with it's something where it might be an initiative that we start to address with the CIOs and the IT directors but it's important to get the entire organization's IT staff on board with the transition because each one is going to have a part to play and in sort of moving forward into that IT as a service sort of an organization great so you know when it looked at some of the things that wtg is doing you know obviously you know Dell EMC Nutanix VMware your biggest partners you know what's what's kind of you know the the big you know big push team today from the majority your customers and what are some of the you know more advanced customers getting excited about yeah so I think you know you listed off those those partners and when we look at them a common theme there is adding this built-in sort of cloud interoperability connectivity and feature set so when we're thinking about all the characteristics that we look for in a cloud operating model we're seeing things like self-service portals things like you know the ability to measure multiple tenants and things like this and so what we're seeing across all those partners is more and more of those features come as parts of the infrastructure solutions and that's reducing the burden on our customers to be able to deploy something that you know operates in that cloud sort of IT as a service offering and so you know some of these customers are getting really excited about that capability to write out-of-the-box deploy a self-service portal deliver these these capabilities straight to their in colonel customers without having to do a bunch of development or or you know build complicated systems to deliver them so it's a self-service portals it's the built-in cloud connectivity to be able to archive things and and send dr out to you know third-party service providers so those are some of the things that our customers who are on this journey and you know maybe they started last year the year before they're moving forward those are the sorts of things that they're starting to point out you know one of the big challenges when we talk about this rather dispersed world we're moving towards you spend some time talking about SAS absolutely SAS is the biggest piece of you know if you call public cloud some of it doesn't live in one of the big clouds or can live lots of places data right data protection a security are something that no matter where I go I need to worry about that it's there's there's no way actually in your definition you're like oh if I do SAS I don't need to worry about the data no no no great - well I think you took somebody's slide there but you know there are some people that mistakingly oh well I ran on a pass I don't need to worry about security no you do containers any of these things data protection my data and you know security I need to worry about that everywhere and that brings a whole new set of challenges yeah and and you know so you make a good point because on for example I'm a security side of things it's continues to be just as much of a concern as it ever was but it's an entirely different way to think about it you know likewise with data protection it's just as important as it ever was but it's an entirely different way to think about one of the things though that I thought was really interesting about security is that when I'm talking to these CIOs and IT directors across our customer base in the past you know if I go back rewind this thing three years they would say I can't go to the cloud because of security right now we're you know were a little bit more mature and in our cloud understanding and and starting to you know transform a little bit and they now that lists that as one of the reasons they want to move to the cloud and I think that was one of the most startling sort of realizations as that shift in my chair yeah absolutely we actually did did some surveys there was a big survey we were attached with called the future of cloud computing and you're right if I hadn't dipped my toe in I was worried about it but once I got there I realized I kind of looked in sighed and said oh my gosh what did I be doing interesting analogy I've paired sometimes is you know the autonomous vehicles and things like that I'm worried about this self-driving or even the braking or things like that that challenging have you looked at most drivers most people you know oh my gosh they're checking their tax they're you know doing all sorts of stuff there it is a bit of a mind flip as done how you think of these things doesn't mean it changes overnight or that there's there's never a silver bullet night day but you know it's some of these viewpoints that we need to change and think a little differently yeah yeah I think that's a great analogy I'm probably SD laughs all right Rick what's exciting you these days your CTO you know you're here there's you know Boston area love if you've got you know anything about you know cool things in the area or just cool tech in general yeah I think you know and and I dressed a lot of this in my keynote earlier today but I'm really high on an analytical approach to a hybrid cloud I want to start to get customers thinking about you know how we can make this a transition as opposed to a you know just jump in right in the deep end it doesn't have to be this this big jarring event as we sort of transform this is something where we can take baby steps and and start to move ourselves forward and so you know we're getting really excited about those technologies that allow us to integrate our existing infrastructure with various other you know cloud services whether they be you know platforms infrastructure and software offerings things that allow us to take the investments that we already have and you know sort of integrate and make use of these cloud services that we know can deliver value to our organization that's what we're most excited about is you know getting more out of what we have yeah you mentioned analytics I mean here in Boston you had in the opening video there was some of the I think it's the Boston Dynamics robots you know right across the river here yeah in the area when I talk to people like in the storage world we talk about intelligence but their eyes light up because we've been talking about intelligence storage for decades but no really now that with all the cool technologies yet we can really put this in here and it's not about you know getting rid of the admins it about really supercharging and be able to deal with you know we've got way more data we've got way more devices we've got way more things I'm going to have to do so you know we need some help with all of these machines to be able to pair the machines with the people to make them do their jobs better yep yep couldn't agree more all right we're going pleasure to catch up with you and thanks again thanks so much for having us here be sure to check out the cube net for all of the content here and all the shows will be back with lots more coverage thanks for watching the Q

(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)