>> 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)

>> It's The Cube, covering WTG TRANSFORM 2019. Brought to you by WINSLOW Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. We're here in Boston, Massachusets, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park, and happy to welcome back to the program Mike Berthiaume, who's Director of Systems Engineering at Nutanix, a good partner of Winslow Technology Group. Mike, thanks for joining us. >> Well as always Stew, it's great to be here. This is number three for us I think, this has become kind a bit of a tradition. >> The third year we've done at this, I've seen you at many of the local user groups here and as I say, a nice home game after lots of travels around the globe. Talking about lots of technologies. >> For sure, looking forward to it. >> What I've always loved, diggin in, in a show like this is we've got users. Scott and the team have a 189 users, many of them are Nutanix customers. So let's start there, what's top of mind from your customers today? >> A lot, so there's a lot happening, as we know in the industry. Things are changing and our customers are trying to figure out what it means for them. But at the end of the day it's all about IT, providing the value back to the business. I think CIOs, and we were just speaking about this in our session, are really pushing their staff to look at public cloud as a potential option. So in many of the folks working on the trenches realize, "Oh yeah, public cloud does make sense "for some things but not necessarily everything." The true strategy we have to have as an organization is multi-cloud, figure out how to make that work. So that's really what we're hearing, and the good news is from our product portfolio Nutanix, and what we're doing. We're really very much in lockstep with that. >> When I think back when that whole wave of hyper-converged infrastructure aged the eye which, Nutanix to its credit never was like, HCI, HCI. It was about simplicity, it was about working on the business, and underneath it that's software that drives the company. The founders of the company came from some of the hyperscalers, some of the file system design underneath there. So when you hear, well the promise of public cloud is supposed to be simple and economic. Well public cloud, we understand is neither simple nor cheap. >> That's right. >> Hyper-converged infrastructure did simplify environments, and changes the economics of how we think if it. When I talk to Nutanix customers it's like, "Oh hey, I don't no longer need to do constant care feeding "of this stack of wires and stuff put together, "much of it is much simpler." You talk about customers, they're going to that multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environment, they're trying to figure out their strategy. Rick Gowan in his presentation said something I thought resonated with me, which is, "You don't want to end up in hybrid cloud, "just you ended up there by mistake without plans," And unfortunately that's where IT is, I've got lots of projects that I do, and I do them as I need them and I realize, "Oh wait, somebody's manage, maintain, "and pull all these things together." So help us understand where Nutanix fits in that multi-cloud story today, which is more than just where people that might not of looked in a couple a years, know the appliance. >> Yeah sure, and I think from are, and mentioned before our roots come from those big large public cloud environments like Google, and Amazon, and others. But when we talk about multi-cloud, and you also made the point that simplicity is probably one of the core values that our customers see Nutanix as being on the forefront there. So I would say that for me, hybrid cloud and I think the mantra within Nutanix, hybrid cloud is not something that many manufacturers have been able to achieve. It's a lot a separate silos, right and as soon as you create multiple silos, you're actually creating operational disruption, and you're actually creating complexity. So if you have to manage public cloud a, public cloud b, your on-prem environment, and maybe your remote offices, and even your edge with different management tools. There's not a ton of value there from a simplicity stand point. So what we strive to do? Is we strive to create that abstraction, that single consistent control plane. That goes between your on-premises, your remote offices, and now truly extend that into the public cloud. So I can manage my resources in the public cloud, in the same way I would on premises. Whether that be next generation applications that probably truly do belong in a public cloud, like cloud-native apps, or my traditional legacy applications that have been running in my data center for years. So that's really what it comes down to, is being able to provide that true seamless experience for users. And at the end a the day businesses and users shouldn't really care where their applications are, it should be whatever most cost effective for the business. And based on who you are as a user, if you're a developer? Or you are a executive? Where my application is shouldn't matter, it should be available wherever I am. >> Mike one of the things that's been interesting watching Nutanix is not the growth of the core market, but its got this three-tier architecture. You have a lot of different software pieces, some of which, at least today are not necessarily directly tied back to the original hyper-converged infrastructure. Where are you with the customers locally? Any kind a proof points? You can give us that kind a help us understand the strategy a bit more. >> I think the majority of the customers are running Nutanix here locally in New England, and probably a good majority of the world are running Nutanix, running kind of the core Nutanix, right. And the value that they're driving from that, they're seeing there is immense. They're getting the simplicity having the ability to run their operations, click one button to do their upgrades without disruption. There is a lot of value there. That's solving many of the issues. Now the higher level capabilities, and the higher level features. In order to be able to deliver those in a consistent way, you have to have a solid core foundation. All right, so that sold core foundation is our core ACI platform, or our cloud like infrastructure. One of the things I'll always say to customers is, "When you look at your Nutanix infrastructure, "your software to find data center, "it actually resembles what's running in a public cloud." So whether, if you're running applications in Amazon for example, you're running in a highly scalable distributed architecture. That's the exact same thing you're doing with Nutanix, and the reason they've been able to deliver those higher value services is because they have that solid foundation underneath it. So if you want to run your environment in a similar way, and true hybrid cloud? You've got to follow their playbook, and the technology that you're choosing, and we believe Nutanix is that right choice. >> Yeah and in many ways we're seeing the blurring the lines between them. I've interviewed people from Nutanix that's on the Cooper Netty Show, that experience that I have and Nutanix has partnerships with some of the public cloud environments. So we're seeing that location matters a little bit less. >> Absolutely, I think the nirvana again if we can imagine, what is this all going to look like five years from now? It's a single portal, single interface where I'm requesting some sort of a business service, or an application. And when I deploy it, it's not going to ask me where it's going to go? It's going to out it where it belongs based on the cost and business logic that I've actually defined in the system. And if it needs to go on Amazon? Or it needs to go on Azure? The decision is going to be made based on business logic, as opposed to technology decision, which I think is what matters. >> So Mike, I can't let you go without talking about, Winslow Technology's here, is a big Dell partner. >> %100. And they sell the Dell XE solution here. They're people out there, there is well the Dell relationship. Yes, they are one Nutanix biggest partners, but they are also, if you look out into the market and you look at market share? The biggest alternative to a Nutanix agency I-Option is the Dell EMC VxRail. So help us understand that dynamic, and how that's playing out in your world? >> Yeah that's a great question, and I kind of expected the controversial questions, as always on theCube, so thanks Stu. In terms a that I would say that when you look at Nutanix, the first thing I'll say is all HCI is not created equal. There is pretty significant differences between the two platforms. Yeah combining and storage, we could loosely define as HCI, but we really can't look at competing solutions as true cloud like infrastructure. Running our controller virtual machine in the user space, and having mobility of applications across hypervisors, and across clouds on a single platform is something very unique to Nutanix. So we're absolutely seeing competitive pressure for sure, but when we have the opportunity to talk to customers about what their multi-cloud journey really means to them? The discussion usually moves forward in a positive way. So I think our view, our perspective. You mention simplicity, we're all about choice, freedom of choice, we don't want to lock our customers into anymore particular technology. Let's do what makes most sense for the business, whether it's alternative public cloud, alternative hardware, or even alternative hypervisors. We give customers choice, we don't have a religion around any one particular technology. We talk about containerization for example, and kubernetes. We give customers the ability to deploy kubernetes on crime, leveraging the source version in kubernetes. All of the capabilities within the Nutanix platform will run on of the hypervisors we support. Right, so that's an important distinction too, it's not like we're telling you have to run one particular hyupervisor to get x feature. So an important distinction point there is we truly do believe in giving our customers the freedom to choose. >> Yeah that's great, just last thing Mike I got to imagine your customers are asking a lot a questions. There's all these new things coming out there that look, sound, or feel a little like what Nutanix is doing. So from the big ones like AWS Outposts, Azure, had Azure stacked, now is the new Azure HCI. So what do you tell your customers when the start calling and asking about these technologies? >> Well, if you look at the history? We've been doing this for a long time now, I've been here for over five years, and Nutanix has been doing this sense two, we've released our product back in 2011, after a couple a years of development. So we've been doing it longer than anybody else, and we also really built our platform around a mantra, that we are highly scalable distributed architecture, along enabling choice, and providing a level of simplicity that customers won't see in any other platform. So just the amount of development and engineering and focus around our customers and the needs of our customers really makes us sustain that. And if you look at just the overall growth of Nutanix, and the transition we're making now to more of a subscription base business model. It makes sense for customers and we've given them the ability to consume in a way that is even more incremental than it was in the past, and certainly more differentiated than what our competitors do. >> All right, Mike Berthiaume always a pleasure to catch up with you on camera, as well as off. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much appreciate it Stu. >> All right, more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCube. (upbeat music)