(music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we are in the shadow of Fenway Park. It's the third year we've had The Cube at The Winslow Technology Groups user evert, which is now called WTG Transform and it's 2019. Joining me is the president and founder of Winslow Technology Group, Scott Winslow. Thanks so much for joining me and for the second year of Scott, I say do, thank you for making the name of the show simpler for me to say. WTG Transform rolls off the tongue. >> Our marketing folks were happy to accommodate you, Stu. But we're delighted to have The Cube back. You guys do such a great job watching the industry, observing the industry, asking the great questions. So delighted to have you here. >> Well, and thank you, we always love talking to the users and you've got 189 users here. The company, itself, is now 50 employees, 35% growth last year. So congratulations and give us a little bit about what's happening at a macro level that are driving some of that, the growth in your business. >> Yeah, thank you, it's been, it's been a fun ride. I mean, we're in the right industry first of all, right? The server storage, hyperconverged infrastructure, networking, hybrid cloud solutions it all continues to grow. Data growth is explosive, so I think we happen to be in the right industry. That's certainly driving the growth. Our partnership with some of the key partners here. Partners like Dell, VMware, Nutanix, Arctic Wolf, Aerohive. You know, I think we've saddled up with the right horses there. And we've really got really a great team, on the sales side, but pre-sales engineering, post-sales engineering. So when you combine all of those factors together, it's led to some nice growth. I put some numbers up. Privately held companies don't usually share those numbers. We do like to share'em with our customers. And, you know, we're a $37 million company last year. We're going to be 47 plus this year and we feel like on our way to be a $100 million reseller by 2022. So it's real exciting. >> Well once again, congratulations on that and what's really interesting to watch is, you know, you started out selling Compellent. And Compellent got bought by Dell a few years back. Dell bought EMC. Those are some of the big inflection points in your business. And you've had some great insight on, you know, especially the things I've talked to you the last few years when we first met you at Dell World and through this transition of, you know, Dell going from just being Dell to being, you know, a bigger player in the enterprise market. They've now gone, as you said, VMware, all the hyperconverge, all of these tail winds for their growth have been part of what's been accelerating your growth. So give us the state of the state when it comes to Dell. How are they doing with the channel? How are they doing with the product, the solution, the innovation that Joe Batista talked about this morning? From Dell, how is that trickling down to you as a partner and, ultimately, your customers? >> Yeah, I mean, we first got involved with Dell back in 2011, as you referenced, when they acquired Compellent. We were concerned about it, at the time. We wondered how we could fit into the ecosystem of this, at the time, $60 billion company. Little did we know, it would be the best thing that ever happened to us, cause we were really, kind of, a boutique shop selling storage and now we've got the full line. And they've got the widest portfolio in the industry, you know, servers, storage, networking, hyperconverged solutions, obviously VMware. And so it's been a great relationship for us. You know, I think their relationship with the channel is good. I wouldn't call it simple. It is at times complex. They do about 40% of their business through the channel. You've got direct sellers out there that are very good that sometimes want to take the business direct, but you looked at the growth numbers that we have and we've accomplished that as a Dell-centric partner. So at the end of the day, and I think this is Michael's argument kind of to the partner community, is that we've been able to grow our business. Some companies will have a ceiling and say, okay all this business below a certain amount is partner business. You know, Dell doesn't have that. You have to kind of navigate your way through the system, but if you develop the kind of relationship that we have with them where there's some trust, they see our capabilities to, you know when you're driving 200 end users to an event like this, you know even large OEMs like Dell, take notice cause it's the ability to drive new logos for their business. So we think the relationship has been really good. I'd give'em, you know an A-. I'd say in terms of their portfolio, I'd give'em an A. In terms of the channel relationships, you know we have squabbles now and then, but in general, I think the relationship is very good. >> Well the thing we know in the industry is that there is no thing as perfect. >> Right. >> And that there needs to be change and growth along time and sounds like they're listening and working with you know, you, your peers in the industry to work that. I know there was a little bit of concern, you know when EMC came into the picture. You're in EMC's backyard here. >> Right. >> And there was some really big EMC channel partners and what would that mean to the companies that had been with Dell and it seems like you're navigating that quite well. >> Yeah, we've been able to find our niche in that ecosystem. You know it's, I'm not saying it's always been easy, but you know we're really starting to sell the PowerMaxes and Unitys and IBPAs and Isilon and getting away from just being that sort of, Compellent-centric partner. I think a couple of the benefits that came out of the merger, one is if you look at Dell's server business and I referenced this in my opening comments, over the last eight quarters they've taken six or seven points a share in the server market from their competitors, HP and Cisco. And that's really the result of the merger and having that additional sales bandwidth. So that's been fantastic for our business and for theirs. I think if you look, like at Dell end user compute, that was never a big part of our business. We kind of got into that over the last four or five years, really at the behest of the Dell sales team. And that's been a big win for us, surprisingly enough, particularly with the Windows 7 to 10 migration. Our end user compute business it through the roof. I gave our sales team too low of numbers on that, they're all about 160% of quota. (laughs) So going to have to fix that next year. >> All right well always tip to the sales rep, if you have a good plan (laughs) max it out because they will adjust it later. >> Exactly. Exactly, pay back is a you know what. (laughs) >> So Scott, one of the biggest changes I've seen in your business, in the last year is, you know you've been deep with Dell for many years. And with the Dell XC, which is the Nutanix OEM, is something that you were on early. You were a strong partner there, Nutanix. Still a strong partner, but today it is a mix of both the Dell XC and the VxRail from Dell EMC. So talk a little bit about, you know why that changed. How that's going, you know, how customers are seeing things these days? >> Yeah, I mean absolutely, we were on very early with Nutanix and we very much believe in their product and the software solution set that they've put together. I can remember Alan Atkinson, from Dell, standing up and saying, "This is our HCI solutions, could be Nutanix on Dell compute." And you know, we've got, you know 55+ really happy customers out there and we continue to sell that solution. And we've got a lot, very good customer satisfaction. That relationship's not going away. Despite what some people may say in the industry. The fact is they've got 35,000 units out there. There's a billion dollar pipeline of XC series. And there's a gentleman that runs the server business at Dell that wants to make sure that doesn't go away cause that's one of the reasons that Dell is doing so well in the server business. Now having said that, you know our take on it has been, hey let's have two of the best products in the industry in our quiver. That being XC series Nutanix and VxRail. You know initially when VxRail first came out, we didn't think that it had some of the capabilities that it needed and as it's evolved, we think that VxRail's gotten a lot better and it's a lot more competitive. Certainly in a VMware environment, a very strong player. And if you look at the numbers, they're doing very well with VxRail and so are we. So right now, we've got the one and two horse in the industry. We think it's great for us to be able to go our customers. We give our AEs and our SAs in the field the ability to evaluate the opportunity. What are the requirements of the customer and do we think that either XC series Nutanix or VxRail will be the better fit? And we feel like either way, it's a win for us and a win for the customer. >> So Scott, feedback we heard at Dell World is that, you know the Dell team is really trying to put their thumb on the scale. To really incent the field to sell VxRail. The XC is there, as you said. You know, Ashley and the server team, you know, they want to sell servers, but you know all things being equal, they're not equal. They want to sell the full Dell stack. So is there any of that that impacts what you're doing or you know pretty much from your standpoint, it's customer choice. We understand there's never one best solution out there and it is often differentiation in there. Obviously, one is only VMware. One has multi-hypervisor including a you know, built in hypervisor, there. There's definitely, it's tough to line these up and compare them. There are differences there, but what's the impact of kind of Dell's positioning and you know, what customers, how do they determine what to use? >> At the end of the day, the rubber meets the road at the customer. I mean we've got to, we always say within our company, we have to be aligned first with the customer. What do they want? What's the best fit for the customer? Now internally, inside the inside baseball, within of our what we say is we've got to grow both businesses. We've got to grow our Nutanix business, which we did significantly last year. And we have to grow our VxRail business, which we did. And that way we keep both groups happy. And we're able to offer a nice portfolio. So I think that's the best way to approach it. >> All right Scott, why don't I give you the final word, is this the 16th year of your event here? >> It's 16th year of the company, 15th year of the event. >> Okay. All right, so give us the final takeaway. I know you've got a lot of meetings. Got a lot of activity. >> Yeah. >> Give everybody the final takeaway from Transform. >> Well it's been a great event, thus far. We've got, you know more breakout sessions to go. We got the ballgame tonight. Chris Sales is on the mound, so that's always exciting. We got a lot of winning ball teams here in Boston, but for us it's just growth. More customers are here, more partners. We've got more going on in the hands on lab. Our expo hallway, there's more product there. More subject matter experts. You know we have a lot more going on in terms of security this year. With Arctic Wolf being here, our VP of PS, Matt Kozlowski's going to walk through a little cyber security case study. And so I think we're doing more on security. And certainly we've just got kind of more of all the solutions that we offer. And we're delighted to have an even bigger group here this year. So onward and upward, I guess, is the final word. >> All right, onward and upward. Scott, thank you so much again for sharing the updates on your company, as well as what's happening with all your users. And we always love those user stories. So, I've got a full day of coverage here at WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching The Cube. (electronic music)

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

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group, and happy to have on the program multi-time guest of theCUBE, Scott Winslow, who is the president and founder of Winslow Technology Group. Scott, thanks so much for having us here. >> Good to be here, Stu, good afternoon. >> Alright, so, you opened up the event here, I think you've said you got between 150 and 175 users, and, if I remember right, your first user event was actually here, and it was like, what, eight users? So, you know, great location here in Boston, you know, Fenway right behind. You're taking your users to the game. Tell us a little bit about the history of the company, and this event. >> Yeah, when we started the user group 13 years ago, it was here at the Hotel Commonwealth, and it's been a great venue for us. Really it started with eight customers around a conference room table, we had Marty Sanders, the CTO from Compellent, Phil Soran, one of my mentors is the CEO of Compellent and founder, and I think we were talking about, how do we improve the GUI on the Enterprise manager for Compellent, and that was how it started, and kind of last minute, we decided to go to a ball game afterwards, and that was kind of the roots of this event, but you know, it's changed over the 13 or 14 years, but we try to provide really good education for our customers, give them some things to think about in their infrastructure and their environments, we try to be a thought-leader, and it's kind of evolved around that theme for the last 13 or 14 years. Obviously a lot bigger now than it was. We've grown up; the challenge for us is how do we continue to have our customers have a white-glove experience, as we continue to grow, but we're really excited about, where Compellent took us to Dell, and Dell led us to Dell EMC, and you know, here we are. >> Yeah, so, Compellent to Dell, Dell to Dell EMC, and we're still talking to the storage industry about making their user interfaces better, right? >> (laughs) We are, we are. Well, I mean, we are in one sense, but in another sense is you move into hyper-converged, you know, that really is kind of the backdrop for that story, right? Because, as you get into hyper-converged infrastructures, you're talking about, you know, one-click upgrades of server storage networking hypervisor, so I think it really is kind of a good backdrop, and we've seen that evolve over the years. >> Yes, Scott, when I look at your portfolio, it started out very much storage, you now have server storage network hyper-converged, the PC and mobile cloud, you know, how many people do you have in the company now, and how do you manage that kind of change and expanse of your portfolio without getting a mild wide and an inch deep? >> Yeah, we've got 37 people in the company now, so we've added six this year already. I think we try not to go too wide in terms of number of vendors. We've tried to focus on a few key strategic partners, so for us that's, you know, Dell EMC, it's Nutanix, it's VMware, and try to really specialize in those areas. We think customers are looking for a partner that's got deep technical expertise, really good sales acumen. I guess a fair criticism of us would be, "you don't go wide enough, you're not partnered "with Cisco or HP," but we'll accept that. We think it's led to 35% growth over the last three years, and we think it's been a good strategy for us. >> Yeah, no, strong growth absolutely. What are you hearing from your users, you know, how much does this digital transformation, pulling them along, and driving them to kind of that breadth of solutions that you're offering? >> Yeah, I mean we're having conversations with them every day, and in the conversation, often times, is do we continue kind of down the path we've been? We're very comfortable with a 3-2-1 solution, for us, a lot of times that's a Dell server, Dell networking, Dell Compellent, we're very comfortable providing that, but you know, as they look and say, "Hey, we built this wonderful car, but it's probably "going to run out of gas at some point," do we move into more of a hyper-converged solution? Do we look at, you know, a cloud solution? And, you know, how do they continue to evolve their environments? And that's provided a great role for us to consult with them, in that regard. >> Yeah, all of your partners, Dell, Nutanix, VMware, all trying to figure out how they live in kind of this hybrid or multi-cloud world. How are your partners doing, what you as kind of the voice of the customer, do you want to see from them to kind of mature these solutions even further? >> Well, I think we've seen it already, if you think about like at .NEXT, you know, Nutanix announces cloud integration with Google, I think we're looking for solutions where we can provide a really good on-prem solution for some of the data, but then you have to have the ability to go off-prem and have cloud integration, and if I look at Nutanix, Dell EMC, VMware, I think they're providing that. If you look at, like, an NSX solution from VMware, for example, you know, we've seen the virtualization of, with VMware we've seen the virtualization of storage with products like Compellent and others, and now you've got a virutalization layer and abstraction layer in the networking with NSX, and that provides some real benefits in terms of what can be done around operating efficiencies of networking, microsegmentation, etc. So, we see those vendors providing those kinds of solutions. >> Yeah, so, NSX is going to be one of the critical components when we get VMware on AWS, I'm curious whether that, Microsoft Azure Stack, or Jeremy Burton was talking this morning about Virtustream being able to go on-premesis. Those solutions, do they excite you, do they excite your customers? You know, what do you say? >> They do, they do excite our customers. I would say right now, I don't think they excite our CFOs much. We're having a lot of conversations with customers about the things like NSX. I wouldn't say it's been a big revenue driver for us. We're still driving a lot of revenue through some of the traditional, you know, server storage networking hyper-converged solutions, but I would say, as it relates to like an NSX for example, it's a topic that customers want to talk about, security's very much top of mind, and it hasn't translated yet into a lot of revenue, but it's definitely a part of the building blocks that our customers are looking at. >> Yeah, you bring up your CFO, and I'm curious, how does the customers looking to kind of change Capex into Opex, how does that affect you, are service providers in the public cloud, are those an opportunity for you, for partnership? Are they a challenge for the kind of the channel's business model? >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think we've seen a lot of the partners that we work with try to provide an operating, Opex model, and try to be more cloud-like in their solutions, so if you look at the Nutanix's and VxRail's, you know, having a solution from Dell EMC or from Nutanix where you can present it up almost like a cloud solution where they only have to commit to maybe 40% of the overall payment, or they can grow it very quickly like they would a cloud solution. So we're seeing a lot of that type of activity, I would say, you know, and at the same time, we're reaching out to the cloud providers, the Amazons and the Azures, to figure out, can we be partnered with them, and what does that model look like, and it's certainly not going to be a lot of margin working with those types of providers, but you can build a big consulting practice around it. So we're heavily engaged in those kind of discussions. >> Alright, Scott, last thing is, your users, as they walk away from this year's event, what do you want them to think about, their relationship with you, and kind of their big takeaway from the event? >> Yeah, I mean, for us, we try to be the trusted advisor, right, that's our role. You've got a number of OEMs out there. We're putting solutions together, that's why we call our engineering team the solutions architects, because we're piecing it all together for them. I look at the manufacturers kind of like as a big aircraft carrier, and they're good aircraft carriers, but we're a little speedboat, right? We can go back and forth, we're very nimble, we can demo stuff quickly. So I want them to think about us as a solution provider, as a trusted advisor, and to think about some of the new technologies that we presented up today. They're so busy working through day-to-day problems that, in one afternoon, to be able to come out here and here about, like, a cloud solution, like Virtustream, NSX, to hear about what's going on in hyper-converge, what's going on in managed security market, I'm hoping they'll take away some of those ideas and think about how it might apply in their business. >> Alright, well, Scott, really appreciate you bringing theCUBE here, looking forward to talking to a lot of your customers as well as some of the partners and, you know, everyone here at the show. I've been Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE.

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering W T. G transformed 2019 by Winslow Technology Group. >> Hi. I'm Stew Minutemen. And this is the Cuban W. T. G. Transformed 2019 here home game in Boston, Massachusetts, our third year. The event happened a Welcome back to the program. Second time on the program in less than a year. Matt Kozlowski, Who's the vice president? Professional services, Winslow Technology Group. Thanks so much for joining. Thank you. Alright, uh, second tie I've had on the program, but first vest and cufflinks you like today. So, you know, showing your own individual style for, >> like, the Ted talk. Look, >> Absolutely. So we will keep this under 18 minutes. Okay? Probably be more like about 12 theirs and no slide. But you tell us a story of change and inspiration. Uh, you know, in all seriousness there what? I actually want to hear the story of change that we're seeing inside of Winslow attack. So, um, you know, question I asked, You know, some of your peers in the company is, you know, if I thought about Winslow attack, you know, just a couple of years ago, it's like, Oh, hey, great deal, partner. No, the pellet side, you know, picking up the servers and some of the other pieces. Yeah, Here, you bring it on Brook board on board. You know, professional services security. Uh, you know, tell us a little bit about you know what? What were you doing since last time we caught up? >> Sure. So if you think about years ago where we had not just winslow but like bars as a whole came from it was, like, way sell boxes and we sell things. And now we're transitioning where people are using cloud or the hybrid cloud models. And they're actually using software in infrastructure as services and way need, like professional services and consulting to help people on that journey. That's like the simplified version of it. >> Yeah, and just, you know, I want to play something back for you and see if it resonates with you. You know, if I go back, you know, let's say 5 to 10 years ago, it was, you know, we get the boxes and the bar gets it, and they've got to spend a lot of work to configure it and do all the pieces. And, you know, that kind of day. One roll out when we talked about OK, how many months from when the equipment got to the bar versus when we're up and running? When we rolled out converged infrastructure, hyper converged infrastructure and all this cloudy stuff, it actually shifted things backwards. Now, before it gets there, there's a lot of work that either the customer or the partner with the customer needs to do so. It shifted it because once it gets on site, well, there's less wiring and cabling. You configuration I need to do. But it just shifted where that engagement service happened. It did not eliminated that what you're saying? >> Yeah, so there's a lot in terms of like planning. I mean, even, like integration work that we do ahead of time. >> I would say things that have changed even over the last, like three or four years is like the complexity of everything is gone up like we're trying to simplify it. We're simplifying maybe the delivery of it and users. But behind the scenes, certainly it's It's more complicated, I would say, than than ever. >> Yeah, you know it. We're no longer just, you know, let's lock the door and Hafiz of Security and put the firewall in place. Right now, it's like, Oh, well, it's micro segmentation in all the places and my application spread out across. You know how many locations, how many services from and therefore write everything has become a little bit >> more and more >> complicated, eh? So how do we make sure we stay secure in 2019? >> So I think there's a couple areas they're so first is, like maintaining that same kind of sense of securing people, infrastructure and things along those lines that we've kind of been doing for a while now that your basic like firewalls and even vulnerability assessments and things like that. But I think over the last couple years and this as we move to like more of like distributed workforce, like people working from home, people working remotely, finding like the right people, there's gonna be more of a focus on like and point protection and, like protecting users at, like the end point >> or the mobile level on them than ever before. >> Um, >> a lot of talking the keynote this morning, amount cloud. Yeah, and you said, you know, where does that put things so, you know, give us from your standpoint. You know, obviously services were hugely important piece of it, you know, a CZ the box. And the location becomes a little bit less important, despite the fact that even when you have things like server list, we know that there's ultimately hardware sure runs underneath it somewhere. You know, what were those Winslow play today and in the future? >> Okay, so I'm gonna give you two kind of conflicting answers to that. So the 1st 1 is, if you look at reasons why people don't go to the cloud, it's there not comfortable in the security of it. I'll say in like the my like, real world, not in the academic or statistical version of it. One of the reasons people do go to the cloud is for security, right? Look a like a lot of health care organizations are goingto like cloud based electronic medical record systems. I feel like that in some ways has insulated or shifted >> some of the burden of the risk and keeping those systems secure to the provider that's hosting them. >> Which is probably better for us, his patients, right, And for the health >> care providers in general. In that case, >> yeah. You know, one of the things we know is that what you need to do as user is you can't just keep doing things the old way because your competition will move faster. Right? And we know from a security standpoint, my friends that aren't even security is like you need to be able to move fast. One of the great things about the cloud is you know, if I'm running on Azure eight of us Hey, that latticed latest patch in that security vulnerability did that get rolled out? Well, I'm not responsible. Yes, they absolutely right. I didn't have to wait for that roll out, you know? So So there's that piece of it. So you know, just how do I keep up obtained? I need to, as as user, do some updates, and therefore, I'm not saying everything goes in the public cloud, but how do I make sure that it's not? Oh, I update my software every two years, or it's I need to make sure that I'm closing those gaps and vulnerabilities of taking advantage of words. I >> think there's going to be like a shift in changing from like normal. CIS admits they're thinking about like patching Windows and patching Lennox and operating systems. But, like once we move information to the cloud and you think about it, more is like information security. So now data is in the cloud. I'm not patching the system's anymore because we'll just assume that, you know, eight of us Microsoft. They're doing a great job with that. But like once data say is in one drive like how my governing, like where that data's going, who's accessing it, who it's being shared with, how it's being backed up things along those lines. It's just a different mindset that people need to adopt, you know, in relation to securing information, not systems. All right, >> man, I'm trying to figure we gotta replace Patch Tuesday with some celebration or some battering event where we can try to tackle some of the some of these new challenges there, You know? What does that mean to some of the changing roles that you're seeing in the customers, though? I guess here here went to attack. You know, I was talking to Arctic wolf in a typical customer, you know, doesn't have their whole security team that runs 24 7 That's where your partner with that. So you know, we're just security fit in. The organization has said, If it was a large enterprise, you know, it's a four level discussion. You know you've got your sea. So where somebody like that, what does the typical kind of mid to small sized company security team look? >> Yeah, it looks like I'm gonna partner with someone. Or that's what it should look like because, like even if companies have like a managed provider, that's doing like patch management and things along those lines, there's something to be said for having like 1/3 party in another party party, like as your security partner, Because if the people that air like doing the patching, they're probably doing a great job at it. But, like you might not want them being the ones also doing like your vulnerability assessments. It's good to have, like different parties in there, So I feel like for smaller medium businesses, it's getting comfortable partnering on and using like professional services. Frankly, Tio to do that. All >> right, so it's really interest Matt next week. Actually, Amazon is holding a cloud security show here in Boston called Reinforced. So, uh, you know, Boston seems an interesting place, You know, the arse. A conference has always been out in San Francisco. Give us kind of the state of security here in the area. >> Okay, so I think I have a unique perspective on this because I'm not from the area. Like I'm from Connecticut. So I come up here. >> You really most people in the United States would be like Connecticut is a suburb of Austin. You know where you are? Yeah, that's that's the one you need to know. Where we are. You on the Yankees Red Sox line that goes down the middle of the state, right? Right around Hartford. >> Yeah, are are like, claim to fame is being in between both city. So yes, um, way do see, though, like Boston emerging as, like, a regional tech hub, if not like the tech hub of the East Coast. Frankly, so I feel like why not have it here? Like, why wouldn't we have it here? Compared to everywhere else? Like there's so many tech companies, and this just doesn't feel like a tech hub of the region's. >> Okay, Well, you know I'm all in favor of things where I could take the trainer drive to rather than have to fly around the president. Huge is part of you Give a session here on Talked about some branch somewhere Give give us so some of the key takeaways and thanks for the audience that they should be thinking about. >> So So in that session, I kind of invented a completely fictional account of a ransomware attack on a hospital. It was Bill on real world scenarios that I just kind of, like merged together. So I would say up front things that I would say that were important to talk about and that we're, you know, cyber security awareness training. I'm making sure people you know are understand. Like the risks involved with female security advance like modern and point protection. We kind of touched on that a little earlier. So, like older, signature based detection is just not not really effective anymore. Um, having a good tamper proof backup strategy is important, too. So let's say, like, systems get ransomware it. Everything's encrypted, like you need a way to restore that data without necessarily paying the ransom on DH like tamperproof backups >> are are the way to do that. Really? So >> all right, that I want to give you the final word. Uh, w t g transform 2019 gives a little inside some of the customers you're talking to. Some of the top of mine, diffuse or any. I don't work >> for me. A lot of the top mine issues around security seriously, but also like modernizing People's Data Center so that delivering on the hybrid cloud message of like installing hardware and software that not just provides, like data storage services on Prem but could do a lot of cloud tearing >> cloud archiving. Also >> because last, we really appreciate the updates. Thank you. Money for Sarah. We're all initiated. I want to thank our audience here. We've had a full day here. Got to talk to some of the users, some of the partners and, of course, our host for the event. Winslow Technology Group. Scott Winslow and the team. Great to see the growth. Always love to be able to dig in with the users and what's happening locally for myself, stupid. And want to thank the whole team here at the Cube for helping us to be ableto support these events and be sure to check out the cute dot net. You could do some searches there. You could find all the guests here and see previously what they've been talking about. See what future events were going out and dig their archive and is always if you have any questions, feel free to reach out myself, the rest of the team and always a pleasure to be able to share with you and thank you for watching.

>> 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)

(click and snap) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group here in Boston in the shadows of Fenway Park. Happy to have with me Mike Franco, who's the principal solutions architect with Virtustream. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. Thanks for having me, and this is a terrific event. It really is. I mean to be here with one of our first channel partners, and by that I mean Winslow Group has been part of Dell for many, many years. They now sell the whole Dell EMC platform with the acquisition last year. And Virtusteam, we opened up a channel partnership just a few months ago, and they were one of the first to join. And here I am in front of hundreds of clients. This is a great opportunity. >> All right, that's great. So we've talked to Scott Winslow, his organization, some of the partners. So, I understand a lot about the Dell relationship. How WTG has been kind of expanding into cloud. Virtustream. Tell us why there's a channel partner now. What that means, and what you look to for somebody like Winslow Group. >> Well, Winslow Group opens up a lot of clients for us, okay? And we need to sell through those partners. Most of these clients are running operations, maybe in the small midsize business, which are really perfect candidates for what we do. Virtustream provides a managed cloud. So unlike the Amazons, the Googles, and the Azures which are great solutions, we're finding clients and saying, "Hey, that was good." But as we start moving to these mission critical applications. The applications that are running my business. We need a managed service. We need performance. We need IO type of critical workloads to be run in a more secure and performance- laden type of cloud. >> Yeah, Jeremy Burton gave the opening remarks. The CMO of Dell. The Dell family really has a large portfolio. I look at kind of the hybrid and multi-cloud world these days, and from a Dell standpoint, you know, VMware has a number of solutions, including VMware on AWS. Dell was working with Microsoft on the Azure (mumbles) solutions. How does Virtustream fit into the overall portfolio? How do you help position, you know, where that fits, okay? Get the mind share and (stutters) the users? >> Great question. I mean, back in May, we announced a connection, okay? So our Cloud Connect, which is vRealized into our stream based clouds. Extreme is our cloud management platform, and a technology that we use to run our off prem clouds. So clients now have the capability through vRealize automation to recognize our cloud into revision, and to modify and manage their workloads through that. We also announced in May, a partnership with our sister company Pivotal. Okay, on their Cloud Foundry. So we now have in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, the capability to run Cloud Foundry in a managed fashion. Okay, again, Cloud Foundry is a technology that a lot of developers will be using to build applications, but it also runs those applications. And now that those applications are becoming stateful and a critical part of their business, they're looking to somebody to manage that. And now we have the capability. And then we talk about the rest of the EMC portfolio, where Native Hybrid Cloud is a package solution that's built on vRacks or vRails, right? Dell's converged black forms with the Native Hybrid Cloud or Pivotal Cloud Foundry, lay it right on top of it with the tools to be able to manage it. That's sold directly to a client, and we have the capability as Virtustream to manage those. So now the client can have these on-client premise solutions, as well as being able to tether back to our enterprise cloud. Our Virtustream Enterprise Cloud. >> Yep. Mike, we saw in the storage industry, there's lots of different solutions, because there's lots of different needs. I find there is no typical cloud strategy when it comes to most companies. But when you're talking to users, whether it be at this event or you know, out talking to customers, you know, why are they coming to Virtustream? What are the big questions they're asking you? What are the challenges that they see, and how do you help them? >> So, I see most of the time they come to us is because at these types of events, they are clients that are delighted with Dell EMC technologies, right? Dell EMC is a leader in almost every product that they sell, okay? And not only that, but the customer satisfaction, the client care service that Dell EMC provides is second to none. We're an extension of that, okay? We have the ability to manage either on prem, or of prem, and that gray area in between in helping them enable to get to the cloud. So, it really has opened up a lot of doors for Virtustream, and yes the solutions are endless. But we had the capability to manage that for them on their prem, and we've been very successful doing it. >> Great. Mike, we know SAP was one of those solutions that really Virtustream made its name on. Well, I know you continued to work on that. Can you give us, you mentioned Cloud Foundry. What are some of the applications? What are some of the big use cases that your customers are having success with? >> So in June we announced the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud. Okay, so what is that? That's our enterprise cloud, now tailored specifically for the healthcare compliance. So it's HIPAA compliant. And also, we're managing some of the more critical applications. The healthcare environment is not cloud native, okay? It's still based on the platform too, right? They virtualized the client server, the three-tiered architecture database, web and app server type of environments that the systems have reckoned, okay? We're expanding into electronic medical records, EMRs, critical client patient care, some analytics for medication. So we're moving into those other areas that's complimenting the SAP work that we're doing. >> Okay, well Mike, appreciate you giving us the updates on Virtustream. Thanks so much for joining us here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Conference. (click and snap)

(shutter clicking) >> I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. We're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group happy to have one of users here, Brian Anderson, who's the director for the College of Arts and Science Information Technology at Boston University, within a short stone's throw here. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for being here and being here while Scott's doing this because it's kind of a fun event for us. >> Well, that's great. Tell us how many times have you been to this? >> It's my third event. I was actually a speaker last year. >> Excellent. >> This year, I'm just coming as a user, listening to the sessions, and being social with the rest of the people who do business with Winslow. >> Yeah, what do you get out of presenting and then attending an event like this? >> Feedback from my peers. I get to hear about what other people are doing, what their solutions are, how they solve some of the same problems we're trying to solve. And it's just a good networking event. >> That's awesome, Brian. And we love how peers can really share with other practitioners. So, the good news, Boston University, I think, we don't need to explain what the university is. But what are some of the drivers happening at the university level. Changes happening, changes happening in every industry. But what, specifically, is happening there that kind of impacts your world? >> Yeah, there's a huge push right now to look at cloud as a solution for a whole variety of areas, replacing infrastructure that's currently in place, trying to figure out how cloud solutions fit into the academics. We have a lot of faculty that want to use cloud solutions to teach. And we've been playing catch-up for the last few years. And we're really taking it seriously and trying to figure out how to provide those resources in both hybrid environments and cloud-only environments. >> Yeah, can you unpack that a little bit? >> Yeah. >> Where are you with cloud today? What are you looking at? What are the criteria? Obviously, cost is always a concern for everyone. But we know how fast in higher education the fees are going up. And therefore, you've got to be under a lot of pressure there. >> Oh we are, we are. We're already using a lot of cloud-based services for things like email, file storage. We now have a Dropbox implementation that we're pushing out to our faculty this year. So it's a combination of what services can we take from on campus and move them up to the cloud and is that feasible financially? It's a big transition to take the capital expenditure and transition over to OP-X. And it's really just the fine line of what services make sense to do so. >> I've talked to lots of, kind of, K through 12 environments. And the students there, obviously, have a lot of high demands there. I have to think it's even more when we get to higher education. You mentioned a little bit the faculty demands and what they're doing. Maybe expand a little bit, faculty and the students themselves, what are they looking for? What do they come into kind of expecting and how are you helping to deliver that? >> Well, I know a lot of students these days are coming from using services like Blackboard throughout most of their career until they get to university. We also have Blackboard, but it's not as widely distributed as students are expecting. We have about a 50% adoption rate of Blackboard in our courses. So it's an effort to try to get faculty to convert their curriculum for the last 20 years into something that's online and that students today can really relate to and want to learn from. There's a lot of integrations with really cool technologies that students like to use and have used in previous schools that we want to try to get up and running so faculty can take advantage of them. So we're fighting the tide between what faculty want to do and their inertia versus what students are expecting when they walk in the door. Knowing how much the university costs per year. And they get a great experience in the dorms and we want to make sure they get the same experience when they're in the classroom. >> Excellent. We heard in the opening remarks this morning really the kind of digital transformation that's going on. Scott Winslow talked about some of those emerging solutions that they're helping to drive. What solutions do you use from WTG? Where do you look to them as a solution partner? >> Well, they introduced us to the Nutanix platform, the Dell XD series, and we've been using that for the last three years to provide VDI solutions for our students. And that's enabling some of our faculty to be very creative in how they teach. We have one faculty who's trying to transform the chemistry lab experience to give the students hands-on experience without actually having to go to one of their prized rooms where all the research is actually done. So we're virtualizing instrumentation where they're able to play around with it and learn how to do it before they sit in front of it. And we're working with them to try to figure out how to expand that for training opportunities for their graduate students and Ph.D. Students. >> Brian, what's the impact of online education, MOOCs, and the like? Is that impacting your group yet? >> A little bit. BU has about ten MOOCs they host per year. They're widely attended at the beginning, and like every MOOC, it dwindles as the semester goes. But it's been a fine line. We haven't accredited them yet, so they're not really worth anything if students take them. But we want to get to that point where that is the case. We see the value. We see that's what the students want. We want to make sure we have the total MOOC experience available for our students and external students. But it's just a lot of distance between where we are now and getting to that point. >> Okay, I appreciate how you've been sharing how cloud is really developing in your environment. As you look into the partners that you work with, what's on your wish list? What would enable you to be able to move this transition even faster, you know, beyond, I'm sure cost is always a concern, but what would you be looking for? What would help you and your organization move even faster? >> Ease of manageability. Right now, a lot of our partners are all siloed applications. If we had a service that could put a bunch of things under the same umbrella and allow ease of management of a whole variety of services, that would be a huge, huge win for us. That would probably make adoption much easier and would accelerate things a lot quicker than we can now. >> All right, what excites you most in technology space these days, Brian? >> I'm going to say the hyperconvergence and what that means for standard technology and how things have been done for the last 25 years. I think that's the future. That's where we are now and that's kind of the nice bridge between what we used to do to the cloud. And I think it's going to be here for a lot longer than people think. >> And when you rolled out the hyperconvergence, is there any specific metrics? What was the impact on your operations and any specific learnings that you would share with your peers? >> Well for us, it was a new service. It was something brand new we were bringing in. And I was amazed at how quickly my system administrators picked up on it and how quickly the faculty started to understand what it was and adopt it to their classes. >> Brian Anderson, really appreciate you sharing with us >> Thank you. >> the journey that BU and your organization are going through. You're watching theCUBE here at the WTG Dell EMC User Group event. (shutter clicking)

>> Hi I'm Stu Miniman with The Cube, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Conference here at the Hotel Commonwealth in Boston. Happy to have with me Mike Berthiaume who is the northeast SE manager with Nutanix. Mike it's great to see ya. >> And I'm happy to be here Stu. Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> So Mike, I've actually known you for a bunch of years. We've been in some of the local user groups, actually moderated a panel you were on a couple of years ago. Talk to us a little bit about Nutanix's channel and of course the relationship with Winslow. >> Excellent, I think Nutanix's channel is very strong. As you know, I think a lot of our viewers know, all of our Nutanix sales are done through the channel. So we are a 100% channel focused company. The Winslow Technology Group has been a tremendous channel partner for us in New England and other parts of the country as well growing their business down in the southeast and the New York Metro area. But they've been fantastic. And what makes them a little bit interesting, you know, they are very focused on Dell EMC, right? So being part of the Dell EMC portfolio opens up quite a few opportunities I think for Nutanix. And it really I think helps Dell EMC complete their portfolio with our technology. >> Sure, Mike absolutely. We're going to be talking to Scott Winslow today. You know, been using Dell, and I think was one of the earliest of the Dell XC customers out there. What is it for the customers that they look for, I guess specifically for Dell XC from a partner like Winslow Technology Group? >> I think from, you know, customers are looking for a partner who has their best interest at heart, right? So the value at a reseller as in specifically Winslow is going to their customers as trusted advisors, as consultants, understanding business challenges, and how to they can solve those with technology. And Nutanix is a natural fit, specifically Dell XC, due to the simplicity, you know, the non disruptive operational procedures that we can bring in. And that's some of the new exciting stuff around our enterprise cloud operating system that we recently talked about at our .NEXT conference. I think the vision that Nutanix holds is in lockstep with what Winslow is trying to do for its customer base here in New England. >> Mike, I want you to talk a little bit about your customers that you're meeting with. What do they care about? What are the drivers there? What are things like converged, hyperconverged, and cloud? Does that mean something to them, or how is it, how do they say it in their business terms? >> Yeah I think when we talk to customers, most customers today, almost all customers, know what converged infrastructure is. Hyperconverged I would say is a little bit less than a converged, but most customers are educated and understand the concepts. I think when we start talking to customers and educate them about the XC platform in Nutanix and open their eyes to this concept of enterprise cloud or enterprise cloud operating system, it changes the discussion. We see, typically I'll see a lot of light bulbs go off and a lot of, "I didn't realize that Nutanix could do that," or "I didn't realize you guys had a native integration with public cloud" or we're focused in the application stack which is again some of the announcements that we made last week, or a few weeks ago now, at .NEXT. >> Yeah, specifically around cloud, what's the, I find there is no typical state out there. Companies are all over the map trying to figure out kind of hybrid or multicloud. Give us a couple examples, probably can't give us customer names, but how are they integrating cloud? How are they building their environments to be more cloud-like, what we at Wikibon call true private cloud? What are you seeing out there in the field? >> It's a great question. So I think there is a sort of a misconception from my view that cloud is purely lift and shift. I'm going to take my applications, and I'm going to move them into public cloud or somebody else's environment. In reality, cloud is a way of doing business, right? It's a way, it's a new way of thinking about IT. We talk about mode one and mode two applications are your legacy and your more stateless applications that probably belong in a public cloud environment. And what Nutanix brings is the ability now to manage an environment in that new way, focusing both on your traditional legacy applications, but helping you move to those mode two applications, partnering with public cloud providers, specifically Google. So that's the conversation we're really having is don't think of cloud as lift and shift. Think of it as a new way of doing business. Let's figure out how cloud is going to benefit your business and align to the business style you're looking to achieve. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the lines we've heard many times is, "Cloud is not a destination. Cloud is really an operating model for many of the users." Last thing, just what's kind of the feeling you get from people in IT today? In the keynote this morning, discussion was, "IT kind of went from a call center to supporting the business and now IT is a driver for the business." Is that what you're seeing? Where is kind of the typical IT mindset? What are they thinking about? What's exciting them, and what's worrying them? >> Yeah I think first and foremost, digital transformation has quickly become kind of the cliche term, right? Maybe one of the most hated terms in IT these days. But it's a reality I think for most folks, and understanding what digital transformation means in the business now understanding that, again IT is actually driving business value in every way. And how can they get to the level where IT's no longer in the way, you know. Long duration projects are a thing of the past. It's a move forward mentality now. Continue to push the boundaries, but yet keep, obviously keep the lights on and ensure that we're not going to disrupt existing business processes that are tried and true. So it's kind of a tough paradigm that we're in right now. And again I think Nutanix really helps because we bring that non disruptive perspective to being able to get to that next level. >> Alright, Mike Berthiaume, really appreciate you joining us here. Nutanix been a great role and working with partners like Winslow Technology Group. You're watching The Cube. We've got lots more coverage here from the WTG User Group Event.