(upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to another CUBEConversation where we go in-depth into the topics that are most important to the technology industry with the thought leaders who are actually getting the work done. I'm Peter Burris, and we've got a great conversation today, and it all starts with the idea of how do you get smart people outside of your organization, in-service organizations to help you achieve your outcomes? It's a challenge because as we become more dependent upon services, we discover that service companies are often trying to sell us bills of goods or visions that aren't solving our exact problem. There's a new breed of service company that's really fascinated by your problem, and wants to sell it. Starts with engineering, starts with value add, and then leads to other types of potential relationships and activities. So what do those service companies look like? Well, to have that conversation, we've got Greg Tinker, who is the CTO and founder of Serene IT. Greg, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Peter, glad to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about Serene IT. >> So Serene IT is a, well we call it a next generation bar. So what do I mean by that? We mean that we are an engineering-first firm, so our staff is big, we're across the U.S., we have multiple branches and we just went international into Canada, with Serene IT Canada. We have other international branches that we coming online next year. So with that being said though, the key to our growth, the key to our success is the fact that we're an engineering firm first. We have very few sales staff. Our sales staff are more of an account management style, more of a nurturer or a farmer, we would call it, versus a hunter that means someone going out, because the customers are coming to us with their problems because they need a smart engineering bench to help them. They're not looking for somebody else's to bring them askew, or resell them a product. That can be easily done by some of the large conglomerates that are already out there, not to mention, spend 30 seconds on Google, you can pretty much buy anything you want. >> Yeah, and you know Fred Brookes said a million years ago, when I was, even before I got into computer science, wrote "The Mythical Man Month", and made the observation that the solution to a hard problem typically, is not more people, >> Right. >> It's working smarter, and working more with the right people. So tell a little about how you're able to find the right people from the industry, and bring them together to turn them into the right team. >> It's a great question, Peter, so I've been very fortunate. I loved my career at Hewlett Packard. I left on good terms because I saw a problem in the industry that I wanted to go and tackle head-on. It's easy for people to sit back and talk about it, it's more difficult to actually go and try to solve the problem, and I'm trying to solve the problem. The problem is, there's a lot of orders out there that bring very low value today, they bring a lot of resale. And that's great for those clients that just know what they want. The vast majority of customers don't know what they want today because the technologies are so advanced, they need help to get from where they were, a legacy model, to a more modern software-defined ecosystem. >> And the business problems are so complex. >> Yes. >> It's that combination of complex business problems, 'cause your competitions and your customers are pushing you, and now advanced technologies that have to be marshaled to solve those problems. >> That's exactly right, so with that being said, I set out build an engineering firm and resale would be something later, but we sell through the engineering consulting firms to solve those business problems for our clients. And so our engineering bench is comprised of engineers from Cisco, from Dell, from HPE, from a lot of big conglomerates that everybody all knows. But when you work in this industry, in the labs of these big conglomerates, me coming from HPE, when you do that, you get a lot of friends across the pillars. >> Sure. >> You build networks. >> You build networks. And quite frankly, it's the Marvel lab guys that own today Q-Logic. We all know each other, and with that being said, some of these guys want to go out and try to solve these big problems with companies like myself, and so with that being said, that's how we're building Serene IT, is engineering-first, and we have a very large technical bench today. Just think about it, the company came online in 2017 with just two, so today, we are significantly bigger than that. We're approaching a 50-plus headcount, and we continue to expand with multiple branches, and our growth rate is almost double every six months. And it's something I'm having a great deal of fun doing. The key thing here though is solving business problems and helping customers. >> Well let's talk about that, because every IT organization faces the challenge that they've been so focused on the hardware assets for so long, or the application assets. Now they're trying to focus on the data assets, but they find themselves often in conflict with the business They're not doing a particularly good job of translating a business opportunity into a technology solution still. >> True. >> You've got these great engineers. How are you getting them to also speak business, so that you facilitate that domain expertise about the business so it can be turned into a technology-reliable solution? >> Like any good engineering firm, you have to have levels right? So we have a knock all the way to level four, and our level four engineers are our master technologists that are usually patent published or some varied nature thereof, with usually a multitude of master ASC certification structures to be able to state the fact that they are level four. We also have some college kids that are coming up that are wanting to learn with us, which is good. But I want to tell you on that same point though, is we only allow those elite, the level three, the level four guys, to be in front of our clients, because they've been in this industry a long time. Like myself, we can understand the business problems, as well as the technology problems, and help a client go from zero to hero. That's what we do well. >> So you're bringing in people who have been business people, but have strong engineering backgrounds >> Correct. >> In product domains, in service domains, in the industry, and you're bringing them together and saying, let's go back to being engineers, that can still talk business. >> That's exactly it, that's the key differentiator with us, is the fact that we're not talking just essays, a lot of ours, in our mindsets have essays they call engineers. We don't hire anyone that can't put fingers on a keyboard. If they can't make magic happen on a keyboard, they're of no value to us, they're of no value to our clients, which is what they need help with. So if we're not able to sit down and have a conversation and pull out a laptop and make some some magic happen with, name it, Ansible, Puppet, Shell, Saltstack, that's just in automation CodeLogics, C-code we've got all the cool stuff in that space. But if we can't sit down and write Python, Ruby on Rails and whatnot, and make something tangible to a client in very short order, we didn't do our job. >> So a lot of companies that I've experienced, a lot of customers I've talked to, have what I would call the "goldilocks" problem with their service providers. By that I mean, some of their service providers don't have the technical chops to just throw numbers at it, so they're too cold. Some of their service providers are too smart, or pushing too hard and they get suspicious of them. How do you be that just right, stay focused on the problem bringing the other team, the engineers or the IT folks that you're working with along with you, so you get that natural technology transfer so the business gets the capability that it can run and you can go do something else? >> So that's a good point, Peter. I mean, we're still working out some of those details, I'll tell you, to be honest with you on that stuff. >> Everybody is. >> Yeah. We're getting better at it, you know customers. If we get to aggressive, and tell the customers this is what's wrong with your problem, this is where you need to go, we call their baby ugly, it puts a lot of contention right on the onset, so it causes problems. So we have to be very cognitive of what they have, and where they want to go, and show them where we're going and why we're doing it, and not just focus on "You did it the wrong way". We don't want to focus on that. That's already done, that ship's already sailed, why bash it? I tell my engineers don't talk negative, there's no good going to come of it. Focus on what you have, and where you need to go with it, and how we're going to get there. Keep it a positive message, and you'll find it'd be more receptive, and it's working for our team. >> Well I'll tell you, one of the things I've heard about Serene IT is that you guys especially developed competencies in technologies that have worked in the past. >> You can say that. >> It seems as though one of the things you're able to do is you're able not to make something so new and so distinct that the client can't see how they can possibly operate it without you. You're taking a lot of open-source, a lot of established tried-and-true technologies and using your smarts to put them together in new and interesting ways so the customer says, "Oh that was smart, that was smart. "I can do that, oh yes, now I get it". Is that, am I mis-characterizing your guys? >> No, you're not, you're actually spot-on. We actually have one of the largest ZFS file systems on the planet right now with 142 million users hitting it and-- >> ZFS? >> Yeah, it's old school. >> With 142 million, okay. >> Yeah, it's old-school But if what's old is new again, we're just putting a new wrapper around it. It worked great in its day, but you put that old technology, the file system itself that's been around for a long time, one of the biggest file systems at 128 bit. You take that file system and you put that on today's Red Hat, Caldera, SUSE, name your favorite. You put that on a big machine, a Linux machine today, a large scale like an HPDL380 with NVME drives with a back-end data store, like a 3PAR or Primäre, or name whatever you want on the back end with a big fiber channel, you'd be surprised what we can do with that thing. So we're able to keep customers' costs down by showing them we can take a old-school technology and make it far bigger than you ever imagined, and give you more horsepower and at less cost, and customers are really receptive to that. Now is that perfect for every footprint? No, that was a unique situation. Not everybody's got 142 million users.(chuckles) >> Well, that's true. And so let me build on that, because the other thing that the CIOs I talk to and senior IT people and also business people, increasingly, is they want to make sure that the solution works now, but that it's not going to end-of-life options for them. >> Yeah. >> How do you do this using tried-and-true technologies combined into new and interesting ways, in a way that still nonetheless gives customers future growth options or future application options? >> I'm not a fan of vendor-locking, I'm not a fan of Franken-monsters. Our team of engineers, we have a mandate that they do not build anything like that, I won't approve it. Because I don't want to have a customer locked in to Serene IT. That was never the intent. We want them to choose us, we want them to come to our team and get our value, so we can show them how to grow their business, and do it in a nice, sustainable way, so we can show their staff how to support it. That takes us into our managed services component. Most of the big things we design and do, we're what we call an adaptive managed services, an AMS model. What do I mean by that statement? We're not a WITO. What's a WITO, you ask? It's a "Walk In, Take Over". That's the big boys, that's the DXEs of the world, that's the Assentras, that's what they do. And they do that well. We're not here to compete with that. But what we're here to do is say, to a company or business, whoever they might be, you probably don't need us to take over everything in your IT shop, and really, we're not going to be the best at that, nor are they in some cases, the other vendors. I'll tell you, you know your business the best. We know infrastructure the best, and we can show you where you can build your skillsets up and get better at it. We can automate a lot of it and show you how to manage the automation, and there'll be certain key points that maybe you guys don't want to own for various reasons, and we will manage just that key component, and we do that today with a lot of our big clients. >> Greg Tinker, CTO and founder of Serene IT, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Peter. >> And once again, I want to thank you for participating in this CUBEConversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to another Cube Conversation where we speak with thought leaders in depth about the topics that are most important to the overall technology community. I'm Peter Burris, your host. Every business inspires to be a digital business, which is every business, faces a significant challenge. They need to use their data in new and value creating ways. But some of that data is not lending itself to new applications, new uses because it's locked up in formats, in technologies and applications that don't lend themselves to change. That's one of the big challenges that every business faces. What can they do to help unlock, to help liberate their data from older formats and older approaches so they can create new sources of value with it. To have that conversation, we're joined by a great guest. Greg Tinker is the CTO and Founder of SereneIT. Greg, welcome back to theCube. >> Thank you Peter, very appreciate it buddy. >> It's been a long time. This is your first time here with SereneIT so why don't you tell us a little bit about SereneIT. >> Sure, so at a high level we are a technology partner. SereneIT focuses on the next generation model structures of engineering first. There's a lot of VARS, in simplest terms, I would say we're a value at a reseller, sure. But we capitalize and focus just on the VA. Anybody can bring VR. The legacy approach of just being a reseller is no longer valid in our industry. Complexities and trying to have a situation where you can liberate data, try to take it from a legacy entrenched model, process, procedure and go into a new modern IT software defined ecosystem is very complex. And our objective is to make the, enablement of IT serene or simple and that's where SereneIT comes from. >> You know, I love the name but if you go back 20 years as you said, the asset that IT was focused on and took care of was the hardware. >> That's right. >> And we bought the hardware from a reseller, they just made the installations, configurations and what not. But as you said, today we're focused on the data. That's the asset. >> That's correct. >> And just as we used to have challenges uplifting and all the things we had to do with hardware, we're having similar types of challenges when you think about how to apply data to new uses, sustain that asset feature of it but apply it in new ways to create new value. As you talk to customers, what is the problem that you find they're encountering as they try to think what to do with their high value traditional data? So there's actually, I'll call it three strategic problems. Becoming to where it to be a workload optimized model structures or your data driven intelligence, trying to pull something out of the data model, trying to pull something out of the data, make it tangible to the business. And then trying to figure out a way to make it easy to enable the users, that is the employees to do something with the data the have. Making it more of a cloud-centric approach. Everybody wants that easy button now. So at a high level, trying to make that a possibility is where we spend our time today. And give you a quick example of that would be legacy block storage. We do a lot in the storage world. And we focus on software defined storage apparatus or solutions. So a lot of our clients are kind of mired down with legacy block, via Fibre Channel basics that were great for their era. But today with cost being a big factor in trying to be able to leverage an ecosystem where I can take my data, wherever my data sits and leverage it on multiple different apparatuses, be it BlueData, be in Kubernetes, be it name your favorite Docker solution. Trying to be able to use that in an ecosystem in a software defined hyper cloud, doing that on a legacy block is very problematic. And that's where we help customers transition from that legacy mindset, legacy IT infrastructure into a more of a modern software defined data program. >> So what's talk about that. Because there's a more modern technology, but really what they're doing is they're saying, look I've got this data, using these protocols like Fibre Channel with these applications and it's doing its job. >> That's right. >> But I want to create options on how I might use that data in the future, options that aren't available to me or aren't available to my business if it stays locked inside Fibre Channel for example. >> That's correct. >> So what you're really doing, is you're giving them paths to new options with their data that can be sustained whatever the technology is. Have I got that right? >> In a nutshell, Frank I would agree with your sentiment on that, your comment is spot on. We take customers data, we look at the business as a whole. And we focus on, what is the core of the business? Be it, maybe it's a High-Performance Computing Cluster Maybe it's a Oracle, Cyrus, Informant name your favorite data base structure. Maybe it's MapR, maybe it's a Dupe. We look at the business and determine, how are we using that data? How much data do we need? What's my data working set size? Understanding that and then we actually would design a solution that will be a software defined ecosystem that we can move that data in. And nine times out of 10 we can do it on the fly. Rarely, rarely ever do we have an outage to do it. Or that might be a small few minute outage window when we do a cut over, where we keep everything in mirroring Lockstep . >> Well that's one of the beauties of software defined is that you have those kinds of flexibilities. >> That's right. >> But think of, so talk to me a little bit about the you are, the customer realizes they have a problem. They find you guys. >> Sure. >> So how do they find you? >> So we do a lot with large scale Fortune 50, Fortune 100, the large scale enterprise businesses. And we do that with our, we're known in the engineering world, big accounts, because of our backdrop in HP engineering. And so HP brings us a lot into these accounts to help them solve a big business problem. So that's how a lot of our customers are finding us today. We are reaching out with media, like theCube here to talk to clients about the fact that we do exist and that we exist to help them consume a more modern IT in footprint. To help them go from that legacy model into that more modern model. >> Okay, so the customer realizes they have a problem, HPE and others, help identify you guys, matches you together. You show up, how do you work with the customer? Is it your big brains and the customer passive? Or you're working side by side to help them accelerate their journey? >> We find it best that we do it in a cohesive manner. We sit down and have a long discussion with their, usually their Chief Executive officer, their CTO, Chief Technology Officer, we'll sit down and talk about the business constraints. And then we'll go down to the directors the guys on the front lines that see the problems on a day to day basis. And we look at where their constraints are. Is it performance, IOP driven. Nine times out of 10, those problems are no longer there. They were solved years ago. Today it's more about the legacy model of, let me log a ticket to stand up a new virtual machine to a SQL database to do this application. So I've logged the ticket, a week two later I finally get a virtual machine. And now I got to get five more teams engaged, I get it online. Total business takes about a month to get some new apparatus up. Where if we go into a software defined ecosystem where we have these playbooks and this model written for the business, we can do that in 10 minutes. Be it on Nutanix do it with SimpliVity, VMware models, we don't' differentiate that. We let the customer tell us which one they use. 'Cause everybody has their liking. Be it some are VMware shop, some are Hyper-V, some are KBM. We do all of them. >> But the point is you want to help them move form an old world that was focused on executing the tasks associate with bringing the system up to a new world that's focused on the resources being able to configure themselves, being able to bring to bring themselves up test themselves in a software defined manner introducing some of those DevOps processes. Whatever the technology is, they have the people and the process to execute the technology. >> That's exactly right, because the technology in a nutshell. If you look at just technology itself that's not the hard part. Not for us anyway, 'cause we're an engineering team that's what we do well. The data driven intelligence stuff and helping customers bring more value out of their data. We can help them with that and show them exactly how we would do it. Be it a different technologies and stuff and we'll get into that discussion later. But the biggest problem we see is the people and processes which you just mentioned. Pushing the button, achieve an objective. That is where the old way of being very ticket driven Siloed approach, really slow down the economics of business. Was a huge driving force of not achieving the ROI that you actually set out to do years ago. Where we have one client that has a little over 4,000 servers and how my team and I explain it to the clients. Come out to the Golden Gate bridge. January 1 you start painting. December 30th you're done painting and January 1 you start painting again. You never get done. It's always getting painted. Patching of these large scale enterprises is the exact same way. You can't patch all the servers on a Saturday. You can't patch three thousand machines, BIOS, firmware, the list goes on. What we do for them is we actually put in an apparatus engine, basically an automation engine and instead of an army of 10 people doing firmware or BIOS and all the stuff updates, we automated 100% of that entire process. That's what SereneIT does. Help a customer take a, could be a legacy model, bare metal machine and show them how we can automate the bare metal machine. We can do the exact same thing in any hypervisor on the planet today. >> So that it's done faster, simpler. The outcome is more predictable. The result is more measurable. >> Yes. >> That's really great stuff. Let's go back to this notion of data because we kind of started with this idea of data and having to evolve the formats increasing the flexibility of it's utilization. We talked about hypervisors and all that technology is kind of sucking it forward, bringing that data forward making it possible to do things with it, but still the data itself is a major challenge. How are you working with customers to get them to envision the new data world independent of some of these other technologies? >> Sure, okay. So yeah, we have clients right now, we have (mumbled) systems these are global file systems that have enormous amount of data in it, some of it is compiled code logics for drivers and firmware and Kernel code structure that are forthcoming technologies that aren't even released yet. We have clients that have data based structure with ascii text is very common road driven. We have customers that have flat ascii files that are just flat text files. So we help the customers grab data from that existing data footprint for new lines of business. Determine what are we touching, how are we touching and how often are we touching it and why are we touching it? Case in point, when you have a large manufacturer doing chip design and your looking at a global file system you're trying to give assertation data as to what drivers are our developers working on most frequently. In the medical community, we have a client we're working on at global scale, we're doing real time data analytics to figure out if we're doing SQL injection from a hacker. So we show them exactly how we can do this in an inline driver stack and show them how to do it with the technology reducing their actual CapEx expend. There's legacy tools out there that work great. You know one of these is like, I won't give names of product and stuff, but there's a lot of cool technologies that's been around for a long time. >> That works. >> That works. >> And it just needs a smart person, or a smart team to put it together so it can be applied. >> That's what we've been doing with our clients is trying to show them that we can take the data that you have, be it flat ascii files or binary data structures. And we can show them that we can give you data analytics and pull that back. We have another client in law industry that we manage worldwide and we do e-discovery. On trying to figure out phrases and things that are maybe concerning to them in a financial world that is the global market. And we're able to give them that data structure on their own intellectual property and we give that to them in real time. We give them a dashboard so they can log in to the dashboard and they can see real time data transparency at a moments notice, so they can tell what the market is doing in Britain or they can tell what the market is doing in Singapore or U.S. by just looking at a dashboard and we're pulling data back. And we're pulling it from outside of world data points, this could be Facebook. Real time feeds, news, media and we pull it from internal data feeds. Email transactions that are going from their financial, they have like CIO's the Chief Investment Officers. Most people think of that as an information officer, right? So we're able to pull data from that and show them that they have a great deal of intellectual property at their fingertips that honestly they've never used before and that's what we're helping customers do today. >> Greg Tinker, Founder, CTO SereneIT. Thanks so much for being on theCube. >> Thank you very much Peter. >> And once again want to thank you for listening to this Cube Conversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)